initial commit of ebook 1047HEADmain

10 files changed, 83576 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/old/1047-0.txt b/old/1047-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4ca4401
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1047-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,16085 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The New Machiavelli, by Herbert George Wells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The New Machiavelli
+
+Author: Herbert George Wells
+
+Posting Date: August 2, 2008 [EBook #1047]
+Release Date: September, 1997
+Last Updated: March 2, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW MACHIAVELLI ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer
+
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
+
+by H. G. Wells
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+     BOOK THE FIRST
+
+     THE MAKING OF A MAN
+
+     I.   CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
+     II.  BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER
+     III. SCHOLASTIC
+     IV.  ADOLESCENCE
+
+
+     BOOK THE SECOND
+
+     MARGARET
+
+     I.   MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE
+     II.  MARGARET IN LONDON
+     III. MARGARET IN VENICE
+     IV.  THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER
+
+
+     BOOK THE THIRD
+
+     THE HEART OF POLITICS
+
+     I.   THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN
+     II.  SEEKING ASSOCIATES
+     III. SECESSION
+     IV.  THE BESETTING OF SEX
+
+
+     BOOK THE FOURTH
+
+     ISABEL
+
+     I.   LOVE AND SUCCESS
+     II.  THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION
+     III. THE BREAKING POINT
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THE FIRST: THE MAKING OF A MAN
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
+
+
+1
+
+Since I came to this place I have been very restless, wasting my
+energies in the futile beginning of ill-conceived books. One does not
+settle down very readily at two and forty to a new way of living, and
+I have found myself with the teeming interests of the life I have
+abandoned still buzzing like a swarm of homeless bees in my head. My
+mind has been full of confused protests and justifications. In any case
+I should have found difficulties enough in expressing the complex thing
+I have to tell, but it has added greatly to my trouble that I have a
+great analogue, that a certain Niccolo Machiavelli chanced to fall out
+of politics at very much the age I have reached, and wrote a book to
+engage the restlessness of his mind, very much as I have wanted to do.
+He wrote about the relation of the great constructive spirit in politics
+to individual character and weaknesses, and so far his achievement lies
+like a deep rut in the road of my intention. It has taken me far astray.
+It is a matter of many weeks now--diversified indeed by some long drives
+into the mountains behind us and a memorable sail to Genoa across the
+blue and purple waters that drowned Shelley--since I began a laboured
+and futile imitation of “The Prince.” I sat up late last night with the
+jumbled accumulation; and at last made a little fire of olive twigs and
+burnt it all, sheet by sheet--to begin again clear this morning.
+
+But incidentally I have re-read most of Machiavelli, not excepting those
+scandalous letters of his to Vettori, and it seems to me, now that I
+have released myself altogether from his literary precedent, that he
+still has his use for me. In spite of his vast prestige I claim kindred
+with him and set his name upon my title-page, in partial intimation of
+the matter of my story. He takes me with sympathy not only by reason
+of the dream he pursued and the humanity of his politics, but by the
+mixture of his nature. His vices come in, essential to my issue. He is
+dead and gone, all his immediate correlations to party and faction have
+faded to insignificance, leaving only on the one hand his broad method
+and conceptions, and upon the other his intimate living personality,
+exposed down to its salacious corners as the soul of no contemporary can
+ever be exposed. Of those double strands it is I have to write, of the
+subtle protesting perplexing play of instinctive passion and desire
+against too abstract a dream of statesmanship. But things that seemed to
+lie very far apart in Machiavelli's time have come near to one another;
+it is no simple story of white passions struggling against the red that
+I have to tell.
+
+The state-making dream is a very old dream indeed in the world's
+history. It plays too small a part in novels. Plato and Confucius
+are but the highest of a great host of minds that have had a kindred
+aspiration, have dreamt of a world of men better ordered, happier,
+finer, securer. They imagined cities grown more powerful and peoples
+made rich and multitudinous by their efforts, they thought in terms
+of harbours and shining navies, great roads engineered marvellously,
+jungles cleared and deserts conquered, the ending of muddle and
+diseases and dirt and misery; the ending of confusions that waste human
+possibilities; they thought of these things with passion and desire as
+other men think of the soft lines and tender beauty of women. Thousands
+of men there are to-day almost mastered by this white passion of
+statecraft, and in nearly every one who reads and thinks you could find,
+I suspect, some sort of answering response. But in every one it presents
+itself extraordinarily entangled and mixed up with other, more intimate
+things.
+
+It was so with Machiavelli. I picture him at San Casciano as he lived
+in retirement upon his property after the fall of the Republic, perhaps
+with a twinge of the torture that punished his conspiracy still lurking
+in his limbs. Such twinges could not stop his dreaming. Then it was “The
+Prince” was written. All day he went about his personal affairs,
+saw homely neighbours, dealt with his family, gave vent to everyday
+passions. He would sit in the shop of Donato del Corno gossiping
+curiously among vicious company, or pace the lonely woods of his estate,
+book in hand, full of bitter meditations. In the evening he returned
+home and went to his study. At the entrance, he says, he pulled off his
+peasant clothes covered with the dust and dirt of that immediate life,
+washed himself, put on his “noble court dress,” closed the door on
+the world of toiling and getting, private loving, private hating and
+personal regrets, sat down with a sigh of contentment to those wider
+dreams.
+
+I like to think of him so, with brown books before him lit by the light
+of candles in silver candlesticks, or heading some new chapter of “The
+Prince,” with a grey quill in his clean fine hand.
+
+So writing, he becomes a symbol for me, and the less none because of his
+animal humour, his queer indecent side, and because of such lapses
+into utter meanness as that which made him sound the note of the
+begging-letter writer even in his “Dedication,” reminding His
+Magnificence very urgently, as if it were the gist of his matter, of the
+continued malignity of fortune in his affairs. These flaws complete him.
+They are my reason for preferring him as a symbol to Plato, of whose
+indelicate side we know nothing, and whose correspondence with Dionysius
+of Syracuse has perished; or to Confucius who travelled China in search
+of a Prince he might instruct, with lapses and indignities now lost
+in the mists of ages. They have achieved the apotheosis of individual
+forgetfulness, and Plato has the added glory of that acquired beauty,
+that bust of the Indian Bacchus which is now indissolubly mingled with
+his tradition. They have passed into the world of the ideal, and every
+humbug takes his freedoms with their names. But Machiavelli, more recent
+and less popular, is still all human and earthly, a fallen brother--and
+at the same time that nobly dressed and nobly dreaming writer at the
+desk.
+
+That vision of the strengthened and perfected state is protagonist in
+my story. But as I re-read “The Prince” and thought out the manner of
+my now abandoned project, I came to perceive how that stir and whirl of
+human thought one calls by way of embodiment the French Revolution, has
+altered absolutely the approach to such a question. Machiavelli, like
+Plato and Pythagoras and Confucius two hundred odd decades before him,
+saw only one method by which a thinking man, himself not powerful, might
+do the work of state building, and that was by seizing the imagination
+of a Prince. Directly these men turned their thoughts towards
+realisation, their attitudes became--what shall I call it?--secretarial.
+Machiavelli, it is true, had some little doubts about the particular
+Prince he wanted, whether it was Caesar Borgia of Giuliano or Lorenzo,
+but a Prince it had to be. Before I saw clearly the differences of our
+own time I searched my mind for the modern equivalent of a Prince. At
+various times I redrafted a parallel dedication to the Prince of
+Wales, to the Emperor William, to Mr. Evesham, to a certain newspaper
+proprietor who was once my schoolfellow at City Merchants', to Mr. J. D.
+Rockefeller--all of them men in their several ways and circumstances and
+possibilities, princely. Yet in every case my pen bent of its own accord
+towards irony because--because, although at first I did not realise it,
+I myself am just as free to be a prince. The appeal was unfair. The old
+sort of Prince, the old little principality has vanished from the world.
+The commonweal is one man's absolute estate and responsibility no more.
+In Machiavelli's time it was indeed to an extreme degree one man's
+affair. But the days of the Prince who planned and directed and was
+the source and centre of all power are ended. We are in a condition of
+affairs infinitely more complex, in which every prince and statesman is
+something of a servant and every intelligent human being something of
+a Prince. No magnificent pensive Lorenzos remain any more in this world
+for secretarial hopes.
+
+In a sense it is wonderful how power has vanished, in a sense wonderful
+how it has increased. I sit here, an unarmed discredited man, at a small
+writing-table in a little defenceless dwelling among the vines, and no
+human being can stop my pen except by the deliberate self-immolation of
+murdering me, nor destroy its fruits except by theft and crime. No King,
+no council, can seize and torture me; no Church, no nation silence me.
+Such powers of ruthless and complete suppression have vanished. But that
+is not because power has diminished, but because it has increased and
+become multitudinous, because it has dispersed itself and specialised.
+It is no longer a negative power we have, but positive; we cannot
+prevent, but we can do. This age, far beyond all previous ages, is full
+of powerful men, men who might, if they had the will for it, achieve
+stupendous things.
+
+The things that might be done to-day! The things indeed that are being
+done! It is the latter that give one so vast a sense of the former. When
+I think of the progress of physical and mechanical science, of medicine
+and sanitation during the last century, when I measure the increase in
+general education and average efficiency, the power now available
+for human service, the merely physical increment, and compare it with
+anything that has ever been at man's disposal before, and when I think
+of what a little straggling, incidental, undisciplined and uncoordinated
+minority of inventors, experimenters, educators, writers and organisers
+has achieved this development of human possibilities, achieved it in
+spite of the disregard and aimlessness of the huge majority, and the
+passionate resistance of the active dull, my imagination grows giddy
+with dazzling intimations of the human splendours the justly organised
+state may yet attain. I glimpse for a bewildering instant the heights
+that may be scaled, the splendid enterprises made possible.
+
+But the appeal goes out now in other forms, in a book that catches at
+thousands of readers for the eye of a Prince diffused. It is the
+old appeal indeed for the unification of human effort, the ending of
+confusions, but instead of the Machiavellian deference to a flattered
+lord, a man cries out of his heart to the unseen fellowship about him.
+The last written dedication of all those I burnt last night, was to no
+single man, but to the socially constructive passion--in any man....
+
+There is, moreover, a second great difference in kind between my world
+and Machiavelli's. We are discovering women. It is as if they had come
+across a vast interval since his time, into the very chamber of the
+statesman.
+
+
+2
+
+In Machiavelli's outlook the interest of womanhood was in a region of
+life almost infinitely remote from his statecraft. They were the vehicle
+of children, but only Imperial Rome and the new world of to-day have
+ever had an inkling of the significance that might give them in the
+state. They did their work, he thought, as the ploughed earth bears its
+crops. Apart from their function of fertility they gave a humorous twist
+to life, stimulated worthy men to toil, and wasted the hours of Princes.
+He left the thought of women outside with his other dusty things when
+he went into his study to write, dismissed them from his mind. But
+our modern world is burthened with its sense of the immense, now half
+articulate, significance of women. They stand now, as it were, close
+beside the silver candlesticks, speaking as Machiavelli writes, until he
+stays his pen and turns to discuss his writing with them.
+
+It is this gradual discovery of sex as a thing collectively portentous
+that I have to mingle with my statecraft if my picture is to be true
+which has turned me at length from a treatise to the telling of my own
+story. In my life I have paralleled very closely the slow realisations
+that are going on in the world about me. I began life ignoring women,
+they came to me at first perplexing and dishonouring; only very slowly
+and very late in my life and after misadventure, did I gauge the power
+and beauty of the love of man and woman and learnt how it must needs
+frame a justifiable vision of the ordered world. Love has brought me
+to disaster, because my career had been planned regardless of its
+possibility and value. But Machiavelli, it seems to me, when he
+went into his study, left not only the earth of life outside but its
+unsuspected soul.
+
+
+3
+
+Like Machiavelli at San Casciano, if I may take this analogy one step
+further, I too am an exile. Office and leading are closed to me. The
+political career that promised so much for me is shattered and ended for
+ever.
+
+I look out from this vine-wreathed veranda under the branches of a stone
+pine; I see wide and far across a purple valley whose sides are terraced
+and set with houses of pine and ivory, the Gulf of Liguria gleaming
+sapphire blue, and cloud-like baseless mountains hanging in the sky, and
+I think of lank and coaly steamships heaving on the grey rollers of the
+English Channel and darkling streets wet with rain, I recall as if I
+were back there the busy exit from Charing Cross, the cross and the
+money-changers' offices, the splendid grime of giant London and the
+crowds going perpetually to and fro, the lights by night and the urgency
+and eventfulness of that great rain-swept heart of the modern world.
+
+It is difficult to think we have left that--for many years if not for
+ever. In thought I walk once more in Palace Yard and hear the clink and
+clatter of hansoms and the quick quiet whirr of motors; I go in vivid
+recent memories through the stir in the lobbies, I sit again at eventful
+dinners in those old dining-rooms like cellars below the House--dinners
+that ended with shrill division bells, I think of huge clubs swarming
+and excited by the bulletins of that electoral battle that was for me
+the opening opportunity. I see the stencilled names and numbers go up on
+the green baize, constituency after constituency, amidst murmurs or loud
+shouting....
+
+It is over for me now and vanished. That opportunity will come no more.
+Very probably you have heard already some crude inaccurate version of
+our story and why I did not take office, and have formed your partial
+judgement on me. And so it is I sit now at my stone table, half out of
+life already, in a warm, large, shadowy leisure, splashed with sunlight
+and hung with vine tendrils, with paper before me to distil such wisdom
+as I can, as Machiavelli in his exile sought to do, from the things I
+have learnt and felt during the career that has ended now in my divorce.
+
+I climbed high and fast from small beginnings. I had the mind of my
+party. I do not know where I might not have ended, but for this red
+blaze that came out of my unguarded nature and closed my career for
+ever.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER
+
+
+1
+
+I dreamt first of states and cities and political things when I was a
+little boy in knickerbockers.
+
+When I think of how such things began in my mind, there comes back to me
+the memory of an enormous bleak room with its ceiling going up to heaven
+and its floor covered irregularly with patched and defective oilcloth
+and a dingy mat or so and a “surround” as they call it, of dark stained
+wood. Here and there against the wall are trunks and boxes. There are
+cupboards on either side of the fireplace and bookshelves with
+books above them, and on the wall and rather tattered is a large
+yellow-varnished geological map of the South of England. Over the mantel
+is a huge lump of white coral rock and several big fossil bones, and
+above that hangs the portrait of a brainy gentleman, sliced in half and
+displaying an interior of intricate detail and much vigour of coloring.
+It is the floor I think of chiefly; over the oilcloth of which, assumed
+to be land, spread towns and villages and forts of wooden bricks; there
+are steep square hills (geologically, volumes of Orr's CYCLOPAEDIA OF
+THE SCIENCES) and the cracks and spaces of the floor and the bare brown
+surround were the water channels and open sea of that continent of mine.
+
+I still remember with infinite gratitude the great-uncle to whom I
+owe my bricks. He must have been one of those rare adults who have not
+forgotten the chagrins and dreams of childhood. He was a prosperous west
+of England builder; including my father he had three nephews, and for
+each of them he caused a box of bricks to be made by an out-of-work
+carpenter, not the insufficient supply of the toyshop, you understand,
+but a really adequate quantity of bricks made out of oak and shaped
+and smoothed, bricks about five inches by two and a half by one, and
+half-bricks and quarter-bricks to correspond. There were hundreds of
+them, many hundreds. I could build six towers as high as myself with
+them, and there seemed quite enough for every engineering project I
+could undertake. I could build whole towns with streets and houses and
+churches and citadels; I could bridge every gap in the oilcloth and make
+causeways over crumpled spaces (which I feigned to be morasses), and on
+a keel of whole bricks it was possible to construct ships to push
+over the high seas to the remotest port in the room. And a disciplined
+population, that rose at last by sedulous begging on birthdays and
+all convenient occasions to well over two hundred, of lead sailors and
+soldiers, horse, foot and artillery, inhabited this world.
+
+Justice has never been done to bricks and soldiers by those who write
+about toys. The praises of the toy theatre have been a common theme for
+essayists, the planning of the scenes, the painting and cutting out of
+the caste, penny plain twopence coloured, the stink and glory of the
+performance and the final conflagration. I had such a theatre once, but
+I never loved it nor hoped for much from it; my bricks and soldiers were
+my perpetual drama. I recall an incessant variety of interests. There
+was the mystery and charm of the complicated buildings one could make,
+with long passages and steps and windows through which one peeped into
+their intricacies, and by means of slips of card one could make slanting
+ways in them, and send marbles rolling from top to base and thence out
+into the hold of a waiting ship. Then there were the fortresses and gun
+emplacements and covered ways in which one's soldiers went. And there
+was commerce; the shops and markets and store-rooms full of nasturtium
+seed, thrift seed, lupin beans and suchlike provender from the garden;
+such stuff one stored in match-boxes and pill-boxes, or packed in sacks
+of old glove fingers tied up with thread and sent off by waggons along
+the great military road to the beleaguered fortress on the Indian
+frontier beyond the worn places that were dismal swamps. And there were
+battles on the way.
+
+That great road is still clear in my memory. I was given, I forget by
+what benefactor, certain particularly fierce red Indians of lead--I have
+never seen such soldiers since--and for these my father helped me to
+make tepees of brown paper, and I settled them in a hitherto desolate
+country under the frowning nail-studded cliffs of an ancient trunk. Then
+I conquered them and garrisoned their land. (Alas! they died, no doubt
+through contact with civilisation--one my mother trod on--and their
+land became a wilderness again and was ravaged for a time by a clockwork
+crocodile of vast proportions.) And out towards the coal-scuttle was a
+region near the impassable thickets of the ragged hearthrug where lived
+certain china Zulus brandishing spears, and a mountain country of
+rudely piled bricks concealing the most devious and enchanting caves and
+several mines of gold and silver paper. Among these rocks a number of
+survivors from a Noah's Ark made a various, dangerous, albeit frequently
+invalid and crippled fauna, and I was wont to increase the uncultivated
+wildness of this region further by trees of privet-twigs from the garden
+hedge and box from the garden borders. By these territories went
+my Imperial Road carrying produce to and fro, bridging gaps in the
+oilcloth, tunnelling through Encyclopaedic hills--one tunnel was three
+volumes long--defended as occasion required by camps of paper tents
+or brick blockhouses, and ending at last in a magnificently engineered
+ascent to a fortress on the cliffs commanding the Indian reservation.
+
+My games upon the floor must have spread over several years and
+developed from small beginnings, incorporating now this suggestion and
+now that. They stretch, I suppose, from seven to eleven or twelve. I
+played them intermittently, and they bulk now in the retrospect far more
+significantly than they did at the time. I played them in bursts, and
+then forgot them for long periods; through the spring and summer I was
+mostly out of doors, and school and classes caught me early. And in
+the retrospect I see them all not only magnified and transfigured, but
+fore-shortened and confused together. A clockwork railway, I seem to
+remember, came and went; one or two clockwork boats, toy sailing ships
+that, being keeled, would do nothing but lie on their beam ends on the
+floor; a detestable lot of cavalrymen, undersized and gilt all over,
+given me by a maiden aunt, and very much what one might expect from
+an aunt, that I used as Nero used his Christians to ornament my public
+buildings; and I finally melted some into fratricidal bullets, and
+therewith blew the rest to flat splashes of lead by means of a brass
+cannon in the garden.
+
+I find this empire of the floor much more vivid and detailed in my
+memory now than many of the owners of the skirts and legs and boots that
+went gingerly across its territories. Occasionally, alas! they stooped
+to scrub, abolishing in one universal destruction the slow growth of
+whole days of civilised development. I still remember the hatred and
+disgust of these catastrophes. Like Noah I was given warnings. Did I
+disregard them, coarse red hands would descend, plucking garrisons
+from fortresses and sailors from ships, jumbling them up in their wrong
+boxes, clumsily so that their rifles and swords were broken, sweeping
+the splendid curves of the Imperial Road into heaps of ruins, casting
+the jungle growth of Zululand into the fire.
+
+“Well, Master Dick,” the voice of this cosmic calamity would say, “you
+ought to have put them away last night. No! I can't wait until you've
+sailed them all away in ships. I got my work to do, and do it I will.”
+
+And in no time all my continents and lands were swirling water and
+swiping strokes of house-flannel.
+
+That was the worst of my giant visitants, but my mother too, dear lady,
+was something of a terror to this microcosm. She wore spring-sided
+boots, a kind of boot now vanished, I believe, from the world, with dull
+bodies and shiny toes, and a silk dress with flounces that were very
+destructive to the more hazardous viaducts of the Imperial Road. She
+was always, I seem to remember, fetching me; fetching me for a meal,
+fetching me for a walk or, detestable absurdity! fetching me for a wash
+and brush up, and she never seemed to understand anything whatever of
+the political systems across which she came to me. Also she forbade all
+toys on Sundays except the bricks for church-building and the soldiers
+for church parade, or a Scriptural use of the remains of the Noah's Ark
+mixed up with a wooden Swiss dairy farm. But she really did not know
+whether a thing was a church or not unless it positively bristled with
+cannon, and many a Sunday afternoon have I played Chicago (with the fear
+of God in my heart) under an infidel pretence that it was a new sort of
+ark rather elaborately done.
+
+Chicago, I must explain, was based upon my father's description of the
+pig slaughterings in that city and certain pictures I had seen. You made
+your beasts--which were all the ark lot really, provisionally conceived
+as pigs--go up elaborate approaches to a central pen, from which
+they went down a cardboard slide four at a time, and dropped most
+satisfyingly down a brick shaft, and pitter-litter over some steep steps
+to where a head slaughterman (ne Noah) strung a cotton loop round their
+legs and sent them by pin hooks along a wire to a second slaughterman
+with a chipped foot (formerly Mrs. Noah) who, if I remember rightly,
+converted them into Army sausage by means of a portion of the inside of
+an old alarum clock.
+
+My mother did not understand my games, but my father did. He wore
+bright-coloured socks and carpet slippers when he was indoors--my mother
+disliked boots in the house--and he would sit down on my little chair
+and survey the microcosm on the floor with admirable understanding and
+sympathy.
+
+It was he who gave me most of my toys and, I more than suspect, most
+of my ideas. “Here's some corrugated iron,” he would say, “suitable for
+roofs and fencing,” and hand me a lump of that stiff crinkled paper that
+is used for packing medicine bottles. Or, “Dick, do you see the tiger
+loose near the Imperial Road?--won't do for your cattle ranch.” And I
+would find a bright new lead tiger like a special creation at large in
+the world, and demanding a hunting expedition and much elaborate effort
+to get him safely housed in the city menagerie beside the captured
+dragon crocodile, tamed now, and his key lost and the heart and spring
+gone out of him.
+
+And to the various irregular reading of my father I owe the inestimable
+blessing of never having a boy's book in my boyhood except those of
+Jules Verne. But my father used to get books for himself and me from
+the Bromstead Institute, Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid and illustrated
+histories; one of the Russo-Turkish war and one of Napier's expedition
+to Abyssinia I read from end to end; Stanley and Livingstone, lives
+of Wellington, Napoleon and Garibaldi, and back volumes of PUNCH, from
+which I derived conceptions of foreign and domestic politics it has
+taken years of adult reflection to correct. And at home permanently we
+had Wood's NATURAL HISTORY, a brand-new illustrated Green's HISTORY OF
+THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, Irving's COMPANIONS OF COLUMBUS, a great number
+of unbound parts of some geographical work, a VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD I
+think it was called, with pictures of foreign places, and Clarke's NEW
+TESTAMENT with a map of Palestine, and a variety of other informing
+books bought at sales. There was a Sowerby's BOTANY also, with thousands
+of carefully tinted pictures of British plants, and one or two other
+important works in the sitting-room. I was allowed to turn these over
+and even lie on the floor with them on Sundays and other occasions of
+exceptional cleanliness.
+
+And in the attic I found one day a very old forgotten map after the
+fashion of a bird's-eye view, representing the Crimea, that fascinated
+me and kept me for hours navigating its waters with a pin.
+
+
+2
+
+My father was a lank-limbed man in easy shabby tweed clothes and with
+his hands in his trouser pockets. He was a science teacher, taking
+a number of classes at the Bromstead Institute in Kent under the old
+Science and Art Department, and “visiting” various schools; and our
+resources were eked out by my mother's income of nearly a hundred
+pounds a year, and by his inheritance of a terrace of three palatial but
+structurally unsound stucco houses near Bromstead Station.
+
+They were big clumsy residences in the earliest Victorian style,
+interminably high and with deep damp basements and downstairs
+coal-cellars and kitchens that suggested an architect vindictively
+devoted to the discomfort of the servant class. If so, he had
+overreached himself and defeated his end, for no servant would stay
+in them unless for exceptional wages or exceptional tolerance of
+inefficiency or exceptional freedom in repartee. Every storey in the
+house was from twelve to fifteen feet high (which would have been cool
+and pleasant in a hot climate), and the stairs went steeply up, to end
+at last in attics too inaccessible for occupation. The ceilings had vast
+plaster cornices of classical design, fragments of which would sometimes
+fall unexpectedly, and the wall-papers were bold and gigantic in pattern
+and much variegated by damp and ill-mended rents.
+
+As my father was quite unable to let more than one of these houses at a
+time, and that for the most part to eccentric and undesirable tenants,
+he thought it politic to live in one of the two others, and devote the
+rent he received from the let one, when it was let, to the incessant
+necessary repairing of all three. He also did some of the repairing
+himself and, smoking a bull-dog pipe the while, which my mother would
+not allow him to do in the house, he cultivated vegetables in a sketchy,
+unpunctual and not always successful manner in the unoccupied gardens.
+The three houses faced north, and the back of the one we occupied was
+covered by a grape-vine that yielded, I remember, small green grapes
+for pies in the spring, and imperfectly ripe black grapes in favourable
+autumns for the purposes of dessert. The grape-vine played an important
+part in my life, for my father broke his neck while he was pruning it,
+when I was thirteen.
+
+My father was what is called a man of ideas, but they were not always
+good ideas. My grandfather had been a private schoolmaster and one of
+the founders of the College of Preceptors, and my father had assisted
+him in his school until increasing competition and diminishing
+attendance had made it evident that the days of small private schools
+kept by unqualified persons were numbered. Thereupon my father had
+roused himself and had qualified as a science teacher under the Science
+and Art Department, which in these days had charge of the scientific and
+artistic education of the mass of the English population, and had thrown
+himself into science teaching and the earning of government grants
+therefor with great if transitory zeal and success.
+
+I do not remember anything of my father's earlier and more energetic
+time. I was the child of my parents' middle years; they married when my
+father was thirty-five and my mother past forty, and I saw only the last
+decadent phase of his educational career.
+
+The Science and Art Department has vanished altogether from the
+world, and people are forgetting it now with the utmost readiness and
+generosity. Part of its substance and staff and spirit survive, more or
+less completely digested into the Board of Education.
+
+The world does move on, even in its government. It is wonderful how many
+of the clumsy and limited governing bodies of my youth and early manhood
+have given place now to more scientific and efficient machinery. When
+I was a boy, Bromstead, which is now a borough, was ruled by a strange
+body called a Local Board--it was the Age of Boards--and I still
+remember indistinctly my father rejoicing at the breakfast-table over
+the liberation of London from the corrupt and devastating control of a
+Metropolitan Board of Works. Then there were also School Boards; I
+was already practically in politics before the London School Board was
+absorbed by the spreading tentacles of the London County Council.
+
+It gives a measure of the newness of our modern ideas of the State to
+remember that the very beginnings of public education lie within my
+father's lifetime, and that many most intelligent and patriotic people
+were shocked beyond measure at the State doing anything of the sort.
+When he was born, totally illiterate people who could neither read a
+book nor write more than perhaps a clumsy signature, were to be found
+everywhere in England; and great masses of the population were getting
+no instruction at all. Only a few schools flourished upon the patronage
+of exceptional parents; all over the country the old endowed grammar
+schools were to be found sinking and dwindling; many of them had
+closed altogether. In the new great centres of population multitudes of
+children were sweated in the factories, darkly ignorant and wretched
+and the under-equipped and under-staffed National and British schools,
+supported by voluntary contributions and sectarian rivalries, made an
+ineffectual fight against this festering darkness. It was a condition
+of affairs clamouring for remedies, but there was an immense amount
+of indifference and prejudice to be overcome before any remedies were
+possible. Perhaps some day some industrious and lucid historian
+will disentangle all the muddle of impulses and antagonisms, the
+commercialism, utilitarianism, obstinate conservatism, humanitarian
+enthusiasm, out of which our present educational organisation arose.
+I have long since come to believe it necessary that all new social
+institutions should be born in confusion, and that at first they should
+present chiefly crude and ridiculous aspects. The distrust of government
+in the Victorian days was far too great, and the general intelligence
+far too low, to permit the State to go about the new business it was
+taking up in a businesslike way, to train teachers, build and equip
+schools, endow pedagogic research, and provide properly written
+school-books. These things it was felt MUST be provided by individual
+and local effort, and since it was manifest that it was individual
+and local effort that were in default, it was reluctantly agreed to
+stimulate them by money payments. The State set up a machinery of
+examination both in Science and Art and for the elementary schools; and
+payments, known technically as grants, were made in accordance with the
+examination results attained, to such schools as Providence might see
+fit to send into the world. In this way it was felt the Demand would
+be established that would, according to the beliefs of that time,
+inevitably ensure the Supply. An industry of “Grant earning” was
+created, and this would give education as a necessary by-product.
+
+In the end this belief was found to need qualification, but
+Grant-earning was still in full activity when I was a small boy. So far
+as the Science and Art Department and my father are concerned, the task
+of examination was entrusted to eminent scientific men, for the most
+part quite unaccustomed to teaching. You see, if they also were teaching
+similar classes to those they examined, it was feared that injustice
+might be done. Year after year these eminent persons set questions
+and employed subordinates to read and mark the increasing thousands of
+answers that ensued, and having no doubt the national ideal of fairness
+well developed in their minds, they were careful each year to re-read
+the preceding papers before composing the current one, in order to see
+what it was usual to ask. As a result of this, in the course of a
+few years the recurrence and permutation of questions became almost
+calculable, and since the practical object of the teaching was to teach
+people not science, but how to write answers to these questions, the
+industry of Grant-earning assumed a form easily distinguished from any
+kind of genuine education whatever.
+
+Other remarkable compromises had also to be made with the spirit of the
+age. The unfortunate conflict between Religion and Science prevalent at
+this time was mitigated, if I remember rightly, by making graduates in
+arts and priests in the established church Science Teachers EX OFFICIO,
+and leaving local and private enterprise to provide schools, diagrams,
+books, material, according to the conceptions of efficiency prevalent in
+the district. Private enterprise made a particularly good thing of the
+books. A number of competing firms of publishers sprang into existence
+specialising in Science and Art Department work; they set themselves to
+produce text-books that should supply exactly the quantity and quality
+of knowledge necessary for every stage of each of five and twenty
+subjects into which desirable science was divided, and copies and models
+and instructions that should give precisely the method and gestures
+esteemed as proficiency in art. Every section of each book was written
+in the idiom found to be most satisfactory to the examiners, and test
+questions extracted from papers set in former years were appended to
+every chapter. By means of these last the teacher was able to train his
+class to the very highest level of grant-earning efficiency, and very
+naturally he cast all other methods of exposition aside. First he posed
+his pupils with questions and then dictated model replies.
+
+That was my father's method of instruction. I attended his classes as an
+elementary grant-earner from the age of ten until his death, and it is
+so I remember him, sitting on the edge of a table, smothering a yawn
+occasionally and giving out the infallible formulae to the industriously
+scribbling class sitting in rows of desks before him. Occasionally he
+would slide to his feet and go to a blackboard on an easel and draw on
+that very slowly and deliberately in coloured chalks a diagram for the
+class to copy in coloured pencils, and sometimes he would display a
+specimen or arrange an experiment for them to see. The room in the
+Institute in which he taught was equipped with a certain amount of
+apparatus prescribed as necessary for subject this and subject that by
+the Science and Art Department, and this my father would supplement with
+maps and diagrams and drawings of his own.
+
+But he never really did experiments, except that in the class in
+systematic botany he sometimes made us tease common flowers to pieces.
+He did not do experiments if he could possibly help it, because in the
+first place they used up time and gas for the Bunsen burner and good
+material in a ruinous fashion, and in the second they were, in his
+rather careless and sketchy hands, apt to endanger the apparatus of
+the Institute and even the lives of his students. Then thirdly, real
+experiments involved washing up. And moreover they always turned out
+wrong, and sometimes misled the too observant learner very seriously
+and opened demoralising controversies. Quite early in life I acquired an
+almost ineradicable sense of the unscientific perversity of Nature and
+the impassable gulf that is fixed between systematic science and elusive
+fact. I knew, for example, that in science, whether it be subject XII.,
+Organic Chemistry, or subject XVII., Animal Physiology, when you blow
+into a glass of lime-water it instantly becomes cloudy, and if you
+continue to blow it clears again, whereas in truth you may blow into the
+stuff from the lime-water bottle until you are crimson in the face and
+painful under the ears, and it never becomes cloudy at all. And I knew,
+too, that in science if you put potassium chlorate into a retort and
+heat it over a Bunsen burner, oxygen is disengaged and may be collected
+over water, whereas in real life if you do anything of the sort the
+vessel cracks with a loud report, the potassium chlorate descends
+sizzling upon the flame, the experimenter says “Oh! Damn!” with
+astonishing heartiness and distinctness, and a lady student in the back
+seats gets up and leaves the room.
+
+Science is the organised conquest of Nature, and I can quite understand
+that ancient libertine refusing to co-operate in her own undoing. And I
+can quite understand, too, my father's preference for what he called
+an illustrative experiment, which was simply an arrangement of the
+apparatus in front of the class with nothing whatever by way of
+material, and the Bunsen burner clean and cool, and then a slow luminous
+description of just what you did put in it when you were so ill-advised
+as to carry the affair beyond illustration, and just exactly what ought
+anyhow to happen when you did. He had considerable powers of vivid
+expression, so that in this way he could make us see all he described.
+The class, freed from any unpleasant nervous tension, could draw this
+still life without flinching, and if any part was too difficult to draw,
+then my father would produce a simplified version on the blackboard
+to be copied instead. And he would also write on the blackboard any
+exceptionally difficult but grant-earning words, such as “empyreumatic”
+ or “botryoidal.”
+
+Some words in constant use he rarely explained. I remember once sticking
+up my hand and asking him in the full flow of description, “Please, sir,
+what is flocculent?”
+
+“The precipitate is.”
+
+“Yes, sir, but what does it mean?”
+
+“Oh! flocculent!” said my father, “flocculent! Why--” he extended his
+hand and arm and twiddled his fingers for a second in the air. “Like
+that,” he said.
+
+I thought the explanation sufficient, but he paused for a moment after
+giving it. “As in a flock bed, you know,” he added and resumed his
+discourse.
+
+
+3
+
+My father, I am afraid, carried a natural incompetence in practical
+affairs to an exceptionally high level. He combined practical
+incompetence, practical enterprise and a thoroughly sanguine
+temperament, in a manner that I have never seen paralleled in any human
+being. He was always trying to do new things in the briskest manner,
+under the suggestion of books or papers or his own spontaneous
+imagination, and as he had never been trained to do anything whatever
+in his life properly, his futilities were extensive and thorough. At one
+time he nearly gave up his classes for intensive culture, so enamoured
+was he of its possibilities; the peculiar pungency of the manure he got,
+in pursuit of a chemical theory of his own, has scarred my olfactory
+memories for a lifetime. The intensive culture phase is very clear in my
+memory; it came near the end of his career and when I was between eleven
+and twelve. I was mobilised to gather caterpillars on several occasions,
+and assisted in nocturnal raids upon the slugs by lantern-light that
+wrecked my preparation work for school next day. My father dug up both
+lawns, and trenched and manured in spasms of immense vigour alternating
+with periods of paralysing distaste for the garden. And for weeks he
+talked about eight hundred pounds an acre at every meal.
+
+A garden, even when it is not exasperated by intensive methods, is a
+thing as exacting as a baby, its moods have to be watched; it does
+not wait upon the cultivator's convenience, but has times of its own.
+Intensive culture greatly increases this disposition to trouble mankind;
+it makes a garden touchy and hysterical, a drugged and demoralised and
+over-irritated garden. My father got at cross purposes with our two
+patches at an early stage. Everything grew wrong from the first to last,
+and if my father's manures intensified nothing else, they certainly
+intensified the Primordial Curse. The peas were eaten in the night
+before they were three inches high, the beans bore nothing but blight,
+the only apparent result of a spraying of the potatoes was to develop
+a PENCHANT in the cat for being ill indoors, the cucumber frames were
+damaged by the catapulting of boys going down the lane at the back,
+and all your cucumbers were mysteriously embittered. That lane with its
+occasional passers-by did much to wreck the intensive scheme, because my
+father always stopped work and went indoors if any one watched him.
+His special manure was apt to arouse a troublesome spirit of inquiry in
+hardy natures.
+
+In digging his rows and shaping his patches he neglected the guiding
+string and trusted to his eye altogether too much, and the consequent
+obliquity and the various wind-breaks and scare-crows he erected, and
+particularly an irrigation contrivance he began and never finished by
+which everything was to be watered at once by means of pieces of gutter
+from the roof and outhouses of Number 2, and a large and particularly
+obstinate clump of elder-bushes in the abolished hedge that he had
+failed to destroy entirely either by axe or by fire, combined to give
+the gardens under intensive culture a singularly desolate and disorderly
+appearance. He took steps towards the diversion of our house drain under
+the influence of the Sewage Utilisation Society; but happily he stopped
+in time. He hardly completed any of the operations he began; something
+else became more urgent or simply he tired; a considerable area of the
+Number 2 territory was never even dug up.
+
+In the end the affair irritated him beyond endurance. Never was a man
+less horticulturally-minded. The clamour of these vegetables he had
+launched into the world for his service and assistance, wore out his
+patience. He would walk into the garden the happiest of men after a
+day or so of disregard, talking to me of history perhaps or social
+organisation, or summarising some book he had read. He talked to me
+of anything that interested him, regardless of my limitations. Then he
+would begin to note the growth of the weeds. “This won't do,” he would
+say and pull up a handful.
+
+More weeding would follow and the talk would become fragmentary. His
+hands would become earthy, his nails black, weeds would snap off in
+his careless grip, leaving the roots behind. The world would darken.
+He would look at his fingers with disgusted astonishment. “CURSE these
+weeds!” he would say from his heart. His discourse was at an end.
+
+I have memories, too, of his sudden unexpected charges into the
+tranquillity of the house, his hands and clothes intensively enriched.
+He would come in like a whirlwind. “This damned stuff all over me and
+the Agricultural Chemistry Class at six! Bah! AAAAAAH!”
+
+My mother would never learn not to attempt to break him of swearing
+on such occasions. She would remain standing a little stiffly in the
+scullery refusing to assist him to the adjectival towel he sought.
+
+“If you say such things--”
+
+He would dance with rage and hurl the soap about. “The towel!” he would
+cry, flicking suds from big fingers in every direction; “the towel! I'll
+let the blithering class slide if you don't give me the towel! I'll give
+up everything, I tell you--everything!”...
+
+At last with the failure of the lettuces came the breaking point. I was
+in the little arbour learning Latin irregular verbs when it happened.
+I can see him still, his peculiar tenor voice still echoes in my brain,
+shouting his opinion of intensive culture for all the world to hear, and
+slashing away at that abominable mockery of a crop with a hoe. We had
+tied them up with bast only a week or so before, and now half were
+rotten and half had shot up into tall slender growths. He had the hoe in
+both hands and slogged. Great wipes he made, and at each stroke he said,
+“Take that!”
+
+The air was thick with flying fragments of abortive salad. It was a
+fantastic massacre. It was the French Revolution of that cold tyranny,
+the vindictive overthrow of the pampered vegetable aristocrats. After he
+had assuaged his passion upon them, he turned for other prey; he kicked
+holes in two of our noblest marrows, flicked off the heads of half a row
+of artichokes, and shied the hoe with a splendid smash into the cucumber
+frame. Something of the awe of that moment returns to me as I write of
+it.
+
+“Well, my boy,” he said, approaching with an expression of beneficent
+happiness, “I've done with gardening. Let's go for a walk like
+reasonable beings. I've had enough of this”--his face was convulsed for
+an instant with bitter resentment--“Pandering to cabbages.”
+
+
+4
+
+That afternoon's walk sticks in my memory for many reasons. One is
+that we went further than I had ever been before; far beyond Keston and
+nearly to Seven-oaks, coming back by train from Dunton Green, and the
+other is that my father as he went along talked about himself, not so
+much to me as to himself, and about life and what he had done with
+it. He monologued so that at times he produced an effect of weird
+world-forgetfulness. I listened puzzled, and at that time not
+understanding many things that afterwards became plain to me. It is only
+in recent years that I have discovered the pathos of that monologue; how
+friendless my father was and uncompanioned in his thoughts and feelings,
+and what a hunger he may have felt for the sympathy of the undeveloped
+youngster who trotted by his side.
+
+“I'm no gardener,” he said, “I'm no anything. Why the devil did I start
+gardening?
+
+“I suppose man was created to mind a garden... But the Fall let us out
+of that! What was I created for? God! what was I created for?...
+
+“Slaves to matter! Minding inanimate things! It doesn't suit me, you
+know. I've got no hands and no patience. I've mucked about with life.
+Mucked about with life.” He suddenly addressed himself to me, and for
+an instant I started like an eavesdropper discovered. “Whatever you do,
+boy, whatever you do, make a Plan. Make a good Plan and stick to it.
+Find out what life is about--I never have--and set yourself to do
+whatever you ought to do. I admit it's a puzzle....
+
+“Those damned houses have been the curse of my life. Stucco white
+elephants! Beastly cracked stucco with stains of green--black and green.
+Conferva and soot.... Property, they are!... Beware of Things, Dick,
+beware of Things! Before you know where you are you are waiting on them
+and minding them. They'll eat your life up. Eat up your hours and your
+blood and energy! When those houses came to me, I ought to have
+sold them--or fled the country. I ought to have cleared out.
+Sarcophagi--eaters of men! Oh! the hours and days of work, the nights
+of anxiety those vile houses have cost me! The painting! It worked up
+my arms; it got all over me. I stank of it. It made me ill. It isn't
+living--it's minding....
+
+“Property's the curse of life. Property! Ugh! Look at this country all
+cut up into silly little parallelograms, look at all those villas we
+passed just now and those potato patches and that tarred shanty and the
+hedge! Somebody's minding every bit of it like a dog tied to a cart's
+tail. Patching it and bothering about it. Bothering! Yapping at every
+passer-by. Look at that notice-board! One rotten worried little beast
+wants to keep us other rotten little beasts off HIS patch,--God knows
+why! Look at the weeds in it. Look at the mended fence!... There's no
+property worth having, Dick, but money. That's only good to spend.
+All these things. Human souls buried under a cartload of blithering
+rubbish....
+
+“I'm not a fool, Dick. I have qualities, imagination, a sort of go. I
+ought to have made a better thing of life.
+
+“I'm sure I could have done things. Only the old people pulled my leg.
+They started me wrong. They never started me at all. I only began to
+find out what life was like when I was nearly forty.
+
+“If I'd gone to a university; if I'd had any sort of sound training, if
+I hadn't slipped into the haphazard places that came easiest....
+
+“Nobody warned me. Nobody. It isn't a world we live in, Dick; it's a
+cascade of accidents; it's a chaos exasperated by policemen! YOU be
+warned in time, Dick. You stick to a plan. Don't wait for any one to
+show you the way. Nobody will. There isn't a way till you make one. Get
+education, get a good education. Fight your way to the top. It's your
+only chance. I've watched you. You'll do no good at digging and property
+minding. There isn't a neighbour in Bromstead won't be able to skin you
+at suchlike games. You and I are the brainy unstable kind, topside or
+nothing. And if ever those blithering houses come to you--don't have
+'em. Give them away! Dynamite 'em--and off! LIVE, Dick! I'll get rid of
+them for you if I can, Dick, but remember what I say.”...
+
+So it was my father discoursed, if not in those particular words, yet
+exactly in that manner, as he slouched along the southward road, with
+resentful eyes becoming less resentful as he talked, and flinging out
+clumsy illustrative motions at the outskirts of Bromstead as we passed
+along them. That afternoon he hated Bromstead, from its foot-tiring
+pebbles up. He had no illusions about Bromstead or himself. I have
+the clearest impression of him in his garden-stained tweeds with a
+deer-stalker hat on the back of his head and presently a pipe sometimes
+between his teeth and sometimes in his gesticulating hand, as he became
+diverted by his talk from his original exasperation....
+
+This particular afternoon is no doubt mixed up in my memory with
+many other afternoons; all sorts of things my father said and did at
+different times have got themselves referred to it; it filled me at the
+time with a great unprecedented sense of fellowship and it has become
+the symbol now for all our intercourse together. If I didn't understand
+the things he said, I did the mood he was in. He gave me two very broad
+ideas in that talk and the talks I have mingled with it; he gave them
+to me very clearly and they have remained fundamental in my mind; one a
+sense of the extraordinary confusion and waste and planlessness of the
+human life that went on all about us; and the other of a great ideal of
+order and economy which he called variously Science and Civilisation,
+and which, though I do not remember that he ever used that word, I
+suppose many people nowadays would identify with Socialism,--as the
+Fabians expound it.
+
+He was not very definite about this Science, you must understand, but
+he seemed always to be waving his hand towards it,--just as his
+contemporary Tennyson seems always to be doing--he belonged to his age
+and mostly his talk was destructive of the limited beliefs of his time,
+he led me to infer rather than actually told me that this Science was
+coming, a spirit of light and order, to the rescue of a world groaning
+and travailing in muddle for the want of it....
+
+
+5
+
+When I think of Bromstead nowadays I find it inseparably bound up
+with the disorders of my father's gardening, and the odd patchings and
+paintings that disfigured his houses. It was all of a piece with that.
+
+Let me try and give something of the quality of Bromstead and something
+of its history. It is the quality and history of a thousand places
+round and about London, and round and about the other great centres of
+population in the world. Indeed it is in a measure the quality of
+the whole of this modern world from which we who have the statesman's
+passion struggle to evolve, and dream still of evolving order.
+
+First, then, you must think of Bromstead a hundred and fifty years ago,
+as a narrow irregular little street of thatched houses strung out on
+the London and Dover Road, a little mellow sample unit of a social order
+that had a kind of completeness, at its level, of its own. At that
+time its population numbered a little under two thousand people, mostly
+engaged in agricultural work or in trades serving agriculture. There was
+a blacksmith, a saddler, a chemist, a doctor, a barber, a linen-draper
+(who brewed his own beer); a veterinary surgeon, a hardware shop,
+and two capacious inns. Round and about it were a number of pleasant
+gentlemen's seats, whose owners went frequently to London town in their
+coaches along the very tolerable high-road. The church was big enough
+to hold the whole population, were people minded to go to church, and
+indeed a large proportion did go, and all who married were married in
+it, and everybody, to begin with, was christened at its font and buried
+at last in its yew-shaded graveyard. Everybody knew everybody in the
+place. It was, in fact, a definite place and a real human community in
+those days. There was a pleasant old market-house in the middle of the
+town with a weekly market, and an annual fair at which much cheerful
+merry making and homely intoxication occurred; there was a pack of
+hounds which hunted within five miles of London Bridge, and the local
+gentry would occasionally enliven the place with valiant cricket matches
+for a hundred guineas a side, to the vast excitement of the entire
+population. It was very much the same sort of place that it had been for
+three or four centuries. A Bromstead Rip van Winkle from 1550 returning
+in 1750 would have found most of the old houses still as he had known
+them, the same trades a little improved and differentiated one from the
+other, the same roads rather more carefully tended, the Inns not very
+much altered, the ancient familiar market-house. The occasional wheeled
+traffic would have struck him as the most remarkable difference, next
+perhaps to the swaggering painted stone monuments instead of brasses
+and the protestant severity of the communion-table in the parish
+church,--both from the material point of view very little things. A
+Rip van Winkle from 1350, again, would have noticed scarcely greater
+changes; fewer clergy, more people, and particularly more people of
+the middling sort; the glass in the windows of many of the houses, the
+stylish chimneys springing up everywhere would have impressed him, and
+suchlike details. The place would have had the same boundaries, the same
+broad essential features, would have been still itself in the way that
+a man is still himself after he has “filled out” a little and grown a
+longer beard and changed his clothes.
+
+But after 1750 something got hold of the world, something that was
+destined to alter the scale of every human affair.
+
+That something was machinery and a vague energetic disposition to
+improve material things. In another part of England ingenious people
+were beginning to use coal in smelting iron, and were producing metal
+in abundance and metal castings in sizes that had hitherto been
+unattainable. Without warning or preparation, increment involving
+countless possibilities of further increment was coming to the strength
+of horses and men. “Power,” all unsuspected, was flowing like a drug
+into the veins of the social body.
+
+Nobody seems to have perceived this coming of power, and nobody had
+calculated its probable consequences. Suddenly, almost inadvertently,
+people found themselves doing things that would have amazed their
+ancestors. They began to construct wheeled vehicles much more easily and
+cheaply than they had ever done before, to make up roads and move things
+about that had formerly been esteemed too heavy for locomotion, to join
+woodwork with iron nails instead of wooden pegs, to achieve all sorts
+of mechanical possibilities, to trade more freely and manufacture on a
+larger scale, to send goods abroad in a wholesale and systematic way,
+to bring back commodities from overseas, not simply spices and fine
+commodities, but goods in bulk. The new influence spread to agriculture,
+iron appliances replaced wooden, breeding of stock became systematic,
+paper-making and printing increased and cheapened. Roofs of slate and
+tile appeared amidst and presently prevailed over the original Bromstead
+thatch, the huge space of Common to the south was extensively enclosed,
+and what had been an ill-defined horse-track to Dover, only passable
+by adventurous coaches in dry weather, became the Dover Road, and was
+presently the route first of one and then of several daily coaches.
+The High Street was discovered to be too tortuous for these awakening
+energies, and a new road cut off its worst contortions. Residential
+villas appeared occupied by retired tradesmen and widows, who esteemed
+the place healthy, and by others of a strange new unoccupied class of
+people who had money invested in joint-stock enterprises. First one
+and then several boys' boarding-schools came, drawing their pupils from
+London,--my grandfather's was one of these. London, twelve miles to the
+north-west, was making itself felt more and more.
+
+But this was only the beginning of the growth period, the first trickle
+of the coming flood of mechanical power. Away in the north they were
+casting iron in bigger and bigger forms, working their way to the
+production of steel on a large scale, applying power in factories.
+Bromstead had almost doubted in size again long before the railway came;
+there was hardly any thatch left in the High Street, but instead were
+houses with handsome brass-knockered front doors and several windows,
+and shops with shop-fronts all of square glass panes, and the place was
+lighted publicly now by oil lamps--previously only one flickering lamp
+outside each of the coaching inns had broken the nocturnal darkness.
+And there was talk, it long remained talk,--of gas. The gasworks came in
+1834, and about that date my father's three houses must have been built
+convenient for the London Road. They mark nearly the beginning of the
+real suburban quality; they were let at first to City people still
+engaged in business.
+
+And then hard on the gasworks had come the railway and cheap coal; there
+was a wild outbreak of brickfields upon the claylands to the east, and
+the Great Growth had begun in earnest. The agricultural placidities that
+had formerly come to the very borders of the High Street were broken up
+north, west and south, by new roads. This enterprising person and then
+that began to “run up” houses, irrespective of every other enterprising
+person who was doing the same thing. A Local Board came into existence,
+and with much hesitation and penny-wise economy inaugurated drainage
+works. Rates became a common topic, a fact of accumulating importance.
+Several chapels of zinc and iron appeared, and also a white new church
+in commercial Gothic upon the common, and another of red brick in the
+residential district out beyond the brickfields towards Chessington.
+
+The population doubled again and doubled again, and became particularly
+teeming in the prolific “working-class” district about the deep-rutted,
+muddy, coal-blackened roads between the gasworks, Blodgett's laundries,
+and the railway goods-yard. Weekly properties, that is to say small
+houses built by small property owners and let by the week, sprang up
+also in the Cage Fields, and presently extended right up the London
+Road. A single national school in an inconvenient situation set itself
+inadequately to collect subscriptions and teach the swarming, sniffing,
+grimy offspring of this dingy new population to read. The villages of
+Beckington, which used to be three miles to the west, and Blamely four
+miles to the east of Bromstead, were experiencing similar distensions
+and proliferations, and grew out to meet us. All effect of locality or
+community had gone from these places long before I was born; hardly any
+one knew any one; there was no general meeting place any more, the old
+fairs were just common nuisances haunted by gypsies, van showmen, Cheap
+Jacks and London roughs, the churches were incapable of a quarter of the
+population. One or two local papers of shameless veniality reported the
+proceedings of the local Bench and the local Board, compelled tradesmen
+who were interested in these affairs to advertise, used the epithet
+“Bromstedian” as one expressing peculiar virtues, and so maintained in
+the general mind a weak tradition of some local quality that embraced
+us all. Then the parish graveyard filled up and became a scandal, and
+an ambitious area with an air of appetite was walled in by a Bromstead
+Cemetery Company, and planted with suitably high-minded and sorrowful
+varieties of conifer. A stonemason took one of the earlier villas with
+a front garden at the end of the High Street, and displayed a supply
+of urns on pillars and headstones and crosses in stone, marble, and
+granite, that would have sufficed to commemorate in elaborate detail the
+entire population of Bromstead as one found it in 1750.
+
+The cemetery was made when I was a little boy of five or six; I was in
+the full tide of building and growth from the first; the second railway
+with its station at Bromstead North and the drainage followed when I was
+ten or eleven, and all my childish memories are of digging and wheeling,
+of woods invaded by building, roads gashed open and littered with iron
+pipes amidst a fearful smell of gas, of men peeped at and seen toiling
+away deep down in excavations, of hedges broken down and replaced by
+planks, of wheelbarrows and builders' sheds, of rivulets overtaken and
+swallowed up by drain-pipes. Big trees, and especially elms, cleared
+of undergrowth and left standing amid such things, acquired a peculiar
+tattered dinginess rather in the quality of needy widow women who have
+seen happier days.
+
+The Ravensbrook of my earlier memories was a beautiful stream. It came
+into my world out of a mysterious Beyond, out of a garden, splashing
+brightly down a weir which had once been the weir of a mill. (Above the
+weir and inaccessible there were bulrushes growing in splendid clumps,
+and beyond that, pampas grass, yellow and crimson spikes of hollyhock,
+and blue suggestions of wonderland.) From the pool at the foot of
+this initial cascade it flowed in a leisurely fashion beside a
+footpath,--there were two pretty thatched cottages on the left, and here
+were ducks, and there were willows on the right,--and so came to where
+great trees grew on high banks on either hand and bowed closer, and at
+last met overhead. This part was difficult to reach because of an old
+fence, but a little boy might glimpse that long cavern of greenery by
+wading. Either I have actually seen kingfishers there, or my father has
+described them so accurately to me that he inserted them into my
+memory. I remember them there anyhow. Most of that overhung part I never
+penetrated at all, but followed the field path with my mother and met
+the stream again, where beyond there were flat meadows, Roper's meadows.
+The Ravensbrook went meandering across the middle of these, now between
+steep banks, and now with wide shallows at the bends where the cattle
+waded and drank. Yellow and purple loose-strife and ordinary rushes grew
+in clumps along the bank, and now and then a willow. On rare occasions
+of rapture one might see a rat cleaning his whiskers at the water's
+edge. The deep places were rich with tangled weeds, and in them fishes
+lurked--to me they were big fishes--water-boatmen and water-beetles
+traversed the calm surface of these still deeps; in one pool were yellow
+lilies and water-soldiers, and in the shoaly places hovering fleets of
+small fry basked in the sunshine--to vanish in a flash at one's shadow.
+In one place, too, were Rapids, where the stream woke with a start from
+a dreamless brooding into foaming panic and babbled and hastened. Well
+do I remember that half-mile of rivulet; all other rivers and cascades
+have their reference to it for me. And after I was eleven, and before we
+left Bromstead, all the delight and beauty of it was destroyed.
+
+The volume of its water decreased abruptly--I suppose the new drainage
+works that linked us up with Beckington, and made me first acquainted
+with the geological quality of the London clay, had to do with
+that--until only a weak uncleansing trickle remained. That at first
+did not strike me as a misfortune. An adventurous small boy might walk
+dryshod in places hitherto inaccessible. But hard upon that came the
+pegs, the planks and carts and devastation. Roper's meadows, being no
+longer in fear of floods, were now to be slashed out into parallelograms
+of untidy road, and built upon with rows of working-class cottages. The
+roads came,--horribly; the houses followed. They seemed to rise in
+the night. People moved into them as soon as the roofs were on, mostly
+workmen and their young wives, and already in a year some of these raw
+houses stood empty again from defaulting tenants, with windows broken
+and wood-work warping and rotting. The Ravensbrook became a dump for
+old iron, rusty cans, abandoned boots and the like, and was a river
+only when unusual rains filled it for a day or so with an inky flood of
+surface water....
+
+That indeed was my most striking perception in the growth of Bromstead.
+The Ravensbrook had been important to my imaginative life; that way
+had always been my first choice in all my walks with my mother, and its
+rapid swamping by the new urban growth made it indicative of all the
+other things that had happened just before my time, or were still, at a
+less dramatic pace, happening. I realised that building was the enemy.
+I began to understand why in every direction out of Bromstead one walked
+past scaffold-poles into litter, why fragments of broken brick and
+cinder mingled in every path, and the significance of the universal
+notice-boards, either white and new or a year old and torn and battered,
+promising sites, proffering houses to be sold or let, abusing and
+intimidating passers-by for fancied trespass, and protecting rights of
+way.
+
+It is difficult to disentangle now what I understood at this time and
+what I have since come to understand, but it seems to me that even
+in those childish days I was acutely aware of an invading and growing
+disorder. The serene rhythms of the old established agriculture, I see
+now, were everywhere being replaced by cultivation under notice and
+snatch crops; hedges ceased to be repaired, and were replaced by cheap
+iron railings or chunks of corrugated iron; more and more hoardings
+sprang up, and contributed more and more to the nomad tribes of filthy
+paper scraps that flew before the wind and overspread the country.
+The outskirts of Bromstead were a maze of exploitation roads that
+led nowhere, that ended in tarred fences studded with nails (I don't
+remember barbed wire in those days; I think the Zeitgeist did not
+produce that until later), and in trespass boards that used vehement
+language. Broken glass, tin cans, and ashes and paper abounded. Cheap
+glass, cheap tin, abundant fuel, and a free untaxed Press had rushed
+upon a world quite unprepared to dispose of these blessings when the
+fulness of enjoyment was past.
+
+I suppose one might have persuaded oneself that all this was but the
+replacement of an ancient tranquillity, or at least an ancient balance,
+by a new order. Only to my eyes, quickened by my father's intimations,
+it was manifestly no order at all. It was a multitude of incoordinated
+fresh starts, each more sweeping and destructive than the last, and none
+of them ever really worked out to a ripe and satisfactory completion.
+Each left a legacy of products, houses, humanity, or what not, in its
+wake. It was a sort of progress that had bolted; it was change out of
+hand, and going at an unprecedented pace nowhere in particular.
+
+No, the Victorian epoch was not the dawn of a new era; it was a hasty,
+trial experiment, a gigantic experiment of the most slovenly and
+wasteful kind. I suppose it was necessary; I suppose all things are
+necessary. I suppose that before men will discipline themselves to learn
+and plan, they must first see in a hundred convincing forms the folly
+and muddle that come from headlong, aimless and haphazard methods.
+The nineteenth century was an age of demonstrations, some of them very
+impressive demonstrations, of the powers that have come to mankind, but
+of permanent achievement, what will our descendants cherish? It is hard
+to estimate what grains of precious metal may not be found in a mud
+torrent of human production on so large a scale, but will any one, a
+hundred years from now, consent to live in the houses the Victorians
+built, travel by their roads or railways, value the furnishings they
+made to live among or esteem, except for curious or historical reasons,
+their prevalent art and the clipped and limited literature that
+satisfied their souls?
+
+That age which bore me was indeed a world full of restricted and
+undisciplined people, overtaken by power, by possessions and great
+new freedoms, and unable to make any civilised use of them whatever;
+stricken now by this idea and now by that, tempted first by one
+possession and then another to ill-considered attempts; it was my
+father's exploitation of his villa gardens on the wholesale level. The
+whole of Bromstead as I remember it, and as I saw it last--it is a year
+ago now--is a dull useless boiling-up of human activities, an immense
+clustering of futilities. It is as unfinished as ever; the builders'
+roads still run out and end in mid-field in their old fashion; the
+various enterprises jumble in the same hopeless contradiction, if
+anything intensified. Pretentious villas jostle slums, and public-house
+and tin tabernacle glower at one another across the cat-haunted lot that
+intervenes. Roper's meadows are now quite frankly a slum; back doors and
+sculleries gape towards the railway, their yards are hung with tattered
+washing unashamed; and there seem to be more boards by the railway every
+time I pass, advertising pills and pickles, tonics and condiments, and
+suchlike solicitudes of a people with no natural health nor appetite
+left in them....
+
+Well, we have to do better. Failure is not failure nor waste wasted if
+it sweeps away illusion and lights the road to a plan.
+
+
+6
+
+Chaotic indiscipline, ill-adjusted effort, spasmodic aims, these give
+the quality of all my Bromstead memories. The crowning one of them all
+rises to desolating tragedy. I remember now the wan spring sunshine of
+that Sunday morning, the stiff feeling of best clothes and aggressive
+cleanliness and formality, when I and my mother returned from church to
+find my father dead. He had been pruning the grape vine. He had
+never had a ladder long enough to reach the sill of the third-floor
+windows--at house-painting times he had borrowed one from the plumber
+who mixed his paint--and he had in his own happy-go-lucky way contrived
+a combination of the garden fruit ladder with a battered kitchen table
+that served all sorts of odd purposes in an outhouse. He had stayed up
+this arrangement by means of the garden roller, and the roller had at
+the critical moment--rolled. He was lying close by the garden door with
+his head queerly bent back against a broken and twisted rainwater pipe,
+an expression of pacific contentment on his face, a bamboo curtain rod
+with a tableknife tied to end of it, still gripped in his hand. We had
+been rapping for some time at the front door unable to make him hear,
+and then we came round by the door in the side trellis into the garden
+and so discovered him.
+
+“Arthur!” I remember my mother crying with the strangest break in her
+voice, “What are you doing there? Arthur! And--SUNDAY!”
+
+I was coming behind her, musing remotely, when the quality of her voice
+roused me. She stood as if she could not go near him. He had always
+puzzled her so, he and his ways, and this seemed only another enigma.
+Then the truth dawned on her, she shrieked as if afraid of him, ran a
+dozen steps back towards the trellis door and stopped and clasped her
+ineffectual gloved hands, leaving me staring blankly, too astonished for
+feeling, at the carelessly flung limbs.
+
+The same idea came to me also. I ran to her. “Mother!” I cried, pale to
+the depths of my spirit, “IS HE DEAD?”
+
+I had been thinking two minutes before of the cold fruit pie that
+glorified our Sunday dinner-table, and how I might perhaps get into the
+tree at the end of the garden to read in the afternoon. Now an immense
+fact had come down like a curtain and blotted out all my childish world.
+My father was lying dead before my eyes.... I perceived that my mother
+was helpless and that things must be done.
+
+“Mother!” I said, “we must get Doctor Beaseley,--and carry him indoors.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ SCHOLASTIC
+
+
+1
+
+My formal education began in a small preparatory school in Bromstead.
+I went there as a day boy. The charge for my instruction was mainly set
+off by the periodic visits of my father with a large bag of battered
+fossils to lecture to us upon geology. I was one of those fortunate
+youngsters who take readily to school work, I had a good memory,
+versatile interests and a considerable appetite for commendation, and
+when I was barely twelve I got a scholarship at the City Merchants
+School and was entrusted with a scholar's railway season ticket to
+Victoria. After my father's death a large and very animated and solidly
+built uncle in tweeds from Staffordshire, Uncle Minter, my mother's
+sister's husband, with a remarkable accent and remarkable vowel sounds,
+who had plunged into the Bromstead home once or twice for the night but
+who was otherwise unknown to me, came on the scene, sold off the
+three gaunt houses with the utmost gusto, invested the proceeds and my
+father's life insurance money, and got us into a small villa at Penge
+within sight of that immense facade of glass and iron, the Crystal
+Palace. Then he retired in a mood of good-natured contempt to his native
+habitat again. We stayed at Penge until my mother's death.
+
+School became a large part of the world to me, absorbing my time and
+interest, and I never acquired that detailed and intimate knowledge of
+Penge and the hilly villadom round about, that I have of the town and
+outskirts of Bromstead.
+
+It was a district of very much the same character, but it was more
+completely urbanised and nearer to the centre of things; there were
+the same unfinished roads, the same occasional disconcerted hedges and
+trees, the same butcher's horse grazing under a builder's notice-board,
+the same incidental lapses into slum. The Crystal Palace grounds cut off
+a large part of my walking radius to the west with impassable fences
+and forbiddingly expensive turnstiles, but it added to the ordinary
+spectacle of meteorology a great variety of gratuitous fireworks which
+banged and flared away of a night after supper and drew me abroad to see
+them better. Such walks as I took, to Croydon, Wembledon, West Wickham
+and Greenwich, impressed upon me the interminable extent of London's
+residential suburbs; mile after mile one went, between houses, villas,
+rows of cottages, streets of shops, under railway arches, over railway
+bridges. I have forgotten the detailed local characteristics--if there
+were any--of much of that region altogether. I was only there two years,
+and half my perambulations occurred at dusk or after dark. But with
+Penge I associate my first realisations of the wonder and beauty of
+twilight and night, the effect of dark walls reflecting lamplight, and
+the mystery of blue haze-veiled hillsides of houses, the glare of shops
+by night, the glowing steam and streaming sparks of railway trains and
+railway signals lit up in the darkness. My first rambles in the evening
+occurred at Penge--I was becoming a big and independent-spirited
+boy--and I began my experience of smoking during these twilight prowls
+with the threepenny packets of American cigarettes then just appearing
+in the world.
+
+My life centred upon the City Merchants School. Usually I caught the
+eight-eighteen for Victoria, I had a midday meal and tea; four nights a
+week I stayed for preparation, and often I was not back home again until
+within an hour of my bedtime. I spent my half holidays at school
+in order to play cricket and football. This, and a pretty voracious
+appetite for miscellaneous reading which was fostered by the Penge
+Middleton Library, did not leave me much leisure for local topography.
+On Sundays also I sang in the choir at St. Martin's Church, and my
+mother did not like me to walk out alone on the Sabbath afternoon, she
+herself slumbered, so that I wrote or read at home. I must confess I was
+at home as little as I could contrive.
+
+Home, after my father's death, had become a very quiet and uneventful
+place indeed. My mother had either an unimaginative temperament or her
+mind was greatly occupied with private religious solicitudes, and I
+remember her talking to me but little, and that usually upon topics
+I was anxious to evade. I had developed my own view about low-Church
+theology long before my father's death, and my meditation upon that
+event had finished my secret estrangement from my mother's faith. My
+reason would not permit even a remote chance of his being in hell, he
+was so manifestly not evil, and this religion would not permit him a
+remote chance of being out yet. When I was a little boy my mother had
+taught me to read and write and pray and had done many things for me,
+indeed she persisted in washing me and even in making my clothes until I
+rebelled against these things as indignities. But our minds parted very
+soon. She never began to understand the mental processes of my play,
+she never interested herself in my school life and work, she could not
+understand things I said; and she came, I think, quite insensibly to
+regard me with something of the same hopeless perplexity she had felt
+towards my father.
+
+Him she must have wedded under considerable delusions. I do not think
+he deceived her, indeed, nor do I suspect him of mercenariness in
+their union; but no doubt he played up to her requirements in the half
+ingenuous way that was and still is the quality of most wooing, and
+presented himself as a very brisk and orthodox young man. I wonder why
+nearly all love-making has to be fraudulent. Afterwards he must have
+disappointed her cruelly by letting one aspect after another of his
+careless, sceptical, experimental temperament appear. Her mind was fixed
+and definite, she embodied all that confidence in church and decorum and
+the assurances of the pulpit which was characteristic of the large mass
+of the English people--for after all, the rather low-Church section WAS
+the largest single mass--in early Victorian times. She had dreams, I
+suspect, of going to church with him side by side; she in a little
+poke bonnet and a large flounced crinoline, all mauve and magenta and
+starched under a little lace-trimmed parasol, and he in a tall silk hat
+and peg-top trousers and a roll-collar coat, and looking rather like
+the Prince Consort,--white angels almost visibly raining benedictions on
+their amiable progress. Perhaps she dreamt gently of much-belaced babies
+and an interestingly pious (but not too dissenting or fanatical) little
+girl or boy or so, also angel-haunted. And I think, too, she must have
+seen herself ruling a seemly “home of taste,” with a vivarium in the
+conservatory that opened out of the drawing-room, or again, making
+preserves in the kitchen. My father's science-teaching, his diagrams
+of disembowelled humanity, his pictures of prehistoric beasts that
+contradicted the Flood, his disposition towards soft shirts and loose
+tweed suits, his inability to use a clothes brush, his spasmodic reading
+fits and his bulldog pipes, must have jarred cruelly with her rather
+unintelligent anticipations. His wild moments of violent temper when he
+would swear and smash things, absurd almost lovable storms that passed
+like summer thunder, must have been starkly dreadful to her. She
+was constitutionally inadaptable, and certainly made no attempt to
+understand or tolerate these outbreaks. She tried them by her standards,
+and by her standards they were wrong. Her standards hid him from her.
+The blazing things he said rankled in her mind unforgettably.
+
+As I remember them together they chafed constantly. Her attitude
+to nearly all his moods and all his enterprises was a sceptical
+disapproval. She treated him as something that belonged to me and not
+to her. “YOUR father,” she used to call him, as though I had got him for
+her.
+
+She had married late and she had, I think, become mentally
+self-subsisting before her marriage. Even in those Herne Hill days
+I used to wonder what was going on in her mind, and I find that old
+speculative curiosity return as I write this. She took a considerable
+interest in the housework that our generally servantless condition put
+upon her--she used to have a charwoman in two or three times a week--but
+she did not do it with any great skill. She covered most of our
+furniture with flouncey ill-fitting covers, and she cooked plainly and
+without very much judgment. The Penge house, as it contained nearly
+all our Bromstead things, was crowded with furniture, and is chiefly
+associated in my mind with the smell of turpentine, a condiment she used
+very freely upon the veneered mahogany pieces. My mother had an equal
+dread of “blacks” by day and the “night air,” so that our brightly clean
+windows were rarely open.
+
+She took a morning paper, and she would open it and glance at the
+headlines, but she did not read it until the afternoon and then, I
+think, she was interested only in the more violent crimes, and in
+railway and mine disasters and in the minutest domesticities of the
+Royal Family. Most of the books at home were my father's, and I do not
+think she opened any of them. She had one or two volumes that dated from
+her own youth, and she tried in vain to interest me in them; there was
+Miss Strickland's QUEENS OF ENGLAND, a book I remember with particular
+animosity, and QUEECHY and the WIDE WIDE WORLD. She made these books of
+hers into a class apart by sewing outer covers upon them of calico and
+figured muslin. To me in these habiliments they seemed not so much books
+as confederated old ladies.
+
+My mother was also very punctual with her religious duties, and rejoiced
+to watch me in the choir.
+
+On winter evenings she occupied an armchair on the other side of the
+table at which I sat, head on hand reading, and she would be darning
+stockings or socks or the like. We achieved an effect of rather stuffy
+comfortableness that was soporific, and in a passive way I think she
+found these among her happy times. On such occasions she was wont to put
+her work down on her knees and fall into a sort of thoughtless musing
+that would last for long intervals and rouse my curiosity. For like most
+young people I could not imagine mental states without definite forms.
+
+She carried on a correspondence with a number of cousins and friends,
+writing letters in a slanting Italian hand and dealing mainly with
+births, marriages and deaths, business starts (in the vaguest terms) and
+the distresses of bankruptcy.
+
+And yet, you know, she did have a curious intimate life of her own that
+I suspected nothing of at the time, that only now becomes credible
+to me. She kept a diary that is still in my possession, a diary of
+fragmentary entries in a miscellaneous collection of pocket books. She
+put down the texts of the sermons she heard, and queer stiff little
+comments on casual visitors,--“Miss G. and much noisy shrieking talk
+about games and such frivolities and CROQUAY. A. delighted and VERY
+ATTENTIVE.” Such little human entries abound. She had an odd way of
+never writing a name, only an initial; my father is always “A.,” and I
+am always “D.” It is manifest she followed the domestic events in the
+life of the Princess of Wales, who is now Queen Mother, with peculiar
+interest and sympathy. “Pray G. all may be well,” she writes in one such
+crisis.
+
+But there are things about myself that I still find too poignant to tell
+easily, certain painful and clumsy circumstances of my birth in very
+great detail, the distresses of my infantile ailments. Then later I
+find such things as this: “Heard D. s----.” The “s” is evidently “swear
+“--“G. bless and keep my boy from evil.” And again, with the thin
+handwriting shaken by distress: “D. would not go to church, and hardened
+his heart and said wicked infidel things, much disrespect of the clergy.
+The anthem is tiresome!!! That men should set up to be wiser than
+their maker!!!” Then trebly underlined: “I FEAR HIS FATHER'S TEACHING.”
+ Dreadful little tangle of misapprehensions and false judgments! More
+comforting for me to read, “D. very kind and good. He grows more
+thoughtful every day.” I suspect myself of forgotten hypocrisies.
+
+At just one point my mother's papers seem to dip deeper. I think the
+death of my father must have stirred her for the first time for many
+years to think for herself. Even she could not go on living in any peace
+at all, believing that he had indeed been flung headlong into hell. Of
+this gnawing solicitude she never spoke to me, never, and for her diary
+also she could find no phrases. But on a loose half-sheet of notepaper
+between its pages I find this passage that follows, written very
+carefully. I do not know whose lines they are nor how she came upon
+them. They run:--
+
+     “And if there be no meeting past the grave;
+      If all is darkness, silence, yet 'tis rest.
+      Be not afraid ye waiting hearts that weep,
+      For God still giveth His beloved sleep,
+      And if an endless sleep He wills, so best.”
+
+That scrap of verse amazed me when I read it. I could even wonder if my
+mother really grasped the import of what she had copied out. It affected
+me as if a stone-deaf person had suddenly turned and joined in a
+whispered conversation. It set me thinking how far a mind in its general
+effect quite hopelessly limited, might range. After that I went through
+all her diaries, trying to find something more than a conventional term
+of tenderness for my father. But I found nothing. And yet somehow there
+grew upon me the realisation that there had been love.... Her love for
+me, on the other hand, was abundantly expressed.
+
+I knew nothing of that secret life of feeling at the time; such
+expression as it found was all beyond my schoolboy range. I did not know
+when I pleased her and I did not know when I distressed her. Chiefly
+I was aware of my mother as rather dull company, as a mind thorny with
+irrational conclusions and incapable of explication, as one believing
+quite wilfully and irritatingly in impossible things. So I suppose it
+had to be; life was coming to me in new forms and with new requirements.
+It was essential to our situation that we should fail to understand.
+After this space of years I have come to realisations and attitudes that
+dissolve my estrangement from her, I can pierce these barriers, I
+can see her and feel her as a loving and feeling and desiring and
+muddle-headed person. There are times when I would have her alive again,
+if only that I might be kind to her for a little while and give her
+some return for the narrow intense affection, the tender desires, she
+evidently lavished so abundantly on me. But then again I ask how I
+could make that return? And I realise the futility of such dreaming. Her
+demand was rigid, and to meet it I should need to act and lie.
+
+So she whose blood fed me, whose body made me, lies in my memory as I
+saw her last, fixed, still, infinitely intimate, infinitely remote....
+
+My own case with my mother, however, does not awaken the same regret I
+feel when I think of how she misjudged and irked my father, and turned
+his weaknesses into thorns for her own tormenting. I wish I could look
+back without that little twinge to two people who were both in their
+different quality so good. But goodness that is narrow is a pedestrian
+and ineffectual goodness. Her attitude to my father seems to me one of
+the essentially tragic things that have come to me personally, one of
+those things that nothing can transfigure, that REMAIN sorrowful, that I
+cannot soothe with any explanation, for as I remember him he was indeed
+the most lovable of weak spasmodic men. But my mother had been trained
+in a hard and narrow system that made evil out of many things not in
+the least evil, and inculcated neither kindliness nor charity. All their
+estrangement followed from that.
+
+These cramping cults do indeed take an enormous toll of human love
+and happiness, and not only that but what we Machiavellians must needs
+consider, they make frightful breaches in human solidarity. I suppose I
+am a deeply religious man, as men of my quality go, but I hate more
+and more, as I grow older, the shadow of intolerance cast by religious
+organisations. All my life has been darkened by irrational intolerance,
+by arbitrary irrational prohibitions and exclusions. Mahometanism
+with its fierce proselytism, has, I suppose, the blackest record of
+uncharitableness, but most of the Christian sects are tainted, tainted
+to a degree beyond any of the anterior paganisms, with this same hateful
+quality. It is their exclusive claim that sends them wrong, the vain
+ambition that inspires them all to teach a uniform one-sided God and be
+the one and only gateway to salvation. Deprecation of all outside the
+household of faith, an organised undervaluation of heretical goodness
+and lovableness, follows, necessarily. Every petty difference is
+exaggerated to the quality of a saving grace or a damning defect.
+Elaborate precautions are taken to shield the believer's mind against
+broad or amiable suggestions; the faithful are deterred by dark
+allusions, by sinister warnings, from books, from theatres, from
+worldly conversation, from all the kindly instruments that mingle human
+sympathy. For only by isolating its flock can the organisation survive.
+
+Every month there came to my mother a little magazine called, if I
+remember rightly, the HOME CHURCHMAN, with the combined authority of
+print and clerical commendation. It was the most evil thing that ever
+came into the house, a very devil, a thin little pamphlet with
+one woodcut illustration on the front page of each number; now the
+uninviting visage of some exponent of the real and only doctrine and
+attitudes, now some coral strand in act of welcoming the missionaries of
+God's mysterious preferences, now a new church in the Victorian Gothic.
+The vile rag it was! A score of vices that shun the policeman have
+nothing of its subtle wickedness. It was an outrage upon the natural
+kindliness of men. The contents were all admirably adjusted to keep a
+spirit in prison. Their force of sustained suggestion was tremendous.
+There would be dreadful intimations of the swift retribution that fell
+upon individuals for Sabbath-breaking, and upon nations for weakening
+towards Ritualism, or treating Roman Catholics as tolerable human
+beings; there would be great rejoicings over the conversion of alleged
+Jews, and terrible descriptions of the death-beds of prominent infidels
+with boldly invented last words,--the most unscrupulous lying; there
+would be the appallingly edifying careers of “early piety” lusciously
+described, or stories of condemned criminals who traced their final ruin
+unerringly to early laxities of the kind that leads people to give up
+subscribing to the HOME CHURCHMAN.
+
+Every month that evil spirit brought about a slump in our mutual love.
+My mother used to read the thing and become depressed and anxious for my
+spiritual welfare, used to be stirred to unintelligent pestering....
+
+
+2
+
+A few years ago I met the editor of this same HOME CHURCHMAN. It was
+at one of the weekly dinners of that Fleet Street dining club, the
+Blackfriars.
+
+I heard the paper's name with a queer little shock and surveyed the
+man with interest. No doubt he was only a successor of the purveyor of
+discords who darkened my boyhood. It was amazing to find an influence
+so terrible embodied in a creature so palpably petty. He was seated some
+way down a table at right angles to the one at which I sat, a man of
+mean appearance with a greyish complexion, thin, with a square nose,
+a heavy wiry moustache and a big Adam's apple sticking out between the
+wings of his collar. He ate with considerable appetite and unconcealed
+relish, and as his jaw was underhung, he chummed and made the moustache
+wave like reeds in the swell of a steamer. It gave him a conscientious
+look. After dinner he a little forced himself upon me. At that time,
+though the shadow of my scandal was already upon me, I still seemed to
+be shaping for great successes, and he was glad to be in conversation
+with me and anxious to intimate political sympathy and support. I tried
+to make him talk of the HOME CHURCHMAN and the kindred publications he
+ran, but he was manifestly ashamed of his job so far as I was concerned.
+
+“One wants,” he said, pitching himself as he supposed in my key, “to put
+constructive ideas into our readers, but they are narrow, you know, very
+narrow. Very.” He made his moustache and lips express judicious regret.
+“One has to consider them carefully, one has to respect their attitudes.
+One dare not go too far with them. One has to feel one's way.”
+
+He chummed and the moustache bristled.
+
+A hireling, beyond question, catering for a demand. I gathered there
+was a home in Tufnell Park, and three boys to be fed and clothed and
+educated....
+
+I had the curiosity to buy a copy of his magazine afterwards, and it
+seemed much the same sort of thing that had worried my mother in my
+boyhood. There was the usual Christian hero, this time with mutton-chop
+whiskers and a long bare upper lip. The Jesuits, it seemed, were still
+hard at it, and Heaven frightfully upset about the Sunday opening of
+museums and the falling birth-rate, and as touchy and vindictive as
+ever. There were two vigorous paragraphs upon the utter damnableness
+of the Rev. R. J. Campbell, a contagious damnableness I gathered, one
+wasn't safe within a mile of Holborn Viaduct, and a foul-mouthed
+attack on poor little Wilkins the novelist--who was being baited by the
+moralists at that time for making one of his big women characters, not
+being in holy wedlock, desire a baby and say so....
+
+The broadening of human thought is a slow and complex process. We do go
+on, we do get on. But when one thinks that people are living and dying
+now, quarrelling and sulking, misled and misunderstanding, vaguely
+fearful, condemning and thwarting one another in the close darknesses of
+these narrow cults--Oh, God! one wants a gale out of Heaven, one wants a
+great wind from the sea!
+
+
+3
+
+While I lived at Penge two little things happened to me, trivial in
+themselves and yet in their quality profoundly significant. They had
+this in common, that they pierced the texture of the life I was quietly
+taking for granted and let me see through it into realities--realities
+I had indeed known about before but never realised. Each of these
+experiences left me with a sense of shock, with all the values in
+my life perplexingly altered, attempting readjustment. One of these
+disturbing and illuminating events was that I was robbed of a new
+pocket-knife and the other that I fell in love. It was altogether
+surprising to me to be robbed. You see, as an only child I had always
+been fairly well looked after and protected, and the result was an
+amazing confidence in the practical goodness of the people one met in
+the world. I knew there were robbers in the world, just as I knew there
+were tigers; that I was ever likely to meet robber or tiger face to face
+seemed equally impossible.
+
+The knife as I remember it was a particularly jolly one with all sorts
+of instruments in it, tweezers and a thing for getting a stone out
+of the hoof of a horse, and a corkscrew; it had cost me a carefully
+accumulated half-crown, and amounted indeed to a new experience in
+knives. I had had it for two or three days, and then one afternoon I
+dropped it through a hole in my pocket on a footpath crossing a field
+between Penge and Anerley. I heard it fall in the way one does without
+at the time appreciating what had happened, then, later, before I got
+home, when my hand wandered into my pocket to embrace the still dear
+new possession I found it gone, and instantly that memory of something
+hitting the ground sprang up into consciousness. I went back and
+commenced a search. Almost immediately I was accosted by the leader of a
+little gang of four or five extremely dirty and ragged boys of assorted
+sizes and slouching carriage who were coming from the Anerley direction.
+
+“Lost anythink, Matey?” said he.
+
+I explained.
+
+“'E's dropped 'is knife,” said my interlocutor, and joined in the
+search.
+
+“What sort of 'andle was it, Matey?” said a small white-faced sniffing
+boy in a big bowler hat.
+
+I supplied the information. His sharp little face scrutinised the ground
+about us.
+
+“GOT it,” he said, and pounced.
+
+“Give it 'ere,” said the big boy hoarsely, and secured it.
+
+I walked towards him serenely confident that he would hand it over to
+me, and that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
+
+“No bloomin' fear!” he said, regarding me obliquely. “Oo said it was
+your knife?”
+
+Remarkable doubts assailed me. “Of course it's my knife,” I said. The
+other boys gathered round me.
+
+“This ain't your knife,” said the big boy, and spat casually.
+
+“I dropped it just now.”
+
+“Findin's keepin's, I believe,” said the big boy.
+
+“Nonsense,” I said. “Give me my knife.”
+
+“'Ow many blades it got?”
+
+“Three.”
+
+“And what sort of 'andle?”
+
+“Bone.”
+
+“Got a corkscrew like?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Ah! This ain't your knife no'ow. See?”
+
+He made no offer to show it to me. My breath went.
+
+“Look here!” I said. “I saw that kid pick it up. It IS my knife.”
+
+“Rot!” said the big boy, and slowly, deliberately put my knife into his
+trouser pocket.
+
+I braced my soul for battle. All civilisation was behind me, but I doubt
+if it kept the colour in my face. I buttoned my jacket and clenched my
+fists and advanced on my antagonist--he had, I suppose, the advantage of
+two years of age and three inches of height. “Hand over that knife,” I
+said.
+
+Then one of the smallest of the band assailed me with extraordinary
+vigour and swiftness from behind, had an arm round my neck and a knee in
+my back before I had the slightest intimation of attack, and so got me
+down. “I got 'im, Bill,” squeaked this amazing little ruffian. My nose
+was flattened by a dirty hand, and as I struck out and hit something
+like sacking, some one kicked my elbow. Two or three seemed to be at
+me at the same time. Then I rolled over and sat up to discover them all
+making off, a ragged flight, footballing my cap, my City Merchants' cap,
+amongst them. I leapt to my feet in a passion of indignation and pursued
+them.
+
+But I did not overtake them. We are beings of mixed composition, and I
+doubt if mine was a single-minded pursuit. I knew that honour required
+me to pursue, and I had a vivid impression of having just been down
+in the dust with a very wiry and active and dirty little antagonist of
+disagreeable odour and incredible and incalculable unscrupulousness,
+kneeling on me and gripping my arm and neck. I wanted of course to be
+even with him, but also I doubted if catching him would necessarily
+involve that. They kicked my cap into the ditch at the end of the field,
+and made off compactly along a cinder lane while I turned aside to
+recover my dishonoured headdress. As I knocked the dust out of that and
+out of my jacket, and brushed my knees and readjusted my very crumpled
+collar, I tried to focus this startling occurrence in my mind.
+
+I had vague ideas of going to a policeman or of complaining at a police
+station, but some boyish instinct against informing prevented that. No
+doubt I entertained ideas of vindictive pursuit and murderous reprisals.
+And I was acutely enraged whenever I thought of my knife. The thing
+indeed rankled in my mind for weeks and weeks, and altered all the
+flavour of my world for me. It was the first time I glimpsed the simple
+brute violence that lurks and peeps beneath our civilisation. A certain
+kindly complacency of attitude towards the palpably lower classes was
+qualified for ever.
+
+
+4
+
+But the other experience was still more cardinal. It was the first clear
+intimation of a new motif in life, the sex motif, that was to rise and
+increase and accumulate power and enrichment and interweave with and at
+last dominate all my life.
+
+It was when I was nearly fifteen this happened. It is inseparably
+connected in my mind with the dusk of warm September evenings. I never
+met the girl I loved by daylight, and I have forgotten her name. It was
+some insignificant name.
+
+Yet the peculiar quality of the adventure keeps it shining darkly like
+some deep coloured gem in the common setting of my memories. It came as
+something new and strange, something that did not join on to anything
+else in my life or connect with any of my thoughts or beliefs or habits;
+it was a wonder, a mystery, a discovery about myself, a discovery
+about the whole world. Only in after years did sexual feeling lose that
+isolation and spread itself out to illuminate and pervade and at last
+possess the whole broad vision of life.
+
+It was in that phase of an urban youth's development, the phase of the
+cheap cigarette, that this thing happened. One evening I came by chance
+on a number of young people promenading by the light of a row of shops
+towards Beckington, and, with all the glory of a glowing cigarette
+between my lips, I joined their strolling number. These twilight parades
+of young people, youngsters chiefly of the lower middle-class, are one
+of the odd social developments of the great suburban growths--unkindly
+critics, blind to the inner meanings of things, call them, I believe,
+Monkeys' Parades--the shop apprentices, the young work girls, the boy
+clerks and so forth, stirred by mysterious intimations, spend their
+first-earned money upon collars and ties, chiffon hats, smart lace
+collars, walking-sticks, sunshades or cigarettes, and come valiantly
+into the vague transfiguring mingling of gaslight and evening, to walk
+up and down, to eye meaningly, even to accost and make friends. It is
+a queer instinctive revolt from the narrow limited friendless homes in
+which so many find themselves, a going out towards something, romance if
+you will, beauty, that has suddenly become a need--a need that hitherto
+has lain dormant and unsuspected. They promenade.
+
+Vulgar!--it is as vulgar as the spirit that calls the moth abroad in the
+evening and lights the body of the glow-worm in the night. I made my
+way through the throng, a little contemptuously as became a public
+schoolboy, my hands in my pockets--none of your cheap canes for me!--and
+very careful of the lie of my cigarette upon my lips. And two girls
+passed me, one a little taller than the other, with dim warm-tinted
+faces under clouds of dark hair and with dark eyes like pools reflecting
+stars.
+
+I half turned, and the shorter one glanced back at me over her
+shoulder--I could draw you now the pose of her cheek and neck and
+shoulder--and instantly I was as passionately in love with the girl as
+I have ever been before or since, as any man ever was with any woman. I
+turned about and followed them, I flung away my cigarette ostentatiously
+and lifted my school cap and spoke to them.
+
+The girl answered shyly with her dark eyes on my face. What I said
+and what she said I cannot remember, but I have little doubt it was
+something absolutely vapid. It really did not matter; the thing was we
+had met. I felt as I think a new-hatched moth must feel when suddenly
+its urgent headlong searching brings it in tremulous amazement upon its
+mate.
+
+We met, covered from each other, with all the nets of civilisation
+keeping us apart. We walked side by side.
+
+It led to scarcely more than that. I think we met four or five times
+altogether, and always with her nearly silent elder sister on the other
+side of her. We walked on the last two occasions arm in arm, furtively
+caressing each other's hands, we went away from the glare of the shops
+into the quiet roads of villadom, and there we whispered instead of
+talking and looked closely into one another's warm and shaded face.
+“Dear,” I whispered very daringly, and she answered, “Dear!” We had a
+vague sense that we wanted more of that quality of intimacy and more. We
+wanted each other as one wants beautiful music again or to breathe again
+the scent of flowers.
+
+And that is all there was between us. The events are nothing, the thing
+that matters is the way in which this experience stabbed through the
+common stuff of life and left it pierced, with a light, with a huge new
+interest shining through the rent.
+
+When I think of it I can recall even now the warm mystery of her face,
+her lips a little apart, lips that I never kissed, her soft shadowed
+throat, and I feel again the sensuous stir of her proximity....
+
+Those two girls never told me their surname nor let me approach their
+house. They made me leave them at the corner of a road of small houses
+near Penge Station. And quite abruptly, without any intimation, they
+vanished and came to the meeting place no more, they vanished as a
+moth goes out of a window into the night, and left me possessed of an
+intolerable want....
+
+The affair pervaded my existence for many weeks. I could not do my work
+and I could not rest at home. Night after night I promenaded up and down
+that Monkeys' Parade full of an unappeasable desire, with a thwarted
+sense of something just begun that ought to have gone on. I went
+backwards and forwards on the way to the vanishing place, and at last
+explored the forbidden road that had swallowed them up. But I never saw
+her again, except that later she came to me, my symbol of womanhood, in
+dreams. How my blood was stirred! I lay awake of nights whispering in
+the darkness for her. I prayed for her.
+
+Indeed that girl, who probably forgot the last vestiges of me when her
+first real kiss came to her, ruled and haunted me, gave a Queen to my
+imagination and a texture to all my desires until I became a man.
+
+I generalised her at last. I suddenly discovered that poetry was about
+her and that she was the key to all that had hitherto seemed nonsense
+about love. I took to reading novels, and if the heroine could not
+possibly be like her, dusky and warm and starlike, I put the book
+aside....
+
+I hesitate and add here one other confession. I want to tell this thing
+because it seems to me we are altogether too restrained and secretive
+about such matters. The cardinal thing in life sneaks in to us darkly
+and shamefully like a thief in the night.
+
+One day during my Cambridge days--it must have been in my first year
+before I knew Hatherleigh--I saw in a print-shop window near the Strand
+an engraving of a girl that reminded me sharply of Penge and its dusky
+encounter. It was just a half length of a bare-shouldered, bare-breasted
+Oriental with arms akimbo, smiling faintly. I looked at it, went my way,
+then turned back and bought it. I felt I must have it. The odd thing
+is that I was more than a little shamefaced about it. I did not have it
+framed and hung in my room open to the criticism of my friends, but I
+kept it in the drawer of my writing-table. And I kept that drawer locked
+for a year. It speedily merged with and became identified with the dark
+girl of Penge. That engraving became in a way my mistress. Often when I
+had sported my oak and was supposed to be reading, I was sitting with it
+before me.
+
+Obeying some instinct I kept the thing very secret indeed. For a time
+nobody suspected what was locked in my drawer nor what was locked in me.
+I seemed as sexless as my world required.
+
+
+5
+
+These things stabbed through my life, intimations of things above and
+below and before me. They had an air of being no more than incidents,
+interruptions.
+
+The broad substance of my existence at this time was the City Merchants
+School. Home was a place where I slept and read, and the mooning
+explorations of the south-eastern postal district which occupied the
+restless evenings and spare days of my vacations mere interstices,
+giving glimpses of enigmatical lights and distant spaces between the
+woven threads of a school-boy's career. School life began for me every
+morning at Herne Hill, for there I was joined by three or four other
+boys and the rest of the way we went together. Most of the streets and
+roads we traversed in our morning's walk from Victoria are still intact,
+the storms of rebuilding that have submerged so much of my boyhood's
+London have passed and left them, and I have revived the impression of
+them again and again in recent years as I have clattered dinnerward in a
+hansom or hummed along in a motor cab to some engagement. The main gate
+still looks out with the same expression of ancient well-proportioned
+kindliness upon St. Margaret's Close. There are imposing new science
+laboratories in Chambers Street indeed, but the old playing fields are
+unaltered except for the big electric trams that go droning and spitting
+blue flashes along the western boundary. I know Ratten, the new Head,
+very well, but I have not been inside the school to see if it has
+changed at all since I went up to Cambridge.
+
+I took all they put before us very readily as a boy, for I had a mind of
+vigorous appetite, but since I have grown mentally to man's estate and
+developed a more and more comprehensive view of our national process
+and our national needs, I am more and more struck by the oddity of the
+educational methods pursued, their aimless disconnectedness from the
+constructive forces in the community. I suppose if we are to view the
+public school as anything more than an institution that has just chanced
+to happen, we must treat it as having a definite function towards the
+general scheme of the nation, as being in a sense designed to take the
+crude young male of the more or less responsible class, to correct
+his harsh egotisms, broaden his outlook, give him a grasp of the
+contemporary developments he will presently be called upon to influence
+and control, and send him on to the university to be made a leading and
+ruling social man. It is easy enough to carp at schoolmasters and set up
+for an Educational Reformer, I know, but still it is impossible not
+to feel how infinitely more effectually--given certain impossibilities
+perhaps--the job might be done.
+
+My memory of school has indeed no hint whatever of that quality of
+elucidation it seems reasonable to demand from it. Here all about me
+was London, a vast inexplicable being, a vortex of gigantic forces, that
+filled and overwhelmed me with impressions, that stirred my imagination
+to a perpetual vague enquiry; and my school not only offered no key
+to it, but had practically no comment to make upon it at all. We were
+within three miles of Westminster and Charing Cross, the government
+offices of a fifth of mankind were all within an hour's stroll, great
+economic changes were going on under our eyes, now the hoardings flamed
+with election placards, now the Salvation Army and now the unemployed
+came trailing in procession through the winter-grey streets, now the
+newspaper placards outside news-shops told of battles in strange places,
+now of amazing discoveries, now of sinister crimes, abject squalor and
+poverty, imperial splendour and luxury, Buckingham Palace, Rotten Row,
+Mayfair, the slums of Pimlico, garbage-littered streets of bawling
+costermongers, the inky silver of the barge-laden Thames--such was the
+background of our days. We went across St. Margaret's Close and through
+the school gate into a quiet puerile world apart from all these things.
+We joined in the earnest acquirement of all that was necessary for Greek
+epigrams and Latin verse, and for the rest played games. We dipped down
+into something clear and elegantly proportioned and time-worn and for
+all its high resolve of stalwart virility a little feeble, like our
+blackened and decayed portals by Inigo Jones.
+
+Within, we were taught as the chief subjects of instruction, Latin and
+Greek. We were taught very badly because the men who taught us did not
+habitually use either of these languages, nobody uses them any more
+now except perhaps for the Latin of a few Levantine monasteries. At the
+utmost our men read them. We were taught these languages because long
+ago Latin had been the language of civilisation; the one way of escape
+from the narrow and localised life had lain in those days through Latin,
+and afterwards Greek had come in as the vehicle of a flood of new and
+amazing ideas. Once these two languages had been the sole means of
+initiation to the detached criticism and partial comprehension of the
+world. I can imagine the fierce zeal of our first Heads, Gardener and
+Roper, teaching Greek like passionate missionaries, as a progressive
+Chinaman might teach English to the boys of Pekin, clumsily,
+impatiently, with rod and harsh urgency, but sincerely, patriotically,
+because they felt that behind it lay revelations, the irresistible
+stimulus to a new phase of history. That was long ago. A new great
+world, a vaster Imperialism had arisen about the school, had assimilated
+all these amazing and incredible ideas, had gone on to new and yet more
+amazing developments of its own. But the City Merchants School still
+made the substance of its teaching Latin and Greek, still, with no
+thought of rotating crops, sowed in a dream amidst the harvesting.
+
+There is no fierceness left in the teaching now. Just after I went up
+to Trinity, Gates, our Head, wrote a review article in defence of our
+curriculum. In this, among other indiscretions, he asserted that it was
+impossible to write good English without an illuminating knowledge of
+the classic tongues, and he split an infinitive and failed to button up
+a sentence in saying so. His main argument conceded every objection
+a reasonable person could make to the City Merchants' curriculum. He
+admitted that translation had now placed all the wisdom of the past at
+a common man's disposal, that scarcely a field of endeavour remained
+in which modern work had not long since passed beyond the ancient
+achievement. He disclaimed any utility. But there was, he said, a
+peculiar magic in these grammatical exercises no other subjects of
+instruction possessed. Nothing else provided the same strengthening and
+orderly discipline for the mind.
+
+He said that, knowing the Senior Classics he did, himself a Senior
+Classic!
+
+Yet in a dim confused way I think he was making out a case. In schools
+as we knew them, and with the sort of assistant available, the sort of
+assistant who has been trained entirely on the old lines, he could
+see no other teaching so effectual in developing attention, restraint,
+sustained constructive effort and various yet systematic adjustment. And
+that was as far as his imagination could go.
+
+It is infinitely easier to begin organised human affairs than end them;
+the curriculum and the social organisation of the English public school
+are the crowning instances of that. They go on because they have begun.
+Schools are not only immortal institutions but reproductive ones. Our
+founder, Jabez Arvon, knew nothing, I am sure, of Gates' pedagogic
+values and would, I feel certain, have dealt with them disrespectfully.
+But public schools and university colleges sprang into existence
+correlated, the scholars went on to the universities and came back to
+teach the schools, to teach as they themselves had been taught, before
+they had ever made any real use of the teaching; the crowd of boys
+herded together, a crowd perpetually renewed and unbrokenly the same,
+adjusted itself by means of spontaneously developed institutions. In
+a century, by its very success, this revolutionary innovation of
+Renascence public schools had become an immense tradition woven closely
+into the fabric of the national life. Intelligent and powerful people
+ceased to talk Latin or read Greek, they had got what was wanted, but
+that only left the schoolmaster the freer to elaborate his point. Since
+most men of any importance or influence in the country had been through
+the mill, it was naturally a little difficult to persuade them that
+it was not quite the best and most ennobling mill the wit of man could
+devise. And, moreover, they did not want their children made strange to
+them. There was all the machinery and all the men needed to teach the
+old subjects, and none to teach whatever new the critic might propose.
+Such science instruction as my father gave seemed indeed the uninviting
+alternative to the classical grind. It was certainly an altogether
+inferior instrument at that time.
+
+So it was I occupied my mind with the exact study of dead languages
+for seven long years. It was the strangest of detachments. We would sit
+under the desk of such a master as Topham like creatures who had fallen
+into an enchanted pit, and he would do his considerable best to work us
+up to enthusiasm for, let us say, a Greek play. If we flagged he would
+lash himself to revive us. He would walk about the class-room mouthing
+great lines in a rich roar, and asking us with a flushed face and
+shining eyes if it was not “GLORIOUS.” The very sight of Greek letters
+brings back to me the dingy, faded, ink-splashed quality of our
+class-room, the banging of books, Topham's disordered hair, the sheen of
+his alpaca gown, his deep unmusical intonations and the wide striding
+of his creaking boots. Glorious! And being plastic human beings we would
+consent that it was glorious, and some of us even achieved an answering
+reverberation and a sympathetic flush. I at times responded freely. We
+all accepted from him unquestioningly that these melodies, these strange
+sounds, exceeded any possibility of beauty that lay in the Gothic
+intricacy, the splash and glitter, the jar and recovery, the stabbing
+lights, the heights and broad distances of our English tongue. That
+indeed was the chief sin of him. It was not that he was for Greek and
+Latin, but that he was fiercely against every beauty that was neither
+classic nor deferred to classical canons.
+
+And what exactly did we make of it, we seniors who understood it best?
+We visualised dimly through that dust and the grammatical difficulties,
+the spectacle of the chorus chanting grotesquely, helping out
+protagonist and antagonist, masked and buskined, with the telling of
+incomprehensible parricides, of inexplicable incest, of gods faded
+beyond symbolism, of that Relentless Law we did not believe in for a
+moment, that no modern western European can believe in. We thought
+of the characters in the unconvincing wigs and costumes of our school
+performance. No Gilbert Murray had come as yet to touch these things
+to life again. It was like the ghost of an antiquarian's toy theatre,
+a ghost that crumbled and condensed into a gritty dust of construing as
+one looked at it.
+
+Marks, shindies, prayers and punishments, all flavoured with the
+leathery stuffiness of time-worn Big Hall....
+
+And then out one would come through our grey old gate into the evening
+light and the spectacle of London hurrying like a cataract, London in
+black and brown and blue and gleaming silver, roaring like the very loom
+of Time. We came out into the new world no teacher has yet had the power
+and courage to grasp and expound. Life and death sang all about one,
+joys and fears on such a scale, in such an intricacy as never Greek
+nor Roman knew. The interminable procession of horse omnibuses went
+lumbering past, bearing countless people we knew not whence, we knew
+not whither. Hansoms clattered, foot passengers jostled one, a thousand
+appeals of shop and boarding caught the eye. The multi-coloured lights
+of window and street mingled with the warm glow of the declining day
+under the softly flushing London skies; the ever-changing placards,
+the shouting news-vendors, told of a kaleidoscopic drama all about the
+globe. One did not realise what had happened to us, but the voice
+of Topham was suddenly drowned and lost, he and his minute, remote
+gesticulations....
+
+That submerged and isolated curriculum did not even join on to living
+interests where it might have done so. We were left absolutely to the
+hints of the newspapers, to casual political speeches, to the cartoons
+of the comic papers or a chance reading of some Socialist pamphlet for
+any general ideas whatever about the huge swirling world process
+in which we found ourselves. I always look back with particular
+exasperation to the cessation of our modern history at the year 1815.
+There it pulled up abruptly, as though it had come upon something
+indelicate....
+
+But, after all, what would Topham or Flack have made of the huge
+adjustments of the nineteenth century? Flack was the chief cricketer on
+the staff; he belonged to that great cult which pretends that the place
+of this or that county in the struggle for the championship is a matter
+of supreme importance to boys. He obliged us to affect a passionate
+interest in the progress of county matches, to work up unnatural
+enthusiasms. What a fuss there would be when some well-trained boy,
+panting as if from Marathon, appeared with an evening paper! “I say, you
+chaps, Middlesex all out for a hundred and five!”
+
+Under Flack's pressure I became, I confess, a cricket humbug of the
+first class. I applied myself industriously year by year to mastering
+scores and averages; I pretended that Lords or the Oval were the places
+nearest Paradise for me. (I never went to either.) Through a slight
+mistake about the county boundary I adopted Surrey for my loyalty,
+though as a matter of fact we were by some five hundred yards or so in
+Kent. It did quite as well for my purposes. I bowled rather straight and
+fast, and spent endless hours acquiring the skill to bowl Flack out. He
+was a bat in the Corinthian style, rich and voluminous, and succumbed
+very easily to a low shooter or an unexpected Yorker, but usually he was
+caught early by long leg. The difficulty was to bowl him before he got
+caught. He loved to lift a ball to leg. After one had clean bowled him
+at the practice nets one deliberately gave him a ball to leg just to
+make him feel nice again.
+
+Flack went about a world of marvels dreaming of leg hits. He has been
+observed, going across the Park on his way to his highly respectable
+club in Piccadilly, to break from profound musings into a strange brief
+dance that ended with an imaginary swipe with his umbrella, a roofer,
+over the trees towards Buckingham Palace. The hit accomplished, Flack
+resumed his way.
+
+Inadequately instructed foreigners would pass him in terror, needlessly
+alert.
+
+
+6
+
+These schoolmasters move through my memory as always a little distant
+and more than a little incomprehensible. Except when they wore flannels,
+I saw them almost always in old college caps and gowns, a uniform which
+greatly increased their detachment from the world of actual men. Gates,
+the head, was a lean loose-limbed man, rather stupid I discovered when I
+reached the Sixth and came into contact with him, but honest, simple
+and very eager to be liberal-minded. He was bald, with an almost conical
+baldness, with a grizzled pointed beard, small featured and, under the
+stresses of a Zeitgeist that demanded liberality, with an expression of
+puzzled but resolute resistance to his own unalterable opinions. He made
+a tall dignified figure in his gown. In my junior days he spoke to me
+only three or four times, and then he annoyed me by giving me a wrong
+surname; it was a sore point because I was an outsider and not one of
+the old school families, the Shoesmiths, the Naylors, the Marklows, the
+Tophams, the Pevises and suchlike, who came generation after generation.
+I recall him most vividly against the background of faded brown
+book-backs in the old library in which we less destructive seniors were
+trusted to work, with the light from the stained-glass window falling
+in coloured patches on his face. It gave him the appearance of having no
+colour of his own. He had a habit of scratching the beard on his cheek
+as he talked, and he used to come and consult us about things and
+invariably do as we said. That, in his phraseology, was “maintaining the
+traditions of the school.”
+
+He had indeed an effect not of a man directing a school, but of a
+man captured and directed by a school. Dead and gone Elizabethans had
+begotten a monster that could carry him about in its mouth.
+
+Yet being a man, as I say, with his hair a little stirred by a Zeitgeist
+that made for change, Gates did at times display a disposition towards
+developments. City Merchants had no modern side, and utilitarian spirits
+were carping in the PALL MALL GAZETTE and elsewhere at the omissions
+from our curriculum, and particularly at our want of German. Moreover,
+four classes still worked together with much clashing and uproar in the
+old Big Hall that had once held in a common tumult the entire school.
+Gates used to come and talk to us older fellows about these things.
+
+“I don't wish to innovate unduly,” he used to say. “But we ought to get
+in some German, you know,--for those who like it. The army men will be
+wanting it some of these days.”
+
+He referred to the organisation of regular evening preparation for the
+lower boys in Big Hall as a “revolutionary change,” but he achieved it,
+and he declared he began the replacement of the hacked wooden tables, at
+which the boys had worked since Tudor days, by sloping desks with safety
+inkpots and scientifically adjustable seats, “with grave misgivings.”
+ And though he never birched a boy in his life, and was, I am convinced,
+morally incapable of such a scuffle, he retained the block and birch in
+the school through all his term of office, and spoke at the Headmasters'
+Conference in temperate approval of corporal chastisement, comparing it,
+dear soul! to the power of the sword....
+
+I wish I could, in some measure and without tediousness, convey the
+effect of his discourses to General Assembly in Big Hall. But that
+is like trying to draw the obverse and reverse of a sixpence worn to
+complete illegibility. His tall fine figure stood high on the days, his
+thoughtful tenor filled the air as he steered his hazardous way
+through sentences that dragged inconclusive tails and dropped redundant
+prepositions. And he pleaded ever so urgently, ever so finely, that
+what we all knew for Sin was sinful, and on the whole best avoided
+altogether, and so went on with deepening notes and even with short
+arresting gestures of the right arm and hand, to stir and exhort us
+towards goodness, towards that modern, unsectarian goodness, goodness
+in general and nothing in particular, which the Zeitgeist seemed to
+indicate in those transitional years.
+
+
+7
+
+The school never quite got hold of me. Partly I think that was because
+I was a day-boy and so freer than most of the boys, partly because of
+a temperamental disposition to see things in my own way and have my
+private dreams, partly because I was a little antagonised by the family
+traditions that ran through the school. I was made to feel at first
+that I was a rank outsider, and I never quite forgot it. I suffered very
+little bullying, and I never had a fight--in all my time there were only
+three fights--but I followed my own curiosities. I was already a
+very keen theologian and politician before I was fifteen. I was also
+intensely interested in modern warfare. I read the morning papers in
+the Reading Room during the midday recess, never missed the illustrated
+weeklies, and often when I could afford it I bought a PALL MALL GAZETTE
+on my way home.
+
+I do not think that I was very exceptional in that; most intelligent
+boys, I believe, want naturally to be men, and are keenly interested
+in men's affairs. There is not the universal passion for a magnified
+puerility among them it is customary to assume. I was indeed a voracious
+reader of everything but boys' books--which I detested--and fiction. I
+read histories, travel, popular science and controversy with particular
+zest, and I loved maps. School work and school games were quite
+subordinate affairs for me. I worked well and made a passable figure
+at games, and I do not think I was abnormally insensitive to the fine
+quality of our school, to the charm of its mediaeval nucleus, its
+Gothic cloisters, its scraps of Palladian and its dignified Georgian
+extensions; the contrast of the old quiet, that in spite of our presence
+pervaded it everywhere, with the rushing and impending London all
+about it, was indeed a continual pleasure to me. But these things were
+certainly not the living and central interests of my life.
+
+I had to conceal my wider outlook to a certain extent--from the masters
+even more than from the boys. Indeed I only let myself go freely with
+one boy, Britten, my especial chum, the son of the Agent-General for
+East Australia. We two discovered in a chance conversation A PROPOS of a
+map in the library that we were both of us curious why there were Malays
+in Madagascar, and how the Mecca pilgrims came from the East Indies
+before steamships were available. Neither of us had suspected that
+there was any one at all in the school who knew or cared a rap about the
+Indian Ocean, except as water on the way to India. But Britten had come
+up through the Suez Canal, and his ship had spoken a pilgrim ship on
+the way. It gave him a startling quality of living knowledge. From these
+pilgrims we got to a comparative treatment of religions, and from that,
+by a sudden plunge, to entirely sceptical and disrespectful confessions
+concerning Gates' last outbreak of simple piety in School Assembly. We
+became congenial intimates from that hour.
+
+The discovery of Britten happened to me when we were both in the Lower
+Fifth. Previously there had been a watertight compartment between the
+books I read and the thoughts they begot on the one hand and human
+intercourse on the other. Now I really began my higher education, and
+aired and examined and developed in conversation the doubts, the ideas,
+the interpretations that had been forming in my mind. As we were both
+day-boys with a good deal of control over our time we organised walks
+and expeditions together, and my habit of solitary and rather vague
+prowling gave way to much more definite joint enterprises. I went
+several times to his house, he was the youngest of several brothers, one
+of whom was a medical student and let us assist at the dissection of a
+cat, and once or twice in vacation time he came to Penge, and we went
+with parcels of provisions to do a thorough day in the grounds and
+galleries of the Crystal Palace, ending with the fireworks at close
+quarters. We went in a river steamboat down to Greenwich, and fired by
+that made an excursion to Margate and back; we explored London docks
+and Bethnal Green Museum, Petticoat Lane and all sorts of out-of-the-way
+places together.
+
+We confessed shyly to one another a common secret vice, “Phantom
+warfare.” When we walked alone, especially in the country, we had both
+developed the same practice of fighting an imaginary battle about us
+as we walked. As we went along we were generals, and our attacks pushed
+along on either side, crouching and gathering behind hedges, cresting
+ridges, occupying copses, rushing open spaces, fighting from house to
+house. The hillsides about Penge were honeycombed in my imagination with
+the pits and trenches I had created to check a victorious invader coming
+out of Surrey. For him West Kensington was chiefly important as the
+scene of a desperate and successful last stand of insurrectionary troops
+(who had seized the Navy, the Bank and other advantages) against a
+royalist army--reinforced by Germans--advancing for reasons best known
+to themselves by way of Harrow and Ealing. It is a secret and solitary
+game, as we found when we tried to play it together. We made a success
+of that only once. All the way down to Margate we schemed defences and
+assailed and fought them as we came back against the sunset. Afterwards
+we recapitulated all that conflict by means of a large scale map of the
+Thames and little paper ironclads in plan cut out of paper.
+
+A subsequent revival of these imaginings was brought about by Britten's
+luck in getting, through a friend of his father's, admission for us both
+to the spectacle of volunteer officers fighting the war game in Caxton
+Hall. We developed a war game of our own at Britten's home with nearly a
+couple of hundred lead soldiers, some excellent spring cannons that shot
+hard and true at six yards, hills of books and a constantly elaborated
+set of rules. For some months that occupied an immense proportion of
+our leisure. Some of our battles lasted several days. We kept the game a
+profound secret from the other fellows. They would not have understood.
+
+And we also began, it was certainly before we were sixteen, to write,
+for the sake of writing. We liked writing. We had discovered Lamb
+and the best of the middle articles in such weeklies as the SATURDAY
+GAZETTE, and we imitated them. Our minds were full of dim uncertain
+things we wanted to drag out into the light of expression. Britten had
+got hold of IN MEMORIAM, and I had disinterred Pope's ESSAY ON MAN and
+RABBI BEN EZRA, and these things had set our theological and cosmic
+solicitudes talking. I was somewhere between sixteen and eighteen,
+I know, when he and I walked along the Thames Embankment confessing
+shamefully to one another that we had never read Lucretius. We thought
+every one who mattered had read Lucretius.
+
+When I was nearly sixteen my mother was taken ill very suddenly,
+and died of some perplexing complaint that involved a post-mortem
+examination; it was, I think, the trouble that has since those days
+been recognised as appendicitis. This led to a considerable change in
+my circumstances; the house at Penge was given up, and my Staffordshire
+uncle arranged for me to lodge during school terms with a needy
+solicitor and his wife in Vicars Street, S. W., about a mile and a half
+from the school. So it was I came right into London; I had almost two
+years of London before I went to Cambridge.
+
+Those were our great days together. Afterwards we were torn apart;
+Britten went to Oxford, and our circumstances never afterwards threw us
+continuously together until the days of the BLUE WEEKLY.
+
+As boys, we walked together, read and discussed the same books, pursued
+the same enquiries. We got a reputation as inseparables and the nickname
+of the Rose and the Lily, for Britten was short and thick-set with
+dark close curling hair and a ruddy Irish type of face; I was lean and
+fair-haired and some inches taller than he. Our talk ranged widely and
+yet had certain very definite limitations. We were amazingly free with
+politics and religion, we went to that little meeting-house of William
+Morris's at Hammersmith and worked out the principles of Socialism
+pretty thoroughly, and we got up the Darwinian theory with the help
+of Britten's medical-student brother and the galleries of the Natural
+History Museum in Cromwell Road. Those wonderful cases on the ground
+floor illustrating mimicry, dimorphism and so forth, were new in our
+times, and we went through them with earnest industry and tried over our
+Darwinism in the light of that. Such topics we did exhaustively. But on
+the other hand I do not remember any discussion whatever of human sex or
+sexual relationships. There, in spite of intense secret curiosities, our
+lips were sealed by a peculiar shyness. And I do not believe we ever had
+occasion either of us to use the word “love.” It was not only that we
+were instinctively shy of the subject, but that we were mightily ashamed
+of the extent of our ignorance and uncertainty in these matters. We
+evaded them elaborately with an assumption of exhaustive knowledge.
+
+We certainly had no shyness about theology. We marked the emancipation
+of our spirits from the frightful teachings that had oppressed our
+boyhood, by much indulgence in blasphemous wit. We had a secret
+literature of irreverent rhymes, and a secret art of theological
+caricature. Britten's father had delighted his family by reading aloud
+from Dr. Richard Garnett's TWILIGHT OF THE GODS, and Britten conveyed
+the precious volume to me. That and the BAB BALLADS were the inspiration
+of some of our earliest lucubrations.
+
+For an imaginative boy the first experience of writing is like a tiger's
+first taste of blood, and our literary flowerings led very directly to
+the revival of the school magazine, which had been comatose for some
+years. But there we came upon a disappointment.
+
+
+8
+
+In that revival we associated certain other of the Sixth Form boys,
+and notably one for whom our enterprise was to lay the foundations of a
+career that has ended in the House of Lords, Arthur Cossington, now
+Lord Paddockhurst. Cossington was at that time a rather heavy, rather
+good-looking boy who was chiefly eminent in cricket, an outsider even as
+we were and preoccupied no doubt, had we been sufficiently detached to
+observe him, with private imaginings very much of the same quality
+and spirit as our own. He was, we were inclined to think, rather a
+sentimentalist, rather a poseur, he affected a concise emphatic style,
+played chess very well, betrayed a belief in will-power, and earned
+Britten's secret hostility, Britten being a sloven, by the invariable
+neatness of his collars and ties. He came into our magazine with a
+vigour that we found extremely surprising and unwelcome.
+
+Britten and I had wanted to write. We had indeed figured our project
+modestly as a manuscript magazine of satirical, liberal and brilliant
+literature by which in some rather inexplicable way the vague tumult of
+ideas that teemed within us was to find form and expression; Cossington,
+it was manifest from the outset, wanted neither to write nor writing,
+but a magazine. I remember the inaugural meeting in Shoesmith major's
+study--we had had great trouble in getting it together--and how
+effectually Cossington bolted with the proposal.
+
+“I think we fellows ought to run a magazine,” said Cossington. “The
+school used to have one. A school like this ought to have a magazine.”
+
+“The last one died in '84,” said Shoesmith from the hearthrug. “Called
+the OBSERVER. Rot rather.”
+
+“Bad title,” said Cossington.
+
+“There was a TATLER before that,” said Britten, sitting on the writing
+table at the window that was closed to deaden the cries of the Lower
+School at play, and clashing his boots together.
+
+“We want something suggestive of City Merchants.”
+
+“CITY MERCHANDIZE,” said Britten.
+
+“Too fanciful. What of ARVONIAN? Richard Arvon was our founder, and it
+seems almost a duty--”
+
+“They call them all -usians or -onians,” said Britten.
+
+“I like CITY MERCHANDIZE,” I said. “We could probably find a quotation
+to suggest--oh! mixed good things.”
+
+Cossington regarded me abstractedly.
+
+“Don't want to put the accent on the City, do we?” said Shoesmith, who
+had a feeling for county families, and Naylor supported him by a murmur
+of approval.
+
+“We ought to call it the ARVONIAN,” decided Cossington, “and we might
+very well have underneath, 'With which is incorporated the OBSERVER.'
+That picks up the old traditions, makes an appeal to old boys and all
+that, and it gives us something to print under the title.”
+
+I still held out for CITY MERCHANDIZE, which had taken my fancy. “Some
+of the chaps' people won't like it,” said Naylor, “certain not to. And
+it sounds Rum.”
+
+“Sounds Weird,” said a boy who had not hitherto spoken.
+
+“We aren't going to do anything Queer,” said Shoesmith, pointedly not
+looking at Britten.
+
+The question of the title had manifestly gone against us. “Oh! HAVE it
+ARVONIAN,” I said.
+
+“And next, what size shall we have?” said Cossington.
+
+“Something like MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE--or LONGMANS'; LONGMANS' is better
+because it has a whole page, not columns. It makes no end of difference
+to one's effects.”
+
+“What effects?” asked Shoesmith abruptly.
+
+“Oh! a pause or a white line or anything. You've got to write closer for
+a double column. It's nuggetty. You can't get a swing on your prose.” I
+had discussed this thoroughly with Britten.
+
+“If the fellows are going to write--” began Britten.
+
+“We ought to keep off fine writing,” said Shoesmith. “It's cheek. I vote
+we don't have any.”
+
+“We sha'n't get any,” said Cossington, and then as an olive branch to
+me, “unless Remington does a bit. Or Britten. But it's no good making
+too much space for it.”
+
+“We ought to be very careful about the writing,” said Shoesmith. “We
+don't want to give ourselves away.”
+
+“I vote we ask old Topham to see us through,” said Naylor.
+
+Britten groaned aloud and every one regarded him. “Greek epigrams on the
+fellows' names,” he said. “Small beer in ancient bottles. Let's get a
+stuffed broody hen to SIT on the magazine.”
+
+“We might do worse than a Greek epigram,” said Cossington. “One in each
+number. It--it impresses parents and keeps up our classical tradition.
+And the masters CAN help. We don't want to antagonise them. Of
+course--we've got to departmentalise. Writing is only one section of the
+thing. The ARVONIAN has to stand for the school. There's questions
+of space and questions of expense. We can't turn out a great chunk of
+printed prose like--like wet cold toast and call it a magazine.”
+
+Britten writhed, appreciating the image.
+
+“There's to be a section of sports. YOU must do that.”
+
+“I'm not going to do any fine writing,” said Shoesmith.
+
+“What you've got to do is just to list all the chaps and put a note to
+their play:--'Naylor minor must pass more. Football isn't the place for
+extreme individualism.' 'Ammersham shapes well as half-back.' Things
+like that.”
+
+“I could do that all right,” said Shoesmith, brightening and manifestly
+becoming pregnant with judgments.
+
+“One great thing about a magazine of this sort,” said Cossington, “is
+to mention just as many names as you can in each number. It keeps the
+interest alive. Chaps will turn it over looking for their own little
+bit. Then it all lights up for them.”
+
+“Do you want any reports of matches?” Shoesmith broke from his
+meditation.
+
+“Rather. With comments.”
+
+“Naylor surpassed himself and negotiated the lemon safely home,” said
+Shoesmith.
+
+“Shut it,” said Naylor modestly.
+
+“Exactly,” said Cossington. “That gives us three features,” touching
+them off on his fingers, “Epigram, Literary Section, Sports. Then we
+want a section to shove anything into, a joke, a notice of anything
+that's going on. So on. Our Note Book.”
+
+“Oh, Hell!” said Britten, and clashed his boots, to the silent
+disapproval of every one.
+
+“Then we want an editorial.”
+
+“A WHAT?” cried Britten, with a note of real terror in his voice.
+
+“Well, don't we? Unless we have our Note Book to begin on the front
+page. It gives a scrappy effect to do that. We want something manly and
+straightforward and a bit thoughtful, about Patriotism, say, or ESPRIT
+DE CORPS, or After-Life.”
+
+I looked at Britten. Hitherto we had not considered Cossington mattered
+very much in the world.
+
+He went over us as a motor-car goes over a dog. There was a sort of
+energy about him, a new sort of energy to us; we had never realised
+that anything of the sort existed in the world. We were hopelessly at
+a disadvantage. Almost instantly we had developed a clear and detailed
+vision of a magazine made up of everything that was most acceptable
+in the magazines that flourished in the adult world about us, and had
+determined to make it a success. He had by a kind of instinct, as it
+were, synthetically plagiarised every successful magazine and breathed
+into this dusty mixture the breath of life. He was elected at his own
+suggestion managing director, with the earnest support of Shoesmith and
+Naylor, and conducted the magazine so successfully and brilliantly that
+he even got a whole back page of advertisements from the big sports shop
+in Holborn, and made the printers pay at the same rate for a notice
+of certain books of their own which they said they had inserted by
+inadvertency to fill up space. The only literary contribution in the
+first number was a column by Topham in faultless stereotyped English in
+depreciation of some fancied evil called Utilitarian Studies and ending
+with that noble old quotation:--
+
+
+“To the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.”
+
+
+And Flack crowded us out of number two with a bright little paper on the
+“Humours of Cricket,” and the Head himself was profusely thoughtful all
+over the editorial under the heading of “The School Chapel; and How it
+Seems to an Old Boy.”
+
+Britten and I found it difficult to express to each other with any grace
+or precision what we felt about that magazine.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ ADOLESCENCE
+
+
+1
+
+I find it very difficult to trace how form was added to form
+and interpretation followed interpretation in my ever-spreading,
+ever-deepening, ever-multiplying and enriching vision of this world into
+which I had been born. Every day added its impressions, its hints, its
+subtle explications to the growing understanding. Day after day the
+living interlacing threads of a mind weave together. Every morning now
+for three weeks and more (for to-day is Thursday and I started on a
+Tuesday) I have been trying to convey some idea of the factors and
+early influences by which my particular scrap of subjective tapestry
+was shaped, to show the child playing on the nursery floor, the son
+perplexed by his mother, gazing aghast at his dead father, exploring
+interminable suburbs, touched by first intimations of the sexual
+mystery, coming in with a sort of confused avidity towards the centres
+of the life of London. It is only by such an effort to write it down
+that one realises how marvellously crowded, how marvellously analytical
+and synthetic those ears must be. One begins with the little child
+to whom the sky is a roof of blue, the world a screen of opaque and
+disconnected facts, the home a thing eternal, and “being good” just
+simple obedience to unquestioned authority; and one comes at last to
+the vast world of one's adult perception, pierced deep by flaring
+searchlights of partial understanding, here masked by mists, here
+refracted and distorted through half translucent veils, here showing
+broad prospects and limitless vistas and here impenetrably dark.
+
+I recall phases of deep speculation, doubts and even prayers by night,
+and strange occasions when by a sort of hypnotic contemplation of
+nothingness I sought to pierce the web of appearances about me. It is
+hard to measure these things in receding perspective, and now I cannot
+trace, so closely has mood succeeded and overlaid and obliterated mood,
+the phases by which an utter horror of death was replaced by the growing
+realisation of its necessity and dignity. Difficulty of the imagination
+with infinite space, infinite time, entangled my mind; and moral
+distress for the pain and suffering of bygone ages that made all thought
+of reformation in the future seem but the grimmest irony upon now
+irreparable wrongs. Many an intricate perplexity of these broadening
+years did not so much get settled as cease to matter. Life crowded me
+away from it.
+
+I have confessed myself a temerarious theologian, and in that
+passage from boyhood to manhood I ranged widely in my search for some
+permanently satisfying Truth. That, too, ceased after a time to be
+urgently interesting. I came at last into a phase that endures to this
+day, of absolute tranquillity, of absolute confidence in whatever that
+Incomprehensible Comprehensive which must needs be the substratum of all
+things, may be. Feeling OF IT, feeling BY IT, I cannot feel afraid of
+it. I think I had got quite clearly and finally to that adjustment long
+before my Cambridge days were done. I am sure that the evil in life is
+transitory and finite like an accident or distress in the nursery; that
+God is my Father and that I may trust Him, even though life hurts so
+that one must needs cry out at it, even though it shows no consequence
+but failure, no promise but pain....
+
+But while I was fearless of theology I must confess it was comparatively
+late before I faced and dared to probe the secrecies of sex. I was
+afraid of sex. I had an instinctive perception that it would be a large
+and difficult thing in my life, but my early training was all in
+the direction of regarding it as an irrelevant thing, as something
+disconnected from all the broad significances of life, as hostile
+and disgraceful in its quality. The world was never so emasculated in
+thought, I suppose, as it was in the Victorian time....
+
+I was afraid to think either of sex or (what I have always found
+inseparable from a kind of sexual emotion) beauty. Even as a boy I knew
+the thing as a haunting and alluring mystery that I tried to keep away
+from. Its dim presence obsessed me none the less for all the extravagant
+decency, the stimulating silences of my upbringing....
+
+The plaster Venuses and Apollos that used to adorn the vast aisle and
+huge grey terraces of the Crystal Palace were the first intimations of
+the beauty of the body that ever came into my life. As I write of it I
+feel again the shameful attraction of those gracious forms. I used to
+look at them not simply, but curiously and askance. Once at least in
+my later days at Penge, I spent a shilling in admission chiefly for the
+sake of them....
+
+The strangest thing of all my odd and solitary upbringing seems to me
+now that swathing up of all the splendours of the flesh, that strange
+combination of fanatical terrorism and shyness that fenced me about with
+prohibitions. It caused me to grow up, I will not say blankly ignorant,
+but with an ignorance blurred and dishonoured by shame, by enigmatical
+warnings, by cultivated aversions, an ignorance in which a fascinated
+curiosity and desire struggled like a thing in a net. I knew so little
+and I felt so much. There was indeed no Aphrodite at all in my youthful
+Pantheon, but instead there was a mysterious and minatory gap. I have
+told how at last a new Venus was born in my imagination out of gas lamps
+and the twilight, a Venus with a cockney accent and dark eyes shining
+out of the dusk, a Venus who was a warm, passion-stirring atmosphere
+rather than incarnate in a body. And I have told, too, how I bought a
+picture.
+
+All this was a thing apart from the rest of my life, a locked avoided
+chamber....
+
+It was not until my last year at Trinity that I really broke down the
+barriers of this unwholesome silence and brought my secret broodings to
+the light of day. Then a little set of us plunged suddenly into what
+we called at first sociological discussion. I can still recall even the
+physical feeling of those first tentative talks. I remember them mostly
+as occurring in the rooms of Ted Hatherleigh, who kept at the corner by
+the Trinity great gate, but we also used to talk a good deal at a man's
+in King's, a man named, if I remember rightly, Redmayne. The atmosphere
+of Hatherleigh's rooms was a haze of tobacco smoke against a background
+brown and deep. He professed himself a socialist with anarchistic
+leanings--he had suffered the martyrdom of ducking for it--and a huge
+French May-day poster displaying a splendid proletarian in red and black
+on a barricade against a flaring orange sky, dominated his decorations.
+Hatherleigh affected a fine untidiness, and all the place, even
+the floor, was littered with books, for the most part open and face
+downward; deeper darknesses were supplied by a discarded gown and
+our caps, all conscientiously battered, Hatherleigh's flopped like an
+elephant's ear and inserted quill pens supported the corners of mine;
+the highlights of the picture came chiefly as reflections from his
+chequered blue mugs full of audit ale. We sat on oak chairs, except the
+four or five who crowded on a capacious settle, we drank a lot of beer
+and were often fuddled, and occasionally quite drunk, and we all smoked
+reckless-looking pipes,--there was a transient fashion among us for corn
+cobs for which Mark Twain, I think, was responsible. Our little excesses
+with liquor were due far more to conscience than appetite, indicated
+chiefly a resolve to break away from restraints that we suspected were
+keeping us off the instructive knife-edges of life. Hatherleigh was a
+good Englishman of the premature type with a red face, a lot of hair, a
+deep voice and an explosive plunging manner, and it was he who said one
+evening--Heaven knows how we got to it--“Look here, you know, it's all
+Rot, this Shutting Up about Women. We OUGHT to talk about them. What are
+we going to do about them? It's got to come. We're all festering inside
+about it. Let's out with it. There's too much Decency altogether about
+this Infernal University!”
+
+We rose to his challenge a little awkwardly and our first talk
+was clumsy, there were flushed faces and red ears, and I remember
+Hatherleigh broke out into a monologue on decency. “Modesty and
+Decency,” said Hatherleigh, “are Oriental vices. The Jews brought them
+to Europe. They're Semitic, just like our monasticism here and the
+seclusion of women and mutilating the dead on a battlefield. And all
+that sort of thing.”
+
+Hatherleigh's mind progressed by huge leaps, leaps that were usually
+wildly inaccurate, and for a time we engaged hotly upon the topic of
+those alleged mutilations and the Semitic responsibility for decency.
+Hatherleigh tried hard to saddle the Semitic race with the less elegant
+war customs of the Soudan and the northwest frontier of India, and
+quoted Doughty, at that time a little-known author, and Cunninghame
+Graham to show that the Arab was worse than a county-town spinster in
+his regard for respectability. But his case was too preposterous, and
+Esmeer, with his shrill penetrating voice and his way of pointing with
+all four long fingers flat together, carried the point against him. He
+quoted Cato and Roman law and the monasteries of Thibet.
+
+“Well, anyway,” said Hatherleigh, escaping from our hands like an
+intellectual frog, “Semitic or not, I've got no use for decency.”
+
+We argued points and Hatherleigh professed an unusually balanced and
+tolerating attitude. “I don't mind a certain refinement and dignity,” he
+admitted generously. “What I object to is this spreading out of decency
+until it darkens the whole sky, until it makes a man's father afraid to
+speak of the most important things, until it makes a man afraid to look
+a frank book in the face or think--even think! until it leads to our
+coming to--to the business at last with nothing but a few prohibitions,
+a few hints, a lot of dirty jokes and, and “--he waved a hand and seemed
+to seek and catch his image in the air--“oh, a confounded buttered slide
+of sentiment, to guide us. I tell you I'm going to think about it and
+talk about it until I see a little more daylight than I do at present.
+I'm twenty-two. Things might happen to me anywhen. You men can go out
+into the world if you like, to sin like fools and marry like fools,
+not knowing what you are doing and ashamed to ask. You'll take
+the consequences, too, I expect, pretty meekly, sniggering a bit,
+sentimentalising a bit, like--like Cambridge humorists.... I mean to
+know what I'm doing.”
+
+He paused to drink, and I think I cut in with ideas of my own. But one
+is apt to forget one's own share in a talk, I find, more than one does
+the clear-cut objectivity of other people's, and I do not know how far
+I contributed to this discussion that followed. I am, however, pretty
+certain that it was then that ideal that we were pleased to call
+aristocracy and which soon became the common property of our set was
+developed. It was Esmeer, I know, who laid down and maintained the
+proposition that so far as minds went there were really only two sorts
+of man in the world, the aristocrat and the man who subdues his mind to
+other people's.
+
+“'I couldn't THINK of it, Sir,'” said Esmeer in his elucidatory tones;
+“that's what a servant says. His mind even is broken in to run between
+fences, and he admits it. WE'VE got to be able to think of anything.
+And 'such things aren't for the Likes of Us!' That's another servant's
+saying. Well, everything IS for the Likes of Us. If we see fit, that
+is.”
+
+A small fresh-coloured man in grey objected.
+
+“Well,” exploded Hatherleigh, “if that isn't so what the deuce are we
+up here for? Instead of working in mines? If some things aren't to be
+thought about ever! We've got the privilege of all these extra years for
+getting things straight in our heads, and then we won't use 'em. Good
+God! what do you think a university's for?”...
+
+Esmeer's idea came with an effect of real emancipation to several of
+us. We were not going to be afraid of ideas any longer, we were going
+to throw down every barrier of prohibition and take them in and see what
+came of it. We became for a time even intemperately experimental, and
+one of us, at the bare suggestion of an eminent psychic investigator,
+took hashish and very nearly died of it within a fortnight of our great
+elucidation.
+
+The chief matter of our interchanges was of course the discussion
+of sex. Once the theme had been opened it became a sore place in
+our intercourse; none of us seemed able to keep away from it. Our
+imaginations got astir with it. We made up for lost time and went
+round it and through it and over it exhaustively. I recall prolonged
+discussion of polygamy on the way to Royston, muddy November tramps to
+Madingley, when amidst much profanity from Hatherleigh at the serious
+treatment of so obsolete a matter, we weighed the reasons, if any, for
+the institution of marriage. The fine dim night-time spaces of the Great
+Court are bound up with the inconclusive finales of mighty hot-eared
+wrangles; the narrows of Trinity Street and Petty Cury and Market Hill
+have their particular associations for me with that spate of confession
+and free speech, that almost painful goal delivery of long pent and
+crappled and sometimes crippled ideas.
+
+And we went on a reading party that Easter to a place called Pulborough
+in Sussex, where there is a fishing inn and a river that goes under a
+bridge. It was a late Easter and a blazing one, and we boated and bathed
+and talked of being Hellenic and the beauty of the body until at moments
+it seemed to us that we were destined to restore the Golden Age, by the
+simple abolition of tailors and outfitters.
+
+Those undergraduate talks! how rich and glorious they seemed, how
+splendidly new the ideas that grew and multiplied in our seething minds!
+We made long afternoon and evening raids over the Downs towards Arundel,
+and would come tramping back through the still keen moonlight singing
+and shouting. We formed romantic friendships with one another, and
+grieved more or less convincingly that there were no splendid women fit
+to be our companions in the world. But Hatherleigh, it seemed, had once
+known a girl whose hair was gloriously red. “My God!” said Hatherleigh
+to convey the quality of her; just simply and with projectile violence:
+“My God!”
+
+Benton had heard of a woman who lived with a man refusing to be married
+to him--we thought that splendid beyond measure,--I cannot now imagine
+why. She was “like a tender goddess,” Benton said. A sort of shame
+came upon us in the dark in spite of our liberal intentions when Benton
+committed himself to that. And after such talk we would fall upon great
+pauses of emotional dreaming, and if by chance we passed a girl in a
+governess cart, or some farmer's daughter walking to the station, we
+became alertly silent or obstreperously indifferent to her. For might
+she not be just that one exception to the banal decency, the sickly
+pointless conventionality, the sham modesty of the times in which we
+lived?
+
+We felt we stood for a new movement, not realising how perennially this
+same emancipation returns to those ancient courts beside the Cam.
+We were the anti-decency party, we discovered a catch phrase that we
+flourished about in the Union and made our watchword, namely, “stark
+fact.” We hung nude pictures in our rooms much as if they had been
+flags, to the earnest concern of our bedders, and I disinterred my
+long-kept engraving and had it framed in fumed oak, and found for it a
+completer and less restrained companion, a companion I never cared for
+in the slightest degree....
+
+This efflorescence did not prevent, I think indeed it rather helped, our
+more formal university work, for most of us took firsts, and three of
+us got Fellowships in one year or another. There was Benton who had a
+Research Fellowship and went to Tubingen, there was Esmeer and myself
+who both became Residential Fellows. I had taken the Mental and
+Moral Science Tripos (as it was then), and three years later I got a
+lectureship in political science. In those days it was disguised in the
+cloak of Political Economy.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+It was our affectation to be a little detached from the main stream of
+undergraduate life. We worked pretty hard, but by virtue of our
+beer, our socialism and suchlike heterodoxy, held ourselves to be
+differentiated from the swatting reading man. None of us, except Baxter,
+who was a rowing blue, a rather abnormal blue with an appetite for
+ideas, took games seriously enough to train, and on the other hand
+we intimated contempt for the rather mediocre, deliberately humorous,
+consciously gentlemanly and consciously wild undergraduate men who
+made up the mass of Cambridge life. After the manner of youth we were
+altogether too hard on our contemporaries. We battered our caps and
+tore our gowns lest they should seem new, and we despised these others
+extremely for doing exactly the same things; we had an idea of ourselves
+and resented beyond measure a similar weakness in these our brothers.
+
+There was a type, or at least there seemed to us to be a type--I'm a
+little doubtful at times now whether after all we didn't create it--for
+which Hatherleigh invented the nickname the “Pinky Dinkys,” intending
+thereby both contempt and abhorrence in almost equal measure. The Pinky
+Dinky summarised all that we particularly did not want to be, and also,
+I now perceive, much of what we were and all that we secretly dreaded
+becoming.
+
+But it is hard to convey the Pinky Dinky idea, for all that it meant so
+much to us. We spent one evening at least during that reading party upon
+the Pinky Dinky; we sat about our one fire after a walk in the
+rain--it was our only wet day--smoked our excessively virile pipes, and
+elaborated the natural history of the Pinky Dinky. We improvised a
+sort of Pinky Dinky litany, and Hatherleigh supplied deep notes for the
+responses.
+
+“The Pinky Dinky extracts a good deal of amusement from life,” said some
+one.
+
+“Damned prig!” said Hatherleigh.
+
+“The Pinky Dinky arises in the Union and treats the question with a
+light gay touch. He makes the weird ones mad. But sometimes he cannot go
+on because of the amusement he extracts.”
+
+“I want to shy books at the giggling swine,” said Hatherleigh.
+
+“The Pinky Dinky says suddenly while he is making the tea, 'We're all
+being frightfully funny. It's time for you to say something now.'”
+
+“The Pinky Dinky shakes his head and says: 'I'm afraid I shall never be
+a responsible being.' And he really IS frivolous.”
+
+“Frivolous but not vulgar,” said Esmeer.
+
+“Pinky Dinkys are chaps who've had their buds nipped,” said Hatherleigh.
+“They're Plebs and they know it. They haven't the Guts to get hold of
+things. And so they worry up all those silly little jokes of theirs to
+carry it off.”...
+
+We tried bad ones for a time, viciously flavoured.
+
+Pinky Dinkys are due to over-production of the type that ought to keep
+outfitters' shops. Pinky Dinkys would like to keep outfitters' shops
+with whimsy 'scriptions on the boxes and make your bill out funny, and
+not be snobs to customers, no!--not even if they had titles.”
+
+“Every Pinky Dinky's people are rather good people, and better than most
+Pinky Dinky's people. But he does not put on side.”
+
+“Pinky Dinkys become playful at the sight of women.”
+
+“'Croquet's my game,' said the Pinky Dinky, and felt a man
+condescended.”
+
+“But what the devil do they think they're up to, anyhow?” roared old
+Hatherleigh suddenly, dropping plump into bottomless despair.
+
+We felt we had still failed to get at the core of the mystery of the
+Pinky Dinky.
+
+We tried over things about his religion. “The Pinky Dinky goes to King's
+Chapel, and sits and feels in the dusk. Solemn things! Oh HUSH! He
+wouldn't tell you--”
+
+“He COULDN'T tell you.”
+
+“Religion is so sacred to him he never talks about it, never reads about
+it, never thinks about it. Just feels!”
+
+“But in his heart of hearts, oh! ever so deep, the Pinky Dinky has a
+doubt--”
+
+Some one protested.
+
+“Not a vulgar doubt,” Esmeer went on, “but a kind of hesitation whether
+the Ancient of Days is really exactly what one would call good form....
+There's a lot of horrid coarseness got into the world somehow. SOMEBODY
+put it there.... And anyhow there's no particular reason why a man
+should be seen about with Him. He's jolly Awful of course and all
+that--”
+
+“The Pinky Dinky for all his fun and levity has a clean mind.”
+
+“A thoroughly clean mind. Not like Esmeer's--the Pig!”
+
+“If once he began to think about sex, how could he be comfortable at
+croquet?”
+
+“It's their Damned Modesty,” said Hatherleigh suddenly, “that's what's
+the matter with the Pinky Dinky. It's Mental Cowardice dressed up as a
+virtue and taking the poor dears in. Cambridge is soaked with it; it's
+some confounded local bacillus. Like the thing that gives a flavour to
+Havana cigars. He comes up here to be made into a man and a ruler of
+the people, and he thinks it shows a nice disposition not to take on the
+job! How the Devil is a great Empire to be run with men like him?”
+
+“All his little jokes and things,” said Esmeer regarding his feet on
+the fender, “it's just a nervous sniggering--because he's afraid....
+Oxford's no better.”
+
+“What's he afraid of?” said I.
+
+“God knows!” exploded Hatherleigh and stared at the fire.
+
+“LIFE!” said Esmeer. “And so in a way are we,” he added, and made a
+thoughtful silence for a time.
+
+“I say,” began Carter, who was doing the Natural Science Tripos, “what
+is the adult form of the Pinky Dinky?”
+
+But there we were checked by our ignorance of the world.
+
+“What is the adult form of any of us?” asked Benton, voicing the thought
+that had arrested our flow.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+I do not remember that we ever lifted our criticism to the dons and the
+organisation of the University. I think we took them for granted. When I
+look back at my youth I am always astonished by the multitude of things
+that we took for granted. It seemed to us that Cambridge was in the
+order of things, for all the world like having eyebrows or a vermiform
+appendix. Now with the larger scepticism of middle age I can entertain
+very fundamental doubts about these old universities. Indeed I had a
+scheme--
+
+I do not see what harm I can do now by laying bare the purpose of the
+political combinations I was trying to effect.
+
+My educational scheme was indeed the starting-point of all the big
+project of conscious public reconstruction at which I aimed. I wanted
+to build up a new educational machine altogether for the governing class
+out of a consolidated system of special public service schools. I
+meant to get to work upon this whatever office I was given in the new
+government. I could have begun my plan from the Admiralty or the
+War Office quite as easily as from the Education Office. I am firmly
+convinced it is hopeless to think of reforming the old public schools
+and universities to meet the needs of a modern state, they send their
+roots too deep and far, the cost would exceed any good that could
+possibly be effected, and so I have sought a way round this invincible
+obstacle. I do think it would be quite practicable to side-track, as the
+Americans say, the whole system by creating hardworking, hard-living,
+modern and scientific boys' schools, first for the Royal Navy and then
+for the public service generally, and as they grew, opening them to
+the public without any absolute obligation to subsequent service.
+Simultaneously with this it would not be impossible to develop a new
+college system with strong faculties in modern philosophy, modern
+history, European literature and criticism, physical and biological
+science, education and sociology.
+
+We could in fact create a new liberal education in this way, and cut the
+umbilicus of the classical languages for good and all. I should have set
+this going, and trusted it to correct or kill the old public schools and
+the Oxford and Cambridge tradition altogether. I had men in my mind to
+begin the work, and I should have found others. I should have aimed at
+making a hard-trained, capable, intellectually active, proud type of
+man. Everything else would have been made subservient to that. I should
+have kept my grip on the men through their vacation, and somehow or
+other I would have contrived a young woman to match them. I think I
+could have seen to it effectually enough that they didn't get at croquet
+and tennis with the vicarage daughters and discover sex in the Peeping
+Tom fashion I did, and that they realised quite early in life that
+it isn't really virile to reek of tobacco. I should have had military
+manoeuvres, training ships, aeroplane work, mountaineering and so forth,
+in the place of the solemn trivialities of games, and I should have fed
+and housed my men clean and very hard--where there wasn't any audit ale,
+no credit tradesmen, and plenty of high pressure douches....
+
+I have revisited Cambridge and Oxford time after time since I came
+down, and so far as the Empire goes, I want to get clear of those two
+places....
+
+Always I renew my old feelings, a physical oppression, a sense of
+lowness and dampness almost exactly like the feeling of an underground
+room where paper moulders and leaves the wall, a feeling of ineradicable
+contagion in the Gothic buildings, in the narrow ditch-like rivers, in
+those roads and roads of stuffy little villas. Those little villas
+have destroyed all the good of the old monastic system and none of its
+evil....
+
+Some of the most charming people in the world live in them, but their
+collective effect is below the quality of any individual among them.
+Cambridge is a world of subdued tones, of excessively subtle humours, of
+prim conduct and free thinking; it fears the Parent, but it has no fear
+of God; it offers amidst surroundings that vary between disguises and
+antiquarian charm the inflammation of literature's purple draught;
+one hears there a peculiar thin scandal like no other scandal in the
+world--a covetous scandal--so that I am always reminded of Ibsen in
+Cambridge. In Cambridge and the plays of Ibsen alone does it seem
+appropriate for the heroine before the great crisis of life to “enter,
+take off her overshoes, and put her wet umbrella upon the writing
+desk.”...
+
+We have to make a new Academic mind for modern needs, and the last thing
+to make it out of, I am convinced, is the old Academic mind. One
+might as soon try to fake the old VICTORY at Portsmouth into a line of
+battleship again. Besides which the old Academic mind, like those old
+bathless, damp Gothic colleges, is much too delightful in its peculiar
+and distinctive way to damage by futile patching.
+
+My heart warms to a sense of affectionate absurdity as I recall dear old
+Codger, surely the most “unleaderly” of men. No more than from the old
+Schoolmen, his kindred, could one get from him a School for Princes.
+Yet apart from his teaching he was as curious and adorable as a good
+Netsuke. Until quite recently he was a power in Cambridge, he could
+make and bar and destroy, and in a way he has become the quintessence of
+Cambridge in my thoughts.
+
+I see him on his way to the morning's lecture, with his plump childish
+face, his round innocent eyes, his absurdly non-prehensile fat hand
+carrying his cap, his grey trousers braced up much too high, his feet a
+trifle inturned, and going across the great court with a queer tripping
+pace that seemed cultivated even to my naive undergraduate eye. Or I
+see him lecturing. He lectured walking up and down between the desks,
+talking in a fluting rapid voice, and with the utmost lucidity. If he
+could not walk up and down he could not lecture. His mind and voice had
+precisely the fluid quality of some clear subtle liquid; one felt it
+could flow round anything and overcome nothing. And its nimble eddies
+were wonderful! Or again I recall him drinking port with little muscular
+movements in his neck and cheek and chin and his brows knit--very
+judicial, very concentrated, preparing to say the apt just thing; it was
+the last thing he would have told a lie about.
+
+When I think of Codger I am reminded of an inscription I saw on some
+occasion in Regent's Park above two eyes scarcely more limpidly innocent
+than his--“Born in the Menagerie.” Never once since Codger began to
+display the early promise of scholarship at the age of eight or more,
+had he been outside the bars. His utmost travel had been to lecture here
+and lecture there. His student phase had culminated in papers of quite
+exceptional brilliance, and he had gone on to lecture with a cheerful
+combination of wit and mannerism that had made him a success from the
+beginning. He has lectured ever since. He lectures still. Year by year
+he has become plumper, more rubicund and more and more of an item for
+the intelligent visitor to see. Even in my time he was pointed out to
+people as part of our innumerable enrichments, and obviously he knew it.
+He has become now almost the leading Character in a little donnish world
+of much too intensely appreciated Characters.
+
+He boasted he took no exercise, and also of his knowledge of port wine.
+Of other wines he confessed quite frankly he had no “special knowledge.”
+ Beyond these things he had little pride except that he claimed to have
+read every novel by a woman writer that had ever entered the Union
+Library. This, however, he held to be remarkable rather than ennobling,
+and such boasts as he made of it were tinged with playfulness. Certainly
+he had a scholar's knowledge of the works of Miss Marie Corelli, Miss
+Braddon, Miss Elizabeth Glyn and Madame Sarah Grand that would have
+astonished and flattered those ladies enormously, and he loved nothing
+so much in his hours of relaxation as to propound and answer difficult
+questions upon their books. Tusher of King's was his ineffectual rival
+in this field, their bouts were memorable and rarely other than glorious
+for Codger; but then Tusher spread himself too much, he also undertook
+to rehearse whole pages out of Bradshaw, and tell you with all the
+changes how to get from any station to any station in Great Britain by
+the nearest and cheapest routes....
+
+Codger lodged with a little deaf innocent old lady, Mrs. Araminta
+Mergle, who was understood to be herself a very redoubtable Character in
+the Gyp-Bedder class; about her he related quietly absurd anecdotes.
+He displayed a marvellous invention in ascribing to her plausible
+expressions of opinion entirely identical in import with those of the
+Oxford and Harvard Pragmatists, against whom he waged a fierce obscure
+war....
+
+It was Codger's function to teach me philosophy, philosophy! the
+intimate wisdom of things. He dealt in a variety of Hegelian stuff like
+nothing else in the world, but marvellously consistent with itself. It
+was a wonderful web he spun out of that queer big active childish brain
+that had never lusted nor hated nor grieved nor feared nor passionately
+loved,--a web of iridescent threads. He had luminous final theories
+about Love and Death and Immortality, odd matters they seemed for him to
+think about! and all his woven thoughts lay across my perception of the
+realities of things, as flimsy and irrelevant and clever and beautiful,
+oh!--as a dew-wet spider's web slung in the morning sunshine across the
+black mouth of a gun....
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+All through those years of development I perceive now there must have
+been growing in me, slowly, irregularly, assimilating to itself all
+the phrases and forms of patriotism, diverting my religious impulses,
+utilising my esthetic tendencies, my dominating idea, the statesman's
+idea, that idea of social service which is the protagonist of my story,
+that real though complex passion for Making, making widely and greatly,
+cities, national order, civilisation, whose interplay with all those
+other factors in life I have set out to present. It was growing in
+me--as one's bones grow, no man intending it.
+
+I have tried to show how, quite early in my life, the fact of
+disorderliness, the conception of social life as being a multitudinous
+confusion out of hand, came to me. One always of course simplifies these
+things in the telling, but I do not think I ever saw the world at large
+in any other terms. I never at any stage entertained the idea
+which sustained my mother, and which sustains so many people in the
+world,--the idea that the universe, whatever superficial discords it
+may present, is as a matter of fact “all right,” is being steered to
+definite ends by a serene and unquestionable God. My mother thought that
+Order prevailed, and that disorder was just incidental and foredoomed
+rebellion; I feel and have always felt that order rebels against and
+struggles against disorder, that order has an up-hill job, in gardens,
+experiments, suburbs, everything alike; from the very beginnings of my
+experience I discovered hostility to order, a constant escaping from
+control.
+
+The current of living and contemporary ideas in which my mind was
+presently swimming made all in the same direction; in place of my
+mother's attentive, meticulous but occasionally extremely irascible
+Providence, the talk was all of the Struggle for Existence and the
+survival not of the Best--that was nonsense, but of the fittest to
+survive.
+
+The attempts to rehabilitate Faith in the form of the Individualist's
+LAISSEZ FAIRE never won upon me. I disliked Herbert Spencer all my life
+until I read his autobiography, and then I laughed a little and loved
+him. I remember as early as the City Merchants' days how Britten and I
+scoffed at that pompous question-begging word “Evolution,” having, so to
+speak, found it out. Evolution, some illuminating talker had remarked at
+the Britten lunch table, had led not only to man, but to the liver-fluke
+and skunk, obviously it might lead anywhere; order came into things only
+through the struggling mind of man. That lit things wonderfully for
+us. When I went up to Cambridge I was perfectly clear that life was
+a various and splendid disorder of forces that the spirit of man sets
+itself to tame. I have never since fallen away from that persuasion.
+
+I do not think I was exceptionally precocious in reaching these
+conclusions and a sort of religious finality for myself by eighteen or
+nineteen. I know men and women vary very much in these matters, just as
+children do in learning to talk. Some will chatter at eighteen months
+and some will hardly speak until three, and the thing has very little
+to do with their subsequent mental quality. So it is with young people;
+some will begin their religious, their social, their sexual interests at
+fourteen, some not until far on in the twenties. Britten and I belonged
+to one of the precocious types, and Cossington very probably to another.
+It wasn't that there was anything priggish about any of us; we should
+have been prigs to have concealed our spontaneous interests and ape the
+theoretical boy.
+
+The world of man centred for my imagination in London, it still centres
+there; the real and present world, that is to say, as distinguished from
+the wonder-lands of atomic and microscopic science and the stars and
+future time. I had travelled scarcely at all, I had never crossed the
+Channel, but I had read copiously and I had formed a very good working
+idea of this round globe with its mountains and wildernesses and forests
+and all the sorts and conditions of human life that were scattered over
+its surface. It was all alive, I felt, and changing every day; how it
+was changing, and the changes men might bring about, fascinated my mind
+beyond measure.
+
+I used to find a charm in old maps that showed The World as Known to the
+Ancients, and I wish I could now without any suspicion of self-deception
+write down compactly the world as it was known to me at nineteen. So
+far as extension went it was, I fancy, very like the world I know now at
+forty-two; I had practically all the mountains and seas, boundaries and
+races, products and possibilities that I have now. But its intension was
+very different. All the interval has been increasing and deepening my
+social knowledge, replacing crude and second-hand impressions by felt
+and realised distinctions.
+
+In 1895--that was my last year with Britten, for I went up to Cambridge
+in September--my vision of the world had much the same relation to the
+vision I have to-day that an ill-drawn daub of a mask has to the direct
+vision of a human face. Britten and I looked at our world and saw--what
+did we see? Forms and colours side by side that we had no suspicion were
+interdependent. We had no conception of the roots of things nor of the
+reaction of things. It did not seem to us, for example, that business
+had anything to do with government, or that money and means affected the
+heroic issues of war. There were no wagons in our war game, and where
+there were guns, there it was assumed the ammunition was gathered
+together. Finance again was a sealed book to us; we did not so much
+connect it with the broad aspects of human affairs as regard it as a
+sort of intrusive nuisance to be earnestly ignored by all right-minded
+men. We had no conception of the quality of politics, nor how
+“interests” came into such affairs; we believed men were swayed by
+purely intellectual convictions and were either right or wrong, honest
+or dishonest (in which case they deserved to be shot), good or bad. We
+knew nothing of mental inertia, and could imagine the opinion of a whole
+nation changed by one lucid and convincing exposition. We were capable
+of the most incongruous transfers from the scroll of history to our own
+times, we could suppose Brixton ravaged and Hampstead burnt in civil
+wars for the succession to the throne, or Cheapside a lane of death and
+the front of the Mansion House set about with guillotines in the course
+of an accurately transposed French Revolution. We rebuilt London by Act
+of Parliament, and once in a mood of hygienic enterprise we transferred
+its population EN MASSE to the North Downs by an order of the Local
+Government Board. We thought nothing of throwing religious organisations
+out of employment or superseding all the newspapers by freely
+distributed bulletins. We could contemplate the possibility of laws
+abolishing whole classes; we were equal to such a dream as the peaceful
+and orderly proclamation of Communism from the steps of St. Paul's
+Cathedral, after the passing of a simply worded bill,--a close and not
+unnaturally an exciting division carrying the third reading. I remember
+quite distinctly evolving that vision. We were then fully fifteen and we
+were perfectly serious about it. We were not fools; it was simply that
+as yet we had gathered no experience at all of the limits and powers of
+legislation and conscious collective intention....
+
+I think this statement does my boyhood justice, and yet I have my
+doubts. It is so hard now to say what one understood and what one did
+not understand. It isn't only that every day changed one's general
+outlook, but also that a boy fluctuates between phases of quite adult
+understanding and phases of tawdrily magnificent puerility. Sometimes
+I myself was in those tumbrils that went along Cheapside to the Mansion
+House, a Sydney Cartonesque figure, a white defeated Mirabean; sometimes
+it was I who sat judging and condemning and ruling (sleeping in
+my clothes and feeding very simply) the soul and autocrat of the
+Provisional Government, which occupied, of all inconvenient places! the
+General Post Office at St. Martin's-le-Grand!...
+
+I cannot trace the development of my ideas at Cambridge, but I believe
+the mere physical fact of going two hours' journey away from London gave
+that place for the first time an effect of unity in my imagination. I
+got outside London. It became tangible instead of being a frame almost
+as universal as sea and sky.
+
+At Cambridge my ideas ceased to live in a duologue; in exchange for
+Britten, with whom, however, I corresponded lengthily, stylishly and
+self-consciously for some years, I had now a set of congenial friends. I
+got talk with some of the younger dons, I learnt to speak in the Union,
+and in my little set we were all pretty busily sharpening each other's
+wits and correcting each other's interpretations. Cambridge made
+politics personal and actual. At City Merchants' we had had no sense
+of effective contact; we boasted, it is true, an under secretary and a
+colonial governor among our old boys, but they were never real to
+us; such distinguished sons as returned to visit the old school were
+allusive and pleasant in the best Pinky Dinky style, and pretended to
+be in earnest about nothing but our football and cricket, to mourn the
+abolition of “water,” and find a shuddering personal interest in the
+ancient swishing block. At Cambridge I felt for the first time that I
+touched the thing that was going on. Real living statesmen came down to
+debate in the Union, the older dons had been their college intimates,
+their sons and nephews expounded them to us and made them real to us.
+They invited us to entertain ideas; I found myself for the first time
+in my life expected to read and think and discuss, my secret vice had
+become a virtue.
+
+That combination-room world is at last larger and more populous and
+various than the world of schoolmasters. The Shoesmiths and Naylors who
+had been the aristocracy of City Merchants' fell into their place in my
+mind; they became an undistinguished mass on the more athletic side of
+Pinky Dinkyism, and their hostility to ideas and to the expression
+of ideas ceased to limit and trouble me. The brighter men of each
+generation stay up; these others go down to propagate their tradition,
+as the fathers of families, as mediocre professional men, as assistant
+masters in schools. Cambridge which perfects them is by the nature
+of things least oppressed by them,--except when it comes to a vote in
+Convocation.
+
+We were still in those days under the shadow of the great Victorians. I
+never saw Gladstone (as I never set eyes on the old Queen), but he
+had resigned office only a year before I went up to Trinity, and the
+Combination Rooms were full of personal gossip about him and Disraeli
+and the other big figures of the gladiatorial stage of Parlimentary
+history, talk that leaked copiously into such sets as mine. The ceiling
+of our guest chamber at Trinity was glorious with the arms of Sir
+William Harcourt, whose Death Duties had seemed at first like a
+socialist dawn. Mr. Evesham we asked to come to the Union every year,
+Masters, Chamberlain and the old Duke of Devonshire; they did not come
+indeed, but their polite refusals brought us all, as it were, within
+personal touch of them. One heard of cabinet councils and meetings at
+country houses. Some of us, pursuing such interests, went so far as to
+read political memoirs and the novels of Disraeli and Mrs. Humphry Ward.
+From gossip, example and the illustrated newspapers one learnt something
+of the way in which parties were split, coalitions formed, how permanent
+officials worked and controlled their ministers, how measures were
+brought forward and projects modified.
+
+And while I was getting the great leading figures on the political
+stage, who had been presented to me in my schooldays not so much as men
+as the pantomimic monsters of political caricature, while I was getting
+them reduced in my imagination to the stature of humanity, and their
+motives to the quality of impulses like my own, I was also acquiring in
+my Tripos work a constantly developing and enriching conception of
+the world of men as a complex of economic, intellectual and moral
+processes....
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Socialism is an intellectual Proteus, but to the men of my generation it
+came as the revolt of the workers. Rodbertus we never heard of and
+the Fabian Society we did not understand; Marx and Morris, the Chicago
+Anarchists, JUSTICE and Social Democratic Federation (as it was then)
+presented socialism to our minds. Hatherleigh was the leading exponent
+of the new doctrines in Trinity, and the figure upon his wall of a
+huge-muscled, black-haired toiler swaggering sledgehammer in hand across
+a revolutionary barricade, seemed the quintessence of what he had to
+expound. Landlord and capitalist had robbed and enslaved the workers,
+and were driving them quite automatically to inevitable insurrection.
+They would arise and the capitalist system would flee and vanish like
+the mists before the morning, like the dews before the sunrise, giving
+place in the most simple and obvious manner to an era of Right and
+Justice and Virtue and Well Being, and in short a Perfectly Splendid
+Time.
+
+I had already discussed this sort of socialism under the guidance of
+Britten, before I went up to Cambridge. It was all mixed up with ideas
+about freedom and natural virtue and a great scorn for kings, titles,
+wealth and officials, and it was symbolised by the red ties we wore. Our
+simple verdict on existing arrangements was that they were “all wrong.”
+ The rich were robbers and knew it, kings and princes were usurpers and
+knew it, religious teachers were impostors in league with power,
+the economic system was an elaborate plot on the part of the few to
+expropriate the many. We went about feeling scornful of all the current
+forms of life, forms that esteemed themselves solid, that were, we knew,
+no more than shapes painted on a curtain that was presently to be torn
+aside....
+
+It was Hatherleigh's poster and his capacity for overstating things, I
+think, that first qualified my simple revolutionary enthusiasm. Perhaps
+also I had met with Fabian publications, but if I did I forget the
+circumstances. And no doubt my innate constructiveness with its
+practical corollary of an analytical treatment of the material supplied,
+was bound to push me on beyond this melodramatic interpretation of human
+affairs.
+
+I compared that Working Man of the poster with any sort of working man
+I knew. I perceived that the latter was not going to change, and indeed
+could not under any stimulus whatever be expected to change, into the
+former. It crept into my mind as slowly and surely as the dawn creeps
+into a room that the former was not, as I had at first rather glibly
+assumed, an “ideal,” but a complete misrepresentation of the quality and
+possibilities of things.
+
+I do not know now whether it was during my school-days or at Cambridge
+that I first began not merely to see the world as a great contrast of
+rich and poor, but to feel the massive effect of that multitudinous
+majority of people who toil continually, who are for ever anxious about
+ways and means, who are restricted, ill clothed, ill fed and ill
+housed, who have limited outlooks and continually suffer misadventures,
+hardships and distresses through the want of money. My lot had fallen
+upon the fringe of the possessing minority; if I did not know the want
+of necessities I knew shabbiness, and the world that let me go on to a
+university education intimated very plainly that there was not a thing
+beyond the primary needs that my stimulated imagination might demand
+that it would not be an effort for me to secure. A certain aggressive
+radicalism against the ruling and propertied classes followed almost
+naturally from my circumstances. It did not at first connect itself at
+all with the perception of a planless disorder in human affairs that had
+been forced upon me by the atmosphere of my upbringing, nor did it link
+me in sympathy with any of the profounder realities of poverty. It was
+a personal independent thing. The dingier people one saw in the back
+streets and lower quarters of Bromstead and Penge, the drift of dirty
+children, ragged old women, street loafers, grimy workers that made
+the social background of London, the stories one heard of privation and
+sweating, only joined up very slowly with the general propositions I was
+making about life. We could become splendidly eloquent about the social
+revolution and the triumph of the Proletariat after the Class war, and
+it was only by a sort of inspiration that it came to me that my bedder,
+a garrulous old thing with a dusty black bonnet over one eye and an
+ostentatiously clean apron outside the dark mysteries that clothed her,
+or the cheeky little ruffians who yelled papers about the streets, were
+really material to such questions.
+
+Directly any of us young socialists of Trinity found ourselves in
+immediate contact with servants or cadgers or gyps or bedders or
+plumbers or navvies or cabmen or railway porters we became unconsciously
+and unthinkingly aristocrats. Our voices altered, our gestures altered.
+We behaved just as all the other men, rich or poor, swatters or
+sportsmen or Pinky Dinkys, behaved, and exactly as we were expected
+to behave. On the whole it is a population of poor quality round about
+Cambridge, rather stunted and spiritless and very difficult to idealise.
+That theoretical Working Man of ours!--if we felt the clash at all we
+explained it, I suppose, by assuming that he came from another part of
+the country; Esmeer, I remember, who lived somewhere in the Fens, was
+very eloquent about the Cornish fishermen, and Hatherleigh, who was
+a Hampshire man, assured us we ought to know the Scottish miner.
+My private fancy was for the Lancashire operative because of his
+co-operative societies, and because what Lancashire thinks to-day
+England thinks to-morrow.... And also I had never been in Lancashire.
+
+By little increments of realisation it was that the profounder verities
+of the problem of socialism came to me. It helped me very much that I
+had to go down to the Potteries several times to discuss my future with
+my uncle and guardian; I walked about and saw Bursley Wakes and much of
+the human aspects of organised industrialism at close quarters for the
+first time. The picture of a splendid Working Man cheated out of his
+innate glorious possibilities, and presently to arise and dash this
+scoundrelly and scandalous system of private ownership to fragments,
+began to give place to a limitless spectacle of inefficiency, to a
+conception of millions of people not organised as they should be, not
+educated as they should be, not simply prevented from but incapable
+of nearly every sort of beauty, mostly kindly and well meaning, mostly
+incompetent, mostly obstinate, and easily humbugged and easily diverted.
+Even the tragic and inspiring idea of Marx, that the poor were nearing
+a limit of painful experience, and awakening to a sense of intolerable
+wrongs, began to develop into the more appalling conception that the
+poor were simply in a witless uncomfortable inconclusive way--“muddling
+along”; that they wanted nothing very definitely nor very urgently, that
+mean fears enslaved them and mean satisfactions decoyed them, that they
+took the very gift of life itself with a spiritless lassitude, hoarding
+it, being rather anxious not to lose it than to use it in any way
+whatever.
+
+The complete development of that realisation was the work of many
+years. I had only the first intimations at Cambridge. But I did have
+intimations. Most acutely do I remember the doubts that followed the
+visit of Chris Robinson. Chris Robinson was heralded by such heroic
+anticipations, and he was so entirely what we had not anticipated.
+
+Hatherleigh got him to come, arranged a sort of meeting for him at
+Redmayne's rooms in King's, and was very proud and proprietorial. It
+failed to stir Cambridge at all profoundly. Beyond a futile attempt
+to screw up Hatherleigh made by some inexpert duffers who used nails
+instead of screws and gimlets, there was no attempt to rag. Next day
+Chris Robinson went and spoke at Bennett Hall in Newnham College, and
+left Cambridge in the evening amidst the cheers of twenty men or so.
+Socialism was at such a low ebb politically in those days that it didn't
+even rouse men to opposition.
+
+And there sat Chris under that flamboyant and heroic Worker of the
+poster, a little wrinkled grey-bearded apologetic man in ready-made
+clothes, with watchful innocent brown eyes and a persistent and
+invincible air of being out of his element. He sat with his stout boots
+tucked up under his chair, and clung to a teacup and saucer and
+looked away from us into the fire, and we all sat about on tables and
+chair-arms and windowsills and boxes and anywhere except upon chairs
+after the manner of young men. The only other chair whose seat was
+occupied was the one containing his knitted woollen comforter and his
+picturesque old beach-photographer's hat. We were all shy and didn't
+know how to take hold of him now we had got him, and, which was
+disconcertingly unanticipated, he was manifestly having the same
+difficulty with us. We had expected to be gripped.
+
+“I'll not be knowing what to say to these Chaps,” he repeated with a
+north-country quality in his speech.
+
+We made reassuring noises.
+
+The Ambassador of the Workers stirred his tea earnestly through an
+uncomfortable pause.
+
+“I'd best tell 'em something of how things are in Lancashire, what
+with the new machines and all that,” he speculated at last with red
+reflections in his thoughtful eyes.
+
+We had an inexcusable dread that perhaps he would make a mess of the
+meeting.
+
+But when he was no longer in the unaccustomed meshes of refined
+conversation, but speaking with an audience before him, he became a
+different man. He declared he would explain to us just exactly what
+socialism was, and went on at once to an impassioned contrast of social
+conditions. “You young men,” he said “come from homes of luxury; every
+need you feel is supplied--”
+
+We sat and stood and sprawled about him, occupying every inch of
+Redmayne's floor space except the hearthrug-platform, and we listened
+to him and thought him over. He was the voice of wrongs that made us
+indignant and eager. We forgot for a time that he had been shy and
+seemed not a little incompetent, his provincial accent became a beauty
+of his earnest speech, we were carried away by his indignations. We
+looked with shining eyes at one another and at the various dons who had
+dropped in and were striving to maintain a front of judicious severity.
+We felt more and more that social injustice must cease, and cease
+forthwith. We felt we could not sleep upon it. At the end we clapped and
+murmured our applause and wanted badly to cheer.
+
+Then like a lancet stuck into a bladder came the heckling. Denson, that
+indolent, liberal-minded sceptic, did most of the questioning. He lay
+contorted in a chair, with his ugly head very low, his legs crossed and
+his left boot very high, and he pointed his remarks with a long thin
+hand and occasionally adjusted the unstable glasses that hid his watery
+eyes. “I don't want to carp,” he began. “The present system, I admit,
+stands condemned. Every present system always HAS stood condemned in the
+minds of intelligent men. But where it seems to me you get thin, is just
+where everybody has been thin, and that's when you come to the remedy.”
+
+“Socialism,” said Chris Robinson, as if it answered everything, and
+Hatherleigh said “Hear! Hear!” very resolutely.
+
+“I suppose I OUGHT to take that as an answer,” said Denson, getting
+his shoulder-blades well down to the seat of his chair; “but I don't.
+I don't, you know. It's rather a shame to cross-examine you after this
+fine address of yours”--Chris Robinson on the hearthrug made acquiescent
+and inviting noises--“but the real question remains how exactly are you
+going to end all these wrongs? There are the administrative questions.
+If you abolish the private owner, I admit you abolish a very complex
+and clumsy way of getting businesses run, land controlled and things
+in general administered, but you don't get rid of the need of
+administration, you know.”
+
+“Democracy,” said Chris Robinson.
+
+“Organised somehow,” said Denson. “And it's just the How perplexes me.
+I can quite easily imagine a socialist state administered in a sort of
+scrambling tumult that would be worse than anything we have got now.
+
+“Nothing could be worse than things are now,” said Chris Robinson. “I
+have seen little children--”
+
+“I submit life on an ill-provisioned raft, for example, could easily be
+worse--or life in a beleagured town.”
+
+Murmurs.
+
+They wrangled for some time, and it had the effect upon me of coming out
+from the glow of a good matinee performance into the cold daylight of
+late afternoon. Chris Robinson did not shine in conflict with Denson; he
+was an orator and not a dialectician, and he missed Denson's points and
+displayed a disposition to plunge into untimely pathos and indignation.
+And Denson hit me curiously hard with one of his shafts. “Suppose,” he
+said, “you found yourself prime minister--”
+
+I looked at Chris Robinson, bright-eyed and his hair a little ruffled
+and his whole being rhetorical, and measured him against the huge
+machine of government muddled and mysterious. Oh! but I was perplexed!
+
+And then we took him back to Hatherleigh's rooms and drank beer and
+smoked about him while he nursed his knee with hairy wristed hands that
+protruded from his flannel shirt, and drank lemonade under the cartoon
+of that emancipated Worker, and we had a great discursive talk with him.
+
+“Eh! you should see our big meetings up north?” he said.
+
+Denson had ruffled him and worried him a good deal, and ever and again
+he came back to that discussion. “It's all very easy for your learned
+men to sit and pick holes,” he said, “while the children suffer and die.
+They don't pick holes up north. They mean business.”
+
+He talked, and that was the most interesting part of it all, of his
+going to work in a factory when he was twelve--“when you Chaps were all
+with your mammies “--and how he had educated himself of nights until he
+would fall asleep at his reading.
+
+“It's made many of us keen for all our lives,” he remarked, “all that
+clemming for education. Why! I longed all through one winter to read a
+bit of Darwin. I must know about this Darwin if I die for it, I said.
+And I could no' get the book.”
+
+Hatherleigh made an enthusiastic noise and drank beer at him with round
+eyes over the mug.
+
+“Well, anyhow I wasted no time on Greek and Latin,” said Chris Robinson.
+“And one learns to go straight at a thing without splitting straws. One
+gets hold of the Elementals.”
+
+(Well, did they? That was the gist of my perplexity.)
+
+“One doesn't quibble,” he said, returning to his rankling memory of
+Denson, “while men decay and starve.”
+
+“But suppose,” I said, suddenly dropping into opposition, “the
+alternative is to risk a worse disaster--or do something patently
+futile.”
+
+“I don't follow that,” said Chris Robinson. “We don't propose anything
+futile, so far as I can see.”
+
+
+6
+
+
+The prevailing force in my undergraduate days was not Socialism
+but Kiplingism. Our set was quite exceptional in its socialistic
+professions. And we were all, you must understand, very distinctly
+Imperialists also, and professed a vivid sense of the “White Man's
+Burden.”
+
+It is a little difficult now to get back to the feelings of that
+period; Kipling has since been so mercilessly and exhaustively mocked,
+criticised and torn to shreds;--never was a man so violently exalted and
+then, himself assisting, so relentlessly called down. But in the middle
+nineties this spectacled and moustached little figure with its heavy
+chin and its general effect of vehement gesticulation, its wild shouts
+of boyish enthusiasm for effective force, its lyric delight in the
+sounds and colours, in the very odours of empire, its wonderful
+discovery of machinery and cotton waste and the under officer and the
+engineer, and “shop” as a poetic dialect, became almost a national
+symbol. He got hold of us wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling and
+haunting quotations, he stirred Britten and myself to futile imitations,
+he coloured the very idiom of our conversation. He rose to his climax
+with his “Recessional,” while I was still an undergraduate.
+
+What did he give me exactly?
+
+He helped to broaden my geographical sense immensely, and he provided
+phrases for just that desire for discipline and devotion and organised
+effort the Socialism of our time failed to express, that the current
+socialist movement still fails, I think, to express. The sort of thing
+that follows, for example, tore something out of my inmost nature and
+gave it a shape, and I took it back from him shaped and let much of
+the rest of him, the tumult and the bullying, the hysteria and the
+impatience, the incoherence and inconsistency, go uncriticised for the
+sake of it:--
+
+
+“Keep ye the Law--be swift in all obedience--Clear the land of evil,
+drive the road and bridge the ford, Make ye sure to each his own That he
+reap where he hath sown; By the peace among Our peoples let men know we
+serve the Lord!”
+
+
+And then again, and for all our later criticism, this sticks in my mind,
+sticks there now as quintessential wisdom:
+
+
+     “The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood an' stone;
+     'E don't obey no orders unless they is 'is own;
+     'E keeps 'is side-arms awful: 'e leaves 'em all about
+     An' then comes up the regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out.
+          All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,
+          All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less,
+          All along of abby-nay, kul, an' hazar-ho,
+          Mind you keep your rifle an' yourself jus' so!”
+
+
+It is after all a secondary matter that Kipling, not having been born
+and brought up in Bromstead and Penge, and the war in South Africa
+being yet in the womb of time, could quite honestly entertain the now
+remarkable delusion that England had her side-arms at that time kept
+anything but “awful.” He learnt better, and we all learnt with him in
+the dark years of exasperating and humiliating struggle that followed,
+and I do not see that we fellow learners are justified in turning
+resentfully upon him for a common ignorance and assumption....
+
+South Africa seems always painted on the back cloth of my Cambridge
+memories. How immense those disasters seemed at the time, disasters
+our facile English world has long since contrived in any edifying or
+profitable sense to forget! How we thrilled to the shouting newspaper
+sellers as the first false flush of victory gave place to the
+realisation of defeat. Far away there our army showed itself human,
+mortal and human in the sight of all the world, the pleasant officers we
+had imagined would change to wonderful heroes at the first crackling of
+rifles, remained the pleasant, rather incompetent men they had always
+been, failing to imagine, failing to plan and co-operate, failing to
+grip. And the common soldiers, too, they were just what our streets and
+country-side had made them, no sudden magic came out of the war bugles
+for them. Neither splendid nor disgraceful were they,--just ill-trained
+and fairly plucky and wonderfully good-tempered men--paying for it. And
+how it lowered our vitality all that first winter to hear of Nicholson's
+Nek, and then presently close upon one another, to realise the
+bloody waste of Magersfontein, the shattering retreat from Stormberg,
+Colenso--Colenso, that blundering battle, with White, as it seemed, in
+Ladysmith near the point of surrender! and so through the long unfolding
+catalogue of bleak disillusionments, of aching, unconcealed anxiety lest
+worse should follow. To advance upon your enemy singing about his lack
+of cleanliness and method went out of fashion altogether! The dirty
+retrogressive Boer vanished from our scheme of illusion.
+
+All through my middle Cambridge period, the guns boomed and the rifles
+crackled away there on the veldt, and the horsemen rode and the tale of
+accidents and blundering went on. Men, mules, horses, stores and money
+poured into South Africa, and the convalescent wounded streamed home. I
+see it in my memory as if I had looked at it through a window instead of
+through the pages of the illustrated papers; I recall as if I had been
+there the wide open spaces, the ragged hillsides, the open order attacks
+of helmeted men in khaki, the scarce visible smoke of the guns, the
+wrecked trains in great lonely places, the burnt isolated farms, and
+at last the blockhouses and the fences of barbed wire uncoiling and
+spreading for endless miles across the desert, netting the elusive enemy
+until at last, though he broke the meshes again and again, we had him in
+the toils. If one's attention strayed in the lecture-room it wandered to
+those battle-fields.
+
+And that imagined panorama of war unfolds to an accompaniment of yelling
+newsboys in the narrow old Cambridge streets, of the flicker of papers
+hastily bought and torn open in the twilight, of the doubtful reception
+of doubtful victories, and the insensate rejoicings at last that seemed
+to some of us more shameful than defeats....
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+A book that stands out among these memories, that stimulated me
+immensely so that I forced it upon my companions, half in the spirit of
+propaganda and half to test it by their comments, was Meredith's ONE OF
+OUR CONQUERORS. It is one of the books that have made me. In that I got
+a supplement and corrective of Kipling. It was the first detached and
+adverse criticism of the Englishman I had ever encountered. It must have
+been published already nine or ten years when I read it. The country
+had paid no heed to it, had gone on to the expensive lessons of the War
+because of the dull aversion our people feel for all such intimations,
+and so I could read it as a book justified. The war endorsed its every
+word for me, underlined each warning indication of the gigantic dangers
+that gathered against our system across the narrow seas. It discovered
+Europe to me, as watching and critical.
+
+But while I could respond to all its criticisms of my country's
+intellectual indolence, of my country's want of training and discipline
+and moral courage, I remember that the idea that on the continent there
+were other peoples going ahead of us, mentally alert while we fumbled,
+disciplined while we slouched, aggressive and preparing to bring our
+Imperial pride to a reckoning, was extremely novel and distasteful to
+me. It set me worrying of nights. It put all my projects for social and
+political reconstruction upon a new uncomfortable footing. It made them
+no longer merely desirable but urgent. Instead of pride and the love
+of making one might own to a baser motive. Under Kipling's sway I had a
+little forgotten the continent of Europe, treated it as a mere envious
+echo to our own world-wide display. I began now to have a disturbing
+sense as it were of busy searchlights over the horizon....
+
+One consequence of the patriotic chagrin Meredith produced in me was an
+attempt to belittle his merit. “It isn't a good novel, anyhow,” I said.
+
+The charge I brought against it was, I remember, a lack of unity. It
+professed to be a study of the English situation in the early nineties,
+but it was all deflected, I said, and all the interest was confused by
+the story of Victor Radnor's fight with society to vindicate the woman
+he had loved and never married. Now in the retrospect and with a mind
+full of bitter enlightenment, I can do Meredith justice, and admit the
+conflict was not only essential but cardinal in his picture, that the
+terrible inflexibility of the rich aunts and the still more terrible
+claim of Mrs. Burman Radnor, the “infernal punctilio,” and Dudley
+Sowerby's limitations, were the central substance of that inalertness
+the book set itself to assail. So many things have been brought together
+in my mind that were once remotely separated. A people that will not
+valiantly face and understand and admit love and passion can understand
+nothing whatever. But in those days what is now just obvious truth to me
+was altogether outside my range of comprehension....
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+As I seek to recapitulate the interlacing growth of my apprehension of
+the world, as I flounder among the half-remembered developments that
+found me a crude schoolboy and left me a man, there comes out, as if
+it stood for all the rest, my first holiday abroad. That did not happen
+until I was twenty-two. I was a fellow of Trinity, and the Peace of
+Vereeniging had just been signed.
+
+I went with a man named Willersley, a man some years senior to myself,
+who had just missed a fellowship and the higher division of the Civil
+Service, and who had become an enthusiastic member of the London School
+Board, upon which the cumulative vote and the support of the “advanced”
+ people had placed him. He had, like myself, a small independent income
+that relieved him of any necessity to earn a living, and he had a
+kindred craving for social theorising and some form of social service.
+He had sought my acquaintance after reading a paper of mine (begotten
+by the visit of Chris Robinson) on the limits of pure democracy. It had
+marched with some thoughts of his own.
+
+We went by train to Spiez on the Lake of Thun, then up the Gemmi,
+and thence with one or two halts and digressions and a little modest
+climbing we crossed over by the Antrona pass (on which we were
+benighted) into Italy, and by way of Domo D'ossola and the Santa Maria
+Maggiore valley to Cannobio, and thence up the lake to Locarno (where,
+as I shall tell, we stayed some eventful days) and so up the Val Maggia
+and over to Airolo and home.
+
+As I write of that long tramp of ours, something of its freshness and
+enlargement returns to me. I feel again the faint pleasant excitement of
+the boat train, the trampling procession of people with hand baggage and
+laden porters along the platform of the Folkestone pier, the scarcely
+perceptible swaying of the moored boat beneath our feet. Then, very
+obvious and simple, the little emotion of standing out from the homeland
+and seeing the long white Kentish cliffs recede. One walked about the
+boat doing one's best not to feel absurdly adventurous, and presently a
+movement of people directed one's attention to a white lighthouse on a
+cliff to the east of us, coming up suddenly; and then one turned to scan
+the little different French coast villages, and then, sliding by in a
+pale sunshine came a long wooden pier with oddly dressed children upon
+it, and the clustering town of Boulogne.
+
+One took it all with the outward calm that became a young man of nearly
+three and twenty, but one was alive to one's finger-tips with pleasing
+little stimulations. The custom house examination excited one, the
+strangeness of a babble in a foreign tongue; one found the French of
+City Merchants' and Cambridge a shy and viscous flow, and then one was
+standing in the train as it went slowly through the rail-laid street to
+Boulogne Ville, and one looked out at the world in French, porters in
+blouses, workmen in enormous purple trousers, police officers in peaked
+caps instead of helmets and romantically cloaked, big carts, all on
+two wheels instead of four, green shuttered casements instead of
+sash windows, and great numbers of neatly dressed women in economical
+mourning.
+
+“Oh! there's a priest!” one said, and was betrayed into suchlike artless
+cries.
+
+It was a real other world, with different government and different
+methods, and in the night one was roused from uneasy slumbers and
+sat blinking and surly, wrapped up in one's couverture and with one's
+oreiller all awry, to encounter a new social phenomenon, the German
+official, so different in manner from the British; and when one woke
+again after that one had come to Bale, and out one tumbled to get coffee
+in Switzerland....
+
+I have been over that route dozens of times since, but it still revives
+a certain lingering youthfulness, a certain sense of cheerful release in
+me.
+
+I remember that I and Willersley became very sociological as we ran on
+to Spiez, and made all sorts of generalisations from the steeply sloping
+fields on the hillsides, and from the people we saw on platforms and
+from little differences in the way things were done.
+
+The clean prosperity of Bale and Switzerland, the big clean stations,
+filled me with patriotic misgivings, as I thought of the vast dirtiness
+of London, the mean dirtiness of Cambridgeshire. It came to me that
+perhaps my scheme of international values was all wrong, that quite
+stupendous possibilities and challenges for us and our empire might be
+developing here--and I recalled Meredith's Skepsey in France with a new
+understanding.
+
+Willersley had dressed himself in a world-worn Norfolk suit of greenish
+grey tweeds that ended unfamiliarly at his rather impending, spectacled,
+intellectual visage. I didn't, I remember, like the contrast of him with
+the drilled Swiss and Germans about us. Convict coloured stockings
+and vast hobnail boots finished him below, and all his luggage was a
+borrowed rucksac that he had tied askew. He did not want to shave in
+the train, but I made him at one of the Swiss stations--I dislike
+these Oxford slovenlinesses--and then confound him! he cut himself and
+bled....
+
+Next morning we were breathing a thin exhilarating air that seemed to
+have washed our very veins to an incredible cleanliness, and
+eating hard-boiled eggs in a vast clear space of rime-edged rocks,
+snow-mottled, above a blue-gashed glacier. All about us the monstrous
+rock surfaces rose towards the shining peaks above, and there were
+winding moraines from which the ice had receded, and then dark
+clustering fir trees far below.
+
+I had an extraordinary feeling of having come out of things, of being
+outside.
+
+“But this is the round world!” I said, with a sense of never having
+perceived it before; “this is the round world!”
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+That holiday was full of big comprehensive effects; the first view of
+the Rhone valley and the distant Valaisian Alps, for example, which we
+saw from the shoulder of the mountain above the Gemmi, and the early
+summer dawn breaking over Italy as we moved from our night's crouching
+and munched bread and chocolate and stretched our stiff limbs among the
+tumbled and precipitous rocks that hung over Lake Cingolo, and surveyed
+the winding tiring rocky track going down and down to Antronapiano.
+
+And our thoughts were as comprehensive as our impressions. Willersley's
+mind abounded in historical matter; he had an inaccurate abundant habit
+of topographical reference; he made me see and trace and see again the
+Roman Empire sweep up these winding valleys, and the coming of the first
+great Peace among the warring tribes of men....
+
+In the retrospect each of us seems to have been talking about our
+outlook almost continually. Each of us, you see, was full of the same
+question, very near and altogether predominant to us, the question:
+“What am I going to do with my life?” He saw it almost as importantly as
+I, but from a different angle, because his choice was largely made and
+mine still hung in the balance.
+
+“I feel we might do so many things,” I said, “and everything that calls
+one, calls one away from something else.”
+
+Willersley agreed without any modest disavowals.
+
+“We have got to think out,” he said, “just what we are and what we are
+up to. We've got to do that now. And then--it's one of those questions
+it is inadvisable to reopen subsequently.”
+
+He beamed at me through his glasses. The sententious use of long words
+was a playful habit with him, that and a slight deliberate humour,
+habits occasional Extension Lecturing was doing very much to intensify.
+
+“You've made your decision?”
+
+He nodded with a peculiar forward movement of his head.
+
+“How would you put it?”
+
+“Social Service--education. Whatever else matters or doesn't matter, it
+seems to me there is one thing we MUST have and increase, and that
+is the number of people who can think a little--and have”--he beamed
+again--“an adequate sense of causation.”
+
+“You're sure it's worth while.”
+
+“For me--certainly. I don't discuss that any more.”
+
+“I don't limit myself too narrowly,” he added. “After all, the work is
+all one. We who know, we who feel, are building the great modern state,
+joining wall to wall and way to way, the new great England rising out
+of the decaying old... we are the real statesmen--I like that use of
+'statesmen.'...”
+
+“Yes,” I said with many doubts. “Yes, of course....”
+
+Willersley is middle-aged now, with silver in his hair and a deepening
+benevolence in his always amiable face, and he has very fairly kept his
+word. He has lived for social service and to do vast masses of
+useful, undistinguished, fertilising work. Think of the days of
+arid administrative plodding and of contention still more arid and
+unrewarded, that he must have spent! His little affectations of gesture
+and manner, imitative affectations for the most part, have increased,
+and the humorous beam and the humorous intonations have become a thing
+he puts on every morning like an old coat. His devotion is mingled with
+a considerable whimsicality, and they say he is easily flattered by
+subordinates and easily offended into opposition by colleagues; he has
+made mistakes at times and followed wrong courses, still there he is,
+a flat contradiction to all the ordinary doctrine of motives, a man who
+has foregone any chances of wealth and profit, foregone any easier paths
+to distinction, foregone marriage and parentage, in order to serve the
+community. He does it without any fee or reward except his personal
+self-satisfaction in doing this work, and he does it without any hope
+of future joys and punishments, for he is an implacable Rationalist. No
+doubt he idealises himself a little, and dreams of recognition. No
+doubt he gets his pleasure from a sense of power, from the spending
+and husbanding of large sums of public money, and from the inevitable
+proprietorship he must feel in the fair, fine, well-ordered schools he
+has done so much to develop. “But for me,” he can say, “there would have
+been a Job about those diagrams, and that subject or this would have
+been less ably taught.”...
+
+The fact remains that for him the rewards have been adequate, if not to
+content at any rate to keep him working. Of course he covets the
+notice of the world he has served, as a lover covets the notice of his
+mistress. Of course he thinks somewhere, somewhen, he will get credit.
+Only last year I heard some men talking of him, and they were noting,
+with little mean smiles, how he had shown himself self-conscious while
+there was talk of some honorary degree-giving or other; it would, I have
+no doubt, please him greatly if his work were to flower into a crimson
+gown in some Academic parterre. Why shouldn't it? But that is incidental
+vanity at the worst; he goes on anyhow. Most men don't.
+
+But we had our walk twenty years and more ago now. He was oldish even
+then as a young man, just as he is oldish still in middle age. Long
+may his industrious elderliness flourish for the good of the world! He
+lectured a little in conversation then; he lectures more now and listens
+less, toilsomely disentangling what you already understand, giving you
+in detail the data you know; these are things like callosities that come
+from a man's work.
+
+Our long three weeks' talk comes back to me as a memory of ideas and
+determinations slowly growing, all mixed up with a smell of wood smoke
+and pine woods and huge precipices and remote gleams of snow-fields and
+the sound of cascading torrents rushing through deep gorges far below.
+It is mixed, too, with gossips with waitresses and fellow travellers,
+with my first essays in colloquial German and Italian, with disputes
+about the way to take, and other things that I will tell of in another
+section. But the white passion of human service was our dominant theme.
+Not simply perhaps nor altogether unselfishly, but quite honestly, and
+with at least a frequent self-forgetfulness, did we want to do fine and
+noble things, to help in their developing, to lessen misery, to broaden
+and exalt life. It is very hard--perhaps it is impossible--to present
+in a page or two the substance and quality of nearly a month's
+conversation, conversation that is casual and discursive in form, that
+ranges carelessly from triviality to immensity, and yet is constantly
+resuming a constructive process, as workmen on a wall loiter and jest
+and go and come back, and all the while build.
+
+We got it more and more definite that the core of our purpose beneath
+all its varied aspects must needs be order and discipline. “Muddle,”
+ said I, “is the enemy.” That remains my belief to this day. Clearness
+and order, light and foresight, these things I know for Good. It was
+muddle had just given us all the still freshly painful disasters and
+humiliations of the war, muddle that gives us the visibly sprawling
+disorder of our cities and industrial country-side, muddle that gives us
+the waste of life, the limitations, wretchedness and unemployment of the
+poor. Muddle! I remember myself quoting Kipling--
+
+
+    “All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,
+     All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less.”
+
+
+“We build the state,” we said over and over again. “That is what we are
+for--servants of the new reorganisation!”
+
+We planned half in earnest and half Utopianising, a League of Social
+Service.
+
+We talked of the splendid world of men that might grow out of such
+unpaid and ill-paid work as we were setting our faces to do. We spoke
+of the intricate difficulties, the monstrous passive resistances, the
+hostilities to such a development as we conceived our work subserved,
+and we spoke with that underlying confidence in the invincibility of the
+causes we adopted that is natural to young and scarcely tried men.
+
+We talked much of the detailed life of politics so far as it was known
+to us, and there Willersley was more experienced and far better informed
+than I; we discussed possible combinations and possible developments,
+and the chances of some great constructive movement coming from
+the heart-searchings the Boer war had occasioned. We would sink to
+gossip--even at the Suetonius level. Willersley would decline towards
+illuminating anecdotes that I capped more or less loosely from my
+private reading. We were particularly wise, I remember, upon the
+management of newspapers, because about that we knew nothing whatever.
+We perceived that great things were to be done through newspapers. We
+talked of swaying opinion and moving great classes to massive action.
+
+Men are egotistical even in devotion. All our splendid projects were
+thickset with the first personal pronoun. We both could write, and all
+that we said in general terms was reflected in the particular in our
+minds; it was ourselves we saw, and no others, writing and speaking
+that moving word. We had already produced manuscript and passed the
+initiations of proof reading; I had been a frequent speaker in the
+Union, and Willersley was an active man on the School Board. Our feet
+were already on the lower rungs that led up and up. He was six and
+twenty, and I twenty-two. We intimated our individual careers in terms
+of bold expectation. I had prophetic glimpses of walls and hoardings
+clamorous with “Vote for Remington,” and Willersley no doubt saw himself
+chairman of this committee and that, saying a few slightly ironical
+words after the declaration of the poll, and then sitting friendly
+beside me on the government benches. There was nothing impossible in
+such dreams. Why not the Board of Education for him? My preference at
+that time wavered between the Local Government Board--I had great ideas
+about town-planning, about revisions of municipal areas and re-organised
+internal transit--and the War Office. I swayed strongly towards the
+latter as the journey progressed. My educational bias came later.
+
+The swelling ambitions that have tramped over Alpine passes! How many
+of them, like mine, have come almost within sight of realisation before
+they failed?
+
+There were times when we posed like young gods (of unassuming exterior),
+and times when we were full of the absurdest little solicitudes about
+our prospects. There were times when one surveyed the whole world of
+men as if it was a little thing at one's feet, and by way of contrast
+I remember once lying in bed--it must have been during this holiday,
+though I cannot for the life of me fix where--and speculating whether
+perhaps some day I might not be a K. C. B., Sir Richard Remington, K. C.
+B., M. P.
+
+But the big style prevailed....
+
+We could not tell from minute to minute whether we were planning for
+a world of solid reality, or telling ourselves fairy tales about this
+prospect of life. So much seemed possible, and everything we could think
+of so improbable. There were lapses when it seemed to me I could never
+be anything but just the entirely unimportant and undistinguished young
+man I was for ever and ever. I couldn't even think of myself as five and
+thirty.
+
+Once I remember Willersley going over a list of failures, and why
+they had failed--but young men in the twenties do not know much about
+failures.
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+Willersley and I professed ourselves Socialists, but by this time I knew
+my Rodbertus as well as my Marx, and there was much in our socialism
+that would have shocked Chris Robinson as much as anything in life could
+have shocked him. Socialism as a simple democratic cry we had done with
+for ever. We were socialists because Individualism for us meant muddle,
+meant a crowd of separated, undisciplined little people all obstinately
+and ignorantly doing things jarringly, each one in his own way.
+“Each,” I said quoting words of my father's that rose apt in my memory,
+“snarling from his own little bit of property, like a dog tied to a
+cart's tail.”
+
+“Essentially,” said Willersley, “essentially we're for conscription, in
+peace and war alike. The man who owns property is a public official and
+has to behave as such. That's the gist of socialism as I understand it.”
+
+“Or be dismissed from his post,” I said, “and replaced by some better
+sort of official. A man's none the less an official because he's
+irresponsible. What he does with his property affects people just the
+same. Private! No one is really private but an outlaw....”
+
+Order and devotion were the very essence of our socialism, and a
+splendid collective vigour and happiness its end. We projected an ideal
+state, an organised state as confident and powerful as modern science,
+as balanced and beautiful as a body, as beneficent as sunshine, the
+organised state that should end muddle for ever; it ruled all our ideals
+and gave form to all our ambitions.
+
+Every man was to be definitely related to that, to have his predominant
+duty to that. Such was the England renewed we had in mind, and how to
+serve that end, to subdue undisciplined worker and undisciplined wealth
+to it, and make the Scientific Commonweal, King, was the continuing
+substance of our intercourse.
+
+
+
+11
+
+
+Every day the wine of the mountains was stronger in our blood, and the
+flush of our youth deeper. We would go in the morning sunlight along
+some narrow Alpine mule-path shouting large suggestions for national
+reorganisation, and weighing considerations as lightly as though the
+world was wax in our hands. “Great England,” we said in effect, over
+and over again, “and we will be among the makers! England renewed! The
+country has been warned; it has learnt its lesson. The disasters and
+anxieties of the war have sunk in. England has become serious.... Oh!
+there are big things before us to do; big enduring things!”
+
+One evening we walked up to the loggia of a little pilgrimage church,
+I forget its name, that stands out on a conical hill at the head of a
+winding stair above the town of Locarno. Down below the houses clustered
+amidst a confusion of heat-bitten greenery. I had been sitting silently
+on the parapet, looking across to the purple mountain masses where
+Switzerland passes into Italy, and the drift of our talk seemed suddenly
+to gather to a head.
+
+I broke into speech, giving form to the thoughts that had been
+accumulating. My words have long since passed out of my memory, the
+phrases of familiar expression have altered for me, but the substance
+remains as clear as ever. I said how we were in our measure emperors
+and kings, men undriven, free to do as we pleased with life; we classed
+among the happy ones, our bread and common necessities were given us for
+nothing, we had abilities,--it wasn't modesty but cowardice to behave
+as if we hadn't--and Fortune watched us to see what we might do with
+opportunity and the world.
+
+“There are so many things to do, you see,” began Willersley, in his
+judicial lecturer's voice.
+
+“So many things we may do,” I interrupted, “with all these years before
+us.... We're exceptional men. It's our place, our duty, to do things.”
+
+“Here anyhow,” I said, answering the faint amusement of his face; “I've
+got no modesty. Everything conspires to set me up. Why should I run
+about like all those grubby little beasts down there, seeking nothing
+but mean little vanities and indulgencies--and then take credit for
+modesty? I KNOW I am capable. I KNOW I have imagination. Modesty! I know
+if I don't attempt the very biggest things in life I am a damned shirk.
+The very biggest! Somebody has to attempt them. I feel like a loaded gun
+that is only a little perplexed because it has to find out just where to
+aim itself....”
+
+The lake and the frontier villages, a white puff of steam on the distant
+railway to Luino, the busy boats and steamers trailing triangular wakes
+of foam, the long vista eastward towards battlemented Bellinzona, the
+vast mountain distances, now tinged with sunset light, behind this
+nearer landscape, and the southward waters with remote coast towns
+shining dimly, waters that merged at last in a luminous golden haze,
+made a broad panoramic spectacle. It was as if one surveyed the
+world,--and it was like the games I used to set out upon my nursery
+floor. I was exalted by it; I felt larger than men. So kings should
+feel.
+
+That sense of largeness came to me then, and it has come to me since,
+again and again, a splendid intimation or a splendid vanity. Once, I
+remember, when I looked at Genoa from the mountain crest behind the
+town and saw that multitudinous place in all its beauty of width and
+abundance and clustering human effort, and once as I was steaming past
+the brown low hills of Staten Island towards the towering vigour and
+clamorous vitality of New York City, that mood rose to its quintessence.
+And once it came to me, as I shall tell, on Dover cliffs. And a hundred
+times when I have thought of England as our country might be, with no
+wretched poor, no wretched rich, a nation armed and ordered, trained and
+purposeful amidst its vales and rivers, that emotion of collective ends
+and collective purposes has returned to me. I felt as great as humanity.
+For a brief moment I was humanity, looking at the world I had made and
+had still to make....
+
+
+
+12
+
+
+And mingled with these dreams of power and patriotic service there was
+another series of a different quality and a different colour, like the
+antagonistic colour of a shot silk. The white life and the red life,
+contrasted and interchanged, passing swiftly at a turn from one to
+another, and refusing ever to mingle peacefully one with the other. I
+was asking myself openly and distinctly: what are you going to do
+for the world? What are you going to do with yourself? and with an
+increasing strength and persistence Nature in spite of my averted
+attention was asking me in penetrating undertones: what are you going
+to do about this other fundamental matter, the beauty of girls and women
+and your desire for them?
+
+I have told of my sisterless youth and the narrow circumstances of my
+upbringing. It made all women-kind mysterious to me. If it had not been
+for my Staffordshire cousins I do not think I should have known any
+girls at all until I was twenty. Of Staffordshire I will tell a little
+later. But I can remember still how through all those ripening years,
+the thought of women's beauty, their magic presence in the world beside
+me and the unknown, untried reactions of their intercourse, grew upon me
+and grew, as a strange presence grows in a room when one is occupied by
+other things. I busied myself and pretended to be wholly occupied, and
+there the woman stood, full half of life neglected, and it seemed to my
+averted mind sometimes that she was there clad and dignified and divine,
+and sometimes Aphrodite shining and commanding, and sometimes that Venus
+who stoops and allures.
+
+This travel abroad seemed to have released a multitude of things in my
+mind; the clear air, the beauty of the sunshine, the very blue of
+the glaciers made me feel my body and quickened all those disregarded
+dreams. I saw the sheathed beauty of women's forms all about me, in the
+cheerful waitresses at the inns, in the pedestrians one encountered
+in the tracks, in the chance fellow travellers at the hotel tables.
+“Confound it!” said I, and talked all the more zealously of that greater
+England that was calling us.
+
+I remember that we passed two Germans, an old man and a tall fair girl,
+father and daughter, who were walking down from Saas. She came swinging
+and shining towards us, easy and strong. I worshipped her as she
+approached.
+
+“Gut Tag!” said Willersley, removing his hat.
+
+“Morgen!” said the old man, saluting.
+
+I stared stockishly at the girl, who passed with an indifferent face.
+
+That sticks in my mind as a picture remains in a room, it has kept there
+bright and fresh as a thing seen yesterday, for twenty years....
+
+I flirted hesitatingly once or twice with comely serving girls, and was
+a little ashamed lest Willersley should detect the keen interest I took
+in them, and then as we came over the pass from Santa Maria Maggiore to
+Cannobio, my secret preoccupation took me by surprise and flooded me and
+broke down my pretences.
+
+The women in that valley are very beautiful--women vary from valley
+to valley in the Alps and are plain and squat here and divinities five
+miles away--and as we came down we passed a group of five or six of them
+resting by the wayside. Their burthens were beside them, and one like
+Ceres held a reaping hook in her brown hand. She watched us approaching
+and smiled faintly, her eyes at mine.
+
+There was some greeting, and two of them laughed together.
+
+We passed.
+
+“Glorious girls they were,” said Willersley, and suddenly an immense
+sense of boredom enveloped me. I saw myself striding on down that
+winding road, talking of politics and parties and bills of parliament
+and all sorts of dessicated things. That road seemed to me to wind on
+for ever down to dust and infinite dreariness. I knew it for a way of
+death. Reality was behind us.
+
+Willersley set himself to draw a sociological moral. “I'm not so
+sure,” he said in a voice of intense discriminations, “after all, that
+agricultural work isn't good for women.”
+
+“Damn agricultural work!” I said, and broke out into a vigorous cursing
+of all I held dear. “Fettered things we are!” I cried. “I wonder why I
+stand it!”
+
+“Stand what?”
+
+“Why don't I go back and make love to those girls and let the world and
+you and everything go hang? Deep breasts and rounded limbs--and we poor
+emasculated devils go tramping by with the blood of youth in us!...”
+
+“I'm not quite sure, Remington,” said Willersley, looking at me with
+a deliberately quaint expression over his glasses, “that picturesque
+scenery is altogether good for your morals.”
+
+That fever was still in my blood when we came to Locarno.
+
+
+
+13
+
+
+Along the hot and dusty lower road between the Orrido of Traffiume and
+Cannobio Willersley had developed his first blister. And partly because
+of that and partly because there was a bag at the station that gave us
+the refreshment of clean linen and partly because of the lazy lower air
+into which we had come, we decided upon three or four days' sojourn in
+the Empress Hotel.
+
+We dined that night at a table-d'hote, and I found myself next to an
+Englishwoman who began a conversation that was resumed presently in the
+hotel lounge. She was a woman of perhaps thirty-three or thirty-four,
+slenderly built, with a warm reddish skin and very abundant fair
+golden hair, the wife of a petulant-looking heavy-faced man of perhaps
+fifty-three, who smoked a cigar and dozed over his coffee and
+presently went to bed. “He always goes to bed like that,” she confided
+startlingly. “He sleeps after all his meals. I never knew such a man to
+sleep.”
+
+Then she returned to our talk, whatever it was.
+
+We had begun at the dinner table with itineraries and the usual
+topographical talk, and she had envied our pedestrian travel. “My
+husband doesn't walk,” she said. “His heart is weak and he cannot manage
+the hills.”
+
+There was something friendly and adventurous in her manner; she conveyed
+she liked me, and when presently Willersley drifted off to write
+letters our talk sank at once to easy confidential undertones. I felt
+enterprising, and indeed it is easy to be daring with people one has
+never seen before and may never see again. I said I loved beautiful
+scenery and all beautiful things, and the pointing note in my voice made
+her laugh. She told me I had bold eyes, and so far as I can remember I
+said she made them bold. “Blue they are,” she remarked, smiling archly.
+“I like blue eyes.” Then I think we compared ages, and she said she was
+the Woman of Thirty, “George Moore's Woman of Thirty.”
+
+I had not read George Moore at the time, but I pretended to understand.
+
+That, I think, was our limit that evening. She went to bed, smiling
+good-night quite prettily down the big staircase, and I and Willersley
+went out to smoke in the garden. My head was full of her, and I found it
+necessary to talk about her. So I made her a problem in sociology. “Who
+the deuce are these people?” I said, “and how do they get a living? They
+seem to have plenty of money. He strikes me as being--Willersley, what
+is a drysalter? I think he's a retired drysalter.”
+
+Willersley theorised while I thought of the woman and that provocative
+quality of dash she had displayed. The next day at lunch she and I met
+like old friends. A huge mass of private thinking during the interval
+had been added to our effect upon one another. We talked for a time of
+insignificant things.
+
+“What do you do,” she asked rather quickly, “after lunch? Take a
+siesta?”
+
+“Sometimes,” I said, and hung for a moment eye to eye.
+
+We hadn't a doubt of each other, but my heart was beating like a steamer
+propeller when it lifts out of the water.
+
+“Do you get a view from your room?” she asked after a pause.
+
+“It's on the third floor, Number seventeen, near the staircase. My
+friend's next door.”
+
+She began to talk of books. She was interested in Christian Science,
+she said, and spoke of a book. I forget altogether what that book was
+called, though I remember to this day with the utmost exactness the
+purplish magenta of its cover. She said she would lend it to me and
+hesitated.
+
+Willersley wanted to go for an expedition across the lake that
+afternoon, but I refused. He made some other proposals that I rejected
+abruptly. “I shall write in my room,” I said.
+
+“Why not write down here?”
+
+“I shall write in my room,” I snarled like a thwarted animal, and he
+looked at me curiously. “Very well,” he said; “then I'll make some notes
+and think about that order of ours out under the magnolias.”
+
+I hovered about the lounge for a time buying postcards and feverishly
+restless, watching the movements of the other people. Finally I went up
+to my room and sat down by the windows, staring out. There came a
+little tap at the unlocked door and in an instant, like the go of a taut
+bowstring, I was up and had it open.
+
+“Here is that book,” she said, and we hesitated.
+
+“COME IN!” I whispered, trembling from head to foot.
+
+“You're just a boy,” she said in a low tone.
+
+I did not feel a bit like a lover, I felt like a burglar with the
+safe-door nearly opened. “Come in,” I said almost impatiently, for
+anyone might be in the passage, and I gripped her wrist and drew her
+towards me.
+
+“What do you mean?” she answered with a faint smile on her lips, and
+awkward and yielding.
+
+I shut the door behind her, still holding her with one hand, then turned
+upon her--she was laughing nervously--and without a word drew her to me
+and kissed her. And I remember that as I kissed her she made a little
+noise almost like the purring miaow with which a cat will greet one and
+her face, close to mine, became solemn and tender.
+
+She was suddenly a different being from the discontented wife who had
+tapped a moment since on my door, a woman transfigured....
+
+That evening I came down to dinner a monster of pride, for behold! I
+was a man. I felt myself the most wonderful and unprecedented of
+adventurers. It was hard to believe that any one in the world before
+had done as much. My mistress and I met smiling, we carried things off
+admirably, and it seemed to me that Willersley was the dullest old dog
+in the world. I wanted to give him advice. I wanted to give him derisive
+pokes. After dinner and coffee in the lounge I was too excited and
+hilarious to go to bed, I made him come with me down to the cafe under
+the arches by the pier, and there drank beer and talked extravagant
+nonsense about everything under the sun, in order not to talk about the
+happenings of the afternoon. All the time something shouted within me:
+“I am a man! I am a man!”...
+
+“What shall we do to-morrow?” said he.
+
+“I'm for loafing,” I said. “Let's row in the morning and spend to-morrow
+afternoon just as we did to-day.”
+
+“They say the church behind the town is worth seeing.”
+
+“We'll go up about sunset; that's the best time for it. We can start
+about five.”
+
+We heard music, and went further along the arcade to discover a place
+where girls in operatic Swiss peasant costume were singing and dancing
+on a creaking, protesting little stage. I eyed their generous display
+of pink neck and arm with the seasoned eye of a man who has lived in the
+world. Life was perfectly simple and easy, I felt, if one took it the
+right way.
+
+Next day Willersley wanted to go on, but I delayed. Altogether I kept
+him back four days. Then abruptly my mood changed, and we decided
+to start early the following morning. I remember, though a little
+indistinctly, the feeling of my last talk with that woman whose surname,
+odd as it may seem, either I never learnt or I have forgotten. (Her
+christian name was Milly.) She was tired and rather low-spirited, and
+disposed to be sentimental, and for the first time in our intercourse I
+found myself liking her for the sake of her own personality. There was
+something kindly and generous appearing behind the veil of naive and
+uncontrolled sensuality she had worn. There was a curious quality of
+motherliness in her attitude to me that something in my nature answered
+and approved. She didn't pretend to keep it up that she had yielded to
+my initiative. “I've done you no harm,” she said a little doubtfully, an
+odd note for a man's victim! And, “we've had a good time. You have liked
+me, haven't you?”
+
+She interested me in her lonely dissatisfied life; she was childless and
+had no hope of children, and her husband was the only son of a rich
+meat salesman, very mean, a mighty smoker--“he reeks of it,” she said,
+“always”--and interested in nothing but golf, billiards (which he played
+very badly), pigeon shooting, convivial Free Masonry and Stock Exchange
+punting. Mostly they drifted about the Riviera. Her mother had contrived
+her marriage when she was eighteen. They were the first samples I ever
+encountered of the great multitude of functionless property owners which
+encumbers modern civilisation--but at the time I didn't think much of
+that aspect of them....
+
+I tell all this business as it happened without comment, because I
+have no comment to make. It was all strange to me, strange rather than
+wonderful, and, it may be, some dream of beauty died for ever in those
+furtive meetings; it happened to me, and I could scarcely have been
+more irresponsible in the matter or controlled events less if I had
+been suddenly pushed over a cliff into water. I swam, of course--finding
+myself in it. Things tested me, and I reacted, as I have told. The bloom
+of my innocence, if ever there had been such a thing, was gone. And here
+is the remarkable thing about it; at the time and for some days I was
+over-weeningly proud; I have never been so proud before or since; I felt
+I had been promoted to virility; I was unable to conceal my exultation
+from Willersley. It was a mood of shining shameless ungracious
+self-approval. As he and I went along in the cool morning sunshine by
+the rice fields in the throat of the Val Maggia a silence fell between
+us.
+
+“You know?” I said abruptly,--“about that woman?”
+
+Willersley did not answer for a moment. He looked at me over the corner
+of his spectacles.
+
+“Things went pretty far?” he asked.
+
+“Oh! all the way!” and I had a twinge of fatuous pride in my
+unpremeditated achievement.
+
+“She came to your room?”
+
+I nodded.
+
+“I heard her. I heard her whispering.... The whispering and rustling and
+so on. I was in my room yesterday.... Any one might have heard you.”
+
+I went on with my head in the air.
+
+“You might have been caught, and that would have meant endless trouble.
+You might have incurred all sorts of consequences. What did you know
+about her?... We have wasted four days in that hot close place. When we
+found that League of Social Service we were talking about,” he said
+with a determined eye upon me, “chastity will be first among the virtues
+prescribed.”
+
+“I shall form a rival league,” I said a little damped. “I'm hanged if I
+give up a single desire in me until I know why.”
+
+He lifted his chin and stared before him through his glasses at nothing.
+“There are some things,” he said, “that a man who means to work--to do
+great public services--MUST turn his back upon. I'm not discussing the
+rights or wrongs of this sort of thing. It happens to be the conditions
+we work under. It will probably always be so. If you want to experiment
+in that way, if you want even to discuss it,--out you go from political
+life. You must know that's so.... You're a strange man, Remington, with
+a kind of kink in you. You've a sort of force. You might happen to do
+immense things.... Only--”
+
+He stopped. He had said all that he had forced himself to say.
+
+“I mean to take myself as I am,” I said. “I'm going to get experience
+for humanity out of all my talents--and bury nothing.”
+
+Willersley twisted his face to its humorous expression. “I doubt if
+sexual proclivities,” he said drily, “come within the scope of the
+parable.”
+
+I let that go for a little while. Then I broke out. “Sex!” said I, “is
+a fundamental thing in life. We went through all this at Trinity. I'm
+going to look at it, experience it, think about it--and get it square
+with the rest of life. Career and Politics must take their chances of
+that. It's part of the general English slackness that they won't look
+this in the face. Gods! what a muffled time we're coming out of! Sex
+means breeding, and breeding is a necessary function in a nation.
+The Romans broke up upon that. The Americans fade out amidst their
+successes. Eugenics--”
+
+“THAT wasn't Eugenics,” said Willersley.
+
+“It was a woman,” I said after a little interval, feeling oddly that
+I had failed altogether to answer him, and yet had a strong dumb case
+against him.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THE SECOND: MARGARET
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE
+
+
+1
+
+I must go back a little way with my story. In the previous book I
+have described the kind of education that happens to a man of my class
+nowadays, and it has been convenient to leap a phase in my experience
+that I must now set out at length. I want to tell in this second
+hook how I came to marry, and to do that I must give something of the
+atmosphere in which I first met my wife and some intimations of the
+forces that went to her making. I met her in Staffordshire while I was
+staying with that uncle of whom I have already spoken, the uncle who
+sold my father's houses and settled my mother in Penge. Margaret was
+twenty then and I was twenty-two.
+
+It was just before the walking tour in Switzerland that opened up
+so much of the world to me. I saw her once, for an afternoon, and
+circumstances so threw her up in relief that I formed a very vivid
+memory of her. She was in the sharpest contrast with the industrial
+world about her; she impressed me as a dainty blue flower might do,
+come upon suddenly on a clinker heap. She remained in my mind at once a
+perplexing interrogation and a symbol....
+
+But first I must tell of my Staffordshire cousins and the world that
+served as a foil for her.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+I first went to stay with my cousins when I was an awkward youth of
+sixteen, wearing deep mourning for my mother. My uncle wanted to talk
+things over with me, he said, and if he could, to persuade me to go into
+business instead of going up to Cambridge.
+
+I remember that visit on account of all sorts of novel things, but
+chiefly, I think, because it was the first time I encountered anything
+that deserves to be spoken of as wealth. For the first time in my life
+I had to do with people who seemed to have endless supplies of money,
+unlimited good clothes, numerous servants; whose daily life was made
+up of things that I had hitherto considered to be treats or exceptional
+extravagances. My cousins of eighteen and nineteen took cabs, for
+instance, with the utmost freedom, and travelled first-class in the
+local trains that run up and down the district of the Five Towns with an
+entire unconsciousness of the magnificence, as it seemed to me, of such
+a proceeding.
+
+The family occupied a large villa in Newcastle, with big lawns before
+it and behind, a shrubbery with quite a lot of shrubs, a coach house
+and stable, and subordinate dwelling-places for the gardener and the
+coachman. Every bedroom contained a gas heater and a canopied brass
+bedstead, and had a little bathroom attached equipped with the porcelain
+baths and fittings my uncle manufactured, bright and sanitary and
+stamped with his name, and the house was furnished throughout with
+chairs and tables in bright shining wood, soft and prevalently
+red Turkish carpets, cosy corners, curtained archways, gold-framed
+landscapes, overmantels, a dining-room sideboard like a palace with
+a large Tantalus, and electric light fittings of a gay and expensive
+quality. There was a fine billiard-room on the ground floor with three
+comfortable sofas and a rotating bookcase containing an excellent
+collection of the English and American humorists from THREE MEN IN
+A BOAT to the penultimate Mark Twain. There was also a conservatory
+opening out of the dining-room, to which the gardener brought potted
+flowers in their season....
+
+My aunt was a little woman with a scared look and a cap that would
+get over one eye, not very like my mother, and nearly eight years her
+junior; she was very much concerned with keeping everything nice, and
+unmercifully bullied by my two cousins, who took after their father and
+followed the imaginations of their own hearts. They were tall, dark,
+warmly flushed girls handsome rather than pretty. Gertrude, the eldest
+and tallest, had eyes that were almost black; Sibyl was of a stouter
+build, and her eyes, of which she was shamelessly proud, were dark blue.
+Sibyl's hair waved, and Gertrude's was severely straight. They treated
+me on my first visit with all the contempt of the adolescent girl for a
+boy a little younger and infinitely less expert in the business of life
+than herself. They were very busy with the writings of notes and certain
+mysterious goings and comings of their own, and left me very much to
+my own devices. Their speech in my presence was full of unfathomable
+allusions. They were the sort of girls who will talk over and through an
+uninitiated stranger with the pleasantest sense of superiority.
+
+I met them at breakfast and at lunch and at the half-past six o'clock
+high tea that formed the third chief meal of the day. I heard them
+rattling off the compositions of Chaminade and Moskowski, with great
+decision and effect, and hovered on the edge of tennis foursomes
+where it was manifest to the dullest intelligence that my presence was
+unnecessary. Then I went off to find some readable book in the place,
+but apart from miscellaneous popular novels, some veterinary works, a
+number of comic books, old bound volumes of THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS
+and a large, popular illustrated History of England, there was very
+little to be found. My aunt talked to me in a casual feeble way, chiefly
+about my mother's last illness. The two had seen very little of each
+other for many years; she made no secret of it that the ineligible
+qualities of my father were the cause of the estrangement. The only
+other society in the house during the day was an old and rather decayed
+Skye terrier in constant conflict with what were no doubt imaginary
+fleas. I took myself off for a series of walks, and acquired a
+considerable knowledge of the scenery and topography of the Potteries.
+
+It puzzled my aunt that I did not go westward, where it was country-side
+and often quite pretty, with hedgerows and fields and copses
+and flowers. But always I went eastward, where in a long valley
+industrialism smokes and sprawls. That was the stuff to which I turned
+by nature, to the human effort, and the accumulation and jar of men's
+activities. And in such a country as that valley social and economic
+relations were simple and manifest. Instead of the limitless confusion
+of London's population, in which no man can trace any but the most
+slender correlation between rich and poor, in which everyone seems
+disconnected and adrift from everyone, you can see here the works,
+the potbank or the ironworks or what not, and here close at hand the
+congested, meanly-housed workers, and at a little distance a small
+middle-class quarter, and again remoter, the big house of the employer.
+It was like a very simplified diagram--after the untraceable confusion
+of London.
+
+I prowled alone, curious and interested, through shabby back streets of
+mean little homes; I followed canals, sometimes canals of mysteriously
+heated waters with ghostly wisps of steam rising against blackened walls
+or a distant prospect of dustbin-fed vegetable gardens, I saw the women
+pouring out from the potbanks, heard the hooters summoning the toilers
+to work, lost my way upon slag heaps as big as the hills of the south
+country, dodged trains at manifestly dangerous level crossings, and
+surveyed across dark intervening spaces, the flaming uproar, the
+gnome-like activities of iron foundries. I heard talk of strikes and
+rumours of strikes, and learnt from the columns of some obscure labour
+paper I bought one day, of the horrors of the lead poisoning that was in
+those days one of the normal risks of certain sorts of pottery workers.
+Then back I came, by the ugly groaning and clanging steam train of that
+period, to my uncle's house and lavish abundance of money and more or
+less furtive flirtations and the tinkle of Moskowski and Chaminade.
+It was, I say, diagrammatic. One saw the expropriator and the
+expropriated--as if Marx had arranged the picture. It was as jumbled and
+far more dingy and disastrous than any of the confusions of building and
+development that had surrounded my youth at Bromstead and Penge, but
+it had a novel quality of being explicable. I found great virtue in the
+word “exploitation.”
+
+There stuck in my mind as if it was symbolical of the whole thing the
+twisted figure of a man, whose face had been horribly scalded--I can't
+describe how, except that one eye was just expressionless white--and
+he ground at an organ bearing a card which told in weak and bitterly
+satirical phrasing that he had been scalded by the hot water from
+the tuyeres of the blast furnace of Lord Pandram's works. He had been
+scalded and quite inadequately compensated and dismissed. And Lord
+Pandram was worth half a million.
+
+That upturned sightless white eye of his took possession of my
+imagination. I don't think that even then I was swayed by any crude
+melodramatic conception of injustice. I was quite prepared to believe
+the card wasn't a punctiliously accurate statement of fact, and that
+a case could be made out for Lord Pandram. Still there in the muddy
+gutter, painfully and dreadfully, was the man, and he was smashed and
+scalded and wretched, and he ground his dismal hurdygurdy with a weary
+arm, calling upon Heaven and the passer-by for help, for help and some
+sort of righting--one could not imagine quite what. There he was as a
+fact, as a by-product of the system that heaped my cousins with trinkets
+and provided the comic novels and the abundant cigars and spacious
+billiard-room of my uncle's house. I couldn't disconnect him and them.
+
+My uncle on his part did nothing to conceal the state of war that
+existed between himself and his workers, and the mingled contempt and
+animosity he felt from them.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Prosperity had overtaken my uncle. So quite naturally he believed that
+every man who was not as prosperous as he was had only himself to blame.
+He was rich and he had left school and gone into his father's business
+at fifteen, and that seemed to him the proper age at which everyone's
+education should terminate. He was very anxious to dissuade me from
+going up to Cambridge, and we argued intermittently through all my
+visit.
+
+I had remembered him as a big and buoyant man, striding destructively
+about the nursery floor of my childhood, and saluting my existence by
+slaps, loud laughter, and questions about half herrings and half eggs
+subtly framed to puzzle and confuse my mind. I didn't see him for some
+years until my father's death, and then he seemed rather smaller,
+though still a fair size, yellow instead of red and much less radiantly
+aggressive. This altered effect was due not so much to my own changed
+perspectives, I fancy, as to the facts that he was suffering for
+continuous cigar smoking, and being taken in hand by his adolescent
+daughters who had just returned from school.
+
+During my first visit there was a perpetual series of--the only word is
+rows, between them and him. Up to the age of fifteen or thereabouts, he
+had maintained his ascendancy over them by simple old-fashioned physical
+chastisement. Then after an interlude of a year it had dawned upon them
+that power had mysteriously departed from him. He had tried stopping
+their pocket money, but they found their mother financially amenable;
+besides which it was fundamental to my uncle's attitude that he should
+give them money freely. Not to do so would seem like admitting a
+difficulty in making it. So that after he had stopped their allowances
+for the fourth time Sybil and Gertrude were prepared to face beggary
+without a qualm. It had been his pride to give them the largest
+allowance of any girls at the school, not even excepting the
+granddaughter of Fladden the Borax King, and his soul recoiled from this
+discipline as it had never recoiled from the ruder method of the
+earlier phase. Both girls had developed to a high pitch in their mutual
+recriminations a gift for damaging retort, and he found it an altogether
+deadlier thing than the power of the raised voice that had always
+cowed my aunt. Whenever he became heated with them, they frowned as if
+involuntarily, drew in their breath sharply, said: “Daddy, you really
+must not say--” and corrected his pronunciation. Then, at a great
+advantage, they resumed the discussion....
+
+My uncle's views about Cambridge, however, were perfectly clear and
+definite. It was waste of time and money. It was all damned foolery.
+Did they make a man a better business man? Not a bit of it. He gave
+instances. It spoilt a man for business by giving him “false ideas.”
+ Some men said that at college a man formed useful friendships. What use
+were friendships to a business man? He might get to know lords, but, as
+my uncle pointed out, a lord's requirements in his line of faience were
+little greater than a common man's. If college introduced him to hotel
+proprietors there might be something in it. Perhaps it helped a man into
+Parliament, Parliament still being a confused retrogressive corner
+in the world where lawyers and suchlike sheltered themselves from the
+onslaughts of common-sense behind a fog of Latin and Greek and twaddle
+and tosh; but I wasn't the sort to go into Parliament, unless I meant to
+be a lawyer. Did I mean to be a lawyer? It cost no end of money, and
+was full of uncertainties, and there were no judges nor great solicitors
+among my relations. “Young chaps think they get on by themselves,” said
+my uncle. “It isn't so. Not unless they take their coats off. I took
+mine off before I was your age by nigh a year.”
+
+We were at cross purposes from the outset, because I did not think men
+lived to make money; and I was obtuse to the hints he was throwing out
+at the possibilities of his own potbank, not willfully obtuse, but just
+failing to penetrate his meaning. Whatever City Merchants had or had
+not done for me, Flack, Topham and old Gates had certainly barred my
+mistaking the profitable production and sale of lavatory basins and
+bathroom fittings for the highest good. It was only upon reflection that
+it dawned upon me that the splendid chance for a young fellow with my
+uncle, “me, having no son of my own,” was anything but an illustration
+for comparison with my own chosen career.
+
+I still remember very distinctly my uncle's talk,--he loved to speak
+“reet Staffordshire”--his rather flabby face with the mottled complexion
+that told of crude ill-regulated appetites, his clumsy gestures--he kept
+emphasising his points by prodding at me with his finger--the ill-worn,
+costly, grey tweed clothes, the watch chain of plain solid gold, and
+soft felt hat thrust back from his head. He tackled me first in the
+garden after lunch, and then tried to raise me to enthusiasm by taking
+me to his potbank and showing me its organisation, from the dusty
+grinding mills in which whitened men worked and coughed, through the
+highly ventilated glazing room in which strangely masked girls looked
+ashamed of themselves,--“They'll risk death, the fools, to show their
+faces to a man,” said my uncle, quite audibly--to the firing kilns and
+the glazing kilns, and so round the whole place to the railway siding
+and the gratifying spectacle of three trucks laden with executed orders.
+
+Then we went up a creaking outside staircase to his little office, and
+he showed off before me for a while, with one or two subordinates and
+the telephone.
+
+“None of your Gas,” he said, “all this. It's Real every bit of it. Hard
+cash and hard glaze.”
+
+“Yes,” I said, with memories of a carelessly read pamphlet in my mind,
+and without any satirical intention, “I suppose you MUST use lead in
+your glazes?”
+
+Whereupon I found I had tapped the ruling grievance of my uncle's
+life. He hated leadless glazes more than he hated anything, except
+the benevolent people who had organised the agitation for their use.
+“Leadless glazes ain't only fit for buns,” he said. “Let me tell you, my
+boy--”
+
+He began in a voice of bland persuasiveness that presently warmed to
+anger, to explain the whole matter. I hadn't the rights of the matter
+at all. Firstly, there was practically no such thing as lead poisoning.
+Secondly, not everyone was liable to lead poisoning, and it would
+be quite easy to pick out the susceptible types--as soon as they had
+it--and put them to other work. Thirdly, the evil effects of
+lead poisoning were much exaggerated. Fourthly, and this was in a
+particularly confidential undertone, many of the people liked to get
+lead poisoning, especially the women, because it caused abortion.
+I might not believe it, but he knew it for a fact. Fifthly, the
+work-people simply would not learn the gravity of the danger, and would
+eat with unwashed hands, and incur all sorts of risks, so that as my
+uncle put it: “the fools deserve what they get.” Sixthly, he and several
+associated firms had organised a simple and generous insurance scheme
+against lead-poisoning risks. Seventhly, he never wearied in rational
+(as distinguished from excessive, futile and expensive) precautions
+against the disease. Eighthly, in the ill-equipped shops of his minor
+competitors lead poisoning was a frequent and virulent evil, and people
+had generalised from these exceptional cases. The small shops, he
+hazarded, looking out of the cracked and dirty window at distant
+chimneys, might be advantageously closed....
+
+“But what's the good of talking?” said my uncle, getting off the table
+on which he had been sitting. “Seems to me there'll come a time when a
+master will get fined if he don't run round the works blowing his girls
+noses for them. That's about what it'll come to.”
+
+He walked to the black mantelpiece and stood on the threadbare rug, and
+urged me not to be misled by the stories of prejudiced and interested
+enemies of our national industries.
+
+“They'll get a strike one of these days, of employers, and then we'll
+see a bit,” he said. “They'll drive Capital abroad and then they'll
+whistle to get it back again.”...
+
+He led the way down the shaky wooden steps and cheered up to tell me
+of his way of checking his coal consumption. He exchanged a ferocious
+greeting with one or two workpeople, and so we came out of the factory
+gates into the ugly narrow streets, paved with a peculiarly hard
+diapered brick of an unpleasing inky-blue colour, and bordered with the
+mean and squalid homes of his workers. Doors stood open and showed grimy
+interiors, and dirty ill-clad children played in the kennel.
+
+We passed a sickly-looking girl with a sallow face, who dragged her
+limbs and peered at us dimly with painful eyes. She stood back, as
+partly blinded people will do, to allow us to pass, although there was
+plenty of room for us.
+
+I glanced back at her.
+
+“THAT'S ploombism,” said my uncle casually.
+
+“What?” said I.
+
+“Ploombism. And the other day I saw a fool of a girl, and what d'you
+think? She'd got a basin that hadn't been fired, a cracked piece of
+biscuit it was, up on the shelf over her head, just all over glaze,
+killing glaze, man, and she was putting up her hand if you please, and
+eating her dinner out of it. Got her dinner in it!
+
+“Eating her dinner out of it,” he repeated in loud and bitter tones, and
+punched me hard in the ribs.
+
+“And then they comes to THAT--and grumbles. And the fools up in
+Westminster want you to put in fans here and fans there--the Longton
+fools have.... And then eating their dinners out of it all the time!”...
+
+At high tea that night--my uncle was still holding out against evening
+dinner--Sibyl and Gertrude made what was evidently a concerted demand
+for a motor-car.
+
+“You've got your mother's brougham,” he said, “that's good enough for
+you.” But he seemed shaken by the fact that some Burslem rival was
+launching out with the new invention. “He spoils his girls,” he
+remarked. “He's a fool,” and became thoughtful.
+
+Afterwards he asked me to come to him into his study; it was a room with
+a writing-desk and full of pieces of earthenware and suchlike litter,
+and we had our great row about Cambridge.
+
+“Have you thought things over, Dick?” he said.
+
+“I think I'll go to Trinity, Uncle,” I said firmly. “I want to go to
+Trinity. It is a great college.”
+
+He was manifestly chagrined. “You're a fool,” he said.
+
+I made no answer.
+
+“You're a damned fool,” he said. “But I suppose you've got to do it. You
+could have come here--That don't matter, though, now... You'll have your
+time and spend your money, and be a poor half-starved clergyman, mucking
+about with the women all the day and afraid to have one of your own
+ever, or you'll be a schoolmaster or some such fool for the rest of your
+life. Or some newspaper chap. That's what you'll get from Cambridge. I'm
+half a mind not to let you. Eh? More than half a mind....”
+
+“You've got to do the thing you can,” he said, after a pause, “and
+likely it's what you're fitted for.”
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+I paid several short visits to Staffordshire during my Cambridge days,
+and always these relations of mine produced the same effect of hardness.
+My uncle's thoughts had neither atmosphere nor mystery. He lived in
+a different universe from the dreams of scientific construction that
+filled my mind. He could as easily have understood Chinese poetry. His
+motives were made up of intense rivalries with other men of his class
+and kind, a few vindictive hates springing from real and fancied
+slights, a habit of acquisition that had become a second nature, a keen
+love both of efficiency and display in his own affairs. He seemed to
+me to have no sense of the state, no sense and much less any love of
+beauty, no charity and no sort of religious feeling whatever. He had
+strong bodily appetites, he ate and drank freely, smoked a great deal,
+and occasionally was carried off by his passions for a “bit of a spree”
+ to Birmingham or Liverpool or Manchester. The indulgences of these
+occasions were usually followed by a period of reaction, when he was
+urgent for the suppression of nudity in the local Art Gallery and a
+harsh and forcible elevation of the superficial morals of the valley.
+And he spoke of the ladies who ministered to the delights of his
+jolly-dog period, when he spoke of them at all, by the unprintable
+feminine equivalent. My aunt he treated with a kindly contempt and
+considerable financial generosity, but his daughters tore his heart; he
+was so proud of them, so glad to find them money to spend, so resolved
+to own them, so instinctively jealous of every man who came near them.
+
+My uncle has been the clue to a great number of men for me. He was an
+illuminating extreme. I have learnt what not to expect from them through
+him, and to comprehend resentments and dangerous sudden antagonisms I
+should have found incomprehensible in their more complex forms, if I had
+not first seen them in him in their feral state.
+
+With his soft felt hat at the back of his head, his rather heavy, rather
+mottled face, his rationally thick boots and slouching tweed-clad form,
+a little round-shouldered and very obstinate looking, he strolls through
+all my speculations sucking his teeth audibly, and occasionally throwing
+out a shrewd aphorism, the intractable unavoidable ore of the new
+civilisation.
+
+Essentially he was simple. Generally speaking, he hated and despised in
+equal measure whatever seemed to suggest that he personally was not
+the most perfect human being conceivable. He hated all education after
+fifteen because he had had no education after fifteen, he hated all
+people who did not have high tea until he himself under duress gave up
+high tea, he hated every game except football, which he had played and
+could judge, he hated all people who spoke foreign languages because he
+knew no language but Staffordshire, he hated all foreigners because he
+was English, and all foreign ways because they were not his ways. Also
+he hated particularly, and in this order, Londoner's, Yorkshiremen,
+Scotch, Welch and Irish, because they were not “reet Staffordshire,” and
+he hated all other Staffordshire men as insufficiently “reet.” He wanted
+to have all his own women inviolate, and to fancy he had a call upon
+every other woman in the world. He wanted to have the best cigars and
+the best brandy in the world to consume or give away magnificently, and
+every one else to have inferior ones. (His billiard table was an extra
+large size, specially made and very inconvenient.) And he hated Trade
+Unions because they interfered with his autocratic direction of his
+works, and his workpeople because they were not obedient and untiring
+mechanisms to do his bidding. He was, in fact, a very naive, vigorous
+human being. He was about as much civilised, about as much tamed to the
+ideas of collective action and mutual consideration as a Central African
+negro.
+
+There are hordes of such men as he throughout all the modern industrial
+world. You will find the same type with the slightest modifications in
+the Pas de Calais or Rhenish Prussia or New Jersey or North Italy. No
+doubt you would find it in New Japan. These men have raised themselves
+up from the general mass of untrained, uncultured, poorish people in a
+hard industrious selfish struggle. To drive others they have had first
+to drive themselves. They have never yet had occasion nor leisure to
+think of the state or social life as a whole, and as for dreams or
+beauty, it was a condition of survival that they should ignore such
+cravings. All the distinctive qualities of my uncle can be thought of as
+dictated by his conditions; his success and harshness, the extravagances
+that expressed his pride in making money, the uncongenial luxury that
+sprang from rivalry, and his self-reliance, his contempt for broad
+views, his contempt for everything that he could not understand.
+
+His daughters were the inevitable children of his life. Queer girls they
+were! Curiously “spirited” as people phrase it, and curiously limited.
+During my Cambridge days I went down to Staffordshire several times. My
+uncle, though he still resented my refusal to go into his business, was
+also in his odd way proud of me. I was his nephew and poor relation, and
+yet there I was, a young gentleman learning all sorts of unremunerative
+things in the grandest manner, “Latin and mook,” while the sons of his
+neighhours, not nephews merely, but sons, stayed unpolished in their
+native town. Every time I went down I found extensive changes and
+altered relations, and before I had settled down to them off I went
+again. I don't think I was one person to them; I was a series of
+visitors. There is a gulf of ages between a gaunt schoolboy of sixteen
+in unbecoming mourning and two vividly self-conscious girls of eighteen
+and nineteen, but a Cambridge “man” of two and twenty with a first and
+good tennis and a growing social experience, is a fair contemporary for
+two girls of twenty-three and twenty-four.
+
+A motor-car appeared, I think in my second visit, a bottle-green
+affair that opened behind, had dark purple cushions, and was controlled
+mysteriously by a man in shiny black costume and a flat cap. The high
+tea had been shifted to seven and rechristened dinner, but my uncle
+would not dress nor consent to have wine; and after one painful
+experiment, I gathered, and a scene, he put his foot down and prohibited
+any but high-necked dresses.
+
+“Daddy's perfectly impossible,” Sybil told me.
+
+The foot had descended vehemently! “My own daughters!” he had said,
+“dressed up like--“--and had arrested himself and fumbled and decided to
+say--“actresses, and showin' their fat arms for every fool to stare
+at!” Nor would he have any people invited to dinner. He didn't, he had
+explained, want strangers poking about in his house when he came home
+tired. So such calling as occurred went on during his absence in the
+afternoon.
+
+One of the peculiarities of the life of these ascendant families of
+the industrial class to which wealth has come, is its tremendous
+insulations. There were no customs of intercourse in the Five Towns. All
+the isolated prosperities of the district sprang from economising, hard
+driven homes, in which there was neither time nor means for hospitality.
+Social intercourse centred very largely upon the church or chapel,
+and the chapels were better at bringing people together than the
+Establishment to which my cousins belonged. Their chief outlet to the
+wider world lay therefore through the acquaintances they had formed at
+school, and through two much less prosperous families of relations who
+lived at Longton and Hanley. A number of gossiping friendships with old
+school mates were “kept up,” and my cousins would “spend the afternoon”
+ or even spend the day with these; such occasions led to other encounters
+and interlaced with the furtive correspondences and snatched meetings
+that formed the emotional thread of their lives. When the billiard table
+had been new, my uncle had taken to asking in a few approved friends for
+an occasional game, but mostly the billiard-room was for glory and the
+girls. Both of them played very well. They never, so far as I know,
+dined out, and when at last after bitter domestic conflicts they began
+to go to dances, they went with the quavering connivance of my aunt,
+and changed into ball frocks at friends' houses on the way. There was a
+tennis club that formed a convenient afternoon rendezvous, and I recall
+that in the period of my earlier visits the young bloods of the district
+found much satisfaction in taking girls for drives in dog-carts and
+suchlike high-wheeled vehicles, a disposition that died in tangled
+tandems at the apparition of motor-car's.
+
+My aunt and uncle had conceived no plans in life for their daughters at
+all. In the undifferentiated industrial community from which they had
+sprung, girls got married somehow, and it did not occur to them that
+the concentration of property that had made them wealthy, had cut their
+children off from the general social sea in which their own awkward
+meeting had occurred, without necessarily opening any other world in
+exchange. My uncle was too much occupied with the works and his business
+affairs and his private vices to philosophise about his girls; he wanted
+them just to keep girls, preferably about sixteen, and to be a sort
+of animated flowers and make home bright and be given things. He was
+irritated that they would not remain at this, and still more irritated
+that they failed to suppress altogether their natural interest in young
+men. The tandems would be steered by weird and devious routes to evade
+the bare chance of his bloodshot eye. My aunt seemed to have no ideas
+whatever about what was likely to happen to her children. She had indeed
+no ideas about anything; she took her husband and the days as they came.
+
+I can see now the pathetic difficulty of my cousins' position in life;
+the absence of any guidance or instruction or provision for their
+development. They supplemented the silences of home by the conversation
+of schoolfellows and the suggestions of popular fiction. They had to
+make what they could out of life with such hints as these. The church
+was far too modest to offer them any advice. It was obtruded upon my
+mind upon my first visit that they were both carrying on correspondences
+and having little furtive passings and seeings and meetings with the
+mysterious owners of certain initials, S. and L. K., and, if I remember
+rightly, “the R. N.” brothers and cousins, I suppose, of their friends.
+The same thing was going on, with a certain intensification, at my next
+visit, excepting only that the initials were different. But when I
+came again their methods were maturer or I was no longer a negligible
+quantity, and the notes and the initials were no longer flaunted quite
+so openly in my face.
+
+My cousins had worked it out from the indications of their universe that
+the end of life is to have a “good time.” They used the phrase. That
+and the drives in dog-carts were only the first of endless points of
+resemblance between them and the commoner sort of American girl. When
+some years ago I paid my first and only visit to America I seemed to
+recover my cousins' atmosphere as soon as I entered the train at Euston.
+There were three girls in my compartment supplied with huge decorated
+cases of sweets, and being seen off by a company of friends, noisily
+arch and eager about the “steamer letters” they would get at Liverpool;
+they were the very soul-sisters of my cousins. The chief elements of a
+good time, as my cousins judged it, as these countless thousands of rich
+young women judge it, are a petty eventfulness, laughter, and to feel
+that you are looking well and attracting attention. Shopping is one of
+its leading joys. You buy things, clothes and trinkets for yourself and
+presents for your friends. Presents always seemed to be flying about
+in that circle; flowers and boxes of sweets were common currency. My
+cousins were always getting and giving, my uncle caressed them with
+parcels and cheques. They kissed him and he exuded sovereigns as a
+stroked APHIS exudes honey. It was like the new language of the Academy
+of Lagado to me, and I never learnt how to express myself in it, for
+nature and training make me feel encumbered to receive presents and
+embarrassed in giving them. But then, like my father, I hate and
+distrust possessions.
+
+Of the quality of their private imagination I never learnt anything; I
+suppose it followed the lines of the fiction they read and was romantic
+and sentimental. So far as marriage went, the married state seemed at
+once very attractive and dreadfully serious to them, composed in equal
+measure of becoming important and becoming old. I don't know what they
+thought about children. I doubt if they thought about them at all. It
+was very secret if they did.
+
+As for the poor and dingy people all about them, my cousins were always
+ready to take part in a Charitable Bazaar. They were unaware of any
+economic correlation of their own prosperity and that circumambient
+poverty, and they knew of Trade Unions simply as disagreeable external
+things that upset my uncle's temper. They knew of nothing wrong in
+social life at all except that there were “Agitators.” It surprised them
+a little, I think, that Agitators were not more drastically put down.
+But they had a sort of instinctive dread of social discussion as of
+something that might breach the happiness of their ignorance....
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+My cousins did more than illustrate Marx for me; they also undertook a
+stage of my emotional education. Their method in that as in everything
+else was extremely simple, but it took my inexperience by surprise.
+
+It must have been on my third visit that Sybil took me in hand. Hitherto
+I seemed to have seen her only in profile, but now she became almost
+completely full face, manifestly regarded me with those violet eyes
+of hers. She passed me things I needed at breakfast--it was the first
+morning of my visit--before I asked for them.
+
+When young men are looked at by pretty cousins, they become intensely
+aware of those cousins. It seemed to me that I had always admired
+Sybil's eyes very greatly, and that there was something in her
+temperament congenial to mine. It was odd I had not noted it on my
+previous visits.
+
+We walked round the garden somewhen that morning, and talked about
+Cambridge. She asked quite a lot of questions about my work and my
+ambitions. She said she had always felt sure I was clever.
+
+The conversation languished a little, and we picked some flowers for the
+house. Then she asked if I could run. I conceded her various starts and
+we raced up and down the middle garden path. Then, a little breathless,
+we went into the new twenty-five guinea summer-house at the end of the
+herbaceous border.
+
+We sat side by side, pleasantly hidden from the house, and she became
+anxious about her hair, which was slightly and prettily disarranged, and
+asked me to help her with the adjustment of a hairpin. I had never in my
+life been so near the soft curly hair and the dainty eyebrow and eyelid
+and warm soft cheek of a girl, and I was stirred--
+
+It stirs me now to recall it.
+
+I became a battleground of impulses and inhibitions.
+
+“Thank you,” said my cousin, and moved a little away from me.
+
+She began to talk about friendship, and lost her thread and forgot the
+little electric stress between us in a rather meandering analysis of her
+principal girl friends.
+
+But afterwards she resumed her purpose.
+
+I went to bed that night with one proposition overshadowing everything
+else in my mind, namely, that kissing my cousin Sybil was a difficult,
+but not impossible, achievement. I do not recall any shadow of a doubt
+whether on the whole it was worth doing. The thing had come into my
+existence, disturbing and interrupting its flow exactly as a fever does.
+Sybil had infected me with herself.
+
+The next day matters came to a crisis in the little upstairs
+sitting-room which had been assigned me as a study during my visit.
+I was working up there, or rather trying to work in spite of the
+outrageous capering of some very primitive elements in my brain, when
+she came up to me, under a transparent pretext of looking for a book.
+
+I turned round and then got up at the sight of her. I quite forget what
+our conversation was about, but I know she led me to believe I might
+kiss her. Then when I attempted to do so she averted her face.
+
+“How COULD you?” she said; “I didn't mean that!”
+
+That remained the state of our relations for two days. I developed a
+growing irritation with and resentment against cousin Sybil, combined
+with an intense desire to get that kiss for which I hungered and
+thirsted. Cousin Sybil went about in the happy persuasion that I was
+madly in love with her, and her game, so far as she was concerned,
+was played and won. It wasn't until I had fretted for two days that
+I realised that I was being used for the commonest form of excitement
+possible to a commonplace girl; that dozens perhaps of young men had
+played the part of Tantalus at cousin Sybil's lips. I walked about my
+room at nights, damning her and calling her by terms which on the whole
+she rather deserved, while Sybil went to sleep pitying “poor old Dick!”
+
+“Damn it!” I said, “I WILL be equal with you.”
+
+But I never did equalise the disadvantage, and perhaps it's as well, for
+I fancy that sort of revenge cuts both people too much for a rational
+man to seek it....
+
+“Why are men so silly?” said cousin Sybil next morning, wriggling back
+with down-bent head to release herself from what should have been a
+compelling embrace.
+
+“Confound it!” I said with a flash of clear vision. “You STARTED this
+game.”
+
+“Oh!”
+
+She stood back against a hedge of roses, a little flushed and excited
+and interested, and ready for the delightful defensive if I should renew
+my attack.
+
+“Beastly hot for scuffling,” I said, white with anger. “I don't know
+whether I'm so keen on kissing you, Sybil, after all. I just thought you
+wanted me to.”
+
+I could have whipped her, and my voice stung more than my words.
+
+Our eyes met; a real hatred in hers leaping up to meet mine.
+
+“Let's play tennis,” I said, after a moment's pause.
+
+“No,” she answered shortly, “I'm going indoors.”
+
+“Very well.”
+
+And that ended the affair with Sybil.
+
+I was still in the full glare of this disillusionment when Gertrude
+awoke from some preoccupation to an interest in my existence. She
+developed a disposition to touch my hand by accident, and let her
+fingers rest in contact with it for a moment,--she had pleasant soft
+hands;--she began to drift into summer houses with me, to let her arm
+rest trustfully against mine, to ask questions about Cambridge. They
+were much the same questions that Sybil had asked. But I controlled
+myself and maintained a profile of intelligent and entirely civil
+indifference to her blandishments.
+
+What Gertrude made of it came out one evening in some talk--I forget
+about what--with Sybil.
+
+“Oh, Dick!” said Gertrude a little impatiently, “Dick's Pi.”
+
+And I never disillusioned her by any subsequent levity from this theory
+of my innate and virginal piety.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+It was against this harsh and crude Staffordshire background that
+I think I must have seen Margaret for the first time. I say I think
+because it is quite possible that we had passed each other in the
+streets of Cambridge, no doubt with that affectation of mutual disregard
+which was once customary between undergraduates and Newnham girls. But
+if that was so I had noted nothing of the slender graciousness that
+shone out so pleasingly against the bleaker midland surroundings.
+
+She was a younger schoolfellow of my cousins', and the step-daughter
+of Seddon, a prominent solicitor of Burslem. She was not only not in
+my cousins' generation but not in their set, she was one of a small
+hardworking group who kept immaculate note-books, and did as much as is
+humanly possible of that insensate pile of written work that the Girls'
+Public School movement has inflicted upon school-girls. She really
+learnt French and German admirably and thoroughly, she got as far in
+mathematics as an unflinching industry can carry any one with no great
+natural aptitude, and she went up to Bennett Hall, Newnham, after the
+usual conflict with her family, to work for the History Tripos.
+
+There in her third year she made herself thoroughly ill through
+overwork, so ill that she had to give up Newnham altogether and go
+abroad with her stepmother. She made herself ill, as so many girls do
+in those university colleges, through the badness of her home and school
+training. She thought study must needs be a hard straining of the mind.
+She worried her work, she gave herself no leisure to see it as a whole,
+she felt herself not making headway and she cut her games and exercise
+in order to increase her hours of toil, and worked into the night. She
+carried a knack of laborious thoroughness into the blind alleys and
+inessentials of her subject. It didn't need the badness of the food for
+which Bennett Hall is celebrated and the remarkable dietary of nocturnal
+cocoa, cakes and soft biscuits with which the girls have supplemented
+it, to ensure her collapse. Her mother brought her home, fretting and
+distressed, and then finding her hopelessly unhappy at home, took her
+and her half-brother, a rather ailing youngster of ten who died three
+years later, for a journey to Italy.
+
+Italy did much to assuage Margaret's chagrin. I think all three of them
+had a very good time there. At home Mr. Seddon, her step-father, played
+the part of a well-meaning blight by reason of the moods that arose
+from nervous dyspepsia. They went to Florence, equipped with various
+introductions and much sound advice from sympathetic Cambridge friends,
+and having acquired an ease in Italy there, went on to Siena, Orvieto,
+and at last Rome. They returned, if I remember rightly, by Pisa,
+Genoa, Milan and Paris. Six months or more they had had abroad, and now
+Margaret was back in Burslem, in health again and consciously a very
+civilised person.
+
+New ideas were abroad, it was Maytime and a spring of abundant
+flowers--daffodils were particularly good that year--and Mrs. Seddon
+celebrated her return by giving an afternoon reception at short notice,
+with the clear intention of letting every one out into the garden if the
+weather held.
+
+The Seddons had a big old farmhouse modified to modern ideas of comfort
+on the road out towards Misterton, with an orchard that had been rather
+pleasantly subdued from use to ornament. It had rich blossoming cherry
+and apple trees. Large patches of grass full of nodding yellow trumpets
+had been left amidst the not too precisely mown grass, which was as
+it were grass path with an occasional lapse into lawn or glade. And
+Margaret, hatless, with the fair hair above her thin, delicately pink
+face very simply done, came to meet our rather too consciously dressed
+party,--we had come in the motor four strong, with my aunt in grey silk.
+Margaret wore a soft flowing flowered blue dress of diaphanous material,
+all unconnected with the fashion and tied with pretty ribbons, like a
+slenderer, unbountiful Primavera.
+
+It was one of those May days that ape the light and heat of summer, and
+I remember disconnectedly quite a number of brightly lit figures and
+groups walking about, and a white gate between orchard and garden and a
+large lawn with an oak tree and a red Georgian house with a verandah and
+open French windows, through which the tea drinking had come out upon
+the moss-edged flagstones even as Mrs. Seddon had planned.
+
+The party was almost entirely feminine except for a little curate with
+a large head, a good voice and a radiant manner, who was obviously
+attracted by Margaret, and two or three young husbands still
+sufficiently addicted to their wives to accompany them. One of them
+I recall as a quite romantic figure with abundant blond curly hair on
+which was poised a grey felt hat encircled by a refined black band. He
+wore, moreover, a loose rich shot silk tie of red and purple, a long
+frock coat, grey trousers and brown shoes, and presently he removed his
+hat and carried it in one hand. There were two tennis-playing youths
+besides myself. There was also one father with three daughters in
+anxious control, a father of the old school scarcely half broken
+in, reluctant, rebellious and consciously and conscientiously “reet
+Staffordshire.” The daughters were all alert to suppress the possible
+plungings, the undesirable humorous impulses of this almost feral guest.
+They nipped his very gestures in the bud. The rest of the people were
+mainly mothers with daughters--daughters of all ages, and a scattering
+of aunts, and there was a tendency to clotting, parties kept together
+and regarded parties suspiciously. Mr. Seddon was in hiding, I think,
+all the time, though not formally absent.
+
+Matters centred upon the tea in the long room of the French windows,
+where four trim maids went to and fro busily between the house and the
+clumps of people seated or standing before it; and tennis and croquet
+were intermittently visible and audible beyond a bank of rockwork rich
+with the spikes and cups and bells of high spring.
+
+Mrs. Seddon presided at the tea urn, and Margaret partly assisted and
+partly talked to me and my cousin Sibyl--Gertrude had found a disused
+and faded initial and was partnering him at tennis in a state of gentle
+revival--while their mother exercised a divided chaperonage from a seat
+near Mrs. Seddon. The little curate, stirring a partially empty cup of
+tea, mingled with our party, and preluded, I remember, every observation
+he made by a vigorous resumption of stirring.
+
+We talked of Cambridge, and Margaret kept us to it. The curate was a
+Selwyn man and had taken a pass degree in theology, but Margaret had
+come to Gaylord's lecturers in Trinity for a term before her breakdown,
+and understood these differences. She had the eagerness of an exile
+to hear the old familiar names of places and personalities. We capped
+familiar anecdotes and were enthusiastic about Kings' Chapel and the
+Backs, and the curate, addressing himself more particularly to Sibyl,
+told a long confused story illustrative of his disposition to reckless
+devilry (of a pure-minded kindly sort) about upsetting two canoes quite
+needlessly on the way to Grantchester.
+
+I can still see Margaret as I saw her that afternoon, see her fresh fair
+face, with the little obliquity of the upper lip, and her brow always
+slightly knitted, and her manner as of one breathlessly shy but
+determined. She had rather open blue eyes, and she spoke in an even
+musical voice with the gentlest of stresses and the ghost of a lisp.
+And it was true, she gathered, that Cambridge still existed. “I went
+to Grantchester,” she said, “last year, and had tea under the
+apple-blossom. I didn't think then I should have to come down.” (It was
+that started the curate upon his anecdote.)
+
+“I've seen a lot of pictures, and learnt a lot about them--at the Pitti
+and the Brera,--the Brera is wonderful--wonderful places,--but it isn't
+like real study,” she was saying presently.... “We bought bales of
+photographs,” she said.
+
+I thought the bales a little out of keeping.
+
+But fair-haired and quite simply and yet graciously and fancifully
+dressed, talking of art and beautiful things and a beautiful land, and
+with so much manifest regret for learning denied, she seemed a
+different kind of being altogether from my smart, hard, high-coloured,
+black-haired and resolutely hatted cousin; she seemed translucent beside
+Gertrude. Even the little twist and droop of her slender body was a
+grace to me.
+
+I liked her from the moment I saw her, and set myself to interest and
+please her as well as I knew how.
+
+We recalled a case of ragging that had rustled the shrubs of Newnham,
+and then Chris Robinson's visit--he had given a talk to Bennett Hall
+also--and our impression of him.
+
+“He disappointed me, too,” said Margaret.
+
+I was moved to tell Margaret something of my own views in the matter of
+social progress, and she listened--oh! with a kind of urged attention,
+and her brow a little more knitted, very earnestly. The little curate
+desisted from the appendices and refuse heaps and general debris of his
+story, and made himself look very alert and intelligent.
+
+“We did a lot of that when I was up in the eighties,” he said. “I'm glad
+Imperialism hasn't swamped you fellows altogether.”
+
+Gertrude, looking bright and confident, came to join our talk from the
+shrubbery; the initial, a little flushed and evidently in a state of
+refreshed relationship, came with her, and a cheerful lady in pink
+and more particularly distinguished by a pink bonnet joined our little
+group. Gertrude had been sipping admiration and was not disposed to play
+a passive part in the talk.
+
+“Socialism!” she cried, catching the word. “It's well Pa isn't here. He
+has Fits when people talk of socialism. Fits!”
+
+The initial laughed in a general kind of way.
+
+The curate said there was socialism AND socialism, and looked at
+Margaret to gauge whether he had been too bold in this utterance. But
+she was all, he perceived, for broad-mindness, and he stirred himself
+(and incidentally his tea) to still more liberality of expression. He
+said the state of the poor was appalling, simply appalling; that there
+were times when he wanted to shatter the whole system, “only,” he said,
+turning to me appealingly, “What have we got to put in its place?”
+
+“The thing that exists is always the more evident alternative,” I said.
+
+The little curate looked at it for a moment. “Precisely,” he said
+explosively, and turned stirring and with his head a little on one side,
+to hear what Margaret was saying.
+
+Margaret was saying, with a swift blush and an effect of daring, that
+she had no doubt she was a socialist.
+
+“And wearing a gold chain!” said Gertrude, “And drinking out of
+eggshell! I like that!”
+
+I came to Margaret's rescue. “It doesn't follow that because one's a
+socialist one ought to dress in sackcloth and ashes.”
+
+The initial coloured deeply, and having secured my attention by prodding
+me slightly with the wrist of the hand that held his teacup, cleared his
+throat and suggested that “one ought to be consistent.”
+
+I perceived we were embarked upon a discussion of the elements. We began
+an interesting little wrangle one of those crude discussions of general
+ideas that are dear to the heart of youth. I and Margaret supported one
+another as socialists, Gertrude and Sybil and the initial maintained
+an anti-socialist position, the curate attempted a cross-bench position
+with an air of intending to come down upon us presently with a casting
+vote. He reminded us of a number of useful principles too often
+overlooked in argument, that in a big question like this there was much
+to be said on both sides, that if every one did his or her duty to every
+one about them there would be no difficulty with social problems at all,
+that over and above all enactments we needed moral changes in people
+themselves. My cousin Gertrude was a difficult controversialist to
+manage, being unconscious of inconsistency in statement and absolutely
+impervious to reply. Her standpoint was essentially materialistic;
+she didn't see why she shouldn't have a good time because other people
+didn't; they would have a good time, she was sure, if she didn't. She
+said that if we did give up everything we had to other people, they
+wouldn't very likely know what to do with it. She asked if we were so
+fond of work-people, why we didn't go and live among them, and expressed
+the inflexible persuasion that if we HAD socialism, everything would
+be just the same again in ten years' time. She also threw upon us the
+imputation of ingratitude for a beautiful world by saying that so far as
+she was concerned she didn't want to upset everything. She was contented
+with things as they were, thank you.
+
+The discussion led in some way that I don't in the least recall now, and
+possibly by abrupt transitions, to a croquet foursome in which Margaret
+involved the curate without involving herself, and then stood beside me
+on the edge of the lawn while the others played. We watched silently for
+a moment.
+
+“I HATE that sort of view,” she said suddenly in a confidential
+undertone, with her delicate pink flush returning.
+
+“It's want of imagination,” I said.
+
+“To think we are just to enjoy ourselves,” she went on; “just to go on
+dressing and playing and having meals and spending money!” She seemed
+to be referring not simply to my cousins, but to the whole world of
+industry and property about us. “But what is one to do?” she asked. “I
+do wish I had not had to come down. It's all so pointless here. There
+seems to be nothing going forward, no ideas, no dreams. No one here
+seems to feel quite what I feel, the sort of need there is for MEANING
+in things. I hate things without meaning.”
+
+“Don't you do--local work?”
+
+“I suppose I shall. I suppose I must find something. Do you think--if
+one were to attempt some sort of propaganda?”
+
+“Could you--?” I began a little doubtfully.
+
+“I suppose I couldn't,” she answered, after a thoughtful moment. “I
+suppose it would come to nothing. And yet I feel there is so much to
+be done for the world, so much one ought to be doing.... I want to do
+something for the world.”
+
+I can see her now as she stood there with her brows nearly frowning, her
+blue eyes looking before her, her mouth almost petulant. “One feels that
+there are so many things going on--out of one's reach,” she said.
+
+I went back in the motor-car with my mind full of her, the quality of
+delicate discontent, the suggestion of exile. Even a kind of weakness in
+her was sympathetic. She told tremendously against her background. She
+was, I say, like a protesting blue flower upon a cinder heap. It is
+curious, too, how she connects and mingles with the furious quarrel
+I had with my uncle that very evening. That came absurdly. Indirectly
+Margaret was responsible. My mind was running on ideas she had revived
+and questions she had set clamouring, and quite inadvertently in my
+attempt to find solutions I talked so as to outrage his profoundest
+feelings....
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+What a preposterous shindy that was!
+
+I sat with him in the smoking-room, propounding what I considered to
+be the most indisputable and non-contentious propositions
+conceivable--until, to my infinite amazement, he exploded and called me
+a “damned young puppy.”
+
+It was seismic.
+
+“Tremendously interesting time,” I said, “just in the beginning of
+making a civilisation.”
+
+“Ah!” he said, with an averted face, and nodded, leaning forward over
+his cigar.
+
+I had not the remotest thought of annoying him.
+
+“Monstrous muddle of things we have got,” I said, “jumbled streets, ugly
+population, ugly factories--”
+
+“You'd do a sight better if you had to do with it,” said my uncle,
+regarding me askance.
+
+“Not me. But a world that had a collective plan and knew where it meant
+to be going would do a sight better, anyhow. We're all swimming in a
+flood of ill-calculated chances--”
+
+“You'll be making out I organised that business down there--by
+chance--next,” said my uncle, his voice thick with challenge.
+
+I went on as though I was back in Trinity.
+
+“There's a lot of chance in the making of all great businesses,” I said.
+
+My uncle remarked that that showed how much I knew about businesses.
+If chance made businesses, why was it that he always succeeded and grew
+while those fools Ackroyd and Sons always took second place? He showed
+a disposition to tell the glorious history of how once Ackroyd's
+overshadowed him, and how now he could buy up Ackroyd's three times
+over. But I wanted to get out what was in my mind.
+
+“Oh!” I said, “as between man and man and business and business, some
+of course get the pull by this quality or that--but it's forces quite
+outside the individual case that make the big part of any success
+under modern conditions. YOU never invented pottery, nor any process in
+pottery that matters a rap in your works; it wasn't YOUR foresight that
+joined all England up with railways and made it possible to organise
+production on an altogether different scale. You really at the utmost
+can't take credit for much more than being the sort of man who happened
+to fit what happened to be the requirements of the time, and who
+happened to be in a position to take advantage of them--”
+
+It was then my uncle cried out and called me a damned young puppy, and
+became involved in some unexpected trouble of his own.
+
+I woke up as it were from my analysis of the situation to discover him
+bent over a splendid spittoon, cursing incoherently, retching a little,
+and spitting out the end of his cigar which he had bitten off in his
+last attempt at self-control, and withal fully prepared as soon as he
+had cleared for action to give me just all that he considered to be the
+contents of his mind upon the condition of mine.
+
+Well, why shouldn't I talk my mind to him? He'd never had an outside
+view of himself for years, and I resolved to stand up to him. We went
+at it hammer and tongs! It became clear that he supposed me to be a
+Socialist, a zealous, embittered hater of all ownership--and also an
+educated man of the vilest, most pretentiously superior description.
+His principal grievance was that I thought I knew everything; to that he
+recurred again and again....
+
+We had been maintaining an armed truce with each other since my resolve
+to go up to Cambridge, and now we had out all that had accumulated
+between us. There had been stupendous accumulations....
+
+The particular things we said and did in that bawling encounter matter
+nothing at all in this story. I can't now estimate how near we came
+to fisticuffs. It ended with my saying, after a pungent reminder of
+benefits conferred and remembered, that I didn't want to stay another
+hour in his house. I went upstairs, in a state of puerile fury, to
+pack and go off to the Railway Hotel, while he, with ironical civility,
+telephoned for a cab.
+
+“Good riddance!” shouted my uncle, seeing me off into the night.
+
+On the face of it our row was preposterous, but the underlying reality
+of our quarrel was the essential antagonism, it seemed to me, in all
+human affairs, the antagonism between ideas and the established method,
+that is to say, between ideas and the rule of thumb. The world I hate
+is the rule-of-thumb world, the thing I and my kind of people exist
+for primarily is to battle with that, to annoy it, disarrange it,
+reconstruct it. We question everything, disturb anything that cannot
+give a clear justification to our questioning, because we believe
+inherently that our sense of disorder implies the possibility of a
+better order. Of course we are detestable. My uncle was of that other
+vaster mass who accept everything for the thing it seems to be, hate
+enquiry and analysis as a tramp hates washing, dread and resist change,
+oppose experiment, despise science. The world is our battleground; and
+all history, all literature that matters, all science, deals with this
+conflict of the thing that is and the speculative “if” that will destroy
+it.
+
+But that is why I did not see Margaret Seddon again for five years.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ MARGARET IN LONDON
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+I was twenty-seven when I met Margaret again, and the intervening
+five years had been years of vigorous activity for me, if not of very
+remarkable growth. When I saw her again, I could count myself a grown
+man. I think, indeed, I counted myself more completely grown than I was.
+At any rate, by all ordinary standards, I had “got on” very well, and
+my ideas, if they had not changed very greatly, had become much more
+definite and my ambitions clearer and bolder.
+
+I had long since abandoned my fellowship and come to London. I had
+published two books that had been talked about, written several
+articles, and established a regular relationship with the WEEKLY REVIEW
+and the EVENING GAZETTE. I was a member of the Eighty Club and learning
+to adapt the style of the Cambridge Union to larger uses. The London
+world had opened out to me very readily. I had developed a pleasant
+variety of social connections. I had made the acquaintance of Mr.
+Evesham, who had been attracted by my NEW RULER, and who talked about
+it and me, and so did a very great deal to make a way for me into the
+company of prominent and amusing people. I dined out quite frequently.
+The glitter and interest of good London dinner parties became a common
+experience. I liked the sort of conversation one got at them extremely,
+the little glow of duologues burning up into more general discussions,
+the closing-in of the men after the going of the women, the sage,
+substantial masculine gossiping, the later resumption of effective talk
+with some pleasant woman, graciously at her best. I had a wide range
+of houses; Cambridge had linked me to one or two correlated sets of
+artistic and literary people, and my books and Mr. Evesham and opened
+to me the big vague world of “society.” I wasn't aggressive nor
+particularly snobbish nor troublesome, sometimes I talked well, and if I
+had nothing interesting to say I said as little as possible, and I had
+a youthful gravity of manner that was liked by hostesses. And the other
+side of my nature that first flared through the cover of restraints at
+Locarno, that too had had opportunity to develop along the line London
+renders practicable. I had had my experiences and secrets and adventures
+among that fringe of ill-mated or erratic or discredited women the
+London world possesses. The thing had long ago ceased to be a matter of
+magic or mystery, and had become a question of appetites and excitement,
+and among other things the excitement of not being found out.
+
+I write rather doubtfully of my growing during this period. Indeed I
+find it hard to judge whether I can say that I grew at all in any real
+sense of the word, between three and twenty and twenty-seven. It seems
+to me now to have been rather a phase of realisation and clarification.
+All the broad lines of my thought were laid down, I am sure, by the date
+of my Locarno adventure, but in those five years I discussed things over
+and over again with myself and others, filled out with concrete fact
+forms I had at first apprehended sketchily and conversationally,
+measured my powers against my ideals and the forces in the world about
+me. It was evident that many men no better than myself and with no
+greater advantages than mine had raised themselves to influential and
+even decisive positions in the worlds of politics and thought. I was
+gathering the confidence and knowledge necessary to attack the world in
+the large manner; I found I could write, and that people would let
+me write if I chose, as one having authority and not as the scribes.
+Socially and politically and intellectually I knew myself for an honest
+man, and that quite without any deliberation on my part this showed
+and made things easy for me. People trusted my good faith from the
+beginning--for all that I came from nowhere and had no better position
+than any adventurer.
+
+But the growth process was arrested, I was nothing bigger at
+twenty-seven than at twenty-two, however much saner and stronger, and
+any one looking closely into my mind during that period might well have
+imagined growth finished altogether. It is particularly evident to me
+now that I came no nearer to any understanding of women during that
+time. That Locarno affair was infinitely more to me than I had supposed.
+It ended something--nipped something in the bud perhaps--took me at a
+stride from a vague, fine, ignorant, closed world of emotion to intrigue
+and a perfectly definite and limited sensuality. It ended my youth, and
+for a time it prevented my manhood. I had never yet even peeped at the
+sweetest, profoundest thing in the world, the heart and meaning of a
+girl, or dreamt with any quality of reality of a wife or any such thing
+as a friend among womanhood. My vague anticipation of such things in
+life had vanished altogether. I turned away from their possibility. It
+seemed to me I knew what had to be known about womankind. I wanted to
+work hard, to get on to a position in which I could develop and forward
+my constructive projects. Women, I thought, had nothing to do with that.
+It seemed clear I could not marry for some years; I was attractive to
+certain types of women, I had vanity enough to give me an agreeable
+confidence in love-making, and I went about seeking a convenient
+mistress quite deliberately, some one who should serve my purpose and
+say in the end, like that kindly first mistress of mine, “I've done you
+no harm,” and so release me. It seemed the only wise way of disposing
+of urgencies that might otherwise entangle and wreck the career I was
+intent upon.
+
+I don't apologise for, or defend my mental and moral phases. So it was
+I appraised life and prepared to take it, and so it is a thousand
+ambitious men see it to-day....
+
+For the rest these five years were a period of definition. My political
+conceptions were perfectly plain and honest. I had one constant desire
+ruling my thoughts. I meant to leave England and the empire better
+ordered than I found it, to organise and discipline, to build up a
+constructive and controlling State out of my world's confusions. We
+had, I saw, to suffuse education with public intention, to develop a new
+better-living generation with a collectivist habit of thought, to link
+now chaotic activities in every human affair, and particularly to catch
+that escaped, world-making, world-ruining, dangerous thing, industrial
+and financial enterprise, and bring it back to the service of the
+general good. I had then the precise image that still serves me as a
+symbol for all I wish to bring about, the image of an engineer building
+a lock in a swelling torrent--with water pressure as his only source of
+power. My thoughts and acts were habitually turned to that enterprise;
+it gave shape and direction to all my life. The problem that most
+engaged my mind during those years was the practical and personal
+problem of just where to apply myself to serve this almost innate
+purpose. How was I, a child of this confusion, struggling upward through
+the confusion, to take hold of things? Somewhere between politics and
+literature my grip must needs be found, but where? Always I seem to
+have been looking for that in those opening years, and disregarding
+everything else to discover it.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+The Baileys, under whose auspices I met Margaret again, were in the
+sharpest contrast with the narrow industrialism of the Staffordshire
+world. They were indeed at the other extreme of the scale, two active
+self-centred people, excessively devoted to the public service. It was
+natural I should gravitate to them, for they seemed to stand for the
+maturer, more disciplined, better informed expression of all I was then
+urgent to attempt to do. The bulk of their friends were politicians or
+public officials, they described themselves as publicists--a vague yet
+sufficiently significant term. They lived and worked in a hard little
+house in Chambers Street, Westminster, and made a centre for quite an
+astonishing amount of political and social activity.
+
+Willersley took me there one evening. The place was almost pretentiously
+matter-of-fact and unassuming. The narrow passage-hall, papered with
+some ancient yellowish paper, grained to imitate wood, was choked with
+hats and cloaks and an occasional feminine wrap. Motioned rather than
+announced by a tall Scotch servant woman, the only domestic I ever
+remember seeing there, we made our way up a narrow staircase past the
+open door of a small study packed with blue-books, to discover Altiora
+Bailey receiving before the fireplace in her drawing-room. She was a
+tall commanding figure, splendid but a little untidy in black silk and
+red beads, with dark eyes that had no depths, with a clear hard voice
+that had an almost visible prominence, aquiline features and straight
+black hair that was apt to get astray, that was now astray like the
+head feathers of an eagle in a gale. She stood with her hands behind her
+back, and talked in a high tenor of a projected Town Planning Bill with
+Blupp, who was practically in those days the secretary of the local
+Government Board. A very short broad man with thick ears and fat white
+hands writhing intertwined behind him, stood with his back to us, eager
+to bark interruptions into Altiora's discourse. A slender girl in pale
+blue, manifestly a young political wife, stood with one foot on the
+fender listening with an expression of entirely puzzled propitiation.
+A tall sandy-bearded bishop with the expression of a man in a trance
+completed this central group.
+
+The room was one of those long apartments once divided by folding doors,
+and reaching from back to front, that are common upon the first floors
+of London houses. Its walls were hung with two or three indifferent
+water colours, there was scarcely any furniture but a sofa or so and a
+chair, and the floor, severely carpeted with matting, was crowded with
+a curious medley of people, men predominating. Several were in evening
+dress, but most had the morning garb of the politician; the women were
+either severely rational or radiantly magnificent. Willersley pointed
+out to me the wife of the Secretary of State for War, and I recognised
+the Duchess of Clynes, who at that time cultivated intellectuality. I
+looked round, identifying a face here or there, and stepping back trod
+on some one's toe, and turned to find it belonged to the Right Hon. G.
+B. Mottisham, dear to the PUNCH caricaturists. He received my apology
+with that intentional charm that is one of his most delightful traits,
+and resumed his discussion. Beside him was Esmeer of Trinity, whom I had
+not seen since my Cambridge days....
+
+Willersley found an ex-member of the School Board for whom he had
+affinities, and left me to exchange experiences and comments upon the
+company with Esmeer. Esmeer was still a don; but he was nibbling, he
+said, at certain negotiations with the TIMES that might bring him
+down to London. He wanted to come to London. “We peep at things from
+Cambridge,” he said.
+
+“This sort of thing,” I said, “makes London necessary. It's the oddest
+gathering.”
+
+“Every one comes here,” said Esmeer. “Mostly we hate them like
+poison--jealousy--and little irritations--Altiora can be a horror at
+times--but we HAVE to come.”
+
+“Things are being done?”
+
+“Oh!--no doubt of it. It's one of the parts of the British
+machinery--that doesn't show.... But nobody else could do it.
+
+“Two people,” said Esmeer, “who've planned to be a power--in an original
+way. And by Jove! they've done it!”
+
+I did not for some time pick out Oscar Bailey, and then Esmeer
+showed him to me in elaborately confidential talk in a corner with a
+distinguished-looking stranger wearing a ribbon. Oscar had none of the
+fine appearance of his wife; he was a short sturdy figure with a rounded
+protruding abdomen and a curious broad, flattened, clean-shaven face
+that seemed nearly all forehead. He was of Anglo-Hungarian extraction,
+and I have always fancied something Mongolian in his type. He peered
+up with reddish swollen-looking eyes over gilt-edged glasses that were
+divided horizontally into portions of different refractive power, and he
+talking in an ingratiating undertone, with busy thin lips, an eager lisp
+and nervous movements of the hand.
+
+People say that thirty years before at Oxford he was almost exactly the
+same eager, clever little man he was when I first met him. He had come
+up to Balliol bristling with extraordinary degrees and prizes captured
+in provincial and Irish and Scotch universities--and had made a name for
+himself as the most formidable dealer in exact fact the rhetoricians
+of the Union had ever had to encounter. From Oxford he had gone on to a
+position in the Higher Division of the Civil Service, I think in the
+War Office, and had speedily made a place for himself as a political
+journalist. He was a particularly neat controversialist, and very full
+of political and sociological ideas. He had a quite astounding memory
+for facts and a mastery of detailed analysis, and the time afforded
+scope for these gifts. The later eighties were full of politico-social
+discussion, and he became a prominent name upon the contents list of the
+NINETEENTH CENTURY, the FORTNIGHTLY and CONTEMPORARY chiefly as a half
+sympathetic but frequently very damaging critic of the socialism of that
+period. He won the immense respect of every one specially interested in
+social and political questions, he soon achieved the limited distinction
+that is awarded such capacity, and at that I think he would have
+remained for the rest of his life if he had not encountered Altiora.
+
+But Altiora Macvitie was an altogether exceptional woman, an
+extraordinary mixture of qualities, the one woman in the world who could
+make something more out of Bailey than that. She had much of the
+vigour and handsomeness of a slender impudent young man, and an
+unscrupulousness altogether feminine. She was one of those women who
+are waiting in--what is the word?--muliebrity. She had courage and
+initiative and a philosophical way of handling questions, and she could
+be bored by regular work like a man. She was entirely unfitted for her
+sex's sphere. She was neither uncertain, coy nor hard to please, and
+altogether too stimulating and aggressive for any gentleman's hours of
+ease. Her cookery would have been about as sketchy as her handwriting,
+which was generally quite illegible, and she would have made, I feel
+sure, a shocking bad nurse. Yet you mustn't imagine she was an inelegant
+or unbeautiful woman, and she is inconceivable to me in high collars or
+any sort of masculine garment. But her soul was bony, and at the base
+of her was a vanity gaunt and greedy! When she wasn't in a state of
+personal untidiness that was partly a protest against the waste of hours
+exacted by the toilet and partly a natural disinclination, she had a
+gypsy splendour of black and red and silver all her own. And somewhen in
+the early nineties she met and married Bailey.
+
+I know very little about her early years. She was the only daughter of
+Sir Deighton Macvitie, who applied the iodoform process to cotton,
+and only his subsequent unfortunate attempts to become a Cotton King
+prevented her being a very rich woman. As it was she had a tolerable
+independence. She came into prominence as one of the more able of the
+little shoal of young women who were led into politico-philanthropic
+activities by the influence of the earlier novels of Mrs. Humphry
+Ward--the Marcella crop. She went “slumming” with distinguished vigour,
+which was quite usual in those days--and returned from her experiences
+as an amateur flower girl with clear and original views about the
+problem--which is and always had been unusual. She had not married, I
+suppose because her standards were high, and men are cowards and with an
+instinctive appetite for muliebrity. She had kept house for her father
+by speaking occasionally to the housekeeper, butler and cook her mother
+had left her, and gathering the most interesting dinner parties she
+could, and had married off four orphan nieces in a harsh and successful
+manner. After her father's smash and death she came out as a writer
+upon social questions and a scathing critic of the Charity Organisation
+Society, and she was three and thirty and a little at loose ends when
+she met Oscar Bailey, so to speak, in the CONTEMPORARY REVIEW. The
+lurking woman in her nature was fascinated by the ease and precision
+with which the little man rolled over all sorts of important and
+authoritative people, she was the first to discover a sort of
+imaginative bigness in his still growing mind, the forehead perhaps
+carried him off physically, and she took occasion to meet and subjugate
+him, and, so soon as he had sufficiently recovered from his abject
+humility and a certain panic at her attentions, marry him.
+
+This had opened a new phase in the lives of Bailey and herself. The two
+supplemented each other to an extraordinary extent. Their subsequent
+career was, I think, almost entirely her invention. She was aggressive,
+imaginative, and had a great capacity for ideas, while he was almost
+destitute of initiative, and could do nothing with ideas except remember
+and discuss them. She was, if not exact, at least indolent, with a
+strong disposition to save energy by sketching--even her handwriting
+showed that--while he was inexhaustibly industrious with a relentless
+invariable calligraphy that grew larger and clearer as the years passed
+by. She had a considerable power of charming; she could be just as nice
+to people--and incidentally just as nasty--as she wanted to be. He was
+always just the same, a little confidential and SOTTO VOCE, artlessly
+rude and egoistic in an undignified way. She had considerable social
+experience, good social connections, and considerable social ambition,
+while he had none of these things. She saw in a flash her opportunity
+to redeem his defects, use his powers, and do large, novel, rather
+startling things. She ran him. Her marriage, which shocked her friends
+and relations beyond measure--for a time they would only speak of Bailey
+as “that gnome”--was a stroke of genius, and forthwith they proceeded
+to make themselves the most formidable and distinguished couple
+conceivable. P. B. P., she boasted, was engraved inside their wedding
+rings, Pro Bono Publico, and she meant it to be no idle threat. She had
+discovered very early that the last thing influential people will do is
+to work. Everything in their lives tends to make them dependent upon a
+supply of confidently administered detail. Their business is with the
+window and not the stock behind, and in the end they are dependent upon
+the stock behind for what goes into the window. She linked with that the
+fact that Bailey had a mind as orderly as a museum, and an invincible
+power over detail. She saw that if two people took the necessary pains
+to know the facts of government and administration with precision, to
+gather together knowledge that was dispersed and confused, to be able to
+say precisely what had to be done and what avoided in this eventuality
+or that, they would necessarily become a centre of reference for all
+sorts of legislative proposals and political expedients, and she went
+unhesitatingly upon that.
+
+Bailey, under her vigorous direction, threw up his post in the
+Civil Service and abandoned sporadic controversies, and they devoted
+themselves to the elaboration and realisation of this centre of public
+information she had conceived as their role. They set out to study
+the methods and organisation and realities of government in the most
+elaborate manner. They did the work as no one had ever hitherto dreamt
+of doing it. They planned the research on a thoroughly satisfying scale,
+and arranged their lives almost entirely for it. They took that house
+in Chambers Street and furnished it with severe economy, they discovered
+that Scotch domestic who is destined to be the guardian and tyrant of
+their declining years, and they set to work. Their first book, “The
+Permanent Official,” fills three plump volumes, and took them and their
+two secretaries upwards of four years to do. It is an amazingly good
+book, an enduring achievement. In a hundred directions the history and
+the administrative treatment of the public service was clarified for all
+time....
+
+They worked regularly every morning from nine to twelve, they lunched
+lightly but severely, in the afternoon they “took exercise” or Bailey
+attended meetings of the London School Board, on which he served, he
+said, for the purposes of study--he also became a railway director
+for the same end. In the late afternoon Altiora was at home to various
+callers, and in the evening came dinner or a reception or both.
+
+Her dinners and gatherings were a very important feature in their
+scheme. She got together all sorts of interesting people in or about
+the public service, she mixed the obscurely efficient with the
+ill-instructed famous and the rudderless rich, got together in one room
+more of the factors in our strange jumble of a public life than had ever
+met easily before. She fed them with a shameless austerity that kept the
+conversation brilliant, on a soup, a plain fish, and mutton or boiled
+fowl and milk pudding, with nothing to drink but whisky and soda, and
+hot and cold water, and milk and lemonade. Everybody was soon very glad
+indeed to come to that. She boasted how little her housekeeping cost
+her, and sought constantly for fresh economies that would enable her,
+she said, to sustain an additional private secretary. Secretaries were
+the Baileys' one extravagance, they loved to think of searches going
+on in the British Museum, and letters being cleared up and precis made
+overhead, while they sat in the little study and worked together, Bailey
+with a clockwork industry, and Altiora in splendid flashes between
+intervals of cigarettes and meditation. “All efficient public careers,”
+ said Altiora, “consist in the proper direction of secretaries.”
+
+“If everything goes well I shall have another secretary next year,”
+ Altiora told me. “I wish I could refuse people dinner napkins. Imagine
+what it means in washing! I dare most things.... But as it is, they
+stand a lot of hardship here.”
+
+“There's something of the miser in both these people,” said Esmeer, and
+the thing was perfectly true. For, after all, the miser is nothing more
+than a man who either through want of imagination or want of suggestion
+misapplies to a base use a natural power of concentration upon one end.
+The concentration itself is neither good nor evil, but a power that
+can be used in either way. And the Baileys gathered and reinvested
+usuriously not money, but knowledge of the utmost value in human
+affairs. They produced an effect of having found themselves--completely.
+One envied them at times extraordinarily. I was attracted, I was
+dazzled--and at the same time there was something about Bailey's big
+wrinkled forehead, his lisping broad mouth, the gestures of his hands
+and an uncivil preoccupation I could not endure....
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Their effect upon me was from the outset very considerable.
+
+Both of them found occasion on that first visit of mine to talk to
+me about my published writings and particularly about my then just
+published book THE NEW RULER, which had interested them very much. It
+fell in indeed so closely with their own way of thinking that I doubt if
+they ever understood how independently I had arrived at my conclusions.
+It was their weakness to claim excessively. That irritation, however,
+came later. We discovered each other immensely; for a time it produced a
+tremendous sense of kindred and co-operation.
+
+Altiora, I remember, maintained that there existed a great army of such
+constructive-minded people as ourselves--as yet undiscovered by one
+another.
+
+“It's like boring a tunnel through a mountain,” said Oscar, “and
+presently hearing the tapping of the workers from the other end.”
+
+“If you didn't know of them beforehand,” I said, “it might be a rather
+badly joined tunnel.”
+
+“Exactly,” said Altiora with a high note, “and that's why we all want to
+find out each other....”
+
+They didn't talk like that on our first encounter, but they urged me to
+lunch with them next day, and then it was we went into things. A woman
+Factory Inspector and the Educational Minister for New Banksland and his
+wife were also there, but I don't remember they made any contribution
+to the conversation. The Baileys saw to that. They kept on at me in an
+urgent litigious way.
+
+“We have read your book,” each began--as though it had been a joint
+function. “And we consider--”
+
+“Yes,” I protested, “I think--”
+
+ That was a secondary matter.
+
+“They did not consider,” said Altiora, raising her voice and going right
+over me, “that I had allowed sufficiently for the inevitable development
+of an official administrative class in the modern state.”
+
+“Nor of its importance,” echoed Oscar.
+
+That, they explained in a sort of chorus, was the cardinal idea of their
+lives, what they were up to, what they stood for. “We want to suggest to
+you,” they said--and I found this was a stock opening of theirs--“that
+from the mere necessities of convenience elected bodies MUST avail
+themselves more and more of the services of expert officials. We have
+that very much in mind. The more complicated and technical affairs
+become, the less confidence will the elected official have in himself.
+We want to suggest that these expert officials must necessarily develop
+into a new class and a very powerful class in the community. We want to
+organise that. It may be THE power of the future. They will necessarily
+have to have very much of a common training. We consider ourselves as
+amateur unpaid precursors of such a class.”...
+
+The vision they displayed for my consideration as the aim of
+public-spirited endeavour, seemed like a harder, narrower, more
+specialised version of the idea of a trained and disciplined state that
+Willersley and I had worked out in the Alps. They wanted things more
+organised, more correlated with government and a collective purpose,
+just as we did, but they saw it not in terms of a growing collective
+understanding, but in terms of functionaries, legislative change, and
+methods of administration....
+
+It wasn't clear at first how we differed. The Baileys were very anxious
+to win me to co-operation, and I was quite prepared at first to identify
+their distinctive expressions with phrases of my own, and so we came
+very readily into an alliance that was to last some years, and break at
+last very painfully. Altiora manifestly liked me, I was soon discussing
+with her the perplexity I found in placing myself efficiently in the
+world, the problem of how to take hold of things that occupied my
+thoughts, and she was sketching out careers for my consideration, very
+much as an architect on his first visit sketches houses, considers
+requirements, and puts before you this example and that of the more or
+less similar thing already done....
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+It is easy to see how much in common there was between the Baileys and
+me, and how natural it was that I should become a constant visitor at
+their house and an ally of theirs in many enterprises. It is not nearly
+so easy to define the profound antagonism of spirit that also held
+between us. There was a difference in texture, a difference in quality.
+How can I express it? The shapes of our thoughts were the same, but the
+substance quite different. It was as if they had made in china or cast
+iron what I had made in transparent living matter. (The comparison is
+manifestly from my point of view.) Certain things never seemed to show
+through their ideas that were visible, refracted perhaps and distorted,
+but visible always through mine.
+
+I thought for a time the essential difference lay in our relation to
+beauty. With me beauty is quite primary in life; I like truth, order
+and goodness, wholly because they are beautiful or lead straight to
+beautiful consequences. The Baileys either hadn't got that or they
+didn't see it. They seemed at times to prefer things harsh and ugly.
+That puzzled me extremely. The esthetic quality of many of their
+proposals, the “manners” of their work, so to speak, were at times as
+dreadful as--well, War Office barrack architecture. A caricature by
+its exaggerated statements will sometimes serve to point a truth by
+antagonising falsity and falsity. I remember talking to a prominent
+museum official in need of more public funds for the work he had in
+hand. I mentioned the possibility of enlisting Bailey's influence.
+
+“Oh, we don't want Philistines like that infernal Bottle-Imp running
+us,” he said hastily, and would hear of no concerted action for the end
+he had in view. “I'd rather not have the extension.
+
+“You see,” he went on to explain, “Bailey's wanting in the essentials.”
+
+“What essentials?” said I.
+
+“Oh! he'd be like a nasty oily efficient little machine for some merely
+subordinate necessity among all my delicate stuff. He'd do all we wanted
+no doubt in the way of money and powers--and he'd do it wrong and mess
+the place for ever. Hands all black, you know. He's just a means. Just a
+very aggressive and unmanageable means. This isn't a plumber's job....”
+
+I stuck to my argument.
+
+“I don't LIKE him,” said the official conclusively, and it seemed to me
+at the time he was just blind prejudice speaking....
+
+I came nearer the truth of the matter as I came to realise that
+our philosophies differed profoundly. That isn't a very curable
+difference,--once people have grown up. Theirs was a philosophy devoid
+of FINESSE. Temperamentally the Baileys were specialised, concentrated,
+accurate, while I am urged either by some Inner force or some entirely
+assimilated influence in my training, always to round off and shadow
+my outlines. I hate them hard. I would sacrifice detail to modelling
+always, and the Baileys, it seemed to me, loved a world as flat and
+metallic as Sidney Cooper's cows. If they had the universe in hand I
+know they would take down all the trees and put up stamped tin green
+shades and sunlight accumulators. Altiora thought trees hopelessly
+irregular and sea cliffs a great mistake.... I got things clearer as
+time went on. Though it was an Hegelian mess of which I had partaken at
+Codger's table by way of a philosophical training, my sympathies have
+always been Pragmatist. I belong almost by nature to that school of
+Pragmatism that, following the medieval Nominalists, bases itself upon
+a denial of the reality of classes, and of the validity of general
+laws. The Baileys classified everything. They were, in the scholastic
+sense--which so oddly contradicts the modern use of the word “Realists.”
+ They believed classes were REAL and independent of their individuals.
+This is the common habit of all so-called educated people who have no
+metaphysical aptitude and no metaphysical training. It leads them to a
+progressive misunderstanding of the world. It was a favourite trick
+of Altiora's to speak of everybody as a “type”; she saw men as samples
+moving; her dining-room became a chamber of representatives. It gave
+a tremendously scientific air to many of their generalisations, using
+“scientific” in its nineteenth-century uncritical Herbert Spencer sense,
+an air that only began to disappear when you thought them over again in
+terms of actuality and the people one knew....
+
+At the Baileys' one always seemed to be getting one's hands on the very
+strings that guided the world. You heard legislation projected to affect
+this “type” and that; statistics marched by you with sin and shame and
+injustice and misery reduced to quite manageable percentages, you found
+men who were to frame or amend bills in grave and intimate exchange
+with Bailey's omniscience, you heard Altiora canvassing approaching
+resignations and possible appointments that might make or mar a
+revolution in administrative methods, and doing it with a vigorous
+directness that manifestly swayed the decision; and you felt you were
+in a sort of signal box with levers all about you, and the world outside
+there, albeit a little dark and mysterious beyond the window, running
+on its lines in ready obedience to these unhesitating lights, true and
+steady to trim termini.
+
+And then with all this administrative fizzle, this pseudo-scientific
+administrative chatter, dying away in your head, out you went into the
+limitless grimy chaos of London streets and squares, roads and avenues
+lined with teeming houses, each larger than the Chambers Street house
+and at least equally alive, you saw the chaotic clamour of hoardings,
+the jumble of traffic, the coming and going of mysterious myriads,
+you heard the rumble of traffic like the noise of a torrent; a vague
+incessant murmur of cries and voices, wanton crimes and accidents bawled
+at you from the placards; imperative unaccountable fashions swaggered
+triumphant in dazzling windows of the shops; and you found yourself
+swaying back to the opposite conviction that the huge formless spirit
+of the world it was that held the strings and danced the puppets on the
+Bailey stage....
+
+Under the lamps you were jostled by people like my Staffordshire uncle
+out for a spree, you saw shy youths conversing with prostitutes, you
+passed young lovers pairing with an entire disregard of the social
+suitability of the “types” they might blend or create, you saw men
+leaning drunken against lamp-posts whom you knew for the “type” that
+will charge with fixed bayonets into the face of death, and you found
+yourself unable to imagine little Bailey achieving either drunkenness or
+the careless defiance of annihilation. You realised that quite a lot of
+types were underrepresented in Chambers Street, that feral and obscure
+and altogether monstrous forces must be at work, as yet altogether
+unassimilated by those neat administrative reorganisations.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Altiora, I remember, preluded Margaret's reappearance by announcing her
+as a “new type.”
+
+I was accustomed to go early to the Baileys' dinners in those days, for
+a preliminary gossip with Altiora in front of her drawing-room fire. One
+got her alone, and that early arrival was a little sign of appreciation
+she valued. She had every woman's need of followers and servants.
+
+“I'm going to send you down to-night,” she said, “with a very
+interesting type indeed--one of the new generation of serious gals.
+Middle-class origin--and quite well off. Rich in fact. Her step-father
+was a solicitor and something of an ENTREPRENEUR towards the end, I
+fancy--in the Black Country. There was a little brother died, and she's
+lost her mother quite recently. Quite on her own, so to speak. She's
+never been out into society very much, and doesn't seem really very
+anxious to go.... Not exactly an intellectual person, you know, but
+quiet, and great force of character. Came up to London on her own and
+came to us--someone had told her we were the sort of people to advise
+her--to ask what to do. I'm sure she'll interest you.”
+
+“What CAN people of that sort do?” I asked. “Is she capable of
+investigation?”
+
+Altiora compressed her lips and shook her head. She always did shake her
+head when you asked that of anyone.
+
+“Of course what she ought to do,” said Altiora, with her silk dress
+pulled back from her knee before the fire, and with a lift of her voice
+towards a chuckle at her daring way of putting things, “is to marry a
+member of Parliament and see he does his work.... Perhaps she will.
+It's a very exceptional gal who can do anything by herself--quite
+exceptional. The more serious they are--without being exceptional--the
+more we want them to marry.”
+
+Her exposition was truncated by the entry of the type in question.
+
+“Well!” cried Altiora turning, and with a high note of welcome, “HERE
+you are!”
+
+Margaret had gained in dignity and prettiness by the lapse of five
+years, and she was now very beautifully and richly and simply dressed.
+Her fair hair had been done in some way that made it seem softer and
+more abundant than it was in my memory, and a gleam of purple velvet-set
+diamonds showed amidst its mist of little golden and brown lines.
+Her dress was of white and violet, the last trace of mourning for her
+mother, and confessed the gracious droop of her tall and slender body.
+She did not suggest Staffordshire at all, and I was puzzled for a moment
+to think where I had met her. Her sweetly shaped mouth with the
+slight obliquity of the lip and the little kink in her brow were
+extraordinarily familiar to me. But she had either been prepared
+by Altiora or she remembered my name. “We met,” she said, “while my
+step-father was alive--at Misterton. You came to see us”; and instantly
+I recalled the sunshine between the apple blossom and a slender pale
+blue girlish shape among the daffodils, like something that had sprung
+from a bulb itself. I recalled at once that I had found her very
+interesting, though I did not clearly remember how it was she had
+interested me.
+
+Other guests arrived--it was one of Altiora's boldly blended mixtures of
+people with ideas and people with influence or money who might perhaps
+be expected to resonate to them. Bailey came down late with an air of
+hurry, and was introduced to Margaret and said absolutely nothing to
+her--there being no information either to receive or impart and nothing
+to do--but stood snatching his left cheek until I rescued him and her,
+and left him free to congratulate the new Lady Snape on her husband's K.
+C. B.
+
+I took Margaret down. We achieved no feats of mutual expression, except
+that it was abundantly clear we were both very pleased and interested
+to meet again, and that we had both kept memories of each other. We made
+that Misterton tea-party and the subsequent marriages of my cousins
+and the world of Burslem generally, matter for quite an agreeable
+conversation until at last Altiora, following her invariable custom,
+called me by name imperatively out of our duologue. “Mr. Remington,” she
+said, “we want your opinion--” in her entirely characteristic effort to
+get all the threads of conversation into her own hands for the climax
+that always wound up her dinners. How the other women used to hate those
+concluding raids of hers! I forget most of the other people at that
+dinner, nor can I recall what the crowning rally was about. It didn't in
+any way join on to my impression of Margaret.
+
+In the drawing-room of the matting floor I rejoined her, with Altiora's
+manifest connivance, and in the interval I had been thinking of our
+former meeting.
+
+“Do you find London,” I asked, “give you more opportunity for doing
+things and learning things than Burslem?”
+
+She showed at once she appreciated my allusion to her former
+confidences. “I was very discontented then,” she said and paused. “I've
+really only been in London for a few months. It's so different. In
+Burslem, life seems all business and getting--without any reason. One
+went on and it didn't seem to mean anything. At least anything that
+mattered.... London seems to be so full of meanings--all mixed up
+together.”
+
+She knitted her brows over her words and smiled appealingly at the end
+as if for consideration for her inadequate expression, appealingly and
+almost humorously.
+
+I looked understandingly at her. “We have all,” I agreed, “to come to
+London.”
+
+“One sees so much distress,” she added, as if she felt she had
+completely omitted something, and needed a codicil.
+
+“What are you doing in London?”
+
+“I'm thinking of studying. Some social question. I thought perhaps I
+might go and study social conditions as Mrs. Bailey did, go perhaps as
+a work-girl or see the reality of living in, but Mrs. Bailey thought
+perhaps it wasn't quite my work.”
+
+“Are you studying?”
+
+“I'm going to a good many lectures, and perhaps I shall take up a
+regular course at the Westminster School of Politics and Sociology. But
+Mrs. Bailey doesn't seem to believe very much in that either.”
+
+Her faintly whimsical smile returned. “I seem rather indefinite,” she
+apologised, “but one does not want to get entangled in things one can't
+do. One--one has so many advantages, one's life seems to be such a trust
+and such a responsibility--”
+
+She stopped.
+
+“A man gets driven into work,” I said.
+
+“It must be splendid to be Mrs. Bailey,” she replied with a glance of
+envious admiration across the room.
+
+“SHE has no doubts, anyhow,” I remarked.
+
+“She HAD,” said Margaret with the pride of one who has received great
+confidences.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+“You've met before?” said Altiora, a day or so later.
+
+I explained when.
+
+“You find her interesting?”
+
+I saw in a flash that Altiora meant to marry me to Margaret.
+
+Her intention became much clearer as the year developed. Altiora was
+systematic even in matters that evade system. I was to marry Margaret,
+and freed from the need of making an income I was to come into
+politics--as an exponent of Baileyism. She put it down with the other
+excellent and advantageous things that should occupy her summer holiday.
+It was her pride and glory to put things down and plan them out in
+detail beforehand, and I'm not quite sure that she did not even mark
+off the day upon which the engagement was to be declared. If she did,
+I disappointed her. We didn't come to an engagement, in spite of the
+broadest hints and the glaring obviousness of everything, that summer.
+
+Every summer the Baileys went out of London to some house they hired
+or borrowed, leaving their secretaries toiling behind, and they went
+on working hard in the mornings and evenings and taking exercise in the
+open air in the afternoon. They cycled assiduously and went for long
+walks at a trot, and raided and studied (and incidentally explained
+themselves to) any social “types” that lived in the neighbourhood. One
+invaded type, resentful under research, described them with a dreadful
+aptness as Donna Quixote and Sancho Panza--and himself as a harmless
+windmill, hurting no one and signifying nothing. She did rather tilt
+at things. This particular summer they were at a pleasant farmhouse in
+level country near Pangbourne, belonging to the Hon. Wilfrid Winchester,
+and they asked me to come down to rooms in the neighbourhood--Altiora
+took them for a month for me in August--and board with them upon
+extremely reasonable terms; and when I got there I found Margaret
+sitting in a hammock at Altiora's feet. Lots of people, I gathered, were
+coming and going in the neighbourhood, the Ponts were in a villa on the
+river, and the Rickhams' houseboat was to moor for some days; but these
+irruptions did not impede a great deal of duologue between Margaret and
+myself.
+
+Altiora was efficient rather than artistic in her match-making. She sent
+us off for long walks together--Margaret was a fairly good walker--she
+exhumed some defective croquet things and incited us to croquet, not
+understanding that detestable game is the worst stimulant for lovers
+in the world. And Margaret and I were always getting left about, and
+finding ourselves for odd half-hours in the kitchen-garden with nothing
+to do except talk, or we were told with a wave of the hand to run away
+and amuse each other.
+
+Altiora even tried a picnic in canoes, knowing from fiction rather than
+imagination or experience the conclusive nature of such excursions. But
+there she fumbled at the last moment, and elected at the river's brink
+to share a canoe with me. Bailey showed so much zeal and so little
+skill--his hat fell off and he became miraculously nothing but
+paddle-clutching hands and a vast wrinkled brow--that at last he had to
+be paddled ignominiously by Margaret, while Altiora, after a phase of
+rigid discretion, as nearly as possible drowned herself--and me no doubt
+into the bargain--with a sudden lateral gesture of the arm to emphasise
+the high note with which she dismissed the efficiency of the Charity
+Organisation Society. We shipped about an inch of water and sat in it
+for the rest of the time, an inconvenience she disregarded heroically.
+We had difficulties in landing Oscar from his frail craft upon the ait
+of our feasting,--he didn't balance sideways and was much alarmed, and
+afterwards, as Margaret had a pain in her back, I took him in my canoe,
+let him hide his shame with an ineffectual but not positively harmful
+paddle, and towed the other by means of the joined painters. Still it
+was the fault of the inadequate information supplied in the books and
+not of Altiora that that was not the date of my betrothal.
+
+I find it not a little difficult to state what kept me back from
+proposing marriage to Margaret that summer, and what urged me forward
+at last to marry her. It is so much easier to remember one's resolutions
+than to remember the moods and suggestions that produced them.
+
+Marrying and getting married was, I think, a pretty simple affair to
+Altiora; it was something that happened to the adolescent and unmarried
+when you threw them together under the circumstances of health, warmth
+and leisure. It happened with the kindly and approving smiles of the
+more experienced elders who had organised these proximities. The young
+people married, settled down, children ensued, and father and mother
+turned their minds, now decently and properly disillusioned, to other
+things. That to Altiora was the normal sexual life, and she believed it
+to be the quality of the great bulk of the life about her.
+
+One of the great barriers to human understanding is the wide
+temperamental difference one finds in the values of things relating to
+sex. It is the issue upon which people most need training in charity and
+imaginative sympathy. Here are no universal standards at all, and indeed
+for no single man nor woman does there seem to be any fixed standard, so
+much do the accidents of circumstances and one's physical phases affect
+one's interpretations. There is nothing in the whole range of sexual
+fact that may not seem supremely beautiful or humanly jolly or
+magnificently wicked or disgusting or trivial or utterly insignificant,
+according to the eye that sees or the mood that colours. Here is
+something that may fill the skies and every waking hour or be almost
+completely banished from a life. It may be everything on Monday and less
+than nothing on Saturday. And we make our laws and rules as though in
+these matters all men and women were commensurable one with another,
+with an equal steadfast passion and an equal constant duty....
+
+I don't know what dreams Altiora may have had in her schoolroom days, I
+always suspected her of suppressed and forgotten phases, but certainly
+her general effect now was of an entirely passionless worldliness in
+these matters. Indeed so far as I could get at her, she regarded sexual
+passion as being hardly more legitimate in a civilised person than--let
+us say--homicidal mania. She must have forgotten--and Bailey too. I
+suspect she forgot before she married him. I don't suppose either of
+them had the slightest intimation of the dimensions sexual love can take
+in the thoughts of the great majority of people with whom they come in
+contact. They loved in their way--an intellectual way it was and a fond
+way--but it had no relation to beauty and physical sensation--except
+that there seemed a decree of exile against these things. They got their
+glow in high moments of altruistic ambition--and in moments of vivid
+worldly success. They sat at opposite ends of their dinner table with so
+and so “captured,” and so and so, flushed with a mutual approval. They
+saw people in love forgetful and distraught about them, and just put it
+down to forgetfulness and distraction. At any rate Altiora manifestly
+viewed my situation and Margaret's with an abnormal and entirely
+misleading simplicity. There was the girl, rich, with an acceptable
+claim to be beautiful, shiningly virtuous, quite capable of political
+interests, and there was I, talented, ambitious and full of
+political and social passion, in need of just the money, devotion and
+regularisation Margaret could provide. We were both unmarried--white
+sheets of uninscribed paper. Was there ever a simpler situation? What
+more could we possibly want?
+
+She was even a little offended at the inconclusiveness that did not
+settle things at Pangbourne. I seemed to her, I suspect, to reflect upon
+her judgment and good intentions.
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+I didn't see things with Altiora's simplicity.
+
+I admired Margaret very much, I was fully aware of all that she and I
+might give each other; indeed so far as Altiora went we were quite in
+agreement. But what seemed solid ground to Altiora and the ultimate
+footing of her emasculated world, was to me just the superficial
+covering of a gulf--oh! abysses of vague and dim, and yet stupendously
+significant things.
+
+I couldn't dismiss the interests and the passion of sex as Altiora did.
+Work, I agreed, was important; career and success; but deep unanalysable
+instincts told me this preoccupation was a thing quite as important;
+dangerous, interfering, destructive indeed, but none the less a
+dominating interest in life. I have told how flittingly and uninvited it
+came like a moth from the outer twilight into my life, how it grew in me
+with my manhood, how it found its way to speech and grew daring, and led
+me at last to experience. After that adventure at Locarno sex and the
+interests and desires of sex never left me for long at peace. I went on
+with my work and my career, and all the time it was like--like someone
+talking ever and again in a room while one tries to write.
+
+There were times when I could have wished the world a world all of men,
+so greatly did this unassimilated series of motives and curiosities
+hamper me; and times when I could have wished the world all of women.
+I seemed always to be seeking something in women, in girls, and I
+was never clear what it was I was seeking. But never--even at my
+coarsest--was I moved by physical desire alone. Was I seeking help and
+fellowship? Was I seeking some intimacy with beauty? It was a thing too
+formless to state, that I seemed always desiring to attain and never
+attaining. Waves of gross sensuousness arose out of this preoccupation,
+carried me to a crisis of gratification or disappointment that was
+clearly not the needed thing; they passed and left my mind free again
+for a time to get on with the permanent pursuits of my life. And then
+presently this solicitude would have me again, an irrelevance as it
+seemed, and yet a constantly recurring demand.
+
+I don't want particularly to dwell upon things that are disagreeable
+for others to read, but I cannot leave them out of my story and get the
+right proportions of the forces I am balancing. I was no abnormal man,
+and that world of order we desire to make must be built of such stuff as
+I was and am and can beget. You cannot have a world of Baileys; it would
+end in one orderly generation. Humanity is begotten in Desire, lives by
+Desire.
+
+
+     “Love which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb;
+      Love which is lust, is the Call from the Gloom.”
+
+
+I echo Henley.
+
+I suppose the life of celibacy which the active, well-fed,
+well-exercised and imaginatively stirred young man of the educated
+classes is supposed to lead from the age of nineteen or twenty,
+when Nature certainly meant him to marry, to thirty or more, when
+civilisation permits him to do so, is the most impossible thing in the
+world. We deal here with facts that are kept secret and obscure, but
+I doubt for my own part if more than one man out of five in our class
+satisfies that ideal demand. The rest are even as I was, and Hatherleigh
+and Esmeer and all the men I knew. I draw no lessons and offer no
+panacea; I have to tell the quality of life, and this is how it is. This
+is how it will remain until men and women have the courage to face the
+facts of life.
+
+I was no systematic libertine, you must understand; things happened to
+me and desire drove me. Any young man would have served for that Locarno
+adventure, and after that what had been a mystic and wonderful thing
+passed rapidly into a gross, manifestly misdirected and complicating
+one. I can count a meagre tale of five illicit loves in the days of my
+youth, to include that first experience, and of them all only two were
+sustained relationships. Besides these five “affairs,” on one or two
+occasions I dipped so low as the inky dismal sensuality of the streets,
+and made one of those pairs of correlated figures, the woman in her
+squalid finery sailing homeward, the man modestly aloof and behind, that
+every night in the London year flit by the score of thousands across the
+sight of the observant....
+
+How ugly it is to recall; ugly and shameful now without qualification!
+Yet at the time there was surely something not altogether ugly in
+it--something that has vanished, some fine thing mortally ailing.
+
+One such occasion I recall as if it were a vision deep down in a pit,
+as if it had happened in another state of existence to someone else. And
+yet it is the sort of thing that has happened, once or twice at least,
+to half the men in London who have been in a position to make it
+possible. Let me try and give you its peculiar effect. Man or woman, you
+ought to know of it.
+
+Figure to yourself a dingy room, somewhere in that network of streets
+that lies about Tottenham Court Road, a dingy bedroom lit by a solitary
+candle and carpeted with scraps and patches, with curtains of cretonne
+closing the window, and a tawdry ornament of paper in the grate. I sit
+on a bed beside a weary-eyed, fair-haired, sturdy young woman, half
+undressed, who is telling me in broken German something that my
+knowledge of German is at first inadequate to understand....
+
+I thought she was boasting about her family, and then slowly the meaning
+came to me. She was a Lett from near Libau in Courland, and she was
+telling me--just as one tells something too strange for comment or
+emotion--how her father had been shot and her sister outraged and
+murdered before her eyes.
+
+It was as if one had dipped into something primordial and stupendous
+beneath the smooth and trivial surfaces of life. There was I, you know,
+the promising young don from Cambridge, who wrote quite brilliantly
+about politics and might presently get into Parliament, with my collar
+and tie in my hand, and a certain sense of shameful adventure fading out
+of my mind.
+
+“Ach Gott!” she sighed by way of comment, and mused deeply for a
+moment before she turned her face to me, as to something forgotten and
+remembered, and assumed the half-hearted meretricious smile.
+
+“Bin ich eine hubsche?” she asked like one who repeats a lesson.
+
+I was moved to crave her pardon and come away.
+
+“Bin ich eine hubsche?” she asked a little anxiously, laying a detaining
+hand upon me, and evidently not understanding a word of what I was
+striving to say.
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+I find it extraordinarily difficult to recall the phases by which
+I passed from my first admiration of Margaret's earnestness and
+unconscious daintiness to an intimate acquaintance. The earlier
+encounters stand out clear and hard, but then the impressions become
+crowded and mingle not only with each other but with all the subsequent
+developments of relationship, the enormous evolutions of interpretation
+and comprehension between husband and wife. Dipping into my memories is
+like dipping into a ragbag, one brings out this memory or that, with no
+intimation of how they came in time or what led to them and joined them
+together. And they are all mixed up with subsequent associations,
+with sympathies and discords, habits of intercourse, surprises and
+disappointments and discovered misunderstandings. I know only that
+always my feelings for Margaret were complicated feelings, woven of many
+and various strands.
+
+It is one of the curious neglected aspects of life how at the same time
+and in relation to the same reality we can have in our minds streams of
+thought at quite different levels. We can be at the same time idealising
+a person and seeing and criticising that person quite coldly and
+clearly, and we slip unconsciously from level to level and produce
+all sorts of inconsistent acts. In a sense I had no illusions about
+Margaret; in a sense my conception of Margaret was entirely poetic
+illusion. I don't think I was ever blind to certain defects of hers, and
+quite as certainly they didn't seem to matter in the slightest degree.
+Her mind had a curious want of vigour, “flatness” is the only word; she
+never seemed to escape from her phrase; her way of thinking, her way of
+doing was indecisive; she remained in her attitude, it did not flow out
+to easy, confirmatory action.
+
+I saw this quite clearly, and when we walked and talked together I
+seemed always trying for animation in her and never finding it. I would
+state my ideas. “I know,” she would say, “I know.”
+
+I talked about myself and she listened wonderfully, but she made no
+answering revelations. I talked politics, and she remarked with her blue
+eyes wide and earnest: “Every WORD you say seems so just.”
+
+I admired her appearance tremendously but--I can only express it by
+saying I didn't want to touch her. Her fair hair was always delectably
+done. It flowed beautifully over her pretty small ears, and she would
+tie its fair coilings with fillets of black or blue velvet that carried
+pretty buckles of silver and paste. The light, the faint down on her
+brow and cheek was delightful. And it was clear to me that I made her
+happy.
+
+My sense of her deficiencies didn't stand in the way of my falling at
+last very deeply in love with her. Her very shortcomings seemed to offer
+me something....
+
+She stood in my mind for goodness--and for things from which it seemed
+to me my hold was slipping.
+
+She seemed to promise a way of escape from the deepening opposition in
+me between physical passions and the constructive career, the career
+of wide aims and human service, upon which I had embarked. All the time
+that I was seeing her as a beautiful, fragile, rather ineffective girl,
+I was also seeing her just as consciously as a shining slender figure,
+a radiant reconciliation, coming into my darkling disorders of lust and
+impulse. I could understand clearly that she was incapable of the most
+necessary subtleties of political thought, and yet I could contemplate
+praying to her and putting all the intricate troubles of my life at her
+feet.
+
+Before the reappearance of Margaret in my world at all an unwonted
+disgust with the consequences and quality of my passions had arisen in
+my mind. Among other things that moment with the Lettish girl haunted
+me persistently. I would see myself again and again sitting amidst those
+sluttish surroundings, collar and tie in hand, while her heavy German
+words grouped themselves to a slowly apprehended meaning. I would
+feel again with a fresh stab of remorse, that this was not a flash of
+adventure, this was not seeing life in any permissible sense, but a dip
+into tragedy, dishonour, hideous degradation, and the pitiless cruelty
+of a world as yet uncontrolled by any ordered will.
+
+“Good God!” I put it to myself, “that I should finish the work those
+Cossacks had begun! I who want order and justice before everything!
+There's no way out of it, no decent excuse! If I didn't think, I ought
+to have thought!”...
+
+“How did I get to it?”... I would ransack the phases of my development
+from the first shy unveiling of a hidden wonder to the last extremity as
+a man will go through muddled account books to find some disorganising
+error....
+
+I was also involved at that time--I find it hard to place these things
+in the exact order of their dates because they were so disconnected
+with the regular progress of my work and life--in an intrigue, a clumsy,
+sensuous, pretentious, artificially stimulated intrigue, with a Mrs.
+Larrimer, a woman living separated from her husband. I will not go
+into particulars of that episode, nor how we quarrelled and chafed one
+another. She was at once unfaithful and jealous and full of whims
+about our meetings; she was careless of our secret, and vulgarised our
+relationship by intolerable interpretations; except for some glowing
+moments of gratification, except for the recurrent and essentially
+vicious desire that drew us back to each other again, we both fretted at
+a vexatious and unexpectedly binding intimacy. The interim was full
+of the quality of work delayed, of time and energy wasted, of insecure
+precautions against scandal and exposure. Disappointment is almost
+inherent in illicit love. I had, and perhaps it was part of her
+recurrent irritation also, a feeling as though one had followed
+something fine and beautiful into a net--into bird lime! These furtive
+scuffles, this sneaking into shabby houses of assignation, was what we
+had made out of the suggestion of pagan beauty; this was the reality
+of our vision of nymphs and satyrs dancing for the joy of life amidst
+incessant sunshine. We had laid hands upon the wonder and glory of
+bodily love and wasted them....
+
+It was the sense of waste, of finely beautiful possibilities getting
+entangled and marred for ever that oppressed me. I had missed, I had
+lost. I did not turn from these things after the fashion of the Baileys,
+as one turns from something low and embarrassing. I felt that these
+great organic forces were still to be wrought into a harmony with my
+constructive passion. I felt too that I was not doing it. I had not
+understood the forces in this struggle nor its nature, and as I learnt
+I failed. I had been started wrong, I had gone on wrong, in a world that
+was muddled and confused, full of false counsel and erratic shames and
+twisted temptations. I learnt to see it so by failures that were perhaps
+destroying any chance of profit in my lessons. Moods of clear keen
+industry alternated with moods of relapse and indulgence and moods of
+dubiety and remorse. I was not going on as the Baileys thought I was
+going on. There were times when the blindness of the Baileys irritated
+me intensely. Beneath the ostensible success of those years, between
+twenty-three and twenty-eight, this rottenness, known to scarcely
+any one but myself, grew and spread. My sense of the probability of
+a collapse intensified. I knew indeed now, even as Willersley had
+prophesied five years before, that I was entangling myself in something
+that might smother all my uses in the world. Down there among those
+incommunicable difficulties, I was puzzled and blundering. I was losing
+my hold upon things; the chaotic and adventurous element in life was
+spreading upward and getting the better of me, over-mastering me and all
+my will to rule and make.... And the strength, the drugging urgency of
+the passion!
+
+Margaret shone at times in my imagination like a radiant angel in a
+world of mire and disorder, in a world of cravings, hot and dull red
+like scars inflamed....
+
+I suppose it was because I had so great a need of such help as her
+whiteness proffered, that I could ascribe impossible perfections to
+her, a power of intellect, a moral power and patience to which she, poor
+fellow mortal, had indeed no claim. If only a few of us WERE angels and
+freed from the tangle of effort, how easy life might be! I wanted her so
+badly, so very badly, to be what I needed. I wanted a woman to save me.
+I forced myself to see her as I wished to see her. Her tepidities became
+infinite delicacies, her mental vagueness an atmospheric realism. The
+harsh precisions of the Baileys and Altiora's blunt directness threw up
+her fineness into relief and made a grace of every weakness.
+
+Mixed up with the memory of times when I talked with Margaret as one
+talks politely to those who are hopelessly inferior in mental quality,
+explaining with a false lucidity, welcoming and encouraging the feeblest
+response, when possible moulding and directing, are times when I did
+indeed, as the old phrase goes, worship the ground she trod on. I was
+equally honest and unconscious of inconsistency at each extreme. But in
+neither phase could I find it easy to make love to Margaret. For in the
+first I did not want to, though I talked abundantly to her of marriage
+and so forth, and was a little puzzled at myself for not going on to
+some personal application, and in the second she seemed inaccessible, I
+felt I must make confessions and put things before her that would be the
+grossest outrage upon the noble purity I attributed to her.
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+I went to Margaret at last to ask her to marry me, wrought up to the
+mood of one who stakes his life on a cast. Separated from her, and with
+the resonance of an evening of angry recriminations with Mrs. Larrimer
+echoing in my mind, I discovered myself to be quite passionately in
+love with Margaret. Last shreds of doubt vanished. It has always been a
+feature of our relationship that Margaret absent means more to me than
+Margaret present; her memory distils from its dross and purifies in
+me. All my criticisms and qualifications of her vanished into some dark
+corner of my mind. She was the lady of my salvation; I must win my way
+to her or perish.
+
+I went to her at last, for all that I knew she loved me, in passionate
+self-abasement, white and a-tremble. She was staying with the Rockleys
+at Woking, for Shena Rockley had been at Bennett Hall with her and they
+had resumed a close intimacy; and I went down to her on an impulse,
+unheralded. I was kept waiting for some minutes, I remember, in a little
+room upon which a conservatory opened, a conservatory full of pots
+of large mauve-edged, white cyclamens in flower. And there was a big
+lacquer cabinet, a Chinese thing, I suppose, of black and gold against
+the red-toned wall. To this day the thought of Margaret is inseparably
+bound up with the sight of a cyclamen's back-turned petals.
+
+She came in, looking pale and drooping rather more than usual. I
+suddenly realised that Altiora's hint of a disappointment leading to
+positive illness was something more than a vindictive comment. She
+closed the door and came across to me and took and dropped my hand and
+stood still. “What is it you want with me?” she asked.
+
+The speech I had been turning over and over in my mind on the way
+vanished at the sight of her.
+
+“I want to talk to you,” I answered lamely.
+
+For some seconds neither of us said a word.
+
+“I want to tell you things about my life,” I began.
+
+She answered with a scarcely audible “yes.”
+
+“I almost asked you to marry me at Pangbourne,” I plunged. “I didn't. I
+didn't because--because you had too much to give me.”
+
+“Too much!” she echoed, “to give you!” She had lifted her eyes to my
+face and the colour was coming into her cheeks.
+
+“Don't misunderstand me,” I said hastily. “I want to tell you things,
+things you don't know. Don't answer me. I want to tell you.”
+
+She stood before the fireplace with her ultimate answer shining through
+the quiet of her face. “Go on,” she said, very softly. It was so
+pitilessly manifest she was resolved to idealise the situation whatever
+I might say. I began walking up and down the room between those
+cyclamens and the cabinet. There were little gold fishermen on the
+cabinet fishing from little islands that each had a pagoda and a tree,
+and there were also men in boats or something, I couldn't determine
+what, and some obscure sub-office in my mind concerned itself with that
+quite intently. Yet I seem to have been striving with all my being
+to get words for the truth of things. “You see,” I emerged, “you make
+everything possible to me. You can give me help and sympathy, support,
+understanding. You know my political ambitions. You know all that I
+might do in the world. I do so intensely want to do constructive things,
+big things perhaps, in this wild jumble.... Only you don't know a bit
+what I am. I want to tell you what I am. I'm complex.... I'm streaked.”
+
+I glanced at her, and she was regarding me with an expression of
+blissful disregard for any meaning I was seeking to convey.
+
+“You see,” I said, “I'm a bad man.”
+
+She sounded a note of valiant incredulity.
+
+Everything seemed to be slipping away from me. I pushed on to the ugly
+facts that remained over from the wreck of my interpretation. “What
+has held me back,” I said, “is the thought that you could not possibly
+understand certain things in my life. Men are not pure as women are. I
+have had love affairs. I mean I have had affairs. Passion--desire. You
+see, I have had a mistress, I have been entangled--”
+
+She seemed about to speak, but I interrupted. “I'm not telling you,” I
+said, “what I meant to tell you. I want you to know clearly that there
+is another side to my life, a dirty side. Deliberately I say, dirty. It
+didn't seem so at first--”
+
+I stopped blankly. “Dirty,” I thought, was the most idiotic choice of
+words to have made.
+
+I had never in any tolerable sense of the word been dirty.
+
+“I drifted into this--as men do,” I said after a little pause and
+stopped again.
+
+She was looking at me with her wide blue eyes.
+
+“Did you imagine,” she began, “that I thought you--that I expected--”
+
+“But how can you know?”
+
+“I know. I do know.”
+
+“But--” I began.
+
+“I know,” she persisted, dropping her eyelids. “Of course I know,” and
+nothing could have convinced me more completely that she did not know.
+
+“All men--” she generalised. “A woman does not understand these
+temptations.”
+
+I was astonished beyond measure at her way of taking my confession. ...
+
+“Of course,” she said, hesitating a little over a transparent
+difficulty, “it is all over and past.”
+
+“It's all over and past,” I answered.
+
+There was a little pause.
+
+“I don't want to know,” she said. “None of that seems to matter now in
+the slightest degree.”
+
+She looked up and smiled as though we had exchanged some acceptable
+commonplaces. “Poor dear!” she said, dismissing everything, and put out
+her arms, and it seemed to me that I could hear the Lettish girl in
+the background--doomed safety valve of purity in this intolerable
+world--telling something in indistinguishable German--I know not what
+nor why....
+
+I took Margaret in my arms and kissed her. Her eyes were wet with tears.
+She clung to me and was near, I felt, to sobbing.
+
+“I have loved you,” she whispered presently, “Oh! ever since we met in
+Misterton--six years and more ago.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ MARGARET IN VENICE
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+There comes into my mind a confused memory of conversations with
+Margaret; we must have had dozens altogether, and they mix in now for
+the most part inextricably not only with one another, but with later
+talks and with things we discussed at Pangbourne. We had the immensest
+anticipations of the years and opportunities that lay before us. I was
+now very deeply in love with her indeed. I felt not that I had cleaned
+up my life but that she had. We called each other “confederate” I
+remember, and made during our brief engagement a series of visits to the
+various legislative bodies in London, the County Council, the House of
+Commons, where we dined with Villiers, and the St. Pancras Vestry, where
+we heard Shaw speaking. I was full of plans and so was she of the way
+in which we were to live and work. We were to pay back in public service
+whatever excess of wealth beyond his merits old Seddon's economic
+advantage had won for him from the toiling people in the potteries. The
+end of the Boer War was so recent that that blessed word “efficiency”
+ echoed still in people's minds and thoughts. Lord Roseberry in a
+memorable oration had put it into the heads of the big outer public, but
+the Baileys with a certain show of justice claimed to have set it going
+in the channels that took it to him--if as a matter of fact it was taken
+to him. But then it was their habit to make claims of that sort. They
+certainly did their share to keep “efficient” going. Altiora's
+highest praise was “thoroughly efficient.” We were to be a “thoroughly
+efficient” political couple of the “new type.” She explained us to
+herself and Oscar, she explained us to ourselves, she explained us to
+the people who came to her dinners and afternoons until the world was
+highly charged with explanation and expectation, and the proposal that I
+should be the Liberal candidate for the Kinghamstead Division seemed the
+most natural development in the world.
+
+I was full of the ideal of hard restrained living and relentless
+activity, and throughout a beautiful November at Venice, where chiefly
+we spent our honeymoon, we turned over and over again and discussed in
+every aspect our conception of a life tremendously focussed upon the
+ideal of social service.
+
+Most clearly there stands out a picture of ourselves talking in a
+gondola on our way to Torcella. Far away behind us the smoke of Murano
+forms a black stain upon an immense shining prospect of smooth water,
+water as unruffled and luminous as the sky above, a mirror on which rows
+of posts and distant black high-stemmed, swan-necked boats with their
+minutely clear swinging gondoliers, float aerially. Remote and low
+before us rises the little tower of our destination. Our men swing
+together and their oars swirl leisurely through the water, hump back in
+the rowlocks, splash sharply and go swishing back again. Margaret lies
+back on cushions, with her face shaded by a holland parasol, and I sit
+up beside her.
+
+“You see,” I say, and in spite of Margaret's note of perfect
+acquiescence I feel myself reasoning against an indefinable antagonism,
+“it is so easy to fall into a slack way with life. There may seem to be
+something priggish in a meticulous discipline, but otherwise it is
+so easy to slip into indolent habits--and to be distracted from one's
+purpose. The country, the world, wants men to serve its constructive
+needs, to work out and carry out plans. For a man who has to make a
+living the enemy is immediate necessity; for people like ourselves
+it's--it's the constant small opportunity of agreeable things.”
+
+“Frittering away,” she says, “time and strength.”
+
+“That is what I feel. It's so pleasant to pretend one is simply modest,
+it looks so foolish at times to take one's self too seriously. We've GOT
+to take ourselves seriously.”
+
+She endorses my words with her eyes.
+
+“I feel I can do great things with life.”
+
+“I KNOW you can.”
+
+“But that's only to be done by concentrating one's life upon one main
+end. We have to plan our days, to make everything subserve our scheme.”
+
+“I feel,” she answers softly, “we ought to give--every hour.”
+
+Her face becomes dreamy. “I WANT to give every hour,” she adds.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+That holiday in Venice is set in my memory like a little artificial lake
+in uneven confused country, as something very bright and skylike, and
+discontinuous with all about it. The faded quality of the very sunshine
+of that season, the mellow discoloured palaces and places, the huge,
+time-ripened paintings of departed splendours, the whispering, nearly
+noiseless passage of hearse-black gondolas, for the horrible steam
+launch had not yet ruined Venice, the stilled magnificences of the
+depopulated lagoons, the universal autumn, made me feel altogether in
+recess from the teeming uproars of reality. There was not a dozen people
+all told, no Americans and scarcely any English, to dine in the big
+cavern of a dining-room, with its vistas of separate tables, its
+distempered walls and its swathed chandeliers. We went about seeing
+beautiful things, accepting beauty on every hand, and taking it for
+granted that all was well with ourselves and the world. It was ten days
+or a fortnight before I became fretful and anxious for action; a long
+tranquillity for such a temperament as mine.
+
+Our pleasures were curiously impersonal, a succession of shared
+aesthetic appreciation threads all that time. Our honeymoon was no
+exultant coming together, no mutual shout of “YOU!” We were almost shy
+with one another, and felt the relief of even a picture to help us
+out. It was entirely in my conception of things that I should be very
+watchful not to shock or distress Margaret or press the sensuous note.
+Our love-making had much of the tepid smoothness of the lagoons.
+We talked in delicate innuendo of what should be glorious freedoms.
+Margaret had missed Verona and Venice in her previous Italian
+journey--fear of the mosquito had driven her mother across Italy to the
+westward route--and now she could fill up her gaps and see the Titians
+and Paul Veroneses she already knew in colourless photographs, the
+Carpaccios, (the St. George series delighted her beyond measure,)
+the Basaitis and that great statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni that Ruskin
+praised.
+
+But since I am not a man to look at pictures and architectural effects
+day after day, I did watch Margaret very closely and store a thousand
+memories of her. I can see her now, her long body drooping a little
+forward, her sweet face upraised to some discovered familiar masterpiece
+and shining with a delicate enthusiasm. I can hear again the soft
+cadences of her voice murmuring commonplace comments, for she had no
+gift of expressing the shapeless satisfaction these things gave her.
+
+Margaret, I perceived, was a cultivated person, the first cultivated
+person with whom I had ever come into close contact. She was cultivated
+and moral, and I, I now realise, was never either of these things. She
+was passive, and I am active. She did not simply and naturally look
+for beauty but she had been incited to look for it at school, and took
+perhaps a keener interest in books and lectures and all the organisation
+of beautiful things than she did in beauty itself; she found much of her
+delight in being guided to it. Now a thing ceases to be beautiful to me
+when some finger points me out its merits. Beauty is the salt of life,
+but I take my beauty as a wild beast gets its salt, as a constituent of
+the meal....
+
+And besides, there was that between us that should have seemed more
+beautiful than any picture....
+
+So we went about Venice tracking down pictures and spiral staircases and
+such-like things, and my brains were busy all the time with such things
+as a comparison of Venice and its nearest modern equivalent, New York,
+with the elaboration of schemes of action when we returned to London,
+with the development of a theory of Margaret.
+
+Our marriage had done this much at least, that it had fused and
+destroyed those two independent ways of thinking about her that had gone
+on in my mind hitherto. Suddenly she had become very near to me, and a
+very big thing, a sort of comprehensive generalisation behind a thousand
+questions, like the sky or England. The judgments and understandings
+that had worked when she was, so to speak, miles away from my life,
+had now to be altogether revised. Trifling things began to matter
+enormously, that she had a weak and easily fatigued back, for example,
+or that when she knitted her brows and stammered a little in talking,
+it didn't really mean that an exquisite significance struggled for
+utterance.
+
+We visited pictures in the mornings chiefly. In the afternoon, unless we
+were making a day-long excursion in a gondola, Margaret would rest for
+an hour while I prowled about in search of English newspapers, and then
+we would go to tea in the Piazza San Marco and watch the drift of people
+feeding the pigeons and going into the little doors beneath the sunlit
+arches and domes of Saint Mark's. Then perhaps we would stroll on the
+Piazzetta, or go out into the sunset in a gondola. Margaret became very
+interested in the shops that abound under the colonnades and decided at
+last to make an extensive purchase of table glass. “These things,” she
+said, “are quite beautiful, and far cheaper than anything but the most
+ordinary looking English ware.” I was interested in her idea, and a good
+deal charmed by the delightful qualities of tinted shape, slender handle
+and twisted stem. I suggested we should get not simply tumblers
+and wineglasses but bedroom waterbottles, fruit- and sweet-dishes,
+water-jugs, and in the end we made quite a business-like afternoon of
+it.
+
+I was beginning now to long quite definitely for events. Energy was
+accumulating in me, and worrying me for an outlet. I found the TIMES and
+the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the other papers I managed to get hold of, more
+and more stimulating. I nearly wrote to the former paper one day in
+answer to a letter by Lord Grimthorpe--I forget now upon what point.
+I chafed secretly against this life of tranquil appreciations more and
+more. I found my attitudes of restrained and delicate affection for
+Margaret increasingly difficult to sustain. I surprised myself and her
+by little gusts of irritability, gusts like the catspaws before a gale.
+I was alarmed at these symptoms.
+
+One night when Margaret had gone up to her room, I put on a light
+overcoat, went out into the night and prowled for a long time through
+the narrow streets, smoking and thinking. I returned and went and sat on
+the edge of her bed to talk to her.
+
+“Look here, Margaret,” I said; “this is all very well, but I'm
+restless.”
+
+“Restless!” she said with a faint surprise in her voice.
+
+“Yes. I think I want exercise. I've got a sort of feeling--I've never
+had it before--as though I was getting fat.”
+
+“My dear!” she cried.
+
+“I want to do things;--ride horses, climb mountains, take the devil out
+of myself.”
+
+She watched me thoughtfully.
+
+“Couldn't we DO something?” she said.
+
+Do what?
+
+“I don't know. Couldn't we perhaps go away from here soon--and walk in
+the mountains--on our way home.”
+
+I thought. “There seems to be no exercise at all in this place.”
+
+“Isn't there some walk?”
+
+“I wonder,” I answered. “We might walk to Chioggia perhaps, along
+the Lido.” And we tried that, but the long stretch of beach fatigued
+Margaret's back, and gave her blisters, and we never got beyond
+Malamocco....
+
+A day or so after we went out to those pleasant black-robed, bearded
+Armenians in their monastery at Saint Lazzaro, and returned towards
+sundown. We fell into silence. “PIU LENTO,” said Margaret to the
+gondolier, and released my accumulated resolution.
+
+“Let us go back to London,” I said abruptly.
+
+Margaret looked at me with surprised blue eyes.
+
+“This is beautiful beyond measure, you know,” I said, sticking to my
+point, “but I have work to do.”
+
+She was silent for some seconds. “I had forgotten,” she said.
+
+“So had I,” I sympathised, and took her hand. “Suddenly I have
+remembered.”
+
+She remained quite still. “There is so much to be done,” I said, almost
+apologetically.
+
+She looked long away from me across the lagoon and at last sighed, like
+one who has drunk deeply, and turned to me.
+
+“I suppose one ought not to be so happy,” she said. “Everything has been
+so beautiful and so simple and splendid. And clean. It has been just
+With You--the time of my life. It's a pity such things must end. But
+the world is calling you, dear.... I ought not to have forgotten it. I
+thought you were resting--and thinking. But if you are rested.--Would
+you like us to start to-morrow?”
+
+She looked at once so fragile and so devoted that on the spur of the
+moment I relented, and we stayed in Venice four more days.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+Margaret had already taken a little house in Radnor Square, Westminster,
+before our marriage, a house that seemed particularly adaptable to our
+needs as public-spirited efficients; it had been very pleasantly painted
+and papered under Margaret's instructions, white paint and clean open
+purples and green predominating, and now we set to work at once upon
+the interesting business of arranging and--with our Venetian glass as a
+beginning--furnishing it. We had been fairly fortunate with our wedding
+presents, and for the most part it was open to us to choose just exactly
+what we would have and just precisely where we would put it.
+
+Margaret had a sense of form and colour altogether superior to mine, and
+so quite apart from the fact that it was her money equipped us, I stood
+aside from all these matters and obeyed her summons to a consultation
+only to endorse her judgment very readily. Until everything was settled
+I went every day to my old rooms in Vincent Square and worked at a
+series of papers that were originally intended for the FORTNIGHTLY
+REVIEW, the papers that afterwards became my fourth book, “New Aspects
+of Liberalism.”
+
+I still remember as delightful most of the circumstances of getting
+into 79, Radnor Square. The thin flavour of indecision about Margaret
+disappeared altogether in a shop; she had the precisest ideas of what
+she wanted, and the devices of the salesman did not sway her. It was
+very pleasant to find her taking things out of my hands with a certain
+masterfulness, and showing the distinctest determination to make a
+house in which I should be able to work in that great project of “doing
+something for the world.”
+
+“And I do want to make things pretty about us,” she said. “You don't
+think it wrong to have things pretty?”
+
+“I want them so.”
+
+“Altiora has things hard.”
+
+“Altiora,” I answered, “takes a pride in standing ugly and uncomfortable
+things. But I don't see that they help her. Anyhow they won't help me.”
+
+So Margaret went to the best shops and got everything very simple and
+very good. She bought some pictures very well indeed; there was a little
+Sussex landscape, full of wind and sunshine, by Nicholson, for my study,
+that hit my taste far better than if I had gone out to get some such
+expression for myself.
+
+“We will buy a picture just now and then,” she said, “sometimes--when we
+see one.”
+
+I would come back through the January mire or fog from Vincent Square to
+the door of 79, and reach it at last with a quite childish appreciation
+of the fact that its solid Georgian proportions and its fine brass
+furnishings belonged to MY home; I would use my latchkey and discover
+Margaret in the warm-lit, spacious hall with a partially opened
+packing-case, fatigued but happy, or go up to have tea with her out
+of the right tea things, “come at last,” or be told to notice what was
+fresh there. It wasn't simply that I had never had a house before, but
+I had really never been, except in the most transitory way, in any house
+that was nearly so delightful as mine promised to be. Everything was
+fresh and bright, and softly and harmoniously toned. Downstairs we had
+a green dining-room with gleaming silver, dark oak, and English
+colour-prints; above was a large drawing-room that could be made still
+larger by throwing open folding doors, and it was all carefully done in
+greys and blues, for the most part with real Sheraton supplemented by
+Sheraton so skilfully imitated by an expert Margaret had discovered as
+to be indistinguishable except to a minute scrutiny. And for me, above
+this and next to my bedroom, there was a roomy study, with specially
+thick stair-carpet outside and thick carpets in the bedroom overhead and
+a big old desk for me to sit at and work between fire and window, and
+another desk specially made for me by that expert if I chose to
+stand and write, and open bookshelves and bookcases and every sort of
+convenient fitting. There were electric heaters beside the open fire,
+and everything was put for me to make tea at any time--electric kettle,
+infuser, biscuits and fresh butter, so that I could get up and work at
+any hour of the day or night. I could do no work in this apartment for
+a long time, I was so interested in the perfection of its arrangements.
+And when I brought in my books and papers from Vincent Square, Margaret
+seized upon all the really shabby volumes and had them re-bound in a
+fine official-looking leather.
+
+I can remember sitting down at that desk and looking round me and
+feeling with a queer effect of surprise that after all even a place
+in the Cabinet, though infinitely remote, was nevertheless in the same
+large world with these fine and quietly expensive things.
+
+On the same floor Margaret had a “den,” a very neat and pretty den with
+good colour-prints of Botticellis and Carpaccios, and there was a third
+apartment for sectarial purposes should the necessity for them arise,
+with a severe-looking desk equipped with patent files. And Margaret
+would come flitting into the room to me, or appear noiselessly
+standing, a tall gracefully drooping form, in the wide open doorway. “Is
+everything right, dear?” she would ask.
+
+“Come in,” I would say, “I'm sorting out papers.”
+
+She would come to the hearthrug.
+
+“I mustn't disturb you,” she would remark.
+
+“I'm not busy yet.”
+
+“Things are getting into order. Then we must make out a time-table as
+the Baileys do, and BEGIN!”
+
+Altiora came in to see us once or twice, and a number of serious
+young wives known to Altiora called and were shown over the house, and
+discussed its arrangements with Margaret. They were all tremendously
+keen on efficient arrangements.
+
+“A little pretty,” said Altiora, with the faintest disapproval,
+“still--”
+
+It was clear she thought we should grow out of that. From the day of our
+return we found other people's houses open to us and eager for us. We
+went out of London for week-ends and dined out, and began discussing
+our projects for reciprocating these hospitalities. As a single man
+unattached, I had had a wide and miscellaneous social range, but now
+I found myself falling into place in a set. For a time I acquiesced
+in this. I went very little to my clubs, the Climax and the National
+Liberal, and participated in no bachelor dinners at all. For a time,
+too, I dropped out of the garrulous literary and journalistic circles I
+had frequented. I put up for the Reform, not so much for the use of the
+club as a sign of serious and substantial political standing. I didn't
+go up to Cambridge, I remember, for nearly a year, so occupied was I
+with my new adjustments.
+
+The people we found ourselves among at this time were people, to put
+it roughly, of the Parliamentary candidate class, or people already
+actually placed in the political world. They ranged between very
+considerable wealth and such a hard, bare independence as old Willersley
+and the sister who kept house for him possessed. There were quite
+a number of young couples like ourselves, a little younger and more
+artless, or a little older and more established. Among the younger men
+I had a sort of distinction because of my Cambridge reputation and my
+writing, and because, unlike them, I was an adventurer and had won and
+married my way into their circles instead of being naturally there. They
+couldn't quite reckon upon what I should do; they felt I had reserves of
+experience and incalculable traditions. Close to us were the Cramptons,
+Willie Crampton, who has since been Postmaster-General, rich and
+very important in Rockshire, and his younger brother Edward, who has
+specialised in history and become one of those unimaginative men of
+letters who are the glory of latter-day England. Then there was Lewis,
+further towards Kensington, where his cousins the Solomons and the
+Hartsteins lived, a brilliant representative of his race, able,
+industrious and invariably uninspired, with a wife a little in revolt
+against the racial tradition of feminine servitude and inclined to the
+suffragette point of view, and Bunting Harblow, an old blue, and with an
+erratic disposition well under the control of the able little cousin he
+had married. I had known all these men, but now (with Altiora floating
+angelically in benediction) they opened their hearts to me and took
+me into their order. They were all like myself, prospective Liberal
+candidates, with a feeling that the period of wandering in the
+wilderness of opposition was drawing near its close. They were all
+tremendously keen upon social and political service, and all greatly
+under the sway of the ideal of a simple, strenuous life, a life finding
+its satisfactions in political achievements and distinctions. The young
+wives were as keen about it as the young husbands, Margaret most of
+all, and I--whatever elements in me didn't march with the attitudes and
+habits of this set were very much in the background during that time.
+
+We would give little dinners and have evening gatherings at which
+everything was very simple and very good, with a slight but perceptible
+austerity, and there was more good fruit and flowers and less perhaps in
+the way of savouries, patties and entrees than was customary. Sherry we
+banished, and Marsala and liqueurs, and there was always good home-made
+lemonade available. No men waited, but very expert parlourmaids. Our
+meat was usually Welsh mutton--I don't know why, unless that mountains
+have ever been the last refuge of the severer virtues. And we talked
+politics and books and ideas and Bernard Shaw (who was a department by
+himself and supposed in those days to be ethically sound at bottom),
+and mingled with the intellectuals--I myself was, as it were, a promoted
+intellectual.
+
+The Cramptons had a tendency to read good things aloud on their less
+frequented receptions, but I have never been able to participate
+submissively in this hyper-digestion of written matter, and generally
+managed to provoke a disruptive debate. We were all very earnest to make
+the most of ourselves and to be and do, and I wonder still at times,
+with an unassuaged perplexity, how it is that in that phase of utmost
+earnestness I have always seemed to myself to be most remote from
+reality.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+I look back now across the detaching intervention of sixteen crowded
+years, critically and I fancy almost impartially, to those beginnings
+of my married life. I try to recall something near to their proper order
+the developing phases of relationship. I am struck most of all by the
+immense unpremeditated, generous-spirited insincerities upon which
+Margaret and I were building.
+
+It seems to me that here I have to tell perhaps the commonest experience
+of all among married educated people, the deliberate, shy, complex
+effort to fill the yawning gaps in temperament as they appear, the
+sustained, failing attempt to bridge abysses, level barriers, evade
+violent pressures. I have come these latter years of my life to believe
+that it is possible for a man and woman to be absolutely real with one
+another, to stand naked souled to each other, unashamed and unafraid,
+because of the natural all-glorifying love between them. It is possible
+to love and be loved untroubling, as a bird flies through the air. But
+it is a rare and intricate chance that brings two people within sight of
+that essential union, and for the majority marriage must adjust itself
+on other terms. Most coupled people never really look at one another.
+They look a little away to preconceived ideas. And each from the first
+days of love-making HIDES from the other, is afraid of disappointing,
+afraid of offending, afraid of discoveries in either sense. They build
+not solidly upon the rock of truth, but upon arches and pillars and
+queer provisional supports that are needed to make a common foundation,
+and below in the imprisoned darknesses, below the fine fabric they
+sustain together begins for each of them a cavernous hidden life. Down
+there things may be prowling that scarce ever peep out to consciousness
+except in the grey half-light of sleepless nights, passions that flash
+out for an instant in an angry glance and are seen no more, starved
+victims and beautiful dreams bricked up to die. For the most of us there
+is no jail delivery of those inner depths, and the life above goes on to
+its honourable end.
+
+I have told how I loved Margaret and how I came to marry her. Perhaps
+already unintentionally I have indicated the quality of the injustice
+our marriage did us both. There was no kindred between us and no
+understanding. We were drawn to one another by the unlikeness of our
+quality, by the things we misunderstood in each other. I know a score of
+couples who have married in that fashion.
+
+Modern conditions and modern ideas, and in particular the intenser and
+subtler perceptions of modern life, press more and more heavily upon a
+marriage tie whose fashion comes from an earlier and less discriminating
+time. When the wife was her husband's subordinate, meeting him simply
+and uncritically for simple ends, when marriage was a purely domestic
+relationship, leaving thought and the vivid things of life
+almost entirely to the unencumbered man, mental and temperamental
+incompatibilities mattered comparatively little. But now the wife,
+and particularly the loving childless wife, unpremeditatedly makes a
+relentless demand for a complete association, and the husband exacts
+unthought of delicacies of understanding and co-operation. These are
+stupendous demands. People not only think more fully and elaborately
+about life than they ever did before, but marriage obliges us to make
+that ever more accidented progress a three-legged race of carelessly
+assorted couples....
+
+Our very mental texture was different. I was rough-minded, to use the
+phrase of William James, primary and intuitive and illogical; she was
+tender-minded, logical, refined and secondary. She was loyal to
+pledge and persons, sentimental and faithful; I am loyal to ideas
+and instincts, emotional and scheming. My imagination moves in broad
+gestures; her's was delicate with a real dread of extravagance. My
+quality is sensuous and ruled by warm impulses; hers was discriminating
+and essentially inhibitory. I like the facts of the case and to mention
+everything; I like naked bodies and the jolly smells of things. She
+abounded in reservations, in circumlocutions and evasions, in keenly
+appreciated secondary points. Perhaps the reader knows that Tintoretto
+in the National Gallery, the Origin of the Milky Way. It is an admirable
+test of temperamental quality. In spite of my early training I have
+come to regard that picture as altogether delightful; to Margaret it
+has always been “needlessly offensive.” In that you have our fundamental
+breach. She had a habit, by no means rare, of damning what she did not
+like or find sympathetic in me on the score that it was not my “true
+self,” and she did not so much accept the universe as select from it and
+do her best to ignore the rest. And also I had far more initiative than
+had she. This is no catalogue of rights and wrongs, or superiorities
+and inferiorities; it is a catalogue of differences between two people
+linked in a relationship that constantly becomes more intolerant of
+differences.
+
+This is how we stood to each other, and none of it was clear to either
+of us at the outset. To begin with, I found myself reserving myself
+from her, then slowly apprehending a jarring between our minds and
+what seemed to me at first a queer little habit of misunderstanding in
+her....
+
+It did not hinder my being very fond of her....
+
+Where our system of reservation became at once most usual and most
+astounding was in our personal relations. It is not too much to say that
+in that regard we never for a moment achieved sincerity with one another
+during the first six years of our life together. It goes even deeper
+than that, for in my effort to realise the ideal of my marriage I ceased
+even to attempt to be sincere with myself. I would not admit my own
+perceptions and interpretations. I tried to fit myself to her thinner
+and finer determinations. There are people who will say with a note
+of approval that I was learning to conquer myself. I record that much
+without any note of approval....
+
+For some years I never deceived Margaret about any concrete fact nor,
+except for the silence about my earlier life that she had almost forced
+upon me, did I hide any concrete fact that seemed to affect her, but
+from the outset I was guilty of immense spiritual concealments, my very
+marriage was based, I see now, on a spiritual subterfuge; I hid moods
+from her, pretended feelings....
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+The interest and excitement of setting-up a house, of walking about
+it from room to room and from floor to floor, or sitting at one's own
+dinner table and watching one's wife control conversation with a pretty,
+timid resolution, of taking a place among the secure and free people of
+our world, passed almost insensibly into the interest and excitement
+of my Parliamentary candidature for the Kinghamstead Division, that
+shapeless chunk of agricultural midland between the Great Western and
+the North Western railways. I was going to “take hold” at last, the
+Kinghamstead Division was my appointed handle. I was to find my place in
+the rather indistinctly sketched constructions that were implicit in the
+minds of all our circle. The precise place I had to fill and the precise
+functions I had to discharge were not as yet very clear, but all that,
+we felt sure, would become plain as things developed.
+
+A few brief months of vague activities of “nursing” gave place to
+the excitements of the contest that followed the return of Mr.
+Camphell-Bannerman to power in 1905. So far as the Kinghamstead Division
+was concerned it was a depressed and tepid battle. I went about the
+constituency making three speeches that were soon threadbare, and an
+odd little collection of people worked for me; two solicitors, a cheap
+photographer, a democratic parson, a number of dissenting ministers, the
+Mayor of Kinghamstead, a Mrs. Bulger, the widow of an old Chartist who
+had grown rich through electric traction patents, Sir Roderick Newton,
+a Jew who had bought Calersham Castle, and old Sir Graham Rivers, that
+sturdy old soldier, were among my chief supporters. We had headquarters
+in each town and village, mostly there were empty shops we leased
+temporarily, and there at least a sort of fuss and a coming and going
+were maintained. The rest of the population stared in a state of
+suspended judgment as we went about the business. The country was
+supposed to be in a state of intellectual conflict and deliberate
+decision, in history it will no doubt figure as a momentous conflict.
+Yet except for an occasional flare of bill-sticking or a bill in a
+window or a placard-plastered motor-car or an argumentative group
+of people outside a public-house or a sluggish movement towards the
+schoolroom or village hall, there was scarcely a sign that a great
+empire was revising its destinies. Now and then one saw a canvasser on
+a doorstep. For the most part people went about their business with an
+entirely irresponsible confidence in the stability of the universe. At
+times one felt a little absurd with one's flutter of colours and one's
+air of saving the country.
+
+My opponent was a quite undistinguished Major-General who relied upon
+his advocacy of Protection, and was particularly anxious we should avoid
+“personalities” and fight the constituency in a gentlemanly spirit. He
+was always writing me notes, apologising for excesses on the part of his
+supporters, or pointing out the undesirability of some course taken by
+mine.
+
+My speeches had been planned upon broad lines, but they lost touch with
+these as the polling approached. To begin with I made a real attempt
+to put what was in my mind before the people I was to supply with
+a political voice. I spoke of the greatness of our empire and its
+destinies, of the splendid projects and possibilities of life and order
+that lay before the world, of all that a resolute and constructive
+effort might do at the present time. “We are building a state,” I said,
+“secure and splendid, we are in the dawn of the great age of mankind.”
+ Sometimes that would get a solitary “'Ear! 'ear!” Then having created,
+as I imagined, a fine atmosphere, I turned upon the history of the last
+Conservative administration and brought it into contrast with the wide
+occasions of the age; discussed its failure to control the grasping
+financiers in South Africa, its failure to release public education from
+sectarian squabbles, its misconduct of the Boer War, its waste of the
+world's resources....
+
+It soon became manifest that my opening and my general spaciousness of
+method bored my audiences a good deal. The richer and wider my phrases
+the thinner sounded my voice in these non-resonating gatherings. Even
+the platform supporters grew restive unconsciously, and stirred and
+coughed. They did not recognise themselves as mankind. Building an
+empire, preparing a fresh stage in the history of humanity, had no
+appeal for them. They were mostly everyday, toiling people, full of
+small personal solicitudes, and they came to my meetings, I think, very
+largely as a relaxation. This stuff was not relaxing. They did not think
+politics was a great constructive process, they thought it was a kind
+of dog-fight. They wanted fun, they wanted spice, they wanted hits,
+they wanted also a chance to say “'Ear', 'ear!” in an intelligent and
+honourable manner and clap their hands and drum with their feet. The
+great constructive process in history gives so little scope for clapping
+and drumming and saying “'Ear, 'ear!” One might as well think of
+hounding on the solar system.
+
+So after one or two attempts to lift my audiences to the level of the
+issues involved, I began to adapt myself to them. I cut down my review
+of our imperial outlook and destinies more and more, and
+developed a series of hits and anecdotes and--what shall I call
+them?--“crudifications” of the issue. My helper's congratulated me on
+the rapid improvement of my platform style. I ceased to speak of the
+late Prime Minister with the respect I bore him, and began to fall in
+with the popular caricature of him as an artful rabbit-witted person
+intent only on keeping his leadership, in spite of the vigorous attempts
+of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain to oust him therefrom. I ceased to qualify my
+statement that Protection would make food dearer for the agricultural
+labourer. I began to speak of Mr. Alfred Lyttelton as an influence at
+once insane and diabolical, as a man inspired by a passionate desire
+to substitute manacled but still criminal Chinese for honest British
+labourers throughout the world. And when it came to the mention of our
+own kindly leader, of Mr. John Burns or any one else of any prominence
+at all on our side I fell more and more into the intonation of one who
+mentions the high gods. And I had my reward in brighter meetings and
+readier and readier applause.
+
+One goes on from phase to phase in these things.
+
+“After all,” I told myself, “if one wants to get to Westminster one must
+follow the road that leads there,” but I found the road nevertheless
+rather unexpectedly distasteful. “When one gets there,” I said, “then it
+is one begins.”
+
+But I would lie awake at nights with that sore throat and headache and
+fatigue which come from speaking in ill-ventilated rooms, and wondering
+how far it was possible to educate a whole people to great political
+ideals. Why should political work always rot down to personalities and
+personal appeals in this way? Life is, I suppose, to begin with and
+end with a matter of personalities, from personalities all our broader
+interests arise and to personalities they return. All our social and
+political effort, all of it, is like trying to make a crowd of people
+fall into formation. The broader lines appear, but then come a rush
+and excitement and irrelevancy, and forthwith the incipient order has
+vanished and the marshals must begin the work over again!
+
+My memory of all that time is essentially confusion. There was a
+frightful lot of tiresome locomotion in it; for the Kinghamstead
+Division is extensive, abounding in ill-graded and badly metalled
+cross-roads and vicious little hills, and singularly unpleasing to
+the eye in a muddy winter. It is sufficiently near to London to
+have undergone the same process of ill-regulated expansion that made
+Bromstead the place it is. Several of its overgrown villages have
+developed strings of factories and sidings along the railway lines, and
+there is an abundance of petty villas. There seemed to be no place
+at which one could take hold of more than this or that element of the
+population. Now we met in a meeting-house, now in a Masonic Hall or
+Drill Hall; I also did a certain amount of open-air speaking in the
+dinner hour outside gas-works and groups of factories. Some special sort
+of people was, as it were, secreted in response to each special appeal.
+One said things carefully adjusted to the distinctive limitations of
+each gathering. Jokes of an incredible silliness and shallowness drifted
+about us. Our advisers made us declare that if we were elected we would
+live in the district, and one hasty agent had bills printed, “If Mr.
+Remington is elected he will live here.” The enemy obtained a number
+of these bills and stuck them on outhouses, pigstyes, dog-kennels; you
+cannot imagine how irksome the repetition of that jest became. The vast
+drifting indifference in between my meetings impressed me more and more.
+I realised the vagueness of my own plans as I had never done before
+I brought them to the test of this experience. I was perplexed by the
+riddle of just how far I was, in any sense of the word, taking hold at
+all, how far I wasn't myself flowing into an accepted groove.
+
+Margaret was troubled by no such doubts. She was clear I had to go into
+Parliament on the side of Liberalism and the light, as against the late
+Government and darkness. Essential to the memory of my first contest, is
+the memory of her clear bright face, very resolute and grave, helping me
+consciously, steadfastly, with all her strength. Her quiet confidence,
+while I was so dissatisfied, worked curiously towards the alienation
+of my sympathies. I felt she had no business to be so sure of me. I had
+moments of vivid resentment at being thus marched towards Parliament.
+
+I seemed now always to be discovering alien forces of character in
+her. Her way of taking life diverged from me more and more. She sounded
+amazing, independent notes. She bought some particularly costly furs for
+the campaign that roused enthusiasm whenever she appeared. She also made
+me a birthday present in November of a heavily fur-trimmed coat and this
+she would make me remove as I went on to the platform, and hold over her
+arm until I was ready to resume it. It was fearfully heavy for her and
+she liked it to be heavy for her. That act of servitude was in essence
+a towering self-assertion. I would glance sideways while some chairman
+floundered through his introduction and see the clear blue eye with
+which she regarded the audience, which existed so far as she was
+concerned merely to return me to Parliament. It was a friendly eye,
+provided they were not silly or troublesome. But it kindled a little at
+the hint of a hostile question. After we had come so far and taken so
+much trouble!
+
+She constituted herself the dragoman of our political travels. In hotels
+she was serenely resolute for the quietest and the best, she rejected
+all their proposals for meals and substituted a severely nourishing
+dietary of her own, and even in private houses she astonished me by her
+tranquil insistence upon special comforts and sustenance. I can see her
+face now as it would confront a hostess, a little intent, but sweetly
+resolute and assured.
+
+Since our marriage she had read a number of political memoirs, and she
+had been particularly impressed by the career of Mrs. Gladstone. I don't
+think it occurred to her to compare and contrast my quality with that
+of Mrs. Gladstone's husband. I suspect her of a deliberate intention
+of achieving parallel results by parallel methods. I was to be
+Gladstonised. Gladstone it appeared used to lubricate his speeches with
+a mixture--if my memory serves me right--of egg beaten up in sherry,
+and Margaret was very anxious I should take a leaf from that celebrated
+book. She wanted, I know, to hold the glass in her hand while I was
+speaking.
+
+But here I was firm. “No,” I said, very decisively, “simply I won't
+stand that. It's a matter of conscience. I shouldn't feel--democratic.
+I'll take my chance of the common water in the carafe on the chairman's
+table.”
+
+“I DO wish you wouldn't,” she said, distressed.
+
+It was absurd to feel irritated; it was so admirable of her, a little
+childish, infinitely womanly and devoted and fine--and I see now how
+pathetic. But I could not afford to succumb to her. I wanted to follow
+my own leading, to see things clearly, and this reassuring pose of a
+high destiny, of an almost terribly efficient pursuit of a fixed end
+when as a matter of fact I had a very doubtful end and an aim as yet by
+no means fixed, was all too seductive for dalliance....
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+And into all these things with the manner of a trifling and casual
+incident comes the figure of Isabel Rivers. My first impressions of
+her were of a rather ugly and ungainly, extraordinarily interesting
+schoolgirl with a beautiful quick flush under her warm brown skin, who
+said and did amusing and surprising things. When first I saw her she
+was riding a very old bicycle downhill with her feet on the fork of the
+frame--it seemed to me to the public danger, but afterwards I came to
+understand the quality of her nerve better--and on the third occasion
+she was for her own private satisfaction climbing a tree. On the
+intervening occasion we had what seems now to have been a long sustained
+conversation about the political situation and the books and papers I
+had written.
+
+I wonder if it was.
+
+What a delightful mixture of child and grave woman she was at that time,
+and how little I reckoned on the part she would play in my life! And
+since she has played that part, how impossible it is to tell now of
+those early days! Since I wrote that opening paragraph to this section
+my idle pen has been, as it were, playing by itself and sketching faces
+on the blotting pad--one impish wizened visage is oddly like little
+Bailey--and I have been thinking cheek on fist amidst a limitless wealth
+of memories. She sits below me on the low wall under the olive trees
+with our little child in her arms. She is now the central fact in my
+life. It still seems a little incredible that that should be so. She has
+destroyed me as a politician, brought me to this belated rebeginning of
+life. When I sit down and try to make her a girl again, I feel like the
+Arabian fisherman who tried to put the genius back into the pot from
+which it had spread gigantic across the skies....
+
+I have a very clear vision of her rush downhill past our
+labouring ascendant car--my colours fluttered from handle-bar and
+shoulder-knot--and her waving hand and the sharp note of her voice. She
+cried out something, I don't know what, some greeting.
+
+“What a pretty girl!” said Margaret.
+
+Parvill, the cheap photographer, that industrious organiser for whom
+by way of repayment I got those magic letters, that knighthood of the
+underlings, “J. P.” was in the car with us and explained her to us. “One
+of the best workers you have,” he said....
+
+And then after a toilsome troubled morning we came, rather cross from
+the strain of sustained amiability, to Sir Graham Rivers' house. It
+seemed all softness and quiet--I recall dead white panelling and
+oval mirrors horizontally set and a marble fireplace between white
+marble-blind Homer and marble-blind Virgil, very grave and fine--and how
+Isabel came in to lunch in a shapeless thing like a blue smock that
+made her bright quick-changing face seem yellow under her cloud of black
+hair. Her step-sister was there, Miss Gamer, to whom the house was
+to descend, a well-dressed lady of thirty, amiably disavowing
+responsibility for Isabel in every phrase and gesture. And there was a
+very pleasant doctor, an Oxford man, who seemed on excellent terms with
+every one. It was manifest that he was in the habit of sparring with the
+girl, but on this occasion she wasn't sparring and refused to be teased
+into a display in spite of the taunts of either him or her father. She
+was, they discovered with rising eyebrows, shy. It seemed an opportunity
+too rare for them to miss. They proclaimed her enthusiasm for me in a
+way that brought a flush to her cheek and a look into her eye between
+appeal and defiance. They declared she had read my books, which I
+thought at the time was exaggeration, their dry political quality was so
+distinctly not what one was accustomed to regard as schoolgirl reading.
+Miss Gamer protested to protect her, “When once in a blue moon Isabel is
+well-behaved....!”
+
+Except for these attacks I do not remember much of the conversation
+at table; it was, I know, discursive and concerned with the sort of
+topographical and social and electioneering fact natural to such a
+visit. Old Rivers struck me as a delightful person, modestly unconscious
+of his doubly-earned V. C. and the plucky defence of Kardin-Bergat that
+won his baronetcy. He was that excellent type, the soldier radical, and
+we began that day a friendship that was only ended by his death in the
+hunting-field three years later. He interested Margaret into a disregard
+of my plate and the fact that I had secured the illegal indulgence of
+Moselle. After lunch we went for coffee into another low room, this
+time brown panelled and looking through French windows on a red-walled
+garden, graceful even in its winter desolation. And there the
+conversation suddenly picked up and became good. It had fallen to a
+pause, and the doctor, with an air of definitely throwing off a mask
+and wrecking an established tranquillity, remarked: “Very probably you
+Liberals will come in, though I'm not sure you'll come in so mightily as
+you think, but what you do when you do come in passes my comprehension.”
+
+“There's good work sometimes,” said Sir Graham, “in undoing.”
+
+“You can't govern a great empire by amending and repealing the Acts of
+your predecessors,” said the doctor.
+
+There came that kind of pause that happens when a subject is broached
+too big and difficult for the gathering. Margaret's blue eyes regarded
+the speaker with quiet disapproval for a moment, and then came to me in
+the not too confident hope that I would snub him out of existence with
+some prompt rhetorical stroke. A voice spoke out of the big armchair.
+
+“We'll do things,” said Isabel.
+
+The doctor's eye lit with the joy of the fisherman who strikes his fish
+at last. “What will you do?” he asked her.
+
+“Every one knows we're a mixed lot,” said Isabel.
+
+“Poor old chaps like me!” interjected the general.
+
+“But that's not a programme,” said the doctor.
+
+“But Mr. Remington has published a programme,” said Isabel.
+
+The doctor cocked half an eye at me.
+
+“In some review,” the girl went on. “After all, we're not going to
+elect the whole Liberal party in the Kinghamstead Division. I'm a
+Remington-ite!”
+
+“But the programme,” said the doctor, “the programme--”
+
+“In front of Mr. Remington!”
+
+“Scandal always comes home at last,” said the doctor. “Let him hear the
+worst.”
+
+“I'd like to hear,” I said. “Electioneering shatters convictions and
+enfeebles the mind.”
+
+“Not mine,” said Isabel stoutly. “I mean--Well, anyhow I take it Mr.
+Remington stands for constructing a civilised state out of this muddle.”
+
+“THIS muddle,” protested the doctor with an appeal of the eye to the
+beautiful long room and the ordered garden outside the bright clean
+windows.
+
+“Well, THAT muddle, if you like! There's a slum within a mile of us
+already. The dust and blacks get worse and worse, Sissie?”
+
+“They do,” agreed Miss Gamer.
+
+“Mr. Remington stands for construction, order, education, discipline.”
+
+“And you?” said the doctor.
+
+“I'm a good Remington-ite.”
+
+“Discipline!” said the doctor.
+
+“Oh!” said Isabel. “At times one has to be--Napoleonic. They want to
+libel me, Mr. Remington. A political worker can't always be in time for
+meals, can she? At times one has to make--splendid cuts.”
+
+Miss Gamer said something indistinctly.
+
+“Order, education, discipline,” said Sir Graham. “Excellent things!
+But I've a sort of memory--in my young days--we talked about something
+called liberty.”
+
+“Liberty under the law,” I said, with an unexpected approving murmur
+from Margaret, and took up the defence. “The old Liberal definition of
+liberty was a trifle uncritical. Privilege and legal restrictions are
+not the only enemies of liberty. An uneducated, underbred, and underfed
+propertyless man is a man who has lost the possibility of liberty.
+There's no liberty worth a rap for him. A man who is swimming hopelessly
+for life wants nothing but the liberty to get out of the water; he'll
+give every other liberty for it--until he gets out.”
+
+Sir Graham took me up and we fell into a discussion of the
+changing qualities of Liberalism. It was a good give-and-take talk,
+extraordinarily refreshing after the nonsense and crowding secondary
+issues of the electioneering outside. We all contributed more or less
+except Miss Gamer; Margaret followed with knitted brows and occasional
+interjections. “People won't SEE that,” for example, and “It all seems
+so plain to me.” The doctor showed himself clever but unsubstantial and
+inconsistent. Isabel sat back with her black mop of hair buried deep in
+the chair looking quickly from face to face. Her colour came and went
+with her vivid intellectual excitement; occasionally she would dart
+a word, usually a very apt word, like a lizard's tongue into the
+discussion. I remember chiefly that a chance illustration betrayed that
+she had read Bishop Burnet....
+
+After that it was not surprising that Isabel should ask for a lift in
+our car as far as the Lurky Committee Room, and that she should offer
+me quite sound advice EN ROUTE upon the intellectual temperament of the
+Lurky gasworkers.
+
+On the third occasion that I saw Isabel she was, as I have said,
+climbing a tree--and a very creditable tree--for her own private
+satisfaction. It was a lapse from the high seriousness of politics, and
+I perceived she felt that I might regard it as such and attach too much
+importance to it. I had some difficulty in reassuring her. And it's odd
+to note now--it has never occurred to me before--that from that day to
+this I do not think I have ever reminded Isabel of that encounter.
+
+And after that memory she seems to be flickering about always in the
+election, an inextinguishable flame; now she flew by on her bicycle,
+now she dashed into committee rooms, now she appeared on doorsteps in
+animated conversation with dubious voters; I took every chance I could
+to talk to her--I had never met anything like her before in the world,
+and she interested me immensely--and before the polling day she and I
+had become, in the frankest simplicity, fast friends....
+
+That, I think, sets out very fairly the facts of our early relationship.
+But it is hard to get it true, either in form or texture, because of
+the bright, translucent, coloured, and refracting memories that come
+between. One forgets not only the tint and quality of thoughts and
+impressions through that intervening haze, one forgets them altogether.
+I don't remember now that I ever thought in those days of passionate
+love or the possibility of such love between us. I may have done so
+again and again. But I doubt it very strongly. I don't think I ever
+thought of such aspects. I had no more sense of any danger between us,
+seeing the years and things that separated us, than I could have had if
+she had been an intelligent bright-eyed bird. Isabel came into my
+life as a new sort of thing; she didn't join on at all to my previous
+experiences of womanhood. They were not, as I have laboured to explain,
+either very wide or very penetrating experiences, on the whole,
+“strangled dinginess” expresses them, but I do not believe they were
+narrower or shallower than those of many other men of my class. I
+thought of women as pretty things and beautiful things, pretty rather
+than beautiful, attractive and at times disconcertingly attractive,
+often bright and witty, but, because of the vast reservations that hid
+them from me, wanting, subtly and inevitably wanting, in understanding.
+My idealisation of Margaret had evaporated insensibly after our
+marriage. The shrine I had made for her in my private thoughts stood
+at last undisguisedly empty. But Isabel did not for a moment admit of
+either idealisation or interested contempt. She opened a new sphere
+of womanhood to me. With her steady amber-brown eyes, her unaffected
+interest in impersonal things, her upstanding waistless blue body, her
+energy, decision and courage, she seemed rather some new and infinitely
+finer form of boyhood than a feminine creature, as I had come to measure
+femininity. She was my perfect friend. Could I have foreseen, had my
+world been more wisely planned, to this day we might have been such
+friends.
+
+She seemed at that time unconscious of sex, though she has told me since
+how full she was of protesting curiosities and restrained emotions. She
+spoke, as indeed she has always spoken, simply, clearly, and vividly;
+schoolgirl slang mingled with words that marked ample voracious reading,
+and she moved quickly with the free directness of some graceful young
+animal. She took many of the easy freedoms a man or a sister might have
+done with me. She would touch my arm, lay a hand on my shoulder as I
+sat, adjust the lapel of a breast-pocket as she talked to me. She says
+now she loved me always from the beginning. I doubt if there was a
+suspicion of that in her mind those days. I used to find her regarding
+me with the clearest, steadiest gaze in the world, exactly like the gaze
+of some nice healthy innocent animal in a forest, interested, inquiring,
+speculative, but singularly untroubled....
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Polling day came after a last hoarse and dingy crescendo. The excitement
+was not of the sort that makes one forget one is tired out. The waiting
+for the end of the count has left a long blank mark on my memory, and
+then everyone was shaking my hand and repeating: “Nine hundred and
+seventy-six.”
+
+My success had been a foregone conclusion since the afternoon, but
+we all behaved as though we had not been anticipating this result for
+hours, as though any other figures but nine hundred and seventy-six
+would have meant something entirely different. “Nine hundred and
+seventy-six!” said Margaret. “They didn't expect three hundred.”
+
+“Nine hundred and seventy-six,” said a little short man with a paper.
+“It means a big turnover. Two dozen short of a thousand, you know.”
+
+A tremendous hullaboo began outside, and a lot of fresh people came into
+the room.
+
+Isabel, flushed but not out of breath, Heaven knows where she had sprung
+from at that time of night! was running her hand down my sleeve almost
+caressingly, with the innocent bold affection of a girl. “Got you in!”
+ she said. “It's been no end of a lark.”
+
+“And now,” said I, “I must go and be constructive.”
+
+“Now you must go and be constructive,” she said.
+
+“You've got to live here,” she added.
+
+“By Jove! yes,” I said. “We'll have to house hunt.”
+
+“I shall read all your speeches.”
+
+She hesitated.
+
+“I wish I was you,” she said, and said it as though it was not exactly
+the thing she was meaning to say.
+
+“They want you to speak,” said Margaret, with something unsaid in her
+face.
+
+“You must come out with me,” I answered, putting my arm through hers,
+and felt someone urging me to the French windows that gave on the
+balcony.
+
+“If you think--” she said, yielding gladly
+
+“Oh, RATHER!” said I.
+
+The Mayor of Kinghamstead, a managing little man with no great belief in
+my oratorical powers, was sticking his face up to mine.
+
+“It's all over,” he said, “and you've won. Say all the nice things you
+can and say them plainly.”
+
+I turned and handed Margaret out through the window and stood looking
+over the Market-place, which was more than half filled with swaying
+people. The crowd set up a roar of approval at the sight of us, tempered
+by a little booing. Down in one corner of the square a fight was going
+on for a flag, a fight that even the prospect of a speech could not
+instantly check. “Speech!” cried voices, “Speech!” and then a brief
+“boo-oo-oo” that was drowned in a cascade of shouts and cheers. The
+conflict round the flag culminated in the smashing of a pane of glass in
+the chemist's window and instantly sank to peace.
+
+“Gentlemen voters of the Kinghamstead Division,” I began.
+
+“Votes for Women!” yelled a voice, amidst laughter--the first time I
+remember hearing that memorable war-cry.
+
+“Three cheers for Mrs. Remington!”
+
+“Mrs. Remington asks me to thank you,” I said, amidst further uproar and
+reiterated cries of “Speech!”
+
+Then silence came with a startling swiftness.
+
+Isabel was still in my mind, I suppose. “I shall go to Westminster,” I
+began. I sought for some compelling phrase and could not find one.
+“To do my share,” I went on, “in building up a great and splendid
+civilisation.”
+
+I paused, and there was a weak gust of cheering, and then a renewal of
+booing.
+
+“This election,” I said, “has been the end and the beginning of much.
+New ideas are abroad--”
+
+“Chinese labour,” yelled a voice, and across the square swept a wildfire
+of booting and bawling.
+
+It is one of the few occasions when I quite lost my hold on a speech. I
+glanced sideways and saw the Mayor of Kinghamstead speaking behind his
+hand to Parvill. By a happy chance Parvill caught my eye.
+
+“What do they want?” I asked.
+
+“Eh?”
+
+“What do they want?”
+
+“Say something about general fairness--the other side,” prompted
+Parvill, flattered but a little surprised by my appeal. I pulled myself
+hastily into a more popular strain with a gross eulogy of my opponent's
+good taste.
+
+“Chinese labour!” cried the voice again.
+
+“You've given that notice to quit,” I answered.
+
+The Market-place roared delight, but whether that delight expressed
+hostility to Chinamen or hostility to their practical enslavement no
+student of the General Election of 1906 has ever been able to determine.
+Certainly one of the most effective posters on our side displayed a
+hideous yellow face, just that and nothing more. There was not even a
+legend to it. How it impressed the electorate we did not know, but that
+it impressed the electorate profoundly there can be no disputing.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+Kinghamstead was one of the earliest constituencies fought, and we came
+back--it must have been Saturday--triumphant but very tired, to our
+house in Radnor Square. In the train we read the first intimations that
+the victory of our party was likely to be a sweeping one.
+
+Then came a period when one was going about receiving and giving
+congratulations and watching the other men arrive, very like a boy who
+has returned to school with the first batch after the holidays. The
+London world reeked with the General Election; it had invaded the
+nurseries. All the children of one's friends had got big maps of England
+cut up into squares to represent constituencies and were busy sticking
+gummed blue labels over the conquered red of Unionism that had hitherto
+submerged the country. And there were also orange labels, if I remember
+rightly, to represent the new Labour party, and green for the Irish. I
+engaged myself to speak at one or two London meetings, and lunched
+at the Reform, which was fairly tepid, and dined and spent one or two
+tumultuous evenings at the National Liberal Club, which was in active
+eruption. The National Liberal became feverishly congested towards
+midnight as the results of the counting came dropping in. A big
+green-baize screen had been fixed up at one end of the large
+smoking-room with the names of the constituencies that were voting that
+day, and directly the figures came to hand, up they went, amidst cheers
+that at last lost their energy through sheer repetition, whenever there
+was record of a Liberal gain. I don't remember what happened when there
+was a Liberal loss; I don't think that any were announced while I was
+there.
+
+How packed and noisy the place was, and what a reek of tobacco and
+whisky fumes we made! Everybody was excited and talking, making waves of
+harsh confused sound that beat upon one's ears, and every now and then
+hoarse voices would shout for someone to speak. Our little set was much
+in evidence. Both the Cramptons were in, Lewis, Bunting Harblow. We gave
+brief addresses attuned to this excitement and the late hour, amidst
+much enthusiasm.
+
+“Now we can DO things!” I said amidst a rapture of applause. Men I did
+not know from Adam held up glasses and nodded to me in solemn fuddled
+approval as I came down past them into the crowd again.
+
+Men were betting whether the Unionists would lose more or less than two
+hundred seats.
+
+“I wonder just what we shall do with it all,” I heard one sceptic
+speculating....
+
+After these orgies I would get home very tired and excited, and find it
+difficult to get to sleep. I would lie and speculate about what it was
+we WERE going to do. One hadn't anticipated quite such a tremendous
+accession to power for one's party. Liberalism was swirling in like a
+flood....
+
+I found the next few weeks very unsatisfactory and distressing. I don't
+clearly remember what it was I had expected; I suppose the fuss and
+strain of the General Election had built up a feeling that my return
+would in some way put power into my hands, and instead I found myself
+a mere undistinguished unit in a vast but rather vague majority. There
+were moments when I felt very distinctly that a majority could be
+too big a crowd altogether. I had all my work still before me, I had
+achieved nothing as yet but opportunity, and a very crowded opportunity
+it was at that. Everyone about me was chatting Parliament and
+appointments; one breathed distracting and irritating speculations as
+to what would be done and who would be asked to do it. I was chiefly
+impressed by what was unlikely to be done and by the absence of any
+general plan of legislation to hold us all together. I found the talk
+about Parliamentary procedure and etiquette particularly trying. We
+dined with the elder Cramptons one evening, and old Sir Edward was
+lengthily sage about what the House liked, what it didn't like, what
+made a good impression and what a bad one. “A man shouldn't speak more
+than twice in his first session, and not at first on too contentious a
+topic,” said Sir Edward. “No.”
+
+“Very much depends on manner. The House hates a lecturer. There's a sort
+of airy earnestness--”
+
+He waved his cigar to eke out his words.
+
+“Little peculiarities of costume count for a great deal. I could name
+one man who spent three years living down a pair of spatterdashers. On
+the other hand--a thing like that--if it catches the eye of the PUNCH
+man, for example, may be your making.”
+
+He went off into a lengthy speculation of why the House had come to like
+an originally unpopular Irishman named Biggar....
+
+The opening of Parliament gave me some peculiar moods. I began to feel
+more and more like a branded sheep. We were sworn in in batches,
+dozens and scores of fresh men, trying not to look too fresh under the
+inspection of policemen and messengers, all of us carrying new silk hats
+and wearing magisterial coats. It is one of my vivid memories from this
+period, the sudden outbreak of silk hats in the smoking-room of the
+National Liberal Club. At first I thought there must have been a
+funeral. Familiar faces that one had grown to know under soft felt hats,
+under bowlers, under liberal-minded wide brims, and above artistic ties
+and tweed jackets, suddenly met one, staring with the stern gaze of
+self-consciousness, from under silk hats of incredible glossiness. There
+was a disposition to wear the hat much too forward, I thought, for a
+good Parliamentary style.
+
+There was much play with the hats all through; a tremendous competition
+to get in first and put hats on coveted seats. A memory hangs about me
+of the House in the early afternoon, an inhumane desolation inhabited
+almost entirely by silk hats. The current use of cards to secure seats
+came later. There were yards and yards of empty green benches with hats
+and hats and hats distributed along them, resolute-looking top hats, lax
+top hats with a kind of shadowy grin under them, sensible top bats brim
+upward, and one scandalous incontinent that had rolled from the front
+Opposition bench right to the middle of the floor. A headless hat is
+surely the most soulless thing in the world, far worse even than a
+skull....
+
+At last, in a leisurely muddled manner we got to the Address; and
+I found myself packed in a dense elbowing crowd to the right of the
+Speaker's chair; while the attenuated Opposition, nearly leaderless
+after the massacre, tilted its brim to its nose and sprawled at its ease
+amidst its empty benches.
+
+There was a tremendous hullaboo about something, and I craned to see
+over the shoulder of the man in front. “Order, order, order!”
+
+“What's it about?” I asked.
+
+The man in front of me was clearly no better informed, and then I
+gathered from a slightly contemptuous Scotchman beside me that it was
+Chris Robinson had walked between the honourable member in possession
+of the house and the Speaker. I caught a glimpse of him blushingly
+whispering about his misadventure to a colleague. He was just that
+same little figure I had once assisted to entertain at Cambridge, but
+grey-haired now, and still it seemed with the same knitted muffler
+he had discarded for a reckless half-hour while he talked to us in
+Hatherleigh's rooms.
+
+It dawned upon me that I wasn't particularly wanted in the House, and
+that I should get all I needed of the opening speeches next day from the
+TIMES.
+
+I made my way out and was presently walking rather aimlessly through the
+outer lobby.
+
+I caught myself regarding the shadow that spread itself out before me,
+multiplied itself in blue tints of various intensity, shuffled itself
+like a pack of cards under the many lights, the square shoulders, the
+silk hat, already worn with a parliamentary tilt backward; I found I was
+surveying this statesmanlike outline with a weak approval. “A MEMBER!”
+ I felt the little cluster of people that were scattered about the lobby
+must be saying.
+
+“Good God!” I said in hot reaction, “what am I doing here?”
+
+It was one of those moments infinitely trivial in themselves, that yet
+are cardinal in a man's life. It came to me with extreme vividness that
+it wasn't so much that I had got hold of something as that something
+had got hold of me. I distinctly recall the rebound of my mind. Whatever
+happened in this Parliament, I at least would attempt something. “By
+God!” I said, “I won't be overwhelmed. I am here to do something, and do
+something I will!”
+
+But I felt that for the moment I could not remain in the House.
+
+I went out by myself with my thoughts into the night. It was a chilling
+night, and rare spots of rain were falling. I glanced over my shoulder
+at the lit windows of the Lords. I walked, I remember, westward, and
+presently came to the Grosvenar Embankment and followed it, watching the
+glittering black rush of the river and the dark, dimly lit barges round
+which the water swirled. Across the river was the hunched sky-line of
+Doulton's potteries, and a kiln flared redly. Dimly luminous trams were
+gliding amidst a dotted line of lamps, and two little trains crawled
+into Waterloo station. Mysterious black figures came by me and were
+suddenly changed to the commonplace at the touch of the nearer lamps. It
+was a big confused world, I felt, for a man to lay his hands upon.
+
+I remember I crossed Vauxhall Bridge and stood for a time watching the
+huge black shapes in the darkness under the gas-works. A shoal of coal
+barges lay indistinctly on the darkly shining mud and water below, and
+a colossal crane was perpetually hauling up coal into mysterious
+blacknesses above, and dropping the empty clutch back to the barges.
+Just one or two minute black featureless figures of men toiled amidst
+these monster shapes. They did not seem to be controlling them but only
+moving about among them. These gas-works have a big chimney that belches
+a lurid flame into the night, a livid shivering bluish flame, shot with
+strange crimson streaks....
+
+On the other side of Lambeth Bridge broad stairs go down to the lapping
+water of the river; the lower steps are luminous under the lamps and
+one treads unwarned into thick soft Thames mud. They seem to be purely
+architectural steps, they lead nowhere, they have an air of absolute
+indifference to mortal ends.
+
+Those shapes and large inhuman places--for all of mankind that one
+sees at night about Lambeth is minute and pitiful beside the industrial
+monsters that snort and toil there--mix up inextricably with my memories
+of my first days as a legislator. Black figures drift by me, heavy vans
+clatter, a newspaper rough tears by on a motor bicycle, and presently,
+on the Albert Embankment, every seat has its one or two outcasts huddled
+together and slumbering.
+
+“These things come, these things go,” a whispering voice urged upon me,
+“as once those vast unmeaning Saurians whose bones encumber museums came
+and went rejoicing noisily in fruitless lives.”...
+
+Fruitless lives!--was that the truth of it all?...
+
+Later I stood within sight of the Houses of Parliament in front of the
+colonnades of St Thomas's Hospital. I leant on the parapet close by a
+lamp-stand of twisted dolphins--and I prayed!
+
+I remember the swirl of the tide upon the water, and how a string of
+barges presently came swinging and bumping round as high-water turned
+to ebb. That sudden change of position and my brief perplexity at it,
+sticks like a paper pin through the substance of my thoughts. It was
+then I was moved to prayer. I prayed that night that life might not
+be in vain, that in particular I might not live in vain. I prayed for
+strength and faith, that the monstrous blundering forces in life might
+not overwhelm me, might not beat me back to futility and a meaningless
+acquiescence in existent things. I knew myself for the weakling I was,
+I knew that nevertheless it was set for me to make such order as I could
+out of these disorders, and my task cowed me, gave me at the thought of
+it a sense of yielding feebleness.
+
+“Break me, O God,” I prayed at last, “disgrace me, torment me, destroy
+me as you will, but save me from self-complacency and little interests
+and little successes and the life that passes like the shadow of a
+dream.”
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THE THIRD: THE HEART OF POLITICS
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+I have been planning and replanning, writing and rewriting, this next
+portion of my book for many days. I perceive I must leave it raw edged
+and ill joined. I have learnt something of the impossibility of History.
+For all I have had to tell is the story of one man's convictions and
+aims and how they reacted upon his life; and I find it too subtle and
+involved and intricate for the doing. I find it taxes all my powers to
+convey even the main forms and forces in that development. It is like
+looking through moving media of changing hue and variable refraction
+at something vitally unstable. Broad theories and generalisations are
+mingled with personal influences, with prevalent prejudices; and
+not only coloured but altered by phases of hopefulness and moods of
+depression. The web is made up of the most diverse elements, beyond
+treatment multitudinous.... For a week or so I desisted altogether,
+and walked over the mountains and returned to sit through the warm soft
+mornings among the shaded rocks above this little perched-up house of
+ours, discussing my difficulties with Isabel and I think on the whole
+complicating them further in the effort to simplify them to manageable
+and stateable elements.
+
+Let me, nevertheless, attempt a rough preliminary analysis of this
+confused process. A main strand is quite easily traceable. This main
+strand is the story of my obvious life, my life as it must have looked
+to most of my acquaintances. It presents you with a young couple,
+bright, hopeful, and energetic, starting out under Altiora's auspices to
+make a career. You figure us well dressed and active, running about in
+motor-cars, visiting in great people's houses, dining amidst brilliant
+companies, going to the theatre, meeting in the lobby. Margaret wore
+hundreds of beautiful dresses. We must have had an air of succeeding
+meritoriously during that time.
+
+We did very continually and faithfully serve our joint career. I thought
+about it a great deal, and did and refrained from doing ten thousand
+things for the sake of it. I kept up a solicitude for it, as it were by
+inertia, long after things had happened and changes occurred in me
+that rendered its completion impossible. Under certain very artless
+pretences, we wanted steadfastly to make a handsome position in the
+world, achieve respect, SUCCEED. Enormous unseen changes had been in
+progress for years in my mind and the realities of my life, before
+our general circle could have had any inkling of their existence, or
+suspected the appearances of our life. Then suddenly our proceedings
+began to be deflected, our outward unanimity visibly strained and marred
+by the insurgence of these so long-hidden developments.
+
+That career had its own hidden side, of course; but when I write
+of these unseen factors I do not mean that but something altogether
+broader. I do not mean the everyday pettinesses which gave the cynical
+observer scope and told of a narrower, baser aspect of the fair but
+limited ambitions of my ostensible self. This “sub-careerist” element
+noted little things that affected the career, made me suspicious of the
+rivalry of so-and-so, propitiatory to so-and-so, whom, as a matter of
+fact, I didn't respect or feel in the least sympathetic towards; guarded
+with that man, who for all his charm and interest wasn't helpful, and
+a little touchy at the appearance of neglect from that. No, I mean
+something greater and not something smaller when I write of a hidden
+life.
+
+In the ostensible self who glowed under the approbation of Altiora
+Bailey, and was envied and discussed, praised and depreciated, in the
+House and in smoking-room gossip, you really have as much of a man as
+usually figures in a novel or an obituary notice. But I am tremendously
+impressed now in the retrospect by the realisation of how little that
+frontage represented me, and just how little such frontages do represent
+the complexities of the intelligent contemporary. Behind it, yet
+struggling to disorganise and alter it, altogether, was a far more
+essential reality, a self less personal, less individualised, and
+broader in its references. Its aims were never simply to get on; it
+had an altogether different system of demands and satisfactions. It
+was critical, curious, more than a little unfeeling--and relentlessly
+illuminating.
+
+It is just the existence and development of this more generalised
+self-behind-the-frontage that is making modern life so much more subtle
+and intricate to render, and so much more hopeful in its relations
+to the perplexities of the universe. I see this mental and spiritual
+hinterland vary enormously in the people about me, from a type which
+seems to keep, as people say, all its goods in the window, to others
+who, like myself, come to regard the ostensible existence more and more
+as a mere experimental feeder and agent for that greater personality
+behind. And this back-self has its history of phases, its crises and
+happy accidents and irrevocable conclusions, more or less distinct from
+the adventures and achievements of the ostensible self. It meets persons
+and phrases, it assimilates the spirit of a book, it is startled into
+new realisations by some accident that seems altogether irrelevant to
+the general tenor of one's life. Its increasing independence of the
+ostensible career makes it the organ of corrective criticism; it
+accumulates disturbing energy. Then it breaks our overt promises and
+repudiates our pledges, coming down at last like an overbearing mentor
+upon the small engagements of the pupil.
+
+In the life of the individual it takes the role that the growth of
+philosophy, science, and creative literature may play in the development
+of mankind.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+It is curious to recall how Britten helped shatter that obvious,
+lucidly explicable presentation of myself upon which I had embarked
+with Margaret. He returned to revive a memory of adolescent dreams and a
+habit of adolescent frankness; he reached through my shallow frontage
+as no one else seemed capable of doing, and dragged that back-self into
+relation with it.
+
+I remember very distinctly a dinner and a subsequent walk with him
+which presents itself now as altogether typical of the quality of his
+influence.
+
+I had come upon him one day while lunching with Somers and Sutton at
+the Playwrights' Club, and had asked him to dinner on the spur of the
+moment. He was oddly the same curly-headed, red-faced ventriloquist, and
+oddly different, rather seedy as well as untidy, and at first a little
+inclined to make comparisons with my sleek successfulness. But that
+disposition presently evaporated, and his talk was good and fresh and
+provocative. And something that had long been straining at its checks in
+my mind flapped over, and he and I found ourselves of one accord.
+
+Altiora wasn't at this dinner. When she came matters were apt to become
+confusedly strenuous. There was always a slight and ineffectual struggle
+at the end on the part of Margaret to anticipate Altiora's overpowering
+tendency to a rally and the establishment of some entirely unjustifiable
+conclusion by a COUP-DE-MAIN. When, however, Altiora was absent, the
+quieter influence of the Cramptons prevailed; temperance and information
+for its own sake prevailed excessively over dinner and the play of
+thought.... Good Lord! what bores the Cramptons were! I wonder I
+endured them as I did. They had all of them the trick of lying in wait
+conversationally; they had no sense of the self-exposures, the gallant
+experiments in statement that are necessary for good conversation. They
+would watch one talking with an expression exactly like peeping through
+bushes. Then they would, as it were, dash out, dissent succinctly,
+contradict some secondary fact, and back to cover. They gave one
+twilight nerves. Their wives were easier but still difficult at a
+stretch; they talked a good deal about children and servants, but with
+an air caught from Altiora of making observations upon sociological
+types. Lewis gossiped about the House in an entirely finite manner. He
+never raised a discussion; nobody ever raised a discussion. He would ask
+what we thought of Evesham's question that afternoon, and Edward would
+say it was good, and Mrs. Willie, who had been behind the grille, would
+think it was very good, and then Willie, parting the branches, would say
+rather conclusively that he didn't think it was very much good, and I
+would deny hearing the question in order to evade a profitless statement
+of views in that vacuum, and then we would cast about in our minds for
+some other topic of equal interest....
+
+On this occasion Altiora was absent, and to qualify our Young Liberal
+bleakness we had Mrs. Millingham, with her white hair and her fresh mind
+and complexion, and Esmeer. Willie Crampton was with us, but not his
+wife, who was having her third baby on principle; his brother Edward was
+present, and the Lewises, and of course the Bunting Harblows. There was
+also some other lady. I remember her as pale blue, but for the life of
+me I cannot remember her name.
+
+Quite early there was a little breeze between Edward Crampton and
+Esmeer, who had ventured an opinion about the partition of Poland.
+Edward was at work then upon the seventh volume of his monumental Life
+of Kosciusko, and a little impatient with views perhaps not altogether
+false but betraying a lamentable ignorance of accessible literature. At
+any rate, his correction of Esmeer was magisterial. After that there was
+a distinct and not altogether delightful pause, and then some one, it
+may have been the pale-blue lady, asked Mrs. Lewis whether her aunt Lady
+Carmixter had returned from her rest-and-sun-cure in Italy. That led to
+a rather anxiously sustained talk about regimen, and Willie told us how
+he had profited by the no-breakfast system. It had increased his power
+of work enormously. He could get through ten hours a day now without
+inconvenience.
+
+“What do you do?” said Esmeer abruptly.
+
+“Oh! no end of work. There's all the estate and looking after things.”
+
+“But publicly?”
+
+“I asked three questions yesterday. And for one of them I had to consult
+nine books!”
+
+We were drifting, I could see, towards Doctor Haig's system of dietary,
+and whether the exclusion or inclusion of fish and chicken were most
+conducive to high efficiency, when Britten, who had refused lemonade
+and claret and demanded Burgundy, broke out, and was discovered to be
+demanding in his throat just what we Young Liberals thought we were up
+to?
+
+“I want,” said Britten, repeating his challenge a little louder, “to
+hear just exactly what you think you are doing in Parliament?”
+
+Lewis laughed nervously, and thought we were “Seeking the Good of the
+Community.”
+
+“HOW?”
+
+“Beneficient Legislation,” said Lewis.
+
+“Beneficient in what direction?” insisted Britten. “I want to know where
+you think you are going.”
+
+“Amelioration of Social Conditions,” said Lewis.
+
+“That's only a phrase!”
+
+“You wouldn't have me sketch bills at dinner?”
+
+“I'd like you to indicate directions,” said Britten, and waited.
+
+“Upward and On,” said Lewis with conscious neatness, and turned to ask
+Mrs. Bunting Harblow about her little boy's French.
+
+For a time talk frothed over Britten's head, but the natural mischief
+in Mrs. Millingham had been stirred, and she was presently echoing his
+demand in lisping, quasi-confidential undertones. “What ARE we Liberals
+doing?” Then Esmeer fell in with the revolutionaries.
+
+To begin with, I was a little shocked by this clamour for
+fundamentals--and a little disconcerted. I had the experience that I
+suppose comes to every one at times of discovering oneself together with
+two different sets of people with whom one has maintained two different
+sets of attitudes. It had always been, I perceived, an instinctive
+suppression in our circle that we shouldn't be more than vague about our
+political ideals. It had almost become part of my morality to respect
+this convention. It was understood we were all working hard, and keeping
+ourselves fit, tremendously fit, under Altiora's inspiration, Pro Bono
+Publico. Bunting Harblow had his under-secretaryship, and Lewis was on
+the verge of the Cabinet, and these things we considered to be in the
+nature of confirmations.... It added to the discomfort of the situation
+that these plunging enquiries were being made in the presence of our
+wives.
+
+The rebel section of our party forced the talk.
+
+Edward Crampton was presently declaring--I forget in what relation: “The
+country is with us.”
+
+My long-controlled hatred of the Cramptons' stereotyped phrases about
+the Country and the House got the better of me. I showed my cloven hoof
+to my friends for the first time.
+
+“We don't respect the Country as we used to do,” I said. “We haven't
+the same belief we used to have in the will of the people. It's no
+good, Crampton, trying to keep that up. We Liberals know as a matter of
+fact--nowadays every one knows--that the monster that brought us into
+power has, among other deficiencies, no head. We've got to give it
+one--if possible with brains and a will. That lies in the future. For
+the present if the country is with us, it means merely that we happen to
+have hold of its tether.”
+
+Lewis was shocked. A “mandate” from the Country was sacred to his system
+of pretences.
+
+Britten wasn't subdued by his first rebuff; presently he was at
+us again. There were several attempts to check his outbreak of
+interrogation; I remember the Cramptons asked questions about the
+welfare of various cousins of Lewis who were unknown to the rest of us,
+and Margaret tried to engage Britten in a sympathetic discussion of the
+Arts and Crafts exhibition. But Britten and Esmeer were persistent, Mrs.
+Millingham was mischievous, and in the end our rising hopes of Young
+Liberalism took to their thickets for good, while we talked all over
+them of the prevalent vacuity of political intentions. Margaret was
+perplexed by me. It is only now I perceive just how perplexing I must
+have been. “Of course, she said with that faint stress of apprehension
+in her eyes, one must have aims.” And, “it isn't always easy to put
+everything into phrases.” “Don't be long,” said Mrs. Edward Crampton
+to her husband as the wives trooped out. And afterwards when we went
+upstairs I had an indefinable persuasion that the ladies had been
+criticising Britten's share in our talk in an altogether unfavourable
+spirit. Mrs. Edward evidently thought him aggressive and impertinent,
+and Margaret with a quiet firmness that brooked no resistance, took him
+at once into a corner and showed him Italian photographs by Coburn. We
+dispersed early.
+
+I walked with Britten along the Chelsea back streets towards Battersea
+Bridge--he lodged on the south side.
+
+“Mrs. Millingham's a dear,” he began.
+
+“She's a dear.”
+
+“I liked her demand for a hansom because a four-wheeler was too safe.”
+
+“She was worked up,” I said. “She's a woman of faultless character, but
+her instincts, as Altiora would say, are anarchistic--when she gives
+them a chance.”
+
+“So she takes it out in hansom cabs.”
+
+“Hansom cabs.”
+
+“She's wise,” said Britten....
+
+“I hope, Remington,” he went on after a pause, “I didn't rag your other
+guests too much. I've a sort of feeling at moments--Remington, those
+chaps are so infernally not--not bloody. It's part of a man's duty
+sometimes at least to eat red beef and get drunk. How is he to
+understand government if he doesn't? It scares me to think of your
+lot--by a sort of misapprehension--being in power. A kind of neuralgia
+in the head, by way of government. I don't understand where YOU come in.
+Those others--they've no lusts. Their ideal is anaemia. You and I,
+we had at least a lust to take hold of life and make something of it.
+They--they want to take hold of life and make nothing of it. They want
+to cut out all the stimulants. Just as though life was anything else but
+a reaction to stimulation!”...
+
+He began to talk of his own life. He had had ill-fortune through most
+of it. He was poor and unsuccessful, and a girl he had been very fond
+of had been attacked and killed by a horse in a field in a very horrible
+manner. These things had wounded and tortured him, but they hadn't
+broken him. They had, it seemed to me, made a kind of crippled and ugly
+demigod of him. He was, I began to perceive, so much better than I had
+any right to expect. At first I had been rather struck by his unkempt
+look, and it made my reaction all the stronger. There was about him
+something, a kind of raw and bleeding faith in the deep things of
+life, that stirred me profoundly as he showed it. My set of people had
+irritated him and disappointed him. I discovered at his touch how they
+irritated him. He reproached me boldly. He made me feel ashamed of my
+easy acquiescences as I walked in my sleek tall neatness beside his
+rather old coat, his rather battered hat, his sturdier shorter shape,
+and listened to his denunciations of our self-satisfied New Liberalism
+and Progressivism.
+
+“It has the same relation to progress--the reality of progress--that the
+things they paint on door panels in the suburbs have to art and beauty.
+There's a sort of filiation.... Your Altiora's just the political
+equivalent of the ladies who sell traced cloth for embroidery; she's
+a dealer in Refined Social Reform for the Parlour. The real progress,
+Remington, is a graver thing and a painfuller thing and a slower thing
+altogether. Look! THAT”--and he pointed to where under a boarding in the
+light of a gas lamp a dingy prostitute stood lurking--“was in Babylon
+and Nineveh. Your little lot make believe there won't be anything of the
+sort after this Parliament! They're going to vanish at a few top notes
+from Altiora Bailey! Remington!--it's foolery. It's prigs at play.
+It's make-believe, make-believe! Your people there haven't got hold of
+things, aren't beginning to get hold of things, don't know anything of
+life at all, shirk life, avoid life, get in little bright clean rooms
+and talk big over your bumpers of lemonade while the Night goes by
+outside--untouched. Those Crampton fools slink by all this,”--he
+waved at the woman again--“pretend it doesn't exist, or is going to be
+banished root and branch by an Act to keep children in the wet outside
+public-houses. Do you think they really care, Remington? I don't. It's
+make-believe. What they want to do, what Lewis wants to do, what Mrs.
+Bunting Harblow wants her husband to do, is to sit and feel very grave
+and necessary and respected on the Government benches. They think of
+putting their feet out like statesmen, and tilting shiny hats with
+becoming brims down over their successful noses. Presentation portrait
+to a club at fifty. That's their Reality. That's their scope. They
+don't, it's manifest, WANT to think beyond that. The things there ARE,
+Remington, they'll never face! the wonder and the depth of life,--lust,
+and the night-sky,--pain.”
+
+“But the good intention,” I pleaded, “the Good Will!”
+
+“Sentimentality,” said Britten. “No Good Will is anything but dishonesty
+unless it frets and burns and hurts and destroys a man. That lot of
+yours have nothing but a good will to think they have good will. Do you
+think they lie awake of nights searching their hearts as we do? Lewis?
+Crampton? Or those neat, admiring, satisfied little wives? See how they
+shrank from the probe!”
+
+“We all,” I said, “shrink from the probe.”
+
+“God help us!” said Britten....
+
+“We are but vermin at the best, Remington,” he broke out, “and the
+greatest saint only a worm that has lifted its head for a moment from
+the dust. We are damned, we are meant to be damned, coral animalculae
+building upward, upward in a sea of damnation. But of all the damned
+things that ever were damned, your damned shirking, temperate,
+sham-efficient, self-satisfied, respectable, make-believe,
+Fabian-spirited Young Liberal is the utterly damnedest.” He paused for
+a moment, and resumed in an entirely different note: “Which is why I was
+so surprised, Remington, to find YOU in this set!”
+
+“You're just the old plunger you used to be, Britten,” I said. “You're
+going too far with all your might for the sake of the damns. Like a
+donkey that drags its cart up a bank to get thistles. There's depths in
+Liberalism--”
+
+“We were talking about Liberals.”
+
+“Liberty!”
+
+“Liberty! What do YOOR little lot know of liberty?”
+
+“What does any little lot know of liberty?”
+
+“It waits outside, too big for our understanding. Like the night and the
+stars. And lust, Remington! lust and bitterness! Don't I know them? with
+all the sweetness and hope of life bitten and trampled, the dear eyes
+and the brain that loved and understood--and my poor mumble of a life
+going on! I'm within sight of being a drunkard, Remington! I'm a failure
+by most standards! Life has cut me to the bone. But I'm not afraid of it
+any more. I've paid something of the price, I've seen something of the
+meaning.”
+
+He flew off at a tangent. “I'd rather die in Delirium Tremens,” he
+cried, “than be a Crampton or a Lewis....”
+
+“Make-believe. Make-believe.” The phrase and Britten's squat gestures
+haunted me as I walked homeward alone. I went to my room and stood
+before my desk and surveyed papers and files and Margaret's admirable
+equipment of me.
+
+I perceived in the lurid light of Britten's suggestions that so it was
+Mr. George Alexander would have mounted a statesman's private room....
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+I was never at any stage a loyal party man. I doubt if party will
+ever again be the force it was during the eighteenth and nineteenth
+centuries. Men are becoming increasingly constructive and selective,
+less patient under tradition and the bondage of initial circumstances.
+As education becomes more universal and liberating, men will sort
+themselves more and more by their intellectual temperaments and less and
+less by their accidental associations. The past will rule them less; the
+future more. It is not simply party but school and college and county
+and country that lose their glamour. One does not hear nearly as much
+as our forefathers did of the “old Harrovian,” “old Arvonian,” “old
+Etonian” claim to this or that unfair advantage or unearnt sympathy.
+Even the Scotch and the Devonians weaken a little in their clannishness.
+A widening sense of fair play destroys such things. They follow
+freemasonry down--freemasonry of which one is chiefly reminded nowadays
+in England by propitiatory symbols outside shady public-houses....
+
+There is, of course, a type of man which clings very obstinately to
+party ties. These are the men with strong reproductive imaginations
+and no imaginative initiative, such men as Cladingbowl, for example, or
+Dayton. They are the scholars-at-large in life. For them the fact that
+the party system has been essential in the history of England for two
+hundred years gives it an overwhelming glamour. They have read histories
+and memoirs, they see the great grey pile of Westminster not so much
+for what it is as for what it was, rich with dramatic memories, populous
+with glorious ghosts, phrasing itself inevitably in anecdotes and
+quotations. It seems almost scandalous that new things should continue
+to happen, swamping with strange qualities the savour of these old
+associations.
+
+That Mr. Ramsay Macdonald should walk through Westminster Hall, thrust
+himself, it may be, through the very piece of space that once held
+Charles the Martyr pleading for his life, seems horrible profanation to
+Dayton, a last posthumous outrage; and he would, I think, like to have
+the front benches left empty now for ever, or at most adorned with
+laureated ivory tablets: “Here Dizzy sat,” and “On this Spot William
+Ewart Gladstone made his First Budget Speech.” Failing this, he demands,
+if only as signs of modesty and respect on the part of the survivors,
+meticulous imitation. “Mr. G.,” he murmurs, “would not have done that,”
+ and laments a vanished subtlety even while Mr. Evesham is speaking. He
+is always gloomily disposed to lapse into wonderings about what
+things are coming to, wonderings that have no grain of curiosity. His
+conception of perfect conduct is industrious persistence along the
+worn-down, well-marked grooves of the great recorded days. So infinitely
+more important to him is the documented, respected thing than the
+elusive present.
+
+Cladingbowl and Dayton do not shine in the House, though Cladingbowl is
+a sound man on a committee, and Dayton keeps the OLD COUNTRY GAZETTE,
+the most gentlemanly paper in London. They prevail, however, in their
+clubs at lunch time. There, with the pleasant consciousness of a
+morning's work free from either zeal or shirking, they mingle with
+permanent officials, prominent lawyers, even a few of the soberer type
+of business men, and relax their minds in the discussion of the morning
+paper, of the architecture of the West End, and of the latest public
+appointments, of golf, of holiday resorts, of the last judicial
+witticisms and forensic “crushers.” The New Year and Birthday honours
+lists are always very sagely and exhaustively considered, and anecdotes
+are popular and keenly judged. They do not talk of the things that are
+really active in their minds, but in the formal and habitual manner they
+suppose to be proper to intelligent but still honourable men. Socialism,
+individual money matters, and religion are forbidden topics, and sex and
+women only in so far as they appear in the law courts. It is to me
+the strangest of conventions, this assumption of unreal loyalties and
+traditional respects, this repudiation and concealment of passionate
+interests. It is like wearing gloves in summer fields, or bathing in a
+gown, or falling in love with the heroine of a novel, or writing under a
+pseudonym, or becoming a masked Tuareg....
+
+It is not, I think, that men of my species are insensitive to the great
+past that is embodied in Westminster and its traditions; we are not so
+much wanting in the historical sense as alive to the greatness of our
+present opportunities and the still vaster future that is possible to
+us. London is the most interesting, beautiful, and wonderful city in the
+world to me, delicate in her incidental and multitudinous littleness,
+and stupendous in her pregnant totality; I cannot bring myself to use
+her as a museum or an old bookshop. When I think of Whitehall that
+little affair on the scaffold outside the Banqueting Hall seems trivial
+and remote in comparison with the possibilities that offer themselves to
+my imagination within the great grey Government buildings close at hand.
+
+It gives me a qualm of nostalgia even to name those places now. I think
+of St. Stephen's tower streaming upwards into the misty London night and
+the great wet quadrangle of New Palace Yard, from which the hansom cabs
+of my first experiences were ousted more and more by taxicabs as the
+second Parliament of King Edward the Seventh aged; I think of the
+Admiralty and War office with their tall Marconi masts sending out
+invisible threads of direction to the armies in the camps, to great
+fleets about the world. The crowded, darkly shining river goes flooding
+through my memory once again, on to those narrow seas that part us
+from our rival nations; I see quadrangles and corridors of spacious
+grey-toned offices in which undistinguished little men and little files
+of papers link us to islands in the tropics, to frozen wildernesses
+gashed for gold, to vast temple-studded plains, to forest worlds
+and mountain worlds, to ports and fortresses and lighthouses and
+watch-towers and grazing lands and corn lands all about the globe. Once
+more I traverse Victoria Street, grimy and dark, where the Agents of the
+Empire jostle one another, pass the big embassies in the West End
+with their flags and scutcheons, follow the broad avenue that leads to
+Buckingham Palace, witness the coming and going of troops and officials
+and guests along it from every land on earth.... Interwoven in the
+texture of it all, mocking, perplexing, stimulating beyond measure, is
+the gleaming consciousness, the challenging knowledge: “You and your
+kind might still, if you could but grasp it here, mould all the destiny
+of Man!”
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+My first three years in Parliament were years of active discontent. The
+little group of younger Liberals to which I belonged was very ignorant
+of the traditions and qualities of our older leaders, and quite out of
+touch with the mass of the party. For a time Parliament was enormously
+taken up with moribund issues and old quarrels. The early Educational
+legislation was sectarian and unenterprising, and the Licensing Bill
+went little further than the attempted rectification of a Conservative
+mistake. I was altogether for the nationalisation of the public-houses,
+and of this end the Bill gave no intimations. It was just beer-baiting.
+I was recalcitrant almost from the beginning, and spoke against the
+Government so early as the second reading of the first Education Bill,
+the one the Lords rejected in 1906. I went a little beyond my intention
+in the heat of speaking,--it is a way with inexperienced man. I called
+the Bill timid, narrow, a mere sop to the jealousies of sects and
+little-minded people. I contrasted its aim and methods with the manifest
+needs of the time.
+
+I am not a particularly good speaker; after the manner of a writer I
+worry to find my meaning too much; but this was one of my successes. I
+spoke after dinner and to a fairly full House, for people were already
+a little curious about me because of my writings. Several of the
+Conservative leaders were present and stayed, and Mr. Evesham,
+I remember, came ostentatiously to hear me, with that engaging
+friendliness of his, and gave me at the first chance an approving “Hear,
+Hear!” I can still recall quite distinctly my two futile attempts to
+catch the Speaker's eye before I was able to begin, the nervous quiver
+of my rather too prepared opening, the effect of hearing my own voice
+and my subconscious wonder as to what I could possibly be talking
+about, the realisation that I was getting on fairly well, the immense
+satisfaction afterwards of having on the whole brought it off, and the
+absurd gratitude I felt for that encouraging cheer.
+
+Addressing the House of Commons is like no other public speaking in the
+world. Its semi-colloquial methods give it an air of being easy, but
+its shifting audience, the comings and goings and hesitations of members
+behind the chair--not mere audience units, but men who matter--the
+desolating emptiness that spreads itself round the man who fails to
+interest, the little compact, disciplined crowd in the strangers'
+gallery, the light, elusive, flickering movements high up behind the
+grill, the wigged, attentive, weary Speaker, the table and the mace
+and the chapel-like Gothic background with its sombre shadows, conspire
+together, produce a confused, uncertain feeling in me, as though I was
+walking upon a pavement full of trap-doors and patches of uncovered
+morass. A misplaced, well-meant “Hear, Hear!” is apt to be
+extraordinarily disconcerting, and under no other circumstances have I
+had to speak with quite the same sideways twist that the arrangement of
+the House imposes. One does not recognise one's own voice threading out
+into the stirring brown. Unless I was excited or speaking to the mind of
+some particular person in the house, I was apt to lose my feeling of an
+auditor. I had no sense of whither my sentences were going, such as one
+has with a public meeting well under one's eye. And to lose one's sense
+of an auditor is for a man of my temperament to lose one's sense of the
+immediate, and to become prolix and vague with qualifications.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+My discontents with the Liberal party and my mental exploration of
+the quality of party generally is curiously mixed up with certain
+impressions of things and people in the National Liberal Club. The
+National Liberal Club is Liberalism made visible in the flesh--and
+Doultonware. It is an extraordinary big club done in a bold, wholesale,
+shiny, marbled style, richly furnished with numerous paintings, steel
+engravings, busts, and full-length statues of the late Mr. Gladstone;
+and its spacious dining-rooms, its long, hazy, crowded smoking-room with
+innumerable little tables and groups of men in armchairs, its
+magazine room and library upstairs, have just that undistinguished and
+unconcentrated diversity which is for me the Liberal note. The pensive
+member sits and hears perplexing dialects and even fragments of foreign
+speech, and among the clustering masses of less insistent whites his
+roving eye catches profiles and complexions that send his mind afield to
+Calcutta or Rangoon or the West Indies or Sierra Leone or the Cape....
+
+I was not infrequently that pensive member. I used to go to the Club to
+doubt about Liberalism.
+
+About two o'clock in the day the great smoking-room is crowded with
+countless little groups. They sit about small round tables, or in
+circles of chairs, and the haze of tobacco seems to prolong the great
+narrow place, with its pillars and bays, to infinity. Some of the groups
+are big, as many as a dozen men talk in loud tones; some are duologues,
+and there is always a sprinkling of lonely, dissociated men. At first
+one gets an impression of men going from group to group and as it were
+linking them, but as one watches closely one finds that these men just
+visit three or four groups at the outside, and know nothing of the
+others. One begins to perceive more and more distinctly that one is
+dealing with a sort of human mosaic; that each patch in that great place
+is of a different quality and colour from the next and never to be mixed
+with it. Most clubs have a common link, a lowest common denominator in
+the Club Bore, who spares no one, but even the National Liberal bores
+are specialised and sectional. As one looks round one sees here a clump
+of men from the North Country or the Potteries, here an island of
+South London politicians, here a couple of young Jews ascendant from
+Whitechapel, here a circle of journalists and writers, here a group of
+Irish politicians, here two East Indians, here a priest or so, here
+a clump of old-fashioned Protestants, here a little knot of eminent
+Rationalists indulging in a blasphemous story SOTTO VOCE. Next them are
+a group of anglicised Germans and highly specialised chess-players,
+and then two of the oddest-looking persons--bulging with documents and
+intent upon extraordinary business transactions over long cigars....
+
+I would listen to a stormy sea of babblement, and try to extract some
+constructive intimations. Every now and then I got a whiff of politics.
+It was clear they were against the Lords--against plutocrats--against
+Cossington's newspapers--against the brewers.... It was tremendously
+clear what they were against. The trouble was to find out what on earth
+they were for!...
+
+As I sat and thought, the streaked and mottled pillars and wall, the
+various views, aspects, and portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, the
+partitions of polished mahogany, the yellow-vested waiters, would
+dissolve and vanish, and I would have a vision of this sample of
+miscellaneous men of limited, diverse interests and a universal
+littleness of imagination enlarged, unlimited, no longer a sample but a
+community, spreading, stretching out to infinity--all in little groups
+and duologues and circles, all with their special and narrow concerns,
+all with their backs to most of the others.
+
+What but a common antagonism would ever keep these multitudes together?
+I understood why modern electioneering is more than half of it
+denunciation. Let us condemn, if possible, let us obstruct and deprive,
+but not let us do. There is no real appeal to the commonplace mind in
+“Let us do.” That calls for the creative imagination, and few have been
+accustomed to respond to that call. The other merely needs jealousy and
+bate, of which there are great and easily accessible reservoirs in every
+human heart....
+
+I remember that vision of endless, narrow, jealous individuality very
+vividly. A seething limitlessness it became at last, like a waste place
+covered by crawling locusts that men sweep up by the sackload and drown
+by the million in ditches....
+
+Grotesquely against it came the lean features, the sidelong shy
+movements of Edward Crampton, seated in a circle of talkers close at
+hand. I had a whiff of his strained, unmusical voice, and behold! he was
+saying something about the “Will of the People....”
+
+The immense and wonderful disconnectednesses of human life! I forgot the
+smoke and jabber of the club altogether; I became a lonely spirit flung
+aloft by some queer accident, a stone upon a ledge in some high and
+rocky wilderness, and below as far as the eye could reach stretched the
+swarming infinitesimals of humanity, like grass upon the field, like
+pebbles upon unbounded beaches. Was there ever to be in human life
+more than that endless struggling individualism? Was there indeed some
+giantry, some immense valiant synthesis, still to come--or present it
+might be and still unseen by me, or was this the beginning and withal
+the last phase of mankind?...
+
+I glimpsed for a while the stupendous impudence of our ambitions,
+the tremendous enterprise to which the modern statesman is implicitly
+addressed. I was as it were one of a little swarm of would-be reef
+builders looking back at the teeming slime upon the ocean floor. All the
+history of mankind, all the history of life, has been and will be
+the story of something struggling out of the indiscriminated abyss,
+struggling to exist and prevail over and comprehend individual lives--an
+effort of insidious attraction, an idea of invincible appeal. That
+something greater than ourselves, which does not so much exist as seek
+existence, palpitating between being and not-being, how marvellous it
+is! It has worn the form and visage of ten thousand different gods,
+sought a shape for itself in stone and ivory and music and wonderful
+words, spoken more and more clearly of a mystery of love, a mystery
+of unity, dabbling meanwhile in blood and cruelty beyond the common
+impulses of men. It is something that comes and goes, like a light that
+shines and is withdrawn, withdrawn so completely that one doubts if it
+has ever been....
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+I would mark with a curious interest the stray country member of
+the club up in town for a night or so. My mind would be busy with
+speculations about him, about his home, his family, his reading, his
+horizons, his innumerable fellows who didn't belong and never came up.
+I would fill in the outline of him with memories of my uncle and his
+Staffordshire neighbours. He was perhaps Alderman This or Councillor
+That down there, a great man in his ward, J. P. within seven miles of
+the boundary of the borough, and a God in his home. Here he was nobody,
+and very shy, and either a little too arrogant or a little too meek
+towards our very democratic mannered but still livened waiters. Was
+he perhaps the backbone of England? He over-ate himself lest he should
+appear mean, went through our Special Dinner conscientiously, drank,
+unless he was teetotal, of unfamiliar wines, and did his best, in spite
+of the rules, to tip. Afterwards, in a state of flushed repletion, he
+would have old brandy, black coffee, and a banded cigar, or in the
+name of temperance omit the brandy and have rather more coffee, in
+the smoking-room. I would sit and watch that stiff dignity of
+self-indulgence, and wonder, wonder....
+
+An infernal clairvoyance would come to me. I would have visions of him
+in relation to his wife, checking always, sometimes bullying, sometimes
+being ostentatiously “kind”; I would see him glance furtively at his
+domestic servants upon his staircase, or stiffen his upper lip against
+the reluctant, protesting business employee. We imaginative people
+are base enough, heaven knows, but it is only in rare moods of bitter
+penetration that we pierce down to the baser lusts, the viler shames,
+the everlasting lying and muddle-headed self-justification of the dull.
+
+I would turn my eyes down the crowded room and see others of him and
+others. What did he think he was up to? Did he for a moment realise that
+his presence under that ceramic glory of a ceiling with me meant, if it
+had any rational meaning at all, that we were jointly doing something
+with the nation and the empire and mankind?... How on earth could any
+one get hold of him, make any noble use of him? He didn't read beyond
+his newspaper. He never thought, but only followed imaginings in his
+heart. He never discussed. At the first hint of discussion his temper
+gave way. He was, I knew, a deep, thinly-covered tank of resentments
+and quite irrational moral rages. Yet withal I would have to resist an
+impulse to go over to him and nudge him and say to him, “Look here!
+What indeed do you think we are doing with the nation and the empire and
+mankind? You know--MANKIND!”
+
+I wonder what reply I should have got.
+
+So far as any average could be struck and so far as any backbone could
+be located, it seemed to me that this silent, shy, replete, sub-angry,
+middle-class sentimentalist was in his endless species and varieties and
+dialects the backbone of our party. So far as I could be considered as
+representing anything in the House, I pretended to sit for the elements
+of HIM....
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+For a time I turned towards the Socialists. They at least had an air of
+coherent intentions. At that time Socialism had come into politics again
+after a period of depression and obscurity, with a tremendous ECLAT.
+There was visibly a following of Socialist members to Chris Robinson;
+mysteriously uncommunicative gentlemen in soft felt hats and short
+coats and square-toed boots who replied to casual advances a little
+surprisingly in rich North Country dialects. Members became aware of a
+“seagreen incorruptible,” as Colonel Marlow put it to me, speaking on
+the Address, a slender twisted figure supporting itself on a stick and
+speaking with a fire that was altogether revolutionary. This was Philip
+Snowden, the member for Blackburn. They had come in nearly forty
+strong altogether, and with an air of presently meaning to come in much
+stronger. They were only one aspect of what seemed at that time a big
+national movement. Socialist societies, we gathered, were springing up
+all over the country, and every one was inquiring about Socialism and
+discussing Socialism. It had taken the Universities with particular
+force, and any youngster with the slightest intellectual pretension was
+either actively for or brilliantly against. For a time our Young Liberal
+group was ostentatiously sympathetic....
+
+When I think of the Socialists there comes a vivid memory of certain
+evening gatherings at our house....
+
+These gatherings had been organised by Margaret as the outcome of
+a discussion at the Baileys'. Altiora had been very emphatic and
+uncharitable upon the futility of the Socialist movement. It seemed that
+even the leaders fought shy of dinner-parties.
+
+“They never meet each other,” said Altiora, “much less people on the
+other side. How can they begin to understand politics until they do
+that?”
+
+“Most of them have totally unpresentable wives,” said Altiora,
+“totally!” and quoted instances, “and they WILL bring them. Or they
+won't come! Some of the poor creatures have scarcely learnt their table
+manners. They just make holes in the talk....”
+
+I thought there was a great deal of truth beneath Altiora's outburst.
+The presentation of the Socialist case seemed very greatly crippled
+by the want of a common intimacy in its leaders; the want of intimacy
+didn't at first appear to be more than an accident, and our talk led to
+Margaret's attempt to get acquaintance and easy intercourse afoot among
+them and between them and the Young Liberals of our group. She gave a
+series of weekly dinners, planned, I think, a little too accurately upon
+Altiora's model, and after each we had as catholic a reception as we
+could contrive.
+
+Our receptions were indeed, I should think, about as catholic as
+receptions could be. Margaret found herself with a weekly houseful of
+insoluble problems in intercourse. One did one's best, but one got a
+nightmare feeling as the evening wore on.
+
+It was one of the few unanimities of these parties that every one should
+be a little odd in appearance, funny about the hair or the tie or the
+shoes or more generally, and that bursts of violent aggression should
+alternate with an attitude entirely defensive. A number of our guests
+had an air of waiting for a clue that never came, and stood and sat
+about silently, mildly amused but not a bit surprised that we did not
+discover their distinctive Open-Sesames. There was a sprinkling of
+manifest seers and prophetesses in shapeless garments, far too many, I
+thought, for really easy social intercourse, and any conversation at any
+moment was liable to become oracular. One was in a state of tension
+from first to last; the most innocent remark seemed capable of exploding
+resentment, and replies came out at the most unexpected angles. We Young
+Liberals went about puzzled but polite to the gathering we had evoked.
+The Young Liberals' tradition is on the whole wonderfully discreet,
+superfluous steam is let out far away from home in the Balkans or
+Africa, and the neat, stiff figures of the Cramptons, Bunting Harblow,
+and Lewis, either in extremely well-cut morning coats indicative of the
+House, or in what is sometimes written of as “faultless evening dress,”
+ stood about on those evenings, they and their very quietly and simply
+and expensively dressed little wives, like a datum line amidst lakes and
+mountains.
+
+I didn't at first see the connection between systematic social
+reorganisation and arbitrary novelties in dietary and costume, just as
+I didn't realise why the most comprehensive constructive projects should
+appear to be supported solely by odd and exceptional personalities.
+On one of these evenings a little group of rather jolly-looking pretty
+young people seated themselves for no particular reason in a large
+circle on the floor of my study, and engaged, so far as I could judge,
+in the game of Hunt the Meaning, the intellectual equivalent of Hunt the
+Slipper. It must have been that same evening I came upon an unbleached
+young gentleman before the oval mirror on the landing engaged in
+removing the remains of an anchovy sandwich from his protruded
+tongue--visible ends of cress having misled him into the belief that he
+was dealing with doctrinally permissible food. It was not unusual to be
+given hand-bills and printed matter by our guests, but there I had
+the advantage over Lewis, who was too tactful to refuse the stuff, too
+neatly dressed to pocket it, and had no writing-desk available upon
+which he could relieve himself in a manner flattering to the giver. So
+that his hands got fuller and fuller. A relentless, compact little woman
+in what Margaret declared to be an extremely expensive black dress
+has also printed herself on my memory; she had set her heart upon my
+contributing to a weekly periodical in the lentil interest with which
+she was associated, and I spent much time and care in evading her.
+
+Mingling with the more hygienic types were a number of Anti-Puritan
+Socialists, bulging with bias against temperance, and breaking out
+against austere methods of living all over their faces. Their manner
+was packed with heartiness. They were apt to choke the approaches to
+the little buffet Margaret had set up downstairs, and there engage in
+discussions of Determinism--it always seemed to be Determinism--which
+became heartier and noisier, but never acrimonious even in the small
+hours. It seemed impossible to settle about this Determinism of
+theirs--ever. And there were worldly Socialists also. I particularly
+recall a large, active, buoyant, lady-killing individual with an
+eyeglass borne upon a broad black ribbon, who swam about us one evening.
+He might have been a slightly frayed actor, in his large frock-coat,
+his white waistcoat, and the sort of black and white check trousers that
+twinkle. He had a high-pitched voice with aristocratic intonations, and
+he seemed to be in a perpetual state of interrogation. “What are we
+all he-a for?” he would ask only too audibly. “What are we doing he-a?
+What's the connection?”
+
+What WAS the connection?
+
+We made a special effort with our last assembly in June, 1907. We tried
+to get something like a representative collection of the parliamentary
+leaders of Socialism, the various exponents of Socialist thought and a
+number of Young Liberal thinkers into one room. Dorvil came, and Horatio
+Bulch; Featherstonehaugh appeared for ten minutes and talked charmingly
+to Margaret and then vanished again; there was Wilkins the novelist and
+Toomer and Dr. Tumpany. Chris Robinson stood about for a time in a new
+comforter, and Magdeberg and Will Pipes and five or six Labour members.
+And on our side we had our particular little group, Bunting Harblow,
+Crampton, Lewis, all looking as broad-minded and open to conviction as
+they possibly could, and even occasionally talking out from their bushes
+almost boldly. But the gathering as a whole refused either to mingle or
+dispute, and as an experiment in intercourse the evening was a failure.
+Unexpected dissociations appeared between Socialists one had supposed
+friendly. I could not have imagined it was possible for half so many
+people to turn their backs on everybody else in such small rooms as
+ours. But the unsaid things those backs expressed broke out, I remarked,
+with refreshed virulence in the various organs of the various sections
+of the party next week.
+
+I talked, I remember, with Dr. Tumpany, a large young man in a still
+larger professional frock-coat, and with a great shock of very fair
+hair, who was candidate for some North Country constituency. We
+discussed the political outlook, and, like so many Socialists at that
+time, he was full of vague threatenings against the Liberal party. I
+was struck by a thing in him that I had already observed less vividly in
+many others of these Socialist leaders, and which gave me at last a clue
+to the whole business. He behaved exactly like a man in possession of
+valuable patent rights, who wants to be dealt with. He had an air of
+having a corner in ideas. Then it flashed into my head that the whole
+Socialist movement was an attempted corner in ideas....
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+Late that night I found myself alone with Margaret amid the debris of
+the gathering.
+
+I sat before the fire, hands in pockets, and Margaret, looking white and
+weary, came and leant upon the mantel.
+
+“Oh, Lord!” said Margaret.
+
+I agreed. Then I resumed my meditation.
+
+“Ideas,” I said, “count for more than I thought in the world.”
+
+Margaret regarded me with that neutral expression behind which she was
+accustomed to wait for clues.
+
+“When you think of the height and depth and importance and wisdom of the
+Socialist ideas, and see the men who are running them,” I explained....
+“A big system of ideas like Socialism grows up out of the obvious common
+sense of our present conditions. It's as impersonal as science. All
+these men--They've given nothing to it. They're just people who have
+pegged out claims upon a big intellectual No-Man's-Land--and don't feel
+quite sure of the law. There's a sort of quarrelsome uneasiness....
+If we professed Socialism do you think they'd welcome us? Not a man of
+them! They'd feel it was burglary....”
+
+“Yes,” said Margaret, looking into the fire. “That is just what I felt
+about them all the evening.... Particularly Dr. Tumpany.”
+
+“We mustn't confuse Socialism with the Socialists,” I said; “that's
+the moral of it. I suppose if God were to find He had made a mistake in
+dates or something, and went back and annihilated everybody from Owen
+onwards who was in any way known as a Socialist leader or teacher,
+Socialism would be exactly where it is and what it is to-day--a growing
+realisation of constructive needs in every man's mind, and a little
+corner in party politics. So, I suppose, it will always be.... But they
+WERE a damned lot, Margaret!”
+
+I looked up at the little noise she made. “TWICE!” she said, smiling
+indulgently, “to-day!” (Even the smile was Altiora's.)
+
+I returned to my thoughts. They WERE a damned human lot. It was an
+excellent word in that connection....
+
+But the ideas marched on, the ideas marched on, just as though men's
+brains were no more than stepping-stones, just as though some great
+brain in which we are all little cells and corpuscles was thinking
+them!...
+
+“I don't think there is a man among them who makes me feel he is
+trustworthy,” said Margaret; “unless it is Featherstonehaugh.”
+
+I sat taking in this proposition.
+
+“They'll never help us, I feel,” said Margaret.
+
+“Us?”
+
+“The Liberals.”
+
+“Oh, damn the Liberals!” I said. “They'll never even help themselves.”
+
+“I don't think I could possibly get on with any of those people,” said
+Margaret, after a pause.
+
+She remained for a time looking down at me and, I could feel, perplexed
+by me, but I wanted to go on with my thinking, and so I did not look up,
+and presently she stooped to my forehead and kissed me and went rustling
+softly to her room.
+
+I remained in my study for a long time with my thoughts crystallising
+out....
+
+It was then, I think, that I first apprehended clearly how that
+opposition to which I have already alluded of the immediate life and the
+mental hinterland of a man, can be applied to public and social affairs.
+The ideas go on--and no person or party succeeds in embodying them. The
+reality of human progress never comes to the surface, it is a power
+in the deeps, an undertow. It goes on in silence while men think, in
+studies where they write self-forgetfully, in laboratories under the
+urgency of an impersonal curiosity, in the rare illumination of honest
+talk, in moments of emotional insight, in thoughtful reading, but not
+in everyday affairs. Everyday affairs and whatever is made an everyday
+affair, are transactions of the ostensible self, the being of habits,
+interests, usage. Temper, vanity, hasty reaction to imitation, personal
+feeling, are their substance. No man can abolish his immediate self and
+specialise in the depths; if he attempt that, he simply turns himself
+into something a little less than the common man. He may have an immense
+hinterland, but that does not absolve him from a frontage. That is the
+essential error of the specialist philosopher, the specialist teacher,
+the specialist publicist. They repudiate frontage; claim to be pure
+hinterland. That is what bothered me about Codger, about those various
+schoolmasters who had prepared me for life, about the Baileys and their
+dream of an official ruling class. A human being who is a philosopher
+in the first place, a teacher in the first place, or a statesman in the
+first place, is thereby and inevitably, though he bring God-like gifts
+to the pretence--a quack. These are attempts to live deep-side
+shallow, inside out. They produce merely a new pettiness. To understand
+Socialism, again, is to gain a new breadth of outlook; to join a
+Socialist organisation is to join a narrow cult which is not even
+tolerably serviceable in presenting or spreading the ideas for which it
+stands....
+
+I perceived I had got something quite fundamental here. It had taken me
+some years to realise the true relation of the great constructive ideas
+that swayed me not only to political parties, but to myself. I had
+been disposed to identify the formulae of some one party with social
+construction, and to regard the other as necessarily anti-constructive,
+just as I had been inclined to follow the Baileys in the
+self-righteousness of supposing myself to be wholly constructive. But I
+saw now that every man of intellectual freedom and vigour is necessarily
+constructive-minded nowadays, and that no man is disinterestedly so.
+Each one of us repeats in himself the conflict of the race between the
+splendour of its possibilities and its immediate associations. We may be
+shaping immortal things, but we must sleep and answer the dinner gong,
+and have our salt of flattery and self-approval. In politics a man
+counts not for what he is in moments of imaginative expansion, but
+for his common workaday, selfish self; and political parties are held
+together not by a community of ultimate aims, but by the stabler bond
+of an accustomed life. Everybody almost is for progress in general, and
+nearly everybody is opposed to any change, except in so far as gross
+increments are change, in his particular method of living and behaviour.
+Every party stands essentially for the interests and mental usages of
+some definite class or group of classes in the exciting community, and
+every party has its scientific-minded and constructive leading section,
+with well-defined hinterlands formulating its social functions in a
+public-spirited form, and its superficial-minded following confessing
+its meannesses and vanities and prejudices. No class will abolish
+itself, materially alter its way of life, or drastically reconstruct
+itself, albeit no class is indisposed to co-operate in the unlimited
+socialisation of any other class. In that capacity for aggression upon
+other classes lies the essential driving force of modern affairs. The
+instincts, the persons, the parties, and vanities sway and struggle.
+The ideas and understandings march on and achieve themselves for all--in
+spite of every one....
+
+The methods and traditions of British politics maintain the form of two
+great parties, with rider groups seeking to gain specific ends in the
+event of a small Government majority. These two main parties are more or
+less heterogeneous in composition. Each, however, has certain necessary
+characteristics. The Conservative Party has always stood quite
+definitely for the established propertied interests. The land-owner,
+the big lawyer, the Established Church, and latterly the huge private
+monopoly of the liquor trade which has been created by temperance
+legislation, are the essential Conservatives. Interwoven now with the
+native wealthy are the families of the great international usurers, and
+a vast miscellaneous mass of financial enterprise. Outside the range of
+resistance implied by these interests, the Conservative Party has always
+shown itself just as constructive and collectivist as any other party.
+The great landowners have been as well-disposed towards the endowment
+of higher education, and as willing to co-operate with the Church in
+protective and mildly educational legislation for children and the
+working class, as any political section. The financiers, too, are
+adventurous-spirited and eager for mechanical progress and technical
+efficiency. They are prepared to spend public money upon research,
+upon ports and harbours and public communications, upon sanitation and
+hygienic organisation. A certain rude benevolence of public intention is
+equally characteristic of the liquor trade. Provided his comfort leads
+to no excesses of temperance, the liquor trade is quite eager to see
+the common man prosperous, happy, and with money to spend in a bar. All
+sections of the party are aggressively patriotic and favourably inclined
+to the idea of an upstanding, well-fed, and well-exercised population
+in uniform. Of course there are reactionary landowners and old-fashioned
+country clergy, full of localised self-importance, jealous even of the
+cottager who can read, but they have neither the power nor the ability
+to retard the constructive forces in the party as a whole. On the other
+hand, when matters point to any definitely confiscatory proposal, to the
+public ownership and collective control of land, for example, or
+state mining and manufactures, or the nationalisation of the so-called
+public-house or extended municipal enterprise, or even to an increase of
+the taxation of property, then the Conservative Party presents a nearly
+adamantine bar. It does not stand for, it IS, the existing arrangement
+in these affairs.
+
+Even more definitely a class party is the Labour Party, whose immediate
+interest is to raise wages, shorten hours of labor, increase employment,
+and make better terms for the working-man tenant and working-man
+purchaser. Its leaders are no doubt constructive minded, but the mass
+of the following is naturally suspicious of education and discipline,
+hostile to the higher education, and--except for an obvious antagonism
+to employers and property owners--almost destitute of ideas. What
+else can it be? It stands for the expropriated multitude, whose whole
+situation and difficulty arise from its individual lack of initiative
+and organising power. It favours the nationalisation of land and capital
+with no sense of the difficulties involved in the process; but, on the
+other hand, the equally reasonable socialisation of individuals which
+is implied by military service is steadily and quite naturally and quite
+illogically opposed by it. It is only in recent years that Labour has
+emerged as a separate party from the huge hospitable caravanserai of
+Liberalism, and there is still a very marked tendency to step back again
+into that multitudinous assemblage.
+
+For multitudinousness has always been the Liberal characteristic.
+Liberalism never has been nor ever can be anything but a diversified
+crowd. Liberalism has to voice everything that is left out by these
+other parties. It is the party against the predominating interests. It
+is at once the party of the failing and of the untried; it is the party
+of decadence and hope. From its nature it must be a vague and planless
+association in comparison with its antagonist, neither so constructive
+on the one hand, nor on the other so competent to hinder the inevitable
+constructions of the civilised state. Essentially it is the party
+of criticism, the “Anti” party. It is a system of hostilities and
+objections that somehow achieves at times an elusive common soul. It is
+a gathering together of all the smaller interests which find themselves
+at a disadvantage against the big established classes, the leasehold
+tenant as against the landowner, the retail tradesman as against
+the merchant and the moneylender, the Nonconformist as against the
+Churchman, the small employer as against the demoralising hospitable
+publican, the man without introductions and broad connections against
+the man who has these things. It is the party of the many small men
+against the fewer prevailing men. It has no more essential reason for
+loving the Collectivist state than the Conservatives; the small dealer
+is doomed to absorption in that just as much as the large owner; but
+it resorts to the state against its antagonists as in the middle ages
+common men pitted themselves against the barons by siding with the king.
+The Liberal Party is the party against “class privilege” because it
+represents no class advantages, but it is also the party that is on
+the whole most set against Collective control because it represents
+no established responsibility. It is constructive only so far as its
+antagonism to the great owner is more powerful than its jealousy of the
+state. It organises only because organisation is forced upon it by the
+organisation of its adversaries. It lapses in and out of alliance with
+Labour as it sways between hostility to wealth and hostility to public
+expenditure....
+
+Every modern European state will have in some form or other these three
+parties: the resistent, militant, authoritative, dull, and unsympathetic
+party of establishment and success, the rich party; the confused,
+sentimental, spasmodic, numerous party of the small, struggling,
+various, undisciplined men, the poor man's party; and a third party
+sometimes detaching itself from the second and sometimes reuniting with
+it, the party of the altogether expropriated masses, the proletarians,
+Labour. Change Conservative and Liberal to Republican and Democrat, for
+example, and you have the conditions in the United States. The Crown or
+a dethroned dynasty, the Established Church or a dispossessed church,
+nationalist secessions, the personalities of party leaders, may break
+up, complicate, and confuse the self-expression of these three necessary
+divisions in the modern social drama, the analyst will make them out
+none the less for that....
+
+And then I came back as if I came back to a refrain;--the ideas go
+on--as though we are all no more than little cells and corpuscles in
+some great brain beyond our understanding....
+
+So it was I sat and thought my problem out.... I still remember my
+satisfaction at seeing things plainly at last. It was like clouds
+dispersing to show the sky. Constructive ideas, of course, couldn't hold
+a party together alone, “interests and habits, not ideas,” I had that
+now, and so the great constructive scheme of Socialism, invading and
+inspiring all parties, was necessarily claimed only by this collection
+of odds and ends, this residuum of disconnected and exceptional people.
+This was true not only of the Socialist idea, but of the scientific
+idea, the idea of veracity--of human confidence in humanity--of all that
+mattered in human life outside the life of individuals.... The only real
+party that would ever profess Socialism was the Labour Party, and that
+in the entirely one-sided form of an irresponsible and non-constructive
+attack on property. Socialism in that mutilated form, the teeth and
+claws without the eyes and brain, I wanted as little as I wanted
+anything in the world.
+
+Perfectly clear it was, perfectly clear, and why hadn't I seen it
+before?... I looked at my watch, and it was half-past two.
+
+I yawned, stretched, got up and went to bed.
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+My ideas about statecraft have passed through three main phases to the
+final convictions that remain. There was the first immediacy of my dream
+of ports and harbours and cities, railways, roads, and administered
+territories--the vision I had seen in the haze from that little church
+above Locarno. Slowly that had passed into a more elaborate legislative
+constructiveness, which had led to my uneasy association with the
+Baileys and the professedly constructive Young Liberals. To get that
+ordered life I had realised the need of organisation, knowledge,
+expertness, a wide movement of co-ordinated methods. On the individual
+side I thought that a life of urgent industry, temperance, and close
+attention was indicated by my perception of these ends. I married
+Margaret and set to work. But something in my mind refused from the
+outset to accept these determinations as final. There was always a doubt
+lurking below, always a faint resentment, a protesting criticism, a
+feeling of vitally important omissions.
+
+I arrived at last at the clear realisation that my political associates,
+and I in my association with them, were oddly narrow, priggish, and
+unreal, that the Socialists with whom we were attempting co-operation
+were preposterously irrelevant to their own theories, that my political
+life didn't in some way comprehend more than itself, that rather
+perplexingly I was missing the thing I was seeking. Britten's footnotes
+to Altiora's self-assertions, her fits of energetic planning, her
+quarrels and rallies and vanities, his illuminating attacks on
+Cramptonism and the heavy-spirited triviality of such Liberalism as the
+Children's Charter, served to point my way to my present conclusions.
+I had been trying to deal all along with human progress as something
+immediate in life, something to be immediately attacked by political
+parties and groups pointing primarily to that end. I now began to
+see that just as in my own being there was the rather shallow, rather
+vulgar, self-seeking careerist, who wore an admirable silk hat and
+bustled self-consciously through the lobby, and a much greater and
+indefinitely growing unpublished personality behind him--my hinterland,
+I have called it--so in human affairs generally the permanent reality
+is also a hinterland, which is never really immediate, which draws
+continually upon human experience and influences human action more and
+more, but which is itself never the actual player upon the stage. It is
+the unseen dramatist who never takes a call. Now it was just through the
+fact that our group about the Baileys didn't understand this, that with
+a sort of frantic energy they were trying to develop that sham expert
+officialdom of theirs to plan, regulate, and direct the affairs of
+humanity, that the perplexing note of silliness and shallowness that I
+had always felt and felt now most acutely under Britten's gibes, came
+in. They were neglecting human life altogether in social organisation.
+
+In the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth of
+statesmanship. It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and all
+organising spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange and
+achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers, leaders of
+men, have always slipped into the error of assuming that they can think
+out the whole--or at any rate completely think out definite parts--of
+the purpose and future of man, clearly and finally; they have set
+themselves to legislate and construct on that assumption, and,
+experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions of reality, they have
+taken to dogma, persecution, training, pruning, secretive education; and
+all the stupidities of self-sufficient energy. In the passion of their
+good intentions they have not hesitated to conceal fact, suppress
+thought, crush disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimental
+desires. And so it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with
+the making, that any extension of social organisation is at present
+achieved.
+
+Directly, however, this idea of an emancipation from immediacy is
+grasped, directly the dominating importance of this critical, less
+personal, mental hinterland in the individual and of the collective mind
+in the race is understood, the whole problem of the statesman and
+his attitude towards politics gain a new significance, and becomes
+accessible to a new series of solutions. He wants no longer to “fix
+up,” as people say, human affairs, but to devote his forces to the
+development of that needed intellectual life without which all his
+shallow attempts at fixing up are futile. He ceases to build on the
+sands, and sets himself to gather foundations.
+
+You see, I began in my teens by wanting to plan and build cities and
+harbours for mankind; I ended in the middle thirties by desiring only
+to serve and increase a general process of thought, a process fearless,
+critical, real-spirited, that would in its own time give cities,
+harbours, air, happiness, everything at a scale and quality and in
+a light altogether beyond the match-striking imaginations of a
+contemporary mind. I wanted freedom of speech and suggestion, vigour of
+thought, and the cultivation of that impulse of veracity that lurks
+more or less discouraged in every man. With that I felt there must go an
+emotion. I hit upon a phrase that became at last something of a refrain
+in my speech and writings, to convey the spirit that I felt was at the
+very heart of real human progress--love and fine thinking.
+
+(I suppose that nowadays no newspaper in England gets through a week
+without the repetition of that phrase.)
+
+My convictions crystallised more and more definitely upon this. The
+more of love and fine thinking the better for men, I said; the less,
+the worse. And upon this fresh basis I set myself to examine what I as
+a politician might do. I perceived I was at last finding an adequate
+expression for all that was in me, for those forces that had rebelled at
+the crude presentations of Bromstead, at the secrecies and suppressions
+of my youth, at the dull unrealities of City Merchants, at the
+conventions and timidities of the Pinky Dinkys, at the philosophical
+recluse of Trinity and the phrases and tradition-worship of my political
+associates. None of these things were half alive, and I wanted life to
+be intensely alive and awake. I wanted thought like an edge of steel and
+desire like a flame. The real work before mankind now, I realised once
+and for all, is the enlargement of human expression, the release and
+intensification of human thought, the vivider utilisation of experience
+and the invigoration of research--and whatever one does in human affairs
+has or lacks value as it helps or hinders that.
+
+With that I had got my problem clear, and the solution, so far as I
+was concerned, lay in finding out the point in the ostensible life of
+politics at which I could most subserve these ends. I was still against
+the muddles of Bromstead, but I had hunted them down now to their
+essential form. The jerry-built slums, the roads that went nowhere,
+the tarred fences, litigious notice-boards and barbed wire fencing, the
+litter and the heaps of dump, were only the outward appearances whose
+ultimate realities were jerry-built conclusions, hasty purposes, aimless
+habits of thought, and imbecile bars and prohibitions in the thoughts
+and souls of men. How are we through politics to get at that confusion?
+
+We want to invigorate and reinvigorate education. We want to create a
+sustained counter effort to the perpetual tendency of all educational
+organisations towards classicalism, secondary issues, and the evasion of
+life.
+
+We want to stimulate the expression of life through art and literature,
+and its exploration through research.
+
+We want to make the best and finest thought accessible to every one,
+and more particularly to create and sustain an enormous free criticism,
+without which art, literature, and research alike degenerate into
+tradition or imposture.
+
+Then all the other problems which are now so insoluble, destitution,
+disease, the difficulty of maintaining international peace, the scarcely
+faced possibility of making life generally and continually beautiful,
+become--EASY....
+
+It was clear to me that the most vital activities in which I could
+engage would be those which most directly affected the Church, public
+habits of thought, education, organised research, literature, and the
+channels of general discussion. I had to ask myself how my position
+as Liberal member for Kinghamstead squared with and conduced to this
+essential work.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ SEEKING ASSOCIATES
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+I have told of my gradual abandonment of the pretensions and habits of
+party Liberalism. In a sense I was moving towards aristocracy. Regarding
+the development of the social and individual mental hinterland as the
+essential thing in human progress, I passed on very naturally to the
+practical assumption that we wanted what I may call “hinterlanders.” Of
+course I do not mean by aristocracy the changing unorganised medley of
+rich people and privileged people who dominate the civilised world of
+to-day, but as opposed to this, a possibility of co-ordinating the will
+of the finer individuals, by habit and literature, into a broad common
+aim. We must have an aristocracy--not of privilege, but of understanding
+and purpose--or mankind will fail. I find this dawning more and more
+clearly when I look through my various writings of the years between
+1903 and 1910. I was already emerging to plain statements in 1908.
+
+I reasoned after this fashion. The line of human improvement and the
+expansion of human life lies in the direction of education and finer
+initiatives. If humanity cannot develop an education far beyond anything
+that is now provided, if it cannot collectively invent devices and solve
+problems on a much richer, broader scale than it does at the present
+time, it cannot hope to achieve any very much finer order or any more
+general happiness than it now enjoys. We must believe, therefore, that
+it CAN develop such a training and education, or we must abandon secular
+constructive hope. And here my peculiar difficulty as against crude
+democracy comes in. If humanity at large is capable of that high
+education and those creative freedoms our hope demands, much more must
+its better and more vigorous types be so capable. And if those who have
+power and leisure now, and freedom to respond to imaginative appeals,
+cannot be won to the idea of collective self-development, then the whole
+of humanity cannot be won to that. From that one passes to what
+has become my general conception in politics, the conception of the
+constructive imagination working upon the vast complex of powerful
+people, clever people, enterprising people, influential people, amidst
+whom power is diffused to-day, to produce that self-conscious, highly
+selective, open-minded, devoted aristocratic culture, which seems to me
+to be the necessary next phase in the development of human affairs.
+I see human progress, not as the spontaneous product of crowds of raw
+minds swayed by elementary needs, but as a natural but elaborate result
+of intricate human interdependencies, of human energy and curiosity
+liberated and acting at leisure, of human passions and motives, modified
+and redirected by literature and art....
+
+But now the reader will understand how it came about that, disappointed
+by the essential littleness of Liberalism, and disillusioned about the
+representative quality of the professed Socialists, I turned my
+mind more and more to a scrutiny of the big people, the wealthy and
+influential people, against whom Liberalism pits its forces. I was
+asking myself definitely whether, after all, it was not my particular
+job to work through them and not against them. Was I not altogether out
+of my element as an Anti-? Weren't there big bold qualities about these
+people that common men lack, and the possibility of far more splendid
+dreams? Were they really the obstacles, might they not be rather the
+vehicles of the possible new braveries of life?
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+The faults of the Imperialist movement were obvious enough. The
+conception of the Boer War had been clumsy and puerile, the costly
+errors of that struggle appalling, and the subsequent campaign of Mr.
+Chamberlain for Tariff Reform seemed calculated to combine the financial
+adventurers of the Empire in one vast conspiracy against the consumer.
+The cant of Imperialism was easy to learn and use; it was speedily
+adopted by all sorts of base enterprises and turned to all sorts of base
+ends. But a big child is permitted big mischief, and my mind was
+now continually returning to the persuasion that after all in some
+development of the idea of Imperial patriotism might be found that wide,
+rough, politically acceptable expression of a constructive dream capable
+of sustaining a great educational and philosophical movement such as
+no formula of Liberalism supplied. The fact that it readily took vulgar
+forms only witnessed to its strong popular appeal. Mixed in with the
+noisiness and humbug of the movement there appeared a real regard for
+social efficiency, a real spirit of animation and enterprise. There
+suddenly appeared in my world--I saw them first, I think, in 1908--a
+new sort of little boy, a most agreeable development of the slouching,
+cunning, cigarette-smoking, town-bred youngster, a small boy in a khaki
+hat, and with bare knees and athletic bearing, earnestly engaged in
+wholesome and invigorating games up to and occasionally a little beyond
+his strength--the Boy Scout. I liked the Boy Scout, and I find it
+difficult to express how much it mattered to me, with my growing bias in
+favour of deliberate national training, that Liberalism hadn't been able
+to produce, and had indeed never attempted to produce, anything of this
+kind.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+In those days there existed a dining club called--there was some lost
+allusion to the exorcism of party feeling in its title--the Pentagram
+Circle. It included Bailey and Dayton and myself, Sir Herbert Thorns,
+Lord Charles Kindling, Minns the poet, Gerbault the big railway man,
+Lord Gane, fresh from the settlement of Framboya, and Rumbold, who later
+became Home Secretary and left us. We were men of all parties and very
+various experiences, and our object was to discuss the welfare of the
+Empire in a disinterested spirit. We dined monthly at the Mermaid in
+Westminster, and for a couple of years we kept up an average attendance
+of ten out of fourteen. The dinner-time was given up to desultory
+conversation, and it is odd how warm and good the social atmosphere of
+that little gathering became as time went on; then over the dessert, so
+soon as the waiters had swept away the crumbs and ceased to fret us, one
+of us would open with perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes' exposition
+of some specially prepared question, and after him we would deliver
+ourselves in turn, each for three or four minutes. When every one
+present had spoken once talk became general again, and it was rare we
+emerged upon Hendon Street before midnight. Sometimes, as my house
+was conveniently near, a knot of men would come home with me and go on
+talking and smoking in my dining-room until two or three. We had Fred
+Neal, that wild Irish journalist, among us towards the end, and his
+stupendous flow of words materially prolonged our closing discussions
+and made our continuance impossible.
+
+I learned very much and very many things at those dinners, but more
+particularly did I become familiarised with the habits of mind of such
+men as Neal, Crupp, Gane, and the one or two other New Imperialists
+who belonged to us. They were nearly all like Bailey Oxford men, though
+mostly of a younger generation, and they were all mysteriously and
+inexplicably advocates of Tariff Reform, as if it were the principal
+instead of at best a secondary aspect of constructive policy. They
+seemed obsessed by the idea that streams of trade could be diverted
+violently so as to link the parts of the Empire by common interests, and
+they were persuaded, I still think mistakenly, that Tariff Reform would
+have an immense popular appeal. They were also very keen on military
+organisation, and with a curious little martinet twist in their minds
+that boded ill for that side of public liberty. So much against them.
+But they were disposed to spend money much more generously on education
+and research of all sorts than our formless host of Liberals seemed
+likely to do; and they were altogether more accessible than the Young
+Liberals to bold, constructive ideas affecting the universities and
+upper classes. The Liberals are abjectly afraid of the universities.
+I found myself constantly falling into line with these men in our
+discussions, and more and more hostile to Dayton's sentimentalising
+evasions of definite schemes and Minns' trust in such things as the
+“Spirit of our People” and the “General Trend of Progress.” It wasn't
+that I thought them very much righter than their opponents; I believe
+all definite party “sides” at any time are bound to be about equally
+right and equally lop-sided; but that I thought I could get more out
+of them and what was more important to me, more out of myself if I
+co-operated with them. By 1908 I had already arrived at a point where I
+could be definitely considering a transfer of my political allegiance.
+
+These abstract questions are inseparably interwoven with my memory of a
+shining long white table, and our hock bottles and burgundy bottles, and
+bottles of Perrier and St. Galmier and the disturbed central trophy of
+dessert, and scattered glasses and nut-shells and cigarette-ends and
+menu-cards used for memoranda. I see old Dayton sitting back and cocking
+his eye to the ceiling in a way he had while he threw warmth into the
+ancient platitudes of Liberalism, and Minns leaning forward, and a
+little like a cockatoo with a taste for confidences, telling us in a
+hushed voice of his faith in the Destiny of Mankind. Thorns lounges,
+rolling his round face and round eyes from speaker to speaker and
+sounding the visible depths of misery whenever Neal begins. Gerbault
+and Gane were given to conversation in undertones, and Bailey pursued
+mysterious purposes in lisping whispers. It was Crupp attracted me most.
+He had, as people say, his eye on me from the beginning. He used to
+speak at me, and drifted into a custom of coming home with me very
+regularly for an after-talk.
+
+He opened his heart to me.
+
+“Neither of us,” he said, “are dukes, and neither of us are horny-handed
+sons of toil. We want to get hold of the handles, and to do that, one
+must go where the power is, and give it just as constructive a twist as
+we can. That's MY Toryism.”
+
+“Is it Kindling's--or Gerbault's?”
+
+“No. But theirs is soft, and mine's hard. Mine will wear theirs out. You
+and I and Bailey are all after the same thing, and why aren't we working
+together?”
+
+“Are you a Confederate?” I asked suddenly.
+
+“That's a secret nobody tells,” he said.
+
+“What are the Confederates after?”
+
+“Making aristocracy work, I suppose. Just as, I gather, you want to
+do.”...
+
+The Confederates were being heard of at that time. They were at once
+attractive and repellent to me, an odd secret society whose membership
+nobody knew, pledged, it was said, to impose Tariff Reform and an ample
+constructive policy upon the Conservatives. In the press, at any rate,
+they had an air of deliberately organised power. I have no doubt the
+rumour of them greatly influenced my ideas....
+
+In the end I made some very rapid decisions, but for nearly two years I
+was hesitating. Hesitations were inevitable in such a matter. I was
+not dealing with any simple question of principle, but with elusive and
+fluctuating estimates of the trend of diverse forces and of the nature
+of my own powers. All through that period I was asking over and over
+again: how far are these Confederates mere dreamers? How far--and this
+was more vital--are they rendering lip-service to social organisations?
+Is it true they desire war because it confirms the ascendency of their
+class? How far can Conservatism be induced to plan and construct before
+it resists the thrust towards change. Is it really in bulk anything more
+than a mass of prejudice and conceit, cynical indulgence, and a hard
+suspicion of and hostility to the expropriated classes in the community?
+
+That is a research which yields no statistics, an enquiry like asking
+what is the ruling colour of a chameleon. The shadowy answer varied
+with my health, varied with my mood and the conduct of the people I was
+watching. How fine can people be? How generous?--not incidentally, but
+all round? How far can you educate sons beyond the outlook of their
+fathers, and how far lift a rich, proud, self-indulgent class above the
+protests of its business agents and solicitors and its own habits and
+vanity? Is chivalry in a class possible?--was it ever, indeed, or will
+it ever indeed be possible? Is the progress that seems attainable in
+certain directions worth the retrogression that may be its price?
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+It was to the Pentagram Circle that I first broached the new conceptions
+that were developing in my mind. I count the evening of my paper the
+beginning of the movement that created the BLUE WEEKLY and our wing of
+the present New Tory party. I do that without any excessive egotism,
+because my essay was no solitary man's production; it was my reaction
+to forces that had come to me very large through my fellow-members; its
+quick reception by them showed that I was, so to speak, merely the first
+of the chestnuts to pop. The atmospheric quality of the evening stands
+out very vividly in my memory. The night, I remember, was warmly foggy
+when after midnight we went to finish our talk at my house.
+
+We had recently changed the rules of the club to admit visitors, and
+so it happened that I had brought Britten, and Crupp introduced Arnold
+Shoesmith, my former schoolfellow at City Merchants, and now the
+wealthy successor of his father and elder brother. I remember his heavy,
+inexpressively handsome face lighting to his rare smile at the sight of
+me, and how little I dreamt of the tragic entanglement that was destined
+to involve us both. Gane was present, and Esmeer, a newly-added
+member, but I think Bailey was absent. Either he was absent, or he said
+something so entirely characteristic and undistinguished that it has
+left no impression on my mind.
+
+I had broken a little from the traditions of the club even in my title,
+which was deliberately a challenge to the liberal idea: it was, “The
+World Exists for Exceptional People.” It is not the title I should
+choose now--for since that time I have got my phrase of “mental
+hinterlander” into journalistic use. I should say now, “The World Exists
+for Mental Hinterland.”
+
+The notes I made of that opening have long since vanished with a
+thousand other papers, but some odd chance has preserved and brought
+with me to Italy the menu for the evening; its back black with the
+scrawled notes I made of the discussion for my reply. I found it the
+other day among some letters from Margaret and a copy of the 1909 Report
+of the Poor Law Commission, also rich with pencilled marginalia.
+
+My opening was a criticism of the democratic idea and method, upon lines
+such as I have already sufficiently indicated in the preceding sections.
+I remember how old Dayton fretted in his chair, and tushed and pished
+at that, even as I gave it, and afterwards we were treated to one of his
+platitudinous harangues, he sitting back in his chair with that small
+obstinate eye of his fixed on the ceiling, and a sort of cadaverous glow
+upon his face, repeating--quite regardless of all my reasoning and all
+that had been said by others in the debate--the sacred empty phrases
+that were his soul's refuge from reality. “You may think it very
+clever,” he said with a nod of his head to mark his sense of his point,
+“not to Trust in the People. I do.” And so on. Nothing in his life or
+work had ever shown that he did trust in the people, but that was
+beside the mark. He was the party Liberal, and these were the party
+incantations.
+
+After my preliminary attack on vague democracy I went on to show that
+all human life was virtually aristocratic; people must either recognise
+aristocracy in general or else follow leaders, which is aristocracy in
+particular, and so I came to my point that the reality of human progress
+lay necessarily through the establishment of freedoms for the human best
+and a collective receptivity and understanding. There was a disgusted
+grunt from Dayton, “Superman rubbish--Nietzsche. Shaw! Ugh!” I sailed on
+over him to my next propositions. The prime essential in a progressive
+civilisation was the establishment of a more effective selective process
+for the privilege of higher education, and the very highest educational
+opportunity for the educable. We were too apt to patronise scholarship
+winners, as though a scholarship was toffee given as a reward for
+virtue. It wasn't any reward at all; it was an invitation to capacity.
+We had no more right to drag in virtue, or any merit but quality, than
+we had to involve it in a search for the tallest man. We didn't want a
+mere process for the selection of good as distinguished from gifted and
+able boys--“No, you DON'T,” from Dayton--we wanted all the brilliant
+stuff in the world concentrated upon the development of the world.
+Just to exasperate Dayton further I put in a plea for gifts as against
+character in educational, artistic, and legislative work. “Good
+teaching,” I said, “is better than good conduct. We are becoming idiotic
+about character.”
+
+Dayton was too moved to speak. He slewed round upon me an eye of
+agonised aversion.
+
+I expatiated on the small proportion of the available ability that is
+really serving humanity to-day. “I suppose to-day all the thought, all
+the art, all the increments of knowledge that matter, are supplied so
+far as the English-speaking community is concerned by--how many?--by
+three or four thousand individuals. ['Less,' said Thorns.) To be
+more precise, by the mental hinterlands of three or four thousand
+individuals. We who know some of the band entertain no illusions as to
+their innate rarity. We know that they are just the few out of many, the
+few who got in our world of chance and confusion, the timely stimulus,
+the apt suggestion at the fortunate moment, the needed training, the
+leisure. The rest are lost in the crowd, fail through the defects of
+their qualities, become commonplace workmen and second-rate professional
+men, marry commonplace wives, are as much waste as the driftage of
+superfluous pollen in a pine forest is waste.”
+
+“Decent honest lives!” said Dayton to his bread-crumbs, with his chin in
+his necktie. “WASTE!”
+
+“And the people who do get what we call opportunity get it usually
+in extremely limited and cramping forms. No man lives a life of
+intellectual productivity alone; he needs not only material and
+opportunity, but helpers, resonators. Round and about what I might
+call the REAL men, you want the sympathetic cooperators, who help by
+understanding. It isn't that our--SALT of three or four thousand is
+needlessly rare; it is sustained by far too small and undifferentiated a
+public. Most of the good men we know are not really doing the very
+best work of their gifts; nearly all are a little adapted, most are
+shockingly adapted to some second-best use. Now, I take it, this is the
+very centre and origin of the muddle, futility, and unhappiness that
+distresses us; it's the cardinal problem of the state--to discover,
+develop, and use the exceptional gifts of men. And I see that best
+done--I drift more and more away from the common stuff of legislative
+and administrative activity--by a quite revolutionary development of the
+educational machinery, but by a still more unprecedented attempt to
+keep science going, to keep literature going, and to keep what is
+the necessary spur of all science and literature, an intelligent and
+appreciative criticism going. You know none of these things have ever
+been kept going hitherto; they've come unexpectedly and inexplicably.”
+
+“Hear, hear!” from Dayton, cough, nodding of the head, and an expression
+of mystical profundity.
+
+“They've lit up a civilisation and vanished, to give place to darkness
+again. Now the modern state doesn't mean to go back to darkness
+again--and so it's got to keep its light burning.” I went on to attack
+the present organisation of our schools and universities, which
+seemed elaborately designed to turn the well-behaved, uncritical, and
+uncreative men of each generation into the authoritative leaders of the
+next, and I suggested remedies upon lines that I have already indicated
+in the earlier chapters of this story....
+
+So far I had the substance of the club with me, but I opened new
+ground and set Crupp agog by confessing my doubt from which party or
+combination of groups these developments of science and literature and
+educational organisation could most reasonably be expected. I looked up
+to find Crupp's dark little eye intent upon me.
+
+There I left it to them.
+
+We had an astonishingly good discussion; Neal burst once, but we emerged
+from his flood after a time, and Dayton had his interlude. The rest was
+all close, keen examination of my problem.
+
+I see Crupp now with his arm bent before him on the table in a way we
+had, as though it was jointed throughout its length like a lobster's
+antenna, his plump, short-fingered hand crushing up a walnut shell into
+smaller and smaller fragments. “Remington,” he said, “has given us the
+data for a movement, a really possible movement. It's not only possible,
+but necessary--urgently necessary, I think, if the Empire is to go on.”
+
+“We're working altogether too much at the social basement in education
+and training,” said Gane. “Remington is right about our neglect of the
+higher levels.”
+
+Britten made a good contribution with an analysis of what he called the
+spirit of a country and what made it. “The modern community needs its
+serious men to be artistic and its artists to be taken seriously,” I
+remember his saying. “The day has gone by for either dull responsibility
+or merely witty art.”
+
+I remember very vividly how Shoesmith harped on an idea I had thrown out
+of using some sort of review or weekly to express and elaborate these
+conceptions of a new, severer, aristocratic culture.
+
+“It would have to be done amazingly well,” said Britten, and my mind
+went back to my school days and that ancient enterprise of ours, and how
+Cossington had rushed it. Well, Cossington had too many papers nowadays
+to interfere with us, and we perhaps had learnt some defensive devices.
+
+“But this thing has to be linked to some political party,” said Crupp,
+with his eye on me. “You can't get away from that. The Liberals,” he
+added, “have never done anything for research or literature.”
+
+“They had a Royal Commission on the Dramatic Censorship,” said Thorns,
+with a note of minute fairness. “It shows what they were made of,” he
+added.
+
+“It's what I've told Remington again and again,” said Crupp, “we've
+got to pick up the tradition of aristocracy, reorganise it, and make it
+work. But he's certainly suggested a method.”
+
+“There won't be much aristocracy to pick up,” said Dayton, darkly to the
+ceiling, “if the House of Lords throws out the Budget.”
+
+“All the more reason for picking it up,” said Neal. “For we can't do
+without it.”
+
+“Will they go to the bad, or will they rise from the ashes, aristocrats
+indeed--if the Liberals come in overwhelmingly?” said Britten.
+
+“It's we who might decide that,” said Crupp, insidiously.
+
+“I agree,” said Gane.
+
+“No one can tell,” said Thorns. “I doubt if they will get beaten.”
+
+It was an odd, fragmentary discussion that night. We were all with ideas
+in our minds at once fine and imperfect. We threw out suggestions that
+showed themselves at once far inadequate, and we tried to qualify them
+by minor self-contradictions. Britten, I think, got more said than any
+one. “You all seem to think you want to organise people, particular
+groups and classes of individuals,” he insisted. “It isn't that. That's
+the standing error of politicians. You want to organise a culture.
+Civilisation isn't a matter of concrete groupings; it's a matter of
+prevailing ideas. The problem is how to make bold, clear ideas prevail.
+The question for Remington and us is just what groups of people will
+most help this culture forward.”
+
+“Yes, but how are the Lords going to behave?” said Crupp. “You yourself
+were asking that a little while ago.”
+
+“If they win or if they lose,” Gane maintained, “there will be a
+movement to reorganise aristocracy--Reform of the House of Lords,
+they'll call the political form of it.”
+
+“Bailey thinks that,” said some one.
+
+“The labour people want abolition,” said some one. “Let 'em,” said
+Thorns.
+
+He became audible, sketching a possibility of action.
+
+“Suppose all of us were able to work together. It's just one of those
+indeterminate, confused, eventful times ahead when a steady jet of ideas
+might produce enormous results.”
+
+“Leave me out of it,” said Dayton, “IF you please.”
+
+“We should,” said Thorns under his breath.
+
+I took up Crupp's initiative, I remember, and expanded it.
+
+“I believe we could do--extensive things,” I insisted.
+
+“Revivals and revisions of Toryism have been tried so often,” said
+Thorns, “from the Young England movement onward.”
+
+“Not one but has produced its enduring effects,” I said. “It's the
+peculiarity of English conservatism that it's persistently progressive
+and rejuvenescent.”
+
+I think it must have been about that point that Dayton fled our
+presence, after some clumsy sentence that I decided upon reflection was
+intended to remind me of my duty to my party.
+
+Then I remember Thorns firing doubts at me obliquely across the table.
+“You can't run a country through its spoilt children,” he said. “What
+you call aristocrats are really spoilt children. They've had too much of
+everything, except bracing experience.”
+
+“Children can always be educated,” said Crupp.
+
+“I said SPOILT children,” said Thorns.
+
+“Look here, Thorns!” said I. “If this Budget row leads to a storm, and
+these big people get their power clipped, what's going to happen? Have
+you thought of that? When they go out lock, stock, and barrel, who comes
+in?”
+
+“Nature abhors a Vacuum,” said Crupp, supporting me.
+
+“Bailey's trained officials,” suggested Gane.
+
+“Quacks with a certificate of approval from Altiora,” said Thorns. “I
+admit the horrors of the alternative. There'd be a massacre in three
+years.”
+
+“One may go on trying possibilities for ever,” I said. “One thing
+emerges. Whatever accidents happen, our civilisation needs, and almost
+consciously needs, a culture of fine creative minds, and all the
+necessary tolerances, opennesses, considerations, that march with that.
+For my own part, I think that is the Most Vital Thing. Build your ship
+of state as you will; get your men as you will; I concentrate on what is
+clearly the affair of my sort of man,--I want to ensure the quality of
+the quarter deck.”
+
+“Hear, hear!” said Shoesmith, suddenly--his first remark for a long
+time. “A first-rate figure,” said Shoesmith, gripping it.
+
+“Our danger is in missing that,” I went on. “Muddle isn't ended by
+transferring power from the muddle-headed few to the muddle-headed
+many, and then cheating the many out of it again in the interests of
+a bureaucracy of sham experts. But that seems the limit of the liberal
+imagination. There is no real progress in a country, except a rise
+in the level of its free intellectual activity. All other progress is
+secondary and dependant. If you take on Bailey's dreams of efficient
+machinery and a sort of fanatical discipline with no free-moving brains
+behind it, confused ugliness becomes rigid ugliness,--that's all.
+No doubt things are moving from looseness to discipline, and from
+irresponsible controls to organised controls--and also and rather
+contrariwise everything is becoming as people say, democratised; but
+all the more need in that, for an ark in which the living element may be
+saved.”
+
+“Hear, hear!” said Shoesmith, faint but pursuing.
+
+It must have been in my house afterwards that Shoesmith became
+noticeable. He seemed trying to say something vague and difficult that
+he didn't get said at all on that occasion. “We could do immense things
+with a weekly,” he repeated, echoing Neal, I think. And there he left
+off and became a mute expressiveness, and it was only afterwards, when I
+was in bed, that I saw we had our capitalist in our hands....
+
+We parted that night on my doorstep in a tremendous glow--but in that
+sort of glow one doesn't act upon without much reconsideration, and it
+was some months before I made my decision to follow up the indications
+of that opening talk.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+I find my thoughts lingering about the Pentagram Circle. In my
+developments it played a large part, not so much by starting new trains
+of thought as by confirming the practicability of things I had already
+hesitatingly entertained. Discussion with these other men so prominently
+involved in current affairs endorsed views that otherwise would have
+seemed only a little less remote from actuality than the guardians of
+Plato or the labour laws of More. Among other questions that were never
+very distant from our discussions, that came apt to every topic, was
+the true significance of democracy, Tariff Reform as a method of
+international hostility, and the imminence of war. On the first issue
+I can still recall little Bailey, glib and winking, explaining that
+democracy was really just a dodge for getting assent to the ordinances
+of the expert official by means of the polling booth. “If they don't
+like things,” said he, “they can vote for the opposition candidate
+and see what happens then--and that, you see, is why we don't want
+proportional representation to let in the wild men.” I opened my
+eyes--the lids had dropped for a moment under the caress of those smooth
+sounds--to see if Bailey's artful forefinger wasn't at the side of his
+predominant nose.
+
+The international situation exercised us greatly. Our meetings were
+pervaded by the feeling that all things moved towards a day of
+reckoning with Germany, and I was largely instrumental in keeping up
+the suggestion that India was in a state of unstable equilibrium, that
+sooner or later something must happen there--something very serious to
+our Empire. Dayton frankly detested these topics. He was full of
+that old Middle Victorian persuasion that whatever is inconvenient or
+disagreeable to the English mind could be annihilated by not thinking
+about it. He used to sit low in his chair and look mulish. “Militarism,”
+ he would declare in a tone of the utmost moral fervour, “is a curse.
+It's an unmitigated curse.” Then he would cough shortly and twitch his
+head back and frown, and seem astonished beyond measure that after this
+conclusive statement we could still go on talking of war.
+
+All our Imperialists were obsessed by the thought of international
+conflict, and their influence revived for a time those uneasinesses that
+had been aroused in me for the first time by my continental journey
+with Willersley and by Meredith's “One of Our Conquerors.” That
+quite justifiable dread of a punishment for all the slackness, mental
+dishonesty, presumption, mercenary respectability and sentimentalised
+commercialism of the Victorian period, at the hands of the better
+organised, more vigorous, and now far more highly civilised peoples
+of Central Europe, seemed to me to have both a good and bad series of
+consequences. It seemed the only thing capable of bracing English minds
+to education, sustained constructive effort and research; but on the
+other hand it produced the quality of a panic, hasty preparation,
+impatience of thought, a wasteful and sometimes quite futile immediacy.
+In 1909, for example, there was a vast clamour for eight additional
+Dreadnoughts--
+
+     “We want eight
+      And we won't wait,”
+
+but no clamour at all about our national waste of inventive talent, our
+mean standard of intellectual attainment, our disingenuous criticism,
+and the consequent failure to distinguish men of the quality needed to
+carry on the modern type of war. Almost universally we have the wrong
+men in our places of responsibility and the right men in no place
+at all, almost universally we have poorly qualified, hesitating, and
+resentful subordinates, because our criticism is worthless and, so
+habitually as to be now almost unconsciously, dishonest. Germany is
+beating England in every matter upon which competition is possible,
+because she attended sedulously to her collective mind for sixty
+pregnant years, because in spite of tremendous defects she is still far
+more anxious for quality in achievement than we are. I remember saying
+that in my paper. From that, I remember, I went on to an image that had
+flashed into my mind. “The British Empire,” I said, “is like some of
+those early vertebrated monsters, the Brontosaurus and the Atlantosaurus
+and such-like; it sacrifices intellect to character; its backbone,
+that is to say,--especially in the visceral region--is bigger than its
+cranium. It's no accident that things are so. We've worked for backbone.
+We brag about backbone, and if the joints are anchylosed so much the
+better. We're still but only half awake to our error. You can't change
+that suddenly.”
+
+“Turn it round and make it go backwards,” interjected Thorns.
+
+“It's trying to do that,” I said, “in places.”
+
+And afterwards Crupp declared I had begotten a nightmare which haunted
+him of nights; he was trying desperately and belatedly to blow a brain
+as one blows soap-bubbles on such a mezoroic saurian as I had conjured
+up, while the clumsy monster's fate, all teeth and brains, crept nearer
+and nearer....
+
+I've grown, I think, since those days out of the urgency of that
+apprehension. I still think a European war, and conceivably a very
+humiliating war for England, may occur at no very distant date, but I
+do not think there is any such heroic quality in our governing class
+as will make that war catastrophic. The prevailing spirit in English
+life--it is one of the essential secrets of our imperial endurance--is
+one of underbred aggression in prosperity and diplomatic compromise in
+moments of danger; we bully haughtily where we can and assimilate where
+we must. It is not for nothing that our upper and middle-class youth is
+educated by teachers of the highest character, scholars and gentlemen,
+men who can pretend quite honestly that Darwinism hasn't upset the
+historical fall of man, that cricket is moral training, and that
+Socialism is an outrage upon the teachings of Christ. A sort of
+dignified dexterity of evasion is the national reward. Germany, with a
+larger population, a vigorous and irreconcilable proletariat, a bolder
+intellectual training, a harsher spirit, can scarcely fail to drive us
+at last to a realisation of intolerable strain. So we may never fight at
+all. The war of preparations that has been going on for thirty years may
+end like a sham-fight at last in an umpire's decision. We shall proudly
+but very firmly take the second place. For my own part, since I love
+England as much as I detest her present lethargy of soul, I pray for a
+chastening war--I wouldn't mind her flag in the dirt if only her spirit
+would come out of it. So I was able to shake off that earlier fear of
+some final and irrevocable destruction truncating all my schemes. At the
+most, a European war would be a dramatic episode in the reconstruction I
+had in view.
+
+In India, too, I no longer foresee, as once I was inclined to
+see, disaster. The English rule in India is surely one of the most
+extraordinary accidents that has ever happened in history. We are there
+like a man who has fallen off a ladder on to the neck of an elephant,
+and doesn't know what to do or how to get down. Until something happens
+he remains. Our functions in India are absurd. We English do not own
+that country, do not even rule it. We make nothing happen; at the most
+we prevent things happening. We suppress our own literature there. Most
+English people cannot even go to this land they possess; the authorities
+would prevent it. If Messrs. Perowne or Cook organised a cheap tour
+of Manchester operatives, it would be stopped. No one dare bring the
+average English voter face to face with the reality of India, or let
+the Indian native have a glimpse of the English voter. In my time I
+have talked to English statesmen, Indian officials and ex-officials,
+viceroys, soldiers, every one who might be supposed to know what India
+signifies, and I have prayed them to tell me what they thought we were
+up to there. I am not writing without my book in these matters. And
+beyond a phrase or so about “even-handed justice”--and look at our
+sedition trials!--they told me nothing. Time after time I have heard
+of that apocryphal native ruler in the north-west, who, when asked what
+would happen if we left India, replied that in a week his men would be
+in the saddle, and in six months not a rupee nor a virgin would be left
+in Lower Bengal. That is always given as our conclusive justification.
+But is it our business to preserve the rupees and virgins of Lower
+Bengal in a sort of magic inconclusiveness? Better plunder than
+paralysis, better fire and sword than futility. Our flag is spread over
+the peninsula, without plans, without intentions--a vast preventive.
+The sum total of our policy is to arrest any discussion, any conferences
+that would enable the Indians to work out a tolerable scheme of the
+future for themselves. But that does not arrest the resentment of men
+held back from life. Consider what it must be for the educated Indian
+sitting at the feast of contemporary possibilities with his mouth gagged
+and his hands bound behind him! The spirit of insurrection breaks out
+in spite of espionage and seizures. Our conflict for inaction develops
+stupendous absurdities. The other day the British Empire was taking off
+and examining printed cotton stomach wraps for seditious emblems and
+inscriptions....
+
+In some manner we shall have to come out of India. We have had our
+chance, and we have demonstrated nothing but the appalling dulness of
+our national imagination. We are not good enough to do anything with
+India. Codger and Flack, and Gates and Dayton, Cladingbowl in the club,
+and the HOME CHURCHMAN in the home, cant about “character,” worship
+of strenuous force and contempt of truth; for the sake of such men and
+things as these, we must abandon in fact, if not in appearance, that
+empty domination. Had we great schools and a powerful teaching, could we
+boast great men, had we the spirit of truth and creation in our lives,
+then indeed it might be different. But a race that bears a sceptre must
+carry gifts to justify it.
+
+It does not follow that we shall be driven catastrophically from India.
+That was my earlier mistake. We are not proud enough in our bones to be
+ruined by India as Spain was by her empire. We may be able to abandon
+India with an air of still remaining there. It is our new method. We
+train our future rulers in the public schools to have a very wholesome
+respect for strength, and as soon as a power arises in India in spite of
+us, be it a man or a culture, or a native state, we shall be willing to
+deal with it. We may or may not have a war, but our governing class will
+be quick to learn when we are beaten. Then they will repeat our South
+African diplomacy, and arrange for some settlement that will abandon
+the reality, such as it is, and preserve the semblance of power. The
+conqueror DE FACTO will become the new “loyal Briton,” and the democracy
+at home will be invited to celebrate our recession--triumphantly. I am
+no believer in the imminent dissolution of our Empire; I am less and
+less inclined to see in either India or Germany the probability of an
+abrupt truncation of those slow intellectual and moral constructions
+which are the essentials of statecraft.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+I sit writing in this little loggia to the sound of dripping water--this
+morning we had rain, and the roof of our little casa is still not dry,
+there are pools in the rocks under the sweet chestnuts, and the torrent
+that crosses the salita is full and boastful,--and I try to recall the
+order of my impressions during that watching, dubious time, before I
+went over to the Conservative Party. I was trying--chaotic task--to
+gauge the possibilities inherent in the quality of the British
+aristocracy. There comes a broad spectacular effect of wide parks,
+diversified by woods and bracken valleys, and dappled with deer; of
+great smooth lawns shaded by ancient trees; of big facades of sunlit
+buildings dominating the country side; of large fine rooms full of
+handsome, easy-mannered people. As a sort of representative picture to
+set off against those other pictures of Liberals and of Socialists I
+have given, I recall one of those huge assemblies the Duchess of Clynes
+inaugurated at Stamford House. The place itself is one of the vastest
+private houses in London, a huge clustering mass of white and gold
+saloons with polished floors and wonderful pictures, and staircases and
+galleries on a Gargantuan scale. And there she sought to gather all
+that was most representative of English activities, and did, in fact, in
+those brilliant nocturnal crowds, get samples of nearly every section
+of our social and intellectual life, with a marked predominance upon the
+political and social side.
+
+I remember sitting in one of the recesses at the end of the big saloon
+with Mrs. Redmondson, one of those sharp-minded, beautiful rich women
+one meets so often in London, who seem to have done nothing and to be
+capable of everything, and we watched the crowd--uniforms and splendours
+were streaming in from a State ball--and exchanged information. I told
+her about the politicians and intellectuals, and she told me about the
+aristocrats, and we sharpened our wit on them and counted the percentage
+of beautiful people among the latter, and wondered if the general effect
+of tallness was or was not an illusion.
+
+They were, we agreed, for the most part bigger than the average of
+people in London, and a handsome lot, even when they were not subtly
+individualised. “They look so well nurtured,” I said, “well cared for.
+I like their quiet, well-trained movements, their pleasant consideration
+for each other.”
+
+“Kindly, good tempered, and at bottom utterly selfish,” she said, “like
+big, rather carefully trained, rather pampered children. What else can
+you expect from them?”
+
+“They are good tempered, anyhow,” I witnessed, “and that's an
+achievement. I don't think I could ever be content under a bad-tempered,
+sentimentalism, strenuous Government. That's why I couldn't stand the
+Roosevelt REGIME in America. One's chief surprise when one comes across
+these big people for the first time is their admirable easiness and
+a real personal modesty. I confess I admire them. Oh! I like them.
+I wouldn't at all mind, I believe, giving over the country to this
+aristocracy--given SOMETHING--”
+
+“Which they haven't got.”
+
+“Which they haven't got--or they'd be the finest sort of people in the
+world.”
+
+“That something?” she inquired.
+
+“I don't know. I've been puzzling my wits to know. They've done all
+sorts of things--”
+
+“That's Lord Wrassleton,” she interrupted, “whose leg was broken--you
+remember?--at Spion Kop.”
+
+“It's healed very well. I like the gold lace and the white glove
+resting, with quite a nice awkwardness, on the sword. When I was a
+little boy I wanted to wear clothes like that. And the stars! He's got
+the V. C. Most of these people here have at any rate shown pluck, you
+know--brought something off.”
+
+“Not quite enough,” she suggested.
+
+“I think that's it,” I said. “Not quite enough--not quite hard enough,”
+ I added.
+
+She laughed and looked at me. “You'd like to make us,” she said.
+
+“What?”
+
+“Hard.”
+
+“I don't think you'll go on if you don't get hard.”
+
+“We shan't be so pleasant if we do.”
+
+“Well, there my puzzled wits come in again. I don't see why an
+aristocracy shouldn't be rather hard trained, and yet kindly. I'm not
+convinced that the resources of education are exhausted. I want to
+better this, because it already looks so good.”
+
+“How are we to do it?” asked Mrs. Redmondson.
+
+“Oh, there you have me! I've been spending my time lately in trying to
+answer that! It makes me quarrel with”--I held up my fingers and ticked
+the items off--“the public schools, the private tutors, the army exams,
+the Universities, the Church, the general attitude of the country
+towards science and literature--”
+
+“We all do,” said Mrs. Redmondson. “We can't begin again at the
+beginning,” she added.
+
+“Couldn't one,” I nodded at the assembly in general, start a movement?
+
+“There's the Confederates,” she said, with a faint smile that masked a
+gleam of curiosity.... “You want,” she said, “to say to the aristocracy,
+'Be aristocrats. NOBLESSE OBLIGE.' Do you remember what happened to the
+monarch who was told to 'Be a King'?”
+
+“Well,” I said, “I want an aristocracy.”
+
+“This,” she said, smiling, “is the pick of them. The backwoodsmen are
+off the stage. These are the brilliant ones--the smart and the blues....
+They cost a lot of money, you know.”
+
+So far Mrs. Redmondson, but the picture remained full of things not
+stated in our speech. They were on the whole handsome people, charitable
+minded, happy, and easy. They led spacious lives, and there was
+something free and fearless about their bearing that I liked extremely.
+The women particularly were wide-reading, fine-thinking. Mrs. Redmondson
+talked as fully and widely and boldly as a man, and with those flashes
+of intuition, those startling, sudden delicacies of perception few men
+display. I liked, too, the relations that held between women and men,
+their general tolerance, their antagonism to the harsh jealousies that
+are the essence of the middle-class order....
+
+After all, if one's aim resolved itself into the development of a type
+and culture of men, why shouldn't one begin at this end?
+
+It is very easy indeed to generalise about a class of human beings, but
+much harder to produce a sample. Was old Lady Forthundred, for instance,
+fairly a sample? I remember her as a smiling, magnificent presence, a
+towering accumulation of figure and wonderful shimmering blue silk and
+black lace and black hair, and small fine features and chins and chins
+and chins, disposed in a big cane chair with wraps and cushions upon the
+great terrace of Champneys. Her eye was blue and hard, and her accent
+and intonation were exactly what you would expect from a rather
+commonplace dressmaker pretending to be aristocratic. I was, I am
+afraid, posing a little as the intelligent but respectful inquirer from
+below investigating the great world, and she was certainly posing as my
+informant. She affected a cynical coarseness. She developed a theory on
+the governance of England, beautifully frank and simple. “Give 'um all
+a peerage when they get twenty thousand a year,” she maintained. “That's
+my remedy.”
+
+In my new role of theoretical aristocrat I felt a little abashed.
+
+“Twenty thousand,” she repeated with conviction.
+
+It occurred to me that I was in the presence of the aristocratic
+theory currently working as distinguished from my as yet unformulated
+intentions.
+
+“You'll get a lot of loafers and scamps among 'um,” said Lady
+Forthundred. “You get loafers and scamps everywhere, but you'll get a
+lot of men who'll work hard to keep things together, and that's what
+we're all after, isn't ut?
+
+“It's not an ideal arrangement.”
+
+“Tell me anything better,” said Lady Forthundred.
+
+On the whole, and because she refused emphatically to believe in
+education, Lady Forthundred scored.
+
+We had been discussing Cossington's recent peerage, for Cossington, my
+old schoolfellow at City Merchants', and my victor in the affair of
+the magazine, had clambered to an amazing wealth up a piled heap of
+energetically pushed penny and halfpenny magazines, and a group of
+daily newspapers. I had expected to find the great lady hostile to the
+new-comer, but she accepted him, she gloried in him.
+
+“We're a peerage,” she said, “but none of us have ever had any nonsense
+about nobility.”
+
+She turned and smiled down on me. “We English,” she said, “are a
+practical people. We assimilate 'um.”
+
+“Then, I suppose, they don't give trouble?”
+
+“Then they don't give trouble.”
+
+“They learn to shoot?”
+
+“And all that,” said Lady Forthundred. “Yes. And things go on. Sometimes
+better than others, but they go on--somehow. It depends very much on the
+sort of butler who pokes 'um about.”
+
+I suggested that it might be possible to get a secure twenty thousand a
+year by at least detrimental methods--socially speaking.
+
+“We must take the bad and the good of 'um,” said Lady Forthundred,
+courageously....
+
+Now, was she a sample? It happened she talked. What was there in the
+brains of the multitude of her first, second, third, fourth, and fifth
+cousins, who didn't talk, who shone tall, and bearing themselves finely,
+against a background of deft, attentive maids and valets, on every
+spacious social scene? How did things look to them?
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+Side by side with Lady Forthundred, it is curious to put Evesham with
+his tall, bent body, his little-featured almost elvish face, his unequal
+mild brown eyes, his gentle manner, his sweet, amazing oratory. He led
+all these people wonderfully. He was always curious and interested about
+life, wary beneath a pleasing frankness--and I tormented my brain to get
+to the bottom of him. For a long time he was the most powerful man in
+England under the throne; he had the Lords in his hand, and a great
+majority in the Commons, and the discontents and intrigues that are the
+concomitants of an overwhelming party advantage broke against him as
+waves break against a cliff. He foresaw so far in these matters that it
+seemed he scarcely troubled to foresee. He brought political art to
+the last triumph of naturalness. Always for me he has been the typical
+aristocrat, so typical and above the mere forms of aristocracy, that he
+remained a commoner to the end of his days.
+
+I had met him at the beginning of my career; he read some early papers
+of mine, and asked to see me, and I conceived a flattered liking for him
+that strengthened to a very strong feeling indeed. He seemed to me to
+stand alone without an equal, the greatest man in British political
+life. Some men one sees through and understands, some one cannot see
+into or round because they are of opaque clay, but about Evesham I had a
+sense of things hidden as it were by depth and mists, because he was so
+big and atmospheric a personality. No other contemporary has had that
+effect upon me. I've sat beside him at dinners, stayed in houses with
+him--he was in the big house party at Champneys--talked to him,
+sounded him, watching him as I sat beside him. I could talk to him with
+extraordinary freedom and a rare sense of being understood. Other men
+have to be treated in a special manner; approached through their own
+mental dialect, flattered by a minute regard for what they have said and
+done. Evesham was as widely and charitably receptive as any man I have
+ever met. The common politicians beside him seemed like rows of stuffy
+little rooms looking out upon the sea.
+
+And what was he up to? What did HE think we were doing with Mankind?
+That I thought worth knowing.
+
+I remember his talking on one occasion at the Hartsteins', at a dinner
+so tremendously floriferous and equipped that we were almost forced into
+duologues, about the possible common constructive purpose in politics.
+
+“I feel so much,” he said, “that the best people in every party
+converge. We don't differ at Westminster as they do in the country
+towns. There's a sort of extending common policy that goes on under
+every government, because on the whole it's the right thing to do, and
+people know it. Things that used to be matters of opinion become matters
+of science--and cease to be party questions.”
+
+He instanced education.
+
+“Apart,” said I, “from the religious question.”
+
+“Apart from the religious question.”
+
+He dropped that aspect with an easy grace, and went on with his general
+theme that political conflict was the outcome of uncertainty. “Directly
+you get a thing established, so that people can say, 'Now this is
+Right,' with the same conviction that people can say water is a
+combination of oxygen and hydrogen, there's no more to be said. The
+thing has to be done....”
+
+And to put against this effect of Evesham, broad and humanely tolerant,
+posing as the minister of a steadily developing constructive conviction,
+there are other memories.
+
+Have I not seen him in the House, persistent, persuasive, indefatigable,
+and by all my standards wickedly perverse, leaning over the table with
+those insistent movements of his hand upon it, or swaying forward with
+a grip upon his coat lapel, fighting with a diabolical skill to preserve
+what are in effect religious tests, tests he must have known would
+outrage and humiliate and injure the consciences of a quarter--and that
+perhaps the best quarter--of the youngsters who come to the work of
+elementary education?
+
+In playing for points in the game of party advantage Evesham displayed
+at times a quite wicked unscrupulousness in the use of his subtle mind.
+I would sit on the Liberal benches and watch him, and listen to his
+urbane voice, fascinated by him. Did he really care? Did anything matter
+to him? And if it really mattered nothing, why did he trouble to serve
+the narrowness and passion of his side? Or did he see far beyond my
+scope, so that this petty iniquity was justified by greater, remoter
+ends of which I had no intimation?
+
+They accused him of nepotism. His friends and family were certainly well
+cared for. In private life he was full of an affectionate intimacy; he
+pleased by being charmed and pleased. One might think at times there was
+no more of him than a clever man happily circumstanced, and finding an
+interest and occupation in politics. And then came a glimpse of thought,
+of imagination, like the sight of a soaring eagle through a staircase
+skylight. Oh, beyond question he was great! No other contemporary
+politician had his quality. In no man have I perceived so
+sympathetically the great contrast between warm, personal things and the
+white dream of statecraft. Except that he had it seemed no hot passions,
+but only interests and fine affections and indolences, he paralleled the
+conflict of my life. He saw and thought widely and deeply; but at times
+it seemed to me his greatness stood over and behind the reality of his
+life, like some splendid servant, thinking his own thoughts, who waits
+behind a lesser master's chair....
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+Of course, when Evesham talked of this ideal of the organised state
+becoming so finely true to practicability and so clearly stated as to
+have the compelling conviction of physical science, he spoke quite after
+my heart. Had he really embodied the attempt to realise that, I could
+have done no more than follow him blindly. But neither he nor I embodied
+that, and there lies the gist of my story. And when it came to a study
+of others among the leading Tories and Imperialists the doubt increased,
+until with some at last it was possible to question whether they had any
+imaginative conception of constructive statecraft at all; whether they
+didn't opaquely accept the world for what it was, and set themselves
+single-mindedly to make a place for themselves and cut a figure in it.
+
+There were some very fine personalities among them: there were the great
+peers who had administered Egypt, India, South Africa, Framboya--Cromer,
+Kitchener, Curzon, Milner, Gane, for example. So far as that easier
+task of holding sword and scales had gone, they had shown the finest
+qualities, but they had returned to the perplexing and exacting problem
+of the home country, a little glorious, a little too simply bold. They
+wanted to arm and they wanted to educate, but the habit of immediate
+necessity made them far more eager to arm than to educate, and their
+experience of heterogeneous controls made them overrate the need for
+obedience in a homogeneous country. They didn't understand raw men,
+ill-trained men, uncertain minds, and intelligent women; and these are
+the things that matter in England.... There were also the great business
+adventurers, from Cranber to Cossington (who was now Lord Paddockhurst).
+My mind remained unsettled, and went up and down the scale between
+a belief in their far-sighted purpose and the perception of crude
+vanities, coarse ambitions, vulgar competitiveness, and a mere habitual
+persistence in the pursuit of gain. For a time I saw a good deal of
+Cossington--I wish I had kept a diary of his talk and gestures, to mark
+how he could vary from day to day between a POSEUR, a smart tradesman,
+and a very bold and wide-thinking political schemer. He had a vanity
+of sweeping actions, motor car pounces, Napoleonic rushes, that led to
+violent ineffectual changes in the policy of his papers, and a haunting
+pursuit by parallel columns in the liberal press that never abashed him
+in the slightest degree. By an accident I plumbed the folly in him--but
+I feel I never plumbed his wisdom. I remember him one day after a lunch
+at the Barhams' saying suddenly, out of profound meditation over the end
+of a cigar, one of those sentences that seem to light the whole interior
+being of a man. “Some day,” he said softly, rather to himself than to
+me, and A PROPOS of nothing--“some day I will raise the country.”
+
+“Why not?” I said, after a pause, and leant across him for the little
+silver spirit-lamp, to light my cigarette....
+
+Then the Tories had for another section the ancient creations, and again
+there were the financial peers, men accustomed to reserve, and their big
+lawyers, accustomed to--well, qualified statement. And below the giant
+personalities of the party were the young bloods, young, adventurous men
+of the type of Lord Tarvrille, who had seen service in South Africa,
+who had travelled and hunted; explorers, keen motorists, interested
+in aviation, active in army organisation. Good, brown-faced stuff they
+were, but impervious to ideas outside the range of their activities,
+more ignorant of science than their chauffeurs, and of the quality
+of English people than welt-politicians; contemptuous of school and
+university by reason of the Gateses and Flacks and Codgers who had come
+their way, witty, light-hearted, patriotic at the Kipling level, with
+a certain aptitude for bullying. They varied in insensible gradations
+between the noble sportsmen on the one hand, and men like Gane and the
+Tories of our Pentagram club on the other. You perceive how a man
+might exercise his mind in the attempt to strike an average of public
+serviceability in this miscellany! And mixed up with these, mixed up
+sometimes in the same man, was the pure reactionary, whose predominant
+idea was that the village schools should confine themselves to teaching
+the catechism, hat-touching and courtesying, and be given a holiday
+whenever beaters were in request....
+
+I find now in my mind as a sort of counterpoise to Evesham the figure
+of old Lord Wardingham, asleep in the largest armchair in the library
+of Stamford Court after lunch. One foot rested on one of those things--I
+think they are called gout stools. He had been playing golf all the
+morning and wearied a weak instep; at lunch he had sat at my table and
+talked in the overbearing manner permitted to irascible important men
+whose insteps are painful. Among other things he had flouted the idea
+that women would ever understand statecraft or be more than a nuisance
+in politics, denied flatly that Hindoos were capable of anything
+whatever except excesses in population, regretted he could not
+censor picture galleries and circulating libraries, and declared that
+dissenters were people who pretended to take theology seriously with the
+express purpose of upsetting the entirely satisfactory compromise of the
+Established Church. “No sensible people, with anything to gain or lose,
+argue about religion,” he said. “They mean mischief.” Having delivered
+his soul upon these points, and silenced the little conversation to the
+left of him from which they had arisen, he became, after an appreciative
+encounter with a sanguinary woodcock, more amiable, responded to some
+respectful initiatives of Crupp's, and related a number of classical
+anecdotes of those blighting snubs, vindictive retorts and scandalous
+miscarriages of justice that are so dear to the forensic mind. Now he
+reposed. He was breathing heavily with his mouth a little open and his
+head on one side. One whisker was turned back against the comfortable
+padding. His plump strong hands gripped the arms of his chair, and his
+frown was a little assuaged. How tremendously fed up he looked! Honours,
+wealth, influence, respect, he had them all. How scornful and hard it
+had made his unguarded expression!
+
+I note without comment that it didn't even occur to me then to wake him
+up and ask him what HE was up to with mankind.
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+One countervailing influence to my drift to Toryism in those days was
+Margaret's quite religious faith in the Liberals. I realised that slowly
+and with a mild astonishment. It set me, indeed, even then questioning
+my own change of opinion. We came at last incidentally, as our way was,
+to an exchange of views. It was as nearly a quarrel as we had before
+I came over to the Conservative side. It was at Champneys, and I think
+during the same visit that witnessed my exploration of Lady Forthundred.
+It arose indirectly, I think, out of some comments of mine upon our
+fellow-guests, but it is one of those memories of which the scene and
+quality remain more vivid than the things said, a memory without any
+very definite beginning or end. It was afternoon, in the pause between
+tea and the dressing bell, and we were in Margaret's big silver-adorned,
+chintz-bright room, looking out on the trim Italian garden.... Yes, the
+beginning of it has escaped me altogether, but I remember it as an odd
+exceptional little wrangle.
+
+At first we seem to have split upon the moral quality of the
+aristocracy, and I had an odd sense that in some way too feminine for
+me to understand our hostess had aggrieved her. She said, I know, that
+Champneys distressed her; made her “eager for work and reality again.”
+
+“But aren't these people real?”
+
+“They're so superficial, so extravagant!”
+
+I said I was not shocked by their unreality. They seemed the least
+affected people I had ever met. “And are they really so extravagant?”
+ I asked, and put it to her that her dresses cost quite as much as any
+other woman's in the house.
+
+“It's not only their dresses,” Margaret parried. “It's the scale and
+spirit of things.”
+
+I questioned that. “They're cynical,” said Margaret, staring before her
+out of the window.
+
+I challenged her, and she quoted the Brabants, about whom there had
+been an ancient scandal. She'd heard of it from Altiora, and it was also
+Altiora who'd given her a horror of Lord Carnaby, who was also with us.
+“You know his reputation,” said Margaret. “That Normandy girl. Every
+one knows about it. I shiver when I look at him. He seems--oh! like
+something not of OUR civilisation. He WILL come and say little things to
+me.”
+
+“Offensive things?”
+
+“No, politenesses and things. Of course his manners are--quite right.
+That only makes it worse, I think. It shows he might have helped--all
+that happened. I do all I can to make him see I don't like him. But none
+of the others make the slightest objection to him.”
+
+“Perhaps these people imagine something might be said for him.”
+
+“That's just it,” said Margaret.
+
+“Charity,” I suggested.
+
+“I don't like that sort of toleration.”
+
+I was oddly annoyed. “Like eating with publicans and sinners,” I said.
+“No!...”
+
+But scandals, and the contempt for rigid standards their condonation
+displayed, weren't more than the sharp edge of the trouble. “It's their
+whole position, their selfish predominance, their class conspiracy
+against the mass of people,” said Margaret. “When I sit at dinner
+in that splendid room, with its glitter and white reflections and
+candlelight, and its flowers and its wonderful service and its
+candelabra of solid gold, I seem to feel the slums and the mines and the
+over-crowded cottages stuffed away under the table.”
+
+I reminded Margaret that she was not altogether innocent of unearned
+increment.
+
+“But aren't we doing our best to give it back?” she said.
+
+I was moved to question her. “Do you really think,” I asked, “that the
+Tories and peers and rich people are to blame for social injustice as we
+have it to-day? Do you really see politics as a struggle of light on the
+Liberal side against darkness on the Tory?”
+
+“They MUST know,” said Margaret.
+
+I found myself questioning that. I see now that to Margaret it must have
+seemed the perversest carping against manifest things, but at the time
+I was concentrated simply upon the elucidation of her view and my own; I
+wanted to get at her conception in the sharpest, hardest lines that were
+possible. It was perfectly clear that she saw Toryism as the diabolical
+element in affairs. The thing showed in its hopeless untruth all the
+clearer for the fine, clean emotion with which she gave it out to me.
+My sleeping peer in the library at Stamford Court and Evesham talking
+luminously behind the Hartstein flowers embodied the devil, and my
+replete citizen sucking at his cigar in the National Liberal Club,
+Willie Crampton discussing the care and management of the stomach over
+a specially hygienic lemonade, and Dr. Tumpany in his aggressive
+frock-coat pegging out a sort of copyright in Socialism, were the centre
+and wings of the angelic side. It was nonsense. But how was I to put the
+truth to her?
+
+“I don't see things at all as you do,” I said. “I don't see things in
+the same way.”
+
+“Think of the poor,” said Margaret, going off at a tangent.
+
+“Think of every one,” I said. “We Liberals have done more mischief
+through well-intentioned benevolence than all the selfishness in the
+world could have done. We built up the liquor interest.”
+
+“WE!” cried Margaret. “How can you say that? It's against us.”
+
+“Naturally. But we made it a monopoly in our clumsy efforts to prevent
+people drinking what they liked, because it interfered with industrial
+regularity--”
+
+“Oh!” cried Margaret, stung; and I could see she thought I was talking
+mere wickedness.
+
+“That's it,” I said.
+
+“But would you have people drink whatever they pleased?”
+
+“Certainly. What right have I to dictate to other men and women?”
+
+“But think of the children!”
+
+“Ah! there you have the folly of modern Liberalism, its half-cunning,
+half-silly way of getting at everything in a roundabout fashion. If
+neglecting children is an offence, and it IS an offence, then deal
+with it as such, but don't go badgering and restricting people who sell
+something that may possibly in some cases lead to a neglect of children.
+If drunkenness is an offence, punish it, but don't punish a man for
+selling honest drink that perhaps after all won't make any one drunk at
+all. Don't intensify the viciousness of the public-house by assuming the
+place isn't fit for women and children. That's either spite or folly.
+Make the public-house FIT for women and children. Make it a real
+public-house. If we Liberals go on as we are going, we shall presently
+want to stop the sale of ink and paper because those things tempt men
+to forgery. We do already threaten the privacy of the post because of
+betting tout's letters. The drift of all that kind of thing is narrow,
+unimaginative, mischievous, stupid....”
+
+I stopped short and walked to the window and surveyed a pretty fountain,
+facsimile of one in Verona, amidst trim-cut borderings of yew. Beyond,
+and seen between the stems of ilex trees, was a great blaze of yellow
+flowers....
+
+“But prevention,” I heard Margaret behind me, “is the essence of our
+work.”
+
+I turned. “There's no prevention but education. There's no antiseptics
+in life but love and fine thinking. Make people fine, make fine people.
+Don't be afraid. These Tory leaders are better people individually
+than the average; why cast them for the villains of the piece? The
+real villain in the piece--in the whole human drama--is the
+muddle-headedness, and it matters very little if it's virtuous-minded or
+wicked. I want to get at muddle-headedness. If I could do that I could
+let all that you call wickedness in the world run about and do what
+it jolly well pleased. It would matter about as much as a slightly
+neglected dog--in an otherwise well-managed home.”
+
+My thoughts had run away with me.
+
+“I can't understand you,” said Margaret, in the profoundest distress. “I
+can't understand how it is you are coming to see things like this.”
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+The moods of a thinking man in politics are curiously evasive and
+difficult to describe. Neither the public nor the historian will permit
+the statesman moods. He has from the first to assume he has an Aim, a
+definite Aim, and to pretend to an absolute consistency with that. Those
+subtle questionings about the very fundamentals of life which plague us
+all so relentlessly nowadays are supposed to be silenced. He lifts his
+chin and pursues his Aim explicitly in the sight of all men. Those
+who have no real political experience can scarcely imagine the immense
+mental and moral strain there is between one's everyday acts and
+utterances on the one hand and the “thinking-out” process on the other.
+It is perplexingly difficult to keep in your mind, fixed and firm, a
+scheme essentially complex, to keep balancing a swaying possibility
+while at the same time under jealous, hostile, and stupid observation
+you tread your part in the platitudinous, quarrelsome, ill-presented
+march of affairs....
+
+The most impossible of all autobiographies is an intellectual
+autobiography. I have thrown together in the crudest way the elements
+of the problem I struggled with, but I can give no record of the subtle
+details; I can tell nothing of the long vacillations between Protean
+values, the talks and re-talks, the meditations, the bleak lucidities of
+sleepless nights....
+
+And yet these things I have struggled with must be thought out, and, to
+begin with, they must be thought out in this muddled, experimenting way.
+To go into a study to think about statecraft is to turn your back on the
+realities you are constantly needing to feel and test and sound if your
+thinking is to remain vital; to choose an aim and pursue it in despite
+of all subsequent questionings is to bury the talent of your mind. It
+is no use dealing with the intricate as though it were simple, to leap
+haphazard at the first course of action that presents itself; the whole
+world of politicians is far too like a man who snatches a poker to a
+failing watch. It is easy to say he wants to “get something done,” but
+the only sane thing to do for the moment is to put aside that poker and
+take thought and get a better implement....
+
+One of the results of these fundamental preoccupations of mine was a
+curious irritability towards Margaret that I found difficult to conceal.
+It was one of the incidental cruelties of our position that this should
+happen. I was in such doubt myself, that I had no power to phrase
+things for her in a form she could use. Hitherto I had stage-managed our
+“serious” conversations. Now I was too much in earnest and too uncertain
+to go on doing this. I avoided talk with her. Her serene, sustained
+confidence in vague formulae and sentimental aspirations exasperated me;
+her want of sympathetic apprehension made my few efforts to indicate my
+changing attitudes distressing and futile. It wasn't that I was always
+thinking right, and that she was always saying wrong. It was that I was
+struggling to get hold of a difficult thing that was, at any rate, half
+true, I could not gauge how true, and that Margaret's habitual phrasing
+ignored these elusive elements of truth, and without premeditation
+fitted into the weaknesses of my new intimations, as though they had
+nothing but weaknesses. It was, for example, obvious that these big
+people, who were the backbone of Imperialism and Conservatism, were
+temperamentally lax, much more indolent, much more sensuous, than our
+deliberately virtuous Young Liberals. I didn't want to be reminded of
+that, just when I was in full effort to realise the finer elements in
+their composition. Margaret classed them and disposed of them. It was
+our incurable differences in habits and gestures of thought coming
+between us again.
+
+The desert of misunderstanding widened. I was forced back upon myself
+and my own secret councils. For a time I went my way alone; an unmixed
+evil for both of us. Except for that Pentagram evening, a series of
+talks with Isabel Rivers, who was now becoming more and more important
+in my intellectual life, and the arguments I maintained with Crupp, I
+never really opened my mind at all during that period of indecisions,
+slow abandonments, and slow acquisitions.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ SECESSION
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+At last, out of a vast accumulation of impressions, decision distilled
+quite suddenly. I succumbed to Evesham and that dream of the right
+thing triumphant through expression. I determined I would go over to
+the Conservatives, and use my every gift and power on the side of such
+forces on that side as made for educational reorganisation, scientific
+research, literature, criticism, and intellectual development. That was
+in 1909. I judged the Tories were driving straight at a conflict with
+the country, and I thought them bound to incur an electoral defeat. I
+under-estimated their strength in the counties. There would follow, I
+calculated, a period of profound reconstruction in method and policy
+alike. I was entirely at one with Crupp in perceiving in this an immense
+opportunity for the things we desired. An aristocracy quickened by
+conflict and on the defensive, and full of the idea of justification
+by reconstruction, might prove altogether more apt for thought and
+high professions than Mrs. Redmondson's spoilt children. Behind the now
+inevitable struggle for a reform of the House of Lords, there would
+be great heart searchings and educational endeavour. On that we
+reckoned....
+
+At last we talked it out to the practical pitch, and Crupp and
+Shoesmith, and I and Gane, made our definite agreement together....
+
+I emerged from enormous silences upon Margaret one evening.
+
+She was just back from the display of some new musicians at the
+Hartsteins. I remember she wore a dress of golden satin, very
+rich-looking and splendid. About her slender neck there was a rope of
+gold-set amber beads. Her hair caught up and echoed and returned these
+golden notes. I, too, was in evening dress, but where I had been escapes
+me,--some forgotten dinner, I suppose. I went into her room. I remember
+I didn't speak for some moments. I went across to the window and pulled
+the blind aside, and looked out upon the railed garden of the square,
+with its shrubs and shadowed turf gleaming pallidly and irregularly in
+the light of the big electric standard in the corner.
+
+“Margaret,” I said, “I think I shall break with the party.”
+
+She made no answer. I turned presently, a movement of enquiry.
+
+“I was afraid you meant to do that,” she said.
+
+“I'm out of touch,” I explained. “Altogether.”
+
+“Oh! I know.”
+
+“It places me in a difficult position,” I said.
+
+Margaret stood at her dressing-table, looking steadfastly at herself
+in the glass, and with her fingers playing with a litter of stoppered
+bottles of tinted glass. “I was afraid it was coming to this,” she said.
+
+“In a way,” I said, “we've been allies. I owe my seat to you. I couldn't
+have gone into Parliament....”
+
+“I don't want considerations like that to affect us,” she interrupted.
+
+There was a pause. She sat down in a chair by her dressing-table, lifted
+an ivory hand-glass, and put it down again.
+
+“I wish,” she said, with something like a sob in her voice, “it were
+possible that you shouldn't do this.” She stopped abruptly, and I did
+not look at her, because I could feel the effort she was making to
+control herself.
+
+“I thought,” she began again, “when you came into Parliament--”
+
+There came another silence. “It's all gone so differently,” she said.
+“Everything has gone so differently.”
+
+I had a sudden memory of her, shining triumphant after the Kinghampstead
+election, and for the first time I realised just how perplexing and
+disappointing my subsequent career must have been to her.
+
+“I'm not doing this without consideration,” I said.
+
+“I know,” she said, in a voice of despair, “I've seen it coming. But--I
+still don't understand it. I don't understand how you can go over.”
+
+“My ideas have changed and developed,” I said.
+
+I walked across to her bearskin hearthrug, and stood by the mantel.
+
+“To think that you,” she said; “you who might have been leader--” She
+could not finish it. “All the forces of reaction,” she threw out.
+
+“I don't think they are the forces of reaction,” I said. “I think I can
+find work to do--better work on that side.”
+
+“Against us!” she said. “As if progress wasn't hard enough! As if it
+didn't call upon every able man!”
+
+“I don't think Liberalism has a monopoly of progress.”
+
+She did not answer that. She sat quite still looking in front of her.
+“WHY have you gone over?” she asked abruptly as though I had said
+nothing.
+
+There came a silence that I was impelled to end. I began a stiff
+dissertation from the hearthrug. “I am going over, because I think I
+may join in an intellectual renascence on the Conservative side. I
+think that in the coming struggle there will be a partial and altogether
+confused and demoralising victory for democracy, that will stir the
+classes which now dominate the Conservative party into an energetic
+revival. They will set out to win back, and win back. Even if my
+estimate of contemporary forces is wrong and they win, they will still
+be forced to reconstruct their outlook. A war abroad will supply the
+chastening if home politics fail. The effort at renascence is bound to
+come by either alternative. I believe I can do more in relation to
+that effort than in any other connexion in the world of politics at the
+present time. That's my case, Margaret.”
+
+She certainly did not grasp what I said. “And so you will throw aside
+all the beginnings, all the beliefs and pledges--” Again her sentence
+remained incomplete. “I doubt if even, once you have gone over, they
+will welcome you.”
+
+“That hardly matters.”
+
+I made an effort to resume my speech.
+
+“I came into Parliament, Margaret,” I said, “a little prematurely.
+Still--I suppose it was only by coming into Parliament that I could see
+things as I do now in terms of personality and imaginative range....”
+ I stopped. Her stiff, unhappy, unlistening silence broke up my
+disquisition.
+
+“After all,” I remarked, “most of this has been implicit in my
+writings.”
+
+She made no sign of admission.
+
+“What are you going to do?” she asked.
+
+“Keep my seat for a time and make the reasons of my breach clear. Then
+either I must resign or--probably this new Budget will lead to a
+General Election. It's evidently meant to strain the Lords and provoke a
+quarrel.”
+
+“You might, I think, have stayed to fight for the Budget.”
+
+“I'm not,” I said, “so keen against the Lords.”
+
+On that we halted.
+
+“But what are you going to do?” she asked.
+
+“I shall make my quarrel over some points in the Budget. I can't quite
+tell you yet where my chance will come. Then I shall either resign my
+seat--or if things drift to dissolution I shall stand again.”
+
+“It's political suicide.”
+
+“Not altogether.”
+
+“I can't imagine you out of Parliament again. It's just like--like
+undoing all we have done. What will you do?”
+
+“Write. Make a new, more definite place for myself. You know, of course,
+there's already a sort of group about Crupp and Gane.”
+
+Margaret seemed lost for a time in painful thought.
+
+“For me,” she said at last, “our political work has been a religion--it
+has been more than a religion.”
+
+I heard in silence. I had no form of protest available against the
+implications of that.
+
+“And then I find you turning against all we aimed to do--talking of
+going over, almost lightly--to those others.”...
+
+She was white-lipped as she spoke. In the most curious way she had
+captured the moral values of the situation. I found myself protesting
+ineffectually against her fixed conviction. “It's because I think my
+duty lies in this change that I make it,” I said.
+
+“I don't see how you can say that,” she replied quietly.
+
+There was another pause between us.
+
+“Oh!” she said and clenched her hand upon the table. “That it should
+have come to this!”
+
+She was extraordinarily dignified and extraordinarily absurd. She was
+hurt and thwarted beyond measure. She had no place in her ideas, I
+thought, for me. I could see how it appeared to her, but I could not
+make her see anything of the intricate process that had brought me to
+this divergence. The opposition of our intellectual temperaments
+was like a gag in my mouth. What was there for me to say? A flash
+of intuition told me that behind her white dignity was a passionate
+disappointment, a shattering of dreams that needed before everything
+else the relief of weeping.
+
+“I've told you,” I said awkwardly, “as soon as I could.”
+
+There was another long silence. “So that is how we stand,” I said with
+an air of having things defined. I walked slowly to the door.
+
+She had risen and stood now staring in front of her.
+
+“Good-night,” I said, making no movement towards our habitual kiss.
+
+“Good-night,” she answered in a tragic note....
+
+I closed the door softly. I remained for a moment or so on the big
+landing, hesitating between my bedroom and my study. As I did so I heard
+the soft rustle of her movement and the click of the key in her bedroom
+door. Then everything was still....
+
+She hid her tears from me. Something gripped my heart at the thought.
+
+“Damnation!” I said wincing. “Why the devil can't people at least THINK
+in the same manner?”
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+And that insufficient colloquy was the beginning of a prolonged
+estrangement between us. It was characteristic of our relations that we
+never reopened the discussion. The thing had been in the air for some
+time; we had recognised it now; the widening breach between us was
+confessed. My own feelings were curiously divided. It is remarkable that
+my very real affection for Margaret only became evident to me with this
+quarrel. The changes of the heart are very subtle changes. I am quite
+unaware how or when my early romantic love for her purity and beauty
+and high-principled devotion evaporated from my life; but I do know that
+quite early in my parliamentary days there had come a vague, unconfessed
+resentment at the tie that seemed to hold me in servitude to her
+standards of private living and public act. I felt I was caught, and
+none the less so because it had been my own act to rivet on my shackles.
+So long as I still held myself bound to her that resentment grew. Now,
+since I had broken my bonds and taken my line it withered again, and I
+could think of Margaret with a returning kindliness.
+
+But I still felt embarrassment with her. I felt myself dependent upon
+her for house room and food and social support, as it were under false
+pretences. I would have liked to have separated our financial affairs
+altogether. But I knew that to raise the issue would have seemed a
+last brutal indelicacy. So I tried almost furtively to keep my personal
+expenditure within the scope of the private income I made by writing,
+and we went out together in her motor brougham, dined and made
+appearances, met politely at breakfast--parted at night with a kiss upon
+her cheek. The locking of her door upon me, which at that time I quite
+understood, which I understand now, became for a time in my mind,
+through some obscure process of the soul, an offence. I never crossed
+the landing to her room again.
+
+In all this matter, and, indeed, in all my relations with Margaret, I
+perceive now I behaved badly and foolishly. My manifest blunder is that
+I, who was several years older than she, much subtler and in many ways
+wiser, never in any measure sought to guide and control her. After our
+marriage I treated her always as an equal, and let her go her way; held
+her responsible for all the weak and ineffective and unfortunate things
+she said and did to me. She wasn't clever enough to justify that. It
+wasn't fair to expect her to sympathise, anticipate, and understand.
+I ought to have taken care of her, roped her to me when it came to
+crossing the difficult places. If I had loved her more, and wiselier and
+more tenderly, if there had not been the consciousness of my financial
+dependence on her always stiffening my pride, I think she would have
+moved with me from the outset, and left the Liberals with me. But she
+did not get any inkling of the ends I sought in my change of sides. It
+must have seemed to her inexplicable perversity. She had, I knew--for
+surely I knew it then--an immense capacity for loyalty and devotion.
+There she was with these treasures untouched, neglected and perplexed.
+A woman who loves wants to give. It is the duty and business of the man
+she has married for love to help her to help and give. But I was stupid.
+My eyes had never been opened. I was stiff with her and difficult to
+her, because even on my wedding morning there had been, deep down in
+my soul, voiceless though present, something weakly protesting, a faint
+perception of wrong-doing, the infinitesimally small, slow-multiplying
+germs of shame.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+I made my breach with the party on the Budget.
+
+In many ways I was disposed to regard the 1909 Budget as a fine piece
+of statecraft. Its production was certainly a very unexpected display
+of vigour on the Liberal side. But, on the whole, this movement
+towards collectivist organisation on the part of the Liberals rather
+strengthened than weakened my resolve to cross the floor of the house.
+It made it more necessary, I thought, to leaven the purely obstructive
+and reactionary elements that were at once manifest in the opposition. I
+assailed the land taxation proposals in one main speech, and a series
+of minor speeches in committee. The line of attack I chose was that the
+land was a great public service that needed to be controlled on broad
+and far-sighted lines. I had no objection to its nationalisation, but I
+did object most strenuously to the idea of leaving it in private hands,
+and attempting to produce beneficial social results through the pressure
+of taxation upon the land-owning class. That might break it up in an
+utterly disastrous way. The drift of the government proposals was all in
+the direction of sweating the landowner to get immediate values from his
+property, and such a course of action was bound to give us an irritated
+and vindictive land-owning class, the class upon which we had hitherto
+relied--not unjustifiably--for certain broad, patriotic services and
+an influence upon our collective judgments that no other class seemed
+prepared to exercise. Abolish landlordism if you will, I said, buy
+it out, but do not drive it to a defensive fight, and leave it still
+sufficiently strong and wealthy to become a malcontent element in your
+state. You have taxed and controlled the brewer and the publican until
+the outraged Liquor Interest has become a national danger. You now
+propose to do the same thing on a larger scale. You turn a class which
+has many fine and truly aristocratic traditions towards revolt, and
+there is nothing in these or any other of your proposals that shows any
+sense of the need for leadership to replace these traditional leaders
+you are ousting. This was the substance of my case, and I hammered at it
+not only in the House, but in the press....
+
+The Kinghampstead division remained for some time insensitive to my
+defection.
+
+Then it woke up suddenly, and began, in the columns of the
+KINGSHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN, an indignant, confused outcry. I was treated to
+an open letter, signed “Junius Secundus,” and I replied in provocative
+terms. There were two thinly attended public meetings at different ends
+of the constituency, and then I had a correspondence with my old friend
+Parvill, the photographer, which ended in my seeing a deputation.
+
+My impression is that it consisted of about eighteen or twenty people.
+They had had to come upstairs to me and they were manifestly full of
+indignation and a little short of breath. There was Parvill himself,
+J.P., dressed wholly in black--I think to mark his sense of the
+occasion--and curiously suggestive in his respect for my character and
+his concern for the honourableness of the KINGHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN editor,
+of Mark Antony at the funeral of Cesar. There was Mrs. Bulger, also in
+mourning; she had never abandoned the widow's streamers since the death
+of her husband ten years ago, and her loyalty to Liberalism of the
+severest type was part as it were of her weeds. There was a nephew of
+Sir Roderick Newton, a bright young Hebrew of the graver type, and a
+couple of dissenting ministers in high collars and hats that stopped
+halfway between the bowler of this world and the shovel-hat of heaven.
+There was also a young solicitor from Lurky done in the horsey style,
+and there was a very little nervous man with a high brow and a face
+contracting below as though the jawbones and teeth had been taken out
+and the features compressed. The rest of the deputation, which included
+two other public-spirited ladies and several ministers of religion,
+might have been raked out of any omnibus going Strandward during the
+May meetings. They thrust Parvill forward as spokesman, and manifested
+a strong disposition to say “Hear, hear!” to his more strenuous protests
+provided my eye wasn't upon them at the time.
+
+I regarded this appalling deputation as Parvill's apologetic but quite
+definite utterances drew to an end. I had a moment of vision. Behind
+them I saw the wonderful array of skeleton forces that stand for public
+opinion, that are as much public opinion as exists indeed at the present
+time. The whole process of politics which bulks so solidly in history
+seemed for that clairvoyant instant but a froth of petty motives above
+abysms of indifference....
+
+Some one had finished. I perceived I had to speak.
+
+“Very well,” I said, “I won't keep you long in replying. I'll resign if
+there isn't a dissolution before next February, and if there is I shan't
+stand again. You don't want the bother and expense of a bye-election
+(approving murmurs) if it can be avoided. But I may tell you plainly now
+that I don't think it will be necessary for me to resign, and the sooner
+you find my successor the better for the party. The Lords are in a
+corner; they've got to fight now or never, and I think they will throw
+out the Budget. Then they will go on fighting. It is a fight that will
+last for years. They have a sort of social discipline, and you haven't.
+You Liberals will find yourselves with a country behind you, vaguely
+indignant perhaps, but totally unprepared with any ideas whatever in
+the matter, face to face with the problem of bringing the British
+constitution up-to-date. Anything may happen, provided only that it is
+sufficiently absurd. If the King backs the Lords--and I don't see why he
+shouldn't--you have no Republican movement whatever to fall back
+upon. You lost it during the Era of Good Taste. The country, I say, is
+destitute of ideas, and you have no ideas to give it. I don't see what
+you will do.... For my own part, I mean to spend a year or so between a
+window and my writing-desk.”
+
+I paused. “I think, gentlemen,” began Parvill, “that we hear all this
+with very great regret....”
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+My estrangement from Margaret stands in my memory now as something that
+played itself out within the four walls of our house in Radnor Square,
+which was, indeed, confined to those limits. I went to and fro between
+my house and the House of Commons, and the dining-rooms and clubs and
+offices in which we were preparing our new developments, in a state
+of aggressive and energetic dissociation, in the nascent state, as a
+chemist would say. I was free now, and greedy for fresh combination. I
+had a tremendous sense of released energies. I had got back to the sort
+of thing I could do, and to the work that had been shaping itself for
+so long in my imagination. Our purpose now was plain, bold, and
+extraordinarily congenial. We meant no less than to organise a new
+movement in English thought and life, to resuscitate a Public Opinion
+and prepare the ground for a revised and renovated ruling culture.
+
+For a time I seemed quite wonderfully able to do whatever I wanted to
+do. Shoesmith responded to my first advances. We decided to create a
+weekly paper as our nucleus, and Crupp and I set to work forthwith to
+collect a group of writers and speakers, including Esmeer, Britten, Lord
+Gane, Neal, and one or two younger men, which should constitute a more
+or less definite editorial council about me, and meet at a weekly lunch
+on Tuesday to sustain our general co-operations. We marked our claim
+upon Toryism even in the colour of our wrapper, and spoke of ourselves
+collectively as the Blue Weeklies. But our lunches were open to all
+sorts of guests, and our deliberations were never of a character to
+control me effectively in my editorial decisions. My only influential
+councillor at first was old Britten, who became my sub-editor. It was
+curious how we two had picked up our ancient intimacy again and resumed
+the easy give and take of our speculative dreaming schoolboy days.
+
+For a time my life centred altogether upon this journalistic work.
+Britten was an experienced journalist, and I had most of the necessary
+instincts for the business. We meant to make the paper right and
+good down to the smallest detail, and we set ourselves at this with
+extraordinary zeal. It wasn't our intention to show our political
+motives too markedly at first, and through all the dust storm and
+tumult and stress of the political struggle of 1910, we made a little
+intellectual oasis of good art criticism and good writing. It was the
+firm belief of nearly all of us that the Lords were destined to be
+beaten badly in 1910, and our game was the longer game of reconstruction
+that would begin when the shouting and tumult of that immediate conflict
+were over. Meanwhile we had to get into touch with just as many good
+minds as possible.
+
+As we felt our feet, I developed slowly and carefully a broadly
+conceived and consistent political attitude. As I will explain later,
+we were feminist from the outset, though that caused Shoesmith and Gane
+great searching of heart; we developed Esmeer's House of Lords reform
+scheme into a general cult of the aristocratic virtues, and we did much
+to humanise and liberalise the narrow excellencies of that Break-up of
+the Poor Law agitation, which had been organised originally by Beatrice
+and Sidney Webb. In addition, without any very definite explanation to
+any one but Esmeer and Isabel Rivers, and as if it was quite a small
+matter, I set myself to secure a uniform philosophical quality in our
+columns.
+
+That, indeed, was the peculiar virtue and characteristic of the BLUE
+WEEKLY. I was now very definitely convinced that much of the confusion
+and futility of contemporary thought was due to the general need of
+metaphysical training.... The great mass of people--and not simply
+common people, but people active and influential in intellectual
+things--are still quite untrained in the methods of thought and
+absolutely innocent of any criticism of method; it is scarcely a
+caricature to call their thinking a crazy patchwork, discontinuous and
+chaotic. They arrive at conclusions by a kind of accident, and do not
+suspect any other way may be found to their attainment. A stage above
+this general condition stands that minority of people who have at
+some time or other discovered general terms and a certain use
+for generalisations. They are--to fall back on the ancient
+technicality--Realists of a crude sort. When I say Realist of course
+I mean Realist as opposed to Nominalist, and not Realist in the almost
+diametrically different sense of opposition to Idealist. Such are the
+Baileys; such, to take their great prototype, was Herbert Spencer (who
+couldn't read Kant); such are whole regiments of prominent and entirely
+self-satisfied contemporaries. They go through queer little processes of
+definition and generalisation and deduction with the completest belief
+in the validity of the intellectual instrument they are using. They are
+Realists--Cocksurists--in matter of fact; sentimentalists in behaviour.
+The Baileys having got to this glorious stage in mental development--it
+is glorious because it has no doubts--were always talking about training
+“Experts” to apply the same simple process to all the affairs
+of mankind. Well, Realism isn't the last word of human wisdom.
+Modest-minded people, doubtful people, subtle people, and the like--the
+kind of people William James writes of as “tough-minded,” go on beyond
+this methodical happiness, and are forever after critical of premises
+and terms. They are truer--and less confident. They have reached
+scepticism and the artistic method. They have emerged into the new
+Nominalism.
+
+Both Isabel and I believe firmly that these differences of intellectual
+method matter profoundly in the affairs of mankind, that the collective
+mind of this intricate complex modern state can only function properly
+upon neo-Nominalist lines. This has always been her side of our mental
+co-operation rather than mine. Her mind has the light movement that
+goes so often with natural mental power; she has a wonderful art in
+illustration, and, as the reader probably knows already, she writes of
+metaphysical matters with a rare charm and vividness. So far there has
+been no collection of her papers published, but they are to be found not
+only in the BLUE WEEKLY columns but scattered about the monthlies; many
+people must be familiar with her style. It was an intention we did
+much to realise before our private downfall, that we would use the BLUE
+WEEKLY to maintain a stream of suggestion against crude thinking, and
+at last scarcely a week passed but some popular distinction, some
+large imposing generalisation, was touched to flaccidity by her pen or
+mine....
+
+I was at great pains to give my philosophical, political, and social
+matter the best literary and critical backing we could get in London. I
+hunted sedulously for good descriptive writing and good criticism; I
+was indefatigable in my readiness to hear and consider, if not to accept
+advice; I watched every corner of the paper, and had a dozen men alert
+to get me special matter of the sort that draws in the unattached
+reader. The chief danger on the literary side of a weekly is that it
+should fall into the hands of some particular school, and this I watched
+for closely. It seems impossible to get vividness of apprehension and
+breadth of view together in the same critic. So it falls to the wise
+editor to secure the first and impose the second. Directly I detected
+the shrill partisan note in our criticism, the attempt to puff a poor
+thing because it was “in the right direction,” or damn a vigorous piece
+of work because it wasn't, I tackled the man and had it out with him.
+Our pay was good enough for that to matter a good deal....
+
+Our distinctive little blue and white poster kept up its neat persistent
+appeal to the public eye, and before 1911 was out, the BLUE WEEKLY was
+printing twenty pages of publishers' advertisements, and went into
+all the clubs in London and three-quarters of the country houses where
+week-end parties gather together. Its sale by newsagents and bookstalls
+grew steadily. One got more and more the reassuring sense of being
+discussed, and influencing discussion.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Our office was at the very top of a big building near the end of Adelphi
+Terrace; the main window beside my desk, a big undivided window of
+plate glass, looked out upon Cleopatra's Needle, the corner of the Hotel
+Cecil, the fine arches of Waterloo Bridge, and the long sweep of south
+bank with its shot towers and chimneys, past Bankside to the dimly seen
+piers of the great bridge below the Tower. The dome of St. Paul's just
+floated into view on the left against the hotel facade. By night and
+day, in every light and atmosphere, it was a beautiful and various view,
+alive as a throbbing heart; a perpetual flow of traffic ploughed and
+splashed the streaming silver of the river, and by night the shapes of
+things became velvet black and grey, and the water a shining mirror
+of steel, wearing coruscating gems of light. In the foreground the
+Embankment trams sailed glowing by, across the water advertisements
+flashed and flickered, trains went and came and a rolling drift of smoke
+reflected unseen fires. By day that spectacle was sometimes a marvel of
+shining wet and wind-cleared atmosphere, sometimes a mystery of drifting
+fog, sometimes a miracle of crowded details, minutely fine.
+
+As I think of that view, so variously spacious in effect, I am back
+there, and this sunlit paper might be lamp-lit and lying on my old desk.
+I see it all again, feel it all again. In the foreground is a green
+shaded lamp and crumpled galley slips and paged proofs and letters, two
+or three papers in manuscript, and so forth. In the shadows are chairs
+and another table bearing papers and books, a rotating bookcase dimly
+seen, a long window seat black in the darkness, and then the cool
+unbroken spectacle of the window. How often I would watch some tram-car,
+some string of barges go from me slowly out of sight. The people were
+black animalculae by day, clustering, collecting, dispersing, by night,
+they were phantom face-specks coming, vanishing, stirring obscurely
+between light and shade.
+
+I recall many hours at my desk in that room before the crisis came,
+hours full of the peculiar happiness of effective strenuous work. Once
+some piece of writing went on, holding me intent and forgetful of time
+until I looked up from the warm circle of my electric lamp to see the
+eastward sky above the pale silhouette of the Tower Bridge, flushed and
+banded brightly with the dawn.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ THE BESETTING OF SEX
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+Art is selection and so is most autobiography. But I am concerned with a
+more tangled business than selection, I want to show a contemporary man
+in relation to the state and social usage, and the social organism in
+relation to that man. To tell my story at all I have to simplify. I have
+given now the broad lines of my political development, and how I passed
+from my initial liberal-socialism to the conception of a constructive
+aristocracy. I have tried to set that out in the form of a man
+discovering himself. Incidentally that self-development led to a
+profound breach with my wife. One has read stories before of husband
+and wife speaking severally two different languages and coming to an
+understanding. But Margaret and I began in her dialect, and, as I came
+more and more to use my own, diverged.
+
+I had thought when I married that the matter of womankind had ended for
+me. I have tried to tell all that sex and women had been to me up to my
+married life with Margaret and our fatal entanglement, tried to show the
+queer, crippled, embarrassed and limited way in which these interests
+break upon the life of a young man under contemporary conditions. I
+do not think my lot was a very exceptional one. I missed the chance of
+sisters and girl playmates, but that is not an uncommon misadventure
+in an age of small families; I never came to know any woman at all
+intimately until I was married to Margaret. My earlier love affairs were
+encounters of sex, under conditions of furtiveness and adventure that
+made them things in themselves, restricted and unilluminating. From a
+boyish disposition to be mystical and worshipping towards women I
+had passed into a disregardful attitude, as though women were things
+inferior or irrelevant, disturbers in great affairs. For a time Margaret
+had blotted out all other women; she was so different and so near;
+she was like a person who stands suddenly in front of a little window
+through which one has been surveying a crowd. She didn't become
+womankind for me so much as eliminate womankind from my world.... And
+then came this secret separation....
+
+Until this estrangement and the rapid and uncontrollable development of
+my relations with Isabel which chanced to follow it, I seemed to have
+solved the problem of women by marriage and disregard. I thought these
+things were over. I went about my career with Margaret beside me, her
+brow slightly knit, her manner faintly strenuous, helping, helping; and
+if we had not altogether abolished sex we had at least so circumscribed
+and isolated it that it would not have affected the general tenor of our
+lives in the slightest degree if we had.
+
+And then, clothing itself more and more in the form of Isabel and her
+problems, this old, this fundamental obsession of my life returned. The
+thing stole upon my mind so that I was unaware of its invasion and how
+it was changing our long intimacy. I have already compared the lot of
+the modern publicist to Machiavelli writing in his study; in his day
+women and sex were as disregarded in these high affairs as, let us say,
+the chemistry of air or the will of the beasts in the fields; in ours
+the case has altogether changed, and woman has come now to stand beside
+the tall candles, half in the light, half in the mystery of the
+shadows, besetting, interrupting, demanding unrelentingly an altogether
+unprecedented attention. I feel that in these matters my life has been
+almost typical of my time. Woman insists upon her presence. She is
+no longer a mere physical need, an aesthetic bye-play, a sentimental
+background; she is a moral and intellectual necessity in a man's life.
+She comes to the politician and demands, Is she a child or a citizen? Is
+she a thing or a soul? She comes to the individual man, as she came
+to me and asks, Is she a cherished weakling or an equal mate, an
+unavoidable helper? Is she to be tried and trusted or guarded and
+controlled, bond or free? For if she is a mate, one must at once trust
+more and exact more, exacting toil, courage, and the hardest, most
+necessary thing of all, the clearest, most shameless, explicitness of
+understanding....
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+In all my earlier imaginings of statecraft I had tacitly assumed either
+that the relations of the sexes were all right or that anyhow they
+didn't concern the state. It was a matter they, whoever “they” were, had
+to settle among themselves. That sort of disregard was possible then.
+But even before 1906 there were endless intimations that the dams
+holding back great reservoirs of discussion were crumbling. We political
+schemers were ploughing wider than any one had ploughed before in the
+field of social reconstruction. We had also, we realised, to plough
+deeper. We had to plough down at last to the passionate elements of
+sexual relationship and examine and decide upon them.
+
+The signs multiplied. In a year or so half the police of the metropolis
+were scarce sufficient to protect the House from one clamorous aspect
+of the new problem. The members went about Westminster with an odd, new
+sense of being beset. A good proportion of us kept up the pretence that
+the Vote for Women was an isolated fad, and the agitation an epidemic
+madness that would presently pass. But it was manifest to any one who
+sought more than comfort in the matter that the streams of women and
+sympathisers and money forthcoming marked far deeper and wider things
+than an idle fancy for the franchise. The existing laws and conventions
+of relationship between Man and Woman were just as unsatisfactory a
+disorder as anything else in our tumbled confusion of a world, and that
+also was coming to bear upon statecraft.
+
+My first parliament was the parliament of the Suffragettes. I don't
+propose to tell here of that amazing campaign, with its absurdities
+and follies, its courage and devotion. There were aspects of that
+unquenchable agitation that were absolutely heroic and aspects that were
+absolutely pitiful. It was unreasonable, unwise, and, except for its
+one central insistence, astonishingly incoherent. It was amazingly
+effective. The very incoherence of the demand witnessed, I think, to the
+forces that lay behind it. It wasn't a simple argument based on a
+simple assumption; it was the first crude expression of a great mass and
+mingling of convergent feelings, of a widespread, confused persuasion
+among modern educated women that the conditions of their relations with
+men were oppressive, ugly, dishonouring, and had to be altered. They
+had not merely adopted the Vote as a symbol of equality; it was fairly
+manifest to me that, given it, they meant to use it, and to use it
+perhaps even vindictively and blindly, as a weapon against many things
+they had every reason to hate....
+
+I remember, with exceptional vividness, that great night early in the
+session of 1909, when--I think it was--fifty or sixty women went to
+prison. I had been dining at the Barham's, and Lord Barham and I came
+down from the direction of St. James's Park into a crowd and a confusion
+outside the Caxton Hall. We found ourselves drifting with an immense
+multitude towards Parliament Square and parallel with a silent,
+close-packed column of girls and women, for the most part white-faced
+and intent. I still remember the effect of their faces upon me. It was
+quite different from the general effect of staring about and divided
+attention one gets in a political procession of men. There was an
+expression of heroic tension.
+
+There had been a pretty deliberate appeal on the part of the women's
+organisers to the Unemployed, who had been demonstrating throughout that
+winter, to join forces with the movement, and the result was shown
+in the quality of the crowd upon the pavement. It was an ugly,
+dangerous-looking crowd, but as yet good-tempered and sympathetic. When
+at last we got within sight of the House the square was a seething seat
+of excited people, and the array of police on horse and on foot might
+have been assembled for a revolutionary outbreak. There were dense
+masses of people up Whitehall, and right on to Westminster Bridge. The
+scuffle that ended in the arrests was the poorest explosion to follow
+such stupendous preparations....
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Later on in that year the women began a new attack. Day and night, and
+all through the long nights of the Budget sittings, at all the piers
+of the gates of New Palace Yard and at St. Stephen's Porch, stood women
+pickets, and watched us silently and reproachfully as we went to and
+fro. They were women of all sorts, though, of course, the independent
+worker-class predominated. There were grey-headed old ladies standing
+there, sturdily charming in the rain; battered-looking, ambiguous women,
+with something of the desperate bitterness of battered women showing in
+their eyes; north-country factory girls; cheaply-dressed suburban women;
+trim, comfortable mothers of families; valiant-eyed girl graduates
+and undergraduates; lank, hungry-looking creatures, who stirred one's
+imagination; one very dainty little woman in deep mourning, I recall,
+grave and steadfast, with eyes fixed on distant things. Some of those
+women looked defiant, some timidly aggressive, some full of the stir of
+adventure, some drooping with cold and fatigue. The supply never ceased.
+I had a mortal fear that somehow the supply might halt or cease. I
+found that continual siege of the legislature extraordinarily
+impressive--infinitely more impressive than the feeble-forcible
+“ragging” of the more militant section. I thought of the appeal that
+must be going through the country, summoning the women from countless
+scattered homes, rooms, colleges, to Westminster.
+
+I remember too the petty little difficulty I felt whether I should
+ignore these pickets altogether, or lift a hat as I hurried past with
+averted eyes, or look them in the face as I did so. Towards the end the
+House evoked an etiquette of salutation.
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+There was a tendency, even on the part of its sympathisers, to treat the
+whole suffrage agitation as if it were a disconnected issue, irrelevant
+to all other broad developments of social and political life. We
+struggled, all of us, to ignore the indicating finger it thrust out
+before us. “Your schemes, for all their bigness,” it insisted to
+our reluctant, averted minds, “still don't go down to the essential
+things....”
+
+We have to go deeper, or our inadequate children's insufficient children
+will starve amidst harvests of earless futility. That conservatism which
+works in every class to preserve in its essentials the habitual daily
+life is all against a profounder treatment of political issues. The
+politician, almost as absurdly as the philosopher, tends constantly, in
+spite of magnificent preludes, vast intimations, to specialise himself
+out of the reality he has so stupendously summoned--he bolts back to
+littleness. The world has to be moulded anew, he continues to admit, but
+without, he adds, any risk of upsetting his week-end visits, his morning
+cup of tea....
+
+The discussion of the relations of men and women disturbs every one. It
+reacts upon the private life of every one who attempts it. And at
+any particular time only a small minority have a personal interest in
+changing the established state of affairs. Habit and interest are in a
+constantly recruited majority against conscious change and adjustment
+in these matters. Drift rules us. The great mass of people, and an
+overwhelming proportion of influential people, are people who have
+banished their dreams and made their compromise. Wonderful and beautiful
+possibilities are no longer to be thought about. They have given up
+any aspirations for intense love, their splendid offspring, for keen
+delights, have accepted a cultivated kindliness and an uncritical sense
+of righteousness as their compensation. It's a settled affair with
+them, a settled, dangerous affair. Most of them fear, and many hate, the
+slightest reminder of those abandoned dreams. As Dayton once said to
+the Pentagram Circle, when we were discussing the problem of a universal
+marriage and divorce law throughout the Empire, “I am for leaving all
+these things alone.” And then, with a groan in his voice, “Leave them
+alone! Leave them all alone!”
+
+That was his whole speech for the evening, in a note of suppressed
+passion, and presently, against all our etiquette, he got up and went
+out.
+
+For some years after my marriage, I too was for leaving them alone. I
+developed a dread and dislike for romance, for emotional music, for the
+human figure in art--turning my heart to landscape. I wanted to sneer
+at lovers and their ecstasies, and was uncomfortable until I found
+the effective sneer. In matters of private morals these were my most
+uncharitable years. I didn't want to think of these things any more for
+ever. I hated the people whose talk or practice showed they were not
+of my opinion. I wanted to believe that their views were immoral and
+objectionable and contemptible, because I had decided to treat them as
+at that level. I was, in fact, falling into the attitude of the normal
+decent man.
+
+And yet one cannot help thinking! The sensible moralised man finds it
+hard to escape the stream of suggestion that there are still dreams
+beyond these commonplace acquiescences,--the appeal of beauty suddenly
+shining upon one, the mothlike stirrings of serene summer nights, the
+sweetness of distant music....
+
+It is one of the paradoxical factors in our public life at the present
+time, which penalises abandonment to love so abundantly and so heavily,
+that power, influence and control fall largely to unencumbered people
+and sterile people and people who have married for passionless purposes,
+people whose very deficiency in feeling has left them free to follow
+ambition, people beautyblind, who don't understand what it is to fall in
+love, what it is to desire children or have them, what it is to feel in
+their blood and bodies the supreme claim of good births and selective
+births above all other affairs in life, people almost of necessity
+averse from this most fundamental aspect of existence....
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+It wasn't, however, my deepening sympathy with and understanding of the
+position of women in general, or the change in my ideas about all these
+intimate things my fast friendship with Isabel was bringing about, that
+led me to the heretical views I have in the last five years dragged from
+the region of academic and timid discussion into the field of practical
+politics. Those influences, no doubt, have converged to the same end,
+and given me a powerful emotional push upon my road, but it was a
+broader and colder view of things that first determined me in my attempt
+to graft the Endowment of Motherhood in some form or other upon British
+Imperialism. Now that I am exiled from the political world, it is
+possible to estimate just how effectually that grafting has been done.
+
+I have explained how the ideas of a trained aristocracy and a universal
+education grew to paramount importance in my political scheme. It is but
+a short step from this to the question of the quantity and quality of
+births in the community, and from that again to these forbidden and
+fear-beset topics of marriage, divorce, and the family organisation.
+A sporadic discussion of these aspects had been going on for years, a
+Eugenic society existed, and articles on the Falling Birth Rate, and the
+Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit were staples of the monthly magazines.
+But beyond an intermittent scolding of prosperous childless people
+in general--one never addressed them in particular--nothing was done
+towards arresting those adverse processes. Almost against my natural
+inclination, I found myself forced to go into these things. I came to
+the conclusion that under modern conditions the isolated private family,
+based on the existing marriage contract, was failing in its work. It
+wasn't producing enough children, and children good enough and well
+trained enough for the demands of the developing civilised state.
+Our civilisation was growing outwardly, and decaying in its intimate
+substance, and unless it was presently to collapse, some very extensive
+and courageous reorganisation was needed. The old haphazard system
+of pairing, qualified more and more by worldly discretions, no longer
+secures a young population numerous enough or good enough for the
+growing needs and possibilities of our Empire. Statecraft sits weaving
+splendid garments, no doubt, but with a puny, ugly, insufficient baby in
+the cradle.
+
+No one so far has dared to take up this problem as a present question
+for statecraft, but it comes unheralded, unadvocated, and sits at
+every legislative board. Every improvement is provisional except the
+improvement of the race, and it became more and more doubtful to me if
+we were improving the race at all! Splendid and beautiful and courageous
+people must come together and have children, women with their fine
+senses and glorious devotion must be freed from the net that compels
+them to be celibate, compels them to be childless and useless, or to
+bear children ignobly to men whom need and ignorance and the treacherous
+pressure of circumstances have forced upon them. We all know that,
+and so few dare even to whisper it for fear that they should seem, in
+seeking to save the family, to threaten its existence. It is as if
+a party of pigmies in a not too capacious room had been joined by a
+carnivorous giant--and decided to go on living happily by cutting him
+dead....
+
+The problem the developing civilised state has to solve is how it can
+get the best possible increase under the best possible conditions.
+I became more and more convinced that the independent family unit
+of to-day, in which the man is master of the wife and owner of the
+children, in which all are dependent upon him, subordinated to his
+enterprises and liable to follow his fortunes up or down, does not
+supply anything like the best conceivable conditions. We want to
+modernise the family footing altogether. An enormous premium both in
+pleasure and competitive efficiency is put upon voluntary childlessness,
+and enormous inducements are held out to women to subordinate
+instinctive and selective preferences to social and material
+considerations.
+
+The practical reaction of modern conditions upon the old tradition of
+the family is this: that beneath the pretence that nothing is changing,
+secretly and with all the unwholesomeness of secrecy everything is
+changed. Offspring fall away, the birth rate falls and falls most among
+just the most efficient and active and best adapted classes in the
+community. The species is recruited from among its failures and from
+among less civilised aliens. Contemporary civilisations are in effect
+burning the best of their possible babies in the furnaces that run the
+machinery. In the United States the native Anglo-American strain has
+scarcely increased at all since 1830, and in most Western European
+countries the same is probably true of the ablest and most energetic
+elements in the community. The women of these classes still remain
+legally and practically dependent and protected, with the only natural
+excuse for their dependence gone....
+
+The modern world becomes an immense spectacle of unsatisfactory
+groupings; here childless couples bored to death in the hopeless effort
+to sustain an incessant honeymoon, here homes in which a solitary child
+grows unsocially, here small two or three-child homes that do no more
+than continue the culture of the parents at a great social cost, here
+numbers of unhappy educated but childless married women, here careless,
+decivilised fecund homes, here orphanages and asylums for the heedlessly
+begotten. It is just the disorderly proliferation of Bromstead over
+again, in lives instead of in houses.
+
+What is the good, what is the common sense, of rectifying boundaries,
+pushing research and discovery, building cities, improving all the
+facilities of life, making great fleets, waging wars, while this aimless
+decadence remains the quality of the biological outlook?...
+
+It is difficult now to trace how I changed from my early aversion until
+I faced this mass of problems. But so far back as 1910 I had it clear
+in my mind that I would rather fail utterly than participate in all the
+surrenders of mind and body that are implied in Dayton's snarl of “Leave
+it alone; leave it all alone!” Marriage and the begetting and care of
+children, is the very ground substance in the life of the community.
+In a world in which everything changes, in which fresh methods, fresh
+adjustments and fresh ideas perpetually renew the circumstances of life,
+it is preposterous that we should not even examine into these matters,
+should rest content to be ruled by the uncriticised traditions of a
+barbaric age.
+
+Now, it seems to me that the solution of this problem is also the
+solution of the woman's individual problem. The two go together, are
+right and left of one question. The only conceivable way out from our
+IMPASSE lies in the recognition of parentage, that is to say of adequate
+mothering, as no longer a chance product of individual passions but
+a service rendered to the State. Women must become less and less
+subordinated to individual men, since this works out in a more or less
+complete limitation, waste, and sterilisation of their essentially
+social function; they must become more and more subordinated as
+individually independent citizens to the collective purpose. Or, to
+express the thing by a familiar phrase, the highly organised, scientific
+state we desire must, if it is to exist at all, base itself not upon
+the irresponsible man-ruled family, but upon the matriarchal family,
+the citizen-ship and freedom of women and the public endowment of
+motherhood.
+
+After two generations of confused and experimental revolt it grows clear
+to modern women that a conscious, deliberate motherhood and mothering is
+their special function in the State, and that a personal subordination
+to an individual man with an unlimited power of control over this
+intimate and supreme duty is a degradation. No contemporary woman of
+education put to the test is willing to recognise any claim a man can
+make upon her but the claim of her freely-given devotion to him. She
+wants the reality of her choice and she means “family” while a man
+too often means only possession. This alters the spirit of the family
+relationships fundamentally. Their form remains just what it was
+when woman was esteemed a pretty, desirable, and incidentally a
+child-producing, chattel. Against these time-honoured ideas the new
+spirit of womanhood struggles in shame, astonishment, bitterness, and
+tears....
+
+I confess myself altogether feminist. I have no doubts in the matter.
+I want this coddling and browbeating of women to cease. I want to
+see women come in, free and fearless, to a full participation in the
+collective purpose of mankind. Women, I am convinced, are as fine
+as men; they can be as wise as men; they are capable of far greater
+devotion than men. I want to see them citizens, with a marriage law
+framed primarily for them and for their protection and the good of the
+race, and not for men's satisfactions. I want to see them bearing and
+rearing good children in the State as a generously rewarded public duty
+and service, choosing their husbands freely and discerningly, and in no
+way enslaved by or subordinated to the men they have chosen. The social
+consciousness of women seems to me an unworked, an almost untouched mine
+of wealth for the constructive purpose of the world. I want to change
+the respective values of the family group altogether, and make the home
+indeed the women's kingdom and the mother the owner and responsible
+guardian of her children.
+
+It is no use pretending that this is not novel and revolutionary; it is.
+The Endowment of Motherhood implies a new method of social organization,
+a rearrangement of the social unit, untried in human experience--as
+untried as electric traction was or flying in 1800. Of course, it may
+work out to modify men's ideas of marriage profoundly. To me that is
+a secondary consideration. I do not believe that particular assertion
+myself, because I am convinced that a practical monogamy is a
+psychological necessity to the mass of civilised people. But even if I
+did believe it I should still keep to my present line, because it is the
+only line that will prevent a highly organised civilisation from ending
+in biological decay. The public Endowment of Motherhood is the only
+possible way which will ensure the permanently developing civilised
+state at which all constructive minds are aiming. A point is reached in
+the life-history of a civilisation when either this reconstruction
+must be effected or the quality and MORALE of the population prove
+insufficient for the needs of the developing organisation. It is not so
+much moral decadence that will destroy us as moral inadaptability.
+The old code fails under the new needs. The only alternative to this
+profound reconstruction is a decay in human quality and social collapse.
+Either this unprecedented rearrangement must be achieved by our
+civilisation, or it must presently come upon a phase of disorder and
+crumble and perish, as Rome perished, as France declines, as the strain
+of the Pilgrim Fathers dwindles out of America. Whatever hope there may
+be in the attempt therefore, there is no alternative to the attempt.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+I wanted political success now dearly enough, but not at the price
+of constructive realities. These questions were no doubt monstrously
+dangerous in the political world; there wasn't a politician alive who
+didn't look scared at the mention of “The Family,” but if raising these
+issues were essential to the social reconstructions on which my life
+was set, that did not matter. It only implied that I should take them
+up with deliberate caution. There was no release because of risk or
+difficulty.
+
+The question of whether I should commit myself to some open project in
+this direction was going on in my mind concurrently with my speculations
+about a change of party, like bass and treble in a complex piece of
+music. The two drew to a conclusion together. I would not only go over
+to Imperialism, but I would attempt to biologise Imperialism.
+
+I thought at first that I was undertaking a monstrous uphill task.
+But as I came to look into the possibilities of the matter, a strong
+persuasion grew up in my mind that this panic fear of legislative
+proposals affecting the family basis was excessive, that things were
+much riper for development in this direction than old-experienced people
+out of touch with the younger generation imagined, that to phrase
+the thing in a parliamentary fashion, “something might be done in the
+constituencies” with the Endowment of Motherhood forthwith, provided
+only that it was made perfectly clear that anything a sane person could
+possibly intend by “morality” was left untouched by these proposals.
+
+I went to work very carefully. I got Roper of the DAILY TELEPHONE and
+Burkett of the DIAL to try over a silly-season discussion of State Help
+for Mothers, and I put a series of articles on eugenics, upon the fall
+in the birth-rate, and similar topics in the BLUE WEEKLY, leading up
+to a tentative and generalised advocacy of the public endowment of the
+nation's children. I was more and more struck by the acceptance won by a
+sober and restrained presentation of this suggestion.
+
+And then, in the fourth year of the BLUE WEEKLY'S career, came the
+Handitch election, and I was forced by the clamour of my antagonist,
+and very willingly forced, to put my convictions to the test. I returned
+triumphantly to Westminster with the Public Endowment of Motherhood
+as part of my open profession and with the full approval of the party
+press. Applauding benches of Imperialists cheered me on my way to the
+table between the whips.
+
+That second time I took the oath I was not one of a crowd of new
+members, but salient, an event, a symbol of profound changes and new
+purposes in the national life.
+
+Here it is my political book comes to an end, and in a sense my book
+ends altogether. For the rest is but to tell how I was swept out of this
+great world of political possibilities. I close this Third Book as I
+opened it, with an admission of difficulties and complexities, but now
+with a pile of manuscript before me I have to confess them unsurmounted
+and still entangled.
+
+Yet my aim was a final simplicity. I have sought to show my growing
+realisation that the essential quality of all political and social
+effort is the development of a great race mind behind the interplay of
+individual lives. That is the collective human reality, the basis of
+morality, the purpose of devotion. To that our lives must be given, from
+that will come the perpetual fresh release and further ennoblement of
+individual lives....
+
+I have wanted to make that idea of a collective mind play in this book
+the part United Italy plays in Machiavelli's PRINCE. I have called it
+the hinterland of reality, shown it accumulating a dominating truth and
+rightness which must force men's now sporadic motives more and more into
+a disciplined and understanding relation to a plan. And I have tried
+to indicate how I sought to serve this great clarification of our
+confusions....
+
+Now I come back to personality and the story of my self-betrayal, and
+how it is I have had to leave all that far-reaching scheme of mine, a
+mere project and beginning for other men to take or leave as it pleases
+them.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THE FOURTH: ISABEL
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ LOVE AND SUCCESS
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+I come to the most evasive and difficult part of my story, which is to
+tell how Isabel and I have made a common wreck of our joint lives.
+
+It is not the telling of one simple disastrous accident. There was a
+vein in our natures that led to this collapse, gradually and at
+this point and that it crept to the surface. One may indeed see our
+destruction--for indeed politically we could not be more extinct if we
+had been shot dead--in the form of a catastrophe as disconnected and
+conclusive as a meteoric stone falling out of heaven upon two friends
+and crushing them both. But I do not think that is true to our situation
+or ourselves. We were not taken by surprise. The thing was in us and
+not from without, it was akin to our way of thinking and our habitual
+attitudes; it had, for all its impulsive effect, a certain necessity. We
+might have escaped no doubt, as two men at a hundred yards may shoot at
+each other with pistols for a considerable time and escape. But it isn't
+particularly reasonable to talk of the contrariety of fate if they both
+get hit.
+
+Isabel and I were dangerous to each other for several years of
+friendship, and not quite unwittingly so.
+
+In writing this, moreover, there is a very great difficulty in steering
+my way between two equally undesirable tones in the telling. In the
+first place I do not want to seem to confess my sins with a penitence I
+am very doubtful if I feel. Now that I have got Isabel we can no doubt
+count the cost of it and feel unquenchable regrets, but I am not sure
+whether, if we could be put back now into such circumstances as we
+were in a year ago, or two years ago, whether with my eyes fully open I
+should not do over again very much as I did. And on the other hand I do
+not want to justify the things we have done. We are two bad people--if
+there is to be any classification of good and bad at all, we have acted
+badly, and quite apart from any other considerations we've largely
+wasted our own very great possibilities. But it is part of a queer
+humour that underlies all this, that I find myself slipping again and
+again into a sentimental treatment of our case that is as unpremeditated
+as it is insincere. When I am a little tired after a morning's writing
+I find the faint suggestion getting into every other sentence that our
+blunders and misdeeds embodied, after the fashion of the prophet Hosea,
+profound moral truths. Indeed, I feel so little confidence in my ability
+to keep this altogether out of my book that I warn the reader here that
+in spite of anything he may read elsewhere in the story, intimating
+however shyly an esoteric and exalted virtue in our proceedings, the
+plain truth of this business is that Isabel and I wanted each other with
+a want entirely formless, inconsiderate, and overwhelming. And though I
+could tell you countless delightful and beautiful things about Isabel,
+were this a book in her praise, I cannot either analyse that want or
+account for its extreme intensity.
+
+I will confess that deep in my mind there is a belief in a sort of wild
+rightness about any love that is fraught with beauty, but that eludes
+me and vanishes again, and is not, I feel, to be put with the real
+veracities and righteousnesses and virtues in the paddocks and
+menageries of human reason....
+
+We have already a child, and Margaret was childless, and I find myself
+prone to insist upon that, as if it was a justification. But, indeed,
+when we became lovers there was small thought of Eugenics between us.
+Ours was a mutual and not a philoprogenitive passion. Old Nature behind
+us may have had such purposes with us, but it is not for us to annex
+her intentions by a moralising afterthought. There isn't, in fact, any
+decent justification for us whatever--at that the story must stand.
+
+But if there is no justification there is at least a very effective
+excuse in the mental confusedness of our time. The evasion of that
+passionately thorough exposition of belief and of the grounds of
+morality, which is the outcome of the mercenary religious compromises of
+the late Vatican period, the stupid suppression of anything but the most
+timid discussion of sexual morality in our literature and drama, the
+pervading cultivated and protected muddle-headedness, leaves mentally
+vigorous people with relatively enormous possibilities of destruction
+and little effective help. They find themselves confronted by the
+habits and prejudices of manifestly commonplace people, and by that
+extraordinary patched-up Christianity, the cult of a “Bromsteadised”
+ deity, diffused, scattered, and aimless, which hides from examination
+and any possibility of faith behind the plea of good taste. A god about
+whom there is delicacy is far worse than no god at all. We are FORCED to
+be laws unto ourselves and to live experimentally. It is inevitable that
+a considerable fraction of just that bolder, more initiatory section of
+the intellectual community, the section that can least be spared from
+the collective life in a period of trial and change, will drift into
+such emotional crises and such disaster as overtook us. Most perhaps
+will escape, but many will go down, many more than the world can spare.
+It is the unwritten law of all our public life, and the same holds true
+of America, that an honest open scandal ends a career. England in the
+last quarter of a century has wasted half a dozen statesmen on this
+score; she would, I believe, reject Nelson now if he sought to serve
+her. Is it wonderful that to us fretting here in exile this should seem
+the cruellest as well as the most foolish elimination of a necessary
+social element? It destroys no vice; for vice hides by nature. It
+not only rewards dullness as if it were positive virtue, but sets an
+enormous premium upon hypocrisy. That is my case, and that is why I am
+telling this side of my story with so much explicitness.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+Ever since the Kinghamstead election I had maintained what seemed a
+desultory friendship with Isabel. At first it was rather Isabel kept
+it up than I. Whenever Margaret and I went down to that villa, with its
+three or four acres of garden and shrubbery about it, which fulfilled
+our election promise to live at Kinghamstead, Isabel would turn up in
+a state of frank cheerfulness, rejoicing at us, and talk all she was
+reading and thinking to me, and stay for all the rest of the day. In
+her shameless liking for me she was as natural as a savage. She would
+exercise me vigorously at tennis, while Margaret lay and rested her
+back in the afternoon, or guide me for some long ramble that dodged the
+suburban and congested patches of the constituency with amazing skill.
+She took possession of me in that unabashed, straight-minded way a girl
+will sometimes adopt with a man, chose my path or criticised my
+game with a motherly solicitude for my welfare that was absurd and
+delightful. And we talked. We discussed and criticised the stories of
+novels, scraps of history, pictures, social questions, socialism, the
+policy of the Government. She was young and most unevenly informed, but
+she was amazingly sharp and quick and good. Never before in my life had
+I known a girl of her age, or a woman of her quality. I had never dreamt
+there was such talk in the world. Kinghamstead became a lightless
+place when she went to Oxford. Heaven knows how much that may not have
+precipitated my abandonment of the seat!
+
+She went to Ridout College, Oxford, and that certainly weighed with
+me when presently after my breach with the Liberals various little
+undergraduate societies began to ask for lectures and discussions. I
+favoured Oxford. I declared openly I did so because of her. At that time
+I think we neither of us suspected the possibility of passion that lay
+like a coiled snake in the path before us. It seemed to us that we
+had the quaintest, most delightful friendship in the world; she was
+my pupil, and I was her guide, philosopher, and friend. People smiled
+indulgently--even Margaret smiled indulgently--at our attraction for one
+another.
+
+Such friendships are not uncommon nowadays--among easy-going,
+liberal-minded people. For the most part, there's no sort of harm, as
+people say, in them. The two persons concerned are never supposed to
+think of the passionate love that hovers so close to the friendship, or
+if they do, then they banish the thought. I think we kept the thought as
+permanently in exile as any one could do. If it did in odd moments come
+into our heads we pretended elaborately it wasn't there.
+
+Only we were both very easily jealous of each other's attention, and
+tremendously insistent upon each other's preference.
+
+I remember once during the Oxford days an intimation that should have
+set me thinking, and I suppose discreetly disentangling myself. It was
+one Sunday afternoon, and it must have been about May, for the trees and
+shrubs of Ridout College were gay with blossom, and fresh with the new
+sharp greens of spring. I had walked talking with Isabel and a couple of
+other girls through the wide gardens of the place, seen and criticised
+the new brick pond, nodded to the daughter of this friend and that
+in the hammocks under the trees, and picked a way among the scattered
+tea-parties on the lawn to our own circle on the grass under a Siberian
+crab near the great bay window. There I sat and ate great quantities
+of cake, and discussed the tactics of the Suffragettes. I had made some
+comments upon the spirit of the movement in an address to the men in
+Pembroke, and it had got abroad, and a group of girls and women dons
+were now having it out with me.
+
+I forget the drift of the conversation, or what it was made Isabel
+interrupt me. She did interrupt me. She had been lying prone on the
+ground at my right hand, chin on fists, listening thoughtfully, and
+I was sitting beside old Lady Evershead on a garden seat. I turned to
+Isabel's voice, and saw her face uplifted, and her dear cheeks and nose
+and forehead all splashed and barred with sunlight and the shadows of
+the twigs of the trees behind me. And something--an infinite tenderness,
+stabbed me. It was a keen physical feeling, like nothing I had ever felt
+before. It had a quality of tears in it. For the first time in my narrow
+and concentrated life another human being had really thrust into my
+being and gripped my very heart.
+
+Our eyes met perplexed for an extraordinary moment. Then I turned
+back and addressed myself a little stiffly to the substance of her
+intervention. For some time I couldn't look at her again.
+
+From that time forth I knew I loved Isabel beyond measure.
+
+Yet it is curious that it never occurred to me for a year or so that
+this was likely to be a matter of passion between us. I have told how
+definitely I put my imagination into harness in those matters at my
+marriage, and I was living now in a world of big interests, where there
+is neither much time nor inclination for deliberate love-making. I
+suppose there is a large class of men who never meet a girl or a woman
+without thinking of sex, who meet a friend's daughter and decide:
+“Mustn't get friendly with her--wouldn't DO,” and set invisible bars
+between themselves and all the wives in the world. Perhaps that is
+the way to live. Perhaps there is no other method than this effectual
+annihilation of half--and the most sympathetic and attractive half--of
+the human beings in the world, so far as any frank intercourse is
+concerned. I am quite convinced anyhow that such a qualified intimacy
+as ours, such a drifting into the sense of possession, such untrammeled
+conversation with an invisible, implacable limit set just where the
+intimacy glows, it is no kind of tolerable compromise. If men and women
+are to go so far together, they must be free to go as far as they may
+want to go, without the vindictive destruction that has come upon us.
+On the basis of the accepted codes the jealous people are right, and the
+liberal-minded ones are playing with fire. If people are not to love,
+then they must be kept apart. If they are not to be kept apart, then we
+must prepare for an unprecedented toleration of lovers.
+
+Isabel was as unforeseeing as I to begin with, but sex marches into the
+life of an intelligent girl with demands and challenges far more urgent
+than the mere call of curiosity and satiable desire that comes to a
+young man. No woman yet has dared to tell the story of that unfolding.
+She attracted men, and she encouraged them, and watched them, and tested
+them, and dismissed them, and concealed the substance of her thoughts
+about them in the way that seems instinctive in a natural-minded girl.
+There was even an engagement--amidst the protests and disapproval of
+the college authorities. I never saw the man, though she gave me a long
+history of the affair, to which I listened with a forced and insincere
+sympathy. She struck me oddly as taking the relationship for a thing
+in itself, and regardless of its consequences. After a time she became
+silent about him, and then threw him over; and by that time, I think,
+for all that she was so much my junior, she knew more about herself and
+me than I was to know for several years to come.
+
+We didn't see each other for some months after my resignation, but we
+kept up a frequent correspondence. She said twice over that she wanted
+to talk to me, that letters didn't convey what one wanted to say, and
+I went up to Oxford pretty definitely to see her--though I combined it
+with one or two other engagements--somewhere in February. Insensibly she
+had become important enough for me to make journeys for her.
+
+But we didn't see very much of one another on that occasion. There was
+something in the air between us that made a faint embarrassment; the
+mere fact, perhaps, that she had asked me to come up.
+
+A year before she would have dashed off with me quite unscrupulously
+to talk alone, carried me off to her room for an hour with a minute of
+chaperonage to satisfy the rules. Now there was always some one or other
+near us that it seemed impossible to exorcise.
+
+We went for a walk on the Sunday afternoon with old Fortescue, K. C.,
+who'd come up to see his two daughters, both great friends of Isabel's,
+and some mute inglorious don whose name I forget, but who was in a
+state of marked admiration for her. The six of us played a game of
+conversational entanglements throughout, and mostly I was impressing
+the Fortescue girls with the want of mental concentration possible in a
+rising politician. We went down Carfex, I remember, to Folly Bridge,
+and inspected the Barges, and then back by way of Merton to the Botanic
+Gardens and Magdalen Bridge. And in the Botanic Gardens she got almost
+her only chance with me.
+
+“Last months at Oxford,” she said.
+
+“And then?” I asked.
+
+“I'm coming to London,” she said.
+
+“To write?”
+
+She was silent for a moment. Then she said abruptly, with that quick
+flush of hers and a sudden boldness in her eyes: “I'm going to work with
+you. Why shouldn't I?”
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Here, again, I suppose I had a fair warning of the drift of things.
+I seem to remember myself in the train to Paddington, sitting with a
+handful of papers--galley proofs for the BLUE WEEKLY, I suppose--on my
+lap, and thinking about her and that last sentence of hers, and all that
+it might mean to me.
+
+It is very hard to recall even the main outline of anything so elusive
+as a meditation. I know that the idea of working with her gripped me,
+fascinated me. That my value in her life seemed growing filled me with
+pride and a kind of gratitude. I was already in no doubt that her value
+in my life was tremendous. It made it none the less, that in those days
+I was obsessed by the idea that she was transitory, and bound to go out
+of my life again. It is no good trying to set too fine a face upon this
+complex business, there is gold and clay and sunlight and savagery in
+every love story, and a multitude of elvish elements peeped out beneath
+the fine rich curtain of affection that masked our future. I've never
+properly weighed how immensely my vanity was gratified by her clear
+preference for me. Nor can I for a moment determine how much deliberate
+intention I hide from myself in this affair.
+
+Certainly I think some part of me must have been saying in the train:
+“Leave go of her. Get away from her. End this now.” I can't have been so
+stupid as not to have had that in my mind....
+
+If she had been only a beautiful girl in love with me, I think I could
+have managed the situation. Once or twice since my marriage and before
+Isabel became of any significance in my life, there had been incidents
+with other people, flashes of temptation--no telling is possible of
+the thing resisted. I think that mere beauty and passion would not
+have taken me. But between myself and Isabel things were incurably
+complicated by the intellectual sympathy we had, the jolly march of
+our minds together. That has always mattered enormously. I should have
+wanted her company nearly as badly if she had been some crippled old
+lady; we would have hunted shoulder to shoulder, as two men. Only two
+men would never have had the patience and readiness for one another
+we two had. I had never for years met any one with whom I could be so
+carelessly sure of understanding or to whom I could listen so easily
+and fully. She gave me, with an extraordinary completeness, that rare,
+precious effect of always saying something fresh, and yet saying it so
+that it filled into and folded about all the little recesses and corners
+of my mind with an infinite, soft familiarity. It is impossible to
+explain that. It is like trying to explain why her voice, her voice
+heard speaking to any one--heard speaking in another room--pleased my
+ears.
+
+She was the only Oxford woman who took a first that year. She spent the
+summer in Scotland and Yorkshire, writing to me continually of all she
+now meant to do, and stirring my imagination. She came to London for
+the autumn session. For a time she stayed with old Lady Colbeck, but she
+fell out with her hostess when it became clear she wanted to write, not
+novels, but journalism, and then she set every one talking by taking
+a flat near Victoria and installing as her sole protector an elderly
+German governess she had engaged through a scholastic agency. She began
+writing, not in that copious flood the undisciplined young woman of
+gifts is apt to produce, but in exactly the manner of an able young man,
+experimenting with forms, developing the phrasing of opinions, taking
+a definite line. She was, of course, tremendously discussed. She was
+disapproved of, but she was invited out to dinner. She got rather a
+reputation for the management of elderly distinguished men. It was an
+odd experience to follow Margaret's soft rustle of silk into some
+big drawing-room and discover my snub-nosed girl in the blue sack
+transformed into a shining creature in the soft splendour of pearls and
+ivory-white and lace, and with a silver band about her dusky hair.
+
+For a time we did not meet very frequently, though always she professed
+an unblushing preference for my company, and talked my views and sought
+me out. Then her usefulness upon the BLUE WEEKLY began to link us
+closelier. She would come up to the office, and sit by the window,
+and talk over the proofs of the next week's articles, going through my
+intentions with a keen investigatory scalpel. Her talk always puts me in
+mind of a steel blade. Her writing became rapidly very good; she had
+a wit and a turn of the phrase that was all her own. We seemed to have
+forgotten the little shadow of embarrassment that had fallen over our
+last meeting at Oxford. Everything seemed natural and easy between us in
+those days; a little unconventional, but that made it all the brighter.
+
+We developed something like a custom of walks, about once a week or so,
+and letters and notes became frequent. I won't pretend things were not
+keenly personal between us, but they had an air of being innocently
+mental. She used to call me “Master” in our talks, a monstrous and
+engaging flattery, and I was inordinately proud to have her as my pupil.
+Who wouldn't have been? And we went on at that distance for a long
+time--until within a year of the Handitch election.
+
+After Lady Colbeck threw her up as altogether too “intellectual” for
+comfortable control, Isabel was taken up by the Balfes in a less formal
+and compromising manner, and week-ended with them and their cousin
+Leonora Sparling, and spent large portions of her summer with them in
+Herefordshire. There was a lover or so in that time, men who came a
+little timidly at this brilliant young person with the frank manner and
+the Amazonian mind, and, she declared, received her kindly refusals with
+manifest relief. And Arnold Shoesmith struck up a sort of friendship
+that oddly imitated mine. She took a liking to him because he was clumsy
+and shy and inexpressive; she embarked upon the dangerous interest of
+helping him to find his soul. I had some twinges of jealousy about that.
+I didn't see the necessity of him. He invaded her time, and I thought
+that might interfere with her work. If their friendship stole some hours
+from Isabel's writing, it did not for a long while interfere with our
+walks or our talks, or the close intimacy we had together.
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+Then suddenly Isabel and I found ourselves passionately in love.
+
+The change came so entirely without warning or intention that I find it
+impossible now to tell the order of its phases. What disturbed pebble
+started the avalanche I cannot trace. Perhaps it was simply that the
+barriers between us and this masked aspect of life had been wearing down
+unperceived.
+
+And there came a change in Isabel. It was like some change in the cycle
+of nature, like the onset of spring--a sharp brightness, an uneasiness.
+She became restless with her work; little encounters with men began to
+happen, encounters not quite in the quality of the earlier proposals;
+and then came an odd incident of which she told me, but somehow, I felt,
+didn't tell me completely. She told me all she was able to tell me.
+She had been at a dance at the Ropers', and a man, rather well known in
+London, had kissed her. The thing amazed her beyond measure. It was the
+sort of thing immediately possible between any man and any woman, that
+one never expects to happen until it happens. It had the surprising
+effect of a judge generally known to be bald suddenly whipping off his
+wig in court. No absolutely unexpected revelation could have quite the
+same quality of shock. She went through the whole thing to me with a
+remarkable detachment, told me how she had felt--and the odd things it
+seemed to open to her.
+
+“I WANT to be kissed, and all that sort of thing,” she avowed. “I
+suppose every woman does.”
+
+She added after a pause: “And I don't want any one to do it.”
+
+This struck me as queerly expressive of the woman's attitude to these
+things. “Some one presently will--solve that,” I said.
+
+“Some one will perhaps.”
+
+I was silent.
+
+“Some one will,” she said, almost viciously. “And then we'll have to
+stop these walks and talks of ours, dear Master.... I'll be sorry to
+give them up.”
+
+“It's part of the requirements of the situation,” I said, “that he
+should be--oh, very interesting! He'll start, no doubt, all sorts of new
+topics, and open no end of attractive vistas.... You can't, you know,
+always go about in a state of pupillage.”
+
+“I don't think I can,” said Isabel. “But it's only just recently I've
+begun to doubt about it.”
+
+I remember these things being said, but just how much we saw and
+understood, and just how far we were really keeping opaque to each other
+then, I cannot remember. But it must have been quite soon after this
+that we spent nearly a whole day together at Kew Gardens, with the
+curtains up and the barriers down, and the thing that had happened plain
+before our eyes. I don't remember we ever made any declaration. We just
+assumed the new footing....
+
+It was a day early in that year--I think in January, because there was
+thin, crisp snow on the grass, and we noted that only two other people
+had been to the Pagoda that day. I've a curious impression of greenish
+colour, hot, moist air and huge palm fronds about very much of our talk,
+as though we were nearly all the time in the Tropical House. But I
+also remember very vividly looking at certain orange and red spray-like
+flowers from Patagonia, which could not have been there. It is a curious
+thing that I do not remember we made any profession of passionate love
+for one another; we talked as though the fact of our intense love for
+each other had always been patent between us. There was so long and
+frank an intimacy between us that we talked far more like brother and
+sister or husband and wife than two people engaged in the war of the
+sexes. We wanted to know what we were going to do, and whatever we
+did we meant to do in the most perfect concert. We both felt an
+extraordinary accession of friendship and tenderness then, and, what
+again is curious, very little passion. But there was also, in spite of
+the perplexities we faced, an immense satisfaction about that day. It
+was as if we had taken off something that had hindered our view of each
+other, like people who unvizored to talk more easily at a masked ball.
+
+I've had since to view our relations from the standpoint of the ordinary
+observer. I find that vision in the most preposterous contrast with all
+that really went on between us. I suppose there I should figure as a
+wicked seducer, while an unprotected girl succumbed to my fascinations.
+As a matter of fact, it didn't occur to us that there was any personal
+inequality between us. I knew her for my equal mentally; in so many
+things she was beyond comparison cleverer than I; her courage outwent
+mine. The quick leap of her mind evoked a flash of joy in mine like the
+response of an induction wire; her way of thinking was like watching
+sunlight reflected from little waves upon the side of a boat, it was so
+bright, so mobile, so variously and easily true to its law. In the back
+of our minds we both had a very definite belief that making love is full
+of joyous, splendid, tender, and exciting possibilities, and we had to
+discuss why we shouldn't be to the last degree lovers.
+
+Now, what I should like to print here, if it were possible, in all the
+screaming emphasis of red ink, is this: that the circumstances of my
+upbringing and the circumstances of Isabel's upbringing had left not a
+shadow of belief or feeling that the utmost passionate love between
+us was in itself intrinsically WRONG. I've told with the fullest
+particularity just all that I was taught or found out for myself
+in these matters, and Isabel's reading and thinking, and the fierce
+silences of her governesses and the breathless warnings of teachers, and
+all the social and religious influences that had been brought to bear
+upon her, had worked out to the same void of conviction. The code had
+failed with us altogether. We didn't for a moment consider anything but
+the expediency of what we both, for all our quiet faces and steady eyes,
+wanted most passionately to do.
+
+Well, here you have the state of mind of whole brigades of people, and
+particularly of young people, nowadays. The current morality hasn't
+gripped them; they don't really believe in it at all. They may render
+it lip-service, but that is quite another thing. There are scarcely any
+tolerable novels to justify its prohibitions; its prohibitions do, in
+fact, remain unjustified amongst these ugly suppressions. You may, if
+you choose, silence the admission of this in literature and current
+discussion; you will not prevent it working out in lives. People come up
+to the great moments of passion crudely unaware, astoundingly unprepared
+as no really civilised and intelligently planned community would let any
+one be unprepared. They find themselves hedged about with customs
+that have no organic hold upon them, and mere discretions all generous
+spirits are disposed to despise.
+
+Consider the infinite absurdities of it! Multitudes of us are trying
+to run this complex modern community on a basis of “Hush” without
+explaining to our children or discussing with them anything about
+love and marriage at all. Doubt and knowledge creep about in enforced
+darknesses and silences. We are living upon an ancient tradition which
+everybody doubts and nobody has ever analysed. We affect a tremendous
+and cultivated shyness and delicacy about imperatives of the most
+arbitrary appearance. What ensues? What did ensue with us, for example?
+On the one hand was a great desire, robbed of any appearance of shame
+and grossness by the power of love, and on the other hand, the possible
+jealousy of so and so, the disapproval of so and so, material risks and
+dangers. It is only in the retrospect that we have been able to grasp
+something of the effectual case against us. The social prohibition lit
+by the intense glow of our passion, presented itself as preposterous,
+irrational, arbitrary, and ugly, a monster fit only for mockery. We
+might be ruined! Well, there is a phase in every love affair, a sort
+of heroic hysteria, when death and ruin are agreeable additions to the
+prospect. It gives the business a gravity, a solemnity. Timid people may
+hesitate and draw back with a vague instinctive terror of the immensity
+of the oppositions they challenge, but neither Isabel nor I are timid
+people.
+
+We weighed what was against us. We decided just exactly as scores of
+thousands of people have decided in this very matter, that if it were
+possible to keep this thing to ourselves, there was nothing against it.
+And so we took our first step. With the hunger of love in us, it was
+easy to conclude we might be lovers, and still keep everything to
+ourselves. That cleared our minds of the one persistent obstacle that
+mattered to us--the haunting presence of Margaret.
+
+And then we found, as all those scores of thousands of people scattered
+about us have found, that we could not keep it to ourselves. Love will
+out. All the rest of this story is the chronicle of that. Love with
+sustained secrecy cannot be love. It is just exactly the point people do
+not understand.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+But before things came to that pass, some months and many phases and a
+sudden journey to America intervened.
+
+“This thing spells disaster,” I said. “You are too big and I am too big
+to attempt this secrecy. Think of the intolerable possibility of being
+found out! At any cost we have to stop--even at the cost of parting.”
+
+“Just because we may be found out!”
+
+“Just because we may be found out.”
+
+“Master, I shouldn't in the least mind being found out with you. I'm
+afraid--I'd be proud.”
+
+“Wait till it happens.”
+
+There followed a struggle of immense insincerity between us. It is hard
+to tell who urged and who resisted.
+
+She came to me one night to the editorial room of the BLUE WEEKLY, and
+argued and kissed me with wet salt lips, and wept in my arms; she told
+me that now passionate longing for me and my intimate life possessed
+her, so that she could not work, could not think, could not endure other
+people for the love of me....
+
+I fled absurdly. That is the secret of the futile journey to America
+that puzzled all my friends.
+
+I ran away from Isabel. I took hold of the situation with all my
+strength, put in Britten with sketchy, hasty instructions to edit the
+paper, and started headlong and with luggage, from which, among other
+things, my shaving things were omitted, upon a tour round the world.
+
+Preposterous flight that was! I remember as a thing almost farcical my
+explanations to Margaret, and how frantically anxious I was to prevent
+the remote possibility of her coming with me, and how I crossed in the
+TUSCAN, a bad, wet boat, and mixed seasickness with ungovernable sorrow.
+I wept--tears. It was inexpressibly queer and ridiculous--and, good God!
+how I hated my fellow-passengers!
+
+New York inflamed and excited me for a time, and when things slackened,
+I whirled westward to Chicago--eating and drinking, I remember, in the
+train from shoals of little dishes, with a sort of desperate voracity.
+I did the queerest things to distract myself--no novelist would dare to
+invent my mental and emotional muddle. Chicago also held me at first,
+amazing lapse from civilisation that the place is! and then abruptly,
+with hosts expecting me, and everything settled for some days in Denver,
+I found myself at the end of my renunciations, and turned and came back
+headlong to London.
+
+Let me confess it wasn't any sense of perfect and incurable trust and
+confidence that brought me back, or any idea that now I had strength to
+refrain. It was a sudden realisation that after all the separation might
+succeed; some careless phrasing in one of her jealously read letters set
+that idea going in my mind--the haunting perception that I might return
+to London and find it empty of the Isabel who had pervaded it. Honour,
+discretion, the careers of both of us, became nothing at the thought. I
+couldn't conceive my life resuming there without Isabel. I couldn't, in
+short, stand it.
+
+I don't even excuse my return. It is inexcusable. I ought to have kept
+upon my way westward--and held out. I couldn't. I wanted Isabel, and
+I wanted her so badly now that everything else in the world was
+phantom-like until that want was satisfied. Perhaps you have never
+wanted anything like that. I went straight to her.
+
+But here I come to untellable things. There is no describing the reality
+of love. The shapes of things are nothing, the actual happenings are
+nothing, except that somehow there falls a light upon them and a wonder.
+Of how we met, and the thrill of the adventure, the curious bright sense
+of defiance, the joy of having dared, I can't tell--I can but hint of
+just one aspect, of what an amazing LARK--it's the only word--it seemed
+to us. The beauty which was the essence of it, which justifies it so far
+as it will bear justification, eludes statement.
+
+What can a record of contrived meetings, of sundering difficulties
+evaded and overcome, signify here? Or what can it convey to say that
+one looked deep into two dear, steadfast eyes, or felt a heart throb
+and beat, or gripped soft hair softly in a trembling hand? Robbed of
+encompassing love, these things are of no more value than the taste of
+good wine or the sight of good pictures, or the hearing of music,--just
+sensuality and no more. No one can tell love--we can only tell the gross
+facts of love and its consequences. Given love--given mutuality, and one
+has effected a supreme synthesis and come to a new level of life--but
+only those who know can know. This business has brought me more
+bitterness and sorrow than I had ever expected to bear, but even now
+I will not say that I regret that wilful home-coming altogether. We
+loved--to the uttermost. Neither of us could have loved any one else
+as we did and do love one another. It was ours, that beauty; it existed
+only between us when we were close together, for no one in the world
+ever to know save ourselves.
+
+My return to the office sticks out in my memory with an extreme
+vividness, because of the wild eagle of pride that screamed within me.
+It was Tuesday morning, and though not a soul in London knew of it yet
+except Isabel, I had been back in England a week. I came in upon Britten
+and stood in the doorway.
+
+“GOD!” he said at the sight of me.
+
+“I'm back,” I said.
+
+He looked at my excited face with those red-brown eyes of his. Silently
+I defied him to speak his mind.
+
+“Where did you turn back?” he said at last.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+I had to tell what were, so far as I can remember my first positive lies
+to Margaret in explaining that return. I had written to her from Chicago
+and again from New York, saying that I felt I ought to be on the spot
+in England for the new session, and that I was coming back--presently.
+I concealed the name of my boat from her, and made a calculated
+prevarication when I announced my presence in London. I telephoned
+before I went back for my rooms to be prepared. She was, I knew, with
+the Bunting Harblows in Durham, and when she came back to Radnor Square
+I had been at home a day.
+
+I remember her return so well.
+
+My going away and the vivid secret of the present had wiped out from my
+mind much of our long estrangement. Something, too, had changed in her.
+I had had some hint of it in her letters, but now I saw it plainly. I
+came out of my study upon the landing when I heard the turmoil of her
+arrival below, and she came upstairs with a quickened gladness. It was a
+cold March, and she was dressed in unfamiliar dark furs that suited her
+extremely and reinforced the delicate flush of her sweet face. She held
+out both her hands to me, and drew me to her unhesitatingly and kissed
+me.
+
+“So glad you are back, dear,” she said. “Oh! so very glad you are back.”
+
+I returned her kiss with a queer feeling at my heart, too
+undifferentiated to be even a definite sense of guilt or meanness. I
+think it was chiefly amazement--at the universe--at myself.
+
+“I never knew what it was to be away from you,” she said.
+
+I perceived suddenly that she had resolved to end our estrangement. She
+put herself so that my arm came caressingly about her.
+
+“These are jolly furs,” I said.
+
+“I got them for you.”
+
+The parlourmaid appeared below dealing with the maid and the luggage
+cab.
+
+“Tell me all about America,” said Margaret. “I feel as though you'd been
+away six year's.”
+
+We went arm in arm into our little sitting-room, and I took off the
+fur's for her and sat down upon the chintz-covered sofa by the fire.
+She had ordered tea, and came and sat by me. I don't know what I had
+expected, but of all things I had certainly not expected this sudden
+abolition of our distances.
+
+“I want to know all about America,” she repeated, with her eyes
+scrutinising me. “Why did you come back?”
+
+I repeated the substance of my letters rather lamely, and she sat
+listening.
+
+“But why did you turn back--without going to Denver?”
+
+“I wanted to come back. I was restless.”
+
+“Restlessness,” she said, and thought. “You were restless in Venice. You
+said it was restlessness took you to America.”
+
+Again she studied me. She turned a little awkwardly to her tea things,
+and poured needless water from the silver kettle into the teapot.
+Then she sat still for some moments looking at the equipage with
+expressionless eyes. I saw her hand upon the edge of the table tremble
+slightly. I watched her closely. A vague uneasiness possessed me. What
+might she not know or guess?
+
+She spoke at last with an effort. “I wish you were in Parliament again,”
+ she said. “Life doesn't give you events enough.”
+
+“If I was in Parliament again, I should be on the Conservative side.”
+
+“I know,” she said, and was still more thoughtful.
+
+“Lately,” she began, and paused. “Lately I've been reading--you.”
+
+I didn't help her out with what she had to say. I waited.
+
+“I didn't understand what you were after. I had misjudged. I didn't
+know. I think perhaps I was rather stupid.” Her eyes were suddenly
+shining with tears. “You didn't give me much chance to understand.”
+
+She turned upon me suddenly with a voice full of tears.
+
+“Husband,” she said abruptly, holding her two hands out to me, “I want
+to begin over again!”
+
+I took her hands, perplexed beyond measure. “My dear!” I said.
+
+“I want to begin over again.”
+
+I bowed my head to hide my face, and found her hand in mine and kissed
+it.
+
+“Ah!” she said, and slowly withdrew her hand. She leant forward with her
+arm on the sofa-back, and looked very intently into my face. I felt the
+most damnable scoundrel in the world as I returned her gaze. The thought
+of Isabel's darkly shining eyes seemed like a physical presence between
+us....
+
+“Tell me,” I said presently, to break the intolerable tension, “tell me
+plainly what you mean by this.”
+
+I sat a little away from her, and then took my teacup in hand, with an
+odd effect of defending myself. “Have you been reading that old book of
+mine?” I asked.
+
+“That and the paper. I took a complete set from the beginning down
+to Durham with me. I have read it over, thought it over. I didn't
+understand--what you were teaching.”
+
+There was a little pause.
+
+“It all seems so plain to me now,” she said, “and so true.”
+
+I was profoundly disconcerted. I put down my teacup, stood up in the
+middle of the hearthrug, and began talking. “I'm tremendously glad,
+Margaret, that you've come to see I'm not altogether perverse,” I began.
+I launched out into a rather trite and windy exposition of my views, and
+she sat close to me on the sofa, looking up into my face, hanging on my
+words, a deliberate and invincible convert.
+
+“Yes,” she said, “yes.”...
+
+I had never doubted my new conceptions before; now I doubted them
+profoundly. But I went on talking. It's the grim irony in the lives of
+all politicians, writers, public teachers, that once the audience is at
+their feet, a new loyalty has gripped them. It isn't their business to
+admit doubt and imperfections. They have to go on talking. And I was
+now so accustomed to Isabel's vivid interruptions, qualifications,
+restatements, and confirmations....
+
+Margaret and I dined together at home. She made me open out my political
+projects to her. “I have been foolish,” she said. “I want to help.”
+
+And by some excuse I have forgotten she made me come to her room. I
+think it was some book I had to take her, some American book I had
+brought back with me, and mentioned in our talk. I walked in with it,
+and put it down on the table and turned to go.
+
+“Husband!” she cried, and held out her slender arms to me. I was
+compelled to go to her and kiss her, and she twined them softly about my
+neck and drew me to her and kissed me. I disentangled them very gently,
+and took each wrist and kissed it, and the backs of her hands.
+
+“Good-night,” I said. There came a little pause. “Good-night, Margaret,”
+ I repeated, and walked very deliberately and with a kind of sham
+preoccupation to the door.
+
+I did not look at her, but I could feel her standing, watching me. If I
+had looked up, she would, I knew, have held out her arms to me....
+
+At the very outset that secret, which was to touch no one but Isabel and
+myself, had reached out to stab another human being.
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+The whole world had changed for Isabel and me; and we tried to pretend
+that nothing had changed except a small matter between us. We believed
+quite honestly at that time that it was possible to keep this thing
+that had happened from any reaction at all, save perhaps through some
+magically enhanced vigour in our work, upon the world about us! Seen in
+retrospect, one can realise the absurdity of this belief; within a week
+I realised it; but that does not alter the fact that we did believe as
+much, and that people who are deeply in love and unable to marry will
+continue to believe so to the very end of time. They will continue to
+believe out of existence every consideration that separates them until
+they have come together. Then they will count the cost, as we two had to
+do.
+
+I am telling a story, and not propounding theories in this book; and
+chiefly I am telling of the ideas and influences and emotions that
+have happened to me--me as a sort of sounding board for my world. The
+moralist is at liberty to go over my conduct with his measure and
+say, “At this point or at that you went wrong, and you ought to have
+done”--so-and-so. The point of interest to the statesman is that it
+didn't for a moment occur to us to do so-and-so when the time for doing
+it came. It amazes me now to think how little either of us troubled
+about the established rights or wrongs of the situation. We hadn't an
+atom of respect for them, innate or acquired. The guardians of public
+morals will say we were very bad people; I submit in defence that they
+are very bad guardians--provocative guardians.... And when at last there
+came a claim against us that had an effective validity for us, we were
+in the full tide of passionate intimacy.
+
+I had a night of nearly sleepless perplexity after Margaret's return.
+She had suddenly presented herself to me like something dramatically
+recalled, fine, generous, infinitely capable of feeling. I was amazed
+how much I had forgotten her. In my contempt for vulgarised and
+conventionalised honour I had forgotten that for me there was such
+a reality as honour. And here it was, warm and near to me, living,
+breathing, unsuspecting. Margaret's pride was my honour, that I had had
+no right even to imperil.
+
+I do not now remember if I thought at that time of going to Isabel and
+putting this new aspect of the case before her. Perhaps I did. Perhaps
+I may have considered even then the possibility of ending what had so
+freshly and passionately begun. If I did, it vanished next day at
+the sight of her. Whatever regrets came in the darkness, the daylight
+brought an obstinate confidence in our resolution again. We would, we
+declared, “pull the thing off.” Margaret must not know. Margaret should
+not know. If Margaret did not know, then no harm whatever would be done.
+We tried to sustain that....
+
+For a brief time we had been like two people in a magic cell, magically
+cut off from the world and full of a light of its own, and then we began
+to realise that we were not in the least cut off, that the world was all
+about us and pressing in upon us, limiting us, threatening us, resuming
+possession of us. I tried to ignore the injury to Margaret of her
+unreciprocated advances. I tried to maintain to myself that this hidden
+love made no difference to the now irreparable breach between husband
+and wife. But I never spoke of it to Isabel or let her see that aspect
+of our case. How could I? The time for that had gone....
+
+Then in new shapes and relations came trouble. Distressful elements
+crept in by reason of our unavoidable furtiveness; we ignored them,
+hid them from each other, and attempted to hide them from ourselves.
+Successful love is a thing of abounding pride, and we had to be secret.
+It was delightful at first to be secret, a whispering, warm conspiracy;
+then presently it became irksome and a little shameful. Her essential
+frankness of soul was all against the masks and falsehoods that many
+women would have enjoyed. Together in our secrecy we relaxed, then in
+the presence of other people again it was tiresome to have to watch
+for the careless, too easy phrase, to snatch back one's hand from the
+limitless betrayal of a light, familiar touch.
+
+Love becomes a poor thing, at best a poor beautiful thing, if it
+develops no continuing and habitual intimacy. We were always meeting,
+and most gloriously loving and beginning--and then we had to snatch at
+remorseless ticking watches, hurry to catch trains, and go back to this
+or that. That is all very well for the intrigues of idle people perhaps,
+but not for an intense personal relationship. It is like lighting a
+candle for the sake of lighting it, over and over again, and each time
+blowing it out. That, no doubt, must be very amusing to children playing
+with the matches, but not to people who love warm light, and want it in
+order to do fine and honourable things together. We had achieved--I
+give the ugly phrase that expresses the increasing discolouration in my
+mind--“illicit intercourse.” To end at that, we now perceived, wasn't in
+our style. But where were we to end?...
+
+Perhaps we might at this stage have given it up. I think if we could
+have seen ahead and around us we might have done so. But the glow of our
+cell blinded us.... I wonder what might have happened if at that time we
+had given it up.... We propounded it, we met again in secret to discuss
+it, and our overpowering passion for one another reduced that meeting to
+absurdity....
+
+Presently the idea of children crept between us. It came in from all our
+conceptions of life and public service; it was, we found, in the quality
+of our minds that physical love without children is a little weak,
+timorous, more than a little shameful. With imaginative people there
+very speedily comes a time when that realisation is inevitable. We
+hadn't thought of that before--it isn't natural to think of that before.
+We hadn't known. There is no literature in English dealing with such
+things.
+
+There is a necessary sequence of phases in love. These came in their
+order, and with them, unanticipated tarnishings on the first bright
+perfection of our relations. For a time these developing phases were
+no more than a secret and private trouble between us, little shadows
+spreading by imperceptible degrees across that vivid and luminous cell.
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+The Handitch election flung me suddenly into prominence.
+
+It is still only two years since that struggle, and I will not trouble
+the reader with a detailed history of events that must be quite
+sufficiently present in his mind for my purpose already. Huge stacks of
+journalism have dealt with Handitch and its significance. For the reader
+very probably, as for most people outside a comparatively small circle,
+it meant my emergence from obscurity. We obtruded no editor's name in
+the BLUE WEEKLY; I had never as yet been on the London hoardings. Before
+Handitch I was a journalist and writer of no great public standing;
+after Handitch, I was definitely a person, in the little group of
+persons who stood for the Young Imperialist movement. Handitch was, to a
+very large extent, my affair. I realised then, as a man comes to do, how
+much one can still grow after seven and twenty. In the second election
+I was a man taking hold of things; at Kinghamstead I had been simply a
+young candidate, a party unit, led about the constituency, told to
+do this and that, and finally washed in by the great Anti-Imperialist
+flood, like a starfish rolling up a beach.
+
+My feminist views had earnt the mistrust of the party, and I do not
+think I should have got the chance of Handitch or indeed any chance at
+all of Parliament for a long time, if it had not been that the seat with
+its long record of Liberal victories and its Liberal majority of 3642 at
+the last election, offered a hopeless contest. The Liberal dissensions
+and the belated but by no means contemptible Socialist candidate were
+providential interpositions. I think, however, the conduct of Gane,
+Crupp, and Tarvrille in coming down to fight for me, did count
+tremendously in my favour. “We aren't going to win, perhaps,” said
+Crupp, “but we are going to talk.” And until the very eve of victory, we
+treated Handitch not so much as a battlefield as a hoarding. And so it
+was the Endowment of Motherhood as a practical form of Eugenics got into
+English politics.
+
+Plutus, our agent, was scared out of his wits when the thing began.
+
+“They're ascribing all sorts of queer ideas to you about the Family,” he
+said.
+
+“I think the Family exists for the good of the children,” I said; “is
+that queer?”
+
+“Not when you explain it--but they won't let you explain it. And about
+marriage--?”
+
+“I'm all right about marriage--trust me.”
+
+“Of course, if YOU had children,” said Plutus, rather
+inconsiderately....
+
+They opened fire upon me in a little electioneering rag call
+the HANDITCH SENTINEL, with a string of garbled quotations and
+misrepresentations that gave me an admirable text for a speech. I spoke
+for an hour and ten minutes with a more and more crumpled copy of the
+SENTINEL in my hand, and I made the fullest and completest exposition
+of the idea of endowing motherhood that I think had ever been made up
+to that time in England. Its effect on the press was extraordinary. The
+Liberal papers gave me quite unprecedented space under the impression
+that I had only to be given rope to hang myself; the Conservatives cut
+me down or tried to justify me; the whole country was talking. I had had
+a pamphlet in type upon the subject, and I revised this carefully and
+put it on the book-stalls within three days. It sold enormously and
+brought me bushels of letters. We issued over three thousand in Handitch
+alone. At meeting after meeting I was heckled upon nothing else. Long
+before polling day Plutus was converted.
+
+“It's catching on like old age pensions,” he said. “We've dished the
+Liberals! To think that such a project should come from our side!”
+
+But it was only with the declaration of the poll that my battle was won.
+No one expected more than a snatch victory, and I was in by over fifteen
+hundred. At one bound Cossington's papers passed from apologetics varied
+by repudiation to triumphant praise. “A renascent England, breeding
+men,” said the leader in his chief daily on the morning after the
+polling, and claimed that the Conservatives had been ever the pioneers
+in sanely bold constructive projects.
+
+I came up to London with a weary but rejoicing Margaret by the night
+train.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+To any one who did not know of that glowing secret between Isabel and
+myself, I might well have appeared at that time the most successful and
+enviable of men. I had recovered rapidly from an uncongenial start
+in political life; I had become a considerable force through the BLUE
+WEEKLY, and was shaping an increasingly influential body of opinion; I
+had re-entered Parliament with quite dramatic distinction, and in spite
+of a certain faltering on the part of the orthodox Conservatives
+towards the bolder elements in our propaganda, I had loyal and unenvious
+associates who were making me a power in the party. People were coming
+to our group, understandings were developing. It was clear we should
+play a prominent part in the next general election, and that, given a
+Conservative victory, I should be assured of office. The world opened
+out to me brightly and invitingly. Great schemes took shape in my mind,
+always more concrete, always more practicable; the years ahead seemed
+falling into order, shining with the credible promise of immense
+achievement.
+
+And at the heart of it all, unseen and unsuspected, was the secret of my
+relations with Isabel--like a seed that germinates and thrusts, thrusts
+relentlessly.
+
+From the onset of the Handitch contest onward, my meetings with her had
+been more and more pervaded by the discussion of our situation. It had
+innumerable aspects. It was very present to us that we wanted to be
+together as much as possible--we were beginning to long very much for
+actual living together in the same house, so that one could come as
+it were carelessly--unawares--upon the other, busy perhaps about some
+trivial thing. We wanted to feel each other in the daily atmosphere.
+Preceding our imperatively sterile passion, you must remember, outside
+it, altogether greater than it so far as our individual lives were
+concerned, there had grown and still grew an enormous affection and
+intellectual sympathy between us. We brought all our impressions and all
+our ideas to each other, to see them in each other's light. It is hard
+to convey that quality of intellectual unison to any one who has not
+experienced it. I thought more and more in terms of conversation with
+Isabel; her possible comments upon things would flash into my mind,
+oh!--with the very sound of her voice.
+
+I remember, too, the odd effect of seeing her in the distance going
+about Handitch, like any stranger canvasser; the queer emotion of her
+approach along the street, the greeting as she passed. The morning of
+the polling she vanished from the constituency. I saw her for an instant
+in the passage behind our Committee rooms.
+
+“Going?” said I.
+
+She nodded.
+
+“Stay it out. I want you to see the fun. I remember--the other time.”
+
+She didn't answer for a moment or so, and stood with face averted.
+
+“It's Margaret's show,” she said abruptly. “If I see her smiling there
+like a queen by your side--! She did--last time. I remember.” She caught
+at a sob and dashed her hand across her face impatiently. “Jealous fool,
+mean and petty, jealous fool!... Good luck, old man, to you! You're
+going to win. But I don't want to see the end of it all the same....”
+
+“Good-bye!” said I, clasping her hand as some supporter appeared in the
+passage....
+
+I came back to London victorious, and a little flushed and coarse with
+victory; and so soon as I could break away I went to Isabel's flat and
+found her white and worn, with the stain of secret weeping about her
+eyes. I came into the room to her and shut the door.
+
+“You said I'd win,” I said, and held out my arms.
+
+She hugged me closely for a moment.
+
+“My dear,” I whispered, “it's nothing--without you--nothing!”
+
+We didn't speak for some seconds. Then she slipped from my hold. “Look!”
+ she said, smiling like winter sunshine. “I've had in all the morning
+papers--the pile of them, and you--resounding.”
+
+“It's more than I dared hope.”
+
+“Or I.”
+
+She stood for a moment still smiling bravely, and then she was sobbing
+in my arms. “The bigger you are--the more you show,” she said--“the more
+we are parted. I know, I know--”
+
+I held her close to me, making no answer.
+
+Presently she became still. “Oh, well,” she said, and wiped her eyes and
+sat down on the little sofa by the fire; and I sat down beside her.
+
+“I didn't know all there was in love,” she said, staring at the coals,
+“when we went love-making.”
+
+I put my arm behind her and took a handful of her dear soft hair in my
+hand and kissed it.
+
+“You've done a great thing this time,” she said. “Handitch will make
+you.”
+
+“It opens big chances,” I said. “But why are you weeping, dear one?”
+
+“Envy,” she said, “and love.”
+
+“You're not lonely?”
+
+“I've plenty to do--and lots of people.”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“I want you.”
+
+“You've got me.”
+
+She put her arm about me and kissed me. “I want you,” she said, “just as
+if I had nothing of you. You don't understand--how a woman wants a man.
+I thought once if I just gave myself to you it would be enough. It was
+nothing--it was just a step across the threshold. My dear, every moment
+you are away I ache for you--ache! I want to be about when it isn't
+love-making or talk. I want to be doing things for you, and watching
+you when you're not thinking of me. All those safe, careless, intimate
+things. And something else--” She stopped. “Dear, I don't want to bother
+you. I just want you to know I love you....”
+
+She caught my head in her hands and kissed it, then stood up abruptly.
+
+I looked up at her, a little perplexed.
+
+“Dear heart,” said I, “isn't this enough? You're my councillor, my
+colleague, my right hand, the secret soul of my life--”
+
+“And I want to darn your socks,” she said, smiling back at me.
+
+“You're insatiable.”
+
+She smiled “No,” she said. “I'm not insatiable, Master. But I'm a woman
+in love. And I'm finding out what I want, and what is necessary to
+me--and what I can't have. That's all.”
+
+“We get a lot.”
+
+“We want a lot. You and I are greedy people for the things we like,
+Master. It's very evident we've got nearly all we can ever have of one
+another--and I'm not satisfied.”
+
+“What more is there?
+
+“For you--very little. I wonder. For me--every thing. Yes--everything.
+You didn't mean it, Master; you didn't know any more than I did when I
+began, but love between a man and a woman is sometimes very one-sided.
+Fearfully one-sided! That's all....”
+
+“Don't YOU ever want children?” she said abruptly.
+
+“I suppose I do.”
+
+“You don't!”
+
+“I haven't thought of them.”
+
+“A man doesn't, perhaps. But I have.... I want them--like hunger.
+YOUR children, and home with you. Really, continually you! That's the
+trouble.... I can't have 'em, Master, and I can't have you.”
+
+She was crying, and through her tears she laughed.
+
+“I'm going to make a scene,” she said, “and get this over. I'm so
+discontented and miserable; I've got to tell you. It would come between
+us if I didn't. I'm in love with you, with everything--with all my
+brains. I'll pull through all right. I'll be good, Master, never you
+fear. But to-day I'm crying out with all my being. This election--You're
+going up; you're going on. In these papers--you're a great big fact.
+It's suddenly come home to me. At the back of my mind I've always had
+the idea I was going to have you somehow presently for myself--I mean to
+have you to go long tramps with, to keep house for, to get meals for,
+to watch for of an evening. It's a sort of habitual background to my
+thought of you. And it's nonsense--utter nonsense!” She stopped. She was
+crying and choking. “And the child, you know--the child!”
+
+I was troubled beyond measure, but Handitch and its intimations were
+clear and strong.
+
+“We can't have that,” I said.
+
+“No,” she said, “we can't have that.”
+
+“We've got our own things to do.”
+
+“YOUR things,” she said.
+
+“Aren't they yours too?”
+
+“Because of you,” she said.
+
+“Aren't they your very own things?”
+
+“Women don't have that sort of very own thing. Indeed, it's true!
+And think! You've been down there preaching the goodness of children,
+telling them the only good thing in a state is happy, hopeful children,
+working to free mothers and children--”
+
+“And we give our own children to do it?” I said.
+
+“Yes,” she said. “And sometimes I think it's too much to give--too much
+altogether.... Children get into a woman's brain--when she mustn't have
+them, especially when she must never hope for them. Think of the child
+we might have now!--the little creature with soft, tender skin, and
+little hands and little feet! At times it haunts me. It comes and says,
+Why wasn't I given life? I can hear it in the night.... The world is
+full of such little ghosts, dear lover--little things that asked for
+life and were refused. They clamour to me. It's like a little fist
+beating at my heart. Love children, beautiful children. Little cold
+hands that tear at my heart! Oh, my heart and my lord!” She was holding
+my arm with both her hands and weeping against it, and now she drew
+herself to my shoulder and wept and sobbed in my embrace. “I shall never
+sit with your child on my knee and you beside me-never, and I am a woman
+and your lover!...”
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+But the profound impossibility of our relation was now becoming more and
+more apparent to us. We found ourselves seeking justification, clinging
+passionately to a situation that was coldly, pitilessly, impossible and
+fated. We wanted quite intensely to live together and have a child, but
+also we wanted very many other things that were incompatible with these
+desires. It was extraordinarily difficult to weigh our political and
+intellectual ambitions against those intimate wishes. The weights kept
+altering according as one found oneself grasping this valued thing or
+that. It wasn't as if we could throw everything aside for our love,
+and have that as we wanted it. Love such as we bore one another isn't
+altogether, or even chiefly, a thing in itself--it is for the most part
+a value set upon things. Our love was interwoven with all our other
+interests; to go out of the world and live in isolation seemed to us
+like killing the best parts of each other; we loved the sight of each
+other engaged finely and characteristically, we knew each other best
+as activities. We had no delusions about material facts; we didn't want
+each other alive or dead, we wanted each other fully alive. We wanted
+to do big things together, and for us to take each other openly and
+desperately would leave us nothing in the world to do. We wanted
+children indeed passionately, but children with every helpful chance in
+the world, and children born in scandal would be handicapped at every
+turn. We wanted to share a home, and not a solitude.
+
+And when we were at this stage of realisation, began the intimations
+that we were found out, and that scandal was afoot against us....
+
+I heard of it first from Esmeer, who deliberately mentioned it,
+with that steady grey eye of his watching me, as an instance of the
+preposterous falsehoods people will circulate. It came to Isabel
+almost simultaneously through a married college friend, who made it her
+business to demand either confirmation or denial. It filled us both with
+consternation. In the surprise of the moment Isabel admitted her secret,
+and her friend went off “reserving her freedom of action.”
+
+Discovery broke out in every direction. Friends with grave faces and
+an atmosphere of infinite tact invaded us both. Other friends ceased to
+invade either of us. It was manifest we had become--we knew not how--a
+private scandal, a subject for duologues, an amazement, a perplexity,
+a vivid interest. In a few brief weeks it seemed London passed from
+absolute unsuspiciousness to a chattering exaggeration of its knowledge
+of our relations.
+
+It was just the most inappropriate time for that disclosure. The long
+smouldering antagonism to my endowment of motherhood ideas had flared
+up into an active campaign in the EXPURGATOR, and it would be altogether
+disastrous to us if I should be convicted of any personal irregularity.
+It was just because of the manifest and challenging respectability of my
+position that I had been able to carry the thing as far as I had done.
+Now suddenly my fortunes had sprung a leak, and scandal was pouring
+in.... It chanced, too, that a wave of moral intolerance was sweeping
+through London, one of those waves in which the bitterness of the
+consciously just finds an ally in the panic of the undiscovered. A
+certain Father Blodgett had been preaching against social corruption
+with extraordinary force, and had roused the Church of England people
+to a kind of competition in denunciation. The old methods of the
+Anti-Socialist campaign had been renewed, and had offered far too wide
+a scope and too tempting an opportunity for private animosity, to be
+restricted to the private affairs of the Socialists. I had intimations
+of an extensive circulation of “private and confidential” letters....
+
+I think there can be nothing else in life quite like the unnerving
+realisation that rumour and scandal are afoot about one. Abruptly
+one's confidence in the solidity of the universe disappears. One
+walks silenced through a world that one feels to be full of inaudible
+accusations. One cannot challenge the assault, get it out into the open,
+separate truth and falsehood. It slinks from you, turns aside its face.
+Old acquaintances suddenly evaded me, made extraordinary excuses;
+men who had presumed on the verge of my world and pestered me with an
+intrusive enterprise, now took the bold step of flat repudiation. I
+became doubtful about the return of a nod, retracted all those tentacles
+of easy civility that I had hitherto spread to the world. I still grow
+warm with amazed indignation when I recall that Edward Crampton, meeting
+me full on the steps of the Climax Club, cut me dead. “By God!” I cried,
+and came near catching him by the throat and wringing out of him what
+of all good deeds and bad, could hearten him, a younger man than I and
+empty beyond comparison, to dare to play the judge to me. And then I had
+an open slight from Mrs. Millingham, whom I had counted on as one counts
+upon the sunrise. I had not expected things of that sort; they were
+disconcerting beyond measure; it was as if the world were giving way
+beneath my feet, as though something failed in the essential confidence
+of life, as though a hand of wet ice had touched my heart. Similar
+things were happening to Isabel. Yet we went on working, visiting,
+meeting, trying to ignore this gathering of implacable forces against
+us.
+
+For a time I was perplexed beyond measure to account for this campaign.
+Then I got a clue. The centre of diffusion was the Bailey household. The
+Baileys had never forgiven me my abandonment of the young Liberal group
+they had done so much to inspire and organise; their dinner-table had
+long been a scene of hostile depreciation of the BLUE WEEKLY and all its
+allies; week after week Altiora proclaimed that I was “doing nothing,”
+ and found other causes for our bye-election triumphs; I counted Chambers
+Street a dangerous place for me. Yet, nevertheless, I was astonished to
+find them using a private scandal against me. They did. I think Handitch
+had filled up the measure of their bitterness, for I had not only
+abandoned them, but I was succeeding beyond even their power of
+misrepresentation. Always I had been a wasp in their spider's web,
+difficult to claim as a tool, uncritical, antagonistic. I admired their
+work and devotion enormously, but I had never concealed my contempt for
+a certain childish vanity they displayed, and for the frequent puerility
+of their political intrigues. I suppose contempt galls more than
+injuries, and anyhow they had me now. They had me. Bailey, I found,
+was warning fathers of girls against me as a “reckless libertine,” and
+Altiora, flushed, roguish, and dishevelled, was sitting on her fender
+curb after dinner, and pledging little parties of five or six women at a
+time with infinite gusto not to let the matter go further. Our cell was
+open to the world, and a bleak, distressful daylight streaming in.
+
+I had a gleam of a more intimate motive in Altiora from the reports that
+came to me. Isabel had been doing a series of five or six articles in
+the POLITICAL REVIEW in support of our campaign, the POLITICAL REVIEW
+which had hitherto been loyally Baileyite. Quite her best writing up to
+the present, at any rate, is in those papers, and no doubt Altiora had
+had not only to read her in those invaded columns, but listen to her
+praises in the mouths of the tactless influential. Altiora, like so many
+people who rely on gesture and vocal insistence in conversation, writes
+a poor and slovenly prose and handles an argument badly; Isabel has her
+University training behind her and wrote from the first with the stark
+power of a clear-headed man. “Now we know,” said Altiora, with just a
+gleam of malice showing through her brightness, “now we know who helps
+with the writing!”
+
+She revealed astonishing knowledge.
+
+For a time I couldn't for the life of me discover her sources. I had,
+indeed, a desperate intention of challenging her, and then I bethought
+me of a youngster named Curmain, who had been my supplemental typist and
+secretary for a time, and whom I had sent on to her before the days of
+our breach. “Of course!” said I, “Curmain!” He was a tall, drooping,
+sidelong youth with sandy hair, a little forward head, and a long
+thin neck. He stole stamps, and, I suspected, rifled my private letter
+drawer, and I found him one day on a turn of the stairs looking guilty
+and ruffled with a pretty Irish housemaid of Margaret's manifestly in
+a state of hot indignation. I saw nothing, but I felt everything in the
+air between them. I hate this pestering of servants, but at the same
+time I didn't want Curmain wiped out of existence, so I had packed him
+off without unnecessary discussion to Altiora. He was quick and cheap
+anyhow, and I thought her general austerity ought to redeem him if
+anything could; the Chambers Street housemaid wasn't for any man's
+kissing and showed it, and the stamps and private letters were looked
+after with an efficiency altogether surpassing mine. And Altiora, I've
+no doubt left now whatever, pumped this young undesirable about me,
+and scenting a story, had him to dinner alone one evening to get to the
+bottom of the matter. She got quite to the bottom of it,--it must have
+been a queer duologue. She read Isabel's careless, intimate letters
+to me, so to speak, by this proxy, and she wasn't ashamed to use this
+information in the service of the bitterness that had sprung up in her
+since our political breach. It was essentially a personal bitterness; it
+helped no public purpose of theirs to get rid of me. My downfall in
+any public sense was sheer waste,--the loss of a man. She knew she was
+behaving badly, and so, when it came to remonstrance, she behaved worse.
+She'd got names and dates and places; the efficiency of her information
+was irresistible. And she set to work at it marvellously. Never before,
+in all her pursuit of efficient ideals, had Altiora achieved such levels
+of efficiency. I wrote a protest that was perhaps ill-advised and angry,
+I went to her and tried to stop her. She wouldn't listen, she wouldn't
+think, she denied and lied, she behaved like a naughty child of six
+years old which has made up its mind to be hurtful. It wasn't only, I
+think, that she couldn't bear our political and social influence; she
+also--I realised at that interview couldn't bear our loving. It seemed
+to her the sickliest thing,--a thing quite unendurable. While such
+things were, the virtue had gone out of her world.
+
+I've the vividest memory of that call of mine. She'd just come in and
+taken off her hat, and she was grey and dishevelled and tired, and in
+a business-like dress of black and crimson that didn't suit her and
+was muddy about the skirts; she'd a cold in her head and sniffed
+penetratingly, she avoided my eye as she talked and interrupted
+everything I had to say; she kept stabbing fiercely at the cushions of
+her sofa with a long hat-pin and pretending she was overwhelmed with
+grief at the DEBACLE she was deliberately organising.
+
+“Then part,” she cried, “part. If you don't want a smashing up,--part!
+You two have got to be parted. You've got never to see each other ever,
+never to speak.” There was a zest in her voice. “We're not circulating
+stories,” she denied. “No! And Curmain never told us anything--Curmain
+is an EXCELLENT young man; oh! a quite excellent young man. You
+misjudged him altogether.”...
+
+I was equally unsuccessful with Bailey. I caught the little wretch in
+the League Club, and he wriggled and lied. He wouldn't say where he had
+got his facts, he wouldn't admit he had told any one. When I gave him
+the names of two men who had come to me astonished and incredulous,
+he attempted absurdly to make me think they had told HIM. He did his
+horrible little best to suggest that honest old Quackett, who had just
+left England for the Cape, was the real scandalmonger. That struck me
+as mean, even for Bailey. I've still the odd vivid impression of his
+fluting voice, excusing the inexcusable, his big, shifty face evading
+me, his perspiration-beaded forehead, the shrugging shoulders, and the
+would-be exculpatory gestures--Houndsditch gestures--of his enormous
+ugly hands.
+
+“I can assure you, my dear fellow,” he said; “I can assure you we've
+done everything to shield you--everything.”...
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Isabel came after dinner one evening and talked in the office. She made
+a white-robed, dusky figure against the deep blues of my big window. I
+sat at my desk and tore a quill pen to pieces as I talked.
+
+“The Baileys don't intend to let this drop,” I said. “They mean that
+every one in London is to know about it.”
+
+“I know.”
+
+“Well!” I said.
+
+“Dear heart,” said Isabel, facing it, “it's no good waiting for things
+to overtake us; we're at the parting of the ways.”
+
+“What are we to do?”
+
+“They won't let us go on.”
+
+“Damn them!”
+
+“They are ORGANISING scandal.”
+
+“It's no good waiting for things to overtake us,” I echoed; “they have
+overtaken us.” I turned on her. “What do you want to do?”
+
+“Everything,” she said. “Keep you and have our work. Aren't we Mates?”
+
+“We can't.”
+
+“And we can't!”
+
+“I've got to tell Margaret,” I said.
+
+“Margaret!”
+
+“I can't bear the idea of any one else getting in front with it. I've
+been wincing about Margaret secretly--”
+
+“I know. You'll have to tell her--and make your peace with her.”
+
+She leant back against the bookcases under the window.
+
+“We've had some good times, Master;” she said, with a sigh in her voice.
+
+And then for a long time we stared at one another in silence.
+
+“We haven't much time left,” she said.
+
+“Shall we bolt?” I said.
+
+“And leave all this?” she asked, with her eyes going round the room.
+“And that?” And her head indicated Westminster. “No!”
+
+I said no more of bolting.
+
+“We've got to screw ourselves up to surrender,” she said.
+
+“Something.”
+
+“A lot.”
+
+“Master,” she said, “it isn't all sex and stuff between us?”
+
+“No!”
+
+“I can't give up the work. Our work's my life.”
+
+We came upon another long pause.
+
+“No one will believe we've ceased to be lovers--if we simply do,” she
+said.
+
+“We shouldn't.”
+
+“We've got to do something more parting than that.”
+
+I nodded, and again we paused. She was coming to something.
+
+“I could marry Shoesmith,” she said abruptly.
+
+“But--” I objected.
+
+“He knows. It wasn't fair. I told him.”
+
+“Oh, that explains,” I said. “There's been a kind of sulkiness--But--you
+told him?”
+
+She nodded. “He's rather badly hurt,” she said. “He's been a good
+friend to me. He's curiously loyal. But something, something he said one
+day--forced me to let him know.... That's been the beastliness of all
+this secrecy. That's the beastliness of all secrecy. You have to spring
+surprises on people. But he keeps on. He's steadfast. He'd already
+suspected. He wants me very badly to marry him....”
+
+“But you don't want to marry him?”
+
+“I'm forced to think of it.”
+
+“But does he want to marry you at that? Take you as a present from the
+world at large?--against your will and desire?... I don't understand
+him.”
+
+“He cares for me.”
+
+“How?”
+
+“He thinks this is a fearful mess for me. He wants to pull it straight.”
+
+We sat for a time in silence, with imaginations that obstinately refused
+to take up the realities of this proposition.
+
+“I don't want you to marry Shoesmith,” I said at last.
+
+“Don't you like him?”
+
+“Not as your husband.”
+
+“He's a very clever and sturdy person--and very generous and devoted to
+me.”
+
+“And me?”
+
+“You can't expect that. He thinks you are wonderful--and, naturally,
+that you ought not to have started this.”
+
+“I've a curious dislike to any one thinking that but myself. I'm quite
+ready to think it myself.”
+
+“He'd let us be friends--and meet.”
+
+“Let us be friends!” I cried, after a long pause. “You and me!”
+
+“He wants me to be engaged soon. Then, he says, he can go round fighting
+these rumours, defending us both--and force a quarrel on the Baileys.”
+
+“I don't understand him,” I said, and added, “I don't understand you.”
+
+I was staring at her face. It seemed white and set in the dimness.
+
+“Do you really mean this, Isabel?” I asked.
+
+“What else is there to do, my dear?--what else is there to do at all?
+I've been thinking day and night. You can't go away with me. You can't
+smash yourself suddenly in the sight of all men. I'd rather die than
+that should happen. Look what you are becoming in the country! Look at
+all you've built up!--me helping. I wouldn't let you do it if you could.
+I wouldn't let you--if it were only for Margaret's sake. THIS... closes
+the scandal, closes everything.”
+
+“It closes all our life together,” I cried.
+
+She was silent.
+
+“It never ought to have begun,” I said.
+
+She winced. Then abruptly she was on her knees before me, with her hands
+upon my shoulder and her eyes meeting mine.
+
+“My dear,” she said very earnestly, “don't misunderstand me! Don't think
+I'm retreating from the things we've done! Our love is the best thing I
+could ever have had from life. Nothing can ever equal it; nothing could
+ever equal the beauty and delight you and I have had together. Never!
+You have loved me; you do love me....”
+
+No one could ever know how to love you as I have loved you; no one could
+ever love me as you have loved me, my king. And it's just because it's
+been so splendid, dear; it's just because I'd die rather than have a
+tithe of all this wiped out of my life again--for it's made me, it's all
+I am--dear, it's years since I began loving you--it's just because of
+its goodness that I want not to end in wreckage now, not to end in
+the smashing up of all the big things I understand in you and love in
+you....
+
+“What is there for us if we keep on and go away?” she went on. “All
+the big interests in our lives will vanish--everything. We shall become
+specialised people--people overshadowed by a situation. We shall be
+an elopement, a romance--all our breadth and meaning gone! People will
+always think of it first when they think of us; all our work and aims
+will be warped by it and subordinated to it. Is it good enough, dear?
+Just to specialise.... I think of you. We've got a case, a passionate
+case, the best of cases, but do we want to spend all our lives defending
+it and justifying it? And there's that other life. I know now you care
+for Margaret--you care more than you think you do. You have said fine
+things of her. I've watched you about her. Little things have dropped
+from you. She's given her life for you; she's nothing without you.
+You feel that to your marrow all the time you are thinking about these
+things. Oh, I'm not jealous, dear. I love you for loving her. I love you
+in relation to her. But there it is, an added weight against us, another
+thing worth saving.”
+
+Presently, I remember, she sat back on her heels and looked up into
+my face. “We've done wrong--and parting's paying. It's time to pay.
+We needn't have paid, if we'd kept to the track.... You and I, Master,
+we've got to be men.”
+
+“Yes,” I said; “we've got to be men.”
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+I was driven to tell Margaret about our situation by my intolerable
+dread that otherwise the thing might come to her through some stupid and
+clumsy informant. She might even meet Altiora, and have it from her.
+
+I can still recall the feeling of sitting at my desk that night in that
+large study of mine in Radnor Square, waiting for Margaret to come home.
+It was oddly like the feeling of a dentist's reception-room; only it was
+for me to do the dentistry with clumsy, cruel hands. I had left the door
+open so that she would come in to me.
+
+I heard her silken rustle on the stairs at last, and then she was in the
+doorway. “May I come in?” she said.
+
+“Do,” I said, and turned round to her.
+
+“Working?” she said.
+
+“Hard,” I answered. “Where have YOU been?”
+
+“At the Vallerys'. Mr. Evesham was talking about you. They were all
+talking. I don't think everybody knew who I was. Just Mrs. Mumble I'd
+been to them. Lord Wardenham doesn't like you.”
+
+“He doesn't.”
+
+“But they all feel you're rather big, anyhow. Then I went on to Park
+Lane to hear a new pianist and some other music at Eva's.”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Then I looked in at the Brabants' for some midnight tea before I came
+on here. They'd got some writers--and Grant was there.”
+
+“You HAVE been flying round....”
+
+There was a little pause between us.
+
+I looked at her pretty, unsuspecting face, and at the slender grace of
+her golden-robed body. What gulfs there were between us! “You've been
+amused,” I said.
+
+“It's been amusing. You've been at the House?”
+
+“The Medical Education Bill kept me.”...
+
+After all, why should I tell her? She'd got to a way of living that
+fulfilled her requirements. Perhaps she'd never hear. But all that day
+and the day before I'd been making up my mind to do the thing.
+
+“I want to tell you something,” I said. “I wish you'd sit down for a
+moment or so.”...
+
+Once I had begun, it seemed to me I had to go through with it.
+
+Something in the quality of my voice gave her an intimation of unusual
+gravity. She looked at me steadily for a moment and sat down slowly in
+my armchair.
+
+“What is it?” she said.
+
+I went on awkwardly. “I've got to tell you--something extraordinarily
+distressing,” I said.
+
+She was manifestly altogether unaware.
+
+“There seems to be a good deal of scandal abroad--I've only recently
+heard of it--about myself--and Isabel.”
+
+“Isabel!”
+
+I nodded.
+
+“What do they say?” she asked.
+
+It was difficult, I found, to speak.
+
+“They say she's my mistress.”
+
+“Oh! How abominable!”
+
+She spoke with the most natural indignation. Our eyes met.
+
+“We've been great friends,” I said.
+
+“Yes. And to make THAT of it. My poor dear! But how can they?” She
+paused and looked at me. “It's so incredible. How can any one believe
+it? I couldn't.”
+
+She stopped, with her distressed eyes regarding me. Her expression
+changed to dread. There was a tense stillness for a second, perhaps.
+
+I turned my face towards the desk, and took up and dropped a handful of
+paper fasteners.
+
+“Margaret,” I said, “I'm afraid you'll have to believe it.”
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Margaret sat very still. When I looked at her again, her face was very
+white, and her distressed eyes scrutinised me. Her lips quivered as she
+spoke. “You really mean--THAT?” she said.
+
+I nodded.
+
+“I never dreamt.”
+
+“I never meant you to dream.”
+
+“And that is why--we've been apart?”
+
+I thought. “I suppose it is.”
+
+“Why have you told me now?”
+
+“Those rumours. I didn't want any one else to tell you.”
+
+“Or else it wouldn't have mattered?”
+
+“No.”
+
+She turned her eyes from me to the fire. Then for a moment she looked
+about the room she had made for me, and then quite silently, with a
+childish quivering of her lips, with a sort of dismayed distress upon
+her face, she was weeping. She sat weeping in her dress of cloth of
+gold, with her bare slender arms dropped limp over the arms of her
+chair, and her eyes averted from me, making no effort to stay or staunch
+her tears. “I am sorry, Margaret,” I said. “I was in love.... I did not
+understand....”
+
+Presently she asked: “What are you going to do?”
+
+“You see, Margaret, now it's come to be your affair--I want to know what
+you--what you want.”
+
+“You want to leave me?”
+
+“If you want me to, I must.”
+
+“Leave Parliament--leave all the things you are doing,--all this fine
+movement of yours?”
+
+“No.” I spoke sullenly. “I don't want to leave anything. I want to stay
+on. I've told you, because I think we--Isabel and I, I mean--have got to
+drive through a storm of scandal anyhow. I don't know how far things may
+go, how much people may feel, and I can't, I can't have you unconscious,
+unarmed, open to any revelation--”
+
+She made no answer.
+
+“When the thing began--I knew it was stupid but I thought it was a
+thing that wouldn't change, wouldn't be anything but itself, wouldn't
+unfold--consequences.... People have got hold of these vague rumours....
+Directly it reached any one else but--but us two--I saw it had to come
+to you.”
+
+I stopped. I had that distressful feeling I have always had with
+Margaret, of not being altogether sure she heard, of being doubtful
+if she understood. I perceived that once again I had struck at her and
+shattered a thousand unsubstantial pinnacles. And I couldn't get at
+her, to help her, or touch her mind! I stood up, and at my movement she
+moved. She produced a dainty little handkerchief, and made an effort to
+wipe her face with it, and held it to her eyes. “Oh, my Husband!” she
+sobbed.
+
+“What do you mean to do?” she said, with her voice muffled by her
+handkerchief.
+
+“We're going to end it,” I said.
+
+Something gripped me tormentingly as I said that. I drew a chair beside
+her and sat down. “You and I, Margaret, have been partners,” I began.
+“We've built up this life of ours together; I couldn't have done it
+without you. We've made a position, created a work--”
+
+She shook her head. “You,” she said.
+
+“You helping. I don't want to shatter it--if you don't want it
+shattered. I can't leave my work. I can't leave you. I want you to
+have--all that you have ever had. I've never meant to rob you. I've made
+an immense and tragic blunder. You don't know how things took us, how
+different they seemed! My character and accident have conspired--We'll
+pay--in ourselves, not in our public service.”
+
+I halted again. Margaret remained very still.
+
+“I want you to understand that the thing is at an end. It is definitely
+at an end. We--we talked--yesterday. We mean to end it altogether.” I
+clenched my hands. “She's--she's going to marry Arnold Shoesmith.”
+
+I wasn't looking now at Margaret any more, but I heard the rustle of her
+movement as she turned on me.
+
+“It's all right,” I said, clinging to my explanation. “We're doing
+nothing shabby. He knows. He will. It's all as right--as things can
+be now. We're not cheating any one, Margaret. We're doing things
+straight--now. Of course, you know.... We shall--we shall have to make
+sacrifices. Give things up pretty completely. Very completely.... We
+shall have not to see each other for a time, you know. Perhaps not a
+long time. Two or three years. Or write--or just any of that sort of
+thing ever--”
+
+Some subconscious barrier gave way in me. I found myself crying
+uncontrollably--as I have never cried since I was a little child. I was
+amazed and horrified at myself. And wonderfully, Margaret was on her
+knees beside me, with her arms about me, mingling her weeping with mine.
+“Oh, my Husband!” she cried, “my poor Husband! Does it hurt you so? I
+would do anything! Oh, the fool I am! Dear, I love you. I love you over
+and away and above all these jealous little things!”
+
+She drew down my head to her as a mother might draw down the head of
+a son. She caressed me, weeping bitterly with me. “Oh! my dear,” she
+sobbed, “my dear! I've never seen you cry! I've never seen you cry.
+Ever! I didn't know you could. Oh! my dear! Can't you have her, my dear,
+if you want her? I can't bear it! Let me help you, dear. Oh! my Husband!
+My Man! I can't bear to have you cry!” For a time she held me in
+silence.
+
+“I've thought this might happen, I dreamt it might happen. You two, I
+mean. It was dreaming put it into my head. When I've seen you together,
+so glad with each other.... Oh! Husband mine, believe me! believe me!
+I'm stupid, I'm cold, I'm only beginning to realise how stupid and cold,
+but all I want in all the world is to give my life to you.”...
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+“We can't part in a room,” said Isabel.
+
+“We'll have one last talk together,” I said, and planned that we should
+meet for a half a day between Dover and Walmer and talk ourselves out.
+I still recall that day very well, recall even the curious exaltation of
+grief that made our mental atmosphere distinctive and memorable. We had
+seen so much of one another, had become so intimate, that we talked of
+parting even as we parted with a sense of incredible remoteness. We went
+together up over the cliffs, and to a place where they fall towards the
+sea, past the white, quaint-lanterned lighthouses of the South Foreland.
+There, in a kind of niche below the crest, we sat talking. It was a
+spacious day, serenely blue and warm, and on the wrinkled water remotely
+below a black tender and six hooded submarines came presently, and
+engaged in mysterious manoeuvers. Shrieking gulls and chattering
+jackdaws circled over us and below us, and dived and swooped; and a
+skerry of weedy, fallen chalk appeared, and gradually disappeared again,
+as the tide fell and rose.
+
+We talked and thought that afternoon on every aspect of our relations.
+It seems to me now we talked so wide and far that scarcely an issue in
+the life between man and woman can arise that we did not at least touch
+upon. Lying there at Isabel's feet, I have become for myself a symbol of
+all this world-wide problem between duty and conscious, passionate love
+the world has still to solve. Because it isn't solved; there's a wrong
+in it either way.. .. The sky, the wide horizon, seemed to lift us out
+of ourselves until we were something representative and general. She was
+womanhood become articulate, talking to her lover.
+
+“I ought,” I said, “never to have loved you.”
+
+“It wasn't a thing planned,” she said.
+
+“I ought never to have let our talk slip to that, never to have turned
+back from America.”
+
+“I'm glad we did it,” she said. “Don't think I repent.”
+
+I looked at her.
+
+“I will never repent,” she said. “Never!” as though she clung to her
+life in saying it.
+
+I remember we talked for a long time of divorce. It seemed to us then,
+and it seems to us still, that it ought to have been possible for
+Margaret to divorce me, and for me to marry without the scandalous and
+ugly publicity, the taint and ostracism that follow such a readjustment.
+We went on to the whole perplexing riddle of marriage. We criticised
+the current code, how muddled and conventionalised it had become, how
+modified by subterfuges and concealments and new necessities, and the
+increasing freedom of women. “It's all like Bromstead when the building
+came,” I said; for I had often talked to her of that early impression of
+purpose dissolving again into chaotic forces. “There is no clear right
+in the world any more. The world is Byzantine. The justest man to-day
+must practise a tainted goodness.”
+
+These questions need discussion--a magnificent frankness of
+discussion--if any standards are again to establish an effective hold
+upon educated people. Discretions, as I have said already, will never
+hold any one worth holding--longer than they held us. Against every
+“shalt not” there must be a “why not” plainly put,--the “why not”
+ largest and plainest, the law deduced from its purpose. “You and I,
+Isabel,” I said, “have always been a little disregardful of duty, partly
+at least because the idea of duty comes to us so ill-clad. Oh! I know
+there's an extravagant insubordinate strain in us, but that wasn't all.
+I wish humbugs would leave duty alone. I wish all duty wasn't covered
+with slime. That's where the real mischief comes in. Passion can always
+contrive to clothe itself in beauty, strips itself splendid. That
+carried us. But for all its mean associations there is this duty....
+
+“Don't we come rather late to it?”
+
+“Not so late that it won't be atrociously hard to do.”
+
+“It's queer to think of now,” said Isabel. “Who could believe we did all
+we have done honestly? Well, in a manner honestly. Who could believe we
+thought this might be hidden? Who could trace it all step by step from
+the time when we found that a certain boldness in our talk was pleasing?
+We talked of love.... Master, there's not much for us to do in the way
+of Apologia that any one will credit. And yet if it were possible to
+tell the very heart of our story....
+
+“Does Margaret really want to go on with you?” she asked--“shield
+you--knowing of... THIS?”
+
+“I'm certain. I don't understand--just as I don't understand Shoesmith,
+but she does. These people walk on solid ground which is just thin air
+to us. They've got something we haven't got. Assurances? I wonder.”...
+
+Then it was, or later, we talked of Shoesmith, and what her life might
+be with him.
+
+“He's good,” she said; “he's kindly. He's everything but magic. He's the
+very image of the decent, sober, honourable life. You can't say a thing
+against him or I--except that something--something in his imagination,
+something in the tone of his voice--fails for me. Why don't I love
+him?--he's a better man than you! Why don't you? IS he a better man than
+you? He's usage, he's honour, he's the right thing, he's the breed and
+the tradition,--a gentleman. You're your erring, incalculable self. I
+suppose we women will trust this sort and love your sort to the very end
+of time....”
+
+We lay side by side and nibbled at grass stalks as we talked. It seemed
+enormously unreasonable to us that two people who had come to the pitch
+of easy and confident affection and happiness that held between us
+should be obliged to part and shun one another, or murder half the
+substance of their lives. We felt ourselves crushed and beaten by an
+indiscriminating machine which destroys happiness in the service of
+jealousy. “The mass of people don't feel these things in quite the same
+manner as we feel them,” she said. “Is it because they're different in
+grain, or educated out of some primitive instinct?”
+
+“It's because we've explored love a little, and they know no more
+than the gateway,” I said. “Lust and then jealousy; their simple
+conception--and we have gone past all that and wandered hand in
+hand....”
+
+I remember that for a time we watched two of that larger sort of gull,
+whose wings are brownish-white, circle and hover against the blue. And
+then we lay and looked at a band of water mirror clear far out to sea,
+and wondered why the breeze that rippled all the rest should leave it so
+serene.
+
+“And in this State of ours,” I resumed.
+
+“Eh!” said Isabel, rolling over into a sitting posture and looking out
+at the horizon. “Let's talk no more of things we can never see. Talk to
+me of the work you are doing and all we shall do--after we have parted.
+We've said too little of that. We've had our red life, and it's over.
+Thank Heaven!--though we stole it! Talk about your work, dear, and the
+things we'll go on doing--just as though we were still together. We'll
+still be together in a sense--through all these things we have in
+common.”
+
+And so we talked of politics and our outlook. We were interested to the
+pitch of self-forgetfulness. We weighed persons and forces, discussed
+the probabilities of the next general election, the steady drift of
+public opinion in the north and west away from Liberalism towards us.
+It was very manifest that in spite of Wardenham and the EXPURGATOR, we
+should come into the new Government strongly. The party had no one else,
+all the young men were formally or informally with us; Esmeer would have
+office, Lord Tarvrille, I... and very probably there would be something
+for Shoesmith. “And for my own part,” I said, “I count on backing on the
+Liberal side. For the last two years we've been forcing competition in
+constructive legislation between the parties. The Liberals have not been
+long in following up our Endowment of Motherhood lead. They'll have to
+give votes and lip service anyhow. Half the readers of the BLUE WEEKLY,
+they say, are Liberals....
+
+“I remember talking about things of this sort with old Willersley,” I
+said, “ever so many years ago. It was some place near Locarno, and we
+looked down the lake that shone weltering--just as now we look over the
+sea. And then we dreamt in an indistinct featureless way of all that you
+and I are doing now.”
+
+“I!” said Isabel, and laughed.
+
+“Well, of some such thing,” I said, and remained for awhile silent,
+thinking of Locarno.
+
+I recalled once more the largeness, the release from small personal
+things that I had felt in my youth; statecraft became real and wonderful
+again with the memory, the gigantic handling of gigantic problems. I
+began to talk out my thoughts, sitting up beside her, as I could never
+talk of them to any one but Isabel; began to recover again the
+purpose that lay under all my political ambitions and adjustments and
+anticipations. I saw the State, splendid and wide as I had seen it in
+that first travel of mine, but now it was no mere distant prospect of
+spires and pinnacles, but populous with fine-trained, bold-thinking,
+bold-doing people. It was as if I had forgotten for a long time and now
+remembered with amazement.
+
+At first, I told her, I had been altogether at a loss how I could do
+anything to battle against the aimless muddle of our world; I had
+wanted a clue--until she had come into my life questioning, suggesting,
+unconsciously illuminating. “But I have done nothing,” she protested. I
+declared she had done everything in growing to education under my eyes,
+in reflecting again upon all the processes that had made myself, so
+that instead of abstractions and blue-books and bills and devices, I had
+realised the world of mankind as a crowd needing before all things fine
+women and men. We'd spoilt ourselves in learning that, but anyhow we had
+our lesson. Before her I was in a nineteenth-century darkness, dealing
+with the nation as if it were a crowd of selfish men, forgetful of women
+and children and that shy wild thing in the hearts of men, love, which
+must be drawn upon as it has never been drawn upon before, if the State
+is to live. I saw now how it is possible to bring the loose factors of a
+great realm together, to create a mind of literature and thought in it,
+and the expression of a purpose to make it self-conscious and fine.
+I had it all clear before me, so that at a score of points I could
+presently begin. The BLUE WEEKLY was a centre of force. Already we had
+given Imperialism a criticism, and leavened half the press from our
+columns. Our movement consolidated and spread. We should presently come
+into power. Everything moved towards our hands. We should be able to get
+at the schools, the services, the universities, the church; enormously
+increase the endowment of research, and organise what was sorely wanted,
+a criticism of research; contrive a closer contact between the press and
+creative intellectual life; foster literature, clarify, strengthen the
+public consciousness, develop social organisation and a sense of the
+State. Men were coming to us every day, brilliant young peers like Lord
+Dentonhill, writers like Carnot and Cresswell. It filled me with pride
+to win such men. “We stand for so much more than we seem to stand for,”
+ I said. I opened my heart to her, so freely that I hesitate to open my
+heart even to the reader, telling of projects and ambitions I cherished,
+of my consciousness of great powers and widening opportunities....
+
+Isabel watched me as I talked.
+
+She too, I think, had forgotten these things for a while. For it is
+curious and I think a very significant thing that since we had become
+lovers, we had talked very little of the broader things that had once so
+strongly gripped our imaginations.
+
+“It's good,” I said, “to talk like this to you, to get back to youth and
+great ambitions with you. There have been times lately when politics has
+seemed the pettiest game played with mean tools for mean ends--and none
+the less so that the happiness of three hundred million people might be
+touched by our follies. I talk to no one else like this.... And now I
+think of parting, I think but of how much more I might have talked to
+you.”...
+
+Things drew to an end at last, but after we had spoken of a thousand
+things.
+
+“We've talked away our last half day,” I said, staring over my shoulder
+at the blazing sunset sky behind us. “Dear, it's been the last day of
+our lives for us.... It doesn't seem like the last day of our lives. Or
+any day.”
+
+“I wonder how it will feel?” said Isabel.
+
+“It will be very strange at first--not to be able to tell you things.”
+
+“I've a superstition that after--after we've parted--if ever I go into
+my room and talk, you'll hear. You'll be--somewhere.”
+
+“I shall be in the world--yes.”
+
+“I don't feel as though these days ahead were real. Here we are, here we
+remain.”
+
+“Yes, I feel that. As though you and I were two immortals, who didn't
+live in time and space at all, who never met, who couldn't part, and
+here we lie on Olympus. And those two poor creatures who did meet, poor
+little Richard Remington and Isabel Rivers, who met and loved too much
+and had to part, they part and go their ways, and we lie here and watch
+them, you and I. She'll cry, poor dear.”
+
+“She'll cry. She's crying now!”
+
+“Poor little beasts! I think he'll cry too. He winces. He could--for
+tuppence. I didn't know he had lachrymal glands at all until a little
+while ago. I suppose all love is hysterical--and a little foolish. Poor
+mites! Silly little pitiful creatures! How we have blundered! Think how
+we must look to God! Well, we'll pity them, and then we'll inspire him
+to stiffen up again--and do as we've determined he shall do. We'll see
+it through,--we who lie here on the cliff. They'll be mean at times, and
+horrid at times; we know them! Do you see her, a poor little fine lady
+in a great house,--she sometimes goes to her room and writes.”
+
+“She writes for his BLUE WEEKLY still.”
+
+“Yes. Sometimes--I hope. And he's there in the office with a bit of her
+copy in his hand.”
+
+“Is it as good as if she still talked it over with him before she wrote
+it? Is it?”
+
+“Better, I think. Let's play it's better--anyhow. It may be that talking
+over was rather mixed with love-making. After all, love-making is joy
+rather than magic. Don't let's pretend about that even.... Let's go on
+watching him. (I don't see why her writing shouldn't be better. Indeed I
+don't.) See! There he goes down along the Embankment to Westminster just
+like a real man, for all that he's smaller than a grain of dust. What is
+running round inside that speck of a head of his? Look at him going past
+the Policemen, specks too--selected large ones from the country. I think
+he's going to dinner with the Speaker--some old thing like that. Is his
+face harder or commoner or stronger?--I can't quite see.... And now he's
+up and speaking in the House. Hope he'll hold on to the thread. He'll
+have to plan his speeches to the very end of his days--and learn the
+headings.”
+
+“Isn't she up in the women's gallery to hear him?”
+
+“No. Unless it's by accident.”
+
+“She's there,” she said.
+
+“Well, by accident it happens. Not too many accidents, Isabel. Never any
+more adventures for us, dear, now. No!... They play the game, you know.
+They've begun late, but now they've got to. You see it's not so
+very hard for them since you and I, my dear, are here always, always
+faithfully here on this warm cliff of love accomplished, watching and
+helping them under high heaven. It isn't so VERY hard. Rather good in
+some ways. Some people HAVE to be broken a little. Can you see Altiora
+down there, by any chance?”
+
+“She's too little to be seen,” she said.
+
+“Can you see the sins they once committed?”
+
+“I can only see you here beside me, dear--for ever. For all my life,
+dear, till I die. Was that--the sin?”...
+
+I took her to the station, and after she had gone I was to drive to
+Dover, and cross to Calais by the night boat. I couldn't, I felt, return
+to London. We walked over the crest and down to the little station of
+Martin Mill side by side, talking at first in broken fragments, for the
+most part of unimportant things.
+
+“None of this,” she said abruptly, “seems in the slightest degree real
+to me. I've got no sense of things ending.”
+
+“We're parting,” I said.
+
+“We're parting--as people part in a play. It's distressing. But I don't
+feel as though you and I were really never to see each other again for
+years. Do you?”
+
+I thought. “No,” I said.
+
+“After we've parted I shall look to talk it over with you.”
+
+“So shall I.”
+
+“That's absurd.”
+
+“Absurd.”
+
+“I feel as if you'd always be there, just about where you are now.
+Invisible perhaps, but there. We've spent so much of our lives joggling
+elbows.”...
+
+“Yes. Yes. I don't in the least realise it. I suppose I shall begin to
+when the train goes out of the station. Are we wanting in imagination,
+Isabel?”
+
+“I don't know. We've always assumed it was the other way about.”
+
+“Even when the train goes out of the station--! I've seen you into so
+many trains.”
+
+“I shall go on thinking of things to say to you--things to put in your
+letters. For years to come. How can I ever stop thinking in that way
+now? We've got into each other's brains.”
+
+“It isn't real,” I said; “nothing is real. The world's no more than a
+fantastic dream. Why are we parting, Isabel?”
+
+“I don't know. It seems now supremely silly. I suppose we have to. Can't
+we meet?--don't you think we shall meet even in dreams?”
+
+“We'll meet a thousand times in dreams,” I said.
+
+“I wish we could dream at the same time,” said Isabel.... “Dream walks.
+I can't believe, dear, I shall never have a walk with you again.”
+
+“If I'd stayed six months in America,” I said, “we might have walked
+long walks and talked long talks for all our lives.”
+
+“Not in a world of Baileys,” said Isabel. “And anyhow--”
+
+She stopped short. I looked interrogation.
+
+“We've loved,” she said.
+
+I took her ticket, saw to her luggage, and stood by the door of the
+compartment. “Good-bye,” I said a little stiffly, conscious of the
+people upon the platform. She bent above me, white and dusky, looking at
+me very steadfastly.
+
+“Come here,” she whispered. “Never mind the porters. What can they know?
+Just one time more--I must.”
+
+She rested her hand against the door of the carriage and bent down upon
+me, and put her cold, moist lips to mine.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ THE BREAKING POINT
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+And then we broke down. We broke our faith with both Margaret and
+Shoesmith, flung career and duty out of our lives, and went away
+together.
+
+It is only now, almost a year after these events, that I can begin to
+see what happened to me. At the time it seemed to me I was a rational,
+responsible creature, but indeed I had not parted from her two days
+before I became a monomaniac to whom nothing could matter but Isabel.
+Every truth had to be squared to that obsession, every duty. It astounds
+me to think how I forgot Margaret, forgot my work, forgot everything
+but that we two were parted. I still believe that with better chances
+we might have escaped the consequences of the emotional storm that
+presently seized us both. But we had no foresight of that, and no
+preparation for it, and our circumstances betrayed us. It was partly
+Shoesmith's unwisdom in delaying his marriage until after the end of the
+session--partly my own amazing folly in returning within four days to
+Westminster. But we were all of us intent upon the defeat of scandal
+and the complete restoration of appearances. It seemed necessary that
+Shoesmith's marriage should not seem to be hurried, still more necessary
+that I should not vanish inexplicably. I had to be visible with Margaret
+in London just as much as possible; we went to restaurants, we visited
+the theatre; we could even contemplate the possibility of my presence at
+the wedding. For that, however, we had schemed a weekend visit to Wales,
+and a fictitious sprained ankle at the last moment which would justify
+my absence....
+
+I cannot convey to you the intolerable wretchedness and rebellion of
+my separation from Isabel. It seemed that in the past two years all
+my thoughts had spun commisures to Isabel's brain and I could think of
+nothing that did not lead me surely to the need of the one intimate I
+had found in the world. I came back to the House and the office and my
+home, I filled all my days with appointments and duty, and it did not
+save me in the least from a lonely emptiness such as I had never felt
+before in all my life. I had little sleep. In the daytime I did a
+hundred things, I even spoke in the House on two occasions, and by my
+own low standards spoke well, and it seemed to me that I was going about
+in my own brain like a hushed survivor in a house whose owner lies dead
+upstairs.
+
+I came to a crisis after that wild dinner of Tarvrille's. Something in
+that stripped my soul bare.
+
+It was an occasion made absurd and strange by the odd accident that the
+house caught fire upstairs while we were dining below. It was a men's
+dinner--“A dinner of all sorts,” said Tarvrille, when he invited me;
+“everything from Evesham and Gane to Wilkins the author, and Heaven
+knows what will happen!” I remember that afterwards Tarvrille was
+accused of having planned the fire to make his dinner a marvel and a
+memory. It was indeed a wonderful occasion, and I suppose if I had not
+been altogether drenched in misery, I should have found the same wild
+amusement in it that glowed in all the others. There were one or two
+university dons, Lord George Fester, the racing man, Panmure, the
+artist, two or three big City men, Weston Massinghay and another
+prominent Liberal whose name I can't remember, the three men Tarvrille
+had promised and Esmeer, Lord Wrassleton, Waulsort, the member for
+Monckton, Neal and several others. We began a little coldly, with
+duologues, but the conversation was already becoming general--so far as
+such a long table permitted--when the fire asserted itself.
+
+It asserted itself first as a penetrating and emphatic smell of burning
+rubber,--it was caused by the fusing of an electric wire. The reek
+forced its way into the discussion of the Pekin massacres that had
+sprung up between Evesham, Waulsort, and the others at the end of the
+table. “Something burning,” said the man next to me.
+
+“Something must be burning,” said Panmure.
+
+Tarvrille hated undignified interruptions. He had a particularly
+imperturbable butler with a cadaverous sad face and an eye of rigid
+disapproval. He spoke to this individual over his shoulder. “Just see,
+will you,” he said, and caught up the pause in the talk to his left.
+
+Wilkins was asking questions, and I, too, was curious. The story of the
+siege of the Legations in China in the year 1900 and all that followed
+upon that, is just one of those disturbing interludes in history that
+refuse to join on to that general scheme of protestation by which
+civilisation is maintained. It is a break in the general flow of
+experience as disconcerting to statecraft as the robbery of my knife and
+the scuffle that followed it had been to me when I was a boy at Penge.
+It is like a tear in a curtain revealing quite unexpected backgrounds. I
+had never given the business a thought for years; now this talk brought
+back a string of pictures to my mind; how the reliefs arrived and the
+plundering began, how section after section of the International Army
+was drawn into murder and pillage, how the infection spread upward
+until the wives of Ministers were busy looting, and the very sentinels
+stripped and crawled like snakes into the Palace they were set to guard.
+It did not stop at robbery, men were murdered, women, being plundered,
+were outraged, children were butchered, strong men had found themselves
+with arms in a lawless, defenceless city, and this had followed. Now it
+was all recalled.
+
+“Respectable ladies addicted to district visiting at home were as bad as
+any one,” said Panmure. “Glazebrook told me of one--flushed like a woman
+at a bargain sale, he said--and when he pointed out to her that the silk
+she'd got was bloodstained, she just said, 'Oh, bother!' and threw it
+aside and went back....”
+
+We became aware that Tarvrille's butler had returned. We tried not to
+seem to listen.
+
+“Beg pardon, m'lord,” he said. “The house IS on fire, m'lord.”
+
+“Upstairs, m'lord.”
+
+“Just overhead, m'lord.”
+
+“The maids are throwing water, m'lord, and I've telephoned FIRE.”
+
+“No, m'lord, no immediate danger.”
+
+“It's all right,” said Tarvrille to the table generally. “Go on! It's
+not a general conflagration, and the fire brigade won't be five minutes.
+Don't see that it's our affair. The stuff's insured. They say old Lady
+Paskershortly was dreadful. Like a harpy. The Dowager Empress had shown
+her some little things of hers. Pet things--hidden away. Susan went
+straight for them--used to take an umbrella for the silks. Born
+shoplifter.”
+
+It was evident he didn't want his dinner spoilt, and we played up
+loyally.
+
+“This is recorded history,” said Wilkins,--“practically. It makes one
+wonder about unrecorded history. In India, for example.”
+
+But nobody touched that.
+
+“Thompson,” said Tarvrille to the imperturbable butler, and indicating
+the table generally, “champagne. Champagne. Keep it going.”
+
+“M'lord,” and Thompson marshalled his assistants.
+
+Some man I didn't know began to remember things about Mandalay. “It's
+queer,” he said, “how people break out at times;” and told his story
+of an army doctor, brave, public-spirited, and, as it happened,
+deeply religious, who was caught one evening by the excitement of
+plundering--and stole and hid, twisted the wrist of a boy until it
+broke, and was afterwards overcome by wild remorse.
+
+I watched Evesham listening intently. “Strange,” he said, “very strange.
+We are such stuff as thieves are made of. And in China, too, they
+murdered people--for the sake of murdering. Apart, so to speak, from
+mercenary considerations. I'm afraid there's no doubt of it in certain
+cases. No doubt at all. Young soldiers fresh from German high schools
+and English homes!”
+
+“Did OUR people?” asked some patriot.
+
+“Not so much. But I'm afraid there were cases.... Some of the Indian
+troops were pretty bad.”
+
+Gane picked up the tale with confirmations.
+
+It is all printed in the vividest way as a picture upon my memory, so
+that were I a painter I think I could give the deep rich browns and warm
+greys beyond the brightly lit table, the various distinguished faces,
+strongly illuminated, interested and keen, above the black and white of
+evening dress, the alert menservants with their heavier, clean-shaved
+faces indistinctly seen in the dimness behind. Then this was coloured
+emotionally for me by my aching sense of loss and sacrifice, and by
+the chance trend of our talk to the breaches and unrealities of the
+civilised scheme. We seemed a little transitory circle of light in a
+universe of darkness and violence; an effect to which the diminishing
+smell of burning rubber, the trampling of feet overhead, the swish
+of water, added enormously. Everybody--unless, perhaps, it was
+Evesham--drank rather carelessly because of the suppressed excitement of
+our situation, and talked the louder and more freely.
+
+“But what a flimsy thing our civilisation is!” said Evesham; “a mere
+thin net of habits and associations!”
+
+“I suppose those men came back,” said Wilkins.
+
+“Lady Paskershortly did!” chuckled Evesham.
+
+“How do they fit it in with the rest of their lives?” Wilkins
+speculated. “I suppose there's Pekin-stained police officers,
+Pekin-stained J. P.'s--trying petty pilferers in the severest
+manner.”...
+
+Then for a time things became preposterous. There was a sudden cascade
+of water by the fireplace, and then absurdly the ceiling began to rain
+upon us, first at this point and then that. “My new suit!” cried some
+one. “Perrrrrr-up pe-rr”--a new vertical line of blackened water would
+establish itself and form a spreading pool upon the gleaming cloth. The
+men nearest would arrange catchment areas of plates and flower bowls.
+“Draw up!” said Tarvrille, “draw up. That's the bad end of the table!”
+ He turned to the imperturbable butler. “Take round bath towels,” he
+said; and presently the men behind us were offering--with inflexible
+dignity--“Port wine, Sir. Bath towel, Sir!” Waulsort, with streaks of
+blackened water on his forehead, was suddenly reminded of a wet year
+when he had followed the French army manoeuvres. An animated dispute
+sprang up between him and Neal about the relative efficiency of the new
+French and German field guns. Wrassleton joined in and a little drunken
+shrivelled Oxford don of some sort with a black-splashed shirt front who
+presently silenced them all by the immensity and particularity of his
+knowledge of field artillery. Then the talk drifted to Sedan and the
+effect of dead horses upon drinking-water, which brought Wrassleton
+and Weston Massinghay into a dispute of great vigour and emphasis. “The
+trouble in South Africa,” said Weston Massinghay, “wasn't that we didn't
+boil our water. It was that we didn't boil our men. The Boers drank the
+same stuff we did. THEY didn't get dysentery.”
+
+That argument went on for some time. I was attacked across the table by
+a man named Burshort about my Endowment of Motherhood schemes, but
+in the gaps of that debate I could still hear Weston Massinghay
+at intervals repeat in a rather thickened voice: “THEY didn't get
+dysentery.”
+
+I think Evesham went early. The rest of us clustered more and more
+closely towards the drier end of the room, the table was pushed along,
+and the area beneath the extinguished conflagration abandoned to a
+tinkling, splashing company of pots and pans and bowls and baths.
+Everybody was now disposed to be hilarious and noisy, to say startling
+and aggressive things; we must have sounded a queer clamour to a
+listener in the next room. The devil inspired them to begin baiting me.
+“Ours isn't the Tory party any more,” said Burshort. “Remington has made
+it the Obstetric Party.”
+
+“That's good!” said Weston Massinghay, with all his teeth gleaming; “I
+shall use that against you in the House!”
+
+“I shall denounce you for abusing private confidences if you do,” said
+Tarvrille.
+
+“Remington wants us to give up launching Dreadnoughts and launch babies
+instead,” Burshort urged. “For the price of one Dreadnought--”
+
+The little shrivelled don who had been omniscient about guns joined in
+the baiting, and displayed himself a venomous creature. Something in
+his eyes told me he knew Isabel and hated me for it. “Love and fine
+thinking,” he began, a little thickly, and knocking over a wine-glass
+with a too easy gesture. “Love and fine thinking. Two things don't go
+together. No philosophy worth a damn ever came out of excesses of love.
+Salt Lake City--Piggott--Ag--Agapemone again--no works to matter.”
+
+Everybody laughed.
+
+“Got to rec'nise these facts,” said my assailant. “Love and fine think'n
+pretty phrase--attractive. Suitable for p'litical dec'rations. Postcard,
+Christmas, gilt lets, in a wreath of white flow's. Not oth'wise
+valu'ble.”
+
+I made some remark, I forget what, but he overbore me.
+
+Real things we want are Hate--Hate and COARSE think'n. I b'long to the
+school of Mrs. F's Aunt--”
+
+“What?” said some one, intent.
+
+“In 'Little Dorrit,'” explained Tarvrille; “go on!”
+
+“Hate a fool,” said my assailant.
+
+Tarvrille glanced at me. I smiled to conceal the loss of my temper.
+
+“Hate,” said the little man, emphasising his point with a clumsy fist.
+“Hate's the driving force. What's m'rality?--hate of rotten goings
+on. What's patriotism?--hate of int'loping foreigners. What's
+Radicalism?--hate of lords. What's Toryism?--hate of disturbance. It's
+all hate--hate from top to bottom. Hate of a mess. Remington owned it
+the other day, said he hated a mu'll. There you are! If you couldn't
+get hate into an election, damn it (hic) people wou'n't poll. Poll for
+love!--no' me!”
+
+He paused, but before any one could speak he had resumed.
+
+“Then this about fine thinking. Like going into a bear pit armed with a
+tagle--talgent--talgent galv'nometer. Like going to fight a mad dog with
+Shasepear and the Bible. Fine thinking--what we want is the thickes'
+thinking we can get. Thinking that stands up alone. Taf Reform means
+work for all, thassort of thing.”
+
+The gentleman from Cambridge paused. “YOU a flag!” he said. “I'd as soon
+go to ba'ell und' wet tissue paper!”
+
+My best answer on the spur of the moment was:
+
+“The Japanese did.” Which was absurd.
+
+I went on to some other reply, I forget exactly what, and the talk of
+the whole table drew round me. It was an extraordinary revelation to me.
+Every one was unusually careless and outspoken, and it was amazing how
+manifestly they echoed the feeling of this old Tory spokesman. They were
+quite friendly to me, they regarded me and the BLUE WEEKLY as valuable
+party assets for Toryism, but it was clear they attached no more
+importance to what were my realities than they did to the remarkable
+therapeutic claims of Mrs. Eddy. They were flushed and amused, perhaps
+they went a little too far in their resolves to draw me, but they left
+the impression on my mind of men irrevocably set upon narrow and cynical
+views of political life. For them the political struggle was a game,
+whose counters were human hate and human credulity; their real aim was
+just every one's aim, the preservation of the class and way of living to
+which their lives were attuned. They did not know how tired I was, how
+exhausted mentally and morally, nor how cruel their convergent attack
+on me chanced to be. But my temper gave way, I became tart and fierce,
+perhaps my replies were a trifle absurd, and Tarvrille, with that quick
+eye and sympathy of his, came to the rescue. Then for a time I sat
+silent and drank port wine while the others talked. The disorder of
+the room, the still dripping ceiling, the noise, the displaced ties and
+crumpled shirts of my companions, jarred on my tormented nerves....
+
+It was long past midnight when we dispersed. I remember Tarvrille coming
+with me into the hall, and then suggesting we should go upstairs to see
+the damage. A manservant carried up two flickering candles for us.
+One end of the room was gutted, curtains, hangings, several chairs and
+tables were completely burnt, the panelling was scorched and warped,
+three smashed windows made the candles flare and gutter, and some scraps
+of broken china still lay on the puddled floor.
+
+As we surveyed this, Lady Tarvrille appeared, back from some party,
+a slender, white-cloaked, satin-footed figure with amazed blue eyes
+beneath her golden hair. I remember how stupidly we laughed at her
+surprise.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+I parted from Panmure at the corner of Aldington Street, and went my way
+alone. But I did not go home, I turned westward and walked for a long
+way, and then struck northward aimlessly. I was too miserable to go to
+my house.
+
+I wandered about that night like a man who has discovered his Gods
+are dead. I can look back now detached yet sympathetic upon that wild
+confusion of moods and impulses, and by it I think I can understand, oh!
+half the wrongdoing and blundering in the world.
+
+I do not feel now the logical force of the process that must have
+convinced me then that I had made my sacrifice and spent my strength in
+vain. At no time had I been under any illusion that the Tory party had
+higher ideals than any other party, yet it came to me like a thing newly
+discovered that the men I had to work with had for the most part no such
+dreams, no sense of any collective purpose, no atom of the faith I held.
+They were just as immediately intent upon personal ends, just as limited
+by habits of thought, as the men in any other group or party. Perhaps I
+had slipped unawares for a time into the delusions of a party man--but I
+do not think so.
+
+No, it was the mood of profound despondency that had followed upon the
+abrupt cessation of my familiar intercourse with Isabel, that gave this
+fact that had always been present in my mind its quality of devastating
+revelation. It seemed as though I had never seen before nor suspected
+the stupendous gap between the chaotic aims, the routine, the
+conventional acquiescences, the vulgarisations of the personal life, and
+that clearly conscious development and service of a collective thought
+and purpose at which my efforts aimed. I had thought them but a little
+way apart, and now I saw they were separated by all the distance
+between earth and heaven. I saw now in myself and every one around me,
+a concentration upon interests close at hand, an inability to detach
+oneself from the provocations, tendernesses, instinctive hates, dumb
+lusts and shy timidities that touched one at every point; and, save
+for rare exalted moments, a regardlessness of broader aims and remoter
+possibilities that made the white passion of statecraft seem as
+unearthly and irrelevant to human life as the story an astronomer will
+tell, half proven but altogether incredible, of habitable planets and
+answering intelligences, suns' distances uncounted across the deep. It
+seemed to me I had aspired too high and thought too far, had mocked my
+own littleness by presumption, had given the uttermost dear reality of
+life for a theoriser's dream.
+
+All through that wandering agony of mine that night a dozen threads of
+thought interwove; now I was a soul speaking in protest to God against
+a task too cold and high for it, and now I was an angry man, scorned and
+pointed upon, who had let life cheat him of the ultimate pride of his
+soul. Now I was the fool of ambition, who opened his box of gold to find
+blank emptiness, and now I was a spinner of flimsy thoughts, whose web
+tore to rags at a touch. I realised for the first time how much I had
+come to depend upon the mind and faith of Isabel, how she had confirmed
+me and sustained me, how little strength I had to go on with our
+purposes now that she had vanished from my life. She had been the
+incarnation of those great abstractions, the saving reality, the voice
+that answered back. There was no support that night in the things that
+had been. We were alone together on the cliff for ever more!--that was
+very pretty in its way, but it had no truth whatever that could help
+me now, no ounce of sustaining value. I wanted Isabel that night, no
+sentiment or memory of her, but Isabel alive,--to talk to me, to touch
+me, to hold me together. I wanted unendurably the dusky gentleness of
+her presence, the consolation of her voice.
+
+We were alone together on the cliff! I startled a passing cabman into
+interest by laughing aloud at that magnificent and characteristic
+sentimentality. What a lie it was, and how satisfying it had been! That
+was just where we shouldn't remain. We of all people had no distinction
+from that humanity whose lot is to forget. We should go out to other
+interests, new experiences, new demands. That tall and intricate fabric
+of ambitious understandings we had built up together in our intimacy
+would be the first to go; and last perhaps to endure with us would be
+a few gross memories of sights and sounds, and trivial incidental
+excitements....
+
+I had a curious feeling that night that I had lost touch with life for
+a long time, and had now been reminded of its quality. That infernal
+little don's parody of my ruling phrase, “Hate and coarse thinking,”
+ stuck in my thoughts like a poisoned dart, a centre of inflammation.
+Just as a man who is debilitated has no longer the vitality to resist
+an infection, so my mind, slackened by the crisis of my separation from
+Isabel, could find no resistance to his emphatic suggestion. It seemed
+to me that what he had said was overpoweringly true, not only of
+contemporary life, but of all possible human life. Love is the rare
+thing, the treasured thing; you lock it away jealously and watch, and
+well you may; hate and aggression and force keep the streets and rule
+the world. And fine thinking is, in the rough issues of life, weak
+thinking, is a balancing indecisive process, discovers with disloyal
+impartiality a justice and a defect on each disputing side. “Good honest
+men,” as Dayton calls them, rule the world, with a way of thinking
+out decisions like shooting cartloads of bricks, and with a steadfast
+pleasure in hostility. Dayton liked to call his antagonists “blaggards
+and scoundrels”--it justified his opposition--the Lords were
+“scoundrels,” all people richer than he were “scoundrels,” all
+Socialists, all troublesome poor people; he liked to think of jails and
+justice being done. His public spirit was saturated with the sombre
+joys of conflict and the pleasant thought of condign punishment for
+all recalcitrant souls. That was the way of it, I perceived. That had
+survival value, as the biologists say. He was fool enough in politics to
+be a consistent and happy politician....
+
+Hate and coarse thinking; how the infernal truth of the phrase beat me
+down that night! I couldn't remember that I had known this all along,
+and that it did not really matter in the slightest degree. I had worked
+it all out long ago in other terms, when I had seen how all parties
+stood for interests inevitably, and how the purpose in life achieves
+itself, if it achieves itself at all, as a bye product of the war
+of individuals and classes. Hadn't I always known that science and
+philosophy elaborate themselves in spite of all the passion and
+narrowness of men, in spite of the vanities and weakness of their
+servants, in spite of all the heated disorder of contemporary things?
+Wasn't it my own phrase to speak of “that greater mind in men, in which
+we are but moments and transitorily lit cells?” Hadn't I known that the
+spirit of man still speaks like a thing that struggles out of mud and
+slime, and that the mere effort to speak means choking and disaster?
+Hadn't I known that we who think without fear and speak without
+discretion will not come to our own for the next two thousand years?
+
+It was the last was most forgotten of all that faith mislaid. Before
+mankind, in my vision that night, stretched new centuries of confusion,
+vast stupid wars, hastily conceived laws, foolish temporary triumphs
+of order, lapses, set-backs, despairs, catastrophes, new beginnings, a
+multitudinous wilderness of time, a nigh plotless drama of wrong-headed
+energies. In order to assuage my parting from Isabel we had set
+ourselves to imagine great rewards for our separation, great personal
+rewards; we had promised ourselves success visible and shining in our
+lives. To console ourselves in our separation we had made out of
+the BLUE WEEKLY and our young Tory movement preposterously enormous
+things-as though those poor fertilising touches at the soil were indeed
+the germinating seeds of the millennium, as though a million lives such
+as ours had not to contribute before the beginning of the beginning.
+That poor pretence had failed. That magnificent proposition shrivelled
+to nothing in the black loneliness of that night.
+
+I saw that there were to be no such compensations. So far as my real
+services to mankind were concerned I had to live an unrecognised
+and unrewarded life. If I made successes it would be by the way. Our
+separation would alter nothing of that. My scandal would cling to me
+now for all my life, a thing affecting relationships, embarrassing and
+hampering my spirit. I should follow the common lot of those who live by
+the imagination, and follow it now in infinite loneliness of soul; the
+one good comforter, the one effectual familiar, was lost to me for
+ever; I should do good and evil together, no one caring to understand;
+I should produce much weary work, much bad-spirited work, much absolute
+evil; the good in me would be too often ill-expressed and missed or
+misinterpreted. In the end I might leave one gleaming flake or so amidst
+the slag heaps for a moment of postmortem sympathy. I was afraid beyond
+measure of my derelict self. Because I believed with all my soul in love
+and fine thinking that did not mean that I should necessarily either
+love steadfastly or think finely. I remember how I fell talking to
+God--I think I talked out loud. “Why do I care for these things?”
+ I cried, “when I can do so little! Why am I apart from the jolly
+thoughtless fighting life of men? These dreams fade to nothingness, and
+leave me bare!”
+
+I scolded. “Why don't you speak to a man, show yourself? I thought I
+had a gleam of you in Isabel,--and then you take her away. Do you really
+think I can carry on this game alone, doing your work in darkness and
+silence, living in muddled conflict, half living, half dying?”
+
+Grotesque analogies arose in my mind. I discovered a strange parallelism
+between my now tattered phrase of “Love and fine thinking” and the
+“Love and the Word” of Christian thought. Was it possible the Christian
+propaganda had at the outset meant just that system of attitudes I had
+been feeling my way towards from the very beginning of my life? Had
+I spent a lifetime making my way back to Christ? It mocks humanity
+to think how Christ has been overlaid. I went along now, recalling
+long-neglected phrases and sentences; I had a new vision of that great
+central figure preaching love with hate and coarse thinking even in the
+disciples about Him, rising to a tidal wave at last in that clamour for
+Barabbas, and the public satisfaction in His fate....
+
+It's curious to think that hopeless love and a noisy disordered dinner
+should lead a man to these speculations, but they did. “He DID mean
+that!” I said, and suddenly thought of what a bludgeon they'd made
+of His Christianity. Athwart that perplexing, patient enigma sitting
+inaudibly among publicans and sinners, danced and gibbered a long
+procession of the champions of orthodoxy. “He wasn't human,” I said,
+and remembered that last despairing cry, “My God! My God! why hast Thou
+forsaken Me?”
+
+“Oh, HE forsakes every one,” I said, flying out as a tired mind will,
+with an obvious repartee....
+
+I passed at a bound from such monstrous theology to a towering rage
+against the Baileys. In an instant and with no sense of absurdity I
+wanted--in the intervals of love and fine thinking--to fling about that
+strenuously virtuous couple; I wanted to kick Keyhole of the PEEPSHOW
+into the gutter and make a common massacre of all the prosperous
+rascaldom that makes a trade and rule of virtue. I can still feel that
+transition. In a moment I had reached that phase of weakly decisive
+anger which is for people of my temperament the concomitant of
+exhaustion.
+
+“I will have her,” I cried. “By Heaven! I WILL have her! Life mocks me
+and cheats me. Nothing can be made good to me again.... Why shouldn't I
+save what I can? I can't save myself without her....”
+
+I remember myself--as a sort of anti-climax to that--rather tediously
+asking my way home. I was somewhere in the neighbourhood of Holland
+Park....
+
+It was then between one and two. I felt that I could go home now without
+any risk of meeting Margaret. It had been the thought of returning to
+Margaret that had sent me wandering that night. It is one of the ugliest
+facts I recall about that time of crisis, the intense aversion I felt
+for Margaret. No sense of her goodness, her injury and nobility, and
+the enormous generosity of her forgiveness, sufficed to mitigate that.
+I hope now that in this book I am able to give something of her silvery
+splendour, but all through this crisis I felt nothing of that. There was
+a triumphant kindliness about her that I found intolerable. She meant to
+be so kind to me, to offer unstinted consolation, to meet my needs, to
+supply just all she imagined Isabel had given me.
+
+When I left Tarvrille's, I felt I could anticipate exactly how she would
+meet my homecoming. She would be perplexed by my crumpled shirt front,
+on which I had spilt some drops of wine; she would overlook that by an
+effort, explain it sentimentally, resolve it should make no difference
+to her. She would want to know who had been present, what we had talked
+about, show the alertest interest in whatever it was--it didn't matter
+what.... No, I couldn't face her.
+
+So I did not reach my study until two o'clock.
+
+There, I remember, stood the new and very beautiful old silver
+candlesticks that she had set there two days since to please me--the
+foolish kindliness of it! But in her search for expression, Margaret
+heaped presents upon me. She had fitted these candlesticks with electric
+lights, and I must, I suppose, have lit them to write my note to Isabel.
+“Give me a word--the world aches without you,” was all I scrawled,
+though I fully meant that she should come to me. I knew, though I ought
+not to have known, that now she had left her flat, she was with the
+Balfes--she was to have been married from the Balfes--and I sent my
+letter there. And I went out into the silent square and posted the note
+forthwith, because I knew quite clearly that if I left it until morning
+I should never post it at all.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+I had a curious revulsion of feeling that morning of our meeting. (Of
+all places for such a clandestine encounter she had chosen the bridge
+opposite Buckingham Palace.) Overnight I had been full of self pity, and
+eager for the comfort of Isabel's presence. But the ill-written scrawl
+in which she had replied had been full of the suggestion of her own
+weakness and misery. And when I saw her, my own selfish sorrows were
+altogether swept away by a wave of pitiful tenderness. Something had
+happened to her that I did not understand. She was manifestly ill. She
+came towards me wearily, she who had always borne herself so bravely;
+her shoulders seemed bent, and her eyes were tired, and her face white
+and drawn. All my life has been a narrow self-centred life; no brothers,
+no sisters or children or weak things had ever yet made any intimate
+appeal to me, and suddenly--I verily believe for the first time in my
+life!--I felt a great passion of protective ownership; I felt that here
+was something that I could die to shelter, something that meant more
+than joy or pride or splendid ambitions or splendid creation to me, a
+new kind of hold upon me, a new power in the world. Some sealed fountain
+was opened in my breast. I knew that I could love Isabel broken, Isabel
+beaten, Isabel ugly and in pain, more than I could love any sweet
+or delightful or glorious thing in life. I didn't care any more for
+anything in the world but Isabel, and that I should protect her. I
+trembled as I came near her, and could scarcely speak to her for the
+emotion that filled me....
+
+“I had your letter,” I said.
+
+“I had yours.”
+
+“Where can we talk?”
+
+I remember my lame sentences. “We'll have a boat. That's best here.”
+
+I took her to the little boat-house, and there we hired a boat, and
+I rowed in silence under the bridge and into the shade of a tree. The
+square grey stone masses of the Foreign Office loomed through the twigs,
+I remember, and a little space of grass separated us from the pathway
+and the scrutiny of passers-by. And there we talked.
+
+“I had to write to you,” I said.
+
+“I had to come.”
+
+“When are you to be married?”
+
+“Thursday week.”
+
+“Well?” I said. “But--can we?”
+
+She leant forward and scrutinised my face with eyes wide open. “What do
+you mean?” she said at last in a whisper.
+
+“Can we stand it? After all?”
+
+I looked at her white face. “Can you?” I said.
+
+She whispered. “Your career?”
+
+Then suddenly her face was contorted,--she wept silently, exactly as a
+child tormented beyond endurance might suddenly weep....
+
+“Oh! I don't care,” I cried, “now. I don't care. Damn the whole system
+of things! Damn all this patching of the irrevocable! I want to take
+care of you, Isabel! and have you with me.”
+
+“I can't stand it,” she blubbered.
+
+“You needn't stand it. I thought it was best for you.... I thought
+indeed it was best for you. I thought even you wanted it like that.”
+
+“Couldn't I live alone--as I meant to do?”
+
+“No,” I said, “you couldn't. You're not strong enough. I've thought of
+that; I've got to shelter you.”
+
+“And I want you,” I went on. “I'm not strong enough--I can't stand life
+without you.”
+
+She stopped weeping, she made a great effort to control herself, and
+looked at me steadfastly for a moment. “I was going to kill myself,” she
+whispered. “I was going to kill myself quietly--somehow. I meant to wait
+a bit and have an accident. I thought--you didn't understand. You were a
+man, and couldn't understand....”
+
+“People can't do as we thought we could do,” I said. “We've gone too far
+together.”
+
+“Yes,” she said, and I stared into her eyes.
+
+“The horror of it,” she whispered. “The horror of being handed over.
+It's just only begun to dawn upon me, seeing him now as I do. He tries
+to be kind to me.... I didn't know. I felt adventurous before.... It
+makes me feel like all the women in the world who have ever been owned
+and subdued.... It's not that he isn't the best of men, it's because I'm
+a part of you.... I can't go through with it. If I go through with it, I
+shall be left--robbed of pride--outraged--a woman beaten....”
+
+“I know,” I said, “I know.”
+
+“I want to live alone.... I don't care for anything now but just escape.
+If you can help me....”
+
+“I must take you away. There's nothing for us but to go away together.”
+
+“But your work,” she said; “your career! Margaret! Our promises!”
+
+“We've made a mess of things, Isabel--or things have made a mess of us.
+I don't know which. Our flags are in the mud, anyhow. It's too late
+to save those other things! They have to go. You can't make terms with
+defeat. I thought it was Margaret needed me most. But it's you. And I
+need you. I didn't think of that either. I haven't a doubt left in the
+world now. We've got to leave everything rather than leave each other.
+I'm sure of it. Now we have gone so far. We've got to go right down to
+earth and begin again.... Dear, I WANT disgrace with you....”
+
+So I whispered to her as she sat crumpled together on the faded cushions
+of the boat, this white and weary young woman who had been so valiant
+and careless a girl. “I don't care,” I said. “I don't care for anything,
+if I can save you out of the wreckage we have made together.”
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+The next day I went to the office of the BLUE WEEKLY in order to get as
+much as possible of its affairs in working order before I left London
+with Isabel. I just missed Shoesmith in the lower office. Upstairs I
+found Britten amidst a pile of outside articles, methodically reading
+the title of each and sometimes the first half-dozen lines, and either
+dropping them in a growing heap on the floor for a clerk to return, or
+putting them aside for consideration. I interrupted him, squatted on
+the window-sill of the open window, and sketched out my ideas for the
+session.
+
+“You're far-sighted,” he remarked at something of mine which reached out
+ahead.
+
+“I like to see things prepared,” I answered.
+
+“Yes,” he said, and ripped open the envelope of a fresh aspirant.
+
+I was silent while he read.
+
+“You're going away with Isabel Rivers,” he said abruptly.
+
+“Well!” I said, amazed.
+
+“I know,” he said, and lost his breath. “Not my business. Only--”
+
+It was queer to find Britten afraid to say a thing.
+
+“It's not playing the game,” he said.
+
+“What do you know?”
+
+“Everything that matters.”
+
+“Some games,” I said, “are too hard to play.”
+
+There came a pause between us.
+
+“I didn't know you were watching all this,” I said.
+
+“Yes,” he answered, after a pause, “I've watched.”
+
+“Sorry--sorry you don't approve.”
+
+“It means smashing such an infernal lot of things, Remington.”
+
+I did not answer.
+
+“You're going away then?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Soon?”
+
+“Right away.”
+
+“There's your wife.”
+
+“I know.”
+
+“Shoesmith--whom you're pledged to in a manner. You've just picked him
+out and made him conspicuous. Every one will know. Oh! of course--it's
+nothing to you. Honour--”
+
+“I know.”
+
+“Common decency.”
+
+I nodded.
+
+“All this movement of ours. That's what I care for most.... It's come to
+be a big thing, Remington.”
+
+“That will go on.”
+
+“We have a use for you--no one else quite fills it. No one.... I'm not
+sure it will go on.”
+
+“Do you think I haven't thought of all these things?”
+
+He shrugged his shoulders, and rejected two papers unread.
+
+“I knew,” he remarked, “when you came back from America. You were alight
+with it.” Then he let his bitterness gleam for a moment. “But I thought
+you would stick to your bargain.”
+
+“It's not so much choice as you think,” I said.
+
+“There's always a choice.”
+
+“No,” I said.
+
+He scrutinised my face.
+
+“I can't live without her--I can't work. She's all mixed up with
+this--and everything. And besides, there's things you can't understand.
+There's feelings you've never felt.... You don't understand how much
+we've been to one another.”
+
+Britten frowned and thought.
+
+“Some things one's GOT to do,” he threw out.
+
+“Some things one can't do.”
+
+“These infernal institutions--”
+
+“Some one must begin,” I said.
+
+He shook his head. “Not YOU,” he said. “No!”
+
+He stretched out his hands on the desk before him, and spoke again.
+
+“Remington,” he said, “I've thought of this business day and night too.
+It matters to me. It matters immensely to me. In a way--it's a thing
+one doesn't often say to a man--I've loved you. I'm the sort of man who
+leads a narrow life.... But you've been something fine and good for me,
+since that time, do you remember? when we talked about Mecca together.”
+
+I nodded.
+
+“Yes. And you'll always be something fine and good for me anyhow. I know
+things about you,--qualities--no mere act can destroy them.. .. Well, I
+can tell you, you're doing wrong. You're going on now like a man who is
+hypnotised and can't turn round. You're piling wrong on wrong. It was
+wrong for you two people ever to be lovers.”
+
+He paused.
+
+“It gripped us hard,” I said.
+
+“Yes!--but in your position! And hers! It was vile!”
+
+“You've not been tempted.”
+
+“How do you know? Anyhow--having done that, you ought to have stood the
+consequences and thought of other people. You could have ended it at the
+first pause for reflection. You didn't. You blundered again. You kept
+on. You owed a certain secrecy to all of us! You didn't keep it.
+You were careless. You made things worse. This engagement and this
+publicity!--Damn it, Remington!”
+
+“I know,” I said, with smarting eyes. “Damn it! with all my heart! It
+came of trying to patch.... You CAN'T patch.”
+
+“And now, as I care for anything under heaven, Remington, you two ought
+to stand these last consequences--and part. You ought to part. Other
+people have to stand things! Other people have to part. You ought to.
+You say--what do you say? It's loss of so much life to lose each other.
+So is losing a hand or a leg. But it's what you've incurred. Amputate.
+Take your punishment--After all, you chose it.”
+
+“Oh, damn!” I said, standing up and going to the window.
+
+“Damn by all means. I never knew a topic so full of justifiable damns.
+But you two did choose it. You ought to stick to your undertaking.”
+
+I turned upon him with a snarl in my voice. “My dear Britten!” I cried.
+“Don't I KNOW I'm doing wrong? Aren't I in a net? Suppose I don't go!
+Is there any right in that? Do you think we're going to be much to
+ourselves or any one after this parting? I've been thinking all
+last night of this business, trying it over and over again from the
+beginning. How was it we went wrong? Since I came back from America--I
+grant you THAT--but SINCE, there's never been a step that wasn't forced,
+that hadn't as much right in it or more, as wrong. You talk as though I
+was a thing of steel that could bend this way or that and never change.
+You talk as though Isabel was a cat one could give to any kind of
+owner.... We two are things that change and grow and alter all the time.
+We're--so interwoven that being parted now will leave us just misshapen
+cripples.... You don't know the motives, you don't know the rush and
+feel of things, you don't know how it was with us, and how it is with
+us. You don't know the hunger for the mere sight of one another; you
+don't know anything.”
+
+Britten looked at his finger-nails closely. His red face puckered to
+a wry frown. “Haven't we all at times wanted the world put back?” he
+grunted, and looked hard and close at one particular nail.
+
+There was a long pause.
+
+“I want her,” I said, “and I'm going to have her. I'm too tired for
+balancing the right or wrong of it any more. You can't separate them.
+I saw her yesterday.... She's--ill.... I'd take her now, if death were
+just outside the door waiting for us.”
+
+“Torture?”
+
+I thought. “Yes.”
+
+“For her?”
+
+“There isn't,” I said.
+
+“If there was?”
+
+I made no answer.
+
+“It's blind Want. And there's nothing ever been put into you to stand
+against it. What are you going to do with the rest of your lives?”
+
+“No end of things.”
+
+“Nothing.”
+
+“I don't believe you are right,” I said. “I believe we can save
+something--”
+
+Britten shook his head. “Some scraps of salvage won't excuse you,” he
+said.
+
+His indignation rose. “In the middle of life!” he said. “No man has a
+right to take his hand from the plough!”
+
+He leant forward on his desk and opened an argumentative palm. “You
+know, Remington,” he said, “and I know, that if this could be fended off
+for six months--if you could be clapped in prison, or got out of the way
+somehow,--until this marriage was all over and settled down for a year,
+say--you know then you two could meet, curious, happy, as friends.
+Saved! You KNOW it.”
+
+I turned and stared at him. “You're wrong, Britten,” I said. “And does
+it matter if we could?”
+
+I found that in talking to him I could frame the apologetics I had not
+been able to find for myself alone.
+
+“I am certain of one thing, Britten. It is our duty not to hush up this
+scandal.”
+
+He raised his eyebrows. I perceived now the element of absurdity in me,
+but at the time I was as serious as a man who is burning.
+
+“It's our duty,” I went on, “to smash now openly in the sight of every
+one. Yes! I've got that as clean and plain--as prison whitewash. I am
+convinced that we have got to be public to the uttermost now--I mean
+it--until every corner of our world knows this story, knows it fully,
+adds it to the Parnell story and the Ashton Dean story and the Carmel
+story and the Witterslea story, and all the other stories that have
+picked man after man out of English public life, the men with active
+imaginations, the men of strong initiative. To think this tottering
+old-woman ridden Empire should dare to waste a man on such a score! You
+say I ought to be penitent--”
+
+Britten shook his head and smiled very faintly.
+
+“I'm boiling with indignation,” I said. “I lay in bed last night and
+went through it all. What in God's name was to be expected of us but
+what has happened? I went through my life bit by bit last night, I
+recalled all I've had to do with virtue and women, and all I was told
+and how I was prepared. I was born into cowardice and debasement. We all
+are. Our generation's grimy with hypocrisy. I came to the most beautiful
+things in life--like peeping Tom of Coventry. I was never given a light,
+never given a touch of natural manhood by all this dingy, furtive,
+canting, humbugging English world. Thank God! I'll soon be out of it!
+The shame of it! The very savages in Australia initiate their children
+better than the English do to-day. Neither of us was ever given a
+view of what they call morality that didn't make it show as shabby
+subservience, as the meanest discretion, an abject submission to
+unreasonable prohibitions! meek surrender of mind and body to the
+dictation of pedants and old women and fools. We weren't taught--we
+were mumbled at! And when we found that the thing they called unclean,
+unclean, was Pagan beauty--God! it was a glory to sin, Britten, it was a
+pride and splendour like bathing in the sunlight after dust and grime!”
+
+“Yes,” said Britten. “That's all very well--”
+
+I interrupted him. “I know there's a case--I'm beginning to think it a
+valid case against us; but we never met it! There's a steely pride in
+self restraint, a nobility of chastity, but only for those who see and
+think and act--untrammeled and unafraid. The other thing, the current
+thing, why! it's worth as much as the chastity of a monkey kept in a
+cage by itself!” I put my foot in a chair, and urged my case upon him.
+“This is a dirty world, Britten, simply because it is a muddled world,
+and the thing you call morality is dirtier now than the thing you call
+immorality. Why don't the moralists pick their stuff out of the slime
+if they care for it, and wipe it?--damn them! I am burning now to say:
+'Yes, we did this and this,' to all the world. All the world!... I
+will!”
+
+Britten rubbed the palm of his hand on the corner of his desk. “That's
+all very well, Remington,” he said. “You mean to go.”
+
+He stopped and began again. “If you didn't know you were in the wrong
+you wouldn't be so damned rhetorical. You're in the wrong. It's as plain
+to you as it is to me. You're leaving a big work, you're leaving a wife
+who trusted you, to go and live with your jolly mistress.... You won't
+see you're a statesman that matters, that no single man, maybe, might
+come to such influence as you in the next ten years. You're throwing
+yourself away and accusing your country of rejecting you.”
+
+He swung round upon his swivel at me. “Remington,” he said, “have you
+forgotten the immense things our movement means?”
+
+I thought. “Perhaps I am rhetorical,” I said.
+
+“But the things we might achieve! If you'd only stay now--even now! Oh!
+you'd suffer a little socially, but what of that? You'd be able to go
+on--perhaps all the better for hostility of the kind you'd get. You
+know, Remington--you KNOW.”
+
+I thought and went back to his earlier point. “If I am rhetorical,
+at any rate it's a living feeling behind it. Yes, I remember all the
+implications of our aims--very splendid, very remote. But just now it's
+rather like offering to give a freezing man the sunlit Himalayas from
+end to end in return for his camp-fire. When you talk of me and my jolly
+mistress, it isn't fair. That misrepresents everything. I'm not going
+out of this--for delights. That's the sort of thing men like Snuffles
+and Keyhole imagine--that excites them! When I think of the things
+these creatures think! Ugh! But YOU know better? You know that physical
+passion that burns like a fire--ends clean. I'm going for love,
+Britten--if I sinned for passion. I'm going, Britten, because when I saw
+her the other day she HURT me. She hurt me damnably, Britten.... I've
+been a cold man--I've led a rhetorical life--you hit me with that
+word!--I put things in a windy way, I know, but what has got hold of
+me at last is her pain. She's ill. Don't you understand? She's a sick
+thing--a weak thing. She's no more a goddess than I'm a god.... I'm
+not in love with her now; I'm RAW with love for her. I feel like a man
+that's been flayed. I have been flayed.... You don't begin to imagine
+the sort of helpless solicitude.... She's not going to do things easily;
+she's ill. Her courage fails.... It's hard to put things when one isn't
+rhetorical, but it's this, Britten--there are distresses that matter
+more than all the delights or achievements in the world.... I made
+her what she is--as I never made Margaret. I've made her--I've broken
+her.... I'm going with my own woman. The rest of my life and England,
+and so forth, must square itself to that....”
+
+For a long time, as it seemed, we remained silent and motionless. We'd
+said all we had to say. My eyes caught a printed slip upon the desk
+before him, and I came back abruptly to the paper.
+
+I picked up this galley proof. It was one of Winter's essays. “This
+man goes on doing first-rate stuff,” I said. “I hope you will keep him
+going.”
+
+He did not answer for a moment or so. “I'll keep him going,” he said at
+last with a sigh.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+I have a letter Margaret wrote me within a week of our flight. I cannot
+resist transcribing some of it here, because it lights things as no word
+of mine can do. It is a string of nearly inconsecutive thoughts written
+in pencil in a fine, tall, sprawling hand. Its very inconsecutiveness is
+essential. Many words are underlined. It was in answer to one from me;
+but what I wrote has passed utterly from my mind....
+
+“Certainly,” she says, “I want to hear from you, but I do not want
+to see you. There's a sort of abstract YOU that I want to go on with.
+Something I've made out of you.... I want to know things about you--but
+I don't want to see or feel or imagine. When some day I have got rid
+of my intolerable sense of proprietorship, it may be different. Then
+perhaps we may meet again. I think it is even more the loss of our
+political work and dreams that I am feeling than the loss of your
+presence. Aching loss. I thought so much of the things we were DOING for
+the world--had given myself so unreservedly. You've left me with nothing
+to DO. I am suddenly at loose ends....
+
+“We women are trained to be so dependent on a man. I've got no life of
+my own at all. It seems now to me that I wore my clothes even for you
+and your schemes....
+
+“After I have told myself a hundred times why this has happened, I ask
+again, 'Why did he give things up? Why did he give things up?'...
+
+“It is just as though you were wilfully dead....
+
+“Then I ask again and again whether this thing need have happened at
+all, whether if I had had a warning, if I had understood better, I might
+not have adapted myself to your restless mind and made this catastrophe
+impossible....
+
+“Oh, my dear! why hadn't you the pluck to hurt me at the beginning, and
+tell me what you thought of me and life? You didn't give me a chance;
+not a chance. I suppose you couldn't. All these things you and I stood
+away from. You let my first repugnances repel you....
+
+“It is strange to think after all these years that I should be asking
+myself, do I love you? have I loved you? In a sense I think I HATE
+you. I feel you have taken my life, dragged it in your wake for a time,
+thrown it aside. I am resentful. Unfairly resentful, for why should I
+exact that you should watch and understand my life, when clearly I have
+understood so little of yours. But I am savage--savage at the wrecking
+of all you were to do.
+
+“Oh, why--why did you give things up?
+
+“No human being is his own to do what he likes with. You were not
+only pledged to my tiresome, ineffectual companionship, but to great
+purposes. They ARE great purposes....
+
+“If only I could take up your work as you leave it, with the strength
+you had--then indeed I feel I could let you go--you and your young
+mistress.... All that matters so little to me....
+
+“Yet I think I must indeed love you yourself in my slower way. At times
+I am mad with jealousy at the thought of all I hadn't the wit to give
+you.... I've always hidden my tears from you--and what was in my heart.
+It's my nature to hide--and you, you want things brought to you to see.
+You are so curious as to be almost cruel. You don't understand reserves.
+You have no mercy with restraints and reservations. You are not really
+a CIVILISED man at all. You hate pretences--and not only pretences but
+decent coverings....
+
+“It's only after one has lost love and the chance of loving that slow
+people like myself find what they might have done. Why wasn't I bold and
+reckless and abandoned? It's as reasonable to ask that, I suppose, as to
+ask why my hair is fair....
+
+“I go on with these perhapses over and over again here when I find
+myself alone....
+
+“My dear, my dear, you can't think of the desolation of things--I shall
+never go back to that house we furnished together, that was to have been
+the laboratory (do you remember calling it a laboratory?) in which you
+were to forge so much of the new order....
+
+“But, dear, if I can help you--even now--in any way--help both of you, I
+mean.... It tears me when I think of you poor and discredited. You will
+let me help you if I can--it will be the last wrong not to let me do
+that....
+
+“You had better not get ill. If you do, and I hear of it--I shall come
+after you with a troupe of doctor's and nurses. If I am a failure as a
+wife, no one has ever said I was anything but a success as a district
+visitor....”
+
+There are other sheets, but I cannot tell whether they were written
+before or after the ones from which I have quoted. And most of them
+have little things too intimate to set down. But this oddly penetrating
+analysis of our differences must, I think, be given.
+
+“There are all sorts of things I can't express about this and want to.
+There's this difference that has always been between us, that you like
+nakedness and wildness, and I, clothing and restraint. It goes through
+everything. You are always TALKING of order and system, and the splendid
+dream of the order that might replace the muddled system you hate, but
+by a sort of instinct you seem to want to break the law. I've watched
+you so closely. Now I want to obey laws, to make sacrifices, to follow
+rules. I don't want to make, but I do want to keep. You are at once
+makers and rebels, you and Isabel too. You're bad people--criminal
+people, I feel, and yet full of something the world must have. You're
+so much better than me, and so much viler. It may be there is no making
+without destruction, but it seems to me sometimes that it is nothing
+but an instinct for lawlessness that drives you. You remind me--do you
+remember?--of that time we went from Naples to Vesuvius, and walked
+over the hot new lava there. Do you remember how tired I was? I know it
+disappointed you that I was tired. One walked there in spite of the heat
+because there was a crust; like custom, like law. But directly a crust
+forms on things, you are restless to break down to the fire again.
+You talk of beauty, both of you, as something terrible, mysterious,
+imperative. YOUR beauty is something altogether different from anything
+I know or feel. It has pain in it. Yet you always speak as though it was
+something I ought to feel and am dishonest not to feel. MY beauty is
+a quiet thing. You have always laughed at my feeling for old-fashioned
+chintz and blue china and Sheraton. But I like all these familiar USED
+things. My beauty is STILL beauty, and yours, is excitement. I
+know nothing of the fascination of the fire, or why one should go
+deliberately out of all the decent fine things of life to run dangers
+and be singed and tormented and destroyed. I don't understand....”
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+I remember very freshly the mood of our departure from London, the
+platform of Charing Cross with the big illuminated clock overhead, the
+bustle of porters and passengers with luggage, the shouting of newsboys
+and boys with flowers and sweets, and the groups of friends seeing
+travellers off by the boat train. Isabel sat very quiet and still in the
+compartment, and I stood upon the platform with the door open, with
+a curious reluctance to take the last step that should sever me from
+London's ground. I showed our tickets, and bought a handful of red roses
+for her. At last came the guards crying: “Take your seats,” and I got
+in and closed the door on me. We had, thank Heaven! a compartment to
+ourselves. I let down the window and stared out.
+
+There was a bustle of final adieux on the platform, a cry of “Stand
+away, please, stand away!” and the train was gliding slowly and smoothly
+out of the station.
+
+I looked out upon the river as the train rumbled with slowly gathering
+pace across the bridge, and the bobbing black heads of the pedestrians
+in the footway, and the curve of the river and the glowing great hotels,
+and the lights and reflections and blacknesses of that old, familiar
+spectacle. Then with a common thought, we turned our eyes westward to
+where the pinnacles of Westminster and the shining clock tower rose hard
+and clear against the still, luminous sky.
+
+“They'll be in Committee on the Reformatory Bill to-night,” I said, a
+little stupidly.
+
+“And so,” I added, “good-bye to London!”
+
+We said no more, but watched the south-side streets below--bright gleams
+of lights and movement, and the dark, dim, monstrous shapes of houses
+and factories. We ran through Waterloo Station, London Bridge, New
+Cross, St. John's. We said never a word. It seemed to me that for a time
+we had exhausted our emotions. We had escaped, we had cut our knot,
+we had accepted the last penalty of that headlong return of mine from
+Chicago a year and a half ago. That was all settled. That harvest of
+feelings we had reaped. I thought now only of London, of London as the
+symbol of all we were leaving and all we had lost in the world. I felt
+nothing now but an enormous and overwhelming regret....
+
+The train swayed and rattled on its way. We ran through old Bromstead,
+where once I had played with cities and armies on the nursery floor. The
+sprawling suburbs with their scattered lights gave way to dim tree-set
+country under a cloud-veiled, intermittently shining moon. We passed
+Cardcaster Place. Perhaps old Wardingham, that pillar of the old
+Conservatives, was there, fretting over his unsuccessful struggle with
+our young Toryism. Little he recked of this new turn of the wheel and
+how it would confirm his contempt of all our novelties. Perhaps some
+faint intimation drew him to the window to see behind the stems of the
+young fir trees that bordered his domain, the little string of lighted
+carriage windows gliding southward....
+
+Suddenly I began to realise just what it was we were doing.
+
+And now, indeed, I knew what London had been to me, London where I
+had been born and educated, the slovenly mother of my mind and all my
+ambitions, London and the empire! It seemed to me we must be going
+out to a world that was utterly empty. All our significance fell from
+us--and before us was no meaning any more. We were leaving London; my
+hand, which had gripped so hungrily upon its complex life, had been
+forced from it, my fingers left their hold. That was over. I should
+never have a voice in public affairs again. The inexorable unwritten
+law which forbids overt scandal sentenced me. We were going out to a
+new life, a life that appeared in that moment to be a mere shrivelled
+remnant of me, a mere residuum of sheltering and feeding and seeing
+amidst alien scenery and the sound of unfamiliar tongues. We were going
+to live cheaply in a foreign place, so cut off that I meet now the
+merest stray tourist, the commonest tweed-clad stranger with a mixture
+of shyness and hunger.... And suddenly all the schemes I was leaving
+appeared fine and adventurous and hopeful as they had never done before.
+How great was this purpose I had relinquished, this bold and subtle
+remaking of the English will! I had doubted so many things, and now
+suddenly I doubted my unimportance, doubted my right to this suicidal
+abandonment. Was I not a trusted messenger, greatly trusted and
+favoured, who had turned aside by the way? Had I not, after all, stood
+for far more than I had thought; was I not filching from that dear great
+city of my birth and life, some vitally necessary thing, a key, a link,
+a reconciling clue in her political development, that now she might seek
+vaguely for in vain? What is one life against the State? Ought I not
+to have sacrificed Isabel and all my passion and sorrow for Isabel, and
+held to my thing--stuck to my thing?
+
+I heard as though he had spoken it in the carriage Britten's “It WAS
+a good game.” No end of a game. And for the first time I imagined the
+faces and voices of Crupp and Esmeer and Gane when they learnt of
+this secret flight, this flight of which they were quite unwarned. And
+Shoesmith might be there in the house,--Shoesmith who was to have been
+married in four days--the thing might hit him full in front of any kind
+of people. Cruel eyes might watch him. Why the devil hadn't I written
+letters to warn them all? I could have posted them five minutes before
+the train started. I had never thought to that moment of the immense
+mess they would be in; how the whole edifice would clatter about their
+ears. I had a sudden desire to stop the train and go back for a day,
+for two days, to set that negligence right. My brain for a moment
+brightened, became animated and prolific of ideas. I thought of a
+brilliant line we might have taken on that confounded Reformatory
+Bill....
+
+That sort of thing was over....
+
+What indeed wasn't over? I passed to a vaguer, more multitudinous
+perception of disaster, the friends I had lost already since Altiora
+began her campaign, the ampler remnant whom now I must lose. I thought
+of people I had been merry with, people I had worked with and played
+with, the companions of talkative walks, the hostesses of houses that
+had once glowed with welcome for us both. I perceived we must lose them
+all. I saw life like a tree in late autumn that had once been rich and
+splendid with friends--and now the last brave dears would be hanging on
+doubtfully against the frosty chill of facts, twisting and tortured in
+the universal gale of indignation, trying to evade the cold blast of the
+truth. I had betrayed my party, my intimate friend, my wife, the
+wife whose devotion had made me what I was. For awhile the figure of
+Margaret, remote, wounded, shamed, dominated my mind, and the thought of
+my immense ingratitude. Damn them! they'd take it out of her too. I had
+a feeling that I wanted to go straight back and grip some one by the
+throat, some one talking ill of Margaret. They'd blame her for not
+keeping me, for letting things go so far.... I wanted the whole world
+to know how fine she was. I saw in imagination the busy, excited
+dinner tables at work upon us all, rather pleasantly excited, brightly
+indignant, merciless.
+
+Well, it's the stuff we are!...
+
+Then suddenly, stabbing me to the heart, came a vision of Margaret's
+tears and the sound of her voice saying, “Husband mine! Oh! husband
+mine! To see you cry!”...
+
+I came out of a cloud of thoughts to discover the narrow compartment,
+with its feeble lamp overhead, and our rugs and hand-baggage swaying on
+the rack, and Isabel, very still in front of me, gripping my wilting red
+roses tightly in her bare and ringless hand.
+
+For a moment I could not understand her attitude, and then I perceived
+she was sitting bent together with her head averted from the light to
+hide the tears that were streaming down her face. She had not got her
+handkerchief out for fear that I should see this, but I saw her tears,
+dark drops of tears, upon her sleeve....
+
+I suppose she had been watching my expression, divining my thoughts.
+
+For a time I stared at her and was motionless, in a sort of still and
+weary amazement. Why had we done this injury to one another? WHY? Then
+something stirred within me.
+
+“ISABEL!” I whispered.
+
+She made no sign.
+
+“Isabel!” I repeated, and then crossed over to her and crept closely to
+her, put my arm about her, and drew her wet cheek to mine.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The New Machiavelli, by Herbert George Wells
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW MACHIAVELLI ***
+
+***** This file should be named 1047-0.txt or 1047-0.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/0/4/1047/
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
+Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the Foundation”
+ or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project
+Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+“Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, “Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.”
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+“Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
+of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/old/1047-0.zip b/old/1047-0.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2bbd214
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1047-0.zip
diff --git a/old/1047-h.zip b/old/1047-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4204c6c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1047-h.zip
diff --git a/old/1047-h/1047-h.htm b/old/1047-h/1047-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fcdd09f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1047-h/1047-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,17982 @@
+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The New Machiavelli, by H. G. Wells
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The New Machiavelli, by Herbert George Wells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The New Machiavelli
+
+Author: Herbert George Wells
+
+Release Date: August 2, 2008 [EBook #1047]
+[Last Updated: July 31, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW MACHIAVELLI ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      by H. G. Wells
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> <b>BOOK THE FIRST: THE MAKING OF A MAN</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS
+        NEVER WRITTEN </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ SCHOLASTIC </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ ADOLESCENCE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> <b>BOOK THE SECOND: MARGARET</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ MARGARET IN LONDON </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ MARGARET IN VENICE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> <b>BOOK THE THIRD: THE HEART OF POLITICS</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ THE RIDDLE FOR THE
+        STATESMAN </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ SEEKING ASSOCIATES </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ SECESSION </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ THE BESETTING OF SEX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> <b>BOOK THE FOURTH: ISABEL</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ LOVE AND SUCCESS </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ THE BREAKING POINT </a>
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      BOOK THE FIRST: THE MAKING OF A MAN
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since I came to this place I have been very restless, wasting my energies
+      in the futile beginning of ill-conceived books. One does not settle down
+      very readily at two and forty to a new way of living, and I have found
+      myself with the teeming interests of the life I have abandoned still
+      buzzing like a swarm of homeless bees in my head. My mind has been full of
+      confused protests and justifications. In any case I should have found
+      difficulties enough in expressing the complex thing I have to tell, but it
+      has added greatly to my trouble that I have a great analogue, that a
+      certain Niccolo Machiavelli chanced to fall out of politics at very much
+      the age I have reached, and wrote a book to engage the restlessness of his
+      mind, very much as I have wanted to do. He wrote about the relation of the
+      great constructive spirit in politics to individual character and
+      weaknesses, and so far his achievement lies like a deep rut in the road of
+      my intention. It has taken me far astray. It is a matter of many weeks now&mdash;diversified
+      indeed by some long drives into the mountains behind us and a memorable
+      sail to Genoa across the blue and purple waters that drowned Shelley&mdash;since
+      I began a laboured and futile imitation of &ldquo;The Prince.&rdquo; I sat up late
+      last night with the jumbled accumulation; and at last made a little fire
+      of olive twigs and burnt it all, sheet by sheet&mdash;to begin again clear
+      this morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But incidentally I have re-read most of Machiavelli, not excepting those
+      scandalous letters of his to Vettori, and it seems to me, now that I have
+      released myself altogether from his literary precedent, that he still has
+      his use for me. In spite of his vast prestige I claim kindred with him and
+      set his name upon my title-page, in partial intimation of the matter of my
+      story. He takes me with sympathy not only by reason of the dream he
+      pursued and the humanity of his politics, but by the mixture of his
+      nature. His vices come in, essential to my issue. He is dead and gone, all
+      his immediate correlations to party and faction have faded to
+      insignificance, leaving only on the one hand his broad method and
+      conceptions, and upon the other his intimate living personality, exposed
+      down to its salacious corners as the soul of no contemporary can ever be
+      exposed. Of those double strands it is I have to write, of the subtle
+      protesting perplexing play of instinctive passion and desire against too
+      abstract a dream of statesmanship. But things that seemed to lie very far
+      apart in Machiavelli's time have come near to one another; it is no simple
+      story of white passions struggling against the red that I have to tell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The state-making dream is a very old dream indeed in the world's history.
+      It plays too small a part in novels. Plato and Confucius are but the
+      highest of a great host of minds that have had a kindred aspiration, have
+      dreamt of a world of men better ordered, happier, finer, securer. They
+      imagined cities grown more powerful and peoples made rich and
+      multitudinous by their efforts, they thought in terms of harbours and
+      shining navies, great roads engineered marvellously, jungles cleared and
+      deserts conquered, the ending of muddle and diseases and dirt and misery;
+      the ending of confusions that waste human possibilities; they thought of
+      these things with passion and desire as other men think of the soft lines
+      and tender beauty of women. Thousands of men there are to-day almost
+      mastered by this white passion of statecraft, and in nearly every one who
+      reads and thinks you could find, I suspect, some sort of answering
+      response. But in every one it presents itself extraordinarily entangled
+      and mixed up with other, more intimate things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was so with Machiavelli. I picture him at San Casciano as he lived in
+      retirement upon his property after the fall of the Republic, perhaps with
+      a twinge of the torture that punished his conspiracy still lurking in his
+      limbs. Such twinges could not stop his dreaming. Then it was &ldquo;The Prince&rdquo;
+       was written. All day he went about his personal affairs, saw homely
+      neighbours, dealt with his family, gave vent to everyday passions. He
+      would sit in the shop of Donato del Corno gossiping curiously among
+      vicious company, or pace the lonely woods of his estate, book in hand,
+      full of bitter meditations. In the evening he returned home and went to
+      his study. At the entrance, he says, he pulled off his peasant clothes
+      covered with the dust and dirt of that immediate life, washed himself, put
+      on his &ldquo;noble court dress,&rdquo; closed the door on the world of toiling and
+      getting, private loving, private hating and personal regrets, sat down
+      with a sigh of contentment to those wider dreams.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I like to think of him so, with brown books before him lit by the light of
+      candles in silver candlesticks, or heading some new chapter of &ldquo;The
+      Prince,&rdquo; with a grey quill in his clean fine hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So writing, he becomes a symbol for me, and the less none because of his
+      animal humour, his queer indecent side, and because of such lapses into
+      utter meanness as that which made him sound the note of the begging-letter
+      writer even in his &ldquo;Dedication,&rdquo; reminding His Magnificence very urgently,
+      as if it were the gist of his matter, of the continued malignity of
+      fortune in his affairs. These flaws complete him. They are my reason for
+      preferring him as a symbol to Plato, of whose indelicate side we know
+      nothing, and whose correspondence with Dionysius of Syracuse has perished;
+      or to Confucius who travelled China in search of a Prince he might
+      instruct, with lapses and indignities now lost in the mists of ages. They
+      have achieved the apotheosis of individual forgetfulness, and Plato has
+      the added glory of that acquired beauty, that bust of the Indian Bacchus
+      which is now indissolubly mingled with his tradition. They have passed
+      into the world of the ideal, and every humbug takes his freedoms with
+      their names. But Machiavelli, more recent and less popular, is still all
+      human and earthly, a fallen brother&mdash;and at the same time that nobly
+      dressed and nobly dreaming writer at the desk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That vision of the strengthened and perfected state is protagonist in my
+      story. But as I re-read &ldquo;The Prince&rdquo; and thought out the manner of my now
+      abandoned project, I came to perceive how that stir and whirl of human
+      thought one calls by way of embodiment the French Revolution, has altered
+      absolutely the approach to such a question. Machiavelli, like Plato and
+      Pythagoras and Confucius two hundred odd decades before him, saw only one
+      method by which a thinking man, himself not powerful, might do the work of
+      state building, and that was by seizing the imagination of a Prince.
+      Directly these men turned their thoughts towards realisation, their
+      attitudes became&mdash;what shall I call it?&mdash;secretarial.
+      Machiavelli, it is true, had some little doubts about the particular
+      Prince he wanted, whether it was Caesar Borgia of Giuliano or Lorenzo, but
+      a Prince it had to be. Before I saw clearly the differences of our own
+      time I searched my mind for the modern equivalent of a Prince. At various
+      times I redrafted a parallel dedication to the Prince of Wales, to the
+      Emperor William, to Mr. Evesham, to a certain newspaper proprietor who was
+      once my schoolfellow at City Merchants', to Mr. J. D. Rockefeller&mdash;all
+      of them men in their several ways and circumstances and possibilities,
+      princely. Yet in every case my pen bent of its own accord towards irony
+      because&mdash;because, although at first I did not realise it, I myself am
+      just as free to be a prince. The appeal was unfair. The old sort of
+      Prince, the old little principality has vanished from the world. The
+      commonweal is one man's absolute estate and responsibility no more. In
+      Machiavelli's time it was indeed to an extreme degree one man's affair.
+      But the days of the Prince who planned and directed and was the source and
+      centre of all power are ended. We are in a condition of affairs infinitely
+      more complex, in which every prince and statesman is something of a
+      servant and every intelligent human being something of a Prince. No
+      magnificent pensive Lorenzos remain any more in this world for secretarial
+      hopes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a sense it is wonderful how power has vanished, in a sense wonderful
+      how it has increased. I sit here, an unarmed discredited man, at a small
+      writing-table in a little defenceless dwelling among the vines, and no
+      human being can stop my pen except by the deliberate self-immolation of
+      murdering me, nor destroy its fruits except by theft and crime. No King,
+      no council, can seize and torture me; no Church, no nation silence me.
+      Such powers of ruthless and complete suppression have vanished. But that
+      is not because power has diminished, but because it has increased and
+      become multitudinous, because it has dispersed itself and specialised. It
+      is no longer a negative power we have, but positive; we cannot prevent,
+      but we can do. This age, far beyond all previous ages, is full of powerful
+      men, men who might, if they had the will for it, achieve stupendous
+      things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The things that might be done to-day! The things indeed that are being
+      done! It is the latter that give one so vast a sense of the former. When I
+      think of the progress of physical and mechanical science, of medicine and
+      sanitation during the last century, when I measure the increase in general
+      education and average efficiency, the power now available for human
+      service, the merely physical increment, and compare it with anything that
+      has ever been at man's disposal before, and when I think of what a little
+      straggling, incidental, undisciplined and uncoordinated minority of
+      inventors, experimenters, educators, writers and organisers has achieved
+      this development of human possibilities, achieved it in spite of the
+      disregard and aimlessness of the huge majority, and the passionate
+      resistance of the active dull, my imagination grows giddy with dazzling
+      intimations of the human splendours the justly organised state may yet
+      attain. I glimpse for a bewildering instant the heights that may be
+      scaled, the splendid enterprises made possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the appeal goes out now in other forms, in a book that catches at
+      thousands of readers for the eye of a Prince diffused. It is the old
+      appeal indeed for the unification of human effort, the ending of
+      confusions, but instead of the Machiavellian deference to a flattered
+      lord, a man cries out of his heart to the unseen fellowship about him. The
+      last written dedication of all those I burnt last night, was to no single
+      man, but to the socially constructive passion&mdash;in any man....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is, moreover, a second great difference in kind between my world and
+      Machiavelli's. We are discovering women. It is as if they had come across
+      a vast interval since his time, into the very chamber of the statesman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Machiavelli's outlook the interest of womanhood was in a region of life
+      almost infinitely remote from his statecraft. They were the vehicle of
+      children, but only Imperial Rome and the new world of to-day have ever had
+      an inkling of the significance that might give them in the state. They did
+      their work, he thought, as the ploughed earth bears its crops. Apart from
+      their function of fertility they gave a humorous twist to life, stimulated
+      worthy men to toil, and wasted the hours of Princes. He left the thought
+      of women outside with his other dusty things when he went into his study
+      to write, dismissed them from his mind. But our modern world is burthened
+      with its sense of the immense, now half articulate, significance of women.
+      They stand now, as it were, close beside the silver candlesticks, speaking
+      as Machiavelli writes, until he stays his pen and turns to discuss his
+      writing with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is this gradual discovery of sex as a thing collectively portentous
+      that I have to mingle with my statecraft if my picture is to be true which
+      has turned me at length from a treatise to the telling of my own story. In
+      my life I have paralleled very closely the slow realisations that are
+      going on in the world about me. I began life ignoring women, they came to
+      me at first perplexing and dishonouring; only very slowly and very late in
+      my life and after misadventure, did I gauge the power and beauty of the
+      love of man and woman and learnt how it must needs frame a justifiable
+      vision of the ordered world. Love has brought me to disaster, because my
+      career had been planned regardless of its possibility and value. But
+      Machiavelli, it seems to me, when he went into his study, left not only
+      the earth of life outside but its unsuspected soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Like Machiavelli at San Casciano, if I may take this analogy one step
+      further, I too am an exile. Office and leading are closed to me. The
+      political career that promised so much for me is shattered and ended for
+      ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I look out from this vine-wreathed veranda under the branches of a stone
+      pine; I see wide and far across a purple valley whose sides are terraced
+      and set with houses of pine and ivory, the Gulf of Liguria gleaming
+      sapphire blue, and cloud-like baseless mountains hanging in the sky, and I
+      think of lank and coaly steamships heaving on the grey rollers of the
+      English Channel and darkling streets wet with rain, I recall as if I were
+      back there the busy exit from Charing Cross, the cross and the
+      money-changers' offices, the splendid grime of giant London and the crowds
+      going perpetually to and fro, the lights by night and the urgency and
+      eventfulness of that great rain-swept heart of the modern world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is difficult to think we have left that&mdash;for many years if not for
+      ever. In thought I walk once more in Palace Yard and hear the clink and
+      clatter of hansoms and the quick quiet whirr of motors; I go in vivid
+      recent memories through the stir in the lobbies, I sit again at eventful
+      dinners in those old dining-rooms like cellars below the House&mdash;dinners
+      that ended with shrill division bells, I think of huge clubs swarming and
+      excited by the bulletins of that electoral battle that was for me the
+      opening opportunity. I see the stencilled names and numbers go up on the
+      green baize, constituency after constituency, amidst murmurs or loud
+      shouting....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is over for me now and vanished. That opportunity will come no more.
+      Very probably you have heard already some crude inaccurate version of our
+      story and why I did not take office, and have formed your partial
+      judgement on me. And so it is I sit now at my stone table, half out of
+      life already, in a warm, large, shadowy leisure, splashed with sunlight
+      and hung with vine tendrils, with paper before me to distil such wisdom as
+      I can, as Machiavelli in his exile sought to do, from the things I have
+      learnt and felt during the career that has ended now in my divorce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I climbed high and fast from small beginnings. I had the mind of my party.
+      I do not know where I might not have ended, but for this red blaze that
+      came out of my unguarded nature and closed my career for ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I dreamt first of states and cities and political things when I was a
+      little boy in knickerbockers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I think of how such things began in my mind, there comes back to me
+      the memory of an enormous bleak room with its ceiling going up to heaven
+      and its floor covered irregularly with patched and defective oilcloth and
+      a dingy mat or so and a &ldquo;surround&rdquo; as they call it, of dark stained wood.
+      Here and there against the wall are trunks and boxes. There are cupboards
+      on either side of the fireplace and bookshelves with books above them, and
+      on the wall and rather tattered is a large yellow-varnished geological map
+      of the South of England. Over the mantel is a huge lump of white coral
+      rock and several big fossil bones, and above that hangs the portrait of a
+      brainy gentleman, sliced in half and displaying an interior of intricate
+      detail and much vigour of coloring. It is the floor I think of chiefly;
+      over the oilcloth of which, assumed to be land, spread towns and villages
+      and forts of wooden bricks; there are steep square hills (geologically,
+      volumes of Orr's CYCLOPAEDIA OF THE SCIENCES) and the cracks and spaces of
+      the floor and the bare brown surround were the water channels and open sea
+      of that continent of mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I still remember with infinite gratitude the great-uncle to whom I owe my
+      bricks. He must have been one of those rare adults who have not forgotten
+      the chagrins and dreams of childhood. He was a prosperous west of England
+      builder; including my father he had three nephews, and for each of them he
+      caused a box of bricks to be made by an out-of-work carpenter, not the
+      insufficient supply of the toyshop, you understand, but a really adequate
+      quantity of bricks made out of oak and shaped and smoothed, bricks about
+      five inches by two and a half by one, and half-bricks and quarter-bricks
+      to correspond. There were hundreds of them, many hundreds. I could build
+      six towers as high as myself with them, and there seemed quite enough for
+      every engineering project I could undertake. I could build whole towns
+      with streets and houses and churches and citadels; I could bridge every
+      gap in the oilcloth and make causeways over crumpled spaces (which I
+      feigned to be morasses), and on a keel of whole bricks it was possible to
+      construct ships to push over the high seas to the remotest port in the
+      room. And a disciplined population, that rose at last by sedulous begging
+      on birthdays and all convenient occasions to well over two hundred, of
+      lead sailors and soldiers, horse, foot and artillery, inhabited this
+      world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Justice has never been done to bricks and soldiers by those who write
+      about toys. The praises of the toy theatre have been a common theme for
+      essayists, the planning of the scenes, the painting and cutting out of the
+      caste, penny plain twopence coloured, the stink and glory of the
+      performance and the final conflagration. I had such a theatre once, but I
+      never loved it nor hoped for much from it; my bricks and soldiers were my
+      perpetual drama. I recall an incessant variety of interests. There was the
+      mystery and charm of the complicated buildings one could make, with long
+      passages and steps and windows through which one peeped into their
+      intricacies, and by means of slips of card one could make slanting ways in
+      them, and send marbles rolling from top to base and thence out into the
+      hold of a waiting ship. Then there were the fortresses and gun
+      emplacements and covered ways in which one's soldiers went. And there was
+      commerce; the shops and markets and store-rooms full of nasturtium seed,
+      thrift seed, lupin beans and suchlike provender from the garden; such
+      stuff one stored in match-boxes and pill-boxes, or packed in sacks of old
+      glove fingers tied up with thread and sent off by waggons along the great
+      military road to the beleaguered fortress on the Indian frontier beyond
+      the worn places that were dismal swamps. And there were battles on the
+      way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That great road is still clear in my memory. I was given, I forget by what
+      benefactor, certain particularly fierce red Indians of lead&mdash;I have
+      never seen such soldiers since&mdash;and for these my father helped me to
+      make tepees of brown paper, and I settled them in a hitherto desolate
+      country under the frowning nail-studded cliffs of an ancient trunk. Then I
+      conquered them and garrisoned their land. (Alas! they died, no doubt
+      through contact with civilisation&mdash;one my mother trod on&mdash;and
+      their land became a wilderness again and was ravaged for a time by a
+      clockwork crocodile of vast proportions.) And out towards the coal-scuttle
+      was a region near the impassable thickets of the ragged hearthrug where
+      lived certain china Zulus brandishing spears, and a mountain country of
+      rudely piled bricks concealing the most devious and enchanting caves and
+      several mines of gold and silver paper. Among these rocks a number of
+      survivors from a Noah's Ark made a various, dangerous, albeit frequently
+      invalid and crippled fauna, and I was wont to increase the uncultivated
+      wildness of this region further by trees of privet-twigs from the garden
+      hedge and box from the garden borders. By these territories went my
+      Imperial Road carrying produce to and fro, bridging gaps in the oilcloth,
+      tunnelling through Encyclopaedic hills&mdash;one tunnel was three volumes
+      long&mdash;defended as occasion required by camps of paper tents or brick
+      blockhouses, and ending at last in a magnificently engineered ascent to a
+      fortress on the cliffs commanding the Indian reservation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My games upon the floor must have spread over several years and developed
+      from small beginnings, incorporating now this suggestion and now that.
+      They stretch, I suppose, from seven to eleven or twelve. I played them
+      intermittently, and they bulk now in the retrospect far more significantly
+      than they did at the time. I played them in bursts, and then forgot them
+      for long periods; through the spring and summer I was mostly out of doors,
+      and school and classes caught me early. And in the retrospect I see them
+      all not only magnified and transfigured, but fore-shortened and confused
+      together. A clockwork railway, I seem to remember, came and went; one or
+      two clockwork boats, toy sailing ships that, being keeled, would do
+      nothing but lie on their beam ends on the floor; a detestable lot of
+      cavalrymen, undersized and gilt all over, given me by a maiden aunt, and
+      very much what one might expect from an aunt, that I used as Nero used his
+      Christians to ornament my public buildings; and I finally melted some into
+      fratricidal bullets, and therewith blew the rest to flat splashes of lead
+      by means of a brass cannon in the garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I find this empire of the floor much more vivid and detailed in my memory
+      now than many of the owners of the skirts and legs and boots that went
+      gingerly across its territories. Occasionally, alas! they stooped to
+      scrub, abolishing in one universal destruction the slow growth of whole
+      days of civilised development. I still remember the hatred and disgust of
+      these catastrophes. Like Noah I was given warnings. Did I disregard them,
+      coarse red hands would descend, plucking garrisons from fortresses and
+      sailors from ships, jumbling them up in their wrong boxes, clumsily so
+      that their rifles and swords were broken, sweeping the splendid curves of
+      the Imperial Road into heaps of ruins, casting the jungle growth of
+      Zululand into the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Master Dick,&rdquo; the voice of this cosmic calamity would say, &ldquo;you
+      ought to have put them away last night. No! I can't wait until you've
+      sailed them all away in ships. I got my work to do, and do it I will.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And in no time all my continents and lands were swirling water and swiping
+      strokes of house-flannel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was the worst of my giant visitants, but my mother too, dear lady,
+      was something of a terror to this microcosm. She wore spring-sided boots,
+      a kind of boot now vanished, I believe, from the world, with dull bodies
+      and shiny toes, and a silk dress with flounces that were very destructive
+      to the more hazardous viaducts of the Imperial Road. She was always, I
+      seem to remember, fetching me; fetching me for a meal, fetching me for a
+      walk or, detestable absurdity! fetching me for a wash and brush up, and
+      she never seemed to understand anything whatever of the political systems
+      across which she came to me. Also she forbade all toys on Sundays except
+      the bricks for church-building and the soldiers for church parade, or a
+      Scriptural use of the remains of the Noah's Ark mixed up with a wooden
+      Swiss dairy farm. But she really did not know whether a thing was a church
+      or not unless it positively bristled with cannon, and many a Sunday
+      afternoon have I played Chicago (with the fear of God in my heart) under
+      an infidel pretence that it was a new sort of ark rather elaborately done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chicago, I must explain, was based upon my father's description of the pig
+      slaughterings in that city and certain pictures I had seen. You made your
+      beasts&mdash;which were all the ark lot really, provisionally conceived as
+      pigs&mdash;go up elaborate approaches to a central pen, from which they
+      went down a cardboard slide four at a time, and dropped most satisfyingly
+      down a brick shaft, and pitter-litter over some steep steps to where a
+      head slaughterman (ne Noah) strung a cotton loop round their legs and sent
+      them by pin hooks along a wire to a second slaughterman with a chipped
+      foot (formerly Mrs. Noah) who, if I remember rightly, converted them into
+      Army sausage by means of a portion of the inside of an old alarum clock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My mother did not understand my games, but my father did. He wore
+      bright-coloured socks and carpet slippers when he was indoors&mdash;my
+      mother disliked boots in the house&mdash;and he would sit down on my
+      little chair and survey the microcosm on the floor with admirable
+      understanding and sympathy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was he who gave me most of my toys and, I more than suspect, most of my
+      ideas. &ldquo;Here's some corrugated iron,&rdquo; he would say, &ldquo;suitable for roofs
+      and fencing,&rdquo; and hand me a lump of that stiff crinkled paper that is used
+      for packing medicine bottles. Or, &ldquo;Dick, do you see the tiger loose near
+      the Imperial Road?&mdash;won't do for your cattle ranch.&rdquo; And I would find
+      a bright new lead tiger like a special creation at large in the world, and
+      demanding a hunting expedition and much elaborate effort to get him safely
+      housed in the city menagerie beside the captured dragon crocodile, tamed
+      now, and his key lost and the heart and spring gone out of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And to the various irregular reading of my father I owe the inestimable
+      blessing of never having a boy's book in my boyhood except those of Jules
+      Verne. But my father used to get books for himself and me from the
+      Bromstead Institute, Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid and illustrated
+      histories; one of the Russo-Turkish war and one of Napier's expedition to
+      Abyssinia I read from end to end; Stanley and Livingstone, lives of
+      Wellington, Napoleon and Garibaldi, and back volumes of PUNCH, from which
+      I derived conceptions of foreign and domestic politics it has taken years
+      of adult reflection to correct. And at home permanently we had Wood's
+      NATURAL HISTORY, a brand-new illustrated Green's HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH
+      PEOPLE, Irving's COMPANIONS OF COLUMBUS, a great number of unbound parts
+      of some geographical work, a VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD I think it was called,
+      with pictures of foreign places, and Clarke's NEW TESTAMENT with a map of
+      Palestine, and a variety of other informing books bought at sales. There
+      was a Sowerby's BOTANY also, with thousands of carefully tinted pictures
+      of British plants, and one or two other important works in the
+      sitting-room. I was allowed to turn these over and even lie on the floor
+      with them on Sundays and other occasions of exceptional cleanliness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in the attic I found one day a very old forgotten map after the
+      fashion of a bird's-eye view, representing the Crimea, that fascinated me
+      and kept me for hours navigating its waters with a pin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My father was a lank-limbed man in easy shabby tweed clothes and with his
+      hands in his trouser pockets. He was a science teacher, taking a number of
+      classes at the Bromstead Institute in Kent under the old Science and Art
+      Department, and &ldquo;visiting&rdquo; various schools; and our resources were eked
+      out by my mother's income of nearly a hundred pounds a year, and by his
+      inheritance of a terrace of three palatial but structurally unsound stucco
+      houses near Bromstead Station.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were big clumsy residences in the earliest Victorian style,
+      interminably high and with deep damp basements and downstairs coal-cellars
+      and kitchens that suggested an architect vindictively devoted to the
+      discomfort of the servant class. If so, he had overreached himself and
+      defeated his end, for no servant would stay in them unless for exceptional
+      wages or exceptional tolerance of inefficiency or exceptional freedom in
+      repartee. Every storey in the house was from twelve to fifteen feet high
+      (which would have been cool and pleasant in a hot climate), and the stairs
+      went steeply up, to end at last in attics too inaccessible for occupation.
+      The ceilings had vast plaster cornices of classical design, fragments of
+      which would sometimes fall unexpectedly, and the wall-papers were bold and
+      gigantic in pattern and much variegated by damp and ill-mended rents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As my father was quite unable to let more than one of these houses at a
+      time, and that for the most part to eccentric and undesirable tenants, he
+      thought it politic to live in one of the two others, and devote the rent
+      he received from the let one, when it was let, to the incessant necessary
+      repairing of all three. He also did some of the repairing himself and,
+      smoking a bull-dog pipe the while, which my mother would not allow him to
+      do in the house, he cultivated vegetables in a sketchy, unpunctual and not
+      always successful manner in the unoccupied gardens. The three houses faced
+      north, and the back of the one we occupied was covered by a grape-vine
+      that yielded, I remember, small green grapes for pies in the spring, and
+      imperfectly ripe black grapes in favourable autumns for the purposes of
+      dessert. The grape-vine played an important part in my life, for my father
+      broke his neck while he was pruning it, when I was thirteen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My father was what is called a man of ideas, but they were not always good
+      ideas. My grandfather had been a private schoolmaster and one of the
+      founders of the College of Preceptors, and my father had assisted him in
+      his school until increasing competition and diminishing attendance had
+      made it evident that the days of small private schools kept by unqualified
+      persons were numbered. Thereupon my father had roused himself and had
+      qualified as a science teacher under the Science and Art Department, which
+      in these days had charge of the scientific and artistic education of the
+      mass of the English population, and had thrown himself into science
+      teaching and the earning of government grants therefor with great if
+      transitory zeal and success.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not remember anything of my father's earlier and more energetic time.
+      I was the child of my parents' middle years; they married when my father
+      was thirty-five and my mother past forty, and I saw only the last decadent
+      phase of his educational career.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Science and Art Department has vanished altogether from the world, and
+      people are forgetting it now with the utmost readiness and generosity.
+      Part of its substance and staff and spirit survive, more or less
+      completely digested into the Board of Education.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The world does move on, even in its government. It is wonderful how many
+      of the clumsy and limited governing bodies of my youth and early manhood
+      have given place now to more scientific and efficient machinery. When I
+      was a boy, Bromstead, which is now a borough, was ruled by a strange body
+      called a Local Board&mdash;it was the Age of Boards&mdash;and I still
+      remember indistinctly my father rejoicing at the breakfast-table over the
+      liberation of London from the corrupt and devastating control of a
+      Metropolitan Board of Works. Then there were also School Boards; I was
+      already practically in politics before the London School Board was
+      absorbed by the spreading tentacles of the London County Council.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It gives a measure of the newness of our modern ideas of the State to
+      remember that the very beginnings of public education lie within my
+      father's lifetime, and that many most intelligent and patriotic people
+      were shocked beyond measure at the State doing anything of the sort. When
+      he was born, totally illiterate people who could neither read a book nor
+      write more than perhaps a clumsy signature, were to be found everywhere in
+      England; and great masses of the population were getting no instruction at
+      all. Only a few schools flourished upon the patronage of exceptional
+      parents; all over the country the old endowed grammar schools were to be
+      found sinking and dwindling; many of them had closed altogether. In the
+      new great centres of population multitudes of children were sweated in the
+      factories, darkly ignorant and wretched and the under-equipped and
+      under-staffed National and British schools, supported by voluntary
+      contributions and sectarian rivalries, made an ineffectual fight against
+      this festering darkness. It was a condition of affairs clamouring for
+      remedies, but there was an immense amount of indifference and prejudice to
+      be overcome before any remedies were possible. Perhaps some day some
+      industrious and lucid historian will disentangle all the muddle of
+      impulses and antagonisms, the commercialism, utilitarianism, obstinate
+      conservatism, humanitarian enthusiasm, out of which our present
+      educational organisation arose. I have long since come to believe it
+      necessary that all new social institutions should be born in confusion,
+      and that at first they should present chiefly crude and ridiculous
+      aspects. The distrust of government in the Victorian days was far too
+      great, and the general intelligence far too low, to permit the State to go
+      about the new business it was taking up in a businesslike way, to train
+      teachers, build and equip schools, endow pedagogic research, and provide
+      properly written school-books. These things it was felt MUST be provided
+      by individual and local effort, and since it was manifest that it was
+      individual and local effort that were in default, it was reluctantly
+      agreed to stimulate them by money payments. The State set up a machinery
+      of examination both in Science and Art and for the elementary schools; and
+      payments, known technically as grants, were made in accordance with the
+      examination results attained, to such schools as Providence might see fit
+      to send into the world. In this way it was felt the Demand would be
+      established that would, according to the beliefs of that time, inevitably
+      ensure the Supply. An industry of &ldquo;Grant earning&rdquo; was created, and this
+      would give education as a necessary by-product.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the end this belief was found to need qualification, but Grant-earning
+      was still in full activity when I was a small boy. So far as the Science
+      and Art Department and my father are concerned, the task of examination
+      was entrusted to eminent scientific men, for the most part quite
+      unaccustomed to teaching. You see, if they also were teaching similar
+      classes to those they examined, it was feared that injustice might be
+      done. Year after year these eminent persons set questions and employed
+      subordinates to read and mark the increasing thousands of answers that
+      ensued, and having no doubt the national ideal of fairness well developed
+      in their minds, they were careful each year to re-read the preceding
+      papers before composing the current one, in order to see what it was usual
+      to ask. As a result of this, in the course of a few years the recurrence
+      and permutation of questions became almost calculable, and since the
+      practical object of the teaching was to teach people not science, but how
+      to write answers to these questions, the industry of Grant-earning assumed
+      a form easily distinguished from any kind of genuine education whatever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Other remarkable compromises had also to be made with the spirit of the
+      age. The unfortunate conflict between Religion and Science prevalent at
+      this time was mitigated, if I remember rightly, by making graduates in
+      arts and priests in the established church Science Teachers EX OFFICIO,
+      and leaving local and private enterprise to provide schools, diagrams,
+      books, material, according to the conceptions of efficiency prevalent in
+      the district. Private enterprise made a particularly good thing of the
+      books. A number of competing firms of publishers sprang into existence
+      specialising in Science and Art Department work; they set themselves to
+      produce text-books that should supply exactly the quantity and quality of
+      knowledge necessary for every stage of each of five and twenty subjects
+      into which desirable science was divided, and copies and models and
+      instructions that should give precisely the method and gestures esteemed
+      as proficiency in art. Every section of each book was written in the idiom
+      found to be most satisfactory to the examiners, and test questions
+      extracted from papers set in former years were appended to every chapter.
+      By means of these last the teacher was able to train his class to the very
+      highest level of grant-earning efficiency, and very naturally he cast all
+      other methods of exposition aside. First he posed his pupils with
+      questions and then dictated model replies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was my father's method of instruction. I attended his classes as an
+      elementary grant-earner from the age of ten until his death, and it is so
+      I remember him, sitting on the edge of a table, smothering a yawn
+      occasionally and giving out the infallible formulae to the industriously
+      scribbling class sitting in rows of desks before him. Occasionally he
+      would slide to his feet and go to a blackboard on an easel and draw on
+      that very slowly and deliberately in coloured chalks a diagram for the
+      class to copy in coloured pencils, and sometimes he would display a
+      specimen or arrange an experiment for them to see. The room in the
+      Institute in which he taught was equipped with a certain amount of
+      apparatus prescribed as necessary for subject this and subject that by the
+      Science and Art Department, and this my father would supplement with maps
+      and diagrams and drawings of his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he never really did experiments, except that in the class in
+      systematic botany he sometimes made us tease common flowers to pieces. He
+      did not do experiments if he could possibly help it, because in the first
+      place they used up time and gas for the Bunsen burner and good material in
+      a ruinous fashion, and in the second they were, in his rather careless and
+      sketchy hands, apt to endanger the apparatus of the Institute and even the
+      lives of his students. Then thirdly, real experiments involved washing up.
+      And moreover they always turned out wrong, and sometimes misled the too
+      observant learner very seriously and opened demoralising controversies.
+      Quite early in life I acquired an almost ineradicable sense of the
+      unscientific perversity of Nature and the impassable gulf that is fixed
+      between systematic science and elusive fact. I knew, for example, that in
+      science, whether it be subject XII., Organic Chemistry, or subject XVII.,
+      Animal Physiology, when you blow into a glass of lime-water it instantly
+      becomes cloudy, and if you continue to blow it clears again, whereas in
+      truth you may blow into the stuff from the lime-water bottle until you are
+      crimson in the face and painful under the ears, and it never becomes
+      cloudy at all. And I knew, too, that in science if you put potassium
+      chlorate into a retort and heat it over a Bunsen burner, oxygen is
+      disengaged and may be collected over water, whereas in real life if you do
+      anything of the sort the vessel cracks with a loud report, the potassium
+      chlorate descends sizzling upon the flame, the experimenter says &ldquo;Oh!
+      Damn!&rdquo; with astonishing heartiness and distinctness, and a lady student in
+      the back seats gets up and leaves the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Science is the organised conquest of Nature, and I can quite understand
+      that ancient libertine refusing to co-operate in her own undoing. And I
+      can quite understand, too, my father's preference for what he called an
+      illustrative experiment, which was simply an arrangement of the apparatus
+      in front of the class with nothing whatever by way of material, and the
+      Bunsen burner clean and cool, and then a slow luminous description of just
+      what you did put in it when you were so ill-advised as to carry the affair
+      beyond illustration, and just exactly what ought anyhow to happen when you
+      did. He had considerable powers of vivid expression, so that in this way
+      he could make us see all he described. The class, freed from any
+      unpleasant nervous tension, could draw this still life without flinching,
+      and if any part was too difficult to draw, then my father would produce a
+      simplified version on the blackboard to be copied instead. And he would
+      also write on the blackboard any exceptionally difficult but grant-earning
+      words, such as &ldquo;empyreumatic&rdquo; or &ldquo;botryoidal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Some words in constant use he rarely explained. I remember once sticking
+      up my hand and asking him in the full flow of description, &ldquo;Please, sir,
+      what is flocculent?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The precipitate is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir, but what does it mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! flocculent!&rdquo; said my father, &ldquo;flocculent! Why&mdash;&rdquo; he extended his
+      hand and arm and twiddled his fingers for a second in the air. &ldquo;Like
+      that,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought the explanation sufficient, but he paused for a moment after
+      giving it. &ldquo;As in a flock bed, you know,&rdquo; he added and resumed his
+      discourse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My father, I am afraid, carried a natural incompetence in practical
+      affairs to an exceptionally high level. He combined practical
+      incompetence, practical enterprise and a thoroughly sanguine temperament,
+      in a manner that I have never seen paralleled in any human being. He was
+      always trying to do new things in the briskest manner, under the
+      suggestion of books or papers or his own spontaneous imagination, and as
+      he had never been trained to do anything whatever in his life properly,
+      his futilities were extensive and thorough. At one time he nearly gave up
+      his classes for intensive culture, so enamoured was he of its
+      possibilities; the peculiar pungency of the manure he got, in pursuit of a
+      chemical theory of his own, has scarred my olfactory memories for a
+      lifetime. The intensive culture phase is very clear in my memory; it came
+      near the end of his career and when I was between eleven and twelve. I was
+      mobilised to gather caterpillars on several occasions, and assisted in
+      nocturnal raids upon the slugs by lantern-light that wrecked my
+      preparation work for school next day. My father dug up both lawns, and
+      trenched and manured in spasms of immense vigour alternating with periods
+      of paralysing distaste for the garden. And for weeks he talked about eight
+      hundred pounds an acre at every meal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A garden, even when it is not exasperated by intensive methods, is a thing
+      as exacting as a baby, its moods have to be watched; it does not wait upon
+      the cultivator's convenience, but has times of its own. Intensive culture
+      greatly increases this disposition to trouble mankind; it makes a garden
+      touchy and hysterical, a drugged and demoralised and over-irritated
+      garden. My father got at cross purposes with our two patches at an early
+      stage. Everything grew wrong from the first to last, and if my father's
+      manures intensified nothing else, they certainly intensified the
+      Primordial Curse. The peas were eaten in the night before they were three
+      inches high, the beans bore nothing but blight, the only apparent result
+      of a spraying of the potatoes was to develop a PENCHANT in the cat for
+      being ill indoors, the cucumber frames were damaged by the catapulting of
+      boys going down the lane at the back, and all your cucumbers were
+      mysteriously embittered. That lane with its occasional passers-by did much
+      to wreck the intensive scheme, because my father always stopped work and
+      went indoors if any one watched him. His special manure was apt to arouse
+      a troublesome spirit of inquiry in hardy natures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In digging his rows and shaping his patches he neglected the guiding
+      string and trusted to his eye altogether too much, and the consequent
+      obliquity and the various wind-breaks and scare-crows he erected, and
+      particularly an irrigation contrivance he began and never finished by
+      which everything was to be watered at once by means of pieces of gutter
+      from the roof and outhouses of Number 2, and a large and particularly
+      obstinate clump of elder-bushes in the abolished hedge that he had failed
+      to destroy entirely either by axe or by fire, combined to give the gardens
+      under intensive culture a singularly desolate and disorderly appearance.
+      He took steps towards the diversion of our house drain under the influence
+      of the Sewage Utilisation Society; but happily he stopped in time. He
+      hardly completed any of the operations he began; something else became
+      more urgent or simply he tired; a considerable area of the Number 2
+      territory was never even dug up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the end the affair irritated him beyond endurance. Never was a man less
+      horticulturally-minded. The clamour of these vegetables he had launched
+      into the world for his service and assistance, wore out his patience. He
+      would walk into the garden the happiest of men after a day or so of
+      disregard, talking to me of history perhaps or social organisation, or
+      summarising some book he had read. He talked to me of anything that
+      interested him, regardless of my limitations. Then he would begin to note
+      the growth of the weeds. &ldquo;This won't do,&rdquo; he would say and pull up a
+      handful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      More weeding would follow and the talk would become fragmentary. His hands
+      would become earthy, his nails black, weeds would snap off in his careless
+      grip, leaving the roots behind. The world would darken. He would look at
+      his fingers with disgusted astonishment. &ldquo;CURSE these weeds!&rdquo; he would say
+      from his heart. His discourse was at an end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have memories, too, of his sudden unexpected charges into the
+      tranquillity of the house, his hands and clothes intensively enriched. He
+      would come in like a whirlwind. &ldquo;This damned stuff all over me and the
+      Agricultural Chemistry Class at six! Bah! AAAAAAH!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      My mother would never learn not to attempt to break him of swearing on
+      such occasions. She would remain standing a little stiffly in the scullery
+      refusing to assist him to the adjectival towel he sought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you say such things&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He would dance with rage and hurl the soap about. &ldquo;The towel!&rdquo; he would
+      cry, flicking suds from big fingers in every direction; &ldquo;the towel! I'll
+      let the blithering class slide if you don't give me the towel! I'll give
+      up everything, I tell you&mdash;everything!&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last with the failure of the lettuces came the breaking point. I was in
+      the little arbour learning Latin irregular verbs when it happened. I can
+      see him still, his peculiar tenor voice still echoes in my brain, shouting
+      his opinion of intensive culture for all the world to hear, and slashing
+      away at that abominable mockery of a crop with a hoe. We had tied them up
+      with bast only a week or so before, and now half were rotten and half had
+      shot up into tall slender growths. He had the hoe in both hands and
+      slogged. Great wipes he made, and at each stroke he said, &ldquo;Take that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The air was thick with flying fragments of abortive salad. It was a
+      fantastic massacre. It was the French Revolution of that cold tyranny, the
+      vindictive overthrow of the pampered vegetable aristocrats. After he had
+      assuaged his passion upon them, he turned for other prey; he kicked holes
+      in two of our noblest marrows, flicked off the heads of half a row of
+      artichokes, and shied the hoe with a splendid smash into the cucumber
+      frame. Something of the awe of that moment returns to me as I write of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, my boy,&rdquo; he said, approaching with an expression of beneficent
+      happiness, &ldquo;I've done with gardening. Let's go for a walk like reasonable
+      beings. I've had enough of this&rdquo;&mdash;his face was convulsed for an
+      instant with bitter resentment&mdash;&ldquo;Pandering to cabbages.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That afternoon's walk sticks in my memory for many reasons. One is that we
+      went further than I had ever been before; far beyond Keston and nearly to
+      Seven-oaks, coming back by train from Dunton Green, and the other is that
+      my father as he went along talked about himself, not so much to me as to
+      himself, and about life and what he had done with it. He monologued so
+      that at times he produced an effect of weird world-forgetfulness. I
+      listened puzzled, and at that time not understanding many things that
+      afterwards became plain to me. It is only in recent years that I have
+      discovered the pathos of that monologue; how friendless my father was and
+      uncompanioned in his thoughts and feelings, and what a hunger he may have
+      felt for the sympathy of the undeveloped youngster who trotted by his
+      side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm no gardener,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I'm no anything. Why the devil did I start
+      gardening?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose man was created to mind a garden... But the Fall let us out of
+      that! What was I created for? God! what was I created for?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Slaves to matter! Minding inanimate things! It doesn't suit me, you know.
+      I've got no hands and no patience. I've mucked about with life. Mucked
+      about with life.&rdquo; He suddenly addressed himself to me, and for an instant
+      I started like an eavesdropper discovered. &ldquo;Whatever you do, boy, whatever
+      you do, make a Plan. Make a good Plan and stick to it. Find out what life
+      is about&mdash;I never have&mdash;and set yourself to do whatever you
+      ought to do. I admit it's a puzzle....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Those damned houses have been the curse of my life. Stucco white
+      elephants! Beastly cracked stucco with stains of green&mdash;black and
+      green. Conferva and soot.... Property, they are!... Beware of Things,
+      Dick, beware of Things! Before you know where you are you are waiting on
+      them and minding them. They'll eat your life up. Eat up your hours and
+      your blood and energy! When those houses came to me, I ought to have sold
+      them&mdash;or fled the country. I ought to have cleared out. Sarcophagi&mdash;eaters
+      of men! Oh! the hours and days of work, the nights of anxiety those vile
+      houses have cost me! The painting! It worked up my arms; it got all over
+      me. I stank of it. It made me ill. It isn't living&mdash;it's minding....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Property's the curse of life. Property! Ugh! Look at this country all cut
+      up into silly little parallelograms, look at all those villas we passed
+      just now and those potato patches and that tarred shanty and the hedge!
+      Somebody's minding every bit of it like a dog tied to a cart's tail.
+      Patching it and bothering about it. Bothering! Yapping at every passer-by.
+      Look at that notice-board! One rotten worried little beast wants to keep
+      us other rotten little beasts off HIS patch,&mdash;God knows why! Look at
+      the weeds in it. Look at the mended fence!... There's no property worth
+      having, Dick, but money. That's only good to spend. All these things.
+      Human souls buried under a cartload of blithering rubbish....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not a fool, Dick. I have qualities, imagination, a sort of go. I
+      ought to have made a better thing of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sure I could have done things. Only the old people pulled my leg.
+      They started me wrong. They never started me at all. I only began to find
+      out what life was like when I was nearly forty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I'd gone to a university; if I'd had any sort of sound training, if I
+      hadn't slipped into the haphazard places that came easiest....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nobody warned me. Nobody. It isn't a world we live in, Dick; it's a
+      cascade of accidents; it's a chaos exasperated by policemen! YOU be warned
+      in time, Dick. You stick to a plan. Don't wait for any one to show you the
+      way. Nobody will. There isn't a way till you make one. Get education, get
+      a good education. Fight your way to the top. It's your only chance. I've
+      watched you. You'll do no good at digging and property minding. There
+      isn't a neighbour in Bromstead won't be able to skin you at suchlike
+      games. You and I are the brainy unstable kind, topside or nothing. And if
+      ever those blithering houses come to you&mdash;don't have 'em. Give them
+      away! Dynamite 'em&mdash;and off! LIVE, Dick! I'll get rid of them for you
+      if I can, Dick, but remember what I say.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So it was my father discoursed, if not in those particular words, yet
+      exactly in that manner, as he slouched along the southward road, with
+      resentful eyes becoming less resentful as he talked, and flinging out
+      clumsy illustrative motions at the outskirts of Bromstead as we passed
+      along them. That afternoon he hated Bromstead, from its foot-tiring
+      pebbles up. He had no illusions about Bromstead or himself. I have the
+      clearest impression of him in his garden-stained tweeds with a
+      deer-stalker hat on the back of his head and presently a pipe sometimes
+      between his teeth and sometimes in his gesticulating hand, as he became
+      diverted by his talk from his original exasperation....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This particular afternoon is no doubt mixed up in my memory with many
+      other afternoons; all sorts of things my father said and did at different
+      times have got themselves referred to it; it filled me at the time with a
+      great unprecedented sense of fellowship and it has become the symbol now
+      for all our intercourse together. If I didn't understand the things he
+      said, I did the mood he was in. He gave me two very broad ideas in that
+      talk and the talks I have mingled with it; he gave them to me very clearly
+      and they have remained fundamental in my mind; one a sense of the
+      extraordinary confusion and waste and planlessness of the human life that
+      went on all about us; and the other of a great ideal of order and economy
+      which he called variously Science and Civilisation, and which, though I do
+      not remember that he ever used that word, I suppose many people nowadays
+      would identify with Socialism,&mdash;as the Fabians expound it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was not very definite about this Science, you must understand, but he
+      seemed always to be waving his hand towards it,&mdash;just as his
+      contemporary Tennyson seems always to be doing&mdash;he belonged to his
+      age and mostly his talk was destructive of the limited beliefs of his
+      time, he led me to infer rather than actually told me that this Science
+      was coming, a spirit of light and order, to the rescue of a world groaning
+      and travailing in muddle for the want of it....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I think of Bromstead nowadays I find it inseparably bound up with the
+      disorders of my father's gardening, and the odd patchings and paintings
+      that disfigured his houses. It was all of a piece with that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let me try and give something of the quality of Bromstead and something of
+      its history. It is the quality and history of a thousand places round and
+      about London, and round and about the other great centres of population in
+      the world. Indeed it is in a measure the quality of the whole of this
+      modern world from which we who have the statesman's passion struggle to
+      evolve, and dream still of evolving order.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      First, then, you must think of Bromstead a hundred and fifty years ago, as
+      a narrow irregular little street of thatched houses strung out on the
+      London and Dover Road, a little mellow sample unit of a social order that
+      had a kind of completeness, at its level, of its own. At that time its
+      population numbered a little under two thousand people, mostly engaged in
+      agricultural work or in trades serving agriculture. There was a
+      blacksmith, a saddler, a chemist, a doctor, a barber, a linen-draper (who
+      brewed his own beer); a veterinary surgeon, a hardware shop, and two
+      capacious inns. Round and about it were a number of pleasant gentlemen's
+      seats, whose owners went frequently to London town in their coaches along
+      the very tolerable high-road. The church was big enough to hold the whole
+      population, were people minded to go to church, and indeed a large
+      proportion did go, and all who married were married in it, and everybody,
+      to begin with, was christened at its font and buried at last in its
+      yew-shaded graveyard. Everybody knew everybody in the place. It was, in
+      fact, a definite place and a real human community in those days. There was
+      a pleasant old market-house in the middle of the town with a weekly
+      market, and an annual fair at which much cheerful merry making and homely
+      intoxication occurred; there was a pack of hounds which hunted within five
+      miles of London Bridge, and the local gentry would occasionally enliven
+      the place with valiant cricket matches for a hundred guineas a side, to
+      the vast excitement of the entire population. It was very much the same
+      sort of place that it had been for three or four centuries. A Bromstead
+      Rip van Winkle from 1550 returning in 1750 would have found most of the
+      old houses still as he had known them, the same trades a little improved
+      and differentiated one from the other, the same roads rather more
+      carefully tended, the Inns not very much altered, the ancient familiar
+      market-house. The occasional wheeled traffic would have struck him as the
+      most remarkable difference, next perhaps to the swaggering painted stone
+      monuments instead of brasses and the protestant severity of the
+      communion-table in the parish church,&mdash;both from the material point
+      of view very little things. A Rip van Winkle from 1350, again, would have
+      noticed scarcely greater changes; fewer clergy, more people, and
+      particularly more people of the middling sort; the glass in the windows of
+      many of the houses, the stylish chimneys springing up everywhere would
+      have impressed him, and suchlike details. The place would have had the
+      same boundaries, the same broad essential features, would have been still
+      itself in the way that a man is still himself after he has &ldquo;filled out&rdquo; a
+      little and grown a longer beard and changed his clothes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But after 1750 something got hold of the world, something that was
+      destined to alter the scale of every human affair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That something was machinery and a vague energetic disposition to improve
+      material things. In another part of England ingenious people were
+      beginning to use coal in smelting iron, and were producing metal in
+      abundance and metal castings in sizes that had hitherto been unattainable.
+      Without warning or preparation, increment involving countless
+      possibilities of further increment was coming to the strength of horses
+      and men. &ldquo;Power,&rdquo; all unsuspected, was flowing like a drug into the veins
+      of the social body.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nobody seems to have perceived this coming of power, and nobody had
+      calculated its probable consequences. Suddenly, almost inadvertently,
+      people found themselves doing things that would have amazed their
+      ancestors. They began to construct wheeled vehicles much more easily and
+      cheaply than they had ever done before, to make up roads and move things
+      about that had formerly been esteemed too heavy for locomotion, to join
+      woodwork with iron nails instead of wooden pegs, to achieve all sorts of
+      mechanical possibilities, to trade more freely and manufacture on a larger
+      scale, to send goods abroad in a wholesale and systematic way, to bring
+      back commodities from overseas, not simply spices and fine commodities,
+      but goods in bulk. The new influence spread to agriculture, iron
+      appliances replaced wooden, breeding of stock became systematic,
+      paper-making and printing increased and cheapened. Roofs of slate and tile
+      appeared amidst and presently prevailed over the original Bromstead
+      thatch, the huge space of Common to the south was extensively enclosed,
+      and what had been an ill-defined horse-track to Dover, only passable by
+      adventurous coaches in dry weather, became the Dover Road, and was
+      presently the route first of one and then of several daily coaches. The
+      High Street was discovered to be too tortuous for these awakening
+      energies, and a new road cut off its worst contortions. Residential villas
+      appeared occupied by retired tradesmen and widows, who esteemed the place
+      healthy, and by others of a strange new unoccupied class of people who had
+      money invested in joint-stock enterprises. First one and then several
+      boys' boarding-schools came, drawing their pupils from London,&mdash;my
+      grandfather's was one of these. London, twelve miles to the north-west,
+      was making itself felt more and more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this was only the beginning of the growth period, the first trickle of
+      the coming flood of mechanical power. Away in the north they were casting
+      iron in bigger and bigger forms, working their way to the production of
+      steel on a large scale, applying power in factories. Bromstead had almost
+      doubted in size again long before the railway came; there was hardly any
+      thatch left in the High Street, but instead were houses with handsome
+      brass-knockered front doors and several windows, and shops with
+      shop-fronts all of square glass panes, and the place was lighted publicly
+      now by oil lamps&mdash;previously only one flickering lamp outside each of
+      the coaching inns had broken the nocturnal darkness. And there was talk,
+      it long remained talk,&mdash;of gas. The gasworks came in 1834, and about
+      that date my father's three houses must have been built convenient for the
+      London Road. They mark nearly the beginning of the real suburban quality;
+      they were let at first to City people still engaged in business.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then hard on the gasworks had come the railway and cheap coal; there
+      was a wild outbreak of brickfields upon the claylands to the east, and the
+      Great Growth had begun in earnest. The agricultural placidities that had
+      formerly come to the very borders of the High Street were broken up north,
+      west and south, by new roads. This enterprising person and then that began
+      to &ldquo;run up&rdquo; houses, irrespective of every other enterprising person who
+      was doing the same thing. A Local Board came into existence, and with much
+      hesitation and penny-wise economy inaugurated drainage works. Rates became
+      a common topic, a fact of accumulating importance. Several chapels of zinc
+      and iron appeared, and also a white new church in commercial Gothic upon
+      the common, and another of red brick in the residential district out
+      beyond the brickfields towards Chessington.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The population doubled again and doubled again, and became particularly
+      teeming in the prolific &ldquo;working-class&rdquo; district about the deep-rutted,
+      muddy, coal-blackened roads between the gasworks, Blodgett's laundries,
+      and the railway goods-yard. Weekly properties, that is to say small houses
+      built by small property owners and let by the week, sprang up also in the
+      Cage Fields, and presently extended right up the London Road. A single
+      national school in an inconvenient situation set itself inadequately to
+      collect subscriptions and teach the swarming, sniffing, grimy offspring of
+      this dingy new population to read. The villages of Beckington, which used
+      to be three miles to the west, and Blamely four miles to the east of
+      Bromstead, were experiencing similar distensions and proliferations, and
+      grew out to meet us. All effect of locality or community had gone from
+      these places long before I was born; hardly any one knew any one; there
+      was no general meeting place any more, the old fairs were just common
+      nuisances haunted by gypsies, van showmen, Cheap Jacks and London roughs,
+      the churches were incapable of a quarter of the population. One or two
+      local papers of shameless veniality reported the proceedings of the local
+      Bench and the local Board, compelled tradesmen who were interested in
+      these affairs to advertise, used the epithet &ldquo;Bromstedian&rdquo; as one
+      expressing peculiar virtues, and so maintained in the general mind a weak
+      tradition of some local quality that embraced us all. Then the parish
+      graveyard filled up and became a scandal, and an ambitious area with an
+      air of appetite was walled in by a Bromstead Cemetery Company, and planted
+      with suitably high-minded and sorrowful varieties of conifer. A stonemason
+      took one of the earlier villas with a front garden at the end of the High
+      Street, and displayed a supply of urns on pillars and headstones and
+      crosses in stone, marble, and granite, that would have sufficed to
+      commemorate in elaborate detail the entire population of Bromstead as one
+      found it in 1750.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cemetery was made when I was a little boy of five or six; I was in the
+      full tide of building and growth from the first; the second railway with
+      its station at Bromstead North and the drainage followed when I was ten or
+      eleven, and all my childish memories are of digging and wheeling, of woods
+      invaded by building, roads gashed open and littered with iron pipes amidst
+      a fearful smell of gas, of men peeped at and seen toiling away deep down
+      in excavations, of hedges broken down and replaced by planks, of
+      wheelbarrows and builders' sheds, of rivulets overtaken and swallowed up
+      by drain-pipes. Big trees, and especially elms, cleared of undergrowth and
+      left standing amid such things, acquired a peculiar tattered dinginess
+      rather in the quality of needy widow women who have seen happier days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Ravensbrook of my earlier memories was a beautiful stream. It came
+      into my world out of a mysterious Beyond, out of a garden, splashing
+      brightly down a weir which had once been the weir of a mill. (Above the
+      weir and inaccessible there were bulrushes growing in splendid clumps, and
+      beyond that, pampas grass, yellow and crimson spikes of hollyhock, and
+      blue suggestions of wonderland.) From the pool at the foot of this initial
+      cascade it flowed in a leisurely fashion beside a footpath,&mdash;there
+      were two pretty thatched cottages on the left, and here were ducks, and
+      there were willows on the right,&mdash;and so came to where great trees
+      grew on high banks on either hand and bowed closer, and at last met
+      overhead. This part was difficult to reach because of an old fence, but a
+      little boy might glimpse that long cavern of greenery by wading. Either I
+      have actually seen kingfishers there, or my father has described them so
+      accurately to me that he inserted them into my memory. I remember them
+      there anyhow. Most of that overhung part I never penetrated at all, but
+      followed the field path with my mother and met the stream again, where
+      beyond there were flat meadows, Roper's meadows. The Ravensbrook went
+      meandering across the middle of these, now between steep banks, and now
+      with wide shallows at the bends where the cattle waded and drank. Yellow
+      and purple loose-strife and ordinary rushes grew in clumps along the bank,
+      and now and then a willow. On rare occasions of rapture one might see a
+      rat cleaning his whiskers at the water's edge. The deep places were rich
+      with tangled weeds, and in them fishes lurked&mdash;to me they were big
+      fishes&mdash;water-boatmen and water-beetles traversed the calm surface of
+      these still deeps; in one pool were yellow lilies and water-soldiers, and
+      in the shoaly places hovering fleets of small fry basked in the sunshine&mdash;to
+      vanish in a flash at one's shadow. In one place, too, were Rapids, where
+      the stream woke with a start from a dreamless brooding into foaming panic
+      and babbled and hastened. Well do I remember that half-mile of rivulet;
+      all other rivers and cascades have their reference to it for me. And after
+      I was eleven, and before we left Bromstead, all the delight and beauty of
+      it was destroyed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The volume of its water decreased abruptly&mdash;I suppose the new
+      drainage works that linked us up with Beckington, and made me first
+      acquainted with the geological quality of the London clay, had to do with
+      that&mdash;until only a weak uncleansing trickle remained. That at first
+      did not strike me as a misfortune. An adventurous small boy might walk
+      dryshod in places hitherto inaccessible. But hard upon that came the pegs,
+      the planks and carts and devastation. Roper's meadows, being no longer in
+      fear of floods, were now to be slashed out into parallelograms of untidy
+      road, and built upon with rows of working-class cottages. The roads came,&mdash;horribly;
+      the houses followed. They seemed to rise in the night. People moved into
+      them as soon as the roofs were on, mostly workmen and their young wives,
+      and already in a year some of these raw houses stood empty again from
+      defaulting tenants, with windows broken and wood-work warping and rotting.
+      The Ravensbrook became a dump for old iron, rusty cans, abandoned boots
+      and the like, and was a river only when unusual rains filled it for a day
+      or so with an inky flood of surface water....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That indeed was my most striking perception in the growth of Bromstead.
+      The Ravensbrook had been important to my imaginative life; that way had
+      always been my first choice in all my walks with my mother, and its rapid
+      swamping by the new urban growth made it indicative of all the other
+      things that had happened just before my time, or were still, at a less
+      dramatic pace, happening. I realised that building was the enemy. I began
+      to understand why in every direction out of Bromstead one walked past
+      scaffold-poles into litter, why fragments of broken brick and cinder
+      mingled in every path, and the significance of the universal
+      notice-boards, either white and new or a year old and torn and battered,
+      promising sites, proffering houses to be sold or let, abusing and
+      intimidating passers-by for fancied trespass, and protecting rights of
+      way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is difficult to disentangle now what I understood at this time and what
+      I have since come to understand, but it seems to me that even in those
+      childish days I was acutely aware of an invading and growing disorder. The
+      serene rhythms of the old established agriculture, I see now, were
+      everywhere being replaced by cultivation under notice and snatch crops;
+      hedges ceased to be repaired, and were replaced by cheap iron railings or
+      chunks of corrugated iron; more and more hoardings sprang up, and
+      contributed more and more to the nomad tribes of filthy paper scraps that
+      flew before the wind and overspread the country. The outskirts of
+      Bromstead were a maze of exploitation roads that led nowhere, that ended
+      in tarred fences studded with nails (I don't remember barbed wire in those
+      days; I think the Zeitgeist did not produce that until later), and in
+      trespass boards that used vehement language. Broken glass, tin cans, and
+      ashes and paper abounded. Cheap glass, cheap tin, abundant fuel, and a
+      free untaxed Press had rushed upon a world quite unprepared to dispose of
+      these blessings when the fulness of enjoyment was past.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose one might have persuaded oneself that all this was but the
+      replacement of an ancient tranquillity, or at least an ancient balance, by
+      a new order. Only to my eyes, quickened by my father's intimations, it was
+      manifestly no order at all. It was a multitude of incoordinated fresh
+      starts, each more sweeping and destructive than the last, and none of them
+      ever really worked out to a ripe and satisfactory completion. Each left a
+      legacy of products, houses, humanity, or what not, in its wake. It was a
+      sort of progress that had bolted; it was change out of hand, and going at
+      an unprecedented pace nowhere in particular.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No, the Victorian epoch was not the dawn of a new era; it was a hasty,
+      trial experiment, a gigantic experiment of the most slovenly and wasteful
+      kind. I suppose it was necessary; I suppose all things are necessary. I
+      suppose that before men will discipline themselves to learn and plan, they
+      must first see in a hundred convincing forms the folly and muddle that
+      come from headlong, aimless and haphazard methods. The nineteenth century
+      was an age of demonstrations, some of them very impressive demonstrations,
+      of the powers that have come to mankind, but of permanent achievement,
+      what will our descendants cherish? It is hard to estimate what grains of
+      precious metal may not be found in a mud torrent of human production on so
+      large a scale, but will any one, a hundred years from now, consent to live
+      in the houses the Victorians built, travel by their roads or railways,
+      value the furnishings they made to live among or esteem, except for
+      curious or historical reasons, their prevalent art and the clipped and
+      limited literature that satisfied their souls?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That age which bore me was indeed a world full of restricted and
+      undisciplined people, overtaken by power, by possessions and great new
+      freedoms, and unable to make any civilised use of them whatever; stricken
+      now by this idea and now by that, tempted first by one possession and then
+      another to ill-considered attempts; it was my father's exploitation of his
+      villa gardens on the wholesale level. The whole of Bromstead as I remember
+      it, and as I saw it last&mdash;it is a year ago now&mdash;is a dull
+      useless boiling-up of human activities, an immense clustering of
+      futilities. It is as unfinished as ever; the builders' roads still run out
+      and end in mid-field in their old fashion; the various enterprises jumble
+      in the same hopeless contradiction, if anything intensified. Pretentious
+      villas jostle slums, and public-house and tin tabernacle glower at one
+      another across the cat-haunted lot that intervenes. Roper's meadows are
+      now quite frankly a slum; back doors and sculleries gape towards the
+      railway, their yards are hung with tattered washing unashamed; and there
+      seem to be more boards by the railway every time I pass, advertising pills
+      and pickles, tonics and condiments, and suchlike solicitudes of a people
+      with no natural health nor appetite left in them....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, we have to do better. Failure is not failure nor waste wasted if it
+      sweeps away illusion and lights the road to a plan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chaotic indiscipline, ill-adjusted effort, spasmodic aims, these give the
+      quality of all my Bromstead memories. The crowning one of them all rises
+      to desolating tragedy. I remember now the wan spring sunshine of that
+      Sunday morning, the stiff feeling of best clothes and aggressive
+      cleanliness and formality, when I and my mother returned from church to
+      find my father dead. He had been pruning the grape vine. He had never had
+      a ladder long enough to reach the sill of the third-floor windows&mdash;at
+      house-painting times he had borrowed one from the plumber who mixed his
+      paint&mdash;and he had in his own happy-go-lucky way contrived a
+      combination of the garden fruit ladder with a battered kitchen table that
+      served all sorts of odd purposes in an outhouse. He had stayed up this
+      arrangement by means of the garden roller, and the roller had at the
+      critical moment&mdash;rolled. He was lying close by the garden door with
+      his head queerly bent back against a broken and twisted rainwater pipe, an
+      expression of pacific contentment on his face, a bamboo curtain rod with a
+      tableknife tied to end of it, still gripped in his hand. We had been
+      rapping for some time at the front door unable to make him hear, and then
+      we came round by the door in the side trellis into the garden and so
+      discovered him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Arthur!&rdquo; I remember my mother crying with the strangest break in her
+      voice, &ldquo;What are you doing there? Arthur! And&mdash;SUNDAY!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was coming behind her, musing remotely, when the quality of her voice
+      roused me. She stood as if she could not go near him. He had always
+      puzzled her so, he and his ways, and this seemed only another enigma. Then
+      the truth dawned on her, she shrieked as if afraid of him, ran a dozen
+      steps back towards the trellis door and stopped and clasped her
+      ineffectual gloved hands, leaving me staring blankly, too astonished for
+      feeling, at the carelessly flung limbs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same idea came to me also. I ran to her. &ldquo;Mother!&rdquo; I cried, pale to
+      the depths of my spirit, &ldquo;IS HE DEAD?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I had been thinking two minutes before of the cold fruit pie that
+      glorified our Sunday dinner-table, and how I might perhaps get into the
+      tree at the end of the garden to read in the afternoon. Now an immense
+      fact had come down like a curtain and blotted out all my childish world.
+      My father was lying dead before my eyes.... I perceived that my mother was
+      helpless and that things must be done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mother!&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;we must get Doctor Beaseley,&mdash;and carry him
+      indoors.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ SCHOLASTIC
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My formal education began in a small preparatory school in Bromstead. I
+      went there as a day boy. The charge for my instruction was mainly set off
+      by the periodic visits of my father with a large bag of battered fossils
+      to lecture to us upon geology. I was one of those fortunate youngsters who
+      take readily to school work, I had a good memory, versatile interests and
+      a considerable appetite for commendation, and when I was barely twelve I
+      got a scholarship at the City Merchants School and was entrusted with a
+      scholar's railway season ticket to Victoria. After my father's death a
+      large and very animated and solidly built uncle in tweeds from
+      Staffordshire, Uncle Minter, my mother's sister's husband, with a
+      remarkable accent and remarkable vowel sounds, who had plunged into the
+      Bromstead home once or twice for the night but who was otherwise unknown
+      to me, came on the scene, sold off the three gaunt houses with the utmost
+      gusto, invested the proceeds and my father's life insurance money, and got
+      us into a small villa at Penge within sight of that immense facade of
+      glass and iron, the Crystal Palace. Then he retired in a mood of
+      good-natured contempt to his native habitat again. We stayed at Penge
+      until my mother's death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      School became a large part of the world to me, absorbing my time and
+      interest, and I never acquired that detailed and intimate knowledge of
+      Penge and the hilly villadom round about, that I have of the town and
+      outskirts of Bromstead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a district of very much the same character, but it was more
+      completely urbanised and nearer to the centre of things; there were the
+      same unfinished roads, the same occasional disconcerted hedges and trees,
+      the same butcher's horse grazing under a builder's notice-board, the same
+      incidental lapses into slum. The Crystal Palace grounds cut off a large
+      part of my walking radius to the west with impassable fences and
+      forbiddingly expensive turnstiles, but it added to the ordinary spectacle
+      of meteorology a great variety of gratuitous fireworks which banged and
+      flared away of a night after supper and drew me abroad to see them better.
+      Such walks as I took, to Croydon, Wembledon, West Wickham and Greenwich,
+      impressed upon me the interminable extent of London's residential suburbs;
+      mile after mile one went, between houses, villas, rows of cottages,
+      streets of shops, under railway arches, over railway bridges. I have
+      forgotten the detailed local characteristics&mdash;if there were any&mdash;of
+      much of that region altogether. I was only there two years, and half my
+      perambulations occurred at dusk or after dark. But with Penge I associate
+      my first realisations of the wonder and beauty of twilight and night, the
+      effect of dark walls reflecting lamplight, and the mystery of blue
+      haze-veiled hillsides of houses, the glare of shops by night, the glowing
+      steam and streaming sparks of railway trains and railway signals lit up in
+      the darkness. My first rambles in the evening occurred at Penge&mdash;I
+      was becoming a big and independent-spirited boy&mdash;and I began my
+      experience of smoking during these twilight prowls with the threepenny
+      packets of American cigarettes then just appearing in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My life centred upon the City Merchants School. Usually I caught the
+      eight-eighteen for Victoria, I had a midday meal and tea; four nights a
+      week I stayed for preparation, and often I was not back home again until
+      within an hour of my bedtime. I spent my half holidays at school in order
+      to play cricket and football. This, and a pretty voracious appetite for
+      miscellaneous reading which was fostered by the Penge Middleton Library,
+      did not leave me much leisure for local topography. On Sundays also I sang
+      in the choir at St. Martin's Church, and my mother did not like me to walk
+      out alone on the Sabbath afternoon, she herself slumbered, so that I wrote
+      or read at home. I must confess I was at home as little as I could
+      contrive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Home, after my father's death, had become a very quiet and uneventful
+      place indeed. My mother had either an unimaginative temperament or her
+      mind was greatly occupied with private religious solicitudes, and I
+      remember her talking to me but little, and that usually upon topics I was
+      anxious to evade. I had developed my own view about low-Church theology
+      long before my father's death, and my meditation upon that event had
+      finished my secret estrangement from my mother's faith. My reason would
+      not permit even a remote chance of his being in hell, he was so manifestly
+      not evil, and this religion would not permit him a remote chance of being
+      out yet. When I was a little boy my mother had taught me to read and write
+      and pray and had done many things for me, indeed she persisted in washing
+      me and even in making my clothes until I rebelled against these things as
+      indignities. But our minds parted very soon. She never began to understand
+      the mental processes of my play, she never interested herself in my school
+      life and work, she could not understand things I said; and she came, I
+      think, quite insensibly to regard me with something of the same hopeless
+      perplexity she had felt towards my father.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Him she must have wedded under considerable delusions. I do not think he
+      deceived her, indeed, nor do I suspect him of mercenariness in their
+      union; but no doubt he played up to her requirements in the half ingenuous
+      way that was and still is the quality of most wooing, and presented
+      himself as a very brisk and orthodox young man. I wonder why nearly all
+      love-making has to be fraudulent. Afterwards he must have disappointed her
+      cruelly by letting one aspect after another of his careless, sceptical,
+      experimental temperament appear. Her mind was fixed and definite, she
+      embodied all that confidence in church and decorum and the assurances of
+      the pulpit which was characteristic of the large mass of the English
+      people&mdash;for after all, the rather low-Church section WAS the largest
+      single mass&mdash;in early Victorian times. She had dreams, I suspect, of
+      going to church with him side by side; she in a little poke bonnet and a
+      large flounced crinoline, all mauve and magenta and starched under a
+      little lace-trimmed parasol, and he in a tall silk hat and peg-top
+      trousers and a roll-collar coat, and looking rather like the Prince
+      Consort,&mdash;white angels almost visibly raining benedictions on their
+      amiable progress. Perhaps she dreamt gently of much-belaced babies and an
+      interestingly pious (but not too dissenting or fanatical) little girl or
+      boy or so, also angel-haunted. And I think, too, she must have seen
+      herself ruling a seemly &ldquo;home of taste,&rdquo; with a vivarium in the
+      conservatory that opened out of the drawing-room, or again, making
+      preserves in the kitchen. My father's science-teaching, his diagrams of
+      disembowelled humanity, his pictures of prehistoric beasts that
+      contradicted the Flood, his disposition towards soft shirts and loose
+      tweed suits, his inability to use a clothes brush, his spasmodic reading
+      fits and his bulldog pipes, must have jarred cruelly with her rather
+      unintelligent anticipations. His wild moments of violent temper when he
+      would swear and smash things, absurd almost lovable storms that passed
+      like summer thunder, must have been starkly dreadful to her. She was
+      constitutionally inadaptable, and certainly made no attempt to understand
+      or tolerate these outbreaks. She tried them by her standards, and by her
+      standards they were wrong. Her standards hid him from her. The blazing
+      things he said rankled in her mind unforgettably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I remember them together they chafed constantly. Her attitude to nearly
+      all his moods and all his enterprises was a sceptical disapproval. She
+      treated him as something that belonged to me and not to her. &ldquo;YOUR
+      father,&rdquo; she used to call him, as though I had got him for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had married late and she had, I think, become mentally self-subsisting
+      before her marriage. Even in those Herne Hill days I used to wonder what
+      was going on in her mind, and I find that old speculative curiosity return
+      as I write this. She took a considerable interest in the housework that
+      our generally servantless condition put upon her&mdash;she used to have a
+      charwoman in two or three times a week&mdash;but she did not do it with
+      any great skill. She covered most of our furniture with flouncey
+      ill-fitting covers, and she cooked plainly and without very much judgment.
+      The Penge house, as it contained nearly all our Bromstead things, was
+      crowded with furniture, and is chiefly associated in my mind with the
+      smell of turpentine, a condiment she used very freely upon the veneered
+      mahogany pieces. My mother had an equal dread of &ldquo;blacks&rdquo; by day and the
+      &ldquo;night air,&rdquo; so that our brightly clean windows were rarely open.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She took a morning paper, and she would open it and glance at the
+      headlines, but she did not read it until the afternoon and then, I think,
+      she was interested only in the more violent crimes, and in railway and
+      mine disasters and in the minutest domesticities of the Royal Family. Most
+      of the books at home were my father's, and I do not think she opened any
+      of them. She had one or two volumes that dated from her own youth, and she
+      tried in vain to interest me in them; there was Miss Strickland's QUEENS
+      OF ENGLAND, a book I remember with particular animosity, and QUEECHY and
+      the WIDE WIDE WORLD. She made these books of hers into a class apart by
+      sewing outer covers upon them of calico and figured muslin. To me in these
+      habiliments they seemed not so much books as confederated old ladies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My mother was also very punctual with her religious duties, and rejoiced
+      to watch me in the choir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On winter evenings she occupied an armchair on the other side of the table
+      at which I sat, head on hand reading, and she would be darning stockings
+      or socks or the like. We achieved an effect of rather stuffy
+      comfortableness that was soporific, and in a passive way I think she found
+      these among her happy times. On such occasions she was wont to put her
+      work down on her knees and fall into a sort of thoughtless musing that
+      would last for long intervals and rouse my curiosity. For like most young
+      people I could not imagine mental states without definite forms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She carried on a correspondence with a number of cousins and friends,
+      writing letters in a slanting Italian hand and dealing mainly with births,
+      marriages and deaths, business starts (in the vaguest terms) and the
+      distresses of bankruptcy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet, you know, she did have a curious intimate life of her own that I
+      suspected nothing of at the time, that only now becomes credible to me.
+      She kept a diary that is still in my possession, a diary of fragmentary
+      entries in a miscellaneous collection of pocket books. She put down the
+      texts of the sermons she heard, and queer stiff little comments on casual
+      visitors,&mdash;&ldquo;Miss G. and much noisy shrieking talk about games and
+      such frivolities and CROQUAY. A. delighted and VERY ATTENTIVE.&rdquo; Such
+      little human entries abound. She had an odd way of never writing a name,
+      only an initial; my father is always &ldquo;A.,&rdquo; and I am always &ldquo;D.&rdquo; It is
+      manifest she followed the domestic events in the life of the Princess of
+      Wales, who is now Queen Mother, with peculiar interest and sympathy. &ldquo;Pray
+      G. all may be well,&rdquo; she writes in one such crisis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there are things about myself that I still find too poignant to tell
+      easily, certain painful and clumsy circumstances of my birth in very great
+      detail, the distresses of my infantile ailments. Then later I find such
+      things as this: &ldquo;Heard D. s&mdash;&mdash;.&rdquo; The &ldquo;s&rdquo; is evidently &ldquo;swear &ldquo;&mdash;&ldquo;G.
+      bless and keep my boy from evil.&rdquo; And again, with the thin handwriting
+      shaken by distress: &ldquo;D. would not go to church, and hardened his heart and
+      said wicked infidel things, much disrespect of the clergy. The anthem is
+      tiresome!!! That men should set up to be wiser than their maker!!!&rdquo; Then
+      trebly underlined: &ldquo;I FEAR HIS FATHER'S TEACHING.&rdquo; Dreadful little tangle
+      of misapprehensions and false judgments! More comforting for me to read,
+      &ldquo;D. very kind and good. He grows more thoughtful every day.&rdquo; I suspect
+      myself of forgotten hypocrisies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At just one point my mother's papers seem to dip deeper. I think the death
+      of my father must have stirred her for the first time for many years to
+      think for herself. Even she could not go on living in any peace at all,
+      believing that he had indeed been flung headlong into hell. Of this
+      gnawing solicitude she never spoke to me, never, and for her diary also
+      she could find no phrases. But on a loose half-sheet of notepaper between
+      its pages I find this passage that follows, written very carefully. I do
+      not know whose lines they are nor how she came upon them. They run:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      That scrap of verse amazed me when I read it. I could even wonder if my
+      mother really grasped the import of what she had copied out. It affected
+      me as if a stone-deaf person had suddenly turned and joined in a whispered
+      conversation. It set me thinking how far a mind in its general effect
+      quite hopelessly limited, might range. After that I went through all her
+      diaries, trying to find something more than a conventional term of
+      tenderness for my father. But I found nothing. And yet somehow there grew
+      upon me the realisation that there had been love.... Her love for me, on
+      the other hand, was abundantly expressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I knew nothing of that secret life of feeling at the time; such expression
+      as it found was all beyond my schoolboy range. I did not know when I
+      pleased her and I did not know when I distressed her. Chiefly I was aware
+      of my mother as rather dull company, as a mind thorny with irrational
+      conclusions and incapable of explication, as one believing quite wilfully
+      and irritatingly in impossible things. So I suppose it had to be; life was
+      coming to me in new forms and with new requirements. It was essential to
+      our situation that we should fail to understand. After this space of years
+      I have come to realisations and attitudes that dissolve my estrangement
+      from her, I can pierce these barriers, I can see her and feel her as a
+      loving and feeling and desiring and muddle-headed person. There are times
+      when I would have her alive again, if only that I might be kind to her for
+      a little while and give her some return for the narrow intense affection,
+      the tender desires, she evidently lavished so abundantly on me. But then
+      again I ask how I could make that return? And I realise the futility of
+      such dreaming. Her demand was rigid, and to meet it I should need to act
+      and lie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So she whose blood fed me, whose body made me, lies in my memory as I saw
+      her last, fixed, still, infinitely intimate, infinitely remote....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My own case with my mother, however, does not awaken the same regret I
+      feel when I think of how she misjudged and irked my father, and turned his
+      weaknesses into thorns for her own tormenting. I wish I could look back
+      without that little twinge to two people who were both in their different
+      quality so good. But goodness that is narrow is a pedestrian and
+      ineffectual goodness. Her attitude to my father seems to me one of the
+      essentially tragic things that have come to me personally, one of those
+      things that nothing can transfigure, that REMAIN sorrowful, that I cannot
+      soothe with any explanation, for as I remember him he was indeed the most
+      lovable of weak spasmodic men. But my mother had been trained in a hard
+      and narrow system that made evil out of many things not in the least evil,
+      and inculcated neither kindliness nor charity. All their estrangement
+      followed from that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These cramping cults do indeed take an enormous toll of human love and
+      happiness, and not only that but what we Machiavellians must needs
+      consider, they make frightful breaches in human solidarity. I suppose I am
+      a deeply religious man, as men of my quality go, but I hate more and more,
+      as I grow older, the shadow of intolerance cast by religious
+      organisations. All my life has been darkened by irrational intolerance, by
+      arbitrary irrational prohibitions and exclusions. Mahometanism with its
+      fierce proselytism, has, I suppose, the blackest record of
+      uncharitableness, but most of the Christian sects are tainted, tainted to
+      a degree beyond any of the anterior paganisms, with this same hateful
+      quality. It is their exclusive claim that sends them wrong, the vain
+      ambition that inspires them all to teach a uniform one-sided God and be
+      the one and only gateway to salvation. Deprecation of all outside the
+      household of faith, an organised undervaluation of heretical goodness and
+      lovableness, follows, necessarily. Every petty difference is exaggerated
+      to the quality of a saving grace or a damning defect. Elaborate
+      precautions are taken to shield the believer's mind against broad or
+      amiable suggestions; the faithful are deterred by dark allusions, by
+      sinister warnings, from books, from theatres, from worldly conversation,
+      from all the kindly instruments that mingle human sympathy. For only by
+      isolating its flock can the organisation survive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every month there came to my mother a little magazine called, if I
+      remember rightly, the HOME CHURCHMAN, with the combined authority of print
+      and clerical commendation. It was the most evil thing that ever came into
+      the house, a very devil, a thin little pamphlet with one woodcut
+      illustration on the front page of each number; now the uninviting visage
+      of some exponent of the real and only doctrine and attitudes, now some
+      coral strand in act of welcoming the missionaries of God's mysterious
+      preferences, now a new church in the Victorian Gothic. The vile rag it
+      was! A score of vices that shun the policeman have nothing of its subtle
+      wickedness. It was an outrage upon the natural kindliness of men. The
+      contents were all admirably adjusted to keep a spirit in prison. Their
+      force of sustained suggestion was tremendous. There would be dreadful
+      intimations of the swift retribution that fell upon individuals for
+      Sabbath-breaking, and upon nations for weakening towards Ritualism, or
+      treating Roman Catholics as tolerable human beings; there would be great
+      rejoicings over the conversion of alleged Jews, and terrible descriptions
+      of the death-beds of prominent infidels with boldly invented last words,&mdash;the
+      most unscrupulous lying; there would be the appallingly edifying careers
+      of &ldquo;early piety&rdquo; lusciously described, or stories of condemned criminals
+      who traced their final ruin unerringly to early laxities of the kind that
+      leads people to give up subscribing to the HOME CHURCHMAN.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every month that evil spirit brought about a slump in our mutual love. My
+      mother used to read the thing and become depressed and anxious for my
+      spiritual welfare, used to be stirred to unintelligent pestering....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A few years ago I met the editor of this same HOME CHURCHMAN. It was at
+      one of the weekly dinners of that Fleet Street dining club, the
+      Blackfriars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I heard the paper's name with a queer little shock and surveyed the man
+      with interest. No doubt he was only a successor of the purveyor of
+      discords who darkened my boyhood. It was amazing to find an influence so
+      terrible embodied in a creature so palpably petty. He was seated some way
+      down a table at right angles to the one at which I sat, a man of mean
+      appearance with a greyish complexion, thin, with a square nose, a heavy
+      wiry moustache and a big Adam's apple sticking out between the wings of
+      his collar. He ate with considerable appetite and unconcealed relish, and
+      as his jaw was underhung, he chummed and made the moustache wave like
+      reeds in the swell of a steamer. It gave him a conscientious look. After
+      dinner he a little forced himself upon me. At that time, though the shadow
+      of my scandal was already upon me, I still seemed to be shaping for great
+      successes, and he was glad to be in conversation with me and anxious to
+      intimate political sympathy and support. I tried to make him talk of the
+      HOME CHURCHMAN and the kindred publications he ran, but he was manifestly
+      ashamed of his job so far as I was concerned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One wants,&rdquo; he said, pitching himself as he supposed in my key, &ldquo;to put
+      constructive ideas into our readers, but they are narrow, you know, very
+      narrow. Very.&rdquo; He made his moustache and lips express judicious regret.
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He chummed and the moustache bristled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A hireling, beyond question, catering for a demand. I gathered there was a
+      home in Tufnell Park, and three boys to be fed and clothed and
+      educated....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had the curiosity to buy a copy of his magazine afterwards, and it
+      seemed much the same sort of thing that had worried my mother in my
+      boyhood. There was the usual Christian hero, this time with mutton-chop
+      whiskers and a long bare upper lip. The Jesuits, it seemed, were still
+      hard at it, and Heaven frightfully upset about the Sunday opening of
+      museums and the falling birth-rate, and as touchy and vindictive as ever.
+      There were two vigorous paragraphs upon the utter damnableness of the Rev.
+      R. J. Campbell, a contagious damnableness I gathered, one wasn't safe
+      within a mile of Holborn Viaduct, and a foul-mouthed attack on poor little
+      Wilkins the novelist&mdash;who was being baited by the moralists at that
+      time for making one of his big women characters, not being in holy
+      wedlock, desire a baby and say so....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The broadening of human thought is a slow and complex process. We do go
+      on, we do get on. But when one thinks that people are living and dying
+      now, quarrelling and sulking, misled and misunderstanding, vaguely
+      fearful, condemning and thwarting one another in the close darknesses of
+      these narrow cults&mdash;Oh, God! one wants a gale out of Heaven, one
+      wants a great wind from the sea!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While I lived at Penge two little things happened to me, trivial in
+      themselves and yet in their quality profoundly significant. They had this
+      in common, that they pierced the texture of the life I was quietly taking
+      for granted and let me see through it into realities&mdash;realities I had
+      indeed known about before but never realised. Each of these experiences
+      left me with a sense of shock, with all the values in my life perplexingly
+      altered, attempting readjustment. One of these disturbing and illuminating
+      events was that I was robbed of a new pocket-knife and the other that I
+      fell in love. It was altogether surprising to me to be robbed. You see, as
+      an only child I had always been fairly well looked after and protected,
+      and the result was an amazing confidence in the practical goodness of the
+      people one met in the world. I knew there were robbers in the world, just
+      as I knew there were tigers; that I was ever likely to meet robber or
+      tiger face to face seemed equally impossible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The knife as I remember it was a particularly jolly one with all sorts of
+      instruments in it, tweezers and a thing for getting a stone out of the
+      hoof of a horse, and a corkscrew; it had cost me a carefully accumulated
+      half-crown, and amounted indeed to a new experience in knives. I had had
+      it for two or three days, and then one afternoon I dropped it through a
+      hole in my pocket on a footpath crossing a field between Penge and
+      Anerley. I heard it fall in the way one does without at the time
+      appreciating what had happened, then, later, before I got home, when my
+      hand wandered into my pocket to embrace the still dear new possession I
+      found it gone, and instantly that memory of something hitting the ground
+      sprang up into consciousness. I went back and commenced a search. Almost
+      immediately I was accosted by the leader of a little gang of four or five
+      extremely dirty and ragged boys of assorted sizes and slouching carriage
+      who were coming from the Anerley direction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lost anythink, Matey?&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I explained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'E's dropped 'is knife,&rdquo; said my interlocutor, and joined in the search.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What sort of 'andle was it, Matey?&rdquo; said a small white-faced sniffing boy
+      in a big bowler hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I supplied the information. His sharp little face scrutinised the ground
+      about us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;GOT it,&rdquo; he said, and pounced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give it 'ere,&rdquo; said the big boy hoarsely, and secured it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I walked towards him serenely confident that he would hand it over to me,
+      and that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No bloomin' fear!&rdquo; he said, regarding me obliquely. &ldquo;Oo said it was your
+      knife?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Remarkable doubts assailed me. &ldquo;Of course it's my knife,&rdquo; I said. The
+      other boys gathered round me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This ain't your knife,&rdquo; said the big boy, and spat casually.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dropped it just now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Findin's keepin's, I believe,&rdquo; said the big boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nonsense,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Give me my knife.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Ow many blades it got?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Three.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what sort of 'andle?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Got a corkscrew like?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! This ain't your knife no'ow. See?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made no offer to show it to me. My breath went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here!&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;I saw that kid pick it up. It IS my knife.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rot!&rdquo; said the big boy, and slowly, deliberately put my knife into his
+      trouser pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I braced my soul for battle. All civilisation was behind me, but I doubt
+      if it kept the colour in my face. I buttoned my jacket and clenched my
+      fists and advanced on my antagonist&mdash;he had, I suppose, the advantage
+      of two years of age and three inches of height. &ldquo;Hand over that knife,&rdquo; I
+      said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then one of the smallest of the band assailed me with extraordinary vigour
+      and swiftness from behind, had an arm round my neck and a knee in my back
+      before I had the slightest intimation of attack, and so got me down. &ldquo;I
+      got 'im, Bill,&rdquo; squeaked this amazing little ruffian. My nose was
+      flattened by a dirty hand, and as I struck out and hit something like
+      sacking, some one kicked my elbow. Two or three seemed to be at me at the
+      same time. Then I rolled over and sat up to discover them all making off,
+      a ragged flight, footballing my cap, my City Merchants' cap, amongst them.
+      I leapt to my feet in a passion of indignation and pursued them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I did not overtake them. We are beings of mixed composition, and I
+      doubt if mine was a single-minded pursuit. I knew that honour required me
+      to pursue, and I had a vivid impression of having just been down in the
+      dust with a very wiry and active and dirty little antagonist of
+      disagreeable odour and incredible and incalculable unscrupulousness,
+      kneeling on me and gripping my arm and neck. I wanted of course to be even
+      with him, but also I doubted if catching him would necessarily involve
+      that. They kicked my cap into the ditch at the end of the field, and made
+      off compactly along a cinder lane while I turned aside to recover my
+      dishonoured headdress. As I knocked the dust out of that and out of my
+      jacket, and brushed my knees and readjusted my very crumpled collar, I
+      tried to focus this startling occurrence in my mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had vague ideas of going to a policeman or of complaining at a police
+      station, but some boyish instinct against informing prevented that. No
+      doubt I entertained ideas of vindictive pursuit and murderous reprisals.
+      And I was acutely enraged whenever I thought of my knife. The thing indeed
+      rankled in my mind for weeks and weeks, and altered all the flavour of my
+      world for me. It was the first time I glimpsed the simple brute violence
+      that lurks and peeps beneath our civilisation. A certain kindly
+      complacency of attitude towards the palpably lower classes was qualified
+      for ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the other experience was still more cardinal. It was the first clear
+      intimation of a new motif in life, the sex motif, that was to rise and
+      increase and accumulate power and enrichment and interweave with and at
+      last dominate all my life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was when I was nearly fifteen this happened. It is inseparably
+      connected in my mind with the dusk of warm September evenings. I never met
+      the girl I loved by daylight, and I have forgotten her name. It was some
+      insignificant name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet the peculiar quality of the adventure keeps it shining darkly like
+      some deep coloured gem in the common setting of my memories. It came as
+      something new and strange, something that did not join on to anything else
+      in my life or connect with any of my thoughts or beliefs or habits; it was
+      a wonder, a mystery, a discovery about myself, a discovery about the whole
+      world. Only in after years did sexual feeling lose that isolation and
+      spread itself out to illuminate and pervade and at last possess the whole
+      broad vision of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in that phase of an urban youth's development, the phase of the
+      cheap cigarette, that this thing happened. One evening I came by chance on
+      a number of young people promenading by the light of a row of shops
+      towards Beckington, and, with all the glory of a glowing cigarette between
+      my lips, I joined their strolling number. These twilight parades of young
+      people, youngsters chiefly of the lower middle-class, are one of the odd
+      social developments of the great suburban growths&mdash;unkindly critics,
+      blind to the inner meanings of things, call them, I believe, Monkeys'
+      Parades&mdash;the shop apprentices, the young work girls, the boy clerks
+      and so forth, stirred by mysterious intimations, spend their first-earned
+      money upon collars and ties, chiffon hats, smart lace collars,
+      walking-sticks, sunshades or cigarettes, and come valiantly into the vague
+      transfiguring mingling of gaslight and evening, to walk up and down, to
+      eye meaningly, even to accost and make friends. It is a queer instinctive
+      revolt from the narrow limited friendless homes in which so many find
+      themselves, a going out towards something, romance if you will, beauty,
+      that has suddenly become a need&mdash;a need that hitherto has lain
+      dormant and unsuspected. They promenade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Vulgar!&mdash;it is as vulgar as the spirit that calls the moth abroad in
+      the evening and lights the body of the glow-worm in the night. I made my
+      way through the throng, a little contemptuously as became a public
+      schoolboy, my hands in my pockets&mdash;none of your cheap canes for me!&mdash;and
+      very careful of the lie of my cigarette upon my lips. And two girls passed
+      me, one a little taller than the other, with dim warm-tinted faces under
+      clouds of dark hair and with dark eyes like pools reflecting stars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I half turned, and the shorter one glanced back at me over her shoulder&mdash;I
+      could draw you now the pose of her cheek and neck and shoulder&mdash;and
+      instantly I was as passionately in love with the girl as I have ever been
+      before or since, as any man ever was with any woman. I turned about and
+      followed them, I flung away my cigarette ostentatiously and lifted my
+      school cap and spoke to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl answered shyly with her dark eyes on my face. What I said and
+      what she said I cannot remember, but I have little doubt it was something
+      absolutely vapid. It really did not matter; the thing was we had met. I
+      felt as I think a new-hatched moth must feel when suddenly its urgent
+      headlong searching brings it in tremulous amazement upon its mate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We met, covered from each other, with all the nets of civilisation keeping
+      us apart. We walked side by side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It led to scarcely more than that. I think we met four or five times
+      altogether, and always with her nearly silent elder sister on the other
+      side of her. We walked on the last two occasions arm in arm, furtively
+      caressing each other's hands, we went away from the glare of the shops
+      into the quiet roads of villadom, and there we whispered instead of
+      talking and looked closely into one another's warm and shaded face.
+      &ldquo;Dear,&rdquo; I whispered very daringly, and she answered, &ldquo;Dear!&rdquo; We had a
+      vague sense that we wanted more of that quality of intimacy and more. We
+      wanted each other as one wants beautiful music again or to breathe again
+      the scent of flowers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And that is all there was between us. The events are nothing, the thing
+      that matters is the way in which this experience stabbed through the
+      common stuff of life and left it pierced, with a light, with a huge new
+      interest shining through the rent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I think of it I can recall even now the warm mystery of her face, her
+      lips a little apart, lips that I never kissed, her soft shadowed throat,
+      and I feel again the sensuous stir of her proximity....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those two girls never told me their surname nor let me approach their
+      house. They made me leave them at the corner of a road of small houses
+      near Penge Station. And quite abruptly, without any intimation, they
+      vanished and came to the meeting place no more, they vanished as a moth
+      goes out of a window into the night, and left me possessed of an
+      intolerable want....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The affair pervaded my existence for many weeks. I could not do my work
+      and I could not rest at home. Night after night I promenaded up and down
+      that Monkeys' Parade full of an unappeasable desire, with a thwarted sense
+      of something just begun that ought to have gone on. I went backwards and
+      forwards on the way to the vanishing place, and at last explored the
+      forbidden road that had swallowed them up. But I never saw her again,
+      except that later she came to me, my symbol of womanhood, in dreams. How
+      my blood was stirred! I lay awake of nights whispering in the darkness for
+      her. I prayed for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed that girl, who probably forgot the last vestiges of me when her
+      first real kiss came to her, ruled and haunted me, gave a Queen to my
+      imagination and a texture to all my desires until I became a man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I generalised her at last. I suddenly discovered that poetry was about her
+      and that she was the key to all that had hitherto seemed nonsense about
+      love. I took to reading novels, and if the heroine could not possibly be
+      like her, dusky and warm and starlike, I put the book aside....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I hesitate and add here one other confession. I want to tell this thing
+      because it seems to me we are altogether too restrained and secretive
+      about such matters. The cardinal thing in life sneaks in to us darkly and
+      shamefully like a thief in the night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day during my Cambridge days&mdash;it must have been in my first year
+      before I knew Hatherleigh&mdash;I saw in a print-shop window near the
+      Strand an engraving of a girl that reminded me sharply of Penge and its
+      dusky encounter. It was just a half length of a bare-shouldered,
+      bare-breasted Oriental with arms akimbo, smiling faintly. I looked at it,
+      went my way, then turned back and bought it. I felt I must have it. The
+      odd thing is that I was more than a little shamefaced about it. I did not
+      have it framed and hung in my room open to the criticism of my friends,
+      but I kept it in the drawer of my writing-table. And I kept that drawer
+      locked for a year. It speedily merged with and became identified with the
+      dark girl of Penge. That engraving became in a way my mistress. Often when
+      I had sported my oak and was supposed to be reading, I was sitting with it
+      before me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Obeying some instinct I kept the thing very secret indeed. For a time
+      nobody suspected what was locked in my drawer nor what was locked in me. I
+      seemed as sexless as my world required.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These things stabbed through my life, intimations of things above and
+      below and before me. They had an air of being no more than incidents,
+      interruptions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The broad substance of my existence at this time was the City Merchants
+      School. Home was a place where I slept and read, and the mooning
+      explorations of the south-eastern postal district which occupied the
+      restless evenings and spare days of my vacations mere interstices, giving
+      glimpses of enigmatical lights and distant spaces between the woven
+      threads of a school-boy's career. School life began for me every morning
+      at Herne Hill, for there I was joined by three or four other boys and the
+      rest of the way we went together. Most of the streets and roads we
+      traversed in our morning's walk from Victoria are still intact, the storms
+      of rebuilding that have submerged so much of my boyhood's London have
+      passed and left them, and I have revived the impression of them again and
+      again in recent years as I have clattered dinnerward in a hansom or hummed
+      along in a motor cab to some engagement. The main gate still looks out
+      with the same expression of ancient well-proportioned kindliness upon St.
+      Margaret's Close. There are imposing new science laboratories in Chambers
+      Street indeed, but the old playing fields are unaltered except for the big
+      electric trams that go droning and spitting blue flashes along the western
+      boundary. I know Ratten, the new Head, very well, but I have not been
+      inside the school to see if it has changed at all since I went up to
+      Cambridge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I took all they put before us very readily as a boy, for I had a mind of
+      vigorous appetite, but since I have grown mentally to man's estate and
+      developed a more and more comprehensive view of our national process and
+      our national needs, I am more and more struck by the oddity of the
+      educational methods pursued, their aimless disconnectedness from the
+      constructive forces in the community. I suppose if we are to view the
+      public school as anything more than an institution that has just chanced
+      to happen, we must treat it as having a definite function towards the
+      general scheme of the nation, as being in a sense designed to take the
+      crude young male of the more or less responsible class, to correct his
+      harsh egotisms, broaden his outlook, give him a grasp of the contemporary
+      developments he will presently be called upon to influence and control,
+      and send him on to the university to be made a leading and ruling social
+      man. It is easy enough to carp at schoolmasters and set up for an
+      Educational Reformer, I know, but still it is impossible not to feel how
+      infinitely more effectually&mdash;given certain impossibilities perhaps&mdash;the
+      job might be done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My memory of school has indeed no hint whatever of that quality of
+      elucidation it seems reasonable to demand from it. Here all about me was
+      London, a vast inexplicable being, a vortex of gigantic forces, that
+      filled and overwhelmed me with impressions, that stirred my imagination to
+      a perpetual vague enquiry; and my school not only offered no key to it,
+      but had practically no comment to make upon it at all. We were within
+      three miles of Westminster and Charing Cross, the government offices of a
+      fifth of mankind were all within an hour's stroll, great economic changes
+      were going on under our eyes, now the hoardings flamed with election
+      placards, now the Salvation Army and now the unemployed came trailing in
+      procession through the winter-grey streets, now the newspaper placards
+      outside news-shops told of battles in strange places, now of amazing
+      discoveries, now of sinister crimes, abject squalor and poverty, imperial
+      splendour and luxury, Buckingham Palace, Rotten Row, Mayfair, the slums of
+      Pimlico, garbage-littered streets of bawling costermongers, the inky
+      silver of the barge-laden Thames&mdash;such was the background of our
+      days. We went across St. Margaret's Close and through the school gate into
+      a quiet puerile world apart from all these things. We joined in the
+      earnest acquirement of all that was necessary for Greek epigrams and Latin
+      verse, and for the rest played games. We dipped down into something clear
+      and elegantly proportioned and time-worn and for all its high resolve of
+      stalwart virility a little feeble, like our blackened and decayed portals
+      by Inigo Jones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within, we were taught as the chief subjects of instruction, Latin and
+      Greek. We were taught very badly because the men who taught us did not
+      habitually use either of these languages, nobody uses them any more now
+      except perhaps for the Latin of a few Levantine monasteries. At the utmost
+      our men read them. We were taught these languages because long ago Latin
+      had been the language of civilisation; the one way of escape from the
+      narrow and localised life had lain in those days through Latin, and
+      afterwards Greek had come in as the vehicle of a flood of new and amazing
+      ideas. Once these two languages had been the sole means of initiation to
+      the detached criticism and partial comprehension of the world. I can
+      imagine the fierce zeal of our first Heads, Gardener and Roper, teaching
+      Greek like passionate missionaries, as a progressive Chinaman might teach
+      English to the boys of Pekin, clumsily, impatiently, with rod and harsh
+      urgency, but sincerely, patriotically, because they felt that behind it
+      lay revelations, the irresistible stimulus to a new phase of history. That
+      was long ago. A new great world, a vaster Imperialism had arisen about the
+      school, had assimilated all these amazing and incredible ideas, had gone
+      on to new and yet more amazing developments of its own. But the City
+      Merchants School still made the substance of its teaching Latin and Greek,
+      still, with no thought of rotating crops, sowed in a dream amidst the
+      harvesting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no fierceness left in the teaching now. Just after I went up to
+      Trinity, Gates, our Head, wrote a review article in defence of our
+      curriculum. In this, among other indiscretions, he asserted that it was
+      impossible to write good English without an illuminating knowledge of the
+      classic tongues, and he split an infinitive and failed to button up a
+      sentence in saying so. His main argument conceded every objection a
+      reasonable person could make to the City Merchants' curriculum. He
+      admitted that translation had now placed all the wisdom of the past at a
+      common man's disposal, that scarcely a field of endeavour remained in
+      which modern work had not long since passed beyond the ancient
+      achievement. He disclaimed any utility. But there was, he said, a peculiar
+      magic in these grammatical exercises no other subjects of instruction
+      possessed. Nothing else provided the same strengthening and orderly
+      discipline for the mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He said that, knowing the Senior Classics he did, himself a Senior
+      Classic!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet in a dim confused way I think he was making out a case. In schools as
+      we knew them, and with the sort of assistant available, the sort of
+      assistant who has been trained entirely on the old lines, he could see no
+      other teaching so effectual in developing attention, restraint, sustained
+      constructive effort and various yet systematic adjustment. And that was as
+      far as his imagination could go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is infinitely easier to begin organised human affairs than end them;
+      the curriculum and the social organisation of the English public school
+      are the crowning instances of that. They go on because they have begun.
+      Schools are not only immortal institutions but reproductive ones. Our
+      founder, Jabez Arvon, knew nothing, I am sure, of Gates' pedagogic values
+      and would, I feel certain, have dealt with them disrespectfully. But
+      public schools and university colleges sprang into existence correlated,
+      the scholars went on to the universities and came back to teach the
+      schools, to teach as they themselves had been taught, before they had ever
+      made any real use of the teaching; the crowd of boys herded together, a
+      crowd perpetually renewed and unbrokenly the same, adjusted itself by
+      means of spontaneously developed institutions. In a century, by its very
+      success, this revolutionary innovation of Renascence public schools had
+      become an immense tradition woven closely into the fabric of the national
+      life. Intelligent and powerful people ceased to talk Latin or read Greek,
+      they had got what was wanted, but that only left the schoolmaster the
+      freer to elaborate his point. Since most men of any importance or
+      influence in the country had been through the mill, it was naturally a
+      little difficult to persuade them that it was not quite the best and most
+      ennobling mill the wit of man could devise. And, moreover, they did not
+      want their children made strange to them. There was all the machinery and
+      all the men needed to teach the old subjects, and none to teach whatever
+      new the critic might propose. Such science instruction as my father gave
+      seemed indeed the uninviting alternative to the classical grind. It was
+      certainly an altogether inferior instrument at that time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So it was I occupied my mind with the exact study of dead languages for
+      seven long years. It was the strangest of detachments. We would sit under
+      the desk of such a master as Topham like creatures who had fallen into an
+      enchanted pit, and he would do his considerable best to work us up to
+      enthusiasm for, let us say, a Greek play. If we flagged he would lash
+      himself to revive us. He would walk about the class-room mouthing great
+      lines in a rich roar, and asking us with a flushed face and shining eyes
+      if it was not &ldquo;GLORIOUS.&rdquo; The very sight of Greek letters brings back to
+      me the dingy, faded, ink-splashed quality of our class-room, the banging
+      of books, Topham's disordered hair, the sheen of his alpaca gown, his deep
+      unmusical intonations and the wide striding of his creaking boots.
+      Glorious! And being plastic human beings we would consent that it was
+      glorious, and some of us even achieved an answering reverberation and a
+      sympathetic flush. I at times responded freely. We all accepted from him
+      unquestioningly that these melodies, these strange sounds, exceeded any
+      possibility of beauty that lay in the Gothic intricacy, the splash and
+      glitter, the jar and recovery, the stabbing lights, the heights and broad
+      distances of our English tongue. That indeed was the chief sin of him. It
+      was not that he was for Greek and Latin, but that he was fiercely against
+      every beauty that was neither classic nor deferred to classical canons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And what exactly did we make of it, we seniors who understood it best? We
+      visualised dimly through that dust and the grammatical difficulties, the
+      spectacle of the chorus chanting grotesquely, helping out protagonist and
+      antagonist, masked and buskined, with the telling of incomprehensible
+      parricides, of inexplicable incest, of gods faded beyond symbolism, of
+      that Relentless Law we did not believe in for a moment, that no modern
+      western European can believe in. We thought of the characters in the
+      unconvincing wigs and costumes of our school performance. No Gilbert
+      Murray had come as yet to touch these things to life again. It was like
+      the ghost of an antiquarian's toy theatre, a ghost that crumbled and
+      condensed into a gritty dust of construing as one looked at it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marks, shindies, prayers and punishments, all flavoured with the leathery
+      stuffiness of time-worn Big Hall....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then out one would come through our grey old gate into the evening
+      light and the spectacle of London hurrying like a cataract, London in
+      black and brown and blue and gleaming silver, roaring like the very loom
+      of Time. We came out into the new world no teacher has yet had the power
+      and courage to grasp and expound. Life and death sang all about one, joys
+      and fears on such a scale, in such an intricacy as never Greek nor Roman
+      knew. The interminable procession of horse omnibuses went lumbering past,
+      bearing countless people we knew not whence, we knew not whither. Hansoms
+      clattered, foot passengers jostled one, a thousand appeals of shop and
+      boarding caught the eye. The multi-coloured lights of window and street
+      mingled with the warm glow of the declining day under the softly flushing
+      London skies; the ever-changing placards, the shouting news-vendors, told
+      of a kaleidoscopic drama all about the globe. One did not realise what had
+      happened to us, but the voice of Topham was suddenly drowned and lost, he
+      and his minute, remote gesticulations....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That submerged and isolated curriculum did not even join on to living
+      interests where it might have done so. We were left absolutely to the
+      hints of the newspapers, to casual political speeches, to the cartoons of
+      the comic papers or a chance reading of some Socialist pamphlet for any
+      general ideas whatever about the huge swirling world process in which we
+      found ourselves. I always look back with particular exasperation to the
+      cessation of our modern history at the year 1815. There it pulled up
+      abruptly, as though it had come upon something indelicate....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, after all, what would Topham or Flack have made of the huge
+      adjustments of the nineteenth century? Flack was the chief cricketer on
+      the staff; he belonged to that great cult which pretends that the place of
+      this or that county in the struggle for the championship is a matter of
+      supreme importance to boys. He obliged us to affect a passionate interest
+      in the progress of county matches, to work up unnatural enthusiasms. What
+      a fuss there would be when some well-trained boy, panting as if from
+      Marathon, appeared with an evening paper! &ldquo;I say, you chaps, Middlesex all
+      out for a hundred and five!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Under Flack's pressure I became, I confess, a cricket humbug of the first
+      class. I applied myself industriously year by year to mastering scores and
+      averages; I pretended that Lords or the Oval were the places nearest
+      Paradise for me. (I never went to either.) Through a slight mistake about
+      the county boundary I adopted Surrey for my loyalty, though as a matter of
+      fact we were by some five hundred yards or so in Kent. It did quite as
+      well for my purposes. I bowled rather straight and fast, and spent endless
+      hours acquiring the skill to bowl Flack out. He was a bat in the
+      Corinthian style, rich and voluminous, and succumbed very easily to a low
+      shooter or an unexpected Yorker, but usually he was caught early by long
+      leg. The difficulty was to bowl him before he got caught. He loved to lift
+      a ball to leg. After one had clean bowled him at the practice nets one
+      deliberately gave him a ball to leg just to make him feel nice again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Flack went about a world of marvels dreaming of leg hits. He has been
+      observed, going across the Park on his way to his highly respectable club
+      in Piccadilly, to break from profound musings into a strange brief dance
+      that ended with an imaginary swipe with his umbrella, a roofer, over the
+      trees towards Buckingham Palace. The hit accomplished, Flack resumed his
+      way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inadequately instructed foreigners would pass him in terror, needlessly
+      alert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These schoolmasters move through my memory as always a little distant and
+      more than a little incomprehensible. Except when they wore flannels, I saw
+      them almost always in old college caps and gowns, a uniform which greatly
+      increased their detachment from the world of actual men. Gates, the head,
+      was a lean loose-limbed man, rather stupid I discovered when I reached the
+      Sixth and came into contact with him, but honest, simple and very eager to
+      be liberal-minded. He was bald, with an almost conical baldness, with a
+      grizzled pointed beard, small featured and, under the stresses of a
+      Zeitgeist that demanded liberality, with an expression of puzzled but
+      resolute resistance to his own unalterable opinions. He made a tall
+      dignified figure in his gown. In my junior days he spoke to me only three
+      or four times, and then he annoyed me by giving me a wrong surname; it was
+      a sore point because I was an outsider and not one of the old school
+      families, the Shoesmiths, the Naylors, the Marklows, the Tophams, the
+      Pevises and suchlike, who came generation after generation. I recall him
+      most vividly against the background of faded brown book-backs in the old
+      library in which we less destructive seniors were trusted to work, with
+      the light from the stained-glass window falling in coloured patches on his
+      face. It gave him the appearance of having no colour of his own. He had a
+      habit of scratching the beard on his cheek as he talked, and he used to
+      come and consult us about things and invariably do as we said. That, in
+      his phraseology, was &ldquo;maintaining the traditions of the school.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had indeed an effect not of a man directing a school, but of a man
+      captured and directed by a school. Dead and gone Elizabethans had begotten
+      a monster that could carry him about in its mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet being a man, as I say, with his hair a little stirred by a Zeitgeist
+      that made for change, Gates did at times display a disposition towards
+      developments. City Merchants had no modern side, and utilitarian spirits
+      were carping in the PALL MALL GAZETTE and elsewhere at the omissions from
+      our curriculum, and particularly at our want of German. Moreover, four
+      classes still worked together with much clashing and uproar in the old Big
+      Hall that had once held in a common tumult the entire school. Gates used
+      to come and talk to us older fellows about these things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't wish to innovate unduly,&rdquo; he used to say. &ldquo;But we ought to get in
+      some German, you know,&mdash;for those who like it. The army men will be
+      wanting it some of these days.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He referred to the organisation of regular evening preparation for the
+      lower boys in Big Hall as a &ldquo;revolutionary change,&rdquo; but he achieved it,
+      and he declared he began the replacement of the hacked wooden tables, at
+      which the boys had worked since Tudor days, by sloping desks with safety
+      inkpots and scientifically adjustable seats, &ldquo;with grave misgivings.&rdquo; And
+      though he never birched a boy in his life, and was, I am convinced,
+      morally incapable of such a scuffle, he retained the block and birch in
+      the school through all his term of office, and spoke at the Headmasters'
+      Conference in temperate approval of corporal chastisement, comparing it,
+      dear soul! to the power of the sword....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wish I could, in some measure and without tediousness, convey the effect
+      of his discourses to General Assembly in Big Hall. But that is like trying
+      to draw the obverse and reverse of a sixpence worn to complete
+      illegibility. His tall fine figure stood high on the days, his thoughtful
+      tenor filled the air as he steered his hazardous way through sentences
+      that dragged inconclusive tails and dropped redundant prepositions. And he
+      pleaded ever so urgently, ever so finely, that what we all knew for Sin
+      was sinful, and on the whole best avoided altogether, and so went on with
+      deepening notes and even with short arresting gestures of the right arm
+      and hand, to stir and exhort us towards goodness, towards that modern,
+      unsectarian goodness, goodness in general and nothing in particular, which
+      the Zeitgeist seemed to indicate in those transitional years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The school never quite got hold of me. Partly I think that was because I
+      was a day-boy and so freer than most of the boys, partly because of a
+      temperamental disposition to see things in my own way and have my private
+      dreams, partly because I was a little antagonised by the family traditions
+      that ran through the school. I was made to feel at first that I was a rank
+      outsider, and I never quite forgot it. I suffered very little bullying,
+      and I never had a fight&mdash;in all my time there were only three fights&mdash;but
+      I followed my own curiosities. I was already a very keen theologian and
+      politician before I was fifteen. I was also intensely interested in modern
+      warfare. I read the morning papers in the Reading Room during the midday
+      recess, never missed the illustrated weeklies, and often when I could
+      afford it I bought a PALL MALL GAZETTE on my way home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not think that I was very exceptional in that; most intelligent boys,
+      I believe, want naturally to be men, and are keenly interested in men's
+      affairs. There is not the universal passion for a magnified puerility
+      among them it is customary to assume. I was indeed a voracious reader of
+      everything but boys' books&mdash;which I detested&mdash;and fiction. I
+      read histories, travel, popular science and controversy with particular
+      zest, and I loved maps. School work and school games were quite
+      subordinate affairs for me. I worked well and made a passable figure at
+      games, and I do not think I was abnormally insensitive to the fine quality
+      of our school, to the charm of its mediaeval nucleus, its Gothic
+      cloisters, its scraps of Palladian and its dignified Georgian extensions;
+      the contrast of the old quiet, that in spite of our presence pervaded it
+      everywhere, with the rushing and impending London all about it, was indeed
+      a continual pleasure to me. But these things were certainly not the living
+      and central interests of my life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had to conceal my wider outlook to a certain extent&mdash;from the
+      masters even more than from the boys. Indeed I only let myself go freely
+      with one boy, Britten, my especial chum, the son of the Agent-General for
+      East Australia. We two discovered in a chance conversation A PROPOS of a
+      map in the library that we were both of us curious why there were Malays
+      in Madagascar, and how the Mecca pilgrims came from the East Indies before
+      steamships were available. Neither of us had suspected that there was any
+      one at all in the school who knew or cared a rap about the Indian Ocean,
+      except as water on the way to India. But Britten had come up through the
+      Suez Canal, and his ship had spoken a pilgrim ship on the way. It gave him
+      a startling quality of living knowledge. From these pilgrims we got to a
+      comparative treatment of religions, and from that, by a sudden plunge, to
+      entirely sceptical and disrespectful confessions concerning Gates' last
+      outbreak of simple piety in School Assembly. We became congenial intimates
+      from that hour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The discovery of Britten happened to me when we were both in the Lower
+      Fifth. Previously there had been a watertight compartment between the
+      books I read and the thoughts they begot on the one hand and human
+      intercourse on the other. Now I really began my higher education, and
+      aired and examined and developed in conversation the doubts, the ideas,
+      the interpretations that had been forming in my mind. As we were both
+      day-boys with a good deal of control over our time we organised walks and
+      expeditions together, and my habit of solitary and rather vague prowling
+      gave way to much more definite joint enterprises. I went several times to
+      his house, he was the youngest of several brothers, one of whom was a
+      medical student and let us assist at the dissection of a cat, and once or
+      twice in vacation time he came to Penge, and we went with parcels of
+      provisions to do a thorough day in the grounds and galleries of the
+      Crystal Palace, ending with the fireworks at close quarters. We went in a
+      river steamboat down to Greenwich, and fired by that made an excursion to
+      Margate and back; we explored London docks and Bethnal Green Museum,
+      Petticoat Lane and all sorts of out-of-the-way places together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We confessed shyly to one another a common secret vice, &ldquo;Phantom warfare.&rdquo;
+       When we walked alone, especially in the country, we had both developed the
+      same practice of fighting an imaginary battle about us as we walked. As we
+      went along we were generals, and our attacks pushed along on either side,
+      crouching and gathering behind hedges, cresting ridges, occupying copses,
+      rushing open spaces, fighting from house to house. The hillsides about
+      Penge were honeycombed in my imagination with the pits and trenches I had
+      created to check a victorious invader coming out of Surrey. For him West
+      Kensington was chiefly important as the scene of a desperate and
+      successful last stand of insurrectionary troops (who had seized the Navy,
+      the Bank and other advantages) against a royalist army&mdash;reinforced by
+      Germans&mdash;advancing for reasons best known to themselves by way of
+      Harrow and Ealing. It is a secret and solitary game, as we found when we
+      tried to play it together. We made a success of that only once. All the
+      way down to Margate we schemed defences and assailed and fought them as we
+      came back against the sunset. Afterwards we recapitulated all that
+      conflict by means of a large scale map of the Thames and little paper
+      ironclads in plan cut out of paper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A subsequent revival of these imaginings was brought about by Britten's
+      luck in getting, through a friend of his father's, admission for us both
+      to the spectacle of volunteer officers fighting the war game in Caxton
+      Hall. We developed a war game of our own at Britten's home with nearly a
+      couple of hundred lead soldiers, some excellent spring cannons that shot
+      hard and true at six yards, hills of books and a constantly elaborated set
+      of rules. For some months that occupied an immense proportion of our
+      leisure. Some of our battles lasted several days. We kept the game a
+      profound secret from the other fellows. They would not have understood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And we also began, it was certainly before we were sixteen, to write, for
+      the sake of writing. We liked writing. We had discovered Lamb and the best
+      of the middle articles in such weeklies as the SATURDAY GAZETTE, and we
+      imitated them. Our minds were full of dim uncertain things we wanted to
+      drag out into the light of expression. Britten had got hold of IN
+      MEMORIAM, and I had disinterred Pope's ESSAY ON MAN and RABBI BEN EZRA,
+      and these things had set our theological and cosmic solicitudes talking. I
+      was somewhere between sixteen and eighteen, I know, when he and I walked
+      along the Thames Embankment confessing shamefully to one another that we
+      had never read Lucretius. We thought every one who mattered had read
+      Lucretius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I was nearly sixteen my mother was taken ill very suddenly, and died
+      of some perplexing complaint that involved a post-mortem examination; it
+      was, I think, the trouble that has since those days been recognised as
+      appendicitis. This led to a considerable change in my circumstances; the
+      house at Penge was given up, and my Staffordshire uncle arranged for me to
+      lodge during school terms with a needy solicitor and his wife in Vicars
+      Street, S. W., about a mile and a half from the school. So it was I came
+      right into London; I had almost two years of London before I went to
+      Cambridge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those were our great days together. Afterwards we were torn apart; Britten
+      went to Oxford, and our circumstances never afterwards threw us
+      continuously together until the days of the BLUE WEEKLY.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As boys, we walked together, read and discussed the same books, pursued
+      the same enquiries. We got a reputation as inseparables and the nickname
+      of the Rose and the Lily, for Britten was short and thick-set with dark
+      close curling hair and a ruddy Irish type of face; I was lean and
+      fair-haired and some inches taller than he. Our talk ranged widely and yet
+      had certain very definite limitations. We were amazingly free with
+      politics and religion, we went to that little meeting-house of William
+      Morris's at Hammersmith and worked out the principles of Socialism pretty
+      thoroughly, and we got up the Darwinian theory with the help of Britten's
+      medical-student brother and the galleries of the Natural History Museum in
+      Cromwell Road. Those wonderful cases on the ground floor illustrating
+      mimicry, dimorphism and so forth, were new in our times, and we went
+      through them with earnest industry and tried over our Darwinism in the
+      light of that. Such topics we did exhaustively. But on the other hand I do
+      not remember any discussion whatever of human sex or sexual relationships.
+      There, in spite of intense secret curiosities, our lips were sealed by a
+      peculiar shyness. And I do not believe we ever had occasion either of us
+      to use the word &ldquo;love.&rdquo; It was not only that we were instinctively shy of
+      the subject, but that we were mightily ashamed of the extent of our
+      ignorance and uncertainty in these matters. We evaded them elaborately
+      with an assumption of exhaustive knowledge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We certainly had no shyness about theology. We marked the emancipation of
+      our spirits from the frightful teachings that had oppressed our boyhood,
+      by much indulgence in blasphemous wit. We had a secret literature of
+      irreverent rhymes, and a secret art of theological caricature. Britten's
+      father had delighted his family by reading aloud from Dr. Richard
+      Garnett's TWILIGHT OF THE GODS, and Britten conveyed the precious volume
+      to me. That and the BAB BALLADS were the inspiration of some of our
+      earliest lucubrations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For an imaginative boy the first experience of writing is like a tiger's
+      first taste of blood, and our literary flowerings led very directly to the
+      revival of the school magazine, which had been comatose for some years.
+      But there we came upon a disappointment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      8
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In that revival we associated certain other of the Sixth Form boys, and
+      notably one for whom our enterprise was to lay the foundations of a career
+      that has ended in the House of Lords, Arthur Cossington, now Lord
+      Paddockhurst. Cossington was at that time a rather heavy, rather
+      good-looking boy who was chiefly eminent in cricket, an outsider even as
+      we were and preoccupied no doubt, had we been sufficiently detached to
+      observe him, with private imaginings very much of the same quality and
+      spirit as our own. He was, we were inclined to think, rather a
+      sentimentalist, rather a poseur, he affected a concise emphatic style,
+      played chess very well, betrayed a belief in will-power, and earned
+      Britten's secret hostility, Britten being a sloven, by the invariable
+      neatness of his collars and ties. He came into our magazine with a vigour
+      that we found extremely surprising and unwelcome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Britten and I had wanted to write. We had indeed figured our project
+      modestly as a manuscript magazine of satirical, liberal and brilliant
+      literature by which in some rather inexplicable way the vague tumult of
+      ideas that teemed within us was to find form and expression; Cossington,
+      it was manifest from the outset, wanted neither to write nor writing, but
+      a magazine. I remember the inaugural meeting in Shoesmith major's study&mdash;we
+      had had great trouble in getting it together&mdash;and how effectually
+      Cossington bolted with the proposal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think we fellows ought to run a magazine,&rdquo; said Cossington. &ldquo;The school
+      used to have one. A school like this ought to have a magazine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The last one died in '84,&rdquo; said Shoesmith from the hearthrug. &ldquo;Called the
+      OBSERVER. Rot rather.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bad title,&rdquo; said Cossington.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was a TATLER before that,&rdquo; said Britten, sitting on the writing
+      table at the window that was closed to deaden the cries of the Lower
+      School at play, and clashing his boots together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We want something suggestive of City Merchants.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;CITY MERCHANDIZE,&rdquo; said Britten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Too fanciful. What of ARVONIAN? Richard Arvon was our founder, and it
+      seems almost a duty&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They call them all -usians or -onians,&rdquo; said Britten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like CITY MERCHANDIZE,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;We could probably find a quotation to
+      suggest&mdash;oh! mixed good things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Cossington regarded me abstractedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't want to put the accent on the City, do we?&rdquo; said Shoesmith, who had
+      a feeling for county families, and Naylor supported him by a murmur of
+      approval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We ought to call it the ARVONIAN,&rdquo; decided Cossington, &ldquo;and we might very
+      well have underneath, 'With which is incorporated the OBSERVER.' That
+      picks up the old traditions, makes an appeal to old boys and all that, and
+      it gives us something to print under the title.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I still held out for CITY MERCHANDIZE, which had taken my fancy. &ldquo;Some of
+      the chaps' people won't like it,&rdquo; said Naylor, &ldquo;certain not to. And it
+      sounds Rum.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sounds Weird,&rdquo; said a boy who had not hitherto spoken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We aren't going to do anything Queer,&rdquo; said Shoesmith, pointedly not
+      looking at Britten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The question of the title had manifestly gone against us. &ldquo;Oh! HAVE it
+      ARVONIAN,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And next, what size shall we have?&rdquo; said Cossington.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something like MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE&mdash;or LONGMANS'; LONGMANS' is
+      better because it has a whole page, not columns. It makes no end of
+      difference to one's effects.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What effects?&rdquo; asked Shoesmith abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! a pause or a white line or anything. You've got to write closer for a
+      double column. It's nuggetty. You can't get a swing on your prose.&rdquo; I had
+      discussed this thoroughly with Britten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If the fellows are going to write&mdash;&rdquo; began Britten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We ought to keep off fine writing,&rdquo; said Shoesmith. &ldquo;It's cheek. I vote
+      we don't have any.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We sha'n't get any,&rdquo; said Cossington, and then as an olive branch to me,
+      &ldquo;unless Remington does a bit. Or Britten. But it's no good making too much
+      space for it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We ought to be very careful about the writing,&rdquo; said Shoesmith. &ldquo;We don't
+      want to give ourselves away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I vote we ask old Topham to see us through,&rdquo; said Naylor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Britten groaned aloud and every one regarded him. &ldquo;Greek epigrams on the
+      fellows' names,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Small beer in ancient bottles. Let's get a
+      stuffed broody hen to SIT on the magazine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We might do worse than a Greek epigram,&rdquo; said Cossington. &ldquo;One in each
+      number. It&mdash;it impresses parents and keeps up our classical
+      tradition. And the masters CAN help. We don't want to antagonise them. Of
+      course&mdash;we've got to departmentalise. Writing is only one section of
+      the thing. The ARVONIAN has to stand for the school. There's questions of
+      space and questions of expense. We can't turn out a great chunk of printed
+      prose like&mdash;like wet cold toast and call it a magazine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Britten writhed, appreciating the image.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's to be a section of sports. YOU must do that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not going to do any fine writing,&rdquo; said Shoesmith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What you've got to do is just to list all the chaps and put a note to
+      their play:&mdash;'Naylor minor must pass more. Football isn't the place
+      for extreme individualism.' 'Ammersham shapes well as half-back.' Things
+      like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could do that all right,&rdquo; said Shoesmith, brightening and manifestly
+      becoming pregnant with judgments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One great thing about a magazine of this sort,&rdquo; said Cossington, &ldquo;is to
+      mention just as many names as you can in each number. It keeps the
+      interest alive. Chaps will turn it over looking for their own little bit.
+      Then it all lights up for them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you want any reports of matches?&rdquo; Shoesmith broke from his meditation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rather. With comments.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Naylor surpassed himself and negotiated the lemon safely home,&rdquo; said
+      Shoesmith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shut it,&rdquo; said Naylor modestly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly,&rdquo; said Cossington. &ldquo;That gives us three features,&rdquo; touching them
+      off on his fingers, &ldquo;Epigram, Literary Section, Sports. Then we want a
+      section to shove anything into, a joke, a notice of anything that's going
+      on. So on. Our Note Book.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Hell!&rdquo; said Britten, and clashed his boots, to the silent disapproval
+      of every one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then we want an editorial.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A WHAT?&rdquo; cried Britten, with a note of real terror in his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, don't we? Unless we have our Note Book to begin on the front page.
+      It gives a scrappy effect to do that. We want something manly and
+      straightforward and a bit thoughtful, about Patriotism, say, or ESPRIT DE
+      CORPS, or After-Life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked at Britten. Hitherto we had not considered Cossington mattered
+      very much in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went over us as a motor-car goes over a dog. There was a sort of energy
+      about him, a new sort of energy to us; we had never realised that anything
+      of the sort existed in the world. We were hopelessly at a disadvantage.
+      Almost instantly we had developed a clear and detailed vision of a
+      magazine made up of everything that was most acceptable in the magazines
+      that flourished in the adult world about us, and had determined to make it
+      a success. He had by a kind of instinct, as it were, synthetically
+      plagiarised every successful magazine and breathed into this dusty mixture
+      the breath of life. He was elected at his own suggestion managing
+      director, with the earnest support of Shoesmith and Naylor, and conducted
+      the magazine so successfully and brilliantly that he even got a whole back
+      page of advertisements from the big sports shop in Holborn, and made the
+      printers pay at the same rate for a notice of certain books of their own
+      which they said they had inserted by inadvertency to fill up space. The
+      only literary contribution in the first number was a column by Topham in
+      faultless stereotyped English in depreciation of some fancied evil called
+      Utilitarian Studies and ending with that noble old quotation:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Flack crowded us out of number two with a bright little paper on the
+      &ldquo;Humours of Cricket,&rdquo; and the Head himself was profusely thoughtful all
+      over the editorial under the heading of &ldquo;The School Chapel; and How it
+      Seems to an Old Boy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Britten and I found it difficult to express to each other with any grace
+      or precision what we felt about that magazine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ ADOLESCENCE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I find it very difficult to trace how form was added to form and
+      interpretation followed interpretation in my ever-spreading,
+      ever-deepening, ever-multiplying and enriching vision of this world into
+      which I had been born. Every day added its impressions, its hints, its
+      subtle explications to the growing understanding. Day after day the living
+      interlacing threads of a mind weave together. Every morning now for three
+      weeks and more (for to-day is Thursday and I started on a Tuesday) I have
+      been trying to convey some idea of the factors and early influences by
+      which my particular scrap of subjective tapestry was shaped, to show the
+      child playing on the nursery floor, the son perplexed by his mother,
+      gazing aghast at his dead father, exploring interminable suburbs, touched
+      by first intimations of the sexual mystery, coming in with a sort of
+      confused avidity towards the centres of the life of London. It is only by
+      such an effort to write it down that one realises how marvellously
+      crowded, how marvellously analytical and synthetic those ears must be. One
+      begins with the little child to whom the sky is a roof of blue, the world
+      a screen of opaque and disconnected facts, the home a thing eternal, and
+      &ldquo;being good&rdquo; just simple obedience to unquestioned authority; and one
+      comes at last to the vast world of one's adult perception, pierced deep by
+      flaring searchlights of partial understanding, here masked by mists, here
+      refracted and distorted through half translucent veils, here showing broad
+      prospects and limitless vistas and here impenetrably dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I recall phases of deep speculation, doubts and even prayers by night, and
+      strange occasions when by a sort of hypnotic contemplation of nothingness
+      I sought to pierce the web of appearances about me. It is hard to measure
+      these things in receding perspective, and now I cannot trace, so closely
+      has mood succeeded and overlaid and obliterated mood, the phases by which
+      an utter horror of death was replaced by the growing realisation of its
+      necessity and dignity. Difficulty of the imagination with infinite space,
+      infinite time, entangled my mind; and moral distress for the pain and
+      suffering of bygone ages that made all thought of reformation in the
+      future seem but the grimmest irony upon now irreparable wrongs. Many an
+      intricate perplexity of these broadening years did not so much get settled
+      as cease to matter. Life crowded me away from it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have confessed myself a temerarious theologian, and in that passage from
+      boyhood to manhood I ranged widely in my search for some permanently
+      satisfying Truth. That, too, ceased after a time to be urgently
+      interesting. I came at last into a phase that endures to this day, of
+      absolute tranquillity, of absolute confidence in whatever that
+      Incomprehensible Comprehensive which must needs be the substratum of all
+      things, may be. Feeling OF IT, feeling BY IT, I cannot feel afraid of it.
+      I think I had got quite clearly and finally to that adjustment long before
+      my Cambridge days were done. I am sure that the evil in life is transitory
+      and finite like an accident or distress in the nursery; that God is my
+      Father and that I may trust Him, even though life hurts so that one must
+      needs cry out at it, even though it shows no consequence but failure, no
+      promise but pain....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But while I was fearless of theology I must confess it was comparatively
+      late before I faced and dared to probe the secrecies of sex. I was afraid
+      of sex. I had an instinctive perception that it would be a large and
+      difficult thing in my life, but my early training was all in the direction
+      of regarding it as an irrelevant thing, as something disconnected from all
+      the broad significances of life, as hostile and disgraceful in its
+      quality. The world was never so emasculated in thought, I suppose, as it
+      was in the Victorian time....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was afraid to think either of sex or (what I have always found
+      inseparable from a kind of sexual emotion) beauty. Even as a boy I knew
+      the thing as a haunting and alluring mystery that I tried to keep away
+      from. Its dim presence obsessed me none the less for all the extravagant
+      decency, the stimulating silences of my upbringing....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The plaster Venuses and Apollos that used to adorn the vast aisle and huge
+      grey terraces of the Crystal Palace were the first intimations of the
+      beauty of the body that ever came into my life. As I write of it I feel
+      again the shameful attraction of those gracious forms. I used to look at
+      them not simply, but curiously and askance. Once at least in my later days
+      at Penge, I spent a shilling in admission chiefly for the sake of them....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The strangest thing of all my odd and solitary upbringing seems to me now
+      that swathing up of all the splendours of the flesh, that strange
+      combination of fanatical terrorism and shyness that fenced me about with
+      prohibitions. It caused me to grow up, I will not say blankly ignorant,
+      but with an ignorance blurred and dishonoured by shame, by enigmatical
+      warnings, by cultivated aversions, an ignorance in which a fascinated
+      curiosity and desire struggled like a thing in a net. I knew so little and
+      I felt so much. There was indeed no Aphrodite at all in my youthful
+      Pantheon, but instead there was a mysterious and minatory gap. I have told
+      how at last a new Venus was born in my imagination out of gas lamps and
+      the twilight, a Venus with a cockney accent and dark eyes shining out of
+      the dusk, a Venus who was a warm, passion-stirring atmosphere rather than
+      incarnate in a body. And I have told, too, how I bought a picture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this was a thing apart from the rest of my life, a locked avoided
+      chamber....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not until my last year at Trinity that I really broke down the
+      barriers of this unwholesome silence and brought my secret broodings to
+      the light of day. Then a little set of us plunged suddenly into what we
+      called at first sociological discussion. I can still recall even the
+      physical feeling of those first tentative talks. I remember them mostly as
+      occurring in the rooms of Ted Hatherleigh, who kept at the corner by the
+      Trinity great gate, but we also used to talk a good deal at a man's in
+      King's, a man named, if I remember rightly, Redmayne. The atmosphere of
+      Hatherleigh's rooms was a haze of tobacco smoke against a background brown
+      and deep. He professed himself a socialist with anarchistic leanings&mdash;he
+      had suffered the martyrdom of ducking for it&mdash;and a huge French
+      May-day poster displaying a splendid proletarian in red and black on a
+      barricade against a flaring orange sky, dominated his decorations.
+      Hatherleigh affected a fine untidiness, and all the place, even the floor,
+      was littered with books, for the most part open and face downward; deeper
+      darknesses were supplied by a discarded gown and our caps, all
+      conscientiously battered, Hatherleigh's flopped like an elephant's ear and
+      inserted quill pens supported the corners of mine; the highlights of the
+      picture came chiefly as reflections from his chequered blue mugs full of
+      audit ale. We sat on oak chairs, except the four or five who crowded on a
+      capacious settle, we drank a lot of beer and were often fuddled, and
+      occasionally quite drunk, and we all smoked reckless-looking pipes,&mdash;there
+      was a transient fashion among us for corn cobs for which Mark Twain, I
+      think, was responsible. Our little excesses with liquor were due far more
+      to conscience than appetite, indicated chiefly a resolve to break away
+      from restraints that we suspected were keeping us off the instructive
+      knife-edges of life. Hatherleigh was a good Englishman of the premature
+      type with a red face, a lot of hair, a deep voice and an explosive
+      plunging manner, and it was he who said one evening&mdash;Heaven knows how
+      we got to it&mdash;&ldquo;Look here, you know, it's all Rot, this Shutting Up
+      about Women. We OUGHT to talk about them. What are we going to do about
+      them? It's got to come. We're all festering inside about it. Let's out
+      with it. There's too much Decency altogether about this Infernal
+      University!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We rose to his challenge a little awkwardly and our first talk was clumsy,
+      there were flushed faces and red ears, and I remember Hatherleigh broke
+      out into a monologue on decency. &ldquo;Modesty and Decency,&rdquo; said Hatherleigh,
+      &ldquo;are Oriental vices. The Jews brought them to Europe. They're Semitic,
+      just like our monasticism here and the seclusion of women and mutilating
+      the dead on a battlefield. And all that sort of thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hatherleigh's mind progressed by huge leaps, leaps that were usually
+      wildly inaccurate, and for a time we engaged hotly upon the topic of those
+      alleged mutilations and the Semitic responsibility for decency.
+      Hatherleigh tried hard to saddle the Semitic race with the less elegant
+      war customs of the Soudan and the northwest frontier of India, and quoted
+      Doughty, at that time a little-known author, and Cunninghame Graham to
+      show that the Arab was worse than a county-town spinster in his regard for
+      respectability. But his case was too preposterous, and Esmeer, with his
+      shrill penetrating voice and his way of pointing with all four long
+      fingers flat together, carried the point against him. He quoted Cato and
+      Roman law and the monasteries of Thibet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, anyway,&rdquo; said Hatherleigh, escaping from our hands like an
+      intellectual frog, &ldquo;Semitic or not, I've got no use for decency.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We argued points and Hatherleigh professed an unusually balanced and
+      tolerating attitude. &ldquo;I don't mind a certain refinement and dignity,&rdquo; he
+      admitted generously. &ldquo;What I object to is this spreading out of decency
+      until it darkens the whole sky, until it makes a man's father afraid to
+      speak of the most important things, until it makes a man afraid to look a
+      frank book in the face or think&mdash;even think! until it leads to our
+      coming to&mdash;to the business at last with nothing but a few
+      prohibitions, a few hints, a lot of dirty jokes and, and &ldquo;&mdash;he waved
+      a hand and seemed to seek and catch his image in the air&mdash;&ldquo;oh, a
+      confounded buttered slide of sentiment, to guide us. I tell you I'm going
+      to think about it and talk about it until I see a little more daylight
+      than I do at present. I'm twenty-two. Things might happen to me anywhen.
+      You men can go out into the world if you like, to sin like fools and marry
+      like fools, not knowing what you are doing and ashamed to ask. You'll take
+      the consequences, too, I expect, pretty meekly, sniggering a bit,
+      sentimentalising a bit, like&mdash;like Cambridge humorists.... I mean to
+      know what I'm doing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused to drink, and I think I cut in with ideas of my own. But one is
+      apt to forget one's own share in a talk, I find, more than one does the
+      clear-cut objectivity of other people's, and I do not know how far I
+      contributed to this discussion that followed. I am, however, pretty
+      certain that it was then that ideal that we were pleased to call
+      aristocracy and which soon became the common property of our set was
+      developed. It was Esmeer, I know, who laid down and maintained the
+      proposition that so far as minds went there were really only two sorts of
+      man in the world, the aristocrat and the man who subdues his mind to other
+      people's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'I couldn't THINK of it, Sir,'&rdquo; said Esmeer in his elucidatory tones;
+      &ldquo;that's what a servant says. His mind even is broken in to run between
+      fences, and he admits it. WE'VE got to be able to think of anything. And
+      'such things aren't for the Likes of Us!' That's another servant's saying.
+      Well, everything IS for the Likes of Us. If we see fit, that is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A small fresh-coloured man in grey objected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; exploded Hatherleigh, &ldquo;if that isn't so what the deuce are we up
+      here for? Instead of working in mines? If some things aren't to be thought
+      about ever! We've got the privilege of all these extra years for getting
+      things straight in our heads, and then we won't use 'em. Good God! what do
+      you think a university's for?&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Esmeer's idea came with an effect of real emancipation to several of us.
+      We were not going to be afraid of ideas any longer, we were going to throw
+      down every barrier of prohibition and take them in and see what came of
+      it. We became for a time even intemperately experimental, and one of us,
+      at the bare suggestion of an eminent psychic investigator, took hashish
+      and very nearly died of it within a fortnight of our great elucidation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chief matter of our interchanges was of course the discussion of sex.
+      Once the theme had been opened it became a sore place in our intercourse;
+      none of us seemed able to keep away from it. Our imaginations got astir
+      with it. We made up for lost time and went round it and through it and
+      over it exhaustively. I recall prolonged discussion of polygamy on the way
+      to Royston, muddy November tramps to Madingley, when amidst much profanity
+      from Hatherleigh at the serious treatment of so obsolete a matter, we
+      weighed the reasons, if any, for the institution of marriage. The fine dim
+      night-time spaces of the Great Court are bound up with the inconclusive
+      finales of mighty hot-eared wrangles; the narrows of Trinity Street and
+      Petty Cury and Market Hill have their particular associations for me with
+      that spate of confession and free speech, that almost painful goal
+      delivery of long pent and crappled and sometimes crippled ideas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And we went on a reading party that Easter to a place called Pulborough in
+      Sussex, where there is a fishing inn and a river that goes under a bridge.
+      It was a late Easter and a blazing one, and we boated and bathed and
+      talked of being Hellenic and the beauty of the body until at moments it
+      seemed to us that we were destined to restore the Golden Age, by the
+      simple abolition of tailors and outfitters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those undergraduate talks! how rich and glorious they seemed, how
+      splendidly new the ideas that grew and multiplied in our seething minds!
+      We made long afternoon and evening raids over the Downs towards Arundel,
+      and would come tramping back through the still keen moonlight singing and
+      shouting. We formed romantic friendships with one another, and grieved
+      more or less convincingly that there were no splendid women fit to be our
+      companions in the world. But Hatherleigh, it seemed, had once known a girl
+      whose hair was gloriously red. &ldquo;My God!&rdquo; said Hatherleigh to convey the
+      quality of her; just simply and with projectile violence: &ldquo;My God!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benton had heard of a woman who lived with a man refusing to be married to
+      him&mdash;we thought that splendid beyond measure,&mdash;I cannot now
+      imagine why. She was &ldquo;like a tender goddess,&rdquo; Benton said. A sort of shame
+      came upon us in the dark in spite of our liberal intentions when Benton
+      committed himself to that. And after such talk we would fall upon great
+      pauses of emotional dreaming, and if by chance we passed a girl in a
+      governess cart, or some farmer's daughter walking to the station, we
+      became alertly silent or obstreperously indifferent to her. For might she
+      not be just that one exception to the banal decency, the sickly pointless
+      conventionality, the sham modesty of the times in which we lived?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We felt we stood for a new movement, not realising how perennially this
+      same emancipation returns to those ancient courts beside the Cam. We were
+      the anti-decency party, we discovered a catch phrase that we flourished
+      about in the Union and made our watchword, namely, &ldquo;stark fact.&rdquo; We hung
+      nude pictures in our rooms much as if they had been flags, to the earnest
+      concern of our bedders, and I disinterred my long-kept engraving and had
+      it framed in fumed oak, and found for it a completer and less restrained
+      companion, a companion I never cared for in the slightest degree....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This efflorescence did not prevent, I think indeed it rather helped, our
+      more formal university work, for most of us took firsts, and three of us
+      got Fellowships in one year or another. There was Benton who had a
+      Research Fellowship and went to Tubingen, there was Esmeer and myself who
+      both became Residential Fellows. I had taken the Mental and Moral Science
+      Tripos (as it was then), and three years later I got a lectureship in
+      political science. In those days it was disguised in the cloak of
+      Political Economy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was our affectation to be a little detached from the main stream of
+      undergraduate life. We worked pretty hard, but by virtue of our beer, our
+      socialism and suchlike heterodoxy, held ourselves to be differentiated
+      from the swatting reading man. None of us, except Baxter, who was a rowing
+      blue, a rather abnormal blue with an appetite for ideas, took games
+      seriously enough to train, and on the other hand we intimated contempt for
+      the rather mediocre, deliberately humorous, consciously gentlemanly and
+      consciously wild undergraduate men who made up the mass of Cambridge life.
+      After the manner of youth we were altogether too hard on our
+      contemporaries. We battered our caps and tore our gowns lest they should
+      seem new, and we despised these others extremely for doing exactly the
+      same things; we had an idea of ourselves and resented beyond measure a
+      similar weakness in these our brothers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a type, or at least there seemed to us to be a type&mdash;I'm a
+      little doubtful at times now whether after all we didn't create it&mdash;for
+      which Hatherleigh invented the nickname the &ldquo;Pinky Dinkys,&rdquo; intending
+      thereby both contempt and abhorrence in almost equal measure. The Pinky
+      Dinky summarised all that we particularly did not want to be, and also, I
+      now perceive, much of what we were and all that we secretly dreaded
+      becoming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it is hard to convey the Pinky Dinky idea, for all that it meant so
+      much to us. We spent one evening at least during that reading party upon
+      the Pinky Dinky; we sat about our one fire after a walk in the rain&mdash;it
+      was our only wet day&mdash;smoked our excessively virile pipes, and
+      elaborated the natural history of the Pinky Dinky. We improvised a sort of
+      Pinky Dinky litany, and Hatherleigh supplied deep notes for the responses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Pinky Dinky extracts a good deal of amusement from life,&rdquo; said some
+      one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damned prig!&rdquo; said Hatherleigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Pinky Dinky arises in the Union and treats the question with a light
+      gay touch. He makes the weird ones mad. But sometimes he cannot go on
+      because of the amusement he extracts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to shy books at the giggling swine,&rdquo; said Hatherleigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Pinky Dinky says suddenly while he is making the tea, 'We're all
+      being frightfully funny. It's time for you to say something now.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Pinky Dinky shakes his head and says: 'I'm afraid I shall never be a
+      responsible being.' And he really IS frivolous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Frivolous but not vulgar,&rdquo; said Esmeer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pinky Dinkys are chaps who've had their buds nipped,&rdquo; said Hatherleigh.
+      &ldquo;They're Plebs and they know it. They haven't the Guts to get hold of
+      things. And so they worry up all those silly little jokes of theirs to
+      carry it off.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We tried bad ones for a time, viciously flavoured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pinky Dinkys are due to over-production of the type that ought to keep
+      outfitters' shops. Pinky Dinkys would like to keep outfitters' shops with
+      whimsy 'scriptions on the boxes and make your bill out funny, and not be
+      snobs to customers, no!&mdash;not even if they had titles.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Every Pinky Dinky's people are rather good people, and better than most
+      Pinky Dinky's people. But he does not put on side.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pinky Dinkys become playful at the sight of women.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Croquet's my game,' said the Pinky Dinky, and felt a man condescended.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what the devil do they think they're up to, anyhow?&rdquo; roared old
+      Hatherleigh suddenly, dropping plump into bottomless despair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We felt we had still failed to get at the core of the mystery of the Pinky
+      Dinky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We tried over things about his religion. &ldquo;The Pinky Dinky goes to King's
+      Chapel, and sits and feels in the dusk. Solemn things! Oh HUSH! He
+      wouldn't tell you&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He COULDN'T tell you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Religion is so sacred to him he never talks about it, never reads about
+      it, never thinks about it. Just feels!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But in his heart of hearts, oh! ever so deep, the Pinky Dinky has a doubt&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Some one protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a vulgar doubt,&rdquo; Esmeer went on, &ldquo;but a kind of hesitation whether
+      the Ancient of Days is really exactly what one would call good form....
+      There's a lot of horrid coarseness got into the world somehow. SOMEBODY
+      put it there.... And anyhow there's no particular reason why a man should
+      be seen about with Him. He's jolly Awful of course and all that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Pinky Dinky for all his fun and levity has a clean mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A thoroughly clean mind. Not like Esmeer's&mdash;the Pig!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If once he began to think about sex, how could he be comfortable at
+      croquet?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's their Damned Modesty,&rdquo; said Hatherleigh suddenly, &ldquo;that's what's the
+      matter with the Pinky Dinky. It's Mental Cowardice dressed up as a virtue
+      and taking the poor dears in. Cambridge is soaked with it; it's some
+      confounded local bacillus. Like the thing that gives a flavour to Havana
+      cigars. He comes up here to be made into a man and a ruler of the people,
+      and he thinks it shows a nice disposition not to take on the job! How the
+      Devil is a great Empire to be run with men like him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All his little jokes and things,&rdquo; said Esmeer regarding his feet on the
+      fender, &ldquo;it's just a nervous sniggering&mdash;because he's afraid....
+      Oxford's no better.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's he afraid of?&rdquo; said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God knows!&rdquo; exploded Hatherleigh and stared at the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;LIFE!&rdquo; said Esmeer. &ldquo;And so in a way are we,&rdquo; he added, and made a
+      thoughtful silence for a time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say,&rdquo; began Carter, who was doing the Natural Science Tripos, &ldquo;what is
+      the adult form of the Pinky Dinky?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But there we were checked by our ignorance of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the adult form of any of us?&rdquo; asked Benton, voicing the thought
+      that had arrested our flow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not remember that we ever lifted our criticism to the dons and the
+      organisation of the University. I think we took them for granted. When I
+      look back at my youth I am always astonished by the multitude of things
+      that we took for granted. It seemed to us that Cambridge was in the order
+      of things, for all the world like having eyebrows or a vermiform appendix.
+      Now with the larger scepticism of middle age I can entertain very
+      fundamental doubts about these old universities. Indeed I had a scheme&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not see what harm I can do now by laying bare the purpose of the
+      political combinations I was trying to effect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My educational scheme was indeed the starting-point of all the big project
+      of conscious public reconstruction at which I aimed. I wanted to build up
+      a new educational machine altogether for the governing class out of a
+      consolidated system of special public service schools. I meant to get to
+      work upon this whatever office I was given in the new government. I could
+      have begun my plan from the Admiralty or the War Office quite as easily as
+      from the Education Office. I am firmly convinced it is hopeless to think
+      of reforming the old public schools and universities to meet the needs of
+      a modern state, they send their roots too deep and far, the cost would
+      exceed any good that could possibly be effected, and so I have sought a
+      way round this invincible obstacle. I do think it would be quite
+      practicable to side-track, as the Americans say, the whole system by
+      creating hardworking, hard-living, modern and scientific boys' schools,
+      first for the Royal Navy and then for the public service generally, and as
+      they grew, opening them to the public without any absolute obligation to
+      subsequent service. Simultaneously with this it would not be impossible to
+      develop a new college system with strong faculties in modern philosophy,
+      modern history, European literature and criticism, physical and biological
+      science, education and sociology.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We could in fact create a new liberal education in this way, and cut the
+      umbilicus of the classical languages for good and all. I should have set
+      this going, and trusted it to correct or kill the old public schools and
+      the Oxford and Cambridge tradition altogether. I had men in my mind to
+      begin the work, and I should have found others. I should have aimed at
+      making a hard-trained, capable, intellectually active, proud type of man.
+      Everything else would have been made subservient to that. I should have
+      kept my grip on the men through their vacation, and somehow or other I
+      would have contrived a young woman to match them. I think I could have
+      seen to it effectually enough that they didn't get at croquet and tennis
+      with the vicarage daughters and discover sex in the Peeping Tom fashion I
+      did, and that they realised quite early in life that it isn't really
+      virile to reek of tobacco. I should have had military manoeuvres, training
+      ships, aeroplane work, mountaineering and so forth, in the place of the
+      solemn trivialities of games, and I should have fed and housed my men
+      clean and very hard&mdash;where there wasn't any audit ale, no credit
+      tradesmen, and plenty of high pressure douches....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have revisited Cambridge and Oxford time after time since I came down,
+      and so far as the Empire goes, I want to get clear of those two places....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Always I renew my old feelings, a physical oppression, a sense of lowness
+      and dampness almost exactly like the feeling of an underground room where
+      paper moulders and leaves the wall, a feeling of ineradicable contagion in
+      the Gothic buildings, in the narrow ditch-like rivers, in those roads and
+      roads of stuffy little villas. Those little villas have destroyed all the
+      good of the old monastic system and none of its evil....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some of the most charming people in the world live in them, but their
+      collective effect is below the quality of any individual among them.
+      Cambridge is a world of subdued tones, of excessively subtle humours, of
+      prim conduct and free thinking; it fears the Parent, but it has no fear of
+      God; it offers amidst surroundings that vary between disguises and
+      antiquarian charm the inflammation of literature's purple draught; one
+      hears there a peculiar thin scandal like no other scandal in the world&mdash;a
+      covetous scandal&mdash;so that I am always reminded of Ibsen in Cambridge.
+      In Cambridge and the plays of Ibsen alone does it seem appropriate for the
+      heroine before the great crisis of life to &ldquo;enter, take off her overshoes,
+      and put her wet umbrella upon the writing desk.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have to make a new Academic mind for modern needs, and the last thing
+      to make it out of, I am convinced, is the old Academic mind. One might as
+      soon try to fake the old VICTORY at Portsmouth into a line of battleship
+      again. Besides which the old Academic mind, like those old bathless, damp
+      Gothic colleges, is much too delightful in its peculiar and distinctive
+      way to damage by futile patching.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My heart warms to a sense of affectionate absurdity as I recall dear old
+      Codger, surely the most &ldquo;unleaderly&rdquo; of men. No more than from the old
+      Schoolmen, his kindred, could one get from him a School for Princes. Yet
+      apart from his teaching he was as curious and adorable as a good Netsuke.
+      Until quite recently he was a power in Cambridge, he could make and bar
+      and destroy, and in a way he has become the quintessence of Cambridge in
+      my thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I see him on his way to the morning's lecture, with his plump childish
+      face, his round innocent eyes, his absurdly non-prehensile fat hand
+      carrying his cap, his grey trousers braced up much too high, his feet a
+      trifle inturned, and going across the great court with a queer tripping
+      pace that seemed cultivated even to my naive undergraduate eye. Or I see
+      him lecturing. He lectured walking up and down between the desks, talking
+      in a fluting rapid voice, and with the utmost lucidity. If he could not
+      walk up and down he could not lecture. His mind and voice had precisely
+      the fluid quality of some clear subtle liquid; one felt it could flow
+      round anything and overcome nothing. And its nimble eddies were wonderful!
+      Or again I recall him drinking port with little muscular movements in his
+      neck and cheek and chin and his brows knit&mdash;very judicial, very
+      concentrated, preparing to say the apt just thing; it was the last thing
+      he would have told a lie about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I think of Codger I am reminded of an inscription I saw on some
+      occasion in Regent's Park above two eyes scarcely more limpidly innocent
+      than his&mdash;&ldquo;Born in the Menagerie.&rdquo; Never once since Codger began to
+      display the early promise of scholarship at the age of eight or more, had
+      he been outside the bars. His utmost travel had been to lecture here and
+      lecture there. His student phase had culminated in papers of quite
+      exceptional brilliance, and he had gone on to lecture with a cheerful
+      combination of wit and mannerism that had made him a success from the
+      beginning. He has lectured ever since. He lectures still. Year by year he
+      has become plumper, more rubicund and more and more of an item for the
+      intelligent visitor to see. Even in my time he was pointed out to people
+      as part of our innumerable enrichments, and obviously he knew it. He has
+      become now almost the leading Character in a little donnish world of much
+      too intensely appreciated Characters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He boasted he took no exercise, and also of his knowledge of port wine. Of
+      other wines he confessed quite frankly he had no &ldquo;special knowledge.&rdquo;
+       Beyond these things he had little pride except that he claimed to have
+      read every novel by a woman writer that had ever entered the Union
+      Library. This, however, he held to be remarkable rather than ennobling,
+      and such boasts as he made of it were tinged with playfulness. Certainly
+      he had a scholar's knowledge of the works of Miss Marie Corelli, Miss
+      Braddon, Miss Elizabeth Glyn and Madame Sarah Grand that would have
+      astonished and flattered those ladies enormously, and he loved nothing so
+      much in his hours of relaxation as to propound and answer difficult
+      questions upon their books. Tusher of King's was his ineffectual rival in
+      this field, their bouts were memorable and rarely other than glorious for
+      Codger; but then Tusher spread himself too much, he also undertook to
+      rehearse whole pages out of Bradshaw, and tell you with all the changes
+      how to get from any station to any station in Great Britain by the nearest
+      and cheapest routes....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Codger lodged with a little deaf innocent old lady, Mrs. Araminta Mergle,
+      who was understood to be herself a very redoubtable Character in the
+      Gyp-Bedder class; about her he related quietly absurd anecdotes. He
+      displayed a marvellous invention in ascribing to her plausible expressions
+      of opinion entirely identical in import with those of the Oxford and
+      Harvard Pragmatists, against whom he waged a fierce obscure war....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Codger's function to teach me philosophy, philosophy! the intimate
+      wisdom of things. He dealt in a variety of Hegelian stuff like nothing
+      else in the world, but marvellously consistent with itself. It was a
+      wonderful web he spun out of that queer big active childish brain that had
+      never lusted nor hated nor grieved nor feared nor passionately loved,&mdash;a
+      web of iridescent threads. He had luminous final theories about Love and
+      Death and Immortality, odd matters they seemed for him to think about! and
+      all his woven thoughts lay across my perception of the realities of
+      things, as flimsy and irrelevant and clever and beautiful, oh!&mdash;as a
+      dew-wet spider's web slung in the morning sunshine across the black mouth
+      of a gun....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All through those years of development I perceive now there must have been
+      growing in me, slowly, irregularly, assimilating to itself all the phrases
+      and forms of patriotism, diverting my religious impulses, utilising my
+      esthetic tendencies, my dominating idea, the statesman's idea, that idea
+      of social service which is the protagonist of my story, that real though
+      complex passion for Making, making widely and greatly, cities, national
+      order, civilisation, whose interplay with all those other factors in life
+      I have set out to present. It was growing in me&mdash;as one's bones grow,
+      no man intending it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have tried to show how, quite early in my life, the fact of
+      disorderliness, the conception of social life as being a multitudinous
+      confusion out of hand, came to me. One always of course simplifies these
+      things in the telling, but I do not think I ever saw the world at large in
+      any other terms. I never at any stage entertained the idea which sustained
+      my mother, and which sustains so many people in the world,&mdash;the idea
+      that the universe, whatever superficial discords it may present, is as a
+      matter of fact &ldquo;all right,&rdquo; is being steered to definite ends by a serene
+      and unquestionable God. My mother thought that Order prevailed, and that
+      disorder was just incidental and foredoomed rebellion; I feel and have
+      always felt that order rebels against and struggles against disorder, that
+      order has an up-hill job, in gardens, experiments, suburbs, everything
+      alike; from the very beginnings of my experience I discovered hostility to
+      order, a constant escaping from control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The current of living and contemporary ideas in which my mind was
+      presently swimming made all in the same direction; in place of my mother's
+      attentive, meticulous but occasionally extremely irascible Providence, the
+      talk was all of the Struggle for Existence and the survival not of the
+      Best&mdash;that was nonsense, but of the fittest to survive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The attempts to rehabilitate Faith in the form of the Individualist's
+      LAISSEZ FAIRE never won upon me. I disliked Herbert Spencer all my life
+      until I read his autobiography, and then I laughed a little and loved him.
+      I remember as early as the City Merchants' days how Britten and I scoffed
+      at that pompous question-begging word &ldquo;Evolution,&rdquo; having, so to speak,
+      found it out. Evolution, some illuminating talker had remarked at the
+      Britten lunch table, had led not only to man, but to the liver-fluke and
+      skunk, obviously it might lead anywhere; order came into things only
+      through the struggling mind of man. That lit things wonderfully for us.
+      When I went up to Cambridge I was perfectly clear that life was a various
+      and splendid disorder of forces that the spirit of man sets itself to
+      tame. I have never since fallen away from that persuasion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not think I was exceptionally precocious in reaching these
+      conclusions and a sort of religious finality for myself by eighteen or
+      nineteen. I know men and women vary very much in these matters, just as
+      children do in learning to talk. Some will chatter at eighteen months and
+      some will hardly speak until three, and the thing has very little to do
+      with their subsequent mental quality. So it is with young people; some
+      will begin their religious, their social, their sexual interests at
+      fourteen, some not until far on in the twenties. Britten and I belonged to
+      one of the precocious types, and Cossington very probably to another. It
+      wasn't that there was anything priggish about any of us; we should have
+      been prigs to have concealed our spontaneous interests and ape the
+      theoretical boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The world of man centred for my imagination in London, it still centres
+      there; the real and present world, that is to say, as distinguished from
+      the wonder-lands of atomic and microscopic science and the stars and
+      future time. I had travelled scarcely at all, I had never crossed the
+      Channel, but I had read copiously and I had formed a very good working
+      idea of this round globe with its mountains and wildernesses and forests
+      and all the sorts and conditions of human life that were scattered over
+      its surface. It was all alive, I felt, and changing every day; how it was
+      changing, and the changes men might bring about, fascinated my mind beyond
+      measure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I used to find a charm in old maps that showed The World as Known to the
+      Ancients, and I wish I could now without any suspicion of self-deception
+      write down compactly the world as it was known to me at nineteen. So far
+      as extension went it was, I fancy, very like the world I know now at
+      forty-two; I had practically all the mountains and seas, boundaries and
+      races, products and possibilities that I have now. But its intension was
+      very different. All the interval has been increasing and deepening my
+      social knowledge, replacing crude and second-hand impressions by felt and
+      realised distinctions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1895&mdash;that was my last year with Britten, for I went up to
+      Cambridge in September&mdash;my vision of the world had much the same
+      relation to the vision I have to-day that an ill-drawn daub of a mask has
+      to the direct vision of a human face. Britten and I looked at our world
+      and saw&mdash;what did we see? Forms and colours side by side that we had
+      no suspicion were interdependent. We had no conception of the roots of
+      things nor of the reaction of things. It did not seem to us, for example,
+      that business had anything to do with government, or that money and means
+      affected the heroic issues of war. There were no wagons in our war game,
+      and where there were guns, there it was assumed the ammunition was
+      gathered together. Finance again was a sealed book to us; we did not so
+      much connect it with the broad aspects of human affairs as regard it as a
+      sort of intrusive nuisance to be earnestly ignored by all right-minded
+      men. We had no conception of the quality of politics, nor how &ldquo;interests&rdquo;
+       came into such affairs; we believed men were swayed by purely intellectual
+      convictions and were either right or wrong, honest or dishonest (in which
+      case they deserved to be shot), good or bad. We knew nothing of mental
+      inertia, and could imagine the opinion of a whole nation changed by one
+      lucid and convincing exposition. We were capable of the most incongruous
+      transfers from the scroll of history to our own times, we could suppose
+      Brixton ravaged and Hampstead burnt in civil wars for the succession to
+      the throne, or Cheapside a lane of death and the front of the Mansion
+      House set about with guillotines in the course of an accurately transposed
+      French Revolution. We rebuilt London by Act of Parliament, and once in a
+      mood of hygienic enterprise we transferred its population EN MASSE to the
+      North Downs by an order of the Local Government Board. We thought nothing
+      of throwing religious organisations out of employment or superseding all
+      the newspapers by freely distributed bulletins. We could contemplate the
+      possibility of laws abolishing whole classes; we were equal to such a
+      dream as the peaceful and orderly proclamation of Communism from the steps
+      of St. Paul's Cathedral, after the passing of a simply worded bill,&mdash;a
+      close and not unnaturally an exciting division carrying the third reading.
+      I remember quite distinctly evolving that vision. We were then fully
+      fifteen and we were perfectly serious about it. We were not fools; it was
+      simply that as yet we had gathered no experience at all of the limits and
+      powers of legislation and conscious collective intention....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think this statement does my boyhood justice, and yet I have my doubts.
+      It is so hard now to say what one understood and what one did not
+      understand. It isn't only that every day changed one's general outlook,
+      but also that a boy fluctuates between phases of quite adult understanding
+      and phases of tawdrily magnificent puerility. Sometimes I myself was in
+      those tumbrils that went along Cheapside to the Mansion House, a Sydney
+      Cartonesque figure, a white defeated Mirabean; sometimes it was I who sat
+      judging and condemning and ruling (sleeping in my clothes and feeding very
+      simply) the soul and autocrat of the Provisional Government, which
+      occupied, of all inconvenient places! the General Post Office at St.
+      Martin's-le-Grand!...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I cannot trace the development of my ideas at Cambridge, but I believe the
+      mere physical fact of going two hours' journey away from London gave that
+      place for the first time an effect of unity in my imagination. I got
+      outside London. It became tangible instead of being a frame almost as
+      universal as sea and sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Cambridge my ideas ceased to live in a duologue; in exchange for
+      Britten, with whom, however, I corresponded lengthily, stylishly and
+      self-consciously for some years, I had now a set of congenial friends. I
+      got talk with some of the younger dons, I learnt to speak in the Union,
+      and in my little set we were all pretty busily sharpening each other's
+      wits and correcting each other's interpretations. Cambridge made politics
+      personal and actual. At City Merchants' we had had no sense of effective
+      contact; we boasted, it is true, an under secretary and a colonial
+      governor among our old boys, but they were never real to us; such
+      distinguished sons as returned to visit the old school were allusive and
+      pleasant in the best Pinky Dinky style, and pretended to be in earnest
+      about nothing but our football and cricket, to mourn the abolition of
+      &ldquo;water,&rdquo; and find a shuddering personal interest in the ancient swishing
+      block. At Cambridge I felt for the first time that I touched the thing
+      that was going on. Real living statesmen came down to debate in the Union,
+      the older dons had been their college intimates, their sons and nephews
+      expounded them to us and made them real to us. They invited us to
+      entertain ideas; I found myself for the first time in my life expected to
+      read and think and discuss, my secret vice had become a virtue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That combination-room world is at last larger and more populous and
+      various than the world of schoolmasters. The Shoesmiths and Naylors who
+      had been the aristocracy of City Merchants' fell into their place in my
+      mind; they became an undistinguished mass on the more athletic side of
+      Pinky Dinkyism, and their hostility to ideas and to the expression of
+      ideas ceased to limit and trouble me. The brighter men of each generation
+      stay up; these others go down to propagate their tradition, as the fathers
+      of families, as mediocre professional men, as assistant masters in
+      schools. Cambridge which perfects them is by the nature of things least
+      oppressed by them,&mdash;except when it comes to a vote in Convocation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were still in those days under the shadow of the great Victorians. I
+      never saw Gladstone (as I never set eyes on the old Queen), but he had
+      resigned office only a year before I went up to Trinity, and the
+      Combination Rooms were full of personal gossip about him and Disraeli and
+      the other big figures of the gladiatorial stage of Parlimentary history,
+      talk that leaked copiously into such sets as mine. The ceiling of our
+      guest chamber at Trinity was glorious with the arms of Sir William
+      Harcourt, whose Death Duties had seemed at first like a socialist dawn.
+      Mr. Evesham we asked to come to the Union every year, Masters, Chamberlain
+      and the old Duke of Devonshire; they did not come indeed, but their polite
+      refusals brought us all, as it were, within personal touch of them. One
+      heard of cabinet councils and meetings at country houses. Some of us,
+      pursuing such interests, went so far as to read political memoirs and the
+      novels of Disraeli and Mrs. Humphry Ward. From gossip, example and the
+      illustrated newspapers one learnt something of the way in which parties
+      were split, coalitions formed, how permanent officials worked and
+      controlled their ministers, how measures were brought forward and projects
+      modified.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And while I was getting the great leading figures on the political stage,
+      who had been presented to me in my schooldays not so much as men as the
+      pantomimic monsters of political caricature, while I was getting them
+      reduced in my imagination to the stature of humanity, and their motives to
+      the quality of impulses like my own, I was also acquiring in my Tripos
+      work a constantly developing and enriching conception of the world of men
+      as a complex of economic, intellectual and moral processes....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Socialism is an intellectual Proteus, but to the men of my generation it
+      came as the revolt of the workers. Rodbertus we never heard of and the
+      Fabian Society we did not understand; Marx and Morris, the Chicago
+      Anarchists, JUSTICE and Social Democratic Federation (as it was then)
+      presented socialism to our minds. Hatherleigh was the leading exponent of
+      the new doctrines in Trinity, and the figure upon his wall of a
+      huge-muscled, black-haired toiler swaggering sledgehammer in hand across a
+      revolutionary barricade, seemed the quintessence of what he had to
+      expound. Landlord and capitalist had robbed and enslaved the workers, and
+      were driving them quite automatically to inevitable insurrection. They
+      would arise and the capitalist system would flee and vanish like the mists
+      before the morning, like the dews before the sunrise, giving place in the
+      most simple and obvious manner to an era of Right and Justice and Virtue
+      and Well Being, and in short a Perfectly Splendid Time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had already discussed this sort of socialism under the guidance of
+      Britten, before I went up to Cambridge. It was all mixed up with ideas
+      about freedom and natural virtue and a great scorn for kings, titles,
+      wealth and officials, and it was symbolised by the red ties we wore. Our
+      simple verdict on existing arrangements was that they were &ldquo;all wrong.&rdquo;
+       The rich were robbers and knew it, kings and princes were usurpers and
+      knew it, religious teachers were impostors in league with power, the
+      economic system was an elaborate plot on the part of the few to
+      expropriate the many. We went about feeling scornful of all the current
+      forms of life, forms that esteemed themselves solid, that were, we knew,
+      no more than shapes painted on a curtain that was presently to be torn
+      aside....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Hatherleigh's poster and his capacity for overstating things, I
+      think, that first qualified my simple revolutionary enthusiasm. Perhaps
+      also I had met with Fabian publications, but if I did I forget the
+      circumstances. And no doubt my innate constructiveness with its practical
+      corollary of an analytical treatment of the material supplied, was bound
+      to push me on beyond this melodramatic interpretation of human affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I compared that Working Man of the poster with any sort of working man I
+      knew. I perceived that the latter was not going to change, and indeed
+      could not under any stimulus whatever be expected to change, into the
+      former. It crept into my mind as slowly and surely as the dawn creeps into
+      a room that the former was not, as I had at first rather glibly assumed,
+      an &ldquo;ideal,&rdquo; but a complete misrepresentation of the quality and
+      possibilities of things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not know now whether it was during my school-days or at Cambridge
+      that I first began not merely to see the world as a great contrast of rich
+      and poor, but to feel the massive effect of that multitudinous majority of
+      people who toil continually, who are for ever anxious about ways and
+      means, who are restricted, ill clothed, ill fed and ill housed, who have
+      limited outlooks and continually suffer misadventures, hardships and
+      distresses through the want of money. My lot had fallen upon the fringe of
+      the possessing minority; if I did not know the want of necessities I knew
+      shabbiness, and the world that let me go on to a university education
+      intimated very plainly that there was not a thing beyond the primary needs
+      that my stimulated imagination might demand that it would not be an effort
+      for me to secure. A certain aggressive radicalism against the ruling and
+      propertied classes followed almost naturally from my circumstances. It did
+      not at first connect itself at all with the perception of a planless
+      disorder in human affairs that had been forced upon me by the atmosphere
+      of my upbringing, nor did it link me in sympathy with any of the
+      profounder realities of poverty. It was a personal independent thing. The
+      dingier people one saw in the back streets and lower quarters of Bromstead
+      and Penge, the drift of dirty children, ragged old women, street loafers,
+      grimy workers that made the social background of London, the stories one
+      heard of privation and sweating, only joined up very slowly with the
+      general propositions I was making about life. We could become splendidly
+      eloquent about the social revolution and the triumph of the Proletariat
+      after the Class war, and it was only by a sort of inspiration that it came
+      to me that my bedder, a garrulous old thing with a dusty black bonnet over
+      one eye and an ostentatiously clean apron outside the dark mysteries that
+      clothed her, or the cheeky little ruffians who yelled papers about the
+      streets, were really material to such questions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Directly any of us young socialists of Trinity found ourselves in
+      immediate contact with servants or cadgers or gyps or bedders or plumbers
+      or navvies or cabmen or railway porters we became unconsciously and
+      unthinkingly aristocrats. Our voices altered, our gestures altered. We
+      behaved just as all the other men, rich or poor, swatters or sportsmen or
+      Pinky Dinkys, behaved, and exactly as we were expected to behave. On the
+      whole it is a population of poor quality round about Cambridge, rather
+      stunted and spiritless and very difficult to idealise. That theoretical
+      Working Man of ours!&mdash;if we felt the clash at all we explained it, I
+      suppose, by assuming that he came from another part of the country;
+      Esmeer, I remember, who lived somewhere in the Fens, was very eloquent
+      about the Cornish fishermen, and Hatherleigh, who was a Hampshire man,
+      assured us we ought to know the Scottish miner. My private fancy was for
+      the Lancashire operative because of his co-operative societies, and
+      because what Lancashire thinks to-day England thinks to-morrow.... And
+      also I had never been in Lancashire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By little increments of realisation it was that the profounder verities of
+      the problem of socialism came to me. It helped me very much that I had to
+      go down to the Potteries several times to discuss my future with my uncle
+      and guardian; I walked about and saw Bursley Wakes and much of the human
+      aspects of organised industrialism at close quarters for the first time.
+      The picture of a splendid Working Man cheated out of his innate glorious
+      possibilities, and presently to arise and dash this scoundrelly and
+      scandalous system of private ownership to fragments, began to give place
+      to a limitless spectacle of inefficiency, to a conception of millions of
+      people not organised as they should be, not educated as they should be,
+      not simply prevented from but incapable of nearly every sort of beauty,
+      mostly kindly and well meaning, mostly incompetent, mostly obstinate, and
+      easily humbugged and easily diverted. Even the tragic and inspiring idea
+      of Marx, that the poor were nearing a limit of painful experience, and
+      awakening to a sense of intolerable wrongs, began to develop into the more
+      appalling conception that the poor were simply in a witless uncomfortable
+      inconclusive way&mdash;&ldquo;muddling along&rdquo;; that they wanted nothing very
+      definitely nor very urgently, that mean fears enslaved them and mean
+      satisfactions decoyed them, that they took the very gift of life itself
+      with a spiritless lassitude, hoarding it, being rather anxious not to lose
+      it than to use it in any way whatever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The complete development of that realisation was the work of many years. I
+      had only the first intimations at Cambridge. But I did have intimations.
+      Most acutely do I remember the doubts that followed the visit of Chris
+      Robinson. Chris Robinson was heralded by such heroic anticipations, and he
+      was so entirely what we had not anticipated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hatherleigh got him to come, arranged a sort of meeting for him at
+      Redmayne's rooms in King's, and was very proud and proprietorial. It
+      failed to stir Cambridge at all profoundly. Beyond a futile attempt to
+      screw up Hatherleigh made by some inexpert duffers who used nails instead
+      of screws and gimlets, there was no attempt to rag. Next day Chris
+      Robinson went and spoke at Bennett Hall in Newnham College, and left
+      Cambridge in the evening amidst the cheers of twenty men or so. Socialism
+      was at such a low ebb politically in those days that it didn't even rouse
+      men to opposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there sat Chris under that flamboyant and heroic Worker of the poster,
+      a little wrinkled grey-bearded apologetic man in ready-made clothes, with
+      watchful innocent brown eyes and a persistent and invincible air of being
+      out of his element. He sat with his stout boots tucked up under his chair,
+      and clung to a teacup and saucer and looked away from us into the fire,
+      and we all sat about on tables and chair-arms and windowsills and boxes
+      and anywhere except upon chairs after the manner of young men. The only
+      other chair whose seat was occupied was the one containing his knitted
+      woollen comforter and his picturesque old beach-photographer's hat. We
+      were all shy and didn't know how to take hold of him now we had got him,
+      and, which was disconcertingly unanticipated, he was manifestly having the
+      same difficulty with us. We had expected to be gripped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll not be knowing what to say to these Chaps,&rdquo; he repeated with a
+      north-country quality in his speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We made reassuring noises.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Ambassador of the Workers stirred his tea earnestly through an
+      uncomfortable pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd best tell 'em something of how things are in Lancashire, what with
+      the new machines and all that,&rdquo; he speculated at last with red reflections
+      in his thoughtful eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had an inexcusable dread that perhaps he would make a mess of the
+      meeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when he was no longer in the unaccustomed meshes of refined
+      conversation, but speaking with an audience before him, he became a
+      different man. He declared he would explain to us just exactly what
+      socialism was, and went on at once to an impassioned contrast of social
+      conditions. &ldquo;You young men,&rdquo; he said &ldquo;come from homes of luxury; every
+      need you feel is supplied&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We sat and stood and sprawled about him, occupying every inch of
+      Redmayne's floor space except the hearthrug-platform, and we listened to
+      him and thought him over. He was the voice of wrongs that made us
+      indignant and eager. We forgot for a time that he had been shy and seemed
+      not a little incompetent, his provincial accent became a beauty of his
+      earnest speech, we were carried away by his indignations. We looked with
+      shining eyes at one another and at the various dons who had dropped in and
+      were striving to maintain a front of judicious severity. We felt more and
+      more that social injustice must cease, and cease forthwith. We felt we
+      could not sleep upon it. At the end we clapped and murmured our applause
+      and wanted badly to cheer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then like a lancet stuck into a bladder came the heckling. Denson, that
+      indolent, liberal-minded sceptic, did most of the questioning. He lay
+      contorted in a chair, with his ugly head very low, his legs crossed and
+      his left boot very high, and he pointed his remarks with a long thin hand
+      and occasionally adjusted the unstable glasses that hid his watery eyes.
+      &ldquo;I don't want to carp,&rdquo; he began. &ldquo;The present system, I admit, stands
+      condemned. Every present system always HAS stood condemned in the minds of
+      intelligent men. But where it seems to me you get thin, is just where
+      everybody has been thin, and that's when you come to the remedy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Socialism,&rdquo; said Chris Robinson, as if it answered everything, and
+      Hatherleigh said &ldquo;Hear! Hear!&rdquo; very resolutely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose I OUGHT to take that as an answer,&rdquo; said Denson, getting his
+      shoulder-blades well down to the seat of his chair; &ldquo;but I don't. I don't,
+      you know. It's rather a shame to cross-examine you after this fine address
+      of yours&rdquo;&mdash;Chris Robinson on the hearthrug made acquiescent and
+      inviting noises&mdash;&ldquo;but the real question remains how exactly are you
+      going to end all these wrongs? There are the administrative questions. If
+      you abolish the private owner, I admit you abolish a very complex and
+      clumsy way of getting businesses run, land controlled and things in
+      general administered, but you don't get rid of the need of administration,
+      you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Democracy,&rdquo; said Chris Robinson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Organised somehow,&rdquo; said Denson. &ldquo;And it's just the How perplexes me. I
+      can quite easily imagine a socialist state administered in a sort of
+      scrambling tumult that would be worse than anything we have got now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing could be worse than things are now,&rdquo; said Chris Robinson. &ldquo;I have
+      seen little children&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I submit life on an ill-provisioned raft, for example, could easily be
+      worse&mdash;or life in a beleagured town.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Murmurs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They wrangled for some time, and it had the effect upon me of coming out
+      from the glow of a good matinee performance into the cold daylight of late
+      afternoon. Chris Robinson did not shine in conflict with Denson; he was an
+      orator and not a dialectician, and he missed Denson's points and displayed
+      a disposition to plunge into untimely pathos and indignation. And Denson
+      hit me curiously hard with one of his shafts. &ldquo;Suppose,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you
+      found yourself prime minister&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked at Chris Robinson, bright-eyed and his hair a little ruffled and
+      his whole being rhetorical, and measured him against the huge machine of
+      government muddled and mysterious. Oh! but I was perplexed!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then we took him back to Hatherleigh's rooms and drank beer and smoked
+      about him while he nursed his knee with hairy wristed hands that protruded
+      from his flannel shirt, and drank lemonade under the cartoon of that
+      emancipated Worker, and we had a great discursive talk with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eh! you should see our big meetings up north?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Denson had ruffled him and worried him a good deal, and ever and again he
+      came back to that discussion. &ldquo;It's all very easy for your learned men to
+      sit and pick holes,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;while the children suffer and die. They
+      don't pick holes up north. They mean business.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He talked, and that was the most interesting part of it all, of his going
+      to work in a factory when he was twelve&mdash;&ldquo;when you Chaps were all
+      with your mammies &ldquo;&mdash;and how he had educated himself of nights until
+      he would fall asleep at his reading.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's made many of us keen for all our lives,&rdquo; he remarked, &ldquo;all that
+      clemming for education. Why! I longed all through one winter to read a bit
+      of Darwin. I must know about this Darwin if I die for it, I said. And I
+      could no' get the book.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hatherleigh made an enthusiastic noise and drank beer at him with round
+      eyes over the mug.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, anyhow I wasted no time on Greek and Latin,&rdquo; said Chris Robinson.
+      &ldquo;And one learns to go straight at a thing without splitting straws. One
+      gets hold of the Elementals.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (Well, did they? That was the gist of my perplexity.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One doesn't quibble,&rdquo; he said, returning to his rankling memory of
+      Denson, &ldquo;while men decay and starve.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But suppose,&rdquo; I said, suddenly dropping into opposition, &ldquo;the alternative
+      is to risk a worse disaster&mdash;or do something patently futile.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't follow that,&rdquo; said Chris Robinson. &ldquo;We don't propose anything
+      futile, so far as I can see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The prevailing force in my undergraduate days was not Socialism but
+      Kiplingism. Our set was quite exceptional in its socialistic professions.
+      And we were all, you must understand, very distinctly Imperialists also,
+      and professed a vivid sense of the &ldquo;White Man's Burden.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a little difficult now to get back to the feelings of that period;
+      Kipling has since been so mercilessly and exhaustively mocked, criticised
+      and torn to shreds;&mdash;never was a man so violently exalted and then,
+      himself assisting, so relentlessly called down. But in the middle nineties
+      this spectacled and moustached little figure with its heavy chin and its
+      general effect of vehement gesticulation, its wild shouts of boyish
+      enthusiasm for effective force, its lyric delight in the sounds and
+      colours, in the very odours of empire, its wonderful discovery of
+      machinery and cotton waste and the under officer and the engineer, and
+      &ldquo;shop&rdquo; as a poetic dialect, became almost a national symbol. He got hold
+      of us wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling and haunting quotations, he
+      stirred Britten and myself to futile imitations, he coloured the very
+      idiom of our conversation. He rose to his climax with his &ldquo;Recessional,&rdquo;
+       while I was still an undergraduate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What did he give me exactly?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He helped to broaden my geographical sense immensely, and he provided
+      phrases for just that desire for discipline and devotion and organised
+      effort the Socialism of our time failed to express, that the current
+      socialist movement still fails, I think, to express. The sort of thing
+      that follows, for example, tore something out of my inmost nature and gave
+      it a shape, and I took it back from him shaped and let much of the rest of
+      him, the tumult and the bullying, the hysteria and the impatience, the
+      incoherence and inconsistency, go uncriticised for the sake of it:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Keep ye the Law&mdash;be swift in all obedience&mdash;Clear the land of
+      evil, drive the road and bridge the ford, Make ye sure to each his own
+      That he reap where he hath sown; By the peace among Our peoples let men
+      know we serve the Lord!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then again, and for all our later criticism, this sticks in my mind,
+      sticks there now as quintessential wisdom:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      It is after all a secondary matter that Kipling, not having been born and
+      brought up in Bromstead and Penge, and the war in South Africa being yet
+      in the womb of time, could quite honestly entertain the now remarkable
+      delusion that England had her side-arms at that time kept anything but
+      &ldquo;awful.&rdquo; He learnt better, and we all learnt with him in the dark years of
+      exasperating and humiliating struggle that followed, and I do not see that
+      we fellow learners are justified in turning resentfully upon him for a
+      common ignorance and assumption....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      South Africa seems always painted on the back cloth of my Cambridge
+      memories. How immense those disasters seemed at the time, disasters our
+      facile English world has long since contrived in any edifying or
+      profitable sense to forget! How we thrilled to the shouting newspaper
+      sellers as the first false flush of victory gave place to the realisation
+      of defeat. Far away there our army showed itself human, mortal and human
+      in the sight of all the world, the pleasant officers we had imagined would
+      change to wonderful heroes at the first crackling of rifles, remained the
+      pleasant, rather incompetent men they had always been, failing to imagine,
+      failing to plan and co-operate, failing to grip. And the common soldiers,
+      too, they were just what our streets and country-side had made them, no
+      sudden magic came out of the war bugles for them. Neither splendid nor
+      disgraceful were they,&mdash;just ill-trained and fairly plucky and
+      wonderfully good-tempered men&mdash;paying for it. And how it lowered our
+      vitality all that first winter to hear of Nicholson's Nek, and then
+      presently close upon one another, to realise the bloody waste of
+      Magersfontein, the shattering retreat from Stormberg, Colenso&mdash;Colenso,
+      that blundering battle, with White, as it seemed, in Ladysmith near the
+      point of surrender! and so through the long unfolding catalogue of bleak
+      disillusionments, of aching, unconcealed anxiety lest worse should follow.
+      To advance upon your enemy singing about his lack of cleanliness and
+      method went out of fashion altogether! The dirty retrogressive Boer
+      vanished from our scheme of illusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All through my middle Cambridge period, the guns boomed and the rifles
+      crackled away there on the veldt, and the horsemen rode and the tale of
+      accidents and blundering went on. Men, mules, horses, stores and money
+      poured into South Africa, and the convalescent wounded streamed home. I
+      see it in my memory as if I had looked at it through a window instead of
+      through the pages of the illustrated papers; I recall as if I had been
+      there the wide open spaces, the ragged hillsides, the open order attacks
+      of helmeted men in khaki, the scarce visible smoke of the guns, the
+      wrecked trains in great lonely places, the burnt isolated farms, and at
+      last the blockhouses and the fences of barbed wire uncoiling and spreading
+      for endless miles across the desert, netting the elusive enemy until at
+      last, though he broke the meshes again and again, we had him in the toils.
+      If one's attention strayed in the lecture-room it wandered to those
+      battle-fields.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And that imagined panorama of war unfolds to an accompaniment of yelling
+      newsboys in the narrow old Cambridge streets, of the flicker of papers
+      hastily bought and torn open in the twilight, of the doubtful reception of
+      doubtful victories, and the insensate rejoicings at last that seemed to
+      some of us more shameful than defeats....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A book that stands out among these memories, that stimulated me immensely
+      so that I forced it upon my companions, half in the spirit of propaganda
+      and half to test it by their comments, was Meredith's ONE OF OUR
+      CONQUERORS. It is one of the books that have made me. In that I got a
+      supplement and corrective of Kipling. It was the first detached and
+      adverse criticism of the Englishman I had ever encountered. It must have
+      been published already nine or ten years when I read it. The country had
+      paid no heed to it, had gone on to the expensive lessons of the War
+      because of the dull aversion our people feel for all such intimations, and
+      so I could read it as a book justified. The war endorsed its every word
+      for me, underlined each warning indication of the gigantic dangers that
+      gathered against our system across the narrow seas. It discovered Europe
+      to me, as watching and critical.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But while I could respond to all its criticisms of my country's
+      intellectual indolence, of my country's want of training and discipline
+      and moral courage, I remember that the idea that on the continent there
+      were other peoples going ahead of us, mentally alert while we fumbled,
+      disciplined while we slouched, aggressive and preparing to bring our
+      Imperial pride to a reckoning, was extremely novel and distasteful to me.
+      It set me worrying of nights. It put all my projects for social and
+      political reconstruction upon a new uncomfortable footing. It made them no
+      longer merely desirable but urgent. Instead of pride and the love of
+      making one might own to a baser motive. Under Kipling's sway I had a
+      little forgotten the continent of Europe, treated it as a mere envious
+      echo to our own world-wide display. I began now to have a disturbing sense
+      as it were of busy searchlights over the horizon....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One consequence of the patriotic chagrin Meredith produced in me was an
+      attempt to belittle his merit. &ldquo;It isn't a good novel, anyhow,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The charge I brought against it was, I remember, a lack of unity. It
+      professed to be a study of the English situation in the early nineties,
+      but it was all deflected, I said, and all the interest was confused by the
+      story of Victor Radnor's fight with society to vindicate the woman he had
+      loved and never married. Now in the retrospect and with a mind full of
+      bitter enlightenment, I can do Meredith justice, and admit the conflict
+      was not only essential but cardinal in his picture, that the terrible
+      inflexibility of the rich aunts and the still more terrible claim of Mrs.
+      Burman Radnor, the &ldquo;infernal punctilio,&rdquo; and Dudley Sowerby's limitations,
+      were the central substance of that inalertness the book set itself to
+      assail. So many things have been brought together in my mind that were
+      once remotely separated. A people that will not valiantly face and
+      understand and admit love and passion can understand nothing whatever. But
+      in those days what is now just obvious truth to me was altogether outside
+      my range of comprehension....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      8
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I seek to recapitulate the interlacing growth of my apprehension of the
+      world, as I flounder among the half-remembered developments that found me
+      a crude schoolboy and left me a man, there comes out, as if it stood for
+      all the rest, my first holiday abroad. That did not happen until I was
+      twenty-two. I was a fellow of Trinity, and the Peace of Vereeniging had
+      just been signed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went with a man named Willersley, a man some years senior to myself, who
+      had just missed a fellowship and the higher division of the Civil Service,
+      and who had become an enthusiastic member of the London School Board, upon
+      which the cumulative vote and the support of the &ldquo;advanced&rdquo; people had
+      placed him. He had, like myself, a small independent income that relieved
+      him of any necessity to earn a living, and he had a kindred craving for
+      social theorising and some form of social service. He had sought my
+      acquaintance after reading a paper of mine (begotten by the visit of Chris
+      Robinson) on the limits of pure democracy. It had marched with some
+      thoughts of his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We went by train to Spiez on the Lake of Thun, then up the Gemmi, and
+      thence with one or two halts and digressions and a little modest climbing
+      we crossed over by the Antrona pass (on which we were benighted) into
+      Italy, and by way of Domo D'ossola and the Santa Maria Maggiore valley to
+      Cannobio, and thence up the lake to Locarno (where, as I shall tell, we
+      stayed some eventful days) and so up the Val Maggia and over to Airolo and
+      home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I write of that long tramp of ours, something of its freshness and
+      enlargement returns to me. I feel again the faint pleasant excitement of
+      the boat train, the trampling procession of people with hand baggage and
+      laden porters along the platform of the Folkestone pier, the scarcely
+      perceptible swaying of the moored boat beneath our feet. Then, very
+      obvious and simple, the little emotion of standing out from the homeland
+      and seeing the long white Kentish cliffs recede. One walked about the boat
+      doing one's best not to feel absurdly adventurous, and presently a
+      movement of people directed one's attention to a white lighthouse on a
+      cliff to the east of us, coming up suddenly; and then one turned to scan
+      the little different French coast villages, and then, sliding by in a pale
+      sunshine came a long wooden pier with oddly dressed children upon it, and
+      the clustering town of Boulogne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One took it all with the outward calm that became a young man of nearly
+      three and twenty, but one was alive to one's finger-tips with pleasing
+      little stimulations. The custom house examination excited one, the
+      strangeness of a babble in a foreign tongue; one found the French of City
+      Merchants' and Cambridge a shy and viscous flow, and then one was standing
+      in the train as it went slowly through the rail-laid street to Boulogne
+      Ville, and one looked out at the world in French, porters in blouses,
+      workmen in enormous purple trousers, police officers in peaked caps
+      instead of helmets and romantically cloaked, big carts, all on two wheels
+      instead of four, green shuttered casements instead of sash windows, and
+      great numbers of neatly dressed women in economical mourning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! there's a priest!&rdquo; one said, and was betrayed into suchlike artless
+      cries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a real other world, with different government and different
+      methods, and in the night one was roused from uneasy slumbers and sat
+      blinking and surly, wrapped up in one's couverture and with one's oreiller
+      all awry, to encounter a new social phenomenon, the German official, so
+      different in manner from the British; and when one woke again after that
+      one had come to Bale, and out one tumbled to get coffee in Switzerland....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have been over that route dozens of times since, but it still revives a
+      certain lingering youthfulness, a certain sense of cheerful release in me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember that I and Willersley became very sociological as we ran on to
+      Spiez, and made all sorts of generalisations from the steeply sloping
+      fields on the hillsides, and from the people we saw on platforms and from
+      little differences in the way things were done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The clean prosperity of Bale and Switzerland, the big clean stations,
+      filled me with patriotic misgivings, as I thought of the vast dirtiness of
+      London, the mean dirtiness of Cambridgeshire. It came to me that perhaps
+      my scheme of international values was all wrong, that quite stupendous
+      possibilities and challenges for us and our empire might be developing
+      here&mdash;and I recalled Meredith's Skepsey in France with a new
+      understanding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Willersley had dressed himself in a world-worn Norfolk suit of greenish
+      grey tweeds that ended unfamiliarly at his rather impending, spectacled,
+      intellectual visage. I didn't, I remember, like the contrast of him with
+      the drilled Swiss and Germans about us. Convict coloured stockings and
+      vast hobnail boots finished him below, and all his luggage was a borrowed
+      rucksac that he had tied askew. He did not want to shave in the train, but
+      I made him at one of the Swiss stations&mdash;I dislike these Oxford
+      slovenlinesses&mdash;and then confound him! he cut himself and bled....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next morning we were breathing a thin exhilarating air that seemed to have
+      washed our very veins to an incredible cleanliness, and eating hard-boiled
+      eggs in a vast clear space of rime-edged rocks, snow-mottled, above a
+      blue-gashed glacier. All about us the monstrous rock surfaces rose towards
+      the shining peaks above, and there were winding moraines from which the
+      ice had receded, and then dark clustering fir trees far below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had an extraordinary feeling of having come out of things, of being
+      outside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But this is the round world!&rdquo; I said, with a sense of never having
+      perceived it before; &ldquo;this is the round world!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      9
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That holiday was full of big comprehensive effects; the first view of the
+      Rhone valley and the distant Valaisian Alps, for example, which we saw
+      from the shoulder of the mountain above the Gemmi, and the early summer
+      dawn breaking over Italy as we moved from our night's crouching and
+      munched bread and chocolate and stretched our stiff limbs among the
+      tumbled and precipitous rocks that hung over Lake Cingolo, and surveyed
+      the winding tiring rocky track going down and down to Antronapiano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And our thoughts were as comprehensive as our impressions. Willersley's
+      mind abounded in historical matter; he had an inaccurate abundant habit of
+      topographical reference; he made me see and trace and see again the Roman
+      Empire sweep up these winding valleys, and the coming of the first great
+      Peace among the warring tribes of men....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the retrospect each of us seems to have been talking about our outlook
+      almost continually. Each of us, you see, was full of the same question,
+      very near and altogether predominant to us, the question: &ldquo;What am I going
+      to do with my life?&rdquo; He saw it almost as importantly as I, but from a
+      different angle, because his choice was largely made and mine still hung
+      in the balance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel we might do so many things,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;and everything that calls
+      one, calls one away from something else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Willersley agreed without any modest disavowals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have got to think out,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;just what we are and what we are up
+      to. We've got to do that now. And then&mdash;it's one of those questions
+      it is inadvisable to reopen subsequently.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He beamed at me through his glasses. The sententious use of long words was
+      a playful habit with him, that and a slight deliberate humour, habits
+      occasional Extension Lecturing was doing very much to intensify.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've made your decision?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded with a peculiar forward movement of his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How would you put it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Social Service&mdash;education. Whatever else matters or doesn't matter,
+      it seems to me there is one thing we MUST have and increase, and that is
+      the number of people who can think a little&mdash;and have&rdquo;&mdash;he
+      beamed again&mdash;&ldquo;an adequate sense of causation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're sure it's worth while.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For me&mdash;certainly. I don't discuss that any more.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't limit myself too narrowly,&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;After all, the work is all
+      one. We who know, we who feel, are building the great modern state,
+      joining wall to wall and way to way, the new great England rising out of
+      the decaying old... we are the real statesmen&mdash;I like that use of
+      'statesmen.'...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said with many doubts. &ldquo;Yes, of course....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Willersley is middle-aged now, with silver in his hair and a deepening
+      benevolence in his always amiable face, and he has very fairly kept his
+      word. He has lived for social service and to do vast masses of useful,
+      undistinguished, fertilising work. Think of the days of arid
+      administrative plodding and of contention still more arid and unrewarded,
+      that he must have spent! His little affectations of gesture and manner,
+      imitative affectations for the most part, have increased, and the humorous
+      beam and the humorous intonations have become a thing he puts on every
+      morning like an old coat. His devotion is mingled with a considerable
+      whimsicality, and they say he is easily flattered by subordinates and
+      easily offended into opposition by colleagues; he has made mistakes at
+      times and followed wrong courses, still there he is, a flat contradiction
+      to all the ordinary doctrine of motives, a man who has foregone any
+      chances of wealth and profit, foregone any easier paths to distinction,
+      foregone marriage and parentage, in order to serve the community. He does
+      it without any fee or reward except his personal self-satisfaction in
+      doing this work, and he does it without any hope of future joys and
+      punishments, for he is an implacable Rationalist. No doubt he idealises
+      himself a little, and dreams of recognition. No doubt he gets his pleasure
+      from a sense of power, from the spending and husbanding of large sums of
+      public money, and from the inevitable proprietorship he must feel in the
+      fair, fine, well-ordered schools he has done so much to develop. &ldquo;But for
+      me,&rdquo; he can say, &ldquo;there would have been a Job about those diagrams, and
+      that subject or this would have been less ably taught.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact remains that for him the rewards have been adequate, if not to
+      content at any rate to keep him working. Of course he covets the notice of
+      the world he has served, as a lover covets the notice of his mistress. Of
+      course he thinks somewhere, somewhen, he will get credit. Only last year I
+      heard some men talking of him, and they were noting, with little mean
+      smiles, how he had shown himself self-conscious while there was talk of
+      some honorary degree-giving or other; it would, I have no doubt, please
+      him greatly if his work were to flower into a crimson gown in some
+      Academic parterre. Why shouldn't it? But that is incidental vanity at the
+      worst; he goes on anyhow. Most men don't.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But we had our walk twenty years and more ago now. He was oldish even then
+      as a young man, just as he is oldish still in middle age. Long may his
+      industrious elderliness flourish for the good of the world! He lectured a
+      little in conversation then; he lectures more now and listens less,
+      toilsomely disentangling what you already understand, giving you in detail
+      the data you know; these are things like callosities that come from a
+      man's work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our long three weeks' talk comes back to me as a memory of ideas and
+      determinations slowly growing, all mixed up with a smell of wood smoke and
+      pine woods and huge precipices and remote gleams of snow-fields and the
+      sound of cascading torrents rushing through deep gorges far below. It is
+      mixed, too, with gossips with waitresses and fellow travellers, with my
+      first essays in colloquial German and Italian, with disputes about the way
+      to take, and other things that I will tell of in another section. But the
+      white passion of human service was our dominant theme. Not simply perhaps
+      nor altogether unselfishly, but quite honestly, and with at least a
+      frequent self-forgetfulness, did we want to do fine and noble things, to
+      help in their developing, to lessen misery, to broaden and exalt life. It
+      is very hard&mdash;perhaps it is impossible&mdash;to present in a page or
+      two the substance and quality of nearly a month's conversation,
+      conversation that is casual and discursive in form, that ranges carelessly
+      from triviality to immensity, and yet is constantly resuming a
+      constructive process, as workmen on a wall loiter and jest and go and come
+      back, and all the while build.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We got it more and more definite that the core of our purpose beneath all
+      its varied aspects must needs be order and discipline. &ldquo;Muddle,&rdquo; said I,
+      &ldquo;is the enemy.&rdquo; That remains my belief to this day. Clearness and order,
+      light and foresight, these things I know for Good. It was muddle had just
+      given us all the still freshly painful disasters and humiliations of the
+      war, muddle that gives us the visibly sprawling disorder of our cities and
+      industrial country-side, muddle that gives us the waste of life, the
+      limitations, wretchedness and unemployment of the poor. Muddle! I remember
+      myself quoting Kipling&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,
+     All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We build the state,&rdquo; we said over and over again. &ldquo;That is what we are
+      for&mdash;servants of the new reorganisation!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We planned half in earnest and half Utopianising, a League of Social
+      Service.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We talked of the splendid world of men that might grow out of such unpaid
+      and ill-paid work as we were setting our faces to do. We spoke of the
+      intricate difficulties, the monstrous passive resistances, the hostilities
+      to such a development as we conceived our work subserved, and we spoke
+      with that underlying confidence in the invincibility of the causes we
+      adopted that is natural to young and scarcely tried men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We talked much of the detailed life of politics so far as it was known to
+      us, and there Willersley was more experienced and far better informed than
+      I; we discussed possible combinations and possible developments, and the
+      chances of some great constructive movement coming from the
+      heart-searchings the Boer war had occasioned. We would sink to gossip&mdash;even
+      at the Suetonius level. Willersley would decline towards illuminating
+      anecdotes that I capped more or less loosely from my private reading. We
+      were particularly wise, I remember, upon the management of newspapers,
+      because about that we knew nothing whatever. We perceived that great
+      things were to be done through newspapers. We talked of swaying opinion
+      and moving great classes to massive action.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Men are egotistical even in devotion. All our splendid projects were
+      thickset with the first personal pronoun. We both could write, and all
+      that we said in general terms was reflected in the particular in our
+      minds; it was ourselves we saw, and no others, writing and speaking that
+      moving word. We had already produced manuscript and passed the initiations
+      of proof reading; I had been a frequent speaker in the Union, and
+      Willersley was an active man on the School Board. Our feet were already on
+      the lower rungs that led up and up. He was six and twenty, and I
+      twenty-two. We intimated our individual careers in terms of bold
+      expectation. I had prophetic glimpses of walls and hoardings clamorous
+      with &ldquo;Vote for Remington,&rdquo; and Willersley no doubt saw himself chairman of
+      this committee and that, saying a few slightly ironical words after the
+      declaration of the poll, and then sitting friendly beside me on the
+      government benches. There was nothing impossible in such dreams. Why not
+      the Board of Education for him? My preference at that time wavered between
+      the Local Government Board&mdash;I had great ideas about town-planning,
+      about revisions of municipal areas and re-organised internal transit&mdash;and
+      the War Office. I swayed strongly towards the latter as the journey
+      progressed. My educational bias came later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The swelling ambitions that have tramped over Alpine passes! How many of
+      them, like mine, have come almost within sight of realisation before they
+      failed?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were times when we posed like young gods (of unassuming exterior),
+      and times when we were full of the absurdest little solicitudes about our
+      prospects. There were times when one surveyed the whole world of men as if
+      it was a little thing at one's feet, and by way of contrast I remember
+      once lying in bed&mdash;it must have been during this holiday, though I
+      cannot for the life of me fix where&mdash;and speculating whether perhaps
+      some day I might not be a K. C. B., Sir Richard Remington, K. C. B., M. P.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the big style prevailed....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We could not tell from minute to minute whether we were planning for a
+      world of solid reality, or telling ourselves fairy tales about this
+      prospect of life. So much seemed possible, and everything we could think
+      of so improbable. There were lapses when it seemed to me I could never be
+      anything but just the entirely unimportant and undistinguished young man I
+      was for ever and ever. I couldn't even think of myself as five and thirty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once I remember Willersley going over a list of failures, and why they had
+      failed&mdash;but young men in the twenties do not know much about
+      failures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      10
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Willersley and I professed ourselves Socialists, but by this time I knew
+      my Rodbertus as well as my Marx, and there was much in our socialism that
+      would have shocked Chris Robinson as much as anything in life could have
+      shocked him. Socialism as a simple democratic cry we had done with for
+      ever. We were socialists because Individualism for us meant muddle, meant
+      a crowd of separated, undisciplined little people all obstinately and
+      ignorantly doing things jarringly, each one in his own way. &ldquo;Each,&rdquo; I said
+      quoting words of my father's that rose apt in my memory, &ldquo;snarling from
+      his own little bit of property, like a dog tied to a cart's tail.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Essentially,&rdquo; said Willersley, &ldquo;essentially we're for conscription, in
+      peace and war alike. The man who owns property is a public official and
+      has to behave as such. That's the gist of socialism as I understand it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or be dismissed from his post,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;and replaced by some better sort
+      of official. A man's none the less an official because he's irresponsible.
+      What he does with his property affects people just the same. Private! No
+      one is really private but an outlaw....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Order and devotion were the very essence of our socialism, and a splendid
+      collective vigour and happiness its end. We projected an ideal state, an
+      organised state as confident and powerful as modern science, as balanced
+      and beautiful as a body, as beneficent as sunshine, the organised state
+      that should end muddle for ever; it ruled all our ideals and gave form to
+      all our ambitions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every man was to be definitely related to that, to have his predominant
+      duty to that. Such was the England renewed we had in mind, and how to
+      serve that end, to subdue undisciplined worker and undisciplined wealth to
+      it, and make the Scientific Commonweal, King, was the continuing substance
+      of our intercourse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      11
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every day the wine of the mountains was stronger in our blood, and the
+      flush of our youth deeper. We would go in the morning sunlight along some
+      narrow Alpine mule-path shouting large suggestions for national
+      reorganisation, and weighing considerations as lightly as though the world
+      was wax in our hands. &ldquo;Great England,&rdquo; we said in effect, over and over
+      again, &ldquo;and we will be among the makers! England renewed! The country has
+      been warned; it has learnt its lesson. The disasters and anxieties of the
+      war have sunk in. England has become serious.... Oh! there are big things
+      before us to do; big enduring things!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      One evening we walked up to the loggia of a little pilgrimage church, I
+      forget its name, that stands out on a conical hill at the head of a
+      winding stair above the town of Locarno. Down below the houses clustered
+      amidst a confusion of heat-bitten greenery. I had been sitting silently on
+      the parapet, looking across to the purple mountain masses where
+      Switzerland passes into Italy, and the drift of our talk seemed suddenly
+      to gather to a head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I broke into speech, giving form to the thoughts that had been
+      accumulating. My words have long since passed out of my memory, the
+      phrases of familiar expression have altered for me, but the substance
+      remains as clear as ever. I said how we were in our measure emperors and
+      kings, men undriven, free to do as we pleased with life; we classed among
+      the happy ones, our bread and common necessities were given us for
+      nothing, we had abilities,&mdash;it wasn't modesty but cowardice to behave
+      as if we hadn't&mdash;and Fortune watched us to see what we might do with
+      opportunity and the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are so many things to do, you see,&rdquo; began Willersley, in his
+      judicial lecturer's voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So many things we may do,&rdquo; I interrupted, &ldquo;with all these years before
+      us.... We're exceptional men. It's our place, our duty, to do things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here anyhow,&rdquo; I said, answering the faint amusement of his face; &ldquo;I've
+      got no modesty. Everything conspires to set me up. Why should I run about
+      like all those grubby little beasts down there, seeking nothing but mean
+      little vanities and indulgencies&mdash;and then take credit for modesty? I
+      KNOW I am capable. I KNOW I have imagination. Modesty! I know if I don't
+      attempt the very biggest things in life I am a damned shirk. The very
+      biggest! Somebody has to attempt them. I feel like a loaded gun that is
+      only a little perplexed because it has to find out just where to aim
+      itself....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lake and the frontier villages, a white puff of steam on the distant
+      railway to Luino, the busy boats and steamers trailing triangular wakes of
+      foam, the long vista eastward towards battlemented Bellinzona, the vast
+      mountain distances, now tinged with sunset light, behind this nearer
+      landscape, and the southward waters with remote coast towns shining dimly,
+      waters that merged at last in a luminous golden haze, made a broad
+      panoramic spectacle. It was as if one surveyed the world,&mdash;and it was
+      like the games I used to set out upon my nursery floor. I was exalted by
+      it; I felt larger than men. So kings should feel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That sense of largeness came to me then, and it has come to me since,
+      again and again, a splendid intimation or a splendid vanity. Once, I
+      remember, when I looked at Genoa from the mountain crest behind the town
+      and saw that multitudinous place in all its beauty of width and abundance
+      and clustering human effort, and once as I was steaming past the brown low
+      hills of Staten Island towards the towering vigour and clamorous vitality
+      of New York City, that mood rose to its quintessence. And once it came to
+      me, as I shall tell, on Dover cliffs. And a hundred times when I have
+      thought of England as our country might be, with no wretched poor, no
+      wretched rich, a nation armed and ordered, trained and purposeful amidst
+      its vales and rivers, that emotion of collective ends and collective
+      purposes has returned to me. I felt as great as humanity. For a brief
+      moment I was humanity, looking at the world I had made and had still to
+      make....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      12
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And mingled with these dreams of power and patriotic service there was
+      another series of a different quality and a different colour, like the
+      antagonistic colour of a shot silk. The white life and the red life,
+      contrasted and interchanged, passing swiftly at a turn from one to
+      another, and refusing ever to mingle peacefully one with the other. I was
+      asking myself openly and distinctly: what are you going to do for the
+      world? What are you going to do with yourself? and with an increasing
+      strength and persistence Nature in spite of my averted attention was
+      asking me in penetrating undertones: what are you going to do about this
+      other fundamental matter, the beauty of girls and women and your desire
+      for them?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have told of my sisterless youth and the narrow circumstances of my
+      upbringing. It made all women-kind mysterious to me. If it had not been
+      for my Staffordshire cousins I do not think I should have known any girls
+      at all until I was twenty. Of Staffordshire I will tell a little later.
+      But I can remember still how through all those ripening years, the thought
+      of women's beauty, their magic presence in the world beside me and the
+      unknown, untried reactions of their intercourse, grew upon me and grew, as
+      a strange presence grows in a room when one is occupied by other things. I
+      busied myself and pretended to be wholly occupied, and there the woman
+      stood, full half of life neglected, and it seemed to my averted mind
+      sometimes that she was there clad and dignified and divine, and sometimes
+      Aphrodite shining and commanding, and sometimes that Venus who stoops and
+      allures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This travel abroad seemed to have released a multitude of things in my
+      mind; the clear air, the beauty of the sunshine, the very blue of the
+      glaciers made me feel my body and quickened all those disregarded dreams.
+      I saw the sheathed beauty of women's forms all about me, in the cheerful
+      waitresses at the inns, in the pedestrians one encountered in the tracks,
+      in the chance fellow travellers at the hotel tables. &ldquo;Confound it!&rdquo; said
+      I, and talked all the more zealously of that greater England that was
+      calling us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember that we passed two Germans, an old man and a tall fair girl,
+      father and daughter, who were walking down from Saas. She came swinging
+      and shining towards us, easy and strong. I worshipped her as she
+      approached.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gut Tag!&rdquo; said Willersley, removing his hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Morgen!&rdquo; said the old man, saluting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I stared stockishly at the girl, who passed with an indifferent face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That sticks in my mind as a picture remains in a room, it has kept there
+      bright and fresh as a thing seen yesterday, for twenty years....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I flirted hesitatingly once or twice with comely serving girls, and was a
+      little ashamed lest Willersley should detect the keen interest I took in
+      them, and then as we came over the pass from Santa Maria Maggiore to
+      Cannobio, my secret preoccupation took me by surprise and flooded me and
+      broke down my pretences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The women in that valley are very beautiful&mdash;women vary from valley
+      to valley in the Alps and are plain and squat here and divinities five
+      miles away&mdash;and as we came down we passed a group of five or six of
+      them resting by the wayside. Their burthens were beside them, and one like
+      Ceres held a reaping hook in her brown hand. She watched us approaching
+      and smiled faintly, her eyes at mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was some greeting, and two of them laughed together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Glorious girls they were,&rdquo; said Willersley, and suddenly an immense sense
+      of boredom enveloped me. I saw myself striding on down that winding road,
+      talking of politics and parties and bills of parliament and all sorts of
+      dessicated things. That road seemed to me to wind on for ever down to dust
+      and infinite dreariness. I knew it for a way of death. Reality was behind
+      us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Willersley set himself to draw a sociological moral. &ldquo;I'm not so sure,&rdquo; he
+      said in a voice of intense discriminations, &ldquo;after all, that agricultural
+      work isn't good for women.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damn agricultural work!&rdquo; I said, and broke out into a vigorous cursing of
+      all I held dear. &ldquo;Fettered things we are!&rdquo; I cried. &ldquo;I wonder why I stand
+      it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stand what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why don't I go back and make love to those girls and let the world and
+      you and everything go hang? Deep breasts and rounded limbs&mdash;and we
+      poor emasculated devils go tramping by with the blood of youth in us!...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not quite sure, Remington,&rdquo; said Willersley, looking at me with a
+      deliberately quaint expression over his glasses, &ldquo;that picturesque scenery
+      is altogether good for your morals.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That fever was still in my blood when we came to Locarno.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      13
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Along the hot and dusty lower road between the Orrido of Traffiume and
+      Cannobio Willersley had developed his first blister. And partly because of
+      that and partly because there was a bag at the station that gave us the
+      refreshment of clean linen and partly because of the lazy lower air into
+      which we had come, we decided upon three or four days' sojourn in the
+      Empress Hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We dined that night at a table-d'hote, and I found myself next to an
+      Englishwoman who began a conversation that was resumed presently in the
+      hotel lounge. She was a woman of perhaps thirty-three or thirty-four,
+      slenderly built, with a warm reddish skin and very abundant fair golden
+      hair, the wife of a petulant-looking heavy-faced man of perhaps
+      fifty-three, who smoked a cigar and dozed over his coffee and presently
+      went to bed. &ldquo;He always goes to bed like that,&rdquo; she confided startlingly.
+      &ldquo;He sleeps after all his meals. I never knew such a man to sleep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she returned to our talk, whatever it was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had begun at the dinner table with itineraries and the usual
+      topographical talk, and she had envied our pedestrian travel. &ldquo;My husband
+      doesn't walk,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;His heart is weak and he cannot manage the
+      hills.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something friendly and adventurous in her manner; she conveyed
+      she liked me, and when presently Willersley drifted off to write letters
+      our talk sank at once to easy confidential undertones. I felt
+      enterprising, and indeed it is easy to be daring with people one has never
+      seen before and may never see again. I said I loved beautiful scenery and
+      all beautiful things, and the pointing note in my voice made her laugh.
+      She told me I had bold eyes, and so far as I can remember I said she made
+      them bold. &ldquo;Blue they are,&rdquo; she remarked, smiling archly. &ldquo;I like blue
+      eyes.&rdquo; Then I think we compared ages, and she said she was the Woman of
+      Thirty, &ldquo;George Moore's Woman of Thirty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I had not read George Moore at the time, but I pretended to understand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That, I think, was our limit that evening. She went to bed, smiling
+      good-night quite prettily down the big staircase, and I and Willersley
+      went out to smoke in the garden. My head was full of her, and I found it
+      necessary to talk about her. So I made her a problem in sociology. &ldquo;Who
+      the deuce are these people?&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;and how do they get a living? They
+      seem to have plenty of money. He strikes me as being&mdash;Willersley,
+      what is a drysalter? I think he's a retired drysalter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Willersley theorised while I thought of the woman and that provocative
+      quality of dash she had displayed. The next day at lunch she and I met
+      like old friends. A huge mass of private thinking during the interval had
+      been added to our effect upon one another. We talked for a time of
+      insignificant things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you do,&rdquo; she asked rather quickly, &ldquo;after lunch? Take a siesta?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sometimes,&rdquo; I said, and hung for a moment eye to eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We hadn't a doubt of each other, but my heart was beating like a steamer
+      propeller when it lifts out of the water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you get a view from your room?&rdquo; she asked after a pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's on the third floor, Number seventeen, near the staircase. My
+      friend's next door.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She began to talk of books. She was interested in Christian Science, she
+      said, and spoke of a book. I forget altogether what that book was called,
+      though I remember to this day with the utmost exactness the purplish
+      magenta of its cover. She said she would lend it to me and hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Willersley wanted to go for an expedition across the lake that afternoon,
+      but I refused. He made some other proposals that I rejected abruptly. &ldquo;I
+      shall write in my room,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not write down here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall write in my room,&rdquo; I snarled like a thwarted animal, and he
+      looked at me curiously. &ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;then I'll make some notes
+      and think about that order of ours out under the magnolias.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I hovered about the lounge for a time buying postcards and feverishly
+      restless, watching the movements of the other people. Finally I went up to
+      my room and sat down by the windows, staring out. There came a little tap
+      at the unlocked door and in an instant, like the go of a taut bowstring, I
+      was up and had it open.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here is that book,&rdquo; she said, and we hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;COME IN!&rdquo; I whispered, trembling from head to foot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're just a boy,&rdquo; she said in a low tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not feel a bit like a lover, I felt like a burglar with the
+      safe-door nearly opened. &ldquo;Come in,&rdquo; I said almost impatiently, for anyone
+      might be in the passage, and I gripped her wrist and drew her towards me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; she answered with a faint smile on her lips, and
+      awkward and yielding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shut the door behind her, still holding her with one hand, then turned
+      upon her&mdash;she was laughing nervously&mdash;and without a word drew
+      her to me and kissed her. And I remember that as I kissed her she made a
+      little noise almost like the purring miaow with which a cat will greet one
+      and her face, close to mine, became solemn and tender.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was suddenly a different being from the discontented wife who had
+      tapped a moment since on my door, a woman transfigured....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That evening I came down to dinner a monster of pride, for behold! I was a
+      man. I felt myself the most wonderful and unprecedented of adventurers. It
+      was hard to believe that any one in the world before had done as much. My
+      mistress and I met smiling, we carried things off admirably, and it seemed
+      to me that Willersley was the dullest old dog in the world. I wanted to
+      give him advice. I wanted to give him derisive pokes. After dinner and
+      coffee in the lounge I was too excited and hilarious to go to bed, I made
+      him come with me down to the cafe under the arches by the pier, and there
+      drank beer and talked extravagant nonsense about everything under the sun,
+      in order not to talk about the happenings of the afternoon. All the time
+      something shouted within me: &ldquo;I am a man! I am a man!&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What shall we do to-morrow?&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm for loafing,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Let's row in the morning and spend to-morrow
+      afternoon just as we did to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They say the church behind the town is worth seeing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'll go up about sunset; that's the best time for it. We can start about
+      five.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We heard music, and went further along the arcade to discover a place
+      where girls in operatic Swiss peasant costume were singing and dancing on
+      a creaking, protesting little stage. I eyed their generous display of pink
+      neck and arm with the seasoned eye of a man who has lived in the world.
+      Life was perfectly simple and easy, I felt, if one took it the right way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next day Willersley wanted to go on, but I delayed. Altogether I kept him
+      back four days. Then abruptly my mood changed, and we decided to start
+      early the following morning. I remember, though a little indistinctly, the
+      feeling of my last talk with that woman whose surname, odd as it may seem,
+      either I never learnt or I have forgotten. (Her christian name was Milly.)
+      She was tired and rather low-spirited, and disposed to be sentimental, and
+      for the first time in our intercourse I found myself liking her for the
+      sake of her own personality. There was something kindly and generous
+      appearing behind the veil of naive and uncontrolled sensuality she had
+      worn. There was a curious quality of motherliness in her attitude to me
+      that something in my nature answered and approved. She didn't pretend to
+      keep it up that she had yielded to my initiative. &ldquo;I've done you no harm,&rdquo;
+       she said a little doubtfully, an odd note for a man's victim! And, &ldquo;we've
+      had a good time. You have liked me, haven't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She interested me in her lonely dissatisfied life; she was childless and
+      had no hope of children, and her husband was the only son of a rich meat
+      salesman, very mean, a mighty smoker&mdash;&ldquo;he reeks of it,&rdquo; she said,
+      &ldquo;always&rdquo;&mdash;and interested in nothing but golf, billiards (which he
+      played very badly), pigeon shooting, convivial Free Masonry and Stock
+      Exchange punting. Mostly they drifted about the Riviera. Her mother had
+      contrived her marriage when she was eighteen. They were the first samples
+      I ever encountered of the great multitude of functionless property owners
+      which encumbers modern civilisation&mdash;but at the time I didn't think
+      much of that aspect of them....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I tell all this business as it happened without comment, because I have no
+      comment to make. It was all strange to me, strange rather than wonderful,
+      and, it may be, some dream of beauty died for ever in those furtive
+      meetings; it happened to me, and I could scarcely have been more
+      irresponsible in the matter or controlled events less if I had been
+      suddenly pushed over a cliff into water. I swam, of course&mdash;finding
+      myself in it. Things tested me, and I reacted, as I have told. The bloom
+      of my innocence, if ever there had been such a thing, was gone. And here
+      is the remarkable thing about it; at the time and for some days I was
+      over-weeningly proud; I have never been so proud before or since; I felt I
+      had been promoted to virility; I was unable to conceal my exultation from
+      Willersley. It was a mood of shining shameless ungracious self-approval.
+      As he and I went along in the cool morning sunshine by the rice fields in
+      the throat of the Val Maggia a silence fell between us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know?&rdquo; I said abruptly,&mdash;&ldquo;about that woman?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Willersley did not answer for a moment. He looked at me over the corner of
+      his spectacles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Things went pretty far?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! all the way!&rdquo; and I had a twinge of fatuous pride in my
+      unpremeditated achievement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She came to your room?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I heard her. I heard her whispering.... The whispering and rustling and
+      so on. I was in my room yesterday.... Any one might have heard you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I went on with my head in the air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You might have been caught, and that would have meant endless trouble.
+      You might have incurred all sorts of consequences. What did you know about
+      her?... We have wasted four days in that hot close place. When we found
+      that League of Social Service we were talking about,&rdquo; he said with a
+      determined eye upon me, &ldquo;chastity will be first among the virtues
+      prescribed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall form a rival league,&rdquo; I said a little damped. &ldquo;I'm hanged if I
+      give up a single desire in me until I know why.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He lifted his chin and stared before him through his glasses at nothing.
+      &ldquo;There are some things,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that a man who means to work&mdash;to
+      do great public services&mdash;MUST turn his back upon. I'm not discussing
+      the rights or wrongs of this sort of thing. It happens to be the
+      conditions we work under. It will probably always be so. If you want to
+      experiment in that way, if you want even to discuss it,&mdash;out you go
+      from political life. You must know that's so.... You're a strange man,
+      Remington, with a kind of kink in you. You've a sort of force. You might
+      happen to do immense things.... Only&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped. He had said all that he had forced himself to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mean to take myself as I am,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;I'm going to get experience for
+      humanity out of all my talents&mdash;and bury nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Willersley twisted his face to its humorous expression. &ldquo;I doubt if sexual
+      proclivities,&rdquo; he said drily, &ldquo;come within the scope of the parable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I let that go for a little while. Then I broke out. &ldquo;Sex!&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;is a
+      fundamental thing in life. We went through all this at Trinity. I'm going
+      to look at it, experience it, think about it&mdash;and get it square with
+      the rest of life. Career and Politics must take their chances of that.
+      It's part of the general English slackness that they won't look this in
+      the face. Gods! what a muffled time we're coming out of! Sex means
+      breeding, and breeding is a necessary function in a nation. The Romans
+      broke up upon that. The Americans fade out amidst their successes.
+      Eugenics&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;THAT wasn't Eugenics,&rdquo; said Willersley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was a woman,&rdquo; I said after a little interval, feeling oddly that I had
+      failed altogether to answer him, and yet had a strong dumb case against
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      BOOK THE SECOND: MARGARET
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I must go back a little way with my story. In the previous book I have
+      described the kind of education that happens to a man of my class
+      nowadays, and it has been convenient to leap a phase in my experience that
+      I must now set out at length. I want to tell in this second hook how I
+      came to marry, and to do that I must give something of the atmosphere in
+      which I first met my wife and some intimations of the forces that went to
+      her making. I met her in Staffordshire while I was staying with that uncle
+      of whom I have already spoken, the uncle who sold my father's houses and
+      settled my mother in Penge. Margaret was twenty then and I was twenty-two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was just before the walking tour in Switzerland that opened up so much
+      of the world to me. I saw her once, for an afternoon, and circumstances so
+      threw her up in relief that I formed a very vivid memory of her. She was
+      in the sharpest contrast with the industrial world about her; she
+      impressed me as a dainty blue flower might do, come upon suddenly on a
+      clinker heap. She remained in my mind at once a perplexing interrogation
+      and a symbol....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But first I must tell of my Staffordshire cousins and the world that
+      served as a foil for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I first went to stay with my cousins when I was an awkward youth of
+      sixteen, wearing deep mourning for my mother. My uncle wanted to talk
+      things over with me, he said, and if he could, to persuade me to go into
+      business instead of going up to Cambridge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember that visit on account of all sorts of novel things, but
+      chiefly, I think, because it was the first time I encountered anything
+      that deserves to be spoken of as wealth. For the first time in my life I
+      had to do with people who seemed to have endless supplies of money,
+      unlimited good clothes, numerous servants; whose daily life was made up of
+      things that I had hitherto considered to be treats or exceptional
+      extravagances. My cousins of eighteen and nineteen took cabs, for
+      instance, with the utmost freedom, and travelled first-class in the local
+      trains that run up and down the district of the Five Towns with an entire
+      unconsciousness of the magnificence, as it seemed to me, of such a
+      proceeding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The family occupied a large villa in Newcastle, with big lawns before it
+      and behind, a shrubbery with quite a lot of shrubs, a coach house and
+      stable, and subordinate dwelling-places for the gardener and the coachman.
+      Every bedroom contained a gas heater and a canopied brass bedstead, and
+      had a little bathroom attached equipped with the porcelain baths and
+      fittings my uncle manufactured, bright and sanitary and stamped with his
+      name, and the house was furnished throughout with chairs and tables in
+      bright shining wood, soft and prevalently red Turkish carpets, cosy
+      corners, curtained archways, gold-framed landscapes, overmantels, a
+      dining-room sideboard like a palace with a large Tantalus, and electric
+      light fittings of a gay and expensive quality. There was a fine
+      billiard-room on the ground floor with three comfortable sofas and a
+      rotating bookcase containing an excellent collection of the English and
+      American humorists from THREE MEN IN A BOAT to the penultimate Mark Twain.
+      There was also a conservatory opening out of the dining-room, to which the
+      gardener brought potted flowers in their season....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My aunt was a little woman with a scared look and a cap that would get
+      over one eye, not very like my mother, and nearly eight years her junior;
+      she was very much concerned with keeping everything nice, and unmercifully
+      bullied by my two cousins, who took after their father and followed the
+      imaginations of their own hearts. They were tall, dark, warmly flushed
+      girls handsome rather than pretty. Gertrude, the eldest and tallest, had
+      eyes that were almost black; Sibyl was of a stouter build, and her eyes,
+      of which she was shamelessly proud, were dark blue. Sibyl's hair waved,
+      and Gertrude's was severely straight. They treated me on my first visit
+      with all the contempt of the adolescent girl for a boy a little younger
+      and infinitely less expert in the business of life than herself. They were
+      very busy with the writings of notes and certain mysterious goings and
+      comings of their own, and left me very much to my own devices. Their
+      speech in my presence was full of unfathomable allusions. They were the
+      sort of girls who will talk over and through an uninitiated stranger with
+      the pleasantest sense of superiority.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I met them at breakfast and at lunch and at the half-past six o'clock high
+      tea that formed the third chief meal of the day. I heard them rattling off
+      the compositions of Chaminade and Moskowski, with great decision and
+      effect, and hovered on the edge of tennis foursomes where it was manifest
+      to the dullest intelligence that my presence was unnecessary. Then I went
+      off to find some readable book in the place, but apart from miscellaneous
+      popular novels, some veterinary works, a number of comic books, old bound
+      volumes of THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS and a large, popular illustrated
+      History of England, there was very little to be found. My aunt talked to
+      me in a casual feeble way, chiefly about my mother's last illness. The two
+      had seen very little of each other for many years; she made no secret of
+      it that the ineligible qualities of my father were the cause of the
+      estrangement. The only other society in the house during the day was an
+      old and rather decayed Skye terrier in constant conflict with what were no
+      doubt imaginary fleas. I took myself off for a series of walks, and
+      acquired a considerable knowledge of the scenery and topography of the
+      Potteries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It puzzled my aunt that I did not go westward, where it was country-side
+      and often quite pretty, with hedgerows and fields and copses and flowers.
+      But always I went eastward, where in a long valley industrialism smokes
+      and sprawls. That was the stuff to which I turned by nature, to the human
+      effort, and the accumulation and jar of men's activities. And in such a
+      country as that valley social and economic relations were simple and
+      manifest. Instead of the limitless confusion of London's population, in
+      which no man can trace any but the most slender correlation between rich
+      and poor, in which everyone seems disconnected and adrift from everyone,
+      you can see here the works, the potbank or the ironworks or what not, and
+      here close at hand the congested, meanly-housed workers, and at a little
+      distance a small middle-class quarter, and again remoter, the big house of
+      the employer. It was like a very simplified diagram&mdash;after the
+      untraceable confusion of London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I prowled alone, curious and interested, through shabby back streets of
+      mean little homes; I followed canals, sometimes canals of mysteriously
+      heated waters with ghostly wisps of steam rising against blackened walls
+      or a distant prospect of dustbin-fed vegetable gardens, I saw the women
+      pouring out from the potbanks, heard the hooters summoning the toilers to
+      work, lost my way upon slag heaps as big as the hills of the south
+      country, dodged trains at manifestly dangerous level crossings, and
+      surveyed across dark intervening spaces, the flaming uproar, the
+      gnome-like activities of iron foundries. I heard talk of strikes and
+      rumours of strikes, and learnt from the columns of some obscure labour
+      paper I bought one day, of the horrors of the lead poisoning that was in
+      those days one of the normal risks of certain sorts of pottery workers.
+      Then back I came, by the ugly groaning and clanging steam train of that
+      period, to my uncle's house and lavish abundance of money and more or less
+      furtive flirtations and the tinkle of Moskowski and Chaminade. It was, I
+      say, diagrammatic. One saw the expropriator and the expropriated&mdash;as
+      if Marx had arranged the picture. It was as jumbled and far more dingy and
+      disastrous than any of the confusions of building and development that had
+      surrounded my youth at Bromstead and Penge, but it had a novel quality of
+      being explicable. I found great virtue in the word &ldquo;exploitation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There stuck in my mind as if it was symbolical of the whole thing the
+      twisted figure of a man, whose face had been horribly scalded&mdash;I
+      can't describe how, except that one eye was just expressionless white&mdash;and
+      he ground at an organ bearing a card which told in weak and bitterly
+      satirical phrasing that he had been scalded by the hot water from the
+      tuyeres of the blast furnace of Lord Pandram's works. He had been scalded
+      and quite inadequately compensated and dismissed. And Lord Pandram was
+      worth half a million.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That upturned sightless white eye of his took possession of my
+      imagination. I don't think that even then I was swayed by any crude
+      melodramatic conception of injustice. I was quite prepared to believe the
+      card wasn't a punctiliously accurate statement of fact, and that a case
+      could be made out for Lord Pandram. Still there in the muddy gutter,
+      painfully and dreadfully, was the man, and he was smashed and scalded and
+      wretched, and he ground his dismal hurdygurdy with a weary arm, calling
+      upon Heaven and the passer-by for help, for help and some sort of righting&mdash;one
+      could not imagine quite what. There he was as a fact, as a by-product of
+      the system that heaped my cousins with trinkets and provided the comic
+      novels and the abundant cigars and spacious billiard-room of my uncle's
+      house. I couldn't disconnect him and them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My uncle on his part did nothing to conceal the state of war that existed
+      between himself and his workers, and the mingled contempt and animosity he
+      felt from them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Prosperity had overtaken my uncle. So quite naturally he believed that
+      every man who was not as prosperous as he was had only himself to blame.
+      He was rich and he had left school and gone into his father's business at
+      fifteen, and that seemed to him the proper age at which everyone's
+      education should terminate. He was very anxious to dissuade me from going
+      up to Cambridge, and we argued intermittently through all my visit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had remembered him as a big and buoyant man, striding destructively
+      about the nursery floor of my childhood, and saluting my existence by
+      slaps, loud laughter, and questions about half herrings and half eggs
+      subtly framed to puzzle and confuse my mind. I didn't see him for some
+      years until my father's death, and then he seemed rather smaller, though
+      still a fair size, yellow instead of red and much less radiantly
+      aggressive. This altered effect was due not so much to my own changed
+      perspectives, I fancy, as to the facts that he was suffering for
+      continuous cigar smoking, and being taken in hand by his adolescent
+      daughters who had just returned from school.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During my first visit there was a perpetual series of&mdash;the only word
+      is rows, between them and him. Up to the age of fifteen or thereabouts, he
+      had maintained his ascendancy over them by simple old-fashioned physical
+      chastisement. Then after an interlude of a year it had dawned upon them
+      that power had mysteriously departed from him. He had tried stopping their
+      pocket money, but they found their mother financially amenable; besides
+      which it was fundamental to my uncle's attitude that he should give them
+      money freely. Not to do so would seem like admitting a difficulty in
+      making it. So that after he had stopped their allowances for the fourth
+      time Sybil and Gertrude were prepared to face beggary without a qualm. It
+      had been his pride to give them the largest allowance of any girls at the
+      school, not even excepting the granddaughter of Fladden the Borax King,
+      and his soul recoiled from this discipline as it had never recoiled from
+      the ruder method of the earlier phase. Both girls had developed to a high
+      pitch in their mutual recriminations a gift for damaging retort, and he
+      found it an altogether deadlier thing than the power of the raised voice
+      that had always cowed my aunt. Whenever he became heated with them, they
+      frowned as if involuntarily, drew in their breath sharply, said: &ldquo;Daddy,
+      you really must not say&mdash;&rdquo; and corrected his pronunciation. Then, at
+      a great advantage, they resumed the discussion....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My uncle's views about Cambridge, however, were perfectly clear and
+      definite. It was waste of time and money. It was all damned foolery. Did
+      they make a man a better business man? Not a bit of it. He gave instances.
+      It spoilt a man for business by giving him &ldquo;false ideas.&rdquo; Some men said
+      that at college a man formed useful friendships. What use were friendships
+      to a business man? He might get to know lords, but, as my uncle pointed
+      out, a lord's requirements in his line of faience were little greater than
+      a common man's. If college introduced him to hotel proprietors there might
+      be something in it. Perhaps it helped a man into Parliament, Parliament
+      still being a confused retrogressive corner in the world where lawyers and
+      suchlike sheltered themselves from the onslaughts of common-sense behind a
+      fog of Latin and Greek and twaddle and tosh; but I wasn't the sort to go
+      into Parliament, unless I meant to be a lawyer. Did I mean to be a lawyer?
+      It cost no end of money, and was full of uncertainties, and there were no
+      judges nor great solicitors among my relations. &ldquo;Young chaps think they
+      get on by themselves,&rdquo; said my uncle. &ldquo;It isn't so. Not unless they take
+      their coats off. I took mine off before I was your age by nigh a year.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We were at cross purposes from the outset, because I did not think men
+      lived to make money; and I was obtuse to the hints he was throwing out at
+      the possibilities of his own potbank, not willfully obtuse, but just
+      failing to penetrate his meaning. Whatever City Merchants had or had not
+      done for me, Flack, Topham and old Gates had certainly barred my mistaking
+      the profitable production and sale of lavatory basins and bathroom
+      fittings for the highest good. It was only upon reflection that it dawned
+      upon me that the splendid chance for a young fellow with my uncle, &ldquo;me,
+      having no son of my own,&rdquo; was anything but an illustration for comparison
+      with my own chosen career.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I still remember very distinctly my uncle's talk,&mdash;he loved to speak
+      &ldquo;reet Staffordshire&rdquo;&mdash;his rather flabby face with the mottled
+      complexion that told of crude ill-regulated appetites, his clumsy gestures&mdash;he
+      kept emphasising his points by prodding at me with his finger&mdash;the
+      ill-worn, costly, grey tweed clothes, the watch chain of plain solid gold,
+      and soft felt hat thrust back from his head. He tackled me first in the
+      garden after lunch, and then tried to raise me to enthusiasm by taking me
+      to his potbank and showing me its organisation, from the dusty grinding
+      mills in which whitened men worked and coughed, through the highly
+      ventilated glazing room in which strangely masked girls looked ashamed of
+      themselves,&mdash;&ldquo;They'll risk death, the fools, to show their faces to a
+      man,&rdquo; said my uncle, quite audibly&mdash;to the firing kilns and the
+      glazing kilns, and so round the whole place to the railway siding and the
+      gratifying spectacle of three trucks laden with executed orders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then we went up a creaking outside staircase to his little office, and he
+      showed off before me for a while, with one or two subordinates and the
+      telephone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None of your Gas,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;all this. It's Real every bit of it. Hard
+      cash and hard glaze.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said, with memories of a carelessly read pamphlet in my mind, and
+      without any satirical intention, &ldquo;I suppose you MUST use lead in your
+      glazes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whereupon I found I had tapped the ruling grievance of my uncle's life. He
+      hated leadless glazes more than he hated anything, except the benevolent
+      people who had organised the agitation for their use. &ldquo;Leadless glazes
+      ain't only fit for buns,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Let me tell you, my boy&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He began in a voice of bland persuasiveness that presently warmed to
+      anger, to explain the whole matter. I hadn't the rights of the matter at
+      all. Firstly, there was practically no such thing as lead poisoning.
+      Secondly, not everyone was liable to lead poisoning, and it would be quite
+      easy to pick out the susceptible types&mdash;as soon as they had it&mdash;and
+      put them to other work. Thirdly, the evil effects of lead poisoning were
+      much exaggerated. Fourthly, and this was in a particularly confidential
+      undertone, many of the people liked to get lead poisoning, especially the
+      women, because it caused abortion. I might not believe it, but he knew it
+      for a fact. Fifthly, the work-people simply would not learn the gravity of
+      the danger, and would eat with unwashed hands, and incur all sorts of
+      risks, so that as my uncle put it: &ldquo;the fools deserve what they get.&rdquo;
+       Sixthly, he and several associated firms had organised a simple and
+      generous insurance scheme against lead-poisoning risks. Seventhly, he
+      never wearied in rational (as distinguished from excessive, futile and
+      expensive) precautions against the disease. Eighthly, in the ill-equipped
+      shops of his minor competitors lead poisoning was a frequent and virulent
+      evil, and people had generalised from these exceptional cases. The small
+      shops, he hazarded, looking out of the cracked and dirty window at distant
+      chimneys, might be advantageously closed....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what's the good of talking?&rdquo; said my uncle, getting off the table on
+      which he had been sitting. &ldquo;Seems to me there'll come a time when a master
+      will get fined if he don't run round the works blowing his girls noses for
+      them. That's about what it'll come to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked to the black mantelpiece and stood on the threadbare rug, and
+      urged me not to be misled by the stories of prejudiced and interested
+      enemies of our national industries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They'll get a strike one of these days, of employers, and then we'll see
+      a bit,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;They'll drive Capital abroad and then they'll whistle to
+      get it back again.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He led the way down the shaky wooden steps and cheered up to tell me of
+      his way of checking his coal consumption. He exchanged a ferocious
+      greeting with one or two workpeople, and so we came out of the factory
+      gates into the ugly narrow streets, paved with a peculiarly hard diapered
+      brick of an unpleasing inky-blue colour, and bordered with the mean and
+      squalid homes of his workers. Doors stood open and showed grimy interiors,
+      and dirty ill-clad children played in the kennel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We passed a sickly-looking girl with a sallow face, who dragged her limbs
+      and peered at us dimly with painful eyes. She stood back, as partly
+      blinded people will do, to allow us to pass, although there was plenty of
+      room for us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I glanced back at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;THAT'S ploombism,&rdquo; said my uncle casually.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo; said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ploombism. And the other day I saw a fool of a girl, and what d'you
+      think? She'd got a basin that hadn't been fired, a cracked piece of
+      biscuit it was, up on the shelf over her head, just all over glaze,
+      killing glaze, man, and she was putting up her hand if you please, and
+      eating her dinner out of it. Got her dinner in it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eating her dinner out of it,&rdquo; he repeated in loud and bitter tones, and
+      punched me hard in the ribs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then they comes to THAT&mdash;and grumbles. And the fools up in
+      Westminster want you to put in fans here and fans there&mdash;the Longton
+      fools have.... And then eating their dinners out of it all the time!&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At high tea that night&mdash;my uncle was still holding out against
+      evening dinner&mdash;Sibyl and Gertrude made what was evidently a
+      concerted demand for a motor-car.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've got your mother's brougham,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that's good enough for
+      you.&rdquo; But he seemed shaken by the fact that some Burslem rival was
+      launching out with the new invention. &ldquo;He spoils his girls,&rdquo; he remarked.
+      &ldquo;He's a fool,&rdquo; and became thoughtful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Afterwards he asked me to come to him into his study; it was a room with a
+      writing-desk and full of pieces of earthenware and suchlike litter, and we
+      had our great row about Cambridge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you thought things over, Dick?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I'll go to Trinity, Uncle,&rdquo; I said firmly. &ldquo;I want to go to
+      Trinity. It is a great college.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was manifestly chagrined. &ldquo;You're a fool,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I made no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're a damned fool,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But I suppose you've got to do it. You
+      could have come here&mdash;That don't matter, though, now... You'll have
+      your time and spend your money, and be a poor half-starved clergyman,
+      mucking about with the women all the day and afraid to have one of your
+      own ever, or you'll be a schoolmaster or some such fool for the rest of
+      your life. Or some newspaper chap. That's what you'll get from Cambridge.
+      I'm half a mind not to let you. Eh? More than half a mind....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've got to do the thing you can,&rdquo; he said, after a pause, &ldquo;and likely
+      it's what you're fitted for.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I paid several short visits to Staffordshire during my Cambridge days, and
+      always these relations of mine produced the same effect of hardness. My
+      uncle's thoughts had neither atmosphere nor mystery. He lived in a
+      different universe from the dreams of scientific construction that filled
+      my mind. He could as easily have understood Chinese poetry. His motives
+      were made up of intense rivalries with other men of his class and kind, a
+      few vindictive hates springing from real and fancied slights, a habit of
+      acquisition that had become a second nature, a keen love both of
+      efficiency and display in his own affairs. He seemed to me to have no
+      sense of the state, no sense and much less any love of beauty, no charity
+      and no sort of religious feeling whatever. He had strong bodily appetites,
+      he ate and drank freely, smoked a great deal, and occasionally was carried
+      off by his passions for a &ldquo;bit of a spree&rdquo; to Birmingham or Liverpool or
+      Manchester. The indulgences of these occasions were usually followed by a
+      period of reaction, when he was urgent for the suppression of nudity in
+      the local Art Gallery and a harsh and forcible elevation of the
+      superficial morals of the valley. And he spoke of the ladies who
+      ministered to the delights of his jolly-dog period, when he spoke of them
+      at all, by the unprintable feminine equivalent. My aunt he treated with a
+      kindly contempt and considerable financial generosity, but his daughters
+      tore his heart; he was so proud of them, so glad to find them money to
+      spend, so resolved to own them, so instinctively jealous of every man who
+      came near them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My uncle has been the clue to a great number of men for me. He was an
+      illuminating extreme. I have learnt what not to expect from them through
+      him, and to comprehend resentments and dangerous sudden antagonisms I
+      should have found incomprehensible in their more complex forms, if I had
+      not first seen them in him in their feral state.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With his soft felt hat at the back of his head, his rather heavy, rather
+      mottled face, his rationally thick boots and slouching tweed-clad form, a
+      little round-shouldered and very obstinate looking, he strolls through all
+      my speculations sucking his teeth audibly, and occasionally throwing out a
+      shrewd aphorism, the intractable unavoidable ore of the new civilisation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Essentially he was simple. Generally speaking, he hated and despised in
+      equal measure whatever seemed to suggest that he personally was not the
+      most perfect human being conceivable. He hated all education after fifteen
+      because he had had no education after fifteen, he hated all people who did
+      not have high tea until he himself under duress gave up high tea, he hated
+      every game except football, which he had played and could judge, he hated
+      all people who spoke foreign languages because he knew no language but
+      Staffordshire, he hated all foreigners because he was English, and all
+      foreign ways because they were not his ways. Also he hated particularly,
+      and in this order, Londoner's, Yorkshiremen, Scotch, Welch and Irish,
+      because they were not &ldquo;reet Staffordshire,&rdquo; and he hated all other
+      Staffordshire men as insufficiently &ldquo;reet.&rdquo; He wanted to have all his own
+      women inviolate, and to fancy he had a call upon every other woman in the
+      world. He wanted to have the best cigars and the best brandy in the world
+      to consume or give away magnificently, and every one else to have inferior
+      ones. (His billiard table was an extra large size, specially made and very
+      inconvenient.) And he hated Trade Unions because they interfered with his
+      autocratic direction of his works, and his workpeople because they were
+      not obedient and untiring mechanisms to do his bidding. He was, in fact, a
+      very naive, vigorous human being. He was about as much civilised, about as
+      much tamed to the ideas of collective action and mutual consideration as a
+      Central African negro.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are hordes of such men as he throughout all the modern industrial
+      world. You will find the same type with the slightest modifications in the
+      Pas de Calais or Rhenish Prussia or New Jersey or North Italy. No doubt
+      you would find it in New Japan. These men have raised themselves up from
+      the general mass of untrained, uncultured, poorish people in a hard
+      industrious selfish struggle. To drive others they have had first to drive
+      themselves. They have never yet had occasion nor leisure to think of the
+      state or social life as a whole, and as for dreams or beauty, it was a
+      condition of survival that they should ignore such cravings. All the
+      distinctive qualities of my uncle can be thought of as dictated by his
+      conditions; his success and harshness, the extravagances that expressed
+      his pride in making money, the uncongenial luxury that sprang from
+      rivalry, and his self-reliance, his contempt for broad views, his contempt
+      for everything that he could not understand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His daughters were the inevitable children of his life. Queer girls they
+      were! Curiously &ldquo;spirited&rdquo; as people phrase it, and curiously limited.
+      During my Cambridge days I went down to Staffordshire several times. My
+      uncle, though he still resented my refusal to go into his business, was
+      also in his odd way proud of me. I was his nephew and poor relation, and
+      yet there I was, a young gentleman learning all sorts of unremunerative
+      things in the grandest manner, &ldquo;Latin and mook,&rdquo; while the sons of his
+      neighhours, not nephews merely, but sons, stayed unpolished in their
+      native town. Every time I went down I found extensive changes and altered
+      relations, and before I had settled down to them off I went again. I don't
+      think I was one person to them; I was a series of visitors. There is a
+      gulf of ages between a gaunt schoolboy of sixteen in unbecoming mourning
+      and two vividly self-conscious girls of eighteen and nineteen, but a
+      Cambridge &ldquo;man&rdquo; of two and twenty with a first and good tennis and a
+      growing social experience, is a fair contemporary for two girls of
+      twenty-three and twenty-four.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A motor-car appeared, I think in my second visit, a bottle-green affair
+      that opened behind, had dark purple cushions, and was controlled
+      mysteriously by a man in shiny black costume and a flat cap. The high tea
+      had been shifted to seven and rechristened dinner, but my uncle would not
+      dress nor consent to have wine; and after one painful experiment, I
+      gathered, and a scene, he put his foot down and prohibited any but
+      high-necked dresses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Daddy's perfectly impossible,&rdquo; Sybil told me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The foot had descended vehemently! &ldquo;My own daughters!&rdquo; he had said,
+      &ldquo;dressed up like&mdash;&ldquo;&mdash;and had arrested himself and fumbled and
+      decided to say&mdash;&ldquo;actresses, and showin' their fat arms for every fool
+      to stare at!&rdquo; Nor would he have any people invited to dinner. He didn't,
+      he had explained, want strangers poking about in his house when he came
+      home tired. So such calling as occurred went on during his absence in the
+      afternoon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the peculiarities of the life of these ascendant families of the
+      industrial class to which wealth has come, is its tremendous insulations.
+      There were no customs of intercourse in the Five Towns. All the isolated
+      prosperities of the district sprang from economising, hard driven homes,
+      in which there was neither time nor means for hospitality. Social
+      intercourse centred very largely upon the church or chapel, and the
+      chapels were better at bringing people together than the Establishment to
+      which my cousins belonged. Their chief outlet to the wider world lay
+      therefore through the acquaintances they had formed at school, and through
+      two much less prosperous families of relations who lived at Longton and
+      Hanley. A number of gossiping friendships with old school mates were &ldquo;kept
+      up,&rdquo; and my cousins would &ldquo;spend the afternoon&rdquo; or even spend the day with
+      these; such occasions led to other encounters and interlaced with the
+      furtive correspondences and snatched meetings that formed the emotional
+      thread of their lives. When the billiard table had been new, my uncle had
+      taken to asking in a few approved friends for an occasional game, but
+      mostly the billiard-room was for glory and the girls. Both of them played
+      very well. They never, so far as I know, dined out, and when at last after
+      bitter domestic conflicts they began to go to dances, they went with the
+      quavering connivance of my aunt, and changed into ball frocks at friends'
+      houses on the way. There was a tennis club that formed a convenient
+      afternoon rendezvous, and I recall that in the period of my earlier visits
+      the young bloods of the district found much satisfaction in taking girls
+      for drives in dog-carts and suchlike high-wheeled vehicles, a disposition
+      that died in tangled tandems at the apparition of motor-car's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My aunt and uncle had conceived no plans in life for their daughters at
+      all. In the undifferentiated industrial community from which they had
+      sprung, girls got married somehow, and it did not occur to them that the
+      concentration of property that had made them wealthy, had cut their
+      children off from the general social sea in which their own awkward
+      meeting had occurred, without necessarily opening any other world in
+      exchange. My uncle was too much occupied with the works and his business
+      affairs and his private vices to philosophise about his girls; he wanted
+      them just to keep girls, preferably about sixteen, and to be a sort of
+      animated flowers and make home bright and be given things. He was
+      irritated that they would not remain at this, and still more irritated
+      that they failed to suppress altogether their natural interest in young
+      men. The tandems would be steered by weird and devious routes to evade the
+      bare chance of his bloodshot eye. My aunt seemed to have no ideas whatever
+      about what was likely to happen to her children. She had indeed no ideas
+      about anything; she took her husband and the days as they came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I can see now the pathetic difficulty of my cousins' position in life; the
+      absence of any guidance or instruction or provision for their development.
+      They supplemented the silences of home by the conversation of
+      schoolfellows and the suggestions of popular fiction. They had to make
+      what they could out of life with such hints as these. The church was far
+      too modest to offer them any advice. It was obtruded upon my mind upon my
+      first visit that they were both carrying on correspondences and having
+      little furtive passings and seeings and meetings with the mysterious
+      owners of certain initials, S. and L. K., and, if I remember rightly, &ldquo;the
+      R. N.&rdquo; brothers and cousins, I suppose, of their friends. The same thing
+      was going on, with a certain intensification, at my next visit, excepting
+      only that the initials were different. But when I came again their methods
+      were maturer or I was no longer a negligible quantity, and the notes and
+      the initials were no longer flaunted quite so openly in my face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My cousins had worked it out from the indications of their universe that
+      the end of life is to have a &ldquo;good time.&rdquo; They used the phrase. That and
+      the drives in dog-carts were only the first of endless points of
+      resemblance between them and the commoner sort of American girl. When some
+      years ago I paid my first and only visit to America I seemed to recover my
+      cousins' atmosphere as soon as I entered the train at Euston. There were
+      three girls in my compartment supplied with huge decorated cases of
+      sweets, and being seen off by a company of friends, noisily arch and eager
+      about the &ldquo;steamer letters&rdquo; they would get at Liverpool; they were the
+      very soul-sisters of my cousins. The chief elements of a good time, as my
+      cousins judged it, as these countless thousands of rich young women judge
+      it, are a petty eventfulness, laughter, and to feel that you are looking
+      well and attracting attention. Shopping is one of its leading joys. You
+      buy things, clothes and trinkets for yourself and presents for your
+      friends. Presents always seemed to be flying about in that circle; flowers
+      and boxes of sweets were common currency. My cousins were always getting
+      and giving, my uncle caressed them with parcels and cheques. They kissed
+      him and he exuded sovereigns as a stroked APHIS exudes honey. It was like
+      the new language of the Academy of Lagado to me, and I never learnt how to
+      express myself in it, for nature and training make me feel encumbered to
+      receive presents and embarrassed in giving them. But then, like my father,
+      I hate and distrust possessions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the quality of their private imagination I never learnt anything; I
+      suppose it followed the lines of the fiction they read and was romantic
+      and sentimental. So far as marriage went, the married state seemed at once
+      very attractive and dreadfully serious to them, composed in equal measure
+      of becoming important and becoming old. I don't know what they thought
+      about children. I doubt if they thought about them at all. It was very
+      secret if they did.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the poor and dingy people all about them, my cousins were always
+      ready to take part in a Charitable Bazaar. They were unaware of any
+      economic correlation of their own prosperity and that circumambient
+      poverty, and they knew of Trade Unions simply as disagreeable external
+      things that upset my uncle's temper. They knew of nothing wrong in social
+      life at all except that there were &ldquo;Agitators.&rdquo; It surprised them a
+      little, I think, that Agitators were not more drastically put down. But
+      they had a sort of instinctive dread of social discussion as of something
+      that might breach the happiness of their ignorance....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My cousins did more than illustrate Marx for me; they also undertook a
+      stage of my emotional education. Their method in that as in everything
+      else was extremely simple, but it took my inexperience by surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must have been on my third visit that Sybil took me in hand. Hitherto I
+      seemed to have seen her only in profile, but now she became almost
+      completely full face, manifestly regarded me with those violet eyes of
+      hers. She passed me things I needed at breakfast&mdash;it was the first
+      morning of my visit&mdash;before I asked for them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When young men are looked at by pretty cousins, they become intensely
+      aware of those cousins. It seemed to me that I had always admired Sybil's
+      eyes very greatly, and that there was something in her temperament
+      congenial to mine. It was odd I had not noted it on my previous visits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We walked round the garden somewhen that morning, and talked about
+      Cambridge. She asked quite a lot of questions about my work and my
+      ambitions. She said she had always felt sure I was clever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The conversation languished a little, and we picked some flowers for the
+      house. Then she asked if I could run. I conceded her various starts and we
+      raced up and down the middle garden path. Then, a little breathless, we
+      went into the new twenty-five guinea summer-house at the end of the
+      herbaceous border.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We sat side by side, pleasantly hidden from the house, and she became
+      anxious about her hair, which was slightly and prettily disarranged, and
+      asked me to help her with the adjustment of a hairpin. I had never in my
+      life been so near the soft curly hair and the dainty eyebrow and eyelid
+      and warm soft cheek of a girl, and I was stirred&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It stirs me now to recall it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I became a battleground of impulses and inhibitions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you,&rdquo; said my cousin, and moved a little away from me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She began to talk about friendship, and lost her thread and forgot the
+      little electric stress between us in a rather meandering analysis of her
+      principal girl friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But afterwards she resumed her purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went to bed that night with one proposition overshadowing everything
+      else in my mind, namely, that kissing my cousin Sybil was a difficult, but
+      not impossible, achievement. I do not recall any shadow of a doubt whether
+      on the whole it was worth doing. The thing had come into my existence,
+      disturbing and interrupting its flow exactly as a fever does. Sybil had
+      infected me with herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next day matters came to a crisis in the little upstairs sitting-room
+      which had been assigned me as a study during my visit. I was working up
+      there, or rather trying to work in spite of the outrageous capering of
+      some very primitive elements in my brain, when she came up to me, under a
+      transparent pretext of looking for a book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I turned round and then got up at the sight of her. I quite forget what
+      our conversation was about, but I know she led me to believe I might kiss
+      her. Then when I attempted to do so she averted her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How COULD you?&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;I didn't mean that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That remained the state of our relations for two days. I developed a
+      growing irritation with and resentment against cousin Sybil, combined with
+      an intense desire to get that kiss for which I hungered and thirsted.
+      Cousin Sybil went about in the happy persuasion that I was madly in love
+      with her, and her game, so far as she was concerned, was played and won.
+      It wasn't until I had fretted for two days that I realised that I was
+      being used for the commonest form of excitement possible to a commonplace
+      girl; that dozens perhaps of young men had played the part of Tantalus at
+      cousin Sybil's lips. I walked about my room at nights, damning her and
+      calling her by terms which on the whole she rather deserved, while Sybil
+      went to sleep pitying &ldquo;poor old Dick!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damn it!&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;I WILL be equal with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But I never did equalise the disadvantage, and perhaps it's as well, for I
+      fancy that sort of revenge cuts both people too much for a rational man to
+      seek it....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why are men so silly?&rdquo; said cousin Sybil next morning, wriggling back
+      with down-bent head to release herself from what should have been a
+      compelling embrace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Confound it!&rdquo; I said with a flash of clear vision. &ldquo;You STARTED this
+      game.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood back against a hedge of roses, a little flushed and excited and
+      interested, and ready for the delightful defensive if I should renew my
+      attack.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beastly hot for scuffling,&rdquo; I said, white with anger. &ldquo;I don't know
+      whether I'm so keen on kissing you, Sybil, after all. I just thought you
+      wanted me to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I could have whipped her, and my voice stung more than my words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our eyes met; a real hatred in hers leaping up to meet mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let's play tennis,&rdquo; I said, after a moment's pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she answered shortly, &ldquo;I'm going indoors.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And that ended the affair with Sybil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was still in the full glare of this disillusionment when Gertrude awoke
+      from some preoccupation to an interest in my existence. She developed a
+      disposition to touch my hand by accident, and let her fingers rest in
+      contact with it for a moment,&mdash;she had pleasant soft hands;&mdash;she
+      began to drift into summer houses with me, to let her arm rest trustfully
+      against mine, to ask questions about Cambridge. They were much the same
+      questions that Sybil had asked. But I controlled myself and maintained a
+      profile of intelligent and entirely civil indifference to her
+      blandishments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What Gertrude made of it came out one evening in some talk&mdash;I forget
+      about what&mdash;with Sybil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Dick!&rdquo; said Gertrude a little impatiently, &ldquo;Dick's Pi.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And I never disillusioned her by any subsequent levity from this theory of
+      my innate and virginal piety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was against this harsh and crude Staffordshire background that I think
+      I must have seen Margaret for the first time. I say I think because it is
+      quite possible that we had passed each other in the streets of Cambridge,
+      no doubt with that affectation of mutual disregard which was once
+      customary between undergraduates and Newnham girls. But if that was so I
+      had noted nothing of the slender graciousness that shone out so pleasingly
+      against the bleaker midland surroundings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was a younger schoolfellow of my cousins', and the step-daughter of
+      Seddon, a prominent solicitor of Burslem. She was not only not in my
+      cousins' generation but not in their set, she was one of a small
+      hardworking group who kept immaculate note-books, and did as much as is
+      humanly possible of that insensate pile of written work that the Girls'
+      Public School movement has inflicted upon school-girls. She really learnt
+      French and German admirably and thoroughly, she got as far in mathematics
+      as an unflinching industry can carry any one with no great natural
+      aptitude, and she went up to Bennett Hall, Newnham, after the usual
+      conflict with her family, to work for the History Tripos.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There in her third year she made herself thoroughly ill through overwork,
+      so ill that she had to give up Newnham altogether and go abroad with her
+      stepmother. She made herself ill, as so many girls do in those university
+      colleges, through the badness of her home and school training. She thought
+      study must needs be a hard straining of the mind. She worried her work,
+      she gave herself no leisure to see it as a whole, she felt herself not
+      making headway and she cut her games and exercise in order to increase her
+      hours of toil, and worked into the night. She carried a knack of laborious
+      thoroughness into the blind alleys and inessentials of her subject. It
+      didn't need the badness of the food for which Bennett Hall is celebrated
+      and the remarkable dietary of nocturnal cocoa, cakes and soft biscuits
+      with which the girls have supplemented it, to ensure her collapse. Her
+      mother brought her home, fretting and distressed, and then finding her
+      hopelessly unhappy at home, took her and her half-brother, a rather ailing
+      youngster of ten who died three years later, for a journey to Italy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Italy did much to assuage Margaret's chagrin. I think all three of them
+      had a very good time there. At home Mr. Seddon, her step-father, played
+      the part of a well-meaning blight by reason of the moods that arose from
+      nervous dyspepsia. They went to Florence, equipped with various
+      introductions and much sound advice from sympathetic Cambridge friends,
+      and having acquired an ease in Italy there, went on to Siena, Orvieto, and
+      at last Rome. They returned, if I remember rightly, by Pisa, Genoa, Milan
+      and Paris. Six months or more they had had abroad, and now Margaret was
+      back in Burslem, in health again and consciously a very civilised person.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      New ideas were abroad, it was Maytime and a spring of abundant flowers&mdash;daffodils
+      were particularly good that year&mdash;and Mrs. Seddon celebrated her
+      return by giving an afternoon reception at short notice, with the clear
+      intention of letting every one out into the garden if the weather held.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Seddons had a big old farmhouse modified to modern ideas of comfort on
+      the road out towards Misterton, with an orchard that had been rather
+      pleasantly subdued from use to ornament. It had rich blossoming cherry and
+      apple trees. Large patches of grass full of nodding yellow trumpets had
+      been left amidst the not too precisely mown grass, which was as it were
+      grass path with an occasional lapse into lawn or glade. And Margaret,
+      hatless, with the fair hair above her thin, delicately pink face very
+      simply done, came to meet our rather too consciously dressed party,&mdash;we
+      had come in the motor four strong, with my aunt in grey silk. Margaret
+      wore a soft flowing flowered blue dress of diaphanous material, all
+      unconnected with the fashion and tied with pretty ribbons, like a
+      slenderer, unbountiful Primavera.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was one of those May days that ape the light and heat of summer, and I
+      remember disconnectedly quite a number of brightly lit figures and groups
+      walking about, and a white gate between orchard and garden and a large
+      lawn with an oak tree and a red Georgian house with a verandah and open
+      French windows, through which the tea drinking had come out upon the
+      moss-edged flagstones even as Mrs. Seddon had planned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The party was almost entirely feminine except for a little curate with a
+      large head, a good voice and a radiant manner, who was obviously attracted
+      by Margaret, and two or three young husbands still sufficiently addicted
+      to their wives to accompany them. One of them I recall as a quite romantic
+      figure with abundant blond curly hair on which was poised a grey felt hat
+      encircled by a refined black band. He wore, moreover, a loose rich shot
+      silk tie of red and purple, a long frock coat, grey trousers and brown
+      shoes, and presently he removed his hat and carried it in one hand. There
+      were two tennis-playing youths besides myself. There was also one father
+      with three daughters in anxious control, a father of the old school
+      scarcely half broken in, reluctant, rebellious and consciously and
+      conscientiously &ldquo;reet Staffordshire.&rdquo; The daughters were all alert to
+      suppress the possible plungings, the undesirable humorous impulses of this
+      almost feral guest. They nipped his very gestures in the bud. The rest of
+      the people were mainly mothers with daughters&mdash;daughters of all ages,
+      and a scattering of aunts, and there was a tendency to clotting, parties
+      kept together and regarded parties suspiciously. Mr. Seddon was in hiding,
+      I think, all the time, though not formally absent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Matters centred upon the tea in the long room of the French windows, where
+      four trim maids went to and fro busily between the house and the clumps of
+      people seated or standing before it; and tennis and croquet were
+      intermittently visible and audible beyond a bank of rockwork rich with the
+      spikes and cups and bells of high spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Seddon presided at the tea urn, and Margaret partly assisted and
+      partly talked to me and my cousin Sibyl&mdash;Gertrude had found a disused
+      and faded initial and was partnering him at tennis in a state of gentle
+      revival&mdash;while their mother exercised a divided chaperonage from a
+      seat near Mrs. Seddon. The little curate, stirring a partially empty cup
+      of tea, mingled with our party, and preluded, I remember, every
+      observation he made by a vigorous resumption of stirring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We talked of Cambridge, and Margaret kept us to it. The curate was a
+      Selwyn man and had taken a pass degree in theology, but Margaret had come
+      to Gaylord's lecturers in Trinity for a term before her breakdown, and
+      understood these differences. She had the eagerness of an exile to hear
+      the old familiar names of places and personalities. We capped familiar
+      anecdotes and were enthusiastic about Kings' Chapel and the Backs, and the
+      curate, addressing himself more particularly to Sibyl, told a long
+      confused story illustrative of his disposition to reckless devilry (of a
+      pure-minded kindly sort) about upsetting two canoes quite needlessly on
+      the way to Grantchester.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I can still see Margaret as I saw her that afternoon, see her fresh fair
+      face, with the little obliquity of the upper lip, and her brow always
+      slightly knitted, and her manner as of one breathlessly shy but
+      determined. She had rather open blue eyes, and she spoke in an even
+      musical voice with the gentlest of stresses and the ghost of a lisp. And
+      it was true, she gathered, that Cambridge still existed. &ldquo;I went to
+      Grantchester,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;last year, and had tea under the apple-blossom.
+      I didn't think then I should have to come down.&rdquo; (It was that started the
+      curate upon his anecdote.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've seen a lot of pictures, and learnt a lot about them&mdash;at the
+      Pitti and the Brera,&mdash;the Brera is wonderful&mdash;wonderful places,&mdash;but
+      it isn't like real study,&rdquo; she was saying presently.... &ldquo;We bought bales
+      of photographs,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought the bales a little out of keeping.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But fair-haired and quite simply and yet graciously and fancifully
+      dressed, talking of art and beautiful things and a beautiful land, and
+      with so much manifest regret for learning denied, she seemed a different
+      kind of being altogether from my smart, hard, high-coloured, black-haired
+      and resolutely hatted cousin; she seemed translucent beside Gertrude. Even
+      the little twist and droop of her slender body was a grace to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I liked her from the moment I saw her, and set myself to interest and
+      please her as well as I knew how.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We recalled a case of ragging that had rustled the shrubs of Newnham, and
+      then Chris Robinson's visit&mdash;he had given a talk to Bennett Hall also&mdash;and
+      our impression of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He disappointed me, too,&rdquo; said Margaret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was moved to tell Margaret something of my own views in the matter of
+      social progress, and she listened&mdash;oh! with a kind of urged
+      attention, and her brow a little more knitted, very earnestly. The little
+      curate desisted from the appendices and refuse heaps and general debris of
+      his story, and made himself look very alert and intelligent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We did a lot of that when I was up in the eighties,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I'm glad
+      Imperialism hasn't swamped you fellows altogether.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gertrude, looking bright and confident, came to join our talk from the
+      shrubbery; the initial, a little flushed and evidently in a state of
+      refreshed relationship, came with her, and a cheerful lady in pink and
+      more particularly distinguished by a pink bonnet joined our little group.
+      Gertrude had been sipping admiration and was not disposed to play a
+      passive part in the talk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Socialism!&rdquo; she cried, catching the word. &ldquo;It's well Pa isn't here. He
+      has Fits when people talk of socialism. Fits!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The initial laughed in a general kind of way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The curate said there was socialism AND socialism, and looked at Margaret
+      to gauge whether he had been too bold in this utterance. But she was all,
+      he perceived, for broad-mindness, and he stirred himself (and incidentally
+      his tea) to still more liberality of expression. He said the state of the
+      poor was appalling, simply appalling; that there were times when he wanted
+      to shatter the whole system, &ldquo;only,&rdquo; he said, turning to me appealingly,
+      &ldquo;What have we got to put in its place?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The thing that exists is always the more evident alternative,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little curate looked at it for a moment. &ldquo;Precisely,&rdquo; he said
+      explosively, and turned stirring and with his head a little on one side,
+      to hear what Margaret was saying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret was saying, with a swift blush and an effect of daring, that she
+      had no doubt she was a socialist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And wearing a gold chain!&rdquo; said Gertrude, &ldquo;And drinking out of eggshell!
+      I like that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I came to Margaret's rescue. &ldquo;It doesn't follow that because one's a
+      socialist one ought to dress in sackcloth and ashes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The initial coloured deeply, and having secured my attention by prodding
+      me slightly with the wrist of the hand that held his teacup, cleared his
+      throat and suggested that &ldquo;one ought to be consistent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I perceived we were embarked upon a discussion of the elements. We began
+      an interesting little wrangle one of those crude discussions of general
+      ideas that are dear to the heart of youth. I and Margaret supported one
+      another as socialists, Gertrude and Sybil and the initial maintained an
+      anti-socialist position, the curate attempted a cross-bench position with
+      an air of intending to come down upon us presently with a casting vote. He
+      reminded us of a number of useful principles too often overlooked in
+      argument, that in a big question like this there was much to be said on
+      both sides, that if every one did his or her duty to every one about them
+      there would be no difficulty with social problems at all, that over and
+      above all enactments we needed moral changes in people themselves. My
+      cousin Gertrude was a difficult controversialist to manage, being
+      unconscious of inconsistency in statement and absolutely impervious to
+      reply. Her standpoint was essentially materialistic; she didn't see why
+      she shouldn't have a good time because other people didn't; they would
+      have a good time, she was sure, if she didn't. She said that if we did
+      give up everything we had to other people, they wouldn't very likely know
+      what to do with it. She asked if we were so fond of work-people, why we
+      didn't go and live among them, and expressed the inflexible persuasion
+      that if we HAD socialism, everything would be just the same again in ten
+      years' time. She also threw upon us the imputation of ingratitude for a
+      beautiful world by saying that so far as she was concerned she didn't want
+      to upset everything. She was contented with things as they were, thank
+      you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The discussion led in some way that I don't in the least recall now, and
+      possibly by abrupt transitions, to a croquet foursome in which Margaret
+      involved the curate without involving herself, and then stood beside me on
+      the edge of the lawn while the others played. We watched silently for a
+      moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I HATE that sort of view,&rdquo; she said suddenly in a confidential undertone,
+      with her delicate pink flush returning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's want of imagination,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To think we are just to enjoy ourselves,&rdquo; she went on; &ldquo;just to go on
+      dressing and playing and having meals and spending money!&rdquo; She seemed to
+      be referring not simply to my cousins, but to the whole world of industry
+      and property about us. &ldquo;But what is one to do?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;I do wish I
+      had not had to come down. It's all so pointless here. There seems to be
+      nothing going forward, no ideas, no dreams. No one here seems to feel
+      quite what I feel, the sort of need there is for MEANING in things. I hate
+      things without meaning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you do&mdash;local work?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose I shall. I suppose I must find something. Do you think&mdash;if
+      one were to attempt some sort of propaganda?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Could you&mdash;?&rdquo; I began a little doubtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose I couldn't,&rdquo; she answered, after a thoughtful moment. &ldquo;I
+      suppose it would come to nothing. And yet I feel there is so much to be
+      done for the world, so much one ought to be doing.... I want to do
+      something for the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I can see her now as she stood there with her brows nearly frowning, her
+      blue eyes looking before her, her mouth almost petulant. &ldquo;One feels that
+      there are so many things going on&mdash;out of one's reach,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went back in the motor-car with my mind full of her, the quality of
+      delicate discontent, the suggestion of exile. Even a kind of weakness in
+      her was sympathetic. She told tremendously against her background. She
+      was, I say, like a protesting blue flower upon a cinder heap. It is
+      curious, too, how she connects and mingles with the furious quarrel I had
+      with my uncle that very evening. That came absurdly. Indirectly Margaret
+      was responsible. My mind was running on ideas she had revived and
+      questions she had set clamouring, and quite inadvertently in my attempt to
+      find solutions I talked so as to outrage his profoundest feelings....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What a preposterous shindy that was!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat with him in the smoking-room, propounding what I considered to be
+      the most indisputable and non-contentious propositions conceivable&mdash;until,
+      to my infinite amazement, he exploded and called me a &ldquo;damned young
+      puppy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was seismic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tremendously interesting time,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;just in the beginning of making
+      a civilisation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; he said, with an averted face, and nodded, leaning forward over his
+      cigar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had not the remotest thought of annoying him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Monstrous muddle of things we have got,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;jumbled streets, ugly
+      population, ugly factories&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'd do a sight better if you had to do with it,&rdquo; said my uncle,
+      regarding me askance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not me. But a world that had a collective plan and knew where it meant to
+      be going would do a sight better, anyhow. We're all swimming in a flood of
+      ill-calculated chances&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll be making out I organised that business down there&mdash;by chance&mdash;next,&rdquo;
+       said my uncle, his voice thick with challenge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went on as though I was back in Trinity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's a lot of chance in the making of all great businesses,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My uncle remarked that that showed how much I knew about businesses. If
+      chance made businesses, why was it that he always succeeded and grew while
+      those fools Ackroyd and Sons always took second place? He showed a
+      disposition to tell the glorious history of how once Ackroyd's
+      overshadowed him, and how now he could buy up Ackroyd's three times over.
+      But I wanted to get out what was in my mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;as between man and man and business and business, some of
+      course get the pull by this quality or that&mdash;but it's forces quite
+      outside the individual case that make the big part of any success under
+      modern conditions. YOU never invented pottery, nor any process in pottery
+      that matters a rap in your works; it wasn't YOUR foresight that joined all
+      England up with railways and made it possible to organise production on an
+      altogether different scale. You really at the utmost can't take credit for
+      much more than being the sort of man who happened to fit what happened to
+      be the requirements of the time, and who happened to be in a position to
+      take advantage of them&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was then my uncle cried out and called me a damned young puppy, and
+      became involved in some unexpected trouble of his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I woke up as it were from my analysis of the situation to discover him
+      bent over a splendid spittoon, cursing incoherently, retching a little,
+      and spitting out the end of his cigar which he had bitten off in his last
+      attempt at self-control, and withal fully prepared as soon as he had
+      cleared for action to give me just all that he considered to be the
+      contents of his mind upon the condition of mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, why shouldn't I talk my mind to him? He'd never had an outside view
+      of himself for years, and I resolved to stand up to him. We went at it
+      hammer and tongs! It became clear that he supposed me to be a Socialist, a
+      zealous, embittered hater of all ownership&mdash;and also an educated man
+      of the vilest, most pretentiously superior description. His principal
+      grievance was that I thought I knew everything; to that he recurred again
+      and again....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had been maintaining an armed truce with each other since my resolve to
+      go up to Cambridge, and now we had out all that had accumulated between
+      us. There had been stupendous accumulations....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The particular things we said and did in that bawling encounter matter
+      nothing at all in this story. I can't now estimate how near we came to
+      fisticuffs. It ended with my saying, after a pungent reminder of benefits
+      conferred and remembered, that I didn't want to stay another hour in his
+      house. I went upstairs, in a state of puerile fury, to pack and go off to
+      the Railway Hotel, while he, with ironical civility, telephoned for a cab.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good riddance!&rdquo; shouted my uncle, seeing me off into the night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the face of it our row was preposterous, but the underlying reality of
+      our quarrel was the essential antagonism, it seemed to me, in all human
+      affairs, the antagonism between ideas and the established method, that is
+      to say, between ideas and the rule of thumb. The world I hate is the
+      rule-of-thumb world, the thing I and my kind of people exist for primarily
+      is to battle with that, to annoy it, disarrange it, reconstruct it. We
+      question everything, disturb anything that cannot give a clear
+      justification to our questioning, because we believe inherently that our
+      sense of disorder implies the possibility of a better order. Of course we
+      are detestable. My uncle was of that other vaster mass who accept
+      everything for the thing it seems to be, hate enquiry and analysis as a
+      tramp hates washing, dread and resist change, oppose experiment, despise
+      science. The world is our battleground; and all history, all literature
+      that matters, all science, deals with this conflict of the thing that is
+      and the speculative &ldquo;if&rdquo; that will destroy it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But that is why I did not see Margaret Seddon again for five years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ MARGARET IN LONDON
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was twenty-seven when I met Margaret again, and the intervening five
+      years had been years of vigorous activity for me, if not of very
+      remarkable growth. When I saw her again, I could count myself a grown man.
+      I think, indeed, I counted myself more completely grown than I was. At any
+      rate, by all ordinary standards, I had &ldquo;got on&rdquo; very well, and my ideas,
+      if they had not changed very greatly, had become much more definite and my
+      ambitions clearer and bolder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had long since abandoned my fellowship and come to London. I had
+      published two books that had been talked about, written several articles,
+      and established a regular relationship with the WEEKLY REVIEW and the
+      EVENING GAZETTE. I was a member of the Eighty Club and learning to adapt
+      the style of the Cambridge Union to larger uses. The London world had
+      opened out to me very readily. I had developed a pleasant variety of
+      social connections. I had made the acquaintance of Mr. Evesham, who had
+      been attracted by my NEW RULER, and who talked about it and me, and so did
+      a very great deal to make a way for me into the company of prominent and
+      amusing people. I dined out quite frequently. The glitter and interest of
+      good London dinner parties became a common experience. I liked the sort of
+      conversation one got at them extremely, the little glow of duologues
+      burning up into more general discussions, the closing-in of the men after
+      the going of the women, the sage, substantial masculine gossiping, the
+      later resumption of effective talk with some pleasant woman, graciously at
+      her best. I had a wide range of houses; Cambridge had linked me to one or
+      two correlated sets of artistic and literary people, and my books and Mr.
+      Evesham and opened to me the big vague world of &ldquo;society.&rdquo; I wasn't
+      aggressive nor particularly snobbish nor troublesome, sometimes I talked
+      well, and if I had nothing interesting to say I said as little as
+      possible, and I had a youthful gravity of manner that was liked by
+      hostesses. And the other side of my nature that first flared through the
+      cover of restraints at Locarno, that too had had opportunity to develop
+      along the line London renders practicable. I had had my experiences and
+      secrets and adventures among that fringe of ill-mated or erratic or
+      discredited women the London world possesses. The thing had long ago
+      ceased to be a matter of magic or mystery, and had become a question of
+      appetites and excitement, and among other things the excitement of not
+      being found out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I write rather doubtfully of my growing during this period. Indeed I find
+      it hard to judge whether I can say that I grew at all in any real sense of
+      the word, between three and twenty and twenty-seven. It seems to me now to
+      have been rather a phase of realisation and clarification. All the broad
+      lines of my thought were laid down, I am sure, by the date of my Locarno
+      adventure, but in those five years I discussed things over and over again
+      with myself and others, filled out with concrete fact forms I had at first
+      apprehended sketchily and conversationally, measured my powers against my
+      ideals and the forces in the world about me. It was evident that many men
+      no better than myself and with no greater advantages than mine had raised
+      themselves to influential and even decisive positions in the worlds of
+      politics and thought. I was gathering the confidence and knowledge
+      necessary to attack the world in the large manner; I found I could write,
+      and that people would let me write if I chose, as one having authority and
+      not as the scribes. Socially and politically and intellectually I knew
+      myself for an honest man, and that quite without any deliberation on my
+      part this showed and made things easy for me. People trusted my good faith
+      from the beginning&mdash;for all that I came from nowhere and had no
+      better position than any adventurer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the growth process was arrested, I was nothing bigger at twenty-seven
+      than at twenty-two, however much saner and stronger, and any one looking
+      closely into my mind during that period might well have imagined growth
+      finished altogether. It is particularly evident to me now that I came no
+      nearer to any understanding of women during that time. That Locarno affair
+      was infinitely more to me than I had supposed. It ended something&mdash;nipped
+      something in the bud perhaps&mdash;took me at a stride from a vague, fine,
+      ignorant, closed world of emotion to intrigue and a perfectly definite and
+      limited sensuality. It ended my youth, and for a time it prevented my
+      manhood. I had never yet even peeped at the sweetest, profoundest thing in
+      the world, the heart and meaning of a girl, or dreamt with any quality of
+      reality of a wife or any such thing as a friend among womanhood. My vague
+      anticipation of such things in life had vanished altogether. I turned away
+      from their possibility. It seemed to me I knew what had to be known about
+      womankind. I wanted to work hard, to get on to a position in which I could
+      develop and forward my constructive projects. Women, I thought, had
+      nothing to do with that. It seemed clear I could not marry for some years;
+      I was attractive to certain types of women, I had vanity enough to give me
+      an agreeable confidence in love-making, and I went about seeking a
+      convenient mistress quite deliberately, some one who should serve my
+      purpose and say in the end, like that kindly first mistress of mine, &ldquo;I've
+      done you no harm,&rdquo; and so release me. It seemed the only wise way of
+      disposing of urgencies that might otherwise entangle and wreck the career
+      I was intent upon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't apologise for, or defend my mental and moral phases. So it was I
+      appraised life and prepared to take it, and so it is a thousand ambitious
+      men see it to-day....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the rest these five years were a period of definition. My political
+      conceptions were perfectly plain and honest. I had one constant desire
+      ruling my thoughts. I meant to leave England and the empire better ordered
+      than I found it, to organise and discipline, to build up a constructive
+      and controlling State out of my world's confusions. We had, I saw, to
+      suffuse education with public intention, to develop a new better-living
+      generation with a collectivist habit of thought, to link now chaotic
+      activities in every human affair, and particularly to catch that escaped,
+      world-making, world-ruining, dangerous thing, industrial and financial
+      enterprise, and bring it back to the service of the general good. I had
+      then the precise image that still serves me as a symbol for all I wish to
+      bring about, the image of an engineer building a lock in a swelling
+      torrent&mdash;with water pressure as his only source of power. My thoughts
+      and acts were habitually turned to that enterprise; it gave shape and
+      direction to all my life. The problem that most engaged my mind during
+      those years was the practical and personal problem of just where to apply
+      myself to serve this almost innate purpose. How was I, a child of this
+      confusion, struggling upward through the confusion, to take hold of
+      things? Somewhere between politics and literature my grip must needs be
+      found, but where? Always I seem to have been looking for that in those
+      opening years, and disregarding everything else to discover it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Baileys, under whose auspices I met Margaret again, were in the
+      sharpest contrast with the narrow industrialism of the Staffordshire
+      world. They were indeed at the other extreme of the scale, two active
+      self-centred people, excessively devoted to the public service. It was
+      natural I should gravitate to them, for they seemed to stand for the
+      maturer, more disciplined, better informed expression of all I was then
+      urgent to attempt to do. The bulk of their friends were politicians or
+      public officials, they described themselves as publicists&mdash;a vague
+      yet sufficiently significant term. They lived and worked in a hard little
+      house in Chambers Street, Westminster, and made a centre for quite an
+      astonishing amount of political and social activity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Willersley took me there one evening. The place was almost pretentiously
+      matter-of-fact and unassuming. The narrow passage-hall, papered with some
+      ancient yellowish paper, grained to imitate wood, was choked with hats and
+      cloaks and an occasional feminine wrap. Motioned rather than announced by
+      a tall Scotch servant woman, the only domestic I ever remember seeing
+      there, we made our way up a narrow staircase past the open door of a small
+      study packed with blue-books, to discover Altiora Bailey receiving before
+      the fireplace in her drawing-room. She was a tall commanding figure,
+      splendid but a little untidy in black silk and red beads, with dark eyes
+      that had no depths, with a clear hard voice that had an almost visible
+      prominence, aquiline features and straight black hair that was apt to get
+      astray, that was now astray like the head feathers of an eagle in a gale.
+      She stood with her hands behind her back, and talked in a high tenor of a
+      projected Town Planning Bill with Blupp, who was practically in those days
+      the secretary of the local Government Board. A very short broad man with
+      thick ears and fat white hands writhing intertwined behind him, stood with
+      his back to us, eager to bark interruptions into Altiora's discourse. A
+      slender girl in pale blue, manifestly a young political wife, stood with
+      one foot on the fender listening with an expression of entirely puzzled
+      propitiation. A tall sandy-bearded bishop with the expression of a man in
+      a trance completed this central group.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room was one of those long apartments once divided by folding doors,
+      and reaching from back to front, that are common upon the first floors of
+      London houses. Its walls were hung with two or three indifferent water
+      colours, there was scarcely any furniture but a sofa or so and a chair,
+      and the floor, severely carpeted with matting, was crowded with a curious
+      medley of people, men predominating. Several were in evening dress, but
+      most had the morning garb of the politician; the women were either
+      severely rational or radiantly magnificent. Willersley pointed out to me
+      the wife of the Secretary of State for War, and I recognised the Duchess
+      of Clynes, who at that time cultivated intellectuality. I looked round,
+      identifying a face here or there, and stepping back trod on some one's
+      toe, and turned to find it belonged to the Right Hon. G. B. Mottisham,
+      dear to the PUNCH caricaturists. He received my apology with that
+      intentional charm that is one of his most delightful traits, and resumed
+      his discussion. Beside him was Esmeer of Trinity, whom I had not seen
+      since my Cambridge days....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Willersley found an ex-member of the School Board for whom he had
+      affinities, and left me to exchange experiences and comments upon the
+      company with Esmeer. Esmeer was still a don; but he was nibbling, he said,
+      at certain negotiations with the TIMES that might bring him down to
+      London. He wanted to come to London. &ldquo;We peep at things from Cambridge,&rdquo;
+       he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This sort of thing,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;makes London necessary. It's the oddest
+      gathering.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Every one comes here,&rdquo; said Esmeer. &ldquo;Mostly we hate them like poison&mdash;jealousy&mdash;and
+      little irritations&mdash;Altiora can be a horror at times&mdash;but we
+      HAVE to come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Things are being done?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&mdash;no doubt of it. It's one of the parts of the British machinery&mdash;that
+      doesn't show.... But nobody else could do it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two people,&rdquo; said Esmeer, &ldquo;who've planned to be a power&mdash;in an
+      original way. And by Jove! they've done it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not for some time pick out Oscar Bailey, and then Esmeer showed him
+      to me in elaborately confidential talk in a corner with a
+      distinguished-looking stranger wearing a ribbon. Oscar had none of the
+      fine appearance of his wife; he was a short sturdy figure with a rounded
+      protruding abdomen and a curious broad, flattened, clean-shaven face that
+      seemed nearly all forehead. He was of Anglo-Hungarian extraction, and I
+      have always fancied something Mongolian in his type. He peered up with
+      reddish swollen-looking eyes over gilt-edged glasses that were divided
+      horizontally into portions of different refractive power, and he talking
+      in an ingratiating undertone, with busy thin lips, an eager lisp and
+      nervous movements of the hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      People say that thirty years before at Oxford he was almost exactly the
+      same eager, clever little man he was when I first met him. He had come up
+      to Balliol bristling with extraordinary degrees and prizes captured in
+      provincial and Irish and Scotch universities&mdash;and had made a name for
+      himself as the most formidable dealer in exact fact the rhetoricians of
+      the Union had ever had to encounter. From Oxford he had gone on to a
+      position in the Higher Division of the Civil Service, I think in the War
+      Office, and had speedily made a place for himself as a political
+      journalist. He was a particularly neat controversialist, and very full of
+      political and sociological ideas. He had a quite astounding memory for
+      facts and a mastery of detailed analysis, and the time afforded scope for
+      these gifts. The later eighties were full of politico-social discussion,
+      and he became a prominent name upon the contents list of the NINETEENTH
+      CENTURY, the FORTNIGHTLY and CONTEMPORARY chiefly as a half sympathetic
+      but frequently very damaging critic of the socialism of that period. He
+      won the immense respect of every one specially interested in social and
+      political questions, he soon achieved the limited distinction that is
+      awarded such capacity, and at that I think he would have remained for the
+      rest of his life if he had not encountered Altiora.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Altiora Macvitie was an altogether exceptional woman, an extraordinary
+      mixture of qualities, the one woman in the world who could make something
+      more out of Bailey than that. She had much of the vigour and handsomeness
+      of a slender impudent young man, and an unscrupulousness altogether
+      feminine. She was one of those women who are waiting in&mdash;what is the
+      word?&mdash;muliebrity. She had courage and initiative and a philosophical
+      way of handling questions, and she could be bored by regular work like a
+      man. She was entirely unfitted for her sex's sphere. She was neither
+      uncertain, coy nor hard to please, and altogether too stimulating and
+      aggressive for any gentleman's hours of ease. Her cookery would have been
+      about as sketchy as her handwriting, which was generally quite illegible,
+      and she would have made, I feel sure, a shocking bad nurse. Yet you
+      mustn't imagine she was an inelegant or unbeautiful woman, and she is
+      inconceivable to me in high collars or any sort of masculine garment. But
+      her soul was bony, and at the base of her was a vanity gaunt and greedy!
+      When she wasn't in a state of personal untidiness that was partly a
+      protest against the waste of hours exacted by the toilet and partly a
+      natural disinclination, she had a gypsy splendour of black and red and
+      silver all her own. And somewhen in the early nineties she met and married
+      Bailey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I know very little about her early years. She was the only daughter of Sir
+      Deighton Macvitie, who applied the iodoform process to cotton, and only
+      his subsequent unfortunate attempts to become a Cotton King prevented her
+      being a very rich woman. As it was she had a tolerable independence. She
+      came into prominence as one of the more able of the little shoal of young
+      women who were led into politico-philanthropic activities by the influence
+      of the earlier novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward&mdash;the Marcella crop. She
+      went &ldquo;slumming&rdquo; with distinguished vigour, which was quite usual in those
+      days&mdash;and returned from her experiences as an amateur flower girl
+      with clear and original views about the problem&mdash;which is and always
+      had been unusual. She had not married, I suppose because her standards
+      were high, and men are cowards and with an instinctive appetite for
+      muliebrity. She had kept house for her father by speaking occasionally to
+      the housekeeper, butler and cook her mother had left her, and gathering
+      the most interesting dinner parties she could, and had married off four
+      orphan nieces in a harsh and successful manner. After her father's smash
+      and death she came out as a writer upon social questions and a scathing
+      critic of the Charity Organisation Society, and she was three and thirty
+      and a little at loose ends when she met Oscar Bailey, so to speak, in the
+      CONTEMPORARY REVIEW. The lurking woman in her nature was fascinated by the
+      ease and precision with which the little man rolled over all sorts of
+      important and authoritative people, she was the first to discover a sort
+      of imaginative bigness in his still growing mind, the forehead perhaps
+      carried him off physically, and she took occasion to meet and subjugate
+      him, and, so soon as he had sufficiently recovered from his abject
+      humility and a certain panic at her attentions, marry him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This had opened a new phase in the lives of Bailey and herself. The two
+      supplemented each other to an extraordinary extent. Their subsequent
+      career was, I think, almost entirely her invention. She was aggressive,
+      imaginative, and had a great capacity for ideas, while he was almost
+      destitute of initiative, and could do nothing with ideas except remember
+      and discuss them. She was, if not exact, at least indolent, with a strong
+      disposition to save energy by sketching&mdash;even her handwriting showed
+      that&mdash;while he was inexhaustibly industrious with a relentless
+      invariable calligraphy that grew larger and clearer as the years passed
+      by. She had a considerable power of charming; she could be just as nice to
+      people&mdash;and incidentally just as nasty&mdash;as she wanted to be. He
+      was always just the same, a little confidential and SOTTO VOCE, artlessly
+      rude and egoistic in an undignified way. She had considerable social
+      experience, good social connections, and considerable social ambition,
+      while he had none of these things. She saw in a flash her opportunity to
+      redeem his defects, use his powers, and do large, novel, rather startling
+      things. She ran him. Her marriage, which shocked her friends and relations
+      beyond measure&mdash;for a time they would only speak of Bailey as &ldquo;that
+      gnome&rdquo;&mdash;was a stroke of genius, and forthwith they proceeded to make
+      themselves the most formidable and distinguished couple conceivable. P. B.
+      P., she boasted, was engraved inside their wedding rings, Pro Bono
+      Publico, and she meant it to be no idle threat. She had discovered very
+      early that the last thing influential people will do is to work.
+      Everything in their lives tends to make them dependent upon a supply of
+      confidently administered detail. Their business is with the window and not
+      the stock behind, and in the end they are dependent upon the stock behind
+      for what goes into the window. She linked with that the fact that Bailey
+      had a mind as orderly as a museum, and an invincible power over detail.
+      She saw that if two people took the necessary pains to know the facts of
+      government and administration with precision, to gather together knowledge
+      that was dispersed and confused, to be able to say precisely what had to
+      be done and what avoided in this eventuality or that, they would
+      necessarily become a centre of reference for all sorts of legislative
+      proposals and political expedients, and she went unhesitatingly upon that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bailey, under her vigorous direction, threw up his post in the Civil
+      Service and abandoned sporadic controversies, and they devoted themselves
+      to the elaboration and realisation of this centre of public information
+      she had conceived as their role. They set out to study the methods and
+      organisation and realities of government in the most elaborate manner.
+      They did the work as no one had ever hitherto dreamt of doing it. They
+      planned the research on a thoroughly satisfying scale, and arranged their
+      lives almost entirely for it. They took that house in Chambers Street and
+      furnished it with severe economy, they discovered that Scotch domestic who
+      is destined to be the guardian and tyrant of their declining years, and
+      they set to work. Their first book, &ldquo;The Permanent Official,&rdquo; fills three
+      plump volumes, and took them and their two secretaries upwards of four
+      years to do. It is an amazingly good book, an enduring achievement. In a
+      hundred directions the history and the administrative treatment of the
+      public service was clarified for all time....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They worked regularly every morning from nine to twelve, they lunched
+      lightly but severely, in the afternoon they &ldquo;took exercise&rdquo; or Bailey
+      attended meetings of the London School Board, on which he served, he said,
+      for the purposes of study&mdash;he also became a railway director for the
+      same end. In the late afternoon Altiora was at home to various callers,
+      and in the evening came dinner or a reception or both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her dinners and gatherings were a very important feature in their scheme.
+      She got together all sorts of interesting people in or about the public
+      service, she mixed the obscurely efficient with the ill-instructed famous
+      and the rudderless rich, got together in one room more of the factors in
+      our strange jumble of a public life than had ever met easily before. She
+      fed them with a shameless austerity that kept the conversation brilliant,
+      on a soup, a plain fish, and mutton or boiled fowl and milk pudding, with
+      nothing to drink but whisky and soda, and hot and cold water, and milk and
+      lemonade. Everybody was soon very glad indeed to come to that. She boasted
+      how little her housekeeping cost her, and sought constantly for fresh
+      economies that would enable her, she said, to sustain an additional
+      private secretary. Secretaries were the Baileys' one extravagance, they
+      loved to think of searches going on in the British Museum, and letters
+      being cleared up and precis made overhead, while they sat in the little
+      study and worked together, Bailey with a clockwork industry, and Altiora
+      in splendid flashes between intervals of cigarettes and meditation. &ldquo;All
+      efficient public careers,&rdquo; said Altiora, &ldquo;consist in the proper direction
+      of secretaries.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If everything goes well I shall have another secretary next year,&rdquo;
+       Altiora told me. &ldquo;I wish I could refuse people dinner napkins. Imagine
+      what it means in washing! I dare most things.... But as it is, they stand
+      a lot of hardship here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's something of the miser in both these people,&rdquo; said Esmeer, and
+      the thing was perfectly true. For, after all, the miser is nothing more
+      than a man who either through want of imagination or want of suggestion
+      misapplies to a base use a natural power of concentration upon one end.
+      The concentration itself is neither good nor evil, but a power that can be
+      used in either way. And the Baileys gathered and reinvested usuriously not
+      money, but knowledge of the utmost value in human affairs. They produced
+      an effect of having found themselves&mdash;completely. One envied them at
+      times extraordinarily. I was attracted, I was dazzled&mdash;and at the
+      same time there was something about Bailey's big wrinkled forehead, his
+      lisping broad mouth, the gestures of his hands and an uncivil
+      preoccupation I could not endure....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their effect upon me was from the outset very considerable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both of them found occasion on that first visit of mine to talk to me
+      about my published writings and particularly about my then just published
+      book THE NEW RULER, which had interested them very much. It fell in indeed
+      so closely with their own way of thinking that I doubt if they ever
+      understood how independently I had arrived at my conclusions. It was their
+      weakness to claim excessively. That irritation, however, came later. We
+      discovered each other immensely; for a time it produced a tremendous sense
+      of kindred and co-operation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Altiora, I remember, maintained that there existed a great army of such
+      constructive-minded people as ourselves&mdash;as yet undiscovered by one
+      another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's like boring a tunnel through a mountain,&rdquo; said Oscar, &ldquo;and presently
+      hearing the tapping of the workers from the other end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you didn't know of them beforehand,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;it might be a rather
+      badly joined tunnel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly,&rdquo; said Altiora with a high note, &ldquo;and that's why we all want to
+      find out each other....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They didn't talk like that on our first encounter, but they urged me to
+      lunch with them next day, and then it was we went into things. A woman
+      Factory Inspector and the Educational Minister for New Banksland and his
+      wife were also there, but I don't remember they made any contribution to
+      the conversation. The Baileys saw to that. They kept on at me in an urgent
+      litigious way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have read your book,&rdquo; each began&mdash;as though it had been a joint
+      function. &ldquo;And we consider&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I protested, &ldquo;I think&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+ That was a secondary matter.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They did not consider,&rdquo; said Altiora, raising her voice and going right
+      over me, &ldquo;that I had allowed sufficiently for the inevitable development
+      of an official administrative class in the modern state.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor of its importance,&rdquo; echoed Oscar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That, they explained in a sort of chorus, was the cardinal idea of their
+      lives, what they were up to, what they stood for. &ldquo;We want to suggest to
+      you,&rdquo; they said&mdash;and I found this was a stock opening of theirs&mdash;&ldquo;that
+      from the mere necessities of convenience elected bodies MUST avail
+      themselves more and more of the services of expert officials. We have that
+      very much in mind. The more complicated and technical affairs become, the
+      less confidence will the elected official have in himself. We want to
+      suggest that these expert officials must necessarily develop into a new
+      class and a very powerful class in the community. We want to organise
+      that. It may be THE power of the future. They will necessarily have to
+      have very much of a common training. We consider ourselves as amateur
+      unpaid precursors of such a class.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The vision they displayed for my consideration as the aim of
+      public-spirited endeavour, seemed like a harder, narrower, more
+      specialised version of the idea of a trained and disciplined state that
+      Willersley and I had worked out in the Alps. They wanted things more
+      organised, more correlated with government and a collective purpose, just
+      as we did, but they saw it not in terms of a growing collective
+      understanding, but in terms of functionaries, legislative change, and
+      methods of administration....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It wasn't clear at first how we differed. The Baileys were very anxious to
+      win me to co-operation, and I was quite prepared at first to identify
+      their distinctive expressions with phrases of my own, and so we came very
+      readily into an alliance that was to last some years, and break at last
+      very painfully. Altiora manifestly liked me, I was soon discussing with
+      her the perplexity I found in placing myself efficiently in the world, the
+      problem of how to take hold of things that occupied my thoughts, and she
+      was sketching out careers for my consideration, very much as an architect
+      on his first visit sketches houses, considers requirements, and puts
+      before you this example and that of the more or less similar thing already
+      done....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is easy to see how much in common there was between the Baileys and me,
+      and how natural it was that I should become a constant visitor at their
+      house and an ally of theirs in many enterprises. It is not nearly so easy
+      to define the profound antagonism of spirit that also held between us.
+      There was a difference in texture, a difference in quality. How can I
+      express it? The shapes of our thoughts were the same, but the substance
+      quite different. It was as if they had made in china or cast iron what I
+      had made in transparent living matter. (The comparison is manifestly from
+      my point of view.) Certain things never seemed to show through their ideas
+      that were visible, refracted perhaps and distorted, but visible always
+      through mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought for a time the essential difference lay in our relation to
+      beauty. With me beauty is quite primary in life; I like truth, order and
+      goodness, wholly because they are beautiful or lead straight to beautiful
+      consequences. The Baileys either hadn't got that or they didn't see it.
+      They seemed at times to prefer things harsh and ugly. That puzzled me
+      extremely. The esthetic quality of many of their proposals, the &ldquo;manners&rdquo;
+       of their work, so to speak, were at times as dreadful as&mdash;well, War
+      Office barrack architecture. A caricature by its exaggerated statements
+      will sometimes serve to point a truth by antagonising falsity and falsity.
+      I remember talking to a prominent museum official in need of more public
+      funds for the work he had in hand. I mentioned the possibility of
+      enlisting Bailey's influence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, we don't want Philistines like that infernal Bottle-Imp running us,&rdquo;
+       he said hastily, and would hear of no concerted action for the end he had
+      in view. &ldquo;I'd rather not have the extension.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; he went on to explain, &ldquo;Bailey's wanting in the essentials.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What essentials?&rdquo; said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! he'd be like a nasty oily efficient little machine for some merely
+      subordinate necessity among all my delicate stuff. He'd do all we wanted
+      no doubt in the way of money and powers&mdash;and he'd do it wrong and
+      mess the place for ever. Hands all black, you know. He's just a means.
+      Just a very aggressive and unmanageable means. This isn't a plumber's
+      job....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I stuck to my argument.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't LIKE him,&rdquo; said the official conclusively, and it seemed to me at
+      the time he was just blind prejudice speaking....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I came nearer the truth of the matter as I came to realise that our
+      philosophies differed profoundly. That isn't a very curable difference,&mdash;once
+      people have grown up. Theirs was a philosophy devoid of FINESSE.
+      Temperamentally the Baileys were specialised, concentrated, accurate,
+      while I am urged either by some Inner force or some entirely assimilated
+      influence in my training, always to round off and shadow my outlines. I
+      hate them hard. I would sacrifice detail to modelling always, and the
+      Baileys, it seemed to me, loved a world as flat and metallic as Sidney
+      Cooper's cows. If they had the universe in hand I know they would take
+      down all the trees and put up stamped tin green shades and sunlight
+      accumulators. Altiora thought trees hopelessly irregular and sea cliffs a
+      great mistake.... I got things clearer as time went on. Though it was an
+      Hegelian mess of which I had partaken at Codger's table by way of a
+      philosophical training, my sympathies have always been Pragmatist. I
+      belong almost by nature to that school of Pragmatism that, following the
+      medieval Nominalists, bases itself upon a denial of the reality of
+      classes, and of the validity of general laws. The Baileys classified
+      everything. They were, in the scholastic sense&mdash;which so oddly
+      contradicts the modern use of the word &ldquo;Realists.&rdquo; They believed classes
+      were REAL and independent of their individuals. This is the common habit
+      of all so-called educated people who have no metaphysical aptitude and no
+      metaphysical training. It leads them to a progressive misunderstanding of
+      the world. It was a favourite trick of Altiora's to speak of everybody as
+      a &ldquo;type&rdquo;; she saw men as samples moving; her dining-room became a chamber
+      of representatives. It gave a tremendously scientific air to many of their
+      generalisations, using &ldquo;scientific&rdquo; in its nineteenth-century uncritical
+      Herbert Spencer sense, an air that only began to disappear when you
+      thought them over again in terms of actuality and the people one knew....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the Baileys' one always seemed to be getting one's hands on the very
+      strings that guided the world. You heard legislation projected to affect
+      this &ldquo;type&rdquo; and that; statistics marched by you with sin and shame and
+      injustice and misery reduced to quite manageable percentages, you found
+      men who were to frame or amend bills in grave and intimate exchange with
+      Bailey's omniscience, you heard Altiora canvassing approaching
+      resignations and possible appointments that might make or mar a revolution
+      in administrative methods, and doing it with a vigorous directness that
+      manifestly swayed the decision; and you felt you were in a sort of signal
+      box with levers all about you, and the world outside there, albeit a
+      little dark and mysterious beyond the window, running on its lines in
+      ready obedience to these unhesitating lights, true and steady to trim
+      termini.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then with all this administrative fizzle, this pseudo-scientific
+      administrative chatter, dying away in your head, out you went into the
+      limitless grimy chaos of London streets and squares, roads and avenues
+      lined with teeming houses, each larger than the Chambers Street house and
+      at least equally alive, you saw the chaotic clamour of hoardings, the
+      jumble of traffic, the coming and going of mysterious myriads, you heard
+      the rumble of traffic like the noise of a torrent; a vague incessant
+      murmur of cries and voices, wanton crimes and accidents bawled at you from
+      the placards; imperative unaccountable fashions swaggered triumphant in
+      dazzling windows of the shops; and you found yourself swaying back to the
+      opposite conviction that the huge formless spirit of the world it was that
+      held the strings and danced the puppets on the Bailey stage....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under the lamps you were jostled by people like my Staffordshire uncle out
+      for a spree, you saw shy youths conversing with prostitutes, you passed
+      young lovers pairing with an entire disregard of the social suitability of
+      the &ldquo;types&rdquo; they might blend or create, you saw men leaning drunken
+      against lamp-posts whom you knew for the &ldquo;type&rdquo; that will charge with
+      fixed bayonets into the face of death, and you found yourself unable to
+      imagine little Bailey achieving either drunkenness or the careless
+      defiance of annihilation. You realised that quite a lot of types were
+      underrepresented in Chambers Street, that feral and obscure and altogether
+      monstrous forces must be at work, as yet altogether unassimilated by those
+      neat administrative reorganisations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Altiora, I remember, preluded Margaret's reappearance by announcing her as
+      a &ldquo;new type.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was accustomed to go early to the Baileys' dinners in those days, for a
+      preliminary gossip with Altiora in front of her drawing-room fire. One got
+      her alone, and that early arrival was a little sign of appreciation she
+      valued. She had every woman's need of followers and servants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going to send you down to-night,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;with a very interesting
+      type indeed&mdash;one of the new generation of serious gals. Middle-class
+      origin&mdash;and quite well off. Rich in fact. Her step-father was a
+      solicitor and something of an ENTREPRENEUR towards the end, I fancy&mdash;in
+      the Black Country. There was a little brother died, and she's lost her
+      mother quite recently. Quite on her own, so to speak. She's never been out
+      into society very much, and doesn't seem really very anxious to go.... Not
+      exactly an intellectual person, you know, but quiet, and great force of
+      character. Came up to London on her own and came to us&mdash;someone had
+      told her we were the sort of people to advise her&mdash;to ask what to do.
+      I'm sure she'll interest you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What CAN people of that sort do?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;Is she capable of
+      investigation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Altiora compressed her lips and shook her head. She always did shake her
+      head when you asked that of anyone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course what she ought to do,&rdquo; said Altiora, with her silk dress pulled
+      back from her knee before the fire, and with a lift of her voice towards a
+      chuckle at her daring way of putting things, &ldquo;is to marry a member of
+      Parliament and see he does his work.... Perhaps she will. It's a very
+      exceptional gal who can do anything by herself&mdash;quite exceptional.
+      The more serious they are&mdash;without being exceptional&mdash;the more
+      we want them to marry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her exposition was truncated by the entry of the type in question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well!&rdquo; cried Altiora turning, and with a high note of welcome, &ldquo;HERE you
+      are!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret had gained in dignity and prettiness by the lapse of five years,
+      and she was now very beautifully and richly and simply dressed. Her fair
+      hair had been done in some way that made it seem softer and more abundant
+      than it was in my memory, and a gleam of purple velvet-set diamonds showed
+      amidst its mist of little golden and brown lines. Her dress was of white
+      and violet, the last trace of mourning for her mother, and confessed the
+      gracious droop of her tall and slender body. She did not suggest
+      Staffordshire at all, and I was puzzled for a moment to think where I had
+      met her. Her sweetly shaped mouth with the slight obliquity of the lip and
+      the little kink in her brow were extraordinarily familiar to me. But she
+      had either been prepared by Altiora or she remembered my name. &ldquo;We met,&rdquo;
+       she said, &ldquo;while my step-father was alive&mdash;at Misterton. You came to
+      see us&rdquo;; and instantly I recalled the sunshine between the apple blossom
+      and a slender pale blue girlish shape among the daffodils, like something
+      that had sprung from a bulb itself. I recalled at once that I had found
+      her very interesting, though I did not clearly remember how it was she had
+      interested me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Other guests arrived&mdash;it was one of Altiora's boldly blended mixtures
+      of people with ideas and people with influence or money who might perhaps
+      be expected to resonate to them. Bailey came down late with an air of
+      hurry, and was introduced to Margaret and said absolutely nothing to her&mdash;there
+      being no information either to receive or impart and nothing to do&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I took Margaret down. We achieved no feats of mutual expression, except
+      that it was abundantly clear we were both very pleased and interested to
+      meet again, and that we had both kept memories of each other. We made that
+      Misterton tea-party and the subsequent marriages of my cousins and the
+      world of Burslem generally, matter for quite an agreeable conversation
+      until at last Altiora, following her invariable custom, called me by name
+      imperatively out of our duologue. &ldquo;Mr. Remington,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;we want your
+      opinion&mdash;&rdquo; in her entirely characteristic effort to get all the
+      threads of conversation into her own hands for the climax that always
+      wound up her dinners. How the other women used to hate those concluding
+      raids of hers! I forget most of the other people at that dinner, nor can I
+      recall what the crowning rally was about. It didn't in any way join on to
+      my impression of Margaret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the drawing-room of the matting floor I rejoined her, with Altiora's
+      manifest connivance, and in the interval I had been thinking of our former
+      meeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you find London,&rdquo; I asked, &ldquo;give you more opportunity for doing things
+      and learning things than Burslem?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She showed at once she appreciated my allusion to her former confidences.
+      &ldquo;I was very discontented then,&rdquo; she said and paused. &ldquo;I've really only
+      been in London for a few months. It's so different. In Burslem, life seems
+      all business and getting&mdash;without any reason. One went on and it
+      didn't seem to mean anything. At least anything that mattered.... London
+      seems to be so full of meanings&mdash;all mixed up together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She knitted her brows over her words and smiled appealingly at the end as
+      if for consideration for her inadequate expression, appealingly and almost
+      humorously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked understandingly at her. &ldquo;We have all,&rdquo; I agreed, &ldquo;to come to
+      London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One sees so much distress,&rdquo; she added, as if she felt she had completely
+      omitted something, and needed a codicil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you doing in London?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm thinking of studying. Some social question. I thought perhaps I might
+      go and study social conditions as Mrs. Bailey did, go perhaps as a
+      work-girl or see the reality of living in, but Mrs. Bailey thought perhaps
+      it wasn't quite my work.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you studying?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going to a good many lectures, and perhaps I shall take up a regular
+      course at the Westminster School of Politics and Sociology. But Mrs.
+      Bailey doesn't seem to believe very much in that either.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her faintly whimsical smile returned. &ldquo;I seem rather indefinite,&rdquo; she
+      apologised, &ldquo;but one does not want to get entangled in things one can't
+      do. One&mdash;one has so many advantages, one's life seems to be such a
+      trust and such a responsibility&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man gets driven into work,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It must be splendid to be Mrs. Bailey,&rdquo; she replied with a glance of
+      envious admiration across the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;SHE has no doubts, anyhow,&rdquo; I remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She HAD,&rdquo; said Margaret with the pride of one who has received great
+      confidences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've met before?&rdquo; said Altiora, a day or so later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I explained when.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You find her interesting?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw in a flash that Altiora meant to marry me to Margaret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her intention became much clearer as the year developed. Altiora was
+      systematic even in matters that evade system. I was to marry Margaret, and
+      freed from the need of making an income I was to come into politics&mdash;as
+      an exponent of Baileyism. She put it down with the other excellent and
+      advantageous things that should occupy her summer holiday. It was her
+      pride and glory to put things down and plan them out in detail beforehand,
+      and I'm not quite sure that she did not even mark off the day upon which
+      the engagement was to be declared. If she did, I disappointed her. We
+      didn't come to an engagement, in spite of the broadest hints and the
+      glaring obviousness of everything, that summer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every summer the Baileys went out of London to some house they hired or
+      borrowed, leaving their secretaries toiling behind, and they went on
+      working hard in the mornings and evenings and taking exercise in the open
+      air in the afternoon. They cycled assiduously and went for long walks at a
+      trot, and raided and studied (and incidentally explained themselves to)
+      any social &ldquo;types&rdquo; that lived in the neighbourhood. One invaded type,
+      resentful under research, described them with a dreadful aptness as Donna
+      Quixote and Sancho Panza&mdash;and himself as a harmless windmill, hurting
+      no one and signifying nothing. She did rather tilt at things. This
+      particular summer they were at a pleasant farmhouse in level country near
+      Pangbourne, belonging to the Hon. Wilfrid Winchester, and they asked me to
+      come down to rooms in the neighbourhood&mdash;Altiora took them for a
+      month for me in August&mdash;and board with them upon extremely reasonable
+      terms; and when I got there I found Margaret sitting in a hammock at
+      Altiora's feet. Lots of people, I gathered, were coming and going in the
+      neighbourhood, the Ponts were in a villa on the river, and the Rickhams'
+      houseboat was to moor for some days; but these irruptions did not impede a
+      great deal of duologue between Margaret and myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Altiora was efficient rather than artistic in her match-making. She sent
+      us off for long walks together&mdash;Margaret was a fairly good walker&mdash;she
+      exhumed some defective croquet things and incited us to croquet, not
+      understanding that detestable game is the worst stimulant for lovers in
+      the world. And Margaret and I were always getting left about, and finding
+      ourselves for odd half-hours in the kitchen-garden with nothing to do
+      except talk, or we were told with a wave of the hand to run away and amuse
+      each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Altiora even tried a picnic in canoes, knowing from fiction rather than
+      imagination or experience the conclusive nature of such excursions. But
+      there she fumbled at the last moment, and elected at the river's brink to
+      share a canoe with me. Bailey showed so much zeal and so little skill&mdash;his
+      hat fell off and he became miraculously nothing but paddle-clutching hands
+      and a vast wrinkled brow&mdash;that at last he had to be paddled
+      ignominiously by Margaret, while Altiora, after a phase of rigid
+      discretion, as nearly as possible drowned herself&mdash;and me no doubt
+      into the bargain&mdash;with a sudden lateral gesture of the arm to
+      emphasise the high note with which she dismissed the efficiency of the
+      Charity Organisation Society. We shipped about an inch of water and sat in
+      it for the rest of the time, an inconvenience she disregarded heroically.
+      We had difficulties in landing Oscar from his frail craft upon the ait of
+      our feasting,&mdash;he didn't balance sideways and was much alarmed, and
+      afterwards, as Margaret had a pain in her back, I took him in my canoe,
+      let him hide his shame with an ineffectual but not positively harmful
+      paddle, and towed the other by means of the joined painters. Still it was
+      the fault of the inadequate information supplied in the books and not of
+      Altiora that that was not the date of my betrothal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I find it not a little difficult to state what kept me back from proposing
+      marriage to Margaret that summer, and what urged me forward at last to
+      marry her. It is so much easier to remember one's resolutions than to
+      remember the moods and suggestions that produced them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marrying and getting married was, I think, a pretty simple affair to
+      Altiora; it was something that happened to the adolescent and unmarried
+      when you threw them together under the circumstances of health, warmth and
+      leisure. It happened with the kindly and approving smiles of the more
+      experienced elders who had organised these proximities. The young people
+      married, settled down, children ensued, and father and mother turned their
+      minds, now decently and properly disillusioned, to other things. That to
+      Altiora was the normal sexual life, and she believed it to be the quality
+      of the great bulk of the life about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the great barriers to human understanding is the wide temperamental
+      difference one finds in the values of things relating to sex. It is the
+      issue upon which people most need training in charity and imaginative
+      sympathy. Here are no universal standards at all, and indeed for no single
+      man nor woman does there seem to be any fixed standard, so much do the
+      accidents of circumstances and one's physical phases affect one's
+      interpretations. There is nothing in the whole range of sexual fact that
+      may not seem supremely beautiful or humanly jolly or magnificently wicked
+      or disgusting or trivial or utterly insignificant, according to the eye
+      that sees or the mood that colours. Here is something that may fill the
+      skies and every waking hour or be almost completely banished from a life.
+      It may be everything on Monday and less than nothing on Saturday. And we
+      make our laws and rules as though in these matters all men and women were
+      commensurable one with another, with an equal steadfast passion and an
+      equal constant duty....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't know what dreams Altiora may have had in her schoolroom days, I
+      always suspected her of suppressed and forgotten phases, but certainly her
+      general effect now was of an entirely passionless worldliness in these
+      matters. Indeed so far as I could get at her, she regarded sexual passion
+      as being hardly more legitimate in a civilised person than&mdash;let us
+      say&mdash;homicidal mania. She must have forgotten&mdash;and Bailey too. I
+      suspect she forgot before she married him. I don't suppose either of them
+      had the slightest intimation of the dimensions sexual love can take in the
+      thoughts of the great majority of people with whom they come in contact.
+      They loved in their way&mdash;an intellectual way it was and a fond way&mdash;but
+      it had no relation to beauty and physical sensation&mdash;except that
+      there seemed a decree of exile against these things. They got their glow
+      in high moments of altruistic ambition&mdash;and in moments of vivid
+      worldly success. They sat at opposite ends of their dinner table with so
+      and so &ldquo;captured,&rdquo; and so and so, flushed with a mutual approval. They saw
+      people in love forgetful and distraught about them, and just put it down
+      to forgetfulness and distraction. At any rate Altiora manifestly viewed my
+      situation and Margaret's with an abnormal and entirely misleading
+      simplicity. There was the girl, rich, with an acceptable claim to be
+      beautiful, shiningly virtuous, quite capable of political interests, and
+      there was I, talented, ambitious and full of political and social passion,
+      in need of just the money, devotion and regularisation Margaret could
+      provide. We were both unmarried&mdash;white sheets of uninscribed paper.
+      Was there ever a simpler situation? What more could we possibly want?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was even a little offended at the inconclusiveness that did not settle
+      things at Pangbourne. I seemed to her, I suspect, to reflect upon her
+      judgment and good intentions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I didn't see things with Altiora's simplicity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I admired Margaret very much, I was fully aware of all that she and I
+      might give each other; indeed so far as Altiora went we were quite in
+      agreement. But what seemed solid ground to Altiora and the ultimate
+      footing of her emasculated world, was to me just the superficial covering
+      of a gulf&mdash;oh! abysses of vague and dim, and yet stupendously
+      significant things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I couldn't dismiss the interests and the passion of sex as Altiora did.
+      Work, I agreed, was important; career and success; but deep unanalysable
+      instincts told me this preoccupation was a thing quite as important;
+      dangerous, interfering, destructive indeed, but none the less a dominating
+      interest in life. I have told how flittingly and uninvited it came like a
+      moth from the outer twilight into my life, how it grew in me with my
+      manhood, how it found its way to speech and grew daring, and led me at
+      last to experience. After that adventure at Locarno sex and the interests
+      and desires of sex never left me for long at peace. I went on with my work
+      and my career, and all the time it was like&mdash;like someone talking
+      ever and again in a room while one tries to write.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were times when I could have wished the world a world all of men, so
+      greatly did this unassimilated series of motives and curiosities hamper
+      me; and times when I could have wished the world all of women. I seemed
+      always to be seeking something in women, in girls, and I was never clear
+      what it was I was seeking. But never&mdash;even at my coarsest&mdash;was I
+      moved by physical desire alone. Was I seeking help and fellowship? Was I
+      seeking some intimacy with beauty? It was a thing too formless to state,
+      that I seemed always desiring to attain and never attaining. Waves of
+      gross sensuousness arose out of this preoccupation, carried me to a crisis
+      of gratification or disappointment that was clearly not the needed thing;
+      they passed and left my mind free again for a time to get on with the
+      permanent pursuits of my life. And then presently this solicitude would
+      have me again, an irrelevance as it seemed, and yet a constantly recurring
+      demand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't want particularly to dwell upon things that are disagreeable for
+      others to read, but I cannot leave them out of my story and get the right
+      proportions of the forces I am balancing. I was no abnormal man, and that
+      world of order we desire to make must be built of such stuff as I was and
+      am and can beget. You cannot have a world of Baileys; it would end in one
+      orderly generation. Humanity is begotten in Desire, lives by Desire.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Love which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb;
+      Love which is lust, is the Call from the Gloom.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      I echo Henley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose the life of celibacy which the active, well-fed, well-exercised
+      and imaginatively stirred young man of the educated classes is supposed to
+      lead from the age of nineteen or twenty, when Nature certainly meant him
+      to marry, to thirty or more, when civilisation permits him to do so, is
+      the most impossible thing in the world. We deal here with facts that are
+      kept secret and obscure, but I doubt for my own part if more than one man
+      out of five in our class satisfies that ideal demand. The rest are even as
+      I was, and Hatherleigh and Esmeer and all the men I knew. I draw no
+      lessons and offer no panacea; I have to tell the quality of life, and this
+      is how it is. This is how it will remain until men and women have the
+      courage to face the facts of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was no systematic libertine, you must understand; things happened to me
+      and desire drove me. Any young man would have served for that Locarno
+      adventure, and after that what had been a mystic and wonderful thing
+      passed rapidly into a gross, manifestly misdirected and complicating one.
+      I can count a meagre tale of five illicit loves in the days of my youth,
+      to include that first experience, and of them all only two were sustained
+      relationships. Besides these five &ldquo;affairs,&rdquo; on one or two occasions I
+      dipped so low as the inky dismal sensuality of the streets, and made one
+      of those pairs of correlated figures, the woman in her squalid finery
+      sailing homeward, the man modestly aloof and behind, that every night in
+      the London year flit by the score of thousands across the sight of the
+      observant....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How ugly it is to recall; ugly and shameful now without qualification! Yet
+      at the time there was surely something not altogether ugly in it&mdash;something
+      that has vanished, some fine thing mortally ailing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One such occasion I recall as if it were a vision deep down in a pit, as
+      if it had happened in another state of existence to someone else. And yet
+      it is the sort of thing that has happened, once or twice at least, to half
+      the men in London who have been in a position to make it possible. Let me
+      try and give you its peculiar effect. Man or woman, you ought to know of
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Figure to yourself a dingy room, somewhere in that network of streets that
+      lies about Tottenham Court Road, a dingy bedroom lit by a solitary candle
+      and carpeted with scraps and patches, with curtains of cretonne closing
+      the window, and a tawdry ornament of paper in the grate. I sit on a bed
+      beside a weary-eyed, fair-haired, sturdy young woman, half undressed, who
+      is telling me in broken German something that my knowledge of German is at
+      first inadequate to understand....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought she was boasting about her family, and then slowly the meaning
+      came to me. She was a Lett from near Libau in Courland, and she was
+      telling me&mdash;just as one tells something too strange for comment or
+      emotion&mdash;how her father had been shot and her sister outraged and
+      murdered before her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was as if one had dipped into something primordial and stupendous
+      beneath the smooth and trivial surfaces of life. There was I, you know,
+      the promising young don from Cambridge, who wrote quite brilliantly about
+      politics and might presently get into Parliament, with my collar and tie
+      in my hand, and a certain sense of shameful adventure fading out of my
+      mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ach Gott!&rdquo; she sighed by way of comment, and mused deeply for a moment
+      before she turned her face to me, as to something forgotten and
+      remembered, and assumed the half-hearted meretricious smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bin ich eine hubsche?&rdquo; she asked like one who repeats a lesson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was moved to crave her pardon and come away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bin ich eine hubsche?&rdquo; she asked a little anxiously, laying a detaining
+      hand upon me, and evidently not understanding a word of what I was
+      striving to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      8
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I find it extraordinarily difficult to recall the phases by which I passed
+      from my first admiration of Margaret's earnestness and unconscious
+      daintiness to an intimate acquaintance. The earlier encounters stand out
+      clear and hard, but then the impressions become crowded and mingle not
+      only with each other but with all the subsequent developments of
+      relationship, the enormous evolutions of interpretation and comprehension
+      between husband and wife. Dipping into my memories is like dipping into a
+      ragbag, one brings out this memory or that, with no intimation of how they
+      came in time or what led to them and joined them together. And they are
+      all mixed up with subsequent associations, with sympathies and discords,
+      habits of intercourse, surprises and disappointments and discovered
+      misunderstandings. I know only that always my feelings for Margaret were
+      complicated feelings, woven of many and various strands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is one of the curious neglected aspects of life how at the same time
+      and in relation to the same reality we can have in our minds streams of
+      thought at quite different levels. We can be at the same time idealising a
+      person and seeing and criticising that person quite coldly and clearly,
+      and we slip unconsciously from level to level and produce all sorts of
+      inconsistent acts. In a sense I had no illusions about Margaret; in a
+      sense my conception of Margaret was entirely poetic illusion. I don't
+      think I was ever blind to certain defects of hers, and quite as certainly
+      they didn't seem to matter in the slightest degree. Her mind had a curious
+      want of vigour, &ldquo;flatness&rdquo; is the only word; she never seemed to escape
+      from her phrase; her way of thinking, her way of doing was indecisive; she
+      remained in her attitude, it did not flow out to easy, confirmatory
+      action.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw this quite clearly, and when we walked and talked together I seemed
+      always trying for animation in her and never finding it. I would state my
+      ideas. &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; she would say, &ldquo;I know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I talked about myself and she listened wonderfully, but she made no
+      answering revelations. I talked politics, and she remarked with her blue
+      eyes wide and earnest: &ldquo;Every WORD you say seems so just.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I admired her appearance tremendously but&mdash;I can only express it by
+      saying I didn't want to touch her. Her fair hair was always delectably
+      done. It flowed beautifully over her pretty small ears, and she would tie
+      its fair coilings with fillets of black or blue velvet that carried pretty
+      buckles of silver and paste. The light, the faint down on her brow and
+      cheek was delightful. And it was clear to me that I made her happy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My sense of her deficiencies didn't stand in the way of my falling at last
+      very deeply in love with her. Her very shortcomings seemed to offer me
+      something....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood in my mind for goodness&mdash;and for things from which it
+      seemed to me my hold was slipping.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed to promise a way of escape from the deepening opposition in me
+      between physical passions and the constructive career, the career of wide
+      aims and human service, upon which I had embarked. All the time that I was
+      seeing her as a beautiful, fragile, rather ineffective girl, I was also
+      seeing her just as consciously as a shining slender figure, a radiant
+      reconciliation, coming into my darkling disorders of lust and impulse. I
+      could understand clearly that she was incapable of the most necessary
+      subtleties of political thought, and yet I could contemplate praying to
+      her and putting all the intricate troubles of my life at her feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before the reappearance of Margaret in my world at all an unwonted disgust
+      with the consequences and quality of my passions had arisen in my mind.
+      Among other things that moment with the Lettish girl haunted me
+      persistently. I would see myself again and again sitting amidst those
+      sluttish surroundings, collar and tie in hand, while her heavy German
+      words grouped themselves to a slowly apprehended meaning. I would feel
+      again with a fresh stab of remorse, that this was not a flash of
+      adventure, this was not seeing life in any permissible sense, but a dip
+      into tragedy, dishonour, hideous degradation, and the pitiless cruelty of
+      a world as yet uncontrolled by any ordered will.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good God!&rdquo; I put it to myself, &ldquo;that I should finish the work those
+      Cossacks had begun! I who want order and justice before everything!
+      There's no way out of it, no decent excuse! If I didn't think, I ought to
+      have thought!&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How did I get to it?&rdquo;... I would ransack the phases of my development
+      from the first shy unveiling of a hidden wonder to the last extremity as a
+      man will go through muddled account books to find some disorganising
+      error....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was also involved at that time&mdash;I find it hard to place these
+      things in the exact order of their dates because they were so disconnected
+      with the regular progress of my work and life&mdash;in an intrigue, a
+      clumsy, sensuous, pretentious, artificially stimulated intrigue, with a
+      Mrs. Larrimer, a woman living separated from her husband. I will not go
+      into particulars of that episode, nor how we quarrelled and chafed one
+      another. She was at once unfaithful and jealous and full of whims about
+      our meetings; she was careless of our secret, and vulgarised our
+      relationship by intolerable interpretations; except for some glowing
+      moments of gratification, except for the recurrent and essentially vicious
+      desire that drew us back to each other again, we both fretted at a
+      vexatious and unexpectedly binding intimacy. The interim was full of the
+      quality of work delayed, of time and energy wasted, of insecure
+      precautions against scandal and exposure. Disappointment is almost
+      inherent in illicit love. I had, and perhaps it was part of her recurrent
+      irritation also, a feeling as though one had followed something fine and
+      beautiful into a net&mdash;into bird lime! These furtive scuffles, this
+      sneaking into shabby houses of assignation, was what we had made out of
+      the suggestion of pagan beauty; this was the reality of our vision of
+      nymphs and satyrs dancing for the joy of life amidst incessant sunshine.
+      We had laid hands upon the wonder and glory of bodily love and wasted
+      them....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the sense of waste, of finely beautiful possibilities getting
+      entangled and marred for ever that oppressed me. I had missed, I had lost.
+      I did not turn from these things after the fashion of the Baileys, as one
+      turns from something low and embarrassing. I felt that these great organic
+      forces were still to be wrought into a harmony with my constructive
+      passion. I felt too that I was not doing it. I had not understood the
+      forces in this struggle nor its nature, and as I learnt I failed. I had
+      been started wrong, I had gone on wrong, in a world that was muddled and
+      confused, full of false counsel and erratic shames and twisted
+      temptations. I learnt to see it so by failures that were perhaps
+      destroying any chance of profit in my lessons. Moods of clear keen
+      industry alternated with moods of relapse and indulgence and moods of
+      dubiety and remorse. I was not going on as the Baileys thought I was going
+      on. There were times when the blindness of the Baileys irritated me
+      intensely. Beneath the ostensible success of those years, between
+      twenty-three and twenty-eight, this rottenness, known to scarcely any one
+      but myself, grew and spread. My sense of the probability of a collapse
+      intensified. I knew indeed now, even as Willersley had prophesied five
+      years before, that I was entangling myself in something that might smother
+      all my uses in the world. Down there among those incommunicable
+      difficulties, I was puzzled and blundering. I was losing my hold upon
+      things; the chaotic and adventurous element in life was spreading upward
+      and getting the better of me, over-mastering me and all my will to rule
+      and make.... And the strength, the drugging urgency of the passion!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret shone at times in my imagination like a radiant angel in a world
+      of mire and disorder, in a world of cravings, hot and dull red like scars
+      inflamed....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose it was because I had so great a need of such help as her
+      whiteness proffered, that I could ascribe impossible perfections to her, a
+      power of intellect, a moral power and patience to which she, poor fellow
+      mortal, had indeed no claim. If only a few of us WERE angels and freed
+      from the tangle of effort, how easy life might be! I wanted her so badly,
+      so very badly, to be what I needed. I wanted a woman to save me. I forced
+      myself to see her as I wished to see her. Her tepidities became infinite
+      delicacies, her mental vagueness an atmospheric realism. The harsh
+      precisions of the Baileys and Altiora's blunt directness threw up her
+      fineness into relief and made a grace of every weakness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mixed up with the memory of times when I talked with Margaret as one talks
+      politely to those who are hopelessly inferior in mental quality,
+      explaining with a false lucidity, welcoming and encouraging the feeblest
+      response, when possible moulding and directing, are times when I did
+      indeed, as the old phrase goes, worship the ground she trod on. I was
+      equally honest and unconscious of inconsistency at each extreme. But in
+      neither phase could I find it easy to make love to Margaret. For in the
+      first I did not want to, though I talked abundantly to her of marriage and
+      so forth, and was a little puzzled at myself for not going on to some
+      personal application, and in the second she seemed inaccessible, I felt I
+      must make confessions and put things before her that would be the grossest
+      outrage upon the noble purity I attributed to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      9
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went to Margaret at last to ask her to marry me, wrought up to the mood
+      of one who stakes his life on a cast. Separated from her, and with the
+      resonance of an evening of angry recriminations with Mrs. Larrimer echoing
+      in my mind, I discovered myself to be quite passionately in love with
+      Margaret. Last shreds of doubt vanished. It has always been a feature of
+      our relationship that Margaret absent means more to me than Margaret
+      present; her memory distils from its dross and purifies in me. All my
+      criticisms and qualifications of her vanished into some dark corner of my
+      mind. She was the lady of my salvation; I must win my way to her or
+      perish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went to her at last, for all that I knew she loved me, in passionate
+      self-abasement, white and a-tremble. She was staying with the Rockleys at
+      Woking, for Shena Rockley had been at Bennett Hall with her and they had
+      resumed a close intimacy; and I went down to her on an impulse,
+      unheralded. I was kept waiting for some minutes, I remember, in a little
+      room upon which a conservatory opened, a conservatory full of pots of
+      large mauve-edged, white cyclamens in flower. And there was a big lacquer
+      cabinet, a Chinese thing, I suppose, of black and gold against the
+      red-toned wall. To this day the thought of Margaret is inseparably bound
+      up with the sight of a cyclamen's back-turned petals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She came in, looking pale and drooping rather more than usual. I suddenly
+      realised that Altiora's hint of a disappointment leading to positive
+      illness was something more than a vindictive comment. She closed the door
+      and came across to me and took and dropped my hand and stood still. &ldquo;What
+      is it you want with me?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The speech I had been turning over and over in my mind on the way vanished
+      at the sight of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to talk to you,&rdquo; I answered lamely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some seconds neither of us said a word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to tell you things about my life,&rdquo; I began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She answered with a scarcely audible &ldquo;yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I almost asked you to marry me at Pangbourne,&rdquo; I plunged. &ldquo;I didn't. I
+      didn't because&mdash;because you had too much to give me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Too much!&rdquo; she echoed, &ldquo;to give you!&rdquo; She had lifted her eyes to my face
+      and the colour was coming into her cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't misunderstand me,&rdquo; I said hastily. &ldquo;I want to tell you things,
+      things you don't know. Don't answer me. I want to tell you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood before the fireplace with her ultimate answer shining through
+      the quiet of her face. &ldquo;Go on,&rdquo; she said, very softly. It was so
+      pitilessly manifest she was resolved to idealise the situation whatever I
+      might say. I began walking up and down the room between those cyclamens
+      and the cabinet. There were little gold fishermen on the cabinet fishing
+      from little islands that each had a pagoda and a tree, and there were also
+      men in boats or something, I couldn't determine what, and some obscure
+      sub-office in my mind concerned itself with that quite intently. Yet I
+      seem to have been striving with all my being to get words for the truth of
+      things. &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; I emerged, &ldquo;you make everything possible to me. You can
+      give me help and sympathy, support, understanding. You know my political
+      ambitions. You know all that I might do in the world. I do so intensely
+      want to do constructive things, big things perhaps, in this wild
+      jumble.... Only you don't know a bit what I am. I want to tell you what I
+      am. I'm complex.... I'm streaked.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I glanced at her, and she was regarding me with an expression of blissful
+      disregard for any meaning I was seeking to convey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;I'm a bad man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sounded a note of valiant incredulity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everything seemed to be slipping away from me. I pushed on to the ugly
+      facts that remained over from the wreck of my interpretation. &ldquo;What has
+      held me back,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;is the thought that you could not possibly
+      understand certain things in my life. Men are not pure as women are. I
+      have had love affairs. I mean I have had affairs. Passion&mdash;desire.
+      You see, I have had a mistress, I have been entangled&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed about to speak, but I interrupted. &ldquo;I'm not telling you,&rdquo; I
+      said, &ldquo;what I meant to tell you. I want you to know clearly that there is
+      another side to my life, a dirty side. Deliberately I say, dirty. It
+      didn't seem so at first&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I stopped blankly. &ldquo;Dirty,&rdquo; I thought, was the most idiotic choice of
+      words to have made.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had never in any tolerable sense of the word been dirty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I drifted into this&mdash;as men do,&rdquo; I said after a little pause and
+      stopped again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was looking at me with her wide blue eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you imagine,&rdquo; she began, &ldquo;that I thought you&mdash;that I expected&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how can you know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know. I do know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;&rdquo; I began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; she persisted, dropping her eyelids. &ldquo;Of course I know,&rdquo; and
+      nothing could have convinced me more completely that she did not know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All men&mdash;&rdquo; she generalised. &ldquo;A woman does not understand these
+      temptations.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was astonished beyond measure at her way of taking my confession. ...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; she said, hesitating a little over a transparent difficulty,
+      &ldquo;it is all over and past.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all over and past,&rdquo; I answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a little pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want to know,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;None of that seems to matter now in the
+      slightest degree.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked up and smiled as though we had exchanged some acceptable
+      commonplaces. &ldquo;Poor dear!&rdquo; she said, dismissing everything, and put out
+      her arms, and it seemed to me that I could hear the Lettish girl in the
+      background&mdash;doomed safety valve of purity in this intolerable world&mdash;telling
+      something in indistinguishable German&mdash;I know not what nor why....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have loved you,&rdquo; she whispered presently, &ldquo;Oh! ever since we met in
+      Misterton&mdash;six years and more ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ MARGARET IN VENICE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There comes into my mind a confused memory of conversations with Margaret;
+      we must have had dozens altogether, and they mix in now for the most part
+      inextricably not only with one another, but with later talks and with
+      things we discussed at Pangbourne. We had the immensest anticipations of
+      the years and opportunities that lay before us. I was now very deeply in
+      love with her indeed. I felt not that I had cleaned up my life but that
+      she had. We called each other &ldquo;confederate&rdquo; I remember, and made during
+      our brief engagement a series of visits to the various legislative bodies
+      in London, the County Council, the House of Commons, where we dined with
+      Villiers, and the St. Pancras Vestry, where we heard Shaw speaking. I was
+      full of plans and so was she of the way in which we were to live and work.
+      We were to pay back in public service whatever excess of wealth beyond his
+      merits old Seddon's economic advantage had won for him from the toiling
+      people in the potteries. The end of the Boer War was so recent that that
+      blessed word &ldquo;efficiency&rdquo; echoed still in people's minds and thoughts.
+      Lord Roseberry in a memorable oration had put it into the heads of the big
+      outer public, but the Baileys with a certain show of justice claimed to
+      have set it going in the channels that took it to him&mdash;if as a matter
+      of fact it was taken to him. But then it was their habit to make claims of
+      that sort. They certainly did their share to keep &ldquo;efficient&rdquo; going.
+      Altiora's highest praise was &ldquo;thoroughly efficient.&rdquo; We were to be a
+      &ldquo;thoroughly efficient&rdquo; political couple of the &ldquo;new type.&rdquo; She explained
+      us to herself and Oscar, she explained us to ourselves, she explained us
+      to the people who came to her dinners and afternoons until the world was
+      highly charged with explanation and expectation, and the proposal that I
+      should be the Liberal candidate for the Kinghamstead Division seemed the
+      most natural development in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was full of the ideal of hard restrained living and relentless activity,
+      and throughout a beautiful November at Venice, where chiefly we spent our
+      honeymoon, we turned over and over again and discussed in every aspect our
+      conception of a life tremendously focussed upon the ideal of social
+      service.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Most clearly there stands out a picture of ourselves talking in a gondola
+      on our way to Torcella. Far away behind us the smoke of Murano forms a
+      black stain upon an immense shining prospect of smooth water, water as
+      unruffled and luminous as the sky above, a mirror on which rows of posts
+      and distant black high-stemmed, swan-necked boats with their minutely
+      clear swinging gondoliers, float aerially. Remote and low before us rises
+      the little tower of our destination. Our men swing together and their oars
+      swirl leisurely through the water, hump back in the rowlocks, splash
+      sharply and go swishing back again. Margaret lies back on cushions, with
+      her face shaded by a holland parasol, and I sit up beside her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; I say, and in spite of Margaret's note of perfect acquiescence
+      I feel myself reasoning against an indefinable antagonism, &ldquo;it is so easy
+      to fall into a slack way with life. There may seem to be something
+      priggish in a meticulous discipline, but otherwise it is so easy to slip
+      into indolent habits&mdash;and to be distracted from one's purpose. The
+      country, the world, wants men to serve its constructive needs, to work out
+      and carry out plans. For a man who has to make a living the enemy is
+      immediate necessity; for people like ourselves it's&mdash;it's the
+      constant small opportunity of agreeable things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Frittering away,&rdquo; she says, &ldquo;time and strength.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is what I feel. It's so pleasant to pretend one is simply modest, it
+      looks so foolish at times to take one's self too seriously. We've GOT to
+      take ourselves seriously.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She endorses my words with her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel I can do great things with life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I KNOW you can.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that's only to be done by concentrating one's life upon one main end.
+      We have to plan our days, to make everything subserve our scheme.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel,&rdquo; she answers softly, &ldquo;we ought to give&mdash;every hour.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her face becomes dreamy. &ldquo;I WANT to give every hour,&rdquo; she adds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That holiday in Venice is set in my memory like a little artificial lake
+      in uneven confused country, as something very bright and skylike, and
+      discontinuous with all about it. The faded quality of the very sunshine of
+      that season, the mellow discoloured palaces and places, the huge,
+      time-ripened paintings of departed splendours, the whispering, nearly
+      noiseless passage of hearse-black gondolas, for the horrible steam launch
+      had not yet ruined Venice, the stilled magnificences of the depopulated
+      lagoons, the universal autumn, made me feel altogether in recess from the
+      teeming uproars of reality. There was not a dozen people all told, no
+      Americans and scarcely any English, to dine in the big cavern of a
+      dining-room, with its vistas of separate tables, its distempered walls and
+      its swathed chandeliers. We went about seeing beautiful things, accepting
+      beauty on every hand, and taking it for granted that all was well with
+      ourselves and the world. It was ten days or a fortnight before I became
+      fretful and anxious for action; a long tranquillity for such a temperament
+      as mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our pleasures were curiously impersonal, a succession of shared aesthetic
+      appreciation threads all that time. Our honeymoon was no exultant coming
+      together, no mutual shout of &ldquo;YOU!&rdquo; We were almost shy with one another,
+      and felt the relief of even a picture to help us out. It was entirely in
+      my conception of things that I should be very watchful not to shock or
+      distress Margaret or press the sensuous note. Our love-making had much of
+      the tepid smoothness of the lagoons. We talked in delicate innuendo of
+      what should be glorious freedoms. Margaret had missed Verona and Venice in
+      her previous Italian journey&mdash;fear of the mosquito had driven her
+      mother across Italy to the westward route&mdash;and now she could fill up
+      her gaps and see the Titians and Paul Veroneses she already knew in
+      colourless photographs, the Carpaccios, (the St. George series delighted
+      her beyond measure,) the Basaitis and that great statue of Bartolomeo
+      Colleoni that Ruskin praised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But since I am not a man to look at pictures and architectural effects day
+      after day, I did watch Margaret very closely and store a thousand memories
+      of her. I can see her now, her long body drooping a little forward, her
+      sweet face upraised to some discovered familiar masterpiece and shining
+      with a delicate enthusiasm. I can hear again the soft cadences of her
+      voice murmuring commonplace comments, for she had no gift of expressing
+      the shapeless satisfaction these things gave her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret, I perceived, was a cultivated person, the first cultivated
+      person with whom I had ever come into close contact. She was cultivated
+      and moral, and I, I now realise, was never either of these things. She was
+      passive, and I am active. She did not simply and naturally look for beauty
+      but she had been incited to look for it at school, and took perhaps a
+      keener interest in books and lectures and all the organisation of
+      beautiful things than she did in beauty itself; she found much of her
+      delight in being guided to it. Now a thing ceases to be beautiful to me
+      when some finger points me out its merits. Beauty is the salt of life, but
+      I take my beauty as a wild beast gets its salt, as a constituent of the
+      meal....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And besides, there was that between us that should have seemed more
+      beautiful than any picture....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So we went about Venice tracking down pictures and spiral staircases and
+      such-like things, and my brains were busy all the time with such things as
+      a comparison of Venice and its nearest modern equivalent, New York, with
+      the elaboration of schemes of action when we returned to London, with the
+      development of a theory of Margaret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our marriage had done this much at least, that it had fused and destroyed
+      those two independent ways of thinking about her that had gone on in my
+      mind hitherto. Suddenly she had become very near to me, and a very big
+      thing, a sort of comprehensive generalisation behind a thousand questions,
+      like the sky or England. The judgments and understandings that had worked
+      when she was, so to speak, miles away from my life, had now to be
+      altogether revised. Trifling things began to matter enormously, that she
+      had a weak and easily fatigued back, for example, or that when she knitted
+      her brows and stammered a little in talking, it didn't really mean that an
+      exquisite significance struggled for utterance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We visited pictures in the mornings chiefly. In the afternoon, unless we
+      were making a day-long excursion in a gondola, Margaret would rest for an
+      hour while I prowled about in search of English newspapers, and then we
+      would go to tea in the Piazza San Marco and watch the drift of people
+      feeding the pigeons and going into the little doors beneath the sunlit
+      arches and domes of Saint Mark's. Then perhaps we would stroll on the
+      Piazzetta, or go out into the sunset in a gondola. Margaret became very
+      interested in the shops that abound under the colonnades and decided at
+      last to make an extensive purchase of table glass. &ldquo;These things,&rdquo; she
+      said, &ldquo;are quite beautiful, and far cheaper than anything but the most
+      ordinary looking English ware.&rdquo; I was interested in her idea, and a good
+      deal charmed by the delightful qualities of tinted shape, slender handle
+      and twisted stem. I suggested we should get not simply tumblers and
+      wineglasses but bedroom waterbottles, fruit- and sweet-dishes, water-jugs,
+      and in the end we made quite a business-like afternoon of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was beginning now to long quite definitely for events. Energy was
+      accumulating in me, and worrying me for an outlet. I found the TIMES and
+      the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the other papers I managed to get hold of, more
+      and more stimulating. I nearly wrote to the former paper one day in answer
+      to a letter by Lord Grimthorpe&mdash;I forget now upon what point. I
+      chafed secretly against this life of tranquil appreciations more and more.
+      I found my attitudes of restrained and delicate affection for Margaret
+      increasingly difficult to sustain. I surprised myself and her by little
+      gusts of irritability, gusts like the catspaws before a gale. I was
+      alarmed at these symptoms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One night when Margaret had gone up to her room, I put on a light
+      overcoat, went out into the night and prowled for a long time through the
+      narrow streets, smoking and thinking. I returned and went and sat on the
+      edge of her bed to talk to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here, Margaret,&rdquo; I said; &ldquo;this is all very well, but I'm restless.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Restless!&rdquo; she said with a faint surprise in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I think I want exercise. I've got a sort of feeling&mdash;I've never
+      had it before&mdash;as though I was getting fat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear!&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to do things;&mdash;ride horses, climb mountains, take the devil
+      out of myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She watched me thoughtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Couldn't we DO something?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Do what?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. Couldn't we perhaps go away from here soon&mdash;and walk
+      in the mountains&mdash;on our way home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought. &ldquo;There seems to be no exercise at all in this place.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn't there some walk?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder,&rdquo; I answered. &ldquo;We might walk to Chioggia perhaps, along the
+      Lido.&rdquo; And we tried that, but the long stretch of beach fatigued
+      Margaret's back, and gave her blisters, and we never got beyond
+      Malamocco....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A day or so after we went out to those pleasant black-robed, bearded
+      Armenians in their monastery at Saint Lazzaro, and returned towards
+      sundown. We fell into silence. &ldquo;PIU LENTO,&rdquo; said Margaret to the
+      gondolier, and released my accumulated resolution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us go back to London,&rdquo; I said abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret looked at me with surprised blue eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is beautiful beyond measure, you know,&rdquo; I said, sticking to my
+      point, &ldquo;but I have work to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was silent for some seconds. &ldquo;I had forgotten,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So had I,&rdquo; I sympathised, and took her hand. &ldquo;Suddenly I have
+      remembered.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She remained quite still. &ldquo;There is so much to be done,&rdquo; I said, almost
+      apologetically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked long away from me across the lagoon and at last sighed, like
+      one who has drunk deeply, and turned to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose one ought not to be so happy,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Everything has been
+      so beautiful and so simple and splendid. And clean. It has been just With
+      You&mdash;the time of my life. It's a pity such things must end. But the
+      world is calling you, dear.... I ought not to have forgotten it. I thought
+      you were resting&mdash;and thinking. But if you are rested.&mdash;Would
+      you like us to start to-morrow?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at once so fragile and so devoted that on the spur of the
+      moment I relented, and we stayed in Venice four more days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret had already taken a little house in Radnor Square, Westminster,
+      before our marriage, a house that seemed particularly adaptable to our
+      needs as public-spirited efficients; it had been very pleasantly painted
+      and papered under Margaret's instructions, white paint and clean open
+      purples and green predominating, and now we set to work at once upon the
+      interesting business of arranging and&mdash;with our Venetian glass as a
+      beginning&mdash;furnishing it. We had been fairly fortunate with our
+      wedding presents, and for the most part it was open to us to choose just
+      exactly what we would have and just precisely where we would put it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret had a sense of form and colour altogether superior to mine, and
+      so quite apart from the fact that it was her money equipped us, I stood
+      aside from all these matters and obeyed her summons to a consultation only
+      to endorse her judgment very readily. Until everything was settled I went
+      every day to my old rooms in Vincent Square and worked at a series of
+      papers that were originally intended for the FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW, the
+      papers that afterwards became my fourth book, &ldquo;New Aspects of Liberalism.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I still remember as delightful most of the circumstances of getting into
+      79, Radnor Square. The thin flavour of indecision about Margaret
+      disappeared altogether in a shop; she had the precisest ideas of what she
+      wanted, and the devices of the salesman did not sway her. It was very
+      pleasant to find her taking things out of my hands with a certain
+      masterfulness, and showing the distinctest determination to make a house
+      in which I should be able to work in that great project of &ldquo;doing
+      something for the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I do want to make things pretty about us,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You don't think
+      it wrong to have things pretty?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want them so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Altiora has things hard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Altiora,&rdquo; I answered, &ldquo;takes a pride in standing ugly and uncomfortable
+      things. But I don't see that they help her. Anyhow they won't help me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So Margaret went to the best shops and got everything very simple and very
+      good. She bought some pictures very well indeed; there was a little Sussex
+      landscape, full of wind and sunshine, by Nicholson, for my study, that hit
+      my taste far better than if I had gone out to get some such expression for
+      myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will buy a picture just now and then,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;sometimes&mdash;when
+      we see one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I would come back through the January mire or fog from Vincent Square to
+      the door of 79, and reach it at last with a quite childish appreciation of
+      the fact that its solid Georgian proportions and its fine brass
+      furnishings belonged to MY home; I would use my latchkey and discover
+      Margaret in the warm-lit, spacious hall with a partially opened
+      packing-case, fatigued but happy, or go up to have tea with her out of the
+      right tea things, &ldquo;come at last,&rdquo; or be told to notice what was fresh
+      there. It wasn't simply that I had never had a house before, but I had
+      really never been, except in the most transitory way, in any house that
+      was nearly so delightful as mine promised to be. Everything was fresh and
+      bright, and softly and harmoniously toned. Downstairs we had a green
+      dining-room with gleaming silver, dark oak, and English colour-prints;
+      above was a large drawing-room that could be made still larger by throwing
+      open folding doors, and it was all carefully done in greys and blues, for
+      the most part with real Sheraton supplemented by Sheraton so skilfully
+      imitated by an expert Margaret had discovered as to be indistinguishable
+      except to a minute scrutiny. And for me, above this and next to my
+      bedroom, there was a roomy study, with specially thick stair-carpet
+      outside and thick carpets in the bedroom overhead and a big old desk for
+      me to sit at and work between fire and window, and another desk specially
+      made for me by that expert if I chose to stand and write, and open
+      bookshelves and bookcases and every sort of convenient fitting. There were
+      electric heaters beside the open fire, and everything was put for me to
+      make tea at any time&mdash;electric kettle, infuser, biscuits and fresh
+      butter, so that I could get up and work at any hour of the day or night. I
+      could do no work in this apartment for a long time, I was so interested in
+      the perfection of its arrangements. And when I brought in my books and
+      papers from Vincent Square, Margaret seized upon all the really shabby
+      volumes and had them re-bound in a fine official-looking leather.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I can remember sitting down at that desk and looking round me and feeling
+      with a queer effect of surprise that after all even a place in the
+      Cabinet, though infinitely remote, was nevertheless in the same large
+      world with these fine and quietly expensive things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the same floor Margaret had a &ldquo;den,&rdquo; a very neat and pretty den with
+      good colour-prints of Botticellis and Carpaccios, and there was a third
+      apartment for sectarial purposes should the necessity for them arise, with
+      a severe-looking desk equipped with patent files. And Margaret would come
+      flitting into the room to me, or appear noiselessly standing, a tall
+      gracefully drooping form, in the wide open doorway. &ldquo;Is everything right,
+      dear?&rdquo; she would ask.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come in,&rdquo; I would say, &ldquo;I'm sorting out papers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She would come to the hearthrug.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mustn't disturb you,&rdquo; she would remark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not busy yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Things are getting into order. Then we must make out a time-table as the
+      Baileys do, and BEGIN!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Altiora came in to see us once or twice, and a number of serious young
+      wives known to Altiora called and were shown over the house, and discussed
+      its arrangements with Margaret. They were all tremendously keen on
+      efficient arrangements.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A little pretty,&rdquo; said Altiora, with the faintest disapproval, &ldquo;still&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was clear she thought we should grow out of that. From the day of our
+      return we found other people's houses open to us and eager for us. We went
+      out of London for week-ends and dined out, and began discussing our
+      projects for reciprocating these hospitalities. As a single man
+      unattached, I had had a wide and miscellaneous social range, but now I
+      found myself falling into place in a set. For a time I acquiesced in this.
+      I went very little to my clubs, the Climax and the National Liberal, and
+      participated in no bachelor dinners at all. For a time, too, I dropped out
+      of the garrulous literary and journalistic circles I had frequented. I put
+      up for the Reform, not so much for the use of the club as a sign of
+      serious and substantial political standing. I didn't go up to Cambridge, I
+      remember, for nearly a year, so occupied was I with my new adjustments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The people we found ourselves among at this time were people, to put it
+      roughly, of the Parliamentary candidate class, or people already actually
+      placed in the political world. They ranged between very considerable
+      wealth and such a hard, bare independence as old Willersley and the sister
+      who kept house for him possessed. There were quite a number of young
+      couples like ourselves, a little younger and more artless, or a little
+      older and more established. Among the younger men I had a sort of
+      distinction because of my Cambridge reputation and my writing, and
+      because, unlike them, I was an adventurer and had won and married my way
+      into their circles instead of being naturally there. They couldn't quite
+      reckon upon what I should do; they felt I had reserves of experience and
+      incalculable traditions. Close to us were the Cramptons, Willie Crampton,
+      who has since been Postmaster-General, rich and very important in
+      Rockshire, and his younger brother Edward, who has specialised in history
+      and become one of those unimaginative men of letters who are the glory of
+      latter-day England. Then there was Lewis, further towards Kensington,
+      where his cousins the Solomons and the Hartsteins lived, a brilliant
+      representative of his race, able, industrious and invariably uninspired,
+      with a wife a little in revolt against the racial tradition of feminine
+      servitude and inclined to the suffragette point of view, and Bunting
+      Harblow, an old blue, and with an erratic disposition well under the
+      control of the able little cousin he had married. I had known all these
+      men, but now (with Altiora floating angelically in benediction) they
+      opened their hearts to me and took me into their order. They were all like
+      myself, prospective Liberal candidates, with a feeling that the period of
+      wandering in the wilderness of opposition was drawing near its close. They
+      were all tremendously keen upon social and political service, and all
+      greatly under the sway of the ideal of a simple, strenuous life, a life
+      finding its satisfactions in political achievements and distinctions. The
+      young wives were as keen about it as the young husbands, Margaret most of
+      all, and I&mdash;whatever elements in me didn't march with the attitudes
+      and habits of this set were very much in the background during that time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We would give little dinners and have evening gatherings at which
+      everything was very simple and very good, with a slight but perceptible
+      austerity, and there was more good fruit and flowers and less perhaps in
+      the way of savouries, patties and entrees than was customary. Sherry we
+      banished, and Marsala and liqueurs, and there was always good home-made
+      lemonade available. No men waited, but very expert parlourmaids. Our meat
+      was usually Welsh mutton&mdash;I don't know why, unless that mountains
+      have ever been the last refuge of the severer virtues. And we talked
+      politics and books and ideas and Bernard Shaw (who was a department by
+      himself and supposed in those days to be ethically sound at bottom), and
+      mingled with the intellectuals&mdash;I myself was, as it were, a promoted
+      intellectual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cramptons had a tendency to read good things aloud on their less
+      frequented receptions, but I have never been able to participate
+      submissively in this hyper-digestion of written matter, and generally
+      managed to provoke a disruptive debate. We were all very earnest to make
+      the most of ourselves and to be and do, and I wonder still at times, with
+      an unassuaged perplexity, how it is that in that phase of utmost
+      earnestness I have always seemed to myself to be most remote from reality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I look back now across the detaching intervention of sixteen crowded
+      years, critically and I fancy almost impartially, to those beginnings of
+      my married life. I try to recall something near to their proper order the
+      developing phases of relationship. I am struck most of all by the immense
+      unpremeditated, generous-spirited insincerities upon which Margaret and I
+      were building.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seems to me that here I have to tell perhaps the commonest experience
+      of all among married educated people, the deliberate, shy, complex effort
+      to fill the yawning gaps in temperament as they appear, the sustained,
+      failing attempt to bridge abysses, level barriers, evade violent
+      pressures. I have come these latter years of my life to believe that it is
+      possible for a man and woman to be absolutely real with one another, to
+      stand naked souled to each other, unashamed and unafraid, because of the
+      natural all-glorifying love between them. It is possible to love and be
+      loved untroubling, as a bird flies through the air. But it is a rare and
+      intricate chance that brings two people within sight of that essential
+      union, and for the majority marriage must adjust itself on other terms.
+      Most coupled people never really look at one another. They look a little
+      away to preconceived ideas. And each from the first days of love-making
+      HIDES from the other, is afraid of disappointing, afraid of offending,
+      afraid of discoveries in either sense. They build not solidly upon the
+      rock of truth, but upon arches and pillars and queer provisional supports
+      that are needed to make a common foundation, and below in the imprisoned
+      darknesses, below the fine fabric they sustain together begins for each of
+      them a cavernous hidden life. Down there things may be prowling that
+      scarce ever peep out to consciousness except in the grey half-light of
+      sleepless nights, passions that flash out for an instant in an angry
+      glance and are seen no more, starved victims and beautiful dreams bricked
+      up to die. For the most of us there is no jail delivery of those inner
+      depths, and the life above goes on to its honourable end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have told how I loved Margaret and how I came to marry her. Perhaps
+      already unintentionally I have indicated the quality of the injustice our
+      marriage did us both. There was no kindred between us and no
+      understanding. We were drawn to one another by the unlikeness of our
+      quality, by the things we misunderstood in each other. I know a score of
+      couples who have married in that fashion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Modern conditions and modern ideas, and in particular the intenser and
+      subtler perceptions of modern life, press more and more heavily upon a
+      marriage tie whose fashion comes from an earlier and less discriminating
+      time. When the wife was her husband's subordinate, meeting him simply and
+      uncritically for simple ends, when marriage was a purely domestic
+      relationship, leaving thought and the vivid things of life almost entirely
+      to the unencumbered man, mental and temperamental incompatibilities
+      mattered comparatively little. But now the wife, and particularly the
+      loving childless wife, unpremeditatedly makes a relentless demand for a
+      complete association, and the husband exacts unthought of delicacies of
+      understanding and co-operation. These are stupendous demands. People not
+      only think more fully and elaborately about life than they ever did
+      before, but marriage obliges us to make that ever more accidented progress
+      a three-legged race of carelessly assorted couples....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our very mental texture was different. I was rough-minded, to use the
+      phrase of William James, primary and intuitive and illogical; she was
+      tender-minded, logical, refined and secondary. She was loyal to pledge and
+      persons, sentimental and faithful; I am loyal to ideas and instincts,
+      emotional and scheming. My imagination moves in broad gestures; her's was
+      delicate with a real dread of extravagance. My quality is sensuous and
+      ruled by warm impulses; hers was discriminating and essentially
+      inhibitory. I like the facts of the case and to mention everything; I like
+      naked bodies and the jolly smells of things. She abounded in reservations,
+      in circumlocutions and evasions, in keenly appreciated secondary points.
+      Perhaps the reader knows that Tintoretto in the National Gallery, the
+      Origin of the Milky Way. It is an admirable test of temperamental quality.
+      In spite of my early training I have come to regard that picture as
+      altogether delightful; to Margaret it has always been &ldquo;needlessly
+      offensive.&rdquo; In that you have our fundamental breach. She had a habit, by
+      no means rare, of damning what she did not like or find sympathetic in me
+      on the score that it was not my &ldquo;true self,&rdquo; and she did not so much
+      accept the universe as select from it and do her best to ignore the rest.
+      And also I had far more initiative than had she. This is no catalogue of
+      rights and wrongs, or superiorities and inferiorities; it is a catalogue
+      of differences between two people linked in a relationship that constantly
+      becomes more intolerant of differences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is how we stood to each other, and none of it was clear to either of
+      us at the outset. To begin with, I found myself reserving myself from her,
+      then slowly apprehending a jarring between our minds and what seemed to me
+      at first a queer little habit of misunderstanding in her....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It did not hinder my being very fond of her....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Where our system of reservation became at once most usual and most
+      astounding was in our personal relations. It is not too much to say that
+      in that regard we never for a moment achieved sincerity with one another
+      during the first six years of our life together. It goes even deeper than
+      that, for in my effort to realise the ideal of my marriage I ceased even
+      to attempt to be sincere with myself. I would not admit my own perceptions
+      and interpretations. I tried to fit myself to her thinner and finer
+      determinations. There are people who will say with a note of approval that
+      I was learning to conquer myself. I record that much without any note of
+      approval....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some years I never deceived Margaret about any concrete fact nor,
+      except for the silence about my earlier life that she had almost forced
+      upon me, did I hide any concrete fact that seemed to affect her, but from
+      the outset I was guilty of immense spiritual concealments, my very
+      marriage was based, I see now, on a spiritual subterfuge; I hid moods from
+      her, pretended feelings....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The interest and excitement of setting-up a house, of walking about it
+      from room to room and from floor to floor, or sitting at one's own dinner
+      table and watching one's wife control conversation with a pretty, timid
+      resolution, of taking a place among the secure and free people of our
+      world, passed almost insensibly into the interest and excitement of my
+      Parliamentary candidature for the Kinghamstead Division, that shapeless
+      chunk of agricultural midland between the Great Western and the North
+      Western railways. I was going to &ldquo;take hold&rdquo; at last, the Kinghamstead
+      Division was my appointed handle. I was to find my place in the rather
+      indistinctly sketched constructions that were implicit in the minds of all
+      our circle. The precise place I had to fill and the precise functions I
+      had to discharge were not as yet very clear, but all that, we felt sure,
+      would become plain as things developed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A few brief months of vague activities of &ldquo;nursing&rdquo; gave place to the
+      excitements of the contest that followed the return of Mr.
+      Camphell-Bannerman to power in 1905. So far as the Kinghamstead Division
+      was concerned it was a depressed and tepid battle. I went about the
+      constituency making three speeches that were soon threadbare, and an odd
+      little collection of people worked for me; two solicitors, a cheap
+      photographer, a democratic parson, a number of dissenting ministers, the
+      Mayor of Kinghamstead, a Mrs. Bulger, the widow of an old Chartist who had
+      grown rich through electric traction patents, Sir Roderick Newton, a Jew
+      who had bought Calersham Castle, and old Sir Graham Rivers, that sturdy
+      old soldier, were among my chief supporters. We had headquarters in each
+      town and village, mostly there were empty shops we leased temporarily, and
+      there at least a sort of fuss and a coming and going were maintained. The
+      rest of the population stared in a state of suspended judgment as we went
+      about the business. The country was supposed to be in a state of
+      intellectual conflict and deliberate decision, in history it will no doubt
+      figure as a momentous conflict. Yet except for an occasional flare of
+      bill-sticking or a bill in a window or a placard-plastered motor-car or an
+      argumentative group of people outside a public-house or a sluggish
+      movement towards the schoolroom or village hall, there was scarcely a sign
+      that a great empire was revising its destinies. Now and then one saw a
+      canvasser on a doorstep. For the most part people went about their
+      business with an entirely irresponsible confidence in the stability of the
+      universe. At times one felt a little absurd with one's flutter of colours
+      and one's air of saving the country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My opponent was a quite undistinguished Major-General who relied upon his
+      advocacy of Protection, and was particularly anxious we should avoid
+      &ldquo;personalities&rdquo; and fight the constituency in a gentlemanly spirit. He was
+      always writing me notes, apologising for excesses on the part of his
+      supporters, or pointing out the undesirability of some course taken by
+      mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My speeches had been planned upon broad lines, but they lost touch with
+      these as the polling approached. To begin with I made a real attempt to
+      put what was in my mind before the people I was to supply with a political
+      voice. I spoke of the greatness of our empire and its destinies, of the
+      splendid projects and possibilities of life and order that lay before the
+      world, of all that a resolute and constructive effort might do at the
+      present time. &ldquo;We are building a state,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;secure and splendid, we
+      are in the dawn of the great age of mankind.&rdquo; Sometimes that would get a
+      solitary &ldquo;'Ear! 'ear!&rdquo; Then having created, as I imagined, a fine
+      atmosphere, I turned upon the history of the last Conservative
+      administration and brought it into contrast with the wide occasions of the
+      age; discussed its failure to control the grasping financiers in South
+      Africa, its failure to release public education from sectarian squabbles,
+      its misconduct of the Boer War, its waste of the world's resources....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It soon became manifest that my opening and my general spaciousness of
+      method bored my audiences a good deal. The richer and wider my phrases the
+      thinner sounded my voice in these non-resonating gatherings. Even the
+      platform supporters grew restive unconsciously, and stirred and coughed.
+      They did not recognise themselves as mankind. Building an empire,
+      preparing a fresh stage in the history of humanity, had no appeal for
+      them. They were mostly everyday, toiling people, full of small personal
+      solicitudes, and they came to my meetings, I think, very largely as a
+      relaxation. This stuff was not relaxing. They did not think politics was a
+      great constructive process, they thought it was a kind of dog-fight. They
+      wanted fun, they wanted spice, they wanted hits, they wanted also a chance
+      to say &ldquo;'Ear', 'ear!&rdquo; in an intelligent and honourable manner and clap
+      their hands and drum with their feet. The great constructive process in
+      history gives so little scope for clapping and drumming and saying &ldquo;'Ear,
+      'ear!&rdquo; One might as well think of hounding on the solar system.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So after one or two attempts to lift my audiences to the level of the
+      issues involved, I began to adapt myself to them. I cut down my review of
+      our imperial outlook and destinies more and more, and developed a series
+      of hits and anecdotes and&mdash;what shall I call them?&mdash;&ldquo;crudifications&rdquo;
+       of the issue. My helper's congratulated me on the rapid improvement of my
+      platform style. I ceased to speak of the late Prime Minister with the
+      respect I bore him, and began to fall in with the popular caricature of
+      him as an artful rabbit-witted person intent only on keeping his
+      leadership, in spite of the vigorous attempts of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain to
+      oust him therefrom. I ceased to qualify my statement that Protection would
+      make food dearer for the agricultural labourer. I began to speak of Mr.
+      Alfred Lyttelton as an influence at once insane and diabolical, as a man
+      inspired by a passionate desire to substitute manacled but still criminal
+      Chinese for honest British labourers throughout the world. And when it
+      came to the mention of our own kindly leader, of Mr. John Burns or any one
+      else of any prominence at all on our side I fell more and more into the
+      intonation of one who mentions the high gods. And I had my reward in
+      brighter meetings and readier and readier applause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One goes on from phase to phase in these things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After all,&rdquo; I told myself, &ldquo;if one wants to get to Westminster one must
+      follow the road that leads there,&rdquo; but I found the road nevertheless
+      rather unexpectedly distasteful. &ldquo;When one gets there,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;then it
+      is one begins.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But I would lie awake at nights with that sore throat and headache and
+      fatigue which come from speaking in ill-ventilated rooms, and wondering
+      how far it was possible to educate a whole people to great political
+      ideals. Why should political work always rot down to personalities and
+      personal appeals in this way? Life is, I suppose, to begin with and end
+      with a matter of personalities, from personalities all our broader
+      interests arise and to personalities they return. All our social and
+      political effort, all of it, is like trying to make a crowd of people fall
+      into formation. The broader lines appear, but then come a rush and
+      excitement and irrelevancy, and forthwith the incipient order has vanished
+      and the marshals must begin the work over again!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My memory of all that time is essentially confusion. There was a frightful
+      lot of tiresome locomotion in it; for the Kinghamstead Division is
+      extensive, abounding in ill-graded and badly metalled cross-roads and
+      vicious little hills, and singularly unpleasing to the eye in a muddy
+      winter. It is sufficiently near to London to have undergone the same
+      process of ill-regulated expansion that made Bromstead the place it is.
+      Several of its overgrown villages have developed strings of factories and
+      sidings along the railway lines, and there is an abundance of petty
+      villas. There seemed to be no place at which one could take hold of more
+      than this or that element of the population. Now we met in a
+      meeting-house, now in a Masonic Hall or Drill Hall; I also did a certain
+      amount of open-air speaking in the dinner hour outside gas-works and
+      groups of factories. Some special sort of people was, as it were, secreted
+      in response to each special appeal. One said things carefully adjusted to
+      the distinctive limitations of each gathering. Jokes of an incredible
+      silliness and shallowness drifted about us. Our advisers made us declare
+      that if we were elected we would live in the district, and one hasty agent
+      had bills printed, &ldquo;If Mr. Remington is elected he will live here.&rdquo; The
+      enemy obtained a number of these bills and stuck them on outhouses,
+      pigstyes, dog-kennels; you cannot imagine how irksome the repetition of
+      that jest became. The vast drifting indifference in between my meetings
+      impressed me more and more. I realised the vagueness of my own plans as I
+      had never done before I brought them to the test of this experience. I was
+      perplexed by the riddle of just how far I was, in any sense of the word,
+      taking hold at all, how far I wasn't myself flowing into an accepted
+      groove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret was troubled by no such doubts. She was clear I had to go into
+      Parliament on the side of Liberalism and the light, as against the late
+      Government and darkness. Essential to the memory of my first contest, is
+      the memory of her clear bright face, very resolute and grave, helping me
+      consciously, steadfastly, with all her strength. Her quiet confidence,
+      while I was so dissatisfied, worked curiously towards the alienation of my
+      sympathies. I felt she had no business to be so sure of me. I had moments
+      of vivid resentment at being thus marched towards Parliament.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I seemed now always to be discovering alien forces of character in her.
+      Her way of taking life diverged from me more and more. She sounded
+      amazing, independent notes. She bought some particularly costly furs for
+      the campaign that roused enthusiasm whenever she appeared. She also made
+      me a birthday present in November of a heavily fur-trimmed coat and this
+      she would make me remove as I went on to the platform, and hold over her
+      arm until I was ready to resume it. It was fearfully heavy for her and she
+      liked it to be heavy for her. That act of servitude was in essence a
+      towering self-assertion. I would glance sideways while some chairman
+      floundered through his introduction and see the clear blue eye with which
+      she regarded the audience, which existed so far as she was concerned
+      merely to return me to Parliament. It was a friendly eye, provided they
+      were not silly or troublesome. But it kindled a little at the hint of a
+      hostile question. After we had come so far and taken so much trouble!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She constituted herself the dragoman of our political travels. In hotels
+      she was serenely resolute for the quietest and the best, she rejected all
+      their proposals for meals and substituted a severely nourishing dietary of
+      her own, and even in private houses she astonished me by her tranquil
+      insistence upon special comforts and sustenance. I can see her face now as
+      it would confront a hostess, a little intent, but sweetly resolute and
+      assured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since our marriage she had read a number of political memoirs, and she had
+      been particularly impressed by the career of Mrs. Gladstone. I don't think
+      it occurred to her to compare and contrast my quality with that of Mrs.
+      Gladstone's husband. I suspect her of a deliberate intention of achieving
+      parallel results by parallel methods. I was to be Gladstonised. Gladstone
+      it appeared used to lubricate his speeches with a mixture&mdash;if my
+      memory serves me right&mdash;of egg beaten up in sherry, and Margaret was
+      very anxious I should take a leaf from that celebrated book. She wanted, I
+      know, to hold the glass in her hand while I was speaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But here I was firm. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; I said, very decisively, &ldquo;simply I won't stand
+      that. It's a matter of conscience. I shouldn't feel&mdash;democratic. I'll
+      take my chance of the common water in the carafe on the chairman's table.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I DO wish you wouldn't,&rdquo; she said, distressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was absurd to feel irritated; it was so admirable of her, a little
+      childish, infinitely womanly and devoted and fine&mdash;and I see now how
+      pathetic. But I could not afford to succumb to her. I wanted to follow my
+      own leading, to see things clearly, and this reassuring pose of a high
+      destiny, of an almost terribly efficient pursuit of a fixed end when as a
+      matter of fact I had a very doubtful end and an aim as yet by no means
+      fixed, was all too seductive for dalliance....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And into all these things with the manner of a trifling and casual
+      incident comes the figure of Isabel Rivers. My first impressions of her
+      were of a rather ugly and ungainly, extraordinarily interesting schoolgirl
+      with a beautiful quick flush under her warm brown skin, who said and did
+      amusing and surprising things. When first I saw her she was riding a very
+      old bicycle downhill with her feet on the fork of the frame&mdash;it
+      seemed to me to the public danger, but afterwards I came to understand the
+      quality of her nerve better&mdash;and on the third occasion she was for
+      her own private satisfaction climbing a tree. On the intervening occasion
+      we had what seems now to have been a long sustained conversation about the
+      political situation and the books and papers I had written.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wonder if it was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What a delightful mixture of child and grave woman she was at that time,
+      and how little I reckoned on the part she would play in my life! And since
+      she has played that part, how impossible it is to tell now of those early
+      days! Since I wrote that opening paragraph to this section my idle pen has
+      been, as it were, playing by itself and sketching faces on the blotting
+      pad&mdash;one impish wizened visage is oddly like little Bailey&mdash;and
+      I have been thinking cheek on fist amidst a limitless wealth of memories.
+      She sits below me on the low wall under the olive trees with our little
+      child in her arms. She is now the central fact in my life. It still seems
+      a little incredible that that should be so. She has destroyed me as a
+      politician, brought me to this belated rebeginning of life. When I sit
+      down and try to make her a girl again, I feel like the Arabian fisherman
+      who tried to put the genius back into the pot from which it had spread
+      gigantic across the skies....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have a very clear vision of her rush downhill past our labouring
+      ascendant car&mdash;my colours fluttered from handle-bar and shoulder-knot&mdash;and
+      her waving hand and the sharp note of her voice. She cried out something,
+      I don't know what, some greeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a pretty girl!&rdquo; said Margaret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Parvill, the cheap photographer, that industrious organiser for whom by
+      way of repayment I got those magic letters, that knighthood of the
+      underlings, &ldquo;J. P.&rdquo; was in the car with us and explained her to us. &ldquo;One
+      of the best workers you have,&rdquo; he said....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then after a toilsome troubled morning we came, rather cross from the
+      strain of sustained amiability, to Sir Graham Rivers' house. It seemed all
+      softness and quiet&mdash;I recall dead white panelling and oval mirrors
+      horizontally set and a marble fireplace between white marble-blind Homer
+      and marble-blind Virgil, very grave and fine&mdash;and how Isabel came in
+      to lunch in a shapeless thing like a blue smock that made her bright
+      quick-changing face seem yellow under her cloud of black hair. Her
+      step-sister was there, Miss Gamer, to whom the house was to descend, a
+      well-dressed lady of thirty, amiably disavowing responsibility for Isabel
+      in every phrase and gesture. And there was a very pleasant doctor, an
+      Oxford man, who seemed on excellent terms with every one. It was manifest
+      that he was in the habit of sparring with the girl, but on this occasion
+      she wasn't sparring and refused to be teased into a display in spite of
+      the taunts of either him or her father. She was, they discovered with
+      rising eyebrows, shy. It seemed an opportunity too rare for them to miss.
+      They proclaimed her enthusiasm for me in a way that brought a flush to her
+      cheek and a look into her eye between appeal and defiance. They declared
+      she had read my books, which I thought at the time was exaggeration, their
+      dry political quality was so distinctly not what one was accustomed to
+      regard as schoolgirl reading. Miss Gamer protested to protect her, &ldquo;When
+      once in a blue moon Isabel is well-behaved....!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Except for these attacks I do not remember much of the conversation at
+      table; it was, I know, discursive and concerned with the sort of
+      topographical and social and electioneering fact natural to such a visit.
+      Old Rivers struck me as a delightful person, modestly unconscious of his
+      doubly-earned V. C. and the plucky defence of Kardin-Bergat that won his
+      baronetcy. He was that excellent type, the soldier radical, and we began
+      that day a friendship that was only ended by his death in the
+      hunting-field three years later. He interested Margaret into a disregard
+      of my plate and the fact that I had secured the illegal indulgence of
+      Moselle. After lunch we went for coffee into another low room, this time
+      brown panelled and looking through French windows on a red-walled garden,
+      graceful even in its winter desolation. And there the conversation
+      suddenly picked up and became good. It had fallen to a pause, and the
+      doctor, with an air of definitely throwing off a mask and wrecking an
+      established tranquillity, remarked: &ldquo;Very probably you Liberals will come
+      in, though I'm not sure you'll come in so mightily as you think, but what
+      you do when you do come in passes my comprehension.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's good work sometimes,&rdquo; said Sir Graham, &ldquo;in undoing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can't govern a great empire by amending and repealing the Acts of
+      your predecessors,&rdquo; said the doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There came that kind of pause that happens when a subject is broached too
+      big and difficult for the gathering. Margaret's blue eyes regarded the
+      speaker with quiet disapproval for a moment, and then came to me in the
+      not too confident hope that I would snub him out of existence with some
+      prompt rhetorical stroke. A voice spoke out of the big armchair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'll do things,&rdquo; said Isabel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor's eye lit with the joy of the fisherman who strikes his fish at
+      last. &ldquo;What will you do?&rdquo; he asked her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Every one knows we're a mixed lot,&rdquo; said Isabel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor old chaps like me!&rdquo; interjected the general.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that's not a programme,&rdquo; said the doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But Mr. Remington has published a programme,&rdquo; said Isabel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor cocked half an eye at me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In some review,&rdquo; the girl went on. &ldquo;After all, we're not going to elect
+      the whole Liberal party in the Kinghamstead Division. I'm a
+      Remington-ite!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the programme,&rdquo; said the doctor, &ldquo;the programme&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In front of Mr. Remington!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Scandal always comes home at last,&rdquo; said the doctor. &ldquo;Let him hear the
+      worst.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd like to hear,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Electioneering shatters convictions and
+      enfeebles the mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not mine,&rdquo; said Isabel stoutly. &ldquo;I mean&mdash;Well, anyhow I take it Mr.
+      Remington stands for constructing a civilised state out of this muddle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;THIS muddle,&rdquo; protested the doctor with an appeal of the eye to the
+      beautiful long room and the ordered garden outside the bright clean
+      windows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, THAT muddle, if you like! There's a slum within a mile of us
+      already. The dust and blacks get worse and worse, Sissie?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They do,&rdquo; agreed Miss Gamer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Remington stands for construction, order, education, discipline.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you?&rdquo; said the doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm a good Remington-ite.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Discipline!&rdquo; said the doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; said Isabel. &ldquo;At times one has to be&mdash;Napoleonic. They want to
+      libel me, Mr. Remington. A political worker can't always be in time for
+      meals, can she? At times one has to make&mdash;splendid cuts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Gamer said something indistinctly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Order, education, discipline,&rdquo; said Sir Graham. &ldquo;Excellent things! But
+      I've a sort of memory&mdash;in my young days&mdash;we talked about
+      something called liberty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Liberty under the law,&rdquo; I said, with an unexpected approving murmur from
+      Margaret, and took up the defence. &ldquo;The old Liberal definition of liberty
+      was a trifle uncritical. Privilege and legal restrictions are not the only
+      enemies of liberty. An uneducated, underbred, and underfed propertyless
+      man is a man who has lost the possibility of liberty. There's no liberty
+      worth a rap for him. A man who is swimming hopelessly for life wants
+      nothing but the liberty to get out of the water; he'll give every other
+      liberty for it&mdash;until he gets out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Graham took me up and we fell into a discussion of the changing
+      qualities of Liberalism. It was a good give-and-take talk, extraordinarily
+      refreshing after the nonsense and crowding secondary issues of the
+      electioneering outside. We all contributed more or less except Miss Gamer;
+      Margaret followed with knitted brows and occasional interjections. &ldquo;People
+      won't SEE that,&rdquo; for example, and &ldquo;It all seems so plain to me.&rdquo; The
+      doctor showed himself clever but unsubstantial and inconsistent. Isabel
+      sat back with her black mop of hair buried deep in the chair looking
+      quickly from face to face. Her colour came and went with her vivid
+      intellectual excitement; occasionally she would dart a word, usually a
+      very apt word, like a lizard's tongue into the discussion. I remember
+      chiefly that a chance illustration betrayed that she had read Bishop
+      Burnet....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After that it was not surprising that Isabel should ask for a lift in our
+      car as far as the Lurky Committee Room, and that she should offer me quite
+      sound advice EN ROUTE upon the intellectual temperament of the Lurky
+      gasworkers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the third occasion that I saw Isabel she was, as I have said, climbing
+      a tree&mdash;and a very creditable tree&mdash;for her own private
+      satisfaction. It was a lapse from the high seriousness of politics, and I
+      perceived she felt that I might regard it as such and attach too much
+      importance to it. I had some difficulty in reassuring her. And it's odd to
+      note now&mdash;it has never occurred to me before&mdash;that from that day
+      to this I do not think I have ever reminded Isabel of that encounter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And after that memory she seems to be flickering about always in the
+      election, an inextinguishable flame; now she flew by on her bicycle, now
+      she dashed into committee rooms, now she appeared on doorsteps in animated
+      conversation with dubious voters; I took every chance I could to talk to
+      her&mdash;I had never met anything like her before in the world, and she
+      interested me immensely&mdash;and before the polling day she and I had
+      become, in the frankest simplicity, fast friends....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That, I think, sets out very fairly the facts of our early relationship.
+      But it is hard to get it true, either in form or texture, because of the
+      bright, translucent, coloured, and refracting memories that come between.
+      One forgets not only the tint and quality of thoughts and impressions
+      through that intervening haze, one forgets them altogether. I don't
+      remember now that I ever thought in those days of passionate love or the
+      possibility of such love between us. I may have done so again and again.
+      But I doubt it very strongly. I don't think I ever thought of such
+      aspects. I had no more sense of any danger between us, seeing the years
+      and things that separated us, than I could have had if she had been an
+      intelligent bright-eyed bird. Isabel came into my life as a new sort of
+      thing; she didn't join on at all to my previous experiences of womanhood.
+      They were not, as I have laboured to explain, either very wide or very
+      penetrating experiences, on the whole, &ldquo;strangled dinginess&rdquo; expresses
+      them, but I do not believe they were narrower or shallower than those of
+      many other men of my class. I thought of women as pretty things and
+      beautiful things, pretty rather than beautiful, attractive and at times
+      disconcertingly attractive, often bright and witty, but, because of the
+      vast reservations that hid them from me, wanting, subtly and inevitably
+      wanting, in understanding. My idealisation of Margaret had evaporated
+      insensibly after our marriage. The shrine I had made for her in my private
+      thoughts stood at last undisguisedly empty. But Isabel did not for a
+      moment admit of either idealisation or interested contempt. She opened a
+      new sphere of womanhood to me. With her steady amber-brown eyes, her
+      unaffected interest in impersonal things, her upstanding waistless blue
+      body, her energy, decision and courage, she seemed rather some new and
+      infinitely finer form of boyhood than a feminine creature, as I had come
+      to measure femininity. She was my perfect friend. Could I have foreseen,
+      had my world been more wisely planned, to this day we might have been such
+      friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed at that time unconscious of sex, though she has told me since
+      how full she was of protesting curiosities and restrained emotions. She
+      spoke, as indeed she has always spoken, simply, clearly, and vividly;
+      schoolgirl slang mingled with words that marked ample voracious reading,
+      and she moved quickly with the free directness of some graceful young
+      animal. She took many of the easy freedoms a man or a sister might have
+      done with me. She would touch my arm, lay a hand on my shoulder as I sat,
+      adjust the lapel of a breast-pocket as she talked to me. She says now she
+      loved me always from the beginning. I doubt if there was a suspicion of
+      that in her mind those days. I used to find her regarding me with the
+      clearest, steadiest gaze in the world, exactly like the gaze of some nice
+      healthy innocent animal in a forest, interested, inquiring, speculative,
+      but singularly untroubled....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Polling day came after a last hoarse and dingy crescendo. The excitement
+      was not of the sort that makes one forget one is tired out. The waiting
+      for the end of the count has left a long blank mark on my memory, and then
+      everyone was shaking my hand and repeating: &ldquo;Nine hundred and
+      seventy-six.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      My success had been a foregone conclusion since the afternoon, but we all
+      behaved as though we had not been anticipating this result for hours, as
+      though any other figures but nine hundred and seventy-six would have meant
+      something entirely different. &ldquo;Nine hundred and seventy-six!&rdquo; said
+      Margaret. &ldquo;They didn't expect three hundred.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nine hundred and seventy-six,&rdquo; said a little short man with a paper. &ldquo;It
+      means a big turnover. Two dozen short of a thousand, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A tremendous hullaboo began outside, and a lot of fresh people came into
+      the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Isabel, flushed but not out of breath, Heaven knows where she had sprung
+      from at that time of night! was running her hand down my sleeve almost
+      caressingly, with the innocent bold affection of a girl. &ldquo;Got you in!&rdquo; she
+      said. &ldquo;It's been no end of a lark.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;I must go and be constructive.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now you must go and be constructive,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've got to live here,&rdquo; she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By Jove! yes,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;We'll have to house hunt.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall read all your speeches.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish I was you,&rdquo; she said, and said it as though it was not exactly the
+      thing she was meaning to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They want you to speak,&rdquo; said Margaret, with something unsaid in her
+      face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must come out with me,&rdquo; I answered, putting my arm through hers, and
+      felt someone urging me to the French windows that gave on the balcony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you think&mdash;&rdquo; she said, yielding gladly
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, RATHER!&rdquo; said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Mayor of Kinghamstead, a managing little man with no great belief in
+      my oratorical powers, was sticking his face up to mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all over,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and you've won. Say all the nice things you can
+      and say them plainly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I turned and handed Margaret out through the window and stood looking over
+      the Market-place, which was more than half filled with swaying people. The
+      crowd set up a roar of approval at the sight of us, tempered by a little
+      booing. Down in one corner of the square a fight was going on for a flag,
+      a fight that even the prospect of a speech could not instantly check.
+      &ldquo;Speech!&rdquo; cried voices, &ldquo;Speech!&rdquo; and then a brief &ldquo;boo-oo-oo&rdquo; that was
+      drowned in a cascade of shouts and cheers. The conflict round the flag
+      culminated in the smashing of a pane of glass in the chemist's window and
+      instantly sank to peace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gentlemen voters of the Kinghamstead Division,&rdquo; I began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Votes for Women!&rdquo; yelled a voice, amidst laughter&mdash;the first time I
+      remember hearing that memorable war-cry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Three cheers for Mrs. Remington!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Remington asks me to thank you,&rdquo; I said, amidst further uproar and
+      reiterated cries of &ldquo;Speech!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then silence came with a startling swiftness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Isabel was still in my mind, I suppose. &ldquo;I shall go to Westminster,&rdquo; I
+      began. I sought for some compelling phrase and could not find one. &ldquo;To do
+      my share,&rdquo; I went on, &ldquo;in building up a great and splendid civilisation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I paused, and there was a weak gust of cheering, and then a renewal of
+      booing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This election,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;has been the end and the beginning of much. New
+      ideas are abroad&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chinese labour,&rdquo; yelled a voice, and across the square swept a wildfire
+      of booting and bawling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is one of the few occasions when I quite lost my hold on a speech. I
+      glanced sideways and saw the Mayor of Kinghamstead speaking behind his
+      hand to Parvill. By a happy chance Parvill caught my eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do they want?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do they want?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Say something about general fairness&mdash;the other side,&rdquo; prompted
+      Parvill, flattered but a little surprised by my appeal. I pulled myself
+      hastily into a more popular strain with a gross eulogy of my opponent's
+      good taste.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chinese labour!&rdquo; cried the voice again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've given that notice to quit,&rdquo; I answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Market-place roared delight, but whether that delight expressed
+      hostility to Chinamen or hostility to their practical enslavement no
+      student of the General Election of 1906 has ever been able to determine.
+      Certainly one of the most effective posters on our side displayed a
+      hideous yellow face, just that and nothing more. There was not even a
+      legend to it. How it impressed the electorate we did not know, but that it
+      impressed the electorate profoundly there can be no disputing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Kinghamstead was one of the earliest constituencies fought, and we came
+      back&mdash;it must have been Saturday&mdash;triumphant but very tired, to
+      our house in Radnor Square. In the train we read the first intimations
+      that the victory of our party was likely to be a sweeping one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then came a period when one was going about receiving and giving
+      congratulations and watching the other men arrive, very like a boy who has
+      returned to school with the first batch after the holidays. The London
+      world reeked with the General Election; it had invaded the nurseries. All
+      the children of one's friends had got big maps of England cut up into
+      squares to represent constituencies and were busy sticking gummed blue
+      labels over the conquered red of Unionism that had hitherto submerged the
+      country. And there were also orange labels, if I remember rightly, to
+      represent the new Labour party, and green for the Irish. I engaged myself
+      to speak at one or two London meetings, and lunched at the Reform, which
+      was fairly tepid, and dined and spent one or two tumultuous evenings at
+      the National Liberal Club, which was in active eruption. The National
+      Liberal became feverishly congested towards midnight as the results of the
+      counting came dropping in. A big green-baize screen had been fixed up at
+      one end of the large smoking-room with the names of the constituencies
+      that were voting that day, and directly the figures came to hand, up they
+      went, amidst cheers that at last lost their energy through sheer
+      repetition, whenever there was record of a Liberal gain. I don't remember
+      what happened when there was a Liberal loss; I don't think that any were
+      announced while I was there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How packed and noisy the place was, and what a reek of tobacco and whisky
+      fumes we made! Everybody was excited and talking, making waves of harsh
+      confused sound that beat upon one's ears, and every now and then hoarse
+      voices would shout for someone to speak. Our little set was much in
+      evidence. Both the Cramptons were in, Lewis, Bunting Harblow. We gave
+      brief addresses attuned to this excitement and the late hour, amidst much
+      enthusiasm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now we can DO things!&rdquo; I said amidst a rapture of applause. Men I did not
+      know from Adam held up glasses and nodded to me in solemn fuddled approval
+      as I came down past them into the crowd again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Men were betting whether the Unionists would lose more or less than two
+      hundred seats.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder just what we shall do with it all,&rdquo; I heard one sceptic
+      speculating....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After these orgies I would get home very tired and excited, and find it
+      difficult to get to sleep. I would lie and speculate about what it was we
+      WERE going to do. One hadn't anticipated quite such a tremendous accession
+      to power for one's party. Liberalism was swirling in like a flood....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I found the next few weeks very unsatisfactory and distressing. I don't
+      clearly remember what it was I had expected; I suppose the fuss and strain
+      of the General Election had built up a feeling that my return would in
+      some way put power into my hands, and instead I found myself a mere
+      undistinguished unit in a vast but rather vague majority. There were
+      moments when I felt very distinctly that a majority could be too big a
+      crowd altogether. I had all my work still before me, I had achieved
+      nothing as yet but opportunity, and a very crowded opportunity it was at
+      that. Everyone about me was chatting Parliament and appointments; one
+      breathed distracting and irritating speculations as to what would be done
+      and who would be asked to do it. I was chiefly impressed by what was
+      unlikely to be done and by the absence of any general plan of legislation
+      to hold us all together. I found the talk about Parliamentary procedure
+      and etiquette particularly trying. We dined with the elder Cramptons one
+      evening, and old Sir Edward was lengthily sage about what the House liked,
+      what it didn't like, what made a good impression and what a bad one. &ldquo;A
+      man shouldn't speak more than twice in his first session, and not at first
+      on too contentious a topic,&rdquo; said Sir Edward. &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very much depends on manner. The House hates a lecturer. There's a sort
+      of airy earnestness&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He waved his cigar to eke out his words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Little peculiarities of costume count for a great deal. I could name one
+      man who spent three years living down a pair of spatterdashers. On the
+      other hand&mdash;a thing like that&mdash;if it catches the eye of the
+      PUNCH man, for example, may be your making.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He went off into a lengthy speculation of why the House had come to like
+      an originally unpopular Irishman named Biggar....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The opening of Parliament gave me some peculiar moods. I began to feel
+      more and more like a branded sheep. We were sworn in in batches, dozens
+      and scores of fresh men, trying not to look too fresh under the inspection
+      of policemen and messengers, all of us carrying new silk hats and wearing
+      magisterial coats. It is one of my vivid memories from this period, the
+      sudden outbreak of silk hats in the smoking-room of the National Liberal
+      Club. At first I thought there must have been a funeral. Familiar faces
+      that one had grown to know under soft felt hats, under bowlers, under
+      liberal-minded wide brims, and above artistic ties and tweed jackets,
+      suddenly met one, staring with the stern gaze of self-consciousness, from
+      under silk hats of incredible glossiness. There was a disposition to wear
+      the hat much too forward, I thought, for a good Parliamentary style.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was much play with the hats all through; a tremendous competition to
+      get in first and put hats on coveted seats. A memory hangs about me of the
+      House in the early afternoon, an inhumane desolation inhabited almost
+      entirely by silk hats. The current use of cards to secure seats came
+      later. There were yards and yards of empty green benches with hats and
+      hats and hats distributed along them, resolute-looking top hats, lax top
+      hats with a kind of shadowy grin under them, sensible top bats brim
+      upward, and one scandalous incontinent that had rolled from the front
+      Opposition bench right to the middle of the floor. A headless hat is
+      surely the most soulless thing in the world, far worse even than a
+      skull....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, in a leisurely muddled manner we got to the Address; and I found
+      myself packed in a dense elbowing crowd to the right of the Speaker's
+      chair; while the attenuated Opposition, nearly leaderless after the
+      massacre, tilted its brim to its nose and sprawled at its ease amidst its
+      empty benches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a tremendous hullaboo about something, and I craned to see over
+      the shoulder of the man in front. &ldquo;Order, order, order!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's it about?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man in front of me was clearly no better informed, and then I gathered
+      from a slightly contemptuous Scotchman beside me that it was Chris
+      Robinson had walked between the honourable member in possession of the
+      house and the Speaker. I caught a glimpse of him blushingly whispering
+      about his misadventure to a colleague. He was just that same little figure
+      I had once assisted to entertain at Cambridge, but grey-haired now, and
+      still it seemed with the same knitted muffler he had discarded for a
+      reckless half-hour while he talked to us in Hatherleigh's rooms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It dawned upon me that I wasn't particularly wanted in the House, and that
+      I should get all I needed of the opening speeches next day from the TIMES.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I made my way out and was presently walking rather aimlessly through the
+      outer lobby.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I caught myself regarding the shadow that spread itself out before me,
+      multiplied itself in blue tints of various intensity, shuffled itself like
+      a pack of cards under the many lights, the square shoulders, the silk hat,
+      already worn with a parliamentary tilt backward; I found I was surveying
+      this statesmanlike outline with a weak approval. &ldquo;A MEMBER!&rdquo; I felt the
+      little cluster of people that were scattered about the lobby must be
+      saying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good God!&rdquo; I said in hot reaction, &ldquo;what am I doing here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was one of those moments infinitely trivial in themselves, that yet are
+      cardinal in a man's life. It came to me with extreme vividness that it
+      wasn't so much that I had got hold of something as that something had got
+      hold of me. I distinctly recall the rebound of my mind. Whatever happened
+      in this Parliament, I at least would attempt something. &ldquo;By God!&rdquo; I said,
+      &ldquo;I won't be overwhelmed. I am here to do something, and do something I
+      will!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But I felt that for the moment I could not remain in the House.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went out by myself with my thoughts into the night. It was a chilling
+      night, and rare spots of rain were falling. I glanced over my shoulder at
+      the lit windows of the Lords. I walked, I remember, westward, and
+      presently came to the Grosvenar Embankment and followed it, watching the
+      glittering black rush of the river and the dark, dimly lit barges round
+      which the water swirled. Across the river was the hunched sky-line of
+      Doulton's potteries, and a kiln flared redly. Dimly luminous trams were
+      gliding amidst a dotted line of lamps, and two little trains crawled into
+      Waterloo station. Mysterious black figures came by me and were suddenly
+      changed to the commonplace at the touch of the nearer lamps. It was a big
+      confused world, I felt, for a man to lay his hands upon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember I crossed Vauxhall Bridge and stood for a time watching the
+      huge black shapes in the darkness under the gas-works. A shoal of coal
+      barges lay indistinctly on the darkly shining mud and water below, and a
+      colossal crane was perpetually hauling up coal into mysterious blacknesses
+      above, and dropping the empty clutch back to the barges. Just one or two
+      minute black featureless figures of men toiled amidst these monster
+      shapes. They did not seem to be controlling them but only moving about
+      among them. These gas-works have a big chimney that belches a lurid flame
+      into the night, a livid shivering bluish flame, shot with strange crimson
+      streaks....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other side of Lambeth Bridge broad stairs go down to the lapping
+      water of the river; the lower steps are luminous under the lamps and one
+      treads unwarned into thick soft Thames mud. They seem to be purely
+      architectural steps, they lead nowhere, they have an air of absolute
+      indifference to mortal ends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those shapes and large inhuman places&mdash;for all of mankind that one
+      sees at night about Lambeth is minute and pitiful beside the industrial
+      monsters that snort and toil there&mdash;mix up inextricably with my
+      memories of my first days as a legislator. Black figures drift by me,
+      heavy vans clatter, a newspaper rough tears by on a motor bicycle, and
+      presently, on the Albert Embankment, every seat has its one or two
+      outcasts huddled together and slumbering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These things come, these things go,&rdquo; a whispering voice urged upon me,
+      &ldquo;as once those vast unmeaning Saurians whose bones encumber museums came
+      and went rejoicing noisily in fruitless lives.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fruitless lives!&mdash;was that the truth of it all?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later I stood within sight of the Houses of Parliament in front of the
+      colonnades of St Thomas's Hospital. I leant on the parapet close by a
+      lamp-stand of twisted dolphins&mdash;and I prayed!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember the swirl of the tide upon the water, and how a string of
+      barges presently came swinging and bumping round as high-water turned to
+      ebb. That sudden change of position and my brief perplexity at it, sticks
+      like a paper pin through the substance of my thoughts. It was then I was
+      moved to prayer. I prayed that night that life might not be in vain, that
+      in particular I might not live in vain. I prayed for strength and faith,
+      that the monstrous blundering forces in life might not overwhelm me, might
+      not beat me back to futility and a meaningless acquiescence in existent
+      things. I knew myself for the weakling I was, I knew that nevertheless it
+      was set for me to make such order as I could out of these disorders, and
+      my task cowed me, gave me at the thought of it a sense of yielding
+      feebleness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Break me, O God,&rdquo; I prayed at last, &ldquo;disgrace me, torment me, destroy me
+      as you will, but save me from self-complacency and little interests and
+      little successes and the life that passes like the shadow of a dream.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      BOOK THE THIRD: THE HEART OF POLITICS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have been planning and replanning, writing and rewriting, this next
+      portion of my book for many days. I perceive I must leave it raw edged and
+      ill joined. I have learnt something of the impossibility of History. For
+      all I have had to tell is the story of one man's convictions and aims and
+      how they reacted upon his life; and I find it too subtle and involved and
+      intricate for the doing. I find it taxes all my powers to convey even the
+      main forms and forces in that development. It is like looking through
+      moving media of changing hue and variable refraction at something vitally
+      unstable. Broad theories and generalisations are mingled with personal
+      influences, with prevalent prejudices; and not only coloured but altered
+      by phases of hopefulness and moods of depression. The web is made up of
+      the most diverse elements, beyond treatment multitudinous.... For a week
+      or so I desisted altogether, and walked over the mountains and returned to
+      sit through the warm soft mornings among the shaded rocks above this
+      little perched-up house of ours, discussing my difficulties with Isabel
+      and I think on the whole complicating them further in the effort to
+      simplify them to manageable and stateable elements.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let me, nevertheless, attempt a rough preliminary analysis of this
+      confused process. A main strand is quite easily traceable. This main
+      strand is the story of my obvious life, my life as it must have looked to
+      most of my acquaintances. It presents you with a young couple, bright,
+      hopeful, and energetic, starting out under Altiora's auspices to make a
+      career. You figure us well dressed and active, running about in
+      motor-cars, visiting in great people's houses, dining amidst brilliant
+      companies, going to the theatre, meeting in the lobby. Margaret wore
+      hundreds of beautiful dresses. We must have had an air of succeeding
+      meritoriously during that time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We did very continually and faithfully serve our joint career. I thought
+      about it a great deal, and did and refrained from doing ten thousand
+      things for the sake of it. I kept up a solicitude for it, as it were by
+      inertia, long after things had happened and changes occurred in me that
+      rendered its completion impossible. Under certain very artless pretences,
+      we wanted steadfastly to make a handsome position in the world, achieve
+      respect, SUCCEED. Enormous unseen changes had been in progress for years
+      in my mind and the realities of my life, before our general circle could
+      have had any inkling of their existence, or suspected the appearances of
+      our life. Then suddenly our proceedings began to be deflected, our outward
+      unanimity visibly strained and marred by the insurgence of these so
+      long-hidden developments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That career had its own hidden side, of course; but when I write of these
+      unseen factors I do not mean that but something altogether broader. I do
+      not mean the everyday pettinesses which gave the cynical observer scope
+      and told of a narrower, baser aspect of the fair but limited ambitions of
+      my ostensible self. This &ldquo;sub-careerist&rdquo; element noted little things that
+      affected the career, made me suspicious of the rivalry of so-and-so,
+      propitiatory to so-and-so, whom, as a matter of fact, I didn't respect or
+      feel in the least sympathetic towards; guarded with that man, who for all
+      his charm and interest wasn't helpful, and a little touchy at the
+      appearance of neglect from that. No, I mean something greater and not
+      something smaller when I write of a hidden life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the ostensible self who glowed under the approbation of Altiora Bailey,
+      and was envied and discussed, praised and depreciated, in the House and in
+      smoking-room gossip, you really have as much of a man as usually figures
+      in a novel or an obituary notice. But I am tremendously impressed now in
+      the retrospect by the realisation of how little that frontage represented
+      me, and just how little such frontages do represent the complexities of
+      the intelligent contemporary. Behind it, yet struggling to disorganise and
+      alter it, altogether, was a far more essential reality, a self less
+      personal, less individualised, and broader in its references. Its aims
+      were never simply to get on; it had an altogether different system of
+      demands and satisfactions. It was critical, curious, more than a little
+      unfeeling&mdash;and relentlessly illuminating.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is just the existence and development of this more generalised
+      self-behind-the-frontage that is making modern life so much more subtle
+      and intricate to render, and so much more hopeful in its relations to the
+      perplexities of the universe. I see this mental and spiritual hinterland
+      vary enormously in the people about me, from a type which seems to keep,
+      as people say, all its goods in the window, to others who, like myself,
+      come to regard the ostensible existence more and more as a mere
+      experimental feeder and agent for that greater personality behind. And
+      this back-self has its history of phases, its crises and happy accidents
+      and irrevocable conclusions, more or less distinct from the adventures and
+      achievements of the ostensible self. It meets persons and phrases, it
+      assimilates the spirit of a book, it is startled into new realisations by
+      some accident that seems altogether irrelevant to the general tenor of
+      one's life. Its increasing independence of the ostensible career makes it
+      the organ of corrective criticism; it accumulates disturbing energy. Then
+      it breaks our overt promises and repudiates our pledges, coming down at
+      last like an overbearing mentor upon the small engagements of the pupil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the life of the individual it takes the role that the growth of
+      philosophy, science, and creative literature may play in the development
+      of mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is curious to recall how Britten helped shatter that obvious, lucidly
+      explicable presentation of myself upon which I had embarked with Margaret.
+      He returned to revive a memory of adolescent dreams and a habit of
+      adolescent frankness; he reached through my shallow frontage as no one
+      else seemed capable of doing, and dragged that back-self into relation
+      with it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember very distinctly a dinner and a subsequent walk with him which
+      presents itself now as altogether typical of the quality of his influence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had come upon him one day while lunching with Somers and Sutton at the
+      Playwrights' Club, and had asked him to dinner on the spur of the moment.
+      He was oddly the same curly-headed, red-faced ventriloquist, and oddly
+      different, rather seedy as well as untidy, and at first a little inclined
+      to make comparisons with my sleek successfulness. But that disposition
+      presently evaporated, and his talk was good and fresh and provocative. And
+      something that had long been straining at its checks in my mind flapped
+      over, and he and I found ourselves of one accord.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Altiora wasn't at this dinner. When she came matters were apt to become
+      confusedly strenuous. There was always a slight and ineffectual struggle
+      at the end on the part of Margaret to anticipate Altiora's overpowering
+      tendency to a rally and the establishment of some entirely unjustifiable
+      conclusion by a COUP-DE-MAIN. When, however, Altiora was absent, the
+      quieter influence of the Cramptons prevailed; temperance and information
+      for its own sake prevailed excessively over dinner and the play of
+      thought.... Good Lord! what bores the Cramptons were! I wonder I endured
+      them as I did. They had all of them the trick of lying in wait
+      conversationally; they had no sense of the self-exposures, the gallant
+      experiments in statement that are necessary for good conversation. They
+      would watch one talking with an expression exactly like peeping through
+      bushes. Then they would, as it were, dash out, dissent succinctly,
+      contradict some secondary fact, and back to cover. They gave one twilight
+      nerves. Their wives were easier but still difficult at a stretch; they
+      talked a good deal about children and servants, but with an air caught
+      from Altiora of making observations upon sociological types. Lewis
+      gossiped about the House in an entirely finite manner. He never raised a
+      discussion; nobody ever raised a discussion. He would ask what we thought
+      of Evesham's question that afternoon, and Edward would say it was good,
+      and Mrs. Willie, who had been behind the grille, would think it was very
+      good, and then Willie, parting the branches, would say rather conclusively
+      that he didn't think it was very much good, and I would deny hearing the
+      question in order to evade a profitless statement of views in that vacuum,
+      and then we would cast about in our minds for some other topic of equal
+      interest....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On this occasion Altiora was absent, and to qualify our Young Liberal
+      bleakness we had Mrs. Millingham, with her white hair and her fresh mind
+      and complexion, and Esmeer. Willie Crampton was with us, but not his wife,
+      who was having her third baby on principle; his brother Edward was
+      present, and the Lewises, and of course the Bunting Harblows. There was
+      also some other lady. I remember her as pale blue, but for the life of me
+      I cannot remember her name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Quite early there was a little breeze between Edward Crampton and Esmeer,
+      who had ventured an opinion about the partition of Poland. Edward was at
+      work then upon the seventh volume of his monumental Life of Kosciusko, and
+      a little impatient with views perhaps not altogether false but betraying a
+      lamentable ignorance of accessible literature. At any rate, his correction
+      of Esmeer was magisterial. After that there was a distinct and not
+      altogether delightful pause, and then some one, it may have been the
+      pale-blue lady, asked Mrs. Lewis whether her aunt Lady Carmixter had
+      returned from her rest-and-sun-cure in Italy. That led to a rather
+      anxiously sustained talk about regimen, and Willie told us how he had
+      profited by the no-breakfast system. It had increased his power of work
+      enormously. He could get through ten hours a day now without
+      inconvenience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you do?&rdquo; said Esmeer abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! no end of work. There's all the estate and looking after things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But publicly?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I asked three questions yesterday. And for one of them I had to consult
+      nine books!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We were drifting, I could see, towards Doctor Haig's system of dietary,
+      and whether the exclusion or inclusion of fish and chicken were most
+      conducive to high efficiency, when Britten, who had refused lemonade and
+      claret and demanded Burgundy, broke out, and was discovered to be
+      demanding in his throat just what we Young Liberals thought we were up to?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want,&rdquo; said Britten, repeating his challenge a little louder, &ldquo;to hear
+      just exactly what you think you are doing in Parliament?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lewis laughed nervously, and thought we were &ldquo;Seeking the Good of the
+      Community.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;HOW?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beneficient Legislation,&rdquo; said Lewis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beneficient in what direction?&rdquo; insisted Britten. &ldquo;I want to know where
+      you think you are going.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amelioration of Social Conditions,&rdquo; said Lewis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's only a phrase!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You wouldn't have me sketch bills at dinner?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd like you to indicate directions,&rdquo; said Britten, and waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Upward and On,&rdquo; said Lewis with conscious neatness, and turned to ask
+      Mrs. Bunting Harblow about her little boy's French.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time talk frothed over Britten's head, but the natural mischief in
+      Mrs. Millingham had been stirred, and she was presently echoing his demand
+      in lisping, quasi-confidential undertones. &ldquo;What ARE we Liberals doing?&rdquo;
+       Then Esmeer fell in with the revolutionaries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To begin with, I was a little shocked by this clamour for fundamentals&mdash;and
+      a little disconcerted. I had the experience that I suppose comes to every
+      one at times of discovering oneself together with two different sets of
+      people with whom one has maintained two different sets of attitudes. It
+      had always been, I perceived, an instinctive suppression in our circle
+      that we shouldn't be more than vague about our political ideals. It had
+      almost become part of my morality to respect this convention. It was
+      understood we were all working hard, and keeping ourselves fit,
+      tremendously fit, under Altiora's inspiration, Pro Bono Publico. Bunting
+      Harblow had his under-secretaryship, and Lewis was on the verge of the
+      Cabinet, and these things we considered to be in the nature of
+      confirmations.... It added to the discomfort of the situation that these
+      plunging enquiries were being made in the presence of our wives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rebel section of our party forced the talk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Edward Crampton was presently declaring&mdash;I forget in what relation:
+      &ldquo;The country is with us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      My long-controlled hatred of the Cramptons' stereotyped phrases about the
+      Country and the House got the better of me. I showed my cloven hoof to my
+      friends for the first time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We don't respect the Country as we used to do,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;We haven't the
+      same belief we used to have in the will of the people. It's no good,
+      Crampton, trying to keep that up. We Liberals know as a matter of fact&mdash;nowadays
+      every one knows&mdash;that the monster that brought us into power has,
+      among other deficiencies, no head. We've got to give it one&mdash;if
+      possible with brains and a will. That lies in the future. For the present
+      if the country is with us, it means merely that we happen to have hold of
+      its tether.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lewis was shocked. A &ldquo;mandate&rdquo; from the Country was sacred to his system
+      of pretences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Britten wasn't subdued by his first rebuff; presently he was at us again.
+      There were several attempts to check his outbreak of interrogation; I
+      remember the Cramptons asked questions about the welfare of various
+      cousins of Lewis who were unknown to the rest of us, and Margaret tried to
+      engage Britten in a sympathetic discussion of the Arts and Crafts
+      exhibition. But Britten and Esmeer were persistent, Mrs. Millingham was
+      mischievous, and in the end our rising hopes of Young Liberalism took to
+      their thickets for good, while we talked all over them of the prevalent
+      vacuity of political intentions. Margaret was perplexed by me. It is only
+      now I perceive just how perplexing I must have been. &ldquo;Of course, she said
+      with that faint stress of apprehension in her eyes, one must have aims.&rdquo;
+       And, &ldquo;it isn't always easy to put everything into phrases.&rdquo; &ldquo;Don't be
+      long,&rdquo; said Mrs. Edward Crampton to her husband as the wives trooped out.
+      And afterwards when we went upstairs I had an indefinable persuasion that
+      the ladies had been criticising Britten's share in our talk in an
+      altogether unfavourable spirit. Mrs. Edward evidently thought him
+      aggressive and impertinent, and Margaret with a quiet firmness that
+      brooked no resistance, took him at once into a corner and showed him
+      Italian photographs by Coburn. We dispersed early.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I walked with Britten along the Chelsea back streets towards Battersea
+      Bridge&mdash;he lodged on the south side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Millingham's a dear,&rdquo; he began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's a dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I liked her demand for a hansom because a four-wheeler was too safe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She was worked up,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;She's a woman of faultless character, but
+      her instincts, as Altiora would say, are anarchistic&mdash;when she gives
+      them a chance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So she takes it out in hansom cabs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hansom cabs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's wise,&rdquo; said Britten....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope, Remington,&rdquo; he went on after a pause, &ldquo;I didn't rag your other
+      guests too much. I've a sort of feeling at moments&mdash;Remington, those
+      chaps are so infernally not&mdash;not bloody. It's part of a man's duty
+      sometimes at least to eat red beef and get drunk. How is he to understand
+      government if he doesn't? It scares me to think of your lot&mdash;by a
+      sort of misapprehension&mdash;being in power. A kind of neuralgia in the
+      head, by way of government. I don't understand where YOU come in. Those
+      others&mdash;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&mdash;they
+      want to take hold of life and make nothing of it. They want to cut out all
+      the stimulants. Just as though life was anything else but a reaction to
+      stimulation!&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to talk of his own life. He had had ill-fortune through most of
+      it. He was poor and unsuccessful, and a girl he had been very fond of had
+      been attacked and killed by a horse in a field in a very horrible manner.
+      These things had wounded and tortured him, but they hadn't broken him.
+      They had, it seemed to me, made a kind of crippled and ugly demigod of
+      him. He was, I began to perceive, so much better than I had any right to
+      expect. At first I had been rather struck by his unkempt look, and it made
+      my reaction all the stronger. There was about him something, a kind of raw
+      and bleeding faith in the deep things of life, that stirred me profoundly
+      as he showed it. My set of people had irritated him and disappointed him.
+      I discovered at his touch how they irritated him. He reproached me boldly.
+      He made me feel ashamed of my easy acquiescences as I walked in my sleek
+      tall neatness beside his rather old coat, his rather battered hat, his
+      sturdier shorter shape, and listened to his denunciations of our
+      self-satisfied New Liberalism and Progressivism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It has the same relation to progress&mdash;the reality of progress&mdash;that
+      the things they paint on door panels in the suburbs have to art and
+      beauty. There's a sort of filiation.... Your Altiora's just the political
+      equivalent of the ladies who sell traced cloth for embroidery; she's a
+      dealer in Refined Social Reform for the Parlour. The real progress,
+      Remington, is a graver thing and a painfuller thing and a slower thing
+      altogether. Look! THAT&rdquo;&mdash;and he pointed to where under a boarding in
+      the light of a gas lamp a dingy prostitute stood lurking&mdash;&ldquo;was in
+      Babylon and Nineveh. Your little lot make believe there won't be anything
+      of the sort after this Parliament! They're going to vanish at a few top
+      notes from Altiora Bailey! Remington!&mdash;it's foolery. It's prigs at
+      play. It's make-believe, make-believe! Your people there haven't got hold
+      of things, aren't beginning to get hold of things, don't know anything of
+      life at all, shirk life, avoid life, get in little bright clean rooms and
+      talk big over your bumpers of lemonade while the Night goes by outside&mdash;untouched.
+      Those Crampton fools slink by all this,&rdquo;&mdash;he waved at the woman again&mdash;&ldquo;pretend
+      it doesn't exist, or is going to be banished root and branch by an Act to
+      keep children in the wet outside public-houses. Do you think they really
+      care, Remington? I don't. It's make-believe. What they want to do, what
+      Lewis wants to do, what Mrs. Bunting Harblow wants her husband to do, is
+      to sit and feel very grave and necessary and respected on the Government
+      benches. They think of putting their feet out like statesmen, and tilting
+      shiny hats with becoming brims down over their successful noses.
+      Presentation portrait to a club at fifty. That's their Reality. That's
+      their scope. They don't, it's manifest, WANT to think beyond that. The
+      things there ARE, Remington, they'll never face! the wonder and the depth
+      of life,&mdash;lust, and the night-sky,&mdash;pain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the good intention,&rdquo; I pleaded, &ldquo;the Good Will!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sentimentality,&rdquo; said Britten. &ldquo;No Good Will is anything but dishonesty
+      unless it frets and burns and hurts and destroys a man. That lot of yours
+      have nothing but a good will to think they have good will. Do you think
+      they lie awake of nights searching their hearts as we do? Lewis? Crampton?
+      Or those neat, admiring, satisfied little wives? See how they shrank from
+      the probe!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We all,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;shrink from the probe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God help us!&rdquo; said Britten....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are but vermin at the best, Remington,&rdquo; he broke out, &ldquo;and the
+      greatest saint only a worm that has lifted its head for a moment from the
+      dust. We are damned, we are meant to be damned, coral animalculae building
+      upward, upward in a sea of damnation. But of all the damned things that
+      ever were damned, your damned shirking, temperate, sham-efficient,
+      self-satisfied, respectable, make-believe, Fabian-spirited Young Liberal
+      is the utterly damnedest.&rdquo; He paused for a moment, and resumed in an
+      entirely different note: &ldquo;Which is why I was so surprised, Remington, to
+      find YOU in this set!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're just the old plunger you used to be, Britten,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;You're
+      going too far with all your might for the sake of the damns. Like a donkey
+      that drags its cart up a bank to get thistles. There's depths in
+      Liberalism&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We were talking about Liberals.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Liberty!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Liberty! What do YOOR little lot know of liberty?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What does any little lot know of liberty?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It waits outside, too big for our understanding. Like the night and the
+      stars. And lust, Remington! lust and bitterness! Don't I know them? with
+      all the sweetness and hope of life bitten and trampled, the dear eyes and
+      the brain that loved and understood&mdash;and my poor mumble of a life
+      going on! I'm within sight of being a drunkard, Remington! I'm a failure
+      by most standards! Life has cut me to the bone. But I'm not afraid of it
+      any more. I've paid something of the price, I've seen something of the
+      meaning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He flew off at a tangent. &ldquo;I'd rather die in Delirium Tremens,&rdquo; he cried,
+      &ldquo;than be a Crampton or a Lewis....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Make-believe. Make-believe.&rdquo; The phrase and Britten's squat gestures
+      haunted me as I walked homeward alone. I went to my room and stood before
+      my desk and surveyed papers and files and Margaret's admirable equipment
+      of me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I perceived in the lurid light of Britten's suggestions that so it was Mr.
+      George Alexander would have mounted a statesman's private room....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was never at any stage a loyal party man. I doubt if party will ever
+      again be the force it was during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
+      Men are becoming increasingly constructive and selective, less patient
+      under tradition and the bondage of initial circumstances. As education
+      becomes more universal and liberating, men will sort themselves more and
+      more by their intellectual temperaments and less and less by their
+      accidental associations. The past will rule them less; the future more. It
+      is not simply party but school and college and county and country that
+      lose their glamour. One does not hear nearly as much as our forefathers
+      did of the &ldquo;old Harrovian,&rdquo; &ldquo;old Arvonian,&rdquo; &ldquo;old Etonian&rdquo; claim to this or
+      that unfair advantage or unearnt sympathy. Even the Scotch and the
+      Devonians weaken a little in their clannishness. A widening sense of fair
+      play destroys such things. They follow freemasonry down&mdash;freemasonry
+      of which one is chiefly reminded nowadays in England by propitiatory
+      symbols outside shady public-houses....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is, of course, a type of man which clings very obstinately to party
+      ties. These are the men with strong reproductive imaginations and no
+      imaginative initiative, such men as Cladingbowl, for example, or Dayton.
+      They are the scholars-at-large in life. For them the fact that the party
+      system has been essential in the history of England for two hundred years
+      gives it an overwhelming glamour. They have read histories and memoirs,
+      they see the great grey pile of Westminster not so much for what it is as
+      for what it was, rich with dramatic memories, populous with glorious
+      ghosts, phrasing itself inevitably in anecdotes and quotations. It seems
+      almost scandalous that new things should continue to happen, swamping with
+      strange qualities the savour of these old associations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That Mr. Ramsay Macdonald should walk through Westminster Hall, thrust
+      himself, it may be, through the very piece of space that once held Charles
+      the Martyr pleading for his life, seems horrible profanation to Dayton, a
+      last posthumous outrage; and he would, I think, like to have the front
+      benches left empty now for ever, or at most adorned with laureated ivory
+      tablets: &ldquo;Here Dizzy sat,&rdquo; and &ldquo;On this Spot William Ewart Gladstone made
+      his First Budget Speech.&rdquo; Failing this, he demands, if only as signs of
+      modesty and respect on the part of the survivors, meticulous imitation.
+      &ldquo;Mr. G.,&rdquo; he murmurs, &ldquo;would not have done that,&rdquo; and laments a vanished
+      subtlety even while Mr. Evesham is speaking. He is always gloomily
+      disposed to lapse into wonderings about what things are coming to,
+      wonderings that have no grain of curiosity. His conception of perfect
+      conduct is industrious persistence along the worn-down, well-marked
+      grooves of the great recorded days. So infinitely more important to him is
+      the documented, respected thing than the elusive present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cladingbowl and Dayton do not shine in the House, though Cladingbowl is a
+      sound man on a committee, and Dayton keeps the OLD COUNTRY GAZETTE, the
+      most gentlemanly paper in London. They prevail, however, in their clubs at
+      lunch time. There, with the pleasant consciousness of a morning's work
+      free from either zeal or shirking, they mingle with permanent officials,
+      prominent lawyers, even a few of the soberer type of business men, and
+      relax their minds in the discussion of the morning paper, of the
+      architecture of the West End, and of the latest public appointments, of
+      golf, of holiday resorts, of the last judicial witticisms and forensic
+      &ldquo;crushers.&rdquo; The New Year and Birthday honours lists are always very sagely
+      and exhaustively considered, and anecdotes are popular and keenly judged.
+      They do not talk of the things that are really active in their minds, but
+      in the formal and habitual manner they suppose to be proper to intelligent
+      but still honourable men. Socialism, individual money matters, and
+      religion are forbidden topics, and sex and women only in so far as they
+      appear in the law courts. It is to me the strangest of conventions, this
+      assumption of unreal loyalties and traditional respects, this repudiation
+      and concealment of passionate interests. It is like wearing gloves in
+      summer fields, or bathing in a gown, or falling in love with the heroine
+      of a novel, or writing under a pseudonym, or becoming a masked Tuareg....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not, I think, that men of my species are insensitive to the great
+      past that is embodied in Westminster and its traditions; we are not so
+      much wanting in the historical sense as alive to the greatness of our
+      present opportunities and the still vaster future that is possible to us.
+      London is the most interesting, beautiful, and wonderful city in the world
+      to me, delicate in her incidental and multitudinous littleness, and
+      stupendous in her pregnant totality; I cannot bring myself to use her as a
+      museum or an old bookshop. When I think of Whitehall that little affair on
+      the scaffold outside the Banqueting Hall seems trivial and remote in
+      comparison with the possibilities that offer themselves to my imagination
+      within the great grey Government buildings close at hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It gives me a qualm of nostalgia even to name those places now. I think of
+      St. Stephen's tower streaming upwards into the misty London night and the
+      great wet quadrangle of New Palace Yard, from which the hansom cabs of my
+      first experiences were ousted more and more by taxicabs as the second
+      Parliament of King Edward the Seventh aged; I think of the Admiralty and
+      War office with their tall Marconi masts sending out invisible threads of
+      direction to the armies in the camps, to great fleets about the world. The
+      crowded, darkly shining river goes flooding through my memory once again,
+      on to those narrow seas that part us from our rival nations; I see
+      quadrangles and corridors of spacious grey-toned offices in which
+      undistinguished little men and little files of papers link us to islands
+      in the tropics, to frozen wildernesses gashed for gold, to vast
+      temple-studded plains, to forest worlds and mountain worlds, to ports and
+      fortresses and lighthouses and watch-towers and grazing lands and corn
+      lands all about the globe. Once more I traverse Victoria Street, grimy and
+      dark, where the Agents of the Empire jostle one another, pass the big
+      embassies in the West End with their flags and scutcheons, follow the
+      broad avenue that leads to Buckingham Palace, witness the coming and going
+      of troops and officials and guests along it from every land on earth....
+      Interwoven in the texture of it all, mocking, perplexing, stimulating
+      beyond measure, is the gleaming consciousness, the challenging knowledge:
+      &ldquo;You and your kind might still, if you could but grasp it here, mould all
+      the destiny of Man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My first three years in Parliament were years of active discontent. The
+      little group of younger Liberals to which I belonged was very ignorant of
+      the traditions and qualities of our older leaders, and quite out of touch
+      with the mass of the party. For a time Parliament was enormously taken up
+      with moribund issues and old quarrels. The early Educational legislation
+      was sectarian and unenterprising, and the Licensing Bill went little
+      further than the attempted rectification of a Conservative mistake. I was
+      altogether for the nationalisation of the public-houses, and of this end
+      the Bill gave no intimations. It was just beer-baiting. I was recalcitrant
+      almost from the beginning, and spoke against the Government so early as
+      the second reading of the first Education Bill, the one the Lords rejected
+      in 1906. I went a little beyond my intention in the heat of speaking,&mdash;it
+      is a way with inexperienced man. I called the Bill timid, narrow, a mere
+      sop to the jealousies of sects and little-minded people. I contrasted its
+      aim and methods with the manifest needs of the time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am not a particularly good speaker; after the manner of a writer I worry
+      to find my meaning too much; but this was one of my successes. I spoke
+      after dinner and to a fairly full House, for people were already a little
+      curious about me because of my writings. Several of the Conservative
+      leaders were present and stayed, and Mr. Evesham, I remember, came
+      ostentatiously to hear me, with that engaging friendliness of his, and
+      gave me at the first chance an approving &ldquo;Hear, Hear!&rdquo; I can still recall
+      quite distinctly my two futile attempts to catch the Speaker's eye before
+      I was able to begin, the nervous quiver of my rather too prepared opening,
+      the effect of hearing my own voice and my subconscious wonder as to what I
+      could possibly be talking about, the realisation that I was getting on
+      fairly well, the immense satisfaction afterwards of having on the whole
+      brought it off, and the absurd gratitude I felt for that encouraging
+      cheer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Addressing the House of Commons is like no other public speaking in the
+      world. Its semi-colloquial methods give it an air of being easy, but its
+      shifting audience, the comings and goings and hesitations of members
+      behind the chair&mdash;not mere audience units, but men who matter&mdash;the
+      desolating emptiness that spreads itself round the man who fails to
+      interest, the little compact, disciplined crowd in the strangers' gallery,
+      the light, elusive, flickering movements high up behind the grill, the
+      wigged, attentive, weary Speaker, the table and the mace and the
+      chapel-like Gothic background with its sombre shadows, conspire together,
+      produce a confused, uncertain feeling in me, as though I was walking upon
+      a pavement full of trap-doors and patches of uncovered morass. A
+      misplaced, well-meant &ldquo;Hear, Hear!&rdquo; is apt to be extraordinarily
+      disconcerting, and under no other circumstances have I had to speak with
+      quite the same sideways twist that the arrangement of the House imposes.
+      One does not recognise one's own voice threading out into the stirring
+      brown. Unless I was excited or speaking to the mind of some particular
+      person in the house, I was apt to lose my feeling of an auditor. I had no
+      sense of whither my sentences were going, such as one has with a public
+      meeting well under one's eye. And to lose one's sense of an auditor is for
+      a man of my temperament to lose one's sense of the immediate, and to
+      become prolix and vague with qualifications.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My discontents with the Liberal party and my mental exploration of the
+      quality of party generally is curiously mixed up with certain impressions
+      of things and people in the National Liberal Club. The National Liberal
+      Club is Liberalism made visible in the flesh&mdash;and Doultonware. It is
+      an extraordinary big club done in a bold, wholesale, shiny, marbled style,
+      richly furnished with numerous paintings, steel engravings, busts, and
+      full-length statues of the late Mr. Gladstone; and its spacious
+      dining-rooms, its long, hazy, crowded smoking-room with innumerable little
+      tables and groups of men in armchairs, its magazine room and library
+      upstairs, have just that undistinguished and unconcentrated diversity
+      which is for me the Liberal note. The pensive member sits and hears
+      perplexing dialects and even fragments of foreign speech, and among the
+      clustering masses of less insistent whites his roving eye catches profiles
+      and complexions that send his mind afield to Calcutta or Rangoon or the
+      West Indies or Sierra Leone or the Cape....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was not infrequently that pensive member. I used to go to the Club to
+      doubt about Liberalism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About two o'clock in the day the great smoking-room is crowded with
+      countless little groups. They sit about small round tables, or in circles
+      of chairs, and the haze of tobacco seems to prolong the great narrow
+      place, with its pillars and bays, to infinity. Some of the groups are big,
+      as many as a dozen men talk in loud tones; some are duologues, and there
+      is always a sprinkling of lonely, dissociated men. At first one gets an
+      impression of men going from group to group and as it were linking them,
+      but as one watches closely one finds that these men just visit three or
+      four groups at the outside, and know nothing of the others. One begins to
+      perceive more and more distinctly that one is dealing with a sort of human
+      mosaic; that each patch in that great place is of a different quality and
+      colour from the next and never to be mixed with it. Most clubs have a
+      common link, a lowest common denominator in the Club Bore, who spares no
+      one, but even the National Liberal bores are specialised and sectional. As
+      one looks round one sees here a clump of men from the North Country or the
+      Potteries, here an island of South London politicians, here a couple of
+      young Jews ascendant from Whitechapel, here a circle of journalists and
+      writers, here a group of Irish politicians, here two East Indians, here a
+      priest or so, here a clump of old-fashioned Protestants, here a little
+      knot of eminent Rationalists indulging in a blasphemous story SOTTO VOCE.
+      Next them are a group of anglicised Germans and highly specialised
+      chess-players, and then two of the oddest-looking persons&mdash;bulging
+      with documents and intent upon extraordinary business transactions over
+      long cigars....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I would listen to a stormy sea of babblement, and try to extract some
+      constructive intimations. Every now and then I got a whiff of politics. It
+      was clear they were against the Lords&mdash;against plutocrats&mdash;against
+      Cossington's newspapers&mdash;against the brewers.... It was tremendously
+      clear what they were against. The trouble was to find out what on earth
+      they were for!...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I sat and thought, the streaked and mottled pillars and wall, the
+      various views, aspects, and portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, the
+      partitions of polished mahogany, the yellow-vested waiters, would dissolve
+      and vanish, and I would have a vision of this sample of miscellaneous men
+      of limited, diverse interests and a universal littleness of imagination
+      enlarged, unlimited, no longer a sample but a community, spreading,
+      stretching out to infinity&mdash;all in little groups and duologues and
+      circles, all with their special and narrow concerns, all with their backs
+      to most of the others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What but a common antagonism would ever keep these multitudes together? I
+      understood why modern electioneering is more than half of it denunciation.
+      Let us condemn, if possible, let us obstruct and deprive, but not let us
+      do. There is no real appeal to the commonplace mind in &ldquo;Let us do.&rdquo; That
+      calls for the creative imagination, and few have been accustomed to
+      respond to that call. The other merely needs jealousy and bate, of which
+      there are great and easily accessible reservoirs in every human heart....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember that vision of endless, narrow, jealous individuality very
+      vividly. A seething limitlessness it became at last, like a waste place
+      covered by crawling locusts that men sweep up by the sackload and drown by
+      the million in ditches....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Grotesquely against it came the lean features, the sidelong shy movements
+      of Edward Crampton, seated in a circle of talkers close at hand. I had a
+      whiff of his strained, unmusical voice, and behold! he was saying
+      something about the &ldquo;Will of the People....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The immense and wonderful disconnectednesses of human life! I forgot the
+      smoke and jabber of the club altogether; I became a lonely spirit flung
+      aloft by some queer accident, a stone upon a ledge in some high and rocky
+      wilderness, and below as far as the eye could reach stretched the swarming
+      infinitesimals of humanity, like grass upon the field, like pebbles upon
+      unbounded beaches. Was there ever to be in human life more than that
+      endless struggling individualism? Was there indeed some giantry, some
+      immense valiant synthesis, still to come&mdash;or present it might be and
+      still unseen by me, or was this the beginning and withal the last phase of
+      mankind?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I glimpsed for a while the stupendous impudence of our ambitions, the
+      tremendous enterprise to which the modern statesman is implicitly
+      addressed. I was as it were one of a little swarm of would-be reef
+      builders looking back at the teeming slime upon the ocean floor. All the
+      history of mankind, all the history of life, has been and will be the
+      story of something struggling out of the indiscriminated abyss, struggling
+      to exist and prevail over and comprehend individual lives&mdash;an effort
+      of insidious attraction, an idea of invincible appeal. That something
+      greater than ourselves, which does not so much exist as seek existence,
+      palpitating between being and not-being, how marvellous it is! It has worn
+      the form and visage of ten thousand different gods, sought a shape for
+      itself in stone and ivory and music and wonderful words, spoken more and
+      more clearly of a mystery of love, a mystery of unity, dabbling meanwhile
+      in blood and cruelty beyond the common impulses of men. It is something
+      that comes and goes, like a light that shines and is withdrawn, withdrawn
+      so completely that one doubts if it has ever been....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I would mark with a curious interest the stray country member of the club
+      up in town for a night or so. My mind would be busy with speculations
+      about him, about his home, his family, his reading, his horizons, his
+      innumerable fellows who didn't belong and never came up. I would fill in
+      the outline of him with memories of my uncle and his Staffordshire
+      neighbours. He was perhaps Alderman This or Councillor That down there, a
+      great man in his ward, J. P. within seven miles of the boundary of the
+      borough, and a God in his home. Here he was nobody, and very shy, and
+      either a little too arrogant or a little too meek towards our very
+      democratic mannered but still livened waiters. Was he perhaps the backbone
+      of England? He over-ate himself lest he should appear mean, went through
+      our Special Dinner conscientiously, drank, unless he was teetotal, of
+      unfamiliar wines, and did his best, in spite of the rules, to tip.
+      Afterwards, in a state of flushed repletion, he would have old brandy,
+      black coffee, and a banded cigar, or in the name of temperance omit the
+      brandy and have rather more coffee, in the smoking-room. I would sit and
+      watch that stiff dignity of self-indulgence, and wonder, wonder....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An infernal clairvoyance would come to me. I would have visions of him in
+      relation to his wife, checking always, sometimes bullying, sometimes being
+      ostentatiously &ldquo;kind&rdquo;; I would see him glance furtively at his domestic
+      servants upon his staircase, or stiffen his upper lip against the
+      reluctant, protesting business employee. We imaginative people are base
+      enough, heaven knows, but it is only in rare moods of bitter penetration
+      that we pierce down to the baser lusts, the viler shames, the everlasting
+      lying and muddle-headed self-justification of the dull.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I would turn my eyes down the crowded room and see others of him and
+      others. What did he think he was up to? Did he for a moment realise that
+      his presence under that ceramic glory of a ceiling with me meant, if it
+      had any rational meaning at all, that we were jointly doing something with
+      the nation and the empire and mankind?... How on earth could any one get
+      hold of him, make any noble use of him? He didn't read beyond his
+      newspaper. He never thought, but only followed imaginings in his heart. He
+      never discussed. At the first hint of discussion his temper gave way. He
+      was, I knew, a deep, thinly-covered tank of resentments and quite
+      irrational moral rages. Yet withal I would have to resist an impulse to go
+      over to him and nudge him and say to him, &ldquo;Look here! What indeed do you
+      think we are doing with the nation and the empire and mankind? You know&mdash;MANKIND!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I wonder what reply I should have got.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far as any average could be struck and so far as any backbone could be
+      located, it seemed to me that this silent, shy, replete, sub-angry,
+      middle-class sentimentalist was in his endless species and varieties and
+      dialects the backbone of our party. So far as I could be considered as
+      representing anything in the House, I pretended to sit for the elements of
+      HIM....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time I turned towards the Socialists. They at least had an air of
+      coherent intentions. At that time Socialism had come into politics again
+      after a period of depression and obscurity, with a tremendous ECLAT. There
+      was visibly a following of Socialist members to Chris Robinson;
+      mysteriously uncommunicative gentlemen in soft felt hats and short coats
+      and square-toed boots who replied to casual advances a little surprisingly
+      in rich North Country dialects. Members became aware of a &ldquo;seagreen
+      incorruptible,&rdquo; as Colonel Marlow put it to me, speaking on the Address, a
+      slender twisted figure supporting itself on a stick and speaking with a
+      fire that was altogether revolutionary. This was Philip Snowden, the
+      member for Blackburn. They had come in nearly forty strong altogether, and
+      with an air of presently meaning to come in much stronger. They were only
+      one aspect of what seemed at that time a big national movement. Socialist
+      societies, we gathered, were springing up all over the country, and every
+      one was inquiring about Socialism and discussing Socialism. It had taken
+      the Universities with particular force, and any youngster with the
+      slightest intellectual pretension was either actively for or brilliantly
+      against. For a time our Young Liberal group was ostentatiously
+      sympathetic....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I think of the Socialists there comes a vivid memory of certain
+      evening gatherings at our house....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These gatherings had been organised by Margaret as the outcome of a
+      discussion at the Baileys'. Altiora had been very emphatic and
+      uncharitable upon the futility of the Socialist movement. It seemed that
+      even the leaders fought shy of dinner-parties.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They never meet each other,&rdquo; said Altiora, &ldquo;much less people on the other
+      side. How can they begin to understand politics until they do that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Most of them have totally unpresentable wives,&rdquo; said Altiora, &ldquo;totally!&rdquo;
+       and quoted instances, &ldquo;and they WILL bring them. Or they won't come! Some
+      of the poor creatures have scarcely learnt their table manners. They just
+      make holes in the talk....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought there was a great deal of truth beneath Altiora's outburst. The
+      presentation of the Socialist case seemed very greatly crippled by the
+      want of a common intimacy in its leaders; the want of intimacy didn't at
+      first appear to be more than an accident, and our talk led to Margaret's
+      attempt to get acquaintance and easy intercourse afoot among them and
+      between them and the Young Liberals of our group. She gave a series of
+      weekly dinners, planned, I think, a little too accurately upon Altiora's
+      model, and after each we had as catholic a reception as we could contrive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our receptions were indeed, I should think, about as catholic as
+      receptions could be. Margaret found herself with a weekly houseful of
+      insoluble problems in intercourse. One did one's best, but one got a
+      nightmare feeling as the evening wore on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was one of the few unanimities of these parties that every one should
+      be a little odd in appearance, funny about the hair or the tie or the
+      shoes or more generally, and that bursts of violent aggression should
+      alternate with an attitude entirely defensive. A number of our guests had
+      an air of waiting for a clue that never came, and stood and sat about
+      silently, mildly amused but not a bit surprised that we did not discover
+      their distinctive Open-Sesames. There was a sprinkling of manifest seers
+      and prophetesses in shapeless garments, far too many, I thought, for
+      really easy social intercourse, and any conversation at any moment was
+      liable to become oracular. One was in a state of tension from first to
+      last; the most innocent remark seemed capable of exploding resentment, and
+      replies came out at the most unexpected angles. We Young Liberals went
+      about puzzled but polite to the gathering we had evoked. The Young
+      Liberals' tradition is on the whole wonderfully discreet, superfluous
+      steam is let out far away from home in the Balkans or Africa, and the
+      neat, stiff figures of the Cramptons, Bunting Harblow, and Lewis, either
+      in extremely well-cut morning coats indicative of the House, or in what is
+      sometimes written of as &ldquo;faultless evening dress,&rdquo; stood about on those
+      evenings, they and their very quietly and simply and expensively dressed
+      little wives, like a datum line amidst lakes and mountains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I didn't at first see the connection between systematic social
+      reorganisation and arbitrary novelties in dietary and costume, just as I
+      didn't realise why the most comprehensive constructive projects should
+      appear to be supported solely by odd and exceptional personalities. On one
+      of these evenings a little group of rather jolly-looking pretty young
+      people seated themselves for no particular reason in a large circle on the
+      floor of my study, and engaged, so far as I could judge, in the game of
+      Hunt the Meaning, the intellectual equivalent of Hunt the Slipper. It must
+      have been that same evening I came upon an unbleached young gentleman
+      before the oval mirror on the landing engaged in removing the remains of
+      an anchovy sandwich from his protruded tongue&mdash;visible ends of cress
+      having misled him into the belief that he was dealing with doctrinally
+      permissible food. It was not unusual to be given hand-bills and printed
+      matter by our guests, but there I had the advantage over Lewis, who was
+      too tactful to refuse the stuff, too neatly dressed to pocket it, and had
+      no writing-desk available upon which he could relieve himself in a manner
+      flattering to the giver. So that his hands got fuller and fuller. A
+      relentless, compact little woman in what Margaret declared to be an
+      extremely expensive black dress has also printed herself on my memory; she
+      had set her heart upon my contributing to a weekly periodical in the
+      lentil interest with which she was associated, and I spent much time and
+      care in evading her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mingling with the more hygienic types were a number of Anti-Puritan
+      Socialists, bulging with bias against temperance, and breaking out against
+      austere methods of living all over their faces. Their manner was packed
+      with heartiness. They were apt to choke the approaches to the little
+      buffet Margaret had set up downstairs, and there engage in discussions of
+      Determinism&mdash;it always seemed to be Determinism&mdash;which became
+      heartier and noisier, but never acrimonious even in the small hours. It
+      seemed impossible to settle about this Determinism of theirs&mdash;ever.
+      And there were worldly Socialists also. I particularly recall a large,
+      active, buoyant, lady-killing individual with an eyeglass borne upon a
+      broad black ribbon, who swam about us one evening. He might have been a
+      slightly frayed actor, in his large frock-coat, his white waistcoat, and
+      the sort of black and white check trousers that twinkle. He had a
+      high-pitched voice with aristocratic intonations, and he seemed to be in a
+      perpetual state of interrogation. &ldquo;What are we all he-a for?&rdquo; he would ask
+      only too audibly. &ldquo;What are we doing he-a? What's the connection?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      What WAS the connection?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We made a special effort with our last assembly in June, 1907. We tried to
+      get something like a representative collection of the parliamentary
+      leaders of Socialism, the various exponents of Socialist thought and a
+      number of Young Liberal thinkers into one room. Dorvil came, and Horatio
+      Bulch; Featherstonehaugh appeared for ten minutes and talked charmingly to
+      Margaret and then vanished again; there was Wilkins the novelist and
+      Toomer and Dr. Tumpany. Chris Robinson stood about for a time in a new
+      comforter, and Magdeberg and Will Pipes and five or six Labour members.
+      And on our side we had our particular little group, Bunting Harblow,
+      Crampton, Lewis, all looking as broad-minded and open to conviction as
+      they possibly could, and even occasionally talking out from their bushes
+      almost boldly. But the gathering as a whole refused either to mingle or
+      dispute, and as an experiment in intercourse the evening was a failure.
+      Unexpected dissociations appeared between Socialists one had supposed
+      friendly. I could not have imagined it was possible for half so many
+      people to turn their backs on everybody else in such small rooms as ours.
+      But the unsaid things those backs expressed broke out, I remarked, with
+      refreshed virulence in the various organs of the various sections of the
+      party next week.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I talked, I remember, with Dr. Tumpany, a large young man in a still
+      larger professional frock-coat, and with a great shock of very fair hair,
+      who was candidate for some North Country constituency. We discussed the
+      political outlook, and, like so many Socialists at that time, he was full
+      of vague threatenings against the Liberal party. I was struck by a thing
+      in him that I had already observed less vividly in many others of these
+      Socialist leaders, and which gave me at last a clue to the whole business.
+      He behaved exactly like a man in possession of valuable patent rights, who
+      wants to be dealt with. He had an air of having a corner in ideas. Then it
+      flashed into my head that the whole Socialist movement was an attempted
+      corner in ideas....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      8
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late that night I found myself alone with Margaret amid the debris of the
+      gathering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat before the fire, hands in pockets, and Margaret, looking white and
+      weary, came and leant upon the mantel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Lord!&rdquo; said Margaret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I agreed. Then I resumed my meditation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ideas,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;count for more than I thought in the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret regarded me with that neutral expression behind which she was
+      accustomed to wait for clues.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When you think of the height and depth and importance and wisdom of the
+      Socialist ideas, and see the men who are running them,&rdquo; I explained.... &ldquo;A
+      big system of ideas like Socialism grows up out of the obvious common
+      sense of our present conditions. It's as impersonal as science. All these
+      men&mdash;They've given nothing to it. They're just people who have pegged
+      out claims upon a big intellectual No-Man's-Land&mdash;and don't feel
+      quite sure of the law. There's a sort of quarrelsome uneasiness.... If we
+      professed Socialism do you think they'd welcome us? Not a man of them!
+      They'd feel it was burglary....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Margaret, looking into the fire. &ldquo;That is just what I felt
+      about them all the evening.... Particularly Dr. Tumpany.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We mustn't confuse Socialism with the Socialists,&rdquo; I said; &ldquo;that's the
+      moral of it. I suppose if God were to find He had made a mistake in dates
+      or something, and went back and annihilated everybody from Owen onwards
+      who was in any way known as a Socialist leader or teacher, Socialism would
+      be exactly where it is and what it is to-day&mdash;a growing realisation
+      of constructive needs in every man's mind, and a little corner in party
+      politics. So, I suppose, it will always be.... But they WERE a damned lot,
+      Margaret!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked up at the little noise she made. &ldquo;TWICE!&rdquo; she said, smiling
+      indulgently, &ldquo;to-day!&rdquo; (Even the smile was Altiora's.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I returned to my thoughts. They WERE a damned human lot. It was an
+      excellent word in that connection....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the ideas marched on, the ideas marched on, just as though men's
+      brains were no more than stepping-stones, just as though some great brain
+      in which we are all little cells and corpuscles was thinking them!...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think there is a man among them who makes me feel he is
+      trustworthy,&rdquo; said Margaret; &ldquo;unless it is Featherstonehaugh.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat taking in this proposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They'll never help us, I feel,&rdquo; said Margaret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Us?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Liberals.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, damn the Liberals!&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;They'll never even help themselves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think I could possibly get on with any of those people,&rdquo; said
+      Margaret, after a pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She remained for a time looking down at me and, I could feel, perplexed by
+      me, but I wanted to go on with my thinking, and so I did not look up, and
+      presently she stooped to my forehead and kissed me and went rustling
+      softly to her room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remained in my study for a long time with my thoughts crystallising
+      out....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was then, I think, that I first apprehended clearly how that opposition
+      to which I have already alluded of the immediate life and the mental
+      hinterland of a man, can be applied to public and social affairs. The
+      ideas go on&mdash;and no person or party succeeds in embodying them. The
+      reality of human progress never comes to the surface, it is a power in the
+      deeps, an undertow. It goes on in silence while men think, in studies
+      where they write self-forgetfully, in laboratories under the urgency of an
+      impersonal curiosity, in the rare illumination of honest talk, in moments
+      of emotional insight, in thoughtful reading, but not in everyday affairs.
+      Everyday affairs and whatever is made an everyday affair, are transactions
+      of the ostensible self, the being of habits, interests, usage. Temper,
+      vanity, hasty reaction to imitation, personal feeling, are their
+      substance. No man can abolish his immediate self and specialise in the
+      depths; if he attempt that, he simply turns himself into something a
+      little less than the common man. He may have an immense hinterland, but
+      that does not absolve him from a frontage. That is the essential error of
+      the specialist philosopher, the specialist teacher, the specialist
+      publicist. They repudiate frontage; claim to be pure hinterland. That is
+      what bothered me about Codger, about those various schoolmasters who had
+      prepared me for life, about the Baileys and their dream of an official
+      ruling class. A human being who is a philosopher in the first place, a
+      teacher in the first place, or a statesman in the first place, is thereby
+      and inevitably, though he bring God-like gifts to the pretence&mdash;a
+      quack. These are attempts to live deep-side shallow, inside out. They
+      produce merely a new pettiness. To understand Socialism, again, is to gain
+      a new breadth of outlook; to join a Socialist organisation is to join a
+      narrow cult which is not even tolerably serviceable in presenting or
+      spreading the ideas for which it stands....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I perceived I had got something quite fundamental here. It had taken me
+      some years to realise the true relation of the great constructive ideas
+      that swayed me not only to political parties, but to myself. I had been
+      disposed to identify the formulae of some one party with social
+      construction, and to regard the other as necessarily anti-constructive,
+      just as I had been inclined to follow the Baileys in the
+      self-righteousness of supposing myself to be wholly constructive. But I
+      saw now that every man of intellectual freedom and vigour is necessarily
+      constructive-minded nowadays, and that no man is disinterestedly so. Each
+      one of us repeats in himself the conflict of the race between the
+      splendour of its possibilities and its immediate associations. We may be
+      shaping immortal things, but we must sleep and answer the dinner gong, and
+      have our salt of flattery and self-approval. In politics a man counts not
+      for what he is in moments of imaginative expansion, but for his common
+      workaday, selfish self; and political parties are held together not by a
+      community of ultimate aims, but by the stabler bond of an accustomed life.
+      Everybody almost is for progress in general, and nearly everybody is
+      opposed to any change, except in so far as gross increments are change, in
+      his particular method of living and behaviour. Every party stands
+      essentially for the interests and mental usages of some definite class or
+      group of classes in the exciting community, and every party has its
+      scientific-minded and constructive leading section, with well-defined
+      hinterlands formulating its social functions in a public-spirited form,
+      and its superficial-minded following confessing its meannesses and
+      vanities and prejudices. No class will abolish itself, materially alter
+      its way of life, or drastically reconstruct itself, albeit no class is
+      indisposed to co-operate in the unlimited socialisation of any other
+      class. In that capacity for aggression upon other classes lies the
+      essential driving force of modern affairs. The instincts, the persons, the
+      parties, and vanities sway and struggle. The ideas and understandings
+      march on and achieve themselves for all&mdash;in spite of every one....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The methods and traditions of British politics maintain the form of two
+      great parties, with rider groups seeking to gain specific ends in the
+      event of a small Government majority. These two main parties are more or
+      less heterogeneous in composition. Each, however, has certain necessary
+      characteristics. The Conservative Party has always stood quite definitely
+      for the established propertied interests. The land-owner, the big lawyer,
+      the Established Church, and latterly the huge private monopoly of the
+      liquor trade which has been created by temperance legislation, are the
+      essential Conservatives. Interwoven now with the native wealthy are the
+      families of the great international usurers, and a vast miscellaneous mass
+      of financial enterprise. Outside the range of resistance implied by these
+      interests, the Conservative Party has always shown itself just as
+      constructive and collectivist as any other party. The great landowners
+      have been as well-disposed towards the endowment of higher education, and
+      as willing to co-operate with the Church in protective and mildly
+      educational legislation for children and the working class, as any
+      political section. The financiers, too, are adventurous-spirited and eager
+      for mechanical progress and technical efficiency. They are prepared to
+      spend public money upon research, upon ports and harbours and public
+      communications, upon sanitation and hygienic organisation. A certain rude
+      benevolence of public intention is equally characteristic of the liquor
+      trade. Provided his comfort leads to no excesses of temperance, the liquor
+      trade is quite eager to see the common man prosperous, happy, and with
+      money to spend in a bar. All sections of the party are aggressively
+      patriotic and favourably inclined to the idea of an upstanding, well-fed,
+      and well-exercised population in uniform. Of course there are reactionary
+      landowners and old-fashioned country clergy, full of localised
+      self-importance, jealous even of the cottager who can read, but they have
+      neither the power nor the ability to retard the constructive forces in the
+      party as a whole. On the other hand, when matters point to any definitely
+      confiscatory proposal, to the public ownership and collective control of
+      land, for example, or state mining and manufactures, or the
+      nationalisation of the so-called public-house or extended municipal
+      enterprise, or even to an increase of the taxation of property, then the
+      Conservative Party presents a nearly adamantine bar. It does not stand
+      for, it IS, the existing arrangement in these affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even more definitely a class party is the Labour Party, whose immediate
+      interest is to raise wages, shorten hours of labor, increase employment,
+      and make better terms for the working-man tenant and working-man
+      purchaser. Its leaders are no doubt constructive minded, but the mass of
+      the following is naturally suspicious of education and discipline, hostile
+      to the higher education, and&mdash;except for an obvious antagonism to
+      employers and property owners&mdash;almost destitute of ideas. What else
+      can it be? It stands for the expropriated multitude, whose whole situation
+      and difficulty arise from its individual lack of initiative and organising
+      power. It favours the nationalisation of land and capital with no sense of
+      the difficulties involved in the process; but, on the other hand, the
+      equally reasonable socialisation of individuals which is implied by
+      military service is steadily and quite naturally and quite illogically
+      opposed by it. It is only in recent years that Labour has emerged as a
+      separate party from the huge hospitable caravanserai of Liberalism, and
+      there is still a very marked tendency to step back again into that
+      multitudinous assemblage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For multitudinousness has always been the Liberal characteristic.
+      Liberalism never has been nor ever can be anything but a diversified
+      crowd. Liberalism has to voice everything that is left out by these other
+      parties. It is the party against the predominating interests. It is at
+      once the party of the failing and of the untried; it is the party of
+      decadence and hope. From its nature it must be a vague and planless
+      association in comparison with its antagonist, neither so constructive on
+      the one hand, nor on the other so competent to hinder the inevitable
+      constructions of the civilised state. Essentially it is the party of
+      criticism, the &ldquo;Anti&rdquo; party. It is a system of hostilities and objections
+      that somehow achieves at times an elusive common soul. It is a gathering
+      together of all the smaller interests which find themselves at a
+      disadvantage against the big established classes, the leasehold tenant as
+      against the landowner, the retail tradesman as against the merchant and
+      the moneylender, the Nonconformist as against the Churchman, the small
+      employer as against the demoralising hospitable publican, the man without
+      introductions and broad connections against the man who has these things.
+      It is the party of the many small men against the fewer prevailing men. It
+      has no more essential reason for loving the Collectivist state than the
+      Conservatives; the small dealer is doomed to absorption in that just as
+      much as the large owner; but it resorts to the state against its
+      antagonists as in the middle ages common men pitted themselves against the
+      barons by siding with the king. The Liberal Party is the party against
+      &ldquo;class privilege&rdquo; because it represents no class advantages, but it is
+      also the party that is on the whole most set against Collective control
+      because it represents no established responsibility. It is constructive
+      only so far as its antagonism to the great owner is more powerful than its
+      jealousy of the state. It organises only because organisation is forced
+      upon it by the organisation of its adversaries. It lapses in and out of
+      alliance with Labour as it sways between hostility to wealth and hostility
+      to public expenditure....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every modern European state will have in some form or other these three
+      parties: the resistent, militant, authoritative, dull, and unsympathetic
+      party of establishment and success, the rich party; the confused,
+      sentimental, spasmodic, numerous party of the small, struggling, various,
+      undisciplined men, the poor man's party; and a third party sometimes
+      detaching itself from the second and sometimes reuniting with it, the
+      party of the altogether expropriated masses, the proletarians, Labour.
+      Change Conservative and Liberal to Republican and Democrat, for example,
+      and you have the conditions in the United States. The Crown or a dethroned
+      dynasty, the Established Church or a dispossessed church, nationalist
+      secessions, the personalities of party leaders, may break up, complicate,
+      and confuse the self-expression of these three necessary divisions in the
+      modern social drama, the analyst will make them out none the less for
+      that....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then I came back as if I came back to a refrain;&mdash;the ideas go on&mdash;as
+      though we are all no more than little cells and corpuscles in some great
+      brain beyond our understanding....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So it was I sat and thought my problem out.... I still remember my
+      satisfaction at seeing things plainly at last. It was like clouds
+      dispersing to show the sky. Constructive ideas, of course, couldn't hold a
+      party together alone, &ldquo;interests and habits, not ideas,&rdquo; I had that now,
+      and so the great constructive scheme of Socialism, invading and inspiring
+      all parties, was necessarily claimed only by this collection of odds and
+      ends, this residuum of disconnected and exceptional people. This was true
+      not only of the Socialist idea, but of the scientific idea, the idea of
+      veracity&mdash;of human confidence in humanity&mdash;of all that mattered
+      in human life outside the life of individuals.... The only real party that
+      would ever profess Socialism was the Labour Party, and that in the
+      entirely one-sided form of an irresponsible and non-constructive attack on
+      property. Socialism in that mutilated form, the teeth and claws without
+      the eyes and brain, I wanted as little as I wanted anything in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perfectly clear it was, perfectly clear, and why hadn't I seen it
+      before?... I looked at my watch, and it was half-past two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I yawned, stretched, got up and went to bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      9
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My ideas about statecraft have passed through three main phases to the
+      final convictions that remain. There was the first immediacy of my dream
+      of ports and harbours and cities, railways, roads, and administered
+      territories&mdash;the vision I had seen in the haze from that little
+      church above Locarno. Slowly that had passed into a more elaborate
+      legislative constructiveness, which had led to my uneasy association with
+      the Baileys and the professedly constructive Young Liberals. To get that
+      ordered life I had realised the need of organisation, knowledge,
+      expertness, a wide movement of co-ordinated methods. On the individual
+      side I thought that a life of urgent industry, temperance, and close
+      attention was indicated by my perception of these ends. I married Margaret
+      and set to work. But something in my mind refused from the outset to
+      accept these determinations as final. There was always a doubt lurking
+      below, always a faint resentment, a protesting criticism, a feeling of
+      vitally important omissions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I arrived at last at the clear realisation that my political associates,
+      and I in my association with them, were oddly narrow, priggish, and
+      unreal, that the Socialists with whom we were attempting co-operation were
+      preposterously irrelevant to their own theories, that my political life
+      didn't in some way comprehend more than itself, that rather perplexingly I
+      was missing the thing I was seeking. Britten's footnotes to Altiora's
+      self-assertions, her fits of energetic planning, her quarrels and rallies
+      and vanities, his illuminating attacks on Cramptonism and the
+      heavy-spirited triviality of such Liberalism as the Children's Charter,
+      served to point my way to my present conclusions. I had been trying to
+      deal all along with human progress as something immediate in life,
+      something to be immediately attacked by political parties and groups
+      pointing primarily to that end. I now began to see that just as in my own
+      being there was the rather shallow, rather vulgar, self-seeking careerist,
+      who wore an admirable silk hat and bustled self-consciously through the
+      lobby, and a much greater and indefinitely growing unpublished personality
+      behind him&mdash;my hinterland, I have called it&mdash;so in human affairs
+      generally the permanent reality is also a hinterland, which is never
+      really immediate, which draws continually upon human experience and
+      influences human action more and more, but which is itself never the
+      actual player upon the stage. It is the unseen dramatist who never takes a
+      call. Now it was just through the fact that our group about the Baileys
+      didn't understand this, that with a sort of frantic energy they were
+      trying to develop that sham expert officialdom of theirs to plan,
+      regulate, and direct the affairs of humanity, that the perplexing note of
+      silliness and shallowness that I had always felt and felt now most acutely
+      under Britten's gibes, came in. They were neglecting human life altogether
+      in social organisation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth of
+      statesmanship. It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and all
+      organising spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange and
+      achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers, leaders of men,
+      have always slipped into the error of assuming that they can think out the
+      whole&mdash;or at any rate completely think out definite parts&mdash;of
+      the purpose and future of man, clearly and finally; they have set
+      themselves to legislate and construct on that assumption, and,
+      experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions of reality, they have
+      taken to dogma, persecution, training, pruning, secretive education; and
+      all the stupidities of self-sufficient energy. In the passion of their
+      good intentions they have not hesitated to conceal fact, suppress thought,
+      crush disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimental desires. And so it
+      is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with the making, that any
+      extension of social organisation is at present achieved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Directly, however, this idea of an emancipation from immediacy is grasped,
+      directly the dominating importance of this critical, less personal, mental
+      hinterland in the individual and of the collective mind in the race is
+      understood, the whole problem of the statesman and his attitude towards
+      politics gain a new significance, and becomes accessible to a new series
+      of solutions. He wants no longer to &ldquo;fix up,&rdquo; as people say, human
+      affairs, but to devote his forces to the development of that needed
+      intellectual life without which all his shallow attempts at fixing up are
+      futile. He ceases to build on the sands, and sets himself to gather
+      foundations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You see, I began in my teens by wanting to plan and build cities and
+      harbours for mankind; I ended in the middle thirties by desiring only to
+      serve and increase a general process of thought, a process fearless,
+      critical, real-spirited, that would in its own time give cities, harbours,
+      air, happiness, everything at a scale and quality and in a light
+      altogether beyond the match-striking imaginations of a contemporary mind.
+      I wanted freedom of speech and suggestion, vigour of thought, and the
+      cultivation of that impulse of veracity that lurks more or less
+      discouraged in every man. With that I felt there must go an emotion. I hit
+      upon a phrase that became at last something of a refrain in my speech and
+      writings, to convey the spirit that I felt was at the very heart of real
+      human progress&mdash;love and fine thinking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (I suppose that nowadays no newspaper in England gets through a week
+      without the repetition of that phrase.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My convictions crystallised more and more definitely upon this. The more
+      of love and fine thinking the better for men, I said; the less, the worse.
+      And upon this fresh basis I set myself to examine what I as a politician
+      might do. I perceived I was at last finding an adequate expression for all
+      that was in me, for those forces that had rebelled at the crude
+      presentations of Bromstead, at the secrecies and suppressions of my youth,
+      at the dull unrealities of City Merchants, at the conventions and
+      timidities of the Pinky Dinkys, at the philosophical recluse of Trinity
+      and the phrases and tradition-worship of my political associates. None of
+      these things were half alive, and I wanted life to be intensely alive and
+      awake. I wanted thought like an edge of steel and desire like a flame. The
+      real work before mankind now, I realised once and for all, is the
+      enlargement of human expression, the release and intensification of human
+      thought, the vivider utilisation of experience and the invigoration of
+      research&mdash;and whatever one does in human affairs has or lacks value
+      as it helps or hinders that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With that I had got my problem clear, and the solution, so far as I was
+      concerned, lay in finding out the point in the ostensible life of politics
+      at which I could most subserve these ends. I was still against the muddles
+      of Bromstead, but I had hunted them down now to their essential form. The
+      jerry-built slums, the roads that went nowhere, the tarred fences,
+      litigious notice-boards and barbed wire fencing, the litter and the heaps
+      of dump, were only the outward appearances whose ultimate realities were
+      jerry-built conclusions, hasty purposes, aimless habits of thought, and
+      imbecile bars and prohibitions in the thoughts and souls of men. How are
+      we through politics to get at that confusion?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We want to invigorate and reinvigorate education. We want to create a
+      sustained counter effort to the perpetual tendency of all educational
+      organisations towards classicalism, secondary issues, and the evasion of
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We want to stimulate the expression of life through art and literature,
+      and its exploration through research.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We want to make the best and finest thought accessible to every one, and
+      more particularly to create and sustain an enormous free criticism,
+      without which art, literature, and research alike degenerate into
+      tradition or imposture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then all the other problems which are now so insoluble, destitution,
+      disease, the difficulty of maintaining international peace, the scarcely
+      faced possibility of making life generally and continually beautiful,
+      become&mdash;EASY....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was clear to me that the most vital activities in which I could engage
+      would be those which most directly affected the Church, public habits of
+      thought, education, organised research, literature, and the channels of
+      general discussion. I had to ask myself how my position as Liberal member
+      for Kinghamstead squared with and conduced to this essential work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ SEEKING ASSOCIATES
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have told of my gradual abandonment of the pretensions and habits of
+      party Liberalism. In a sense I was moving towards aristocracy. Regarding
+      the development of the social and individual mental hinterland as the
+      essential thing in human progress, I passed on very naturally to the
+      practical assumption that we wanted what I may call &ldquo;hinterlanders.&rdquo; Of
+      course I do not mean by aristocracy the changing unorganised medley of
+      rich people and privileged people who dominate the civilised world of
+      to-day, but as opposed to this, a possibility of co-ordinating the will of
+      the finer individuals, by habit and literature, into a broad common aim.
+      We must have an aristocracy&mdash;not of privilege, but of understanding
+      and purpose&mdash;or mankind will fail. I find this dawning more and more
+      clearly when I look through my various writings of the years between 1903
+      and 1910. I was already emerging to plain statements in 1908.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I reasoned after this fashion. The line of human improvement and the
+      expansion of human life lies in the direction of education and finer
+      initiatives. If humanity cannot develop an education far beyond anything
+      that is now provided, if it cannot collectively invent devices and solve
+      problems on a much richer, broader scale than it does at the present time,
+      it cannot hope to achieve any very much finer order or any more general
+      happiness than it now enjoys. We must believe, therefore, that it CAN
+      develop such a training and education, or we must abandon secular
+      constructive hope. And here my peculiar difficulty as against crude
+      democracy comes in. If humanity at large is capable of that high education
+      and those creative freedoms our hope demands, much more must its better
+      and more vigorous types be so capable. And if those who have power and
+      leisure now, and freedom to respond to imaginative appeals, cannot be won
+      to the idea of collective self-development, then the whole of humanity
+      cannot be won to that. From that one passes to what has become my general
+      conception in politics, the conception of the constructive imagination
+      working upon the vast complex of powerful people, clever people,
+      enterprising people, influential people, amidst whom power is diffused
+      to-day, to produce that self-conscious, highly selective, open-minded,
+      devoted aristocratic culture, which seems to me to be the necessary next
+      phase in the development of human affairs. I see human progress, not as
+      the spontaneous product of crowds of raw minds swayed by elementary needs,
+      but as a natural but elaborate result of intricate human
+      interdependencies, of human energy and curiosity liberated and acting at
+      leisure, of human passions and motives, modified and redirected by
+      literature and art....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But now the reader will understand how it came about that, disappointed by
+      the essential littleness of Liberalism, and disillusioned about the
+      representative quality of the professed Socialists, I turned my mind more
+      and more to a scrutiny of the big people, the wealthy and influential
+      people, against whom Liberalism pits its forces. I was asking myself
+      definitely whether, after all, it was not my particular job to work
+      through them and not against them. Was I not altogether out of my element
+      as an Anti-? Weren't there big bold qualities about these people that
+      common men lack, and the possibility of far more splendid dreams? Were
+      they really the obstacles, might they not be rather the vehicles of the
+      possible new braveries of life?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The faults of the Imperialist movement were obvious enough. The conception
+      of the Boer War had been clumsy and puerile, the costly errors of that
+      struggle appalling, and the subsequent campaign of Mr. Chamberlain for
+      Tariff Reform seemed calculated to combine the financial adventurers of
+      the Empire in one vast conspiracy against the consumer. The cant of
+      Imperialism was easy to learn and use; it was speedily adopted by all
+      sorts of base enterprises and turned to all sorts of base ends. But a big
+      child is permitted big mischief, and my mind was now continually returning
+      to the persuasion that after all in some development of the idea of
+      Imperial patriotism might be found that wide, rough, politically
+      acceptable expression of a constructive dream capable of sustaining a
+      great educational and philosophical movement such as no formula of
+      Liberalism supplied. The fact that it readily took vulgar forms only
+      witnessed to its strong popular appeal. Mixed in with the noisiness and
+      humbug of the movement there appeared a real regard for social efficiency,
+      a real spirit of animation and enterprise. There suddenly appeared in my
+      world&mdash;I saw them first, I think, in 1908&mdash;a new sort of little
+      boy, a most agreeable development of the slouching, cunning,
+      cigarette-smoking, town-bred youngster, a small boy in a khaki hat, and
+      with bare knees and athletic bearing, earnestly engaged in wholesome and
+      invigorating games up to and occasionally a little beyond his strength&mdash;the
+      Boy Scout. I liked the Boy Scout, and I find it difficult to express how
+      much it mattered to me, with my growing bias in favour of deliberate
+      national training, that Liberalism hadn't been able to produce, and had
+      indeed never attempted to produce, anything of this kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In those days there existed a dining club called&mdash;there was some lost
+      allusion to the exorcism of party feeling in its title&mdash;the Pentagram
+      Circle. It included Bailey and Dayton and myself, Sir Herbert Thorns, Lord
+      Charles Kindling, Minns the poet, Gerbault the big railway man, Lord Gane,
+      fresh from the settlement of Framboya, and Rumbold, who later became Home
+      Secretary and left us. We were men of all parties and very various
+      experiences, and our object was to discuss the welfare of the Empire in a
+      disinterested spirit. We dined monthly at the Mermaid in Westminster, and
+      for a couple of years we kept up an average attendance of ten out of
+      fourteen. The dinner-time was given up to desultory conversation, and it
+      is odd how warm and good the social atmosphere of that little gathering
+      became as time went on; then over the dessert, so soon as the waiters had
+      swept away the crumbs and ceased to fret us, one of us would open with
+      perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes' exposition of some specially prepared
+      question, and after him we would deliver ourselves in turn, each for three
+      or four minutes. When every one present had spoken once talk became
+      general again, and it was rare we emerged upon Hendon Street before
+      midnight. Sometimes, as my house was conveniently near, a knot of men
+      would come home with me and go on talking and smoking in my dining-room
+      until two or three. We had Fred Neal, that wild Irish journalist, among us
+      towards the end, and his stupendous flow of words materially prolonged our
+      closing discussions and made our continuance impossible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I learned very much and very many things at those dinners, but more
+      particularly did I become familiarised with the habits of mind of such men
+      as Neal, Crupp, Gane, and the one or two other New Imperialists who
+      belonged to us. They were nearly all like Bailey Oxford men, though mostly
+      of a younger generation, and they were all mysteriously and inexplicably
+      advocates of Tariff Reform, as if it were the principal instead of at best
+      a secondary aspect of constructive policy. They seemed obsessed by the
+      idea that streams of trade could be diverted violently so as to link the
+      parts of the Empire by common interests, and they were persuaded, I still
+      think mistakenly, that Tariff Reform would have an immense popular appeal.
+      They were also very keen on military organisation, and with a curious
+      little martinet twist in their minds that boded ill for that side of
+      public liberty. So much against them. But they were disposed to spend
+      money much more generously on education and research of all sorts than our
+      formless host of Liberals seemed likely to do; and they were altogether
+      more accessible than the Young Liberals to bold, constructive ideas
+      affecting the universities and upper classes. The Liberals are abjectly
+      afraid of the universities. I found myself constantly falling into line
+      with these men in our discussions, and more and more hostile to Dayton's
+      sentimentalising evasions of definite schemes and Minns' trust in such
+      things as the &ldquo;Spirit of our People&rdquo; and the &ldquo;General Trend of Progress.&rdquo;
+       It wasn't that I thought them very much righter than their opponents; I
+      believe all definite party &ldquo;sides&rdquo; at any time are bound to be about
+      equally right and equally lop-sided; but that I thought I could get more
+      out of them and what was more important to me, more out of myself if I
+      co-operated with them. By 1908 I had already arrived at a point where I
+      could be definitely considering a transfer of my political allegiance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These abstract questions are inseparably interwoven with my memory of a
+      shining long white table, and our hock bottles and burgundy bottles, and
+      bottles of Perrier and St. Galmier and the disturbed central trophy of
+      dessert, and scattered glasses and nut-shells and cigarette-ends and
+      menu-cards used for memoranda. I see old Dayton sitting back and cocking
+      his eye to the ceiling in a way he had while he threw warmth into the
+      ancient platitudes of Liberalism, and Minns leaning forward, and a little
+      like a cockatoo with a taste for confidences, telling us in a hushed voice
+      of his faith in the Destiny of Mankind. Thorns lounges, rolling his round
+      face and round eyes from speaker to speaker and sounding the visible
+      depths of misery whenever Neal begins. Gerbault and Gane were given to
+      conversation in undertones, and Bailey pursued mysterious purposes in
+      lisping whispers. It was Crupp attracted me most. He had, as people say,
+      his eye on me from the beginning. He used to speak at me, and drifted into
+      a custom of coming home with me very regularly for an after-talk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He opened his heart to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Neither of us,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;are dukes, and neither of us are horny-handed
+      sons of toil. We want to get hold of the handles, and to do that, one must
+      go where the power is, and give it just as constructive a twist as we can.
+      That's MY Toryism.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it Kindling's&mdash;or Gerbault's?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. But theirs is soft, and mine's hard. Mine will wear theirs out. You
+      and I and Bailey are all after the same thing, and why aren't we working
+      together?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you a Confederate?&rdquo; I asked suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's a secret nobody tells,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are the Confederates after?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Making aristocracy work, I suppose. Just as, I gather, you want to
+      do.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Confederates were being heard of at that time. They were at once
+      attractive and repellent to me, an odd secret society whose membership
+      nobody knew, pledged, it was said, to impose Tariff Reform and an ample
+      constructive policy upon the Conservatives. In the press, at any rate,
+      they had an air of deliberately organised power. I have no doubt the
+      rumour of them greatly influenced my ideas....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the end I made some very rapid decisions, but for nearly two years I
+      was hesitating. Hesitations were inevitable in such a matter. I was not
+      dealing with any simple question of principle, but with elusive and
+      fluctuating estimates of the trend of diverse forces and of the nature of
+      my own powers. All through that period I was asking over and over again:
+      how far are these Confederates mere dreamers? How far&mdash;and this was
+      more vital&mdash;are they rendering lip-service to social organisations?
+      Is it true they desire war because it confirms the ascendency of their
+      class? How far can Conservatism be induced to plan and construct before it
+      resists the thrust towards change. Is it really in bulk anything more than
+      a mass of prejudice and conceit, cynical indulgence, and a hard suspicion
+      of and hostility to the expropriated classes in the community?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That is a research which yields no statistics, an enquiry like asking what
+      is the ruling colour of a chameleon. The shadowy answer varied with my
+      health, varied with my mood and the conduct of the people I was watching.
+      How fine can people be? How generous?&mdash;not incidentally, but all
+      round? How far can you educate sons beyond the outlook of their fathers,
+      and how far lift a rich, proud, self-indulgent class above the protests of
+      its business agents and solicitors and its own habits and vanity? Is
+      chivalry in a class possible?&mdash;was it ever, indeed, or will it ever
+      indeed be possible? Is the progress that seems attainable in certain
+      directions worth the retrogression that may be its price?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was to the Pentagram Circle that I first broached the new conceptions
+      that were developing in my mind. I count the evening of my paper the
+      beginning of the movement that created the BLUE WEEKLY and our wing of the
+      present New Tory party. I do that without any excessive egotism, because
+      my essay was no solitary man's production; it was my reaction to forces
+      that had come to me very large through my fellow-members; its quick
+      reception by them showed that I was, so to speak, merely the first of the
+      chestnuts to pop. The atmospheric quality of the evening stands out very
+      vividly in my memory. The night, I remember, was warmly foggy when after
+      midnight we went to finish our talk at my house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had recently changed the rules of the club to admit visitors, and so it
+      happened that I had brought Britten, and Crupp introduced Arnold
+      Shoesmith, my former schoolfellow at City Merchants, and now the wealthy
+      successor of his father and elder brother. I remember his heavy,
+      inexpressively handsome face lighting to his rare smile at the sight of
+      me, and how little I dreamt of the tragic entanglement that was destined
+      to involve us both. Gane was present, and Esmeer, a newly-added member,
+      but I think Bailey was absent. Either he was absent, or he said something
+      so entirely characteristic and undistinguished that it has left no
+      impression on my mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;The World
+      Exists for Exceptional People.&rdquo; It is not the title I should choose now&mdash;for
+      since that time I have got my phrase of &ldquo;mental hinterlander&rdquo; into
+      journalistic use. I should say now, &ldquo;The World Exists for Mental
+      Hinterland.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The notes I made of that opening have long since vanished with a thousand
+      other papers, but some odd chance has preserved and brought with me to
+      Italy the menu for the evening; its back black with the scrawled notes I
+      made of the discussion for my reply. I found it the other day among some
+      letters from Margaret and a copy of the 1909 Report of the Poor Law
+      Commission, also rich with pencilled marginalia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My opening was a criticism of the democratic idea and method, upon lines
+      such as I have already sufficiently indicated in the preceding sections. I
+      remember how old Dayton fretted in his chair, and tushed and pished at
+      that, even as I gave it, and afterwards we were treated to one of his
+      platitudinous harangues, he sitting back in his chair with that small
+      obstinate eye of his fixed on the ceiling, and a sort of cadaverous glow
+      upon his face, repeating&mdash;quite regardless of all my reasoning and
+      all that had been said by others in the debate&mdash;the sacred empty
+      phrases that were his soul's refuge from reality. &ldquo;You may think it very
+      clever,&rdquo; he said with a nod of his head to mark his sense of his point,
+      &ldquo;not to Trust in the People. I do.&rdquo; And so on. Nothing in his life or work
+      had ever shown that he did trust in the people, but that was beside the
+      mark. He was the party Liberal, and these were the party incantations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After my preliminary attack on vague democracy I went on to show that all
+      human life was virtually aristocratic; people must either recognise
+      aristocracy in general or else follow leaders, which is aristocracy in
+      particular, and so I came to my point that the reality of human progress
+      lay necessarily through the establishment of freedoms for the human best
+      and a collective receptivity and understanding. There was a disgusted
+      grunt from Dayton, &ldquo;Superman rubbish&mdash;Nietzsche. Shaw! Ugh!&rdquo; I sailed
+      on over him to my next propositions. The prime essential in a progressive
+      civilisation was the establishment of a more effective selective process
+      for the privilege of higher education, and the very highest educational
+      opportunity for the educable. We were too apt to patronise scholarship
+      winners, as though a scholarship was toffee given as a reward for virtue.
+      It wasn't any reward at all; it was an invitation to capacity. We had no
+      more right to drag in virtue, or any merit but quality, than we had to
+      involve it in a search for the tallest man. We didn't want a mere process
+      for the selection of good as distinguished from gifted and able boys&mdash;&ldquo;No,
+      you DON'T,&rdquo; from Dayton&mdash;we wanted all the brilliant stuff in the
+      world concentrated upon the development of the world. Just to exasperate
+      Dayton further I put in a plea for gifts as against character in
+      educational, artistic, and legislative work. &ldquo;Good teaching,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;is
+      better than good conduct. We are becoming idiotic about character.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dayton was too moved to speak. He slewed round upon me an eye of agonised
+      aversion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I expatiated on the small proportion of the available ability that is
+      really serving humanity to-day. &ldquo;I suppose to-day all the thought, all the
+      art, all the increments of knowledge that matter, are supplied so far as
+      the English-speaking community is concerned by&mdash;how many?&mdash;by
+      three or four thousand individuals. ('Less,' said Thorns.) To be more
+      precise, by the mental hinterlands of three or four thousand individuals.
+      We who know some of the band entertain no illusions as to their innate
+      rarity. We know that they are just the few out of many, the few who got in
+      our world of chance and confusion, the timely stimulus, the apt suggestion
+      at the fortunate moment, the needed training, the leisure. The rest are
+      lost in the crowd, fail through the defects of their qualities, become
+      commonplace workmen and second-rate professional men, marry commonplace
+      wives, are as much waste as the driftage of superfluous pollen in a pine
+      forest is waste.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Decent honest lives!&rdquo; said Dayton to his bread-crumbs, with his chin in
+      his necktie. &ldquo;WASTE!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the people who do get what we call opportunity get it usually in
+      extremely limited and cramping forms. No man lives a life of intellectual
+      productivity alone; he needs not only material and opportunity, but
+      helpers, resonators. Round and about what I might call the REAL men, you
+      want the sympathetic cooperators, who help by understanding. It isn't that
+      our&mdash;SALT of three or four thousand is needlessly rare; it is
+      sustained by far too small and undifferentiated a public. Most of the good
+      men we know are not really doing the very best work of their gifts; nearly
+      all are a little adapted, most are shockingly adapted to some second-best
+      use. Now, I take it, this is the very centre and origin of the muddle,
+      futility, and unhappiness that distresses us; it's the cardinal problem of
+      the state&mdash;to discover, develop, and use the exceptional gifts of
+      men. And I see that best done&mdash;I drift more and more away from the
+      common stuff of legislative and administrative activity&mdash;by a quite
+      revolutionary development of the educational machinery, but by a still
+      more unprecedented attempt to keep science going, to keep literature
+      going, and to keep what is the necessary spur of all science and
+      literature, an intelligent and appreciative criticism going. You know none
+      of these things have ever been kept going hitherto; they've come
+      unexpectedly and inexplicably.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hear, hear!&rdquo; from Dayton, cough, nodding of the head, and an expression
+      of mystical profundity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They've lit up a civilisation and vanished, to give place to darkness
+      again. Now the modern state doesn't mean to go back to darkness again&mdash;and
+      so it's got to keep its light burning.&rdquo; I went on to attack the present
+      organisation of our schools and universities, which seemed elaborately
+      designed to turn the well-behaved, uncritical, and uncreative men of each
+      generation into the authoritative leaders of the next, and I suggested
+      remedies upon lines that I have already indicated in the earlier chapters
+      of this story....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far I had the substance of the club with me, but I opened new ground
+      and set Crupp agog by confessing my doubt from which party or combination
+      of groups these developments of science and literature and educational
+      organisation could most reasonably be expected. I looked up to find
+      Crupp's dark little eye intent upon me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There I left it to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had an astonishingly good discussion; Neal burst once, but we emerged
+      from his flood after a time, and Dayton had his interlude. The rest was
+      all close, keen examination of my problem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I see Crupp now with his arm bent before him on the table in a way we had,
+      as though it was jointed throughout its length like a lobster's antenna,
+      his plump, short-fingered hand crushing up a walnut shell into smaller and
+      smaller fragments. &ldquo;Remington,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;has given us the data for a
+      movement, a really possible movement. It's not only possible, but
+      necessary&mdash;urgently necessary, I think, if the Empire is to go on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We're working altogether too much at the social basement in education and
+      training,&rdquo; said Gane. &ldquo;Remington is right about our neglect of the higher
+      levels.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Britten made a good contribution with an analysis of what he called the
+      spirit of a country and what made it. &ldquo;The modern community needs its
+      serious men to be artistic and its artists to be taken seriously,&rdquo; I
+      remember his saying. &ldquo;The day has gone by for either dull responsibility
+      or merely witty art.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember very vividly how Shoesmith harped on an idea I had thrown out
+      of using some sort of review or weekly to express and elaborate these
+      conceptions of a new, severer, aristocratic culture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would have to be done amazingly well,&rdquo; said Britten, and my mind went
+      back to my school days and that ancient enterprise of ours, and how
+      Cossington had rushed it. Well, Cossington had too many papers nowadays to
+      interfere with us, and we perhaps had learnt some defensive devices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But this thing has to be linked to some political party,&rdquo; said Crupp,
+      with his eye on me. &ldquo;You can't get away from that. The Liberals,&rdquo; he
+      added, &ldquo;have never done anything for research or literature.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They had a Royal Commission on the Dramatic Censorship,&rdquo; said Thorns,
+      with a note of minute fairness. &ldquo;It shows what they were made of,&rdquo; he
+      added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's what I've told Remington again and again,&rdquo; said Crupp, &ldquo;we've got to
+      pick up the tradition of aristocracy, reorganise it, and make it work. But
+      he's certainly suggested a method.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There won't be much aristocracy to pick up,&rdquo; said Dayton, darkly to the
+      ceiling, &ldquo;if the House of Lords throws out the Budget.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All the more reason for picking it up,&rdquo; said Neal. &ldquo;For we can't do
+      without it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will they go to the bad, or will they rise from the ashes, aristocrats
+      indeed&mdash;if the Liberals come in overwhelmingly?&rdquo; said Britten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's we who might decide that,&rdquo; said Crupp, insidiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I agree,&rdquo; said Gane.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one can tell,&rdquo; said Thorns. &ldquo;I doubt if they will get beaten.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an odd, fragmentary discussion that night. We were all with ideas
+      in our minds at once fine and imperfect. We threw out suggestions that
+      showed themselves at once far inadequate, and we tried to qualify them by
+      minor self-contradictions. Britten, I think, got more said than any one.
+      &ldquo;You all seem to think you want to organise people, particular groups and
+      classes of individuals,&rdquo; he insisted. &ldquo;It isn't that. That's the standing
+      error of politicians. You want to organise a culture. Civilisation isn't a
+      matter of concrete groupings; it's a matter of prevailing ideas. The
+      problem is how to make bold, clear ideas prevail. The question for
+      Remington and us is just what groups of people will most help this culture
+      forward.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, but how are the Lords going to behave?&rdquo; said Crupp. &ldquo;You yourself
+      were asking that a little while ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If they win or if they lose,&rdquo; Gane maintained, &ldquo;there will be a movement
+      to reorganise aristocracy&mdash;Reform of the House of Lords, they'll call
+      the political form of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bailey thinks that,&rdquo; said some one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The labour people want abolition,&rdquo; said some one. &ldquo;Let 'em,&rdquo; said Thorns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He became audible, sketching a possibility of action.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose all of us were able to work together. It's just one of those
+      indeterminate, confused, eventful times ahead when a steady jet of ideas
+      might produce enormous results.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave me out of it,&rdquo; said Dayton, &ldquo;IF you please.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We should,&rdquo; said Thorns under his breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I took up Crupp's initiative, I remember, and expanded it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe we could do&mdash;extensive things,&rdquo; I insisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Revivals and revisions of Toryism have been tried so often,&rdquo; said Thorns,
+      &ldquo;from the Young England movement onward.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not one but has produced its enduring effects,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;It's the
+      peculiarity of English conservatism that it's persistently progressive and
+      rejuvenescent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I think it must have been about that point that Dayton fled our presence,
+      after some clumsy sentence that I decided upon reflection was intended to
+      remind me of my duty to my party.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I remember Thorns firing doubts at me obliquely across the table.
+      &ldquo;You can't run a country through its spoilt children,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;What you
+      call aristocrats are really spoilt children. They've had too much of
+      everything, except bracing experience.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Children can always be educated,&rdquo; said Crupp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I said SPOILT children,&rdquo; said Thorns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here, Thorns!&rdquo; said I. &ldquo;If this Budget row leads to a storm, and
+      these big people get their power clipped, what's going to happen? Have you
+      thought of that? When they go out lock, stock, and barrel, who comes in?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nature abhors a Vacuum,&rdquo; said Crupp, supporting me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bailey's trained officials,&rdquo; suggested Gane.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quacks with a certificate of approval from Altiora,&rdquo; said Thorns. &ldquo;I
+      admit the horrors of the alternative. There'd be a massacre in three
+      years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One may go on trying possibilities for ever,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;One thing emerges.
+      Whatever accidents happen, our civilisation needs, and almost consciously
+      needs, a culture of fine creative minds, and all the necessary tolerances,
+      opennesses, considerations, that march with that. For my own part, I think
+      that is the Most Vital Thing. Build your ship of state as you will; get
+      your men as you will; I concentrate on what is clearly the affair of my
+      sort of man,&mdash;I want to ensure the quality of the quarter deck.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hear, hear!&rdquo; said Shoesmith, suddenly&mdash;his first remark for a long
+      time. &ldquo;A first-rate figure,&rdquo; said Shoesmith, gripping it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our danger is in missing that,&rdquo; I went on. &ldquo;Muddle isn't ended by
+      transferring power from the muddle-headed few to the muddle-headed many,
+      and then cheating the many out of it again in the interests of a
+      bureaucracy of sham experts. But that seems the limit of the liberal
+      imagination. There is no real progress in a country, except a rise in the
+      level of its free intellectual activity. All other progress is secondary
+      and dependant. If you take on Bailey's dreams of efficient machinery and a
+      sort of fanatical discipline with no free-moving brains behind it,
+      confused ugliness becomes rigid ugliness,&mdash;that's all. No doubt
+      things are moving from looseness to discipline, and from irresponsible
+      controls to organised controls&mdash;and also and rather contrariwise
+      everything is becoming as people say, democratised; but all the more need
+      in that, for an ark in which the living element may be saved.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hear, hear!&rdquo; said Shoesmith, faint but pursuing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must have been in my house afterwards that Shoesmith became noticeable.
+      He seemed trying to say something vague and difficult that he didn't get
+      said at all on that occasion. &ldquo;We could do immense things with a weekly,&rdquo;
+       he repeated, echoing Neal, I think. And there he left off and became a
+      mute expressiveness, and it was only afterwards, when I was in bed, that I
+      saw we had our capitalist in our hands....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We parted that night on my doorstep in a tremendous glow&mdash;but in that
+      sort of glow one doesn't act upon without much reconsideration, and it was
+      some months before I made my decision to follow up the indications of that
+      opening talk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I find my thoughts lingering about the Pentagram Circle. In my
+      developments it played a large part, not so much by starting new trains of
+      thought as by confirming the practicability of things I had already
+      hesitatingly entertained. Discussion with these other men so prominently
+      involved in current affairs endorsed views that otherwise would have
+      seemed only a little less remote from actuality than the guardians of
+      Plato or the labour laws of More. Among other questions that were never
+      very distant from our discussions, that came apt to every topic, was the
+      true significance of democracy, Tariff Reform as a method of international
+      hostility, and the imminence of war. On the first issue I can still recall
+      little Bailey, glib and winking, explaining that democracy was really just
+      a dodge for getting assent to the ordinances of the expert official by
+      means of the polling booth. &ldquo;If they don't like things,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;they
+      can vote for the opposition candidate and see what happens then&mdash;and
+      that, you see, is why we don't want proportional representation to let in
+      the wild men.&rdquo; I opened my eyes&mdash;the lids had dropped for a moment
+      under the caress of those smooth sounds&mdash;to see if Bailey's artful
+      forefinger wasn't at the side of his predominant nose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The international situation exercised us greatly. Our meetings were
+      pervaded by the feeling that all things moved towards a day of reckoning
+      with Germany, and I was largely instrumental in keeping up the suggestion
+      that India was in a state of unstable equilibrium, that sooner or later
+      something must happen there&mdash;something very serious to our Empire.
+      Dayton frankly detested these topics. He was full of that old Middle
+      Victorian persuasion that whatever is inconvenient or disagreeable to the
+      English mind could be annihilated by not thinking about it. He used to sit
+      low in his chair and look mulish. &ldquo;Militarism,&rdquo; he would declare in a tone
+      of the utmost moral fervour, &ldquo;is a curse. It's an unmitigated curse.&rdquo; Then
+      he would cough shortly and twitch his head back and frown, and seem
+      astonished beyond measure that after this conclusive statement we could
+      still go on talking of war.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All our Imperialists were obsessed by the thought of international
+      conflict, and their influence revived for a time those uneasinesses that
+      had been aroused in me for the first time by my continental journey with
+      Willersley and by Meredith's &ldquo;One of Our Conquerors.&rdquo; That quite
+      justifiable dread of a punishment for all the slackness, mental
+      dishonesty, presumption, mercenary respectability and sentimentalised
+      commercialism of the Victorian period, at the hands of the better
+      organised, more vigorous, and now far more highly civilised peoples of
+      Central Europe, seemed to me to have both a good and bad series of
+      consequences. It seemed the only thing capable of bracing English minds to
+      education, sustained constructive effort and research; but on the other
+      hand it produced the quality of a panic, hasty preparation, impatience of
+      thought, a wasteful and sometimes quite futile immediacy. In 1909, for
+      example, there was a vast clamour for eight additional Dreadnoughts&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;We want eight
+      And we won't wait,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      but no clamour at all about our national waste of inventive talent, our
+      mean standard of intellectual attainment, our disingenuous criticism, and
+      the consequent failure to distinguish men of the quality needed to carry
+      on the modern type of war. Almost universally we have the wrong men in our
+      places of responsibility and the right men in no place at all, almost
+      universally we have poorly qualified, hesitating, and resentful
+      subordinates, because our criticism is worthless and, so habitually as to
+      be now almost unconsciously, dishonest. Germany is beating England in
+      every matter upon which competition is possible, because she attended
+      sedulously to her collective mind for sixty pregnant years, because in
+      spite of tremendous defects she is still far more anxious for quality in
+      achievement than we are. I remember saying that in my paper. From that, I
+      remember, I went on to an image that had flashed into my mind. &ldquo;The
+      British Empire,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;is like some of those early vertebrated
+      monsters, the Brontosaurus and the Atlantosaurus and such-like; it
+      sacrifices intellect to character; its backbone, that is to say,&mdash;especially
+      in the visceral region&mdash;is bigger than its cranium. It's no accident
+      that things are so. We've worked for backbone. We brag about backbone, and
+      if the joints are anchylosed so much the better. We're still but only half
+      awake to our error. You can't change that suddenly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Turn it round and make it go backwards,&rdquo; interjected Thorns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's trying to do that,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;in places.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And afterwards Crupp declared I had begotten a nightmare which haunted him
+      of nights; he was trying desperately and belatedly to blow a brain as one
+      blows soap-bubbles on such a mezoroic saurian as I had conjured up, while
+      the clumsy monster's fate, all teeth and brains, crept nearer and
+      nearer....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I've grown, I think, since those days out of the urgency of that
+      apprehension. I still think a European war, and conceivably a very
+      humiliating war for England, may occur at no very distant date, but I do
+      not think there is any such heroic quality in our governing class as will
+      make that war catastrophic. The prevailing spirit in English life&mdash;it
+      is one of the essential secrets of our imperial endurance&mdash;is one of
+      underbred aggression in prosperity and diplomatic compromise in moments of
+      danger; we bully haughtily where we can and assimilate where we must. It
+      is not for nothing that our upper and middle-class youth is educated by
+      teachers of the highest character, scholars and gentlemen, men who can
+      pretend quite honestly that Darwinism hasn't upset the historical fall of
+      man, that cricket is moral training, and that Socialism is an outrage upon
+      the teachings of Christ. A sort of dignified dexterity of evasion is the
+      national reward. Germany, with a larger population, a vigorous and
+      irreconcilable proletariat, a bolder intellectual training, a harsher
+      spirit, can scarcely fail to drive us at last to a realisation of
+      intolerable strain. So we may never fight at all. The war of preparations
+      that has been going on for thirty years may end like a sham-fight at last
+      in an umpire's decision. We shall proudly but very firmly take the second
+      place. For my own part, since I love England as much as I detest her
+      present lethargy of soul, I pray for a chastening war&mdash;I wouldn't
+      mind her flag in the dirt if only her spirit would come out of it. So I
+      was able to shake off that earlier fear of some final and irrevocable
+      destruction truncating all my schemes. At the most, a European war would
+      be a dramatic episode in the reconstruction I had in view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In India, too, I no longer foresee, as once I was inclined to see,
+      disaster. The English rule in India is surely one of the most
+      extraordinary accidents that has ever happened in history. We are there
+      like a man who has fallen off a ladder on to the neck of an elephant, and
+      doesn't know what to do or how to get down. Until something happens he
+      remains. Our functions in India are absurd. We English do not own that
+      country, do not even rule it. We make nothing happen; at the most we
+      prevent things happening. We suppress our own literature there. Most
+      English people cannot even go to this land they possess; the authorities
+      would prevent it. If Messrs. Perowne or Cook organised a cheap tour of
+      Manchester operatives, it would be stopped. No one dare bring the average
+      English voter face to face with the reality of India, or let the Indian
+      native have a glimpse of the English voter. In my time I have talked to
+      English statesmen, Indian officials and ex-officials, viceroys, soldiers,
+      every one who might be supposed to know what India signifies, and I have
+      prayed them to tell me what they thought we were up to there. I am not
+      writing without my book in these matters. And beyond a phrase or so about
+      &ldquo;even-handed justice&rdquo;&mdash;and look at our sedition trials!&mdash;they
+      told me nothing. Time after time I have heard of that apocryphal native
+      ruler in the north-west, who, when asked what would happen if we left
+      India, replied that in a week his men would be in the saddle, and in six
+      months not a rupee nor a virgin would be left in Lower Bengal. That is
+      always given as our conclusive justification. But is it our business to
+      preserve the rupees and virgins of Lower Bengal in a sort of magic
+      inconclusiveness? Better plunder than paralysis, better fire and sword
+      than futility. Our flag is spread over the peninsula, without plans,
+      without intentions&mdash;a vast preventive. The sum total of our policy is
+      to arrest any discussion, any conferences that would enable the Indians to
+      work out a tolerable scheme of the future for themselves. But that does
+      not arrest the resentment of men held back from life. Consider what it
+      must be for the educated Indian sitting at the feast of contemporary
+      possibilities with his mouth gagged and his hands bound behind him! The
+      spirit of insurrection breaks out in spite of espionage and seizures. Our
+      conflict for inaction develops stupendous absurdities. The other day the
+      British Empire was taking off and examining printed cotton stomach wraps
+      for seditious emblems and inscriptions....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In some manner we shall have to come out of India. We have had our chance,
+      and we have demonstrated nothing but the appalling dulness of our national
+      imagination. We are not good enough to do anything with India. Codger and
+      Flack, and Gates and Dayton, Cladingbowl in the club, and the HOME
+      CHURCHMAN in the home, cant about &ldquo;character,&rdquo; worship of strenuous force
+      and contempt of truth; for the sake of such men and things as these, we
+      must abandon in fact, if not in appearance, that empty domination. Had we
+      great schools and a powerful teaching, could we boast great men, had we
+      the spirit of truth and creation in our lives, then indeed it might be
+      different. But a race that bears a sceptre must carry gifts to justify it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It does not follow that we shall be driven catastrophically from India.
+      That was my earlier mistake. We are not proud enough in our bones to be
+      ruined by India as Spain was by her empire. We may be able to abandon
+      India with an air of still remaining there. It is our new method. We train
+      our future rulers in the public schools to have a very wholesome respect
+      for strength, and as soon as a power arises in India in spite of us, be it
+      a man or a culture, or a native state, we shall be willing to deal with
+      it. We may or may not have a war, but our governing class will be quick to
+      learn when we are beaten. Then they will repeat our South African
+      diplomacy, and arrange for some settlement that will abandon the reality,
+      such as it is, and preserve the semblance of power. The conqueror DE FACTO
+      will become the new &ldquo;loyal Briton,&rdquo; and the democracy at home will be
+      invited to celebrate our recession&mdash;triumphantly. I am no believer in
+      the imminent dissolution of our Empire; I am less and less inclined to see
+      in either India or Germany the probability of an abrupt truncation of
+      those slow intellectual and moral constructions which are the essentials
+      of statecraft.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sit writing in this little loggia to the sound of dripping water&mdash;this
+      morning we had rain, and the roof of our little casa is still not dry,
+      there are pools in the rocks under the sweet chestnuts, and the torrent
+      that crosses the salita is full and boastful,&mdash;and I try to recall
+      the order of my impressions during that watching, dubious time, before I
+      went over to the Conservative Party. I was trying&mdash;chaotic task&mdash;to
+      gauge the possibilities inherent in the quality of the British
+      aristocracy. There comes a broad spectacular effect of wide parks,
+      diversified by woods and bracken valleys, and dappled with deer; of great
+      smooth lawns shaded by ancient trees; of big facades of sunlit buildings
+      dominating the country side; of large fine rooms full of handsome,
+      easy-mannered people. As a sort of representative picture to set off
+      against those other pictures of Liberals and of Socialists I have given, I
+      recall one of those huge assemblies the Duchess of Clynes inaugurated at
+      Stamford House. The place itself is one of the vastest private houses in
+      London, a huge clustering mass of white and gold saloons with polished
+      floors and wonderful pictures, and staircases and galleries on a
+      Gargantuan scale. And there she sought to gather all that was most
+      representative of English activities, and did, in fact, in those brilliant
+      nocturnal crowds, get samples of nearly every section of our social and
+      intellectual life, with a marked predominance upon the political and
+      social side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember sitting in one of the recesses at the end of the big saloon
+      with Mrs. Redmondson, one of those sharp-minded, beautiful rich women one
+      meets so often in London, who seem to have done nothing and to be capable
+      of everything, and we watched the crowd&mdash;uniforms and splendours were
+      streaming in from a State ball&mdash;and exchanged information. I told her
+      about the politicians and intellectuals, and she told me about the
+      aristocrats, and we sharpened our wit on them and counted the percentage
+      of beautiful people among the latter, and wondered if the general effect
+      of tallness was or was not an illusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were, we agreed, for the most part bigger than the average of people
+      in London, and a handsome lot, even when they were not subtly
+      individualised. &ldquo;They look so well nurtured,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;well cared for. I
+      like their quiet, well-trained movements, their pleasant consideration for
+      each other.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kindly, good tempered, and at bottom utterly selfish,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;like
+      big, rather carefully trained, rather pampered children. What else can you
+      expect from them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are good tempered, anyhow,&rdquo; I witnessed, &ldquo;and that's an achievement.
+      I don't think I could ever be content under a bad-tempered,
+      sentimentalism, strenuous Government. That's why I couldn't stand the
+      Roosevelt REGIME in America. One's chief surprise when one comes across
+      these big people for the first time is their admirable easiness and a real
+      personal modesty. I confess I admire them. Oh! I like them. I wouldn't at
+      all mind, I believe, giving over the country to this aristocracy&mdash;given
+      SOMETHING&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which they haven't got.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which they haven't got&mdash;or they'd be the finest sort of people in
+      the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That something?&rdquo; she inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. I've been puzzling my wits to know. They've done all sorts
+      of things&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's Lord Wrassleton,&rdquo; she interrupted, &ldquo;whose leg was broken&mdash;you
+      remember?&mdash;at Spion Kop.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's healed very well. I like the gold lace and the white glove resting,
+      with quite a nice awkwardness, on the sword. When I was a little boy I
+      wanted to wear clothes like that. And the stars! He's got the V. C. Most
+      of these people here have at any rate shown pluck, you know&mdash;brought
+      something off.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not quite enough,&rdquo; she suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think that's it,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Not quite enough&mdash;not quite hard
+      enough,&rdquo; I added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed and looked at me. &ldquo;You'd like to make us,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think you'll go on if you don't get hard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We shan't be so pleasant if we do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, there my puzzled wits come in again. I don't see why an aristocracy
+      shouldn't be rather hard trained, and yet kindly. I'm not convinced that
+      the resources of education are exhausted. I want to better this, because
+      it already looks so good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How are we to do it?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Redmondson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, there you have me! I've been spending my time lately in trying to
+      answer that! It makes me quarrel with&rdquo;&mdash;I held up my fingers and
+      ticked the items off&mdash;&ldquo;the public schools, the private tutors, the
+      army exams, the Universities, the Church, the general attitude of the
+      country towards science and literature&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We all do,&rdquo; said Mrs. Redmondson. &ldquo;We can't begin again at the
+      beginning,&rdquo; she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Couldn't one,&rdquo; I nodded at the assembly in general, start a movement?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's the Confederates,&rdquo; she said, with a faint smile that masked a
+      gleam of curiosity.... &ldquo;You want,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;to say to the aristocracy,
+      'Be aristocrats. NOBLESSE OBLIGE.' Do you remember what happened to the
+      monarch who was told to 'Be a King'?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;I want an aristocracy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This,&rdquo; she said, smiling, &ldquo;is the pick of them. The backwoodsmen are off
+      the stage. These are the brilliant ones&mdash;the smart and the blues....
+      They cost a lot of money, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So far Mrs. Redmondson, but the picture remained full of things not stated
+      in our speech. They were on the whole handsome people, charitable minded,
+      happy, and easy. They led spacious lives, and there was something free and
+      fearless about their bearing that I liked extremely. The women
+      particularly were wide-reading, fine-thinking. Mrs. Redmondson talked as
+      fully and widely and boldly as a man, and with those flashes of intuition,
+      those startling, sudden delicacies of perception few men display. I liked,
+      too, the relations that held between women and men, their general
+      tolerance, their antagonism to the harsh jealousies that are the essence
+      of the middle-class order....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After all, if one's aim resolved itself into the development of a type and
+      culture of men, why shouldn't one begin at this end?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is very easy indeed to generalise about a class of human beings, but
+      much harder to produce a sample. Was old Lady Forthundred, for instance,
+      fairly a sample? I remember her as a smiling, magnificent presence, a
+      towering accumulation of figure and wonderful shimmering blue silk and
+      black lace and black hair, and small fine features and chins and chins and
+      chins, disposed in a big cane chair with wraps and cushions upon the great
+      terrace of Champneys. Her eye was blue and hard, and her accent and
+      intonation were exactly what you would expect from a rather commonplace
+      dressmaker pretending to be aristocratic. I was, I am afraid, posing a
+      little as the intelligent but respectful inquirer from below investigating
+      the great world, and she was certainly posing as my informant. She
+      affected a cynical coarseness. She developed a theory on the governance of
+      England, beautifully frank and simple. &ldquo;Give 'um all a peerage when they
+      get twenty thousand a year,&rdquo; she maintained. &ldquo;That's my remedy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In my new role of theoretical aristocrat I felt a little abashed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Twenty thousand,&rdquo; she repeated with conviction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It occurred to me that I was in the presence of the aristocratic theory
+      currently working as distinguished from my as yet unformulated intentions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll get a lot of loafers and scamps among 'um,&rdquo; said Lady Forthundred.
+      &ldquo;You get loafers and scamps everywhere, but you'll get a lot of men who'll
+      work hard to keep things together, and that's what we're all after, isn't
+      ut?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's not an ideal arrangement.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me anything better,&rdquo; said Lady Forthundred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the whole, and because she refused emphatically to believe in
+      education, Lady Forthundred scored.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had been discussing Cossington's recent peerage, for Cossington, my old
+      schoolfellow at City Merchants', and my victor in the affair of the
+      magazine, had clambered to an amazing wealth up a piled heap of
+      energetically pushed penny and halfpenny magazines, and a group of daily
+      newspapers. I had expected to find the great lady hostile to the
+      new-comer, but she accepted him, she gloried in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We're a peerage,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;but none of us have ever had any nonsense
+      about nobility.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned and smiled down on me. &ldquo;We English,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;are a practical
+      people. We assimilate 'um.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, I suppose, they don't give trouble?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then they don't give trouble.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They learn to shoot?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And all that,&rdquo; said Lady Forthundred. &ldquo;Yes. And things go on. Sometimes
+      better than others, but they go on&mdash;somehow. It depends very much on
+      the sort of butler who pokes 'um about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I suggested that it might be possible to get a secure twenty thousand a
+      year by at least detrimental methods&mdash;socially speaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We must take the bad and the good of 'um,&rdquo; said Lady Forthundred,
+      courageously....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, was she a sample? It happened she talked. What was there in the
+      brains of the multitude of her first, second, third, fourth, and fifth
+      cousins, who didn't talk, who shone tall, and bearing themselves finely,
+      against a background of deft, attentive maids and valets, on every
+      spacious social scene? How did things look to them?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Side by side with Lady Forthundred, it is curious to put Evesham with his
+      tall, bent body, his little-featured almost elvish face, his unequal mild
+      brown eyes, his gentle manner, his sweet, amazing oratory. He led all
+      these people wonderfully. He was always curious and interested about life,
+      wary beneath a pleasing frankness&mdash;and I tormented my brain to get to
+      the bottom of him. For a long time he was the most powerful man in England
+      under the throne; he had the Lords in his hand, and a great majority in
+      the Commons, and the discontents and intrigues that are the concomitants
+      of an overwhelming party advantage broke against him as waves break
+      against a cliff. He foresaw so far in these matters that it seemed he
+      scarcely troubled to foresee. He brought political art to the last triumph
+      of naturalness. Always for me he has been the typical aristocrat, so
+      typical and above the mere forms of aristocracy, that he remained a
+      commoner to the end of his days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had met him at the beginning of my career; he read some early papers of
+      mine, and asked to see me, and I conceived a flattered liking for him that
+      strengthened to a very strong feeling indeed. He seemed to me to stand
+      alone without an equal, the greatest man in British political life. Some
+      men one sees through and understands, some one cannot see into or round
+      because they are of opaque clay, but about Evesham I had a sense of things
+      hidden as it were by depth and mists, because he was so big and
+      atmospheric a personality. No other contemporary has had that effect upon
+      me. I've sat beside him at dinners, stayed in houses with him&mdash;he was
+      in the big house party at Champneys&mdash;talked to him, sounded him,
+      watching him as I sat beside him. I could talk to him with extraordinary
+      freedom and a rare sense of being understood. Other men have to be treated
+      in a special manner; approached through their own mental dialect,
+      flattered by a minute regard for what they have said and done. Evesham was
+      as widely and charitably receptive as any man I have ever met. The common
+      politicians beside him seemed like rows of stuffy little rooms looking out
+      upon the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And what was he up to? What did HE think we were doing with Mankind? That
+      I thought worth knowing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember his talking on one occasion at the Hartsteins', at a dinner so
+      tremendously floriferous and equipped that we were almost forced into
+      duologues, about the possible common constructive purpose in politics.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel so much,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that the best people in every party converge.
+      We don't differ at Westminster as they do in the country towns. There's a
+      sort of extending common policy that goes on under every government,
+      because on the whole it's the right thing to do, and people know it.
+      Things that used to be matters of opinion become matters of science&mdash;and
+      cease to be party questions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He instanced education.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Apart,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;from the religious question.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Apart from the religious question.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He dropped that aspect with an easy grace, and went on with his general
+      theme that political conflict was the outcome of uncertainty. &ldquo;Directly
+      you get a thing established, so that people can say, 'Now this is Right,'
+      with the same conviction that people can say water is a combination of
+      oxygen and hydrogen, there's no more to be said. The thing has to be
+      done....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Have I not seen him in the House, persistent, persuasive, indefatigable,
+      and by all my standards wickedly perverse, leaning over the table with
+      those insistent movements of his hand upon it, or swaying forward with a
+      grip upon his coat lapel, fighting with a diabolical skill to preserve
+      what are in effect religious tests, tests he must have known would outrage
+      and humiliate and injure the consciences of a quarter&mdash;and that
+      perhaps the best quarter&mdash;of the youngsters who come to the work of
+      elementary education?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In playing for points in the game of party advantage Evesham displayed at
+      times a quite wicked unscrupulousness in the use of his subtle mind. I
+      would sit on the Liberal benches and watch him, and listen to his urbane
+      voice, fascinated by him. Did he really care? Did anything matter to him?
+      And if it really mattered nothing, why did he trouble to serve the
+      narrowness and passion of his side? Or did he see far beyond my scope, so
+      that this petty iniquity was justified by greater, remoter ends of which I
+      had no intimation?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They accused him of nepotism. His friends and family were certainly well
+      cared for. In private life he was full of an affectionate intimacy; he
+      pleased by being charmed and pleased. One might think at times there was
+      no more of him than a clever man happily circumstanced, and finding an
+      interest and occupation in politics. And then came a glimpse of thought,
+      of imagination, like the sight of a soaring eagle through a staircase
+      skylight. Oh, beyond question he was great! No other contemporary
+      politician had his quality. In no man have I perceived so sympathetically
+      the great contrast between warm, personal things and the white dream of
+      statecraft. Except that he had it seemed no hot passions, but only
+      interests and fine affections and indolences, he paralleled the conflict
+      of my life. He saw and thought widely and deeply; but at times it seemed
+      to me his greatness stood over and behind the reality of his life, like
+      some splendid servant, thinking his own thoughts, who waits behind a
+      lesser master's chair....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      8
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, when Evesham talked of this ideal of the organised state
+      becoming so finely true to practicability and so clearly stated as to have
+      the compelling conviction of physical science, he spoke quite after my
+      heart. Had he really embodied the attempt to realise that, I could have
+      done no more than follow him blindly. But neither he nor I embodied that,
+      and there lies the gist of my story. And when it came to a study of others
+      among the leading Tories and Imperialists the doubt increased, until with
+      some at last it was possible to question whether they had any imaginative
+      conception of constructive statecraft at all; whether they didn't opaquely
+      accept the world for what it was, and set themselves single-mindedly to
+      make a place for themselves and cut a figure in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were some very fine personalities among them: there were the great
+      peers who had administered Egypt, India, South Africa, Framboya&mdash;Cromer,
+      Kitchener, Curzon, Milner, Gane, for example. So far as that easier task
+      of holding sword and scales had gone, they had shown the finest qualities,
+      but they had returned to the perplexing and exacting problem of the home
+      country, a little glorious, a little too simply bold. They wanted to arm
+      and they wanted to educate, but the habit of immediate necessity made them
+      far more eager to arm than to educate, and their experience of
+      heterogeneous controls made them overrate the need for obedience in a
+      homogeneous country. They didn't understand raw men, ill-trained men,
+      uncertain minds, and intelligent women; and these are the things that
+      matter in England.... There were also the great business adventurers, from
+      Cranber to Cossington (who was now Lord Paddockhurst). My mind remained
+      unsettled, and went up and down the scale between a belief in their
+      far-sighted purpose and the perception of crude vanities, coarse
+      ambitions, vulgar competitiveness, and a mere habitual persistence in the
+      pursuit of gain. For a time I saw a good deal of Cossington&mdash;I wish I
+      had kept a diary of his talk and gestures, to mark how he could vary from
+      day to day between a POSEUR, a smart tradesman, and a very bold and
+      wide-thinking political schemer. He had a vanity of sweeping actions,
+      motor car pounces, Napoleonic rushes, that led to violent ineffectual
+      changes in the policy of his papers, and a haunting pursuit by parallel
+      columns in the liberal press that never abashed him in the slightest
+      degree. By an accident I plumbed the folly in him&mdash;but I feel I never
+      plumbed his wisdom. I remember him one day after a lunch at the Barhams'
+      saying suddenly, out of profound meditation over the end of a cigar, one
+      of those sentences that seem to light the whole interior being of a man.
+      &ldquo;Some day,&rdquo; he said softly, rather to himself than to me, and A PROPOS of
+      nothing&mdash;&ldquo;some day I will raise the country.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo; I said, after a pause, and leant across him for the little
+      silver spirit-lamp, to light my cigarette....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the Tories had for another section the ancient creations, and again
+      there were the financial peers, men accustomed to reserve, and their big
+      lawyers, accustomed to&mdash;well, qualified statement. And below the
+      giant personalities of the party were the young bloods, young, adventurous
+      men of the type of Lord Tarvrille, who had seen service in South Africa,
+      who had travelled and hunted; explorers, keen motorists, interested in
+      aviation, active in army organisation. Good, brown-faced stuff they were,
+      but impervious to ideas outside the range of their activities, more
+      ignorant of science than their chauffeurs, and of the quality of English
+      people than welt-politicians; contemptuous of school and university by
+      reason of the Gateses and Flacks and Codgers who had come their way,
+      witty, light-hearted, patriotic at the Kipling level, with a certain
+      aptitude for bullying. They varied in insensible gradations between the
+      noble sportsmen on the one hand, and men like Gane and the Tories of our
+      Pentagram club on the other. You perceive how a man might exercise his
+      mind in the attempt to strike an average of public serviceability in this
+      miscellany! And mixed up with these, mixed up sometimes in the same man,
+      was the pure reactionary, whose predominant idea was that the village
+      schools should confine themselves to teaching the catechism, hat-touching
+      and courtesying, and be given a holiday whenever beaters were in
+      request....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I find now in my mind as a sort of counterpoise to Evesham the figure of
+      old Lord Wardingham, asleep in the largest armchair in the library of
+      Stamford Court after lunch. One foot rested on one of those things&mdash;I
+      think they are called gout stools. He had been playing golf all the
+      morning and wearied a weak instep; at lunch he had sat at my table and
+      talked in the overbearing manner permitted to irascible important men
+      whose insteps are painful. Among other things he had flouted the idea that
+      women would ever understand statecraft or be more than a nuisance in
+      politics, denied flatly that Hindoos were capable of anything whatever
+      except excesses in population, regretted he could not censor picture
+      galleries and circulating libraries, and declared that dissenters were
+      people who pretended to take theology seriously with the express purpose
+      of upsetting the entirely satisfactory compromise of the Established
+      Church. &ldquo;No sensible people, with anything to gain or lose, argue about
+      religion,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;They mean mischief.&rdquo; Having delivered his soul upon
+      these points, and silenced the little conversation to the left of him from
+      which they had arisen, he became, after an appreciative encounter with a
+      sanguinary woodcock, more amiable, responded to some respectful
+      initiatives of Crupp's, and related a number of classical anecdotes of
+      those blighting snubs, vindictive retorts and scandalous miscarriages of
+      justice that are so dear to the forensic mind. Now he reposed. He was
+      breathing heavily with his mouth a little open and his head on one side.
+      One whisker was turned back against the comfortable padding. His plump
+      strong hands gripped the arms of his chair, and his frown was a little
+      assuaged. How tremendously fed up he looked! Honours, wealth, influence,
+      respect, he had them all. How scornful and hard it had made his unguarded
+      expression!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I note without comment that it didn't even occur to me then to wake him up
+      and ask him what HE was up to with mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      9
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One countervailing influence to my drift to Toryism in those days was
+      Margaret's quite religious faith in the Liberals. I realised that slowly
+      and with a mild astonishment. It set me, indeed, even then questioning my
+      own change of opinion. We came at last incidentally, as our way was, to an
+      exchange of views. It was as nearly a quarrel as we had before I came over
+      to the Conservative side. It was at Champneys, and I think during the same
+      visit that witnessed my exploration of Lady Forthundred. It arose
+      indirectly, I think, out of some comments of mine upon our fellow-guests,
+      but it is one of those memories of which the scene and quality remain more
+      vivid than the things said, a memory without any very definite beginning
+      or end. It was afternoon, in the pause between tea and the dressing bell,
+      and we were in Margaret's big silver-adorned, chintz-bright room, looking
+      out on the trim Italian garden.... Yes, the beginning of it has escaped me
+      altogether, but I remember it as an odd exceptional little wrangle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first we seem to have split upon the moral quality of the aristocracy,
+      and I had an odd sense that in some way too feminine for me to understand
+      our hostess had aggrieved her. She said, I know, that Champneys distressed
+      her; made her &ldquo;eager for work and reality again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But aren't these people real?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They're so superficial, so extravagant!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I said I was not shocked by their unreality. They seemed the least
+      affected people I had ever met. &ldquo;And are they really so extravagant?&rdquo; I
+      asked, and put it to her that her dresses cost quite as much as any other
+      woman's in the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's not only their dresses,&rdquo; Margaret parried. &ldquo;It's the scale and
+      spirit of things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I questioned that. &ldquo;They're cynical,&rdquo; said Margaret, staring before her
+      out of the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I challenged her, and she quoted the Brabants, about whom there had been
+      an ancient scandal. She'd heard of it from Altiora, and it was also
+      Altiora who'd given her a horror of Lord Carnaby, who was also with us.
+      &ldquo;You know his reputation,&rdquo; said Margaret. &ldquo;That Normandy girl. Every one
+      knows about it. I shiver when I look at him. He seems&mdash;oh! like
+      something not of OUR civilisation. He WILL come and say little things to
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Offensive things?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, politenesses and things. Of course his manners are&mdash;quite right.
+      That only makes it worse, I think. It shows he might have helped&mdash;all
+      that happened. I do all I can to make him see I don't like him. But none
+      of the others make the slightest objection to him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps these people imagine something might be said for him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's just it,&rdquo; said Margaret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Charity,&rdquo; I suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't like that sort of toleration.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was oddly annoyed. &ldquo;Like eating with publicans and sinners,&rdquo; I said.
+      &ldquo;No!...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But scandals, and the contempt for rigid standards their condonation
+      displayed, weren't more than the sharp edge of the trouble. &ldquo;It's their
+      whole position, their selfish predominance, their class conspiracy against
+      the mass of people,&rdquo; said Margaret. &ldquo;When I sit at dinner in that splendid
+      room, with its glitter and white reflections and candlelight, and its
+      flowers and its wonderful service and its candelabra of solid gold, I seem
+      to feel the slums and the mines and the over-crowded cottages stuffed away
+      under the table.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I reminded Margaret that she was not altogether innocent of unearned
+      increment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But aren't we doing our best to give it back?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was moved to question her. &ldquo;Do you really think,&rdquo; I asked, &ldquo;that the
+      Tories and peers and rich people are to blame for social injustice as we
+      have it to-day? Do you really see politics as a struggle of light on the
+      Liberal side against darkness on the Tory?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They MUST know,&rdquo; said Margaret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I found myself questioning that. I see now that to Margaret it must have
+      seemed the perversest carping against manifest things, but at the time I
+      was concentrated simply upon the elucidation of her view and my own; I
+      wanted to get at her conception in the sharpest, hardest lines that were
+      possible. It was perfectly clear that she saw Toryism as the diabolical
+      element in affairs. The thing showed in its hopeless untruth all the
+      clearer for the fine, clean emotion with which she gave it out to me. My
+      sleeping peer in the library at Stamford Court and Evesham talking
+      luminously behind the Hartstein flowers embodied the devil, and my replete
+      citizen sucking at his cigar in the National Liberal Club, Willie Crampton
+      discussing the care and management of the stomach over a specially
+      hygienic lemonade, and Dr. Tumpany in his aggressive frock-coat pegging
+      out a sort of copyright in Socialism, were the centre and wings of the
+      angelic side. It was nonsense. But how was I to put the truth to her?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't see things at all as you do,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;I don't see things in the
+      same way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Think of the poor,&rdquo; said Margaret, going off at a tangent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Think of every one,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;We Liberals have done more mischief through
+      well-intentioned benevolence than all the selfishness in the world could
+      have done. We built up the liquor interest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;WE!&rdquo; cried Margaret. &ldquo;How can you say that? It's against us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Naturally. But we made it a monopoly in our clumsy efforts to prevent
+      people drinking what they liked, because it interfered with industrial
+      regularity&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; cried Margaret, stung; and I could see she thought I was talking
+      mere wickedness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's it,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But would you have people drink whatever they pleased?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly. What right have I to dictate to other men and women?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But think of the children!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! there you have the folly of modern Liberalism, its half-cunning,
+      half-silly way of getting at everything in a roundabout fashion. If
+      neglecting children is an offence, and it IS an offence, then deal with it
+      as such, but don't go badgering and restricting people who sell something
+      that may possibly in some cases lead to a neglect of children. If
+      drunkenness is an offence, punish it, but don't punish a man for selling
+      honest drink that perhaps after all won't make any one drunk at all. Don't
+      intensify the viciousness of the public-house by assuming the place isn't
+      fit for women and children. That's either spite or folly. Make the
+      public-house FIT for women and children. Make it a real public-house. If
+      we Liberals go on as we are going, we shall presently want to stop the
+      sale of ink and paper because those things tempt men to forgery. We do
+      already threaten the privacy of the post because of betting tout's
+      letters. The drift of all that kind of thing is narrow, unimaginative,
+      mischievous, stupid....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I stopped short and walked to the window and surveyed a pretty fountain,
+      facsimile of one in Verona, amidst trim-cut borderings of yew. Beyond, and
+      seen between the stems of ilex trees, was a great blaze of yellow
+      flowers....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But prevention,&rdquo; I heard Margaret behind me, &ldquo;is the essence of our
+      work.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I turned. &ldquo;There's no prevention but education. There's no antiseptics in
+      life but love and fine thinking. Make people fine, make fine people. Don't
+      be afraid. These Tory leaders are better people individually than the
+      average; why cast them for the villains of the piece? The real villain in
+      the piece&mdash;in the whole human drama&mdash;is the muddle-headedness,
+      and it matters very little if it's virtuous-minded or wicked. I want to
+      get at muddle-headedness. If I could do that I could let all that you call
+      wickedness in the world run about and do what it jolly well pleased. It
+      would matter about as much as a slightly neglected dog&mdash;in an
+      otherwise well-managed home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      My thoughts had run away with me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't understand you,&rdquo; said Margaret, in the profoundest distress. &ldquo;I
+      can't understand how it is you are coming to see things like this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      10
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The moods of a thinking man in politics are curiously evasive and
+      difficult to describe. Neither the public nor the historian will permit
+      the statesman moods. He has from the first to assume he has an Aim, a
+      definite Aim, and to pretend to an absolute consistency with that. Those
+      subtle questionings about the very fundamentals of life which plague us
+      all so relentlessly nowadays are supposed to be silenced. He lifts his
+      chin and pursues his Aim explicitly in the sight of all men. Those who
+      have no real political experience can scarcely imagine the immense mental
+      and moral strain there is between one's everyday acts and utterances on
+      the one hand and the &ldquo;thinking-out&rdquo; process on the other. It is
+      perplexingly difficult to keep in your mind, fixed and firm, a scheme
+      essentially complex, to keep balancing a swaying possibility while at the
+      same time under jealous, hostile, and stupid observation you tread your
+      part in the platitudinous, quarrelsome, ill-presented march of affairs....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The most impossible of all autobiographies is an intellectual
+      autobiography. I have thrown together in the crudest way the elements of
+      the problem I struggled with, but I can give no record of the subtle
+      details; I can tell nothing of the long vacillations between Protean
+      values, the talks and re-talks, the meditations, the bleak lucidities of
+      sleepless nights....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet these things I have struggled with must be thought out, and, to
+      begin with, they must be thought out in this muddled, experimenting way.
+      To go into a study to think about statecraft is to turn your back on the
+      realities you are constantly needing to feel and test and sound if your
+      thinking is to remain vital; to choose an aim and pursue it in despite of
+      all subsequent questionings is to bury the talent of your mind. It is no
+      use dealing with the intricate as though it were simple, to leap haphazard
+      at the first course of action that presents itself; the whole world of
+      politicians is far too like a man who snatches a poker to a failing watch.
+      It is easy to say he wants to &ldquo;get something done,&rdquo; but the only sane
+      thing to do for the moment is to put aside that poker and take thought and
+      get a better implement....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the results of these fundamental preoccupations of mine was a
+      curious irritability towards Margaret that I found difficult to conceal.
+      It was one of the incidental cruelties of our position that this should
+      happen. I was in such doubt myself, that I had no power to phrase things
+      for her in a form she could use. Hitherto I had stage-managed our
+      &ldquo;serious&rdquo; conversations. Now I was too much in earnest and too uncertain
+      to go on doing this. I avoided talk with her. Her serene, sustained
+      confidence in vague formulae and sentimental aspirations exasperated me;
+      her want of sympathetic apprehension made my few efforts to indicate my
+      changing attitudes distressing and futile. It wasn't that I was always
+      thinking right, and that she was always saying wrong. It was that I was
+      struggling to get hold of a difficult thing that was, at any rate, half
+      true, I could not gauge how true, and that Margaret's habitual phrasing
+      ignored these elusive elements of truth, and without premeditation fitted
+      into the weaknesses of my new intimations, as though they had nothing but
+      weaknesses. It was, for example, obvious that these big people, who were
+      the backbone of Imperialism and Conservatism, were temperamentally lax,
+      much more indolent, much more sensuous, than our deliberately virtuous
+      Young Liberals. I didn't want to be reminded of that, just when I was in
+      full effort to realise the finer elements in their composition. Margaret
+      classed them and disposed of them. It was our incurable differences in
+      habits and gestures of thought coming between us again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The desert of misunderstanding widened. I was forced back upon myself and
+      my own secret councils. For a time I went my way alone; an unmixed evil
+      for both of us. Except for that Pentagram evening, a series of talks with
+      Isabel Rivers, who was now becoming more and more important in my
+      intellectual life, and the arguments I maintained with Crupp, I never
+      really opened my mind at all during that period of indecisions, slow
+      abandonments, and slow acquisitions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ SECESSION
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, out of a vast accumulation of impressions, decision distilled
+      quite suddenly. I succumbed to Evesham and that dream of the right thing
+      triumphant through expression. I determined I would go over to the
+      Conservatives, and use my every gift and power on the side of such forces
+      on that side as made for educational reorganisation, scientific research,
+      literature, criticism, and intellectual development. That was in 1909. I
+      judged the Tories were driving straight at a conflict with the country,
+      and I thought them bound to incur an electoral defeat. I under-estimated
+      their strength in the counties. There would follow, I calculated, a period
+      of profound reconstruction in method and policy alike. I was entirely at
+      one with Crupp in perceiving in this an immense opportunity for the things
+      we desired. An aristocracy quickened by conflict and on the defensive, and
+      full of the idea of justification by reconstruction, might prove
+      altogether more apt for thought and high professions than Mrs.
+      Redmondson's spoilt children. Behind the now inevitable struggle for a
+      reform of the House of Lords, there would be great heart searchings and
+      educational endeavour. On that we reckoned....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last we talked it out to the practical pitch, and Crupp and Shoesmith,
+      and I and Gane, made our definite agreement together....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I emerged from enormous silences upon Margaret one evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was just back from the display of some new musicians at the
+      Hartsteins. I remember she wore a dress of golden satin, very rich-looking
+      and splendid. About her slender neck there was a rope of gold-set amber
+      beads. Her hair caught up and echoed and returned these golden notes. I,
+      too, was in evening dress, but where I had been escapes me,&mdash;some
+      forgotten dinner, I suppose. I went into her room. I remember I didn't
+      speak for some moments. I went across to the window and pulled the blind
+      aside, and looked out upon the railed garden of the square, with its
+      shrubs and shadowed turf gleaming pallidly and irregularly in the light of
+      the big electric standard in the corner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Margaret,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;I think I shall break with the party.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made no answer. I turned presently, a movement of enquiry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was afraid you meant to do that,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm out of touch,&rdquo; I explained. &ldquo;Altogether.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! I know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It places me in a difficult position,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret stood at her dressing-table, looking steadfastly at herself in
+      the glass, and with her fingers playing with a litter of stoppered bottles
+      of tinted glass. &ldquo;I was afraid it was coming to this,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In a way,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;we've been allies. I owe my seat to you. I couldn't
+      have gone into Parliament....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want considerations like that to affect us,&rdquo; she interrupted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a pause. She sat down in a chair by her dressing-table, lifted
+      an ivory hand-glass, and put it down again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish,&rdquo; she said, with something like a sob in her voice, &ldquo;it were
+      possible that you shouldn't do this.&rdquo; She stopped abruptly, and I did not
+      look at her, because I could feel the effort she was making to control
+      herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought,&rdquo; she began again, &ldquo;when you came into Parliament&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There came another silence. &ldquo;It's all gone so differently,&rdquo; she said.
+      &ldquo;Everything has gone so differently.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I had a sudden memory of her, shining triumphant after the Kinghampstead
+      election, and for the first time I realised just how perplexing and
+      disappointing my subsequent career must have been to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not doing this without consideration,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; she said, in a voice of despair, &ldquo;I've seen it coming. But&mdash;I
+      still don't understand it. I don't understand how you can go over.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My ideas have changed and developed,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I walked across to her bearskin hearthrug, and stood by the mantel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To think that you,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;you who might have been leader&mdash;&rdquo; She
+      could not finish it. &ldquo;All the forces of reaction,&rdquo; she threw out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think they are the forces of reaction,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;I think I can
+      find work to do&mdash;better work on that side.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Against us!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;As if progress wasn't hard enough! As if it
+      didn't call upon every able man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think Liberalism has a monopoly of progress.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not answer that. She sat quite still looking in front of her. &ldquo;WHY
+      have you gone over?&rdquo; she asked abruptly as though I had said nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There came a silence that I was impelled to end. I began a stiff
+      dissertation from the hearthrug. &ldquo;I am going over, because I think I may
+      join in an intellectual renascence on the Conservative side. I think that
+      in the coming struggle there will be a partial and altogether confused and
+      demoralising victory for democracy, that will stir the classes which now
+      dominate the Conservative party into an energetic revival. They will set
+      out to win back, and win back. Even if my estimate of contemporary forces
+      is wrong and they win, they will still be forced to reconstruct their
+      outlook. A war abroad will supply the chastening if home politics fail.
+      The effort at renascence is bound to come by either alternative. I believe
+      I can do more in relation to that effort than in any other connexion in
+      the world of politics at the present time. That's my case, Margaret.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She certainly did not grasp what I said. &ldquo;And so you will throw aside all
+      the beginnings, all the beliefs and pledges&mdash;&rdquo; Again her sentence
+      remained incomplete. &ldquo;I doubt if even, once you have gone over, they will
+      welcome you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That hardly matters.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I made an effort to resume my speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I came into Parliament, Margaret,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;a little prematurely. Still&mdash;I
+      suppose it was only by coming into Parliament that I could see things as I
+      do now in terms of personality and imaginative range....&rdquo; I stopped. Her
+      stiff, unhappy, unlistening silence broke up my disquisition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After all,&rdquo; I remarked, &ldquo;most of this has been implicit in my writings.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made no sign of admission.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you going to do?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Keep my seat for a time and make the reasons of my breach clear. Then
+      either I must resign or&mdash;probably this new Budget will lead to a
+      General Election. It's evidently meant to strain the Lords and provoke a
+      quarrel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You might, I think, have stayed to fight for the Budget.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;so keen against the Lords.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On that we halted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what are you going to do?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall make my quarrel over some points in the Budget. I can't quite
+      tell you yet where my chance will come. Then I shall either resign my seat&mdash;or
+      if things drift to dissolution I shall stand again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's political suicide.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not altogether.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't imagine you out of Parliament again. It's just like&mdash;like
+      undoing all we have done. What will you do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Write. Make a new, more definite place for myself. You know, of course,
+      there's already a sort of group about Crupp and Gane.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret seemed lost for a time in painful thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For me,&rdquo; she said at last, &ldquo;our political work has been a religion&mdash;it
+      has been more than a religion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I heard in silence. I had no form of protest available against the
+      implications of that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then I find you turning against all we aimed to do&mdash;talking of
+      going over, almost lightly&mdash;to those others.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was white-lipped as she spoke. In the most curious way she had
+      captured the moral values of the situation. I found myself protesting
+      ineffectually against her fixed conviction. &ldquo;It's because I think my duty
+      lies in this change that I make it,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't see how you can say that,&rdquo; she replied quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was another pause between us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; she said and clenched her hand upon the table. &ldquo;That it should have
+      come to this!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was extraordinarily dignified and extraordinarily absurd. She was hurt
+      and thwarted beyond measure. She had no place in her ideas, I thought, for
+      me. I could see how it appeared to her, but I could not make her see
+      anything of the intricate process that had brought me to this divergence.
+      The opposition of our intellectual temperaments was like a gag in my
+      mouth. What was there for me to say? A flash of intuition told me that
+      behind her white dignity was a passionate disappointment, a shattering of
+      dreams that needed before everything else the relief of weeping.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've told you,&rdquo; I said awkwardly, &ldquo;as soon as I could.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was another long silence. &ldquo;So that is how we stand,&rdquo; I said with an
+      air of having things defined. I walked slowly to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had risen and stood now staring in front of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-night,&rdquo; I said, making no movement towards our habitual kiss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-night,&rdquo; she answered in a tragic note....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I closed the door softly. I remained for a moment or so on the big
+      landing, hesitating between my bedroom and my study. As I did so I heard
+      the soft rustle of her movement and the click of the key in her bedroom
+      door. Then everything was still....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She hid her tears from me. Something gripped my heart at the thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damnation!&rdquo; I said wincing. &ldquo;Why the devil can't people at least THINK in
+      the same manner?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And that insufficient colloquy was the beginning of a prolonged
+      estrangement between us. It was characteristic of our relations that we
+      never reopened the discussion. The thing had been in the air for some
+      time; we had recognised it now; the widening breach between us was
+      confessed. My own feelings were curiously divided. It is remarkable that
+      my very real affection for Margaret only became evident to me with this
+      quarrel. The changes of the heart are very subtle changes. I am quite
+      unaware how or when my early romantic love for her purity and beauty and
+      high-principled devotion evaporated from my life; but I do know that quite
+      early in my parliamentary days there had come a vague, unconfessed
+      resentment at the tie that seemed to hold me in servitude to her standards
+      of private living and public act. I felt I was caught, and none the less
+      so because it had been my own act to rivet on my shackles. So long as I
+      still held myself bound to her that resentment grew. Now, since I had
+      broken my bonds and taken my line it withered again, and I could think of
+      Margaret with a returning kindliness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I still felt embarrassment with her. I felt myself dependent upon her
+      for house room and food and social support, as it were under false
+      pretences. I would have liked to have separated our financial affairs
+      altogether. But I knew that to raise the issue would have seemed a last
+      brutal indelicacy. So I tried almost furtively to keep my personal
+      expenditure within the scope of the private income I made by writing, and
+      we went out together in her motor brougham, dined and made appearances,
+      met politely at breakfast&mdash;parted at night with a kiss upon her
+      cheek. The locking of her door upon me, which at that time I quite
+      understood, which I understand now, became for a time in my mind, through
+      some obscure process of the soul, an offence. I never crossed the landing
+      to her room again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In all this matter, and, indeed, in all my relations with Margaret, I
+      perceive now I behaved badly and foolishly. My manifest blunder is that I,
+      who was several years older than she, much subtler and in many ways wiser,
+      never in any measure sought to guide and control her. After our marriage I
+      treated her always as an equal, and let her go her way; held her
+      responsible for all the weak and ineffective and unfortunate things she
+      said and did to me. She wasn't clever enough to justify that. It wasn't
+      fair to expect her to sympathise, anticipate, and understand. I ought to
+      have taken care of her, roped her to me when it came to crossing the
+      difficult places. If I had loved her more, and wiselier and more tenderly,
+      if there had not been the consciousness of my financial dependence on her
+      always stiffening my pride, I think she would have moved with me from the
+      outset, and left the Liberals with me. But she did not get any inkling of
+      the ends I sought in my change of sides. It must have seemed to her
+      inexplicable perversity. She had, I knew&mdash;for surely I knew it then&mdash;an
+      immense capacity for loyalty and devotion. There she was with these
+      treasures untouched, neglected and perplexed. A woman who loves wants to
+      give. It is the duty and business of the man she has married for love to
+      help her to help and give. But I was stupid. My eyes had never been
+      opened. I was stiff with her and difficult to her, because even on my
+      wedding morning there had been, deep down in my soul, voiceless though
+      present, something weakly protesting, a faint perception of wrong-doing,
+      the infinitesimally small, slow-multiplying germs of shame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I made my breach with the party on the Budget.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In many ways I was disposed to regard the 1909 Budget as a fine piece of
+      statecraft. Its production was certainly a very unexpected display of
+      vigour on the Liberal side. But, on the whole, this movement towards
+      collectivist organisation on the part of the Liberals rather strengthened
+      than weakened my resolve to cross the floor of the house. It made it more
+      necessary, I thought, to leaven the purely obstructive and reactionary
+      elements that were at once manifest in the opposition. I assailed the land
+      taxation proposals in one main speech, and a series of minor speeches in
+      committee. The line of attack I chose was that the land was a great public
+      service that needed to be controlled on broad and far-sighted lines. I had
+      no objection to its nationalisation, but I did object most strenuously to
+      the idea of leaving it in private hands, and attempting to produce
+      beneficial social results through the pressure of taxation upon the
+      land-owning class. That might break it up in an utterly disastrous way.
+      The drift of the government proposals was all in the direction of sweating
+      the landowner to get immediate values from his property, and such a course
+      of action was bound to give us an irritated and vindictive land-owning
+      class, the class upon which we had hitherto relied&mdash;not unjustifiably&mdash;for
+      certain broad, patriotic services and an influence upon our collective
+      judgments that no other class seemed prepared to exercise. Abolish
+      landlordism if you will, I said, buy it out, but do not drive it to a
+      defensive fight, and leave it still sufficiently strong and wealthy to
+      become a malcontent element in your state. You have taxed and controlled
+      the brewer and the publican until the outraged Liquor Interest has become
+      a national danger. You now propose to do the same thing on a larger scale.
+      You turn a class which has many fine and truly aristocratic traditions
+      towards revolt, and there is nothing in these or any other of your
+      proposals that shows any sense of the need for leadership to replace these
+      traditional leaders you are ousting. This was the substance of my case,
+      and I hammered at it not only in the House, but in the press....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Kinghampstead division remained for some time insensitive to my
+      defection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then it woke up suddenly, and began, in the columns of the KINGSHAMPSTEAD
+      GUARDIAN, an indignant, confused outcry. I was treated to an open letter,
+      signed &ldquo;Junius Secundus,&rdquo; and I replied in provocative terms. There were
+      two thinly attended public meetings at different ends of the constituency,
+      and then I had a correspondence with my old friend Parvill, the
+      photographer, which ended in my seeing a deputation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My impression is that it consisted of about eighteen or twenty people.
+      They had had to come upstairs to me and they were manifestly full of
+      indignation and a little short of breath. There was Parvill himself, J.P.,
+      dressed wholly in black&mdash;I think to mark his sense of the occasion&mdash;and
+      curiously suggestive in his respect for my character and his concern for
+      the honourableness of the KINGHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN editor, of Mark Antony at
+      the funeral of Cesar. There was Mrs. Bulger, also in mourning; she had
+      never abandoned the widow's streamers since the death of her husband ten
+      years ago, and her loyalty to Liberalism of the severest type was part as
+      it were of her weeds. There was a nephew of Sir Roderick Newton, a bright
+      young Hebrew of the graver type, and a couple of dissenting ministers in
+      high collars and hats that stopped halfway between the bowler of this
+      world and the shovel-hat of heaven. There was also a young solicitor from
+      Lurky done in the horsey style, and there was a very little nervous man
+      with a high brow and a face contracting below as though the jawbones and
+      teeth had been taken out and the features compressed. The rest of the
+      deputation, which included two other public-spirited ladies and several
+      ministers of religion, might have been raked out of any omnibus going
+      Strandward during the May meetings. They thrust Parvill forward as
+      spokesman, and manifested a strong disposition to say &ldquo;Hear, hear!&rdquo; to his
+      more strenuous protests provided my eye wasn't upon them at the time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I regarded this appalling deputation as Parvill's apologetic but quite
+      definite utterances drew to an end. I had a moment of vision. Behind them
+      I saw the wonderful array of skeleton forces that stand for public
+      opinion, that are as much public opinion as exists indeed at the present
+      time. The whole process of politics which bulks so solidly in history
+      seemed for that clairvoyant instant but a froth of petty motives above
+      abysms of indifference....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some one had finished. I perceived I had to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;I won't keep you long in replying. I'll resign if
+      there isn't a dissolution before next February, and if there is I shan't
+      stand again. You don't want the bother and expense of a bye-election
+      (approving murmurs) if it can be avoided. But I may tell you plainly now
+      that I don't think it will be necessary for me to resign, and the sooner
+      you find my successor the better for the party. The Lords are in a corner;
+      they've got to fight now or never, and I think they will throw out the
+      Budget. Then they will go on fighting. It is a fight that will last for
+      years. They have a sort of social discipline, and you haven't. You
+      Liberals will find yourselves with a country behind you, vaguely indignant
+      perhaps, but totally unprepared with any ideas whatever in the matter,
+      face to face with the problem of bringing the British constitution
+      up-to-date. Anything may happen, provided only that it is sufficiently
+      absurd. If the King backs the Lords&mdash;and I don't see why he shouldn't&mdash;you
+      have no Republican movement whatever to fall back upon. You lost it during
+      the Era of Good Taste. The country, I say, is destitute of ideas, and you
+      have no ideas to give it. I don't see what you will do.... For my own
+      part, I mean to spend a year or so between a window and my writing-desk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I paused. &ldquo;I think, gentlemen,&rdquo; began Parvill, &ldquo;that we hear all this with
+      very great regret....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My estrangement from Margaret stands in my memory now as something that
+      played itself out within the four walls of our house in Radnor Square,
+      which was, indeed, confined to those limits. I went to and fro between my
+      house and the House of Commons, and the dining-rooms and clubs and offices
+      in which we were preparing our new developments, in a state of aggressive
+      and energetic dissociation, in the nascent state, as a chemist would say.
+      I was free now, and greedy for fresh combination. I had a tremendous sense
+      of released energies. I had got back to the sort of thing I could do, and
+      to the work that had been shaping itself for so long in my imagination.
+      Our purpose now was plain, bold, and extraordinarily congenial. We meant
+      no less than to organise a new movement in English thought and life, to
+      resuscitate a Public Opinion and prepare the ground for a revised and
+      renovated ruling culture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time I seemed quite wonderfully able to do whatever I wanted to do.
+      Shoesmith responded to my first advances. We decided to create a weekly
+      paper as our nucleus, and Crupp and I set to work forthwith to collect a
+      group of writers and speakers, including Esmeer, Britten, Lord Gane, Neal,
+      and one or two younger men, which should constitute a more or less
+      definite editorial council about me, and meet at a weekly lunch on Tuesday
+      to sustain our general co-operations. We marked our claim upon Toryism
+      even in the colour of our wrapper, and spoke of ourselves collectively as
+      the Blue Weeklies. But our lunches were open to all sorts of guests, and
+      our deliberations were never of a character to control me effectively in
+      my editorial decisions. My only influential councillor at first was old
+      Britten, who became my sub-editor. It was curious how we two had picked up
+      our ancient intimacy again and resumed the easy give and take of our
+      speculative dreaming schoolboy days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time my life centred altogether upon this journalistic work. Britten
+      was an experienced journalist, and I had most of the necessary instincts
+      for the business. We meant to make the paper right and good down to the
+      smallest detail, and we set ourselves at this with extraordinary zeal. It
+      wasn't our intention to show our political motives too markedly at first,
+      and through all the dust storm and tumult and stress of the political
+      struggle of 1910, we made a little intellectual oasis of good art
+      criticism and good writing. It was the firm belief of nearly all of us
+      that the Lords were destined to be beaten badly in 1910, and our game was
+      the longer game of reconstruction that would begin when the shouting and
+      tumult of that immediate conflict were over. Meanwhile we had to get into
+      touch with just as many good minds as possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we felt our feet, I developed slowly and carefully a broadly conceived
+      and consistent political attitude. As I will explain later, we were
+      feminist from the outset, though that caused Shoesmith and Gane great
+      searching of heart; we developed Esmeer's House of Lords reform scheme
+      into a general cult of the aristocratic virtues, and we did much to
+      humanise and liberalise the narrow excellencies of that Break-up of the
+      Poor Law agitation, which had been organised originally by Beatrice and
+      Sidney Webb. In addition, without any very definite explanation to any one
+      but Esmeer and Isabel Rivers, and as if it was quite a small matter, I set
+      myself to secure a uniform philosophical quality in our columns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That, indeed, was the peculiar virtue and characteristic of the BLUE
+      WEEKLY. I was now very definitely convinced that much of the confusion and
+      futility of contemporary thought was due to the general need of
+      metaphysical training.... The great mass of people&mdash;and not simply
+      common people, but people active and influential in intellectual things&mdash;are
+      still quite untrained in the methods of thought and absolutely innocent of
+      any criticism of method; it is scarcely a caricature to call their
+      thinking a crazy patchwork, discontinuous and chaotic. They arrive at
+      conclusions by a kind of accident, and do not suspect any other way may be
+      found to their attainment. A stage above this general condition stands
+      that minority of people who have at some time or other discovered general
+      terms and a certain use for generalisations. They are&mdash;to fall back
+      on the ancient technicality&mdash;Realists of a crude sort. When I say
+      Realist of course I mean Realist as opposed to Nominalist, and not Realist
+      in the almost diametrically different sense of opposition to Idealist.
+      Such are the Baileys; such, to take their great prototype, was Herbert
+      Spencer (who couldn't read Kant); such are whole regiments of prominent
+      and entirely self-satisfied contemporaries. They go through queer little
+      processes of definition and generalisation and deduction with the
+      completest belief in the validity of the intellectual instrument they are
+      using. They are Realists&mdash;Cocksurists&mdash;in matter of fact;
+      sentimentalists in behaviour. The Baileys having got to this glorious
+      stage in mental development&mdash;it is glorious because it has no doubts&mdash;were
+      always talking about training &ldquo;Experts&rdquo; to apply the same simple process
+      to all the affairs of mankind. Well, Realism isn't the last word of human
+      wisdom. Modest-minded people, doubtful people, subtle people, and the like&mdash;the
+      kind of people William James writes of as &ldquo;tough-minded,&rdquo; go on beyond
+      this methodical happiness, and are forever after critical of premises and
+      terms. They are truer&mdash;and less confident. They have reached
+      scepticism and the artistic method. They have emerged into the new
+      Nominalism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both Isabel and I believe firmly that these differences of intellectual
+      method matter profoundly in the affairs of mankind, that the collective
+      mind of this intricate complex modern state can only function properly
+      upon neo-Nominalist lines. This has always been her side of our mental
+      co-operation rather than mine. Her mind has the light movement that goes
+      so often with natural mental power; she has a wonderful art in
+      illustration, and, as the reader probably knows already, she writes of
+      metaphysical matters with a rare charm and vividness. So far there has
+      been no collection of her papers published, but they are to be found not
+      only in the BLUE WEEKLY columns but scattered about the monthlies; many
+      people must be familiar with her style. It was an intention we did much to
+      realise before our private downfall, that we would use the BLUE WEEKLY to
+      maintain a stream of suggestion against crude thinking, and at last
+      scarcely a week passed but some popular distinction, some large imposing
+      generalisation, was touched to flaccidity by her pen or mine....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was at great pains to give my philosophical, political, and social
+      matter the best literary and critical backing we could get in London. I
+      hunted sedulously for good descriptive writing and good criticism; I was
+      indefatigable in my readiness to hear and consider, if not to accept
+      advice; I watched every corner of the paper, and had a dozen men alert to
+      get me special matter of the sort that draws in the unattached reader. The
+      chief danger on the literary side of a weekly is that it should fall into
+      the hands of some particular school, and this I watched for closely. It
+      seems impossible to get vividness of apprehension and breadth of view
+      together in the same critic. So it falls to the wise editor to secure the
+      first and impose the second. Directly I detected the shrill partisan note
+      in our criticism, the attempt to puff a poor thing because it was &ldquo;in the
+      right direction,&rdquo; or damn a vigorous piece of work because it wasn't, I
+      tackled the man and had it out with him. Our pay was good enough for that
+      to matter a good deal....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our distinctive little blue and white poster kept up its neat persistent
+      appeal to the public eye, and before 1911 was out, the BLUE WEEKLY was
+      printing twenty pages of publishers' advertisements, and went into all the
+      clubs in London and three-quarters of the country houses where week-end
+      parties gather together. Its sale by newsagents and bookstalls grew
+      steadily. One got more and more the reassuring sense of being discussed,
+      and influencing discussion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our office was at the very top of a big building near the end of Adelphi
+      Terrace; the main window beside my desk, a big undivided window of plate
+      glass, looked out upon Cleopatra's Needle, the corner of the Hotel Cecil,
+      the fine arches of Waterloo Bridge, and the long sweep of south bank with
+      its shot towers and chimneys, past Bankside to the dimly seen piers of the
+      great bridge below the Tower. The dome of St. Paul's just floated into
+      view on the left against the hotel facade. By night and day, in every
+      light and atmosphere, it was a beautiful and various view, alive as a
+      throbbing heart; a perpetual flow of traffic ploughed and splashed the
+      streaming silver of the river, and by night the shapes of things became
+      velvet black and grey, and the water a shining mirror of steel, wearing
+      coruscating gems of light. In the foreground the Embankment trams sailed
+      glowing by, across the water advertisements flashed and flickered, trains
+      went and came and a rolling drift of smoke reflected unseen fires. By day
+      that spectacle was sometimes a marvel of shining wet and wind-cleared
+      atmosphere, sometimes a mystery of drifting fog, sometimes a miracle of
+      crowded details, minutely fine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I think of that view, so variously spacious in effect, I am back there,
+      and this sunlit paper might be lamp-lit and lying on my old desk. I see it
+      all again, feel it all again. In the foreground is a green shaded lamp and
+      crumpled galley slips and paged proofs and letters, two or three papers in
+      manuscript, and so forth. In the shadows are chairs and another table
+      bearing papers and books, a rotating bookcase dimly seen, a long window
+      seat black in the darkness, and then the cool unbroken spectacle of the
+      window. How often I would watch some tram-car, some string of barges go
+      from me slowly out of sight. The people were black animalculae by day,
+      clustering, collecting, dispersing, by night, they were phantom
+      face-specks coming, vanishing, stirring obscurely between light and shade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I recall many hours at my desk in that room before the crisis came, hours
+      full of the peculiar happiness of effective strenuous work. Once some
+      piece of writing went on, holding me intent and forgetful of time until I
+      looked up from the warm circle of my electric lamp to see the eastward sky
+      above the pale silhouette of the Tower Bridge, flushed and banded brightly
+      with the dawn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ THE BESETTING OF SEX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Art is selection and so is most autobiography. But I am concerned with a
+      more tangled business than selection, I want to show a contemporary man in
+      relation to the state and social usage, and the social organism in
+      relation to that man. To tell my story at all I have to simplify. I have
+      given now the broad lines of my political development, and how I passed
+      from my initial liberal-socialism to the conception of a constructive
+      aristocracy. I have tried to set that out in the form of a man discovering
+      himself. Incidentally that self-development led to a profound breach with
+      my wife. One has read stories before of husband and wife speaking
+      severally two different languages and coming to an understanding. But
+      Margaret and I began in her dialect, and, as I came more and more to use
+      my own, diverged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had thought when I married that the matter of womankind had ended for
+      me. I have tried to tell all that sex and women had been to me up to my
+      married life with Margaret and our fatal entanglement, tried to show the
+      queer, crippled, embarrassed and limited way in which these interests
+      break upon the life of a young man under contemporary conditions. I do not
+      think my lot was a very exceptional one. I missed the chance of sisters
+      and girl playmates, but that is not an uncommon misadventure in an age of
+      small families; I never came to know any woman at all intimately until I
+      was married to Margaret. My earlier love affairs were encounters of sex,
+      under conditions of furtiveness and adventure that made them things in
+      themselves, restricted and unilluminating. From a boyish disposition to be
+      mystical and worshipping towards women I had passed into a disregardful
+      attitude, as though women were things inferior or irrelevant, disturbers
+      in great affairs. For a time Margaret had blotted out all other women; she
+      was so different and so near; she was like a person who stands suddenly in
+      front of a little window through which one has been surveying a crowd. She
+      didn't become womankind for me so much as eliminate womankind from my
+      world.... And then came this secret separation....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Until this estrangement and the rapid and uncontrollable development of my
+      relations with Isabel which chanced to follow it, I seemed to have solved
+      the problem of women by marriage and disregard. I thought these things
+      were over. I went about my career with Margaret beside me, her brow
+      slightly knit, her manner faintly strenuous, helping, helping; and if we
+      had not altogether abolished sex we had at least so circumscribed and
+      isolated it that it would not have affected the general tenor of our lives
+      in the slightest degree if we had.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, clothing itself more and more in the form of Isabel and her
+      problems, this old, this fundamental obsession of my life returned. The
+      thing stole upon my mind so that I was unaware of its invasion and how it
+      was changing our long intimacy. I have already compared the lot of the
+      modern publicist to Machiavelli writing in his study; in his day women and
+      sex were as disregarded in these high affairs as, let us say, the
+      chemistry of air or the will of the beasts in the fields; in ours the case
+      has altogether changed, and woman has come now to stand beside the tall
+      candles, half in the light, half in the mystery of the shadows, besetting,
+      interrupting, demanding unrelentingly an altogether unprecedented
+      attention. I feel that in these matters my life has been almost typical of
+      my time. Woman insists upon her presence. She is no longer a mere physical
+      need, an aesthetic bye-play, a sentimental background; she is a moral and
+      intellectual necessity in a man's life. She comes to the politician and
+      demands, Is she a child or a citizen? Is she a thing or a soul? She comes
+      to the individual man, as she came to me and asks, Is she a cherished
+      weakling or an equal mate, an unavoidable helper? Is she to be tried and
+      trusted or guarded and controlled, bond or free? For if she is a mate, one
+      must at once trust more and exact more, exacting toil, courage, and the
+      hardest, most necessary thing of all, the clearest, most shameless,
+      explicitness of understanding....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In all my earlier imaginings of statecraft I had tacitly assumed either
+      that the relations of the sexes were all right or that anyhow they didn't
+      concern the state. It was a matter they, whoever &ldquo;they&rdquo; were, had to
+      settle among themselves. That sort of disregard was possible then. But
+      even before 1906 there were endless intimations that the dams holding back
+      great reservoirs of discussion were crumbling. We political schemers were
+      ploughing wider than any one had ploughed before in the field of social
+      reconstruction. We had also, we realised, to plough deeper. We had to
+      plough down at last to the passionate elements of sexual relationship and
+      examine and decide upon them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The signs multiplied. In a year or so half the police of the metropolis
+      were scarce sufficient to protect the House from one clamorous aspect of
+      the new problem. The members went about Westminster with an odd, new sense
+      of being beset. A good proportion of us kept up the pretence that the Vote
+      for Women was an isolated fad, and the agitation an epidemic madness that
+      would presently pass. But it was manifest to any one who sought more than
+      comfort in the matter that the streams of women and sympathisers and money
+      forthcoming marked far deeper and wider things than an idle fancy for the
+      franchise. The existing laws and conventions of relationship between Man
+      and Woman were just as unsatisfactory a disorder as anything else in our
+      tumbled confusion of a world, and that also was coming to bear upon
+      statecraft.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My first parliament was the parliament of the Suffragettes. I don't
+      propose to tell here of that amazing campaign, with its absurdities and
+      follies, its courage and devotion. There were aspects of that unquenchable
+      agitation that were absolutely heroic and aspects that were absolutely
+      pitiful. It was unreasonable, unwise, and, except for its one central
+      insistence, astonishingly incoherent. It was amazingly effective. The very
+      incoherence of the demand witnessed, I think, to the forces that lay
+      behind it. It wasn't a simple argument based on a simple assumption; it
+      was the first crude expression of a great mass and mingling of convergent
+      feelings, of a widespread, confused persuasion among modern educated women
+      that the conditions of their relations with men were oppressive, ugly,
+      dishonouring, and had to be altered. They had not merely adopted the Vote
+      as a symbol of equality; it was fairly manifest to me that, given it, they
+      meant to use it, and to use it perhaps even vindictively and blindly, as a
+      weapon against many things they had every reason to hate....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember, with exceptional vividness, that great night early in the
+      session of 1909, when&mdash;I think it was&mdash;fifty or sixty women went
+      to prison. I had been dining at the Barham's, and Lord Barham and I came
+      down from the direction of St. James's Park into a crowd and a confusion
+      outside the Caxton Hall. We found ourselves drifting with an immense
+      multitude towards Parliament Square and parallel with a silent,
+      close-packed column of girls and women, for the most part white-faced and
+      intent. I still remember the effect of their faces upon me. It was quite
+      different from the general effect of staring about and divided attention
+      one gets in a political procession of men. There was an expression of
+      heroic tension.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There had been a pretty deliberate appeal on the part of the women's
+      organisers to the Unemployed, who had been demonstrating throughout that
+      winter, to join forces with the movement, and the result was shown in the
+      quality of the crowd upon the pavement. It was an ugly, dangerous-looking
+      crowd, but as yet good-tempered and sympathetic. When at last we got
+      within sight of the House the square was a seething seat of excited
+      people, and the array of police on horse and on foot might have been
+      assembled for a revolutionary outbreak. There were dense masses of people
+      up Whitehall, and right on to Westminster Bridge. The scuffle that ended
+      in the arrests was the poorest explosion to follow such stupendous
+      preparations....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later on in that year the women began a new attack. Day and night, and all
+      through the long nights of the Budget sittings, at all the piers of the
+      gates of New Palace Yard and at St. Stephen's Porch, stood women pickets,
+      and watched us silently and reproachfully as we went to and fro. They were
+      women of all sorts, though, of course, the independent worker-class
+      predominated. There were grey-headed old ladies standing there, sturdily
+      charming in the rain; battered-looking, ambiguous women, with something of
+      the desperate bitterness of battered women showing in their eyes;
+      north-country factory girls; cheaply-dressed suburban women; trim,
+      comfortable mothers of families; valiant-eyed girl graduates and
+      undergraduates; lank, hungry-looking creatures, who stirred one's
+      imagination; one very dainty little woman in deep mourning, I recall,
+      grave and steadfast, with eyes fixed on distant things. Some of those
+      women looked defiant, some timidly aggressive, some full of the stir of
+      adventure, some drooping with cold and fatigue. The supply never ceased. I
+      had a mortal fear that somehow the supply might halt or cease. I found
+      that continual siege of the legislature extraordinarily impressive&mdash;infinitely
+      more impressive than the feeble-forcible &ldquo;ragging&rdquo; of the more militant
+      section. I thought of the appeal that must be going through the country,
+      summoning the women from countless scattered homes, rooms, colleges, to
+      Westminster.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember too the petty little difficulty I felt whether I should ignore
+      these pickets altogether, or lift a hat as I hurried past with averted
+      eyes, or look them in the face as I did so. Towards the end the House
+      evoked an etiquette of salutation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a tendency, even on the part of its sympathisers, to treat the
+      whole suffrage agitation as if it were a disconnected issue, irrelevant to
+      all other broad developments of social and political life. We struggled,
+      all of us, to ignore the indicating finger it thrust out before us. &ldquo;Your
+      schemes, for all their bigness,&rdquo; it insisted to our reluctant, averted
+      minds, &ldquo;still don't go down to the essential things....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We have to go deeper, or our inadequate children's insufficient children
+      will starve amidst harvests of earless futility. That conservatism which
+      works in every class to preserve in its essentials the habitual daily life
+      is all against a profounder treatment of political issues. The politician,
+      almost as absurdly as the philosopher, tends constantly, in spite of
+      magnificent preludes, vast intimations, to specialise himself out of the
+      reality he has so stupendously summoned&mdash;he bolts back to littleness.
+      The world has to be moulded anew, he continues to admit, but without, he
+      adds, any risk of upsetting his week-end visits, his morning cup of
+      tea....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The discussion of the relations of men and women disturbs every one. It
+      reacts upon the private life of every one who attempts it. And at any
+      particular time only a small minority have a personal interest in changing
+      the established state of affairs. Habit and interest are in a constantly
+      recruited majority against conscious change and adjustment in these
+      matters. Drift rules us. The great mass of people, and an overwhelming
+      proportion of influential people, are people who have banished their
+      dreams and made their compromise. Wonderful and beautiful possibilities
+      are no longer to be thought about. They have given up any aspirations for
+      intense love, their splendid offspring, for keen delights, have accepted a
+      cultivated kindliness and an uncritical sense of righteousness as their
+      compensation. It's a settled affair with them, a settled, dangerous
+      affair. Most of them fear, and many hate, the slightest reminder of those
+      abandoned dreams. As Dayton once said to the Pentagram Circle, when we
+      were discussing the problem of a universal marriage and divorce law
+      throughout the Empire, &ldquo;I am for leaving all these things alone.&rdquo; And
+      then, with a groan in his voice, &ldquo;Leave them alone! Leave them all alone!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was his whole speech for the evening, in a note of suppressed
+      passion, and presently, against all our etiquette, he got up and went out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some years after my marriage, I too was for leaving them alone. I
+      developed a dread and dislike for romance, for emotional music, for the
+      human figure in art&mdash;turning my heart to landscape. I wanted to sneer
+      at lovers and their ecstasies, and was uncomfortable until I found the
+      effective sneer. In matters of private morals these were my most
+      uncharitable years. I didn't want to think of these things any more for
+      ever. I hated the people whose talk or practice showed they were not of my
+      opinion. I wanted to believe that their views were immoral and
+      objectionable and contemptible, because I had decided to treat them as at
+      that level. I was, in fact, falling into the attitude of the normal decent
+      man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet one cannot help thinking! The sensible moralised man finds it hard
+      to escape the stream of suggestion that there are still dreams beyond
+      these commonplace acquiescences,&mdash;the appeal of beauty suddenly
+      shining upon one, the mothlike stirrings of serene summer nights, the
+      sweetness of distant music....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is one of the paradoxical factors in our public life at the present
+      time, which penalises abandonment to love so abundantly and so heavily,
+      that power, influence and control fall largely to unencumbered people and
+      sterile people and people who have married for passionless purposes,
+      people whose very deficiency in feeling has left them free to follow
+      ambition, people beautyblind, who don't understand what it is to fall in
+      love, what it is to desire children or have them, what it is to feel in
+      their blood and bodies the supreme claim of good births and selective
+      births above all other affairs in life, people almost of necessity averse
+      from this most fundamental aspect of existence....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It wasn't, however, my deepening sympathy with and understanding of the
+      position of women in general, or the change in my ideas about all these
+      intimate things my fast friendship with Isabel was bringing about, that
+      led me to the heretical views I have in the last five years dragged from
+      the region of academic and timid discussion into the field of practical
+      politics. Those influences, no doubt, have converged to the same end, and
+      given me a powerful emotional push upon my road, but it was a broader and
+      colder view of things that first determined me in my attempt to graft the
+      Endowment of Motherhood in some form or other upon British Imperialism.
+      Now that I am exiled from the political world, it is possible to estimate
+      just how effectually that grafting has been done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have explained how the ideas of a trained aristocracy and a universal
+      education grew to paramount importance in my political scheme. It is but a
+      short step from this to the question of the quantity and quality of births
+      in the community, and from that again to these forbidden and fear-beset
+      topics of marriage, divorce, and the family organisation. A sporadic
+      discussion of these aspects had been going on for years, a Eugenic society
+      existed, and articles on the Falling Birth Rate, and the Rapid
+      Multiplication of the Unfit were staples of the monthly magazines. But
+      beyond an intermittent scolding of prosperous childless people in general&mdash;one
+      never addressed them in particular&mdash;nothing was done towards
+      arresting those adverse processes. Almost against my natural inclination,
+      I found myself forced to go into these things. I came to the conclusion
+      that under modern conditions the isolated private family, based on the
+      existing marriage contract, was failing in its work. It wasn't producing
+      enough children, and children good enough and well trained enough for the
+      demands of the developing civilised state. Our civilisation was growing
+      outwardly, and decaying in its intimate substance, and unless it was
+      presently to collapse, some very extensive and courageous reorganisation
+      was needed. The old haphazard system of pairing, qualified more and more
+      by worldly discretions, no longer secures a young population numerous
+      enough or good enough for the growing needs and possibilities of our
+      Empire. Statecraft sits weaving splendid garments, no doubt, but with a
+      puny, ugly, insufficient baby in the cradle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No one so far has dared to take up this problem as a present question for
+      statecraft, but it comes unheralded, unadvocated, and sits at every
+      legislative board. Every improvement is provisional except the improvement
+      of the race, and it became more and more doubtful to me if we were
+      improving the race at all! Splendid and beautiful and courageous people
+      must come together and have children, women with their fine senses and
+      glorious devotion must be freed from the net that compels them to be
+      celibate, compels them to be childless and useless, or to bear children
+      ignobly to men whom need and ignorance and the treacherous pressure of
+      circumstances have forced upon them. We all know that, and so few dare
+      even to whisper it for fear that they should seem, in seeking to save the
+      family, to threaten its existence. It is as if a party of pigmies in a not
+      too capacious room had been joined by a carnivorous giant&mdash;and
+      decided to go on living happily by cutting him dead....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The problem the developing civilised state has to solve is how it can get
+      the best possible increase under the best possible conditions. I became
+      more and more convinced that the independent family unit of to-day, in
+      which the man is master of the wife and owner of the children, in which
+      all are dependent upon him, subordinated to his enterprises and liable to
+      follow his fortunes up or down, does not supply anything like the best
+      conceivable conditions. We want to modernise the family footing
+      altogether. An enormous premium both in pleasure and competitive
+      efficiency is put upon voluntary childlessness, and enormous inducements
+      are held out to women to subordinate instinctive and selective preferences
+      to social and material considerations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The practical reaction of modern conditions upon the old tradition of the
+      family is this: that beneath the pretence that nothing is changing,
+      secretly and with all the unwholesomeness of secrecy everything is
+      changed. Offspring fall away, the birth rate falls and falls most among
+      just the most efficient and active and best adapted classes in the
+      community. The species is recruited from among its failures and from among
+      less civilised aliens. Contemporary civilisations are in effect burning
+      the best of their possible babies in the furnaces that run the machinery.
+      In the United States the native Anglo-American strain has scarcely
+      increased at all since 1830, and in most Western European countries the
+      same is probably true of the ablest and most energetic elements in the
+      community. The women of these classes still remain legally and practically
+      dependent and protected, with the only natural excuse for their dependence
+      gone....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The modern world becomes an immense spectacle of unsatisfactory groupings;
+      here childless couples bored to death in the hopeless effort to sustain an
+      incessant honeymoon, here homes in which a solitary child grows
+      unsocially, here small two or three-child homes that do no more than
+      continue the culture of the parents at a great social cost, here numbers
+      of unhappy educated but childless married women, here careless,
+      decivilised fecund homes, here orphanages and asylums for the heedlessly
+      begotten. It is just the disorderly proliferation of Bromstead over again,
+      in lives instead of in houses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What is the good, what is the common sense, of rectifying boundaries,
+      pushing research and discovery, building cities, improving all the
+      facilities of life, making great fleets, waging wars, while this aimless
+      decadence remains the quality of the biological outlook?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is difficult now to trace how I changed from my early aversion until I
+      faced this mass of problems. But so far back as 1910 I had it clear in my
+      mind that I would rather fail utterly than participate in all the
+      surrenders of mind and body that are implied in Dayton's snarl of &ldquo;Leave
+      it alone; leave it all alone!&rdquo; Marriage and the begetting and care of
+      children, is the very ground substance in the life of the community. In a
+      world in which everything changes, in which fresh methods, fresh
+      adjustments and fresh ideas perpetually renew the circumstances of life,
+      it is preposterous that we should not even examine into these matters,
+      should rest content to be ruled by the uncriticised traditions of a
+      barbaric age.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, it seems to me that the solution of this problem is also the solution
+      of the woman's individual problem. The two go together, are right and left
+      of one question. The only conceivable way out from our IMPASSE lies in the
+      recognition of parentage, that is to say of adequate mothering, as no
+      longer a chance product of individual passions but a service rendered to
+      the State. Women must become less and less subordinated to individual men,
+      since this works out in a more or less complete limitation, waste, and
+      sterilisation of their essentially social function; they must become more
+      and more subordinated as individually independent citizens to the
+      collective purpose. Or, to express the thing by a familiar phrase, the
+      highly organised, scientific state we desire must, if it is to exist at
+      all, base itself not upon the irresponsible man-ruled family, but upon the
+      matriarchal family, the citizen-ship and freedom of women and the public
+      endowment of motherhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After two generations of confused and experimental revolt it grows clear
+      to modern women that a conscious, deliberate motherhood and mothering is
+      their special function in the State, and that a personal subordination to
+      an individual man with an unlimited power of control over this intimate
+      and supreme duty is a degradation. No contemporary woman of education put
+      to the test is willing to recognise any claim a man can make upon her but
+      the claim of her freely-given devotion to him. She wants the reality of
+      her choice and she means &ldquo;family&rdquo; while a man too often means only
+      possession. This alters the spirit of the family relationships
+      fundamentally. Their form remains just what it was when woman was esteemed
+      a pretty, desirable, and incidentally a child-producing, chattel. Against
+      these time-honoured ideas the new spirit of womanhood struggles in shame,
+      astonishment, bitterness, and tears....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I confess myself altogether feminist. I have no doubts in the matter. I
+      want this coddling and browbeating of women to cease. I want to see women
+      come in, free and fearless, to a full participation in the collective
+      purpose of mankind. Women, I am convinced, are as fine as men; they can be
+      as wise as men; they are capable of far greater devotion than men. I want
+      to see them citizens, with a marriage law framed primarily for them and
+      for their protection and the good of the race, and not for men's
+      satisfactions. I want to see them bearing and rearing good children in the
+      State as a generously rewarded public duty and service, choosing their
+      husbands freely and discerningly, and in no way enslaved by or
+      subordinated to the men they have chosen. The social consciousness of
+      women seems to me an unworked, an almost untouched mine of wealth for the
+      constructive purpose of the world. I want to change the respective values
+      of the family group altogether, and make the home indeed the women's
+      kingdom and the mother the owner and responsible guardian of her children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;as
+      untried as electric traction was or flying in 1800. Of course, it may work
+      out to modify men's ideas of marriage profoundly. To me that is a
+      secondary consideration. I do not believe that particular assertion
+      myself, because I am convinced that a practical monogamy is a
+      psychological necessity to the mass of civilised people. But even if I did
+      believe it I should still keep to my present line, because it is the only
+      line that will prevent a highly organised civilisation from ending in
+      biological decay. The public Endowment of Motherhood is the only possible
+      way which will ensure the permanently developing civilised state at which
+      all constructive minds are aiming. A point is reached in the life-history
+      of a civilisation when either this reconstruction must be effected or the
+      quality and MORALE of the population prove insufficient for the needs of
+      the developing organisation. It is not so much moral decadence that will
+      destroy us as moral inadaptability. The old code fails under the new
+      needs. The only alternative to this profound reconstruction is a decay in
+      human quality and social collapse. Either this unprecedented rearrangement
+      must be achieved by our civilisation, or it must presently come upon a
+      phase of disorder and crumble and perish, as Rome perished, as France
+      declines, as the strain of the Pilgrim Fathers dwindles out of America.
+      Whatever hope there may be in the attempt therefore, there is no
+      alternative to the attempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wanted political success now dearly enough, but not at the price of
+      constructive realities. These questions were no doubt monstrously
+      dangerous in the political world; there wasn't a politician alive who
+      didn't look scared at the mention of &ldquo;The Family,&rdquo; but if raising these
+      issues were essential to the social reconstructions on which my life was
+      set, that did not matter. It only implied that I should take them up with
+      deliberate caution. There was no release because of risk or difficulty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The question of whether I should commit myself to some open project in
+      this direction was going on in my mind concurrently with my speculations
+      about a change of party, like bass and treble in a complex piece of music.
+      The two drew to a conclusion together. I would not only go over to
+      Imperialism, but I would attempt to biologise Imperialism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought at first that I was undertaking a monstrous uphill task. But as
+      I came to look into the possibilities of the matter, a strong persuasion
+      grew up in my mind that this panic fear of legislative proposals affecting
+      the family basis was excessive, that things were much riper for
+      development in this direction than old-experienced people out of touch
+      with the younger generation imagined, that to phrase the thing in a
+      parliamentary fashion, &ldquo;something might be done in the constituencies&rdquo;
+       with the Endowment of Motherhood forthwith, provided only that it was made
+      perfectly clear that anything a sane person could possibly intend by
+      &ldquo;morality&rdquo; was left untouched by these proposals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went to work very carefully. I got Roper of the DAILY TELEPHONE and
+      Burkett of the DIAL to try over a silly-season discussion of State Help
+      for Mothers, and I put a series of articles on eugenics, upon the fall in
+      the birth-rate, and similar topics in the BLUE WEEKLY, leading up to a
+      tentative and generalised advocacy of the public endowment of the nation's
+      children. I was more and more struck by the acceptance won by a sober and
+      restrained presentation of this suggestion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, in the fourth year of the BLUE WEEKLY'S career, came the
+      Handitch election, and I was forced by the clamour of my antagonist, and
+      very willingly forced, to put my convictions to the test. I returned
+      triumphantly to Westminster with the Public Endowment of Motherhood as
+      part of my open profession and with the full approval of the party press.
+      Applauding benches of Imperialists cheered me on my way to the table
+      between the whips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That second time I took the oath I was not one of a crowd of new members,
+      but salient, an event, a symbol of profound changes and new purposes in
+      the national life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here it is my political book comes to an end, and in a sense my book ends
+      altogether. For the rest is but to tell how I was swept out of this great
+      world of political possibilities. I close this Third Book as I opened it,
+      with an admission of difficulties and complexities, but now with a pile of
+      manuscript before me I have to confess them unsurmounted and still
+      entangled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet my aim was a final simplicity. I have sought to show my growing
+      realisation that the essential quality of all political and social effort
+      is the development of a great race mind behind the interplay of individual
+      lives. That is the collective human reality, the basis of morality, the
+      purpose of devotion. To that our lives must be given, from that will come
+      the perpetual fresh release and further ennoblement of individual
+      lives....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have wanted to make that idea of a collective mind play in this book the
+      part United Italy plays in Machiavelli's PRINCE. I have called it the
+      hinterland of reality, shown it accumulating a dominating truth and
+      rightness which must force men's now sporadic motives more and more into a
+      disciplined and understanding relation to a plan. And I have tried to
+      indicate how I sought to serve this great clarification of our
+      confusions....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now I come back to personality and the story of my self-betrayal, and how
+      it is I have had to leave all that far-reaching scheme of mine, a mere
+      project and beginning for other men to take or leave as it pleases them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0016" id="link2H_4_0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      BOOK THE FOURTH: ISABEL
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ LOVE AND SUCCESS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I come to the most evasive and difficult part of my story, which is to
+      tell how Isabel and I have made a common wreck of our joint lives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not the telling of one simple disastrous accident. There was a vein
+      in our natures that led to this collapse, gradually and at this point and
+      that it crept to the surface. One may indeed see our destruction&mdash;for
+      indeed politically we could not be more extinct if we had been shot dead&mdash;in
+      the form of a catastrophe as disconnected and conclusive as a meteoric
+      stone falling out of heaven upon two friends and crushing them both. But I
+      do not think that is true to our situation or ourselves. We were not taken
+      by surprise. The thing was in us and not from without, it was akin to our
+      way of thinking and our habitual attitudes; it had, for all its impulsive
+      effect, a certain necessity. We might have escaped no doubt, as two men at
+      a hundred yards may shoot at each other with pistols for a considerable
+      time and escape. But it isn't particularly reasonable to talk of the
+      contrariety of fate if they both get hit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Isabel and I were dangerous to each other for several years of friendship,
+      and not quite unwittingly so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In writing this, moreover, there is a very great difficulty in steering my
+      way between two equally undesirable tones in the telling. In the first
+      place I do not want to seem to confess my sins with a penitence I am very
+      doubtful if I feel. Now that I have got Isabel we can no doubt count the
+      cost of it and feel unquenchable regrets, but I am not sure whether, if we
+      could be put back now into such circumstances as we were in a year ago, or
+      two years ago, whether with my eyes fully open I should not do over again
+      very much as I did. And on the other hand I do not want to justify the
+      things we have done. We are two bad people&mdash;if there is to be any
+      classification of good and bad at all, we have acted badly, and quite
+      apart from any other considerations we've largely wasted our own very
+      great possibilities. But it is part of a queer humour that underlies all
+      this, that I find myself slipping again and again into a sentimental
+      treatment of our case that is as unpremeditated as it is insincere. When I
+      am a little tired after a morning's writing I find the faint suggestion
+      getting into every other sentence that our blunders and misdeeds embodied,
+      after the fashion of the prophet Hosea, profound moral truths. Indeed, I
+      feel so little confidence in my ability to keep this altogether out of my
+      book that I warn the reader here that in spite of anything he may read
+      elsewhere in the story, intimating however shyly an esoteric and exalted
+      virtue in our proceedings, the plain truth of this business is that Isabel
+      and I wanted each other with a want entirely formless, inconsiderate, and
+      overwhelming. And though I could tell you countless delightful and
+      beautiful things about Isabel, were this a book in her praise, I cannot
+      either analyse that want or account for its extreme intensity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I will confess that deep in my mind there is a belief in a sort of wild
+      rightness about any love that is fraught with beauty, but that eludes me
+      and vanishes again, and is not, I feel, to be put with the real veracities
+      and righteousnesses and virtues in the paddocks and menageries of human
+      reason....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have already a child, and Margaret was childless, and I find myself
+      prone to insist upon that, as if it was a justification. But, indeed, when
+      we became lovers there was small thought of Eugenics between us. Ours was
+      a mutual and not a philoprogenitive passion. Old Nature behind us may have
+      had such purposes with us, but it is not for us to annex her intentions by
+      a moralising afterthought. There isn't, in fact, any decent justification
+      for us whatever&mdash;at that the story must stand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But if there is no justification there is at least a very effective excuse
+      in the mental confusedness of our time. The evasion of that passionately
+      thorough exposition of belief and of the grounds of morality, which is the
+      outcome of the mercenary religious compromises of the late Vatican period,
+      the stupid suppression of anything but the most timid discussion of sexual
+      morality in our literature and drama, the pervading cultivated and
+      protected muddle-headedness, leaves mentally vigorous people with
+      relatively enormous possibilities of destruction and little effective
+      help. They find themselves confronted by the habits and prejudices of
+      manifestly commonplace people, and by that extraordinary patched-up
+      Christianity, the cult of a &ldquo;Bromsteadised&rdquo; deity, diffused, scattered,
+      and aimless, which hides from examination and any possibility of faith
+      behind the plea of good taste. A god about whom there is delicacy is far
+      worse than no god at all. We are FORCED to be laws unto ourselves and to
+      live experimentally. It is inevitable that a considerable fraction of just
+      that bolder, more initiatory section of the intellectual community, the
+      section that can least be spared from the collective life in a period of
+      trial and change, will drift into such emotional crises and such disaster
+      as overtook us. Most perhaps will escape, but many will go down, many more
+      than the world can spare. It is the unwritten law of all our public life,
+      and the same holds true of America, that an honest open scandal ends a
+      career. England in the last quarter of a century has wasted half a dozen
+      statesmen on this score; she would, I believe, reject Nelson now if he
+      sought to serve her. Is it wonderful that to us fretting here in exile
+      this should seem the cruellest as well as the most foolish elimination of
+      a necessary social element? It destroys no vice; for vice hides by nature.
+      It not only rewards dullness as if it were positive virtue, but sets an
+      enormous premium upon hypocrisy. That is my case, and that is why I am
+      telling this side of my story with so much explicitness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ever since the Kinghamstead election I had maintained what seemed a
+      desultory friendship with Isabel. At first it was rather Isabel kept it up
+      than I. Whenever Margaret and I went down to that villa, with its three or
+      four acres of garden and shrubbery about it, which fulfilled our election
+      promise to live at Kinghamstead, Isabel would turn up in a state of frank
+      cheerfulness, rejoicing at us, and talk all she was reading and thinking
+      to me, and stay for all the rest of the day. In her shameless liking for
+      me she was as natural as a savage. She would exercise me vigorously at
+      tennis, while Margaret lay and rested her back in the afternoon, or guide
+      me for some long ramble that dodged the suburban and congested patches of
+      the constituency with amazing skill. She took possession of me in that
+      unabashed, straight-minded way a girl will sometimes adopt with a man,
+      chose my path or criticised my game with a motherly solicitude for my
+      welfare that was absurd and delightful. And we talked. We discussed and
+      criticised the stories of novels, scraps of history, pictures, social
+      questions, socialism, the policy of the Government. She was young and most
+      unevenly informed, but she was amazingly sharp and quick and good. Never
+      before in my life had I known a girl of her age, or a woman of her
+      quality. I had never dreamt there was such talk in the world. Kinghamstead
+      became a lightless place when she went to Oxford. Heaven knows how much
+      that may not have precipitated my abandonment of the seat!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She went to Ridout College, Oxford, and that certainly weighed with me
+      when presently after my breach with the Liberals various little
+      undergraduate societies began to ask for lectures and discussions. I
+      favoured Oxford. I declared openly I did so because of her. At that time I
+      think we neither of us suspected the possibility of passion that lay like
+      a coiled snake in the path before us. It seemed to us that we had the
+      quaintest, most delightful friendship in the world; she was my pupil, and
+      I was her guide, philosopher, and friend. People smiled indulgently&mdash;even
+      Margaret smiled indulgently&mdash;at our attraction for one another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such friendships are not uncommon nowadays&mdash;among easy-going,
+      liberal-minded people. For the most part, there's no sort of harm, as
+      people say, in them. The two persons concerned are never supposed to think
+      of the passionate love that hovers so close to the friendship, or if they
+      do, then they banish the thought. I think we kept the thought as
+      permanently in exile as any one could do. If it did in odd moments come
+      into our heads we pretended elaborately it wasn't there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only we were both very easily jealous of each other's attention, and
+      tremendously insistent upon each other's preference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember once during the Oxford days an intimation that should have set
+      me thinking, and I suppose discreetly disentangling myself. It was one
+      Sunday afternoon, and it must have been about May, for the trees and
+      shrubs of Ridout College were gay with blossom, and fresh with the new
+      sharp greens of spring. I had walked talking with Isabel and a couple of
+      other girls through the wide gardens of the place, seen and criticised the
+      new brick pond, nodded to the daughter of this friend and that in the
+      hammocks under the trees, and picked a way among the scattered tea-parties
+      on the lawn to our own circle on the grass under a Siberian crab near the
+      great bay window. There I sat and ate great quantities of cake, and
+      discussed the tactics of the Suffragettes. I had made some comments upon
+      the spirit of the movement in an address to the men in Pembroke, and it
+      had got abroad, and a group of girls and women dons were now having it out
+      with me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I forget the drift of the conversation, or what it was made Isabel
+      interrupt me. She did interrupt me. She had been lying prone on the ground
+      at my right hand, chin on fists, listening thoughtfully, and I was sitting
+      beside old Lady Evershead on a garden seat. I turned to Isabel's voice,
+      and saw her face uplifted, and her dear cheeks and nose and forehead all
+      splashed and barred with sunlight and the shadows of the twigs of the
+      trees behind me. And something&mdash;an infinite tenderness, stabbed me.
+      It was a keen physical feeling, like nothing I had ever felt before. It
+      had a quality of tears in it. For the first time in my narrow and
+      concentrated life another human being had really thrust into my being and
+      gripped my very heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our eyes met perplexed for an extraordinary moment. Then I turned back and
+      addressed myself a little stiffly to the substance of her intervention.
+      For some time I couldn't look at her again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From that time forth I knew I loved Isabel beyond measure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet it is curious that it never occurred to me for a year or so that this
+      was likely to be a matter of passion between us. I have told how
+      definitely I put my imagination into harness in those matters at my
+      marriage, and I was living now in a world of big interests, where there is
+      neither much time nor inclination for deliberate love-making. I suppose
+      there is a large class of men who never meet a girl or a woman without
+      thinking of sex, who meet a friend's daughter and decide: &ldquo;Mustn't get
+      friendly with her&mdash;wouldn't DO,&rdquo; and set invisible bars between
+      themselves and all the wives in the world. Perhaps that is the way to
+      live. Perhaps there is no other method than this effectual annihilation of
+      half&mdash;and the most sympathetic and attractive half&mdash;of the human
+      beings in the world, so far as any frank intercourse is concerned. I am
+      quite convinced anyhow that such a qualified intimacy as ours, such a
+      drifting into the sense of possession, such untrammeled conversation with
+      an invisible, implacable limit set just where the intimacy glows, it is no
+      kind of tolerable compromise. If men and women are to go so far together,
+      they must be free to go as far as they may want to go, without the
+      vindictive destruction that has come upon us. On the basis of the accepted
+      codes the jealous people are right, and the liberal-minded ones are
+      playing with fire. If people are not to love, then they must be kept
+      apart. If they are not to be kept apart, then we must prepare for an
+      unprecedented toleration of lovers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Isabel was as unforeseeing as I to begin with, but sex marches into the
+      life of an intelligent girl with demands and challenges far more urgent
+      than the mere call of curiosity and satiable desire that comes to a young
+      man. No woman yet has dared to tell the story of that unfolding. She
+      attracted men, and she encouraged them, and watched them, and tested them,
+      and dismissed them, and concealed the substance of her thoughts about them
+      in the way that seems instinctive in a natural-minded girl. There was even
+      an engagement&mdash;amidst the protests and disapproval of the college
+      authorities. I never saw the man, though she gave me a long history of the
+      affair, to which I listened with a forced and insincere sympathy. She
+      struck me oddly as taking the relationship for a thing in itself, and
+      regardless of its consequences. After a time she became silent about him,
+      and then threw him over; and by that time, I think, for all that she was
+      so much my junior, she knew more about herself and me than I was to know
+      for several years to come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We didn't see each other for some months after my resignation, but we kept
+      up a frequent correspondence. She said twice over that she wanted to talk
+      to me, that letters didn't convey what one wanted to say, and I went up to
+      Oxford pretty definitely to see her&mdash;though I combined it with one or
+      two other engagements&mdash;somewhere in February. Insensibly she had
+      become important enough for me to make journeys for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But we didn't see very much of one another on that occasion. There was
+      something in the air between us that made a faint embarrassment; the mere
+      fact, perhaps, that she had asked me to come up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A year before she would have dashed off with me quite unscrupulously to
+      talk alone, carried me off to her room for an hour with a minute of
+      chaperonage to satisfy the rules. Now there was always some one or other
+      near us that it seemed impossible to exorcise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We went for a walk on the Sunday afternoon with old Fortescue, K. C.,
+      who'd come up to see his two daughters, both great friends of Isabel's,
+      and some mute inglorious don whose name I forget, but who was in a state
+      of marked admiration for her. The six of us played a game of
+      conversational entanglements throughout, and mostly I was impressing the
+      Fortescue girls with the want of mental concentration possible in a rising
+      politician. We went down Carfex, I remember, to Folly Bridge, and
+      inspected the Barges, and then back by way of Merton to the Botanic
+      Gardens and Magdalen Bridge. And in the Botanic Gardens she got almost her
+      only chance with me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Last months at Oxford,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm coming to London,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To write?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was silent for a moment. Then she said abruptly, with that quick flush
+      of hers and a sudden boldness in her eyes: &ldquo;I'm going to work with you.
+      Why shouldn't I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, again, I suppose I had a fair warning of the drift of things. I seem
+      to remember myself in the train to Paddington, sitting with a handful of
+      papers&mdash;galley proofs for the BLUE WEEKLY, I suppose&mdash;on my lap,
+      and thinking about her and that last sentence of hers, and all that it
+      might mean to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is very hard to recall even the main outline of anything so elusive as
+      a meditation. I know that the idea of working with her gripped me,
+      fascinated me. That my value in her life seemed growing filled me with
+      pride and a kind of gratitude. I was already in no doubt that her value in
+      my life was tremendous. It made it none the less, that in those days I was
+      obsessed by the idea that she was transitory, and bound to go out of my
+      life again. It is no good trying to set too fine a face upon this complex
+      business, there is gold and clay and sunlight and savagery in every love
+      story, and a multitude of elvish elements peeped out beneath the fine rich
+      curtain of affection that masked our future. I've never properly weighed
+      how immensely my vanity was gratified by her clear preference for me. Nor
+      can I for a moment determine how much deliberate intention I hide from
+      myself in this affair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Certainly I think some part of me must have been saying in the train:
+      &ldquo;Leave go of her. Get away from her. End this now.&rdquo; I can't have been so
+      stupid as not to have had that in my mind....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If she had been only a beautiful girl in love with me, I think I could
+      have managed the situation. Once or twice since my marriage and before
+      Isabel became of any significance in my life, there had been incidents
+      with other people, flashes of temptation&mdash;no telling is possible of
+      the thing resisted. I think that mere beauty and passion would not have
+      taken me. But between myself and Isabel things were incurably complicated
+      by the intellectual sympathy we had, the jolly march of our minds
+      together. That has always mattered enormously. I should have wanted her
+      company nearly as badly if she had been some crippled old lady; we would
+      have hunted shoulder to shoulder, as two men. Only two men would never
+      have had the patience and readiness for one another we two had. I had
+      never for years met any one with whom I could be so carelessly sure of
+      understanding or to whom I could listen so easily and fully. She gave me,
+      with an extraordinary completeness, that rare, precious effect of always
+      saying something fresh, and yet saying it so that it filled into and
+      folded about all the little recesses and corners of my mind with an
+      infinite, soft familiarity. It is impossible to explain that. It is like
+      trying to explain why her voice, her voice heard speaking to any one&mdash;heard
+      speaking in another room&mdash;pleased my ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was the only Oxford woman who took a first that year. She spent the
+      summer in Scotland and Yorkshire, writing to me continually of all she now
+      meant to do, and stirring my imagination. She came to London for the
+      autumn session. For a time she stayed with old Lady Colbeck, but she fell
+      out with her hostess when it became clear she wanted to write, not novels,
+      but journalism, and then she set every one talking by taking a flat near
+      Victoria and installing as her sole protector an elderly German governess
+      she had engaged through a scholastic agency. She began writing, not in
+      that copious flood the undisciplined young woman of gifts is apt to
+      produce, but in exactly the manner of an able young man, experimenting
+      with forms, developing the phrasing of opinions, taking a definite line.
+      She was, of course, tremendously discussed. She was disapproved of, but
+      she was invited out to dinner. She got rather a reputation for the
+      management of elderly distinguished men. It was an odd experience to
+      follow Margaret's soft rustle of silk into some big drawing-room and
+      discover my snub-nosed girl in the blue sack transformed into a shining
+      creature in the soft splendour of pearls and ivory-white and lace, and
+      with a silver band about her dusky hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time we did not meet very frequently, though always she professed an
+      unblushing preference for my company, and talked my views and sought me
+      out. Then her usefulness upon the BLUE WEEKLY began to link us closelier.
+      She would come up to the office, and sit by the window, and talk over the
+      proofs of the next week's articles, going through my intentions with a
+      keen investigatory scalpel. Her talk always puts me in mind of a steel
+      blade. Her writing became rapidly very good; she had a wit and a turn of
+      the phrase that was all her own. We seemed to have forgotten the little
+      shadow of embarrassment that had fallen over our last meeting at Oxford.
+      Everything seemed natural and easy between us in those days; a little
+      unconventional, but that made it all the brighter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We developed something like a custom of walks, about once a week or so,
+      and letters and notes became frequent. I won't pretend things were not
+      keenly personal between us, but they had an air of being innocently
+      mental. She used to call me &ldquo;Master&rdquo; in our talks, a monstrous and
+      engaging flattery, and I was inordinately proud to have her as my pupil.
+      Who wouldn't have been? And we went on at that distance for a long time&mdash;until
+      within a year of the Handitch election.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After Lady Colbeck threw her up as altogether too &ldquo;intellectual&rdquo; for
+      comfortable control, Isabel was taken up by the Balfes in a less formal
+      and compromising manner, and week-ended with them and their cousin Leonora
+      Sparling, and spent large portions of her summer with them in
+      Herefordshire. There was a lover or so in that time, men who came a little
+      timidly at this brilliant young person with the frank manner and the
+      Amazonian mind, and, she declared, received her kindly refusals with
+      manifest relief. And Arnold Shoesmith struck up a sort of friendship that
+      oddly imitated mine. She took a liking to him because he was clumsy and
+      shy and inexpressive; she embarked upon the dangerous interest of helping
+      him to find his soul. I had some twinges of jealousy about that. I didn't
+      see the necessity of him. He invaded her time, and I thought that might
+      interfere with her work. If their friendship stole some hours from
+      Isabel's writing, it did not for a long while interfere with our walks or
+      our talks, or the close intimacy we had together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then suddenly Isabel and I found ourselves passionately in love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The change came so entirely without warning or intention that I find it
+      impossible now to tell the order of its phases. What disturbed pebble
+      started the avalanche I cannot trace. Perhaps it was simply that the
+      barriers between us and this masked aspect of life had been wearing down
+      unperceived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there came a change in Isabel. It was like some change in the cycle of
+      nature, like the onset of spring&mdash;a sharp brightness, an uneasiness.
+      She became restless with her work; little encounters with men began to
+      happen, encounters not quite in the quality of the earlier proposals; and
+      then came an odd incident of which she told me, but somehow, I felt,
+      didn't tell me completely. She told me all she was able to tell me. She
+      had been at a dance at the Ropers', and a man, rather well known in
+      London, had kissed her. The thing amazed her beyond measure. It was the
+      sort of thing immediately possible between any man and any woman, that one
+      never expects to happen until it happens. It had the surprising effect of
+      a judge generally known to be bald suddenly whipping off his wig in court.
+      No absolutely unexpected revelation could have quite the same quality of
+      shock. She went through the whole thing to me with a remarkable
+      detachment, told me how she had felt&mdash;and the odd things it seemed to
+      open to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I WANT to be kissed, and all that sort of thing,&rdquo; she avowed. &ldquo;I suppose
+      every woman does.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She added after a pause: &ldquo;And I don't want any one to do it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This struck me as queerly expressive of the woman's attitude to these
+      things. &ldquo;Some one presently will&mdash;solve that,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some one will perhaps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some one will,&rdquo; she said, almost viciously. &ldquo;And then we'll have to stop
+      these walks and talks of ours, dear Master.... I'll be sorry to give them
+      up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's part of the requirements of the situation,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;that he should
+      be&mdash;oh, very interesting! He'll start, no doubt, all sorts of new
+      topics, and open no end of attractive vistas.... You can't, you know,
+      always go about in a state of pupillage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think I can,&rdquo; said Isabel. &ldquo;But it's only just recently I've
+      begun to doubt about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember these things being said, but just how much we saw and
+      understood, and just how far we were really keeping opaque to each other
+      then, I cannot remember. But it must have been quite soon after this that
+      we spent nearly a whole day together at Kew Gardens, with the curtains up
+      and the barriers down, and the thing that had happened plain before our
+      eyes. I don't remember we ever made any declaration. We just assumed the
+      new footing....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a day early in that year&mdash;I think in January, because there
+      was thin, crisp snow on the grass, and we noted that only two other people
+      had been to the Pagoda that day. I've a curious impression of greenish
+      colour, hot, moist air and huge palm fronds about very much of our talk,
+      as though we were nearly all the time in the Tropical House. But I also
+      remember very vividly looking at certain orange and red spray-like flowers
+      from Patagonia, which could not have been there. It is a curious thing
+      that I do not remember we made any profession of passionate love for one
+      another; we talked as though the fact of our intense love for each other
+      had always been patent between us. There was so long and frank an intimacy
+      between us that we talked far more like brother and sister or husband and
+      wife than two people engaged in the war of the sexes. We wanted to know
+      what we were going to do, and whatever we did we meant to do in the most
+      perfect concert. We both felt an extraordinary accession of friendship and
+      tenderness then, and, what again is curious, very little passion. But
+      there was also, in spite of the perplexities we faced, an immense
+      satisfaction about that day. It was as if we had taken off something that
+      had hindered our view of each other, like people who unvizored to talk
+      more easily at a masked ball.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I've had since to view our relations from the standpoint of the ordinary
+      observer. I find that vision in the most preposterous contrast with all
+      that really went on between us. I suppose there I should figure as a
+      wicked seducer, while an unprotected girl succumbed to my fascinations. As
+      a matter of fact, it didn't occur to us that there was any personal
+      inequality between us. I knew her for my equal mentally; in so many things
+      she was beyond comparison cleverer than I; her courage outwent mine. The
+      quick leap of her mind evoked a flash of joy in mine like the response of
+      an induction wire; her way of thinking was like watching sunlight
+      reflected from little waves upon the side of a boat, it was so bright, so
+      mobile, so variously and easily true to its law. In the back of our minds
+      we both had a very definite belief that making love is full of joyous,
+      splendid, tender, and exciting possibilities, and we had to discuss why we
+      shouldn't be to the last degree lovers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, what I should like to print here, if it were possible, in all the
+      screaming emphasis of red ink, is this: that the circumstances of my
+      upbringing and the circumstances of Isabel's upbringing had left not a
+      shadow of belief or feeling that the utmost passionate love between us was
+      in itself intrinsically WRONG. I've told with the fullest particularity
+      just all that I was taught or found out for myself in these matters, and
+      Isabel's reading and thinking, and the fierce silences of her governesses
+      and the breathless warnings of teachers, and all the social and religious
+      influences that had been brought to bear upon her, had worked out to the
+      same void of conviction. The code had failed with us altogether. We didn't
+      for a moment consider anything but the expediency of what we both, for all
+      our quiet faces and steady eyes, wanted most passionately to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, here you have the state of mind of whole brigades of people, and
+      particularly of young people, nowadays. The current morality hasn't
+      gripped them; they don't really believe in it at all. They may render it
+      lip-service, but that is quite another thing. There are scarcely any
+      tolerable novels to justify its prohibitions; its prohibitions do, in
+      fact, remain unjustified amongst these ugly suppressions. You may, if you
+      choose, silence the admission of this in literature and current
+      discussion; you will not prevent it working out in lives. People come up
+      to the great moments of passion crudely unaware, astoundingly unprepared
+      as no really civilised and intelligently planned community would let any
+      one be unprepared. They find themselves hedged about with customs that
+      have no organic hold upon them, and mere discretions all generous spirits
+      are disposed to despise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Consider the infinite absurdities of it! Multitudes of us are trying to
+      run this complex modern community on a basis of &ldquo;Hush&rdquo; without explaining
+      to our children or discussing with them anything about love and marriage
+      at all. Doubt and knowledge creep about in enforced darknesses and
+      silences. We are living upon an ancient tradition which everybody doubts
+      and nobody has ever analysed. We affect a tremendous and cultivated
+      shyness and delicacy about imperatives of the most arbitrary appearance.
+      What ensues? What did ensue with us, for example? On the one hand was a
+      great desire, robbed of any appearance of shame and grossness by the power
+      of love, and on the other hand, the possible jealousy of so and so, the
+      disapproval of so and so, material risks and dangers. It is only in the
+      retrospect that we have been able to grasp something of the effectual case
+      against us. The social prohibition lit by the intense glow of our passion,
+      presented itself as preposterous, irrational, arbitrary, and ugly, a
+      monster fit only for mockery. We might be ruined! Well, there is a phase
+      in every love affair, a sort of heroic hysteria, when death and ruin are
+      agreeable additions to the prospect. It gives the business a gravity, a
+      solemnity. Timid people may hesitate and draw back with a vague
+      instinctive terror of the immensity of the oppositions they challenge, but
+      neither Isabel nor I are timid people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We weighed what was against us. We decided just exactly as scores of
+      thousands of people have decided in this very matter, that if it were
+      possible to keep this thing to ourselves, there was nothing against it.
+      And so we took our first step. With the hunger of love in us, it was easy
+      to conclude we might be lovers, and still keep everything to ourselves.
+      That cleared our minds of the one persistent obstacle that mattered to us&mdash;the
+      haunting presence of Margaret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then we found, as all those scores of thousands of people scattered
+      about us have found, that we could not keep it to ourselves. Love will
+      out. All the rest of this story is the chronicle of that. Love with
+      sustained secrecy cannot be love. It is just exactly the point people do
+      not understand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But before things came to that pass, some months and many phases and a
+      sudden journey to America intervened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This thing spells disaster,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;You are too big and I am too big to
+      attempt this secrecy. Think of the intolerable possibility of being found
+      out! At any cost we have to stop&mdash;even at the cost of parting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just because we may be found out!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just because we may be found out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Master, I shouldn't in the least mind being found out with you. I'm
+      afraid&mdash;I'd be proud.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait till it happens.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There followed a struggle of immense insincerity between us. It is hard to
+      tell who urged and who resisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She came to me one night to the editorial room of the BLUE WEEKLY, and
+      argued and kissed me with wet salt lips, and wept in my arms; she told me
+      that now passionate longing for me and my intimate life possessed her, so
+      that she could not work, could not think, could not endure other people
+      for the love of me....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I fled absurdly. That is the secret of the futile journey to America that
+      puzzled all my friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I ran away from Isabel. I took hold of the situation with all my strength,
+      put in Britten with sketchy, hasty instructions to edit the paper, and
+      started headlong and with luggage, from which, among other things, my
+      shaving things were omitted, upon a tour round the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Preposterous flight that was! I remember as a thing almost farcical my
+      explanations to Margaret, and how frantically anxious I was to prevent the
+      remote possibility of her coming with me, and how I crossed in the TUSCAN,
+      a bad, wet boat, and mixed seasickness with ungovernable sorrow. I wept&mdash;tears.
+      It was inexpressibly queer and ridiculous&mdash;and, good God! how I hated
+      my fellow-passengers!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      New York inflamed and excited me for a time, and when things slackened, I
+      whirled westward to Chicago&mdash;eating and drinking, I remember, in the
+      train from shoals of little dishes, with a sort of desperate voracity. I
+      did the queerest things to distract myself&mdash;no novelist would dare to
+      invent my mental and emotional muddle. Chicago also held me at first,
+      amazing lapse from civilisation that the place is! and then abruptly, with
+      hosts expecting me, and everything settled for some days in Denver, I
+      found myself at the end of my renunciations, and turned and came back
+      headlong to London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let me confess it wasn't any sense of perfect and incurable trust and
+      confidence that brought me back, or any idea that now I had strength to
+      refrain. It was a sudden realisation that after all the separation might
+      succeed; some careless phrasing in one of her jealously read letters set
+      that idea going in my mind&mdash;the haunting perception that I might
+      return to London and find it empty of the Isabel who had pervaded it.
+      Honour, discretion, the careers of both of us, became nothing at the
+      thought. I couldn't conceive my life resuming there without Isabel. I
+      couldn't, in short, stand it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't even excuse my return. It is inexcusable. I ought to have kept
+      upon my way westward&mdash;and held out. I couldn't. I wanted Isabel, and
+      I wanted her so badly now that everything else in the world was
+      phantom-like until that want was satisfied. Perhaps you have never wanted
+      anything like that. I went straight to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But here I come to untellable things. There is no describing the reality
+      of love. The shapes of things are nothing, the actual happenings are
+      nothing, except that somehow there falls a light upon them and a wonder.
+      Of how we met, and the thrill of the adventure, the curious bright sense
+      of defiance, the joy of having dared, I can't tell&mdash;I can but hint of
+      just one aspect, of what an amazing LARK&mdash;it's the only word&mdash;it
+      seemed to us. The beauty which was the essence of it, which justifies it
+      so far as it will bear justification, eludes statement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What can a record of contrived meetings, of sundering difficulties evaded
+      and overcome, signify here? Or what can it convey to say that one looked
+      deep into two dear, steadfast eyes, or felt a heart throb and beat, or
+      gripped soft hair softly in a trembling hand? Robbed of encompassing love,
+      these things are of no more value than the taste of good wine or the sight
+      of good pictures, or the hearing of music,&mdash;just sensuality and no
+      more. No one can tell love&mdash;we can only tell the gross facts of love
+      and its consequences. Given love&mdash;given mutuality, and one has
+      effected a supreme synthesis and come to a new level of life&mdash;but
+      only those who know can know. This business has brought me more bitterness
+      and sorrow than I had ever expected to bear, but even now I will not say
+      that I regret that wilful home-coming altogether. We loved&mdash;to the
+      uttermost. Neither of us could have loved any one else as we did and do
+      love one another. It was ours, that beauty; it existed only between us
+      when we were close together, for no one in the world ever to know save
+      ourselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My return to the office sticks out in my memory with an extreme vividness,
+      because of the wild eagle of pride that screamed within me. It was Tuesday
+      morning, and though not a soul in London knew of it yet except Isabel, I
+      had been back in England a week. I came in upon Britten and stood in the
+      doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;GOD!&rdquo; he said at the sight of me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm back,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at my excited face with those red-brown eyes of his. Silently I
+      defied him to speak his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where did you turn back?&rdquo; he said at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had to tell what were, so far as I can remember my first positive lies
+      to Margaret in explaining that return. I had written to her from Chicago
+      and again from New York, saying that I felt I ought to be on the spot in
+      England for the new session, and that I was coming back&mdash;presently. I
+      concealed the name of my boat from her, and made a calculated
+      prevarication when I announced my presence in London. I telephoned before
+      I went back for my rooms to be prepared. She was, I knew, with the Bunting
+      Harblows in Durham, and when she came back to Radnor Square I had been at
+      home a day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember her return so well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My going away and the vivid secret of the present had wiped out from my
+      mind much of our long estrangement. Something, too, had changed in her. I
+      had had some hint of it in her letters, but now I saw it plainly. I came
+      out of my study upon the landing when I heard the turmoil of her arrival
+      below, and she came upstairs with a quickened gladness. It was a cold
+      March, and she was dressed in unfamiliar dark furs that suited her
+      extremely and reinforced the delicate flush of her sweet face. She held
+      out both her hands to me, and drew me to her unhesitatingly and kissed me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So glad you are back, dear,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Oh! so very glad you are back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I returned her kiss with a queer feeling at my heart, too undifferentiated
+      to be even a definite sense of guilt or meanness. I think it was chiefly
+      amazement&mdash;at the universe&mdash;at myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never knew what it was to be away from you,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I perceived suddenly that she had resolved to end our estrangement. She
+      put herself so that my arm came caressingly about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These are jolly furs,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I got them for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The parlourmaid appeared below dealing with the maid and the luggage cab.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me all about America,&rdquo; said Margaret. &ldquo;I feel as though you'd been
+      away six year's.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We went arm in arm into our little sitting-room, and I took off the fur's
+      for her and sat down upon the chintz-covered sofa by the fire. She had
+      ordered tea, and came and sat by me. I don't know what I had expected, but
+      of all things I had certainly not expected this sudden abolition of our
+      distances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to know all about America,&rdquo; she repeated, with her eyes
+      scrutinising me. &ldquo;Why did you come back?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I repeated the substance of my letters rather lamely, and she sat
+      listening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why did you turn back&mdash;without going to Denver?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted to come back. I was restless.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Restlessness,&rdquo; she said, and thought. &ldquo;You were restless in Venice. You
+      said it was restlessness took you to America.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again she studied me. She turned a little awkwardly to her tea things, and
+      poured needless water from the silver kettle into the teapot. Then she sat
+      still for some moments looking at the equipage with expressionless eyes. I
+      saw her hand upon the edge of the table tremble slightly. I watched her
+      closely. A vague uneasiness possessed me. What might she not know or
+      guess?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She spoke at last with an effort. &ldquo;I wish you were in Parliament again,&rdquo;
+       she said. &ldquo;Life doesn't give you events enough.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I was in Parliament again, I should be on the Conservative side.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; she said, and was still more thoughtful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lately,&rdquo; she began, and paused. &ldquo;Lately I've been reading&mdash;you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I didn't help her out with what she had to say. I waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't understand what you were after. I had misjudged. I didn't know.
+      I think perhaps I was rather stupid.&rdquo; Her eyes were suddenly shining with
+      tears. &ldquo;You didn't give me much chance to understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned upon me suddenly with a voice full of tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Husband,&rdquo; she said abruptly, holding her two hands out to me, &ldquo;I want to
+      begin over again!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I took her hands, perplexed beyond measure. &ldquo;My dear!&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to begin over again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I bowed my head to hide my face, and found her hand in mine and kissed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; she said, and slowly withdrew her hand. She leant forward with her
+      arm on the sofa-back, and looked very intently into my face. I felt the
+      most damnable scoundrel in the world as I returned her gaze. The thought
+      of Isabel's darkly shining eyes seemed like a physical presence between
+      us....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; I said presently, to break the intolerable tension, &ldquo;tell me
+      plainly what you mean by this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat a little away from her, and then took my teacup in hand, with an odd
+      effect of defending myself. &ldquo;Have you been reading that old book of mine?&rdquo;
+       I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That and the paper. I took a complete set from the beginning down to
+      Durham with me. I have read it over, thought it over. I didn't understand&mdash;what
+      you were teaching.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a little pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It all seems so plain to me now,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and so true.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was profoundly disconcerted. I put down my teacup, stood up in the
+      middle of the hearthrug, and began talking. &ldquo;I'm tremendously glad,
+      Margaret, that you've come to see I'm not altogether perverse,&rdquo; I began. I
+      launched out into a rather trite and windy exposition of my views, and she
+      sat close to me on the sofa, looking up into my face, hanging on my words,
+      a deliberate and invincible convert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;yes.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had never doubted my new conceptions before; now I doubted them
+      profoundly. But I went on talking. It's the grim irony in the lives of all
+      politicians, writers, public teachers, that once the audience is at their
+      feet, a new loyalty has gripped them. It isn't their business to admit
+      doubt and imperfections. They have to go on talking. And I was now so
+      accustomed to Isabel's vivid interruptions, qualifications, restatements,
+      and confirmations....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret and I dined together at home. She made me open out my political
+      projects to her. &ldquo;I have been foolish,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I want to help.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And by some excuse I have forgotten she made me come to her room. I think
+      it was some book I had to take her, some American book I had brought back
+      with me, and mentioned in our talk. I walked in with it, and put it down
+      on the table and turned to go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Husband!&rdquo; she cried, and held out her slender arms to me. I was compelled
+      to go to her and kiss her, and she twined them softly about my neck and
+      drew me to her and kissed me. I disentangled them very gently, and took
+      each wrist and kissed it, and the backs of her hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-night,&rdquo; I said. There came a little pause. &ldquo;Good-night, Margaret,&rdquo; I
+      repeated, and walked very deliberately and with a kind of sham
+      preoccupation to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not look at her, but I could feel her standing, watching me. If I
+      had looked up, she would, I knew, have held out her arms to me....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the very outset that secret, which was to touch no one but Isabel and
+      myself, had reached out to stab another human being.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole world had changed for Isabel and me; and we tried to pretend
+      that nothing had changed except a small matter between us. We believed
+      quite honestly at that time that it was possible to keep this thing that
+      had happened from any reaction at all, save perhaps through some magically
+      enhanced vigour in our work, upon the world about us! Seen in retrospect,
+      one can realise the absurdity of this belief; within a week I realised it;
+      but that does not alter the fact that we did believe as much, and that
+      people who are deeply in love and unable to marry will continue to believe
+      so to the very end of time. They will continue to believe out of existence
+      every consideration that separates them until they have come together.
+      Then they will count the cost, as we two had to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am telling a story, and not propounding theories in this book; and
+      chiefly I am telling of the ideas and influences and emotions that have
+      happened to me&mdash;me as a sort of sounding board for my world. The
+      moralist is at liberty to go over my conduct with his measure and say, &ldquo;At
+      this point or at that you went wrong, and you ought to have done&rdquo;&mdash;so-and-so.
+      The point of interest to the statesman is that it didn't for a moment
+      occur to us to do so-and-so when the time for doing it came. It amazes me
+      now to think how little either of us troubled about the established rights
+      or wrongs of the situation. We hadn't an atom of respect for them, innate
+      or acquired. The guardians of public morals will say we were very bad
+      people; I submit in defence that they are very bad guardians&mdash;provocative
+      guardians.... And when at last there came a claim against us that had an
+      effective validity for us, we were in the full tide of passionate
+      intimacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had a night of nearly sleepless perplexity after Margaret's return. She
+      had suddenly presented herself to me like something dramatically recalled,
+      fine, generous, infinitely capable of feeling. I was amazed how much I had
+      forgotten her. In my contempt for vulgarised and conventionalised honour I
+      had forgotten that for me there was such a reality as honour. And here it
+      was, warm and near to me, living, breathing, unsuspecting. Margaret's
+      pride was my honour, that I had had no right even to imperil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not now remember if I thought at that time of going to Isabel and
+      putting this new aspect of the case before her. Perhaps I did. Perhaps I
+      may have considered even then the possibility of ending what had so
+      freshly and passionately begun. If I did, it vanished next day at the
+      sight of her. Whatever regrets came in the darkness, the daylight brought
+      an obstinate confidence in our resolution again. We would, we declared,
+      &ldquo;pull the thing off.&rdquo; Margaret must not know. Margaret should not know. If
+      Margaret did not know, then no harm whatever would be done. We tried to
+      sustain that....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a brief time we had been like two people in a magic cell, magically
+      cut off from the world and full of a light of its own, and then we began
+      to realise that we were not in the least cut off, that the world was all
+      about us and pressing in upon us, limiting us, threatening us, resuming
+      possession of us. I tried to ignore the injury to Margaret of her
+      unreciprocated advances. I tried to maintain to myself that this hidden
+      love made no difference to the now irreparable breach between husband and
+      wife. But I never spoke of it to Isabel or let her see that aspect of our
+      case. How could I? The time for that had gone....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then in new shapes and relations came trouble. Distressful elements crept
+      in by reason of our unavoidable furtiveness; we ignored them, hid them
+      from each other, and attempted to hide them from ourselves. Successful
+      love is a thing of abounding pride, and we had to be secret. It was
+      delightful at first to be secret, a whispering, warm conspiracy; then
+      presently it became irksome and a little shameful. Her essential frankness
+      of soul was all against the masks and falsehoods that many women would
+      have enjoyed. Together in our secrecy we relaxed, then in the presence of
+      other people again it was tiresome to have to watch for the careless, too
+      easy phrase, to snatch back one's hand from the limitless betrayal of a
+      light, familiar touch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Love becomes a poor thing, at best a poor beautiful thing, if it develops
+      no continuing and habitual intimacy. We were always meeting, and most
+      gloriously loving and beginning&mdash;and then we had to snatch at
+      remorseless ticking watches, hurry to catch trains, and go back to this or
+      that. That is all very well for the intrigues of idle people perhaps, but
+      not for an intense personal relationship. It is like lighting a candle for
+      the sake of lighting it, over and over again, and each time blowing it
+      out. That, no doubt, must be very amusing to children playing with the
+      matches, but not to people who love warm light, and want it in order to do
+      fine and honourable things together. We had achieved&mdash;I give the ugly
+      phrase that expresses the increasing discolouration in my mind&mdash;&ldquo;illicit
+      intercourse.&rdquo; To end at that, we now perceived, wasn't in our style. But
+      where were we to end?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps we might at this stage have given it up. I think if we could have
+      seen ahead and around us we might have done so. But the glow of our cell
+      blinded us.... I wonder what might have happened if at that time we had
+      given it up.... We propounded it, we met again in secret to discuss it,
+      and our overpowering passion for one another reduced that meeting to
+      absurdity....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently the idea of children crept between us. It came in from all our
+      conceptions of life and public service; it was, we found, in the quality
+      of our minds that physical love without children is a little weak,
+      timorous, more than a little shameful. With imaginative people there very
+      speedily comes a time when that realisation is inevitable. We hadn't
+      thought of that before&mdash;it isn't natural to think of that before. We
+      hadn't known. There is no literature in English dealing with such things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a necessary sequence of phases in love. These came in their
+      order, and with them, unanticipated tarnishings on the first bright
+      perfection of our relations. For a time these developing phases were no
+      more than a secret and private trouble between us, little shadows
+      spreading by imperceptible degrees across that vivid and luminous cell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      8
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Handitch election flung me suddenly into prominence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is still only two years since that struggle, and I will not trouble the
+      reader with a detailed history of events that must be quite sufficiently
+      present in his mind for my purpose already. Huge stacks of journalism have
+      dealt with Handitch and its significance. For the reader very probably, as
+      for most people outside a comparatively small circle, it meant my
+      emergence from obscurity. We obtruded no editor's name in the BLUE WEEKLY;
+      I had never as yet been on the London hoardings. Before Handitch I was a
+      journalist and writer of no great public standing; after Handitch, I was
+      definitely a person, in the little group of persons who stood for the
+      Young Imperialist movement. Handitch was, to a very large extent, my
+      affair. I realised then, as a man comes to do, how much one can still grow
+      after seven and twenty. In the second election I was a man taking hold of
+      things; at Kinghamstead I had been simply a young candidate, a party unit,
+      led about the constituency, told to do this and that, and finally washed
+      in by the great Anti-Imperialist flood, like a starfish rolling up a
+      beach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My feminist views had earnt the mistrust of the party, and I do not think
+      I should have got the chance of Handitch or indeed any chance at all of
+      Parliament for a long time, if it had not been that the seat with its long
+      record of Liberal victories and its Liberal majority of 3642 at the last
+      election, offered a hopeless contest. The Liberal dissensions and the
+      belated but by no means contemptible Socialist candidate were providential
+      interpositions. I think, however, the conduct of Gane, Crupp, and
+      Tarvrille in coming down to fight for me, did count tremendously in my
+      favour. &ldquo;We aren't going to win, perhaps,&rdquo; said Crupp, &ldquo;but we are going
+      to talk.&rdquo; And until the very eve of victory, we treated Handitch not so
+      much as a battlefield as a hoarding. And so it was the Endowment of
+      Motherhood as a practical form of Eugenics got into English politics.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Plutus, our agent, was scared out of his wits when the thing began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They're ascribing all sorts of queer ideas to you about the Family,&rdquo; he
+      said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think the Family exists for the good of the children,&rdquo; I said; &ldquo;is that
+      queer?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not when you explain it&mdash;but they won't let you explain it. And
+      about marriage&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm all right about marriage&mdash;trust me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, if YOU had children,&rdquo; said Plutus, rather inconsiderately....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They opened fire upon me in a little electioneering rag call the HANDITCH
+      SENTINEL, with a string of garbled quotations and misrepresentations that
+      gave me an admirable text for a speech. I spoke for an hour and ten
+      minutes with a more and more crumpled copy of the SENTINEL in my hand, and
+      I made the fullest and completest exposition of the idea of endowing
+      motherhood that I think had ever been made up to that time in England. Its
+      effect on the press was extraordinary. The Liberal papers gave me quite
+      unprecedented space under the impression that I had only to be given rope
+      to hang myself; the Conservatives cut me down or tried to justify me; the
+      whole country was talking. I had had a pamphlet in type upon the subject,
+      and I revised this carefully and put it on the book-stalls within three
+      days. It sold enormously and brought me bushels of letters. We issued over
+      three thousand in Handitch alone. At meeting after meeting I was heckled
+      upon nothing else. Long before polling day Plutus was converted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's catching on like old age pensions,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;We've dished the
+      Liberals! To think that such a project should come from our side!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was only with the declaration of the poll that my battle was won.
+      No one expected more than a snatch victory, and I was in by over fifteen
+      hundred. At one bound Cossington's papers passed from apologetics varied
+      by repudiation to triumphant praise. &ldquo;A renascent England, breeding men,&rdquo;
+       said the leader in his chief daily on the morning after the polling, and
+      claimed that the Conservatives had been ever the pioneers in sanely bold
+      constructive projects.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I came up to London with a weary but rejoicing Margaret by the night
+      train.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To any one who did not know of that glowing secret between Isabel and
+      myself, I might well have appeared at that time the most successful and
+      enviable of men. I had recovered rapidly from an uncongenial start in
+      political life; I had become a considerable force through the BLUE WEEKLY,
+      and was shaping an increasingly influential body of opinion; I had
+      re-entered Parliament with quite dramatic distinction, and in spite of a
+      certain faltering on the part of the orthodox Conservatives towards the
+      bolder elements in our propaganda, I had loyal and unenvious associates
+      who were making me a power in the party. People were coming to our group,
+      understandings were developing. It was clear we should play a prominent
+      part in the next general election, and that, given a Conservative victory,
+      I should be assured of office. The world opened out to me brightly and
+      invitingly. Great schemes took shape in my mind, always more concrete,
+      always more practicable; the years ahead seemed falling into order,
+      shining with the credible promise of immense achievement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And at the heart of it all, unseen and unsuspected, was the secret of my
+      relations with Isabel&mdash;like a seed that germinates and thrusts,
+      thrusts relentlessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the onset of the Handitch contest onward, my meetings with her had
+      been more and more pervaded by the discussion of our situation. It had
+      innumerable aspects. It was very present to us that we wanted to be
+      together as much as possible&mdash;we were beginning to long very much for
+      actual living together in the same house, so that one could come as it
+      were carelessly&mdash;unawares&mdash;upon the other, busy perhaps about
+      some trivial thing. We wanted to feel each other in the daily atmosphere.
+      Preceding our imperatively sterile passion, you must remember, outside it,
+      altogether greater than it so far as our individual lives were concerned,
+      there had grown and still grew an enormous affection and intellectual
+      sympathy between us. We brought all our impressions and all our ideas to
+      each other, to see them in each other's light. It is hard to convey that
+      quality of intellectual unison to any one who has not experienced it. I
+      thought more and more in terms of conversation with Isabel; her possible
+      comments upon things would flash into my mind, oh!&mdash;with the very
+      sound of her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember, too, the odd effect of seeing her in the distance going about
+      Handitch, like any stranger canvasser; the queer emotion of her approach
+      along the street, the greeting as she passed. The morning of the polling
+      she vanished from the constituency. I saw her for an instant in the
+      passage behind our Committee rooms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Going?&rdquo; said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stay it out. I want you to see the fun. I remember&mdash;the other time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She didn't answer for a moment or so, and stood with face averted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's Margaret's show,&rdquo; she said abruptly. &ldquo;If I see her smiling there
+      like a queen by your side&mdash;! She did&mdash;last time. I remember.&rdquo;
+       She caught at a sob and dashed her hand across her face impatiently.
+      &ldquo;Jealous fool, mean and petty, jealous fool!... Good luck, old man, to
+      you! You're going to win. But I don't want to see the end of it all the
+      same....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-bye!&rdquo; said I, clasping her hand as some supporter appeared in the
+      passage....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I came back to London victorious, and a little flushed and coarse with
+      victory; and so soon as I could break away I went to Isabel's flat and
+      found her white and worn, with the stain of secret weeping about her eyes.
+      I came into the room to her and shut the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You said I'd win,&rdquo; I said, and held out my arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She hugged me closely for a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear,&rdquo; I whispered, &ldquo;it's nothing&mdash;without you&mdash;nothing!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We didn't speak for some seconds. Then she slipped from my hold. &ldquo;Look!&rdquo;
+       she said, smiling like winter sunshine. &ldquo;I've had in all the morning
+      papers&mdash;the pile of them, and you&mdash;resounding.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's more than I dared hope.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or I.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood for a moment still smiling bravely, and then she was sobbing in
+      my arms. &ldquo;The bigger you are&mdash;the more you show,&rdquo; she said&mdash;&ldquo;the
+      more we are parted. I know, I know&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I held her close to me, making no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently she became still. &ldquo;Oh, well,&rdquo; she said, and wiped her eyes and
+      sat down on the little sofa by the fire; and I sat down beside her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't know all there was in love,&rdquo; she said, staring at the coals,
+      &ldquo;when we went love-making.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I put my arm behind her and took a handful of her dear soft hair in my
+      hand and kissed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've done a great thing this time,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Handitch will make you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It opens big chances,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;But why are you weeping, dear one?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Envy,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and love.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're not lonely?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've plenty to do&mdash;and lots of people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've got me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She put her arm about me and kissed me. &ldquo;I want you,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;just as
+      if I had nothing of you. You don't understand&mdash;how a woman wants a
+      man. I thought once if I just gave myself to you it would be enough. It
+      was nothing&mdash;it was just a step across the threshold. My dear, every
+      moment you are away I ache for you&mdash;ache! I want to be about when it
+      isn't love-making or talk. I want to be doing things for you, and watching
+      you when you're not thinking of me. All those safe, careless, intimate
+      things. And something else&mdash;&rdquo; She stopped. &ldquo;Dear, I don't want to
+      bother you. I just want you to know I love you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She caught my head in her hands and kissed it, then stood up abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked up at her, a little perplexed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear heart,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;isn't this enough? You're my councillor, my
+      colleague, my right hand, the secret soul of my life&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I want to darn your socks,&rdquo; she said, smiling back at me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're insatiable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I'm not insatiable, Master. But I'm a woman in
+      love. And I'm finding out what I want, and what is necessary to me&mdash;and
+      what I can't have. That's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We get a lot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We want a lot. You and I are greedy people for the things we like,
+      Master. It's very evident we've got nearly all we can ever have of one
+      another&mdash;and I'm not satisfied.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What more is there?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For you&mdash;very little. I wonder. For me&mdash;every thing. Yes&mdash;everything.
+      You didn't mean it, Master; you didn't know any more than I did when I
+      began, but love between a man and a woman is sometimes very one-sided.
+      Fearfully one-sided! That's all....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't YOU ever want children?&rdquo; she said abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose I do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven't thought of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man doesn't, perhaps. But I have.... I want them&mdash;like hunger.
+      YOUR children, and home with you. Really, continually you! That's the
+      trouble.... I can't have 'em, Master, and I can't have you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was crying, and through her tears she laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going to make a scene,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and get this over. I'm so
+      discontented and miserable; I've got to tell you. It would come between us
+      if I didn't. I'm in love with you, with everything&mdash;with all my
+      brains. I'll pull through all right. I'll be good, Master, never you fear.
+      But to-day I'm crying out with all my being. This election&mdash;You're
+      going up; you're going on. In these papers&mdash;you're a great big fact.
+      It's suddenly come home to me. At the back of my mind I've always had the
+      idea I was going to have you somehow presently for myself&mdash;I mean to
+      have you to go long tramps with, to keep house for, to get meals for, to
+      watch for of an evening. It's a sort of habitual background to my thought
+      of you. And it's nonsense&mdash;utter nonsense!&rdquo; She stopped. She was
+      crying and choking. &ldquo;And the child, you know&mdash;the child!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was troubled beyond measure, but Handitch and its intimations were clear
+      and strong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We can't have that,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;we can't have that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We've got our own things to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;YOUR things,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aren't they yours too?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because of you,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aren't they your very own things?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And we give our own children to do it?&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;And sometimes I think it's too much to give&mdash;too
+      much altogether.... Children get into a woman's brain&mdash;when she
+      mustn't have them, especially when she must never hope for them. Think of
+      the child we might have now!&mdash;the little creature with soft, tender
+      skin, and little hands and little feet! At times it haunts me. It comes
+      and says, Why wasn't I given life? I can hear it in the night.... The
+      world is full of such little ghosts, dear lover&mdash;little things that
+      asked for life and were refused. They clamour to me. It's like a little
+      fist beating at my heart. Love children, beautiful children. Little cold
+      hands that tear at my heart! Oh, my heart and my lord!&rdquo; She was holding my
+      arm with both her hands and weeping against it, and now she drew herself
+      to my shoulder and wept and sobbed in my embrace. &ldquo;I shall never sit with
+      your child on my knee and you beside me-never, and I am a woman and your
+      lover!...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the profound impossibility of our relation was now becoming more and
+      more apparent to us. We found ourselves seeking justification, clinging
+      passionately to a situation that was coldly, pitilessly, impossible and
+      fated. We wanted quite intensely to live together and have a child, but
+      also we wanted very many other things that were incompatible with these
+      desires. It was extraordinarily difficult to weigh our political and
+      intellectual ambitions against those intimate wishes. The weights kept
+      altering according as one found oneself grasping this valued thing or
+      that. It wasn't as if we could throw everything aside for our love, and
+      have that as we wanted it. Love such as we bore one another isn't
+      altogether, or even chiefly, a thing in itself&mdash;it is for the most
+      part a value set upon things. Our love was interwoven with all our other
+      interests; to go out of the world and live in isolation seemed to us like
+      killing the best parts of each other; we loved the sight of each other
+      engaged finely and characteristically, we knew each other best as
+      activities. We had no delusions about material facts; we didn't want each
+      other alive or dead, we wanted each other fully alive. We wanted to do big
+      things together, and for us to take each other openly and desperately
+      would leave us nothing in the world to do. We wanted children indeed
+      passionately, but children with every helpful chance in the world, and
+      children born in scandal would be handicapped at every turn. We wanted to
+      share a home, and not a solitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when we were at this stage of realisation, began the intimations that
+      we were found out, and that scandal was afoot against us....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I heard of it first from Esmeer, who deliberately mentioned it, with that
+      steady grey eye of his watching me, as an instance of the preposterous
+      falsehoods people will circulate. It came to Isabel almost simultaneously
+      through a married college friend, who made it her business to demand
+      either confirmation or denial. It filled us both with consternation. In
+      the surprise of the moment Isabel admitted her secret, and her friend went
+      off &ldquo;reserving her freedom of action.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Discovery broke out in every direction. Friends with grave faces and an
+      atmosphere of infinite tact invaded us both. Other friends ceased to
+      invade either of us. It was manifest we had become&mdash;we knew not how&mdash;a
+      private scandal, a subject for duologues, an amazement, a perplexity, a
+      vivid interest. In a few brief weeks it seemed London passed from absolute
+      unsuspiciousness to a chattering exaggeration of its knowledge of our
+      relations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was just the most inappropriate time for that disclosure. The long
+      smouldering antagonism to my endowment of motherhood ideas had flared up
+      into an active campaign in the EXPURGATOR, and it would be altogether
+      disastrous to us if I should be convicted of any personal irregularity. It
+      was just because of the manifest and challenging respectability of my
+      position that I had been able to carry the thing as far as I had done. Now
+      suddenly my fortunes had sprung a leak, and scandal was pouring in.... It
+      chanced, too, that a wave of moral intolerance was sweeping through
+      London, one of those waves in which the bitterness of the consciously just
+      finds an ally in the panic of the undiscovered. A certain Father Blodgett
+      had been preaching against social corruption with extraordinary force, and
+      had roused the Church of England people to a kind of competition in
+      denunciation. The old methods of the Anti-Socialist campaign had been
+      renewed, and had offered far too wide a scope and too tempting an
+      opportunity for private animosity, to be restricted to the private affairs
+      of the Socialists. I had intimations of an extensive circulation of
+      &ldquo;private and confidential&rdquo; letters....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think there can be nothing else in life quite like the unnerving
+      realisation that rumour and scandal are afoot about one. Abruptly one's
+      confidence in the solidity of the universe disappears. One walks silenced
+      through a world that one feels to be full of inaudible accusations. One
+      cannot challenge the assault, get it out into the open, separate truth and
+      falsehood. It slinks from you, turns aside its face. Old acquaintances
+      suddenly evaded me, made extraordinary excuses; men who had presumed on
+      the verge of my world and pestered me with an intrusive enterprise, now
+      took the bold step of flat repudiation. I became doubtful about the return
+      of a nod, retracted all those tentacles of easy civility that I had
+      hitherto spread to the world. I still grow warm with amazed indignation
+      when I recall that Edward Crampton, meeting me full on the steps of the
+      Climax Club, cut me dead. &ldquo;By God!&rdquo; I cried, and came near catching him by
+      the throat and wringing out of him what of all good deeds and bad, could
+      hearten him, a younger man than I and empty beyond comparison, to dare to
+      play the judge to me. And then I had an open slight from Mrs. Millingham,
+      whom I had counted on as one counts upon the sunrise. I had not expected
+      things of that sort; they were disconcerting beyond measure; it was as if
+      the world were giving way beneath my feet, as though something failed in
+      the essential confidence of life, as though a hand of wet ice had touched
+      my heart. Similar things were happening to Isabel. Yet we went on working,
+      visiting, meeting, trying to ignore this gathering of implacable forces
+      against us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time I was perplexed beyond measure to account for this campaign.
+      Then I got a clue. The centre of diffusion was the Bailey household. The
+      Baileys had never forgiven me my abandonment of the young Liberal group
+      they had done so much to inspire and organise; their dinner-table had long
+      been a scene of hostile depreciation of the BLUE WEEKLY and all its
+      allies; week after week Altiora proclaimed that I was &ldquo;doing nothing,&rdquo; and
+      found other causes for our bye-election triumphs; I counted Chambers
+      Street a dangerous place for me. Yet, nevertheless, I was astonished to
+      find them using a private scandal against me. They did. I think Handitch
+      had filled up the measure of their bitterness, for I had not only
+      abandoned them, but I was succeeding beyond even their power of
+      misrepresentation. Always I had been a wasp in their spider's web,
+      difficult to claim as a tool, uncritical, antagonistic. I admired their
+      work and devotion enormously, but I had never concealed my contempt for a
+      certain childish vanity they displayed, and for the frequent puerility of
+      their political intrigues. I suppose contempt galls more than injuries,
+      and anyhow they had me now. They had me. Bailey, I found, was warning
+      fathers of girls against me as a &ldquo;reckless libertine,&rdquo; and Altiora,
+      flushed, roguish, and dishevelled, was sitting on her fender curb after
+      dinner, and pledging little parties of five or six women at a time with
+      infinite gusto not to let the matter go further. Our cell was open to the
+      world, and a bleak, distressful daylight streaming in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had a gleam of a more intimate motive in Altiora from the reports that
+      came to me. Isabel had been doing a series of five or six articles in the
+      POLITICAL REVIEW in support of our campaign, the POLITICAL REVIEW which
+      had hitherto been loyally Baileyite. Quite her best writing up to the
+      present, at any rate, is in those papers, and no doubt Altiora had had not
+      only to read her in those invaded columns, but listen to her praises in
+      the mouths of the tactless influential. Altiora, like so many people who
+      rely on gesture and vocal insistence in conversation, writes a poor and
+      slovenly prose and handles an argument badly; Isabel has her University
+      training behind her and wrote from the first with the stark power of a
+      clear-headed man. &ldquo;Now we know,&rdquo; said Altiora, with just a gleam of malice
+      showing through her brightness, &ldquo;now we know who helps with the writing!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She revealed astonishing knowledge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time I couldn't for the life of me discover her sources. I had,
+      indeed, a desperate intention of challenging her, and then I bethought me
+      of a youngster named Curmain, who had been my supplemental typist and
+      secretary for a time, and whom I had sent on to her before the days of our
+      breach. &ldquo;Of course!&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;Curmain!&rdquo; He was a tall, drooping, sidelong
+      youth with sandy hair, a little forward head, and a long thin neck. He
+      stole stamps, and, I suspected, rifled my private letter drawer, and I
+      found him one day on a turn of the stairs looking guilty and ruffled with
+      a pretty Irish housemaid of Margaret's manifestly in a state of hot
+      indignation. I saw nothing, but I felt everything in the air between them.
+      I hate this pestering of servants, but at the same time I didn't want
+      Curmain wiped out of existence, so I had packed him off without
+      unnecessary discussion to Altiora. He was quick and cheap anyhow, and I
+      thought her general austerity ought to redeem him if anything could; the
+      Chambers Street housemaid wasn't for any man's kissing and showed it, and
+      the stamps and private letters were looked after with an efficiency
+      altogether surpassing mine. And Altiora, I've no doubt left now whatever,
+      pumped this young undesirable about me, and scenting a story, had him to
+      dinner alone one evening to get to the bottom of the matter. She got quite
+      to the bottom of it,&mdash;it must have been a queer duologue. She read
+      Isabel's careless, intimate letters to me, so to speak, by this proxy, and
+      she wasn't ashamed to use this information in the service of the
+      bitterness that had sprung up in her since our political breach. It was
+      essentially a personal bitterness; it helped no public purpose of theirs
+      to get rid of me. My downfall in any public sense was sheer waste,&mdash;the
+      loss of a man. She knew she was behaving badly, and so, when it came to
+      remonstrance, she behaved worse. She'd got names and dates and places; the
+      efficiency of her information was irresistible. And she set to work at it
+      marvellously. Never before, in all her pursuit of efficient ideals, had
+      Altiora achieved such levels of efficiency. I wrote a protest that was
+      perhaps ill-advised and angry, I went to her and tried to stop her. She
+      wouldn't listen, she wouldn't think, she denied and lied, she behaved like
+      a naughty child of six years old which has made up its mind to be hurtful.
+      It wasn't only, I think, that she couldn't bear our political and social
+      influence; she also&mdash;I realised at that interview couldn't bear our
+      loving. It seemed to her the sickliest thing,&mdash;a thing quite
+      unendurable. While such things were, the virtue had gone out of her world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I've the vividest memory of that call of mine. She'd just come in and
+      taken off her hat, and she was grey and dishevelled and tired, and in a
+      business-like dress of black and crimson that didn't suit her and was
+      muddy about the skirts; she'd a cold in her head and sniffed
+      penetratingly, she avoided my eye as she talked and interrupted everything
+      I had to say; she kept stabbing fiercely at the cushions of her sofa with
+      a long hat-pin and pretending she was overwhelmed with grief at the
+      DEBACLE she was deliberately organising.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then part,&rdquo; she cried, &ldquo;part. If you don't want a smashing up,&mdash;part!
+      You two have got to be parted. You've got never to see each other ever,
+      never to speak.&rdquo; There was a zest in her voice. &ldquo;We're not circulating
+      stories,&rdquo; she denied. &ldquo;No! And Curmain never told us anything&mdash;Curmain
+      is an EXCELLENT young man; oh! a quite excellent young man. You misjudged
+      him altogether.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was equally unsuccessful with Bailey. I caught the little wretch in the
+      League Club, and he wriggled and lied. He wouldn't say where he had got
+      his facts, he wouldn't admit he had told any one. When I gave him the
+      names of two men who had come to me astonished and incredulous, he
+      attempted absurdly to make me think they had told HIM. He did his horrible
+      little best to suggest that honest old Quackett, who had just left England
+      for the Cape, was the real scandalmonger. That struck me as mean, even for
+      Bailey. I've still the odd vivid impression of his fluting voice, excusing
+      the inexcusable, his big, shifty face evading me, his perspiration-beaded
+      forehead, the shrugging shoulders, and the would-be exculpatory gestures&mdash;Houndsditch
+      gestures&mdash;of his enormous ugly hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can assure you, my dear fellow,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I can assure you we've done
+      everything to shield you&mdash;everything.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Isabel came after dinner one evening and talked in the office. She made a
+      white-robed, dusky figure against the deep blues of my big window. I sat
+      at my desk and tore a quill pen to pieces as I talked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Baileys don't intend to let this drop,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;They mean that every
+      one in London is to know about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well!&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear heart,&rdquo; said Isabel, facing it, &ldquo;it's no good waiting for things to
+      overtake us; we're at the parting of the ways.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are we to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They won't let us go on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damn them!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are ORGANISING scandal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's no good waiting for things to overtake us,&rdquo; I echoed; &ldquo;they have
+      overtaken us.&rdquo; I turned on her. &ldquo;What do you want to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everything,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Keep you and have our work. Aren't we Mates?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We can't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And we can't!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've got to tell Margaret,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Margaret!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't bear the idea of any one else getting in front with it. I've been
+      wincing about Margaret secretly&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know. You'll have to tell her&mdash;and make your peace with her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She leant back against the bookcases under the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We've had some good times, Master;&rdquo; she said, with a sigh in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then for a long time we stared at one another in silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We haven't much time left,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall we bolt?&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And leave all this?&rdquo; she asked, with her eyes going round the room. &ldquo;And
+      that?&rdquo; And her head indicated Westminster. &ldquo;No!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I said no more of bolting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We've got to screw ourselves up to surrender,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A lot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Master,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;it isn't all sex and stuff between us?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't give up the work. Our work's my life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We came upon another long pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one will believe we've ceased to be lovers&mdash;if we simply do,&rdquo; she
+      said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We shouldn't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We've got to do something more parting than that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded, and again we paused. She was coming to something.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could marry Shoesmith,&rdquo; she said abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;&rdquo; I objected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He knows. It wasn't fair. I told him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, that explains,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;There's been a kind of sulkiness&mdash;But&mdash;you
+      told him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She nodded. &ldquo;He's rather badly hurt,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;He's been a good friend
+      to me. He's curiously loyal. But something, something he said one day&mdash;forced
+      me to let him know.... That's been the beastliness of all this secrecy.
+      That's the beastliness of all secrecy. You have to spring surprises on
+      people. But he keeps on. He's steadfast. He'd already suspected. He wants
+      me very badly to marry him....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you don't want to marry him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm forced to think of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But does he want to marry you at that? Take you as a present from the
+      world at large?&mdash;against your will and desire?... I don't understand
+      him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He cares for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He thinks this is a fearful mess for me. He wants to pull it straight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We sat for a time in silence, with imaginations that obstinately refused
+      to take up the realities of this proposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want you to marry Shoesmith,&rdquo; I said at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you like him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not as your husband.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's a very clever and sturdy person&mdash;and very generous and devoted
+      to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can't expect that. He thinks you are wonderful&mdash;and, naturally,
+      that you ought not to have started this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've a curious dislike to any one thinking that but myself. I'm quite
+      ready to think it myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He'd let us be friends&mdash;and meet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us be friends!&rdquo; I cried, after a long pause. &ldquo;You and me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He wants me to be engaged soon. Then, he says, he can go round fighting
+      these rumours, defending us both&mdash;and force a quarrel on the
+      Baileys.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't understand him,&rdquo; I said, and added, &ldquo;I don't understand you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was staring at her face. It seemed white and set in the dimness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you really mean this, Isabel?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What else is there to do, my dear?&mdash;what else is there to do at all?
+      I've been thinking day and night. You can't go away with me. You can't
+      smash yourself suddenly in the sight of all men. I'd rather die than that
+      should happen. Look what you are becoming in the country! Look at all
+      you've built up!&mdash;me helping. I wouldn't let you do it if you could.
+      I wouldn't let you&mdash;if it were only for Margaret's sake. THIS...
+      closes the scandal, closes everything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It closes all our life together,&rdquo; I cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It never ought to have begun,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She winced. Then abruptly she was on her knees before me, with her hands
+      upon my shoulder and her eyes meeting mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear,&rdquo; she said very earnestly, &ldquo;don't misunderstand me! Don't think
+      I'm retreating from the things we've done! Our love is the best thing I
+      could ever have had from life. Nothing can ever equal it; nothing could
+      ever equal the beauty and delight you and I have had together. Never! You
+      have loved me; you do love me....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No one could ever know how to love you as I have loved you; no one could
+      ever love me as you have loved me, my king. And it's just because it's
+      been so splendid, dear; it's just because I'd die rather than have a tithe
+      of all this wiped out of my life again&mdash;for it's made me, it's all I
+      am&mdash;dear, it's years since I began loving you&mdash;it's just because
+      of its goodness that I want not to end in wreckage now, not to end in the
+      smashing up of all the big things I understand in you and love in you....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is there for us if we keep on and go away?&rdquo; she went on. &ldquo;All the
+      big interests in our lives will vanish&mdash;everything. We shall become
+      specialised people&mdash;people overshadowed by a situation. We shall be
+      an elopement, a romance&mdash;all our breadth and meaning gone! People
+      will always think of it first when they think of us; all our work and aims
+      will be warped by it and subordinated to it. Is it good enough, dear? Just
+      to specialise.... I think of you. We've got a case, a passionate case, the
+      best of cases, but do we want to spend all our lives defending it and
+      justifying it? And there's that other life. I know now you care for
+      Margaret&mdash;you care more than you think you do. You have said fine
+      things of her. I've watched you about her. Little things have dropped from
+      you. She's given her life for you; she's nothing without you. You feel
+      that to your marrow all the time you are thinking about these things. Oh,
+      I'm not jealous, dear. I love you for loving her. I love you in relation
+      to her. But there it is, an added weight against us, another thing worth
+      saving.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently, I remember, she sat back on her heels and looked up into my
+      face. &ldquo;We've done wrong&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said; &ldquo;we've got to be men.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was driven to tell Margaret about our situation by my intolerable dread
+      that otherwise the thing might come to her through some stupid and clumsy
+      informant. She might even meet Altiora, and have it from her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I can still recall the feeling of sitting at my desk that night in that
+      large study of mine in Radnor Square, waiting for Margaret to come home.
+      It was oddly like the feeling of a dentist's reception-room; only it was
+      for me to do the dentistry with clumsy, cruel hands. I had left the door
+      open so that she would come in to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I heard her silken rustle on the stairs at last, and then she was in the
+      doorway. &ldquo;May I come in?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do,&rdquo; I said, and turned round to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Working?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hard,&rdquo; I answered. &ldquo;Where have YOU been?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At the Vallerys'. Mr. Evesham was talking about you. They were all
+      talking. I don't think everybody knew who I was. Just Mrs. Mumble I'd been
+      to them. Lord Wardenham doesn't like you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He doesn't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But they all feel you're rather big, anyhow. Then I went on to Park Lane
+      to hear a new pianist and some other music at Eva's.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I looked in at the Brabants' for some midnight tea before I came on
+      here. They'd got some writers&mdash;and Grant was there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You HAVE been flying round....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a little pause between us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked at her pretty, unsuspecting face, and at the slender grace of her
+      golden-robed body. What gulfs there were between us! &ldquo;You've been amused,&rdquo;
+       I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's been amusing. You've been at the House?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Medical Education Bill kept me.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After all, why should I tell her? She'd got to a way of living that
+      fulfilled her requirements. Perhaps she'd never hear. But all that day and
+      the day before I'd been making up my mind to do the thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to tell you something,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;I wish you'd sit down for a
+      moment or so.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once I had begun, it seemed to me I had to go through with it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something in the quality of my voice gave her an intimation of unusual
+      gravity. She looked at me steadily for a moment and sat down slowly in my
+      armchair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went on awkwardly. &ldquo;I've got to tell you&mdash;something extraordinarily
+      distressing,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was manifestly altogether unaware.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There seems to be a good deal of scandal abroad&mdash;I've only recently
+      heard of it&mdash;about myself&mdash;and Isabel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isabel!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do they say?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was difficult, I found, to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They say she's my mistress.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! How abominable!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She spoke with the most natural indignation. Our eyes met.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We've been great friends,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. And to make THAT of it. My poor dear! But how can they?&rdquo; She paused
+      and looked at me. &ldquo;It's so incredible. How can any one believe it? I
+      couldn't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped, with her distressed eyes regarding me. Her expression changed
+      to dread. There was a tense stillness for a second, perhaps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I turned my face towards the desk, and took up and dropped a handful of
+      paper fasteners.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Margaret,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;I'm afraid you'll have to believe it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret sat very still. When I looked at her again, her face was very
+      white, and her distressed eyes scrutinised me. Her lips quivered as she
+      spoke. &ldquo;You really mean&mdash;THAT?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never dreamt.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never meant you to dream.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that is why&mdash;we've been apart?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought. &ldquo;I suppose it is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why have you told me now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Those rumours. I didn't want any one else to tell you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or else it wouldn't have mattered?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned her eyes from me to the fire. Then for a moment she looked
+      about the room she had made for me, and then quite silently, with a
+      childish quivering of her lips, with a sort of dismayed distress upon her
+      face, she was weeping. She sat weeping in her dress of cloth of gold, with
+      her bare slender arms dropped limp over the arms of her chair, and her
+      eyes averted from me, making no effort to stay or staunch her tears. &ldquo;I am
+      sorry, Margaret,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;I was in love.... I did not understand....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently she asked: &ldquo;What are you going to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see, Margaret, now it's come to be your affair&mdash;I want to know
+      what you&mdash;what you want.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You want to leave me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you want me to, I must.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave Parliament&mdash;leave all the things you are doing,&mdash;all this
+      fine movement of yours?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo; I spoke sullenly. &ldquo;I don't want to leave anything. I want to stay
+      on. I've told you, because I think we&mdash;Isabel and I, I mean&mdash;have
+      got to drive through a storm of scandal anyhow. I don't know how far
+      things may go, how much people may feel, and I can't, I can't have you
+      unconscious, unarmed, open to any revelation&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When the thing began&mdash;I knew it was stupid but I thought it was a
+      thing that wouldn't change, wouldn't be anything but itself, wouldn't
+      unfold&mdash;consequences.... People have got hold of these vague
+      rumours.... Directly it reached any one else but&mdash;but us two&mdash;I
+      saw it had to come to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I stopped. I had that distressful feeling I have always had with Margaret,
+      of not being altogether sure she heard, of being doubtful if she
+      understood. I perceived that once again I had struck at her and shattered
+      a thousand unsubstantial pinnacles. And I couldn't get at her, to help
+      her, or touch her mind! I stood up, and at my movement she moved. She
+      produced a dainty little handkerchief, and made an effort to wipe her face
+      with it, and held it to her eyes. &ldquo;Oh, my Husband!&rdquo; she sobbed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean to do?&rdquo; she said, with her voice muffled by her
+      handkerchief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We're going to end it,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something gripped me tormentingly as I said that. I drew a chair beside
+      her and sat down. &ldquo;You and I, Margaret, have been partners,&rdquo; I began.
+      &ldquo;We've built up this life of ours together; I couldn't have done it
+      without you. We've made a position, created a work&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head. &ldquo;You,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You helping. I don't want to shatter it&mdash;if you don't want it
+      shattered. I can't leave my work. I can't leave you. I want you to have&mdash;all
+      that you have ever had. I've never meant to rob you. I've made an immense
+      and tragic blunder. You don't know how things took us, how different they
+      seemed! My character and accident have conspired&mdash;We'll pay&mdash;in
+      ourselves, not in our public service.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I halted again. Margaret remained very still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want you to understand that the thing is at an end. It is definitely at
+      an end. We&mdash;we talked&mdash;yesterday. We mean to end it altogether.&rdquo;
+       I clenched my hands. &ldquo;She's&mdash;she's going to marry Arnold Shoesmith.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I wasn't looking now at Margaret any more, but I heard the rustle of her
+      movement as she turned on me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all right,&rdquo; I said, clinging to my explanation. &ldquo;We're doing nothing
+      shabby. He knows. He will. It's all as right&mdash;as things can be now.
+      We're not cheating any one, Margaret. We're doing things straight&mdash;now.
+      Of course, you know.... We shall&mdash;we shall have to make sacrifices.
+      Give things up pretty completely. Very completely.... We shall have not to
+      see each other for a time, you know. Perhaps not a long time. Two or three
+      years. Or write&mdash;or just any of that sort of thing ever&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Some subconscious barrier gave way in me. I found myself crying
+      uncontrollably&mdash;as I have never cried since I was a little child. I
+      was amazed and horrified at myself. And wonderfully, Margaret was on her
+      knees beside me, with her arms about me, mingling her weeping with mine.
+      &ldquo;Oh, my Husband!&rdquo; she cried, &ldquo;my poor Husband! Does it hurt you so? I
+      would do anything! Oh, the fool I am! Dear, I love you. I love you over
+      and away and above all these jealous little things!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She drew down my head to her as a mother might draw down the head of a
+      son. She caressed me, weeping bitterly with me. &ldquo;Oh! my dear,&rdquo; she sobbed,
+      &ldquo;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!&rdquo; For a time she held me in silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've thought this might happen, I dreamt it might happen. You two, I
+      mean. It was dreaming put it into my head. When I've seen you together, so
+      glad with each other.... Oh! Husband mine, believe me! believe me! I'm
+      stupid, I'm cold, I'm only beginning to realise how stupid and cold, but
+      all I want in all the world is to give my life to you.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We can't part in a room,&rdquo; said Isabel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'll have one last talk together,&rdquo; I said, and planned that we should
+      meet for a half a day between Dover and Walmer and talk ourselves out. I
+      still recall that day very well, recall even the curious exaltation of
+      grief that made our mental atmosphere distinctive and memorable. We had
+      seen so much of one another, had become so intimate, that we talked of
+      parting even as we parted with a sense of incredible remoteness. We went
+      together up over the cliffs, and to a place where they fall towards the
+      sea, past the white, quaint-lanterned lighthouses of the South Foreland.
+      There, in a kind of niche below the crest, we sat talking. It was a
+      spacious day, serenely blue and warm, and on the wrinkled water remotely
+      below a black tender and six hooded submarines came presently, and engaged
+      in mysterious manoeuvers. Shrieking gulls and chattering jackdaws circled
+      over us and below us, and dived and swooped; and a skerry of weedy, fallen
+      chalk appeared, and gradually disappeared again, as the tide fell and
+      rose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We talked and thought that afternoon on every aspect of our relations. It
+      seems to me now we talked so wide and far that scarcely an issue in the
+      life between man and woman can arise that we did not at least touch upon.
+      Lying there at Isabel's feet, I have become for myself a symbol of all
+      this world-wide problem between duty and conscious, passionate love the
+      world has still to solve. Because it isn't solved; there's a wrong in it
+      either way.. .. The sky, the wide horizon, seemed to lift us out of
+      ourselves until we were something representative and general. She was
+      womanhood become articulate, talking to her lover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ought,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;never to have loved you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It wasn't a thing planned,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ought never to have let our talk slip to that, never to have turned
+      back from America.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm glad we did it,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Don't think I repent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will never repent,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Never!&rdquo; as though she clung to her life
+      in saying it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember we talked for a long time of divorce. It seemed to us then, and
+      it seems to us still, that it ought to have been possible for Margaret to
+      divorce me, and for me to marry without the scandalous and ugly publicity,
+      the taint and ostracism that follow such a readjustment. We went on to the
+      whole perplexing riddle of marriage. We criticised the current code, how
+      muddled and conventionalised it had become, how modified by subterfuges
+      and concealments and new necessities, and the increasing freedom of women.
+      &ldquo;It's all like Bromstead when the building came,&rdquo; I said; for I had often
+      talked to her of that early impression of purpose dissolving again into
+      chaotic forces. &ldquo;There is no clear right in the world any more. The world
+      is Byzantine. The justest man to-day must practise a tainted goodness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      These questions need discussion&mdash;a magnificent frankness of
+      discussion&mdash;if any standards are again to establish an effective hold
+      upon educated people. Discretions, as I have said already, will never hold
+      any one worth holding&mdash;longer than they held us. Against every &ldquo;shalt
+      not&rdquo; there must be a &ldquo;why not&rdquo; plainly put,&mdash;the &ldquo;why not&rdquo; largest
+      and plainest, the law deduced from its purpose. &ldquo;You and I, Isabel,&rdquo; I
+      said, &ldquo;have always been a little disregardful of duty, partly at least
+      because the idea of duty comes to us so ill-clad. Oh! I know there's an
+      extravagant insubordinate strain in us, but that wasn't all. I wish
+      humbugs would leave duty alone. I wish all duty wasn't covered with slime.
+      That's where the real mischief comes in. Passion can always contrive to
+      clothe itself in beauty, strips itself splendid. That carried us. But for
+      all its mean associations there is this duty....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't we come rather late to it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not so late that it won't be atrociously hard to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's queer to think of now,&rdquo; said Isabel. &ldquo;Who could believe we did all
+      we have done honestly? Well, in a manner honestly. Who could believe we
+      thought this might be hidden? Who could trace it all step by step from the
+      time when we found that a certain boldness in our talk was pleasing? We
+      talked of love.... Master, there's not much for us to do in the way of
+      Apologia that any one will credit. And yet if it were possible to tell the
+      very heart of our story....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does Margaret really want to go on with you?&rdquo; she asked&mdash;&ldquo;shield you&mdash;knowing
+      of... THIS?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm certain. I don't understand&mdash;just as I don't understand
+      Shoesmith, but she does. These people walk on solid ground which is just
+      thin air to us. They've got something we haven't got. Assurances? I
+      wonder.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then it was, or later, we talked of Shoesmith, and what her life might be
+      with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's good,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;he's kindly. He's everything but magic. He's the
+      very image of the decent, sober, honourable life. You can't say a thing
+      against him or I&mdash;except that something&mdash;something in his
+      imagination, something in the tone of his voice&mdash;fails for me. Why
+      don't I love him?&mdash;he's a better man than you! Why don't you? IS he a
+      better man than you? He's usage, he's honour, he's the right thing, he's
+      the breed and the tradition,&mdash;a gentleman. You're your erring,
+      incalculable self. I suppose we women will trust this sort and love your
+      sort to the very end of time....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We lay side by side and nibbled at grass stalks as we talked. It seemed
+      enormously unreasonable to us that two people who had come to the pitch of
+      easy and confident affection and happiness that held between us should be
+      obliged to part and shun one another, or murder half the substance of
+      their lives. We felt ourselves crushed and beaten by an indiscriminating
+      machine which destroys happiness in the service of jealousy. &ldquo;The mass of
+      people don't feel these things in quite the same manner as we feel them,&rdquo;
+       she said. &ldquo;Is it because they're different in grain, or educated out of
+      some primitive instinct?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's because we've explored love a little, and they know no more than the
+      gateway,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Lust and then jealousy; their simple conception&mdash;and
+      we have gone past all that and wandered hand in hand....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember that for a time we watched two of that larger sort of gull,
+      whose wings are brownish-white, circle and hover against the blue. And
+      then we lay and looked at a band of water mirror clear far out to sea, and
+      wondered why the breeze that rippled all the rest should leave it so
+      serene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And in this State of ours,&rdquo; I resumed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eh!&rdquo; said Isabel, rolling over into a sitting posture and looking out at
+      the horizon. &ldquo;Let's talk no more of things we can never see. Talk to me of
+      the work you are doing and all we shall do&mdash;after we have parted.
+      We've said too little of that. We've had our red life, and it's over.
+      Thank Heaven!&mdash;though we stole it! Talk about your work, dear, and
+      the things we'll go on doing&mdash;just as though we were still together.
+      We'll still be together in a sense&mdash;through all these things we have
+      in common.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And so we talked of politics and our outlook. We were interested to the
+      pitch of self-forgetfulness. We weighed persons and forces, discussed the
+      probabilities of the next general election, the steady drift of public
+      opinion in the north and west away from Liberalism towards us. It was very
+      manifest that in spite of Wardenham and the EXPURGATOR, we should come
+      into the new Government strongly. The party had no one else, all the young
+      men were formally or informally with us; Esmeer would have office, Lord
+      Tarvrille, I... and very probably there would be something for Shoesmith.
+      &ldquo;And for my own part,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;I count on backing on the Liberal side.
+      For the last two years we've been forcing competition in constructive
+      legislation between the parties. The Liberals have not been long in
+      following up our Endowment of Motherhood lead. They'll have to give votes
+      and lip service anyhow. Half the readers of the BLUE WEEKLY, they say, are
+      Liberals....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I remember talking about things of this sort with old Willersley,&rdquo; I
+      said, &ldquo;ever so many years ago. It was some place near Locarno, and we
+      looked down the lake that shone weltering&mdash;just as now we look over
+      the sea. And then we dreamt in an indistinct featureless way of all that
+      you and I are doing now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I!&rdquo; said Isabel, and laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, of some such thing,&rdquo; I said, and remained for awhile silent,
+      thinking of Locarno.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I recalled once more the largeness, the release from small personal things
+      that I had felt in my youth; statecraft became real and wonderful again
+      with the memory, the gigantic handling of gigantic problems. I began to
+      talk out my thoughts, sitting up beside her, as I could never talk of them
+      to any one but Isabel; began to recover again the purpose that lay under
+      all my political ambitions and adjustments and anticipations. I saw the
+      State, splendid and wide as I had seen it in that first travel of mine,
+      but now it was no mere distant prospect of spires and pinnacles, but
+      populous with fine-trained, bold-thinking, bold-doing people. It was as if
+      I had forgotten for a long time and now remembered with amazement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first, I told her, I had been altogether at a loss how I could do
+      anything to battle against the aimless muddle of our world; I had wanted a
+      clue&mdash;until she had come into my life questioning, suggesting,
+      unconsciously illuminating. &ldquo;But I have done nothing,&rdquo; she protested. I
+      declared she had done everything in growing to education under my eyes, in
+      reflecting again upon all the processes that had made myself, so that
+      instead of abstractions and blue-books and bills and devices, I had
+      realised the world of mankind as a crowd needing before all things fine
+      women and men. We'd spoilt ourselves in learning that, but anyhow we had
+      our lesson. Before her I was in a nineteenth-century darkness, dealing
+      with the nation as if it were a crowd of selfish men, forgetful of women
+      and children and that shy wild thing in the hearts of men, love, which
+      must be drawn upon as it has never been drawn upon before, if the State is
+      to live. I saw now how it is possible to bring the loose factors of a
+      great realm together, to create a mind of literature and thought in it,
+      and the expression of a purpose to make it self-conscious and fine. I had
+      it all clear before me, so that at a score of points I could presently
+      begin. The BLUE WEEKLY was a centre of force. Already we had given
+      Imperialism a criticism, and leavened half the press from our columns. Our
+      movement consolidated and spread. We should presently come into power.
+      Everything moved towards our hands. We should be able to get at the
+      schools, the services, the universities, the church; enormously increase
+      the endowment of research, and organise what was sorely wanted, a
+      criticism of research; contrive a closer contact between the press and
+      creative intellectual life; foster literature, clarify, strengthen the
+      public consciousness, develop social organisation and a sense of the
+      State. Men were coming to us every day, brilliant young peers like Lord
+      Dentonhill, writers like Carnot and Cresswell. It filled me with pride to
+      win such men. &ldquo;We stand for so much more than we seem to stand for,&rdquo; I
+      said. I opened my heart to her, so freely that I hesitate to open my heart
+      even to the reader, telling of projects and ambitions I cherished, of my
+      consciousness of great powers and widening opportunities....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Isabel watched me as I talked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She too, I think, had forgotten these things for a while. For it is
+      curious and I think a very significant thing that since we had become
+      lovers, we had talked very little of the broader things that had once so
+      strongly gripped our imaginations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's good,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;to talk like this to you, to get back to youth and
+      great ambitions with you. There have been times lately when politics has
+      seemed the pettiest game played with mean tools for mean ends&mdash;and
+      none the less so that the happiness of three hundred million people might
+      be touched by our follies. I talk to no one else like this.... And now I
+      think of parting, I think but of how much more I might have talked to
+      you.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Things drew to an end at last, but after we had spoken of a thousand
+      things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We've talked away our last half day,&rdquo; I said, staring over my shoulder at
+      the blazing sunset sky behind us. &ldquo;Dear, it's been the last day of our
+      lives for us.... It doesn't seem like the last day of our lives. Or any
+      day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder how it will feel?&rdquo; said Isabel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will be very strange at first&mdash;not to be able to tell you
+      things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've a superstition that after&mdash;after we've parted&mdash;if ever I
+      go into my room and talk, you'll hear. You'll be&mdash;somewhere.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall be in the world&mdash;yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't feel as though these days ahead were real. Here we are, here we
+      remain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I feel that. As though you and I were two immortals, who didn't live
+      in time and space at all, who never met, who couldn't part, and here we
+      lie on Olympus. And those two poor creatures who did meet, poor little
+      Richard Remington and Isabel Rivers, who met and loved too much and had to
+      part, they part and go their ways, and we lie here and watch them, you and
+      I. She'll cry, poor dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She'll cry. She's crying now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor little beasts! I think he'll cry too. He winces. He could&mdash;for
+      tuppence. I didn't know he had lachrymal glands at all until a little
+      while ago. I suppose all love is hysterical&mdash;and a little foolish.
+      Poor mites! Silly little pitiful creatures! How we have blundered! Think
+      how we must look to God! Well, we'll pity them, and then we'll inspire him
+      to stiffen up again&mdash;and do as we've determined he shall do. We'll
+      see it through,&mdash;we who lie here on the cliff. They'll be mean at
+      times, and horrid at times; we know them! Do you see her, a poor little
+      fine lady in a great house,&mdash;she sometimes goes to her room and
+      writes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She writes for his BLUE WEEKLY still.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Sometimes&mdash;I hope. And he's there in the office with a bit of
+      her copy in his hand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it as good as if she still talked it over with him before she wrote
+      it? Is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better, I think. Let's play it's better&mdash;anyhow. It may be that
+      talking over was rather mixed with love-making. After all, love-making is
+      joy rather than magic. Don't let's pretend about that even.... Let's go on
+      watching him. (I don't see why her writing shouldn't be better. Indeed I
+      don't.) See! There he goes down along the Embankment to Westminster just
+      like a real man, for all that he's smaller than a grain of dust. What is
+      running round inside that speck of a head of his? Look at him going past
+      the Policemen, specks too&mdash;selected large ones from the country. I
+      think he's going to dinner with the Speaker&mdash;some old thing like
+      that. Is his face harder or commoner or stronger?&mdash;I can't quite
+      see.... And now he's up and speaking in the House. Hope he'll hold on to
+      the thread. He'll have to plan his speeches to the very end of his days&mdash;and
+      learn the headings.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn't she up in the women's gallery to hear him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Unless it's by accident.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's there,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, by accident it happens. Not too many accidents, Isabel. Never any
+      more adventures for us, dear, now. No!... They play the game, you know.
+      They've begun late, but now they've got to. You see it's not so very hard
+      for them since you and I, my dear, are here always, always faithfully here
+      on this warm cliff of love accomplished, watching and helping them under
+      high heaven. It isn't so VERY hard. Rather good in some ways. Some people
+      HAVE to be broken a little. Can you see Altiora down there, by any
+      chance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's too little to be seen,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can you see the sins they once committed?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can only see you here beside me, dear&mdash;for ever. For all my life,
+      dear, till I die. Was that&mdash;the sin?&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I took her to the station, and after she had gone I was to drive to Dover,
+      and cross to Calais by the night boat. I couldn't, I felt, return to
+      London. We walked over the crest and down to the little station of Martin
+      Mill side by side, talking at first in broken fragments, for the most part
+      of unimportant things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None of this,&rdquo; she said abruptly, &ldquo;seems in the slightest degree real to
+      me. I've got no sense of things ending.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We're parting,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We're parting&mdash;as people part in a play. It's distressing. But I
+      don't feel as though you and I were really never to see each other again
+      for years. Do you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After we've parted I shall look to talk it over with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So shall I.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's absurd.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Absurd.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel as if you'd always be there, just about where you are now.
+      Invisible perhaps, but there. We've spent so much of our lives joggling
+      elbows.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Yes. I don't in the least realise it. I suppose I shall begin to
+      when the train goes out of the station. Are we wanting in imagination,
+      Isabel?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. We've always assumed it was the other way about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even when the train goes out of the station&mdash;! I've seen you into so
+      many trains.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall go on thinking of things to say to you&mdash;things to put in
+      your letters. For years to come. How can I ever stop thinking in that way
+      now? We've got into each other's brains.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't real,&rdquo; I said; &ldquo;nothing is real. The world's no more than a
+      fantastic dream. Why are we parting, Isabel?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. It seems now supremely silly. I suppose we have to. Can't
+      we meet?&mdash;don't you think we shall meet even in dreams?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'll meet a thousand times in dreams,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish we could dream at the same time,&rdquo; said Isabel.... &ldquo;Dream walks. I
+      can't believe, dear, I shall never have a walk with you again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I'd stayed six months in America,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;we might have walked long
+      walks and talked long talks for all our lives.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not in a world of Baileys,&rdquo; said Isabel. &ldquo;And anyhow&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped short. I looked interrogation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We've loved,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I took her ticket, saw to her luggage, and stood by the door of the
+      compartment. &ldquo;Good-bye,&rdquo; I said a little stiffly, conscious of the people
+      upon the platform. She bent above me, white and dusky, looking at me very
+      steadfastly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come here,&rdquo; she whispered. &ldquo;Never mind the porters. What can they know?
+      Just one time more&mdash;I must.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She rested her hand against the door of the carriage and bent down upon
+      me, and put her cold, moist lips to mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ THE BREAKING POINT
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then we broke down. We broke our faith with both Margaret and
+      Shoesmith, flung career and duty out of our lives, and went away together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is only now, almost a year after these events, that I can begin to see
+      what happened to me. At the time it seemed to me I was a rational,
+      responsible creature, but indeed I had not parted from her two days before
+      I became a monomaniac to whom nothing could matter but Isabel. Every truth
+      had to be squared to that obsession, every duty. It astounds me to think
+      how I forgot Margaret, forgot my work, forgot everything but that we two
+      were parted. I still believe that with better chances we might have
+      escaped the consequences of the emotional storm that presently seized us
+      both. But we had no foresight of that, and no preparation for it, and our
+      circumstances betrayed us. It was partly Shoesmith's unwisdom in delaying
+      his marriage until after the end of the session&mdash;partly my own
+      amazing folly in returning within four days to Westminster. But we were
+      all of us intent upon the defeat of scandal and the complete restoration
+      of appearances. It seemed necessary that Shoesmith's marriage should not
+      seem to be hurried, still more necessary that I should not vanish
+      inexplicably. I had to be visible with Margaret in London just as much as
+      possible; we went to restaurants, we visited the theatre; we could even
+      contemplate the possibility of my presence at the wedding. For that,
+      however, we had schemed a weekend visit to Wales, and a fictitious
+      sprained ankle at the last moment which would justify my absence....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I cannot convey to you the intolerable wretchedness and rebellion of my
+      separation from Isabel. It seemed that in the past two years all my
+      thoughts had spun commisures to Isabel's brain and I could think of
+      nothing that did not lead me surely to the need of the one intimate I had
+      found in the world. I came back to the House and the office and my home, I
+      filled all my days with appointments and duty, and it did not save me in
+      the least from a lonely emptiness such as I had never felt before in all
+      my life. I had little sleep. In the daytime I did a hundred things, I even
+      spoke in the House on two occasions, and by my own low standards spoke
+      well, and it seemed to me that I was going about in my own brain like a
+      hushed survivor in a house whose owner lies dead upstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I came to a crisis after that wild dinner of Tarvrille's. Something in
+      that stripped my soul bare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an occasion made absurd and strange by the odd accident that the
+      house caught fire upstairs while we were dining below. It was a men's
+      dinner&mdash;&ldquo;A dinner of all sorts,&rdquo; said Tarvrille, when he invited me;
+      &ldquo;everything from Evesham and Gane to Wilkins the author, and Heaven knows
+      what will happen!&rdquo; I remember that afterwards Tarvrille was accused of
+      having planned the fire to make his dinner a marvel and a memory. It was
+      indeed a wonderful occasion, and I suppose if I had not been altogether
+      drenched in misery, I should have found the same wild amusement in it that
+      glowed in all the others. There were one or two university dons, Lord
+      George Fester, the racing man, Panmure, the artist, two or three big City
+      men, Weston Massinghay and another prominent Liberal whose name I can't
+      remember, the three men Tarvrille had promised and Esmeer, Lord
+      Wrassleton, Waulsort, the member for Monckton, Neal and several others. We
+      began a little coldly, with duologues, but the conversation was already
+      becoming general&mdash;so far as such a long table permitted&mdash;when
+      the fire asserted itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It asserted itself first as a penetrating and emphatic smell of burning
+      rubber,&mdash;it was caused by the fusing of an electric wire. The reek
+      forced its way into the discussion of the Pekin massacres that had sprung
+      up between Evesham, Waulsort, and the others at the end of the table.
+      &ldquo;Something burning,&rdquo; said the man next to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something must be burning,&rdquo; said Panmure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tarvrille hated undignified interruptions. He had a particularly
+      imperturbable butler with a cadaverous sad face and an eye of rigid
+      disapproval. He spoke to this individual over his shoulder. &ldquo;Just see,
+      will you,&rdquo; he said, and caught up the pause in the talk to his left.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wilkins was asking questions, and I, too, was curious. The story of the
+      siege of the Legations in China in the year 1900 and all that followed
+      upon that, is just one of those disturbing interludes in history that
+      refuse to join on to that general scheme of protestation by which
+      civilisation is maintained. It is a break in the general flow of
+      experience as disconcerting to statecraft as the robbery of my knife and
+      the scuffle that followed it had been to me when I was a boy at Penge. It
+      is like a tear in a curtain revealing quite unexpected backgrounds. I had
+      never given the business a thought for years; now this talk brought back a
+      string of pictures to my mind; how the reliefs arrived and the plundering
+      began, how section after section of the International Army was drawn into
+      murder and pillage, how the infection spread upward until the wives of
+      Ministers were busy looting, and the very sentinels stripped and crawled
+      like snakes into the Palace they were set to guard. It did not stop at
+      robbery, men were murdered, women, being plundered, were outraged,
+      children were butchered, strong men had found themselves with arms in a
+      lawless, defenceless city, and this had followed. Now it was all recalled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Respectable ladies addicted to district visiting at home were as bad as
+      any one,&rdquo; said Panmure. &ldquo;Glazebrook told me of one&mdash;flushed like a
+      woman at a bargain sale, he said&mdash;and when he pointed out to her that
+      the silk she'd got was bloodstained, she just said, 'Oh, bother!' and
+      threw it aside and went back....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We became aware that Tarvrille's butler had returned. We tried not to seem
+      to listen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beg pardon, m'lord,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;The house IS on fire, m'lord.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Upstairs, m'lord.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just overhead, m'lord.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The maids are throwing water, m'lord, and I've telephoned FIRE.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, m'lord, no immediate danger.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all right,&rdquo; said Tarvrille to the table generally. &ldquo;Go on! It's not
+      a general conflagration, and the fire brigade won't be five minutes. Don't
+      see that it's our affair. The stuff's insured. They say old Lady
+      Paskershortly was dreadful. Like a harpy. The Dowager Empress had shown
+      her some little things of hers. Pet things&mdash;hidden away. Susan went
+      straight for them&mdash;used to take an umbrella for the silks. Born
+      shoplifter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was evident he didn't want his dinner spoilt, and we played up loyally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is recorded history,&rdquo; said Wilkins,&mdash;&ldquo;practically. It makes one
+      wonder about unrecorded history. In India, for example.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But nobody touched that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thompson,&rdquo; said Tarvrille to the imperturbable butler, and indicating the
+      table generally, &ldquo;champagne. Champagne. Keep it going.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;M'lord,&rdquo; and Thompson marshalled his assistants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some man I didn't know began to remember things about Mandalay. &ldquo;It's
+      queer,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;how people break out at times;&rdquo; and told his story of an
+      army doctor, brave, public-spirited, and, as it happened, deeply
+      religious, who was caught one evening by the excitement of plundering&mdash;and
+      stole and hid, twisted the wrist of a boy until it broke, and was
+      afterwards overcome by wild remorse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I watched Evesham listening intently. &ldquo;Strange,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;very strange.
+      We are such stuff as thieves are made of. And in China, too, they murdered
+      people&mdash;for the sake of murdering. Apart, so to speak, from mercenary
+      considerations. I'm afraid there's no doubt of it in certain cases. No
+      doubt at all. Young soldiers fresh from German high schools and English
+      homes!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did OUR people?&rdquo; asked some patriot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not so much. But I'm afraid there were cases.... Some of the Indian
+      troops were pretty bad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gane picked up the tale with confirmations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is all printed in the vividest way as a picture upon my memory, so that
+      were I a painter I think I could give the deep rich browns and warm greys
+      beyond the brightly lit table, the various distinguished faces, strongly
+      illuminated, interested and keen, above the black and white of evening
+      dress, the alert menservants with their heavier, clean-shaved faces
+      indistinctly seen in the dimness behind. Then this was coloured
+      emotionally for me by my aching sense of loss and sacrifice, and by the
+      chance trend of our talk to the breaches and unrealities of the civilised
+      scheme. We seemed a little transitory circle of light in a universe of
+      darkness and violence; an effect to which the diminishing smell of burning
+      rubber, the trampling of feet overhead, the swish of water, added
+      enormously. Everybody&mdash;unless, perhaps, it was Evesham&mdash;drank
+      rather carelessly because of the suppressed excitement of our situation,
+      and talked the louder and more freely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what a flimsy thing our civilisation is!&rdquo; said Evesham; &ldquo;a mere thin
+      net of habits and associations!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose those men came back,&rdquo; said Wilkins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lady Paskershortly did!&rdquo; chuckled Evesham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do they fit it in with the rest of their lives?&rdquo; Wilkins speculated.
+      &ldquo;I suppose there's Pekin-stained police officers, Pekin-stained J. P.'s&mdash;trying
+      petty pilferers in the severest manner.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then for a time things became preposterous. There was a sudden cascade of
+      water by the fireplace, and then absurdly the ceiling began to rain upon
+      us, first at this point and then that. &ldquo;My new suit!&rdquo; cried some one.
+      &ldquo;Perrrrrr-up pe-rr&rdquo;&mdash;a new vertical line of blackened water would
+      establish itself and form a spreading pool upon the gleaming cloth. The
+      men nearest would arrange catchment areas of plates and flower bowls.
+      &ldquo;Draw up!&rdquo; said Tarvrille, &ldquo;draw up. That's the bad end of the table!&rdquo; He
+      turned to the imperturbable butler. &ldquo;Take round bath towels,&rdquo; he said; and
+      presently the men behind us were offering&mdash;with inflexible dignity&mdash;&ldquo;Port
+      wine, Sir. Bath towel, Sir!&rdquo; Waulsort, with streaks of blackened water on
+      his forehead, was suddenly reminded of a wet year when he had followed the
+      French army manoeuvres. An animated dispute sprang up between him and Neal
+      about the relative efficiency of the new French and German field guns.
+      Wrassleton joined in and a little drunken shrivelled Oxford don of some
+      sort with a black-splashed shirt front who presently silenced them all by
+      the immensity and particularity of his knowledge of field artillery. Then
+      the talk drifted to Sedan and the effect of dead horses upon
+      drinking-water, which brought Wrassleton and Weston Massinghay into a
+      dispute of great vigour and emphasis. &ldquo;The trouble in South Africa,&rdquo; said
+      Weston Massinghay, &ldquo;wasn't that we didn't boil our water. It was that we
+      didn't boil our men. The Boers drank the same stuff we did. THEY didn't
+      get dysentery.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That argument went on for some time. I was attacked across the table by a
+      man named Burshort about my Endowment of Motherhood schemes, but in the
+      gaps of that debate I could still hear Weston Massinghay at intervals
+      repeat in a rather thickened voice: &ldquo;THEY didn't get dysentery.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I think Evesham went early. The rest of us clustered more and more closely
+      towards the drier end of the room, the table was pushed along, and the
+      area beneath the extinguished conflagration abandoned to a tinkling,
+      splashing company of pots and pans and bowls and baths. Everybody was now
+      disposed to be hilarious and noisy, to say startling and aggressive
+      things; we must have sounded a queer clamour to a listener in the next
+      room. The devil inspired them to begin baiting me. &ldquo;Ours isn't the Tory
+      party any more,&rdquo; said Burshort. &ldquo;Remington has made it the Obstetric
+      Party.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's good!&rdquo; said Weston Massinghay, with all his teeth gleaming; &ldquo;I
+      shall use that against you in the House!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall denounce you for abusing private confidences if you do,&rdquo; said
+      Tarvrille.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Remington wants us to give up launching Dreadnoughts and launch babies
+      instead,&rdquo; Burshort urged. &ldquo;For the price of one Dreadnought&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The little shrivelled don who had been omniscient about guns joined in the
+      baiting, and displayed himself a venomous creature. Something in his eyes
+      told me he knew Isabel and hated me for it. &ldquo;Love and fine thinking,&rdquo; he
+      began, a little thickly, and knocking over a wine-glass with a too easy
+      gesture. &ldquo;Love and fine thinking. Two things don't go together. No
+      philosophy worth a damn ever came out of excesses of love. Salt Lake City&mdash;Piggott&mdash;Ag&mdash;Agapemone
+      again&mdash;no works to matter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Everybody laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Got to rec'nise these facts,&rdquo; said my assailant. &ldquo;Love and fine think'n
+      pretty phrase&mdash;attractive. Suitable for p'litical dec'rations.
+      Postcard, Christmas, gilt lets, in a wreath of white flow's. Not oth'wise
+      valu'ble.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I made some remark, I forget what, but he overbore me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Real things we want are Hate&mdash;Hate and COARSE think'n. I b'long to
+      the school of Mrs. F's Aunt&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo; said some one, intent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In 'Little Dorrit,'&rdquo; explained Tarvrille; &ldquo;go on!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hate a fool,&rdquo; said my assailant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tarvrille glanced at me. I smiled to conceal the loss of my temper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hate,&rdquo; said the little man, emphasising his point with a clumsy fist.
+      &ldquo;Hate's the driving force. What's m'rality?&mdash;hate of rotten goings
+      on. What's patriotism?&mdash;hate of int'loping foreigners. What's
+      Radicalism?&mdash;hate of lords. What's Toryism?&mdash;hate of
+      disturbance. It's all hate&mdash;hate from top to bottom. Hate of a mess.
+      Remington owned it the other day, said he hated a mu'll. There you are! If
+      you couldn't get hate into an election, damn it (hic) people wou'n't poll.
+      Poll for love!&mdash;no' me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused, but before any one could speak he had resumed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then this about fine thinking. Like going into a bear pit armed with a
+      tagle&mdash;talgent&mdash;talgent galv'nometer. Like going to fight a mad
+      dog with Shasepear and the Bible. Fine thinking&mdash;what we want is the
+      thickes' thinking we can get. Thinking that stands up alone. Taf Reform
+      means work for all, thassort of thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The gentleman from Cambridge paused. &ldquo;YOU a flag!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I'd as soon
+      go to ba'ell und' wet tissue paper!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      My best answer on the spur of the moment was:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Japanese did.&rdquo; Which was absurd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went on to some other reply, I forget exactly what, and the talk of the
+      whole table drew round me. It was an extraordinary revelation to me. Every
+      one was unusually careless and outspoken, and it was amazing how
+      manifestly they echoed the feeling of this old Tory spokesman. They were
+      quite friendly to me, they regarded me and the BLUE WEEKLY as valuable
+      party assets for Toryism, but it was clear they attached no more
+      importance to what were my realities than they did to the remarkable
+      therapeutic claims of Mrs. Eddy. They were flushed and amused, perhaps
+      they went a little too far in their resolves to draw me, but they left the
+      impression on my mind of men irrevocably set upon narrow and cynical views
+      of political life. For them the political struggle was a game, whose
+      counters were human hate and human credulity; their real aim was just
+      every one's aim, the preservation of the class and way of living to which
+      their lives were attuned. They did not know how tired I was, how exhausted
+      mentally and morally, nor how cruel their convergent attack on me chanced
+      to be. But my temper gave way, I became tart and fierce, perhaps my
+      replies were a trifle absurd, and Tarvrille, with that quick eye and
+      sympathy of his, came to the rescue. Then for a time I sat silent and
+      drank port wine while the others talked. The disorder of the room, the
+      still dripping ceiling, the noise, the displaced ties and crumpled shirts
+      of my companions, jarred on my tormented nerves....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was long past midnight when we dispersed. I remember Tarvrille coming
+      with me into the hall, and then suggesting we should go upstairs to see
+      the damage. A manservant carried up two flickering candles for us. One end
+      of the room was gutted, curtains, hangings, several chairs and tables were
+      completely burnt, the panelling was scorched and warped, three smashed
+      windows made the candles flare and gutter, and some scraps of broken china
+      still lay on the puddled floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we surveyed this, Lady Tarvrille appeared, back from some party, a
+      slender, white-cloaked, satin-footed figure with amazed blue eyes beneath
+      her golden hair. I remember how stupidly we laughed at her surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I parted from Panmure at the corner of Aldington Street, and went my way
+      alone. But I did not go home, I turned westward and walked for a long way,
+      and then struck northward aimlessly. I was too miserable to go to my
+      house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wandered about that night like a man who has discovered his Gods are
+      dead. I can look back now detached yet sympathetic upon that wild
+      confusion of moods and impulses, and by it I think I can understand, oh!
+      half the wrongdoing and blundering in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not feel now the logical force of the process that must have
+      convinced me then that I had made my sacrifice and spent my strength in
+      vain. At no time had I been under any illusion that the Tory party had
+      higher ideals than any other party, yet it came to me like a thing newly
+      discovered that the men I had to work with had for the most part no such
+      dreams, no sense of any collective purpose, no atom of the faith I held.
+      They were just as immediately intent upon personal ends, just as limited
+      by habits of thought, as the men in any other group or party. Perhaps I
+      had slipped unawares for a time into the delusions of a party man&mdash;but
+      I do not think so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No, it was the mood of profound despondency that had followed upon the
+      abrupt cessation of my familiar intercourse with Isabel, that gave this
+      fact that had always been present in my mind its quality of devastating
+      revelation. It seemed as though I had never seen before nor suspected the
+      stupendous gap between the chaotic aims, the routine, the conventional
+      acquiescences, the vulgarisations of the personal life, and that clearly
+      conscious development and service of a collective thought and purpose at
+      which my efforts aimed. I had thought them but a little way apart, and now
+      I saw they were separated by all the distance between earth and heaven. I
+      saw now in myself and every one around me, a concentration upon interests
+      close at hand, an inability to detach oneself from the provocations,
+      tendernesses, instinctive hates, dumb lusts and shy timidities that
+      touched one at every point; and, save for rare exalted moments, a
+      regardlessness of broader aims and remoter possibilities that made the
+      white passion of statecraft seem as unearthly and irrelevant to human life
+      as the story an astronomer will tell, half proven but altogether
+      incredible, of habitable planets and answering intelligences, suns'
+      distances uncounted across the deep. It seemed to me I had aspired too
+      high and thought too far, had mocked my own littleness by presumption, had
+      given the uttermost dear reality of life for a theoriser's dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All through that wandering agony of mine that night a dozen threads of
+      thought interwove; now I was a soul speaking in protest to God against a
+      task too cold and high for it, and now I was an angry man, scorned and
+      pointed upon, who had let life cheat him of the ultimate pride of his
+      soul. Now I was the fool of ambition, who opened his box of gold to find
+      blank emptiness, and now I was a spinner of flimsy thoughts, whose web
+      tore to rags at a touch. I realised for the first time how much I had come
+      to depend upon the mind and faith of Isabel, how she had confirmed me and
+      sustained me, how little strength I had to go on with our purposes now
+      that she had vanished from my life. She had been the incarnation of those
+      great abstractions, the saving reality, the voice that answered back.
+      There was no support that night in the things that had been. We were alone
+      together on the cliff for ever more!&mdash;that was very pretty in its
+      way, but it had no truth whatever that could help me now, no ounce of
+      sustaining value. I wanted Isabel that night, no sentiment or memory of
+      her, but Isabel alive,&mdash;to talk to me, to touch me, to hold me
+      together. I wanted unendurably the dusky gentleness of her presence, the
+      consolation of her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were alone together on the cliff! I startled a passing cabman into
+      interest by laughing aloud at that magnificent and characteristic
+      sentimentality. What a lie it was, and how satisfying it had been! That
+      was just where we shouldn't remain. We of all people had no distinction
+      from that humanity whose lot is to forget. We should go out to other
+      interests, new experiences, new demands. That tall and intricate fabric of
+      ambitious understandings we had built up together in our intimacy would be
+      the first to go; and last perhaps to endure with us would be a few gross
+      memories of sights and sounds, and trivial incidental excitements....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had a curious feeling that night that I had lost touch with life for a
+      long time, and had now been reminded of its quality. That infernal little
+      don's parody of my ruling phrase, &ldquo;Hate and coarse thinking,&rdquo; stuck in my
+      thoughts like a poisoned dart, a centre of inflammation. Just as a man who
+      is debilitated has no longer the vitality to resist an infection, so my
+      mind, slackened by the crisis of my separation from Isabel, could find no
+      resistance to his emphatic suggestion. It seemed to me that what he had
+      said was overpoweringly true, not only of contemporary life, but of all
+      possible human life. Love is the rare thing, the treasured thing; you lock
+      it away jealously and watch, and well you may; hate and aggression and
+      force keep the streets and rule the world. And fine thinking is, in the
+      rough issues of life, weak thinking, is a balancing indecisive process,
+      discovers with disloyal impartiality a justice and a defect on each
+      disputing side. &ldquo;Good honest men,&rdquo; as Dayton calls them, rule the world,
+      with a way of thinking out decisions like shooting cartloads of bricks,
+      and with a steadfast pleasure in hostility. Dayton liked to call his
+      antagonists &ldquo;blaggards and scoundrels&rdquo;&mdash;it justified his opposition&mdash;the
+      Lords were &ldquo;scoundrels,&rdquo; all people richer than he were &ldquo;scoundrels,&rdquo; all
+      Socialists, all troublesome poor people; he liked to think of jails and
+      justice being done. His public spirit was saturated with the sombre joys
+      of conflict and the pleasant thought of condign punishment for all
+      recalcitrant souls. That was the way of it, I perceived. That had survival
+      value, as the biologists say. He was fool enough in politics to be a
+      consistent and happy politician....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hate and coarse thinking; how the infernal truth of the phrase beat me
+      down that night! I couldn't remember that I had known this all along, and
+      that it did not really matter in the slightest degree. I had worked it all
+      out long ago in other terms, when I had seen how all parties stood for
+      interests inevitably, and how the purpose in life achieves itself, if it
+      achieves itself at all, as a bye product of the war of individuals and
+      classes. Hadn't I always known that science and philosophy elaborate
+      themselves in spite of all the passion and narrowness of men, in spite of
+      the vanities and weakness of their servants, in spite of all the heated
+      disorder of contemporary things? Wasn't it my own phrase to speak of &ldquo;that
+      greater mind in men, in which we are but moments and transitorily lit
+      cells?&rdquo; Hadn't I known that the spirit of man still speaks like a thing
+      that struggles out of mud and slime, and that the mere effort to speak
+      means choking and disaster? Hadn't I known that we who think without fear
+      and speak without discretion will not come to our own for the next two
+      thousand years?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the last was most forgotten of all that faith mislaid. Before
+      mankind, in my vision that night, stretched new centuries of confusion,
+      vast stupid wars, hastily conceived laws, foolish temporary triumphs of
+      order, lapses, set-backs, despairs, catastrophes, new beginnings, a
+      multitudinous wilderness of time, a nigh plotless drama of wrong-headed
+      energies. In order to assuage my parting from Isabel we had set ourselves
+      to imagine great rewards for our separation, great personal rewards; we
+      had promised ourselves success visible and shining in our lives. To
+      console ourselves in our separation we had made out of the BLUE WEEKLY and
+      our young Tory movement preposterously enormous things-as though those
+      poor fertilising touches at the soil were indeed the germinating seeds of
+      the millennium, as though a million lives such as ours had not to
+      contribute before the beginning of the beginning. That poor pretence had
+      failed. That magnificent proposition shrivelled to nothing in the black
+      loneliness of that night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw that there were to be no such compensations. So far as my real
+      services to mankind were concerned I had to live an unrecognised and
+      unrewarded life. If I made successes it would be by the way. Our
+      separation would alter nothing of that. My scandal would cling to me now
+      for all my life, a thing affecting relationships, embarrassing and
+      hampering my spirit. I should follow the common lot of those who live by
+      the imagination, and follow it now in infinite loneliness of soul; the one
+      good comforter, the one effectual familiar, was lost to me for ever; I
+      should do good and evil together, no one caring to understand; I should
+      produce much weary work, much bad-spirited work, much absolute evil; the
+      good in me would be too often ill-expressed and missed or misinterpreted.
+      In the end I might leave one gleaming flake or so amidst the slag heaps
+      for a moment of postmortem sympathy. I was afraid beyond measure of my
+      derelict self. Because I believed with all my soul in love and fine
+      thinking that did not mean that I should necessarily either love
+      steadfastly or think finely. I remember how I fell talking to God&mdash;I
+      think I talked out loud. &ldquo;Why do I care for these things?&rdquo; I cried, &ldquo;when
+      I can do so little! Why am I apart from the jolly thoughtless fighting
+      life of men? These dreams fade to nothingness, and leave me bare!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I scolded. &ldquo;Why don't you speak to a man, show yourself? I thought I had a
+      gleam of you in Isabel,&mdash;and then you take her away. Do you really
+      think I can carry on this game alone, doing your work in darkness and
+      silence, living in muddled conflict, half living, half dying?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Grotesque analogies arose in my mind. I discovered a strange parallelism
+      between my now tattered phrase of &ldquo;Love and fine thinking&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Love
+      and the Word&rdquo; of Christian thought. Was it possible the Christian
+      propaganda had at the outset meant just that system of attitudes I had
+      been feeling my way towards from the very beginning of my life? Had I
+      spent a lifetime making my way back to Christ? It mocks humanity to think
+      how Christ has been overlaid. I went along now, recalling long-neglected
+      phrases and sentences; I had a new vision of that great central figure
+      preaching love with hate and coarse thinking even in the disciples about
+      Him, rising to a tidal wave at last in that clamour for Barabbas, and the
+      public satisfaction in His fate....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It's curious to think that hopeless love and a noisy disordered dinner
+      should lead a man to these speculations, but they did. &ldquo;He DID mean that!&rdquo;
+       I said, and suddenly thought of what a bludgeon they'd made of His
+      Christianity. Athwart that perplexing, patient enigma sitting inaudibly
+      among publicans and sinners, danced and gibbered a long procession of the
+      champions of orthodoxy. &ldquo;He wasn't human,&rdquo; I said, and remembered that
+      last despairing cry, &ldquo;My God! My God! why hast Thou forsaken Me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, HE forsakes every one,&rdquo; I said, flying out as a tired mind will, with
+      an obvious repartee....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I passed at a bound from such monstrous theology to a towering rage
+      against the Baileys. In an instant and with no sense of absurdity I wanted&mdash;in
+      the intervals of love and fine thinking&mdash;to fling about that
+      strenuously virtuous couple; I wanted to kick Keyhole of the PEEPSHOW into
+      the gutter and make a common massacre of all the prosperous rascaldom that
+      makes a trade and rule of virtue. I can still feel that transition. In a
+      moment I had reached that phase of weakly decisive anger which is for
+      people of my temperament the concomitant of exhaustion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will have her,&rdquo; I cried. &ldquo;By Heaven! I WILL have her! Life mocks me and
+      cheats me. Nothing can be made good to me again.... Why shouldn't I save
+      what I can? I can't save myself without her....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember myself&mdash;as a sort of anti-climax to that&mdash;rather
+      tediously asking my way home. I was somewhere in the neighbourhood of
+      Holland Park....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was then between one and two. I felt that I could go home now without
+      any risk of meeting Margaret. It had been the thought of returning to
+      Margaret that had sent me wandering that night. It is one of the ugliest
+      facts I recall about that time of crisis, the intense aversion I felt for
+      Margaret. No sense of her goodness, her injury and nobility, and the
+      enormous generosity of her forgiveness, sufficed to mitigate that. I hope
+      now that in this book I am able to give something of her silvery
+      splendour, but all through this crisis I felt nothing of that. There was a
+      triumphant kindliness about her that I found intolerable. She meant to be
+      so kind to me, to offer unstinted consolation, to meet my needs, to supply
+      just all she imagined Isabel had given me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I left Tarvrille's, I felt I could anticipate exactly how she would
+      meet my homecoming. She would be perplexed by my crumpled shirt front, on
+      which I had spilt some drops of wine; she would overlook that by an
+      effort, explain it sentimentally, resolve it should make no difference to
+      her. She would want to know who had been present, what we had talked
+      about, show the alertest interest in whatever it was&mdash;it didn't
+      matter what.... No, I couldn't face her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So I did not reach my study until two o'clock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There, I remember, stood the new and very beautiful old silver
+      candlesticks that she had set there two days since to please me&mdash;the
+      foolish kindliness of it! But in her search for expression, Margaret
+      heaped presents upon me. She had fitted these candlesticks with electric
+      lights, and I must, I suppose, have lit them to write my note to Isabel.
+      &ldquo;Give me a word&mdash;the world aches without you,&rdquo; was all I scrawled,
+      though I fully meant that she should come to me. I knew, though I ought
+      not to have known, that now she had left her flat, she was with the Balfes&mdash;she
+      was to have been married from the Balfes&mdash;and I sent my letter there.
+      And I went out into the silent square and posted the note forthwith,
+      because I knew quite clearly that if I left it until morning I should
+      never post it at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had a curious revulsion of feeling that morning of our meeting. (Of all
+      places for such a clandestine encounter she had chosen the bridge opposite
+      Buckingham Palace.) Overnight I had been full of self pity, and eager for
+      the comfort of Isabel's presence. But the ill-written scrawl in which she
+      had replied had been full of the suggestion of her own weakness and
+      misery. And when I saw her, my own selfish sorrows were altogether swept
+      away by a wave of pitiful tenderness. Something had happened to her that I
+      did not understand. She was manifestly ill. She came towards me wearily,
+      she who had always borne herself so bravely; her shoulders seemed bent,
+      and her eyes were tired, and her face white and drawn. All my life has
+      been a narrow self-centred life; no brothers, no sisters or children or
+      weak things had ever yet made any intimate appeal to me, and suddenly&mdash;I
+      verily believe for the first time in my life!&mdash;I felt a great passion
+      of protective ownership; I felt that here was something that I could die
+      to shelter, something that meant more than joy or pride or splendid
+      ambitions or splendid creation to me, a new kind of hold upon me, a new
+      power in the world. Some sealed fountain was opened in my breast. I knew
+      that I could love Isabel broken, Isabel beaten, Isabel ugly and in pain,
+      more than I could love any sweet or delightful or glorious thing in life.
+      I didn't care any more for anything in the world but Isabel, and that I
+      should protect her. I trembled as I came near her, and could scarcely
+      speak to her for the emotion that filled me....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had your letter,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had yours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where can we talk?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember my lame sentences. &ldquo;We'll have a boat. That's best here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I took her to the little boat-house, and there we hired a boat, and I
+      rowed in silence under the bridge and into the shade of a tree. The square
+      grey stone masses of the Foreign Office loomed through the twigs, I
+      remember, and a little space of grass separated us from the pathway and
+      the scrutiny of passers-by. And there we talked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had to write to you,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had to come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When are you to be married?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thursday week.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;But&mdash;can we?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She leant forward and scrutinised my face with eyes wide open. &ldquo;What do
+      you mean?&rdquo; she said at last in a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can we stand it? After all?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked at her white face. &ldquo;Can you?&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She whispered. &ldquo;Your career?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then suddenly her face was contorted,&mdash;she wept silently, exactly as
+      a child tormented beyond endurance might suddenly weep....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! I don't care,&rdquo; I cried, &ldquo;now. I don't care. Damn the whole system of
+      things! Damn all this patching of the irrevocable! I want to take care of
+      you, Isabel! and have you with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't stand it,&rdquo; she blubbered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You needn't stand it. I thought it was best for you.... I thought indeed
+      it was best for you. I thought even you wanted it like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Couldn't I live alone&mdash;as I meant to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;you couldn't. You're not strong enough. I've thought of
+      that; I've got to shelter you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I want you,&rdquo; I went on. &ldquo;I'm not strong enough&mdash;I can't stand
+      life without you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped weeping, she made a great effort to control herself, and
+      looked at me steadfastly for a moment. &ldquo;I was going to kill myself,&rdquo; she
+      whispered. &ldquo;I was going to kill myself quietly&mdash;somehow. I meant to
+      wait a bit and have an accident. I thought&mdash;you didn't understand.
+      You were a man, and couldn't understand....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;People can't do as we thought we could do,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;We've gone too far
+      together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, and I stared into her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The horror of it,&rdquo; she whispered. &ldquo;The horror of being handed over. It's
+      just only begun to dawn upon me, seeing him now as I do. He tries to be
+      kind to me.... I didn't know. I felt adventurous before.... It makes me
+      feel like all the women in the world who have ever been owned and
+      subdued.... It's not that he isn't the best of men, it's because I'm a
+      part of you.... I can't go through with it. If I go through with it, I
+      shall be left&mdash;robbed of pride&mdash;outraged&mdash;a woman
+      beaten....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;I know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to live alone.... I don't care for anything now but just escape.
+      If you can help me....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must take you away. There's nothing for us but to go away together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But your work,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;your career! Margaret! Our promises!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We've made a mess of things, Isabel&mdash;or things have made a mess of
+      us. I don't know which. Our flags are in the mud, anyhow. It's too late to
+      save those other things! They have to go. You can't make terms with
+      defeat. I thought it was Margaret needed me most. But it's you. And I need
+      you. I didn't think of that either. I haven't a doubt left in the world
+      now. We've got to leave everything rather than leave each other. I'm sure
+      of it. Now we have gone so far. We've got to go right down to earth and
+      begin again.... Dear, I WANT disgrace with you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So I whispered to her as she sat crumpled together on the faded cushions
+      of the boat, this white and weary young woman who had been so valiant and
+      careless a girl. &ldquo;I don't care,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;I don't care for anything, if I
+      can save you out of the wreckage we have made together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next day I went to the office of the BLUE WEEKLY in order to get as
+      much as possible of its affairs in working order before I left London with
+      Isabel. I just missed Shoesmith in the lower office. Upstairs I found
+      Britten amidst a pile of outside articles, methodically reading the title
+      of each and sometimes the first half-dozen lines, and either dropping them
+      in a growing heap on the floor for a clerk to return, or putting them
+      aside for consideration. I interrupted him, squatted on the window-sill of
+      the open window, and sketched out my ideas for the session.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're far-sighted,&rdquo; he remarked at something of mine which reached out
+      ahead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like to see things prepared,&rdquo; I answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said, and ripped open the envelope of a fresh aspirant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was silent while he read.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're going away with Isabel Rivers,&rdquo; he said abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well!&rdquo; I said, amazed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; he said, and lost his breath. &ldquo;Not my business. Only&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was queer to find Britten afraid to say a thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's not playing the game,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everything that matters.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some games,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;are too hard to play.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There came a pause between us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't know you were watching all this,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he answered, after a pause, &ldquo;I've watched.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sorry&mdash;sorry you don't approve.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It means smashing such an infernal lot of things, Remington.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're going away then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Soon?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Right away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's your wife.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shoesmith&mdash;whom you're pledged to in a manner. You've just picked
+      him out and made him conspicuous. Every one will know. Oh! of course&mdash;it's
+      nothing to you. Honour&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Common decency.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All this movement of ours. That's what I care for most.... It's come to
+      be a big thing, Remington.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That will go on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have a use for you&mdash;no one else quite fills it. No one.... I'm
+      not sure it will go on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think I haven't thought of all these things?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shrugged his shoulders, and rejected two papers unread.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I knew,&rdquo; he remarked, &ldquo;when you came back from America. You were alight
+      with it.&rdquo; Then he let his bitterness gleam for a moment. &ldquo;But I thought
+      you would stick to your bargain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's not so much choice as you think,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's always a choice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He scrutinised my face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't live without her&mdash;I can't work. She's all mixed up with this&mdash;and
+      everything. And besides, there's things you can't understand. There's
+      feelings you've never felt.... You don't understand how much we've been to
+      one another.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Britten frowned and thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some things one's GOT to do,&rdquo; he threw out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some things one can't do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These infernal institutions&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some one must begin,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He shook his head. &ldquo;Not YOU,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;No!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stretched out his hands on the desk before him, and spoke again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Remington,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I've thought of this business day and night too. It
+      matters to me. It matters immensely to me. In a way&mdash;it's a thing one
+      doesn't often say to a man&mdash;I've loved you. I'm the sort of man who
+      leads a narrow life.... But you've been something fine and good for me,
+      since that time, do you remember? when we talked about Mecca together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. And you'll always be something fine and good for me anyhow. I know
+      things about you,&mdash;qualities&mdash;no mere act can destroy them.. ..
+      Well, I can tell you, you're doing wrong. You're going on now like a man
+      who is hypnotised and can't turn round. You're piling wrong on wrong. It
+      was wrong for you two people ever to be lovers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It gripped us hard,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes!&mdash;but in your position! And hers! It was vile!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've not been tempted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you know? Anyhow&mdash;having done that, you ought to have stood
+      the consequences and thought of other people. You could have ended it at
+      the first pause for reflection. You didn't. You blundered again. You kept
+      on. You owed a certain secrecy to all of us! You didn't keep it. You were
+      careless. You made things worse. This engagement and this publicity!&mdash;Damn
+      it, Remington!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; I said, with smarting eyes. &ldquo;Damn it! with all my heart! It came
+      of trying to patch.... You CAN'T patch.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now, as I care for anything under heaven, Remington, you two ought to
+      stand these last consequences&mdash;and part. You ought to part. Other
+      people have to stand things! Other people have to part. You ought to. You
+      say&mdash;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&mdash;After all, you chose it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, damn!&rdquo; I said, standing up and going to the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I turned upon him with a snarl in my voice. &ldquo;My dear Britten!&rdquo; I cried.
+      &ldquo;Don't I KNOW I'm doing wrong? Aren't I in a net? Suppose I don't go! Is
+      there any right in that? Do you think we're going to be much to ourselves
+      or any one after this parting? I've been thinking all last night of this
+      business, trying it over and over again from the beginning. How was it we
+      went wrong? Since I came back from America&mdash;I grant you THAT&mdash;but
+      SINCE, there's never been a step that wasn't forced, that hadn't as much
+      right in it or more, as wrong. You talk as though I was a thing of steel
+      that could bend this way or that and never change. You talk as though
+      Isabel was a cat one could give to any kind of owner.... We two are things
+      that change and grow and alter all the time. We're&mdash;so interwoven
+      that being parted now will leave us just misshapen cripples.... You don't
+      know the motives, you don't know the rush and feel of things, you don't
+      know how it was with us, and how it is with us. You don't know the hunger
+      for the mere sight of one another; you don't know anything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Britten looked at his finger-nails closely. His red face puckered to a wry
+      frown. &ldquo;Haven't we all at times wanted the world put back?&rdquo; he grunted,
+      and looked hard and close at one particular nail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a long pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want her,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;and I'm going to have her. I'm too tired for
+      balancing the right or wrong of it any more. You can't separate them. I
+      saw her yesterday.... She's&mdash;ill.... I'd take her now, if death were
+      just outside the door waiting for us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Torture?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought. &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There isn't,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If there was?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I made no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's blind Want. And there's nothing ever been put into you to stand
+      against it. What are you going to do with the rest of your lives?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No end of things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't believe you are right,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;I believe we can save something&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Britten shook his head. &ldquo;Some scraps of salvage won't excuse you,&rdquo; he
+      said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His indignation rose. &ldquo;In the middle of life!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;No man has a
+      right to take his hand from the plough!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He leant forward on his desk and opened an argumentative palm. &ldquo;You know,
+      Remington,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and I know, that if this could be fended off for six
+      months&mdash;if you could be clapped in prison, or got out of the way
+      somehow,&mdash;until this marriage was all over and settled down for a
+      year, say&mdash;you know then you two could meet, curious, happy, as
+      friends. Saved! You KNOW it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I turned and stared at him. &ldquo;You're wrong, Britten,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;And does it
+      matter if we could?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I found that in talking to him I could frame the apologetics I had not
+      been able to find for myself alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am certain of one thing, Britten. It is our duty not to hush up this
+      scandal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's our duty,&rdquo; I went on, &ldquo;to smash now openly in the sight of every
+      one. Yes! I've got that as clean and plain&mdash;as prison whitewash. I am
+      convinced that we have got to be public to the uttermost now&mdash;I mean
+      it&mdash;until every corner of our world knows this story, knows it fully,
+      adds it to the Parnell story and the Ashton Dean story and the Carmel
+      story and the Witterslea story, and all the other stories that have picked
+      man after man out of English public life, the men with active
+      imaginations, the men of strong initiative. To think this tottering
+      old-woman ridden Empire should dare to waste a man on such a score! You
+      say I ought to be penitent&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Britten shook his head and smiled very faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm boiling with indignation,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;I lay in bed last night and went
+      through it all. What in God's name was to be expected of us but what has
+      happened? I went through my life bit by bit last night, I recalled all
+      I've had to do with virtue and women, and all I was told and how I was
+      prepared. I was born into cowardice and debasement. We all are. Our
+      generation's grimy with hypocrisy. I came to the most beautiful things in
+      life&mdash;like peeping Tom of Coventry. I was never given a light, never
+      given a touch of natural manhood by all this dingy, furtive, canting,
+      humbugging English world. Thank God! I'll soon be out of it! The shame of
+      it! The very savages in Australia initiate their children better than the
+      English do to-day. Neither of us was ever given a view of what they call
+      morality that didn't make it show as shabby subservience, as the meanest
+      discretion, an abject submission to unreasonable prohibitions! meek
+      surrender of mind and body to the dictation of pedants and old women and
+      fools. We weren't taught&mdash;we were mumbled at! And when we found that
+      the thing they called unclean, unclean, was Pagan beauty&mdash;God! it was
+      a glory to sin, Britten, it was a pride and splendour like bathing in the
+      sunlight after dust and grime!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Britten. &ldquo;That's all very well&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I interrupted him. &ldquo;I know there's a case&mdash;I'm beginning to think it
+      a valid case against us; but we never met it! There's a steely pride in
+      self restraint, a nobility of chastity, but only for those who see and
+      think and act&mdash;untrammeled and unafraid. The other thing, the current
+      thing, why! it's worth as much as the chastity of a monkey kept in a cage
+      by itself!&rdquo; I put my foot in a chair, and urged my case upon him. &ldquo;This is
+      a dirty world, Britten, simply because it is a muddled world, and the
+      thing you call morality is dirtier now than the thing you call immorality.
+      Why don't the moralists pick their stuff out of the slime if they care for
+      it, and wipe it?&mdash;damn them! I am burning now to say: 'Yes, we did
+      this and this,' to all the world. All the world!... I will!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Britten rubbed the palm of his hand on the corner of his desk. &ldquo;That's all
+      very well, Remington,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You mean to go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped and began again. &ldquo;If you didn't know you were in the wrong you
+      wouldn't be so damned rhetorical. You're in the wrong. It's as plain to
+      you as it is to me. You're leaving a big work, you're leaving a wife who
+      trusted you, to go and live with your jolly mistress.... You won't see
+      you're a statesman that matters, that no single man, maybe, might come to
+      such influence as you in the next ten years. You're throwing yourself away
+      and accusing your country of rejecting you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He swung round upon his swivel at me. &ldquo;Remington,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;have you
+      forgotten the immense things our movement means?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought. &ldquo;Perhaps I am rhetorical,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the things we might achieve! If you'd only stay now&mdash;even now!
+      Oh! you'd suffer a little socially, but what of that? You'd be able to go
+      on&mdash;perhaps all the better for hostility of the kind you'd get. You
+      know, Remington&mdash;you KNOW.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought and went back to his earlier point. &ldquo;If I am rhetorical, at any
+      rate it's a living feeling behind it. Yes, I remember all the implications
+      of our aims&mdash;very splendid, very remote. But just now it's rather
+      like offering to give a freezing man the sunlit Himalayas from end to end
+      in return for his camp-fire. When you talk of me and my jolly mistress, it
+      isn't fair. That misrepresents everything. I'm not going out of this&mdash;for
+      delights. That's the sort of thing men like Snuffles and Keyhole imagine&mdash;that
+      excites them! When I think of the things these creatures think! Ugh! But
+      YOU know better? You know that physical passion that burns like a fire&mdash;ends
+      clean. I'm going for love, Britten&mdash;if I sinned for passion. I'm
+      going, Britten, because when I saw her the other day she HURT me. She hurt
+      me damnably, Britten.... I've been a cold man&mdash;I've led a rhetorical
+      life&mdash;you hit me with that word!&mdash;I put things in a windy way, I
+      know, but what has got hold of me at last is her pain. She's ill. Don't
+      you understand? She's a sick thing&mdash;a weak thing. She's no more a
+      goddess than I'm a god.... I'm not in love with her now; I'm RAW with love
+      for her. I feel like a man that's been flayed. I have been flayed.... You
+      don't begin to imagine the sort of helpless solicitude.... She's not going
+      to do things easily; she's ill. Her courage fails.... It's hard to put
+      things when one isn't rhetorical, but it's this, Britten&mdash;there are
+      distresses that matter more than all the delights or achievements in the
+      world.... I made her what she is&mdash;as I never made Margaret. I've made
+      her&mdash;I've broken her.... I'm going with my own woman. The rest of my
+      life and England, and so forth, must square itself to that....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a long time, as it seemed, we remained silent and motionless. We'd
+      said all we had to say. My eyes caught a printed slip upon the desk before
+      him, and I came back abruptly to the paper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I picked up this galley proof. It was one of Winter's essays. &ldquo;This man
+      goes on doing first-rate stuff,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;I hope you will keep him going.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not answer for a moment or so. &ldquo;I'll keep him going,&rdquo; he said at
+      last with a sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have a letter Margaret wrote me within a week of our flight. I cannot
+      resist transcribing some of it here, because it lights things as no word
+      of mine can do. It is a string of nearly inconsecutive thoughts written in
+      pencil in a fine, tall, sprawling hand. Its very inconsecutiveness is
+      essential. Many words are underlined. It was in answer to one from me; but
+      what I wrote has passed utterly from my mind....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; she says, &ldquo;I want to hear from you, but I do not want to see
+      you. There's a sort of abstract YOU that I want to go on with. Something
+      I've made out of you.... I want to know things about you&mdash;but I don't
+      want to see or feel or imagine. When some day I have got rid of my
+      intolerable sense of proprietorship, it may be different. Then perhaps we
+      may meet again. I think it is even more the loss of our political work and
+      dreams that I am feeling than the loss of your presence. Aching loss. I
+      thought so much of the things we were DOING for the world&mdash;had given
+      myself so unreservedly. You've left me with nothing to DO. I am suddenly
+      at loose ends....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We women are trained to be so dependent on a man. I've got no life of my
+      own at all. It seems now to me that I wore my clothes even for you and
+      your schemes....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After I have told myself a hundred times why this has happened, I ask
+      again, 'Why did he give things up? Why did he give things up?'...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is just as though you were wilfully dead....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I ask again and again whether this thing need have happened at all,
+      whether if I had had a warning, if I had understood better, I might not
+      have adapted myself to your restless mind and made this catastrophe
+      impossible....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, my dear! why hadn't you the pluck to hurt me at the beginning, and
+      tell me what you thought of me and life? You didn't give me a chance; not
+      a chance. I suppose you couldn't. All these things you and I stood away
+      from. You let my first repugnances repel you....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is strange to think after all these years that I should be asking
+      myself, do I love you? have I loved you? In a sense I think I HATE you. I
+      feel you have taken my life, dragged it in your wake for a time, thrown it
+      aside. I am resentful. Unfairly resentful, for why should I exact that you
+      should watch and understand my life, when clearly I have understood so
+      little of yours. But I am savage&mdash;savage at the wrecking of all you
+      were to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, why&mdash;why did you give things up?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No human being is his own to do what he likes with. You were not only
+      pledged to my tiresome, ineffectual companionship, but to great purposes.
+      They ARE great purposes....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If only I could take up your work as you leave it, with the strength you
+      had&mdash;then indeed I feel I could let you go&mdash;you and your young
+      mistress.... All that matters so little to me....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yet I think I must indeed love you yourself in my slower way. At times I
+      am mad with jealousy at the thought of all I hadn't the wit to give
+      you.... I've always hidden my tears from you&mdash;and what was in my
+      heart. It's my nature to hide&mdash;and you, you want things brought to
+      you to see. You are so curious as to be almost cruel. You don't understand
+      reserves. You have no mercy with restraints and reservations. You are not
+      really a CIVILISED man at all. You hate pretences&mdash;and not only
+      pretences but decent coverings....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's only after one has lost love and the chance of loving that slow
+      people like myself find what they might have done. Why wasn't I bold and
+      reckless and abandoned? It's as reasonable to ask that, I suppose, as to
+      ask why my hair is fair....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I go on with these perhapses over and over again here when I find myself
+      alone....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear, my dear, you can't think of the desolation of things&mdash;I
+      shall never go back to that house we furnished together, that was to have
+      been the laboratory (do you remember calling it a laboratory?) in which
+      you were to forge so much of the new order....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, dear, if I can help you&mdash;even now&mdash;in any way&mdash;help
+      both of you, I mean.... It tears me when I think of you poor and
+      discredited. You will let me help you if I can&mdash;it will be the last
+      wrong not to let me do that....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You had better not get ill. If you do, and I hear of it&mdash;I shall
+      come after you with a troupe of doctor's and nurses. If I am a failure as
+      a wife, no one has ever said I was anything but a success as a district
+      visitor....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There are other sheets, but I cannot tell whether they were written before
+      or after the ones from which I have quoted. And most of them have little
+      things too intimate to set down. But this oddly penetrating analysis of
+      our differences must, I think, be given.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are all sorts of things I can't express about this and want to.
+      There's this difference that has always been between us, that you like
+      nakedness and wildness, and I, clothing and restraint. It goes through
+      everything. You are always TALKING of order and system, and the splendid
+      dream of the order that might replace the muddled system you hate, but by
+      a sort of instinct you seem to want to break the law. I've watched you so
+      closely. Now I want to obey laws, to make sacrifices, to follow rules. I
+      don't want to make, but I do want to keep. You are at once makers and
+      rebels, you and Isabel too. You're bad people&mdash;criminal people, I
+      feel, and yet full of something the world must have. You're so much better
+      than me, and so much viler. It may be there is no making without
+      destruction, but it seems to me sometimes that it is nothing but an
+      instinct for lawlessness that drives you. You remind me&mdash;do you
+      remember?&mdash;of that time we went from Naples to Vesuvius, and walked
+      over the hot new lava there. Do you remember how tired I was? I know it
+      disappointed you that I was tired. One walked there in spite of the heat
+      because there was a crust; like custom, like law. But directly a crust
+      forms on things, you are restless to break down to the fire again. You
+      talk of beauty, both of you, as something terrible, mysterious,
+      imperative. YOUR beauty is something altogether different from anything I
+      know or feel. It has pain in it. Yet you always speak as though it was
+      something I ought to feel and am dishonest not to feel. MY beauty is a
+      quiet thing. You have always laughed at my feeling for old-fashioned
+      chintz and blue china and Sheraton. But I like all these familiar USED
+      things. My beauty is STILL beauty, and yours, is excitement. I know
+      nothing of the fascination of the fire, or why one should go deliberately
+      out of all the decent fine things of life to run dangers and be singed and
+      tormented and destroyed. I don't understand....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember very freshly the mood of our departure from London, the
+      platform of Charing Cross with the big illuminated clock overhead, the
+      bustle of porters and passengers with luggage, the shouting of newsboys
+      and boys with flowers and sweets, and the groups of friends seeing
+      travellers off by the boat train. Isabel sat very quiet and still in the
+      compartment, and I stood upon the platform with the door open, with a
+      curious reluctance to take the last step that should sever me from
+      London's ground. I showed our tickets, and bought a handful of red roses
+      for her. At last came the guards crying: &ldquo;Take your seats,&rdquo; and I got in
+      and closed the door on me. We had, thank Heaven! a compartment to
+      ourselves. I let down the window and stared out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a bustle of final adieux on the platform, a cry of &ldquo;Stand away,
+      please, stand away!&rdquo; and the train was gliding slowly and smoothly out of
+      the station.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked out upon the river as the train rumbled with slowly gathering
+      pace across the bridge, and the bobbing black heads of the pedestrians in
+      the footway, and the curve of the river and the glowing great hotels, and
+      the lights and reflections and blacknesses of that old, familiar
+      spectacle. Then with a common thought, we turned our eyes westward to
+      where the pinnacles of Westminster and the shining clock tower rose hard
+      and clear against the still, luminous sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They'll be in Committee on the Reformatory Bill to-night,&rdquo; I said, a
+      little stupidly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so,&rdquo; I added, &ldquo;good-bye to London!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We said no more, but watched the south-side streets below&mdash;bright
+      gleams of lights and movement, and the dark, dim, monstrous shapes of
+      houses and factories. We ran through Waterloo Station, London Bridge, New
+      Cross, St. John's. We said never a word. It seemed to me that for a time
+      we had exhausted our emotions. We had escaped, we had cut our knot, we had
+      accepted the last penalty of that headlong return of mine from Chicago a
+      year and a half ago. That was all settled. That harvest of feelings we had
+      reaped. I thought now only of London, of London as the symbol of all we
+      were leaving and all we had lost in the world. I felt nothing now but an
+      enormous and overwhelming regret....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The train swayed and rattled on its way. We ran through old Bromstead,
+      where once I had played with cities and armies on the nursery floor. The
+      sprawling suburbs with their scattered lights gave way to dim tree-set
+      country under a cloud-veiled, intermittently shining moon. We passed
+      Cardcaster Place. Perhaps old Wardingham, that pillar of the old
+      Conservatives, was there, fretting over his unsuccessful struggle with our
+      young Toryism. Little he recked of this new turn of the wheel and how it
+      would confirm his contempt of all our novelties. Perhaps some faint
+      intimation drew him to the window to see behind the stems of the young fir
+      trees that bordered his domain, the little string of lighted carriage
+      windows gliding southward....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly I began to realise just what it was we were doing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now, indeed, I knew what London had been to me, London where I had
+      been born and educated, the slovenly mother of my mind and all my
+      ambitions, London and the empire! It seemed to me we must be going out to
+      a world that was utterly empty. All our significance fell from us&mdash;and
+      before us was no meaning any more. We were leaving London; my hand, which
+      had gripped so hungrily upon its complex life, had been forced from it, my
+      fingers left their hold. That was over. I should never have a voice in
+      public affairs again. The inexorable unwritten law which forbids overt
+      scandal sentenced me. We were going out to a new life, a life that
+      appeared in that moment to be a mere shrivelled remnant of me, a mere
+      residuum of sheltering and feeding and seeing amidst alien scenery and the
+      sound of unfamiliar tongues. We were going to live cheaply in a foreign
+      place, so cut off that I meet now the merest stray tourist, the commonest
+      tweed-clad stranger with a mixture of shyness and hunger.... And suddenly
+      all the schemes I was leaving appeared fine and adventurous and hopeful as
+      they had never done before. How great was this purpose I had relinquished,
+      this bold and subtle remaking of the English will! I had doubted so many
+      things, and now suddenly I doubted my unimportance, doubted my right to
+      this suicidal abandonment. Was I not a trusted messenger, greatly trusted
+      and favoured, who had turned aside by the way? Had I not, after all, stood
+      for far more than I had thought; was I not filching from that dear great
+      city of my birth and life, some vitally necessary thing, a key, a link, a
+      reconciling clue in her political development, that now she might seek
+      vaguely for in vain? What is one life against the State? Ought I not to
+      have sacrificed Isabel and all my passion and sorrow for Isabel, and held
+      to my thing&mdash;stuck to my thing?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I heard as though he had spoken it in the carriage Britten's &ldquo;It WAS a
+      good game.&rdquo; No end of a game. And for the first time I imagined the faces
+      and voices of Crupp and Esmeer and Gane when they learnt of this secret
+      flight, this flight of which they were quite unwarned. And Shoesmith might
+      be there in the house,&mdash;Shoesmith who was to have been married in
+      four days&mdash;the thing might hit him full in front of any kind of
+      people. Cruel eyes might watch him. Why the devil hadn't I written letters
+      to warn them all? I could have posted them five minutes before the train
+      started. I had never thought to that moment of the immense mess they would
+      be in; how the whole edifice would clatter about their ears. I had a
+      sudden desire to stop the train and go back for a day, for two days, to
+      set that negligence right. My brain for a moment brightened, became
+      animated and prolific of ideas. I thought of a brilliant line we might
+      have taken on that confounded Reformatory Bill....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That sort of thing was over....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What indeed wasn't over? I passed to a vaguer, more multitudinous
+      perception of disaster, the friends I had lost already since Altiora began
+      her campaign, the ampler remnant whom now I must lose. I thought of people
+      I had been merry with, people I had worked with and played with, the
+      companions of talkative walks, the hostesses of houses that had once
+      glowed with welcome for us both. I perceived we must lose them all. I saw
+      life like a tree in late autumn that had once been rich and splendid with
+      friends&mdash;and now the last brave dears would be hanging on doubtfully
+      against the frosty chill of facts, twisting and tortured in the universal
+      gale of indignation, trying to evade the cold blast of the truth. I had
+      betrayed my party, my intimate friend, my wife, the wife whose devotion
+      had made me what I was. For awhile the figure of Margaret, remote,
+      wounded, shamed, dominated my mind, and the thought of my immense
+      ingratitude. Damn them! they'd take it out of her too. I had a feeling
+      that I wanted to go straight back and grip some one by the throat, some
+      one talking ill of Margaret. They'd blame her for not keeping me, for
+      letting things go so far.... I wanted the whole world to know how fine she
+      was. I saw in imagination the busy, excited dinner tables at work upon us
+      all, rather pleasantly excited, brightly indignant, merciless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, it's the stuff we are!...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then suddenly, stabbing me to the heart, came a vision of Margaret's tears
+      and the sound of her voice saying, &ldquo;Husband mine! Oh! husband mine! To see
+      you cry!&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I came out of a cloud of thoughts to discover the narrow compartment, with
+      its feeble lamp overhead, and our rugs and hand-baggage swaying on the
+      rack, and Isabel, very still in front of me, gripping my wilting red roses
+      tightly in her bare and ringless hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment I could not understand her attitude, and then I perceived she
+      was sitting bent together with her head averted from the light to hide the
+      tears that were streaming down her face. She had not got her handkerchief
+      out for fear that I should see this, but I saw her tears, dark drops of
+      tears, upon her sleeve....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose she had been watching my expression, divining my thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time I stared at her and was motionless, in a sort of still and
+      weary amazement. Why had we done this injury to one another? WHY? Then
+      something stirred within me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;ISABEL!&rdquo; I whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She made no sign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isabel!&rdquo; I repeated, and then crossed over to her and crept closely to
+      her, put my arm about her, and drew her wet cheek to mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The New Machiavelli, by Herbert George Wells
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW MACHIAVELLI ***
+
+***** This file should be named 1047-h.htm or 1047-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/0/4/1047/
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer, and David Widger
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase &ldquo;Project
+Gutenberg&rdquo;), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (&ldquo;the Foundation&rdquo;
+ or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; appears, or with which the phrase &ldquo;Project
+Gutenberg&rdquo; is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+&ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original &ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, &ldquo;Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.&rdquo;
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+&ldquo;Defects,&rdquo; such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the &ldquo;Right
+of Replacement or Refund&rdquo; described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
diff --git a/old/1047.txt b/old/1047.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b6fbe7d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1047.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,16084 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The New Machiavelli, by Herbert George Wells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The New Machiavelli
+
+Author: Herbert George Wells
+
+Posting Date: August 2, 2008 [EBook #1047]
+Release Date: September, 1997
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW MACHIAVELLI ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer
+
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
+
+by H. G. Wells
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+     BOOK THE FIRST
+
+     THE MAKING OF A MAN
+
+     I.   CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
+     II.  BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER
+     III. SCHOLASTIC
+     IV.  ADOLESCENCE
+
+
+     BOOK THE SECOND
+
+     MARGARET
+
+     I.   MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE
+     II.  MARGARET IN LONDON
+     III. MARGARET IN VENICE
+     IV.  THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER
+
+
+     BOOK THE THIRD
+
+     THE HEART OF POLITICS
+
+     I.   THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN
+     II.  SEEKING ASSOCIATES
+     III. SECESSION
+     IV.  THE BESETTING OF SEX
+
+
+     BOOK THE FOURTH
+
+     ISABEL
+
+     I.   LOVE AND SUCCESS
+     II.  THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION
+     III. THE BREAKING POINT
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THE FIRST: THE MAKING OF A MAN
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
+
+
+1
+
+Since I came to this place I have been very restless, wasting my
+energies in the futile beginning of ill-conceived books. One does not
+settle down very readily at two and forty to a new way of living, and
+I have found myself with the teeming interests of the life I have
+abandoned still buzzing like a swarm of homeless bees in my head. My
+mind has been full of confused protests and justifications. In any case
+I should have found difficulties enough in expressing the complex thing
+I have to tell, but it has added greatly to my trouble that I have a
+great analogue, that a certain Niccolo Machiavelli chanced to fall out
+of politics at very much the age I have reached, and wrote a book to
+engage the restlessness of his mind, very much as I have wanted to do.
+He wrote about the relation of the great constructive spirit in politics
+to individual character and weaknesses, and so far his achievement lies
+like a deep rut in the road of my intention. It has taken me far astray.
+It is a matter of many weeks now--diversified indeed by some long drives
+into the mountains behind us and a memorable sail to Genoa across the
+blue and purple waters that drowned Shelley--since I began a laboured
+and futile imitation of "The Prince." I sat up late last night with the
+jumbled accumulation; and at last made a little fire of olive twigs and
+burnt it all, sheet by sheet--to begin again clear this morning.
+
+But incidentally I have re-read most of Machiavelli, not excepting those
+scandalous letters of his to Vettori, and it seems to me, now that I
+have released myself altogether from his literary precedent, that he
+still has his use for me. In spite of his vast prestige I claim kindred
+with him and set his name upon my title-page, in partial intimation of
+the matter of my story. He takes me with sympathy not only by reason
+of the dream he pursued and the humanity of his politics, but by the
+mixture of his nature. His vices come in, essential to my issue. He is
+dead and gone, all his immediate correlations to party and faction have
+faded to insignificance, leaving only on the one hand his broad method
+and conceptions, and upon the other his intimate living personality,
+exposed down to its salacious corners as the soul of no contemporary can
+ever be exposed. Of those double strands it is I have to write, of the
+subtle protesting perplexing play of instinctive passion and desire
+against too abstract a dream of statesmanship. But things that seemed to
+lie very far apart in Machiavelli's time have come near to one another;
+it is no simple story of white passions struggling against the red that
+I have to tell.
+
+The state-making dream is a very old dream indeed in the world's
+history. It plays too small a part in novels. Plato and Confucius
+are but the highest of a great host of minds that have had a kindred
+aspiration, have dreamt of a world of men better ordered, happier,
+finer, securer. They imagined cities grown more powerful and peoples
+made rich and multitudinous by their efforts, they thought in terms
+of harbours and shining navies, great roads engineered marvellously,
+jungles cleared and deserts conquered, the ending of muddle and
+diseases and dirt and misery; the ending of confusions that waste human
+possibilities; they thought of these things with passion and desire as
+other men think of the soft lines and tender beauty of women. Thousands
+of men there are to-day almost mastered by this white passion of
+statecraft, and in nearly every one who reads and thinks you could find,
+I suspect, some sort of answering response. But in every one it presents
+itself extraordinarily entangled and mixed up with other, more intimate
+things.
+
+It was so with Machiavelli. I picture him at San Casciano as he lived
+in retirement upon his property after the fall of the Republic, perhaps
+with a twinge of the torture that punished his conspiracy still lurking
+in his limbs. Such twinges could not stop his dreaming. Then it was "The
+Prince" was written. All day he went about his personal affairs,
+saw homely neighbours, dealt with his family, gave vent to everyday
+passions. He would sit in the shop of Donato del Corno gossiping
+curiously among vicious company, or pace the lonely woods of his estate,
+book in hand, full of bitter meditations. In the evening he returned
+home and went to his study. At the entrance, he says, he pulled off his
+peasant clothes covered with the dust and dirt of that immediate life,
+washed himself, put on his "noble court dress," closed the door on
+the world of toiling and getting, private loving, private hating and
+personal regrets, sat down with a sigh of contentment to those wider
+dreams.
+
+I like to think of him so, with brown books before him lit by the light
+of candles in silver candlesticks, or heading some new chapter of "The
+Prince," with a grey quill in his clean fine hand.
+
+So writing, he becomes a symbol for me, and the less none because of his
+animal humour, his queer indecent side, and because of such lapses
+into utter meanness as that which made him sound the note of the
+begging-letter writer even in his "Dedication," reminding His
+Magnificence very urgently, as if it were the gist of his matter, of the
+continued malignity of fortune in his affairs. These flaws complete him.
+They are my reason for preferring him as a symbol to Plato, of whose
+indelicate side we know nothing, and whose correspondence with Dionysius
+of Syracuse has perished; or to Confucius who travelled China in search
+of a Prince he might instruct, with lapses and indignities now lost
+in the mists of ages. They have achieved the apotheosis of individual
+forgetfulness, and Plato has the added glory of that acquired beauty,
+that bust of the Indian Bacchus which is now indissolubly mingled with
+his tradition. They have passed into the world of the ideal, and every
+humbug takes his freedoms with their names. But Machiavelli, more recent
+and less popular, is still all human and earthly, a fallen brother--and
+at the same time that nobly dressed and nobly dreaming writer at the
+desk.
+
+That vision of the strengthened and perfected state is protagonist in
+my story. But as I re-read "The Prince" and thought out the manner of
+my now abandoned project, I came to perceive how that stir and whirl of
+human thought one calls by way of embodiment the French Revolution, has
+altered absolutely the approach to such a question. Machiavelli, like
+Plato and Pythagoras and Confucius two hundred odd decades before him,
+saw only one method by which a thinking man, himself not powerful, might
+do the work of state building, and that was by seizing the imagination
+of a Prince. Directly these men turned their thoughts towards
+realisation, their attitudes became--what shall I call it?--secretarial.
+Machiavelli, it is true, had some little doubts about the particular
+Prince he wanted, whether it was Caesar Borgia of Giuliano or Lorenzo,
+but a Prince it had to be. Before I saw clearly the differences of our
+own time I searched my mind for the modern equivalent of a Prince. At
+various times I redrafted a parallel dedication to the Prince of
+Wales, to the Emperor William, to Mr. Evesham, to a certain newspaper
+proprietor who was once my schoolfellow at City Merchants', to Mr. J. D.
+Rockefeller--all of them men in their several ways and circumstances and
+possibilities, princely. Yet in every case my pen bent of its own accord
+towards irony because--because, although at first I did not realise it,
+I myself am just as free to be a prince. The appeal was unfair. The old
+sort of Prince, the old little principality has vanished from the world.
+The commonweal is one man's absolute estate and responsibility no more.
+In Machiavelli's time it was indeed to an extreme degree one man's
+affair. But the days of the Prince who planned and directed and was
+the source and centre of all power are ended. We are in a condition of
+affairs infinitely more complex, in which every prince and statesman is
+something of a servant and every intelligent human being something of
+a Prince. No magnificent pensive Lorenzos remain any more in this world
+for secretarial hopes.
+
+In a sense it is wonderful how power has vanished, in a sense wonderful
+how it has increased. I sit here, an unarmed discredited man, at a small
+writing-table in a little defenceless dwelling among the vines, and no
+human being can stop my pen except by the deliberate self-immolation of
+murdering me, nor destroy its fruits except by theft and crime. No King,
+no council, can seize and torture me; no Church, no nation silence me.
+Such powers of ruthless and complete suppression have vanished. But that
+is not because power has diminished, but because it has increased and
+become multitudinous, because it has dispersed itself and specialised.
+It is no longer a negative power we have, but positive; we cannot
+prevent, but we can do. This age, far beyond all previous ages, is full
+of powerful men, men who might, if they had the will for it, achieve
+stupendous things.
+
+The things that might be done to-day! The things indeed that are being
+done! It is the latter that give one so vast a sense of the former. When
+I think of the progress of physical and mechanical science, of medicine
+and sanitation during the last century, when I measure the increase in
+general education and average efficiency, the power now available
+for human service, the merely physical increment, and compare it with
+anything that has ever been at man's disposal before, and when I think
+of what a little straggling, incidental, undisciplined and uncoordinated
+minority of inventors, experimenters, educators, writers and organisers
+has achieved this development of human possibilities, achieved it in
+spite of the disregard and aimlessness of the huge majority, and the
+passionate resistance of the active dull, my imagination grows giddy
+with dazzling intimations of the human splendours the justly organised
+state may yet attain. I glimpse for a bewildering instant the heights
+that may be scaled, the splendid enterprises made possible.
+
+But the appeal goes out now in other forms, in a book that catches at
+thousands of readers for the eye of a Prince diffused. It is the
+old appeal indeed for the unification of human effort, the ending of
+confusions, but instead of the Machiavellian deference to a flattered
+lord, a man cries out of his heart to the unseen fellowship about him.
+The last written dedication of all those I burnt last night, was to no
+single man, but to the socially constructive passion--in any man....
+
+There is, moreover, a second great difference in kind between my world
+and Machiavelli's. We are discovering women. It is as if they had come
+across a vast interval since his time, into the very chamber of the
+statesman.
+
+
+2
+
+In Machiavelli's outlook the interest of womanhood was in a region of
+life almost infinitely remote from his statecraft. They were the vehicle
+of children, but only Imperial Rome and the new world of to-day have
+ever had an inkling of the significance that might give them in the
+state. They did their work, he thought, as the ploughed earth bears its
+crops. Apart from their function of fertility they gave a humorous twist
+to life, stimulated worthy men to toil, and wasted the hours of Princes.
+He left the thought of women outside with his other dusty things when
+he went into his study to write, dismissed them from his mind. But
+our modern world is burthened with its sense of the immense, now half
+articulate, significance of women. They stand now, as it were, close
+beside the silver candlesticks, speaking as Machiavelli writes, until he
+stays his pen and turns to discuss his writing with them.
+
+It is this gradual discovery of sex as a thing collectively portentous
+that I have to mingle with my statecraft if my picture is to be true
+which has turned me at length from a treatise to the telling of my own
+story. In my life I have paralleled very closely the slow realisations
+that are going on in the world about me. I began life ignoring women,
+they came to me at first perplexing and dishonouring; only very slowly
+and very late in my life and after misadventure, did I gauge the power
+and beauty of the love of man and woman and learnt how it must needs
+frame a justifiable vision of the ordered world. Love has brought me
+to disaster, because my career had been planned regardless of its
+possibility and value. But Machiavelli, it seems to me, when he
+went into his study, left not only the earth of life outside but its
+unsuspected soul.
+
+
+3
+
+Like Machiavelli at San Casciano, if I may take this analogy one step
+further, I too am an exile. Office and leading are closed to me. The
+political career that promised so much for me is shattered and ended for
+ever.
+
+I look out from this vine-wreathed veranda under the branches of a stone
+pine; I see wide and far across a purple valley whose sides are terraced
+and set with houses of pine and ivory, the Gulf of Liguria gleaming
+sapphire blue, and cloud-like baseless mountains hanging in the sky, and
+I think of lank and coaly steamships heaving on the grey rollers of the
+English Channel and darkling streets wet with rain, I recall as if I
+were back there the busy exit from Charing Cross, the cross and the
+money-changers' offices, the splendid grime of giant London and the
+crowds going perpetually to and fro, the lights by night and the urgency
+and eventfulness of that great rain-swept heart of the modern world.
+
+It is difficult to think we have left that--for many years if not for
+ever. In thought I walk once more in Palace Yard and hear the clink and
+clatter of hansoms and the quick quiet whirr of motors; I go in vivid
+recent memories through the stir in the lobbies, I sit again at eventful
+dinners in those old dining-rooms like cellars below the House--dinners
+that ended with shrill division bells, I think of huge clubs swarming
+and excited by the bulletins of that electoral battle that was for me
+the opening opportunity. I see the stencilled names and numbers go up on
+the green baize, constituency after constituency, amidst murmurs or loud
+shouting....
+
+It is over for me now and vanished. That opportunity will come no more.
+Very probably you have heard already some crude inaccurate version of
+our story and why I did not take office, and have formed your partial
+judgement on me. And so it is I sit now at my stone table, half out of
+life already, in a warm, large, shadowy leisure, splashed with sunlight
+and hung with vine tendrils, with paper before me to distil such wisdom
+as I can, as Machiavelli in his exile sought to do, from the things I
+have learnt and felt during the career that has ended now in my divorce.
+
+I climbed high and fast from small beginnings. I had the mind of my
+party. I do not know where I might not have ended, but for this red
+blaze that came out of my unguarded nature and closed my career for
+ever.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER
+
+
+1
+
+I dreamt first of states and cities and political things when I was a
+little boy in knickerbockers.
+
+When I think of how such things began in my mind, there comes back to me
+the memory of an enormous bleak room with its ceiling going up to heaven
+and its floor covered irregularly with patched and defective oilcloth
+and a dingy mat or so and a "surround" as they call it, of dark stained
+wood. Here and there against the wall are trunks and boxes. There are
+cupboards on either side of the fireplace and bookshelves with
+books above them, and on the wall and rather tattered is a large
+yellow-varnished geological map of the South of England. Over the mantel
+is a huge lump of white coral rock and several big fossil bones, and
+above that hangs the portrait of a brainy gentleman, sliced in half and
+displaying an interior of intricate detail and much vigour of coloring.
+It is the floor I think of chiefly; over the oilcloth of which, assumed
+to be land, spread towns and villages and forts of wooden bricks; there
+are steep square hills (geologically, volumes of Orr's CYCLOPAEDIA OF
+THE SCIENCES) and the cracks and spaces of the floor and the bare brown
+surround were the water channels and open sea of that continent of mine.
+
+I still remember with infinite gratitude the great-uncle to whom I
+owe my bricks. He must have been one of those rare adults who have not
+forgotten the chagrins and dreams of childhood. He was a prosperous west
+of England builder; including my father he had three nephews, and for
+each of them he caused a box of bricks to be made by an out-of-work
+carpenter, not the insufficient supply of the toyshop, you understand,
+but a really adequate quantity of bricks made out of oak and shaped
+and smoothed, bricks about five inches by two and a half by one, and
+half-bricks and quarter-bricks to correspond. There were hundreds of
+them, many hundreds. I could build six towers as high as myself with
+them, and there seemed quite enough for every engineering project I
+could undertake. I could build whole towns with streets and houses and
+churches and citadels; I could bridge every gap in the oilcloth and make
+causeways over crumpled spaces (which I feigned to be morasses), and on
+a keel of whole bricks it was possible to construct ships to push
+over the high seas to the remotest port in the room. And a disciplined
+population, that rose at last by sedulous begging on birthdays and
+all convenient occasions to well over two hundred, of lead sailors and
+soldiers, horse, foot and artillery, inhabited this world.
+
+Justice has never been done to bricks and soldiers by those who write
+about toys. The praises of the toy theatre have been a common theme for
+essayists, the planning of the scenes, the painting and cutting out of
+the caste, penny plain twopence coloured, the stink and glory of the
+performance and the final conflagration. I had such a theatre once, but
+I never loved it nor hoped for much from it; my bricks and soldiers were
+my perpetual drama. I recall an incessant variety of interests. There
+was the mystery and charm of the complicated buildings one could make,
+with long passages and steps and windows through which one peeped into
+their intricacies, and by means of slips of card one could make slanting
+ways in them, and send marbles rolling from top to base and thence out
+into the hold of a waiting ship. Then there were the fortresses and gun
+emplacements and covered ways in which one's soldiers went. And there
+was commerce; the shops and markets and store-rooms full of nasturtium
+seed, thrift seed, lupin beans and suchlike provender from the garden;
+such stuff one stored in match-boxes and pill-boxes, or packed in sacks
+of old glove fingers tied up with thread and sent off by waggons along
+the great military road to the beleaguered fortress on the Indian
+frontier beyond the worn places that were dismal swamps. And there were
+battles on the way.
+
+That great road is still clear in my memory. I was given, I forget by
+what benefactor, certain particularly fierce red Indians of lead--I have
+never seen such soldiers since--and for these my father helped me to
+make tepees of brown paper, and I settled them in a hitherto desolate
+country under the frowning nail-studded cliffs of an ancient trunk. Then
+I conquered them and garrisoned their land. (Alas! they died, no doubt
+through contact with civilisation--one my mother trod on--and their
+land became a wilderness again and was ravaged for a time by a clockwork
+crocodile of vast proportions.) And out towards the coal-scuttle was a
+region near the impassable thickets of the ragged hearthrug where lived
+certain china Zulus brandishing spears, and a mountain country of
+rudely piled bricks concealing the most devious and enchanting caves and
+several mines of gold and silver paper. Among these rocks a number of
+survivors from a Noah's Ark made a various, dangerous, albeit frequently
+invalid and crippled fauna, and I was wont to increase the uncultivated
+wildness of this region further by trees of privet-twigs from the garden
+hedge and box from the garden borders. By these territories went
+my Imperial Road carrying produce to and fro, bridging gaps in the
+oilcloth, tunnelling through Encyclopaedic hills--one tunnel was three
+volumes long--defended as occasion required by camps of paper tents
+or brick blockhouses, and ending at last in a magnificently engineered
+ascent to a fortress on the cliffs commanding the Indian reservation.
+
+My games upon the floor must have spread over several years and
+developed from small beginnings, incorporating now this suggestion and
+now that. They stretch, I suppose, from seven to eleven or twelve. I
+played them intermittently, and they bulk now in the retrospect far more
+significantly than they did at the time. I played them in bursts, and
+then forgot them for long periods; through the spring and summer I was
+mostly out of doors, and school and classes caught me early. And in
+the retrospect I see them all not only magnified and transfigured, but
+fore-shortened and confused together. A clockwork railway, I seem to
+remember, came and went; one or two clockwork boats, toy sailing ships
+that, being keeled, would do nothing but lie on their beam ends on the
+floor; a detestable lot of cavalrymen, undersized and gilt all over,
+given me by a maiden aunt, and very much what one might expect from
+an aunt, that I used as Nero used his Christians to ornament my public
+buildings; and I finally melted some into fratricidal bullets, and
+therewith blew the rest to flat splashes of lead by means of a brass
+cannon in the garden.
+
+I find this empire of the floor much more vivid and detailed in my
+memory now than many of the owners of the skirts and legs and boots that
+went gingerly across its territories. Occasionally, alas! they stooped
+to scrub, abolishing in one universal destruction the slow growth of
+whole days of civilised development. I still remember the hatred and
+disgust of these catastrophes. Like Noah I was given warnings. Did I
+disregard them, coarse red hands would descend, plucking garrisons
+from fortresses and sailors from ships, jumbling them up in their wrong
+boxes, clumsily so that their rifles and swords were broken, sweeping
+the splendid curves of the Imperial Road into heaps of ruins, casting
+the jungle growth of Zululand into the fire.
+
+"Well, Master Dick," the voice of this cosmic calamity would say, "you
+ought to have put them away last night. No! I can't wait until you've
+sailed them all away in ships. I got my work to do, and do it I will."
+
+And in no time all my continents and lands were swirling water and
+swiping strokes of house-flannel.
+
+That was the worst of my giant visitants, but my mother too, dear lady,
+was something of a terror to this microcosm. She wore spring-sided
+boots, a kind of boot now vanished, I believe, from the world, with dull
+bodies and shiny toes, and a silk dress with flounces that were very
+destructive to the more hazardous viaducts of the Imperial Road. She
+was always, I seem to remember, fetching me; fetching me for a meal,
+fetching me for a walk or, detestable absurdity! fetching me for a wash
+and brush up, and she never seemed to understand anything whatever of
+the political Systems across which she came to me. Also she forbade all
+toys on Sundays except the bricks for church-building and the soldiers
+for church parade, or a Scriptural use of the remains of the Noah's Ark
+mixed up with a wooden Swiss dairy farm. But she really did not know
+whether a thing was a church or not unless it positively bristled with
+cannon, and many a Sunday afternoon have I played Chicago (with the fear
+of God in my heart) under an infidel pretence that it was a new sort of
+ark rather elaborately done.
+
+Chicago, I must explain, was based upon my father's description of the
+pig slaughterings in that city and certain pictures I had seen. You made
+your beasts--which were all the ark lot really, provisionally conceived
+as pigs--go up elaborate approaches to a central pen, from which
+they went down a cardboard slide four at a time, and dropped most
+satisfyingly down a brick shaft, and pitter-litter over some steep steps
+to where a head slaughterman (ne Noah) strung a cotton loop round their
+legs and sent them by pin hooks along a wire to a second slaughterman
+with a chipped foot (formerly Mrs. Noah) who, if I remember rightly,
+converted them into Army sausage by means of a portion of the inside of
+an old alarum clock.
+
+My mother did not understand my games, but my father did. He wore
+bright-coloured socks and carpet slippers when he was indoors--my mother
+disliked boots in the house--and he would sit down on my little chair
+and survey the microcosm on the floor with admirable understanding and
+sympathy.
+
+It was he who gave me most of my toys and, I more than suspect, most
+of my ideas. "Here's some corrugated iron," he would say, "suitable for
+roofs and fencing," and hand me a lump of that stiff crinkled paper that
+is used for packing medicine bottles. Or, "Dick, do you see the tiger
+loose near the Imperial Road?--won't do for your cattle ranch." And I
+would find a bright new lead tiger like a special creation at large in
+the world, and demanding a hunting expedition and much elaborate effort
+to get him safely housed in the city menagerie beside the captured
+dragon crocodile, tamed now, and his key lost and the heart and spring
+gone out of him.
+
+And to the various irregular reading of my father I owe the inestimable
+blessing of never having a boy's book in my boyhood except those of
+Jules Verne. But my father used to get books for himself and me from
+the Bromstead Institute, Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid and illustrated
+histories; one of the Russo-Turkish war and one of Napier's expedition
+to Abyssinia I read from end to end; Stanley and Livingstone, lives
+of Wellington, Napoleon and Garibaldi, and back volumes of PUNCH, from
+which I derived conceptions of foreign and domestic politics it has
+taken years of adult reflection to correct. And at home permanently we
+had Wood's NATURAL HISTORY, a brand-new illustrated Green's HISTORY OF
+THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, Irving's COMPANIONS OF COLUMBUS, a great number
+of unbound parts of some geographical work, a VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD I
+think it was called, with pictures of foreign places, and Clarke's NEW
+TESTAMENT with a map of Palestine, and a variety of other informing
+books bought at sales. There was a Sowerby's BOTANY also, with thousands
+of carefully tinted pictures of British plants, and one or two other
+important works in the sitting-room. I was allowed to turn these over
+and even lie on the floor with them on Sundays and other occasions of
+exceptional cleanliness.
+
+And in the attic I found one day a very old forgotten map after the
+fashion of a bird's-eye view, representing the Crimea, that fascinated
+me and kept me for hours navigating its waters with a pin.
+
+
+2
+
+My father was a lank-limbed man in easy shabby tweed clothes and with
+his hands in his trouser pockets. He was a science teacher, taking
+a number of classes at the Bromstead Institute in Kent under the old
+Science and Art Department, and "visiting" various schools; and our
+resources were eked out by my mother's income of nearly a hundred
+pounds a year, and by his inheritance of a terrace of three palatial but
+structurally unsound stucco houses near Bromstead Station.
+
+They were big clumsy residences in the earliest Victorian style,
+interminably high and with deep damp basements and downstairs
+coal-cellars and kitchens that suggested an architect vindictively
+devoted to the discomfort of the servant class. If so, he had
+overreached himself and defeated his end, for no servant would stay
+in them unless for exceptional wages or exceptional tolerance of
+inefficiency or exceptional freedom in repartee. Every storey in the
+house was from twelve to fifteen feet high (which would have been cool
+and pleasant in a hot climate), and the stairs went steeply up, to end
+at last in attics too inaccessible for occupation. The ceilings had vast
+plaster cornices of classical design, fragments of which would sometimes
+fall unexpectedly, and the wall-papers were bold and gigantic in pattern
+and much variegated by damp and ill-mended rents.
+
+As my father was quite unable to let more than one of these houses at a
+time, and that for the most part to eccentric and undesirable tenants,
+he thought it politic to live in one of the two others, and devote the
+rent he received from the let one, when it was let, to the incessant
+necessary repairing of all three. He also did some of the repairing
+himself and, smoking a bull-dog pipe the while, which my mother would
+not allow him to do in the house, he cultivated vegetables in a sketchy,
+unpunctual and not always successful manner in the unoccupied gardens.
+The three houses faced north, and the back of the one we occupied was
+covered by a grape-vine that yielded, I remember, small green grapes
+for pies in the spring, and imperfectly ripe black grapes in favourable
+autumns for the purposes of dessert. The grape-vine played an important
+part in my life, for my father broke his neck while he was pruning it,
+when I was thirteen.
+
+My father was what is called a man of ideas, but they were not always
+good ideas. My grandfather had been a private schoolmaster and one of
+the founders of the College of Preceptors, and my father had assisted
+him in his school until increasing competition and diminishing
+attendance had made it evident that the days of small private schools
+kept by unqualified persons were numbered. Thereupon my father had
+roused himself and had qualified as a science teacher under the Science
+and Art Department, which in these days had charge of the scientific and
+artistic education of the mass of the English population, and had thrown
+himself into science teaching and the earning of government grants
+therefor with great if transitory zeal and success.
+
+I do not remember anything of my father's earlier and more energetic
+time. I was the child of my parents' middle years; they married when my
+father was thirty-five and my mother past forty, and I saw only the last
+decadent phase of his educational career.
+
+The Science and Art Department has vanished altogether from the
+world, and people are forgetting it now with the utmost readiness and
+generosity. Part of its substance and staff and spirit survive, more or
+less completely digested into the Board of Education.
+
+The world does move on, even in its government. It is wonderful how many
+of the clumsy and limited governing bodies of my youth and early manhood
+have given place now to more scientific and efficient machinery. When
+I was a boy, Bromstead, which is now a borough, was ruled by a strange
+body called a Local Board--it was the Age of Boards--and I still
+remember indistinctly my father rejoicing at the breakfast-table over
+the liberation of London from the corrupt and devastating control of a
+Metropolitan Board of Works. Then there were also School Boards; I
+was already practically in politics before the London School Board was
+absorbed by the spreading tentacles of the London County Council.
+
+It gives a measure of the newness of our modern ideas of the State to
+remember that the very beginnings of public education lie within my
+father's lifetime, and that many most intelligent and patriotic people
+were shocked beyond measure at the State doing anything of the sort.
+When he was born, totally illiterate people who could neither read a
+book nor write more than perhaps a clumsy signature, were to be found
+everywhere in England; and great masses of the population were getting
+no instruction at all. Only a few schools flourished upon the patronage
+of exceptional parents; all over the country the old endowed grammar
+schools were to be found sinking and dwindling; many of them had
+closed altogether. In the new great centres of population multitudes of
+children were sweated in the factories, darkly ignorant and wretched
+and the under-equipped and under-staffed National and British schools,
+supported by voluntary contributions and sectarian rivalries, made an
+ineffectual fight against this festering darkness. It was a condition
+of affairs clamouring for remedies, but there was an immense amount
+of indifference and prejudice to be overcome before any remedies were
+possible. Perhaps some day some industrious and lucid historian
+will disentangle all the muddle of impulses and antagonisms, the
+commercialism, utilitarianism, obstinate conservatism, humanitarian
+enthusiasm, out of which our present educational organisation arose.
+I have long since come to believe it necessary that all new social
+institutions should be born in confusion, and that at first they should
+present chiefly crude and ridiculous aspects. The distrust of government
+in the Victorian days was far too great, and the general intelligence
+far too low, to permit the State to go about the new business it was
+taking up in a businesslike way, to train teachers, build and equip
+schools, endow pedagogic research, and provide properly written
+school-books. These things it was felt MUST be provided by individual
+and local effort, and since it was manifest that it was individual
+and local effort that were in default, it was reluctantly agreed to
+stimulate them by money payments. The State set up a machinery of
+examination both in Science and Art and for the elementary schools; and
+payments, known technically as grants, were made in accordance with the
+examination results attained, to such schools as Providence might see
+fit to send into the world. In this way it was felt the Demand would
+be established that would, according to the beliefs of that time,
+inevitably ensure the Supply. An industry of "Grant earning" was
+created, and this would give education as a necessary by-product.
+
+In the end this belief was found to need qualification, but
+Grant-earning was still in full activity when I was a small boy. So far
+as the Science and Art Department and my father are concerned, the task
+of examination was entrusted to eminent scientific men, for the most
+part quite unaccustomed to teaching. You see, if they also were teaching
+similar classes to those they examined, it was feared that injustice
+might be done. Year after year these eminent persons set questions
+and employed subordinates to read and mark the increasing thousands of
+answers that ensued, and having no doubt the national ideal of fairness
+well developed in their minds, they were careful each year to re-read
+the preceding papers before composing the current one, in order to see
+what it was usual to ask. As a result of this, in the course of a
+few years the recurrence and permutation of questions became almost
+calculable, and since the practical object of the teaching was to teach
+people not science, but how to write answers to these questions, the
+industry of Grant-earning assumed a form easily distinguished from any
+kind of genuine education whatever.
+
+Other remarkable compromises had also to be made with the spirit of the
+age. The unfortunate conflict between Religion and Science prevalent at
+this time was mitigated, if I remember rightly, by making graduates in
+arts and priests in the established church Science Teachers EX OFFICIO,
+and leaving local and private enterprise to provide schools, diagrams,
+books, material, according to the conceptions of efficiency prevalent in
+the district. Private enterprise made a particularly good thing of the
+books. A number of competing firms of publishers sprang into existence
+specialising in Science and Art Department work; they set themselves to
+produce text-books that should supply exactly the quantity and quality
+of knowledge necessary for every stage of each of five and twenty
+subjects into which desirable science was divided, and copies and models
+and instructions that should give precisely the method and gestures
+esteemed as proficiency in art. Every section of each book was written
+in the idiom found to be most satisfactory to the examiners, and test
+questions extracted from papers set in former years were appended to
+every chapter. By means of these last the teacher was able to train his
+class to the very highest level of grant-earning efficiency, and very
+naturally he cast all other methods of exposition aside. First he posed
+his pupils with questions and then dictated model replies.
+
+That was my father's method of instruction. I attended his classes as an
+elementary grant-earner from the age of ten until his death, and it is
+so I remember him, sitting on the edge of a table, smothering a yawn
+occasionally and giving out the infallible formulae to the industriously
+scribbling class sitting in rows of desks before him. Occasionally he
+would slide to his feet and go to a blackboard on an easel and draw on
+that very slowly and deliberately in coloured chalks a diagram for the
+class to copy in coloured pencils, and sometimes he would display a
+specimen or arrange an experiment for them to see. The room in the
+Institute in which he taught was equipped with a certain amount of
+apparatus prescribed as necessary for subject this and subject that by
+the Science and Art Department, and this my father would supplement with
+maps and diagrams and drawings of his own.
+
+But he never really did experiments, except that in the class in
+systematic botany he sometimes made us tease common flowers to pieces.
+He did not do experiments if he could possibly help it, because in the
+first place they used up time and gas for the Bunsen burner and good
+material in a ruinous fashion, and in the second they were, in his
+rather careless and sketchy hands, apt to endanger the apparatus of
+the Institute and even the lives of his students. Then thirdly, real
+experiments involved washing up. And moreover they always turned out
+wrong, and sometimes misled the too observant learner very seriously
+and opened demoralising controversies. Quite early in life I acquired an
+almost ineradicable sense of the unscientific perversity of Nature and
+the impassable gulf that is fixed between systematic science and elusive
+fact. I knew, for example, that in science, whether it be subject XII.,
+Organic Chemistry, or subject XVII., Animal Physiology, when you blow
+into a glass of lime-water it instantly becomes cloudy, and if you
+continue to blow it clears again, whereas in truth you may blow into the
+stuff from the lime-water bottle until you are crimson in the face and
+painful under the ears, and it never becomes cloudy at all. And I knew,
+too, that in science if you put potassium chlorate into a retort and
+heat it over a Bunsen burner, oxygen is disengaged and may be collected
+over water, whereas in real life if you do anything of the sort the
+vessel cracks with a loud report, the potassium chlorate descends
+sizzling upon the flame, the experimenter says "Oh! Damn!" with
+astonishing heartiness and distinctness, and a lady student in the back
+seats gets up and leaves the room.
+
+Science is the organised conquest of Nature, and I can quite understand
+that ancient libertine refusing to co-operate in her own undoing. And I
+can quite understand, too, my father's preference for what he called
+an illustrative experiment, which was simply an arrangement of the
+apparatus in front of the class with nothing whatever by way of
+material, and the Bunsen burner clean and cool, and then a slow luminous
+description of just what you did put in it when you were so ill-advised
+as to carry the affair beyond illustration, and just exactly what ought
+anyhow to happen when you did. He had considerable powers of vivid
+expression, so that in this way he could make us see all he described.
+The class, freed from any unpleasant nervous tension, could draw this
+still life without flinching, and if any part was too difficult to draw,
+then my father would produce a simplified version on the blackboard
+to be copied instead. And he would also write on the blackboard any
+exceptionally difficult but grant-earning words, such as "empyreumatic"
+or "botryoidal."
+
+Some words in constant use he rarely explained. I remember once sticking
+up my hand and asking him in the full flow of description, "Please, sir,
+what is flocculent?"
+
+"The precipitate is."
+
+"Yes, sir, but what does it mean?"
+
+"Oh! flocculent!" said my father, "flocculent! Why--" he extended his
+hand and arm and twiddled his fingers for a second in the air. "Like
+that," he said.
+
+I thought the explanation sufficient, but he paused for a moment after
+giving it. "As in a flock bed, you know," he added and resumed his
+discourse.
+
+
+3
+
+My father, I am afraid, carried a natural incompetence in practical
+affairs to an exceptionally high level. He combined practical
+incompetence, practical enterprise and a thoroughly sanguine
+temperament, in a manner that I have never seen paralleled in any human
+being. He was always trying to do new things in the briskest manner,
+under the suggestion of books or papers or his own spontaneous
+imagination, and as he had never been trained to do anything whatever
+in his life properly, his futilities were extensive and thorough. At one
+time he nearly gave up his classes for intensive culture, so enamoured
+was he of its possibilities; the peculiar pungency of the manure he got,
+in pursuit of a chemical theory of his own, has scarred my olfactory
+memories for a lifetime. The intensive culture phase is very clear in my
+memory; it came near the end of his career and when I was between eleven
+and twelve. I was mobilised to gather caterpillars on several occasions,
+and assisted in nocturnal raids upon the slugs by lantern-light that
+wrecked my preparation work for school next day. My father dug up both
+lawns, and trenched and manured in spasms of immense vigour alternating
+with periods of paralysing distaste for the garden. And for weeks he
+talked about eight hundred pounds an acre at every meal.
+
+A garden, even when it is not exasperated by intensive methods, is a
+thing as exacting as a baby, its moods have to be watched; it does
+not wait upon the cultivator's convenience, but has times of its own.
+Intensive culture greatly increases this disposition to trouble mankind;
+it makes a garden touchy and hysterical, a drugged and demoralised and
+over-irritated garden. My father got at cross purposes with our two
+patches at an early stage. Everything grew wrong from the first to last,
+and if my father's manures intensified nothing else, they certainly
+intensified the Primordial Curse. The peas were eaten in the night
+before they were three inches high, the beans bore nothing but blight,
+the only apparent result of a spraying of the potatoes was to develop
+a PENCHANT in the cat for being ill indoors, the cucumber frames were
+damaged by the catapulting of boys going down the lane at the back,
+and all your cucumbers were mysteriously embittered. That lane with its
+occasional passers-by did much to wreck the intensive scheme, because my
+father always stopped work and went indoors if any one watched him.
+His special manure was apt to arouse a troublesome spirit of inquiry in
+hardy natures.
+
+In digging his rows and shaping his patches he neglected the guiding
+string and trusted to his eye altogether too much, and the consequent
+obliquity and the various wind-breaks and scare-crows he erected, and
+particularly an irrigation contrivance he began and never finished by
+which everything was to be watered at once by means of pieces of gutter
+from the roof and outhouses of Number 2, and a large and particularly
+obstinate clump of elder-bushes in the abolished hedge that he had
+failed to destroy entirely either by axe or by fire, combined to give
+the gardens under intensive culture a singularly desolate and disorderly
+appearance. He took steps towards the diversion of our house drain under
+the influence of the Sewage Utilisation Society; but happily he stopped
+in time. He hardly completed any of the operations he began; something
+else became more urgent or simply he tired; a considerable area of the
+Number 2 territory was never even dug up.
+
+In the end the affair irritated him beyond endurance. Never was a man
+less horticulturally-minded. The clamour of these vegetables he had
+launched into the world for his service and assistance, wore out his
+patience. He would walk into the garden the happiest of men after a
+day or so of disregard, talking to me of history perhaps or social
+organisation, or summarising some book he had read. He talked to me
+of anything that interested him, regardless of my limitations. Then he
+would begin to note the growth of the weeds. "This won't do," he would
+say and pull up a handful.
+
+More weeding would follow and the talk would become fragmentary. His
+hands would become earthy, his nails black, weeds would snap off in
+his careless grip, leaving the roots behind. The world would darken.
+He would look at his fingers with disgusted astonishment. "CURSE these
+weeds!" he would say from his heart. His discourse was at an end.
+
+I have memories, too, of his sudden unexpected charges into the
+tranquillity of the house, his hands and clothes intensively enriched.
+He would come in like a whirlwind. "This damned stuff all over me and
+the Agricultural Chemistry Class at six! Bah! AAAAAAH!"
+
+My mother would never learn not to attempt to break him of swearing
+on such occasions. She would remain standing a little stiffly in the
+scullery refusing to assist him to the adjectival towel he sought.
+
+"If you say such things--"
+
+He would dance with rage and hurl the soap about. "The towel!" he would
+cry, flicking suds from big fingers in every direction; "the towel! I'll
+let the blithering class slide if you don't give me the towel! I'll give
+up everything, I tell you--everything!"...
+
+At last with the failure of the lettuces came the breaking point. I was
+in the little arbour learning Latin irregular verbs when it happened.
+I can see him still, his peculiar tenor voice still echoes in my brain,
+shouting his opinion of intensive culture for all the world to hear, and
+slashing away at that abominable mockery of a crop with a hoe. We had
+tied them up with bast only a week or so before, and now half were
+rotten and half had shot up into tall slender growths. He had the hoe in
+both hands and slogged. Great wipes he made, and at each stroke he said,
+"Take that!"
+
+The air was thick with flying fragments of abortive salad. It was a
+fantastic massacre. It was the French Revolution of that cold tyranny,
+the vindictive overthrow of the pampered vegetable aristocrats. After he
+had assuaged his passion upon them, he turned for other prey; he kicked
+holes in two of our noblest marrows, flicked off the heads of half a row
+of artichokes, and shied the hoe with a splendid smash into the cucumber
+frame. Something of the awe of that moment returns to me as I write of
+it.
+
+"Well, my boy," he said, approaching with an expression of beneficent
+happiness, "I've done with gardening. Let's go for a walk like
+reasonable beings. I've had enough of this"--his face was convulsed for
+an instant with bitter resentment--"Pandering to cabbages."
+
+
+4
+
+That afternoon's walk sticks in my memory for many reasons. One is
+that we went further than I had ever been before; far beyond Keston and
+nearly to Seven-oaks, coming back by train from Dunton Green, and the
+other is that my father as he went along talked about himself, not so
+much to me as to himself, and about life and what he had done with
+it. He monologued so that at times he produced an effect of weird
+world-forgetfulness. I listened puzzled, and at that time not
+understanding many things that afterwards became plain to me. It is only
+in recent years that I have discovered the pathos of that monologue; how
+friendless my father was and uncompanioned in his thoughts and feelings,
+and what a hunger he may have felt for the sympathy of the undeveloped
+youngster who trotted by his side.
+
+"I'm no gardener," he said, "I'm no anything. Why the devil did I start
+gardening?
+
+"I suppose man was created to mind a garden... But the Fall let us out
+of that! What was I created for? God! what was I created for?...
+
+"Slaves to matter! Minding inanimate things! It doesn't suit me, you
+know. I've got no hands and no patience. I've mucked about with life.
+Mucked about with life." He suddenly addressed himself to me, and for
+an instant I started like an eavesdropper discovered. "Whatever you do,
+boy, whatever you do, make a Plan. Make a good Plan and stick to it.
+Find out what life is about--I never have--and set yourself to do
+whatever you ought to do. I admit it's a puzzle....
+
+"Those damned houses have been the curse of my life. Stucco white
+elephants! Beastly cracked stucco with stains of green--black and green.
+Conferva and soot.... Property, they are!... Beware of Things, Dick,
+beware of Things! Before you know where you are you are waiting on them
+and minding them. They'll eat your life up. Eat up your hours and your
+blood and energy! When those houses came to me, I ought to have
+sold them--or fled the country. I ought to have cleared out.
+Sarcophagi--eaters of men! Oh! the hours and days of work, the nights
+of anxiety those vile houses have cost me! The painting! It worked up
+my arms; it got all over me. I stank of it. It made me ill. It isn't
+living--it's minding....
+
+"Property's the curse of life. Property! Ugh! Look at this country all
+cut up into silly little parallelograms, look at all those villas we
+passed just now and those potato patches and that tarred shanty and the
+hedge! Somebody's minding every bit of it like a dog tied to a cart's
+tail. Patching it and bothering about it. Bothering! Yapping at every
+passer-by. Look at that notice-board! One rotten worried little beast
+wants to keep us other rotten little beasts off HIS patch,--God knows
+why! Look at the weeds in it. Look at the mended fence!... There's no
+property worth having, Dick, but money. That's only good to spend.
+All these things. Human souls buried under a cartload of blithering
+rubbish....
+
+"I'm not a fool, Dick. I have qualities, imagination, a sort of go. I
+ought to have made a better thing of life.
+
+"I'm sure I could have done things. Only the old people pulled my leg.
+They started me wrong. They never started me at all. I only began to
+find out what life was like when I was nearly forty.
+
+"If I'd gone to a university; if I'd had any sort of sound training, if
+I hadn't slipped into the haphazard places that came easiest....
+
+"Nobody warned me. Nobody. It isn't a world we live in, Dick; it's a
+cascade of accidents; it's a chaos exasperated by policemen! YOU be
+warned in time, Dick. You stick to a plan. Don't wait for any one to
+show you the way. Nobody will. There isn't a way till you make one. Get
+education, get a good education. Fight your way to the top. It's your
+only chance. I've watched you. You'll do no good at digging and property
+minding. There isn't a neighbour in Bromstead won't be able to skin you
+at suchlike games. You and I are the brainy unstable kind, topside or
+nothing. And if ever those blithering houses come to you--don't have
+'em. Give them away! Dynamite 'em--and off! LIVE, Dick! I'll get rid of
+them for you if I can, Dick, but remember what I say."...
+
+So it was my father discoursed, if not in those particular words, yet
+exactly in that manner, as he slouched along the southward road, with
+resentful eyes becoming less resentful as he talked, and flinging out
+clumsy illustrative motions at the outskirts of Bromstead as we passed
+along them. That afternoon he hated Bromstead, from its foot-tiring
+pebbles up. He had no illusions about Bromstead or himself. I have
+the clearest impression of him in his garden-stained tweeds with a
+deer-stalker hat on the back of his head and presently a pipe sometimes
+between his teeth and sometimes in his gesticulating hand, as he became
+diverted by his talk from his original exasperation....
+
+This particular afternoon is no doubt mixed up in my memory with
+many other afternoons; all sorts of things my father said and did at
+different times have got themselves referred to it; it filled me at the
+time with a great unprecedented sense of fellowship and it has become
+the symbol now for all our intercourse together. If I didn't understand
+the things he said, I did the mood he was in. He gave me two very broad
+ideas in that talk and the talks I have mingled with it; he gave them
+to me very clearly and they have remained fundamental in my mind; one a
+sense of the extraordinary confusion and waste and planlessness of the
+human life that went on all about us; and the other of a great ideal of
+order and economy which he called variously Science and Civilisation,
+and which, though I do not remember that he ever used that word, I
+suppose many people nowadays would identify with Socialism,--as the
+Fabians expound it.
+
+He was not very definite about this Science, you must understand, but
+he seemed always to be waving his hand towards it,--just as his
+contemporary Tennyson seems always to be doing--he belonged to his age
+and mostly his talk was destructive of the limited beliefs of his time,
+he led me to infer rather than actually told me that this Science was
+coming, a spirit of light and order, to the rescue of a world groaning
+and travailing in muddle for the want of it....
+
+
+5
+
+When I think of Bromstead nowadays I find it inseparably bound up
+with the disorders of my father's gardening, and the odd patchings and
+paintings that disfigured his houses. It was all of a piece with that.
+
+Let me try and give something of the quality of Bromstead and something
+of its history. It is the quality and history of a thousand places
+round and about London, and round and about the other great centres of
+population in the world. Indeed it is in a measure the quality of
+the whole of this modern world from which we who have the statesman's
+passion struggle to evolve, and dream still of evolving order.
+
+First, then, you must think of Bromstead a hundred and fifty years ago,
+as a narrow irregular little street of thatched houses strung out on
+the London and Dover Road, a little mellow sample unit of a social order
+that had a kind of completeness, at its level, of its own. At that
+time its population numbered a little under two thousand people, mostly
+engaged in agricultural work or in trades serving agriculture. There was
+a blacksmith, a saddler, a chemist, a doctor, a barber, a linen-draper
+(who brewed his own beer); a veterinary surgeon, a hardware shop,
+and two capacious inns. Round and about it were a number of pleasant
+gentlemen's seats, whose owners went frequently to London town in their
+coaches along the very tolerable high-road. The church was big enough
+to hold the whole population, were people minded to go to church, and
+indeed a large proportion did go, and all who married were married in
+it, and everybody, to begin with, was christened at its font and buried
+at last in its yew-shaded graveyard. Everybody knew everybody in the
+place. It was, in fact, a definite place and a real human community in
+those days. There was a pleasant old market-house in the middle of the
+town with a weekly market, and an annual fair at which much cheerful
+merry making and homely intoxication occurred; there was a pack of
+hounds which hunted within five miles of London Bridge, and the local
+gentry would occasionally enliven the place with valiant cricket matches
+for a hundred guineas a side, to the vast excitement of the entire
+population. It was very much the same sort of place that it had been for
+three or four centuries. A Bromstead Rip van Winkle from 1550 returning
+in 1750 would have found most of the old houses still as he had known
+them, the same trades a little improved and differentiated one from the
+other, the same roads rather more carefully tended, the Inns not very
+much altered, the ancient familiar market-house. The occasional wheeled
+traffic would have struck him as the most remarkable difference, next
+perhaps to the swaggering painted stone monuments instead of brasses
+and the protestant severity of the communion-table in the parish
+church,--both from the material point of view very little things. A
+Rip van Winkle from 1350, again, would have noticed scarcely greater
+changes; fewer clergy, more people, and particularly more people of
+the middling sort; the glass in the windows of many of the houses, the
+stylish chimneys springing up everywhere would have impressed him, and
+suchlike details. The place would have had the same boundaries, the same
+broad essential features, would have been still itself in the way that
+a man is still himself after he has "filled out" a little and grown a
+longer beard and changed his clothes.
+
+But after 1750 something got hold of the world, something that was
+destined to alter the scale of every human affair.
+
+That something was machinery and a vague energetic disposition to
+improve material things. In another part of England ingenious people
+were beginning to use coal in smelting iron, and were producing metal
+in abundance and metal castings in sizes that had hitherto been
+unattainable. Without warning or preparation, increment involving
+countless possibilities of further increment was coming to the strength
+of horses and men. "Power," all unsuspected, was flowing like a drug
+into the veins of the social body.
+
+Nobody seems to have perceived this coming of power, and nobody had
+calculated its probable consequences. Suddenly, almost inadvertently,
+people found themselves doing things that would have amazed their
+ancestors. They began to construct wheeled vehicles much more easily and
+cheaply than they had ever done before, to make up roads and move things
+about that had formerly been esteemed too heavy for locomotion, to join
+woodwork with iron nails instead of wooden pegs, to achieve all sorts
+of mechanical possibilities, to trade more freely and manufacture on a
+larger scale, to send goods abroad in a wholesale and systematic way,
+to bring back commodities from overseas, not simply spices and fine
+commodities, but goods in bulk. The new influence spread to agriculture,
+iron appliances replaced wooden, breeding of stock became systematic,
+paper-making and printing increased and cheapened. Roofs of slate and
+tile appeared amidst and presently prevailed over the original Bromstead
+thatch, the huge space of Common to the south was extensively enclosed,
+and what had been an ill-defined horse-track to Dover, only passable
+by adventurous coaches in dry weather, became the Dover Road, and was
+presently the route first of one and then of several daily coaches.
+The High Street was discovered to be too tortuous for these awakening
+energies, and a new road cut off its worst contortions. Residential
+villas appeared occupied by retired tradesmen and widows, who esteemed
+the place healthy, and by others of a strange new unoccupied class of
+people who had money invested in joint-stock enterprises. First one
+and then several boys' boarding-schools came, drawing their pupils from
+London,--my grandfather's was one of these. London, twelve miles to the
+north-west, was making itself felt more and more.
+
+But this was only the beginning of the growth period, the first trickle
+of the coming flood of mechanical power. Away in the north they were
+casting iron in bigger and bigger forms, working their way to the
+production of steel on a large scale, applying power in factories.
+Bromstead had almost doubted in size again long before the railway came;
+there was hardly any thatch left in the High Street, but instead were
+houses with handsome brass-knockered front doors and several windows,
+and shops with shop-fronts all of square glass panes, and the place was
+lighted publicly now by oil lamps--previously only one flickering lamp
+outside each of the coaching inns had broken the nocturnal darkness.
+And there was talk, it long remained talk,--of gas. The gasworks came in
+1834, and about that date my father's three houses must have been built
+convenient for the London Road. They mark nearly the beginning of the
+real suburban quality; they were let at first to City people still
+engaged in business.
+
+And then hard on the gasworks had come the railway and cheap coal; there
+was a wild outbreak of brickfields upon the claylands to the east, and
+the Great Growth had begun in earnest. The agricultural placidities that
+had formerly come to the very borders of the High Street were broken up
+north, west and south, by new roads. This enterprising person and then
+that began to "run up" houses, irrespective of every other enterprising
+person who was doing the same thing. A Local Board came into existence,
+and with much hesitation and penny-wise economy inaugurated drainage
+works. Rates became a common topic, a fact of accumulating importance.
+Several chapels of zinc and iron appeared, and also a white new church
+in commercial Gothic upon the common, and another of red brick in the
+residential district out beyond the brickfields towards Chessington.
+
+The population doubled again and doubled again, and became particularly
+teeming in the prolific "working-class" district about the deep-rutted,
+muddy, coal-blackened roads between the gasworks, Blodgett's laundries,
+and the railway goods-yard. Weekly properties, that is to say small
+houses built by small property owners and let by the week, sprang up
+also in the Cage Fields, and presently extended right up the London
+Road. A single national school in an inconvenient situation set itself
+inadequately to collect subscriptions and teach the swarming, sniffing,
+grimy offspring of this dingy new population to read. The villages of
+Beckington, which used to be three miles to the west, and Blamely four
+miles to the east of Bromstead, were experiencing similar distensions
+and proliferations, and grew out to meet us. All effect of locality or
+community had gone from these places long before I was born; hardly any
+one knew any one; there was no general meeting place any more, the old
+fairs were just common nuisances haunted by gypsies, van showmen, Cheap
+Jacks and London roughs, the churches were incapable of a quarter of the
+population. One or two local papers of shameless veniality reported the
+proceedings of the local Bench and the local Board, compelled tradesmen
+who were interested in these affairs to advertise, used the epithet
+"Bromstedian" as one expressing peculiar virtues, and so maintained in
+the general mind a weak tradition of some local quality that embraced
+us all. Then the parish graveyard filled up and became a scandal, and
+an ambitious area with an air of appetite was walled in by a Bromstead
+Cemetery Company, and planted with suitably high-minded and sorrowful
+varieties of conifer. A stonemason took one of the earlier villas with
+a front garden at the end of the High Street, and displayed a supply
+of urns on pillars and headstones and crosses in stone, marble, and
+granite, that would have sufficed to commemorate in elaborate detail the
+entire population of Bromstead as one found it in 1750.
+
+The cemetery was made when I was a little boy of five or six; I was in
+the full tide of building and growth from the first; the second railway
+with its station at Bromstead North and the drainage followed when I was
+ten or eleven, and all my childish memories are of digging and wheeling,
+of woods invaded by building, roads gashed open and littered with iron
+pipes amidst a fearful smell of gas, of men peeped at and seen toiling
+away deep down in excavations, of hedges broken down and replaced by
+planks, of wheelbarrows and builders' sheds, of rivulets overtaken and
+swallowed up by drain-pipes. Big trees, and especially elms, cleared
+of undergrowth and left standing amid such things, acquired a peculiar
+tattered dinginess rather in the quality of needy widow women who have
+seen happier days.
+
+The Ravensbrook of my earlier memories was a beautiful stream. It came
+into my world out of a mysterious Beyond, out of a garden, splashing
+brightly down a weir which had once been the weir of a mill. (Above the
+weir and inaccessible there were bulrushes growing in splendid clumps,
+and beyond that, pampas grass, yellow and crimson spikes of hollyhock,
+and blue suggestions of wonderland.) From the pool at the foot of
+this initial cascade it flowed in a leisurely fashion beside a
+footpath,--there were two pretty thatched cottages on the left, and here
+were ducks, and there were willows on the right,--and so came to where
+great trees grew on high banks on either hand and bowed closer, and at
+last met overhead. This part was difficult to reach because of an old
+fence, but a little boy might glimpse that long cavern of greenery by
+wading. Either I have actually seen kingfishers there, or my father has
+described them so accurately to me that he inserted them into my
+memory. I remember them there anyhow. Most of that overhung part I never
+penetrated at all, but followed the field path with my mother and met
+the stream again, where beyond there were flat meadows, Roper's meadows.
+The Ravensbrook went meandering across the middle of these, now between
+steep banks, and now with wide shallows at the bends where the cattle
+waded and drank. Yellow and purple loose-strife and ordinary rushes grew
+in clumps along the bank, and now and then a willow. On rare occasions
+of rapture one might see a rat cleaning his whiskers at the water's
+edge. The deep places were rich with tangled weeds, and in them fishes
+lurked--to me they were big fishes--water-boatmen and water-beetles
+traversed the calm surface of these still deeps; in one pool were yellow
+lilies and water-soldiers, and in the shoaly places hovering fleets of
+small fry basked in the sunshine--to vanish in a flash at one's shadow.
+In one place, too, were Rapids, where the stream woke with a start from
+a dreamless brooding into foaming panic and babbled and hastened. Well
+do I remember that half-mile of rivulet; all other rivers and cascades
+have their reference to it for me. And after I was eleven, and before we
+left Bromstead, all the delight and beauty of it was destroyed.
+
+The volume of its water decreased abruptly--I suppose the new drainage
+works that linked us up with Beckington, and made me first acquainted
+with the geological quality of the London clay, had to do with
+that--until only a weak uncleansing trickle remained. That at first
+did not strike me as a misfortune. An adventurous small boy might walk
+dryshod in places hitherto inaccessible. But hard upon that came the
+pegs, the planks and carts and devastation. Roper's meadows, being no
+longer in fear of floods, were now to be slashed out into parallelograms
+of untidy road, and built upon with rows of working-class cottages. The
+roads came,--horribly; the houses followed. They seemed to rise in
+the night. People moved into them as soon as the roofs were on, mostly
+workmen and their young wives, and already in a year some of these raw
+houses stood empty again from defaulting tenants, with windows broken
+and wood-work warping and rotting. The Ravensbrook became a dump for
+old iron, rusty cans, abandoned boots and the like, and was a river
+only when unusual rains filled it for a day or so with an inky flood of
+surface water....
+
+That indeed was my most striking perception in the growth of Bromstead.
+The Ravensbrook had been important to my imaginative life; that way
+had always been my first choice in all my walks with my mother, and its
+rapid swamping by the new urban growth made it indicative of all the
+other things that had happened just before my time, or were still, at a
+less dramatic pace, happening. I realised that building was the enemy.
+I began to understand why in every direction out of Bromstead one walked
+past scaffold-poles into litter, why fragments of broken brick and
+cinder mingled in every path, and the significance of the universal
+notice-boards, either white and new or a year old and torn and battered,
+promising sites, proffering houses to be sold or let, abusing and
+intimidating passers-by for fancied trespass, and protecting rights of
+way.
+
+It is difficult to disentangle now what I understood at this time and
+what I have since come to understand, but it seems to me that even
+in those childish days I was acutely aware of an invading and growing
+disorder. The serene rhythms of the old established agriculture, I see
+now, were everywhere being replaced by cultivation under notice and
+snatch crops; hedges ceased to be repaired, and were replaced by cheap
+iron railings or chunks of corrugated iron; more and more hoardings
+sprang up, and contributed more and more to the nomad tribes of filthy
+paper scraps that flew before the wind and overspread the country.
+The outskirts of Bromstead were a maze of exploitation roads that
+led nowhere, that ended in tarred fences studded with nails (I don't
+remember barbed wire in those days; I think the Zeitgeist did not
+produce that until later), and in trespass boards that used vehement
+language. Broken glass, tin cans, and ashes and paper abounded. Cheap
+glass, cheap tin, abundant fuel, and a free untaxed Press had rushed
+upon a world quite unprepared to dispose of these blessings when the
+fulness of enjoyment was past.
+
+I suppose one might have persuaded oneself that all this was but the
+replacement of an ancient tranquillity, or at least an ancient balance,
+by a new order. Only to my eyes, quickened by my father's intimations,
+it was manifestly no order at all. It was a multitude of incoordinated
+fresh starts, each more sweeping and destructive than the last, and none
+of them ever really worked out to a ripe and satisfactory completion.
+Each left a legacy of products, houses, humanity, or what not, in its
+wake. It was a sort of progress that had bolted; it was change out of
+hand, and going at an unprecedented pace nowhere in particular.
+
+No, the Victorian epoch was not the dawn of a new era; it was a hasty,
+trial experiment, a gigantic experiment of the most slovenly and
+wasteful kind. I suppose it was necessary; I suppose all things are
+necessary. I suppose that before men will discipline themselves to learn
+and plan, they must first see in a hundred convincing forms the folly
+and muddle that come from headlong, aimless and haphazard methods.
+The nineteenth century was an age of demonstrations, some of them very
+impressive demonstrations, of the powers that have come to mankind, but
+of permanent achievement, what will our descendants cherish? It is hard
+to estimate what grains of precious metal may not be found in a mud
+torrent of human production on so large a scale, but will any one, a
+hundred years from now, consent to live in the houses the Victorians
+built, travel by their roads or railways, value the furnishings they
+made to live among or esteem, except for curious or historical reasons,
+their prevalent art and the clipped and limited literature that
+satisfied their souls?
+
+That age which bore me was indeed a world full of restricted and
+undisciplined people, overtaken by power, by possessions and great
+new freedoms, and unable to make any civilised use of them whatever;
+stricken now by this idea and now by that, tempted first by one
+possession and then another to ill-considered attempts; it was my
+father's exploitation of his villa gardens on the wholesale level. The
+whole of Bromstead as I remember it, and as I saw it last--it is a year
+ago now--is a dull useless boiling-up of human activities, an immense
+clustering of futilities. It is as unfinished as ever; the builders'
+roads still run out and end in mid-field in their old fashion; the
+various enterprises jumble in the same hopeless contradiction, if
+anything intensified. Pretentious villas jostle slums, and public-house
+and tin tabernacle glower at one another across the cat-haunted lot that
+intervenes. Roper's meadows are now quite frankly a slum; back doors and
+sculleries gape towards the railway, their yards are hung with tattered
+washing unashamed; and there seem to be more boards by the railway every
+time I pass, advertising pills and pickles, tonics and condiments, and
+suchlike solicitudes of a people with no natural health nor appetite
+left in them....
+
+Well, we have to do better. Failure is not failure nor waste wasted if
+it sweeps away illusion and lights the road to a plan.
+
+
+6
+
+Chaotic indiscipline, ill-adjusted effort, spasmodic aims, these give
+the quality of all my Bromstead memories. The crowning one of them all
+rises to desolating tragedy. I remember now the wan spring sunshine of
+that Sunday morning, the stiff feeling of best clothes and aggressive
+cleanliness and formality, when I and my mother returned from church to
+find my father dead. He had been pruning the grape vine. He had
+never had a ladder long enough to reach the sill of the third-floor
+windows--at house-painting times he had borrowed one from the plumber
+who mixed his paint--and he had in his own happy-go-lucky way contrived
+a combination of the garden fruit ladder with a battered kitchen table
+that served all sorts of odd purposes in an outhouse. He had stayed up
+this arrangement by means of the garden roller, and the roller had at
+the critical moment--rolled. He was lying close by the garden door with
+his head queerly bent back against a broken and twisted rainwater pipe,
+an expression of pacific contentment on his face, a bamboo curtain rod
+with a tableknife tied to end of it, still gripped in his hand. We had
+been rapping for some time at the front door unable to make him hear,
+and then we came round by the door in the side trellis into the garden
+and so discovered him.
+
+"Arthur!" I remember my mother crying with the strangest break in her
+voice, "What are you doing there? Arthur! And--SUNDAY!"
+
+I was coming behind her, musing remotely, when the quality of her voice
+roused me. She stood as if she could not go near him. He had always
+puzzled her so, he and his ways, and this seemed only another enigma.
+Then the truth dawned on her, she shrieked as if afraid of him, ran a
+dozen steps back towards the trellis door and stopped and clasped her
+ineffectual gloved hands, leaving me staring blankly, too astonished for
+feeling, at the carelessly flung limbs.
+
+The same idea came to me also. I ran to her. "Mother!" I cried, pale to
+the depths of my spirit, "IS HE DEAD?"
+
+I had been thinking two minutes before of the cold fruit pie that
+glorified our Sunday dinner-table, and how I might perhaps get into the
+tree at the end of the garden to read in the afternoon. Now an immense
+fact had come down like a curtain and blotted out all my childish world.
+My father was lying dead before my eyes.... I perceived that my mother
+was helpless and that things must be done.
+
+"Mother!" I said, "we must get Doctor Beaseley,--and carry him indoors."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ SCHOLASTIC
+
+
+1
+
+My formal education began in a small preparatory school in Bromstead.
+I went there as a day boy. The charge for my instruction was mainly set
+off by the periodic visits of my father with a large bag of battered
+fossils to lecture to us upon geology. I was one of those fortunate
+youngsters who take readily to school work, I had a good memory,
+versatile interests and a considerable appetite for commendation, and
+when I was barely twelve I got a scholarship at the City Merchants
+School and was entrusted with a scholar's railway season ticket to
+Victoria. After my father's death a large and very animated and solidly
+built uncle in tweeds from Staffordshire, Uncle Minter, my mother's
+sister's husband, with a remarkable accent and remarkable vowel sounds,
+who had plunged into the Bromstead home once or twice for the night but
+who was otherwise unknown to me, came on the scene, sold off the
+three gaunt houses with the utmost gusto, invested the proceeds and my
+father's life insurance money, and got us into a small villa at Penge
+within sight of that immense facade of glass and iron, the Crystal
+Palace. Then he retired in a mood of good-natured contempt to his native
+habitat again. We stayed at Penge until my mother's death.
+
+School became a large part of the world to me, absorbing my time and
+interest, and I never acquired that detailed and intimate knowledge of
+Penge and the hilly villadom round about, that I have of the town and
+outskirts of Bromstead.
+
+It was a district of very much the same character, but it was more
+completely urbanised and nearer to the centre of things; there were
+the same unfinished roads, the same occasional disconcerted hedges and
+trees, the same butcher's horse grazing under a builder's notice-board,
+the same incidental lapses into slum. The Crystal Palace grounds cut off
+a large part of my walking radius to the west with impassable fences
+and forbiddingly expensive turnstiles, but it added to the ordinary
+spectacle of meteorology a great variety of gratuitous fireworks which
+banged and flared away of a night after supper and drew me abroad to see
+them better. Such walks as I took, to Croydon, Wembledon, West Wickham
+and Greenwich, impressed upon me the interminable extent of London's
+residential suburbs; mile after mile one went, between houses, villas,
+rows of cottages, streets of shops, under railway arches, over railway
+bridges. I have forgotten the detailed local characteristics--if there
+were any--of much of that region altogether. I was only there two years,
+and half my perambulations occurred at dusk or after dark. But with
+Penge I associate my first realisations of the wonder and beauty of
+twilight and night, the effect of dark walls reflecting lamplight, and
+the mystery of blue haze-veiled hillsides of houses, the glare of shops
+by night, the glowing steam and streaming sparks of railway trains and
+railway signals lit up in the darkness. My first rambles in the evening
+occurred at Penge--I was becoming a big and independent-spirited
+boy--and I began my experience of smoking during these twilight prowls
+with the threepenny packets of American cigarettes then just appearing
+in the world.
+
+My life centred upon the City Merchants School. Usually I caught the
+eight-eighteen for Victoria, I had a midday meal and tea; four nights a
+week I stayed for preparation, and often I was not back home again until
+within an hour of my bedtime. I spent my half holidays at school
+in order to play cricket and football. This, and a pretty voracious
+appetite for miscellaneous reading which was fostered by the Penge
+Middleton Library, did not leave me much leisure for local topography.
+On Sundays also I sang in the choir at St. Martin's Church, and my
+mother did not like me to walk out alone on the Sabbath afternoon, she
+herself slumbered, so that I wrote or read at home. I must confess I was
+at home as little as I could contrive.
+
+Home, after my father's death, had become a very quiet and uneventful
+place indeed. My mother had either an unimaginative temperament or her
+mind was greatly occupied with private religious solicitudes, and I
+remember her talking to me but little, and that usually upon topics
+I was anxious to evade. I had developed my own view about low-Church
+theology long before my father's death, and my meditation upon that
+event had finished my secret estrangement from my mother's faith. My
+reason would not permit even a remote chance of his being in hell, he
+was so manifestly not evil, and this religion would not permit him a
+remote chance of being out yet. When I was a little boy my mother had
+taught me to read and write and pray and had done many things for me,
+indeed she persisted in washing me and even in making my clothes until I
+rebelled against these things as indignities. But our minds parted very
+soon. She never began to understand the mental processes of my play,
+she never interested herself in my school life and work, she could not
+understand things I said; and she came, I think, quite insensibly to
+regard me with something of the same hopeless perplexity she had felt
+towards my father.
+
+Him she must have wedded under considerable delusions. I do not think
+he deceived her, indeed, nor do I suspect him of mercenariness in
+their union; but no doubt he played up to her requirements in the half
+ingenuous way that was and still is the quality of most wooing, and
+presented himself as a very brisk and orthodox young man. I wonder why
+nearly all love-making has to be fraudulent. Afterwards he must have
+disappointed her cruelly by letting one aspect after another of his
+careless, sceptical, experimental temperament appear. Her mind was fixed
+and definite, she embodied all that confidence in church and decorum and
+the assurances of the pulpit which was characteristic of the large mass
+of the English people--for after all, the rather low-Church section WAS
+the largest single mass--in early Victorian times. She had dreams, I
+suspect, of going to church with him side by side; she in a little
+poke bonnet and a large flounced crinoline, all mauve and magenta and
+starched under a little lace-trimmed parasol, and he in a tall silk hat
+and peg-top trousers and a roll-collar coat, and looking rather like
+the Prince Consort,--white angels almost visibly raining benedictions on
+their amiable progress. Perhaps she dreamt gently of much-belaced babies
+and an interestingly pious (but not too dissenting or fanatical) little
+girl or boy or so, also angel-haunted. And I think, too, she must have
+seen herself ruling a seemly "home of taste," with a vivarium in the
+conservatory that opened out of the drawing-room, or again, making
+preserves in the kitchen. My father's science-teaching, his diagrams
+of disembowelled humanity, his pictures of prehistoric beasts that
+contradicted the Flood, his disposition towards soft shirts and loose
+tweed suits, his inability to use a clothes brush, his spasmodic reading
+fits and his bulldog pipes, must have jarred cruelly with her rather
+unintelligent anticipations. His wild moments of violent temper when he
+would swear and smash things, absurd almost lovable storms that passed
+like summer thunder, must have been starkly dreadful to her. She
+was constitutionally inadaptable, and certainly made no attempt to
+understand or tolerate these outbreaks. She tried them by her standards,
+and by her standards they were wrong. Her standards hid him from her.
+The blazing things he said rankled in her mind unforgettably.
+
+As I remember them together they chafed constantly. Her attitude
+to nearly all his moods and all his enterprises was a sceptical
+disapproval. She treated him as something that belonged to me and not
+to her. "YOUR father," she used to call him, as though I had got him for
+her.
+
+She had married late and she had, I think, become mentally
+self-subsisting before her marriage. Even in those Herne Hill days
+I used to wonder what was going on in her mind, and I find that old
+speculative curiosity return as I write this. She took a considerable
+interest in the housework that our generally servantless condition put
+upon her--she used to have a charwoman in two or three times a week--but
+she did not do it with any great skill. She covered most of our
+furniture with flouncey ill-fitting covers, and she cooked plainly and
+without very much judgment. The Penge house, as it contained nearly
+all our Bromstead things, was crowded with furniture, and is chiefly
+associated in my mind with the smell of turpentine, a condiment she used
+very freely upon the veneered mahogany pieces. My mother had an equal
+dread of "blacks" by day and the "night air," so that our brightly clean
+windows were rarely open.
+
+She took a morning paper, and she would open it and glance at the
+headlines, but she did not read it until the afternoon and then, I
+think, she was interested only in the more violent crimes, and in
+railway and mine disasters and in the minutest domesticities of the
+Royal Family. Most of the books at home were my father's, and I do not
+think she opened any of them. She had one or two volumes that dated from
+her own youth, and she tried in vain to interest me in them; there was
+Miss Strickland's QUEENS OF ENGLAND, a book I remember with particular
+animosity, and QUEECHY and the WIDE WIDE WORLD. She made these books of
+hers into a class apart by sewing outer covers upon them of calico and
+figured muslin. To me in these habiliments they seemed not so much books
+as confederated old ladies.
+
+My mother was also very punctual with her religious duties, and rejoiced
+to watch me in the choir.
+
+On winter evenings she occupied an armchair on the other side of the
+table at which I sat, head on hand reading, and she would be darning
+stockings or socks or the like. We achieved an effect of rather stuffy
+comfortableness that was soporific, and in a passive way I think she
+found these among her happy times. On such occasions she was wont to put
+her work down on her knees and fall into a sort of thoughtless musing
+that would last for long intervals and rouse my curiosity. For like most
+young people I could not imagine mental states without definite forms.
+
+She carried on a correspondence with a number of cousins and friends,
+writing letters in a slanting Italian hand and dealing mainly with
+births, marriages and deaths, business starts (in the vaguest terms) and
+the distresses of bankruptcy.
+
+And yet, you know, she did have a curious intimate life of her own that
+I suspected nothing of at the time, that only now becomes credible
+to me. She kept a diary that is still in my possession, a diary of
+fragmentary entries in a miscellaneous collection of pocket books. She
+put down the texts of the sermons she heard, and queer stiff little
+comments on casual visitors,--"Miss G. and much noisy shrieking talk
+about games and such frivolities and CROQUAY. A. delighted and VERY
+ATTENTIVE." Such little human entries abound. She had an odd way of
+never writing a name, only an initial; my father is always "A.," and I
+am always "D." It is manifest she followed the domestic events in the
+life of the Princess of Wales, who is now Queen Mother, with peculiar
+interest and sympathy. "Pray G. all may be well," she writes in one such
+crisis.
+
+But there are things about myself that I still find too poignant to tell
+easily, certain painful and clumsy circumstances of my birth in very
+great detail, the distresses of my infantile ailments. Then later I
+find such things as this: "Heard D. s----." The "s" is evidently "swear
+"--"G. bless and keep my boy from evil." And again, with the thin
+handwriting shaken by distress: "D. would not go to church, and hardened
+his heart and said wicked infidel things, much disrespect of the clergy.
+The anthem is tiresome!!! That men should set up to be wiser than
+their maker!!!" Then trebly underlined: "I FEAR HIS FATHER'S TEACHING."
+Dreadful little tangle of misapprehensions and false judgments! More
+comforting for me to read, "D. very kind and good. He grows more
+thoughtful every day." I suspect myself of forgotten hypocrisies.
+
+At just one point my mother's papers seem to dip deeper. I think the
+death of my father must have stirred her for the first time for many
+years to think for herself. Even she could not go on living in any peace
+at all, believing that he had indeed been flung headlong into hell. Of
+this gnawing solicitude she never spoke to me, never, and for her diary
+also she could find no phrases. But on a loose half-sheet of notepaper
+between its pages I find this passage that follows, written very
+carefully. I do not know whose lines they are nor how she came upon
+them. They run:--
+
+     "And if there be no meeting past the grave;
+      If all is darkness, silence, yet 'tis rest.
+      Be not afraid ye waiting hearts that weep,
+      For God still giveth His beloved sleep,
+      And if an endless sleep He wills, so best."
+
+That scrap of verse amazed me when I read it. I could even wonder if my
+mother really grasped the import of what she had copied out. It affected
+me as if a stone-deaf person had suddenly turned and joined in a
+whispered conversation. It set me thinking how far a mind in its general
+effect quite hopelessly limited, might range. After that I went through
+all her diaries, trying to find something more than a conventional term
+of tenderness for my father. But I found nothing. And yet somehow there
+grew upon me the realisation that there had been love.... Her love for
+me, on the other hand, was abundantly expressed.
+
+I knew nothing of that secret life of feeling at the time; such
+expression as it found was all beyond my schoolboy range. I did not know
+when I pleased her and I did not know when I distressed her. Chiefly
+I was aware of my mother as rather dull company, as a mind thorny with
+irrational conclusions and incapable of explication, as one believing
+quite wilfully and irritatingly in impossible things. So I suppose it
+had to be; life was coming to me in new forms and with new requirements.
+It was essential to our situation that we should fail to understand.
+After this space of years I have come to realisations and attitudes that
+dissolve my estrangement from her, I can pierce these barriers, I
+can see her and feel her as a loving and feeling and desiring and
+muddle-headed person. There are times when I would have her alive again,
+if only that I might be kind to her for a little while and give her
+some return for the narrow intense affection, the tender desires, she
+evidently lavished so abundantly on me. But then again I ask how I
+could make that return? And I realise the futility of such dreaming. Her
+demand was rigid, and to meet it I should need to act and lie.
+
+So she whose blood fed me, whose body made me, lies in my memory as I
+saw her last, fixed, still, infinitely intimate, infinitely remote....
+
+My own case with my mother, however, does not awaken the same regret I
+feel when I think of how she misjudged and irked my father, and turned
+his weaknesses into thorns for her own tormenting. I wish I could look
+back without that little twinge to two people who were both in their
+different quality so good. But goodness that is narrow is a pedestrian
+and ineffectual goodness. Her attitude to my father seems to me one of
+the essentially tragic things that have come to me personally, one of
+those things that nothing can transfigure, that REMAIN sorrowful, that I
+cannot soothe with any explanation, for as I remember him he was indeed
+the most lovable of weak spasmodic men. But my mother had been trained
+in a hard and narrow system that made evil out of many things not in
+the least evil, and inculcated neither kindliness nor charity. All their
+estrangement followed from that.
+
+These cramping cults do indeed take an enormous toll of human love
+and happiness, and not only that but what we Machiavellians must needs
+consider, they make frightful breaches in human solidarity. I suppose I
+am a deeply religious man, as men of my quality go, but I hate more
+and more, as I grow older, the shadow of intolerance cast by religious
+organisations. All my life has been darkened by irrational intolerance,
+by arbitrary irrational prohibitions and exclusions. Mahometanism
+with its fierce proselytism, has, I suppose, the blackest record of
+uncharitableness, but most of the Christian sects are tainted, tainted
+to a degree beyond any of the anterior paganisms, with this same hateful
+quality. It is their exclusive claim that sends them wrong, the vain
+ambition that inspires them all to teach a uniform one-sided God and be
+the one and only gateway to salvation. Deprecation of all outside the
+household of faith, an organised undervaluation of heretical goodness
+and lovableness, follows, necessarily. Every petty difference is
+exaggerated to the quality of a saving grace or a damning defect.
+Elaborate precautions are taken to shield the believer's mind against
+broad or amiable suggestions; the faithful are deterred by dark
+allusions, by sinister warnings, from books, from theatres, from
+worldly conversation, from all the kindly instruments that mingle human
+sympathy. For only by isolating its flock can the organisation survive.
+
+Every month there came to my mother a little magazine called, if I
+remember rightly, the HOME CHURCHMAN, with the combined authority of
+print and clerical commendation. It was the most evil thing that ever
+came into the house, a very devil, a thin little pamphlet with
+one woodcut illustration on the front page of each number; now the
+uninviting visage of some exponent of the real and only doctrine and
+attitudes, now some coral strand in act of welcoming the missionaries of
+God's mysterious preferences, now a new church in the Victorian Gothic.
+The vile rag it was! A score of vices that shun the policeman have
+nothing of its subtle wickedness. It was an outrage upon the natural
+kindliness of men. The contents were all admirably adjusted to keep a
+spirit in prison. Their force of sustained suggestion was tremendous.
+There would be dreadful intimations of the swift retribution that fell
+upon individuals for Sabbath-breaking, and upon nations for weakening
+towards Ritualism, or treating Roman Catholics as tolerable human
+beings; there would be great rejoicings over the conversion of alleged
+Jews, and terrible descriptions of the death-beds of prominent infidels
+with boldly invented last words,--the most unscrupulous lying; there
+would be the appallingly edifying careers of "early piety" lusciously
+described, or stories of condemned criminals who traced their final ruin
+unerringly to early laxities of the kind that leads people to give up
+subscribing to the HOME CHURCHMAN.
+
+Every month that evil spirit brought about a slump in our mutual love.
+My mother used to read the thing and become depressed and anxious for my
+spiritual welfare, used to be stirred to unintelligent pestering....
+
+
+2
+
+A few years ago I met the editor of this same HOME CHURCHMAN. It was
+at one of the weekly dinners of that Fleet Street dining club, the
+Blackfriars.
+
+I heard the paper's name with a queer little shock and surveyed the
+man with interest. No doubt he was only a successor of the purveyor of
+discords who darkened my boyhood. It was amazing to find an influence
+so terrible embodied in a creature so palpably petty. He was seated some
+way down a table at right angles to the one at which I sat, a man of
+mean appearance with a greyish complexion, thin, with a square nose,
+a heavy wiry moustache and a big Adam's apple sticking out between the
+wings of his collar. He ate with considerable appetite and unconcealed
+relish, and as his jaw was underhung, he chummed and made the moustache
+wave like reeds in the swell of a steamer. It gave him a conscientious
+look. After dinner he a little forced himself upon me. At that time,
+though the shadow of my scandal was already upon me, I still seemed to
+be shaping for great successes, and he was glad to be in conversation
+with me and anxious to intimate political sympathy and support. I tried
+to make him talk of the HOME CHURCHMAN and the kindred publications he
+ran, but he was manifestly ashamed of his job so far as I was concerned.
+
+"One wants," he said, pitching himself as he supposed in my key, "to put
+constructive ideas into our readers, but they are narrow, you know, very
+narrow. Very." He made his moustache and lips express judicious regret.
+"One has to consider them carefully, one has to respect their attitudes.
+One dare not go too far with them. One has to feel one's way."
+
+He chummed and the moustache bristled.
+
+A hireling, beyond question, catering for a demand. I gathered there
+was a home in Tufnell Park, and three boys to be fed and clothed and
+educated....
+
+I had the curiosity to buy a copy of his magazine afterwards, and it
+seemed much the same sort of thing that had worried my mother in my
+boyhood. There was the usual Christian hero, this time with mutton-chop
+whiskers and a long bare upper lip. The Jesuits, it seemed, were still
+hard at it, and Heaven frightfully upset about the Sunday opening of
+museums and the falling birth-rate, and as touchy and vindictive as
+ever. There were two vigorous paragraphs upon the utter damnableness
+of the Rev. R. J. Campbell, a contagious damnableness I gathered, one
+wasn't safe within a mile of Holborn Viaduct, and a foul-mouthed
+attack on poor little Wilkins the novelist--who was being baited by the
+moralists at that time for making one of his big women characters, not
+being in holy wedlock, desire a baby and say so....
+
+The broadening of human thought is a slow and complex process. We do go
+on, we do get on. But when one thinks that people are living and dying
+now, quarrelling and sulking, misled and misunderstanding, vaguely
+fearful, condemning and thwarting one another in the close darknesses of
+these narrow cults--Oh, God! one wants a gale out of Heaven, one wants a
+great wind from the sea!
+
+
+3
+
+While I lived at Penge two little things happened to me, trivial in
+themselves and yet in their quality profoundly significant. They had
+this in common, that they pierced the texture of the life I was quietly
+taking for granted and let me see through it into realities--realities
+I had indeed known about before but never realised. Each of these
+experiences left me with a sense of shock, with all the values in
+my life perplexingly altered, attempting readjustment. One of these
+disturbing and illuminating events was that I was robbed of a new
+pocket-knife and the other that I fell in love. It was altogether
+surprising to me to be robbed. You see, as an only child I had always
+been fairly well looked after and protected, and the result was an
+amazing confidence in the practical goodness of the people one met in
+the world. I knew there were robbers in the world, just as I knew there
+were tigers; that I was ever likely to meet robber or tiger face to face
+seemed equally impossible.
+
+The knife as I remember it was a particularly jolly one with all sorts
+of instruments in it, tweezers and a thing for getting a stone out
+of the hoof of a horse, and a corkscrew; it had cost me a carefully
+accumulated half-crown, and amounted indeed to a new experience in
+knives. I had had it for two or three days, and then one afternoon I
+dropped it through a hole in my pocket on a footpath crossing a field
+between Penge and Anerley. I heard it fall in the way one does without
+at the time appreciating what had happened, then, later, before I got
+home, when my hand wandered into my pocket to embrace the still dear
+new possession I found it gone, and instantly that memory of something
+hitting the ground sprang up into consciousness. I went back and
+commenced a search. Almost immediately I was accosted by the leader of a
+little gang of four or five extremely dirty and ragged boys of assorted
+sizes and slouching carriage who were coming from the Anerley direction.
+
+"Lost anythink, Matey?" said he.
+
+I explained.
+
+"'E's dropped 'is knife," said my interlocutor, and joined in the
+search.
+
+"What sort of 'andle was it, Matey?" said a small white-faced sniffing
+boy in a big bowler hat.
+
+I supplied the information. His sharp little face scrutinised the ground
+about us.
+
+"GOT it," he said, and pounced.
+
+"Give it 'ere," said the big boy hoarsely, and secured it.
+
+I walked towards him serenely confident that he would hand it over to
+me, and that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
+
+"No bloomin' fear!" he said, regarding me obliquely. "Oo said it was
+your knife?"
+
+Remarkable doubts assailed me. "Of course it's my knife," I said. The
+other boys gathered round me.
+
+"This ain't your knife," said the big boy, and spat casually.
+
+"I dropped it just now."
+
+"Findin's keepin's, I believe," said the big boy.
+
+"Nonsense," I said. "Give me my knife."
+
+"'Ow many blades it got?"
+
+"Three."
+
+"And what sort of 'andle?"
+
+"Bone."
+
+"Got a corkscrew like?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Ah! This ain't your knife no'ow. See?"
+
+He made no offer to show it to me. My breath went.
+
+"Look here!" I said. "I saw that kid pick it up. It IS my knife."
+
+"Rot!" said the big boy, and slowly, deliberately put my knife into his
+trouser pocket.
+
+I braced my soul for battle. All civilisation was behind me, but I doubt
+if it kept the colour in my face. I buttoned my jacket and clenched my
+fists and advanced on my antagonist--he had, I suppose, the advantage of
+two years of age and three inches of height. "Hand over that knife," I
+said.
+
+Then one of the smallest of the band assailed me with extraordinary
+vigour and swiftness from behind, had an arm round my neck and a knee in
+my back before I had the slightest intimation of attack, and so got me
+down. "I got 'im, Bill," squeaked this amazing little ruffian. My nose
+was flattened by a dirty hand, and as I struck out and hit something
+like sacking, some one kicked my elbow. Two or three seemed to be at
+me at the same time. Then I rolled over and sat up to discover them all
+making off, a ragged flight, footballing my cap, my City Merchants' cap,
+amongst them. I leapt to my feet in a passion of indignation and pursued
+them.
+
+But I did not overtake them. We are beings of mixed composition, and I
+doubt if mine was a single-minded pursuit. I knew that honour required
+me to pursue, and I had a vivid impression of having just been down
+in the dust with a very wiry and active and dirty little antagonist of
+disagreeable odour and incredible and incalculable unscrupulousness,
+kneeling on me and gripping my arm and neck. I wanted of course to be
+even with him, but also I doubted if catching him would necessarily
+involve that. They kicked my cap into the ditch at the end of the field,
+and made off compactly along a cinder lane while I turned aside to
+recover my dishonoured headdress. As I knocked the dust out of that and
+out of my jacket, and brushed my knees and readjusted my very crumpled
+collar, I tried to focus this startling occurrence in my mind.
+
+I had vague ideas of going to a policeman or of complaining at a police
+station, but some boyish instinct against informing prevented that. No
+doubt I entertained ideas of vindictive pursuit and murderous reprisals.
+And I was acutely enraged whenever I thought of my knife. The thing
+indeed rankled in my mind for weeks and weeks, and altered all the
+flavour of my world for me. It was the first time I glimpsed the simple
+brute violence that lurks and peeps beneath our civilisation. A certain
+kindly complacency of attitude towards the palpably lower classes was
+qualified for ever.
+
+
+4
+
+But the other experience was still more cardinal. It was the first clear
+intimation of a new motif in life, the sex motif, that was to rise and
+increase and accumulate power and enrichment and interweave with and at
+last dominate all my life.
+
+It was when I was nearly fifteen this happened. It is inseparably
+connected in my mind with the dusk of warm September evenings. I never
+met the girl I loved by daylight, and I have forgotten her name. It was
+some insignificant name.
+
+Yet the peculiar quality of the adventure keeps it shining darkly like
+some deep coloured gem in the common setting of my memories. It came as
+something new and strange, something that did not join on to anything
+else in my life or connect with any of my thoughts or beliefs or habits;
+it was a wonder, a mystery, a discovery about myself, a discovery
+about the whole world. Only in after years did sexual feeling lose that
+isolation and spread itself out to illuminate and pervade and at last
+possess the whole broad vision of life.
+
+It was in that phase of an urban youth's development, the phase of the
+cheap cigarette, that this thing happened. One evening I came by chance
+on a number of young people promenading by the light of a row of shops
+towards Beckington, and, with all the glory of a glowing cigarette
+between my lips, I joined their strolling number. These twilight parades
+of young people, youngsters chiefly of the lower middle-class, are one
+of the odd social developments of the great suburban growths--unkindly
+critics, blind to the inner meanings of things, call them, I believe,
+Monkeys' Parades--the shop apprentices, the young work girls, the boy
+clerks and so forth, stirred by mysterious intimations, spend their
+first-earned money upon collars and ties, chiffon hats, smart lace
+collars, walking-sticks, sunshades or cigarettes, and come valiantly
+into the vague transfiguring mingling of gaslight and evening, to walk
+up and down, to eye meaningly, even to accost and make friends. It is
+a queer instinctive revolt from the narrow limited friendless homes in
+which so many find themselves, a going out towards something, romance if
+you will, beauty, that has suddenly become a need--a need that hitherto
+has lain dormant and unsuspected. They promenade.
+
+Vulgar!--it is as vulgar as the spirit that calls the moth abroad in the
+evening and lights the body of the glow-worm in the night. I made my
+way through the throng, a little contemptuously as became a public
+schoolboy, my hands in my pockets--none of your cheap canes for me!--and
+very careful of the lie of my cigarette upon my lips. And two girls
+passed me, one a little taller than the other, with dim warm-tinted
+faces under clouds of dark hair and with dark eyes like pools reflecting
+stars.
+
+I half turned, and the shorter one glanced back at me over her
+shoulder--I could draw you now the pose of her cheek and neck and
+shoulder--and instantly I was as passionately in love with the girl as
+I have ever been before or since, as any man ever was with any woman. I
+turned about and followed them, I flung away my cigarette ostentatiously
+and lifted my school cap and spoke to them.
+
+The girl answered shyly with her dark eyes on my face. What I said
+and what she said I cannot remember, but I have little doubt it was
+something absolutely vapid. It really did not matter; the thing was we
+had met. I felt as I think a new-hatched moth must feel when suddenly
+its urgent headlong searching brings it in tremulous amazement upon its
+mate.
+
+We met, covered from each other, with all the nets of civilisation
+keeping us apart. We walked side by side.
+
+It led to scarcely more than that. I think we met four or five times
+altogether, and always with her nearly silent elder sister on the other
+side of her. We walked on the last two occasions arm in arm, furtively
+caressing each other's hands, we went away from the glare of the shops
+into the quiet roads of villadom, and there we whispered instead of
+talking and looked closely into one another's warm and shaded face.
+"Dear," I whispered very daringly, and she answered, "Dear!" We had a
+vague sense that we wanted more of that quality of intimacy and more. We
+wanted each other as one wants beautiful music again or to breathe again
+the scent of flowers.
+
+And that is all there was between us. The events are nothing, the thing
+that matters is the way in which this experience stabbed through the
+common stuff of life and left it pierced, with a light, with a huge new
+interest shining through the rent.
+
+When I think of it I can recall even now the warm mystery of her face,
+her lips a little apart, lips that I never kissed, her soft shadowed
+throat, and I feel again the sensuous stir of her proximity....
+
+Those two girls never told me their surname nor let me approach their
+house. They made me leave them at the corner of a road of small houses
+near Penge Station. And quite abruptly, without any intimation, they
+vanished and came to the meeting place no more, they vanished as a
+moth goes out of a window into the night, and left me possessed of an
+intolerable want....
+
+The affair pervaded my existence for many weeks. I could not do my work
+and I could not rest at home. Night after night I promenaded up and down
+that Monkeys' Parade full of an unappeasable desire, with a thwarted
+sense of something just begun that ought to have gone on. I went
+backwards and forwards on the way to the vanishing place, and at last
+explored the forbidden road that had swallowed them up. But I never saw
+her again, except that later she came to me, my symbol of womanhood, in
+dreams. How my blood was stirred! I lay awake of nights whispering in
+the darkness for her. I prayed for her.
+
+Indeed that girl, who probably forgot the last vestiges of me when her
+first real kiss came to her, ruled and haunted me, gave a Queen to my
+imagination and a texture to all my desires until I became a man.
+
+I generalised her at last. I suddenly discovered that poetry was about
+her and that she was the key to all that had hitherto seemed nonsense
+about love. I took to reading novels, and if the heroine could not
+possibly be like her, dusky and warm and starlike, I put the book
+aside....
+
+I hesitate and add here one other confession. I want to tell this thing
+because it seems to me we are altogether too restrained and secretive
+about such matters. The cardinal thing in life sneaks in to us darkly
+and shamefully like a thief in the night.
+
+One day during my Cambridge days--it must have been in my first year
+before I knew Hatherleigh--I saw in a print-shop window near the Strand
+an engraving of a girl that reminded me sharply of Penge and its dusky
+encounter. It was just a half length of a bare-shouldered, bare-breasted
+Oriental with arms akimbo, smiling faintly. I looked at it, went my way,
+then turned back and bought it. I felt I must have it. The odd thing
+is that I was more than a little shamefaced about it. I did not have it
+framed and hung in my room open to the criticism of my friends, but I
+kept it in the drawer of my writing-table. And I kept that drawer locked
+for a year. It speedily merged with and became identified with the dark
+girl of Penge. That engraving became in a way my mistress. Often when I
+had sported my oak and was supposed to be reading, I was sitting with it
+before me.
+
+Obeying some instinct I kept the thing very secret indeed. For a time
+nobody suspected what was locked in my drawer nor what was locked in me.
+I seemed as sexless as my world required.
+
+
+5
+
+These things stabbed through my life, intimations of things above and
+below and before me. They had an air of being no more than incidents,
+interruptions.
+
+The broad substance of my existence at this time was the City Merchants
+School. Home was a place where I slept and read, and the mooning
+explorations of the south-eastern postal district which occupied the
+restless evenings and spare days of my vacations mere interstices,
+giving glimpses of enigmatical lights and distant spaces between the
+woven threads of a school-boy's career. School life began for me every
+morning at Herne Hill, for there I was joined by three or four other
+boys and the rest of the way we went together. Most of the streets and
+roads we traversed in our morning's walk from Victoria are still intact,
+the storms of rebuilding that have submerged so much of my boyhood's
+London have passed and left them, and I have revived the impression of
+them again and again in recent years as I have clattered dinnerward in a
+hansom or hummed along in a motor cab to some engagement. The main gate
+still looks out with the same expression of ancient well-proportioned
+kindliness upon St. Margaret's Close. There are imposing new science
+laboratories in Chambers Street indeed, but the old playing fields are
+unaltered except for the big electric trams that go droning and spitting
+blue flashes along the western boundary. I know Ratten, the new Head,
+very well, but I have not been inside the school to see if it has
+changed at all since I went up to Cambridge.
+
+I took all they put before us very readily as a boy, for I had a mind of
+vigorous appetite, but since I have grown mentally to man's estate and
+developed a more and more comprehensive view of our national process
+and our national needs, I am more and more struck by the oddity of the
+educational methods pursued, their aimless disconnectedness from the
+constructive forces in the community. I suppose if we are to view the
+public school as anything more than an institution that has just chanced
+to happen, we must treat it as having a definite function towards the
+general scheme of the nation, as being in a sense designed to take the
+crude young male of the more or less responsible class, to correct
+his harsh egotisms, broaden his outlook, give him a grasp of the
+contemporary developments he will presently be called upon to influence
+and control, and send him on to the university to be made a leading and
+ruling social man. It is easy enough to carp at schoolmasters and set up
+for an Educational Reformer, I know, but still it is impossible not
+to feel how infinitely more effectually--given certain impossibilities
+perhaps--the job might be done.
+
+My memory of school has indeed no hint whatever of that quality of
+elucidation it seems reasonable to demand from it. Here all about me
+was London, a vast inexplicable being, a vortex of gigantic forces, that
+filled and overwhelmed me with impressions, that stirred my imagination
+to a perpetual vague enquiry; and my school not only offered no key
+to it, but had practically no comment to make upon it at all. We were
+within three miles of Westminster and Charing Cross, the government
+offices of a fifth of mankind were all within an hour's stroll, great
+economic changes were going on under our eyes, now the hoardings flamed
+with election placards, now the Salvation Army and now the unemployed
+came trailing in procession through the winter-grey streets, now the
+newspaper placards outside news-shops told of battles in strange places,
+now of amazing discoveries, now of sinister crimes, abject squalor and
+poverty, imperial splendour and luxury, Buckingham Palace, Rotten Row,
+Mayfair, the slums of Pimlico, garbage-littered streets of bawling
+costermongers, the inky silver of the barge-laden Thames--such was the
+background of our days. We went across St. Margaret's Close and through
+the school gate into a quiet puerile world apart from all these things.
+We joined in the earnest acquirement of all that was necessary for Greek
+epigrams and Latin verse, and for the rest played games. We dipped down
+into something clear and elegantly proportioned and time-worn and for
+all its high resolve of stalwart virility a little feeble, like our
+blackened and decayed portals by Inigo Jones.
+
+Within, we were taught as the chief subjects of instruction, Latin and
+Greek. We were taught very badly because the men who taught us did not
+habitually use either of these languages, nobody uses them any more
+now except perhaps for the Latin of a few Levantine monasteries. At the
+utmost our men read them. We were taught these languages because long
+ago Latin had been the language of civilisation; the one way of escape
+from the narrow and localised life had lain in those days through Latin,
+and afterwards Greek had come in as the vehicle of a flood of new and
+amazing ideas. Once these two languages had been the sole means of
+initiation to the detached criticism and partial comprehension of the
+world. I can imagine the fierce zeal of our first Heads, Gardener and
+Roper, teaching Greek like passionate missionaries, as a progressive
+Chinaman might teach English to the boys of Pekin, clumsily,
+impatiently, with rod and harsh urgency, but sincerely, patriotically,
+because they felt that behind it lay revelations, the irresistible
+stimulus to a new phase of history. That was long ago. A new great
+world, a vaster Imperialism had arisen about the school, had assimilated
+all these amazing and incredible ideas, had gone on to new and yet more
+amazing developments of its own. But the City Merchants School still
+made the substance of its teaching Latin and Greek, still, with no
+thought of rotating crops, sowed in a dream amidst the harvesting.
+
+There is no fierceness left in the teaching now. Just after I went up
+to Trinity, Gates, our Head, wrote a review article in defence of our
+curriculum. In this, among other indiscretions, he asserted that it was
+impossible to write good English without an illuminating knowledge of
+the classic tongues, and he split an infinitive and failed to button up
+a sentence in saying so. His main argument conceded every objection
+a reasonable person could make to the City Merchants' curriculum. He
+admitted that translation had now placed all the wisdom of the past at
+a common man's disposal, that scarcely a field of endeavour remained
+in which modern work had not long since passed beyond the ancient
+achievement. He disclaimed any utility. But there was, he said, a
+peculiar magic in these grammatical exercises no other subjects of
+instruction possessed. Nothing else provided the same strengthening and
+orderly discipline for the mind.
+
+He said that, knowing the Senior Classics he did, himself a Senior
+Classic!
+
+Yet in a dim confused way I think he was making out a case. In schools
+as we knew them, and with the sort of assistant available, the sort of
+assistant who has been trained entirely on the old lines, he could
+see no other teaching so effectual in developing attention, restraint,
+sustained constructive effort and various yet systematic adjustment. And
+that was as far as his imagination could go.
+
+It is infinitely easier to begin organised human affairs than end them;
+the curriculum and the social organisation of the English public school
+are the crowning instances of that. They go on because they have begun.
+Schools are not only immortal institutions but reproductive ones. Our
+founder, Jabez Arvon, knew nothing, I am sure, of Gates' pedagogic
+values and would, I feel certain, have dealt with them disrespectfully.
+But public schools and university colleges sprang into existence
+correlated, the scholars went on to the universities and came back to
+teach the schools, to teach as they themselves had been taught, before
+they had ever made any real use of the teaching; the crowd of boys
+herded together, a crowd perpetually renewed and unbrokenly the same,
+adjusted itself by means of spontaneously developed institutions. In
+a century, by its very success, this revolutionary innovation of
+Renascence public schools had become an immense tradition woven closely
+into the fabric of the national life. Intelligent and powerful people
+ceased to talk Latin or read Greek, they had got what was wanted, but
+that only left the schoolmaster the freer to elaborate his point. Since
+most men of any importance or influence in the country had been through
+the mill, it was naturally a little difficult to persuade them that
+it was not quite the best and most ennobling mill the wit of man could
+devise. And, moreover, they did not want their children made strange to
+them. There was all the machinery and all the men needed to teach the
+old subjects, and none to teach whatever new the critic might propose.
+Such science instruction as my father gave seemed indeed the uninviting
+alternative to the classical grind. It was certainly an altogether
+inferior instrument at that time.
+
+So it was I occupied my mind with the exact study of dead languages
+for seven long years. It was the strangest of detachments. We would sit
+under the desk of such a master as Topham like creatures who had fallen
+into an enchanted pit, and he would do his considerable best to work us
+up to enthusiasm for, let us say, a Greek play. If we flagged he would
+lash himself to revive us. He would walk about the class-room mouthing
+great lines in a rich roar, and asking us with a flushed face and
+shining eyes if it was not "GLORIOUS." The very sight of Greek letters
+brings back to me the dingy, faded, ink-splashed quality of our
+class-room, the banging of books, Topham's disordered hair, the sheen of
+his alpaca gown, his deep unmusical intonations and the wide striding
+of his creaking boots. Glorious! And being plastic human beings we would
+consent that it was glorious, and some of us even achieved an answering
+reverberation and a sympathetic flush. I at times responded freely. We
+all accepted from him unquestioningly that these melodies, these strange
+sounds, exceeded any possibility of beauty that lay in the Gothic
+intricacy, the splash and glitter, the jar and recovery, the stabbing
+lights, the heights and broad distances of our English tongue. That
+indeed was the chief sin of him. It was not that he was for Greek and
+Latin, but that he was fiercely against every beauty that was neither
+classic nor deferred to classical canons.
+
+And what exactly did we make of it, we seniors who understood it best?
+We visualised dimly through that dust and the grammatical difficulties,
+the spectacle of the chorus chanting grotesquely, helping out
+protagonist and antagonist, masked and buskined, with the telling of
+incomprehensible parricides, of inexplicable incest, of gods faded
+beyond symbolism, of that Relentless Law we did not believe in for a
+moment, that no modern western European can believe in. We thought
+of the characters in the unconvincing wigs and costumes of our school
+performance. No Gilbert Murray had come as yet to touch these things
+to life again. It was like the ghost of an antiquarian's toy theatre,
+a ghost that crumbled and condensed into a gritty dust of construing as
+one looked at it.
+
+Marks, shindies, prayers and punishments, all flavoured with the
+leathery stuffiness of time-worn Big Hall....
+
+And then out one would come through our grey old gate into the evening
+light and the spectacle of London hurrying like a cataract, London in
+black and brown and blue and gleaming silver, roaring like the very loom
+of Time. We came out into the new world no teacher has yet had the power
+and courage to grasp and expound. Life and death sang all about one,
+joys and fears on such a scale, in such an intricacy as never Greek
+nor Roman knew. The interminable procession of horse omnibuses went
+lumbering past, bearing countless people we knew not whence, we knew
+not whither. Hansoms clattered, foot passengers jostled one, a thousand
+appeals of shop and boarding caught the eye. The multi-coloured lights
+of window and street mingled with the warm glow of the declining day
+under the softly flushing London skies; the ever-changing placards,
+the shouting news-vendors, told of a kaleidoscopic drama all about the
+globe. One did not realise what had happened to us, but the voice
+of Topham was suddenly drowned and lost, he and his minute, remote
+gesticulations....
+
+That submerged and isolated curriculum did not even join on to living
+interests where it might have done so. We were left absolutely to the
+hints of the newspapers, to casual political speeches, to the cartoons
+of the comic papers or a chance reading of some Socialist pamphlet for
+any general ideas whatever about the huge swirling world process
+in which we found ourselves. I always look back with particular
+exasperation to the cessation of our modern history at the year 1815.
+There it pulled up abruptly, as though it had come upon something
+indelicate....
+
+But, after all, what would Topham or Flack have made of the huge
+adjustments of the nineteenth century? Flack was the chief cricketer on
+the staff; he belonged to that great cult which pretends that the place
+of this or that county in the struggle for the championship is a matter
+of supreme importance to boys. He obliged us to affect a passionate
+interest in the progress of county matches, to work up unnatural
+enthusiasms. What a fuss there would be when some well-trained boy,
+panting as if from Marathon, appeared with an evening paper! "I say, you
+chaps, Middlesex all out for a hundred and five!"
+
+Under Flack's pressure I became, I confess, a cricket humbug of the
+first class. I applied myself industriously year by year to mastering
+scores and averages; I pretended that Lords or the Oval were the places
+nearest Paradise for me. (I never went to either.) Through a slight
+mistake about the county boundary I adopted Surrey for my loyalty,
+though as a matter of fact we were by some five hundred yards or so in
+Kent. It did quite as well for my purposes. I bowled rather straight and
+fast, and spent endless hours acquiring the skill to bowl Flack out. He
+was a bat in the Corinthian style, rich and voluminous, and succumbed
+very easily to a low shooter or an unexpected Yorker, but usually he was
+caught early by long leg. The difficulty was to bowl him before he got
+caught. He loved to lift a ball to leg. After one had clean bowled him
+at the practice nets one deliberately gave him a ball to leg just to
+make him feel nice again.
+
+Flack went about a world of marvels dreaming of leg hits. He has been
+observed, going across the Park on his way to his highly respectable
+club in Piccadilly, to break from profound musings into a strange brief
+dance that ended with an imaginary swipe with his umbrella, a roofer,
+over the trees towards Buckingham Palace. The hit accomplished, Flack
+resumed his way.
+
+Inadequately instructed foreigners would pass him in terror, needlessly
+alert.
+
+
+6
+
+These schoolmasters move through my memory as always a little distant
+and more than a little incomprehensible. Except when they wore flannels,
+I saw them almost always in old college caps and gowns, a uniform which
+greatly increased their detachment from the world of actual men. Gates,
+the head, was a lean loose-limbed man, rather stupid I discovered when I
+reached the Sixth and came into contact with him, but honest, simple
+and very eager to be liberal-minded. He was bald, with an almost conical
+baldness, with a grizzled pointed beard, small featured and, under the
+stresses of a Zeitgeist that demanded liberality, with an expression of
+puzzled but resolute resistance to his own unalterable opinions. He made
+a tall dignified figure in his gown. In my junior days he spoke to me
+only three or four times, and then he annoyed me by giving me a wrong
+surname; it was a sore point because I was an outsider and not one of
+the old school families, the Shoesmiths, the Naylors, the Marklows, the
+Tophams, the Pevises and suchlike, who came generation after generation.
+I recall him most vividly against the background of faded brown
+book-backs in the old library in which we less destructive seniors were
+trusted to work, with the light from the stained-glass window falling
+in coloured patches on his face. It gave him the appearance of having no
+colour of his own. He had a habit of scratching the beard on his cheek
+as he talked, and he used to come and consult us about things and
+invariably do as we said. That, in his phraseology, was "maintaining the
+traditions of the school."
+
+He had indeed an effect not of a man directing a school, but of a
+man captured and directed by a school. Dead and gone Elizabethans had
+begotten a monster that could carry him about in its mouth.
+
+Yet being a man, as I say, with his hair a little stirred by a Zeitgeist
+that made for change, Gates did at times display a disposition towards
+developments. City Merchants had no modern side, and utilitarian spirits
+were carping in the PALL MALL GAZETTE and elsewhere at the omissions
+from our curriculum, and particularly at our want of German. Moreover,
+four classes still worked together with much clashing and uproar in the
+old Big Hall that had once held in a common tumult the entire school.
+Gates used to come and talk to us older fellows about these things.
+
+"I don't wish to innovate unduly," he used to say. "But we ought to get
+in some German, you know,--for those who like it. The army men will be
+wanting it some of these days."
+
+He referred to the organisation of regular evening preparation for the
+lower boys in Big Hall as a "revolutionary change," but he achieved it,
+and he declared he began the replacement of the hacked wooden tables, at
+which the boys had worked since Tudor days, by sloping desks with safety
+inkpots and scientifically adjustable seats, "with grave misgivings."
+And though he never birched a boy in his life, and was, I am convinced,
+morally incapable of such a scuffle, he retained the block and birch in
+the school through all his term of office, and spoke at the Headmasters'
+Conference in temperate approval of corporal chastisement, comparing it,
+dear soul! to the power of the sword....
+
+I wish I could, in some measure and without tediousness, convey the
+effect of his discourses to General Assembly in Big Hall. But that
+is like trying to draw the obverse and reverse of a sixpence worn to
+complete illegibility. His tall fine figure stood high on the days, his
+thoughtful tenor filled the air as he steered his hazardous way
+through sentences that dragged inconclusive tails and dropped redundant
+prepositions. And he pleaded ever so urgently, ever so finely, that
+what we all knew for Sin was sinful, and on the whole best avoided
+altogether, and so went on with deepening notes and even with short
+arresting gestures of the right arm and hand, to stir and exhort us
+towards goodness, towards that modern, unsectarian goodness, goodness
+in general and nothing in particular, which the Zeitgeist seemed to
+indicate in those transitional years.
+
+
+7
+
+The school never quite got hold of me. Partly I think that was because
+I was a day-boy and so freer than most of the boys, partly because of
+a temperamental disposition to see things in my own way and have my
+private dreams, partly because I was a little antagonised by the family
+traditions that ran through the school. I was made to feel at first
+that I was a rank outsider, and I never quite forgot it. I suffered very
+little bullying, and I never had a fight--in all my time there were only
+three fights--but I followed my own curiosities. I was already a
+very keen theologian and politician before I was fifteen. I was also
+intensely interested in modern warfare. I read the morning papers in
+the Reading Room during the midday recess, never missed the illustrated
+weeklies, and often when I could afford it I bought a PALL MALL GAZETTE
+on my way home.
+
+I do not think that I was very exceptional in that; most intelligent
+boys, I believe, want naturally to be men, and are keenly interested
+in men's affairs. There is not the universal passion for a magnified
+puerility among them it is customary to assume. I was indeed a voracious
+reader of everything but boys' books--which I detested--and fiction. I
+read histories, travel, popular science and controversy with particular
+zest, and I loved maps. School work and school games were quite
+subordinate affairs for me. I worked well and made a passable figure
+at games, and I do not think I was abnormally insensitive to the fine
+quality of our school, to the charm of its mediaeval nucleus, its
+Gothic cloisters, its scraps of Palladian and its dignified Georgian
+extensions; the contrast of the old quiet, that in spite of our presence
+pervaded it everywhere, with the rushing and impending London all
+about it, was indeed a continual pleasure to me. But these things were
+certainly not the living and central interests of my life.
+
+I had to conceal my wider outlook to a certain extent--from the masters
+even more than from the boys. Indeed I only let myself go freely with
+one boy, Britten, my especial chum, the son of the Agent-General for
+East Australia. We two discovered in a chance conversation A PROPOS of a
+map in the library that we were both of us curious why there were Malays
+in Madagascar, and how the Mecca pilgrims came from the East Indies
+before steamships were available. Neither of us had suspected that
+there was any one at all in the school who knew or cared a rap about the
+Indian Ocean, except as water on the way to India. But Britten had come
+up through the Suez Canal, and his ship had spoken a pilgrim ship on
+the way. It gave him a startling quality of living knowledge. From these
+pilgrims we got to a comparative treatment of religions, and from that,
+by a sudden plunge, to entirely sceptical and disrespectful confessions
+concerning Gates' last outbreak of simple piety in School Assembly. We
+became congenial intimates from that hour.
+
+The discovery of Britten happened to me when we were both in the Lower
+Fifth. Previously there had been a watertight compartment between the
+books I read and the thoughts they begot on the one hand and human
+intercourse on the other. Now I really began my higher education, and
+aired and examined and developed in conversation the doubts, the ideas,
+the interpretations that had been forming in my mind. As we were both
+day-boys with a good deal of control over our time we organised walks
+and expeditions together, and my habit of solitary and rather vague
+prowling gave way to much more definite joint enterprises. I went
+several times to his house, he was the youngest of several brothers, one
+of whom was a medical student and let us assist at the dissection of a
+cat, and once or twice in vacation time he came to Penge, and we went
+with parcels of provisions to do a thorough day in the grounds and
+galleries of the Crystal Palace, ending with the fireworks at close
+quarters. We went in a river steamboat down to Greenwich, and fired by
+that made an excursion to Margate and back; we explored London docks
+and Bethnal Green Museum, Petticoat Lane and all sorts of out-of-the-way
+places together.
+
+We confessed shyly to one another a common secret vice, "Phantom
+warfare." When we walked alone, especially in the country, we had both
+developed the same practice of fighting an imaginary battle about us
+as we walked. As we went along we were generals, and our attacks pushed
+along on either side, crouching and gathering behind hedges, cresting
+ridges, occupying copses, rushing open spaces, fighting from house to
+house. The hillsides about Penge were honeycombed in my imagination with
+the pits and trenches I had created to check a victorious invader coming
+out of Surrey. For him West Kensington was chiefly important as the
+scene of a desperate and successful last stand of insurrectionary troops
+(who had seized the Navy, the Bank and other advantages) against a
+royalist army--reinforced by Germans--advancing for reasons best known
+to themselves by way of Harrow and Ealing. It is a secret and solitary
+game, as we found when we tried to play it together. We made a success
+of that only once. All the way down to Margate we schemed defences and
+assailed and fought them as we came back against the sunset. Afterwards
+we recapitulated all that conflict by means of a large scale map of the
+Thames and little paper ironclads in plan cut out of paper.
+
+A subsequent revival of these imaginings was brought about by Britten's
+luck in getting, through a friend of his father's, admission for us both
+to the spectacle of volunteer officers fighting the war game in Caxton
+Hall. We developed a war game of our own at Britten's home with nearly a
+couple of hundred lead soldiers, some excellent spring cannons that shot
+hard and true at six yards, hills of books and a constantly elaborated
+set of rules. For some months that occupied an immense proportion of
+our leisure. Some of our battles lasted several days. We kept the game a
+profound secret from the other fellows. They would not have understood.
+
+And we also began, it was certainly before we were sixteen, to write,
+for the sake of writing. We liked writing. We had discovered Lamb
+and the best of the middle articles in such weeklies as the SATURDAY
+GAZETTE, and we imitated them. Our minds were full of dim uncertain
+things we wanted to drag out into the light of expression. Britten had
+got hold of IN MEMORIAM, and I had disinterred Pope's ESSAY ON MAN and
+RABBI BEN EZRA, and these things had set our theological and cosmic
+solicitudes talking. I was somewhere between sixteen and eighteen,
+I know, when he and I walked along the Thames Embankment confessing
+shamefully to one another that we had never read Lucretius. We thought
+every one who mattered had read Lucretius.
+
+When I was nearly sixteen my mother was taken ill very suddenly,
+and died of some perplexing complaint that involved a post-mortem
+examination; it was, I think, the trouble that has since those days
+been recognised as appendicitis. This led to a considerable change in
+my circumstances; the house at Penge was given up, and my Staffordshire
+uncle arranged for me to lodge during school terms with a needy
+solicitor and his wife in Vicars Street, S. W., about a mile and a half
+from the school. So it was I came right into London; I had almost two
+years of London before I went to Cambridge.
+
+Those were our great days together. Afterwards we were torn apart;
+Britten went to Oxford, and our circumstances never afterwards threw us
+continuously together until the days of the BLUE WEEKLY.
+
+As boys, we walked together, read and discussed the same books, pursued
+the same enquiries. We got a reputation as inseparables and the nickname
+of the Rose and the Lily, for Britten was short and thick-set with
+dark close curling hair and a ruddy Irish type of face; I was lean and
+fair-haired and some inches taller than he. Our talk ranged widely and
+yet had certain very definite limitations. We were amazingly free with
+politics and religion, we went to that little meeting-house of William
+Morris's at Hammersmith and worked out the principles of Socialism
+pretty thoroughly, and we got up the Darwinian theory with the help
+of Britten's medical-student brother and the galleries of the Natural
+History Museum in Cromwell Road. Those wonderful cases on the ground
+floor illustrating mimicry, dimorphism and so forth, were new in our
+times, and we went through them with earnest industry and tried over our
+Darwinism in the light of that. Such topics we did exhaustively. But on
+the other hand I do not remember any discussion whatever of human sex or
+sexual relationships. There, in spite of intense secret curiosities, our
+lips were sealed by a peculiar shyness. And I do not believe we ever had
+occasion either of us to use the word "love." It was not only that we
+were instinctively shy of the subject, but that we were mightily ashamed
+of the extent of our ignorance and uncertainty in these matters. We
+evaded them elaborately with an assumption of exhaustive knowledge.
+
+We certainly had no shyness about theology. We marked the emancipation
+of our spirits from the frightful teachings that had oppressed our
+boyhood, by much indulgence in blasphemous wit. We had a secret
+literature of irreverent rhymes, and a secret art of theological
+caricature. Britten's father had delighted his family by reading aloud
+from Dr. Richard Garnett's TWILIGHT OF THE GODS, and Britten conveyed
+the precious volume to me. That and the BAB BALLADS were the inspiration
+of some of our earliest lucubrations.
+
+For an imaginative boy the first experience of writing is like a tiger's
+first taste of blood, and our literary flowerings led very directly to
+the revival of the school magazine, which had been comatose for some
+years. But there we came upon a disappointment.
+
+
+8
+
+In that revival we associated certain other of the Sixth Form boys,
+and notably one for whom our enterprise was to lay the foundations of a
+career that has ended in the House of Lords, Arthur Cossington, now
+Lord Paddockhurst. Cossington was at that time a rather heavy, rather
+good-looking boy who was chiefly eminent in cricket, an outsider even as
+we were and preoccupied no doubt, had we been sufficiently detached to
+observe him, with private imaginings very much of the same quality
+and spirit as our own. He was, we were inclined to think, rather a
+sentimentalist, rather a poseur, he affected a concise emphatic style,
+played chess very well, betrayed a belief in will-power, and earned
+Britten's secret hostility, Britten being a sloven, by the invariable
+neatness of his collars and ties. He came into our magazine with a
+vigour that we found extremely surprising and unwelcome.
+
+Britten and I had wanted to write. We had indeed figured our project
+modestly as a manuscript magazine of satirical, liberal and brilliant
+literature by which in some rather inexplicable way the vague tumult of
+ideas that teemed within us was to find form and expression; Cossington,
+it was manifest from the outset, wanted neither to write nor writing,
+but a magazine. I remember the inaugural meeting in Shoesmith major's
+study--we had had great trouble in getting it together--and how
+effectually Cossington bolted with the proposal.
+
+"I think we fellows ought to run a magazine," said Cossington. "The
+school used to have one. A school like this ought to have a magazine."
+
+"The last one died in '84," said Shoesmith from the hearthrug. "Called
+the OBSERVER. Rot rather."
+
+"Bad title," said Cossington.
+
+"There was a TATLER before that," said Britten, sitting on the writing
+table at the window that was closed to deaden the cries of the Lower
+School at play, and clashing his boots together.
+
+"We want something suggestive of City Merchants."
+
+"CITY MERCHANDIZE," said Britten.
+
+"Too fanciful. What of ARVONIAN? Richard Arvon was our founder, and it
+seems almost a duty--"
+
+"They call them all -usians or -onians," said Britten.
+
+"I like CITY MERCHANDIZE," I said. "We could probably find a quotation
+to suggest--oh! mixed good things."
+
+Cossington regarded me abstractedly.
+
+"Don't want to put the accent on the City, do we?" said Shoesmith, who
+had a feeling for county families, and Naylor supported him by a murmur
+of approval.
+
+"We ought to call it the ARVONIAN," decided Cossington, "and we might
+very well have underneath, 'With which is incorporated the OBSERVER.'
+That picks up the old traditions, makes an appeal to old boys and all
+that, and it gives us something to print under the title."
+
+I still held out for CITY MERCHANDIZE, which had taken my fancy. "Some
+of the chaps' people won't like it," said Naylor, "certain not to. And
+it sounds Rum."
+
+"Sounds Weird," said a boy who had not hitherto spoken.
+
+"We aren't going to do anything Queer," said Shoesmith, pointedly not
+looking at Britten.
+
+The question of the title had manifestly gone against us. "Oh! HAVE it
+ARVONIAN," I said.
+
+"And next, what size shall we have?" said Cossington.
+
+"Something like MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE--or LONGMANS'; LONGMANS' is better
+because it has a whole page, not columns. It makes no end of difference
+to one's effects."
+
+"What effects?" asked Shoesmith abruptly.
+
+"Oh! a pause or a white line or anything. You've got to write closer for
+a double column. It's nuggetty. You can't get a swing on your prose." I
+had discussed this thoroughly with Britten.
+
+"If the fellows are going to write--" began Britten.
+
+"We ought to keep off fine writing," said Shoesmith. "It's cheek. I vote
+we don't have any."
+
+"We sha'n't get any," said Cossington, and then as an olive branch to
+me, "unless Remington does a bit. Or Britten. But it's no good making
+too much space for it."
+
+"We ought to be very careful about the writing," said Shoesmith. "We
+don't want to give ourselves away."
+
+"I vote we ask old Topham to see us through," said Naylor.
+
+Britten groaned aloud and every one regarded him. "Greek epigrams on the
+fellows' names," he said. "Small beer in ancient bottles. Let's get a
+stuffed broody hen to SIT on the magazine."
+
+"We might do worse than a Greek epigram," said Cossington. "One in each
+number. It--it impresses parents and keeps up our classical tradition.
+And the masters CAN help. We don't want to antagonise them. Of
+course--we've got to departmentalise. Writing is only one section of the
+thing. The ARVONIAN has to stand for the school. There's questions
+of space and questions of expense. We can't turn out a great chunk of
+printed prose like--like wet cold toast and call it a magazine."
+
+Britten writhed, appreciating the image.
+
+"There's to be a section of sports. YOU must do that."
+
+"I'm not going to do any fine writing," said Shoesmith.
+
+"What you've got to do is just to list all the chaps and put a note to
+their play:--'Naylor minor must pass more. Football isn't the place for
+extreme individualism.' 'Ammersham shapes well as half-back.' Things
+like that."
+
+"I could do that all right," said Shoesmith, brightening and manifestly
+becoming pregnant with judgments.
+
+"One great thing about a magazine of this sort," said Cossington, "is
+to mention just as many names as you can in each number. It keeps the
+interest alive. Chaps will turn it over looking for their own little
+bit. Then it all lights up for them."
+
+"Do you want any reports of matches?" Shoesmith broke from his
+meditation.
+
+"Rather. With comments."
+
+"Naylor surpassed himself and negotiated the lemon safely home," said
+Shoesmith.
+
+"Shut it," said Naylor modestly.
+
+"Exactly," said Cossington. "That gives us three features," touching
+them off on his fingers, "Epigram, Literary Section, Sports. Then we
+want a section to shove anything into, a joke, a notice of anything
+that's going on. So on. Our Note Book."
+
+"Oh, Hell!" said Britten, and clashed his boots, to the silent
+disapproval of every one.
+
+"Then we want an editorial."
+
+"A WHAT?" cried Britten, with a note of real terror in his voice.
+
+"Well, don't we? Unless we have our Note Book to begin on the front
+page. It gives a scrappy effect to do that. We want something manly and
+straightforward and a bit thoughtful, about Patriotism, say, or ESPRIT
+DE CORPS, or After-Life."
+
+I looked at Britten. Hitherto we had not considered Cossington mattered
+very much in the world.
+
+He went over us as a motor-car goes over a dog. There was a sort of
+energy about him, a new sort of energy to us; we had never realised
+that anything of the sort existed in the world. We were hopelessly at
+a disadvantage. Almost instantly we had developed a clear and detailed
+vision of a magazine made up of everything that was most acceptable
+in the magazines that flourished in the adult world about us, and had
+determined to make it a success. He had by a kind of instinct, as it
+were, synthetically plagiarised every successful magazine and breathed
+into this dusty mixture the breath of life. He was elected at his own
+suggestion managing director, with the earnest support of Shoesmith and
+Naylor, and conducted the magazine so successfully and brilliantly that
+he even got a whole back page of advertisements from the big sports shop
+in Holborn, and made the printers pay at the same rate for a notice
+of certain books of their own which they said they had inserted by
+inadvertency to fill up space. The only literary contribution in the
+first number was a column by Topham in faultless stereotyped English in
+depreciation of some fancied evil called Utilitarian Studies and ending
+with that noble old quotation:--
+
+
+"To the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome."
+
+
+And Flack crowded us out of number two with a bright little paper on the
+"Humours of Cricket," and the Head himself was profusely thoughtful all
+over the editorial under the heading of "The School Chapel; and How it
+Seems to an Old Boy."
+
+Britten and I found it difficult to express to each other with any grace
+or precision what we felt about that magazine.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ ADOLESCENCE
+
+
+1
+
+I find it very difficult to trace how form was added to form
+and interpretation followed interpretation in my ever-spreading,
+ever-deepening, ever-multiplying and enriching vision of this world into
+which I had been born. Every day added its impressions, its hints, its
+subtle explications to the growing understanding. Day after day the
+living interlacing threads of a mind weave together. Every morning now
+for three weeks and more (for to-day is Thursday and I started on a
+Tuesday) I have been trying to convey some idea of the factors and
+early influences by which my particular scrap of subjective tapestry
+was shaped, to show the child playing on the nursery floor, the son
+perplexed by his mother, gazing aghast at his dead father, exploring
+interminable suburbs, touched by first intimations of the sexual
+mystery, coming in with a sort of confused avidity towards the centres
+of the life of London. It is only by such an effort to write it down
+that one realises how marvellously crowded, how marvellously analytical
+and synthetic those ears must be. One begins with the little child
+to whom the sky is a roof of blue, the world a screen of opaque and
+disconnected facts, the home a thing eternal, and "being good" just
+simple obedience to unquestioned authority; and one comes at last to
+the vast world of one's adult perception, pierced deep by flaring
+searchlights of partial understanding, here masked by mists, here
+refracted and distorted through half translucent veils, here showing
+broad prospects and limitless vistas and here impenetrably dark.
+
+I recall phases of deep speculation, doubts and even prayers by night,
+and strange occasions when by a sort of hypnotic contemplation of
+nothingness I sought to pierce the web of appearances about me. It is
+hard to measure these things in receding perspective, and now I cannot
+trace, so closely has mood succeeded and overlaid and obliterated mood,
+the phases by which an utter horror of death was replaced by the growing
+realisation of its necessity and dignity. Difficulty of the imagination
+with infinite space, infinite time, entangled my mind; and moral
+distress for the pain and suffering of bygone ages that made all thought
+of reformation in the future seem but the grimmest irony upon now
+irreparable wrongs. Many an intricate perplexity of these broadening
+years did not so much get settled as cease to matter. Life crowded me
+away from it.
+
+I have confessed myself a temerarious theologian, and in that
+passage from boyhood to manhood I ranged widely in my search for some
+permanently satisfying Truth. That, too, ceased after a time to be
+urgently interesting. I came at last into a phase that endures to this
+day, of absolute tranquillity, of absolute confidence in whatever that
+Incomprehensible Comprehensive which must needs be the substratum of all
+things, may be. Feeling OF IT, feeling BY IT, I cannot feel afraid of
+it. I think I had got quite clearly and finally to that adjustment long
+before my Cambridge days were done. I am sure that the evil in life is
+transitory and finite like an accident or distress in the nursery; that
+God is my Father and that I may trust Him, even though life hurts so
+that one must needs cry out at it, even though it shows no consequence
+but failure, no promise but pain....
+
+But while I was fearless of theology I must confess it was comparatively
+late before I faced and dared to probe the secrecies of sex. I was
+afraid of sex. I had an instinctive perception that it would be a large
+and difficult thing in my life, but my early training was all in
+the direction of regarding it as an irrelevant thing, as something
+disconnected from all the broad significances of life, as hostile
+and disgraceful in its quality. The world was never so emasculated in
+thought, I suppose, as it was in the Victorian time....
+
+I was afraid to think either of sex or (what I have always found
+inseparable from a kind of sexual emotion) beauty. Even as a boy I knew
+the thing as a haunting and alluring mystery that I tried to keep away
+from. Its dim presence obsessed me none the less for all the extravagant
+decency, the stimulating silences of my upbringing....
+
+The plaster Venuses and Apollos that used to adorn the vast aisle and
+huge grey terraces of the Crystal Palace were the first intimations of
+the beauty of the body that ever came into my life. As I write of it I
+feel again the shameful attraction of those gracious forms. I used to
+look at them not simply, but curiously and askance. Once at least in
+my later days at Penge, I spent a shilling in admission chiefly for the
+sake of them....
+
+The strangest thing of all my odd and solitary upbringing seems to me
+now that swathing up of all the splendours of the flesh, that strange
+combination of fanatical terrorism and shyness that fenced me about with
+prohibitions. It caused me to grow up, I will not say blankly ignorant,
+but with an ignorance blurred and dishonoured by shame, by enigmatical
+warnings, by cultivated aversions, an ignorance in which a fascinated
+curiosity and desire struggled like a thing in a net. I knew so little
+and I felt so much. There was indeed no Aphrodite at all in my youthful
+Pantheon, but instead there was a mysterious and minatory gap. I have
+told how at last a new Venus was born in my imagination out of gas lamps
+and the twilight, a Venus with a cockney accent and dark eyes shining
+out of the dusk, a Venus who was a warm, passion-stirring atmosphere
+rather than incarnate in a body. And I have told, too, how I bought a
+picture.
+
+All this was a thing apart from the rest of my life, a locked avoided
+chamber....
+
+It was not until my last year at Trinity that I really broke down the
+barriers of this unwholesome silence and brought my secret broodings to
+the light of day. Then a little set of us plunged suddenly into what
+we called at first sociological discussion. I can still recall even the
+physical feeling of those first tentative talks. I remember them mostly
+as occurring in the rooms of Ted Hatherleigh, who kept at the corner by
+the Trinity great gate, but we also used to talk a good deal at a man's
+in King's, a man named, if I remember rightly, Redmayne. The atmosphere
+of Hatherleigh's rooms was a haze of tobacco smoke against a background
+brown and deep. He professed himself a socialist with anarchistic
+leanings--he had suffered the martyrdom of ducking for it--and a huge
+French May-day poster displaying a splendid proletarian in red and black
+on a barricade against a flaring orange sky, dominated his decorations.
+Hatherleigh affected a fine untidiness, and all the place, even
+the floor, was littered with books, for the most part open and face
+downward; deeper darknesses were supplied by a discarded gown and
+our caps, all conscientiously battered, Hatherleigh's flopped like an
+elephant's ear and inserted quill pens supported the corners of mine;
+the highlights of the picture came chiefly as reflections from his
+chequered blue mugs full of audit ale. We sat on oak chairs, except the
+four or five who crowded on a capacious settle, we drank a lot of beer
+and were often fuddled, and occasionally quite drunk, and we all smoked
+reckless-looking pipes,--there was a transient fashion among us for corn
+cobs for which Mark Twain, I think, was responsible. Our little excesses
+with liquor were due far more to conscience than appetite, indicated
+chiefly a resolve to break away from restraints that we suspected were
+keeping us off the instructive knife-edges of life. Hatherleigh was a
+good Englishman of the premature type with a red face, a lot of hair, a
+deep voice and an explosive plunging manner, and it was he who said one
+evening--Heaven knows how we got to it--"Look here, you know, it's all
+Rot, this Shutting Up about Women. We OUGHT to talk about them. What are
+we going to do about them? It's got to come. We're all festering inside
+about it. Let's out with it. There's too much Decency altogether about
+this Infernal University!"
+
+We rose to his challenge a little awkwardly and our first talk
+was clumsy, there were flushed faces and red ears, and I remember
+Hatherleigh broke out into a monologue on decency. "Modesty and
+Decency," said Hatherleigh, "are Oriental vices. The Jews brought them
+to Europe. They're Semitic, just like our monasticism here and the
+seclusion of women and mutilating the dead on a battlefield. And all
+that sort of thing."
+
+Hatherleigh's mind progressed by huge leaps, leaps that were usually
+wildly inaccurate, and for a time we engaged hotly upon the topic of
+those alleged mutilations and the Semitic responsibility for decency.
+Hatherleigh tried hard to saddle the Semitic race with the less elegant
+war customs of the Soudan and the northwest frontier of India, and
+quoted Doughty, at that time a little-known author, and Cunninghame
+Graham to show that the Arab was worse than a county-town spinster in
+his regard for respectability. But his case was too preposterous, and
+Esmeer, with his shrill penetrating voice and his way of pointing with
+all four long fingers flat together, carried the point against him. He
+quoted Cato and Roman law and the monasteries of Thibet.
+
+"Well, anyway," said Hatherleigh, escaping from our hands like an
+intellectual frog, "Semitic or not, I've got no use for decency."
+
+We argued points and Hatherleigh professed an unusually balanced and
+tolerating attitude. "I don't mind a certain refinement and dignity," he
+admitted generously. "What I object to is this spreading out of decency
+until it darkens the whole sky, until it makes a man's father afraid to
+speak of the most important things, until it makes a man afraid to look
+a frank book in the face or think--even think! until it leads to our
+coming to--to the business at last with nothing but a few prohibitions,
+a few hints, a lot of dirty jokes and, and "--he waved a hand and seemed
+to seek and catch his image in the air--"oh, a confounded buttered slide
+of sentiment, to guide us. I tell you I'm going to think about it and
+talk about it until I see a little more daylight than I do at present.
+I'm twenty-two. Things might happen to me anywhen. You men can go out
+into the world if you like, to sin like fools and marry like fools,
+not knowing what you are doing and ashamed to ask. You'll take
+the consequences, too, I expect, pretty meekly, sniggering a bit,
+sentimentalising a bit, like--like Cambridge humorists.... I mean to
+know what I'm doing."
+
+He paused to drink, and I think I cut in with ideas of my own. But one
+is apt to forget one's own share in a talk, I find, more than one does
+the clear-cut objectivity of other people's, and I do not know how far
+I contributed to this discussion that followed. I am, however, pretty
+certain that it was then that ideal that we were pleased to call
+aristocracy and which soon became the common property of our set was
+developed. It was Esmeer, I know, who laid down and maintained the
+proposition that so far as minds went there were really only two sorts
+of man in the world, the aristocrat and the man who subdues his mind to
+other people's.
+
+"'I couldn't THINK of it, Sir,'" said Esmeer in his elucidatory tones;
+"that's what a servant says. His mind even is broken in to run between
+fences, and he admits it. WE'VE got to be able to think of anything.
+And 'such things aren't for the Likes of Us!' That's another servant's
+saying. Well, everything IS for the Likes of Us. If we see fit, that
+is."
+
+A small fresh-coloured man in grey objected.
+
+"Well," exploded Hatherleigh, "if that isn't so what the deuce are we
+up here for? Instead of working in mines? If some things aren't to be
+thought about ever! We've got the privilege of all these extra years for
+getting things straight in our heads, and then we won't use 'em. Good
+God! what do you think a university's for?"...
+
+Esmeer's idea came with an effect of real emancipation to several of
+us. We were not going to be afraid of ideas any longer, we were going
+to throw down every barrier of prohibition and take them in and see what
+came of it. We became for a time even intemperately experimental, and
+one of us, at the bare suggestion of an eminent psychic investigator,
+took hashish and very nearly died of it within a fortnight of our great
+elucidation.
+
+The chief matter of our interchanges was of course the discussion
+of sex. Once the theme had been opened it became a sore place in
+our intercourse; none of us seemed able to keep away from it. Our
+imaginations got astir with it. We made up for lost time and went
+round it and through it and over it exhaustively. I recall prolonged
+discussion of polygamy on the way to Royston, muddy November tramps to
+Madingley, when amidst much profanity from Hatherleigh at the serious
+treatment of so obsolete a matter, we weighed the reasons, if any, for
+the institution of marriage. The fine dim night-time spaces of the Great
+Court are bound up with the inconclusive finales of mighty hot-eared
+wrangles; the narrows of Trinity Street and Petty Cury and Market Hill
+have their particular associations for me with that spate of confession
+and free speech, that almost painful goal delivery of long pent and
+crappled and sometimes crippled ideas.
+
+And we went on a reading party that Easter to a place called Pulborough
+in Sussex, where there is a fishing inn and a river that goes under a
+bridge. It was a late Easter and a blazing one, and we boated and bathed
+and talked of being Hellenic and the beauty of the body until at moments
+it seemed to us that we were destined to restore the Golden Age, by the
+simple abolition of tailors and outfitters.
+
+Those undergraduate talks! how rich and glorious they seemed, how
+splendidly new the ideas that grew and multiplied in our seething minds!
+We made long afternoon and evening raids over the Downs towards Arundel,
+and would come tramping back through the still keen moonlight singing
+and shouting. We formed romantic friendships with one another, and
+grieved more or less convincingly that there were no splendid women fit
+to be our companions in the world. But Hatherleigh, it seemed, had once
+known a girl whose hair was gloriously red. "My God!" said Hatherleigh
+to convey the quality of her; just simply and with projectile violence:
+"My God!"
+
+Benton had heard of a woman who lived with a man refusing to be married
+to him--we thought that splendid beyond measure,--I cannot now imagine
+why. She was "like a tender goddess," Benton said. A sort of shame
+came upon us in the dark in spite of our liberal intentions when Benton
+committed himself to that. And after such talk we would fall upon great
+pauses of emotional dreaming, and if by chance we passed a girl in a
+governess cart, or some farmer's daughter walking to the station, we
+became alertly silent or obstreperously indifferent to her. For might
+she not be just that one exception to the banal decency, the sickly
+pointless conventionality, the sham modesty of the times in which we
+lived?
+
+We felt we stood for a new movement, not realising how perennially this
+same emancipation returns to those ancient courts beside the Cam.
+We were the anti-decency party, we discovered a catch phrase that we
+flourished about in the Union and made our watchword, namely, "stark
+fact." We hung nude pictures in our rooms much as if they had been
+flags, to the earnest concern of our bedders, and I disinterred my
+long-kept engraving and had it framed in fumed oak, and found for it a
+completer and less restrained companion, a companion I never cared for
+in the slightest degree....
+
+This efflorescence did not prevent, I think indeed it rather helped, our
+more formal university work, for most of us took firsts, and three of
+us got Fellowships in one year or another. There was Benton who had a
+Research Fellowship and went to Tubingen, there was Esmeer and myself
+who both became Residential Fellows. I had taken the Mental and
+Moral Science Tripos (as it was then), and three years later I got a
+lectureship in political science. In those days it was disguised in the
+cloak of Political Economy.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+It was our affectation to be a little detached from the main stream of
+undergraduate life. We worked pretty hard, but by virtue of our
+beer, our socialism and suchlike heterodoxy, held ourselves to be
+differentiated from the swatting reading man. None of us, except Baxter,
+who was a rowing blue, a rather abnormal blue with an appetite for
+ideas, took games seriously enough to train, and on the other hand
+we intimated contempt for the rather mediocre, deliberately humorous,
+consciously gentlemanly and consciously wild undergraduate men who
+made up the mass of Cambridge life. After the manner of youth we were
+altogether too hard on our contemporaries. We battered our caps and
+tore our gowns lest they should seem new, and we despised these others
+extremely for doing exactly the same things; we had an idea of ourselves
+and resented beyond measure a similar weakness in these our brothers.
+
+There was a type, or at least there seemed to us to be a type--I'm a
+little doubtful at times now whether after all we didn't create it--for
+which Hatherleigh invented the nickname the "Pinky Dinkys," intending
+thereby both contempt and abhorrence in almost equal measure. The Pinky
+Dinky summarised all that we particularly did not want to be, and also,
+I now perceive, much of what we were and all that we secretly dreaded
+becoming.
+
+But it is hard to convey the Pinky Dinky idea, for all that it meant so
+much to us. We spent one evening at least during that reading party upon
+the Pinky Dinky; we sat about our one fire after a walk in the
+rain--it was our only wet day--smoked our excessively virile pipes, and
+elaborated the natural history of the Pinky Dinky. We improvised a
+sort of Pinky Dinky litany, and Hatherleigh supplied deep notes for the
+responses.
+
+"The Pinky Dinky extracts a good deal of amusement from life," said some
+one.
+
+"Damned prig!" said Hatherleigh.
+
+"The Pinky Dinky arises in the Union and treats the question with a
+light gay touch. He makes the weird ones mad. But sometimes he cannot go
+on because of the amusement he extracts."
+
+"I want to shy books at the giggling swine," said Hatherleigh.
+
+"The Pinky Dinky says suddenly while he is making the tea, 'We're all
+being frightfully funny. It's time for you to say something now.'"
+
+"The Pinky Dinky shakes his head and says: 'I'm afraid I shall never be
+a responsible being.' And he really IS frivolous."
+
+"Frivolous but not vulgar," said Esmeer.
+
+"Pinky Dinkys are chaps who've had their buds nipped," said Hatherleigh.
+"They're Plebs and they know it. They haven't the Guts to get hold of
+things. And so they worry up all those silly little jokes of theirs to
+carry it off."...
+
+We tried bad ones for a time, viciously flavoured.
+
+Pinky Dinkys are due to over-production of the type that ought to keep
+outfitters' shops. Pinky Dinkys would like to keep outfitters' shops
+with whimsy 'scriptions on the boxes and make your bill out funny, and
+not be snobs to customers, no!--not even if they had titles."
+
+"Every Pinky Dinky's people are rather good people, and better than most
+Pinky Dinky's people. But he does not put on side."
+
+"Pinky Dinkys become playful at the sight of women."
+
+"'Croquet's my game,' said the Pinky Dinky, and felt a man
+condescended."
+
+"But what the devil do they think they're up to, anyhow?" roared old
+Hatherleigh suddenly, dropping plump into bottomless despair.
+
+We felt we had still failed to get at the core of the mystery of the
+Pinky Dinky.
+
+We tried over things about his religion. "The Pinky Dinky goes to King's
+Chapel, and sits and feels in the dusk. Solemn things! Oh HUSH! He
+wouldn't tell you--"
+
+"He COULDN'T tell you."
+
+"Religion is so sacred to him he never talks about it, never reads about
+it, never thinks about it. Just feels!"
+
+"But in his heart of hearts, oh! ever so deep, the Pinky Dinky has a
+doubt--"
+
+Some one protested.
+
+"Not a vulgar doubt," Esmeer went on, "but a kind of hesitation whether
+the Ancient of Days is really exactly what one would call good form....
+There's a lot of horrid coarseness got into the world somehow. SOMEBODY
+put it there.... And anyhow there's no particular reason why a man
+should be seen about with Him. He's jolly Awful of course and all
+that--"
+
+"The Pinky Dinky for all his fun and levity has a clean mind."
+
+"A thoroughly clean mind. Not like Esmeer's--the Pig!"
+
+"If once he began to think about sex, how could he be comfortable at
+croquet?"
+
+"It's their Damned Modesty," said Hatherleigh suddenly, "that's what's
+the matter with the Pinky Dinky. It's Mental Cowardice dressed up as a
+virtue and taking the poor dears in. Cambridge is soaked with it; it's
+some confounded local bacillus. Like the thing that gives a flavour to
+Havana cigars. He comes up here to be made into a man and a ruler of
+the people, and he thinks it shows a nice disposition not to take on the
+job! How the Devil is a great Empire to be run with men like him?"
+
+"All his little jokes and things," said Esmeer regarding his feet on
+the fender, "it's just a nervous sniggering--because he's afraid....
+Oxford's no better."
+
+"What's he afraid of?" said I.
+
+"God knows!" exploded Hatherleigh and stared at the fire.
+
+"LIFE!" said Esmeer. "And so in a way are we," he added, and made a
+thoughtful silence for a time.
+
+"I say," began Carter, who was doing the Natural Science Tripos, "what
+is the adult form of the Pinky Dinky?"
+
+But there we were checked by our ignorance of the world.
+
+"What is the adult form of any of us?" asked Benton, voicing the thought
+that had arrested our flow.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+I do not remember that we ever lifted our criticism to the dons and the
+organisation of the University. I think we took them for granted. When I
+look back at my youth I am always astonished by the multitude of things
+that we took for granted. It seemed to us that Cambridge was in the
+order of things, for all the world like having eyebrows or a vermiform
+appendix. Now with the larger scepticism of middle age I can entertain
+very fundamental doubts about these old universities. Indeed I had a
+scheme--
+
+I do not see what harm I can do now by laying bare the purpose of the
+political combinations I was trying to effect.
+
+My educational scheme was indeed the starting-point of all the big
+project of conscious public reconstruction at which I aimed. I wanted
+to build up a new educational machine altogether for the governing class
+out of a consolidated system of special public service schools. I
+meant to get to work upon this whatever office I was given in the new
+government. I could have begun my plan from the Admiralty or the
+War Office quite as easily as from the Education Office. I am firmly
+convinced it is hopeless to think of reforming the old public schools
+and universities to meet the needs of a modern state, they send their
+roots too deep and far, the cost would exceed any good that could
+possibly be effected, and so I have sought a way round this invincible
+obstacle. I do think it would be quite practicable to side-track, as the
+Americans say, the whole system by creating hardworking, hard-living,
+modern and scientific boys' schools, first for the Royal Navy and then
+for the public service generally, and as they grew, opening them to
+the public without any absolute obligation to subsequent service.
+Simultaneously with this it would not be impossible to develop a new
+college system with strong faculties in modern philosophy, modern
+history, European literature and criticism, physical and biological
+science, education and sociology.
+
+We could in fact create a new liberal education in this way, and cut the
+umbilicus of the classical languages for good and all. I should have set
+this going, and trusted it to correct or kill the old public schools and
+the Oxford and Cambridge tradition altogether. I had men in my mind to
+begin the work, and I should have found others. I should have aimed at
+making a hard-trained, capable, intellectually active, proud type of
+man. Everything else would have been made subservient to that. I should
+have kept my grip on the men through their vacation, and somehow or
+other I would have contrived a young woman to match them. I think I
+could have seen to it effectually enough that they didn't get at croquet
+and tennis with the vicarage daughters and discover sex in the Peeping
+Tom fashion I did, and that they realised quite early in life that
+it isn't really virile to reek of tobacco. I should have had military
+manoeuvres, training ships, aeroplane work, mountaineering and so forth,
+in the place of the solemn trivialities of games, and I should have fed
+and housed my men clean and very hard--where there wasn't any audit ale,
+no credit tradesmen, and plenty of high pressure douches....
+
+I have revisited Cambridge and Oxford time after time since I came
+down, and so far as the Empire goes, I want to get clear of those two
+places....
+
+Always I renew my old feelings, a physical oppression, a sense of
+lowness and dampness almost exactly like the feeling of an underground
+room where paper moulders and leaves the wall, a feeling of ineradicable
+contagion in the Gothic buildings, in the narrow ditch-like rivers, in
+those roads and roads of stuffy little villas. Those little villas
+have destroyed all the good of the old monastic system and none of its
+evil....
+
+Some of the most charming people in the world live in them, but their
+collective effect is below the quality of any individual among them.
+Cambridge is a world of subdued tones, of excessively subtle humours, of
+prim conduct and free thinking; it fears the Parent, but it has no fear
+of God; it offers amidst surroundings that vary between disguises and
+antiquarian charm the inflammation of literature's purple draught;
+one hears there a peculiar thin scandal like no other scandal in the
+world--a covetous scandal--so that I am always reminded of Ibsen in
+Cambridge. In Cambridge and the plays of Ibsen alone does it seem
+appropriate for the heroine before the great crisis of life to "enter,
+take off her overshoes, and put her wet umbrella upon the writing
+desk."...
+
+We have to make a new Academic mind for modern needs, and the last thing
+to make it out of, I am convinced, is the old Academic mind. One
+might as soon try to fake the old VICTORY at Portsmouth into a line of
+battleship again. Besides which the old Academic mind, like those old
+bathless, damp Gothic colleges, is much too delightful in its peculiar
+and distinctive way to damage by futile patching.
+
+My heart warms to a sense of affectionate absurdity as I recall dear old
+Codger, surely the most "unleaderly" of men. No more than from the old
+Schoolmen, his kindred, could one get from him a School for Princes.
+Yet apart from his teaching he was as curious and adorable as a good
+Netsuke. Until quite recently he was a power in Cambridge, he could
+make and bar and destroy, and in a way he has become the quintessence of
+Cambridge in my thoughts.
+
+I see him on his way to the morning's lecture, with his plump childish
+face, his round innocent eyes, his absurdly non-prehensile fat hand
+carrying his cap, his grey trousers braced up much too high, his feet a
+trifle inturned, and going across the great court with a queer tripping
+pace that seemed cultivated even to my naive undergraduate eye. Or I
+see him lecturing. He lectured walking up and down between the desks,
+talking in a fluting rapid voice, and with the utmost lucidity. If he
+could not walk up and down he could not lecture. His mind and voice had
+precisely the fluid quality of some clear subtle liquid; one felt it
+could flow round anything and overcome nothing. And its nimble eddies
+were wonderful! Or again I recall him drinking port with little muscular
+movements in his neck and cheek and chin and his brows knit--very
+judicial, very concentrated, preparing to say the apt just thing; it was
+the last thing he would have told a lie about.
+
+When I think of Codger I am reminded of an inscription I saw on some
+occasion in Regent's Park above two eyes scarcely more limpidly innocent
+than his--"Born in the Menagerie." Never once since Codger began to
+display the early promise of scholarship at the age of eight or more,
+had he been outside the bars. His utmost travel had been to lecture here
+and lecture there. His student phase had culminated in papers of quite
+exceptional brilliance, and he had gone on to lecture with a cheerful
+combination of wit and mannerism that had made him a success from the
+beginning. He has lectured ever since. He lectures still. Year by year
+he has become plumper, more rubicund and more and more of an item for
+the intelligent visitor to see. Even in my time he was pointed out to
+people as part of our innumerable enrichments, and obviously he knew it.
+He has become now almost the leading Character in a little donnish world
+of much too intensely appreciated Characters.
+
+He boasted he took no exercise, and also of his knowledge of port wine.
+Of other wines he confessed quite frankly he had no "special knowledge."
+Beyond these things he had little pride except that he claimed to have
+read every novel by a woman writer that had ever entered the Union
+Library. This, however, he held to be remarkable rather than ennobling,
+and such boasts as he made of it were tinged with playfulness. Certainly
+he had a scholar's knowledge of the works of Miss Marie Corelli, Miss
+Braddon, Miss Elizabeth Glyn and Madame Sarah Grand that would have
+astonished and flattered those ladies enormously, and he loved nothing
+so much in his hours of relaxation as to propound and answer difficult
+questions upon their books. Tusher of King's was his ineffectual rival
+in this field, their bouts were memorable and rarely other than glorious
+for Codger; but then Tusher spread himself too much, he also undertook
+to rehearse whole pages out of Bradshaw, and tell you with all the
+changes how to get from any station to any station in Great Britain by
+the nearest and cheapest routes....
+
+Codger lodged with a little deaf innocent old lady, Mrs. Araminta
+Mergle, who was understood to be herself a very redoubtable Character in
+the Gyp-Bedder class; about her he related quietly absurd anecdotes.
+He displayed a marvellous invention in ascribing to her plausible
+expressions of opinion entirely identical in import with those of the
+Oxford and Harvard Pragmatists, against whom he waged a fierce obscure
+war....
+
+It was Codger's function to teach me philosophy, philosophy! the
+intimate wisdom of things. He dealt in a variety of Hegelian stuff like
+nothing else in the world, but marvellously consistent with itself. It
+was a wonderful web he spun out of that queer big active childish brain
+that had never lusted nor hated nor grieved nor feared nor passionately
+loved,--a web of iridescent threads. He had luminous final theories
+about Love and Death and Immortality, odd matters they seemed for him to
+think about! and all his woven thoughts lay across my perception of the
+realities of things, as flimsy and irrelevant and clever and beautiful,
+oh!--as a dew-wet spider's web slung in the morning sunshine across the
+black mouth of a gun....
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+All through those years of development I perceive now there must have
+been growing in me, slowly, irregularly, assimilating to itself all
+the phrases and forms of patriotism, diverting my religious impulses,
+utilising my esthetic tendencies, my dominating idea, the statesman's
+idea, that idea of social service which is the protagonist of my story,
+that real though complex passion for Making, making widely and greatly,
+cities, national order, civilisation, whose interplay with all those
+other factors in life I have set out to present. It was growing in
+me--as one's bones grow, no man intending it.
+
+I have tried to show how, quite early in my life, the fact of
+disorderliness, the conception of social life as being a multitudinous
+confusion out of hand, came to me. One always of course simplifies these
+things in the telling, but I do not think I ever saw the world at large
+in any other terms. I never at any stage entertained the idea
+which sustained my mother, and which sustains so many people in the
+world,--the idea that the universe, whatever superficial discords it
+may present, is as a matter of fact "all right," is being steered to
+definite ends by a serene and unquestionable God. My mother thought that
+Order prevailed, and that disorder was just incidental and foredoomed
+rebellion; I feel and have always felt that order rebels against and
+struggles against disorder, that order has an up-hill job, in gardens,
+experiments, suburbs, everything alike; from the very beginnings of my
+experience I discovered hostility to order, a constant escaping from
+control.
+
+The current of living and contemporary ideas in which my mind was
+presently swimming made all in the same direction; in place of my
+mother's attentive, meticulous but occasionally extremely irascible
+Providence, the talk was all of the Struggle for Existence and the
+survival not of the Best--that was nonsense, but of the fittest to
+survive.
+
+The attempts to rehabilitate Faith in the form of the Individualist's
+LAISSEZ FAIRE never won upon me. I disliked Herbert Spencer all my life
+until I read his autobiography, and then I laughed a little and loved
+him. I remember as early as the City Merchants' days how Britten and I
+scoffed at that pompous question-begging word "Evolution," having, so to
+speak, found it out. Evolution, some illuminating talker had remarked at
+the Britten lunch table, had led not only to man, but to the liver-fluke
+and skunk, obviously it might lead anywhere; order came into things only
+through the struggling mind of man. That lit things wonderfully for
+us. When I went up to Cambridge I was perfectly clear that life was
+a various and splendid disorder of forces that the spirit of man sets
+itself to tame. I have never since fallen away from that persuasion.
+
+I do not think I was exceptionally precocious in reaching these
+conclusions and a sort of religious finality for myself by eighteen or
+nineteen. I know men and women vary very much in these matters, just as
+children do in learning to talk. Some will chatter at eighteen months
+and some will hardly speak until three, and the thing has very little
+to do with their subsequent mental quality. So it is with young people;
+some will begin their religious, their social, their sexual interests at
+fourteen, some not until far on in the twenties. Britten and I belonged
+to one of the precocious types, and Cossington very probably to another.
+It wasn't that there was anything priggish about any of us; we should
+have been prigs to have concealed our spontaneous interests and ape the
+theoretical boy.
+
+The world of man centred for my imagination in London, it still centres
+there; the real and present world, that is to say, as distinguished from
+the wonder-lands of atomic and microscopic science and the stars and
+future time. I had travelled scarcely at all, I had never crossed the
+Channel, but I had read copiously and I had formed a very good working
+idea of this round globe with its mountains and wildernesses and forests
+and all the sorts and conditions of human life that were scattered over
+its surface. It was all alive, I felt, and changing every day; how it
+was changing, and the changes men might bring about, fascinated my mind
+beyond measure.
+
+I used to find a charm in old maps that showed The World as Known to the
+Ancients, and I wish I could now without any suspicion of self-deception
+write down compactly the world as it was known to me at nineteen. So
+far as extension went it was, I fancy, very like the world I know now at
+forty-two; I had practically all the mountains and seas, boundaries and
+races, products and possibilities that I have now. But its intension was
+very different. All the interval has been increasing and deepening my
+social knowledge, replacing crude and second-hand impressions by felt
+and realised distinctions.
+
+In 1895--that was my last year with Britten, for I went up to Cambridge
+in September--my vision of the world had much the same relation to the
+vision I have to-day that an ill-drawn daub of a mask has to the direct
+vision of a human face. Britten and I looked at our world and saw--what
+did we see? Forms and colours side by side that we had no suspicion were
+interdependent. We had no conception of the roots of things nor of the
+reaction of things. It did not seem to us, for example, that business
+had anything to do with government, or that money and means affected the
+heroic issues of war. There were no wagons in our war game, and where
+there were guns, there it was assumed the ammunition was gathered
+together. Finance again was a sealed book to us; we did not so much
+connect it with the broad aspects of human affairs as regard it as a
+sort of intrusive nuisance to be earnestly ignored by all right-minded
+men. We had no conception of the quality of politics, nor how
+"interests" came into such affairs; we believed men were swayed by
+purely intellectual convictions and were either right or wrong, honest
+or dishonest (in which case they deserved to be shot), good or bad. We
+knew nothing of mental inertia, and could imagine the opinion of a whole
+nation changed by one lucid and convincing exposition. We were capable
+of the most incongruous transfers from the scroll of history to our own
+times, we could suppose Brixton ravaged and Hampstead burnt in civil
+wars for the succession to the throne, or Cheapside a lane of death and
+the front of the Mansion House set about with guillotines in the course
+of an accurately transposed French Revolution. We rebuilt London by Act
+of Parliament, and once in a mood of hygienic enterprise we transferred
+its population EN MASSE to the North Downs by an order of the Local
+Government Board. We thought nothing of throwing religious organisations
+out of employment or superseding all the newspapers by freely
+distributed bulletins. We could contemplate the possibility of laws
+abolishing whole classes; we were equal to such a dream as the peaceful
+and orderly proclamation of Communism from the steps of St. Paul's
+Cathedral, after the passing of a simply worded bill,--a close and not
+unnaturally an exciting division carrying the third reading. I remember
+quite distinctly evolving that vision. We were then fully fifteen and we
+were perfectly serious about it. We were not fools; it was simply that
+as yet we had gathered no experience at all of the limits and powers of
+legislation and conscious collective intention....
+
+I think this statement does my boyhood justice, and yet I have my
+doubts. It is so hard now to say what one understood and what one did
+not understand. It isn't only that every day changed one's general
+outlook, but also that a boy fluctuates between phases of quite adult
+understanding and phases of tawdrily magnificent puerility. Sometimes
+I myself was in those tumbrils that went along Cheapside to the Mansion
+House, a Sydney Cartonesque figure, a white defeated Mirabean; sometimes
+it was I who sat judging and condemning and ruling (sleeping in
+my clothes and feeding very simply) the soul and autocrat of the
+Provisional Government, which occupied, of all inconvenient places! the
+General Post Office at St. Martin's-le-Grand!...
+
+I cannot trace the development of my ideas at Cambridge, but I believe
+the mere physical fact of going two hours' journey away from London gave
+that place for the first time an effect of unity in my imagination. I
+got outside London. It became tangible instead of being a frame almost
+as universal as sea and sky.
+
+At Cambridge my ideas ceased to live in a duologue; in exchange for
+Britten, with whom, however, I corresponded lengthily, stylishly and
+self-consciously for some years, I had now a set of congenial friends. I
+got talk with some of the younger dons, I learnt to speak in the Union,
+and in my little set we were all pretty busily sharpening each other's
+wits and correcting each other's interpretations. Cambridge made
+politics personal and actual. At City Merchants' we had had no sense
+of effective contact; we boasted, it is true, an under secretary and a
+colonial governor among our old boys, but they were never real to
+us; such distinguished sons as returned to visit the old school were
+allusive and pleasant in the best Pinky Dinky style, and pretended to
+be in earnest about nothing but our football and cricket, to mourn the
+abolition of "water," and find a shuddering personal interest in the
+ancient swishing block. At Cambridge I felt for the first time that I
+touched the thing that was going on. Real living statesmen came down to
+debate in the Union, the older dons had been their college intimates,
+their sons and nephews expounded them to us and made them real to us.
+They invited us to entertain ideas; I found myself for the first time
+in my life expected to read and think and discuss, my secret vice had
+become a virtue.
+
+That combination-room world is at last larger and more populous and
+various than the world of schoolmasters. The Shoesmiths and Naylors who
+had been the aristocracy of City Merchants' fell into their place in my
+mind; they became an undistinguished mass on the more athletic side of
+Pinky Dinkyism, and their hostility to ideas and to the expression
+of ideas ceased to limit and trouble me. The brighter men of each
+generation stay up; these others go down to propagate their tradition,
+as the fathers of families, as mediocre professional men, as assistant
+masters in schools. Cambridge which perfects them is by the nature
+of things least oppressed by them,--except when it comes to a vote in
+Convocation.
+
+We were still in those days under the shadow of the great Victorians. I
+never saw Gladstone (as I never set eyes on the old Queen), but he
+had resigned office only a year before I went up to Trinity, and the
+Combination Rooms were full of personal gossip about him and Disraeli
+and the other big figures of the gladiatorial stage of Parlimentary
+history, talk that leaked copiously into such sets as mine. The ceiling
+of our guest chamber at Trinity was glorious with the arms of Sir
+William Harcourt, whose Death Duties had seemed at first like a
+socialist dawn. Mr. Evesham we asked to come to the Union every year,
+Masters, Chamberlain and the old Duke of Devonshire; they did not come
+indeed, but their polite refusals brought us all, as it were, within
+personal touch of them. One heard of cabinet councils and meetings at
+country houses. Some of us, pursuing such interests, went so far as to
+read political memoirs and the novels of Disraeli and Mrs. Humphry Ward.
+From gossip, example and the illustrated newspapers one learnt something
+of the way in which parties were split, coalitions formed, how permanent
+officials worked and controlled their ministers, how measures were
+brought forward and projects modified.
+
+And while I was getting the great leading figures on the political
+stage, who had been presented to me in my schooldays not so much as men
+as the pantomimic monsters of political caricature, while I was getting
+them reduced in my imagination to the stature of humanity, and their
+motives to the quality of impulses like my own, I was also acquiring in
+my Tripos work a constantly developing and enriching conception of
+the world of men as a complex of economic, intellectual and moral
+processes....
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Socialism is an intellectual Proteus, but to the men of my generation it
+came as the revolt of the workers. Rodbertus we never heard of and
+the Fabian Society we did not understand; Marx and Morris, the Chicago
+Anarchists, JUSTICE and Social Democratic Federation (as it was then)
+presented socialism to our minds. Hatherleigh was the leading exponent
+of the new doctrines in Trinity, and the figure upon his wall of a
+huge-muscled, black-haired toiler swaggering sledgehammer in hand across
+a revolutionary barricade, seemed the quintessence of what he had to
+expound. Landlord and capitalist had robbed and enslaved the workers,
+and were driving them quite automatically to inevitable insurrection.
+They would arise and the capitalist system would flee and vanish like
+the mists before the morning, like the dews before the sunrise, giving
+place in the most simple and obvious manner to an era of Right and
+Justice and Virtue and Well Being, and in short a Perfectly Splendid
+Time.
+
+I had already discussed this sort of socialism under the guidance of
+Britten, before I went up to Cambridge. It was all mixed up with ideas
+about freedom and natural virtue and a great scorn for kings, titles,
+wealth and officials, and it was symbolised by the red ties we wore. Our
+simple verdict on existing arrangements was that they were "all wrong."
+The rich were robbers and knew it, kings and princes were usurpers and
+knew it, religious teachers were impostors in league with power,
+the economic system was an elaborate plot on the part of the few to
+expropriate the many. We went about feeling scornful of all the current
+forms of life, forms that esteemed themselves solid, that were, we knew,
+no more than shapes painted on a curtain that was presently to be torn
+aside....
+
+It was Hatherleigh's poster and his capacity for overstating things, I
+think, that first qualified my simple revolutionary enthusiasm. Perhaps
+also I had met with Fabian publications, but if I did I forget the
+circumstances. And no doubt my innate constructiveness with its
+practical corollary of an analytical treatment of the material supplied,
+was bound to push me on beyond this melodramatic interpretation of human
+affairs.
+
+I compared that Working Man of the poster with any sort of working man
+I knew. I perceived that the latter was not going to change, and indeed
+could not under any stimulus whatever be expected to change, into the
+former. It crept into my mind as slowly and surely as the dawn creeps
+into a room that the former was not, as I had at first rather glibly
+assumed, an "ideal," but a complete misrepresentation of the quality and
+possibilities of things.
+
+I do not know now whether it was during my school-days or at Cambridge
+that I first began not merely to see the world as a great contrast of
+rich and poor, but to feel the massive effect of that multitudinous
+majority of people who toil continually, who are for ever anxious about
+ways and means, who are restricted, ill clothed, ill fed and ill
+housed, who have limited outlooks and continually suffer misadventures,
+hardships and distresses through the want of money. My lot had fallen
+upon the fringe of the possessing minority; if I did not know the want
+of necessities I knew shabbiness, and the world that let me go on to a
+university education intimated very plainly that there was not a thing
+beyond the primary needs that my stimulated imagination might demand
+that it would not be an effort for me to secure. A certain aggressive
+radicalism against the ruling and propertied classes followed almost
+naturally from my circumstances. It did not at first connect itself at
+all with the perception of a planless disorder in human affairs that had
+been forced upon me by the atmosphere of my upbringing, nor did it link
+me in sympathy with any of the profounder realities of poverty. It was
+a personal independent thing. The dingier people one saw in the back
+streets and lower quarters of Bromstead and Penge, the drift of dirty
+children, ragged old women, street loafers, grimy workers that made
+the social background of London, the stories one heard of privation and
+sweating, only joined up very slowly with the general propositions I was
+making about life. We could become splendidly eloquent about the social
+revolution and the triumph of the Proletariat after the Class war, and
+it was only by a sort of inspiration that it came to me that my bedder,
+a garrulous old thing with a dusty black bonnet over one eye and an
+ostentatiously clean apron outside the dark mysteries that clothed her,
+or the cheeky little ruffians who yelled papers about the streets, were
+really material to such questions.
+
+Directly any of us young socialists of Trinity found ourselves in
+immediate contact with servants or cadgers or gyps or bedders or
+plumbers or navvies or cabmen or railway porters we became unconsciously
+and unthinkingly aristocrats. Our voices altered, our gestures altered.
+We behaved just as all the other men, rich or poor, swatters or
+sportsmen or Pinky Dinkys, behaved, and exactly as we were expected
+to behave. On the whole it is a population of poor quality round about
+Cambridge, rather stunted and spiritless and very difficult to idealise.
+That theoretical Working Man of ours!--if we felt the clash at all we
+explained it, I suppose, by assuming that he came from another part of
+the country; Esmeer, I remember, who lived somewhere in the Fens, was
+very eloquent about the Cornish fishermen, and Hatherleigh, who was
+a Hampshire man, assured us we ought to know the Scottish miner.
+My private fancy was for the Lancashire operative because of his
+co-operative societies, and because what Lancashire thinks to-day
+England thinks to-morrow.... And also I had never been in Lancashire.
+
+By little increments of realisation it was that the profounder verities
+of the problem of socialism came to me. It helped me very much that I
+had to go down to the Potteries several times to discuss my future with
+my uncle and guardian; I walked about and saw Bursley Wakes and much of
+the human aspects of organised industrialism at close quarters for the
+first time. The picture of a splendid Working Man cheated out of his
+innate glorious possibilities, and presently to arise and dash this
+scoundrelly and scandalous system of private ownership to fragments,
+began to give place to a limitless spectacle of inefficiency, to a
+conception of millions of people not organised as they should be, not
+educated as they should be, not simply prevented from but incapable
+of nearly every sort of beauty, mostly kindly and well meaning, mostly
+incompetent, mostly obstinate, and easily humbugged and easily diverted.
+Even the tragic and inspiring idea of Marx, that the poor were nearing
+a limit of painful experience, and awakening to a sense of intolerable
+wrongs, began to develop into the more appalling conception that the
+poor were simply in a witless uncomfortable inconclusive way--"muddling
+along"; that they wanted nothing very definitely nor very urgently, that
+mean fears enslaved them and mean satisfactions decoyed them, that they
+took the very gift of life itself with a spiritless lassitude, hoarding
+it, being rather anxious not to lose it than to use it in any way
+whatever.
+
+The complete development of that realisation was the work of many
+years. I had only the first intimations at Cambridge. But I did have
+intimations. Most acutely do I remember the doubts that followed the
+visit of Chris Robinson. Chris Robinson was heralded by such heroic
+anticipations, and he was so entirely what we had not anticipated.
+
+Hatherleigh got him to come, arranged a sort of meeting for him at
+Redmayne's rooms in King's, and was very proud and proprietorial. It
+failed to stir Cambridge at all profoundly. Beyond a futile attempt
+to screw up Hatherleigh made by some inexpert duffers who used nails
+instead of screws and gimlets, there was no attempt to rag. Next day
+Chris Robinson went and spoke at Bennett Hall in Newnham College, and
+left Cambridge in the evening amidst the cheers of twenty men or so.
+Socialism was at such a low ebb politically in those days that it didn't
+even rouse men to opposition.
+
+And there sat Chris under that flamboyant and heroic Worker of the
+poster, a little wrinkled grey-bearded apologetic man in ready-made
+clothes, with watchful innocent brown eyes and a persistent and
+invincible air of being out of his element. He sat with his stout boots
+tucked up under his chair, and clung to a teacup and saucer and
+looked away from us into the fire, and we all sat about on tables and
+chair-arms and windowsills and boxes and anywhere except upon chairs
+after the manner of young men. The only other chair whose seat was
+occupied was the one containing his knitted woollen comforter and his
+picturesque old beach-photographer's hat. We were all shy and didn't
+know how to take hold of him now we had got him, and, which was
+disconcertingly unanticipated, he was manifestly having the same
+difficulty with us. We had expected to be gripped.
+
+"I'll not be knowing what to say to these Chaps," he repeated with a
+north-country quality in his speech.
+
+We made reassuring noises.
+
+The Ambassador of the Workers stirred his tea earnestly through an
+uncomfortable pause.
+
+"I'd best tell 'em something of how things are in Lancashire, what
+with the new machines and all that," he speculated at last with red
+reflections in his thoughtful eyes.
+
+We had an inexcusable dread that perhaps he would make a mess of the
+meeting.
+
+But when he was no longer in the unaccustomed meshes of refined
+conversation, but speaking with an audience before him, he became a
+different man. He declared he would explain to us just exactly what
+socialism was, and went on at once to an impassioned contrast of social
+conditions. "You young men," he said "come from homes of luxury; every
+need you feel is supplied--"
+
+We sat and stood and sprawled about him, occupying every inch of
+Redmayne's floor space except the hearthrug-platform, and we listened
+to him and thought him over. He was the voice of wrongs that made us
+indignant and eager. We forgot for a time that he had been shy and
+seemed not a little incompetent, his provincial accent became a beauty
+of his earnest speech, we were carried away by his indignations. We
+looked with shining eyes at one another and at the various dons who had
+dropped in and were striving to maintain a front of judicious severity.
+We felt more and more that social injustice must cease, and cease
+forthwith. We felt we could not sleep upon it. At the end we clapped and
+murmured our applause and wanted badly to cheer.
+
+Then like a lancet stuck into a bladder came the heckling. Denson, that
+indolent, liberal-minded sceptic, did most of the questioning. He lay
+contorted in a chair, with his ugly head very low, his legs crossed and
+his left boot very high, and he pointed his remarks with a long thin
+hand and occasionally adjusted the unstable glasses that hid his watery
+eyes. "I don't want to carp," he began. "The present system, I admit,
+stands condemned. Every present system always HAS stood condemned in the
+minds of intelligent men. But where it seems to me you get thin, is just
+where everybody has been thin, and that's when you come to the remedy."
+
+"Socialism," said Chris Robinson, as if it answered everything, and
+Hatherleigh said "Hear! Hear!" very resolutely.
+
+"I suppose I OUGHT to take that as an answer," said Denson, getting
+his shoulder-blades well down to the seat of his chair; "but I don't.
+I don't, you know. It's rather a shame to cross-examine you after this
+fine address of yours"--Chris Robinson on the hearthrug made acquiescent
+and inviting noises--"but the real question remains how exactly are you
+going to end all these wrongs? There are the administrative questions.
+If you abolish the private owner, I admit you abolish a very complex
+and clumsy way of getting businesses run, land controlled and things
+in general administered, but you don't get rid of the need of
+administration, you know."
+
+"Democracy," said Chris Robinson.
+
+"Organised somehow," said Denson. "And it's just the How perplexes me.
+I can quite easily imagine a socialist state administered in a sort of
+scrambling tumult that would be worse than anything we have got now.
+
+"Nothing could be worse than things are now," said Chris Robinson. "I
+have seen little children--"
+
+"I submit life on an ill-provisioned raft, for example, could easily be
+worse--or life in a beleagured town."
+
+Murmurs.
+
+They wrangled for some time, and it had the effect upon me of coming out
+from the glow of a good matinee performance into the cold daylight of
+late afternoon. Chris Robinson did not shine in conflict with Denson; he
+was an orator and not a dialectician, and he missed Denson's points and
+displayed a disposition to plunge into untimely pathos and indignation.
+And Denson hit me curiously hard with one of his shafts. "Suppose," he
+said, "you found yourself prime minister--"
+
+I looked at Chris Robinson, bright-eyed and his hair a little ruffled
+and his whole being rhetorical, and measured him against the huge
+machine of government muddled and mysterious. Oh! but I was perplexed!
+
+And then we took him back to Hatherleigh's rooms and drank beer and
+smoked about him while he nursed his knee with hairy wristed hands that
+protruded from his flannel shirt, and drank lemonade under the cartoon
+of that emancipated Worker, and we had a great discursive talk with him.
+
+"Eh! you should see our big meetings up north?" he said.
+
+Denson had ruffled him and worried him a good deal, and ever and again
+he came back to that discussion. "It's all very easy for your learned
+men to sit and pick holes," he said, "while the children suffer and die.
+They don't pick holes up north. They mean business."
+
+He talked, and that was the most interesting part of it all, of his
+going to work in a factory when he was twelve--"when you Chaps were all
+with your mammies "--and how he had educated himself of nights until he
+would fall asleep at his reading.
+
+"It's made many of us keen for all our lives," he remarked, "all that
+clemming for education. Why! I longed all through one winter to read a
+bit of Darwin. I must know about this Darwin if I die for it, I said.
+And I could no' get the book."
+
+Hatherleigh made an enthusiastic noise and drank beer at him with round
+eyes over the mug.
+
+"Well, anyhow I wasted no time on Greek and Latin," said Chris Robinson.
+"And one learns to go straight at a thing without splitting straws. One
+gets hold of the Elementals."
+
+(Well, did they? That was the gist of my perplexity.)
+
+"One doesn't quibble," he said, returning to his rankling memory of
+Denson, "while men decay and starve."
+
+"But suppose," I said, suddenly dropping into opposition, "the
+alternative is to risk a worse disaster--or do something patently
+futile."
+
+"I don't follow that," said Chris Robinson. "We don't propose anything
+futile, so far as I can see."
+
+
+6
+
+
+The prevailing force in my undergraduate days was not Socialism
+but Kiplingism. Our set was quite exceptional in its socialistic
+professions. And we were all, you must understand, very distinctly
+Imperialists also, and professed a vivid sense of the "White Man's
+Burden."
+
+It is a little difficult now to get back to the feelings of that
+period; Kipling has since been so mercilessly and exhaustively mocked,
+criticised and torn to shreds;--never was a man so violently exalted and
+then, himself assisting, so relentlessly called down. But in the middle
+nineties this spectacled and moustached little figure with its heavy
+chin and its general effect of vehement gesticulation, its wild shouts
+of boyish enthusiasm for effective force, its lyric delight in the
+sounds and colours, in the very odours of empire, its wonderful
+discovery of machinery and cotton waste and the under officer and the
+engineer, and "shop" as a poetic dialect, became almost a national
+symbol. He got hold of us wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling and
+haunting quotations, he stirred Britten and myself to futile imitations,
+he coloured the very idiom of our conversation. He rose to his climax
+with his "Recessional," while I was still an undergraduate.
+
+What did he give me exactly?
+
+He helped to broaden my geographical sense immensely, and he provided
+phrases for just that desire for discipline and devotion and organised
+effort the Socialism of our time failed to express, that the current
+socialist movement still fails, I think, to express. The sort of thing
+that follows, for example, tore something out of my inmost nature and
+gave it a shape, and I took it back from him shaped and let much of
+the rest of him, the tumult and the bullying, the hysteria and the
+impatience, the incoherence and inconsistency, go uncriticised for the
+sake of it:--
+
+
+"Keep ye the Law--be swift in all obedience--Clear the land of evil,
+drive the road and bridge the ford, Make ye sure to each his own That he
+reap where he hath sown; By the peace among Our peoples let men know we
+serve the Lord!"
+
+
+And then again, and for all our later criticism, this sticks in my mind,
+sticks there now as quintessential wisdom:
+
+
+     "The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood an' stone;
+     'E don't obey no orders unless they is 'is own;
+     'E keeps 'is side-arms awful: 'e leaves 'em all about
+     An' then comes up the regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out.
+          All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,
+          All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less,
+          All along of abby-nay, kul, an' hazar-ho,
+          Mind you keep your rifle an' yourself jus' so!"
+
+
+It is after all a secondary matter that Kipling, not having been born
+and brought up in Bromstead and Penge, and the war in South Africa
+being yet in the womb of time, could quite honestly entertain the now
+remarkable delusion that England had her side-arms at that time kept
+anything but "awful." He learnt better, and we all learnt with him in
+the dark years of exasperating and humiliating struggle that followed,
+and I do not see that we fellow learners are justified in turning
+resentfully upon him for a common ignorance and assumption....
+
+South Africa seems always painted on the back cloth of my Cambridge
+memories. How immense those disasters seemed at the time, disasters
+our facile English world has long since contrived in any edifying or
+profitable sense to forget! How we thrilled to the shouting newspaper
+sellers as the first false flush of victory gave place to the
+realisation of defeat. Far away there our army showed itself human,
+mortal and human in the sight of all the world, the pleasant officers we
+had imagined would change to wonderful heroes at the first crackling of
+rifles, remained the pleasant, rather incompetent men they had always
+been, failing to imagine, failing to plan and co-operate, failing to
+grip. And the common soldiers, too, they were just what our streets and
+country-side had made them, no sudden magic came out of the war bugles
+for them. Neither splendid nor disgraceful were they,--just ill-trained
+and fairly plucky and wonderfully good-tempered men--paying for it. And
+how it lowered our vitality all that first winter to hear of Nicholson's
+Nek, and then presently close upon one another, to realise the
+bloody waste of Magersfontein, the shattering retreat from Stormberg,
+Colenso--Colenso, that blundering battle, with White, as it seemed, in
+Ladysmith near the point of surrender! and so through the long unfolding
+catalogue of bleak disillusionments, of aching, unconcealed anxiety lest
+worse should follow. To advance upon your enemy singing about his lack
+of cleanliness and method went out of fashion altogether! The dirty
+retrogressive Boer vanished from our scheme of illusion.
+
+All through my middle Cambridge period, the guns boomed and the rifles
+crackled away there on the veldt, and the horsemen rode and the tale of
+accidents and blundering went on. Men, mules, horses, stores and money
+poured into South Africa, and the convalescent wounded streamed home. I
+see it in my memory as if I had looked at it through a window instead of
+through the pages of the illustrated papers; I recall as if I had been
+there the wide open spaces, the ragged hillsides, the open order attacks
+of helmeted men in khaki, the scarce visible smoke of the guns, the
+wrecked trains in great lonely places, the burnt isolated farms, and
+at last the blockhouses and the fences of barbed wire uncoiling and
+spreading for endless miles across the desert, netting the elusive enemy
+until at last, though he broke the meshes again and again, we had him in
+the toils. If one's attention strayed in the lecture-room it wandered to
+those battle-fields.
+
+And that imagined panorama of war unfolds to an accompaniment of yelling
+newsboys in the narrow old Cambridge streets, of the flicker of papers
+hastily bought and torn open in the twilight, of the doubtful reception
+of doubtful victories, and the insensate rejoicings at last that seemed
+to some of us more shameful than defeats....
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+A book that stands out among these memories, that stimulated me
+immensely so that I forced it upon my companions, half in the spirit of
+propaganda and half to test it by their comments, was Meredith's ONE OF
+OUR CONQUERORS. It is one of the books that have made me. In that I got
+a supplement and corrective of Kipling. It was the first detached and
+adverse criticism of the Englishman I had ever encountered. It must have
+been published already nine or ten years when I read it. The country
+had paid no heed to it, had gone on to the expensive lessons of the War
+because of the dull aversion our people feel for all such intimations,
+and so I could read it as a book justified. The war endorsed its every
+word for me, underlined each warning indication of the gigantic dangers
+that gathered against our system across the narrow seas. It discovered
+Europe to me, as watching and critical.
+
+But while I could respond to all its criticisms of my country's
+intellectual indolence, of my country's want of training and discipline
+and moral courage, I remember that the idea that on the continent there
+were other peoples going ahead of us, mentally alert while we fumbled,
+disciplined while we slouched, aggressive and preparing to bring our
+Imperial pride to a reckoning, was extremely novel and distasteful to
+me. It set me worrying of nights. It put all my projects for social and
+political reconstruction upon a new uncomfortable footing. It made them
+no longer merely desirable but urgent. Instead of pride and the love
+of making one might own to a baser motive. Under Kipling's sway I had a
+little forgotten the continent of Europe, treated it as a mere envious
+echo to our own world-wide display. I began now to have a disturbing
+sense as it were of busy searchlights over the horizon....
+
+One consequence of the patriotic chagrin Meredith produced in me was an
+attempt to belittle his merit. "It isn't a good novel, anyhow," I said.
+
+The charge I brought against it was, I remember, a lack of unity. It
+professed to be a study of the English situation in the early nineties,
+but it was all deflected, I said, and all the interest was confused by
+the story of Victor Radnor's fight with society to vindicate the woman
+he had loved and never married. Now in the retrospect and with a mind
+full of bitter enlightenment, I can do Meredith justice, and admit the
+conflict was not only essential but cardinal in his picture, that the
+terrible inflexibility of the rich aunts and the still more terrible
+claim of Mrs. Burman Radnor, the "infernal punctilio," and Dudley
+Sowerby's limitations, were the central substance of that inalertness
+the book set itself to assail. So many things have been brought together
+in my mind that were once remotely separated. A people that will not
+valiantly face and understand and admit love and passion can understand
+nothing whatever. But in those days what is now just obvious truth to me
+was altogether outside my range of comprehension....
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+As I seek to recapitulate the interlacing growth of my apprehension of
+the world, as I flounder among the half-remembered developments that
+found me a crude schoolboy and left me a man, there comes out, as if
+it stood for all the rest, my first holiday abroad. That did not happen
+until I was twenty-two. I was a fellow of Trinity, and the Peace of
+Vereeniging had just been signed.
+
+I went with a man named Willersley, a man some years senior to myself,
+who had just missed a fellowship and the higher division of the Civil
+Service, and who had become an enthusiastic member of the London School
+Board, upon which the cumulative vote and the support of the "advanced"
+people had placed him. He had, like myself, a small independent income
+that relieved him of any necessity to earn a living, and he had a
+kindred craving for social theorising and some form of social service.
+He had sought my acquaintance after reading a paper of mine (begotten
+by the visit of Chris Robinson) on the limits of pure democracy. It had
+marched with some thoughts of his own.
+
+We went by train to Spiez on the Lake of Thun, then up the Gemmi,
+and thence with one or two halts and digressions and a little modest
+climbing we crossed over by the Antrona pass (on which we were
+benighted) into Italy, and by way of Domo D'ossola and the Santa Maria
+Maggiore valley to Cannobio, and thence up the lake to Locarno (where,
+as I shall tell, we stayed some eventful days) and so up the Val Maggia
+and over to Airolo and home.
+
+As I write of that long tramp of ours, something of its freshness and
+enlargement returns to me. I feel again the faint pleasant excitement of
+the boat train, the trampling procession of people with hand baggage and
+laden porters along the platform of the Folkestone pier, the scarcely
+perceptible swaying of the moored boat beneath our feet. Then, very
+obvious and simple, the little emotion of standing out from the homeland
+and seeing the long white Kentish cliffs recede. One walked about the
+boat doing one's best not to feel absurdly adventurous, and presently a
+movement of people directed one's attention to a white lighthouse on a
+cliff to the east of us, coming up suddenly; and then one turned to scan
+the little different French coast villages, and then, sliding by in a
+pale sunshine came a long wooden pier with oddly dressed children upon
+it, and the clustering town of Boulogne.
+
+One took it all with the outward calm that became a young man of nearly
+three and twenty, but one was alive to one's finger-tips with pleasing
+little stimulations. The custom house examination excited one, the
+strangeness of a babble in a foreign tongue; one found the French of
+City Merchants' and Cambridge a shy and viscous flow, and then one was
+standing in the train as it went slowly through the rail-laid street to
+Boulogne Ville, and one looked out at the world in French, porters in
+blouses, workmen in enormous purple trousers, police officers in peaked
+caps instead of helmets and romantically cloaked, big carts, all on
+two wheels instead of four, green shuttered casements instead of
+sash windows, and great numbers of neatly dressed women in economical
+mourning.
+
+"Oh! there's a priest!" one said, and was betrayed into suchlike artless
+cries.
+
+It was a real other world, with different government and different
+methods, and in the night one was roused from uneasy slumbers and
+sat blinking and surly, wrapped up in one's couverture and with one's
+oreiller all awry, to encounter a new social phenomenon, the German
+official, so different in manner from the British; and when one woke
+again after that one had come to Bale, and out one tumbled to get coffee
+in Switzerland....
+
+I have been over that route dozens of times since, but it still revives
+a certain lingering youthfulness, a certain sense of cheerful release in
+me.
+
+I remember that I and Willersley became very sociological as we ran on
+to Spiez, and made all sorts of generalisations from the steeply sloping
+fields on the hillsides, and from the people we saw on platforms and
+from little differences in the way things were done.
+
+The clean prosperity of Bale and Switzerland, the big clean stations,
+filled me with patriotic misgivings, as I thought of the vast dirtiness
+of London, the mean dirtiness of Cambridgeshire. It came to me that
+perhaps my scheme of international values was all wrong, that quite
+stupendous possibilities and challenges for us and our empire might be
+developing here--and I recalled Meredith's Skepsey in France with a new
+understanding.
+
+Willersley had dressed himself in a world-worn Norfolk suit of greenish
+grey tweeds that ended unfamiliarly at his rather impending, spectacled,
+intellectual visage. I didn't, I remember, like the contrast of him with
+the drilled Swiss and Germans about us. Convict coloured stockings
+and vast hobnail boots finished him below, and all his luggage was a
+borrowed rucksac that he had tied askew. He did not want to shave in
+the train, but I made him at one of the Swiss stations--I dislike
+these Oxford slovenlinesses--and then confound him! he cut himself and
+bled....
+
+Next morning we were breathing a thin exhilarating air that seemed to
+have washed our very veins to an incredible cleanliness, and
+eating hard-boiled eggs in a vast clear space of rime-edged rocks,
+snow-mottled, above a blue-gashed glacier. All about us the monstrous
+rock surfaces rose towards the shining peaks above, and there were
+winding moraines from which the ice had receded, and then dark
+clustering fir trees far below.
+
+I had an extraordinary feeling of having come out of things, of being
+outside.
+
+"But this is the round world!" I said, with a sense of never having
+perceived it before; "this is the round world!"
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+That holiday was full of big comprehensive effects; the first view of
+the Rhone valley and the distant Valaisian Alps, for example, which we
+saw from the shoulder of the mountain above the Gemmi, and the early
+summer dawn breaking over Italy as we moved from our night's crouching
+and munched bread and chocolate and stretched our stiff limbs among the
+tumbled and precipitous rocks that hung over Lake Cingolo, and surveyed
+the winding tiring rocky track going down and down to Antronapiano.
+
+And our thoughts were as comprehensive as our impressions. Willersley's
+mind abounded in historical matter; he had an inaccurate abundant habit
+of topographical reference; he made me see and trace and see again the
+Roman Empire sweep up these winding valleys, and the coming of the first
+great Peace among the warring tribes of men....
+
+In the retrospect each of us seems to have been talking about our
+outlook almost continually. Each of us, you see, was full of the same
+question, very near and altogether predominant to us, the question:
+"What am I going to do with my life?" He saw it almost as importantly as
+I, but from a different angle, because his choice was largely made and
+mine still hung in the balance.
+
+"I feel we might do so many things," I said, "and everything that calls
+one, calls one away from something else."
+
+Willersley agreed without any modest disavowals.
+
+"We have got to think out," he said, "just what we are and what we are
+up to. We've got to do that now. And then--it's one of those questions
+it is inadvisable to reopen subsequently."
+
+He beamed at me through his glasses. The sententious use of long words
+was a playful habit with him, that and a slight deliberate humour,
+habits occasional Extension Lecturing was doing very much to intensify.
+
+"You've made your decision?"
+
+He nodded with a peculiar forward movement of his head.
+
+"How would you put it?"
+
+"Social Service--education. Whatever else matters or doesn't matter, it
+seems to me there is one thing we MUST have and increase, and that
+is the number of people who can think a little--and have"--he beamed
+again--"an adequate sense of causation."
+
+"You're sure it's worth while."
+
+"For me--certainly. I don't discuss that any more."
+
+"I don't limit myself too narrowly," he added. "After all, the work is
+all one. We who know, we who feel, are building the great modern state,
+joining wall to wall and way to way, the new great England rising out
+of the decaying old... we are the real statesmen--I like that use of
+'statesmen.'..."
+
+"Yes," I said with many doubts. "Yes, of course...."
+
+Willersley is middle-aged now, with silver in his hair and a deepening
+benevolence in his always amiable face, and he has very fairly kept his
+word. He has lived for social service and to do vast masses of
+useful, undistinguished, fertilising work. Think of the days of
+arid administrative plodding and of contention still more arid and
+unrewarded, that he must have spent! His little affectations of gesture
+and manner, imitative affectations for the most part, have increased,
+and the humorous beam and the humorous intonations have become a thing
+he puts on every morning like an old coat. His devotion is mingled with
+a considerable whimsicality, and they say he is easily flattered by
+subordinates and easily offended into opposition by colleagues; he has
+made mistakes at times and followed wrong courses, still there he is,
+a flat contradiction to all the ordinary doctrine of motives, a man who
+has foregone any chances of wealth and profit, foregone any easier paths
+to distinction, foregone marriage and parentage, in order to serve the
+community. He does it without any fee or reward except his personal
+self-satisfaction in doing this work, and he does it without any hope
+of future joys and punishments, for he is an implacable Rationalist. No
+doubt he idealises himself a little, and dreams of recognition. No
+doubt he gets his pleasure from a sense of power, from the spending
+and husbanding of large sums of public money, and from the inevitable
+proprietorship he must feel in the fair, fine, well-ordered schools he
+has done so much to develop. "But for me," he can say, "there would have
+been a Job about those diagrams, and that subject or this would have
+been less ably taught."...
+
+The fact remains that for him the rewards have been adequate, if not to
+content at any rate to keep him working. Of course he covets the
+notice of the world he has served, as a lover covets the notice of his
+mistress. Of course he thinks somewhere, somewhen, he will get credit.
+Only last year I heard some men talking of him, and they were noting,
+with little mean smiles, how he had shown himself self-conscious while
+there was talk of some honorary degree-giving or other; it would, I have
+no doubt, please him greatly if his work were to flower into a crimson
+gown in some Academic parterre. Why shouldn't it? But that is incidental
+vanity at the worst; he goes on anyhow. Most men don't.
+
+But we had our walk twenty years and more ago now. He was oldish even
+then as a young man, just as he is oldish still in middle age. Long
+may his industrious elderliness flourish for the good of the world! He
+lectured a little in conversation then; he lectures more now and listens
+less, toilsomely disentangling what you already understand, giving you
+in detail the data you know; these are things like callosities that come
+from a man's work.
+
+Our long three weeks' talk comes back to me as a memory of ideas and
+determinations slowly growing, all mixed up with a smell of wood smoke
+and pine woods and huge precipices and remote gleams of snow-fields and
+the sound of cascading torrents rushing through deep gorges far below.
+It is mixed, too, with gossips with waitresses and fellow travellers,
+with my first essays in colloquial German and Italian, with disputes
+about the way to take, and other things that I will tell of in another
+section. But the white passion of human service was our dominant theme.
+Not simply perhaps nor altogether unselfishly, but quite honestly, and
+with at least a frequent self-forgetfulness, did we want to do fine and
+noble things, to help in their developing, to lessen misery, to broaden
+and exalt life. It is very hard--perhaps it is impossible--to present
+in a page or two the substance and quality of nearly a month's
+conversation, conversation that is casual and discursive in form, that
+ranges carelessly from triviality to immensity, and yet is constantly
+resuming a constructive process, as workmen on a wall loiter and jest
+and go and come back, and all the while build.
+
+We got it more and more definite that the core of our purpose beneath
+all its varied aspects must needs be order and discipline. "Muddle,"
+said I, "is the enemy." That remains my belief to this day. Clearness
+and order, light and foresight, these things I know for Good. It was
+muddle had just given us all the still freshly painful disasters and
+humiliations of the war, muddle that gives us the visibly sprawling
+disorder of our cities and industrial country-side, muddle that gives us
+the waste of life, the limitations, wretchedness and unemployment of the
+poor. Muddle! I remember myself quoting Kipling--
+
+
+    "All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,
+     All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less."
+
+
+"We build the state," we said over and over again. "That is what we are
+for--servants of the new reorganisation!"
+
+We planned half in earnest and half Utopianising, a League of Social
+Service.
+
+We talked of the splendid world of men that might grow out of such
+unpaid and ill-paid work as we were setting our faces to do. We spoke
+of the intricate difficulties, the monstrous passive resistances, the
+hostilities to such a development as we conceived our work subserved,
+and we spoke with that underlying confidence in the invincibility of the
+causes we adopted that is natural to young and scarcely tried men.
+
+We talked much of the detailed life of politics so far as it was known
+to us, and there Willersley was more experienced and far better informed
+than I; we discussed possible combinations and possible developments,
+and the chances of some great constructive movement coming from
+the heart-searchings the Boer war had occasioned. We would sink to
+gossip--even at the Suetonius level. Willersley would decline towards
+illuminating anecdotes that I capped more or less loosely from my
+private reading. We were particularly wise, I remember, upon the
+management of newspapers, because about that we knew nothing whatever.
+We perceived that great things were to be done through newspapers. We
+talked of swaying opinion and moving great classes to massive action.
+
+Men are egotistical even in devotion. All our splendid projects were
+thickset with the first personal pronoun. We both could write, and all
+that we said in general terms was reflected in the particular in our
+minds; it was ourselves we saw, and no others, writing and speaking
+that moving word. We had already produced manuscript and passed the
+initiations of proof reading; I had been a frequent speaker in the
+Union, and Willersley was an active man on the School Board. Our feet
+were already on the lower rungs that led up and up. He was six and
+twenty, and I twenty-two. We intimated our individual careers in terms
+of bold expectation. I had prophetic glimpses of walls and hoardings
+clamorous with "Vote for Remington," and Willersley no doubt saw himself
+chairman of this committee and that, saying a few slightly ironical
+words after the declaration of the poll, and then sitting friendly
+beside me on the government benches. There was nothing impossible in
+such dreams. Why not the Board of Education for him? My preference at
+that time wavered between the Local Government Board--I had great ideas
+about town-planning, about revisions of municipal areas and re-organised
+internal transit--and the War Office. I swayed strongly towards the
+latter as the journey progressed. My educational bias came later.
+
+The swelling ambitions that have tramped over Alpine passes! How many
+of them, like mine, have come almost within sight of realisation before
+they failed?
+
+There were times when we posed like young gods (of unassuming exterior),
+and times when we were full of the absurdest little solicitudes about
+our prospects. There were times when one surveyed the whole world of
+men as if it was a little thing at one's feet, and by way of contrast
+I remember once lying in bed--it must have been during this holiday,
+though I cannot for the life of me fix where--and speculating whether
+perhaps some day I might not be a K. C. B., Sir Richard Remington, K. C.
+B., M. P.
+
+But the big style prevailed....
+
+We could not tell from minute to minute whether we were planning for
+a world of solid reality, or telling ourselves fairy tales about this
+prospect of life. So much seemed possible, and everything we could think
+of so improbable. There were lapses when it seemed to me I could never
+be anything but just the entirely unimportant and undistinguished young
+man I was for ever and ever. I couldn't even think of myself as five and
+thirty.
+
+Once I remember Willersley going over a list of failures, and why
+they had failed--but young men in the twenties do not know much about
+failures.
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+Willersley and I professed ourselves Socialists, but by this time I knew
+my Rodbertus as well as my Marx, and there was much in our socialism
+that would have shocked Chris Robinson as much as anything in life could
+have shocked him. Socialism as a simple democratic cry we had done with
+for ever. We were socialists because Individualism for us meant muddle,
+meant a crowd of separated, undisciplined little people all obstinately
+and ignorantly doing things jarringly, each one in his own way.
+"Each," I said quoting words of my father's that rose apt in my memory,
+"snarling from his own little bit of property, like a dog tied to a
+cart's tail."
+
+"Essentially," said Willersley, "essentially we're for conscription, in
+peace and war alike. The man who owns property is a public official and
+has to behave as such. That's the gist of socialism as I understand it."
+
+"Or be dismissed from his post," I said, "and replaced by some better
+sort of official. A man's none the less an official because he's
+irresponsible. What he does with his property affects people just the
+same. Private! No one is really private but an outlaw...."
+
+Order and devotion were the very essence of our socialism, and a
+splendid collective vigour and happiness its end. We projected an ideal
+state, an organised state as confident and powerful as modern science,
+as balanced and beautiful as a body, as beneficent as sunshine, the
+organised state that should end muddle for ever; it ruled all our ideals
+and gave form to all our ambitions.
+
+Every man was to be definitely related to that, to have his predominant
+duty to that. Such was the England renewed we had in mind, and how to
+serve that end, to subdue undisciplined worker and undisciplined wealth
+to it, and make the Scientific Commonweal, King, was the continuing
+substance of our intercourse.
+
+
+
+11
+
+
+Every day the wine of the mountains was stronger in our blood, and the
+flush of our youth deeper. We would go in the morning sunlight along
+some narrow Alpine mule-path shouting large suggestions for national
+reorganisation, and weighing considerations as lightly as though the
+world was wax in our hands. "Great England," we said in effect, over
+and over again, "and we will be among the makers! England renewed! The
+country has been warned; it has learnt its lesson. The disasters and
+anxieties of the war have sunk in. England has become serious.... Oh!
+there are big things before us to do; big enduring things!"
+
+One evening we walked up to the loggia of a little pilgrimage church,
+I forget its name, that stands out on a conical hill at the head of a
+winding stair above the town of Locarno. Down below the houses clustered
+amidst a confusion of heat-bitten greenery. I had been sitting silently
+on the parapet, looking across to the purple mountain masses where
+Switzerland passes into Italy, and the drift of our talk seemed suddenly
+to gather to a head.
+
+I broke into speech, giving form to the thoughts that had been
+accumulating. My words have long since passed out of my memory, the
+phrases of familiar expression have altered for me, but the substance
+remains as clear as ever. I said how we were in our measure emperors
+and kings, men undriven, free to do as we pleased with life; we classed
+among the happy ones, our bread and common necessities were given us for
+nothing, we had abilities,--it wasn't modesty but cowardice to behave
+as if we hadn't--and Fortune watched us to see what we might do with
+opportunity and the world.
+
+"There are so many things to do, you see," began Willersley, in his
+judicial lecturer's voice.
+
+"So many things we may do," I interrupted, "with all these years before
+us.... We're exceptional men. It's our place, our duty, to do things."
+
+"Here anyhow," I said, answering the faint amusement of his face; "I've
+got no modesty. Everything conspires to set me up. Why should I run
+about like all those grubby little beasts down there, seeking nothing
+but mean little vanities and indulgencies--and then take credit for
+modesty? I KNOW I am capable. I KNOW I have imagination. Modesty! I know
+if I don't attempt the very biggest things in life I am a damned shirk.
+The very biggest! Somebody has to attempt them. I feel like a loaded gun
+that is only a little perplexed because it has to find out just where to
+aim itself...."
+
+The lake and the frontier villages, a white puff of steam on the distant
+railway to Luino, the busy boats and steamers trailing triangular wakes
+of foam, the long vista eastward towards battlemented Bellinzona, the
+vast mountain distances, now tinged with sunset light, behind this
+nearer landscape, and the southward waters with remote coast towns
+shining dimly, waters that merged at last in a luminous golden haze,
+made a broad panoramic spectacle. It was as if one surveyed the
+world,--and it was like the games I used to set out upon my nursery
+floor. I was exalted by it; I felt larger than men. So kings should
+feel.
+
+That sense of largeness came to me then, and it has come to me since,
+again and again, a splendid intimation or a splendid vanity. Once, I
+remember, when I looked at Genoa from the mountain crest behind the
+town and saw that multitudinous place in all its beauty of width and
+abundance and clustering human effort, and once as I was steaming past
+the brown low hills of Staten Island towards the towering vigour and
+clamorous vitality of New York City, that mood rose to its quintessence.
+And once it came to me, as I shall tell, on Dover cliffs. And a hundred
+times when I have thought of England as our country might be, with no
+wretched poor, no wretched rich, a nation armed and ordered, trained and
+purposeful amidst its vales and rivers, that emotion of collective ends
+and collective purposes has returned to me. I felt as great as humanity.
+For a brief moment I was humanity, looking at the world I had made and
+had still to make....
+
+
+
+12
+
+
+And mingled with these dreams of power and patriotic service there was
+another series of a different quality and a different colour, like the
+antagonistic colour of a shot silk. The white life and the red life,
+contrasted and interchanged, passing swiftly at a turn from one to
+another, and refusing ever to mingle peacefully one with the other. I
+was asking myself openly and distinctly: what are you going to do
+for the world? What are you going to do with yourself? and with an
+increasing strength and persistence Nature in spite of my averted
+attention was asking me in penetrating undertones: what are you going
+to do about this other fundamental matter, the beauty of girls and women
+and your desire for them?
+
+I have told of my sisterless youth and the narrow circumstances of my
+upbringing. It made all women-kind mysterious to me. If it had not been
+for my Staffordshire cousins I do not think I should have known any
+girls at all until I was twenty. Of Staffordshire I will tell a little
+later. But I can remember still how through all those ripening years,
+the thought of women's beauty, their magic presence in the world beside
+me and the unknown, untried reactions of their intercourse, grew upon me
+and grew, as a strange presence grows in a room when one is occupied by
+other things. I busied myself and pretended to be wholly occupied, and
+there the woman stood, full half of life neglected, and it seemed to my
+averted mind sometimes that she was there clad and dignified and divine,
+and sometimes Aphrodite shining and commanding, and sometimes that Venus
+who stoops and allures.
+
+This travel abroad seemed to have released a multitude of things in my
+mind; the clear air, the beauty of the sunshine, the very blue of
+the glaciers made me feel my body and quickened all those disregarded
+dreams. I saw the sheathed beauty of women's forms all about me, in the
+cheerful waitresses at the inns, in the pedestrians one encountered
+in the tracks, in the chance fellow travellers at the hotel tables.
+"Confound it!" said I, and talked all the more zealously of that greater
+England that was calling us.
+
+I remember that we passed two Germans, an old man and a tall fair girl,
+father and daughter, who were walking down from Saas. She came swinging
+and shining towards us, easy and strong. I worshipped her as she
+approached.
+
+"Gut Tag!" said Willersley, removing his hat.
+
+"Morgen!" said the old man, saluting.
+
+I stared stockishly at the girl, who passed with an indifferent face.
+
+That sticks in my mind as a picture remains in a room, it has kept there
+bright and fresh as a thing seen yesterday, for twenty years....
+
+I flirted hesitatingly once or twice with comely serving girls, and was
+a little ashamed lest Willersley should detect the keen interest I took
+in them, and then as we came over the pass from Santa Maria Maggiore to
+Cannobio, my secret preoccupation took me by surprise and flooded me and
+broke down my pretences.
+
+The women in that valley are very beautiful--women vary from valley
+to valley in the Alps and are plain and squat here and divinities five
+miles away--and as we came down we passed a group of five or six of them
+resting by the wayside. Their burthens were beside them, and one like
+Ceres held a reaping hook in her brown hand. She watched us approaching
+and smiled faintly, her eyes at mine.
+
+There was some greeting, and two of them laughed together.
+
+We passed.
+
+"Glorious girls they were," said Willersley, and suddenly an immense
+sense of boredom enveloped me. I saw myself striding on down that
+winding road, talking of politics and parties and bills of parliament
+and all sorts of dessicated things. That road seemed to me to wind on
+for ever down to dust and infinite dreariness. I knew it for a way of
+death. Reality was behind us.
+
+Willersley set himself to draw a sociological moral. "I'm not so
+sure," he said in a voice of intense discriminations, "after all, that
+agricultural work isn't good for women."
+
+"Damn agricultural work!" I said, and broke out into a vigorous cursing
+of all I held dear. "Fettered things we are!" I cried. "I wonder why I
+stand it!"
+
+"Stand what?"
+
+"Why don't I go back and make love to those girls and let the world and
+you and everything go hang? Deep breasts and rounded limbs--and we poor
+emasculated devils go tramping by with the blood of youth in us!..."
+
+"I'm not quite sure, Remington," said Willersley, looking at me with
+a deliberately quaint expression over his glasses, "that picturesque
+scenery is altogether good for your morals."
+
+That fever was still in my blood when we came to Locarno.
+
+
+
+13
+
+
+Along the hot and dusty lower road between the Orrido of Traffiume and
+Cannobio Willersley had developed his first blister. And partly because
+of that and partly because there was a bag at the station that gave us
+the refreshment of clean linen and partly because of the lazy lower air
+into which we had come, we decided upon three or four days' sojourn in
+the Empress Hotel.
+
+We dined that night at a table-d'hote, and I found myself next to an
+Englishwoman who began a conversation that was resumed presently in the
+hotel lounge. She was a woman of perhaps thirty-three or thirty-four,
+slenderly built, with a warm reddish skin and very abundant fair
+golden hair, the wife of a petulant-looking heavy-faced man of perhaps
+fifty-three, who smoked a cigar and dozed over his coffee and
+presently went to bed. "He always goes to bed like that," she confided
+startlingly. "He sleeps after all his meals. I never knew such a man to
+sleep."
+
+Then she returned to our talk, whatever it was.
+
+We had begun at the dinner table with itineraries and the usual
+topographical talk, and she had envied our pedestrian travel. "My
+husband doesn't walk," she said. "His heart is weak and he cannot manage
+the hills."
+
+There was something friendly and adventurous in her manner; she conveyed
+she liked me, and when presently Willersley drifted off to write
+letters our talk sank at once to easy confidential undertones. I felt
+enterprising, and indeed it is easy to be daring with people one has
+never seen before and may never see again. I said I loved beautiful
+scenery and all beautiful things, and the pointing note in my voice made
+her laugh. She told me I had bold eyes, and so far as I can remember I
+said she made them bold. "Blue they are," she remarked, smiling archly.
+"I like blue eyes." Then I think we compared ages, and she said she was
+the Woman of Thirty, "George Moore's Woman of Thirty."
+
+I had not read George Moore at the time, but I pretended to understand.
+
+That, I think, was our limit that evening. She went to bed, smiling
+good-night quite prettily down the big staircase, and I and Willersley
+went out to smoke in the garden. My head was full of her, and I found it
+necessary to talk about her. So I made her a problem in sociology. "Who
+the deuce are these people?" I said, "and how do they get a living? They
+seem to have plenty of money. He strikes me as being--Willersley, what
+is a drysalter? I think he's a retired drysalter."
+
+Willersley theorised while I thought of the woman and that provocative
+quality of dash she had displayed. The next day at lunch she and I met
+like old friends. A huge mass of private thinking during the interval
+had been added to our effect upon one another. We talked for a time of
+insignificant things.
+
+"What do you do," she asked rather quickly, "after lunch? Take a
+siesta?"
+
+"Sometimes," I said, and hung for a moment eye to eye.
+
+We hadn't a doubt of each other, but my heart was beating like a steamer
+propeller when it lifts out of the water.
+
+"Do you get a view from your room?" she asked after a pause.
+
+"It's on the third floor, Number seventeen, near the staircase. My
+friend's next door."
+
+She began to talk of books. She was interested in Christian Science,
+she said, and spoke of a book. I forget altogether what that book was
+called, though I remember to this day with the utmost exactness the
+purplish magenta of its cover. She said she would lend it to me and
+hesitated.
+
+Willersley wanted to go for an expedition across the lake that
+afternoon, but I refused. He made some other proposals that I rejected
+abruptly. "I shall write in my room," I said.
+
+"Why not write down here?"
+
+"I shall write in my room," I snarled like a thwarted animal, and he
+looked at me curiously. "Very well," he said; "then I'll make some notes
+and think about that order of ours out under the magnolias."
+
+I hovered about the lounge for a time buying postcards and feverishly
+restless, watching the movements of the other people. Finally I went up
+to my room and sat down by the windows, staring out. There came a
+little tap at the unlocked door and in an instant, like the go of a taut
+bowstring, I was up and had it open.
+
+"Here is that book," she said, and we hesitated.
+
+"COME IN!" I whispered, trembling from head to foot.
+
+"You're just a boy," she said in a low tone.
+
+I did not feel a bit like a lover, I felt like a burglar with the
+safe-door nearly opened. "Come in," I said almost impatiently, for
+anyone might be in the passage, and I gripped her wrist and drew her
+towards me.
+
+"What do you mean?" she answered with a faint smile on her lips, and
+awkward and yielding.
+
+I shut the door behind her, still holding her with one hand, then turned
+upon her--she was laughing nervously--and without a word drew her to me
+and kissed her. And I remember that as I kissed her she made a little
+noise almost like the purring miaow with which a cat will greet one and
+her face, close to mine, became solemn and tender.
+
+She was suddenly a different being from the discontented wife who had
+tapped a moment since on my door, a woman transfigured....
+
+That evening I came down to dinner a monster of pride, for behold! I
+was a man. I felt myself the most wonderful and unprecedented of
+adventurers. It was hard to believe that any one in the world before
+had done as much. My mistress and I met smiling, we carried things off
+admirably, and it seemed to me that Willersley was the dullest old dog
+in the world. I wanted to give him advice. I wanted to give him derisive
+pokes. After dinner and coffee in the lounge I was too excited and
+hilarious to go to bed, I made him come with me down to the cafe under
+the arches by the pier, and there drank beer and talked extravagant
+nonsense about everything under the sun, in order not to talk about the
+happenings of the afternoon. All the time something shouted within me:
+"I am a man! I am a man!"...
+
+"What shall we do to-morrow?" said he.
+
+"I'm for loafing," I said. "Let's row in the morning and spend to-morrow
+afternoon just as we did to-day."
+
+"They say the church behind the town is worth seeing."
+
+"We'll go up about sunset; that's the best time for it. We can start
+about five."
+
+We heard music, and went further along the arcade to discover a place
+where girls in operatic Swiss peasant costume were singing and dancing
+on a creaking, protesting little stage. I eyed their generous display
+of pink neck and arm with the seasoned eye of a man who has lived in the
+world. Life was perfectly simple and easy, I felt, if one took it the
+right way.
+
+Next day Willersley wanted to go on, but I delayed. Altogether I kept
+him back four days. Then abruptly my mood changed, and we decided
+to start early the following morning. I remember, though a little
+indistinctly, the feeling of my last talk with that woman whose surname,
+odd as it may seem, either I never learnt or I have forgotten. (Her
+christian name was Milly.) She was tired and rather low-spirited, and
+disposed to be sentimental, and for the first time in our intercourse I
+found myself liking her for the sake of her own personality. There was
+something kindly and generous appearing behind the veil of naive and
+uncontrolled sensuality she had worn. There was a curious quality of
+motherliness in her attitude to me that something in my nature answered
+and approved. She didn't pretend to keep it up that she had yielded to
+my initiative. "I've done you no harm," she said a little doubtfully, an
+odd note for a man's victim! And, "we've had a good time. You have liked
+me, haven't you?"
+
+She interested me in her lonely dissatisfied life; she was childless and
+had no hope of children, and her husband was the only son of a rich
+meat salesman, very mean, a mighty smoker--"he reeks of it," she said,
+"always"--and interested in nothing but golf, billiards (which he played
+very badly), pigeon shooting, convivial Free Masonry and Stock Exchange
+punting. Mostly they drifted about the Riviera. Her mother had contrived
+her marriage when she was eighteen. They were the first samples I ever
+encountered of the great multitude of functionless property owners which
+encumbers modern civilisation--but at the time I didn't think much of
+that aspect of them....
+
+I tell all this business as it happened without comment, because I
+have no comment to make. It was all strange to me, strange rather than
+wonderful, and, it may be, some dream of beauty died for ever in those
+furtive meetings; it happened to me, and I could scarcely have been
+more irresponsible in the matter or controlled events less if I had
+been suddenly pushed over a cliff into water. I swam, of course--finding
+myself in it. Things tested me, and I reacted, as I have told. The bloom
+of my innocence, if ever there had been such a thing, was gone. And here
+is the remarkable thing about it; at the time and for some days I was
+over-weeningly proud; I have never been so proud before or since; I felt
+I had been promoted to virility; I was unable to conceal my exultation
+from Willersley. It was a mood of shining shameless ungracious
+self-approval. As he and I went along in the cool morning sunshine by
+the rice fields in the throat of the Val Maggia a silence fell between
+us.
+
+"You know?" I said abruptly,--"about that woman?"
+
+Willersley did not answer for a moment. He looked at me over the corner
+of his spectacles.
+
+"Things went pretty far?" he asked.
+
+"Oh! all the way!" and I had a twinge of fatuous pride in my
+unpremeditated achievement.
+
+"She came to your room?"
+
+I nodded.
+
+"I heard her. I heard her whispering.... The whispering and rustling and
+so on. I was in my room yesterday.... Any one might have heard you."
+
+I went on with my head in the air.
+
+"You might have been caught, and that would have meant endless trouble.
+You might have incurred all sorts of consequences. What did you know
+about her?... We have wasted four days in that hot close place. When we
+found that League of Social Service we were talking about," he said
+with a determined eye upon me, "chastity will be first among the virtues
+prescribed."
+
+"I shall form a rival league," I said a little damped. "I'm hanged if I
+give up a single desire in me until I know why."
+
+He lifted his chin and stared before him through his glasses at nothing.
+"There are some things," he said, "that a man who means to work--to do
+great public services--MUST turn his back upon. I'm not discussing the
+rights or wrongs of this sort of thing. It happens to be the conditions
+we work under. It will probably always be so. If you want to experiment
+in that way, if you want even to discuss it,--out you go from political
+life. You must know that's so.... You're a strange man, Remington, with
+a kind of kink in you. You've a sort of force. You might happen to do
+immense things.... Only--"
+
+He stopped. He had said all that he had forced himself to say.
+
+"I mean to take myself as I am," I said. "I'm going to get experience
+for humanity out of all my talents--and bury nothing."
+
+Willersley twisted his face to its humorous expression. "I doubt if
+sexual proclivities," he said drily, "come within the scope of the
+parable."
+
+I let that go for a little while. Then I broke out. "Sex!" said I, "is
+a fundamental thing in life. We went through all this at Trinity. I'm
+going to look at it, experience it, think about it--and get it square
+with the rest of life. Career and Politics must take their chances of
+that. It's part of the general English slackness that they won't look
+this in the face. Gods! what a muffled time we're coming out of! Sex
+means breeding, and breeding is a necessary function in a nation.
+The Romans broke up upon that. The Americans fade out amidst their
+successes. Eugenics--"
+
+"THAT wasn't Eugenics," said Willersley.
+
+"It was a woman," I said after a little interval, feeling oddly that
+I had failed altogether to answer him, and yet had a strong dumb case
+against him.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THE SECOND: MARGARET
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE
+
+
+1
+
+I must go back a little way with my story. In the previous book I
+have described the kind of education that happens to a man of my class
+nowadays, and it has been convenient to leap a phase in my experience
+that I must now set out at length. I want to tell in this second
+hook how I came to marry, and to do that I must give something of the
+atmosphere in which I first met my wife and some intimations of the
+forces that went to her making. I met her in Staffordshire while I was
+staying with that uncle of whom I have already spoken, the uncle who
+sold my father's houses and settled my mother in Penge. Margaret was
+twenty then and I was twenty-two.
+
+It was just before the walking tour in Switzerland that opened up
+so much of the world to me. I saw her once, for an afternoon, and
+circumstances so threw her up in relief that I formed a very vivid
+memory of her. She was in the sharpest contrast with the industrial
+world about her; she impressed me as a dainty blue flower might do,
+come upon suddenly on a clinker heap. She remained in my mind at once a
+perplexing interrogation and a symbol....
+
+But first I must tell of my Staffordshire cousins and the world that
+served as a foil for her.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+I first went to stay with my cousins when I was an awkward youth of
+sixteen, wearing deep mourning for my mother. My uncle wanted to talk
+things over with me, he said, and if he could, to persuade me to go into
+business instead of going up to Cambridge.
+
+I remember that visit on account of all sorts of novel things, but
+chiefly, I think, because it was the first time I encountered anything
+that deserves to be spoken of as wealth. For the first time in my life
+I had to do with people who seemed to have endless supplies of money,
+unlimited good clothes, numerous servants; whose daily life was made
+up of things that I had hitherto considered to be treats or exceptional
+extravagances. My cousins of eighteen and nineteen took cabs, for
+instance, with the utmost freedom, and travelled first-class in the
+local trains that run up and down the district of the Five Towns with an
+entire unconsciousness of the magnificence, as it seemed to me, of such
+a proceeding.
+
+The family occupied a large villa in Newcastle, with big lawns before
+it and behind, a shrubbery with quite a lot of shrubs, a coach house
+and stable, and subordinate dwelling-places for the gardener and the
+coachman. Every bedroom contained a gas heater and a canopied brass
+bedstead, and had a little bathroom attached equipped with the porcelain
+baths and fittings my uncle manufactured, bright and sanitary and
+stamped with his name, and the house was furnished throughout with
+chairs and tables in bright shining wood, soft and prevalently
+red Turkish carpets, cosy corners, curtained archways, gold-framed
+landscapes, overmantels, a dining-room sideboard like a palace with
+a large Tantalus, and electric light fittings of a gay and expensive
+quality. There was a fine billiard-room on the ground floor with three
+comfortable sofas and a rotating bookcase containing an excellent
+collection of the English and American humorists from THREE MEN IN
+A BOAT to the penultimate Mark Twain. There was also a conservatory
+opening out of the dining-room, to which the gardener brought potted
+flowers in their season....
+
+My aunt was a little woman with a scared look and a cap that would
+get over one eye, not very like my mother, and nearly eight years her
+junior; she was very much concerned with keeping everything nice, and
+unmercifully bullied by my two cousins, who took after their father and
+followed the imaginations of their own hearts. They were tall, dark,
+warmly flushed girls handsome rather than pretty. Gertrude, the eldest
+and tallest, had eyes that were almost black; Sibyl was of a stouter
+build, and her eyes, of which she was shamelessly proud, were dark blue.
+Sibyl's hair waved, and Gertrude's was severely straight. They treated
+me on my first visit with all the contempt of the adolescent girl for a
+boy a little younger and infinitely less expert in the business of life
+than herself. They were very busy with the writings of notes and certain
+mysterious goings and comings of their own, and left me very much to
+my own devices. Their speech in my presence was full of unfathomable
+allusions. They were the sort of girls who will talk over and through an
+uninitiated stranger with the pleasantest sense of superiority.
+
+I met them at breakfast and at lunch and at the half-past six o'clock
+high tea that formed the third chief meal of the day. I heard them
+rattling off the compositions of Chaminade and Moskowski, with great
+decision and effect, and hovered on the edge of tennis foursomes
+where it was manifest to the dullest intelligence that my presence was
+unnecessary. Then I went off to find some readable book in the place,
+but apart from miscellaneous popular novels, some veterinary works, a
+number of comic books, old bound volumes of THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS
+and a large, popular illustrated History of England, there was very
+little to be found. My aunt talked to me in a casual feeble way, chiefly
+about my mother's last illness. The two had seen very little of each
+other for many years; she made no secret of it that the ineligible
+qualities of my father were the cause of the estrangement. The only
+other society in the house during the day was an old and rather decayed
+Skye terrier in constant conflict with what were no doubt imaginary
+fleas. I took myself off for a series of walks, and acquired a
+considerable knowledge of the scenery and topography of the Potteries.
+
+It puzzled my aunt that I did not go westward, where it was country-side
+and often quite pretty, with hedgerows and fields and copses
+and flowers. But always I went eastward, where in a long valley
+industrialism smokes and sprawls. That was the stuff to which I turned
+by nature, to the human effort, and the accumulation and jar of men's
+activities. And in such a country as that valley social and economic
+relations were simple and manifest. Instead of the limitless confusion
+of London's population, in which no man can trace any but the most
+slender correlation between rich and poor, in which everyone seems
+disconnected and adrift from everyone, you can see here the works,
+the potbank or the ironworks or what not, and here close at hand the
+congested, meanly-housed workers, and at a little distance a small
+middle-class quarter, and again remoter, the big house of the employer.
+It was like a very simplified diagram--after the untraceable confusion
+of London.
+
+I prowled alone, curious and interested, through shabby back streets of
+mean little homes; I followed canals, sometimes canals of mysteriously
+heated waters with ghostly wisps of steam rising against blackened walls
+or a distant prospect of dustbin-fed vegetable gardens, I saw the women
+pouring out from the potbanks, heard the hooters summoning the toilers
+to work, lost my way upon slag heaps as big as the hills of the south
+country, dodged trains at manifestly dangerous level crossings, and
+surveyed across dark intervening spaces, the flaming uproar, the
+gnome-like activities of iron foundries. I heard talk of strikes and
+rumours of strikes, and learnt from the columns of some obscure labour
+paper I bought one day, of the horrors of the lead poisoning that was in
+those days one of the normal risks of certain sorts of pottery workers.
+Then back I came, by the ugly groaning and clanging steam train of that
+period, to my uncle's house and lavish abundance of money and more or
+less furtive flirtations and the tinkle of Moskowski and Chaminade.
+It was, I say, diagrammatic. One saw the expropriator and the
+expropriated--as if Marx had arranged the picture. It was as jumbled and
+far more dingy and disastrous than any of the confusions of building and
+development that had surrounded my youth at Bromstead and Penge, but
+it had a novel quality of being explicable. I found great virtue in the
+word "exploitation."
+
+There stuck in my mind as if it was symbolical of the whole thing the
+twisted figure of a man, whose face had been horribly scalded--I can't
+describe how, except that one eye was just expressionless white--and
+he ground at an organ bearing a card which told in weak and bitterly
+satirical phrasing that he had been scalded by the hot water from
+the tuyeres of the blast furnace of Lord Pandram's works. He had been
+scalded and quite inadequately compensated and dismissed. And Lord
+Pandram was worth half a million.
+
+That upturned sightless white eye of his took possession of my
+imagination. I don't think that even then I was swayed by any crude
+melodramatic conception of injustice. I was quite prepared to believe
+the card wasn't a punctiliously accurate statement of fact, and that
+a case could be made out for Lord Pandram. Still there in the muddy
+gutter, painfully and dreadfully, was the man, and he was smashed and
+scalded and wretched, and he ground his dismal hurdygurdy with a weary
+arm, calling upon Heaven and the passer-by for help, for help and some
+sort of righting--one could not imagine quite what. There he was as a
+fact, as a by-product of the system that heaped my cousins with trinkets
+and provided the comic novels and the abundant cigars and spacious
+billiard-room of my uncle's house. I couldn't disconnect him and them.
+
+My uncle on his part did nothing to conceal the state of war that
+existed between himself and his workers, and the mingled contempt and
+animosity he felt from them.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Prosperity had overtaken my uncle. So quite naturally he believed that
+every man who was not as prosperous as he was had only himself to blame.
+He was rich and he had left school and gone into his father's business
+at fifteen, and that seemed to him the proper age at which everyone's
+education should terminate. He was very anxious to dissuade me from
+going up to Cambridge, and we argued intermittently through all my
+visit.
+
+I had remembered him as a big and buoyant man, striding destructively
+about the nursery floor of my childhood, and saluting my existence by
+slaps, loud laughter, and questions about half herrings and half eggs
+subtly framed to puzzle and confuse my mind. I didn't see him for some
+years until my father's death, and then he seemed rather smaller,
+though still a fair size, yellow instead of red and much less radiantly
+aggressive. This altered effect was due not so much to my own changed
+perspectives, I fancy, as to the facts that he was suffering for
+continuous cigar smoking, and being taken in hand by his adolescent
+daughters who had just returned from school.
+
+During my first visit there was a perpetual series of--the only word is
+rows, between them and him. Up to the age of fifteen or thereabouts, he
+had maintained his ascendancy over them by simple old-fashioned physical
+chastisement. Then after an interlude of a year it had dawned upon them
+that power had mysteriously departed from him. He had tried stopping
+their pocket money, but they found their mother financially amenable;
+besides which it was fundamental to my uncle's attitude that he should
+give them money freely. Not to do so would seem like admitting a
+difficulty in making it. So that after he had stopped their allowances
+for the fourth time Sybil and Gertrude were prepared to face beggary
+without a qualm. It had been his pride to give them the largest
+allowance of any girls at the school, not even excepting the
+granddaughter of Fladden the Borax King, and his soul recoiled from this
+discipline as it had never recoiled from the ruder method of the
+earlier phase. Both girls had developed to a high pitch in their mutual
+recriminations a gift for damaging retort, and he found it an altogether
+deadlier thing than the power of the raised voice that had always
+cowed my aunt. Whenever he became heated with them, they frowned as if
+involuntarily, drew in their breath sharply, said: "Daddy, you really
+must not say--" and corrected his pronunciation. Then, at a great
+advantage, they resumed the discussion....
+
+My uncle's views about Cambridge, however, were perfectly clear and
+definite. It was waste of time and money. It was all damned foolery.
+Did they make a man a better business man? Not a bit of it. He gave
+instances. It spoilt a man for business by giving him "false ideas."
+Some men said that at college a man formed useful friendships. What use
+were friendships to a business man? He might get to know lords, but, as
+my uncle pointed out, a lord's requirements in his line of faience were
+little greater than a common man's. If college introduced him to hotel
+proprietors there might be something in it. Perhaps it helped a man into
+Parliament, Parliament still being a confused retrogressive corner
+in the world where lawyers and suchlike sheltered themselves from the
+onslaughts of common-sense behind a fog of Latin and Greek and twaddle
+and tosh; but I wasn't the sort to go into Parliament, unless I meant to
+be a lawyer. Did I mean to be a lawyer? It cost no end of money, and
+was full of uncertainties, and there were no judges nor great solicitors
+among my relations. "Young chaps think they get on by themselves," said
+my uncle. "It isn't so. Not unless they take their coats off. I took
+mine off before I was your age by nigh a year."
+
+We were at cross purposes from the outset, because I did not think men
+lived to make money; and I was obtuse to the hints he was throwing out
+at the possibilities of his own potbank, not willfully obtuse, but just
+failing to penetrate his meaning. Whatever City Merchants had or had
+not done for me, Flack, Topham and old Gates had certainly barred my
+mistaking the profitable production and sale of lavatory basins and
+bathroom fittings for the highest good. It was only upon reflection that
+it dawned upon me that the splendid chance for a young fellow with my
+uncle, "me, having no son of my own," was anything but an illustration
+for comparison with my own chosen career.
+
+I still remember very distinctly my uncle's talk,--he loved to speak
+"reet Staffordshire"--his rather flabby face with the mottled complexion
+that told of crude ill-regulated appetites, his clumsy gestures--he kept
+emphasising his points by prodding at me with his finger--the ill-worn,
+costly, grey tweed clothes, the watch chain of plain solid gold, and
+soft felt hat thrust back from his head. He tackled me first in the
+garden after lunch, and then tried to raise me to enthusiasm by taking
+me to his potbank and showing me its organisation, from the dusty
+grinding mills in which whitened men worked and coughed, through the
+highly ventilated glazing room in which strangely masked girls looked
+ashamed of themselves,--"They'll risk death, the fools, to show their
+faces to a man," said my uncle, quite audibly--to the firing kilns and
+the glazing kilns, and so round the whole place to the railway siding
+and the gratifying spectacle of three trucks laden with executed orders.
+
+Then we went up a creaking outside staircase to his little office, and
+he showed off before me for a while, with one or two subordinates and
+the telephone.
+
+"None of your Gas," he said, "all this. It's Real every bit of it. Hard
+cash and hard glaze."
+
+"Yes," I said, with memories of a carelessly read pamphlet in my mind,
+and without any satirical intention, "I suppose you MUST use lead in
+your glazes?"
+
+Whereupon I found I had tapped the ruling grievance of my uncle's
+life. He hated leadless glazes more than he hated anything, except
+the benevolent people who had organised the agitation for their use.
+"Leadless glazes ain't only fit for buns," he said. "Let me tell you, my
+boy--"
+
+He began in a voice of bland persuasiveness that presently warmed to
+anger, to explain the whole matter. I hadn't the rights of the matter
+at all. Firstly, there was practically no such thing as lead poisoning.
+Secondly, not everyone was liable to lead poisoning, and it would
+be quite easy to pick out the susceptible types--as soon as they had
+it--and put them to other work. Thirdly, the evil effects of
+lead poisoning were much exaggerated. Fourthly, and this was in a
+particularly confidential undertone, many of the people liked to get
+lead poisoning, especially the women, because it caused abortion.
+I might not believe it, but he knew it for a fact. Fifthly, the
+work-people simply would not learn the gravity of the danger, and would
+eat with unwashed hands, and incur all sorts of risks, so that as my
+uncle put it: "the fools deserve what they get." Sixthly, he and several
+associated firms had organised a simple and generous insurance scheme
+against lead-poisoning risks. Seventhly, he never wearied in rational
+(as distinguished from excessive, futile and expensive) precautions
+against the disease. Eighthly, in the ill-equipped shops of his minor
+competitors lead poisoning was a frequent and virulent evil, and people
+had generalised from these exceptional cases. The small shops, he
+hazarded, looking out of the cracked and dirty window at distant
+chimneys, might be advantageously closed....
+
+"But what's the good of talking?" said my uncle, getting off the table
+on which he had been sitting. "Seems to me there'll come a time when a
+master will get fined if he don't run round the works blowing his girls
+noses for them. That's about what it'll come to."
+
+He walked to the black mantelpiece and stood on the threadbare rug, and
+urged me not to be misled by the stories of prejudiced and interested
+enemies of our national industries.
+
+"They'll get a strike one of these days, of employers, and then we'll
+see a bit," he said. "They'll drive Capital abroad and then they'll
+whistle to get it back again."...
+
+He led the way down the shaky wooden steps and cheered up to tell me
+of his way of checking his coal consumption. He exchanged a ferocious
+greeting with one or two workpeople, and so we came out of the factory
+gates into the ugly narrow streets, paved with a peculiarly hard
+diapered brick of an unpleasing inky-blue colour, and bordered with the
+mean and squalid homes of his workers. Doors stood open and showed grimy
+interiors, and dirty ill-clad children played in the kennel.
+
+We passed a sickly-looking girl with a sallow face, who dragged her
+limbs and peered at us dimly with painful eyes. She stood back, as
+partly blinded people will do, to allow us to pass, although there was
+plenty of room for us.
+
+I glanced back at her.
+
+"THAT'S ploombism," said my uncle casually.
+
+"What?" said I.
+
+"Ploombism. And the other day I saw a fool of a girl, and what d'you
+think? She'd got a basin that hadn't been fired, a cracked piece of
+biscuit it was, up on the shelf over her head, just all over glaze,
+killing glaze, man, and she was putting up her hand if you please, and
+eating her dinner out of it. Got her dinner in it!
+
+"Eating her dinner out of it," he repeated in loud and bitter tones, and
+punched me hard in the ribs.
+
+"And then they comes to THAT--and grumbles. And the fools up in
+Westminster want you to put in fans here and fans there--the Longton
+fools have.... And then eating their dinners out of it all the time!"...
+
+At high tea that night--my uncle was still holding out against evening
+dinner--Sibyl and Gertrude made what was evidently a concerted demand
+for a motor-car.
+
+"You've got your mother's brougham," he said, "that's good enough for
+you." But he seemed shaken by the fact that some Burslem rival was
+launching out with the new invention. "He spoils his girls," he
+remarked. "He's a fool," and became thoughtful.
+
+Afterwards he asked me to come to him into his study; it was a room with
+a writing-desk and full of pieces of earthenware and suchlike litter,
+and we had our great row about Cambridge.
+
+"Have you thought things over, Dick?" he said.
+
+"I think I'll go to Trinity, Uncle," I said firmly. "I want to go to
+Trinity. It is a great college."
+
+He was manifestly chagrined. "You're a fool," he said.
+
+I made no answer.
+
+"You're a damned fool," he said. "But I suppose you've got to do it. You
+could have come here--That don't matter, though, now... You'll have your
+time and spend your money, and be a poor half-starved clergyman, mucking
+about with the women all the day and afraid to have one of your own
+ever, or you'll be a schoolmaster or some such fool for the rest of your
+life. Or some newspaper chap. That's what you'll get from Cambridge. I'm
+half a mind not to let you. Eh? More than half a mind...."
+
+"You've got to do the thing you can," he said, after a pause, "and
+likely it's what you're fitted for."
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+I paid several short visits to Staffordshire during my Cambridge days,
+and always these relations of mine produced the same effect of hardness.
+My uncle's thoughts had neither atmosphere nor mystery. He lived in
+a different universe from the dreams of scientific construction that
+filled my mind. He could as easily have understood Chinese poetry. His
+motives were made up of intense rivalries with other men of his class
+and kind, a few vindictive hates springing from real and fancied
+slights, a habit of acquisition that had become a second nature, a keen
+love both of efficiency and display in his own affairs. He seemed to
+me to have no sense of the state, no sense and much less any love of
+beauty, no charity and no sort of religious feeling whatever. He had
+strong bodily appetites, he ate and drank freely, smoked a great deal,
+and occasionally was carried off by his passions for a "bit of a spree"
+to Birmingham or Liverpool or Manchester. The indulgences of these
+occasions were usually followed by a period of reaction, when he was
+urgent for the suppression of nudity in the local Art Gallery and a
+harsh and forcible elevation of the superficial morals of the valley.
+And he spoke of the ladies who ministered to the delights of his
+jolly-dog period, when he spoke of them at all, by the unprintable
+feminine equivalent. My aunt he treated with a kindly contempt and
+considerable financial generosity, but his daughters tore his heart; he
+was so proud of them, so glad to find them money to spend, so resolved
+to own them, so instinctively jealous of every man who came near them.
+
+My uncle has been the clue to a great number of men for me. He was an
+illuminating extreme. I have learnt what not to expect from them through
+him, and to comprehend resentments and dangerous sudden antagonisms I
+should have found incomprehensible in their more complex forms, if I had
+not first seen them in him in their feral state.
+
+With his soft felt hat at the back of his head, his rather heavy, rather
+mottled face, his rationally thick boots and slouching tweed-clad form,
+a little round-shouldered and very obstinate looking, he strolls through
+all my speculations sucking his teeth audibly, and occasionally throwing
+out a shrewd aphorism, the intractable unavoidable ore of the new
+civilisation.
+
+Essentially he was simple. Generally speaking, he hated and despised in
+equal measure whatever seemed to suggest that he personally was not
+the most perfect human being conceivable. He hated all education after
+fifteen because he had had no education after fifteen, he hated all
+people who did not have high tea until he himself under duress gave up
+high tea, he hated every game except football, which he had played and
+could judge, he hated all people who spoke foreign languages because he
+knew no language but Staffordshire, he hated all foreigners because he
+was English, and all foreign ways because they were not his ways. Also
+he hated particularly, and in this order, Londoner's, Yorkshiremen,
+Scotch, Welch and Irish, because they were not "reet Staffordshire," and
+he hated all other Staffordshire men as insufficiently "reet." He wanted
+to have all his own women inviolate, and to fancy he had a call upon
+every other woman in the world. He wanted to have the best cigars and
+the best brandy in the world to consume or give away magnificently, and
+every one else to have inferior ones. (His billiard table was an extra
+large size, specially made and very inconvenient.) And he hated Trade
+Unions because they interfered with his autocratic direction of his
+works, and his workpeople because they were not obedient and untiring
+mechanisms to do his bidding. He was, in fact, a very naive, vigorous
+human being. He was about as much civilised, about as much tamed to the
+ideas of collective action and mutual consideration as a Central African
+negro.
+
+There are hordes of such men as he throughout all the modern industrial
+world. You will find the same type with the slightest modifications in
+the Pas de Calais or Rhenish Prussia or New Jersey or North Italy. No
+doubt you would find it in New Japan. These men have raised themselves
+up from the general mass of untrained, uncultured, poorish people in a
+hard industrious selfish struggle. To drive others they have had first
+to drive themselves. They have never yet had occasion nor leisure to
+think of the state or social life as a whole, and as for dreams or
+beauty, it was a condition of survival that they should ignore such
+cravings. All the distinctive qualities of my uncle can be thought of as
+dictated by his conditions; his success and harshness, the extravagances
+that expressed his pride in making money, the uncongenial luxury that
+sprang from rivalry, and his self-reliance, his contempt for broad
+views, his contempt for everything that he could not understand.
+
+His daughters were the inevitable children of his life. Queer girls they
+were! Curiously "spirited" as people phrase it, and curiously limited.
+During my Cambridge days I went down to Staffordshire several times. My
+uncle, though he still resented my refusal to go into his business, was
+also in his odd way proud of me. I was his nephew and poor relation, and
+yet there I was, a young gentleman learning all sorts of unremunerative
+things in the grandest manner, "Latin and mook," while the sons of his
+neighhours, not nephews merely, but sons, stayed unpolished in their
+native town. Every time I went down I found extensive changes and
+altered relations, and before I had settled down to them off I went
+again. I don't think I was one person to them; I was a series of
+visitors. There is a gulf of ages between a gaunt schoolboy of sixteen
+in unbecoming mourning and two vividly self-conscious girls of eighteen
+and nineteen, but a Cambridge "man" of two and twenty with a first and
+good tennis and a growing social experience, is a fair contemporary for
+two girls of twenty-three and twenty-four.
+
+A motor-car appeared, I think in my second visit, a bottle-green
+affair that opened behind, had dark purple cushions, and was controlled
+mysteriously by a man in shiny black costume and a flat cap. The high
+tea had been shifted to seven and rechristened dinner, but my uncle
+would not dress nor consent to have wine; and after one painful
+experiment, I gathered, and a scene, he put his foot down and prohibited
+any but high-necked dresses.
+
+"Daddy's perfectly impossible," Sybil told me.
+
+The foot had descended vehemently! "My own daughters!" he had said,
+"dressed up like--"--and had arrested himself and fumbled and decided to
+say--"actresses, and showin' their fat arms for every fool to stare
+at!" Nor would he have any people invited to dinner. He didn't, he had
+explained, want strangers poking about in his house when he came home
+tired. So such calling as occurred went on during his absence in the
+afternoon.
+
+One of the peculiarities of the life of these ascendant families of
+the industrial class to which wealth has come, is its tremendous
+insulations. There were no customs of intercourse in the Five Towns. All
+the isolated prosperities of the district sprang from economising, hard
+driven homes, in which there was neither time nor means for hospitality.
+Social intercourse centred very largely upon the church or chapel,
+and the chapels were better at bringing people together than the
+Establishment to which my cousins belonged. Their chief outlet to the
+wider world lay therefore through the acquaintances they had formed at
+school, and through two much less prosperous families of relations who
+lived at Longton and Hanley. A number of gossiping friendships with old
+school mates were "kept up," and my cousins would "spend the afternoon"
+or even spend the day with these; such occasions led to other encounters
+and interlaced with the furtive correspondences and snatched meetings
+that formed the emotional thread of their lives. When the billiard table
+had been new, my uncle had taken to asking in a few approved friends for
+an occasional game, but mostly the billiard-room was for glory and the
+girls. Both of them played very well. They never, so far as I know,
+dined out, and when at last after bitter domestic conflicts they began
+to go to dances, they went with the quavering connivance of my aunt,
+and changed into ball frocks at friends' houses on the way. There was a
+tennis club that formed a convenient afternoon rendezvous, and I recall
+that in the period of my earlier visits the young bloods of the district
+found much satisfaction in taking girls for drives in dog-carts and
+suchlike high-wheeled vehicles, a disposition that died in tangled
+tandems at the apparition of motor-car's.
+
+My aunt and uncle had conceived no plans in life for their daughters at
+all. In the undifferentiated industrial community from which they had
+sprung, girls got married somehow, and it did not occur to them that
+the concentration of property that had made them wealthy, had cut their
+children off from the general social sea in which their own awkward
+meeting had occurred, without necessarily opening any other world in
+exchange. My uncle was too much occupied with the works and his business
+affairs and his private vices to philosophise about his girls; he wanted
+them just to keep girls, preferably about sixteen, and to be a sort
+of animated flowers and make home bright and be given things. He was
+irritated that they would not remain at this, and still more irritated
+that they failed to suppress altogether their natural interest in young
+men. The tandems would be steered by weird and devious routes to evade
+the bare chance of his bloodshot eye. My aunt seemed to have no ideas
+whatever about what was likely to happen to her children. She had indeed
+no ideas about anything; she took her husband and the days as they came.
+
+I can see now the pathetic difficulty of my cousins' position in life;
+the absence of any guidance or instruction or provision for their
+development. They supplemented the silences of home by the conversation
+of schoolfellows and the suggestions of popular fiction. They had to
+make what they could out of life with such hints as these. The church
+was far too modest to offer them any advice. It was obtruded upon my
+mind upon my first visit that they were both carrying on correspondences
+and having little furtive passings and seeings and meetings with the
+mysterious owners of certain initials, S. and L. K., and, if I remember
+rightly, "the R. N." brothers and cousins, I suppose, of their friends.
+The same thing was going on, with a certain intensification, at my next
+visit, excepting only that the initials were different. But when I
+came again their methods were maturer or I was no longer a negligible
+quantity, and the notes and the initials were no longer flaunted quite
+so openly in my face.
+
+My cousins had worked it out from the indications of their universe that
+the end of life is to have a "good time." They used the phrase. That
+and the drives in dog-carts were only the first of endless points of
+resemblance between them and the commoner sort of American girl. When
+some years ago I paid my first and only visit to America I seemed to
+recover my cousins' atmosphere as soon as I entered the train at Euston.
+There were three girls in my compartment supplied with huge decorated
+cases of sweets, and being seen off by a company of friends, noisily
+arch and eager about the "steamer letters" they would get at Liverpool;
+they were the very soul-sisters of my cousins. The chief elements of a
+good time, as my cousins judged it, as these countless thousands of rich
+young women judge it, are a petty eventfulness, laughter, and to feel
+that you are looking well and attracting attention. Shopping is one of
+its leading joys. You buy things, clothes and trinkets for yourself and
+presents for your friends. Presents always seemed to be flying about
+in that circle; flowers and boxes of sweets were common currency. My
+cousins were always getting and giving, my uncle caressed them with
+parcels and cheques. They kissed him and he exuded sovereigns as a
+stroked APHIS exudes honey. It was like the new language of the Academy
+of Lagado to me, and I never learnt how to express myself in it, for
+nature and training make me feel encumbered to receive presents and
+embarrassed in giving them. But then, like my father, I hate and
+distrust possessions.
+
+Of the quality of their private imagination I never learnt anything; I
+suppose it followed the lines of the fiction they read and was romantic
+and sentimental. So far as marriage went, the married state seemed at
+once very attractive and dreadfully serious to them, composed in equal
+measure of becoming important and becoming old. I don't know what they
+thought about children. I doubt if they thought about them at all. It
+was very secret if they did.
+
+As for the poor and dingy people all about them, my cousins were always
+ready to take part in a Charitable Bazaar. They were unaware of any
+economic correlation of their own prosperity and that circumambient
+poverty, and they knew of Trade Unions simply as disagreeable external
+things that upset my uncle's temper. They knew of nothing wrong in
+social life at all except that there were "Agitators." It surprised them
+a little, I think, that Agitators were not more drastically put down.
+But they had a sort of instinctive dread of social discussion as of
+something that might breach the happiness of their ignorance....
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+My cousins did more than illustrate Marx for me; they also undertook a
+stage of my emotional education. Their method in that as in everything
+else was extremely simple, but it took my inexperience by surprise.
+
+It must have been on my third visit that Sybil took me in hand. Hitherto
+I seemed to have seen her only in profile, but now she became almost
+completely full face, manifestly regarded me with those violet eyes
+of hers. She passed me things I needed at breakfast--it was the first
+morning of my visit--before I asked for them.
+
+When young men are looked at by pretty cousins, they become intensely
+aware of those cousins. It seemed to me that I had always admired
+Sybil's eyes very greatly, and that there was something in her
+temperament congenial to mine. It was odd I had not noted it on my
+previous visits.
+
+We walked round the garden somewhen that morning, and talked about
+Cambridge. She asked quite a lot of questions about my work and my
+ambitions. She said she had always felt sure I was clever.
+
+The conversation languished a little, and we picked some flowers for the
+house. Then she asked if I could run. I conceded her various starts and
+we raced up and down the middle garden path. Then, a little breathless,
+we went into the new twenty-five guinea summer-house at the end of the
+herbaceous border.
+
+We sat side by side, pleasantly hidden from the house, and she became
+anxious about her hair, which was slightly and prettily disarranged, and
+asked me to help her with the adjustment of a hairpin. I had never in my
+life been so near the soft curly hair and the dainty eyebrow and eyelid
+and warm soft cheek of a girl, and I was stirred--
+
+It stirs me now to recall it.
+
+I became a battleground of impulses and inhibitions.
+
+"Thank you," said my cousin, and moved a little away from me.
+
+She began to talk about friendship, and lost her thread and forgot the
+little electric stress between us in a rather meandering analysis of her
+principal girl friends.
+
+But afterwards she resumed her purpose.
+
+I went to bed that night with one proposition overshadowing everything
+else in my mind, namely, that kissing my cousin Sybil was a difficult,
+but not impossible, achievement. I do not recall any shadow of a doubt
+whether on the whole it was worth doing. The thing had come into my
+existence, disturbing and interrupting its flow exactly as a fever does.
+Sybil had infected me with herself.
+
+The next day matters came to a crisis in the little upstairs
+sitting-room which had been assigned me as a study during my visit.
+I was working up there, or rather trying to work in spite of the
+outrageous capering of some very primitive elements in my brain, when
+she came up to me, under a transparent pretext of looking for a book.
+
+I turned round and then got up at the sight of her. I quite forget what
+our conversation was about, but I know she led me to believe I might
+kiss her. Then when I attempted to do so she averted her face.
+
+"How COULD you?" she said; "I didn't mean that!"
+
+That remained the state of our relations for two days. I developed a
+growing irritation with and resentment against cousin Sybil, combined
+with an intense desire to get that kiss for which I hungered and
+thirsted. Cousin Sybil went about in the happy persuasion that I was
+madly in love with her, and her game, so far as she was concerned,
+was played and won. It wasn't until I had fretted for two days that
+I realised that I was being used for the commonest form of excitement
+possible to a commonplace girl; that dozens perhaps of young men had
+played the part of Tantalus at cousin Sybil's lips. I walked about my
+room at nights, damning her and calling her by terms which on the whole
+she rather deserved, while Sybil went to sleep pitying "poor old Dick!"
+
+"Damn it!" I said, "I WILL be equal with you."
+
+But I never did equalise the disadvantage, and perhaps it's as well, for
+I fancy that sort of revenge cuts both people too much for a rational
+man to seek it....
+
+"Why are men so silly?" said cousin Sybil next morning, wriggling back
+with down-bent head to release herself from what should have been a
+compelling embrace.
+
+"Confound it!" I said with a flash of clear vision. "You STARTED this
+game."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+She stood back against a hedge of roses, a little flushed and excited
+and interested, and ready for the delightful defensive if I should renew
+my attack.
+
+"Beastly hot for scuffling," I said, white with anger. "I don't know
+whether I'm so keen on kissing you, Sybil, after all. I just thought you
+wanted me to."
+
+I could have whipped her, and my voice stung more than my words.
+
+Our eyes met; a real hatred in hers leaping up to meet mine.
+
+"Let's play tennis," I said, after a moment's pause.
+
+"No," she answered shortly, "I'm going indoors."
+
+"Very well."
+
+And that ended the affair with Sybil.
+
+I was still in the full glare of this disillusionment when Gertrude
+awoke from some preoccupation to an interest in my existence. She
+developed a disposition to touch my hand by accident, and let her
+fingers rest in contact with it for a moment,--she had pleasant soft
+hands;--she began to drift into summer houses with me, to let her arm
+rest trustfully against mine, to ask questions about Cambridge. They
+were much the same questions that Sybil had asked. But I controlled
+myself and maintained a profile of intelligent and entirely civil
+indifference to her blandishments.
+
+What Gertrude made of it came out one evening in some talk--I forget
+about what--with Sybil.
+
+"Oh, Dick!" said Gertrude a little impatiently, "Dick's Pi."
+
+And I never disillusioned her by any subsequent levity from this theory
+of my innate and virginal piety.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+It was against this harsh and crude Staffordshire background that
+I think I must have seen Margaret for the first time. I say I think
+because it is quite possible that we had passed each other in the
+streets of Cambridge, no doubt with that affectation of mutual disregard
+which was once customary between undergraduates and Newnham girls. But
+if that was so I had noted nothing of the slender graciousness that
+shone out so pleasingly against the bleaker midland surroundings.
+
+She was a younger schoolfellow of my cousins', and the step-daughter
+of Seddon, a prominent solicitor of Burslem. She was not only not in
+my cousins' generation but not in their set, she was one of a small
+hardworking group who kept immaculate note-books, and did as much as is
+humanly possible of that insensate pile of written work that the Girls'
+Public School movement has inflicted upon school-girls. She really
+learnt French and German admirably and thoroughly, she got as far in
+mathematics as an unflinching industry can carry any one with no great
+natural aptitude, and she went up to Bennett Hall, Newnham, after the
+usual conflict with her family, to work for the History Tripos.
+
+There in her third year she made herself thoroughly ill through
+overwork, so ill that she had to give up Newnham altogether and go
+abroad with her stepmother. She made herself ill, as so many girls do
+in those university colleges, through the badness of her home and school
+training. She thought study must needs be a hard straining of the mind.
+She worried her work, she gave herself no leisure to see it as a whole,
+she felt herself not making headway and she cut her games and exercise
+in order to increase her hours of toil, and worked into the night. She
+carried a knack of laborious thoroughness into the blind alleys and
+inessentials of her subject. It didn't need the badness of the food for
+which Bennett Hall is celebrated and the remarkable dietary of nocturnal
+cocoa, cakes and soft biscuits with which the girls have supplemented
+it, to ensure her collapse. Her mother brought her home, fretting and
+distressed, and then finding her hopelessly unhappy at home, took her
+and her half-brother, a rather ailing youngster of ten who died three
+years later, for a journey to Italy.
+
+Italy did much to assuage Margaret's chagrin. I think all three of them
+had a very good time there. At home Mr. Seddon, her step-father, played
+the part of a well-meaning blight by reason of the moods that arose
+from nervous dyspepsia. They went to Florence, equipped with various
+introductions and much sound advice from sympathetic Cambridge friends,
+and having acquired an ease in Italy there, went on to Siena, Orvieto,
+and at last Rome. They returned, if I remember rightly, by Pisa,
+Genoa, Milan and Paris. Six months or more they had had abroad, and now
+Margaret was back in Burslem, in health again and consciously a very
+civilised person.
+
+New ideas were abroad, it was Maytime and a spring of abundant
+flowers--daffodils were particularly good that year--and Mrs. Seddon
+celebrated her return by giving an afternoon reception at short notice,
+with the clear intention of letting every one out into the garden if the
+weather held.
+
+The Seddons had a big old farmhouse modified to modern ideas of comfort
+on the road out towards Misterton, with an orchard that had been rather
+pleasantly subdued from use to ornament. It had rich blossoming cherry
+and apple trees. Large patches of grass full of nodding yellow trumpets
+had been left amidst the not too precisely mown grass, which was as
+it were grass path with an occasional lapse into lawn or glade. And
+Margaret, hatless, with the fair hair above her thin, delicately pink
+face very simply done, came to meet our rather too consciously dressed
+party,--we had come in the motor four strong, with my aunt in grey silk.
+Margaret wore a soft flowing flowered blue dress of diaphanous material,
+all unconnected with the fashion and tied with pretty ribbons, like a
+slenderer, unbountiful Primavera.
+
+It was one of those May days that ape the light and heat of summer, and
+I remember disconnectedly quite a number of brightly lit figures and
+groups walking about, and a white gate between orchard and garden and a
+large lawn with an oak tree and a red Georgian house with a verandah and
+open French windows, through which the tea drinking had come out upon
+the moss-edged flagstones even as Mrs. Seddon had planned.
+
+The party was almost entirely feminine except for a little curate with
+a large head, a good voice and a radiant manner, who was obviously
+attracted by Margaret, and two or three young husbands still
+sufficiently addicted to their wives to accompany them. One of them
+I recall as a quite romantic figure with abundant blond curly hair on
+which was poised a grey felt hat encircled by a refined black band. He
+wore, moreover, a loose rich shot silk tie of red and purple, a long
+frock coat, grey trousers and brown shoes, and presently he removed his
+hat and carried it in one hand. There were two tennis-playing youths
+besides myself. There was also one father with three daughters in
+anxious control, a father of the old school scarcely half broken
+in, reluctant, rebellious and consciously and conscientiously "reet
+Staffordshire." The daughters were all alert to suppress the possible
+plungings, the undesirable humorous impulses of this almost feral guest.
+They nipped his very gestures in the bud. The rest of the people were
+mainly mothers with daughters--daughters of all ages, and a scattering
+of aunts, and there was a tendency to clotting, parties kept together
+and regarded parties suspiciously. Mr. Seddon was in hiding, I think,
+all the time, though not formally absent.
+
+Matters centred upon the tea in the long room of the French windows,
+where four trim maids went to and fro busily between the house and the
+clumps of people seated or standing before it; and tennis and croquet
+were intermittently visible and audible beyond a bank of rockwork rich
+with the spikes and cups and bells of high spring.
+
+Mrs. Seddon presided at the tea urn, and Margaret partly assisted and
+partly talked to me and my cousin Sibyl--Gertrude had found a disused
+and faded initial and was partnering him at tennis in a state of gentle
+revival--while their mother exercised a divided chaperonage from a seat
+near Mrs. Seddon. The little curate, stirring a partially empty cup of
+tea, mingled with our party, and preluded, I remember, every observation
+he made by a vigorous resumption of stirring.
+
+We talked of Cambridge, and Margaret kept us to it. The curate was a
+Selwyn man and had taken a pass degree in theology, but Margaret had
+come to Gaylord's lecturers in Trinity for a term before her breakdown,
+and understood these differences. She had the eagerness of an exile
+to hear the old familiar names of places and personalities. We capped
+familiar anecdotes and were enthusiastic about Kings' Chapel and the
+Backs, and the curate, addressing himself more particularly to Sibyl,
+told a long confused story illustrative of his disposition to reckless
+devilry (of a pure-minded kindly sort) about upsetting two canoes quite
+needlessly on the way to Grantchester.
+
+I can still see Margaret as I saw her that afternoon, see her fresh fair
+face, with the little obliquity of the upper lip, and her brow always
+slightly knitted, and her manner as of one breathlessly shy but
+determined. She had rather open blue eyes, and she spoke in an even
+musical voice with the gentlest of stresses and the ghost of a lisp.
+And it was true, she gathered, that Cambridge still existed. "I went
+to Grantchester," she said, "last year, and had tea under the
+apple-blossom. I didn't think then I should have to come down." (It was
+that started the curate upon his anecdote.)
+
+"I've seen a lot of pictures, and learnt a lot about them--at the Pitti
+and the Brera,--the Brera is wonderful--wonderful places,--but it isn't
+like real study," she was saying presently.... "We bought bales of
+photographs," she said.
+
+I thought the bales a little out of keeping.
+
+But fair-haired and quite simply and yet graciously and fancifully
+dressed, talking of art and beautiful things and a beautiful land, and
+with so much manifest regret for learning denied, she seemed a
+different kind of being altogether from my smart, hard, high-coloured,
+black-haired and resolutely hatted cousin; she seemed translucent beside
+Gertrude. Even the little twist and droop of her slender body was a
+grace to me.
+
+I liked her from the moment I saw her, and set myself to interest and
+please her as well as I knew how.
+
+We recalled a case of ragging that had rustled the shrubs of Newnham,
+and then Chris Robinson's visit--he had given a talk to Bennett Hall
+also--and our impression of him.
+
+"He disappointed me, too," said Margaret.
+
+I was moved to tell Margaret something of my own views in the matter of
+social progress, and she listened--oh! with a kind of urged attention,
+and her brow a little more knitted, very earnestly. The little curate
+desisted from the appendices and refuse heaps and general debris of his
+story, and made himself look very alert and intelligent.
+
+"We did a lot of that when I was up in the eighties," he said. "I'm glad
+Imperialism hasn't swamped you fellows altogether."
+
+Gertrude, looking bright and confident, came to join our talk from the
+shrubbery; the initial, a little flushed and evidently in a state of
+refreshed relationship, came with her, and a cheerful lady in pink
+and more particularly distinguished by a pink bonnet joined our little
+group. Gertrude had been sipping admiration and was not disposed to play
+a passive part in the talk.
+
+"Socialism!" she cried, catching the word. "It's well Pa isn't here. He
+has Fits when people talk of socialism. Fits!"
+
+The initial laughed in a general kind of way.
+
+The curate said there was socialism AND socialism, and looked at
+Margaret to gauge whether he had been too bold in this utterance. But
+she was all, he perceived, for broad-mindness, and he stirred himself
+(and incidentally his tea) to still more liberality of expression. He
+said the state of the poor was appalling, simply appalling; that there
+were times when he wanted to shatter the whole system, "only," he said,
+turning to me appealingly, "What have we got to put in its place?"
+
+"The thing that exists is always the more evident alternative," I said.
+
+The little curate looked at it for a moment. "Precisely," he said
+explosively, and turned stirring and with his head a little on one side,
+to hear what Margaret was saying.
+
+Margaret was saying, with a swift blush and an effect of daring, that
+she had no doubt she was a socialist.
+
+"And wearing a gold chain!" said Gertrude, "And drinking out of
+eggshell! I like that!"
+
+I came to Margaret's rescue. "It doesn't follow that because one's a
+socialist one ought to dress in sackcloth and ashes."
+
+The initial coloured deeply, and having secured my attention by prodding
+me slightly with the wrist of the hand that held his teacup, cleared his
+throat and suggested that "one ought to be consistent."
+
+I perceived we were embarked upon a discussion of the elements. We began
+an interesting little wrangle one of those crude discussions of general
+ideas that are dear to the heart of youth. I and Margaret supported one
+another as socialists, Gertrude and Sybil and the initial maintained
+an anti-socialist position, the curate attempted a cross-bench position
+with an air of intending to come down upon us presently with a casting
+vote. He reminded us of a number of useful principles too often
+overlooked in argument, that in a big question like this there was much
+to be said on both sides, that if every one did his or her duty to every
+one about them there would be no difficulty with social problems at all,
+that over and above all enactments we needed moral changes in people
+themselves. My cousin Gertrude was a difficult controversialist to
+manage, being unconscious of inconsistency in statement and absolutely
+impervious to reply. Her standpoint was essentially materialistic;
+she didn't see why she shouldn't have a good time because other people
+didn't; they would have a good time, she was sure, if she didn't. She
+said that if we did give up everything we had to other people, they
+wouldn't very likely know what to do with it. She asked if we were so
+fond of work-people, why we didn't go and live among them, and expressed
+the inflexible persuasion that if we HAD socialism, everything would
+be just the same again in ten years' time. She also threw upon us the
+imputation of ingratitude for a beautiful world by saying that so far as
+she was concerned she didn't want to upset everything. She was contented
+with things as they were, thank you.
+
+The discussion led in some way that I don't in the least recall now, and
+possibly by abrupt transitions, to a croquet foursome in which Margaret
+involved the curate without involving herself, and then stood beside me
+on the edge of the lawn while the others played. We watched silently for
+a moment.
+
+"I HATE that sort of view," she said suddenly in a confidential
+undertone, with her delicate pink flush returning.
+
+"It's want of imagination," I said.
+
+"To think we are just to enjoy ourselves," she went on; "just to go on
+dressing and playing and having meals and spending money!" She seemed
+to be referring not simply to my cousins, but to the whole world of
+industry and property about us. "But what is one to do?" she asked. "I
+do wish I had not had to come down. It's all so pointless here. There
+seems to be nothing going forward, no ideas, no dreams. No one here
+seems to feel quite what I feel, the sort of need there is for MEANING
+in things. I hate things without meaning."
+
+"Don't you do--local work?"
+
+"I suppose I shall. I suppose I must find something. Do you think--if
+one were to attempt some sort of propaganda?"
+
+"Could you--?" I began a little doubtfully.
+
+"I suppose I couldn't," she answered, after a thoughtful moment. "I
+suppose it would come to nothing. And yet I feel there is so much to
+be done for the world, so much one ought to be doing.... I want to do
+something for the world."
+
+I can see her now as she stood there with her brows nearly frowning, her
+blue eyes looking before her, her mouth almost petulant. "One feels that
+there are so many things going on--out of one's reach," she said.
+
+I went back in the motor-car with my mind full of her, the quality of
+delicate discontent, the suggestion of exile. Even a kind of weakness in
+her was sympathetic. She told tremendously against her background. She
+was, I say, like a protesting blue flower upon a cinder heap. It is
+curious, too, how she connects and mingles with the furious quarrel
+I had with my uncle that very evening. That came absurdly. Indirectly
+Margaret was responsible. My mind was running on ideas she had revived
+and questions she had set clamouring, and quite inadvertently in my
+attempt to find solutions I talked so as to outrage his profoundest
+feelings....
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+What a preposterous shindy that was!
+
+I sat with him in the smoking-room, propounding what I considered to
+be the most indisputable and non-contentious propositions
+conceivable--until, to my infinite amazement, he exploded and called me
+a "damned young puppy."
+
+It was seismic.
+
+"Tremendously interesting time," I said, "just in the beginning of
+making a civilisation."
+
+"Ah!" he said, with an averted face, and nodded, leaning forward over
+his cigar.
+
+I had not the remotest thought of annoying him.
+
+"Monstrous muddle of things we have got," I said, "jumbled streets, ugly
+population, ugly factories--"
+
+"You'd do a sight better if you had to do with it," said my uncle,
+regarding me askance.
+
+"Not me. But a world that had a collective plan and knew where it meant
+to be going would do a sight better, anyhow. We're all swimming in a
+flood of ill-calculated chances--"
+
+"You'll be making out I organised that business down there--by
+chance--next," said my uncle, his voice thick with challenge.
+
+I went on as though I was back in Trinity.
+
+"There's a lot of chance in the making of all great businesses," I said.
+
+My uncle remarked that that showed how much I knew about businesses.
+If chance made businesses, why was it that he always succeeded and grew
+while those fools Ackroyd and Sons always took second place? He showed
+a disposition to tell the glorious history of how once Ackroyd's
+overshadowed him, and how now he could buy up Ackroyd's three times
+over. But I wanted to get out what was in my mind.
+
+"Oh!" I said, "as between man and man and business and business, some
+of course get the pull by this quality or that--but it's forces quite
+outside the individual case that make the big part of any success
+under modern conditions. YOU never invented pottery, nor any process in
+pottery that matters a rap in your works; it wasn't YOUR foresight that
+joined all England up with railways and made it possible to organise
+production on an altogether different scale. You really at the utmost
+can't take credit for much more than being the sort of man who happened
+to fit what happened to be the requirements of the time, and who
+happened to be in a position to take advantage of them--"
+
+It was then my uncle cried out and called me a damned young puppy, and
+became involved in some unexpected trouble of his own.
+
+I woke up as it were from my analysis of the situation to discover him
+bent over a splendid spittoon, cursing incoherently, retching a little,
+and spitting out the end of his cigar which he had bitten off in his
+last attempt at self-control, and withal fully prepared as soon as he
+had cleared for action to give me just all that he considered to be the
+contents of his mind upon the condition of mine.
+
+Well, why shouldn't I talk my mind to him? He'd never had an outside
+view of himself for years, and I resolved to stand up to him. We went
+at it hammer and tongs! It became clear that he supposed me to be a
+Socialist, a zealous, embittered hater of all ownership--and also an
+educated man of the vilest, most pretentiously superior description.
+His principal grievance was that I thought I knew everything; to that he
+recurred again and again....
+
+We had been maintaining an armed truce with each other since my resolve
+to go up to Cambridge, and now we had out all that had accumulated
+between us. There had been stupendous accumulations....
+
+The particular things we said and did in that bawling encounter matter
+nothing at all in this story. I can't now estimate how near we came
+to fisticuffs. It ended with my saying, after a pungent reminder of
+benefits conferred and remembered, that I didn't want to stay another
+hour in his house. I went upstairs, in a state of puerile fury, to
+pack and go off to the Railway Hotel, while he, with ironical civility,
+telephoned for a cab.
+
+"Good riddance!" shouted my uncle, seeing me off into the night.
+
+On the face of it our row was preposterous, but the underlying reality
+of our quarrel was the essential antagonism, it seemed to me, in all
+human affairs, the antagonism between ideas and the established method,
+that is to say, between ideas and the rule of thumb. The world I hate
+is the rule-of-thumb world, the thing I and my kind of people exist
+for primarily is to battle with that, to annoy it, disarrange it,
+reconstruct it. We question everything, disturb anything that cannot
+give a clear justification to our questioning, because we believe
+inherently that our sense of disorder implies the possibility of a
+better order. Of course we are detestable. My uncle was of that other
+vaster mass who accept everything for the thing it seems to be, hate
+enquiry and analysis as a tramp hates washing, dread and resist change,
+oppose experiment, despise science. The world is our battleground; and
+all history, all literature that matters, all science, deals with this
+conflict of the thing that is and the speculative "if" that will destroy
+it.
+
+But that is why I did not see Margaret Seddon again for five years.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ MARGARET IN LONDON
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+I was twenty-seven when I met Margaret again, and the intervening
+five years had been years of vigorous activity for me, if not of very
+remarkable growth. When I saw her again, I could count myself a grown
+man. I think, indeed, I counted myself more completely grown than I was.
+At any rate, by all ordinary standards, I had "got on" very well, and
+my ideas, if they had not changed very greatly, had become much more
+definite and my ambitions clearer and bolder.
+
+I had long since abandoned my fellowship and come to London. I had
+published two books that had been talked about, written several
+articles, and established a regular relationship with the WEEKLY REVIEW
+and the EVENING GAZETTE. I was a member of the Eighty Club and learning
+to adapt the style of the Cambridge Union to larger uses. The London
+world had opened out to me very readily. I had developed a pleasant
+variety of social connections. I had made the acquaintance of Mr.
+Evesham, who had been attracted by my NEW RULER, and who talked about
+it and me, and so did a very great deal to make a way for me into the
+company of prominent and amusing people. I dined out quite frequently.
+The glitter and interest of good London dinner parties became a common
+experience. I liked the sort of conversation one got at them extremely,
+the little glow of duologues burning up into more general discussions,
+the closing-in of the men after the going of the women, the sage,
+substantial masculine gossiping, the later resumption of effective talk
+with some pleasant woman, graciously at her best. I had a wide range
+of houses; Cambridge had linked me to one or two correlated sets of
+artistic and literary people, and my books and Mr. Evesham and opened
+to me the big vague world of "society." I wasn't aggressive nor
+particularly snobbish nor troublesome, sometimes I talked well, and if I
+had nothing interesting to say I said as little as possible, and I had
+a youthful gravity of manner that was liked by hostesses. And the other
+side of my nature that first flared through the cover of restraints at
+Locarno, that too had had opportunity to develop along the line London
+renders practicable. I had had my experiences and secrets and adventures
+among that fringe of ill-mated or erratic or discredited women the
+London world possesses. The thing had long ago ceased to be a matter of
+magic or mystery, and had become a question of appetites and excitement,
+and among other things the excitement of not being found out.
+
+I write rather doubtfully of my growing during this period. Indeed I
+find it hard to judge whether I can say that I grew at all in any real
+sense of the word, between three and twenty and twenty-seven. It seems
+to me now to have been rather a phase of realisation and clarification.
+All the broad lines of my thought were laid down, I am sure, by the date
+of my Locarno adventure, but in those five years I discussed things over
+and over again with myself and others, filled out with concrete fact
+forms I had at first apprehended sketchily and conversationally,
+measured my powers against my ideals and the forces in the world about
+me. It was evident that many men no better than myself and with no
+greater advantages than mine had raised themselves to influential and
+even decisive positions in the worlds of politics and thought. I was
+gathering the confidence and knowledge necessary to attack the world in
+the large manner; I found I could write, and that people would let
+me write if I chose, as one having authority and not as the scribes.
+Socially and politically and intellectually I knew myself for an honest
+man, and that quite without any deliberation on my part this showed
+and made things easy for me. People trusted my good faith from the
+beginning--for all that I came from nowhere and had no better position
+than any adventurer.
+
+But the growth process was arrested, I was nothing bigger at
+twenty-seven than at twenty-two, however much saner and stronger, and
+any one looking closely into my mind during that period might well have
+imagined growth finished altogether. It is particularly evident to me
+now that I came no nearer to any understanding of women during that
+time. That Locarno affair was infinitely more to me than I had supposed.
+It ended something--nipped something in the bud perhaps--took me at a
+stride from a vague, fine, ignorant, closed world of emotion to intrigue
+and a perfectly definite and limited sensuality. It ended my youth, and
+for a time it prevented my manhood. I had never yet even peeped at the
+sweetest, profoundest thing in the world, the heart and meaning of a
+girl, or dreamt with any quality of reality of a wife or any such thing
+as a friend among womanhood. My vague anticipation of such things in
+life had vanished altogether. I turned away from their possibility. It
+seemed to me I knew what had to be known about womankind. I wanted to
+work hard, to get on to a position in which I could develop and forward
+my constructive projects. Women, I thought, had nothing to do with that.
+It seemed clear I could not marry for some years; I was attractive to
+certain types of women, I had vanity enough to give me an agreeable
+confidence in love-making, and I went about seeking a convenient
+mistress quite deliberately, some one who should serve my purpose and
+say in the end, like that kindly first mistress of mine, "I've done you
+no harm," and so release me. It seemed the only wise way of disposing
+of urgencies that might otherwise entangle and wreck the career I was
+intent upon.
+
+I don't apologise for, or defend my mental and moral phases. So it was
+I appraised life and prepared to take it, and so it is a thousand
+ambitious men see it to-day....
+
+For the rest these five years were a period of definition. My political
+conceptions were perfectly plain and honest. I had one constant desire
+ruling my thoughts. I meant to leave England and the empire better
+ordered than I found it, to organise and discipline, to build up a
+constructive and controlling State out of my world's confusions. We
+had, I saw, to suffuse education with public intention, to develop a new
+better-living generation with a collectivist habit of thought, to link
+now chaotic activities in every human affair, and particularly to catch
+that escaped, world-making, world-ruining, dangerous thing, industrial
+and financial enterprise, and bring it back to the service of the
+general good. I had then the precise image that still serves me as a
+symbol for all I wish to bring about, the image of an engineer building
+a lock in a swelling torrent--with water pressure as his only source of
+power. My thoughts and acts were habitually turned to that enterprise;
+it gave shape and direction to all my life. The problem that most
+engaged my mind during those years was the practical and personal
+problem of just where to apply myself to serve this almost innate
+purpose. How was I, a child of this confusion, struggling upward through
+the confusion, to take hold of things? Somewhere between politics and
+literature my grip must needs be found, but where? Always I seem to
+have been looking for that in those opening years, and disregarding
+everything else to discover it.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+The Baileys, under whose auspices I met Margaret again, were in the
+sharpest contrast with the narrow industrialism of the Staffordshire
+world. They were indeed at the other extreme of the scale, two active
+self-centred people, excessively devoted to the public service. It was
+natural I should gravitate to them, for they seemed to stand for the
+maturer, more disciplined, better informed expression of all I was then
+urgent to attempt to do. The bulk of their friends were politicians or
+public officials, they described themselves as publicists--a vague yet
+sufficiently significant term. They lived and worked in a hard little
+house in Chambers Street, Westminster, and made a centre for quite an
+astonishing amount of political and social activity.
+
+Willersley took me there one evening. The place was almost pretentiously
+matter-of-fact and unassuming. The narrow passage-hall, papered with
+some ancient yellowish paper, grained to imitate wood, was choked with
+hats and cloaks and an occasional feminine wrap. Motioned rather than
+announced by a tall Scotch servant woman, the only domestic I ever
+remember seeing there, we made our way up a narrow staircase past the
+open door of a small study packed with blue-books, to discover Altiora
+Bailey receiving before the fireplace in her drawing-room. She was a
+tall commanding figure, splendid but a little untidy in black silk and
+red beads, with dark eyes that had no depths, with a clear hard voice
+that had an almost visible prominence, aquiline features and straight
+black hair that was apt to get astray, that was now astray like the
+head feathers of an eagle in a gale. She stood with her hands behind her
+back, and talked in a high tenor of a projected Town Planning Bill with
+Blupp, who was practically in those days the secretary of the local
+Government Board. A very short broad man with thick ears and fat white
+hands writhing intertwined behind him, stood with his back to us, eager
+to bark interruptions into Altiora's discourse. A slender girl in pale
+blue, manifestly a young political wife, stood with one foot on the
+fender listening with an expression of entirely puzzled propitiation.
+A tall sandy-bearded bishop with the expression of a man in a trance
+completed this central group.
+
+The room was one of those long apartments once divided by folding doors,
+and reaching from back to front, that are common upon the first floors
+of London houses. Its walls were hung with two or three indifferent
+water colours, there was scarcely any furniture but a sofa or so and a
+chair, and the floor, severely carpeted with matting, was crowded with
+a curious medley of people, men predominating. Several were in evening
+dress, but most had the morning garb of the politician; the women were
+either severely rational or radiantly magnificent. Willersley pointed
+out to me the wife of the Secretary of State for War, and I recognised
+the Duchess of Clynes, who at that time cultivated intellectuality. I
+looked round, identifying a face here or there, and stepping back trod
+on some one's toe, and turned to find it belonged to the Right Hon. G.
+B. Mottisham, dear to the PUNCH caricaturists. He received my apology
+with that intentional charm that is one of his most delightful traits,
+and resumed his discussion. Beside him was Esmeer of Trinity, whom I had
+not seen since my Cambridge days....
+
+Willersley found an ex-member of the School Board for whom he had
+affinities, and left me to exchange experiences and comments upon the
+company with Esmeer. Esmeer was still a don; but he was nibbling, he
+said, at certain negotiations with the TIMES that might bring him
+down to London. He wanted to come to London. "We peep at things from
+Cambridge," he said.
+
+"This sort of thing," I said, "makes London necessary. It's the oddest
+gathering."
+
+"Every one comes here," said Esmeer. "Mostly we hate them like
+poison--jealousy--and little irritations--Altiora can be a horror at
+times--but we HAVE to come."
+
+"Things are being done?"
+
+"Oh!--no doubt of it. It's one of the parts of the British
+machinery--that doesn't show.... But nobody else could do it.
+
+"Two people," said Esmeer, "who've planned to be a power--in an original
+way. And by Jove! they've done it!"
+
+I did not for some time pick out Oscar Bailey, and then Esmeer
+showed him to me in elaborately confidential talk in a corner with a
+distinguished-looking stranger wearing a ribbon. Oscar had none of the
+fine appearance of his wife; he was a short sturdy figure with a rounded
+protruding abdomen and a curious broad, flattened, clean-shaven face
+that seemed nearly all forehead. He was of Anglo-Hungarian extraction,
+and I have always fancied something Mongolian in his type. He peered
+up with reddish swollen-looking eyes over gilt-edged glasses that were
+divided horizontally into portions of different refractive power, and he
+talking in an ingratiating undertone, with busy thin lips, an eager lisp
+and nervous movements of the hand.
+
+People say that thirty years before at Oxford he was almost exactly the
+same eager, clever little man he was when I first met him. He had come
+up to Balliol bristling with extraordinary degrees and prizes captured
+in provincial and Irish and Scotch universities--and had made a name for
+himself as the most formidable dealer in exact fact the rhetoricians
+of the Union had ever had to encounter. From Oxford he had gone on to a
+position in the Higher Division of the Civil Service, I think in the
+War Office, and had speedily made a place for himself as a political
+journalist. He was a particularly neat controversialist, and very full
+of political and sociological ideas. He had a quite astounding memory
+for facts and a mastery of detailed analysis, and the time afforded
+scope for these gifts. The later eighties were full of politico-social
+discussion, and he became a prominent name upon the contents list of the
+NINETEENTH CENTURY, the FORTNIGHTLY and CONTEMPORARY chiefly as a half
+sympathetic but frequently very damaging critic of the socialism of that
+period. He won the immense respect of every one specially interested in
+social and political questions, he soon achieved the limited distinction
+that is awarded such capacity, and at that I think he would have
+remained for the rest of his life if he had not encountered Altiora.
+
+But Altiora Macvitie was an altogether exceptional woman, an
+extraordinary mixture of qualities, the one woman in the world who could
+make something more out of Bailey than that. She had much of the
+vigour and handsomeness of a slender impudent young man, and an
+unscrupulousness altogether feminine. She was one of those women who
+are waiting in--what is the word?--muliebrity. She had courage and
+initiative and a philosophical way of handling questions, and she could
+be bored by regular work like a man. She was entirely unfitted for her
+sex's sphere. She was neither uncertain, coy nor hard to please, and
+altogether too stimulating and aggressive for any gentleman's hours of
+ease. Her cookery would have been about as sketchy as her handwriting,
+which was generally quite illegible, and she would have made, I feel
+sure, a shocking bad nurse. Yet you mustn't imagine she was an inelegant
+or unbeautiful woman, and she is inconceivable to me in high collars or
+any sort of masculine garment. But her soul was bony, and at the base
+of her was a vanity gaunt and greedy! When she wasn't in a state of
+personal untidiness that was partly a protest against the waste of hours
+exacted by the toilet and partly a natural disinclination, she had a
+gypsy splendour of black and red and silver all her own. And somewhen in
+the early nineties she met and married Bailey.
+
+I know very little about her early years. She was the only daughter of
+Sir Deighton Macvitie, who applied the iodoform process to cotton,
+and only his subsequent unfortunate attempts to become a Cotton King
+prevented her being a very rich woman. As it was she had a tolerable
+independence. She came into prominence as one of the more able of the
+little shoal of young women who were led into politico-philanthropic
+activities by the influence of the earlier novels of Mrs. Humphry
+Ward--the Marcella crop. She went "slumming" with distinguished vigour,
+which was quite usual in those days--and returned from her experiences
+as an amateur flower girl with clear and original views about the
+problem--which is and always had been unusual. She had not married, I
+suppose because her standards were high, and men are cowards and with an
+instinctive appetite for muliebrity. She had kept house for her father
+by speaking occasionally to the housekeeper, butler and cook her mother
+had left her, and gathering the most interesting dinner parties she
+could, and had married off four orphan nieces in a harsh and successful
+manner. After her father's smash and death she came out as a writer
+upon social questions and a scathing critic of the Charity Organisation
+Society, and she was three and thirty and a little at loose ends when
+she met Oscar Bailey, so to speak, in the CONTEMPORARY REVIEW. The
+lurking woman in her nature was fascinated by the ease and precision
+with which the little man rolled over all sorts of important and
+authoritative people, she was the first to discover a sort of
+imaginative bigness in his still growing mind, the forehead perhaps
+carried him off physically, and she took occasion to meet and subjugate
+him, and, so soon as he had sufficiently recovered from his abject
+humility and a certain panic at her attentions, marry him.
+
+This had opened a new phase in the lives of Bailey and herself. The two
+supplemented each other to an extraordinary extent. Their subsequent
+career was, I think, almost entirely her invention. She was aggressive,
+imaginative, and had a great capacity for ideas, while he was almost
+destitute of initiative, and could do nothing with ideas except remember
+and discuss them. She was, if not exact, at least indolent, with a
+strong disposition to save energy by sketching--even her handwriting
+showed that--while he was inexhaustibly industrious with a relentless
+invariable calligraphy that grew larger and clearer as the years passed
+by. She had a considerable power of charming; she could be just as nice
+to people--and incidentally just as nasty--as she wanted to be. He was
+always just the same, a little confidential and SOTTO VOCE, artlessly
+rude and egoistic in an undignified way. She had considerable social
+experience, good social connections, and considerable social ambition,
+while he had none of these things. She saw in a flash her opportunity
+to redeem his defects, use his powers, and do large, novel, rather
+startling things. She ran him. Her marriage, which shocked her friends
+and relations beyond measure--for a time they would only speak of Bailey
+as "that gnome"--was a stroke of genius, and forthwith they proceeded
+to make themselves the most formidable and distinguished couple
+conceivable. P. B. P., she boasted, was engraved inside their wedding
+rings, Pro Bono Publico, and she meant it to be no idle threat. She had
+discovered very early that the last thing influential people will do is
+to work. Everything in their lives tends to make them dependent upon a
+supply of confidently administered detail. Their business is with the
+window and not the stock behind, and in the end they are dependent upon
+the stock behind for what goes into the window. She linked with that the
+fact that Bailey had a mind as orderly as a museum, and an invincible
+power over detail. She saw that if two people took the necessary pains
+to know the facts of government and administration with precision, to
+gather together knowledge that was dispersed and confused, to be able to
+say precisely what had to be done and what avoided in this eventuality
+or that, they would necessarily become a centre of reference for all
+sorts of legislative proposals and political expedients, and she went
+unhesitatingly upon that.
+
+Bailey, under her vigorous direction, threw up his post in the
+Civil Service and abandoned sporadic controversies, and they devoted
+themselves to the elaboration and realisation of this centre of public
+information she had conceived as their role. They set out to study
+the methods and organisation and realities of government in the most
+elaborate manner. They did the work as no one had ever hitherto dreamt
+of doing it. They planned the research on a thoroughly satisfying scale,
+and arranged their lives almost entirely for it. They took that house
+in Chambers Street and furnished it with severe economy, they discovered
+that Scotch domestic who is destined to be the guardian and tyrant of
+their declining years, and they set to work. Their first book, "The
+Permanent Official," fills three plump volumes, and took them and their
+two secretaries upwards of four years to do. It is an amazingly good
+book, an enduring achievement. In a hundred directions the history and
+the administrative treatment of the public service was clarified for all
+time....
+
+They worked regularly every morning from nine to twelve, they lunched
+lightly but severely, in the afternoon they "took exercise" or Bailey
+attended meetings of the London School Board, on which he served, he
+said, for the purposes of study--he also became a railway director
+for the same end. In the late afternoon Altiora was at home to various
+callers, and in the evening came dinner or a reception or both.
+
+Her dinners and gatherings were a very important feature in their
+scheme. She got together all sorts of interesting people in or about
+the public service, she mixed the obscurely efficient with the
+ill-instructed famous and the rudderless rich, got together in one room
+more of the factors in our strange jumble of a public life than had ever
+met easily before. She fed them with a shameless austerity that kept the
+conversation brilliant, on a soup, a plain fish, and mutton or boiled
+fowl and milk pudding, with nothing to drink but whisky and soda, and
+hot and cold water, and milk and lemonade. Everybody was soon very glad
+indeed to come to that. She boasted how little her housekeeping cost
+her, and sought constantly for fresh economies that would enable her,
+she said, to sustain an additional private secretary. Secretaries were
+the Baileys' one extravagance, they loved to think of searches going
+on in the British Museum, and letters being cleared up and precis made
+overhead, while they sat in the little study and worked together, Bailey
+with a clockwork industry, and Altiora in splendid flashes between
+intervals of cigarettes and meditation. "All efficient public careers,"
+said Altiora, "consist in the proper direction of secretaries."
+
+"If everything goes well I shall have another secretary next year,"
+Altiora told me. "I wish I could refuse people dinner napkins. Imagine
+what it means in washing! I dare most things.... But as it is, they
+stand a lot of hardship here."
+
+"There's something of the miser in both these people," said Esmeer, and
+the thing was perfectly true. For, after all, the miser is nothing more
+than a man who either through want of imagination or want of suggestion
+misapplies to a base use a natural power of concentration upon one end.
+The concentration itself is neither good nor evil, but a power that
+can be used in either way. And the Baileys gathered and reinvested
+usuriously not money, but knowledge of the utmost value in human
+affairs. They produced an effect of having found themselves--completely.
+One envied them at times extraordinarily. I was attracted, I was
+dazzled--and at the same time there was something about Bailey's big
+wrinkled forehead, his lisping broad mouth, the gestures of his hands
+and an uncivil preoccupation I could not endure....
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Their effect upon me was from the outset very considerable.
+
+Both of them found occasion on that first visit of mine to talk to
+me about my published writings and particularly about my then just
+published book THE NEW RULER, which had interested them very much. It
+fell in indeed so closely with their own way of thinking that I doubt if
+they ever understood how independently I had arrived at my conclusions.
+It was their weakness to claim excessively. That irritation, however,
+came later. We discovered each other immensely; for a time it produced a
+tremendous sense of kindred and co-operation.
+
+Altiora, I remember, maintained that there existed a great army of such
+constructive-minded people as ourselves--as yet undiscovered by one
+another.
+
+"It's like boring a tunnel through a mountain," said Oscar, "and
+presently hearing the tapping of the workers from the other end."
+
+"If you didn't know of them beforehand," I said, "it might be a rather
+badly joined tunnel."
+
+"Exactly," said Altiora with a high note, "and that's why we all want to
+find out each other...."
+
+They didn't talk like that on our first encounter, but they urged me to
+lunch with them next day, and then it was we went into things. A woman
+Factory Inspector and the Educational Minister for New Banksland and his
+wife were also there, but I don't remember they made any contribution
+to the conversation. The Baileys saw to that. They kept on at me in an
+urgent litigious way.
+
+"We have read your book," each began--as though it had been a joint
+function. "And we consider--"
+
+"Yes," I protested, "I think--"
+
+ That was a secondary matter.
+
+"They did not consider," said Altiora, raising her voice and going right
+over me, "that I had allowed sufficiently for the inevitable development
+of an official administrative class in the modern state."
+
+"Nor of its importance," echoed Oscar.
+
+That, they explained in a sort of chorus, was the cardinal idea of their
+lives, what they were up to, what they stood for. "We want to suggest to
+you," they said--and I found this was a stock opening of theirs--"that
+from the mere necessities of convenience elected bodies MUST avail
+themselves more and more of the services of expert officials. We have
+that very much in mind. The more complicated and technical affairs
+become, the less confidence will the elected official have in himself.
+We want to suggest that these expert officials must necessarily develop
+into a new class and a very powerful class in the community. We want to
+organise that. It may be THE power of the future. They will necessarily
+have to have very much of a common training. We consider ourselves as
+amateur unpaid precursors of such a class."...
+
+The vision they displayed for my consideration as the aim of
+public-spirited endeavour, seemed like a harder, narrower, more
+specialised version of the idea of a trained and disciplined state that
+Willersley and I had worked out in the Alps. They wanted things more
+organised, more correlated with government and a collective purpose,
+just as we did, but they saw it not in terms of a growing collective
+understanding, but in terms of functionaries, legislative change, and
+methods of administration....
+
+It wasn't clear at first how we differed. The Baileys were very anxious
+to win me to co-operation, and I was quite prepared at first to identify
+their distinctive expressions with phrases of my own, and so we came
+very readily into an alliance that was to last some years, and break at
+last very painfully. Altiora manifestly liked me, I was soon discussing
+with her the perplexity I found in placing myself efficiently in the
+world, the problem of how to take hold of things that occupied my
+thoughts, and she was sketching out careers for my consideration, very
+much as an architect on his first visit sketches houses, considers
+requirements, and puts before you this example and that of the more or
+less similar thing already done....
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+It is easy to see how much in common there was between the Baileys and
+me, and how natural it was that I should become a constant visitor at
+their house and an ally of theirs in many enterprises. It is not nearly
+so easy to define the profound antagonism of spirit that also held
+between us. There was a difference in texture, a difference in quality.
+How can I express it? The shapes of our thoughts were the same, but the
+substance quite different. It was as if they had made in china or cast
+iron what I had made in transparent living matter. (The comparison is
+manifestly from my point of view.) Certain things never seemed to show
+through their ideas that were visible, refracted perhaps and distorted,
+but visible always through mine.
+
+I thought for a time the essential difference lay in our relation to
+beauty. With me beauty is quite primary in life; I like truth, order
+and goodness, wholly because they are beautiful or lead straight to
+beautiful consequences. The Baileys either hadn't got that or they
+didn't see it. They seemed at times to prefer things harsh and ugly.
+That puzzled me extremely. The esthetic quality of many of their
+proposals, the "manners" of their work, so to speak, were at times as
+dreadful as--well, War Office barrack architecture. A caricature by
+its exaggerated statements will sometimes serve to point a truth by
+antagonising falsity and falsity. I remember talking to a prominent
+museum official in need of more public funds for the work he had in
+hand. I mentioned the possibility of enlisting Bailey's influence.
+
+"Oh, we don't want Philistines like that infernal Bottle-Imp running
+us," he said hastily, and would hear of no concerted action for the end
+he had in view. "I'd rather not have the extension.
+
+"You see," he went on to explain, "Bailey's wanting in the essentials."
+
+"What essentials?" said I.
+
+"Oh! he'd be like a nasty oily efficient little machine for some merely
+subordinate necessity among all my delicate stuff. He'd do all we wanted
+no doubt in the way of money and powers--and he'd do it wrong and mess
+the place for ever. Hands all black, you know. He's just a means. Just a
+very aggressive and unmanageable means. This isn't a plumber's job...."
+
+I stuck to my argument.
+
+"I don't LIKE him," said the official conclusively, and it seemed to me
+at the time he was just blind prejudice speaking....
+
+I came nearer the truth of the matter as I came to realise that
+our philosophies differed profoundly. That isn't a very curable
+difference,--once people have grown up. Theirs was a philosophy devoid
+of FINESSE. Temperamentally the Baileys were specialised, concentrated,
+accurate, while I am urged either by some Inner force or some entirely
+assimilated influence in my training, always to round off and shadow
+my outlines. I hate them hard. I would sacrifice detail to modelling
+always, and the Baileys, it seemed to me, loved a world as flat and
+metallic as Sidney Cooper's cows. If they had the universe in hand I
+know they would take down all the trees and put up stamped tin green
+shades and sunlight accumulators. Altiora thought trees hopelessly
+irregular and sea cliffs a great mistake.... I got things clearer as
+time went on. Though it was an Hegelian mess of which I had partaken at
+Codger's table by way of a philosophical training, my sympathies have
+always been Pragmatist. I belong almost by nature to that school of
+Pragmatism that, following the medieval Nominalists, bases itself upon
+a denial of the reality of classes, and of the validity of general
+laws. The Baileys classified everything. They were, in the scholastic
+sense--which so oddly contradicts the modern use of the word "Realists."
+They believed classes were REAL and independent of their individuals.
+This is the common habit of all so-called educated people who have no
+metaphysical aptitude and no metaphysical training. It leads them to a
+progressive misunderstanding of the world. It was a favourite trick
+of Altiora's to speak of everybody as a "type"; she saw men as samples
+moving; her dining-room became a chamber of representatives. It gave
+a tremendously scientific air to many of their generalisations, using
+"scientific" in its nineteenth-century uncritical Herbert Spencer sense,
+an air that only began to disappear when you thought them over again in
+terms of actuality and the people one knew....
+
+At the Baileys' one always seemed to be getting one's hands on the very
+strings that guided the world. You heard legislation projected to affect
+this "type" and that; statistics marched by you with sin and shame and
+injustice and misery reduced to quite manageable percentages, you found
+men who were to frame or amend bills in grave and intimate exchange
+with Bailey's omniscience, you heard Altiora canvassing approaching
+resignations and possible appointments that might make or mar a
+revolution in administrative methods, and doing it with a vigorous
+directness that manifestly swayed the decision; and you felt you were
+in a sort of signal box with levers all about you, and the world outside
+there, albeit a little dark and mysterious beyond the window, running
+on its lines in ready obedience to these unhesitating lights, true and
+steady to trim termini.
+
+And then with all this administrative fizzle, this pseudo-scientific
+administrative chatter, dying away in your head, out you went into the
+limitless grimy chaos of London streets and squares, roads and avenues
+lined with teeming houses, each larger than the Chambers Street house
+and at least equally alive, you saw the chaotic clamour of hoardings,
+the jumble of traffic, the coming and going of mysterious myriads,
+you heard the rumble of traffic like the noise of a torrent; a vague
+incessant murmur of cries and voices, wanton crimes and accidents bawled
+at you from the placards; imperative unaccountable fashions swaggered
+triumphant in dazzling windows of the shops; and you found yourself
+swaying back to the opposite conviction that the huge formless spirit
+of the world it was that held the strings and danced the puppets on the
+Bailey stage....
+
+Under the lamps you were jostled by people like my Staffordshire uncle
+out for a spree, you saw shy youths conversing with prostitutes, you
+passed young lovers pairing with an entire disregard of the social
+suitability of the "types" they might blend or create, you saw men
+leaning drunken against lamp-posts whom you knew for the "type" that
+will charge with fixed bayonets into the face of death, and you found
+yourself unable to imagine little Bailey achieving either drunkenness or
+the careless defiance of annihilation. You realised that quite a lot of
+types were underrepresented in Chambers Street, that feral and obscure
+and altogether monstrous forces must be at work, as yet altogether
+unassimilated by those neat administrative reorganisations.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Altiora, I remember, preluded Margaret's reappearance by announcing her
+as a "new type."
+
+I was accustomed to go early to the Baileys' dinners in those days, for
+a preliminary gossip with Altiora in front of her drawing-room fire. One
+got her alone, and that early arrival was a little sign of appreciation
+she valued. She had every woman's need of followers and servants.
+
+"I'm going to send you down to-night," she said, "with a very
+interesting type indeed--one of the new generation of serious gals.
+Middle-class origin--and quite well off. Rich in fact. Her step-father
+was a solicitor and something of an ENTREPRENEUR towards the end, I
+fancy--in the Black Country. There was a little brother died, and she's
+lost her mother quite recently. Quite on her own, so to speak. She's
+never been out into society very much, and doesn't seem really very
+anxious to go.... Not exactly an intellectual person, you know, but
+quiet, and great force of character. Came up to London on her own and
+came to us--someone had told her we were the sort of people to advise
+her--to ask what to do. I'm sure she'll interest you."
+
+"What CAN people of that sort do?" I asked. "Is she capable of
+investigation?"
+
+Altiora compressed her lips and shook her head. She always did shake her
+head when you asked that of anyone.
+
+"Of course what she ought to do," said Altiora, with her silk dress
+pulled back from her knee before the fire, and with a lift of her voice
+towards a chuckle at her daring way of putting things, "is to marry a
+member of Parliament and see he does his work.... Perhaps she will.
+It's a very exceptional gal who can do anything by herself--quite
+exceptional. The more serious they are--without being exceptional--the
+more we want them to marry."
+
+Her exposition was truncated by the entry of the type in question.
+
+"Well!" cried Altiora turning, and with a high note of welcome, "HERE
+you are!"
+
+Margaret had gained in dignity and prettiness by the lapse of five
+years, and she was now very beautifully and richly and simply dressed.
+Her fair hair had been done in some way that made it seem softer and
+more abundant than it was in my memory, and a gleam of purple velvet-set
+diamonds showed amidst its mist of little golden and brown lines.
+Her dress was of white and violet, the last trace of mourning for her
+mother, and confessed the gracious droop of her tall and slender body.
+She did not suggest Staffordshire at all, and I was puzzled for a moment
+to think where I had met her. Her sweetly shaped mouth with the
+slight obliquity of the lip and the little kink in her brow were
+extraordinarily familiar to me. But she had either been prepared
+by Altiora or she remembered my name. "We met," she said, "while my
+step-father was alive--at Misterton. You came to see us"; and instantly
+I recalled the sunshine between the apple blossom and a slender pale
+blue girlish shape among the daffodils, like something that had sprung
+from a bulb itself. I recalled at once that I had found her very
+interesting, though I did not clearly remember how it was she had
+interested me.
+
+Other guests arrived--it was one of Altiora's boldly blended mixtures of
+people with ideas and people with influence or money who might perhaps
+be expected to resonate to them. Bailey came down late with an air of
+hurry, and was introduced to Margaret and said absolutely nothing to
+her--there being no information either to receive or impart and nothing
+to do--but stood snatching his left cheek until I rescued him and her,
+and left him free to congratulate the new Lady Snape on her husband's K.
+C. B.
+
+I took Margaret down. We achieved no feats of mutual expression, except
+that it was abundantly clear we were both very pleased and interested
+to meet again, and that we had both kept memories of each other. We made
+that Misterton tea-party and the subsequent marriages of my cousins
+and the world of Burslem generally, matter for quite an agreeable
+conversation until at last Altiora, following her invariable custom,
+called me by name imperatively out of our duologue. "Mr. Remington," she
+said, "we want your opinion--" in her entirely characteristic effort to
+get all the threads of conversation into her own hands for the climax
+that always wound up her dinners. How the other women used to hate those
+concluding raids of hers! I forget most of the other people at that
+dinner, nor can I recall what the crowning rally was about. It didn't in
+any way join on to my impression of Margaret.
+
+In the drawing-room of the matting floor I rejoined her, with Altiora's
+manifest connivance, and in the interval I had been thinking of our
+former meeting.
+
+"Do you find London," I asked, "give you more opportunity for doing
+things and learning things than Burslem?"
+
+She showed at once she appreciated my allusion to her former
+confidences. "I was very discontented then," she said and paused. "I've
+really only been in London for a few months. It's so different. In
+Burslem, life seems all business and getting--without any reason. One
+went on and it didn't seem to mean anything. At least anything that
+mattered.... London seems to be so full of meanings--all mixed up
+together."
+
+She knitted her brows over her words and smiled appealingly at the end
+as if for consideration for her inadequate expression, appealingly and
+almost humorously.
+
+I looked understandingly at her. "We have all," I agreed, "to come to
+London."
+
+"One sees so much distress," she added, as if she felt she had
+completely omitted something, and needed a codicil.
+
+"What are you doing in London?"
+
+"I'm thinking of studying. Some social question. I thought perhaps I
+might go and study social conditions as Mrs. Bailey did, go perhaps as
+a work-girl or see the reality of living in, but Mrs. Bailey thought
+perhaps it wasn't quite my work."
+
+"Are you studying?"
+
+"I'm going to a good many lectures, and perhaps I shall take up a
+regular course at the Westminster School of Politics and Sociology. But
+Mrs. Bailey doesn't seem to believe very much in that either."
+
+Her faintly whimsical smile returned. "I seem rather indefinite," she
+apologised, "but one does not want to get entangled in things one can't
+do. One--one has so many advantages, one's life seems to be such a trust
+and such a responsibility--"
+
+She stopped.
+
+"A man gets driven into work," I said.
+
+"It must be splendid to be Mrs. Bailey," she replied with a glance of
+envious admiration across the room.
+
+"SHE has no doubts, anyhow," I remarked.
+
+"She HAD," said Margaret with the pride of one who has received great
+confidences.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+"You've met before?" said Altiora, a day or so later.
+
+I explained when.
+
+"You find her interesting?"
+
+I saw in a flash that Altiora meant to marry me to Margaret.
+
+Her intention became much clearer as the year developed. Altiora was
+systematic even in matters that evade system. I was to marry Margaret,
+and freed from the need of making an income I was to come into
+politics--as an exponent of Baileyism. She put it down with the other
+excellent and advantageous things that should occupy her summer holiday.
+It was her pride and glory to put things down and plan them out in
+detail beforehand, and I'm not quite sure that she did not even mark
+off the day upon which the engagement was to be declared. If she did,
+I disappointed her. We didn't come to an engagement, in spite of the
+broadest hints and the glaring obviousness of everything, that summer.
+
+Every summer the Baileys went out of London to some house they hired
+or borrowed, leaving their secretaries toiling behind, and they went
+on working hard in the mornings and evenings and taking exercise in the
+open air in the afternoon. They cycled assiduously and went for long
+walks at a trot, and raided and studied (and incidentally explained
+themselves to) any social "types" that lived in the neighbourhood. One
+invaded type, resentful under research, described them with a dreadful
+aptness as Donna Quixote and Sancho Panza--and himself as a harmless
+windmill, hurting no one and signifying nothing. She did rather tilt
+at things. This particular summer they were at a pleasant farmhouse in
+level country near Pangbourne, belonging to the Hon. Wilfrid Winchester,
+and they asked me to come down to rooms in the neighbourhood--Altiora
+took them for a month for me in August--and board with them upon
+extremely reasonable terms; and when I got there I found Margaret
+sitting in a hammock at Altiora's feet. Lots of people, I gathered, were
+coming and going in the neighbourhood, the Ponts were in a villa on the
+river, and the Rickhams' houseboat was to moor for some days; but these
+irruptions did not impede a great deal of duologue between Margaret and
+myself.
+
+Altiora was efficient rather than artistic in her match-making. She sent
+us off for long walks together--Margaret was a fairly good walker--she
+exhumed some defective croquet things and incited us to croquet, not
+understanding that detestable game is the worst stimulant for lovers
+in the world. And Margaret and I were always getting left about, and
+finding ourselves for odd half-hours in the kitchen-garden with nothing
+to do except talk, or we were told with a wave of the hand to run away
+and amuse each other.
+
+Altiora even tried a picnic in canoes, knowing from fiction rather than
+imagination or experience the conclusive nature of such excursions. But
+there she fumbled at the last moment, and elected at the river's brink
+to share a canoe with me. Bailey showed so much zeal and so little
+skill--his hat fell off and he became miraculously nothing but
+paddle-clutching hands and a vast wrinkled brow--that at last he had to
+be paddled ignominiously by Margaret, while Altiora, after a phase of
+rigid discretion, as nearly as possible drowned herself--and me no doubt
+into the bargain--with a sudden lateral gesture of the arm to emphasise
+the high note with which she dismissed the efficiency of the Charity
+Organisation Society. We shipped about an inch of water and sat in it
+for the rest of the time, an inconvenience she disregarded heroically.
+We had difficulties in landing Oscar from his frail craft upon the ait
+of our feasting,--he didn't balance sideways and was much alarmed, and
+afterwards, as Margaret had a pain in her back, I took him in my canoe,
+let him hide his shame with an ineffectual but not positively harmful
+paddle, and towed the other by means of the joined painters. Still it
+was the fault of the inadequate information supplied in the books and
+not of Altiora that that was not the date of my betrothal.
+
+I find it not a little difficult to state what kept me back from
+proposing marriage to Margaret that summer, and what urged me forward
+at last to marry her. It is so much easier to remember one's resolutions
+than to remember the moods and suggestions that produced them.
+
+Marrying and getting married was, I think, a pretty simple affair to
+Altiora; it was something that happened to the adolescent and unmarried
+when you threw them together under the circumstances of health, warmth
+and leisure. It happened with the kindly and approving smiles of the
+more experienced elders who had organised these proximities. The young
+people married, settled down, children ensued, and father and mother
+turned their minds, now decently and properly disillusioned, to other
+things. That to Altiora was the normal sexual life, and she believed it
+to be the quality of the great bulk of the life about her.
+
+One of the great barriers to human understanding is the wide
+temperamental difference one finds in the values of things relating to
+sex. It is the issue upon which people most need training in charity and
+imaginative sympathy. Here are no universal standards at all, and indeed
+for no single man nor woman does there seem to be any fixed standard, so
+much do the accidents of circumstances and one's physical phases affect
+one's interpretations. There is nothing in the whole range of sexual
+fact that may not seem supremely beautiful or humanly jolly or
+magnificently wicked or disgusting or trivial or utterly insignificant,
+according to the eye that sees or the mood that colours. Here is
+something that may fill the skies and every waking hour or be almost
+completely banished from a life. It may be everything on Monday and less
+than nothing on Saturday. And we make our laws and rules as though in
+these matters all men and women were commensurable one with another,
+with an equal steadfast passion and an equal constant duty....
+
+I don't know what dreams Altiora may have had in her schoolroom days, I
+always suspected her of suppressed and forgotten phases, but certainly
+her general effect now was of an entirely passionless worldliness in
+these matters. Indeed so far as I could get at her, she regarded sexual
+passion as being hardly more legitimate in a civilised person than--let
+us say--homicidal mania. She must have forgotten--and Bailey too. I
+suspect she forgot before she married him. I don't suppose either of
+them had the slightest intimation of the dimensions sexual love can take
+in the thoughts of the great majority of people with whom they come in
+contact. They loved in their way--an intellectual way it was and a fond
+way--but it had no relation to beauty and physical sensation--except
+that there seemed a decree of exile against these things. They got their
+glow in high moments of altruistic ambition--and in moments of vivid
+worldly success. They sat at opposite ends of their dinner table with so
+and so "captured," and so and so, flushed with a mutual approval. They
+saw people in love forgetful and distraught about them, and just put it
+down to forgetfulness and distraction. At any rate Altiora manifestly
+viewed my situation and Margaret's with an abnormal and entirely
+misleading simplicity. There was the girl, rich, with an acceptable
+claim to be beautiful, shiningly virtuous, quite capable of political
+interests, and there was I, talented, ambitious and full of
+political and social passion, in need of just the money, devotion and
+regularisation Margaret could provide. We were both unmarried--white
+sheets of uninscribed paper. Was there ever a simpler situation? What
+more could we possibly want?
+
+She was even a little offended at the inconclusiveness that did not
+settle things at Pangbourne. I seemed to her, I suspect, to reflect upon
+her judgment and good intentions.
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+I didn't see things with Altiora's simplicity.
+
+I admired Margaret very much, I was fully aware of all that she and I
+might give each other; indeed so far as Altiora went we were quite in
+agreement. But what seemed solid ground to Altiora and the ultimate
+footing of her emasculated world, was to me just the superficial
+covering of a gulf--oh! abysses of vague and dim, and yet stupendously
+significant things.
+
+I couldn't dismiss the interests and the passion of sex as Altiora did.
+Work, I agreed, was important; career and success; but deep unanalysable
+instincts told me this preoccupation was a thing quite as important;
+dangerous, interfering, destructive indeed, but none the less a
+dominating interest in life. I have told how flittingly and uninvited it
+came like a moth from the outer twilight into my life, how it grew in me
+with my manhood, how it found its way to speech and grew daring, and led
+me at last to experience. After that adventure at Locarno sex and the
+interests and desires of sex never left me for long at peace. I went on
+with my work and my career, and all the time it was like--like someone
+talking ever and again in a room while one tries to write.
+
+There were times when I could have wished the world a world all of men,
+so greatly did this unassimilated series of motives and curiosities
+hamper me; and times when I could have wished the world all of women.
+I seemed always to be seeking something in women, in girls, and I
+was never clear what it was I was seeking. But never--even at my
+coarsest--was I moved by physical desire alone. Was I seeking help and
+fellowship? Was I seeking some intimacy with beauty? It was a thing too
+formless to state, that I seemed always desiring to attain and never
+attaining. Waves of gross sensuousness arose out of this preoccupation,
+carried me to a crisis of gratification or disappointment that was
+clearly not the needed thing; they passed and left my mind free again
+for a time to get on with the permanent pursuits of my life. And then
+presently this solicitude would have me again, an irrelevance as it
+seemed, and yet a constantly recurring demand.
+
+I don't want particularly to dwell upon things that are disagreeable
+for others to read, but I cannot leave them out of my story and get the
+right proportions of the forces I am balancing. I was no abnormal man,
+and that world of order we desire to make must be built of such stuff as
+I was and am and can beget. You cannot have a world of Baileys; it would
+end in one orderly generation. Humanity is begotten in Desire, lives by
+Desire.
+
+
+     "Love which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb;
+      Love which is lust, is the Call from the Gloom."
+
+
+I echo Henley.
+
+I suppose the life of celibacy which the active, well-fed,
+well-exercised and imaginatively stirred young man of the educated
+classes is supposed to lead from the age of nineteen or twenty,
+when Nature certainly meant him to marry, to thirty or more, when
+civilisation permits him to do so, is the most impossible thing in the
+world. We deal here with facts that are kept secret and obscure, but
+I doubt for my own part if more than one man out of five in our class
+satisfies that ideal demand. The rest are even as I was, and Hatherleigh
+and Esmeer and all the men I knew. I draw no lessons and offer no
+panacea; I have to tell the quality of life, and this is how it is. This
+is how it will remain until men and women have the courage to face the
+facts of life.
+
+I was no systematic libertine, you must understand; things happened to
+me and desire drove me. Any young man would have served for that Locarno
+adventure, and after that what had been a mystic and wonderful thing
+passed rapidly into a gross, manifestly misdirected and complicating
+one. I can count a meagre tale of five illicit loves in the days of my
+youth, to include that first experience, and of them all only two were
+sustained relationships. Besides these five "affairs," on one or two
+occasions I dipped so low as the inky dismal sensuality of the streets,
+and made one of those pairs of correlated figures, the woman in her
+squalid finery sailing homeward, the man modestly aloof and behind, that
+every night in the London year flit by the score of thousands across the
+sight of the observant....
+
+How ugly it is to recall; ugly and shameful now without qualification!
+Yet at the time there was surely something not altogether ugly in
+it--something that has vanished, some fine thing mortally ailing.
+
+One such occasion I recall as if it were a vision deep down in a pit,
+as if it had happened in another state of existence to someone else. And
+yet it is the sort of thing that has happened, once or twice at least,
+to half the men in London who have been in a position to make it
+possible. Let me try and give you its peculiar effect. Man or woman, you
+ought to know of it.
+
+Figure to yourself a dingy room, somewhere in that network of streets
+that lies about Tottenham Court Road, a dingy bedroom lit by a solitary
+candle and carpeted with scraps and patches, with curtains of cretonne
+closing the window, and a tawdry ornament of paper in the grate. I sit
+on a bed beside a weary-eyed, fair-haired, sturdy young woman, half
+undressed, who is telling me in broken German something that my
+knowledge of German is at first inadequate to understand....
+
+I thought she was boasting about her family, and then slowly the meaning
+came to me. She was a Lett from near Libau in Courland, and she was
+telling me--just as one tells something too strange for comment or
+emotion--how her father had been shot and her sister outraged and
+murdered before her eyes.
+
+It was as if one had dipped into something primordial and stupendous
+beneath the smooth and trivial surfaces of life. There was I, you know,
+the promising young don from Cambridge, who wrote quite brilliantly
+about politics and might presently get into Parliament, with my collar
+and tie in my hand, and a certain sense of shameful adventure fading out
+of my mind.
+
+"Ach Gott!" she sighed by way of comment, and mused deeply for a
+moment before she turned her face to me, as to something forgotten and
+remembered, and assumed the half-hearted meretricious smile.
+
+"Bin ich eine hubsche?" she asked like one who repeats a lesson.
+
+I was moved to crave her pardon and come away.
+
+"Bin ich eine hubsche?" she asked a little anxiously, laying a detaining
+hand upon me, and evidently not understanding a word of what I was
+striving to say.
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+I find it extraordinarily difficult to recall the phases by which
+I passed from my first admiration of Margaret's earnestness and
+unconscious daintiness to an intimate acquaintance. The earlier
+encounters stand out clear and hard, but then the impressions become
+crowded and mingle not only with each other but with all the subsequent
+developments of relationship, the enormous evolutions of interpretation
+and comprehension between husband and wife. Dipping into my memories is
+like dipping into a ragbag, one brings out this memory or that, with no
+intimation of how they came in time or what led to them and joined them
+together. And they are all mixed up with subsequent associations,
+with sympathies and discords, habits of intercourse, surprises and
+disappointments and discovered misunderstandings. I know only that
+always my feelings for Margaret were complicated feelings, woven of many
+and various strands.
+
+It is one of the curious neglected aspects of life how at the same time
+and in relation to the same reality we can have in our minds streams of
+thought at quite different levels. We can be at the same time idealising
+a person and seeing and criticising that person quite coldly and
+clearly, and we slip unconsciously from level to level and produce
+all sorts of inconsistent acts. In a sense I had no illusions about
+Margaret; in a sense my conception of Margaret was entirely poetic
+illusion. I don't think I was ever blind to certain defects of hers, and
+quite as certainly they didn't seem to matter in the slightest degree.
+Her mind had a curious want of vigour, "flatness" is the only word; she
+never seemed to escape from her phrase; her way of thinking, her way of
+doing was indecisive; she remained in her attitude, it did not flow out
+to easy, confirmatory action.
+
+I saw this quite clearly, and when we walked and talked together I
+seemed always trying for animation in her and never finding it. I would
+state my ideas. "I know," she would say, "I know."
+
+I talked about myself and she listened wonderfully, but she made no
+answering revelations. I talked politics, and she remarked with her blue
+eyes wide and earnest: "Every WORD you say seems so just."
+
+I admired her appearance tremendously but--I can only express it by
+saying I didn't want to touch her. Her fair hair was always delectably
+done. It flowed beautifully over her pretty small ears, and she would
+tie its fair coilings with fillets of black or blue velvet that carried
+pretty buckles of silver and paste. The light, the faint down on her
+brow and cheek was delightful. And it was clear to me that I made her
+happy.
+
+My sense of her deficiencies didn't stand in the way of my falling at
+last very deeply in love with her. Her very shortcomings seemed to offer
+me something....
+
+She stood in my mind for goodness--and for things from which it seemed
+to me my hold was slipping.
+
+She seemed to promise a way of escape from the deepening opposition in
+me between physical passions and the constructive career, the career
+of wide aims and human service, upon which I had embarked. All the time
+that I was seeing her as a beautiful, fragile, rather ineffective girl,
+I was also seeing her just as consciously as a shining slender figure,
+a radiant reconciliation, coming into my darkling disorders of lust and
+impulse. I could understand clearly that she was incapable of the most
+necessary subtleties of political thought, and yet I could contemplate
+praying to her and putting all the intricate troubles of my life at her
+feet.
+
+Before the reappearance of Margaret in my world at all an unwonted
+disgust with the consequences and quality of my passions had arisen in
+my mind. Among other things that moment with the Lettish girl haunted
+me persistently. I would see myself again and again sitting amidst those
+sluttish surroundings, collar and tie in hand, while her heavy German
+words grouped themselves to a slowly apprehended meaning. I would
+feel again with a fresh stab of remorse, that this was not a flash of
+adventure, this was not seeing life in any permissible sense, but a dip
+into tragedy, dishonour, hideous degradation, and the pitiless cruelty
+of a world as yet uncontrolled by any ordered will.
+
+"Good God!" I put it to myself, "that I should finish the work those
+Cossacks had begun! I who want order and justice before everything!
+There's no way out of it, no decent excuse! If I didn't think, I ought
+to have thought!"...
+
+"How did I get to it?"... I would ransack the phases of my development
+from the first shy unveiling of a hidden wonder to the last extremity as
+a man will go through muddled account books to find some disorganising
+error....
+
+I was also involved at that time--I find it hard to place these things
+in the exact order of their dates because they were so disconnected
+with the regular progress of my work and life--in an intrigue, a clumsy,
+sensuous, pretentious, artificially stimulated intrigue, with a Mrs.
+Larrimer, a woman living separated from her husband. I will not go
+into particulars of that episode, nor how we quarrelled and chafed one
+another. She was at once unfaithful and jealous and full of whims
+about our meetings; she was careless of our secret, and vulgarised our
+relationship by intolerable interpretations; except for some glowing
+moments of gratification, except for the recurrent and essentially
+vicious desire that drew us back to each other again, we both fretted at
+a vexatious and unexpectedly binding intimacy. The interim was full
+of the quality of work delayed, of time and energy wasted, of insecure
+precautions against scandal and exposure. Disappointment is almost
+inherent in illicit love. I had, and perhaps it was part of her
+recurrent irritation also, a feeling as though one had followed
+something fine and beautiful into a net--into bird lime! These furtive
+scuffles, this sneaking into shabby houses of assignation, was what we
+had made out of the suggestion of pagan beauty; this was the reality
+of our vision of nymphs and satyrs dancing for the joy of life amidst
+incessant sunshine. We had laid hands upon the wonder and glory of
+bodily love and wasted them....
+
+It was the sense of waste, of finely beautiful possibilities getting
+entangled and marred for ever that oppressed me. I had missed, I had
+lost. I did not turn from these things after the fashion of the Baileys,
+as one turns from something low and embarrassing. I felt that these
+great organic forces were still to be wrought into a harmony with my
+constructive passion. I felt too that I was not doing it. I had not
+understood the forces in this struggle nor its nature, and as I learnt
+I failed. I had been started wrong, I had gone on wrong, in a world that
+was muddled and confused, full of false counsel and erratic shames and
+twisted temptations. I learnt to see it so by failures that were perhaps
+destroying any chance of profit in my lessons. Moods of clear keen
+industry alternated with moods of relapse and indulgence and moods of
+dubiety and remorse. I was not going on as the Baileys thought I was
+going on. There were times when the blindness of the Baileys irritated
+me intensely. Beneath the ostensible success of those years, between
+twenty-three and twenty-eight, this rottenness, known to scarcely
+any one but myself, grew and spread. My sense of the probability of
+a collapse intensified. I knew indeed now, even as Willersley had
+prophesied five years before, that I was entangling myself in something
+that might smother all my uses in the world. Down there among those
+incommunicable difficulties, I was puzzled and blundering. I was losing
+my hold upon things; the chaotic and adventurous element in life was
+spreading upward and getting the better of me, over-mastering me and all
+my will to rule and make.... And the strength, the drugging urgency of
+the passion!
+
+Margaret shone at times in my imagination like a radiant angel in a
+world of mire and disorder, in a world of cravings, hot and dull red
+like scars inflamed....
+
+I suppose it was because I had so great a need of such help as her
+whiteness proffered, that I could ascribe impossible perfections to
+her, a power of intellect, a moral power and patience to which she, poor
+fellow mortal, had indeed no claim. If only a few of us WERE angels and
+freed from the tangle of effort, how easy life might be! I wanted her so
+badly, so very badly, to be what I needed. I wanted a woman to save me.
+I forced myself to see her as I wished to see her. Her tepidities became
+infinite delicacies, her mental vagueness an atmospheric realism. The
+harsh precisions of the Baileys and Altiora's blunt directness threw up
+her fineness into relief and made a grace of every weakness.
+
+Mixed up with the memory of times when I talked with Margaret as one
+talks politely to those who are hopelessly inferior in mental quality,
+explaining with a false lucidity, welcoming and encouraging the feeblest
+response, when possible moulding and directing, are times when I did
+indeed, as the old phrase goes, worship the ground she trod on. I was
+equally honest and unconscious of inconsistency at each extreme. But in
+neither phase could I find it easy to make love to Margaret. For in the
+first I did not want to, though I talked abundantly to her of marriage
+and so forth, and was a little puzzled at myself for not going on to
+some personal application, and in the second she seemed inaccessible, I
+felt I must make confessions and put things before her that would be the
+grossest outrage upon the noble purity I attributed to her.
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+I went to Margaret at last to ask her to marry me, wrought up to the
+mood of one who stakes his life on a cast. Separated from her, and with
+the resonance of an evening of angry recriminations with Mrs. Larrimer
+echoing in my mind, I discovered myself to be quite passionately in
+love with Margaret. Last shreds of doubt vanished. It has always been a
+feature of our relationship that Margaret absent means more to me than
+Margaret present; her memory distils from its dross and purifies in
+me. All my criticisms and qualifications of her vanished into some dark
+corner of my mind. She was the lady of my salvation; I must win my way
+to her or perish.
+
+I went to her at last, for all that I knew she loved me, in passionate
+self-abasement, white and a-tremble. She was staying with the Rockleys
+at Woking, for Shena Rockley had been at Bennett Hall with her and they
+had resumed a close intimacy; and I went down to her on an impulse,
+unheralded. I was kept waiting for some minutes, I remember, in a little
+room upon which a conservatory opened, a conservatory full of pots
+of large mauve-edged, white cyclamens in flower. And there was a big
+lacquer cabinet, a Chinese thing, I suppose, of black and gold against
+the red-toned wall. To this day the thought of Margaret is inseparably
+bound up with the sight of a cyclamen's back-turned petals.
+
+She came in, looking pale and drooping rather more than usual. I
+suddenly realised that Altiora's hint of a disappointment leading to
+positive illness was something more than a vindictive comment. She
+closed the door and came across to me and took and dropped my hand and
+stood still. "What is it you want with me?" she asked.
+
+The speech I had been turning over and over in my mind on the way
+vanished at the sight of her.
+
+"I want to talk to you," I answered lamely.
+
+For some seconds neither of us said a word.
+
+"I want to tell you things about my life," I began.
+
+She answered with a scarcely audible "yes."
+
+"I almost asked you to marry me at Pangbourne," I plunged. "I didn't. I
+didn't because--because you had too much to give me."
+
+"Too much!" she echoed, "to give you!" She had lifted her eyes to my
+face and the colour was coming into her cheeks.
+
+"Don't misunderstand me," I said hastily. "I want to tell you things,
+things you don't know. Don't answer me. I want to tell you."
+
+She stood before the fireplace with her ultimate answer shining through
+the quiet of her face. "Go on," she said, very softly. It was so
+pitilessly manifest she was resolved to idealise the situation whatever
+I might say. I began walking up and down the room between those
+cyclamens and the cabinet. There were little gold fishermen on the
+cabinet fishing from little islands that each had a pagoda and a tree,
+and there were also men in boats or something, I couldn't determine
+what, and some obscure sub-office in my mind concerned itself with that
+quite intently. Yet I seem to have been striving with all my being
+to get words for the truth of things. "You see," I emerged, "you make
+everything possible to me. You can give me help and sympathy, support,
+understanding. You know my political ambitions. You know all that I
+might do in the world. I do so intensely want to do constructive things,
+big things perhaps, in this wild jumble.... Only you don't know a bit
+what I am. I want to tell you what I am. I'm complex.... I'm streaked."
+
+I glanced at her, and she was regarding me with an expression of
+blissful disregard for any meaning I was seeking to convey.
+
+"You see," I said, "I'm a bad man."
+
+She sounded a note of valiant incredulity.
+
+Everything seemed to be slipping away from me. I pushed on to the ugly
+facts that remained over from the wreck of my interpretation. "What
+has held me back," I said, "is the thought that you could not possibly
+understand certain things in my life. Men are not pure as women are. I
+have had love affairs. I mean I have had affairs. Passion--desire. You
+see, I have had a mistress, I have been entangled--"
+
+She seemed about to speak, but I interrupted. "I'm not telling you," I
+said, "what I meant to tell you. I want you to know clearly that there
+is another side to my life, a dirty side. Deliberately I say, dirty. It
+didn't seem so at first--"
+
+I stopped blankly. "Dirty," I thought, was the most idiotic choice of
+words to have made.
+
+I had never in any tolerable sense of the word been dirty.
+
+"I drifted into this--as men do," I said after a little pause and
+stopped again.
+
+She was looking at me with her wide blue eyes.
+
+"Did you imagine," she began, "that I thought you--that I expected--"
+
+"But how can you know?"
+
+"I know. I do know."
+
+"But--" I began.
+
+"I know," she persisted, dropping her eyelids. "Of course I know," and
+nothing could have convinced me more completely that she did not know.
+
+"All men--" she generalised. "A woman does not understand these
+temptations."
+
+I was astonished beyond measure at her way of taking my confession. ...
+
+"Of course," she said, hesitating a little over a transparent
+difficulty, "it is all over and past."
+
+"It's all over and past," I answered.
+
+There was a little pause.
+
+"I don't want to know," she said. "None of that seems to matter now in
+the slightest degree."
+
+She looked up and smiled as though we had exchanged some acceptable
+commonplaces. "Poor dear!" she said, dismissing everything, and put out
+her arms, and it seemed to me that I could hear the Lettish girl in
+the background--doomed safety valve of purity in this intolerable
+world--telling something in indistinguishable German--I know not what
+nor why....
+
+I took Margaret in my arms and kissed her. Her eyes were wet with tears.
+She clung to me and was near, I felt, to sobbing.
+
+"I have loved you," she whispered presently, "Oh! ever since we met in
+Misterton--six years and more ago."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ MARGARET IN VENICE
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+There comes into my mind a confused memory of conversations with
+Margaret; we must have had dozens altogether, and they mix in now for
+the most part inextricably not only with one another, but with later
+talks and with things we discussed at Pangbourne. We had the immensest
+anticipations of the years and opportunities that lay before us. I was
+now very deeply in love with her indeed. I felt not that I had cleaned
+up my life but that she had. We called each other "confederate" I
+remember, and made during our brief engagement a series of visits to the
+various legislative bodies in London, the County Council, the House of
+Commons, where we dined with Villiers, and the St. Pancras Vestry, where
+we heard Shaw speaking. I was full of plans and so was she of the way
+in which we were to live and work. We were to pay back in public service
+whatever excess of wealth beyond his merits old Seddon's economic
+advantage had won for him from the toiling people in the potteries. The
+end of the Boer War was so recent that that blessed word "efficiency"
+echoed still in people's minds and thoughts. Lord Roseberry in a
+memorable oration had put it into the heads of the big outer public, but
+the Baileys with a certain show of justice claimed to have set it going
+in the channels that took it to him--if as a matter of fact it was taken
+to him. But then it was their habit to make claims of that sort. They
+certainly did their share to keep "efficient" going. Altiora's
+highest praise was "thoroughly efficient." We were to be a "thoroughly
+efficient" political couple of the "new type." She explained us to
+herself and Oscar, she explained us to ourselves, she explained us to
+the people who came to her dinners and afternoons until the world was
+highly charged with explanation and expectation, and the proposal that I
+should be the Liberal candidate for the Kinghamstead Division seemed the
+most natural development in the world.
+
+I was full of the ideal of hard restrained living and relentless
+activity, and throughout a beautiful November at Venice, where chiefly
+we spent our honeymoon, we turned over and over again and discussed in
+every aspect our conception of a life tremendously focussed upon the
+ideal of social service.
+
+Most clearly there stands out a picture of ourselves talking in a
+gondola on our way to Torcella. Far away behind us the smoke of Murano
+forms a black stain upon an immense shining prospect of smooth water,
+water as unruffled and luminous as the sky above, a mirror on which rows
+of posts and distant black high-stemmed, swan-necked boats with their
+minutely clear swinging gondoliers, float aerially. Remote and low
+before us rises the little tower of our destination. Our men swing
+together and their oars swirl leisurely through the water, hump back in
+the rowlocks, splash sharply and go swishing back again. Margaret lies
+back on cushions, with her face shaded by a holland parasol, and I sit
+up beside her.
+
+"You see," I say, and in spite of Margaret's note of perfect
+acquiescence I feel myself reasoning against an indefinable antagonism,
+"it is so easy to fall into a slack way with life. There may seem to be
+something priggish in a meticulous discipline, but otherwise it is
+so easy to slip into indolent habits--and to be distracted from one's
+purpose. The country, the world, wants men to serve its constructive
+needs, to work out and carry out plans. For a man who has to make a
+living the enemy is immediate necessity; for people like ourselves
+it's--it's the constant small opportunity of agreeable things."
+
+"Frittering away," she says, "time and strength."
+
+"That is what I feel. It's so pleasant to pretend one is simply modest,
+it looks so foolish at times to take one's self too seriously. We've GOT
+to take ourselves seriously."
+
+She endorses my words with her eyes.
+
+"I feel I can do great things with life."
+
+"I KNOW you can."
+
+"But that's only to be done by concentrating one's life upon one main
+end. We have to plan our days, to make everything subserve our scheme."
+
+"I feel," she answers softly, "we ought to give--every hour."
+
+Her face becomes dreamy. "I WANT to give every hour," she adds.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+That holiday in Venice is set in my memory like a little artificial lake
+in uneven confused country, as something very bright and skylike, and
+discontinuous with all about it. The faded quality of the very sunshine
+of that season, the mellow discoloured palaces and places, the huge,
+time-ripened paintings of departed splendours, the whispering, nearly
+noiseless passage of hearse-black gondolas, for the horrible steam
+launch had not yet ruined Venice, the stilled magnificences of the
+depopulated lagoons, the universal autumn, made me feel altogether in
+recess from the teeming uproars of reality. There was not a dozen people
+all told, no Americans and scarcely any English, to dine in the big
+cavern of a dining-room, with its vistas of separate tables, its
+distempered walls and its swathed chandeliers. We went about seeing
+beautiful things, accepting beauty on every hand, and taking it for
+granted that all was well with ourselves and the world. It was ten days
+or a fortnight before I became fretful and anxious for action; a long
+tranquillity for such a temperament as mine.
+
+Our pleasures were curiously impersonal, a succession of shared
+aesthetic appreciation threads all that time. Our honeymoon was no
+exultant coming together, no mutual shout of "YOU!" We were almost shy
+with one another, and felt the relief of even a picture to help us
+out. It was entirely in my conception of things that I should be very
+watchful not to shock or distress Margaret or press the sensuous note.
+Our love-making had much of the tepid smoothness of the lagoons.
+We talked in delicate innuendo of what should be glorious freedoms.
+Margaret had missed Verona and Venice in her previous Italian
+journey--fear of the mosquito had driven her mother across Italy to the
+westward route--and now she could fill up her gaps and see the Titians
+and Paul Veroneses she already knew in colourless photographs, the
+Carpaccios, (the St. George series delighted her beyond measure,)
+the Basaitis and that great statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni that Ruskin
+praised.
+
+But since I am not a man to look at pictures and architectural effects
+day after day, I did watch Margaret very closely and store a thousand
+memories of her. I can see her now, her long body drooping a little
+forward, her sweet face upraised to some discovered familiar masterpiece
+and shining with a delicate enthusiasm. I can hear again the soft
+cadences of her voice murmuring commonplace comments, for she had no
+gift of expressing the shapeless satisfaction these things gave her.
+
+Margaret, I perceived, was a cultivated person, the first cultivated
+person with whom I had ever come into close contact. She was cultivated
+and moral, and I, I now realise, was never either of these things. She
+was passive, and I am active. She did not simply and naturally look
+for beauty but she had been incited to look for it at school, and took
+perhaps a keener interest in books and lectures and all the organisation
+of beautiful things than she did in beauty itself; she found much of her
+delight in being guided to it. Now a thing ceases to be beautiful to me
+when some finger points me out its merits. Beauty is the salt of life,
+but I take my beauty as a wild beast gets its salt, as a constituent of
+the meal....
+
+And besides, there was that between us that should have seemed more
+beautiful than any picture....
+
+So we went about Venice tracking down pictures and spiral staircases and
+such-like things, and my brains were busy all the time with such things
+as a comparison of Venice and its nearest modern equivalent, New York,
+with the elaboration of schemes of action when we returned to London,
+with the development of a theory of Margaret.
+
+Our marriage had done this much at least, that it had fused and
+destroyed those two independent ways of thinking about her that had gone
+on in my mind hitherto. Suddenly she had become very near to me, and a
+very big thing, a sort of comprehensive generalisation behind a thousand
+questions, like the sky or England. The judgments and understandings
+that had worked when she was, so to speak, miles away from my life,
+had now to be altogether revised. Trifling things began to matter
+enormously, that she had a weak and easily fatigued back, for example,
+or that when she knitted her brows and stammered a little in talking,
+it didn't really mean that an exquisite significance struggled for
+utterance.
+
+We visited pictures in the mornings chiefly. In the afternoon, unless we
+were making a day-long excursion in a gondola, Margaret would rest for
+an hour while I prowled about in search of English newspapers, and then
+we would go to tea in the Piazza San Marco and watch the drift of people
+feeding the pigeons and going into the little doors beneath the sunlit
+arches and domes of Saint Mark's. Then perhaps we would stroll on the
+Piazzetta, or go out into the sunset in a gondola. Margaret became very
+interested in the shops that abound under the colonnades and decided at
+last to make an extensive purchase of table glass. "These things," she
+said, "are quite beautiful, and far cheaper than anything but the most
+ordinary looking English ware." I was interested in her idea, and a good
+deal charmed by the delightful qualities of tinted shape, slender handle
+and twisted stem. I suggested we should get not simply tumblers
+and wineglasses but bedroom waterbottles, fruit- and sweet-dishes,
+water-jugs, and in the end we made quite a business-like afternoon of
+it.
+
+I was beginning now to long quite definitely for events. Energy was
+accumulating in me, and worrying me for an outlet. I found the TIMES and
+the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the other papers I managed to get hold of, more
+and more stimulating. I nearly wrote to the former paper one day in
+answer to a letter by Lord Grimthorpe--I forget now upon what point.
+I chafed secretly against this life of tranquil appreciations more and
+more. I found my attitudes of restrained and delicate affection for
+Margaret increasingly difficult to sustain. I surprised myself and her
+by little gusts of irritability, gusts like the catspaws before a gale.
+I was alarmed at these symptoms.
+
+One night when Margaret had gone up to her room, I put on a light
+overcoat, went out into the night and prowled for a long time through
+the narrow streets, smoking and thinking. I returned and went and sat on
+the edge of her bed to talk to her.
+
+"Look here, Margaret," I said; "this is all very well, but I'm
+restless."
+
+"Restless!" she said with a faint surprise in her voice.
+
+"Yes. I think I want exercise. I've got a sort of feeling--I've never
+had it before--as though I was getting fat."
+
+"My dear!" she cried.
+
+"I want to do things;--ride horses, climb mountains, take the devil out
+of myself."
+
+She watched me thoughtfully.
+
+"Couldn't we DO something?" she said.
+
+Do what?
+
+"I don't know. Couldn't we perhaps go away from here soon--and walk in
+the mountains--on our way home."
+
+I thought. "There seems to be no exercise at all in this place."
+
+"Isn't there some walk?"
+
+"I wonder," I answered. "We might walk to Chioggia perhaps, along
+the Lido." And we tried that, but the long stretch of beach fatigued
+Margaret's back, and gave her blisters, and we never got beyond
+Malamocco....
+
+A day or so after we went out to those pleasant black-robed, bearded
+Armenians in their monastery at Saint Lazzaro, and returned towards
+sundown. We fell into silence. "PIU LENTO," said Margaret to the
+gondolier, and released my accumulated resolution.
+
+"Let us go back to London," I said abruptly.
+
+Margaret looked at me with surprised blue eyes.
+
+"This is beautiful beyond measure, you know," I said, sticking to my
+point, "but I have work to do."
+
+She was silent for some seconds. "I had forgotten," she said.
+
+"So had I," I sympathised, and took her hand. "Suddenly I have
+remembered."
+
+She remained quite still. "There is so much to be done," I said, almost
+apologetically.
+
+She looked long away from me across the lagoon and at last sighed, like
+one who has drunk deeply, and turned to me.
+
+"I suppose one ought not to be so happy," she said. "Everything has been
+so beautiful and so simple and splendid. And clean. It has been just
+With You--the time of my life. It's a pity such things must end. But
+the world is calling you, dear.... I ought not to have forgotten it. I
+thought you were resting--and thinking. But if you are rested.--Would
+you like us to start to-morrow?"
+
+She looked at once so fragile and so devoted that on the spur of the
+moment I relented, and we stayed in Venice four more days.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+Margaret had already taken a little house in Radnor Square, Westminster,
+before our marriage, a house that seemed particularly adaptable to our
+needs as public-spirited efficients; it had been very pleasantly painted
+and papered under Margaret's instructions, white paint and clean open
+purples and green predominating, and now we set to work at once upon
+the interesting business of arranging and--with our Venetian glass as a
+beginning--furnishing it. We had been fairly fortunate with our wedding
+presents, and for the most part it was open to us to choose just exactly
+what we would have and just precisely where we would put it.
+
+Margaret had a sense of form and colour altogether superior to mine, and
+so quite apart from the fact that it was her money equipped us, I stood
+aside from all these matters and obeyed her summons to a consultation
+only to endorse her judgment very readily. Until everything was settled
+I went every day to my old rooms in Vincent Square and worked at a
+series of papers that were originally intended for the FORTNIGHTLY
+REVIEW, the papers that afterwards became my fourth book, "New Aspects
+of Liberalism."
+
+I still remember as delightful most of the circumstances of getting
+into 79, Radnor Square. The thin flavour of indecision about Margaret
+disappeared altogether in a shop; she had the precisest ideas of what
+she wanted, and the devices of the salesman did not sway her. It was
+very pleasant to find her taking things out of my hands with a certain
+masterfulness, and showing the distinctest determination to make a
+house in which I should be able to work in that great project of "doing
+something for the world."
+
+"And I do want to make things pretty about us," she said. "You don't
+think it wrong to have things pretty?"
+
+"I want them so."
+
+"Altiora has things hard."
+
+"Altiora," I answered, "takes a pride in standing ugly and uncomfortable
+things. But I don't see that they help her. Anyhow they won't help me."
+
+So Margaret went to the best shops and got everything very simple and
+very good. She bought some pictures very well indeed; there was a little
+Sussex landscape, full of wind and sunshine, by Nicholson, for my study,
+that hit my taste far better than if I had gone out to get some such
+expression for myself.
+
+"We will buy a picture just now and then," she said, "sometimes--when we
+see one."
+
+I would come back through the January mire or fog from Vincent Square to
+the door of 79, and reach it at last with a quite childish appreciation
+of the fact that its solid Georgian proportions and its fine brass
+furnishings belonged to MY home; I would use my latchkey and discover
+Margaret in the warm-lit, spacious hall with a partially opened
+packing-case, fatigued but happy, or go up to have tea with her out
+of the right tea things, "come at last," or be told to notice what was
+fresh there. It wasn't simply that I had never had a house before, but
+I had really never been, except in the most transitory way, in any house
+that was nearly so delightful as mine promised to be. Everything was
+fresh and bright, and softly and harmoniously toned. Downstairs we had
+a green dining-room with gleaming silver, dark oak, and English
+colour-prints; above was a large drawing-room that could be made still
+larger by throwing open folding doors, and it was all carefully done in
+greys and blues, for the most part with real Sheraton supplemented by
+Sheraton so skilfully imitated by an expert Margaret had discovered as
+to be indistinguishable except to a minute scrutiny. And for me, above
+this and next to my bedroom, there was a roomy study, with specially
+thick stair-carpet outside and thick carpets in the bedroom overhead and
+a big old desk for me to sit at and work between fire and window, and
+another desk specially made for me by that expert if I chose to
+stand and write, and open bookshelves and bookcases and every sort of
+convenient fitting. There were electric heaters beside the open fire,
+and everything was put for me to make tea at any time--electric kettle,
+infuser, biscuits and fresh butter, so that I could get up and work at
+any hour of the day or night. I could do no work in this apartment for
+a long time, I was so interested in the perfection of its arrangements.
+And when I brought in my books and papers from Vincent Square, Margaret
+seized upon all the really shabby volumes and had them re-bound in a
+fine official-looking leather.
+
+I can remember sitting down at that desk and looking round me and
+feeling with a queer effect of surprise that after all even a place
+in the Cabinet, though infinitely remote, was nevertheless in the same
+large world with these fine and quietly expensive things.
+
+On the same floor Margaret had a "den," a very neat and pretty den with
+good colour-prints of Botticellis and Carpaccios, and there was a third
+apartment for sectarial purposes should the necessity for them arise,
+with a severe-looking desk equipped with patent files. And Margaret
+would come flitting into the room to me, or appear noiselessly
+standing, a tall gracefully drooping form, in the wide open doorway. "Is
+everything right, dear?" she would ask.
+
+"Come in," I would say, "I'm sorting out papers."
+
+She would come to the hearthrug.
+
+"I mustn't disturb you," she would remark.
+
+"I'm not busy yet."
+
+"Things are getting into order. Then we must make out a time-table as
+the Baileys do, and BEGIN!"
+
+Altiora came in to see us once or twice, and a number of serious
+young wives known to Altiora called and were shown over the house, and
+discussed its arrangements with Margaret. They were all tremendously
+keen on efficient arrangements.
+
+"A little pretty," said Altiora, with the faintest disapproval,
+"still--"
+
+It was clear she thought we should grow out of that. From the day of our
+return we found other people's houses open to us and eager for us. We
+went out of London for week-ends and dined out, and began discussing
+our projects for reciprocating these hospitalities. As a single man
+unattached, I had had a wide and miscellaneous social range, but now
+I found myself falling into place in a set. For a time I acquiesced
+in this. I went very little to my clubs, the Climax and the National
+Liberal, and participated in no bachelor dinners at all. For a time,
+too, I dropped out of the garrulous literary and journalistic circles I
+had frequented. I put up for the Reform, not so much for the use of the
+club as a sign of serious and substantial political standing. I didn't
+go up to Cambridge, I remember, for nearly a year, so occupied was I
+with my new adjustments.
+
+The people we found ourselves among at this time were people, to put
+it roughly, of the Parliamentary candidate class, or people already
+actually placed in the political world. They ranged between very
+considerable wealth and such a hard, bare independence as old Willersley
+and the sister who kept house for him possessed. There were quite
+a number of young couples like ourselves, a little younger and more
+artless, or a little older and more established. Among the younger men
+I had a sort of distinction because of my Cambridge reputation and my
+writing, and because, unlike them, I was an adventurer and had won and
+married my way into their circles instead of being naturally there. They
+couldn't quite reckon upon what I should do; they felt I had reserves of
+experience and incalculable traditions. Close to us were the Cramptons,
+Willie Crampton, who has since been Postmaster-General, rich and
+very important in Rockshire, and his younger brother Edward, who has
+specialised in history and become one of those unimaginative men of
+letters who are the glory of latter-day England. Then there was Lewis,
+further towards Kensington, where his cousins the Solomons and the
+Hartsteins lived, a brilliant representative of his race, able,
+industrious and invariably uninspired, with a wife a little in revolt
+against the racial tradition of feminine servitude and inclined to the
+suffragette point of view, and Bunting Harblow, an old blue, and with an
+erratic disposition well under the control of the able little cousin he
+had married. I had known all these men, but now (with Altiora floating
+angelically in benediction) they opened their hearts to me and took
+me into their order. They were all like myself, prospective Liberal
+candidates, with a feeling that the period of wandering in the
+wilderness of opposition was drawing near its close. They were all
+tremendously keen upon social and political service, and all greatly
+under the sway of the ideal of a simple, strenuous life, a life finding
+its satisfactions in political achievements and distinctions. The young
+wives were as keen about it as the young husbands, Margaret most of
+all, and I--whatever elements in me didn't march with the attitudes and
+habits of this set were very much in the background during that time.
+
+We would give little dinners and have evening gatherings at which
+everything was very simple and very good, with a slight but perceptible
+austerity, and there was more good fruit and flowers and less perhaps in
+the way of savouries, patties and entrees than was customary. Sherry we
+banished, and Marsala and liqueurs, and there was always good home-made
+lemonade available. No men waited, but very expert parlourmaids. Our
+meat was usually Welsh mutton--I don't know why, unless that mountains
+have ever been the last refuge of the severer virtues. And we talked
+politics and books and ideas and Bernard Shaw (who was a department by
+himself and supposed in those days to be ethically sound at bottom),
+and mingled with the intellectuals--I myself was, as it were, a promoted
+intellectual.
+
+The Cramptons had a tendency to read good things aloud on their less
+frequented receptions, but I have never been able to participate
+submissively in this hyper-digestion of written matter, and generally
+managed to provoke a disruptive debate. We were all very earnest to make
+the most of ourselves and to be and do, and I wonder still at times,
+with an unassuaged perplexity, how it is that in that phase of utmost
+earnestness I have always seemed to myself to be most remote from
+reality.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+I look back now across the detaching intervention of sixteen crowded
+years, critically and I fancy almost impartially, to those beginnings
+of my married life. I try to recall something near to their proper order
+the developing phases of relationship. I am struck most of all by the
+immense unpremeditated, generous-spirited insincerities upon which
+Margaret and I were building.
+
+It seems to me that here I have to tell perhaps the commonest experience
+of all among married educated people, the deliberate, shy, complex
+effort to fill the yawning gaps in temperament as they appear, the
+sustained, failing attempt to bridge abysses, level barriers, evade
+violent pressures. I have come these latter years of my life to believe
+that it is possible for a man and woman to be absolutely real with one
+another, to stand naked souled to each other, unashamed and unafraid,
+because of the natural all-glorifying love between them. It is possible
+to love and be loved untroubling, as a bird flies through the air. But
+it is a rare and intricate chance that brings two people within sight of
+that essential union, and for the majority marriage must adjust itself
+on other terms. Most coupled people never really look at one another.
+They look a little away to preconceived ideas. And each from the first
+days of love-making HIDES from the other, is afraid of disappointing,
+afraid of offending, afraid of discoveries in either sense. They build
+not solidly upon the rock of truth, but upon arches and pillars and
+queer provisional supports that are needed to make a common foundation,
+and below in the imprisoned darknesses, below the fine fabric they
+sustain together begins for each of them a cavernous hidden life. Down
+there things may be prowling that scarce ever peep out to consciousness
+except in the grey half-light of sleepless nights, passions that flash
+out for an instant in an angry glance and are seen no more, starved
+victims and beautiful dreams bricked up to die. For the most of us there
+is no jail delivery of those inner depths, and the life above goes on to
+its honourable end.
+
+I have told how I loved Margaret and how I came to marry her. Perhaps
+already unintentionally I have indicated the quality of the injustice
+our marriage did us both. There was no kindred between us and no
+understanding. We were drawn to one another by the unlikeness of our
+quality, by the things we misunderstood in each other. I know a score of
+couples who have married in that fashion.
+
+Modern conditions and modern ideas, and in particular the intenser and
+subtler perceptions of modern life, press more and more heavily upon a
+marriage tie whose fashion comes from an earlier and less discriminating
+time. When the wife was her husband's subordinate, meeting him simply
+and uncritically for simple ends, when marriage was a purely domestic
+relationship, leaving thought and the vivid things of life
+almost entirely to the unencumbered man, mental and temperamental
+incompatibilities mattered comparatively little. But now the wife,
+and particularly the loving childless wife, unpremeditatedly makes a
+relentless demand for a complete association, and the husband exacts
+unthought of delicacies of understanding and co-operation. These are
+stupendous demands. People not only think more fully and elaborately
+about life than they ever did before, but marriage obliges us to make
+that ever more accidented progress a three-legged race of carelessly
+assorted couples....
+
+Our very mental texture was different. I was rough-minded, to use the
+phrase of William James, primary and intuitive and illogical; she was
+tender-minded, logical, refined and secondary. She was loyal to
+pledge and persons, sentimental and faithful; I am loyal to ideas
+and instincts, emotional and scheming. My imagination moves in broad
+gestures; her's was delicate with a real dread of extravagance. My
+quality is sensuous and ruled by warm impulses; hers was discriminating
+and essentially inhibitory. I like the facts of the case and to mention
+everything; I like naked bodies and the jolly smells of things. She
+abounded in reservations, in circumlocutions and evasions, in keenly
+appreciated secondary points. Perhaps the reader knows that Tintoretto
+in the National Gallery, the Origin of the Milky Way. It is an admirable
+test of temperamental quality. In spite of my early training I have
+come to regard that picture as altogether delightful; to Margaret it
+has always been "needlessly offensive." In that you have our fundamental
+breach. She had a habit, by no means rare, of damning what she did not
+like or find sympathetic in me on the score that it was not my "true
+self," and she did not so much accept the universe as select from it and
+do her best to ignore the rest. And also I had far more initiative than
+had she. This is no catalogue of rights and wrongs, or superiorities
+and inferiorities; it is a catalogue of differences between two people
+linked in a relationship that constantly becomes more intolerant of
+differences.
+
+This is how we stood to each other, and none of it was clear to either
+of us at the outset. To begin with, I found myself reserving myself
+from her, then slowly apprehending a jarring between our minds and
+what seemed to me at first a queer little habit of misunderstanding in
+her....
+
+It did not hinder my being very fond of her....
+
+Where our system of reservation became at once most usual and most
+astounding was in our personal relations. It is not too much to say that
+in that regard we never for a moment achieved sincerity with one another
+during the first six years of our life together. It goes even deeper
+than that, for in my effort to realise the ideal of my marriage I ceased
+even to attempt to be sincere with myself. I would not admit my own
+perceptions and interpretations. I tried to fit myself to her thinner
+and finer determinations. There are people who will say with a note
+of approval that I was learning to conquer myself. I record that much
+without any note of approval....
+
+For some years I never deceived Margaret about any concrete fact nor,
+except for the silence about my earlier life that she had almost forced
+upon me, did I hide any concrete fact that seemed to affect her, but
+from the outset I was guilty of immense spiritual concealments, my very
+marriage was based, I see now, on a spiritual subterfuge; I hid moods
+from her, pretended feelings....
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+The interest and excitement of setting-up a house, of walking about
+it from room to room and from floor to floor, or sitting at one's own
+dinner table and watching one's wife control conversation with a pretty,
+timid resolution, of taking a place among the secure and free people of
+our world, passed almost insensibly into the interest and excitement
+of my Parliamentary candidature for the Kinghamstead Division, that
+shapeless chunk of agricultural midland between the Great Western and
+the North Western railways. I was going to "take hold" at last, the
+Kinghamstead Division was my appointed handle. I was to find my place in
+the rather indistinctly sketched constructions that were implicit in the
+minds of all our circle. The precise place I had to fill and the precise
+functions I had to discharge were not as yet very clear, but all that,
+we felt sure, would become plain as things developed.
+
+A few brief months of vague activities of "nursing" gave place to
+the excitements of the contest that followed the return of Mr.
+Camphell-Bannerman to power in 1905. So far as the Kinghamstead Division
+was concerned it was a depressed and tepid battle. I went about the
+constituency making three speeches that were soon threadbare, and an
+odd little collection of people worked for me; two solicitors, a cheap
+photographer, a democratic parson, a number of dissenting ministers, the
+Mayor of Kinghamstead, a Mrs. Bulger, the widow of an old Chartist who
+had grown rich through electric traction patents, Sir Roderick Newton,
+a Jew who had bought Calersham Castle, and old Sir Graham Rivers, that
+sturdy old soldier, were among my chief supporters. We had headquarters
+in each town and village, mostly there were empty shops we leased
+temporarily, and there at least a sort of fuss and a coming and going
+were maintained. The rest of the population stared in a state of
+suspended judgment as we went about the business. The country was
+supposed to be in a state of intellectual conflict and deliberate
+decision, in history it will no doubt figure as a momentous conflict.
+Yet except for an occasional flare of bill-sticking or a bill in a
+window or a placard-plastered motor-car or an argumentative group
+of people outside a public-house or a sluggish movement towards the
+schoolroom or village hall, there was scarcely a sign that a great
+empire was revising its destinies. Now and then one saw a canvasser on
+a doorstep. For the most part people went about their business with an
+entirely irresponsible confidence in the stability of the universe. At
+times one felt a little absurd with one's flutter of colours and one's
+air of saving the country.
+
+My opponent was a quite undistinguished Major-General who relied upon
+his advocacy of Protection, and was particularly anxious we should avoid
+"personalities" and fight the constituency in a gentlemanly spirit. He
+was always writing me notes, apologising for excesses on the part of his
+supporters, or pointing out the undesirability of some course taken by
+mine.
+
+My speeches had been planned upon broad lines, but they lost touch with
+these as the polling approached. To begin with I made a real attempt
+to put what was in my mind before the people I was to supply with
+a political voice. I spoke of the greatness of our empire and its
+destinies, of the splendid projects and possibilities of life and order
+that lay before the world, of all that a resolute and constructive
+effort might do at the present time. "We are building a state," I said,
+"secure and splendid, we are in the dawn of the great age of mankind."
+Sometimes that would get a solitary "'Ear! 'ear!" Then having created,
+as I imagined, a fine atmosphere, I turned upon the history of the last
+Conservative administration and brought it into contrast with the wide
+occasions of the age; discussed its failure to control the grasping
+financiers in South Africa, its failure to release public education from
+sectarian squabbles, its misconduct of the Boer War, its waste of the
+world's resources....
+
+It soon became manifest that my opening and my general spaciousness of
+method bored my audiences a good deal. The richer and wider my phrases
+the thinner sounded my voice in these non-resonating gatherings. Even
+the platform supporters grew restive unconsciously, and stirred and
+coughed. They did not recognise themselves as mankind. Building an
+empire, preparing a fresh stage in the history of humanity, had no
+appeal for them. They were mostly everyday, toiling people, full of
+small personal solicitudes, and they came to my meetings, I think, very
+largely as a relaxation. This stuff was not relaxing. They did not think
+politics was a great constructive process, they thought it was a kind
+of dog-fight. They wanted fun, they wanted spice, they wanted hits,
+they wanted also a chance to say "'Ear', 'ear!" in an intelligent and
+honourable manner and clap their hands and drum with their feet. The
+great constructive process in history gives so little scope for clapping
+and drumming and saying "'Ear, 'ear!" One might as well think of
+hounding on the solar system.
+
+So after one or two attempts to lift my audiences to the level of the
+issues involved, I began to adapt myself to them. I cut down my review
+of our imperial outlook and destinies more and more, and
+developed a series of hits and anecdotes and--what shall I call
+them?--"crudifications" of the issue. My helper's congratulated me on
+the rapid improvement of my platform style. I ceased to speak of the
+late Prime Minister with the respect I bore him, and began to fall in
+with the popular caricature of him as an artful rabbit-witted person
+intent only on keeping his leadership, in spite of the vigorous attempts
+of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain to oust him therefrom. I ceased to qualify my
+statement that Protection would make food dearer for the agricultural
+labourer. I began to speak of Mr. Alfred Lyttelton as an influence at
+once insane and diabolical, as a man inspired by a passionate desire
+to substitute manacled but still criminal Chinese for honest British
+labourers throughout the world. And when it came to the mention of our
+own kindly leader, of Mr. John Burns or any one else of any prominence
+at all on our side I fell more and more into the intonation of one who
+mentions the high gods. And I had my reward in brighter meetings and
+readier and readier applause.
+
+One goes on from phase to phase in these things.
+
+"After all," I told myself, "if one wants to get to Westminster one must
+follow the road that leads there," but I found the road nevertheless
+rather unexpectedly distasteful. "When one gets there," I said, "then it
+is one begins."
+
+But I would lie awake at nights with that sore throat and headache and
+fatigue which come from speaking in ill-ventilated rooms, and wondering
+how far it was possible to educate a whole people to great political
+ideals. Why should political work always rot down to personalities and
+personal appeals in this way? Life is, I suppose, to begin with and
+end with a matter of personalities, from personalities all our broader
+interests arise and to personalities they return. All our social and
+political effort, all of it, is like trying to make a crowd of people
+fall into formation. The broader lines appear, but then come a rush
+and excitement and irrelevancy, and forthwith the incipient order has
+vanished and the marshals must begin the work over again!
+
+My memory of all that time is essentially confusion. There was a
+frightful lot of tiresome locomotion in it; for the Kinghamstead
+Division is extensive, abounding in ill-graded and badly metalled
+cross-roads and vicious little hills, and singularly unpleasing to
+the eye in a muddy winter. It is sufficiently near to London to
+have undergone the same process of ill-regulated expansion that made
+Bromstead the place it is. Several of its overgrown villages have
+developed strings of factories and sidings along the railway lines, and
+there is an abundance of petty villas. There seemed to be no place
+at which one could take hold of more than this or that element of the
+population. Now we met in a meeting-house, now in a Masonic Hall or
+Drill Hall; I also did a certain amount of open-air speaking in the
+dinner hour outside gas-works and groups of factories. Some special sort
+of people was, as it were, secreted in response to each special appeal.
+One said things carefully adjusted to the distinctive limitations of
+each gathering. Jokes of an incredible silliness and shallowness drifted
+about us. Our advisers made us declare that if we were elected we would
+live in the district, and one hasty agent had bills printed, "If Mr.
+Remington is elected he will live here." The enemy obtained a number
+of these bills and stuck them on outhouses, pigstyes, dog-kennels; you
+cannot imagine how irksome the repetition of that jest became. The vast
+drifting indifference in between my meetings impressed me more and more.
+I realised the vagueness of my own plans as I had never done before
+I brought them to the test of this experience. I was perplexed by the
+riddle of just how far I was, in any sense of the word, taking hold at
+all, how far I wasn't myself flowing into an accepted groove.
+
+Margaret was troubled by no such doubts. She was clear I had to go into
+Parliament on the side of Liberalism and the light, as against the late
+Government and darkness. Essential to the memory of my first contest, is
+the memory of her clear bright face, very resolute and grave, helping me
+consciously, steadfastly, with all her strength. Her quiet confidence,
+while I was so dissatisfied, worked curiously towards the alienation
+of my sympathies. I felt she had no business to be so sure of me. I had
+moments of vivid resentment at being thus marched towards Parliament.
+
+I seemed now always to be discovering alien forces of character in
+her. Her way of taking life diverged from me more and more. She sounded
+amazing, independent notes. She bought some particularly costly furs for
+the campaign that roused enthusiasm whenever she appeared. She also made
+me a birthday present in November of a heavily fur-trimmed coat and this
+she would make me remove as I went on to the platform, and hold over her
+arm until I was ready to resume it. It was fearfully heavy for her and
+she liked it to be heavy for her. That act of servitude was in essence
+a towering self-assertion. I would glance sideways while some chairman
+floundered through his introduction and see the clear blue eye with
+which she regarded the audience, which existed so far as she was
+concerned merely to return me to Parliament. It was a friendly eye,
+provided they were not silly or troublesome. But it kindled a little at
+the hint of a hostile question. After we had come so far and taken so
+much trouble!
+
+She constituted herself the dragoman of our political travels. In hotels
+she was serenely resolute for the quietest and the best, she rejected
+all their proposals for meals and substituted a severely nourishing
+dietary of her own, and even in private houses she astonished me by her
+tranquil insistence upon special comforts and sustenance. I can see her
+face now as it would confront a hostess, a little intent, but sweetly
+resolute and assured.
+
+Since our marriage she had read a number of political memoirs, and she
+had been particularly impressed by the career of Mrs. Gladstone. I don't
+think it occurred to her to compare and contrast my quality with that
+of Mrs. Gladstone's husband. I suspect her of a deliberate intention
+of achieving parallel results by parallel methods. I was to be
+Gladstonised. Gladstone it appeared used to lubricate his speeches with
+a mixture--if my memory serves me right--of egg beaten up in sherry,
+and Margaret was very anxious I should take a leaf from that celebrated
+book. She wanted, I know, to hold the glass in her hand while I was
+speaking.
+
+But here I was firm. "No," I said, very decisively, "simply I won't
+stand that. It's a matter of conscience. I shouldn't feel--democratic.
+I'll take my chance of the common water in the carafe on the chairman's
+table."
+
+"I DO wish you wouldn't," she said, distressed.
+
+It was absurd to feel irritated; it was so admirable of her, a little
+childish, infinitely womanly and devoted and fine--and I see now how
+pathetic. But I could not afford to succumb to her. I wanted to follow
+my own leading, to see things clearly, and this reassuring pose of a
+high destiny, of an almost terribly efficient pursuit of a fixed end
+when as a matter of fact I had a very doubtful end and an aim as yet by
+no means fixed, was all too seductive for dalliance....
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+And into all these things with the manner of a trifling and casual
+incident comes the figure of Isabel Rivers. My first impressions of
+her were of a rather ugly and ungainly, extraordinarily interesting
+schoolgirl with a beautiful quick flush under her warm brown skin, who
+said and did amusing and surprising things. When first I saw her she
+was riding a very old bicycle downhill with her feet on the fork of the
+frame--it seemed to me to the public danger, but afterwards I came to
+understand the quality of her nerve better--and on the third occasion
+she was for her own private satisfaction climbing a tree. On the
+intervening occasion we had what seems now to have been a long sustained
+conversation about the political situation and the books and papers I
+had written.
+
+I wonder if it was.
+
+What a delightful mixture of child and grave woman she was at that time,
+and how little I reckoned on the part she would play in my life! And
+since she has played that part, how impossible it is to tell now of
+those early days! Since I wrote that opening paragraph to this section
+my idle pen has been, as it were, playing by itself and sketching faces
+on the blotting pad--one impish wizened visage is oddly like little
+Bailey--and I have been thinking cheek on fist amidst a limitless wealth
+of memories. She sits below me on the low wall under the olive trees
+with our little child in her arms. She is now the central fact in my
+life. It still seems a little incredible that that should be so. She has
+destroyed me as a politician, brought me to this belated rebeginning of
+life. When I sit down and try to make her a girl again, I feel like the
+Arabian fisherman who tried to put the genius back into the pot from
+which it had spread gigantic across the skies....
+
+I have a very clear vision of her rush downhill past our
+labouring ascendant car--my colours fluttered from handle-bar and
+shoulder-knot--and her waving hand and the sharp note of her voice. She
+cried out something, I don't know what, some greeting.
+
+"What a pretty girl!" said Margaret.
+
+Parvill, the cheap photographer, that industrious organiser for whom
+by way of repayment I got those magic letters, that knighthood of the
+underlings, "J. P." was in the car with us and explained her to us. "One
+of the best workers you have," he said....
+
+And then after a toilsome troubled morning we came, rather cross from
+the strain of sustained amiability, to Sir Graham Rivers' house. It
+seemed all softness and quiet--I recall dead white panelling and
+oval mirrors horizontally set and a marble fireplace between white
+marble-blind Homer and marble-blind Virgil, very grave and fine--and how
+Isabel came in to lunch in a shapeless thing like a blue smock that
+made her bright quick-changing face seem yellow under her cloud of black
+hair. Her step-sister was there, Miss Gamer, to whom the house was
+to descend, a well-dressed lady of thirty, amiably disavowing
+responsibility for Isabel in every phrase and gesture. And there was a
+very pleasant doctor, an Oxford man, who seemed on excellent terms with
+every one. It was manifest that he was in the habit of sparring with the
+girl, but on this occasion she wasn't sparring and refused to be teased
+into a display in spite of the taunts of either him or her father. She
+was, they discovered with rising eyebrows, shy. It seemed an opportunity
+too rare for them to miss. They proclaimed her enthusiasm for me in a
+way that brought a flush to her cheek and a look into her eye between
+appeal and defiance. They declared she had read my books, which I
+thought at the time was exaggeration, their dry political quality was so
+distinctly not what one was accustomed to regard as schoolgirl reading.
+Miss Gamer protested to protect her, "When once in a blue moon Isabel is
+well-behaved....!"
+
+Except for these attacks I do not remember much of the conversation
+at table; it was, I know, discursive and concerned with the sort of
+topographical and social and electioneering fact natural to such a
+visit. Old Rivers struck me as a delightful person, modestly unconscious
+of his doubly-earned V. C. and the plucky defence of Kardin-Bergat that
+won his baronetcy. He was that excellent type, the soldier radical, and
+we began that day a friendship that was only ended by his death in the
+hunting-field three years later. He interested Margaret into a disregard
+of my plate and the fact that I had secured the illegal indulgence of
+Moselle. After lunch we went for coffee into another low room, this
+time brown panelled and looking through French windows on a red-walled
+garden, graceful even in its winter desolation. And there the
+conversation suddenly picked up and became good. It had fallen to a
+pause, and the doctor, with an air of definitely throwing off a mask
+and wrecking an established tranquillity, remarked: "Very probably you
+Liberals will come in, though I'm not sure you'll come in so mightily as
+you think, but what you do when you do come in passes my comprehension."
+
+"There's good work sometimes," said Sir Graham, "in undoing."
+
+"You can't govern a great empire by amending and repealing the Acts of
+your predecessors," said the doctor.
+
+There came that kind of pause that happens when a subject is broached
+too big and difficult for the gathering. Margaret's blue eyes regarded
+the speaker with quiet disapproval for a moment, and then came to me in
+the not too confident hope that I would snub him out of existence with
+some prompt rhetorical stroke. A voice spoke out of the big armchair.
+
+"We'll do things," said Isabel.
+
+The doctor's eye lit with the joy of the fisherman who strikes his fish
+at last. "What will you do?" he asked her.
+
+"Every one knows we're a mixed lot," said Isabel.
+
+"Poor old chaps like me!" interjected the general.
+
+"But that's not a programme," said the doctor.
+
+"But Mr. Remington has published a programme," said Isabel.
+
+The doctor cocked half an eye at me.
+
+"In some review," the girl went on. "After all, we're not going to
+elect the whole Liberal party in the Kinghamstead Division. I'm a
+Remington-ite!"
+
+"But the programme," said the doctor, "the programme--"
+
+"In front of Mr. Remington!"
+
+"Scandal always comes home at last," said the doctor. "Let him hear the
+worst."
+
+"I'd like to hear," I said. "Electioneering shatters convictions and
+enfeebles the mind."
+
+"Not mine," said Isabel stoutly. "I mean--Well, anyhow I take it Mr.
+Remington stands for constructing a civilised state out of this muddle."
+
+"THIS muddle," protested the doctor with an appeal of the eye to the
+beautiful long room and the ordered garden outside the bright clean
+windows.
+
+"Well, THAT muddle, if you like! There's a slum within a mile of us
+already. The dust and blacks get worse and worse, Sissie?"
+
+"They do," agreed Miss Gamer.
+
+"Mr. Remington stands for construction, order, education, discipline."
+
+"And you?" said the doctor.
+
+"I'm a good Remington-ite."
+
+"Discipline!" said the doctor.
+
+"Oh!" said Isabel. "At times one has to be--Napoleonic. They want to
+libel me, Mr. Remington. A political worker can't always be in time for
+meals, can she? At times one has to make--splendid cuts."
+
+Miss Gamer said something indistinctly.
+
+"Order, education, discipline," said Sir Graham. "Excellent things!
+But I've a sort of memory--in my young days--we talked about something
+called liberty."
+
+"Liberty under the law," I said, with an unexpected approving murmur
+from Margaret, and took up the defence. "The old Liberal definition of
+liberty was a trifle uncritical. Privilege and legal restrictions are
+not the only enemies of liberty. An uneducated, underbred, and underfed
+propertyless man is a man who has lost the possibility of liberty.
+There's no liberty worth a rap for him. A man who is swimming hopelessly
+for life wants nothing but the liberty to get out of the water; he'll
+give every other liberty for it--until he gets out."
+
+Sir Graham took me up and we fell into a discussion of the
+changing qualities of Liberalism. It was a good give-and-take talk,
+extraordinarily refreshing after the nonsense and crowding secondary
+issues of the electioneering outside. We all contributed more or less
+except Miss Gamer; Margaret followed with knitted brows and occasional
+interjections. "People won't SEE that," for example, and "It all seems
+so plain to me." The doctor showed himself clever but unsubstantial and
+inconsistent. Isabel sat back with her black mop of hair buried deep in
+the chair looking quickly from face to face. Her colour came and went
+with her vivid intellectual excitement; occasionally she would dart
+a word, usually a very apt word, like a lizard's tongue into the
+discussion. I remember chiefly that a chance illustration betrayed that
+she had read Bishop Burnet....
+
+After that it was not surprising that Isabel should ask for a lift in
+our car as far as the Lurky Committee Room, and that she should offer
+me quite sound advice EN ROUTE upon the intellectual temperament of the
+Lurky gasworkers.
+
+On the third occasion that I saw Isabel she was, as I have said,
+climbing a tree--and a very creditable tree--for her own private
+satisfaction. It was a lapse from the high seriousness of politics, and
+I perceived she felt that I might regard it as such and attach too much
+importance to it. I had some difficulty in reassuring her. And it's odd
+to note now--it has never occurred to me before--that from that day to
+this I do not think I have ever reminded Isabel of that encounter.
+
+And after that memory she seems to be flickering about always in the
+election, an inextinguishable flame; now she flew by on her bicycle,
+now she dashed into committee rooms, now she appeared on doorsteps in
+animated conversation with dubious voters; I took every chance I could
+to talk to her--I had never met anything like her before in the world,
+and she interested me immensely--and before the polling day she and I
+had become, in the frankest simplicity, fast friends....
+
+That, I think, sets out very fairly the facts of our early relationship.
+But it is hard to get it true, either in form or texture, because of
+the bright, translucent, coloured, and refracting memories that come
+between. One forgets not only the tint and quality of thoughts and
+impressions through that intervening haze, one forgets them altogether.
+I don't remember now that I ever thought in those days of passionate
+love or the possibility of such love between us. I may have done so
+again and again. But I doubt it very strongly. I don't think I ever
+thought of such aspects. I had no more sense of any danger between us,
+seeing the years and things that separated us, than I could have had if
+she had been an intelligent bright-eyed bird. Isabel came into my
+life as a new sort of thing; she didn't join on at all to my previous
+experiences of womanhood. They were not, as I have laboured to explain,
+either very wide or very penetrating experiences, on the whole,
+"strangled dinginess" expresses them, but I do not believe they were
+narrower or shallower than those of many other men of my class. I
+thought of women as pretty things and beautiful things, pretty rather
+than beautiful, attractive and at times disconcertingly attractive,
+often bright and witty, but, because of the vast reservations that hid
+them from me, wanting, subtly and inevitably wanting, in understanding.
+My idealisation of Margaret had evaporated insensibly after our
+marriage. The shrine I had made for her in my private thoughts stood
+at last undisguisedly empty. But Isabel did not for a moment admit of
+either idealisation or interested contempt. She opened a new sphere
+of womanhood to me. With her steady amber-brown eyes, her unaffected
+interest in impersonal things, her upstanding waistless blue body, her
+energy, decision and courage, she seemed rather some new and infinitely
+finer form of boyhood than a feminine creature, as I had come to measure
+femininity. She was my perfect friend. Could I have foreseen, had my
+world been more wisely planned, to this day we might have been such
+friends.
+
+She seemed at that time unconscious of sex, though she has told me since
+how full she was of protesting curiosities and restrained emotions. She
+spoke, as indeed she has always spoken, simply, clearly, and vividly;
+schoolgirl slang mingled with words that marked ample voracious reading,
+and she moved quickly with the free directness of some graceful young
+animal. She took many of the easy freedoms a man or a sister might have
+done with me. She would touch my arm, lay a hand on my shoulder as I
+sat, adjust the lapel of a breast-pocket as she talked to me. She says
+now she loved me always from the beginning. I doubt if there was a
+suspicion of that in her mind those days. I used to find her regarding
+me with the clearest, steadiest gaze in the world, exactly like the gaze
+of some nice healthy innocent animal in a forest, interested, inquiring,
+speculative, but singularly untroubled....
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Polling day came after a last hoarse and dingy crescendo. The excitement
+was not of the sort that makes one forget one is tired out. The waiting
+for the end of the count has left a long blank mark on my memory, and
+then everyone was shaking my hand and repeating: "Nine hundred and
+seventy-six."
+
+My success had been a foregone conclusion since the afternoon, but
+we all behaved as though we had not been anticipating this result for
+hours, as though any other figures but nine hundred and seventy-six
+would have meant something entirely different. "Nine hundred and
+seventy-six!" said Margaret. "They didn't expect three hundred."
+
+"Nine hundred and seventy-six," said a little short man with a paper.
+"It means a big turnover. Two dozen short of a thousand, you know."
+
+A tremendous hullaboo began outside, and a lot of fresh people came into
+the room.
+
+Isabel, flushed but not out of breath, Heaven knows where she had sprung
+from at that time of night! was running her hand down my sleeve almost
+caressingly, with the innocent bold affection of a girl. "Got you in!"
+she said. "It's been no end of a lark."
+
+"And now," said I, "I must go and be constructive."
+
+"Now you must go and be constructive," she said.
+
+"You've got to live here," she added.
+
+"By Jove! yes," I said. "We'll have to house hunt."
+
+"I shall read all your speeches."
+
+She hesitated.
+
+"I wish I was you," she said, and said it as though it was not exactly
+the thing she was meaning to say.
+
+"They want you to speak," said Margaret, with something unsaid in her
+face.
+
+"You must come out with me," I answered, putting my arm through hers,
+and felt someone urging me to the French windows that gave on the
+balcony.
+
+"If you think--" she said, yielding gladly
+
+"Oh, RATHER!" said I.
+
+The Mayor of Kinghamstead, a managing little man with no great belief in
+my oratorical powers, was sticking his face up to mine.
+
+"It's all over," he said, "and you've won. Say all the nice things you
+can and say them plainly."
+
+I turned and handed Margaret out through the window and stood looking
+over the Market-place, which was more than half filled with swaying
+people. The crowd set up a roar of approval at the sight of us, tempered
+by a little booing. Down in one corner of the square a fight was going
+on for a flag, a fight that even the prospect of a speech could not
+instantly check. "Speech!" cried voices, "Speech!" and then a brief
+"boo-oo-oo" that was drowned in a cascade of shouts and cheers. The
+conflict round the flag culminated in the smashing of a pane of glass in
+the chemist's window and instantly sank to peace.
+
+"Gentlemen voters of the Kinghamstead Division," I began.
+
+"Votes for Women!" yelled a voice, amidst laughter--the first time I
+remember hearing that memorable war-cry.
+
+"Three cheers for Mrs. Remington!"
+
+"Mrs. Remington asks me to thank you," I said, amidst further uproar and
+reiterated cries of "Speech!"
+
+Then silence came with a startling swiftness.
+
+Isabel was still in my mind, I suppose. "I shall go to Westminster," I
+began. I sought for some compelling phrase and could not find one.
+"To do my share," I went on, "in building up a great and splendid
+civilisation."
+
+I paused, and there was a weak gust of cheering, and then a renewal of
+booing.
+
+"This election," I said, "has been the end and the beginning of much.
+New ideas are abroad--"
+
+"Chinese labour," yelled a voice, and across the square swept a wildfire
+of booting and bawling.
+
+It is one of the few occasions when I quite lost my hold on a speech. I
+glanced sideways and saw the Mayor of Kinghamstead speaking behind his
+hand to Parvill. By a happy chance Parvill caught my eye.
+
+"What do they want?" I asked.
+
+"Eh?"
+
+"What do they want?"
+
+"Say something about general fairness--the other side," prompted
+Parvill, flattered but a little surprised by my appeal. I pulled myself
+hastily into a more popular strain with a gross eulogy of my opponent's
+good taste.
+
+"Chinese labour!" cried the voice again.
+
+"You've given that notice to quit," I answered.
+
+The Market-place roared delight, but whether that delight expressed
+hostility to Chinamen or hostility to their practical enslavement no
+student of the General Election of 1906 has ever been able to determine.
+Certainly one of the most effective posters on our side displayed a
+hideous yellow face, just that and nothing more. There was not even a
+legend to it. How it impressed the electorate we did not know, but that
+it impressed the electorate profoundly there can be no disputing.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+Kinghamstead was one of the earliest constituencies fought, and we came
+back--it must have been Saturday--triumphant but very tired, to our
+house in Radnor Square. In the train we read the first intimations that
+the victory of our party was likely to be a sweeping one.
+
+Then came a period when one was going about receiving and giving
+congratulations and watching the other men arrive, very like a boy who
+has returned to school with the first batch after the holidays. The
+London world reeked with the General Election; it had invaded the
+nurseries. All the children of one's friends had got big maps of England
+cut up into squares to represent constituencies and were busy sticking
+gummed blue labels over the conquered red of Unionism that had hitherto
+submerged the country. And there were also orange labels, if I remember
+rightly, to represent the new Labour party, and green for the Irish. I
+engaged myself to speak at one or two London meetings, and lunched
+at the Reform, which was fairly tepid, and dined and spent one or two
+tumultuous evenings at the National Liberal Club, which was in active
+eruption. The National Liberal became feverishly congested towards
+midnight as the results of the counting came dropping in. A big
+green-baize screen had been fixed up at one end of the large
+smoking-room with the names of the constituencies that were voting that
+day, and directly the figures came to hand, up they went, amidst cheers
+that at last lost their energy through sheer repetition, whenever there
+was record of a Liberal gain. I don't remember what happened when there
+was a Liberal loss; I don't think that any were announced while I was
+there.
+
+How packed and noisy the place was, and what a reek of tobacco and
+whisky fumes we made! Everybody was excited and talking, making waves of
+harsh confused sound that beat upon one's ears, and every now and then
+hoarse voices would shout for someone to speak. Our little set was much
+in evidence. Both the Cramptons were in, Lewis, Bunting Harblow. We gave
+brief addresses attuned to this excitement and the late hour, amidst
+much enthusiasm.
+
+"Now we can DO things!" I said amidst a rapture of applause. Men I did
+not know from Adam held up glasses and nodded to me in solemn fuddled
+approval as I came down past them into the crowd again.
+
+Men were betting whether the Unionists would lose more or less than two
+hundred seats.
+
+"I wonder just what we shall do with it all," I heard one sceptic
+speculating....
+
+After these orgies I would get home very tired and excited, and find it
+difficult to get to sleep. I would lie and speculate about what it was
+we WERE going to do. One hadn't anticipated quite such a tremendous
+accession to power for one's party. Liberalism was swirling in like a
+flood....
+
+I found the next few weeks very unsatisfactory and distressing. I don't
+clearly remember what it was I had expected; I suppose the fuss and
+strain of the General Election had built up a feeling that my return
+would in some way put power into my hands, and instead I found myself
+a mere undistinguished unit in a vast but rather vague majority. There
+were moments when I felt very distinctly that a majority could be
+too big a crowd altogether. I had all my work still before me, I had
+achieved nothing as yet but opportunity, and a very crowded opportunity
+it was at that. Everyone about me was chatting Parliament and
+appointments; one breathed distracting and irritating speculations as
+to what would be done and who would be asked to do it. I was chiefly
+impressed by what was unlikely to be done and by the absence of any
+general plan of legislation to hold us all together. I found the talk
+about Parliamentary procedure and etiquette particularly trying. We
+dined with the elder Cramptons one evening, and old Sir Edward was
+lengthily sage about what the House liked, what it didn't like, what
+made a good impression and what a bad one. "A man shouldn't speak more
+than twice in his first session, and not at first on too contentious a
+topic," said Sir Edward. "No."
+
+"Very much depends on manner. The House hates a lecturer. There's a sort
+of airy earnestness--"
+
+He waved his cigar to eke out his words.
+
+"Little peculiarities of costume count for a great deal. I could name
+one man who spent three years living down a pair of spatterdashers. On
+the other hand--a thing like that--if it catches the eye of the PUNCH
+man, for example, may be your making."
+
+He went off into a lengthy speculation of why the House had come to like
+an originally unpopular Irishman named Biggar....
+
+The opening of Parliament gave me some peculiar moods. I began to feel
+more and more like a branded sheep. We were sworn in in batches,
+dozens and scores of fresh men, trying not to look too fresh under the
+inspection of policemen and messengers, all of us carrying new silk hats
+and wearing magisterial coats. It is one of my vivid memories from this
+period, the sudden outbreak of silk hats in the smoking-room of the
+National Liberal Club. At first I thought there must have been a
+funeral. Familiar faces that one had grown to know under soft felt hats,
+under bowlers, under liberal-minded wide brims, and above artistic ties
+and tweed jackets, suddenly met one, staring with the stern gaze of
+self-consciousness, from under silk hats of incredible glossiness. There
+was a disposition to wear the hat much too forward, I thought, for a
+good Parliamentary style.
+
+There was much play with the hats all through; a tremendous competition
+to get in first and put hats on coveted seats. A memory hangs about me
+of the House in the early afternoon, an inhumane desolation inhabited
+almost entirely by silk hats. The current use of cards to secure seats
+came later. There were yards and yards of empty green benches with hats
+and hats and hats distributed along them, resolute-looking top hats, lax
+top hats with a kind of shadowy grin under them, sensible top bats brim
+upward, and one scandalous incontinent that had rolled from the front
+Opposition bench right to the middle of the floor. A headless hat is
+surely the most soulless thing in the world, far worse even than a
+skull....
+
+At last, in a leisurely muddled manner we got to the Address; and
+I found myself packed in a dense elbowing crowd to the right of the
+Speaker's chair; while the attenuated Opposition, nearly leaderless
+after the massacre, tilted its brim to its nose and sprawled at its ease
+amidst its empty benches.
+
+There was a tremendous hullaboo about something, and I craned to see
+over the shoulder of the man in front. "Order, order, order!"
+
+"What's it about?" I asked.
+
+The man in front of me was clearly no better informed, and then I
+gathered from a slightly contemptuous Scotchman beside me that it was
+Chris Robinson had walked between the honourable member in possession
+of the house and the Speaker. I caught a glimpse of him blushingly
+whispering about his misadventure to a colleague. He was just that
+same little figure I had once assisted to entertain at Cambridge, but
+grey-haired now, and still it seemed with the same knitted muffler
+he had discarded for a reckless half-hour while he talked to us in
+Hatherleigh's rooms.
+
+It dawned upon me that I wasn't particularly wanted in the House, and
+that I should get all I needed of the opening speeches next day from the
+TIMES.
+
+I made my way out and was presently walking rather aimlessly through the
+outer lobby.
+
+I caught myself regarding the shadow that spread itself out before me,
+multiplied itself in blue tints of various intensity, shuffled itself
+like a pack of cards under the many lights, the square shoulders, the
+silk hat, already worn with a parliamentary tilt backward; I found I was
+surveying this statesmanlike outline with a weak approval. "A MEMBER!"
+I felt the little cluster of people that were scattered about the lobby
+must be saying.
+
+"Good God!" I said in hot reaction, "what am I doing here?"
+
+It was one of those moments infinitely trivial in themselves, that yet
+are cardinal in a man's life. It came to me with extreme vividness that
+it wasn't so much that I had got hold of something as that something
+had got hold of me. I distinctly recall the rebound of my mind. Whatever
+happened in this Parliament, I at least would attempt something. "By
+God!" I said, "I won't be overwhelmed. I am here to do something, and do
+something I will!"
+
+But I felt that for the moment I could not remain in the House.
+
+I went out by myself with my thoughts into the night. It was a chilling
+night, and rare spots of rain were falling. I glanced over my shoulder
+at the lit windows of the Lords. I walked, I remember, westward, and
+presently came to the Grosvenar Embankment and followed it, watching the
+glittering black rush of the river and the dark, dimly lit barges round
+which the water swirled. Across the river was the hunched sky-line of
+Doulton's potteries, and a kiln flared redly. Dimly luminous trams were
+gliding amidst a dotted line of lamps, and two little trains crawled
+into Waterloo station. Mysterious black figures came by me and were
+suddenly changed to the commonplace at the touch of the nearer lamps. It
+was a big confused world, I felt, for a man to lay his hands upon.
+
+I remember I crossed Vauxhall Bridge and stood for a time watching the
+huge black shapes in the darkness under the gas-works. A shoal of coal
+barges lay indistinctly on the darkly shining mud and water below, and
+a colossal crane was perpetually hauling up coal into mysterious
+blacknesses above, and dropping the empty clutch back to the barges.
+Just one or two minute black featureless figures of men toiled amidst
+these monster shapes. They did not seem to be controlling them but only
+moving about among them. These gas-works have a big chimney that belches
+a lurid flame into the night, a livid shivering bluish flame, shot with
+strange crimson streaks....
+
+On the other side of Lambeth Bridge broad stairs go down to the lapping
+water of the river; the lower steps are luminous under the lamps and
+one treads unwarned into thick soft Thames mud. They seem to be purely
+architectural steps, they lead nowhere, they have an air of absolute
+indifference to mortal ends.
+
+Those shapes and large inhuman places--for all of mankind that one
+sees at night about Lambeth is minute and pitiful beside the industrial
+monsters that snort and toil there--mix up inextricably with my memories
+of my first days as a legislator. Black figures drift by me, heavy vans
+clatter, a newspaper rough tears by on a motor bicycle, and presently,
+on the Albert Embankment, every seat has its one or two outcasts huddled
+together and slumbering.
+
+"These things come, these things go," a whispering voice urged upon me,
+"as once those vast unmeaning Saurians whose bones encumber museums came
+and went rejoicing noisily in fruitless lives."...
+
+Fruitless lives!--was that the truth of it all?...
+
+Later I stood within sight of the Houses of Parliament in front of the
+colonnades of St Thomas's Hospital. I leant on the parapet close by a
+lamp-stand of twisted dolphins--and I prayed!
+
+I remember the swirl of the tide upon the water, and how a string of
+barges presently came swinging and bumping round as high-water turned
+to ebb. That sudden change of position and my brief perplexity at it,
+sticks like a paper pin through the substance of my thoughts. It was
+then I was moved to prayer. I prayed that night that life might not
+be in vain, that in particular I might not live in vain. I prayed for
+strength and faith, that the monstrous blundering forces in life might
+not overwhelm me, might not beat me back to futility and a meaningless
+acquiescence in existent things. I knew myself for the weakling I was,
+I knew that nevertheless it was set for me to make such order as I could
+out of these disorders, and my task cowed me, gave me at the thought of
+it a sense of yielding feebleness.
+
+"Break me, O God," I prayed at last, "disgrace me, torment me, destroy
+me as you will, but save me from self-complacency and little interests
+and little successes and the life that passes like the shadow of a
+dream."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THE THIRD: THE HEART OF POLITICS
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+I have been planning and replanning, writing and rewriting, this next
+portion of my book for many days. I perceive I must leave it raw edged
+and ill joined. I have learnt something of the impossibility of History.
+For all I have had to tell is the story of one man's convictions and
+aims and how they reacted upon his life; and I find it too subtle and
+involved and intricate for the doing. I find it taxes all my powers to
+convey even the main forms and forces in that development. It is like
+looking through moving media of changing hue and variable refraction
+at something vitally unstable. Broad theories and generalisations are
+mingled with personal influences, with prevalent prejudices; and
+not only coloured but altered by phases of hopefulness and moods of
+depression. The web is made up of the most diverse elements, beyond
+treatment multitudinous.... For a week or so I desisted altogether,
+and walked over the mountains and returned to sit through the warm soft
+mornings among the shaded rocks above this little perched-up house of
+ours, discussing my difficulties with Isabel and I think on the whole
+complicating them further in the effort to simplify them to manageable
+and stateable elements.
+
+Let me, nevertheless, attempt a rough preliminary analysis of this
+confused process. A main strand is quite easily traceable. This main
+strand is the story of my obvious life, my life as it must have looked
+to most of my acquaintances. It presents you with a young couple,
+bright, hopeful, and energetic, starting out under Altiora's auspices to
+make a career. You figure us well dressed and active, running about in
+motor-cars, visiting in great people's houses, dining amidst brilliant
+companies, going to the theatre, meeting in the lobby. Margaret wore
+hundreds of beautiful dresses. We must have had an air of succeeding
+meritoriously during that time.
+
+We did very continually and faithfully serve our joint career. I thought
+about it a great deal, and did and refrained from doing ten thousand
+things for the sake of it. I kept up a solicitude for it, as it were by
+inertia, long after things had happened and changes occurred in me
+that rendered its completion impossible. Under certain very artless
+pretences, we wanted steadfastly to make a handsome position in the
+world, achieve respect, SUCCEED. Enormous unseen changes had been in
+progress for years in my mind and the realities of my life, before
+our general circle could have had any inkling of their existence, or
+suspected the appearances of our life. Then suddenly our proceedings
+began to be deflected, our outward unanimity visibly strained and marred
+by the insurgence of these so long-hidden developments.
+
+That career had its own hidden side, of course; but when I write
+of these unseen factors I do not mean that but something altogether
+broader. I do not mean the everyday pettinesses which gave the cynical
+observer scope and told of a narrower, baser aspect of the fair but
+limited ambitions of my ostensible self. This "sub-careerist" element
+noted little things that affected the career, made me suspicious of the
+rivalry of so-and-so, propitiatory to so-and-so, whom, as a matter of
+fact, I didn't respect or feel in the least sympathetic towards; guarded
+with that man, who for all his charm and interest wasn't helpful, and
+a little touchy at the appearance of neglect from that. No, I mean
+something greater and not something smaller when I write of a hidden
+life.
+
+In the ostensible self who glowed under the approbation of Altiora
+Bailey, and was envied and discussed, praised and depreciated, in the
+House and in smoking-room gossip, you really have as much of a man as
+usually figures in a novel or an obituary notice. But I am tremendously
+impressed now in the retrospect by the realisation of how little that
+frontage represented me, and just how little such frontages do represent
+the complexities of the intelligent contemporary. Behind it, yet
+struggling to disorganise and alter it, altogether, was a far more
+essential reality, a self less personal, less individualised, and
+broader in its references. Its aims were never simply to get on; it
+had an altogether different system of demands and satisfactions. It
+was critical, curious, more than a little unfeeling--and relentlessly
+illuminating.
+
+It is just the existence and development of this more generalised
+self-behind-the-frontage that is making modern life so much more subtle
+and intricate to render, and so much more hopeful in its relations
+to the perplexities of the universe. I see this mental and spiritual
+hinterland vary enormously in the people about me, from a type which
+seems to keep, as people say, all its goods in the window, to others
+who, like myself, come to regard the ostensible existence more and more
+as a mere experimental feeder and agent for that greater personality
+behind. And this back-self has its history of phases, its crises and
+happy accidents and irrevocable conclusions, more or less distinct from
+the adventures and achievements of the ostensible self. It meets persons
+and phrases, it assimilates the spirit of a book, it is startled into
+new realisations by some accident that seems altogether irrelevant to
+the general tenor of one's life. Its increasing independence of the
+ostensible career makes it the organ of corrective criticism; it
+accumulates disturbing energy. Then it breaks our overt promises and
+repudiates our pledges, coming down at last like an overbearing mentor
+upon the small engagements of the pupil.
+
+In the life of the individual it takes the role that the growth of
+philosophy, science, and creative literature may play in the development
+of mankind.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+It is curious to recall how Britten helped shatter that obvious,
+lucidly explicable presentation of myself upon which I had embarked
+with Margaret. He returned to revive a memory of adolescent dreams and a
+habit of adolescent frankness; he reached through my shallow frontage
+as no one else seemed capable of doing, and dragged that back-self into
+relation with it.
+
+I remember very distinctly a dinner and a subsequent walk with him
+which presents itself now as altogether typical of the quality of his
+influence.
+
+I had come upon him one day while lunching with Somers and Sutton at
+the Playwrights' Club, and had asked him to dinner on the spur of the
+moment. He was oddly the same curly-headed, red-faced ventriloquist, and
+oddly different, rather seedy as well as untidy, and at first a little
+inclined to make comparisons with my sleek successfulness. But that
+disposition presently evaporated, and his talk was good and fresh and
+provocative. And something that had long been straining at its checks in
+my mind flapped over, and he and I found ourselves of one accord.
+
+Altiora wasn't at this dinner. When she came matters were apt to become
+confusedly strenuous. There was always a slight and ineffectual struggle
+at the end on the part of Margaret to anticipate Altiora's overpowering
+tendency to a rally and the establishment of some entirely unjustifiable
+conclusion by a COUP-DE-MAIN. When, however, Altiora was absent, the
+quieter influence of the Cramptons prevailed; temperance and information
+for its own sake prevailed excessively over dinner and the play of
+thought.... Good Lord! what bores the Cramptons were! I wonder I
+endured them as I did. They had all of them the trick of lying in wait
+conversationally; they had no sense of the self-exposures, the gallant
+experiments in statement that are necessary for good conversation. They
+would watch one talking with an expression exactly like peeping through
+bushes. Then they would, as it were, dash out, dissent succinctly,
+contradict some secondary fact, and back to cover. They gave one
+twilight nerves. Their wives were easier but still difficult at a
+stretch; they talked a good deal about children and servants, but with
+an air caught from Altiora of making observations upon sociological
+types. Lewis gossiped about the House in an entirely finite manner. He
+never raised a discussion; nobody ever raised a discussion. He would ask
+what we thought of Evesham's question that afternoon, and Edward would
+say it was good, and Mrs. Willie, who had been behind the grille, would
+think it was very good, and then Willie, parting the branches, would say
+rather conclusively that he didn't think it was very much good, and I
+would deny hearing the question in order to evade a profitless statement
+of views in that vacuum, and then we would cast about in our minds for
+some other topic of equal interest....
+
+On this occasion Altiora was absent, and to qualify our Young Liberal
+bleakness we had Mrs. Millingham, with her white hair and her fresh mind
+and complexion, and Esmeer. Willie Crampton was with us, but not his
+wife, who was having her third baby on principle; his brother Edward was
+present, and the Lewises, and of course the Bunting Harblows. There was
+also some other lady. I remember her as pale blue, but for the life of
+me I cannot remember her name.
+
+Quite early there was a little breeze between Edward Crampton and
+Esmeer, who had ventured an opinion about the partition of Poland.
+Edward was at work then upon the seventh volume of his monumental Life
+of Kosciusko, and a little impatient with views perhaps not altogether
+false but betraying a lamentable ignorance of accessible literature. At
+any rate, his correction of Esmeer was magisterial. After that there was
+a distinct and not altogether delightful pause, and then some one, it
+may have been the pale-blue lady, asked Mrs. Lewis whether her aunt Lady
+Carmixter had returned from her rest-and-sun-cure in Italy. That led to
+a rather anxiously sustained talk about regimen, and Willie told us how
+he had profited by the no-breakfast system. It had increased his power
+of work enormously. He could get through ten hours a day now without
+inconvenience.
+
+"What do you do?" said Esmeer abruptly.
+
+"Oh! no end of work. There's all the estate and looking after things."
+
+"But publicly?"
+
+"I asked three questions yesterday. And for one of them I had to consult
+nine books!"
+
+We were drifting, I could see, towards Doctor Haig's system of dietary,
+and whether the exclusion or inclusion of fish and chicken were most
+conducive to high efficiency, when Britten, who had refused lemonade
+and claret and demanded Burgundy, broke out, and was discovered to be
+demanding in his throat just what we Young Liberals thought we were up
+to?
+
+"I want," said Britten, repeating his challenge a little louder, "to
+hear just exactly what you think you are doing in Parliament?"
+
+Lewis laughed nervously, and thought we were "Seeking the Good of the
+Community."
+
+"HOW?"
+
+"Beneficient Legislation," said Lewis.
+
+"Beneficient in what direction?" insisted Britten. "I want to know where
+you think you are going."
+
+"Amelioration of Social Conditions," said Lewis.
+
+"That's only a phrase!"
+
+"You wouldn't have me sketch bills at dinner?"
+
+"I'd like you to indicate directions," said Britten, and waited.
+
+"Upward and On," said Lewis with conscious neatness, and turned to ask
+Mrs. Bunting Harblow about her little boy's French.
+
+For a time talk frothed over Britten's head, but the natural mischief
+in Mrs. Millingham had been stirred, and she was presently echoing his
+demand in lisping, quasi-confidential undertones. "What ARE we Liberals
+doing?" Then Esmeer fell in with the revolutionaries.
+
+To begin with, I was a little shocked by this clamour for
+fundamentals--and a little disconcerted. I had the experience that I
+suppose comes to every one at times of discovering oneself together with
+two different sets of people with whom one has maintained two different
+sets of attitudes. It had always been, I perceived, an instinctive
+suppression in our circle that we shouldn't be more than vague about our
+political ideals. It had almost become part of my morality to respect
+this convention. It was understood we were all working hard, and keeping
+ourselves fit, tremendously fit, under Altiora's inspiration, Pro Bono
+Publico. Bunting Harblow had his under-secretaryship, and Lewis was on
+the verge of the Cabinet, and these things we considered to be in the
+nature of confirmations.... It added to the discomfort of the situation
+that these plunging enquiries were being made in the presence of our
+wives.
+
+The rebel section of our party forced the talk.
+
+Edward Crampton was presently declaring--I forget in what relation: "The
+country is with us."
+
+My long-controlled hatred of the Cramptons' stereotyped phrases about
+the Country and the House got the better of me. I showed my cloven hoof
+to my friends for the first time.
+
+"We don't respect the Country as we used to do," I said. "We haven't
+the same belief we used to have in the will of the people. It's no
+good, Crampton, trying to keep that up. We Liberals know as a matter of
+fact--nowadays every one knows--that the monster that brought us into
+power has, among other deficiencies, no head. We've got to give it
+one--if possible with brains and a will. That lies in the future. For
+the present if the country is with us, it means merely that we happen to
+have hold of its tether."
+
+Lewis was shocked. A "mandate" from the Country was sacred to his system
+of pretences.
+
+Britten wasn't subdued by his first rebuff; presently he was at
+us again. There were several attempts to check his outbreak of
+interrogation; I remember the Cramptons asked questions about the
+welfare of various cousins of Lewis who were unknown to the rest of us,
+and Margaret tried to engage Britten in a sympathetic discussion of the
+Arts and Crafts exhibition. But Britten and Esmeer were persistent, Mrs.
+Millingham was mischievous, and in the end our rising hopes of Young
+Liberalism took to their thickets for good, while we talked all over
+them of the prevalent vacuity of political intentions. Margaret was
+perplexed by me. It is only now I perceive just how perplexing I must
+have been. "Of course, she said with that faint stress of apprehension
+in her eyes, one must have aims." And, "it isn't always easy to put
+everything into phrases." "Don't be long," said Mrs. Edward Crampton
+to her husband as the wives trooped out. And afterwards when we went
+upstairs I had an indefinable persuasion that the ladies had been
+criticising Britten's share in our talk in an altogether unfavourable
+spirit. Mrs. Edward evidently thought him aggressive and impertinent,
+and Margaret with a quiet firmness that brooked no resistance, took him
+at once into a corner and showed him Italian photographs by Coburn. We
+dispersed early.
+
+I walked with Britten along the Chelsea back streets towards Battersea
+Bridge--he lodged on the south side.
+
+"Mrs. Millingham's a dear," he began.
+
+"She's a dear."
+
+"I liked her demand for a hansom because a four-wheeler was too safe."
+
+"She was worked up," I said. "She's a woman of faultless character, but
+her instincts, as Altiora would say, are anarchistic--when she gives
+them a chance."
+
+"So she takes it out in hansom cabs."
+
+"Hansom cabs."
+
+"She's wise," said Britten....
+
+"I hope, Remington," he went on after a pause, "I didn't rag your other
+guests too much. I've a sort of feeling at moments--Remington, those
+chaps are so infernally not--not bloody. It's part of a man's duty
+sometimes at least to eat red beef and get drunk. How is he to
+understand government if he doesn't? It scares me to think of your
+lot--by a sort of misapprehension--being in power. A kind of neuralgia
+in the head, by way of government. I don't understand where YOU come in.
+Those others--they've no lusts. Their ideal is anaemia. You and I,
+we had at least a lust to take hold of life and make something of it.
+They--they want to take hold of life and make nothing of it. They want
+to cut out all the stimulants. Just as though life was anything else but
+a reaction to stimulation!"...
+
+He began to talk of his own life. He had had ill-fortune through most
+of it. He was poor and unsuccessful, and a girl he had been very fond
+of had been attacked and killed by a horse in a field in a very horrible
+manner. These things had wounded and tortured him, but they hadn't
+broken him. They had, it seemed to me, made a kind of crippled and ugly
+demigod of him. He was, I began to perceive, so much better than I had
+any right to expect. At first I had been rather struck by his unkempt
+look, and it made my reaction all the stronger. There was about him
+something, a kind of raw and bleeding faith in the deep things of
+life, that stirred me profoundly as he showed it. My set of people had
+irritated him and disappointed him. I discovered at his touch how they
+irritated him. He reproached me boldly. He made me feel ashamed of my
+easy acquiescences as I walked in my sleek tall neatness beside his
+rather old coat, his rather battered hat, his sturdier shorter shape,
+and listened to his denunciations of our self-satisfied New Liberalism
+and Progressivism.
+
+"It has the same relation to progress--the reality of progress--that the
+things they paint on door panels in the suburbs have to art and beauty.
+There's a sort of filiation.... Your Altiora's just the political
+equivalent of the ladies who sell traced cloth for embroidery; she's
+a dealer in Refined Social Reform for the Parlour. The real progress,
+Remington, is a graver thing and a painfuller thing and a slower thing
+altogether. Look! THAT"--and he pointed to where under a boarding in the
+light of a gas lamp a dingy prostitute stood lurking--"was in Babylon
+and Nineveh. Your little lot make believe there won't be anything of the
+sort after this Parliament! They're going to vanish at a few top notes
+from Altiora Bailey! Remington!--it's foolery. It's prigs at play.
+It's make-believe, make-believe! Your people there haven't got hold of
+things, aren't beginning to get hold of things, don't know anything of
+life at all, shirk life, avoid life, get in little bright clean rooms
+and talk big over your bumpers of lemonade while the Night goes by
+outside--untouched. Those Crampton fools slink by all this,"--he
+waved at the woman again--"pretend it doesn't exist, or is going to be
+banished root and branch by an Act to keep children in the wet outside
+public-houses. Do you think they really care, Remington? I don't. It's
+make-believe. What they want to do, what Lewis wants to do, what Mrs.
+Bunting Harblow wants her husband to do, is to sit and feel very grave
+and necessary and respected on the Government benches. They think of
+putting their feet out like statesmen, and tilting shiny hats with
+becoming brims down over their successful noses. Presentation portrait
+to a club at fifty. That's their Reality. That's their scope. They
+don't, it's manifest, WANT to think beyond that. The things there ARE,
+Remington, they'll never face! the wonder and the depth of life,--lust,
+and the night-sky,--pain."
+
+"But the good intention," I pleaded, "the Good Will!"
+
+"Sentimentality," said Britten. "No Good Will is anything but dishonesty
+unless it frets and burns and hurts and destroys a man. That lot of
+yours have nothing but a good will to think they have good will. Do you
+think they lie awake of nights searching their hearts as we do? Lewis?
+Crampton? Or those neat, admiring, satisfied little wives? See how they
+shrank from the probe!"
+
+"We all," I said, "shrink from the probe."
+
+"God help us!" said Britten....
+
+"We are but vermin at the best, Remington," he broke out, "and the
+greatest saint only a worm that has lifted its head for a moment from
+the dust. We are damned, we are meant to be damned, coral animalculae
+building upward, upward in a sea of damnation. But of all the damned
+things that ever were damned, your damned shirking, temperate,
+sham-efficient, self-satisfied, respectable, make-believe,
+Fabian-spirited Young Liberal is the utterly damnedest." He paused for
+a moment, and resumed in an entirely different note: "Which is why I was
+so surprised, Remington, to find YOU in this set!"
+
+"You're just the old plunger you used to be, Britten," I said. "You're
+going too far with all your might for the sake of the damns. Like a
+donkey that drags its cart up a bank to get thistles. There's depths in
+Liberalism--"
+
+"We were talking about Liberals."
+
+"Liberty!"
+
+"Liberty! What do YOOR little lot know of liberty?"
+
+"What does any little lot know of liberty?"
+
+"It waits outside, too big for our understanding. Like the night and the
+stars. And lust, Remington! lust and bitterness! Don't I know them? with
+all the sweetness and hope of life bitten and trampled, the dear eyes
+and the brain that loved and understood--and my poor mumble of a life
+going on! I'm within sight of being a drunkard, Remington! I'm a failure
+by most standards! Life has cut me to the bone. But I'm not afraid of it
+any more. I've paid something of the price, I've seen something of the
+meaning."
+
+He flew off at a tangent. "I'd rather die in Delirium Tremens," he
+cried, "than be a Crampton or a Lewis...."
+
+"Make-believe. Make-believe." The phrase and Britten's squat gestures
+haunted me as I walked homeward alone. I went to my room and stood
+before my desk and surveyed papers and files and Margaret's admirable
+equipment of me.
+
+I perceived in the lurid light of Britten's suggestions that so it was
+Mr. George Alexander would have mounted a statesman's private room....
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+I was never at any stage a loyal party man. I doubt if party will
+ever again be the force it was during the eighteenth and nineteenth
+centuries. Men are becoming increasingly constructive and selective,
+less patient under tradition and the bondage of initial circumstances.
+As education becomes more universal and liberating, men will sort
+themselves more and more by their intellectual temperaments and less and
+less by their accidental associations. The past will rule them less; the
+future more. It is not simply party but school and college and county
+and country that lose their glamour. One does not hear nearly as much
+as our forefathers did of the "old Harrovian," "old Arvonian," "old
+Etonian" claim to this or that unfair advantage or unearnt sympathy.
+Even the Scotch and the Devonians weaken a little in their clannishness.
+A widening sense of fair play destroys such things. They follow
+freemasonry down--freemasonry of which one is chiefly reminded nowadays
+in England by propitiatory symbols outside shady public-houses....
+
+There is, of course, a type of man which clings very obstinately to
+party ties. These are the men with strong reproductive imaginations
+and no imaginative initiative, such men as Cladingbowl, for example, or
+Dayton. They are the scholars-at-large in life. For them the fact that
+the party system has been essential in the history of England for two
+hundred years gives it an overwhelming glamour. They have read histories
+and memoirs, they see the great grey pile of Westminster not so much
+for what it is as for what it was, rich with dramatic memories, populous
+with glorious ghosts, phrasing itself inevitably in anecdotes and
+quotations. It seems almost scandalous that new things should continue
+to happen, swamping with strange qualities the savour of these old
+associations.
+
+That Mr. Ramsay Macdonald should walk through Westminster Hall, thrust
+himself, it may be, through the very piece of space that once held
+Charles the Martyr pleading for his life, seems horrible profanation to
+Dayton, a last posthumous outrage; and he would, I think, like to have
+the front benches left empty now for ever, or at most adorned with
+laureated ivory tablets: "Here Dizzy sat," and "On this Spot William
+Ewart Gladstone made his First Budget Speech." Failing this, he demands,
+if only as signs of modesty and respect on the part of the survivors,
+meticulous imitation. "Mr. G.," he murmurs, "would not have done that,"
+and laments a vanished subtlety even while Mr. Evesham is speaking. He
+is always gloomily disposed to lapse into wonderings about what
+things are coming to, wonderings that have no grain of curiosity. His
+conception of perfect conduct is industrious persistence along the
+worn-down, well-marked grooves of the great recorded days. So infinitely
+more important to him is the documented, respected thing than the
+elusive present.
+
+Cladingbowl and Dayton do not shine in the House, though Cladingbowl is
+a sound man on a committee, and Dayton keeps the OLD COUNTRY GAZETTE,
+the most gentlemanly paper in London. They prevail, however, in their
+clubs at lunch time. There, with the pleasant consciousness of a
+morning's work free from either zeal or shirking, they mingle with
+permanent officials, prominent lawyers, even a few of the soberer type
+of business men, and relax their minds in the discussion of the morning
+paper, of the architecture of the West End, and of the latest public
+appointments, of golf, of holiday resorts, of the last judicial
+witticisms and forensic "crushers." The New Year and Birthday honours
+lists are always very sagely and exhaustively considered, and anecdotes
+are popular and keenly judged. They do not talk of the things that are
+really active in their minds, but in the formal and habitual manner they
+suppose to be proper to intelligent but still honourable men. Socialism,
+individual money matters, and religion are forbidden topics, and sex and
+women only in so far as they appear in the law courts. It is to me
+the strangest of conventions, this assumption of unreal loyalties and
+traditional respects, this repudiation and concealment of passionate
+interests. It is like wearing gloves in summer fields, or bathing in a
+gown, or falling in love with the heroine of a novel, or writing under a
+pseudonym, or becoming a masked Tuareg....
+
+It is not, I think, that men of my species are insensitive to the great
+past that is embodied in Westminster and its traditions; we are not so
+much wanting in the historical sense as alive to the greatness of our
+present opportunities and the still vaster future that is possible to
+us. London is the most interesting, beautiful, and wonderful city in the
+world to me, delicate in her incidental and multitudinous littleness,
+and stupendous in her pregnant totality; I cannot bring myself to use
+her as a museum or an old bookshop. When I think of Whitehall that
+little affair on the scaffold outside the Banqueting Hall seems trivial
+and remote in comparison with the possibilities that offer themselves to
+my imagination within the great grey Government buildings close at hand.
+
+It gives me a qualm of nostalgia even to name those places now. I think
+of St. Stephen's tower streaming upwards into the misty London night and
+the great wet quadrangle of New Palace Yard, from which the hansom cabs
+of my first experiences were ousted more and more by taxicabs as the
+second Parliament of King Edward the Seventh aged; I think of the
+Admiralty and War office with their tall Marconi masts sending out
+invisible threads of direction to the armies in the camps, to great
+fleets about the world. The crowded, darkly shining river goes flooding
+through my memory once again, on to those narrow seas that part us
+from our rival nations; I see quadrangles and corridors of spacious
+grey-toned offices in which undistinguished little men and little files
+of papers link us to islands in the tropics, to frozen wildernesses
+gashed for gold, to vast temple-studded plains, to forest worlds
+and mountain worlds, to ports and fortresses and lighthouses and
+watch-towers and grazing lands and corn lands all about the globe. Once
+more I traverse Victoria Street, grimy and dark, where the Agents of the
+Empire jostle one another, pass the big embassies in the West End
+with their flags and scutcheons, follow the broad avenue that leads to
+Buckingham Palace, witness the coming and going of troops and officials
+and guests along it from every land on earth.... Interwoven in the
+texture of it all, mocking, perplexing, stimulating beyond measure, is
+the gleaming consciousness, the challenging knowledge: "You and your
+kind might still, if you could but grasp it here, mould all the destiny
+of Man!"
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+My first three years in Parliament were years of active discontent. The
+little group of younger Liberals to which I belonged was very ignorant
+of the traditions and qualities of our older leaders, and quite out of
+touch with the mass of the party. For a time Parliament was enormously
+taken up with moribund issues and old quarrels. The early Educational
+legislation was sectarian and unenterprising, and the Licensing Bill
+went little further than the attempted rectification of a Conservative
+mistake. I was altogether for the nationalisation of the public-houses,
+and of this end the Bill gave no intimations. It was just beer-baiting.
+I was recalcitrant almost from the beginning, and spoke against the
+Government so early as the second reading of the first Education Bill,
+the one the Lords rejected in 1906. I went a little beyond my intention
+in the heat of speaking,--it is a way with inexperienced man. I called
+the Bill timid, narrow, a mere sop to the jealousies of sects and
+little-minded people. I contrasted its aim and methods with the manifest
+needs of the time.
+
+I am not a particularly good speaker; after the manner of a writer I
+worry to find my meaning too much; but this was one of my successes. I
+spoke after dinner and to a fairly full House, for people were already
+a little curious about me because of my writings. Several of the
+Conservative leaders were present and stayed, and Mr. Evesham,
+I remember, came ostentatiously to hear me, with that engaging
+friendliness of his, and gave me at the first chance an approving "Hear,
+Hear!" I can still recall quite distinctly my two futile attempts to
+catch the Speaker's eye before I was able to begin, the nervous quiver
+of my rather too prepared opening, the effect of hearing my own voice
+and my subconscious wonder as to what I could possibly be talking
+about, the realisation that I was getting on fairly well, the immense
+satisfaction afterwards of having on the whole brought it off, and the
+absurd gratitude I felt for that encouraging cheer.
+
+Addressing the House of Commons is like no other public speaking in the
+world. Its semi-colloquial methods give it an air of being easy, but
+its shifting audience, the comings and goings and hesitations of members
+behind the chair--not mere audience units, but men who matter--the
+desolating emptiness that spreads itself round the man who fails to
+interest, the little compact, disciplined crowd in the strangers'
+gallery, the light, elusive, flickering movements high up behind the
+grill, the wigged, attentive, weary Speaker, the table and the mace
+and the chapel-like Gothic background with its sombre shadows, conspire
+together, produce a confused, uncertain feeling in me, as though I was
+walking upon a pavement full of trap-doors and patches of uncovered
+morass. A misplaced, well-meant "Hear, Hear!" is apt to be
+extraordinarily disconcerting, and under no other circumstances have I
+had to speak with quite the same sideways twist that the arrangement of
+the House imposes. One does not recognise one's own voice threading out
+into the stirring brown. Unless I was excited or speaking to the mind of
+some particular person in the house, I was apt to lose my feeling of an
+auditor. I had no sense of whither my sentences were going, such as one
+has with a public meeting well under one's eye. And to lose one's sense
+of an auditor is for a man of my temperament to lose one's sense of the
+immediate, and to become prolix and vague with qualifications.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+My discontents with the Liberal party and my mental exploration of
+the quality of party generally is curiously mixed up with certain
+impressions of things and people in the National Liberal Club. The
+National Liberal Club is Liberalism made visible in the flesh--and
+Doultonware. It is an extraordinary big club done in a bold, wholesale,
+shiny, marbled style, richly furnished with numerous paintings, steel
+engravings, busts, and full-length statues of the late Mr. Gladstone;
+and its spacious dining-rooms, its long, hazy, crowded smoking-room with
+innumerable little tables and groups of men in armchairs, its
+magazine room and library upstairs, have just that undistinguished and
+unconcentrated diversity which is for me the Liberal note. The pensive
+member sits and hears perplexing dialects and even fragments of foreign
+speech, and among the clustering masses of less insistent whites his
+roving eye catches profiles and complexions that send his mind afield to
+Calcutta or Rangoon or the West Indies or Sierra Leone or the Cape....
+
+I was not infrequently that pensive member. I used to go to the Club to
+doubt about Liberalism.
+
+About two o'clock in the day the great smoking-room is crowded with
+countless little groups. They sit about small round tables, or in
+circles of chairs, and the haze of tobacco seems to prolong the great
+narrow place, with its pillars and bays, to infinity. Some of the groups
+are big, as many as a dozen men talk in loud tones; some are duologues,
+and there is always a sprinkling of lonely, dissociated men. At first
+one gets an impression of men going from group to group and as it were
+linking them, but as one watches closely one finds that these men just
+visit three or four groups at the outside, and know nothing of the
+others. One begins to perceive more and more distinctly that one is
+dealing with a sort of human mosaic; that each patch in that great place
+is of a different quality and colour from the next and never to be mixed
+with it. Most clubs have a common link, a lowest common denominator in
+the Club Bore, who spares no one, but even the National Liberal bores
+are specialised and sectional. As one looks round one sees here a clump
+of men from the North Country or the Potteries, here an island of
+South London politicians, here a couple of young Jews ascendant from
+Whitechapel, here a circle of journalists and writers, here a group of
+Irish politicians, here two East Indians, here a priest or so, here
+a clump of old-fashioned Protestants, here a little knot of eminent
+Rationalists indulging in a blasphemous story SOTTO VOCE. Next them are
+a group of anglicised Germans and highly specialised chess-players,
+and then two of the oddest-looking persons--bulging with documents and
+intent upon extraordinary business transactions over long cigars....
+
+I would listen to a stormy sea of babblement, and try to extract some
+constructive intimations. Every now and then I got a whiff of politics.
+It was clear they were against the Lords--against plutocrats--against
+Cossington's newspapers--against the brewers.... It was tremendously
+clear what they were against. The trouble was to find out what on earth
+they were for!...
+
+As I sat and thought, the streaked and mottled pillars and wall, the
+various views, aspects, and portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, the
+partitions of polished mahogany, the yellow-vested waiters, would
+dissolve and vanish, and I would have a vision of this sample of
+miscellaneous men of limited, diverse interests and a universal
+littleness of imagination enlarged, unlimited, no longer a sample but a
+community, spreading, stretching out to infinity--all in little groups
+and duologues and circles, all with their special and narrow concerns,
+all with their backs to most of the others.
+
+What but a common antagonism would ever keep these multitudes together?
+I understood why modern electioneering is more than half of it
+denunciation. Let us condemn, if possible, let us obstruct and deprive,
+but not let us do. There is no real appeal to the commonplace mind in
+"Let us do." That calls for the creative imagination, and few have been
+accustomed to respond to that call. The other merely needs jealousy and
+bate, of which there are great and easily accessible reservoirs in every
+human heart....
+
+I remember that vision of endless, narrow, jealous individuality very
+vividly. A seething limitlessness it became at last, like a waste place
+covered by crawling locusts that men sweep up by the sackload and drown
+by the million in ditches....
+
+Grotesquely against it came the lean features, the sidelong shy
+movements of Edward Crampton, seated in a circle of talkers close at
+hand. I had a whiff of his strained, unmusical voice, and behold! he was
+saying something about the "Will of the People...."
+
+The immense and wonderful disconnectednesses of human life! I forgot the
+smoke and jabber of the club altogether; I became a lonely spirit flung
+aloft by some queer accident, a stone upon a ledge in some high and
+rocky wilderness, and below as far as the eye could reach stretched the
+swarming infinitesimals of humanity, like grass upon the field, like
+pebbles upon unbounded beaches. Was there ever to be in human life
+more than that endless struggling individualism? Was there indeed some
+giantry, some immense valiant synthesis, still to come--or present it
+might be and still unseen by me, or was this the beginning and withal
+the last phase of mankind?...
+
+I glimpsed for a while the stupendous impudence of our ambitions,
+the tremendous enterprise to which the modern statesman is implicitly
+addressed. I was as it were one of a little swarm of would-be reef
+builders looking back at the teeming slime upon the ocean floor. All the
+history of mankind, all the history of life, has been and will be
+the story of something struggling out of the indiscriminated abyss,
+struggling to exist and prevail over and comprehend individual lives--an
+effort of insidious attraction, an idea of invincible appeal. That
+something greater than ourselves, which does not so much exist as seek
+existence, palpitating between being and not-being, how marvellous it
+is! It has worn the form and visage of ten thousand different gods,
+sought a shape for itself in stone and ivory and music and wonderful
+words, spoken more and more clearly of a mystery of love, a mystery
+of unity, dabbling meanwhile in blood and cruelty beyond the common
+impulses of men. It is something that comes and goes, like a light that
+shines and is withdrawn, withdrawn so completely that one doubts if it
+has ever been....
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+I would mark with a curious interest the stray country member of
+the club up in town for a night or so. My mind would be busy with
+speculations about him, about his home, his family, his reading, his
+horizons, his innumerable fellows who didn't belong and never came up.
+I would fill in the outline of him with memories of my uncle and his
+Staffordshire neighbours. He was perhaps Alderman This or Councillor
+That down there, a great man in his ward, J. P. within seven miles of
+the boundary of the borough, and a God in his home. Here he was nobody,
+and very shy, and either a little too arrogant or a little too meek
+towards our very democratic mannered but still livened waiters. Was
+he perhaps the backbone of England? He over-ate himself lest he should
+appear mean, went through our Special Dinner conscientiously, drank,
+unless he was teetotal, of unfamiliar wines, and did his best, in spite
+of the rules, to tip. Afterwards, in a state of flushed repletion, he
+would have old brandy, black coffee, and a banded cigar, or in the
+name of temperance omit the brandy and have rather more coffee, in
+the smoking-room. I would sit and watch that stiff dignity of
+self-indulgence, and wonder, wonder....
+
+An infernal clairvoyance would come to me. I would have visions of him
+in relation to his wife, checking always, sometimes bullying, sometimes
+being ostentatiously "kind"; I would see him glance furtively at his
+domestic servants upon his staircase, or stiffen his upper lip against
+the reluctant, protesting business employee. We imaginative people
+are base enough, heaven knows, but it is only in rare moods of bitter
+penetration that we pierce down to the baser lusts, the viler shames,
+the everlasting lying and muddle-headed self-justification of the dull.
+
+I would turn my eyes down the crowded room and see others of him and
+others. What did he think he was up to? Did he for a moment realise that
+his presence under that ceramic glory of a ceiling with me meant, if it
+had any rational meaning at all, that we were jointly doing something
+with the nation and the empire and mankind?... How on earth could any
+one get hold of him, make any noble use of him? He didn't read beyond
+his newspaper. He never thought, but only followed imaginings in his
+heart. He never discussed. At the first hint of discussion his temper
+gave way. He was, I knew, a deep, thinly-covered tank of resentments
+and quite irrational moral rages. Yet withal I would have to resist an
+impulse to go over to him and nudge him and say to him, "Look here!
+What indeed do you think we are doing with the nation and the empire and
+mankind? You know--MANKIND!"
+
+I wonder what reply I should have got.
+
+So far as any average could be struck and so far as any backbone could
+be located, it seemed to me that this silent, shy, replete, sub-angry,
+middle-class sentimentalist was in his endless species and varieties and
+dialects the backbone of our party. So far as I could be considered as
+representing anything in the House, I pretended to sit for the elements
+of HIM....
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+For a time I turned towards the Socialists. They at least had an air of
+coherent intentions. At that time Socialism had come into politics again
+after a period of depression and obscurity, with a tremendous ECLAT.
+There was visibly a following of Socialist members to Chris Robinson;
+mysteriously uncommunicative gentlemen in soft felt hats and short
+coats and square-toed boots who replied to casual advances a little
+surprisingly in rich North Country dialects. Members became aware of a
+"seagreen incorruptible," as Colonel Marlow put it to me, speaking on
+the Address, a slender twisted figure supporting itself on a stick and
+speaking with a fire that was altogether revolutionary. This was Philip
+Snowden, the member for Blackburn. They had come in nearly forty
+strong altogether, and with an air of presently meaning to come in much
+stronger. They were only one aspect of what seemed at that time a big
+national movement. Socialist societies, we gathered, were springing up
+all over the country, and every one was inquiring about Socialism and
+discussing Socialism. It had taken the Universities with particular
+force, and any youngster with the slightest intellectual pretension was
+either actively for or brilliantly against. For a time our Young Liberal
+group was ostentatiously sympathetic....
+
+When I think of the Socialists there comes a vivid memory of certain
+evening gatherings at our house....
+
+These gatherings had been organised by Margaret as the outcome of
+a discussion at the Baileys'. Altiora had been very emphatic and
+uncharitable upon the futility of the Socialist movement. It seemed that
+even the leaders fought shy of dinner-parties.
+
+"They never meet each other," said Altiora, "much less people on the
+other side. How can they begin to understand politics until they do
+that?"
+
+"Most of them have totally unpresentable wives," said Altiora,
+"totally!" and quoted instances, "and they WILL bring them. Or they
+won't come! Some of the poor creatures have scarcely learnt their table
+manners. They just make holes in the talk...."
+
+I thought there was a great deal of truth beneath Altiora's outburst.
+The presentation of the Socialist case seemed very greatly crippled
+by the want of a common intimacy in its leaders; the want of intimacy
+didn't at first appear to be more than an accident, and our talk led to
+Margaret's attempt to get acquaintance and easy intercourse afoot among
+them and between them and the Young Liberals of our group. She gave a
+series of weekly dinners, planned, I think, a little too accurately upon
+Altiora's model, and after each we had as catholic a reception as we
+could contrive.
+
+Our receptions were indeed, I should think, about as catholic as
+receptions could be. Margaret found herself with a weekly houseful of
+insoluble problems in intercourse. One did one's best, but one got a
+nightmare feeling as the evening wore on.
+
+It was one of the few unanimities of these parties that every one should
+be a little odd in appearance, funny about the hair or the tie or the
+shoes or more generally, and that bursts of violent aggression should
+alternate with an attitude entirely defensive. A number of our guests
+had an air of waiting for a clue that never came, and stood and sat
+about silently, mildly amused but not a bit surprised that we did not
+discover their distinctive Open-Sesames. There was a sprinkling of
+manifest seers and prophetesses in shapeless garments, far too many, I
+thought, for really easy social intercourse, and any conversation at any
+moment was liable to become oracular. One was in a state of tension
+from first to last; the most innocent remark seemed capable of exploding
+resentment, and replies came out at the most unexpected angles. We Young
+Liberals went about puzzled but polite to the gathering we had evoked.
+The Young Liberals' tradition is on the whole wonderfully discreet,
+superfluous steam is let out far away from home in the Balkans or
+Africa, and the neat, stiff figures of the Cramptons, Bunting Harblow,
+and Lewis, either in extremely well-cut morning coats indicative of the
+House, or in what is sometimes written of as "faultless evening dress,"
+stood about on those evenings, they and their very quietly and simply
+and expensively dressed little wives, like a datum line amidst lakes and
+mountains.
+
+I didn't at first see the connection between systematic social
+reorganisation and arbitrary novelties in dietary and costume, just as
+I didn't realise why the most comprehensive constructive projects should
+appear to be supported solely by odd and exceptional personalities.
+On one of these evenings a little group of rather jolly-looking pretty
+young people seated themselves for no particular reason in a large
+circle on the floor of my study, and engaged, so far as I could judge,
+in the game of Hunt the Meaning, the intellectual equivalent of Hunt the
+Slipper. It must have been that same evening I came upon an unbleached
+young gentleman before the oval mirror on the landing engaged in
+removing the remains of an anchovy sandwich from his protruded
+tongue--visible ends of cress having misled him into the belief that he
+was dealing with doctrinally permissible food. It was not unusual to be
+given hand-bills and printed matter by our guests, but there I had
+the advantage over Lewis, who was too tactful to refuse the stuff, too
+neatly dressed to pocket it, and had no writing-desk available upon
+which he could relieve himself in a manner flattering to the giver. So
+that his hands got fuller and fuller. A relentless, compact little woman
+in what Margaret declared to be an extremely expensive black dress
+has also printed herself on my memory; she had set her heart upon my
+contributing to a weekly periodical in the lentil interest with which
+she was associated, and I spent much time and care in evading her.
+
+Mingling with the more hygienic types were a number of Anti-Puritan
+Socialists, bulging with bias against temperance, and breaking out
+against austere methods of living all over their faces. Their manner
+was packed with heartiness. They were apt to choke the approaches to
+the little buffet Margaret had set up downstairs, and there engage in
+discussions of Determinism--it always seemed to be Determinism--which
+became heartier and noisier, but never acrimonious even in the small
+hours. It seemed impossible to settle about this Determinism of
+theirs--ever. And there were worldly Socialists also. I particularly
+recall a large, active, buoyant, lady-killing individual with an
+eyeglass borne upon a broad black ribbon, who swam about us one evening.
+He might have been a slightly frayed actor, in his large frock-coat,
+his white waistcoat, and the sort of black and white check trousers that
+twinkle. He had a high-pitched voice with aristocratic intonations, and
+he seemed to be in a perpetual state of interrogation. "What are we
+all he-a for?" he would ask only too audibly. "What are we doing he-a?
+What's the connection?"
+
+What WAS the connection?
+
+We made a special effort with our last assembly in June, 1907. We tried
+to get something like a representative collection of the parliamentary
+leaders of Socialism, the various exponents of Socialist thought and a
+number of Young Liberal thinkers into one room. Dorvil came, and Horatio
+Bulch; Featherstonehaugh appeared for ten minutes and talked charmingly
+to Margaret and then vanished again; there was Wilkins the novelist and
+Toomer and Dr. Tumpany. Chris Robinson stood about for a time in a new
+comforter, and Magdeberg and Will Pipes and five or six Labour members.
+And on our side we had our particular little group, Bunting Harblow,
+Crampton, Lewis, all looking as broad-minded and open to conviction as
+they possibly could, and even occasionally talking out from their bushes
+almost boldly. But the gathering as a whole refused either to mingle or
+dispute, and as an experiment in intercourse the evening was a failure.
+Unexpected dissociations appeared between Socialists one had supposed
+friendly. I could not have imagined it was possible for half so many
+people to turn their backs on everybody else in such small rooms as
+ours. But the unsaid things those backs expressed broke out, I remarked,
+with refreshed virulence in the various organs of the various sections
+of the party next week.
+
+I talked, I remember, with Dr. Tumpany, a large young man in a still
+larger professional frock-coat, and with a great shock of very fair
+hair, who was candidate for some North Country constituency. We
+discussed the political outlook, and, like so many Socialists at that
+time, he was full of vague threatenings against the Liberal party. I
+was struck by a thing in him that I had already observed less vividly in
+many others of these Socialist leaders, and which gave me at last a clue
+to the whole business. He behaved exactly like a man in possession of
+valuable patent rights, who wants to be dealt with. He had an air of
+having a corner in ideas. Then it flashed into my head that the whole
+Socialist movement was an attempted corner in ideas....
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+Late that night I found myself alone with Margaret amid the debris of
+the gathering.
+
+I sat before the fire, hands in pockets, and Margaret, looking white and
+weary, came and leant upon the mantel.
+
+"Oh, Lord!" said Margaret.
+
+I agreed. Then I resumed my meditation.
+
+"Ideas," I said, "count for more than I thought in the world."
+
+Margaret regarded me with that neutral expression behind which she was
+accustomed to wait for clues.
+
+"When you think of the height and depth and importance and wisdom of the
+Socialist ideas, and see the men who are running them," I explained....
+"A big system of ideas like Socialism grows up out of the obvious common
+sense of our present conditions. It's as impersonal as science. All
+these men--They've given nothing to it. They're just people who have
+pegged out claims upon a big intellectual No-Man's-Land--and don't feel
+quite sure of the law. There's a sort of quarrelsome uneasiness....
+If we professed Socialism do you think they'd welcome us? Not a man of
+them! They'd feel it was burglary...."
+
+"Yes," said Margaret, looking into the fire. "That is just what I felt
+about them all the evening.... Particularly Dr. Tumpany."
+
+"We mustn't confuse Socialism with the Socialists," I said; "that's
+the moral of it. I suppose if God were to find He had made a mistake in
+dates or something, and went back and annihilated everybody from Owen
+onwards who was in any way known as a Socialist leader or teacher,
+Socialism would be exactly where it is and what it is to-day--a growing
+realisation of constructive needs in every man's mind, and a little
+corner in party politics. So, I suppose, it will always be.... But they
+WERE a damned lot, Margaret!"
+
+I looked up at the little noise she made. "TWICE!" she said, smiling
+indulgently, "to-day!" (Even the smile was Altiora's.)
+
+I returned to my thoughts. They WERE a damned human lot. It was an
+excellent word in that connection....
+
+But the ideas marched on, the ideas marched on, just as though men's
+brains were no more than stepping-stones, just as though some great
+brain in which we are all little cells and corpuscles was thinking
+them!...
+
+"I don't think there is a man among them who makes me feel he is
+trustworthy," said Margaret; "unless it is Featherstonehaugh."
+
+I sat taking in this proposition.
+
+"They'll never help us, I feel," said Margaret.
+
+"Us?"
+
+"The Liberals."
+
+"Oh, damn the Liberals!" I said. "They'll never even help themselves."
+
+"I don't think I could possibly get on with any of those people," said
+Margaret, after a pause.
+
+She remained for a time looking down at me and, I could feel, perplexed
+by me, but I wanted to go on with my thinking, and so I did not look up,
+and presently she stooped to my forehead and kissed me and went rustling
+softly to her room.
+
+I remained in my study for a long time with my thoughts crystallising
+out....
+
+It was then, I think, that I first apprehended clearly how that
+opposition to which I have already alluded of the immediate life and the
+mental hinterland of a man, can be applied to public and social affairs.
+The ideas go on--and no person or party succeeds in embodying them. The
+reality of human progress never comes to the surface, it is a power
+in the deeps, an undertow. It goes on in silence while men think, in
+studies where they write self-forgetfully, in laboratories under the
+urgency of an impersonal curiosity, in the rare illumination of honest
+talk, in moments of emotional insight, in thoughtful reading, but not
+in everyday affairs. Everyday affairs and whatever is made an everyday
+affair, are transactions of the ostensible self, the being of habits,
+interests, usage. Temper, vanity, hasty reaction to imitation, personal
+feeling, are their substance. No man can abolish his immediate self and
+specialise in the depths; if he attempt that, he simply turns himself
+into something a little less than the common man. He may have an immense
+hinterland, but that does not absolve him from a frontage. That is the
+essential error of the specialist philosopher, the specialist teacher,
+the specialist publicist. They repudiate frontage; claim to be pure
+hinterland. That is what bothered me about Codger, about those various
+schoolmasters who had prepared me for life, about the Baileys and their
+dream of an official ruling class. A human being who is a philosopher
+in the first place, a teacher in the first place, or a statesman in the
+first place, is thereby and inevitably, though he bring God-like gifts
+to the pretence--a quack. These are attempts to live deep-side
+shallow, inside out. They produce merely a new pettiness. To understand
+Socialism, again, is to gain a new breadth of outlook; to join a
+Socialist organisation is to join a narrow cult which is not even
+tolerably serviceable in presenting or spreading the ideas for which it
+stands....
+
+I perceived I had got something quite fundamental here. It had taken me
+some years to realise the true relation of the great constructive ideas
+that swayed me not only to political parties, but to myself. I had
+been disposed to identify the formulae of some one party with social
+construction, and to regard the other as necessarily anti-constructive,
+just as I had been inclined to follow the Baileys in the
+self-righteousness of supposing myself to be wholly constructive. But I
+saw now that every man of intellectual freedom and vigour is necessarily
+constructive-minded nowadays, and that no man is disinterestedly so.
+Each one of us repeats in himself the conflict of the race between the
+splendour of its possibilities and its immediate associations. We may be
+shaping immortal things, but we must sleep and answer the dinner gong,
+and have our salt of flattery and self-approval. In politics a man
+counts not for what he is in moments of imaginative expansion, but
+for his common workaday, selfish self; and political parties are held
+together not by a community of ultimate aims, but by the stabler bond
+of an accustomed life. Everybody almost is for progress in general, and
+nearly everybody is opposed to any change, except in so far as gross
+increments are change, in his particular method of living and behaviour.
+Every party stands essentially for the interests and mental usages of
+some definite class or group of classes in the exciting community, and
+every party has its scientific-minded and constructive leading section,
+with well-defined hinterlands formulating its social functions in a
+public-spirited form, and its superficial-minded following confessing
+its meannesses and vanities and prejudices. No class will abolish
+itself, materially alter its way of life, or drastically reconstruct
+itself, albeit no class is indisposed to co-operate in the unlimited
+socialisation of any other class. In that capacity for aggression upon
+other classes lies the essential driving force of modern affairs. The
+instincts, the persons, the parties, and vanities sway and struggle.
+The ideas and understandings march on and achieve themselves for all--in
+spite of every one....
+
+The methods and traditions of British politics maintain the form of two
+great parties, with rider groups seeking to gain specific ends in the
+event of a small Government majority. These two main parties are more or
+less heterogeneous in composition. Each, however, has certain necessary
+characteristics. The Conservative Party has always stood quite
+definitely for the established propertied interests. The land-owner,
+the big lawyer, the Established Church, and latterly the huge private
+monopoly of the liquor trade which has been created by temperance
+legislation, are the essential Conservatives. Interwoven now with the
+native wealthy are the families of the great international usurers, and
+a vast miscellaneous mass of financial enterprise. Outside the range of
+resistance implied by these interests, the Conservative Party has always
+shown itself just as constructive and collectivist as any other party.
+The great landowners have been as well-disposed towards the endowment
+of higher education, and as willing to co-operate with the Church in
+protective and mildly educational legislation for children and the
+working class, as any political section. The financiers, too, are
+adventurous-spirited and eager for mechanical progress and technical
+efficiency. They are prepared to spend public money upon research,
+upon ports and harbours and public communications, upon sanitation and
+hygienic organisation. A certain rude benevolence of public intention is
+equally characteristic of the liquor trade. Provided his comfort leads
+to no excesses of temperance, the liquor trade is quite eager to see
+the common man prosperous, happy, and with money to spend in a bar. All
+sections of the party are aggressively patriotic and favourably inclined
+to the idea of an upstanding, well-fed, and well-exercised population
+in uniform. Of course there are reactionary landowners and old-fashioned
+country clergy, full of localised self-importance, jealous even of the
+cottager who can read, but they have neither the power nor the ability
+to retard the constructive forces in the party as a whole. On the other
+hand, when matters point to any definitely confiscatory proposal, to the
+public ownership and collective control of land, for example, or
+state mining and manufactures, or the nationalisation of the so-called
+public-house or extended municipal enterprise, or even to an increase of
+the taxation of property, then the Conservative Party presents a nearly
+adamantine bar. It does not stand for, it IS, the existing arrangement
+in these affairs.
+
+Even more definitely a class party is the Labour Party, whose immediate
+interest is to raise wages, shorten hours of labor, increase employment,
+and make better terms for the working-man tenant and working-man
+purchaser. Its leaders are no doubt constructive minded, but the mass
+of the following is naturally suspicious of education and discipline,
+hostile to the higher education, and--except for an obvious antagonism
+to employers and property owners--almost destitute of ideas. What
+else can it be? It stands for the expropriated multitude, whose whole
+situation and difficulty arise from its individual lack of initiative
+and organising power. It favours the nationalisation of land and capital
+with no sense of the difficulties involved in the process; but, on the
+other hand, the equally reasonable socialisation of individuals which
+is implied by military service is steadily and quite naturally and quite
+illogically opposed by it. It is only in recent years that Labour has
+emerged as a separate party from the huge hospitable caravanserai of
+Liberalism, and there is still a very marked tendency to step back again
+into that multitudinous assemblage.
+
+For multitudinousness has always been the Liberal characteristic.
+Liberalism never has been nor ever can be anything but a diversified
+crowd. Liberalism has to voice everything that is left out by these
+other parties. It is the party against the predominating interests. It
+is at once the party of the failing and of the untried; it is the party
+of decadence and hope. From its nature it must be a vague and planless
+association in comparison with its antagonist, neither so constructive
+on the one hand, nor on the other so competent to hinder the inevitable
+constructions of the civilised state. Essentially it is the party
+of criticism, the "Anti" party. It is a system of hostilities and
+objections that somehow achieves at times an elusive common soul. It is
+a gathering together of all the smaller interests which find themselves
+at a disadvantage against the big established classes, the leasehold
+tenant as against the landowner, the retail tradesman as against
+the merchant and the moneylender, the Nonconformist as against the
+Churchman, the small employer as against the demoralising hospitable
+publican, the man without introductions and broad connections against
+the man who has these things. It is the party of the many small men
+against the fewer prevailing men. It has no more essential reason for
+loving the Collectivist state than the Conservatives; the small dealer
+is doomed to absorption in that just as much as the large owner; but
+it resorts to the state against its antagonists as in the middle ages
+common men pitted themselves against the barons by siding with the king.
+The Liberal Party is the party against "class privilege" because it
+represents no class advantages, but it is also the party that is on
+the whole most set against Collective control because it represents
+no established responsibility. It is constructive only so far as its
+antagonism to the great owner is more powerful than its jealousy of the
+state. It organises only because organisation is forced upon it by the
+organisation of its adversaries. It lapses in and out of alliance with
+Labour as it sways between hostility to wealth and hostility to public
+expenditure....
+
+Every modern European state will have in some form or other these three
+parties: the resistent, militant, authoritative, dull, and unsympathetic
+party of establishment and success, the rich party; the confused,
+sentimental, spasmodic, numerous party of the small, struggling,
+various, undisciplined men, the poor man's party; and a third party
+sometimes detaching itself from the second and sometimes reuniting with
+it, the party of the altogether expropriated masses, the proletarians,
+Labour. Change Conservative and Liberal to Republican and Democrat, for
+example, and you have the conditions in the United States. The Crown or
+a dethroned dynasty, the Established Church or a dispossessed church,
+nationalist secessions, the personalities of party leaders, may break
+up, complicate, and confuse the self-expression of these three necessary
+divisions in the modern social drama, the analyst will make them out
+none the less for that....
+
+And then I came back as if I came back to a refrain;--the ideas go
+on--as though we are all no more than little cells and corpuscles in
+some great brain beyond our understanding....
+
+So it was I sat and thought my problem out.... I still remember my
+satisfaction at seeing things plainly at last. It was like clouds
+dispersing to show the sky. Constructive ideas, of course, couldn't hold
+a party together alone, "interests and habits, not ideas," I had that
+now, and so the great constructive scheme of Socialism, invading and
+inspiring all parties, was necessarily claimed only by this collection
+of odds and ends, this residuum of disconnected and exceptional people.
+This was true not only of the Socialist idea, but of the scientific
+idea, the idea of veracity--of human confidence in humanity--of all that
+mattered in human life outside the life of individuals.... The only real
+party that would ever profess Socialism was the Labour Party, and that
+in the entirely one-sided form of an irresponsible and non-constructive
+attack on property. Socialism in that mutilated form, the teeth and
+claws without the eyes and brain, I wanted as little as I wanted
+anything in the world.
+
+Perfectly clear it was, perfectly clear, and why hadn't I seen it
+before?... I looked at my watch, and it was half-past two.
+
+I yawned, stretched, got up and went to bed.
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+My ideas about statecraft have passed through three main phases to the
+final convictions that remain. There was the first immediacy of my dream
+of ports and harbours and cities, railways, roads, and administered
+territories--the vision I had seen in the haze from that little church
+above Locarno. Slowly that had passed into a more elaborate legislative
+constructiveness, which had led to my uneasy association with the
+Baileys and the professedly constructive Young Liberals. To get that
+ordered life I had realised the need of organisation, knowledge,
+expertness, a wide movement of co-ordinated methods. On the individual
+side I thought that a life of urgent industry, temperance, and close
+attention was indicated by my perception of these ends. I married
+Margaret and set to work. But something in my mind refused from the
+outset to accept these determinations as final. There was always a doubt
+lurking below, always a faint resentment, a protesting criticism, a
+feeling of vitally important omissions.
+
+I arrived at last at the clear realisation that my political associates,
+and I in my association with them, were oddly narrow, priggish, and
+unreal, that the Socialists with whom we were attempting co-operation
+were preposterously irrelevant to their own theories, that my political
+life didn't in some way comprehend more than itself, that rather
+perplexingly I was missing the thing I was seeking. Britten's footnotes
+to Altiora's self-assertions, her fits of energetic planning, her
+quarrels and rallies and vanities, his illuminating attacks on
+Cramptonism and the heavy-spirited triviality of such Liberalism as the
+Children's Charter, served to point my way to my present conclusions.
+I had been trying to deal all along with human progress as something
+immediate in life, something to be immediately attacked by political
+parties and groups pointing primarily to that end. I now began to
+see that just as in my own being there was the rather shallow, rather
+vulgar, self-seeking careerist, who wore an admirable silk hat and
+bustled self-consciously through the lobby, and a much greater and
+indefinitely growing unpublished personality behind him--my hinterland,
+I have called it--so in human affairs generally the permanent reality
+is also a hinterland, which is never really immediate, which draws
+continually upon human experience and influences human action more and
+more, but which is itself never the actual player upon the stage. It is
+the unseen dramatist who never takes a call. Now it was just through the
+fact that our group about the Baileys didn't understand this, that with
+a sort of frantic energy they were trying to develop that sham expert
+officialdom of theirs to plan, regulate, and direct the affairs of
+humanity, that the perplexing note of silliness and shallowness that I
+had always felt and felt now most acutely under Britten's gibes, came
+in. They were neglecting human life altogether in social organisation.
+
+In the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth of
+statesmanship. It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and all
+organising spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange and
+achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers, leaders of
+men, have always slipped into the error of assuming that they can think
+out the whole--or at any rate completely think out definite parts--of
+the purpose and future of man, clearly and finally; they have set
+themselves to legislate and construct on that assumption, and,
+experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions of reality, they have
+taken to dogma, persecution, training, pruning, secretive education; and
+all the stupidities of self-sufficient energy. In the passion of their
+good intentions they have not hesitated to conceal fact, suppress
+thought, crush disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimental
+desires. And so it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with
+the making, that any extension of social organisation is at present
+achieved.
+
+Directly, however, this idea of an emancipation from immediacy is
+grasped, directly the dominating importance of this critical, less
+personal, mental hinterland in the individual and of the collective mind
+in the race is understood, the whole problem of the statesman and
+his attitude towards politics gain a new significance, and becomes
+accessible to a new series of solutions. He wants no longer to "fix
+up," as people say, human affairs, but to devote his forces to the
+development of that needed intellectual life without which all his
+shallow attempts at fixing up are futile. He ceases to build on the
+sands, and sets himself to gather foundations.
+
+You see, I began in my teens by wanting to plan and build cities and
+harbours for mankind; I ended in the middle thirties by desiring only
+to serve and increase a general process of thought, a process fearless,
+critical, real-spirited, that would in its own time give cities,
+harbours, air, happiness, everything at a scale and quality and in
+a light altogether beyond the match-striking imaginations of a
+contemporary mind. I wanted freedom of speech and suggestion, vigour of
+thought, and the cultivation of that impulse of veracity that lurks
+more or less discouraged in every man. With that I felt there must go an
+emotion. I hit upon a phrase that became at last something of a refrain
+in my speech and writings, to convey the spirit that I felt was at the
+very heart of real human progress--love and fine thinking.
+
+(I suppose that nowadays no newspaper in England gets through a week
+without the repetition of that phrase.)
+
+My convictions crystallised more and more definitely upon this. The
+more of love and fine thinking the better for men, I said; the less,
+the worse. And upon this fresh basis I set myself to examine what I as
+a politician might do. I perceived I was at last finding an adequate
+expression for all that was in me, for those forces that had rebelled at
+the crude presentations of Bromstead, at the secrecies and suppressions
+of my youth, at the dull unrealities of City Merchants, at the
+conventions and timidities of the Pinky Dinkys, at the philosophical
+recluse of Trinity and the phrases and tradition-worship of my political
+associates. None of these things were half alive, and I wanted life to
+be intensely alive and awake. I wanted thought like an edge of steel and
+desire like a flame. The real work before mankind now, I realised once
+and for all, is the enlargement of human expression, the release and
+intensification of human thought, the vivider utilisation of experience
+and the invigoration of research--and whatever one does in human affairs
+has or lacks value as it helps or hinders that.
+
+With that I had got my problem clear, and the solution, so far as I
+was concerned, lay in finding out the point in the ostensible life of
+politics at which I could most subserve these ends. I was still against
+the muddles of Bromstead, but I had hunted them down now to their
+essential form. The jerry-built slums, the roads that went nowhere,
+the tarred fences, litigious notice-boards and barbed wire fencing, the
+litter and the heaps of dump, were only the outward appearances whose
+ultimate realities were jerry-built conclusions, hasty purposes, aimless
+habits of thought, and imbecile bars and prohibitions in the thoughts
+and souls of men. How are we through politics to get at that confusion?
+
+We want to invigorate and reinvigorate education. We want to create a
+sustained counter effort to the perpetual tendency of all educational
+organisations towards classicalism, secondary issues, and the evasion of
+life.
+
+We want to stimulate the expression of life through art and literature,
+and its exploration through research.
+
+We want to make the best and finest thought accessible to every one,
+and more particularly to create and sustain an enormous free criticism,
+without which art, literature, and research alike degenerate into
+tradition or imposture.
+
+Then all the other problems which are now so insoluble, destitution,
+disease, the difficulty of maintaining international peace, the scarcely
+faced possibility of making life generally and continually beautiful,
+become--EASY....
+
+It was clear to me that the most vital activities in which I could
+engage would be those which most directly affected the Church, public
+habits of thought, education, organised research, literature, and the
+channels of general discussion. I had to ask myself how my position
+as Liberal member for Kinghamstead squared with and conduced to this
+essential work.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ SEEKING ASSOCIATES
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+I have told of my gradual abandonment of the pretensions and habits of
+party Liberalism. In a sense I was moving towards aristocracy. Regarding
+the development of the social and individual mental hinterland as the
+essential thing in human progress, I passed on very naturally to the
+practical assumption that we wanted what I may call "hinterlanders." Of
+course I do not mean by aristocracy the changing unorganised medley of
+rich people and privileged people who dominate the civilised world of
+to-day, but as opposed to this, a possibility of co-ordinating the will
+of the finer individuals, by habit and literature, into a broad common
+aim. We must have an aristocracy--not of privilege, but of understanding
+and purpose--or mankind will fail. I find this dawning more and more
+clearly when I look through my various writings of the years between
+1903 and 1910. I was already emerging to plain statements in 1908.
+
+I reasoned after this fashion. The line of human improvement and the
+expansion of human life lies in the direction of education and finer
+initiatives. If humanity cannot develop an education far beyond anything
+that is now provided, if it cannot collectively invent devices and solve
+problems on a much richer, broader scale than it does at the present
+time, it cannot hope to achieve any very much finer order or any more
+general happiness than it now enjoys. We must believe, therefore, that
+it CAN develop such a training and education, or we must abandon secular
+constructive hope. And here my peculiar difficulty as against crude
+democracy comes in. If humanity at large is capable of that high
+education and those creative freedoms our hope demands, much more must
+its better and more vigorous types be so capable. And if those who have
+power and leisure now, and freedom to respond to imaginative appeals,
+cannot be won to the idea of collective self-development, then the whole
+of humanity cannot be won to that. From that one passes to what
+has become my general conception in politics, the conception of the
+constructive imagination working upon the vast complex of powerful
+people, clever people, enterprising people, influential people, amidst
+whom power is diffused to-day, to produce that self-conscious, highly
+selective, open-minded, devoted aristocratic culture, which seems to me
+to be the necessary next phase in the development of human affairs.
+I see human progress, not as the spontaneous product of crowds of raw
+minds swayed by elementary needs, but as a natural but elaborate result
+of intricate human interdependencies, of human energy and curiosity
+liberated and acting at leisure, of human passions and motives, modified
+and redirected by literature and art....
+
+But now the reader will understand how it came about that, disappointed
+by the essential littleness of Liberalism, and disillusioned about the
+representative quality of the professed Socialists, I turned my
+mind more and more to a scrutiny of the big people, the wealthy and
+influential people, against whom Liberalism pits its forces. I was
+asking myself definitely whether, after all, it was not my particular
+job to work through them and not against them. Was I not altogether out
+of my element as an Anti-? Weren't there big bold qualities about these
+people that common men lack, and the possibility of far more splendid
+dreams? Were they really the obstacles, might they not be rather the
+vehicles of the possible new braveries of life?
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+The faults of the Imperialist movement were obvious enough. The
+conception of the Boer War had been clumsy and puerile, the costly
+errors of that struggle appalling, and the subsequent campaign of Mr.
+Chamberlain for Tariff Reform seemed calculated to combine the financial
+adventurers of the Empire in one vast conspiracy against the consumer.
+The cant of Imperialism was easy to learn and use; it was speedily
+adopted by all sorts of base enterprises and turned to all sorts of base
+ends. But a big child is permitted big mischief, and my mind was
+now continually returning to the persuasion that after all in some
+development of the idea of Imperial patriotism might be found that wide,
+rough, politically acceptable expression of a constructive dream capable
+of sustaining a great educational and philosophical movement such as
+no formula of Liberalism supplied. The fact that it readily took vulgar
+forms only witnessed to its strong popular appeal. Mixed in with the
+noisiness and humbug of the movement there appeared a real regard for
+social efficiency, a real spirit of animation and enterprise. There
+suddenly appeared in my world--I saw them first, I think, in 1908--a
+new sort of little boy, a most agreeable development of the slouching,
+cunning, cigarette-smoking, town-bred youngster, a small boy in a khaki
+hat, and with bare knees and athletic bearing, earnestly engaged in
+wholesome and invigorating games up to and occasionally a little beyond
+his strength--the Boy Scout. I liked the Boy Scout, and I find it
+difficult to express how much it mattered to me, with my growing bias in
+favour of deliberate national training, that Liberalism hadn't been able
+to produce, and had indeed never attempted to produce, anything of this
+kind.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+In those days there existed a dining club called--there was some lost
+allusion to the exorcism of party feeling in its title--the Pentagram
+Circle. It included Bailey and Dayton and myself, Sir Herbert Thorns,
+Lord Charles Kindling, Minns the poet, Gerbault the big railway man,
+Lord Gane, fresh from the settlement of Framboya, and Rumbold, who later
+became Home Secretary and left us. We were men of all parties and very
+various experiences, and our object was to discuss the welfare of the
+Empire in a disinterested spirit. We dined monthly at the Mermaid in
+Westminster, and for a couple of years we kept up an average attendance
+of ten out of fourteen. The dinner-time was given up to desultory
+conversation, and it is odd how warm and good the social atmosphere of
+that little gathering became as time went on; then over the dessert, so
+soon as the waiters had swept away the crumbs and ceased to fret us, one
+of us would open with perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes' exposition
+of some specially prepared question, and after him we would deliver
+ourselves in turn, each for three or four minutes. When every one
+present had spoken once talk became general again, and it was rare we
+emerged upon Hendon Street before midnight. Sometimes, as my house
+was conveniently near, a knot of men would come home with me and go on
+talking and smoking in my dining-room until two or three. We had Fred
+Neal, that wild Irish journalist, among us towards the end, and his
+stupendous flow of words materially prolonged our closing discussions
+and made our continuance impossible.
+
+I learned very much and very many things at those dinners, but more
+particularly did I become familiarised with the habits of mind of such
+men as Neal, Crupp, Gane, and the one or two other New Imperialists
+who belonged to us. They were nearly all like Bailey Oxford men, though
+mostly of a younger generation, and they were all mysteriously and
+inexplicably advocates of Tariff Reform, as if it were the principal
+instead of at best a secondary aspect of constructive policy. They
+seemed obsessed by the idea that streams of trade could be diverted
+violently so as to link the parts of the Empire by common interests, and
+they were persuaded, I still think mistakenly, that Tariff Reform would
+have an immense popular appeal. They were also very keen on military
+organisation, and with a curious little martinet twist in their minds
+that boded ill for that side of public liberty. So much against them.
+But they were disposed to spend money much more generously on education
+and research of all sorts than our formless host of Liberals seemed
+likely to do; and they were altogether more accessible than the Young
+Liberals to bold, constructive ideas affecting the universities and
+upper classes. The Liberals are abjectly afraid of the universities.
+I found myself constantly falling into line with these men in our
+discussions, and more and more hostile to Dayton's sentimentalising
+evasions of definite schemes and Minns' trust in such things as the
+"Spirit of our People" and the "General Trend of Progress." It wasn't
+that I thought them very much righter than their opponents; I believe
+all definite party "sides" at any time are bound to be about equally
+right and equally lop-sided; but that I thought I could get more out
+of them and what was more important to me, more out of myself if I
+co-operated with them. By 1908 I had already arrived at a point where I
+could be definitely considering a transfer of my political allegiance.
+
+These abstract questions are inseparably interwoven with my memory of a
+shining long white table, and our hock bottles and burgundy bottles, and
+bottles of Perrier and St. Galmier and the disturbed central trophy of
+dessert, and scattered glasses and nut-shells and cigarette-ends and
+menu-cards used for memoranda. I see old Dayton sitting back and cocking
+his eye to the ceiling in a way he had while he threw warmth into the
+ancient platitudes of Liberalism, and Minns leaning forward, and a
+little like a cockatoo with a taste for confidences, telling us in a
+hushed voice of his faith in the Destiny of Mankind. Thorns lounges,
+rolling his round face and round eyes from speaker to speaker and
+sounding the visible depths of misery whenever Neal begins. Gerbault
+and Gane were given to conversation in undertones, and Bailey pursued
+mysterious purposes in lisping whispers. It was Crupp attracted me most.
+He had, as people say, his eye on me from the beginning. He used to
+speak at me, and drifted into a custom of coming home with me very
+regularly for an after-talk.
+
+He opened his heart to me.
+
+"Neither of us," he said, "are dukes, and neither of us are horny-handed
+sons of toil. We want to get hold of the handles, and to do that, one
+must go where the power is, and give it just as constructive a twist as
+we can. That's MY Toryism."
+
+"Is it Kindling's--or Gerbault's?"
+
+"No. But theirs is soft, and mine's hard. Mine will wear theirs out. You
+and I and Bailey are all after the same thing, and why aren't we working
+together?"
+
+"Are you a Confederate?" I asked suddenly.
+
+"That's a secret nobody tells," he said.
+
+"What are the Confederates after?"
+
+"Making aristocracy work, I suppose. Just as, I gather, you want to
+do."...
+
+The Confederates were being heard of at that time. They were at once
+attractive and repellent to me, an odd secret society whose membership
+nobody knew, pledged, it was said, to impose Tariff Reform and an ample
+constructive policy upon the Conservatives. In the press, at any rate,
+they had an air of deliberately organised power. I have no doubt the
+rumour of them greatly influenced my ideas....
+
+In the end I made some very rapid decisions, but for nearly two years I
+was hesitating. Hesitations were inevitable in such a matter. I was
+not dealing with any simple question of principle, but with elusive and
+fluctuating estimates of the trend of diverse forces and of the nature
+of my own powers. All through that period I was asking over and over
+again: how far are these Confederates mere dreamers? How far--and this
+was more vital--are they rendering lip-service to social organisations?
+Is it true they desire war because it confirms the ascendency of their
+class? How far can Conservatism be induced to plan and construct before
+it resists the thrust towards change. Is it really in bulk anything more
+than a mass of prejudice and conceit, cynical indulgence, and a hard
+suspicion of and hostility to the expropriated classes in the community?
+
+That is a research which yields no statistics, an enquiry like asking
+what is the ruling colour of a chameleon. The shadowy answer varied
+with my health, varied with my mood and the conduct of the people I was
+watching. How fine can people be? How generous?--not incidentally, but
+all round? How far can you educate sons beyond the outlook of their
+fathers, and how far lift a rich, proud, self-indulgent class above the
+protests of its business agents and solicitors and its own habits and
+vanity? Is chivalry in a class possible?--was it ever, indeed, or will
+it ever indeed be possible? Is the progress that seems attainable in
+certain directions worth the retrogression that may be its price?
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+It was to the Pentagram Circle that I first broached the new conceptions
+that were developing in my mind. I count the evening of my paper the
+beginning of the movement that created the BLUE WEEKLY and our wing of
+the present New Tory party. I do that without any excessive egotism,
+because my essay was no solitary man's production; it was my reaction
+to forces that had come to me very large through my fellow-members; its
+quick reception by them showed that I was, so to speak, merely the first
+of the chestnuts to pop. The atmospheric quality of the evening stands
+out very vividly in my memory. The night, I remember, was warmly foggy
+when after midnight we went to finish our talk at my house.
+
+We had recently changed the rules of the club to admit visitors, and
+so it happened that I had brought Britten, and Crupp introduced Arnold
+Shoesmith, my former schoolfellow at City Merchants, and now the
+wealthy successor of his father and elder brother. I remember his heavy,
+inexpressively handsome face lighting to his rare smile at the sight of
+me, and how little I dreamt of the tragic entanglement that was destined
+to involve us both. Gane was present, and Esmeer, a newly-added
+member, but I think Bailey was absent. Either he was absent, or he said
+something so entirely characteristic and undistinguished that it has
+left no impression on my mind.
+
+I had broken a little from the traditions of the club even in my title,
+which was deliberately a challenge to the liberal idea: it was, "The
+World Exists for Exceptional People." It is not the title I should
+choose now--for since that time I have got my phrase of "mental
+hinterlander" into journalistic use. I should say now, "The World Exists
+for Mental Hinterland."
+
+The notes I made of that opening have long since vanished with a
+thousand other papers, but some odd chance has preserved and brought
+with me to Italy the menu for the evening; its back black with the
+scrawled notes I made of the discussion for my reply. I found it the
+other day among some letters from Margaret and a copy of the 1909 Report
+of the Poor Law Commission, also rich with pencilled marginalia.
+
+My opening was a criticism of the democratic idea and method, upon lines
+such as I have already sufficiently indicated in the preceding sections.
+I remember how old Dayton fretted in his chair, and tushed and pished
+at that, even as I gave it, and afterwards we were treated to one of his
+platitudinous harangues, he sitting back in his chair with that small
+obstinate eye of his fixed on the ceiling, and a sort of cadaverous glow
+upon his face, repeating--quite regardless of all my reasoning and all
+that had been said by others in the debate--the sacred empty phrases
+that were his soul's refuge from reality. "You may think it very
+clever," he said with a nod of his head to mark his sense of his point,
+"not to Trust in the People. I do." And so on. Nothing in his life or
+work had ever shown that he did trust in the people, but that was
+beside the mark. He was the party Liberal, and these were the party
+incantations.
+
+After my preliminary attack on vague democracy I went on to show that
+all human life was virtually aristocratic; people must either recognise
+aristocracy in general or else follow leaders, which is aristocracy in
+particular, and so I came to my point that the reality of human progress
+lay necessarily through the establishment of freedoms for the human best
+and a collective receptivity and understanding. There was a disgusted
+grunt from Dayton, "Superman rubbish--Nietzsche. Shaw! Ugh!" I sailed on
+over him to my next propositions. The prime essential in a progressive
+civilisation was the establishment of a more effective selective process
+for the privilege of higher education, and the very highest educational
+opportunity for the educable. We were too apt to patronise scholarship
+winners, as though a scholarship was toffee given as a reward for
+virtue. It wasn't any reward at all; it was an invitation to capacity.
+We had no more right to drag in virtue, or any merit but quality, than
+we had to involve it in a search for the tallest man. We didn't want a
+mere process for the selection of good as distinguished from gifted and
+able boys--"No, you DON'T," from Dayton--we wanted all the brilliant
+stuff in the world concentrated upon the development of the world.
+Just to exasperate Dayton further I put in a plea for gifts as against
+character in educational, artistic, and legislative work. "Good
+teaching," I said, "is better than good conduct. We are becoming idiotic
+about character."
+
+Dayton was too moved to speak. He slewed round upon me an eye of
+agonised aversion.
+
+I expatiated on the small proportion of the available ability that is
+really serving humanity to-day. "I suppose to-day all the thought, all
+the art, all the increments of knowledge that matter, are supplied so
+far as the English-speaking community is concerned by--how many?--by
+three or four thousand individuals. ('Less,' said Thorns.) To be
+more precise, by the mental hinterlands of three or four thousand
+individuals. We who know some of the band entertain no illusions as to
+their innate rarity. We know that they are just the few out of many, the
+few who got in our world of chance and confusion, the timely stimulus,
+the apt suggestion at the fortunate moment, the needed training, the
+leisure. The rest are lost in the crowd, fail through the defects of
+their qualities, become commonplace workmen and second-rate professional
+men, marry commonplace wives, are as much waste as the driftage of
+superfluous pollen in a pine forest is waste."
+
+"Decent honest lives!" said Dayton to his bread-crumbs, with his chin in
+his necktie. "WASTE!"
+
+"And the people who do get what we call opportunity get it usually
+in extremely limited and cramping forms. No man lives a life of
+intellectual productivity alone; he needs not only material and
+opportunity, but helpers, resonators. Round and about what I might
+call the REAL men, you want the sympathetic cooperators, who help by
+understanding. It isn't that our--SALT of three or four thousand is
+needlessly rare; it is sustained by far too small and undifferentiated a
+public. Most of the good men we know are not really doing the very
+best work of their gifts; nearly all are a little adapted, most are
+shockingly adapted to some second-best use. Now, I take it, this is the
+very centre and origin of the muddle, futility, and unhappiness that
+distresses us; it's the cardinal problem of the state--to discover,
+develop, and use the exceptional gifts of men. And I see that best
+done--I drift more and more away from the common stuff of legislative
+and administrative activity--by a quite revolutionary development of the
+educational machinery, but by a still more unprecedented attempt to
+keep science going, to keep literature going, and to keep what is
+the necessary spur of all science and literature, an intelligent and
+appreciative criticism going. You know none of these things have ever
+been kept going hitherto; they've come unexpectedly and inexplicably."
+
+"Hear, hear!" from Dayton, cough, nodding of the head, and an expression
+of mystical profundity.
+
+"They've lit up a civilisation and vanished, to give place to darkness
+again. Now the modern state doesn't mean to go back to darkness
+again--and so it's got to keep its light burning." I went on to attack
+the present organisation of our schools and universities, which
+seemed elaborately designed to turn the well-behaved, uncritical, and
+uncreative men of each generation into the authoritative leaders of the
+next, and I suggested remedies upon lines that I have already indicated
+in the earlier chapters of this story....
+
+So far I had the substance of the club with me, but I opened new
+ground and set Crupp agog by confessing my doubt from which party or
+combination of groups these developments of science and literature and
+educational organisation could most reasonably be expected. I looked up
+to find Crupp's dark little eye intent upon me.
+
+There I left it to them.
+
+We had an astonishingly good discussion; Neal burst once, but we emerged
+from his flood after a time, and Dayton had his interlude. The rest was
+all close, keen examination of my problem.
+
+I see Crupp now with his arm bent before him on the table in a way we
+had, as though it was jointed throughout its length like a lobster's
+antenna, his plump, short-fingered hand crushing up a walnut shell into
+smaller and smaller fragments. "Remington," he said, "has given us the
+data for a movement, a really possible movement. It's not only possible,
+but necessary--urgently necessary, I think, if the Empire is to go on."
+
+"We're working altogether too much at the social basement in education
+and training," said Gane. "Remington is right about our neglect of the
+higher levels."
+
+Britten made a good contribution with an analysis of what he called the
+spirit of a country and what made it. "The modern community needs its
+serious men to be artistic and its artists to be taken seriously," I
+remember his saying. "The day has gone by for either dull responsibility
+or merely witty art."
+
+I remember very vividly how Shoesmith harped on an idea I had thrown out
+of using some sort of review or weekly to express and elaborate these
+conceptions of a new, severer, aristocratic culture.
+
+"It would have to be done amazingly well," said Britten, and my mind
+went back to my school days and that ancient enterprise of ours, and how
+Cossington had rushed it. Well, Cossington had too many papers nowadays
+to interfere with us, and we perhaps had learnt some defensive devices.
+
+"But this thing has to be linked to some political party," said Crupp,
+with his eye on me. "You can't get away from that. The Liberals," he
+added, "have never done anything for research or literature."
+
+"They had a Royal Commission on the Dramatic Censorship," said Thorns,
+with a note of minute fairness. "It shows what they were made of," he
+added.
+
+"It's what I've told Remington again and again," said Crupp, "we've
+got to pick up the tradition of aristocracy, reorganise it, and make it
+work. But he's certainly suggested a method."
+
+"There won't be much aristocracy to pick up," said Dayton, darkly to the
+ceiling, "if the House of Lords throws out the Budget."
+
+"All the more reason for picking it up," said Neal. "For we can't do
+without it."
+
+"Will they go to the bad, or will they rise from the ashes, aristocrats
+indeed--if the Liberals come in overwhelmingly?" said Britten.
+
+"It's we who might decide that," said Crupp, insidiously.
+
+"I agree," said Gane.
+
+"No one can tell," said Thorns. "I doubt if they will get beaten."
+
+It was an odd, fragmentary discussion that night. We were all with ideas
+in our minds at once fine and imperfect. We threw out suggestions that
+showed themselves at once far inadequate, and we tried to qualify them
+by minor self-contradictions. Britten, I think, got more said than any
+one. "You all seem to think you want to organise people, particular
+groups and classes of individuals," he insisted. "It isn't that. That's
+the standing error of politicians. You want to organise a culture.
+Civilisation isn't a matter of concrete groupings; it's a matter of
+prevailing ideas. The problem is how to make bold, clear ideas prevail.
+The question for Remington and us is just what groups of people will
+most help this culture forward."
+
+"Yes, but how are the Lords going to behave?" said Crupp. "You yourself
+were asking that a little while ago."
+
+"If they win or if they lose," Gane maintained, "there will be a
+movement to reorganise aristocracy--Reform of the House of Lords,
+they'll call the political form of it."
+
+"Bailey thinks that," said some one.
+
+"The labour people want abolition," said some one. "Let 'em," said
+Thorns.
+
+He became audible, sketching a possibility of action.
+
+"Suppose all of us were able to work together. It's just one of those
+indeterminate, confused, eventful times ahead when a steady jet of ideas
+might produce enormous results."
+
+"Leave me out of it," said Dayton, "IF you please."
+
+"We should," said Thorns under his breath.
+
+I took up Crupp's initiative, I remember, and expanded it.
+
+"I believe we could do--extensive things," I insisted.
+
+"Revivals and revisions of Toryism have been tried so often," said
+Thorns, "from the Young England movement onward."
+
+"Not one but has produced its enduring effects," I said. "It's the
+peculiarity of English conservatism that it's persistently progressive
+and rejuvenescent."
+
+I think it must have been about that point that Dayton fled our
+presence, after some clumsy sentence that I decided upon reflection was
+intended to remind me of my duty to my party.
+
+Then I remember Thorns firing doubts at me obliquely across the table.
+"You can't run a country through its spoilt children," he said. "What
+you call aristocrats are really spoilt children. They've had too much of
+everything, except bracing experience."
+
+"Children can always be educated," said Crupp.
+
+"I said SPOILT children," said Thorns.
+
+"Look here, Thorns!" said I. "If this Budget row leads to a storm, and
+these big people get their power clipped, what's going to happen? Have
+you thought of that? When they go out lock, stock, and barrel, who comes
+in?"
+
+"Nature abhors a Vacuum," said Crupp, supporting me.
+
+"Bailey's trained officials," suggested Gane.
+
+"Quacks with a certificate of approval from Altiora," said Thorns. "I
+admit the horrors of the alternative. There'd be a massacre in three
+years."
+
+"One may go on trying possibilities for ever," I said. "One thing
+emerges. Whatever accidents happen, our civilisation needs, and almost
+consciously needs, a culture of fine creative minds, and all the
+necessary tolerances, opennesses, considerations, that march with that.
+For my own part, I think that is the Most Vital Thing. Build your ship
+of state as you will; get your men as you will; I concentrate on what is
+clearly the affair of my sort of man,--I want to ensure the quality of
+the quarter deck."
+
+"Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, suddenly--his first remark for a long
+time. "A first-rate figure," said Shoesmith, gripping it.
+
+"Our danger is in missing that," I went on. "Muddle isn't ended by
+transferring power from the muddle-headed few to the muddle-headed
+many, and then cheating the many out of it again in the interests of
+a bureaucracy of sham experts. But that seems the limit of the liberal
+imagination. There is no real progress in a country, except a rise
+in the level of its free intellectual activity. All other progress is
+secondary and dependant. If you take on Bailey's dreams of efficient
+machinery and a sort of fanatical discipline with no free-moving brains
+behind it, confused ugliness becomes rigid ugliness,--that's all.
+No doubt things are moving from looseness to discipline, and from
+irresponsible controls to organised controls--and also and rather
+contrariwise everything is becoming as people say, democratised; but
+all the more need in that, for an ark in which the living element may be
+saved."
+
+"Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, faint but pursuing.
+
+It must have been in my house afterwards that Shoesmith became
+noticeable. He seemed trying to say something vague and difficult that
+he didn't get said at all on that occasion. "We could do immense things
+with a weekly," he repeated, echoing Neal, I think. And there he left
+off and became a mute expressiveness, and it was only afterwards, when I
+was in bed, that I saw we had our capitalist in our hands....
+
+We parted that night on my doorstep in a tremendous glow--but in that
+sort of glow one doesn't act upon without much reconsideration, and it
+was some months before I made my decision to follow up the indications
+of that opening talk.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+I find my thoughts lingering about the Pentagram Circle. In my
+developments it played a large part, not so much by starting new trains
+of thought as by confirming the practicability of things I had already
+hesitatingly entertained. Discussion with these other men so prominently
+involved in current affairs endorsed views that otherwise would have
+seemed only a little less remote from actuality than the guardians of
+Plato or the labour laws of More. Among other questions that were never
+very distant from our discussions, that came apt to every topic, was
+the true significance of democracy, Tariff Reform as a method of
+international hostility, and the imminence of war. On the first issue
+I can still recall little Bailey, glib and winking, explaining that
+democracy was really just a dodge for getting assent to the ordinances
+of the expert official by means of the polling booth. "If they don't
+like things," said he, "they can vote for the opposition candidate
+and see what happens then--and that, you see, is why we don't want
+proportional representation to let in the wild men." I opened my
+eyes--the lids had dropped for a moment under the caress of those smooth
+sounds--to see if Bailey's artful forefinger wasn't at the side of his
+predominant nose.
+
+The international situation exercised us greatly. Our meetings were
+pervaded by the feeling that all things moved towards a day of
+reckoning with Germany, and I was largely instrumental in keeping up
+the suggestion that India was in a state of unstable equilibrium, that
+sooner or later something must happen there--something very serious to
+our Empire. Dayton frankly detested these topics. He was full of
+that old Middle Victorian persuasion that whatever is inconvenient or
+disagreeable to the English mind could be annihilated by not thinking
+about it. He used to sit low in his chair and look mulish. "Militarism,"
+he would declare in a tone of the utmost moral fervour, "is a curse.
+It's an unmitigated curse." Then he would cough shortly and twitch his
+head back and frown, and seem astonished beyond measure that after this
+conclusive statement we could still go on talking of war.
+
+All our Imperialists were obsessed by the thought of international
+conflict, and their influence revived for a time those uneasinesses that
+had been aroused in me for the first time by my continental journey
+with Willersley and by Meredith's "One of Our Conquerors." That
+quite justifiable dread of a punishment for all the slackness, mental
+dishonesty, presumption, mercenary respectability and sentimentalised
+commercialism of the Victorian period, at the hands of the better
+organised, more vigorous, and now far more highly civilised peoples
+of Central Europe, seemed to me to have both a good and bad series of
+consequences. It seemed the only thing capable of bracing English minds
+to education, sustained constructive effort and research; but on the
+other hand it produced the quality of a panic, hasty preparation,
+impatience of thought, a wasteful and sometimes quite futile immediacy.
+In 1909, for example, there was a vast clamour for eight additional
+Dreadnoughts--
+
+     "We want eight
+      And we won't wait,"
+
+but no clamour at all about our national waste of inventive talent, our
+mean standard of intellectual attainment, our disingenuous criticism,
+and the consequent failure to distinguish men of the quality needed to
+carry on the modern type of war. Almost universally we have the wrong
+men in our places of responsibility and the right men in no place
+at all, almost universally we have poorly qualified, hesitating, and
+resentful subordinates, because our criticism is worthless and, so
+habitually as to be now almost unconsciously, dishonest. Germany is
+beating England in every matter upon which competition is possible,
+because she attended sedulously to her collective mind for sixty
+pregnant years, because in spite of tremendous defects she is still far
+more anxious for quality in achievement than we are. I remember saying
+that in my paper. From that, I remember, I went on to an image that had
+flashed into my mind. "The British Empire," I said, "is like some of
+those early vertebrated monsters, the Brontosaurus and the Atlantosaurus
+and such-like; it sacrifices intellect to character; its backbone,
+that is to say,--especially in the visceral region--is bigger than its
+cranium. It's no accident that things are so. We've worked for backbone.
+We brag about backbone, and if the joints are anchylosed so much the
+better. We're still but only half awake to our error. You can't change
+that suddenly."
+
+"Turn it round and make it go backwards," interjected Thorns.
+
+"It's trying to do that," I said, "in places."
+
+And afterwards Crupp declared I had begotten a nightmare which haunted
+him of nights; he was trying desperately and belatedly to blow a brain
+as one blows soap-bubbles on such a mezoroic saurian as I had conjured
+up, while the clumsy monster's fate, all teeth and brains, crept nearer
+and nearer....
+
+I've grown, I think, since those days out of the urgency of that
+apprehension. I still think a European war, and conceivably a very
+humiliating war for England, may occur at no very distant date, but I
+do not think there is any such heroic quality in our governing class
+as will make that war catastrophic. The prevailing spirit in English
+life--it is one of the essential secrets of our imperial endurance--is
+one of underbred aggression in prosperity and diplomatic compromise in
+moments of danger; we bully haughtily where we can and assimilate where
+we must. It is not for nothing that our upper and middle-class youth is
+educated by teachers of the highest character, scholars and gentlemen,
+men who can pretend quite honestly that Darwinism hasn't upset the
+historical fall of man, that cricket is moral training, and that
+Socialism is an outrage upon the teachings of Christ. A sort of
+dignified dexterity of evasion is the national reward. Germany, with a
+larger population, a vigorous and irreconcilable proletariat, a bolder
+intellectual training, a harsher spirit, can scarcely fail to drive us
+at last to a realisation of intolerable strain. So we may never fight at
+all. The war of preparations that has been going on for thirty years may
+end like a sham-fight at last in an umpire's decision. We shall proudly
+but very firmly take the second place. For my own part, since I love
+England as much as I detest her present lethargy of soul, I pray for a
+chastening war--I wouldn't mind her flag in the dirt if only her spirit
+would come out of it. So I was able to shake off that earlier fear of
+some final and irrevocable destruction truncating all my schemes. At the
+most, a European war would be a dramatic episode in the reconstruction I
+had in view.
+
+In India, too, I no longer foresee, as once I was inclined to
+see, disaster. The English rule in India is surely one of the most
+extraordinary accidents that has ever happened in history. We are there
+like a man who has fallen off a ladder on to the neck of an elephant,
+and doesn't know what to do or how to get down. Until something happens
+he remains. Our functions in India are absurd. We English do not own
+that country, do not even rule it. We make nothing happen; at the most
+we prevent things happening. We suppress our own literature there. Most
+English people cannot even go to this land they possess; the authorities
+would prevent it. If Messrs. Perowne or Cook organised a cheap tour
+of Manchester operatives, it would be stopped. No one dare bring the
+average English voter face to face with the reality of India, or let
+the Indian native have a glimpse of the English voter. In my time I
+have talked to English statesmen, Indian officials and ex-officials,
+viceroys, soldiers, every one who might be supposed to know what India
+signifies, and I have prayed them to tell me what they thought we were
+up to there. I am not writing without my book in these matters. And
+beyond a phrase or so about "even-handed justice"--and look at our
+sedition trials!--they told me nothing. Time after time I have heard
+of that apocryphal native ruler in the north-west, who, when asked what
+would happen if we left India, replied that in a week his men would be
+in the saddle, and in six months not a rupee nor a virgin would be left
+in Lower Bengal. That is always given as our conclusive justification.
+But is it our business to preserve the rupees and virgins of Lower
+Bengal in a sort of magic inconclusiveness? Better plunder than
+paralysis, better fire and sword than futility. Our flag is spread over
+the peninsula, without plans, without intentions--a vast preventive.
+The sum total of our policy is to arrest any discussion, any conferences
+that would enable the Indians to work out a tolerable scheme of the
+future for themselves. But that does not arrest the resentment of men
+held back from life. Consider what it must be for the educated Indian
+sitting at the feast of contemporary possibilities with his mouth gagged
+and his hands bound behind him! The spirit of insurrection breaks out
+in spite of espionage and seizures. Our conflict for inaction develops
+stupendous absurdities. The other day the British Empire was taking off
+and examining printed cotton stomach wraps for seditious emblems and
+inscriptions....
+
+In some manner we shall have to come out of India. We have had our
+chance, and we have demonstrated nothing but the appalling dulness of
+our national imagination. We are not good enough to do anything with
+India. Codger and Flack, and Gates and Dayton, Cladingbowl in the club,
+and the HOME CHURCHMAN in the home, cant about "character," worship
+of strenuous force and contempt of truth; for the sake of such men and
+things as these, we must abandon in fact, if not in appearance, that
+empty domination. Had we great schools and a powerful teaching, could we
+boast great men, had we the spirit of truth and creation in our lives,
+then indeed it might be different. But a race that bears a sceptre must
+carry gifts to justify it.
+
+It does not follow that we shall be driven catastrophically from India.
+That was my earlier mistake. We are not proud enough in our bones to be
+ruined by India as Spain was by her empire. We may be able to abandon
+India with an air of still remaining there. It is our new method. We
+train our future rulers in the public schools to have a very wholesome
+respect for strength, and as soon as a power arises in India in spite of
+us, be it a man or a culture, or a native state, we shall be willing to
+deal with it. We may or may not have a war, but our governing class will
+be quick to learn when we are beaten. Then they will repeat our South
+African diplomacy, and arrange for some settlement that will abandon
+the reality, such as it is, and preserve the semblance of power. The
+conqueror DE FACTO will become the new "loyal Briton," and the democracy
+at home will be invited to celebrate our recession--triumphantly. I am
+no believer in the imminent dissolution of our Empire; I am less and
+less inclined to see in either India or Germany the probability of an
+abrupt truncation of those slow intellectual and moral constructions
+which are the essentials of statecraft.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+I sit writing in this little loggia to the sound of dripping water--this
+morning we had rain, and the roof of our little casa is still not dry,
+there are pools in the rocks under the sweet chestnuts, and the torrent
+that crosses the salita is full and boastful,--and I try to recall the
+order of my impressions during that watching, dubious time, before I
+went over to the Conservative Party. I was trying--chaotic task--to
+gauge the possibilities inherent in the quality of the British
+aristocracy. There comes a broad spectacular effect of wide parks,
+diversified by woods and bracken valleys, and dappled with deer; of
+great smooth lawns shaded by ancient trees; of big facades of sunlit
+buildings dominating the country side; of large fine rooms full of
+handsome, easy-mannered people. As a sort of representative picture to
+set off against those other pictures of Liberals and of Socialists I
+have given, I recall one of those huge assemblies the Duchess of Clynes
+inaugurated at Stamford House. The place itself is one of the vastest
+private houses in London, a huge clustering mass of white and gold
+saloons with polished floors and wonderful pictures, and staircases and
+galleries on a Gargantuan scale. And there she sought to gather all
+that was most representative of English activities, and did, in fact, in
+those brilliant nocturnal crowds, get samples of nearly every section
+of our social and intellectual life, with a marked predominance upon the
+political and social side.
+
+I remember sitting in one of the recesses at the end of the big saloon
+with Mrs. Redmondson, one of those sharp-minded, beautiful rich women
+one meets so often in London, who seem to have done nothing and to be
+capable of everything, and we watched the crowd--uniforms and splendours
+were streaming in from a State ball--and exchanged information. I told
+her about the politicians and intellectuals, and she told me about the
+aristocrats, and we sharpened our wit on them and counted the percentage
+of beautiful people among the latter, and wondered if the general effect
+of tallness was or was not an illusion.
+
+They were, we agreed, for the most part bigger than the average of
+people in London, and a handsome lot, even when they were not subtly
+individualised. "They look so well nurtured," I said, "well cared for.
+I like their quiet, well-trained movements, their pleasant consideration
+for each other."
+
+"Kindly, good tempered, and at bottom utterly selfish," she said, "like
+big, rather carefully trained, rather pampered children. What else can
+you expect from them?"
+
+"They are good tempered, anyhow," I witnessed, "and that's an
+achievement. I don't think I could ever be content under a bad-tempered,
+sentimentalism, strenuous Government. That's why I couldn't stand the
+Roosevelt REGIME in America. One's chief surprise when one comes across
+these big people for the first time is their admirable easiness and
+a real personal modesty. I confess I admire them. Oh! I like them.
+I wouldn't at all mind, I believe, giving over the country to this
+aristocracy--given SOMETHING--"
+
+"Which they haven't got."
+
+"Which they haven't got--or they'd be the finest sort of people in the
+world."
+
+"That something?" she inquired.
+
+"I don't know. I've been puzzling my wits to know. They've done all
+sorts of things--"
+
+"That's Lord Wrassleton," she interrupted, "whose leg was broken--you
+remember?--at Spion Kop."
+
+"It's healed very well. I like the gold lace and the white glove
+resting, with quite a nice awkwardness, on the sword. When I was a
+little boy I wanted to wear clothes like that. And the stars! He's got
+the V. C. Most of these people here have at any rate shown pluck, you
+know--brought something off."
+
+"Not quite enough," she suggested.
+
+"I think that's it," I said. "Not quite enough--not quite hard enough,"
+I added.
+
+She laughed and looked at me. "You'd like to make us," she said.
+
+"What?"
+
+"Hard."
+
+"I don't think you'll go on if you don't get hard."
+
+"We shan't be so pleasant if we do."
+
+"Well, there my puzzled wits come in again. I don't see why an
+aristocracy shouldn't be rather hard trained, and yet kindly. I'm not
+convinced that the resources of education are exhausted. I want to
+better this, because it already looks so good."
+
+"How are we to do it?" asked Mrs. Redmondson.
+
+"Oh, there you have me! I've been spending my time lately in trying to
+answer that! It makes me quarrel with"--I held up my fingers and ticked
+the items off--"the public schools, the private tutors, the army exams,
+the Universities, the Church, the general attitude of the country
+towards science and literature--"
+
+"We all do," said Mrs. Redmondson. "We can't begin again at the
+beginning," she added.
+
+"Couldn't one," I nodded at the assembly in general, start a movement?
+
+"There's the Confederates," she said, with a faint smile that masked a
+gleam of curiosity.... "You want," she said, "to say to the aristocracy,
+'Be aristocrats. NOBLESSE OBLIGE.' Do you remember what happened to the
+monarch who was told to 'Be a King'?"
+
+"Well," I said, "I want an aristocracy."
+
+"This," she said, smiling, "is the pick of them. The backwoodsmen are
+off the stage. These are the brilliant ones--the smart and the blues....
+They cost a lot of money, you know."
+
+So far Mrs. Redmondson, but the picture remained full of things not
+stated in our speech. They were on the whole handsome people, charitable
+minded, happy, and easy. They led spacious lives, and there was
+something free and fearless about their bearing that I liked extremely.
+The women particularly were wide-reading, fine-thinking. Mrs. Redmondson
+talked as fully and widely and boldly as a man, and with those flashes
+of intuition, those startling, sudden delicacies of perception few men
+display. I liked, too, the relations that held between women and men,
+their general tolerance, their antagonism to the harsh jealousies that
+are the essence of the middle-class order....
+
+After all, if one's aim resolved itself into the development of a type
+and culture of men, why shouldn't one begin at this end?
+
+It is very easy indeed to generalise about a class or human beings, but
+much harder to produce a sample. Was old Lady Forthundred, for instance,
+fairly a sample? I remember her as a smiling, magnificent presence, a
+towering accumulation of figure and wonderful shimmering blue silk and
+black lace and black hair, and small fine features and chins and chins
+and chins, disposed in a big cane chair with wraps and cushions upon the
+great terrace of Champneys. Her eye was blue and hard, and her accent
+and intonation were exactly what you would expect from a rather
+commonplace dressmaker pretending to be aristocratic. I was, I am
+afraid, posing a little as the intelligent but respectful inquirer from
+below investigating the great world, and she was certainly posing as my
+informant. She affected a cynical coarseness. She developed a theory on
+the governance of England, beautifully frank and simple. "Give 'um all
+a peerage when they get twenty thousand a year," she maintained. "That's
+my remedy."
+
+In my new role of theoretical aristocrat I felt a little abashed.
+
+"Twenty thousand," she repeated with conviction.
+
+It occurred to me that I was in the presence of the aristocratic
+theory currently working as distinguished from my as yet unformulated
+intentions.
+
+"You'll get a lot of loafers and scamps among 'um," said Lady
+Forthundred. "You get loafers and scamps everywhere, but you'll get a
+lot of men who'll work hard to keep things together, and that's what
+we're all after, isn't ut?
+
+"It's not an ideal arrangement."
+
+"Tell me anything better," said Lady Forthundred.
+
+On the whole, and because she refused emphatically to believe in
+education, Lady Forthundred scored.
+
+We had been discussing Cossington's recent peerage, for Cossington, my
+old schoolfellow at City Merchants', and my victor in the affair of
+the magazine, had clambered to an amazing wealth up a piled heap of
+energetically pushed penny and halfpenny magazines, and a group of
+daily newspapers. I had expected to find the great lady hostile to the
+new-comer, but she accepted him, she gloried in him.
+
+"We're a peerage," she said, "but none of us have ever had any nonsense
+about nobility."
+
+She turned and smiled down on me. "We English," she said, "are a
+practical people. We assimilate 'um."
+
+"Then, I suppose, they don't give trouble?"
+
+"Then they don't give trouble."
+
+"They learn to shoot?"
+
+"And all that," said Lady Forthundred. "Yes. And things go on. Sometimes
+better than others, but they go on--somehow. It depends very much on the
+sort of butler who pokes 'um about."
+
+I suggested that it might be possible to get a secure twenty thousand a
+year by at least detrimental methods--socially speaking.
+
+"We must take the bad and the good of 'um," said Lady Forthundred,
+courageously....
+
+Now, was she a sample? It happened she talked. What was there in the
+brains of the multitude of her first, second, third, fourth, and fifth
+cousins, who didn't talk, who shone tall, and bearing themselves finely,
+against a background of deft, attentive maids and valets, on every
+spacious social scene? How did things look to them?
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+Side by side with Lady Forthundred, it is curious to put Evesham with
+his tall, bent body, his little-featured almost elvish face, his unequal
+mild brown eyes, his gentle manner, his sweet, amazing oratory. He led
+all these people wonderfully. He was always curious and interested about
+life, wary beneath a pleasing frankness--and I tormented my brain to get
+to the bottom of him. For a long time he was the most powerful man in
+England under the throne; he had the Lords in his hand, and a great
+majority in the Commons, and the discontents and intrigues that are the
+concomitants of an overwhelming party advantage broke against him as
+waves break against a cliff. He foresaw so far in these matters that it
+seemed he scarcely troubled to foresee. He brought political art to
+the last triumph of naturalness. Always for me he has been the typical
+aristocrat, so typical and above the mere forms of aristocracy, that he
+remained a commoner to the end of his days.
+
+I had met him at the beginning of my career; he read some early papers
+of mine, and asked to see me, and I conceived a flattered liking for him
+that strengthened to a very strong feeling indeed. He seemed to me to
+stand alone without an equal, the greatest man in British political
+life. Some men one sees through and understands, some one cannot see
+into or round because they are of opaque clay, but about Evesham I had a
+sense of things hidden as it were by depth and mists, because he was so
+big and atmospheric a personality. No other contemporary has had that
+effect upon me. I've sat beside him at dinners, stayed in houses with
+him--he was in the big house party at Champneys--talked to him,
+sounded him, watching him as I sat beside him. I could talk to him with
+extraordinary freedom and a rare sense of being understood. Other men
+have to be treated in a special manner; approached through their own
+mental dialect, flattered by a minute regard for what they have said and
+done. Evesham was as widely and charitably receptive as any man I have
+ever met. The common politicians beside him seemed like rows of stuffy
+little rooms looking out upon the sea.
+
+And what was he up to? What did HE think we were doing with Mankind?
+That I thought worth knowing.
+
+I remember his talking on one occasion at the Hartsteins', at a dinner
+so tremendously floriferous and equipped that we were almost forced into
+duologues, about the possible common constructive purpose in politics.
+
+"I feel so much," he said, "that the best people in every party
+converge. We don't differ at Westminster as they do in the country
+towns. There's a sort of extending common policy that goes on under
+every government, because on the whole it's the right thing to do, and
+people know it. Things that used to be matters of opinion become matters
+of science--and cease to be party questions."
+
+He instanced education.
+
+"Apart," said I, "from the religious question."
+
+"Apart from the religious question."
+
+He dropped that aspect with an easy grace, and went on with his general
+theme that political conflict was the outcome of uncertainty. "Directly
+you get a thing established, so that people can say, 'Now this is
+Right,' with the same conviction that people can say water is a
+combination of oxygen and hydrogen, there's no more to be said. The
+thing has to be done...."
+
+And to put against this effect of Evesham, broad and humanely tolerant,
+posing as the minister of a steadily developing constructive conviction,
+there are other memories.
+
+Have I not seen him in the House, persistent, persuasive, indefatigable,
+and by all my standards wickedly perverse, leaning over the table with
+those insistent movements of his hand upon it, or swaying forward with
+a grip upon his coat lapel, fighting with a diabolical skill to preserve
+what are in effect religious tests, tests he must have known would
+outrage and humiliate and injure the consciences of a quarter--and that
+perhaps the best quarter--of the youngsters who come to the work of
+elementary education?
+
+In playing for points in the game of party advantage Evesham displayed
+at times a quite wicked unscrupulousness in the use of his subtle mind.
+I would sit on the Liberal benches and watch him, and listen to his
+urbane voice, fascinated by him. Did he really care? Did anything matter
+to him? And if it really mattered nothing, why did he trouble to serve
+the narrowness and passion of his side? Or did he see far beyond my
+scope, so that this petty iniquity was justified by greater, remoter
+ends of which I had no intimation?
+
+They accused him of nepotism. His friends and family were certainly well
+cared for. In private life he was full of an affectionate intimacy; he
+pleased by being charmed and pleased. One might think at times there was
+no more of him than a clever man happily circumstanced, and finding an
+interest and occupation in politics. And then came a glimpse of thought,
+of imagination, like the sight of a soaring eagle through a staircase
+skylight. Oh, beyond question he was great! No other contemporary
+politician had his quality. In no man have I perceived so
+sympathetically the great contrast between warm, personal things and the
+white dream of statecraft. Except that he had it seemed no hot passions,
+but only interests and fine affections and indolences, he paralleled the
+conflict of my life. He saw and thought widely and deeply; but at times
+it seemed to me his greatness stood over and behind the reality of his
+life, like some splendid servant, thinking his own thoughts, who waits
+behind a lesser master's chair....
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+Of course, when Evesham talked of this ideal of the organised state
+becoming so finely true to practicability and so clearly stated as to
+have the compelling conviction of physical science, he spoke quite after
+my heart. Had he really embodied the attempt to realise that, I could
+have done no more than follow him blindly. But neither he nor I embodied
+that, and there lies the gist of my story. And when it came to a study
+of others among the leading Tories and Imperialists the doubt increased,
+until with some at last it was possible to question whether they had any
+imaginative conception of constructive statecraft at all; whether they
+didn't opaquely accept the world for what it was, and set themselves
+single-mindedly to make a place for themselves and cut a figure in it.
+
+There were some very fine personalities among them: there were the great
+peers who had administered Egypt, India, South Africa, Framboya--Cromer,
+Kitchener, Curzon, Milner, Gane, for example. So far as that easier
+task of holding sword and scales had gone, they had shown the finest
+qualities, but they had returned to the perplexing and exacting problem
+of the home country, a little glorious, a little too simply bold. They
+wanted to arm and they wanted to educate, but the habit of immediate
+necessity made them far more eager to arm than to educate, and their
+experience of heterogeneous controls made them overrate the need for
+obedience in a homogeneous country. They didn't understand raw men,
+ill-trained men, uncertain minds, and intelligent women; and these are
+the things that matter in England.... There were also the great business
+adventurers, from Cranber to Cossington (who was now Lord Paddockhurst).
+My mind remained unsettled, and went up and down the scale between
+a belief in their far-sighted purpose and the perception of crude
+vanities, coarse ambitions, vulgar competitiveness, and a mere habitual
+persistence in the pursuit of gain. For a time I saw a good deal of
+Cossington--I wish I had kept a diary of his talk and gestures, to mark
+how he could vary from day to day between a POSEUR, a smart tradesman,
+and a very bold and wide-thinking political schemer. He had a vanity
+of sweeping actions, motor car pounces, Napoleonic rushes, that led to
+violent ineffectual changes in the policy of his papers, and a haunting
+pursuit by parallel columns in the liberal press that never abashed him
+in the slightest degree. By an accident I plumbed the folly in him--but
+I feel I never plumbed his wisdom. I remember him one day after a lunch
+at the Barhams' saying suddenly, out of profound meditation over the end
+of a cigar, one of those sentences that seem to light the whole interior
+being of a man. "Some day," he said softly, rather to himself than to
+me, and A PROPOS of nothing--"some day I will raise the country."
+
+"Why not?" I said, after a pause, and leant across him for the little
+silver spirit-lamp, to light my cigarette....
+
+Then the Tories had for another section the ancient creations, and again
+there were the financial peers, men accustomed to reserve, and their big
+lawyers, accustomed to--well, qualified statement. And below the giant
+personalities of the party were the young bloods, young, adventurous men
+of the type of Lord Tarvrille, who had seen service in South Africa,
+who had travelled and hunted; explorers, keen motorists, interested
+in aviation, active in army organisation. Good, brown-faced stuff they
+were, but impervious to ideas outside the range of their activities,
+more ignorant of science than their chauffeurs, and of the quality
+of English people than welt-politicians; contemptuous of school and
+university by reason of the Gateses and Flacks and Codgers who had come
+their way, witty, light-hearted, patriotic at the Kipling level, with
+a certain aptitude for bullying. They varied in insensible gradations
+between the noble sportsmen on the one hand, and men like Gane and the
+Tories of our Pentagram club on the other. You perceive how a man
+might exercise his mind in the attempt to strike an average of public
+serviceability in this miscellany! And mixed up with these, mixed up
+sometimes in the same man, was the pure reactionary, whose predominant
+idea was that the village schools should confine themselves to teaching
+the catechism, hat-touching and courtesying, and be given a holiday
+whenever beaters were in request....
+
+I find now in my mind as a sort of counterpoise to Evesham the figure
+of old Lord Wardingham, asleep in the largest armchair in the library
+of Stamford Court after lunch. One foot rested on one of those things--I
+think they are called gout stools. He had been playing golf all the
+morning and wearied a weak instep; at lunch he had sat at my table and
+talked in the overbearing manner permitted to irascible important men
+whose insteps are painful. Among other things he had flouted the idea
+that women would ever understand statecraft or be more than a nuisance
+in politics, denied flatly that Hindoos were capable of anything
+whatever except excesses in population, regretted he could not
+censor picture galleries and circulating libraries, and declared that
+dissenters were people who pretended to take theology seriously with the
+express purpose of upsetting the entirely satisfactory compromise of the
+Established Church. "No sensible people, with anything to gain or lose,
+argue about religion," he said. "They mean mischief." Having delivered
+his soul upon these points, and silenced the little conversation to the
+left of him from which they had arisen, he became, after an appreciative
+encounter with a sanguinary woodcock, more amiable, responded to some
+respectful initiatives of Crupp's, and related a number of classical
+anecdotes of those blighting snubs, vindictive retorts and scandalous
+miscarriages of justice that are so dear to the forensic mind. Now he
+reposed. He was breathing heavily with his mouth a little open and his
+head on one side. One whisker was turned back against the comfortable
+padding. His plump strong hands gripped the arms of his chair, and his
+frown was a little assuaged. How tremendously fed up he looked! Honours,
+wealth, influence, respect, he had them all. How scornful and hard it
+had made his unguarded expression!
+
+I note without comment that it didn't even occur to me then to wake him
+up and ask him what HE was up to with mankind.
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+One countervailing influence to my drift to Toryism in those days was
+Margaret's quite religious faith in the Liberals. I realised that slowly
+and with a mild astonishment. It set me, indeed, even then questioning
+my own change of opinion. We came at last incidentally, as our way was,
+to an exchange of views. It was as nearly a quarrel as we had before
+I came over to the Conservative side. It was at Champneys, and I think
+during the same visit that witnessed my exploration of Lady Forthundred.
+It arose indirectly, I think, out of some comments of mine upon our
+fellow-guests, but it is one of those memories of which the scene and
+quality remain more vivid than the things said, a memory without any
+very definite beginning or end. It was afternoon, in the pause between
+tea and the dressing bell, and we were in Margaret's big silver-adorned,
+chintz-bright room, looking out on the trim Italian garden.... Yes, the
+beginning of it has escaped me altogether, but I remember it as an odd
+exceptional little wrangle.
+
+At first we seem to have split upon the moral quality of the
+aristocracy, and I had an odd sense that in some way too feminine for
+me to understand our hostess had aggrieved her. She said, I know, that
+Champneys distressed her; made her "eager for work and reality again."
+
+"But aren't these people real?"
+
+"They're so superficial, so extravagant!"
+
+I said I was not shocked by their unreality. They seemed the least
+affected people I had ever met. "And are they really so extravagant?"
+I asked, and put it to her that her dresses cost quite as much as any
+other woman's in the house.
+
+"It's not only their dresses," Margaret parried. "It's the scale and
+spirit of things."
+
+I questioned that. "They're cynical," said Margaret, staring before her
+out of the window.
+
+I challenged her, and she quoted the Brabants, about whom there had
+been an ancient scandal. She'd heard of it from Altiora, and it was also
+Altiora who'd given her a horror of Lord Carnaby, who was also with us.
+"You know his reputation," said Margaret. "That Normandy girl. Every
+one knows about it. I shiver when I look at him. He seems--oh! like
+something not of OUR civilisation. He WILL come and say little things to
+me."
+
+"Offensive things?"
+
+"No, politenesses and things. Of course his manners are--quite right.
+That only makes it worse, I think. It shows he might have helped--all
+that happened. I do all I can to make him see I don't like him. But none
+of the others make the slightest objection to him."
+
+"Perhaps these people imagine something might be said for him."
+
+"That's just it," said Margaret.
+
+"Charity," I suggested.
+
+"I don't like that sort of toleration."
+
+I was oddly annoyed. "Like eating with publicans and sinners," I said.
+"No!..."
+
+But scandals, and the contempt for rigid standards their condonation
+displayed, weren't more than the sharp edge of the trouble. "It's their
+whole position, their selfish predominance, their class conspiracy
+against the mass of people," said Margaret. "When I sit at dinner
+in that splendid room, with its glitter and white reflections and
+candlelight, and its flowers and its wonderful service and its
+candelabra of solid gold, I seem to feel the slums and the mines and the
+over-crowded cottages stuffed away under the table."
+
+I reminded Margaret that she was not altogether innocent of unearned
+increment.
+
+"But aren't we doing our best to give it back?" she said.
+
+I was moved to question her. "Do you really think," I asked, "that the
+Tories and peers and rich people are to blame for social injustice as we
+have it to-day? Do you really see politics as a struggle of light on the
+Liberal side against darkness on the Tory?"
+
+"They MUST know," said Margaret.
+
+I found myself questioning that. I see now that to Margaret it must have
+seemed the perversest carping against manifest things, but at the time
+I was concentrated simply upon the elucidation of her view and my own; I
+wanted to get at her conception in the sharpest, hardest lines that were
+possible. It was perfectly clear that she saw Toryism as the diabolical
+element in affairs. The thing showed in its hopeless untruth all the
+clearer for the fine, clean emotion with which she gave it out to me.
+My sleeping peer in the library at Stamford Court and Evesham talking
+luminously behind the Hartstein flowers embodied the devil, and my
+replete citizen sucking at his cigar in the National Liberal Club,
+Willie Crampton discussing the care and management of the stomach over
+a specially hygienic lemonade, and Dr. Tumpany in his aggressive
+frock-coat pegging out a sort of copyright in Socialism, were the centre
+and wings of the angelic side. It was nonsense. But how was I to put the
+truth to her?
+
+"I don't see things at all as you do," I said. "I don't see things in
+the same way."
+
+"Think of the poor," said Margaret, going off at a tangent.
+
+"Think of every one," I said. "We Liberals have done more mischief
+through well-intentioned benevolence than all the selfishness in the
+world could have done. We built up the liquor interest."
+
+"WE!" cried Margaret. "How can you say that? It's against us."
+
+"Naturally. But we made it a monopoly in our clumsy efforts to prevent
+people drinking what they liked, because it interfered with industrial
+regularity--"
+
+"Oh!" cried Margaret, stung; and I could see she thought I was talking
+mere wickedness.
+
+"That's it," I said.
+
+"But would you have people drink whatever they pleased?"
+
+"Certainly. What right have I to dictate to other men and women?"
+
+"But think of the children!"
+
+"Ah! there you have the folly of modern Liberalism, its half-cunning,
+half-silly way of getting at everything in a roundabout fashion. If
+neglecting children is an offence, and it IS an offence, then deal
+with it as such, but don't go badgering and restricting people who sell
+something that may possibly in some cases lead to a neglect of children.
+If drunkenness is an offence, punish it, but don't punish a man for
+selling honest drink that perhaps after all won't make any one drunk at
+all. Don't intensify the viciousness of the public-house by assuming the
+place isn't fit for women and children. That's either spite or folly.
+Make the public-house FIT for women and children. Make it a real
+public-house. If we Liberals go on as we are going, we shall presently
+want to stop the sale of ink and paper because those things tempt men
+to forgery. We do already threaten the privacy of the post because of
+betting tout's letters. The drift of all that kind of thing is narrow,
+unimaginative, mischievous, stupid...."
+
+I stopped short and walked to the window and surveyed a pretty fountain,
+facsimile of one in Verona, amidst trim-cut borderings of yew. Beyond,
+and seen between the stems of ilex trees, was a great blaze of yellow
+flowers....
+
+"But prevention," I heard Margaret behind me, "is the essence of our
+work."
+
+I turned. "There's no prevention but education. There's no antiseptics
+in life but love and fine thinking. Make people fine, make fine people.
+Don't be afraid. These Tory leaders are better people individually
+than the average; why cast them for the villains of the piece? The
+real villain in the piece--in the whole human drama--is the
+muddle-headedness, and it matters very little if it's virtuous-minded or
+wicked. I want to get at muddle-headedness. If I could do that I could
+let all that you call wickedness in the world run about and do what
+it jolly well pleased. It would matter about as much as a slightly
+neglected dog--in an otherwise well-managed home."
+
+My thoughts had run away with me.
+
+"I can't understand you," said Margaret, in the profoundest distress. "I
+can't understand how it is you are coming to see things like this."
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+The moods of a thinking man in politics are curiously evasive and
+difficult to describe. Neither the public nor the historian will permit
+the statesman moods. He has from the first to assume he has an Aim, a
+definite Aim, and to pretend to an absolute consistency with that. Those
+subtle questionings about the very fundamentals of life which plague us
+all so relentlessly nowadays are supposed to be silenced. He lifts his
+chin and pursues his Aim explicitly in the sight of all men. Those
+who have no real political experience can scarcely imagine the immense
+mental and moral strain there is between one's everyday acts and
+utterances on the one hand and the "thinking-out" process on the other.
+It is perplexingly difficult to keep in your mind, fixed and firm, a
+scheme essentially complex, to keep balancing a swaying possibility
+while at the same time under jealous, hostile, and stupid observation
+you tread your part in the platitudinous, quarrelsome, ill-presented
+march of affairs....
+
+The most impossible of all autobiographies is an intellectual
+autobiography. I have thrown together in the crudest way the elements
+of the problem I struggled with, but I can give no record of the subtle
+details; I can tell nothing of the long vacillations between Protean
+values, the talks and re-talks, the meditations, the bleak lucidities of
+sleepless nights....
+
+And yet these things I have struggled with must be thought out, and, to
+begin with, they must be thought out in this muddled, experimenting way.
+To go into a study to think about statecraft is to turn your back on the
+realities you are constantly needing to feel and test and sound if your
+thinking is to remain vital; to choose an aim and pursue it in despite
+of all subsequent questionings is to bury the talent of your mind. It
+is no use dealing with the intricate as though it were simple, to leap
+haphazard at the first course of action that presents itself; the whole
+world of politicians is far too like a man who snatches a poker to a
+failing watch. It is easy to say he wants to "get something done," but
+the only sane thing to do for the moment is to put aside that poker and
+take thought and get a better implement....
+
+One of the results of these fundamental preoccupations of mine was a
+curious irritability towards Margaret that I found difficult to conceal.
+It was one of the incidental cruelties of our position that this should
+happen. I was in such doubt myself, that I had no power to phrase
+things for her in a form she could use. Hitherto I had stage-managed our
+"serious" conversations. Now I was too much in earnest and too uncertain
+to go on doing this. I avoided talk with her. Her serene, sustained
+confidence in vague formulae and sentimental aspirations exasperated me;
+her want of sympathetic apprehension made my few efforts to indicate my
+changing attitudes distressing and futile. It wasn't that I was always
+thinking right, and that she was always saying wrong. It was that I was
+struggling to get hold of a difficult thing that was, at any rate, half
+true, I could not gauge how true, and that Margaret's habitual phrasing
+ignored these elusive elements of truth, and without premeditation
+fitted into the weaknesses of my new intimations, as though they had
+nothing but weaknesses. It was, for example, obvious that these big
+people, who were the backbone of Imperialism and Conservatism, were
+temperamentally lax, much more indolent, much more sensuous, than our
+deliberately virtuous Young Liberals. I didn't want to be reminded of
+that, just when I was in full effort to realise the finer elements in
+their composition. Margaret classed them and disposed of them. It was
+our incurable differences in habits and gestures of thought coming
+between us again.
+
+The desert of misunderstanding widened. I was forced back upon myself
+and my own secret councils. For a time I went my way alone; an unmixed
+evil for both of us. Except for that Pentagram evening, a series of
+talks with Isabel Rivers, who was now becoming more and more important
+in my intellectual life, and the arguments I maintained with Crupp, I
+never really opened my mind at all during that period of indecisions,
+slow abandonments, and slow acquisitions.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ SECESSION
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+At last, out of a vast accumulation of impressions, decision distilled
+quite suddenly. I succumbed to Evesham and that dream of the right
+thing triumphant through expression. I determined I would go over to
+the Conservatives, and use my every gift and power on the side of such
+forces on that side as made for educational reorganisation, scientific
+research, literature, criticism, and intellectual development. That was
+in 1909. I judged the Tories were driving straight at a conflict with
+the country, and I thought them bound to incur an electoral defeat. I
+under-estimated their strength in the counties. There would follow, I
+calculated, a period of profound reconstruction in method and policy
+alike. I was entirely at one with Crupp in perceiving in this an immense
+opportunity for the things we desired. An aristocracy quickened by
+conflict and on the defensive, and full of the idea of justification
+by reconstruction, might prove altogether more apt for thought and
+high professions than Mrs. Redmondson's spoilt children. Behind the now
+inevitable struggle for a reform of the House of Lords, there would
+be great heart searchings and educational endeavour. On that we
+reckoned....
+
+At last we talked it out to the practical pitch, and Crupp and
+Shoesmith, and I and Gane, made our definite agreement together....
+
+I emerged from enormous silences upon Margaret one evening.
+
+She was just back from the display of some new musicians at the
+Hartsteins. I remember she wore a dress of golden satin, very
+rich-looking and splendid. About her slender neck there was a rope of
+gold-set amber beads. Her hair caught up and echoed and returned these
+golden notes. I, too, was in evening dress, but where I had been escapes
+me,--some forgotten dinner, I suppose. I went into her room. I remember
+I didn't speak for some moments. I went across to the window and pulled
+the blind aside, and looked out upon the railed garden of the square,
+with its shrubs and shadowed turf gleaming pallidly and irregularly in
+the light of the big electric standard in the corner.
+
+"Margaret," I said, "I think I shall break with the party."
+
+She made no answer. I turned presently, a movement of enquiry.
+
+"I was afraid you meant to do that," she said.
+
+"I'm out of touch," I explained. "Altogether."
+
+"Oh! I know."
+
+"It places me in a difficult position," I said.
+
+Margaret stood at her dressing-table, looking steadfastly at herself
+in the glass, and with her fingers playing with a litter of stoppered
+bottles of tinted glass. "I was afraid it was coming to this," she said.
+
+"In a way," I said, "we've been allies. I owe my seat to you. I couldn't
+have gone into Parliament...."
+
+"I don't want considerations like that to affect us," she interrupted.
+
+There was a pause. She sat down in a chair by her dressing-table, lifted
+an ivory hand-glass, and put it down again.
+
+"I wish," she said, with something like a sob in her voice, "it were
+possible that you shouldn't do this." She stopped abruptly, and I did
+not look at her, because I could feel the effort she was making to
+control herself.
+
+"I thought," she began again, "when you came into Parliament--"
+
+There came another silence. "It's all gone so differently," she said.
+"Everything has gone so differently."
+
+I had a sudden memory of her, shining triumphant after the Kinghampstead
+election, and for the first time I realised just how perplexing and
+disappointing my subsequent career must have been to her.
+
+"I'm not doing this without consideration," I said.
+
+"I know," she said, in a voice of despair, "I've seen it coming. But--I
+still don't understand it. I don't understand how you can go over."
+
+"My ideas have changed and developed," I said.
+
+I walked across to her bearskin hearthrug, and stood by the mantel.
+
+"To think that you," she said; "you who might have been leader--" She
+could not finish it. "All the forces of reaction," she threw out.
+
+"I don't think they are the forces of reaction," I said. "I think I can
+find work to do--better work on that side."
+
+"Against us!" she said. "As if progress wasn't hard enough! As if it
+didn't call upon every able man!"
+
+"I don't think Liberalism has a monopoly of progress."
+
+She did not answer that. She sat quite still looking in front of her.
+"WHY have you gone over?" she asked abruptly as though I had said
+nothing.
+
+There came a silence that I was impelled to end. I began a stiff
+dissertation from the hearthrug. "I am going over, because I think I
+may join in an intellectual renascence on the Conservative side. I
+think that in the coming struggle there will be a partial and altogether
+confused and demoralising victory for democracy, that will stir the
+classes which now dominate the Conservative party into an energetic
+revival. They will set out to win back, and win back. Even if my
+estimate of contemporary forces is wrong and they win, they will still
+be forced to reconstruct their outlook. A war abroad will supply the
+chastening if home politics fail. The effort at renascence is bound to
+come by either alternative. I believe I can do more in relation to
+that effort than in any other connexion in the world of politics at the
+present time. That's my case, Margaret."
+
+She certainly did not grasp what I said. "And so you will throw aside
+all the beginnings, all the beliefs and pledges--" Again her sentence
+remained incomplete. "I doubt if even, once you have gone over, they
+will welcome you."
+
+"That hardly matters."
+
+I made an effort to resume my speech.
+
+"I came into Parliament, Margaret," I said, "a little prematurely.
+Still--I suppose it was only by coming into Parliament that I could see
+things as I do now in terms of personality and imaginative range...."
+I stopped. Her stiff, unhappy, unlistening silence broke up my
+disquisition.
+
+"After all," I remarked, "most of this has been implicit in my
+writings."
+
+She made no sign of admission.
+
+"What are you going to do?" she asked.
+
+"Keep my seat for a time and make the reasons of my breach clear. Then
+either I must resign or--probably this new Budget will lead to a
+General Election. It's evidently meant to strain the Lords and provoke a
+quarrel."
+
+"You might, I think, have stayed to fight for the Budget."
+
+"I'm not," I said, "so keen against the Lords."
+
+On that we halted.
+
+"But what are you going to do?" she asked.
+
+"I shall make my quarrel over some points in the Budget. I can't quite
+tell you yet where my chance will come. Then I shall either resign my
+seat--or if things drift to dissolution I shall stand again."
+
+"It's political suicide."
+
+"Not altogether."
+
+"I can't imagine you out of Parliament again. It's just like--like
+undoing all we have done. What will you do?"
+
+"Write. Make a new, more definite place for myself. You know, of course,
+there's already a sort of group about Crupp and Gane."
+
+Margaret seemed lost for a time in painful thought.
+
+"For me," she said at last, "our political work has been a religion--it
+has been more than a religion."
+
+I heard in silence. I had no form of protest available against the
+implications of that.
+
+"And then I find you turning against all we aimed to do--talking of
+going over, almost lightly--to those others."...
+
+She was white-lipped as she spoke. In the most curious way she had
+captured the moral values of the situation. I found myself protesting
+ineffectually against her fixed conviction. "It's because I think my
+duty lies in this change that I make it," I said.
+
+"I don't see how you can say that," she replied quietly.
+
+There was another pause between us.
+
+"Oh!" she said and clenched her hand upon the table. "That it should
+have come to this!"
+
+She was extraordinarily dignified and extraordinarily absurd. She was
+hurt and thwarted beyond measure. She had no place in her ideas, I
+thought, for me. I could see how it appeared to her, but I could not
+make her see anything of the intricate process that had brought me to
+this divergence. The opposition of our intellectual temperaments
+was like a gag in my mouth. What was there for me to say? A flash
+of intuition told me that behind her white dignity was a passionate
+disappointment, a shattering of dreams that needed before everything
+else the relief of weeping.
+
+"I've told you," I said awkwardly, "as soon as I could."
+
+There was another long silence. "So that is how we stand," I said with
+an air of having things defined. I walked slowly to the door.
+
+She had risen and stood now staring in front of her.
+
+"Good-night," I said, making no movement towards our habitual kiss.
+
+"Good-night," she answered in a tragic note....
+
+I closed the door softly. I remained for a moment or so on the big
+landing, hesitating between my bedroom and my study. As I did so I heard
+the soft rustle of her movement and the click of the key in her bedroom
+door. Then everything was still....
+
+She hid her tears from me. Something gripped my heart at the thought.
+
+"Damnation!" I said wincing. "Why the devil can't people at least THINK
+in the same manner?"
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+And that insufficient colloquy was the beginning of a prolonged
+estrangement between us. It was characteristic of our relations that we
+never reopened the discussion. The thing had been in the air for some
+time; we had recognised it now; the widening breach between us was
+confessed. My own feelings were curiously divided. It is remarkable that
+my very real affection for Margaret only became evident to me with this
+quarrel. The changes of the heart are very subtle changes. I am quite
+unaware how or when my early romantic love for her purity and beauty
+and high-principled devotion evaporated from my life; but I do know that
+quite early in my parliamentary days there had come a vague, unconfessed
+resentment at the tie that seemed to hold me in servitude to her
+standards of private living and public act. I felt I was caught, and
+none the less so because it had been my own act to rivet on my shackles.
+So long as I still held myself bound to her that resentment grew. Now,
+since I had broken my bonds and taken my line it withered again, and I
+could think of Margaret with a returning kindliness.
+
+But I still felt embarrassment with her. I felt myself dependent upon
+her for house room and food and social support, as it were under false
+pretences. I would have liked to have separated our financial affairs
+altogether. But I knew that to raise the issue would have seemed a
+last brutal indelicacy. So I tried almost furtively to keep my personal
+expenditure within the scope of the private income I made by writing,
+and we went out together in her motor brougham, dined and made
+appearances, met politely at breakfast--parted at night with a kiss upon
+her cheek. The locking of her door upon me, which at that time I quite
+understood, which I understand now, became for a time in my mind,
+through some obscure process of the soul, an offence. I never crossed
+the landing to her room again.
+
+In all this matter, and, indeed, in all my relations with Margaret, I
+perceive now I behaved badly and foolishly. My manifest blunder is that
+I, who was several years older than she, much subtler and in many ways
+wiser, never in any measure sought to guide and control her. After our
+marriage I treated her always as an equal, and let her go her way; held
+her responsible for all the weak and ineffective and unfortunate things
+she said and did to me. She wasn't clever enough to justify that. It
+wasn't fair to expect her to sympathise, anticipate, and understand.
+I ought to have taken care of her, roped her to me when it came to
+crossing the difficult places. If I had loved her more, and wiselier and
+more tenderly, if there had not been the consciousness of my financial
+dependence on her always stiffening my pride, I think she would have
+moved with me from the outset, and left the Liberals with me. But she
+did not get any inkling of the ends I sought in my change of sides. It
+must have seemed to her inexplicable perversity. She had, I knew--for
+surely I knew it then--an immense capacity for loyalty and devotion.
+There she was with these treasures untouched, neglected and perplexed.
+A woman who loves wants to give. It is the duty and business of the man
+she has married for love to help her to help and give. But I was stupid.
+My eyes had never been opened. I was stiff with her and difficult to
+her, because even on my wedding morning there had been, deep down in
+my soul, voiceless though present, something weakly protesting, a faint
+perception of wrong-doing, the infinitesimally small, slow-multiplying
+germs of shame.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+I made my breach with the party on the Budget.
+
+In many ways I was disposed to regard the 1909 Budget as a fine piece
+of statecraft. Its production was certainly a very unexpected display
+of vigour on the Liberal side. But, on the whole, this movement
+towards collectivist organisation on the part of the Liberals rather
+strengthened than weakened my resolve to cross the floor of the house.
+It made it more necessary, I thought, to leaven the purely obstructive
+and reactionary elements that were at once manifest in the opposition. I
+assailed the land taxation proposals in one main speech, and a series
+of minor speeches in committee. The line of attack I chose was that the
+land was a great public service that needed to be controlled on broad
+and far-sighted lines. I had no objection to its nationalisation, but I
+did object most strenuously to the idea of leaving it in private hands,
+and attempting to produce beneficial social results through the pressure
+of taxation upon the land-owning class. That might break it up in an
+utterly disastrous way. The drift of the government proposals was all in
+the direction of sweating the landowner to get immediate values from his
+property, and such a course of action was bound to give us an irritated
+and vindictive land-owning class, the class upon which we had hitherto
+relied--not unjustifiably--for certain broad, patriotic services and
+an influence upon our collective judgments that no other class seemed
+prepared to exercise. Abolish landlordism if you will, I said, buy
+it out, but do not drive it to a defensive fight, and leave it still
+sufficiently strong and wealthy to become a malcontent element in your
+state. You have taxed and controlled the brewer and the publican until
+the outraged Liquor Interest has become a national danger. You now
+propose to do the same thing on a larger scale. You turn a class which
+has many fine and truly aristocratic traditions towards revolt, and
+there is nothing in these or any other of your proposals that shows any
+sense of the need for leadership to replace these traditional leaders
+you are ousting. This was the substance of my case, and I hammered at it
+not only in the House, but in the press....
+
+The Kinghampstead division remained for some time insensitive to my
+defection.
+
+Then it woke up suddenly, and began, in the columns of the
+KINGSHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN, an indignant, confused outcry. I was treated to
+an open letter, signed "Junius Secundus," and I replied in provocative
+terms. There were two thinly attended public meetings at different ends
+of the constituency, and then I had a correspondence with my old friend
+Parvill, the photographer, which ended in my seeing a deputation.
+
+My impression is that it consisted of about eighteen or twenty people.
+They had had to come upstairs to me and they were manifestly full of
+indignation and a little short of breath. There was Parvill himself,
+J.P., dressed wholly in black--I think to mark his sense of the
+occasion--and curiously suggestive in his respect for my character and
+his concern for the honourableness of the KINGHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN editor,
+of Mark Antony at the funeral of Cesar. There was Mrs. Bulger, also in
+mourning; she had never abandoned the widow's streamers since the death
+of her husband ten years ago, and her loyalty to Liberalism of the
+severest type was part as it were of her weeds. There was a nephew of
+Sir Roderick Newton, a bright young Hebrew of the graver type, and a
+couple of dissenting ministers in high collars and hats that stopped
+halfway between the bowler of this world and the shovel-hat of heaven.
+There was also a young solicitor from Lurky done in the horsey style,
+and there was a very little nervous man with a high brow and a face
+contracting below as though the jawbones and teeth had been taken out
+and the features compressed. The rest of the deputation, which included
+two other public-spirited ladies and several ministers of religion,
+might have been raked out of any omnibus going Strandward during the
+May meetings. They thrust Parvill forward as spokesman, and manifested
+a strong disposition to say "Hear, hear!" to his more strenuous protests
+provided my eye wasn't upon them at the time.
+
+I regarded this appalling deputation as Parvill's apologetic but quite
+definite utterances drew to an end. I had a moment of vision. Behind
+them I saw the wonderful array of skeleton forces that stand for public
+opinion, that are as much public opinion as exists indeed at the present
+time. The whole process of politics which bulks so solidly in history
+seemed for that clairvoyant instant but a froth of petty motives above
+abysms of indifference....
+
+Some one had finished. I perceived I had to speak.
+
+"Very well," I said, "I won't keep you long in replying. I'll resign if
+there isn't a dissolution before next February, and if there is I shan't
+stand again. You don't want the bother and expense of a bye-election
+(approving murmurs) if it can be avoided. But I may tell you plainly now
+that I don't think it will be necessary for me to resign, and the sooner
+you find my successor the better for the party. The Lords are in a
+corner; they've got to fight now or never, and I think they will throw
+out the Budget. Then they will go on fighting. It is a fight that will
+last for years. They have a sort of social discipline, and you haven't.
+You Liberals will find yourselves with a country behind you, vaguely
+indignant perhaps, but totally unprepared with any ideas whatever in
+the matter, face to face with the problem of bringing the British
+constitution up-to-date. Anything may happen, provided only that it is
+sufficiently absurd. If the King backs the Lords--and I don't see why he
+shouldn't--you have no Republican movement whatever to fall back
+upon. You lost it during the Era of Good Taste. The country, I say, is
+destitute of ideas, and you have no ideas to give it. I don't see what
+you will do.... For my own part, I mean to spend a year or so between a
+window and my writing-desk."
+
+I paused. "I think, gentlemen," began Parvill, "that we hear all this
+with very great regret...."
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+My estrangement from Margaret stands in my memory now as something that
+played itself out within the four walls of our house in Radnor Square,
+which was, indeed, confined to those limits. I went to and fro between
+my house and the House of Commons, and the dining-rooms and clubs and
+offices in which we were preparing our new developments, in a state
+of aggressive and energetic dissociation, in the nascent state, as a
+chemist would say. I was free now, and greedy for fresh combination. I
+had a tremendous sense of released energies. I had got back to the sort
+of thing I could do, and to the work that had been shaping itself for
+so long in my imagination. Our purpose now was plain, bold, and
+extraordinarily congenial. We meant no less than to organise a new
+movement in English thought and life, to resuscitate a Public Opinion
+and prepare the ground for a revised and renovated ruling culture.
+
+For a time I seemed quite wonderfully able to do whatever I wanted to
+do. Shoesmith responded to my first advances. We decided to create a
+weekly paper as our nucleus, and Crupp and I set to work forthwith to
+collect a group of writers and speakers, including Esmeer, Britten, Lord
+Gane, Neal, and one or two younger men, which should constitute a more
+or less definite editorial council about me, and meet at a weekly lunch
+on Tuesday to sustain our general co-operations. We marked our claim
+upon Toryism even in the colour of our wrapper, and spoke of ourselves
+collectively as the Blue Weeklies. But our lunches were open to all
+sorts of guests, and our deliberations were never of a character to
+control me effectively in my editorial decisions. My only influential
+councillor at first was old Britten, who became my sub-editor. It was
+curious how we two had picked up our ancient intimacy again and resumed
+the easy give and take of our speculative dreaming schoolboy days.
+
+For a time my life centred altogether upon this journalistic work.
+Britten was an experienced journalist, and I had most of the necessary
+instincts for the business. We meant to make the paper right and
+good down to the smallest detail, and we set ourselves at this with
+extraordinary zeal. It wasn't our intention to show our political
+motives too markedly at first, and through all the dust storm and
+tumult and stress of the political struggle of 1910, we made a little
+intellectual oasis of good art criticism and good writing. It was the
+firm belief of nearly all of us that the Lords were destined to be
+beaten badly in 1910, and our game was the longer game of reconstruction
+that would begin when the shouting and tumult of that immediate conflict
+were over. Meanwhile we had to get into touch with just as many good
+minds as possible.
+
+As we felt our feet, I developed slowly and carefully a broadly
+conceived and consistent political attitude. As I will explain later,
+we were feminist from the outset, though that caused Shoesmith and Gane
+great searching of heart; we developed Esmeer's House of Lords reform
+scheme into a general cult of the aristocratic virtues, and we did much
+to humanise and liberalise the narrow excellencies of that Break-up of
+the Poor Law agitation, which had been organised originally by Beatrice
+and Sidney Webb. In addition, without any very definite explanation to
+any one but Esmeer and Isabel Rivers, and as if it was quite a small
+matter, I set myself to secure a uniform philosophical quality in our
+columns.
+
+That, indeed, was the peculiar virtue and characteristic of the BLUE
+WEEKLY. I was now very definitely convinced that much of the confusion
+and futility of contemporary thought was due to the general need of
+metaphysical training.... The great mass of people--and not simply
+common people, but people active and influential in intellectual
+things--are still quite untrained in the methods of thought and
+absolutely innocent of any criticism of method; it is scarcely a
+caricature to call their thinking a crazy patchwork, discontinuous and
+chaotic. They arrive at conclusions by a kind of accident, and do not
+suspect any other way may be found to their attainment. A stage above
+this general condition stands that minority of people who have at
+some time or other discovered general terms and a certain use
+for generalisations. They are--to fall back on the ancient
+technicality--Realists of a crude sort. When I say Realist of course
+I mean Realist as opposed to Nominalist, and not Realist in the almost
+diametrically different sense of opposition to Idealist. Such are the
+Baileys; such, to take their great prototype, was Herbert Spencer (who
+couldn't read Kant); such are whole regiments of prominent and entirely
+self-satisfied contemporaries. They go through queer little processes of
+definition and generalisation and deduction with the completest belief
+in the validity of the intellectual instrument they are using. They are
+Realists--Cocksurists--in matter of fact; sentimentalists in behaviour.
+The Baileys having got to this glorious stage in mental development--it
+is glorious because it has no doubts--were always talking about training
+"Experts" to apply the same simple process to all the affairs
+of mankind. Well, Realism isn't the last word of human wisdom.
+Modest-minded people, doubtful people, subtle people, and the like--the
+kind of people William James writes of as "tough-minded," go on beyond
+this methodical happiness, and are forever after critical of premises
+and terms. They are truer--and less confident. They have reached
+scepticism and the artistic method. They have emerged into the new
+Nominalism.
+
+Both Isabel and I believe firmly that these differences of intellectual
+method matter profoundly in the affairs of mankind, that the collective
+mind of this intricate complex modern state can only function properly
+upon neo-Nominalist lines. This has always been her side of our mental
+co-operation rather than mine. Her mind has the light movement that
+goes so often with natural mental power; she has a wonderful art in
+illustration, and, as the reader probably knows already, she writes of
+metaphysical matters with a rare charm and vividness. So far there has
+been no collection of her papers published, but they are to be found not
+only in the BLUE WEEKLY columns but scattered about the monthlies; many
+people must be familiar with her style. It was an intention we did
+much to realise before our private downfall, that we would use the BLUE
+WEEKLY to maintain a stream of suggestion against crude thinking, and
+at last scarcely a week passed but some popular distinction, some
+large imposing generalisation, was touched to flaccidity by her pen or
+mine....
+
+I was at great pains to give my philosophical, political, and social
+matter the best literary and critical backing we could get in London. I
+hunted sedulously for good descriptive writing and good criticism; I
+was indefatigable in my readiness to hear and consider, if not to accept
+advice; I watched every corner of the paper, and had a dozen men alert
+to get me special matter of the sort that draws in the unattached
+reader. The chief danger on the literary side of a weekly is that it
+should fall into the hands of some particular school, and this I watched
+for closely. It seems impossible to get vividness of apprehension and
+breadth of view together in the same critic. So it falls to the wise
+editor to secure the first and impose the second. Directly I detected
+the shrill partisan note in our criticism, the attempt to puff a poor
+thing because it was "in the right direction," or damn a vigorous piece
+of work because it wasn't, I tackled the man and had it out with him.
+Our pay was good enough for that to matter a good deal....
+
+Our distinctive little blue and white poster kept up its neat persistent
+appeal to the public eye, and before 1911 was out, the BLUE WEEKLY was
+printing twenty pages of publishers' advertisements, and went into
+all the clubs in London and three-quarters of the country houses where
+week-end parties gather together. Its sale by newsagents and bookstalls
+grew steadily. One got more and more the reassuring sense of being
+discussed, and influencing discussion.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Our office was at the very top of a big building near the end of Adelphi
+Terrace; the main window beside my desk, a big undivided window of
+plate glass, looked out upon Cleopatra's Needle, the corner of the Hotel
+Cecil, the fine arches of Waterloo Bridge, and the long sweep of south
+bank with its shot towers and chimneys, past Bankside to the dimly seen
+piers of the great bridge below the Tower. The dome of St. Paul's just
+floated into view on the left against the hotel facade. By night and
+day, in every light and atmosphere, it was a beautiful and various view,
+alive as a throbbing heart; a perpetual flow of traffic ploughed and
+splashed the streaming silver of the river, and by night the shapes of
+things became velvet black and grey, and the water a shining mirror
+of steel, wearing coruscating gems of light. In the foreground the
+Embankment trams sailed glowing by, across the water advertisements
+flashed and flickered, trains went and came and a rolling drift of smoke
+reflected unseen fires. By day that spectacle was sometimes a marvel of
+shining wet and wind-cleared atmosphere, sometimes a mystery of drifting
+fog, sometimes a miracle of crowded details, minutely fine.
+
+As I think of that view, so variously spacious in effect, I am back
+there, and this sunlit paper might be lamp-lit and lying on my old desk.
+I see it all again, feel it all again. In the foreground is a green
+shaded lamp and crumpled galley slips and paged proofs and letters, two
+or three papers in manuscript, and so forth. In the shadows are chairs
+and another table bearing papers and books, a rotating bookcase dimly
+seen, a long window seat black in the darkness, and then the cool
+unbroken spectacle of the window. How often I would watch some tram-car,
+some string of barges go from me slowly out of sight. The people were
+black animalculae by day, clustering, collecting, dispersing, by night,
+they were phantom face-specks coming, vanishing, stirring obscurely
+between light and shade.
+
+I recall many hours at my desk in that room before the crisis came,
+hours full of the peculiar happiness of effective strenuous work. Once
+some piece of writing went on, holding me intent and forgetful of time
+until I looked up from the warm circle of my electric lamp to see the
+eastward sky above the pale silhouette of the Tower Bridge, flushed and
+banded brightly with the dawn.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ THE BESETTING OF SEX
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+Art is selection and so is most autobiography. But I am concerned with a
+more tangled business than selection, I want to show a contemporary man
+in relation to the state and social usage, and the social organism in
+relation to that man. To tell my story at all I have to simplify. I have
+given now the broad lines of my political development, and how I passed
+from my initial liberal-socialism to the conception of a constructive
+aristocracy. I have tried to set that out in the form of a man
+discovering himself. Incidentally that self-development led to a
+profound breach with my wife. One has read stories before of husband
+and wife speaking severally two different languages and coming to an
+understanding. But Margaret and I began in her dialect, and, as I came
+more and more to use my own, diverged.
+
+I had thought when I married that the matter of womankind had ended for
+me. I have tried to tell all that sex and women had been to me up to my
+married life with Margaret and our fatal entanglement, tried to show the
+queer, crippled, embarrassed and limited way in which these interests
+break upon the life of a young man under contemporary conditions. I
+do not think my lot was a very exceptional one. I missed the chance of
+sisters and girl playmates, but that is not an uncommon misadventure
+in an age of small families; I never came to know any woman at all
+intimately until I was married to Margaret. My earlier love affairs were
+encounters of sex, under conditions of furtiveness and adventure that
+made them things in themselves, restricted and unilluminating. From a
+boyish disposition to be mystical and worshipping towards women I
+had passed into a disregardful attitude, as though women were things
+inferior or irrelevant, disturbers in great affairs. For a time Margaret
+had blotted out all other women; she was so different and so near;
+she was like a person who stands suddenly in front of a little window
+through which one has been surveying a crowd. She didn't become
+womankind for me so much as eliminate womankind from my world.... And
+then came this secret separation....
+
+Until this estrangement and the rapid and uncontrollable development of
+my relations with Isabel which chanced to follow it, I seemed to have
+solved the problem of women by marriage and disregard. I thought these
+things were over. I went about my career with Margaret beside me, her
+brow slightly knit, her manner faintly strenuous, helping, helping; and
+if we had not altogether abolished sex we had at least so circumscribed
+and isolated it that it would not have affected the general tenor of our
+lives in the slightest degree if we had.
+
+And then, clothing itself more and more in the form of Isabel and her
+problems, this old, this fundamental obsession of my life returned. The
+thing stole upon my mind so that I was unaware of its invasion and how
+it was changing our long intimacy. I have already compared the lot of
+the modern publicist to Machiavelli writing in his study; in his day
+women and sex were as disregarded in these high affairs as, let us say,
+the chemistry of air or the will of the beasts in the fields; in ours
+the case has altogether changed, and woman has come now to stand beside
+the tall candles, half in the light, half in the mystery of the
+shadows, besetting, interrupting, demanding unrelentingly an altogether
+unprecedented attention. I feel that in these matters my life has been
+almost typical of my time. Woman insists upon her presence. She is
+no longer a mere physical need, an aesthetic bye-play, a sentimental
+background; she is a moral and intellectual necessity in a man's life.
+She comes to the politician and demands, Is she a child or a citizen? Is
+she a thing or a soul? She comes to the individual man, as she came
+to me and asks, Is she a cherished weakling or an equal mate, an
+unavoidable helper? Is she to be tried and trusted or guarded and
+controlled, bond or free? For if she is a mate, one must at once trust
+more and exact more, exacting toil, courage, and the hardest, most
+necessary thing of all, the clearest, most shameless, explicitness of
+understanding....
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+In all my earlier imaginings of statecraft I had tacitly assumed either
+that the relations of the sexes were all right or that anyhow they
+didn't concern the state. It was a matter they, whoever "they" were, had
+to settle among themselves. That sort of disregard was possible then.
+But even before 1906 there were endless intimations that the dams
+holding back great reservoirs of discussion were crumbling. We political
+schemers were ploughing wider than any one had ploughed before in the
+field of social reconstruction. We had also, we realised, to plough
+deeper. We had to plough down at last to the passionate elements of
+sexual relationship and examine and decide upon them.
+
+The signs multiplied. In a year or so half the police of the metropolis
+were scarce sufficient to protect the House from one clamorous aspect
+of the new problem. The members went about Westminster with an odd, new
+sense of being beset. A good proportion of us kept up the pretence that
+the Vote for Women was an isolated fad, and the agitation an epidemic
+madness that would presently pass. But it was manifest to any one who
+sought more than comfort in the matter that the streams of women and
+sympathisers and money forthcoming marked far deeper and wider things
+than an idle fancy for the franchise. The existing laws and conventions
+of relationship between Man and Woman were just as unsatisfactory a
+disorder as anything else in our tumbled confusion of a world, and that
+also was coming to bear upon statecraft.
+
+My first parliament was the parliament of the Suffragettes. I don't
+propose to tell here of that amazing campaign, with its absurdities
+and follies, its courage and devotion. There were aspects of that
+unquenchable agitation that were absolutely heroic and aspects that were
+absolutely pitiful. It was unreasonable, unwise, and, except for its
+one central insistence, astonishingly incoherent. It was amazingly
+effective. The very incoherence of the demand witnessed, I think, to the
+forces that lay behind it. It wasn't a simple argument based on a
+simple assumption; it was the first crude expression of a great mass and
+mingling of convergent feelings, of a widespread, confused persuasion
+among modern educated women that the conditions of their relations with
+men were oppressive, ugly, dishonouring, and had to be altered. They
+had not merely adopted the Vote as a symbol of equality; it was fairly
+manifest to me that, given it, they meant to use it, and to use it
+perhaps even vindictively and blindly, as a weapon against many things
+they had every reason to hate....
+
+I remember, with exceptional vividness, that great night early in the
+session of 1909, when--I think it was--fifty or sixty women went to
+prison. I had been dining at the Barham's, and Lord Barham and I came
+down from the direction of St. James's Park into a crowd and a confusion
+outside the Caxton Hall. We found ourselves drifting with an immense
+multitude towards Parliament Square and parallel with a silent,
+close-packed column of girls and women, for the most part white-faced
+and intent. I still remember the effect of their faces upon me. It was
+quite different from the general effect of staring about and divided
+attention one gets in a political procession of men. There was an
+expression of heroic tension.
+
+There had been a pretty deliberate appeal on the part of the women's
+organisers to the Unemployed, who had been demonstrating throughout that
+winter, to join forces with the movement, and the result was shown
+in the quality of the crowd upon the pavement. It was an ugly,
+dangerous-looking crowd, but as yet good-tempered and sympathetic. When
+at last we got within sight of the House the square was a seething seat
+of excited people, and the array of police on horse and on foot might
+have been assembled for a revolutionary outbreak. There were dense
+masses of people up Whitehall, and right on to Westminster Bridge. The
+scuffle that ended in the arrests was the poorest explosion to follow
+such stupendous preparations....
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Later on in that year the women began a new attack. Day and night, and
+all through the long nights of the Budget sittings, at all the piers
+of the gates of New Palace Yard and at St. Stephen's Porch, stood women
+pickets, and watched us silently and reproachfully as we went to and
+fro. They were women of all sorts, though, of course, the independent
+worker-class predominated. There were grey-headed old ladies standing
+there, sturdily charming in the rain; battered-looking, ambiguous women,
+with something of the desperate bitterness of battered women showing in
+their eyes; north-country factory girls; cheaply-dressed suburban women;
+trim, comfortable mothers of families; valiant-eyed girl graduates
+and undergraduates; lank, hungry-looking creatures, who stirred one's
+imagination; one very dainty little woman in deep mourning, I recall,
+grave and steadfast, with eyes fixed on distant things. Some of those
+women looked defiant, some timidly aggressive, some full of the stir of
+adventure, some drooping with cold and fatigue. The supply never ceased.
+I had a mortal fear that somehow the supply might halt or cease. I
+found that continual siege of the legislature extraordinarily
+impressive--infinitely more impressive than the feeble-forcible
+"ragging" of the more militant section. I thought of the appeal that
+must be going through the country, summoning the women from countless
+scattered homes, rooms, colleges, to Westminster.
+
+I remember too the petty little difficulty I felt whether I should
+ignore these pickets altogether, or lift a hat as I hurried past with
+averted eyes, or look them in the face as I did so. Towards the end the
+House evoked an etiquette of salutation.
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+There was a tendency, even on the part of its sympathisers, to treat the
+whole suffrage agitation as if it were a disconnected issue, irrelevant
+to all other broad developments of social and political life. We
+struggled, all of us, to ignore the indicating finger it thrust out
+before us. "Your schemes, for all their bigness," it insisted to
+our reluctant, averted minds, "still don't go down to the essential
+things...."
+
+We have to go deeper, or our inadequate children's insufficient children
+will starve amidst harvests of earless futility. That conservatism which
+works in every class to preserve in its essentials the habitual daily
+life is all against a profounder treatment of political issues. The
+politician, almost as absurdly as the philosopher, tends constantly, in
+spite of magnificent preludes, vast intimations, to specialise himself
+out of the reality he has so stupendously summoned--he bolts back to
+littleness. The world has to be moulded anew, he continues to admit, but
+without, he adds, any risk of upsetting his week-end visits, his morning
+cup of tea....
+
+The discussion of the relations of men and women disturbs every one. It
+reacts upon the private life of every one who attempts it. And at
+any particular time only a small minority have a personal interest in
+changing the established state of affairs. Habit and interest are in a
+constantly recruited majority against conscious change and adjustment
+in these matters. Drift rules us. The great mass of people, and an
+overwhelming proportion of influential people, are people who have
+banished their dreams and made their compromise. Wonderful and beautiful
+possibilities are no longer to be thought about. They have given up
+any aspirations for intense love, their splendid offspring, for keen
+delights, have accepted a cultivated kindliness and an uncritical sense
+of righteousness as their compensation. It's a settled affair with
+them, a settled, dangerous affair. Most of them fear, and many hate, the
+slightest reminder of those abandoned dreams. As Dayton once said to
+the Pentagram Circle, when we were discussing the problem of a universal
+marriage and divorce law throughout the Empire, "I am for leaving all
+these things alone." And then, with a groan in his voice, "Leave them
+alone! Leave them all alone!"
+
+That was his whole speech for the evening, in a note of suppressed
+passion, and presently, against all our etiquette, he got up and went
+out.
+
+For some years after my marriage, I too was for leaving them alone. I
+developed a dread and dislike for romance, for emotional music, for the
+human figure in art--turning my heart to landscape. I wanted to sneer
+at lovers and their ecstasies, and was uncomfortable until I found
+the effective sneer. In matters of private morals these were my most
+uncharitable years. I didn't want to think of these things any more for
+ever. I hated the people whose talk or practice showed they were not
+of my opinion. I wanted to believe that their views were immoral and
+objectionable and contemptible, because I had decided to treat them as
+at that level. I was, in fact, falling into the attitude of the normal
+decent man.
+
+And yet one cannot help thinking! The sensible moralised man finds it
+hard to escape the stream of suggestion that there are still dreams
+beyond these commonplace acquiescences,--the appeal of beauty suddenly
+shining upon one, the mothlike stirrings of serene summer nights, the
+sweetness of distant music....
+
+It is one of the paradoxical factors in our public life at the present
+time, which penalises abandonment to love so abundantly and so heavily,
+that power, influence and control fall largely to unencumbered people
+and sterile people and people who have married for passionless purposes,
+people whose very deficiency in feeling has left them free to follow
+ambition, people beautyblind, who don't understand what it is to fall in
+love, what it is to desire children or have them, what it is to feel in
+their blood and bodies the supreme claim of good births and selective
+births above all other affairs in life, people almost of necessity
+averse from this most fundamental aspect of existence....
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+It wasn't, however, my deepening sympathy with and understanding of the
+position of women in general, or the change in my ideas about all these
+intimate things my fast friendship with Isabel was bringing about, that
+led me to the heretical views I have in the last five years dragged from
+the region of academic and timid discussion into the field of practical
+politics. Those influences, no doubt, have converged to the same end,
+and given me a powerful emotional push upon my road, but it was a
+broader and colder view of things that first determined me in my attempt
+to graft the Endowment of Motherhood in some form or other upon British
+Imperialism. Now that I am exiled from the political world, it is
+possible to estimate just how effectually that grafting has been done.
+
+I have explained how the ideas of a trained aristocracy and a universal
+education grew to paramount importance in my political scheme. It is but
+a short step from this to the question of the quantity and quality of
+births in the community, and from that again to these forbidden and
+fear-beset topics of marriage, divorce, and the family organisation.
+A sporadic discussion of these aspects had been going on for years, a
+Eugenic society existed, and articles on the Falling Birth Rate, and the
+Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit were staples of the monthly magazines.
+But beyond an intermittent scolding of prosperous childless people
+in general--one never addressed them in particular--nothing was done
+towards arresting those adverse processes. Almost against my natural
+inclination, I found myself forced to go into these things. I came to
+the conclusion that under modern conditions the isolated private family,
+based on the existing marriage contract, was failing in its work. It
+wasn't producing enough children, and children good enough and well
+trained enough for the demands of the developing civilised state.
+Our civilisation was growing outwardly, and decaying in its intimate
+substance, and unless it was presently to collapse, some very extensive
+and courageous reorganisation was needed. The old haphazard system
+of pairing, qualified more and more by worldly discretions, no longer
+secures a young population numerous enough or good enough for the
+growing needs and possibilities of our Empire. Statecraft sits weaving
+splendid garments, no doubt, but with a puny, ugly, insufficient baby in
+the cradle.
+
+No one so far has dared to take up this problem as a present question
+for statecraft, but it comes unheralded, unadvocated, and sits at
+every legislative board. Every improvement is provisional except the
+improvement of the race, and it became more and more doubtful to me if
+we were improving the race at all! Splendid and beautiful and courageous
+people must come together and have children, women with their fine
+senses and glorious devotion must be freed from the net that compels
+them to be celibate, compels them to be childless and useless, or to
+bear children ignobly to men whom need and ignorance and the treacherous
+pressure of circumstances have forced upon them. We all know that,
+and so few dare even to whisper it for fear that they should seem, in
+seeking to save the family, to threaten its existence. It is as if
+a party of pigmies in a not too capacious room had been joined by a
+carnivorous giant--and decided to go on living happily by cutting him
+dead....
+
+The problem the developing civilised state has to solve is how it can
+get the best possible increase under the best possible conditions.
+I became more and more convinced that the independent family unit
+of to-day, in which the man is master of the wife and owner of the
+children, in which all are dependent upon him, subordinated to his
+enterprises and liable to follow his fortunes up or down, does not
+supply anything like the best conceivable conditions. We want to
+modernise the family footing altogether. An enormous premium both in
+pleasure and competitive efficiency is put upon voluntary childlessness,
+and enormous inducements are held out to women to subordinate
+instinctive and selective preferences to social and material
+considerations.
+
+The practical reaction of modern conditions upon the old tradition of
+the family is this: that beneath the pretence that nothing is changing,
+secretly and with all the unwholesomeness of secrecy everything is
+changed. Offspring fall away, the birth rate falls and falls most among
+just the most efficient and active and best adapted classes in the
+community. The species is recruited from among its failures and from
+among less civilised aliens. Contemporary civilisations are in effect
+burning the best of their possible babies in the furnaces that run the
+machinery. In the United States the native Anglo-American strain has
+scarcely increased at all since 1830, and in most Western European
+countries the same is probably true of the ablest and most energetic
+elements in the community. The women of these classes still remain
+legally and practically dependent and protected, with the only natural
+excuse for their dependence gone....
+
+The modern world becomes an immense spectacle of unsatisfactory
+groupings; here childless couples bored to death in the hopeless effort
+to sustain an incessant honeymoon, here homes in which a solitary child
+grows unsocially, here small two or three-child homes that do no more
+than continue the culture of the parents at a great social cost, here
+numbers of unhappy educated but childless married women, here careless,
+decivilised fecund homes, here orphanages and asylums for the heedlessly
+begotten. It is just the disorderly proliferation of Bromstead over
+again, in lives instead of in houses.
+
+What is the good, what is the common sense, of rectifying boundaries,
+pushing research and discovery, building cities, improving all the
+facilities of life, making great fleets, waging wars, while this aimless
+decadence remains the quality of the biological outlook?...
+
+It is difficult now to trace how I changed from my early aversion until
+I faced this mass of problems. But so far back as 1910 I had it clear
+in my mind that I would rather fail utterly than participate in all the
+surrenders of mind and body that are implied in Dayton's snarl of "Leave
+it alone; leave it all alone!" Marriage and the begetting and care of
+children, is the very ground substance in the life of the community.
+In a world in which everything changes, in which fresh methods, fresh
+adjustments and fresh ideas perpetually renew the circumstances of life,
+it is preposterous that we should not even examine into these matters,
+should rest content to be ruled by the uncriticised traditions of a
+barbaric age.
+
+Now, it seems to me that the solution of this problem is also the
+solution of the woman's individual problem. The two go together, are
+right and left of one question. The only conceivable way out from our
+IMPASSE lies in the recognition of parentage, that is to say of adequate
+mothering, as no longer a chance product of individual passions but
+a service rendered to the State. Women must become less and less
+subordinated to individual men, since this works out in a more or less
+complete limitation, waste, and sterilisation of their essentially
+social function; they must become more and more subordinated as
+individually independent citizens to the collective purpose. Or, to
+express the thing by a familiar phrase, the highly organised, scientific
+state we desire must, if it is to exist at all, base itself not upon
+the irresponsible man-ruled family, but upon the matriarchal family,
+the citizen-ship and freedom of women and the public endowment of
+motherhood.
+
+After two generations of confused and experimental revolt it grows clear
+to modern women that a conscious, deliberate motherhood and mothering is
+their special function in the State, and that a personal subordination
+to an individual man with an unlimited power of control over this
+intimate and supreme duty is a degradation. No contemporary woman of
+education put to the test is willing to recognise any claim a man can
+make upon her but the claim of her freely-given devotion to him. She
+wants the reality of her choice and she means "family" while a man
+too often means only possession. This alters the spirit of the family
+relationships fundamentally. Their form remains just what it was
+when woman was esteemed a pretty, desirable, and incidentally a
+child-producing, chattel. Against these time-honoured ideas the new
+spirit of womanhood struggles in shame, astonishment, bitterness, and
+tears....
+
+I confess myself altogether feminist. I have no doubts in the matter.
+I want this coddling and browbeating of women to cease. I want to
+see women come in, free and fearless, to a full participation in the
+collective purpose of mankind. Women, I am convinced, are as fine
+as men; they can be as wise as men; they are capable of far greater
+devotion than men. I want to see them citizens, with a marriage law
+framed primarily for them and for their protection and the good of the
+race, and not for men's satisfactions. I want to see them bearing and
+rearing good children in the State as a generously rewarded public duty
+and service, choosing their husbands freely and discerningly, and in no
+way enslaved by or subordinated to the men they have chosen. The social
+consciousness of women seems to me an unworked, an almost untouched mine
+of wealth for the constructive purpose of the world. I want to change
+the respective values of the family group altogether, and make the home
+indeed the women's kingdom and the mother the owner and responsible
+guardian of her children.
+
+It is no use pretending that this is not novel and revolutionary; it is.
+The Endowment of Motherhood implies a new method of social organization,
+a rearrangement of the social unit, untried in human experience--as
+untried as electric traction was or flying in 1800. Of course, it may
+work out to modify men's ideas of marriage profoundly. To me that is
+a secondary consideration. I do not believe that particular assertion
+myself, because I am convinced that a practical monogamy is a
+psychological necessity to the mass of civilised people. But even if I
+did believe it I should still keep to my present line, because it is the
+only line that will prevent a highly organised civilisation from ending
+in biological decay. The public Endowment of Motherhood is the only
+possible way which will ensure the permanently developing civilised
+state at which all constructive minds are aiming. A point is reached in
+the life-history of a civilisation when either this reconstruction
+must be effected or the quality and MORALE of the population prove
+insufficient for the needs of the developing organisation. It is not so
+much moral decadence that will destroy us as moral inadaptability.
+The old code fails under the new needs. The only alternative to this
+profound reconstruction is a decay in human quality and social collapse.
+Either this unprecedented rearrangement must be achieved by our
+civilisation, or it must presently come upon a phase of disorder and
+crumble and perish, as Rome perished, as France declines, as the strain
+of the Pilgrim Fathers dwindles out of America. Whatever hope there may
+be in the attempt therefore, there is no alternative to the attempt.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+I wanted political success now dearly enough, but not at the price
+of constructive realities. These questions were no doubt monstrously
+dangerous in the political world; there wasn't a politician alive who
+didn't look scared at the mention of "The Family," but if raising these
+issues were essential to the social reconstructions on which my life
+was set, that did not matter. It only implied that I should take them
+up with deliberate caution. There was no release because of risk or
+difficulty.
+
+The question of whether I should commit myself to some open project in
+this direction was going on in my mind concurrently with my speculations
+about a change of party, like bass and treble in a complex piece of
+music. The two drew to a conclusion together. I would not only go over
+to Imperialism, but I would attempt to biologise Imperialism.
+
+I thought at first that I was undertaking a monstrous uphill task.
+But as I came to look into the possibilities of the matter, a strong
+persuasion grew up in my mind that this panic fear of legislative
+proposals affecting the family basis was excessive, that things were
+much riper for development in this direction than old-experienced people
+out of touch with the younger generation imagined, that to phrase
+the thing in a parliamentary fashion, "something might be done in the
+constituencies" with the Endowment of Motherhood forthwith, provided
+only that it was made perfectly clear that anything a sane person could
+possibly intend by "morality" was left untouched by these proposals.
+
+I went to work very carefully. I got Roper of the DAILY TELEPHONE and
+Burkett of the DIAL to try over a silly-season discussion of State Help
+for Mothers, and I put a series of articles on eugenics, upon the fall
+in the birth-rate, and similar topics in the BLUE WEEKLY, leading up
+to a tentative and generalised advocacy of the public endowment of the
+nation's children. I was more and more struck by the acceptance won by a
+sober and restrained presentation of this suggestion.
+
+And then, in the fourth year of the BLUE WEEKLY'S career, came the
+Handitch election, and I was forced by the clamour of my antagonist,
+and very willingly forced, to put my convictions to the test. I returned
+triumphantly to Westminster with the Public Endowment of Motherhood
+as part of my open profession and with the full approval of the party
+press. Applauding benches of Imperialists cheered me on my way to the
+table between the whips.
+
+That second time I took the oath I was not one of a crowd of new
+members, but salient, an event, a symbol of profound changes and new
+purposes in the national life.
+
+Here it is my political book comes to an end, and in a sense my book
+ends altogether. For the rest is but to tell how I was swept out of this
+great world of political possibilities. I close this Third Book as I
+opened it, with an admission of difficulties and complexities, but now
+with a pile of manuscript before me I have to confess them unsurmounted
+and still entangled.
+
+Yet my aim was a final simplicity. I have sought to show my growing
+realisation that the essential quality of all political and social
+effort is the development of a great race mind behind the interplay of
+individual lives. That is the collective human reality, the basis of
+morality, the purpose of devotion. To that our lives must be given, from
+that will come the perpetual fresh release and further ennoblement of
+individual lives....
+
+I have wanted to make that idea of a collective mind play in this book
+the part United Italy plays in Machiavelli's PRINCE. I have called it
+the hinterland of reality, shown it accumulating a dominating truth and
+rightness which must force men's now sporadic motives more and more into
+a disciplined and understanding relation to a plan. And I have tried
+to indicate how I sought to serve this great clarification of our
+confusions....
+
+Now I come back to personality and the story of my self-betrayal, and
+how it is I have had to leave all that far-reaching scheme of mine, a
+mere project and beginning for other men to take or leave as it pleases
+them.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THE FOURTH: ISABEL
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ LOVE AND SUCCESS
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+I come to the most evasive and difficult part of my story, which is to
+tell how Isabel and I have made a common wreck of our joint lives.
+
+It is not the telling of one simple disastrous accident. There was a
+vein in our natures that led to this collapse, gradually and at
+this point and that it crept to the surface. One may indeed see our
+destruction--for indeed politically we could not be more extinct if we
+had been shot dead--in the form of a catastrophe as disconnected and
+conclusive as a meteoric stone falling out of heaven upon two friends
+and crushing them both. But I do not think that is true to our situation
+or ourselves. We were not taken by surprise. The thing was in us and
+not from without, it was akin to our way of thinking and our habitual
+attitudes; it had, for all its impulsive effect, a certain necessity. We
+might have escaped no doubt, as two men at a hundred yards may shoot at
+each other with pistols for a considerable time and escape. But it isn't
+particularly reasonable to talk of the contrariety of fate if they both
+get hit.
+
+Isabel and I were dangerous to each other for several years of
+friendship, and not quite unwittingly so.
+
+In writing this, moreover, there is a very great difficulty in steering
+my way between two equally undesirable tones in the telling. In the
+first place I do not want to seem to confess my sins with a penitence I
+am very doubtful if I feel. Now that I have got Isabel we can no doubt
+count the cost of it and feel unquenchable regrets, but I am not sure
+whether, if we could be put back now into such circumstances as we
+were in a year ago, or two years ago, whether with my eyes fully open I
+should not do over again very much as I did. And on the other hand I do
+not want to justify the things we have done. We are two bad people--if
+there is to be any classification of good and bad at all, we have acted
+badly, and quite apart from any other considerations we've largely
+wasted our own very great possibilities. But it is part of a queer
+humour that underlies all this, that I find myself slipping again and
+again into a sentimental treatment of our case that is as unpremeditated
+as it is insincere. When I am a little tired after a morning's writing
+I find the faint suggestion getting into every other sentence that our
+blunders and misdeeds embodied, after the fashion of the prophet Hosea,
+profound moral truths. Indeed, I feel so little confidence in my ability
+to keep this altogether out of my book that I warn the reader here that
+in spite of anything he may read elsewhere in the story, intimating
+however shyly an esoteric and exalted virtue in our proceedings, the
+plain truth of this business is that Isabel and I wanted each other with
+a want entirely formless, inconsiderate, and overwhelming. And though I
+could tell you countless delightful and beautiful things about Isabel,
+were this a book in her praise, I cannot either analyse that want or
+account for its extreme intensity.
+
+I will confess that deep in my mind there is a belief in a sort of wild
+rightness about any love that is fraught with beauty, but that eludes
+me and vanishes again, and is not, I feel, to be put with the real
+veracities and righteousnesses and virtues in the paddocks and
+menageries of human reason....
+
+We have already a child, and Margaret was childless, and I find myself
+prone to insist upon that, as if it was a justification. But, indeed,
+when we became lovers there was small thought of Eugenics between us.
+Ours was a mutual and not a philoprogenitive passion. Old Nature behind
+us may have had such purposes with us, but it is not for us to annex
+her intentions by a moralising afterthought. There isn't, in fact, any
+decent justification for us whatever--at that the story must stand.
+
+But if there is no justification there is at least a very effective
+excuse in the mental confusedness of our time. The evasion of that
+passionately thorough exposition of belief and of the grounds of
+morality, which is the outcome of the mercenary religious compromises of
+the late Vatican period, the stupid suppression of anything but the most
+timid discussion of sexual morality in our literature and drama, the
+pervading cultivated and protected muddle-headedness, leaves mentally
+vigorous people with relatively enormous possibilities of destruction
+and little effective help. They find themselves confronted by the
+habits and prejudices of manifestly commonplace people, and by that
+extraordinary patched-up Christianity, the cult of a "Bromsteadised"
+deity, diffused, scattered, and aimless, which hides from examination
+and any possibility of faith behind the plea of good taste. A god about
+whom there is delicacy is far worse than no god at all. We are FORCED to
+be laws unto ourselves and to live experimentally. It is inevitable that
+a considerable fraction of just that bolder, more initiatory section of
+the intellectual community, the section that can least be spared from
+the collective life in a period of trial and change, will drift into
+such emotional crises and such disaster as overtook us. Most perhaps
+will escape, but many will go down, many more than the world can spare.
+It is the unwritten law of all our public life, and the same holds true
+of America, that an honest open scandal ends a career. England in the
+last quarter of a century has wasted half a dozen statesmen on this
+score; she would, I believe, reject Nelson now if he sought to serve
+her. Is it wonderful that to us fretting here in exile this should seem
+the cruellest as well as the most foolish elimination of a necessary
+social element? It destroys no vice; for vice hides by nature. It
+not only rewards dullness as if it were positive virtue, but sets an
+enormous premium upon hypocrisy. That is my case, and that is why I am
+telling this side of my story with so much explicitness.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+Ever since the Kinghamstead election I had maintained what seemed a
+desultory friendship with Isabel. At first it was rather Isabel kept
+it up than I. Whenever Margaret and I went down to that villa, with its
+three or four acres of garden and shrubbery about it, which fulfilled
+our election promise to live at Kinghamstead, Isabel would turn up in
+a state of frank cheerfulness, rejoicing at us, and talk all she was
+reading and thinking to me, and stay for all the rest of the day. In
+her shameless liking for me she was as natural as a savage. She would
+exercise me vigorously at tennis, while Margaret lay and rested her
+back in the afternoon, or guide me for some long ramble that dodged the
+suburban and congested patches of the constituency with amazing skill.
+She took possession of me in that unabashed, straight-minded way a girl
+will sometimes adopt with a man, chose my path or criticised my
+game with a motherly solicitude for my welfare that was absurd and
+delightful. And we talked. We discussed and criticised the stories of
+novels, scraps of history, pictures, social questions, socialism, the
+policy of the Government. She was young and most unevenly informed, but
+she was amazingly sharp and quick and good. Never before in my life had
+I known a girl of her age, or a woman of her quality. I had never dreamt
+there was such talk in the world. Kinghamstead became a lightless
+place when she went to Oxford. Heaven knows how much that may not have
+precipitated my abandonment of the seat!
+
+She went to Ridout College, Oxford, and that certainly weighed with
+me when presently after my breach with the Liberals various little
+undergraduate societies began to ask for lectures and discussions. I
+favoured Oxford. I declared openly I did so because of her. At that time
+I think we neither of us suspected the possibility of passion that lay
+like a coiled snake in the path before us. It seemed to us that we
+had the quaintest, most delightful friendship in the world; she was
+my pupil, and I was her guide, philosopher, and friend. People smiled
+indulgently--even Margaret smiled indulgently--at our attraction for one
+another.
+
+Such friendships are not uncommon nowadays--among easy-going,
+liberal-minded people. For the most part, there's no sort of harm, as
+people say, in them. The two persons concerned are never supposed to
+think of the passionate love that hovers so close to the friendship, or
+if they do, then they banish the thought. I think we kept the thought as
+permanently in exile as any one could do. If it did in odd moments come
+into our heads we pretended elaborately it wasn't there.
+
+Only we were both very easily jealous of each other's attention, and
+tremendously insistent upon each other's preference.
+
+I remember once during the Oxford days an intimation that should have
+set me thinking, and I suppose discreetly disentangling myself. It was
+one Sunday afternoon, and it must have been about May, for the trees and
+shrubs of Ridout College were gay with blossom, and fresh with the new
+sharp greens of spring. I had walked talking with Isabel and a couple of
+other girls through the wide gardens of the place, seen and criticised
+the new brick pond, nodded to the daughter of this friend and that
+in the hammocks under the trees, and picked a way among the scattered
+tea-parties on the lawn to our own circle on the grass under a Siberian
+crab near the great bay window. There I sat and ate great quantities
+of cake, and discussed the tactics of the Suffragettes. I had made some
+comments upon the spirit of the movement in an address to the men in
+Pembroke, and it had got abroad, and a group of girls and women dons
+were now having it out with me.
+
+I forget the drift of the conversation, or what it was made Isabel
+interrupt me. She did interrupt me. She had been lying prone on the
+ground at my right hand, chin on fists, listening thoughtfully, and
+I was sitting beside old Lady Evershead on a garden seat. I turned to
+Isabel's voice, and saw her face uplifted, and her dear cheeks and nose
+and forehead all splashed and barred with sunlight and the shadows of
+the twigs of the trees behind me. And something--an infinite tenderness,
+stabbed me. It was a keen physical feeling, like nothing I had ever felt
+before. It had a quality of tears in it. For the first time in my narrow
+and concentrated life another human being had really thrust into my
+being and gripped my very heart.
+
+Our eyes met perplexed for an extraordinary moment. Then I turned
+back and addressed myself a little stiffly to the substance of her
+intervention. For some time I couldn't look at her again.
+
+From that time forth I knew I loved Isabel beyond measure.
+
+Yet it is curious that it never occurred to me for a year or so that
+this was likely to be a matter of passion between us. I have told how
+definitely I put my imagination into harness in those matters at my
+marriage, and I was living now in a world of big interests, where there
+is neither much time nor inclination for deliberate love-making. I
+suppose there is a large class of men who never meet a girl or a woman
+without thinking of sex, who meet a friend's daughter and decide:
+"Mustn't get friendly with her--wouldn't DO," and set invisible bars
+between themselves and all the wives in the world. Perhaps that is
+the way to live. Perhaps there is no other method than this effectual
+annihilation of half--and the most sympathetic and attractive half--of
+the human beings in the world, so far as any frank intercourse is
+concerned. I am quite convinced anyhow that such a qualified intimacy
+as ours, such a drifting into the sense of possession, such untrammeled
+conversation with an invisible, implacable limit set just where the
+intimacy glows, it is no kind of tolerable compromise. If men and women
+are to go so far together, they must be free to go as far as they may
+want to go, without the vindictive destruction that has come upon us.
+On the basis of the accepted codes the jealous people are right, and the
+liberal-minded ones are playing with fire. If people are not to love,
+then they must be kept apart. If they are not to be kept apart, then we
+must prepare for an unprecedented toleration of lovers.
+
+Isabel was as unforeseeing as I to begin with, but sex marches into the
+life of an intelligent girl with demands and challenges far more urgent
+than the mere call of curiosity and satiable desire that comes to a
+young man. No woman yet has dared to tell the story of that unfolding.
+She attracted men, and she encouraged them, and watched them, and tested
+them, and dismissed them, and concealed the substance of her thoughts
+about them in the way that seems instinctive in a natural-minded girl.
+There was even an engagement--amidst the protests and disapproval of
+the college authorities. I never saw the man, though she gave me a long
+history of the affair, to which I listened with a forced and insincere
+sympathy. She struck me oddly as taking the relationship for a thing
+in itself, and regardless of its consequences. After a time she became
+silent about him, and then threw him over; and by that time, I think,
+for all that she was so much my junior, she knew more about herself and
+me than I was to know for several years to come.
+
+We didn't see each other for some months after my resignation, but we
+kept up a frequent correspondence. She said twice over that she wanted
+to talk to me, that letters didn't convey what one wanted to say, and
+I went up to Oxford pretty definitely to see her--though I combined it
+with one or two other engagements--somewhere in February. Insensibly she
+had become important enough for me to make journeys for her.
+
+But we didn't see very much of one another on that occasion. There was
+something in the air between us that made a faint embarrassment; the
+mere fact, perhaps, that she had asked me to come up.
+
+A year before she would have dashed off with me quite unscrupulously
+to talk alone, carried me off to her room for an hour with a minute of
+chaperonage to satisfy the rules. Now there was always some one or other
+near us that it seemed impossible to exorcise.
+
+We went for a walk on the Sunday afternoon with old Fortescue, K. C.,
+who'd come up to see his two daughters, both great friends of Isabel's,
+and some mute inglorious don whose name I forget, but who was in a
+state of marked admiration for her. The six of us played a game of
+conversational entanglements throughout, and mostly I was impressing
+the Fortescue girls with the want of mental concentration possible in a
+rising politician. We went down Carfex, I remember, to Folly Bridge,
+and inspected the Barges, and then back by way of Merton to the Botanic
+Gardens and Magdalen Bridge. And in the Botanic Gardens she got almost
+her only chance with me.
+
+"Last months at Oxford," she said.
+
+"And then?" I asked.
+
+"I'm coming to London," she said.
+
+"To write?"
+
+She was silent for a moment. Then she said abruptly, with that quick
+flush of hers and a sudden boldness in her eyes: "I'm going to work with
+you. Why shouldn't I?"
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Here, again, I suppose I had a fair warning of the drift of things.
+I seem to remember myself in the train to Paddington, sitting with a
+handful of papers--galley proofs for the BLUE WEEKLY, I suppose--on my
+lap, and thinking about her and that last sentence of hers, and all that
+it might mean to me.
+
+It is very hard to recall even the main outline of anything so elusive
+as a meditation. I know that the idea of working with her gripped me,
+fascinated me. That my value in her life seemed growing filled me with
+pride and a kind of gratitude. I was already in no doubt that her value
+in my life was tremendous. It made it none the less, that in those days
+I was obsessed by the idea that she was transitory, and bound to go out
+of my life again. It is no good trying to set too fine a face upon this
+complex business, there is gold and clay and sunlight and savagery in
+every love story, and a multitude of elvish elements peeped out beneath
+the fine rich curtain of affection that masked our future. I've never
+properly weighed how immensely my vanity was gratified by her clear
+preference for me. Nor can I for a moment determine how much deliberate
+intention I hide from myself in this affair.
+
+Certainly I think some part of me must have been saying in the train:
+"Leave go of her. Get away from her. End this now." I can't have been so
+stupid as not to have had that in my mind....
+
+If she had been only a beautiful girl in love with me, I think I could
+have managed the situation. Once or twice since my marriage and before
+Isabel became of any significance in my life, there had been incidents
+with other people, flashes of temptation--no telling is possible of
+the thing resisted. I think that mere beauty and passion would not
+have taken me. But between myself and Isabel things were incurably
+complicated by the intellectual sympathy we had, the jolly march of
+our minds together. That has always mattered enormously. I should have
+wanted her company nearly as badly if she had been some crippled old
+lady; we would have hunted shoulder to shoulder, as two men. Only two
+men would never have had the patience and readiness for one another
+we two had. I had never for years met any one with whom I could be so
+carelessly sure of understanding or to whom I could listen so easily
+and fully. She gave me, with an extraordinary completeness, that rare,
+precious effect of always saying something fresh, and yet saying it so
+that it filled into and folded about all the little recesses and corners
+of my mind with an infinite, soft familiarity. It is impossible to
+explain that. It is like trying to explain why her voice, her voice
+heard speaking to any one--heard speaking in another room--pleased my
+ears.
+
+She was the only Oxford woman who took a first that year. She spent the
+summer in Scotland and Yorkshire, writing to me continually of all she
+now meant to do, and stirring my imagination. She came to London for
+the autumn session. For a time she stayed with old Lady Colbeck, but she
+fell out with her hostess when it became clear she wanted to write, not
+novels, but journalism, and then she set every one talking by taking
+a flat near Victoria and installing as her sole protector an elderly
+German governess she had engaged through a scholastic agency. She began
+writing, not in that copious flood the undisciplined young woman of
+gifts is apt to produce, but in exactly the manner of an able young man,
+experimenting with forms, developing the phrasing of opinions, taking
+a definite line. She was, of course, tremendously discussed. She was
+disapproved of, but she was invited out to dinner. She got rather a
+reputation for the management of elderly distinguished men. It was an
+odd experience to follow Margaret's soft rustle of silk into some
+big drawing-room and discover my snub-nosed girl in the blue sack
+transformed into a shining creature in the soft splendour of pearls and
+ivory-white and lace, and with a silver band about her dusky hair.
+
+For a time we did not meet very frequently, though always she professed
+an unblushing preference for my company, and talked my views and sought
+me out. Then her usefulness upon the BLUE WEEKLY began to link us
+closelier. She would come up to the office, and sit by the window,
+and talk over the proofs of the next week's articles, going through my
+intentions with a keen investigatory scalpel. Her talk always puts me in
+mind of a steel blade. Her writing became rapidly very good; she had
+a wit and a turn of the phrase that was all her own. We seemed to have
+forgotten the little shadow of embarrassment that had fallen over our
+last meeting at Oxford. Everything seemed natural and easy between us in
+those days; a little unconventional, but that made it all the brighter.
+
+We developed something like a custom of walks, about once a week or so,
+and letters and notes became frequent. I won't pretend things were not
+keenly personal between us, but they had an air of being innocently
+mental. She used to call me "Master" in our talks, a monstrous and
+engaging flattery, and I was inordinately proud to have her as my pupil.
+Who wouldn't have been? And we went on at that distance for a long
+time--until within a year of the Handitch election.
+
+After Lady Colbeck threw her up as altogether too "intellectual" for
+comfortable control, Isabel was taken up by the Balfes in a less formal
+and compromising manner, and week-ended with them and their cousin
+Leonora Sparling, and spent large portions of her summer with them in
+Herefordshire. There was a lover or so in that time, men who came a
+little timidly at this brilliant young person with the frank manner and
+the Amazonian mind, and, she declared, received her kindly refusals with
+manifest relief. And Arnold Shoesmith struck up a sort of friendship
+that oddly imitated mine. She took a liking to him because he was clumsy
+and shy and inexpressive; she embarked upon the dangerous interest of
+helping him to find his soul. I had some twinges of jealousy about that.
+I didn't see the necessity of him. He invaded her time, and I thought
+that might interfere with her work. If their friendship stole some hours
+from Isabel's writing, it did not for a long while interfere with our
+walks or our talks, or the close intimacy we had together.
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+Then suddenly Isabel and I found ourselves passionately in love.
+
+The change came so entirely without warning or intention that I find it
+impossible now to tell the order of its phases. What disturbed pebble
+started the avalanche I cannot trace. Perhaps it was simply that the
+barriers between us and this masked aspect of life had been wearing down
+unperceived.
+
+And there came a change in Isabel. It was like some change in the cycle
+of nature, like the onset of spring--a sharp brightness, an uneasiness.
+She became restless with her work; little encounters with men began to
+happen, encounters not quite in the quality of the earlier proposals;
+and then came an odd incident of which she told me, but somehow, I felt,
+didn't tell me completely. She told me all she was able to tell me.
+She had been at a dance at the Ropers', and a man, rather well known in
+London, had kissed her. The thing amazed her beyond measure. It was the
+sort of thing immediately possible between any man and any woman, that
+one never expects to happen until it happens. It had the surprising
+effect of a judge generally known to be bald suddenly whipping off his
+wig in court. No absolutely unexpected revelation could have quite the
+same quality of shock. She went through the whole thing to me with a
+remarkable detachment, told me how she had felt--and the odd things it
+seemed to open to her.
+
+"I WANT to be kissed, and all that sort of thing," she avowed. "I
+suppose every woman does."
+
+She added after a pause: "And I don't want any one to do it."
+
+This struck me as queerly expressive of the woman's attitude to these
+things. "Some one presently will--solve that," I said.
+
+"Some one will perhaps."
+
+I was silent.
+
+"Some one will," she said, almost viciously. "And then we'll have to
+stop these walks and talks of ours, dear Master.... I'll be sorry to
+give them up."
+
+"It's part of the requirements of the situation," I said, "that he
+should be--oh, very interesting! He'll start, no doubt, all sorts of new
+topics, and open no end of attractive vistas.... You can't, you know,
+always go about in a state of pupillage."
+
+"I don't think I can," said Isabel. "But it's only just recently I've
+begun to doubt about it."
+
+I remember these things being said, but just how much we saw and
+understood, and just how far we were really keeping opaque to each other
+then, I cannot remember. But it must have been quite soon after this
+that we spent nearly a whole day together at Kew Gardens, with the
+curtains up and the barriers down, and the thing that had happened plain
+before our eyes. I don't remember we ever made any declaration. We just
+assumed the new footing....
+
+It was a day early in that year--I think in January, because there was
+thin, crisp snow on the grass, and we noted that only two other people
+had been to the Pagoda that day. I've a curious impression of greenish
+colour, hot, moist air and huge palm fronds about very much of our talk,
+as though we were nearly all the time in the Tropical House. But I
+also remember very vividly looking at certain orange and red spray-like
+flowers from Patagonia, which could not have been there. It is a curious
+thing that I do not remember we made any profession of passionate love
+for one another; we talked as though the fact of our intense love for
+each other had always been patent between us. There was so long and
+frank an intimacy between us that we talked far more like brother and
+sister or husband and wife than two people engaged in the war of the
+sexes. We wanted to know what we were going to do, and whatever we
+did we meant to do in the most perfect concert. We both felt an
+extraordinary accession of friendship and tenderness then, and, what
+again is curious, very little passion. But there was also, in spite of
+the perplexities we faced, an immense satisfaction about that day. It
+was as if we had taken off something that had hindered our view of each
+other, like people who unvizored to talk more easily at a masked ball.
+
+I've had since to view our relations from the standpoint of the ordinary
+observer. I find that vision in the most preposterous contrast with all
+that really went on between us. I suppose there I should figure as a
+wicked seducer, while an unprotected girl succumbed to my fascinations.
+As a matter of fact, it didn't occur to us that there was any personal
+inequality between us. I knew her for my equal mentally; in so many
+things she was beyond comparison cleverer than I; her courage outwent
+mine. The quick leap of her mind evoked a flash of joy in mine like the
+response of an induction wire; her way of thinking was like watching
+sunlight reflected from little waves upon the side of a boat, it was so
+bright, so mobile, so variously and easily true to its law. In the back
+of our minds we both had a very definite belief that making love is full
+of joyous, splendid, tender, and exciting possibilities, and we had to
+discuss why we shouldn't be to the last degree lovers.
+
+Now, what I should like to print here, if it were possible, in all the
+screaming emphasis of red ink, is this: that the circumstances of my
+upbringing and the circumstances of Isabel's upbringing had left not a
+shadow of belief or feeling that the utmost passionate love between
+us was in itself intrinsically WRONG. I've told with the fullest
+particularity just all that I was taught or found out for myself
+in these matters, and Isabel's reading and thinking, and the fierce
+silences of her governesses and the breathless warnings of teachers, and
+all the social and religious influences that had been brought to bear
+upon her, had worked out to the same void of conviction. The code had
+failed with us altogether. We didn't for a moment consider anything but
+the expediency of what we both, for all our quiet faces and steady eyes,
+wanted most passionately to do.
+
+Well, here you have the state of mind of whole brigades of people, and
+particularly of young people, nowadays. The current morality hasn't
+gripped them; they don't really believe in it at all. They may render
+it lip-service, but that is quite another thing. There are scarcely any
+tolerable novels to justify its prohibitions; its prohibitions do, in
+fact, remain unjustified amongst these ugly suppressions. You may, if
+you choose, silence the admission of this in literature and current
+discussion; you will not prevent it working out in lives. People come up
+to the great moments of passion crudely unaware, astoundingly unprepared
+as no really civilised and intelligently planned community would let any
+one be unprepared. They find themselves hedged about with customs
+that have no organic hold upon them, and mere discretions all generous
+spirits are disposed to despise.
+
+Consider the infinite absurdities of it! Multitudes of us are trying
+to run this complex modern community on a basis of "Hush" without
+explaining to our children or discussing with them anything about
+love and marriage at all. Doubt and knowledge creep about in enforced
+darknesses and silences. We are living upon an ancient tradition which
+everybody doubts and nobody has ever analysed. We affect a tremendous
+and cultivated shyness and delicacy about imperatives of the most
+arbitrary appearance. What ensues? What did ensue with us, for example?
+On the one hand was a great desire, robbed of any appearance of shame
+and grossness by the power of love, and on the other hand, the possible
+jealousy of so and so, the disapproval of so and so, material risks and
+dangers. It is only in the retrospect that we have been able to grasp
+something of the effectual case against us. The social prohibition lit
+by the intense glow of our passion, presented itself as preposterous,
+irrational, arbitrary, and ugly, a monster fit only for mockery. We
+might be ruined! Well, there is a phase in every love affair, a sort
+of heroic hysteria, when death and ruin are agreeable additions to the
+prospect. It gives the business a gravity, a solemnity. Timid people may
+hesitate and draw back with a vague instinctive terror of the immensity
+of the oppositions they challenge, but neither Isabel nor I are timid
+people.
+
+We weighed what was against us. We decided just exactly as scores of
+thousands of people have decided in this very matter, that if it were
+possible to keep this thing to ourselves, there was nothing against it.
+And so we took our first step. With the hunger of love in us, it was
+easy to conclude we might be lovers, and still keep everything to
+ourselves. That cleared our minds of the one persistent obstacle that
+mattered to us--the haunting presence of Margaret.
+
+And then we found, as all those scores of thousands of people scattered
+about us have found, that we could not keep it to ourselves. Love will
+out. All the rest of this story is the chronicle of that. Love with
+sustained secrecy cannot be love. It is just exactly the point people do
+not understand.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+But before things came to that pass, some months and many phases and a
+sudden journey to America intervened.
+
+"This thing spells disaster," I said. "You are too big and I am too big
+to attempt this secrecy. Think of the intolerable possibility of being
+found out! At any cost we have to stop--even at the cost of parting."
+
+"Just because we may be found out!"
+
+"Just because we may be found out."
+
+"Master, I shouldn't in the least mind being found out with you. I'm
+afraid--I'd be proud."
+
+"Wait till it happens."
+
+There followed a struggle of immense insincerity between us. It is hard
+to tell who urged and who resisted.
+
+She came to me one night to the editorial room of the BLUE WEEKLY, and
+argued and kissed me with wet salt lips, and wept in my arms; she told
+me that now passionate longing for me and my intimate life possessed
+her, so that she could not work, could not think, could not endure other
+people for the love of me....
+
+I fled absurdly. That is the secret of the futile journey to America
+that puzzled all my friends.
+
+I ran away from Isabel. I took hold of the situation with all my
+strength, put in Britten with sketchy, hasty instructions to edit the
+paper, and started headlong and with luggage, from which, among other
+things, my shaving things were omitted, upon a tour round the world.
+
+Preposterous flight that was! I remember as a thing almost farcical my
+explanations to Margaret, and how frantically anxious I was to prevent
+the remote possibility of her coming with me, and how I crossed in the
+TUSCAN, a bad, wet boat, and mixed seasickness with ungovernable sorrow.
+I wept--tears. It was inexpressibly queer and ridiculous--and, good God!
+how I hated my fellow-passengers!
+
+New York inflamed and excited me for a time, and when things slackened,
+I whirled westward to Chicago--eating and drinking, I remember, in the
+train from shoals of little dishes, with a sort of desperate voracity.
+I did the queerest things to distract myself--no novelist would dare to
+invent my mental and emotional muddle. Chicago also held me at first,
+amazing lapse from civilisation that the place is! and then abruptly,
+with hosts expecting me, and everything settled for some days in Denver,
+I found myself at the end of my renunciations, and turned and came back
+headlong to London.
+
+Let me confess it wasn't any sense of perfect and incurable trust and
+confidence that brought me back, or any idea that now I had strength to
+refrain. It was a sudden realisation that after all the separation might
+succeed; some careless phrasing in one of her jealously read letters set
+that idea going in my mind--the haunting perception that I might return
+to London and find it empty of the Isabel who had pervaded it. Honour,
+discretion, the careers of both of us, became nothing at the thought. I
+couldn't conceive my life resuming there without Isabel. I couldn't, in
+short, stand it.
+
+I don't even excuse my return. It is inexcusable. I ought to have kept
+upon my way westward--and held out. I couldn't. I wanted Isabel, and
+I wanted her so badly now that everything else in the world was
+phantom-like until that want was satisfied. Perhaps you have never
+wanted anything like that. I went straight to her.
+
+But here I come to untellable things. There is no describing the reality
+of love. The shapes of things are nothing, the actual happenings are
+nothing, except that somehow there falls a light upon them and a wonder.
+Of how we met, and the thrill of the adventure, the curious bright sense
+of defiance, the joy of having dared, I can't tell--I can but hint of
+just one aspect, of what an amazing LARK--it's the only word--it seemed
+to us. The beauty which was the essence of it, which justifies it so far
+as it will bear justification, eludes statement.
+
+What can a record of contrived meetings, of sundering difficulties
+evaded and overcome, signify here? Or what can it convey to say that
+one looked deep into two dear, steadfast eyes, or felt a heart throb
+and beat, or gripped soft hair softly in a trembling hand? Robbed of
+encompassing love, these things are of no more value than the taste of
+good wine or the sight of good pictures, or the hearing of music,--just
+sensuality and no more. No one can tell love--we can only tell the gross
+facts of love and its consequences. Given love--given mutuality, and one
+has effected a supreme synthesis and come to a new level of life--but
+only those who know can know. This business has brought me more
+bitterness and sorrow than I had ever expected to bear, but even now
+I will not say that I regret that wilful home-coming altogether. We
+loved--to the uttermost. Neither of us could have loved any one else
+as we did and do love one another. It was ours, that beauty; it existed
+only between us when we were close together, for no one in the world
+ever to know save ourselves.
+
+My return to the office sticks out in my memory with an extreme
+vividness, because of the wild eagle of pride that screamed within me.
+It was Tuesday morning, and though not a soul in London knew of it yet
+except Isabel, I had been back in England a week. I came in upon Britten
+and stood in the doorway.
+
+"GOD!" he said at the sight of me.
+
+"I'm back," I said.
+
+He looked at my excited face with those red-brown eyes of his. Silently
+I defied him to speak his mind.
+
+"Where did you turn back?" he said at last.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+I had to tell what were, so far as I can remember my first positive lies
+to Margaret in explaining that return. I had written to her from Chicago
+and again from New York, saying that I felt I ought to be on the spot
+in England for the new session, and that I was coming back--presently.
+I concealed the name of my boat from her, and made a calculated
+prevarication when I announced my presence in London. I telephoned
+before I went back for my rooms to be prepared. She was, I knew, with
+the Bunting Harblows in Durham, and when she came back to Radnor Square
+I had been at home a day.
+
+I remember her return so well.
+
+My going away and the vivid secret of the present had wiped out from my
+mind much of our long estrangement. Something, too, had changed in her.
+I had had some hint of it in her letters, but now I saw it plainly. I
+came out of my study upon the landing when I heard the turmoil of her
+arrival below, and she came upstairs with a quickened gladness. It was a
+cold March, and she was dressed in unfamiliar dark furs that suited her
+extremely and reinforced the delicate flush of her sweet face. She held
+out both her hands to me, and drew me to her unhesitatingly and kissed
+me.
+
+"So glad you are back, dear," she said. "Oh! so very glad you are back."
+
+I returned her kiss with a queer feeling at my heart, too
+undifferentiated to be even a definite sense of guilt or meanness. I
+think it was chiefly amazement--at the universe--at myself.
+
+"I never knew what it was to be away from you," she said.
+
+I perceived suddenly that she had resolved to end our estrangement. She
+put herself so that my arm came caressingly about her.
+
+"These are jolly furs," I said.
+
+"I got them for you."
+
+The parlourmaid appeared below dealing with the maid and the luggage
+cab.
+
+"Tell me all about America," said Margaret. "I feel as though you'd been
+away six year's."
+
+We went arm in arm into our little sitting-room, and I took off the
+fur's for her and sat down upon the chintz-covered sofa by the fire.
+She had ordered tea, and came and sat by me. I don't know what I had
+expected, but of all things I had certainly not expected this sudden
+abolition of our distances.
+
+"I want to know all about America," she repeated, with her eyes
+scrutinising me. "Why did you come back?"
+
+I repeated the substance of my letters rather lamely, and she sat
+listening.
+
+"But why did you turn back--without going to Denver?"
+
+"I wanted to come back. I was restless."
+
+"Restlessness," she said, and thought. "You were restless in Venice. You
+said it was restlessness took you to America."
+
+Again she studied me. She turned a little awkwardly to her tea things,
+and poured needless water from the silver kettle into the teapot.
+Then she sat still for some moments looking at the equipage with
+expressionless eyes. I saw her hand upon the edge of the table tremble
+slightly. I watched her closely. A vague uneasiness possessed me. What
+might she not know or guess?
+
+She spoke at last with an effort. "I wish you were in Parliament again,"
+she said. "Life doesn't give you events enough."
+
+"If I was in Parliament again, I should be on the Conservative side."
+
+"I know," she said, and was still more thoughtful.
+
+"Lately," she began, and paused. "Lately I've been reading--you."
+
+I didn't help her out with what she had to say. I waited.
+
+"I didn't understand what you were after. I had misjudged. I didn't
+know. I think perhaps I was rather stupid." Her eyes were suddenly
+shining with tears. "You didn't give me much chance to understand."
+
+She turned upon me suddenly with a voice full of tears.
+
+"Husband," she said abruptly, holding her two hands out to me, "I want
+to begin over again!"
+
+I took her hands, perplexed beyond measure. "My dear!" I said.
+
+"I want to begin over again."
+
+I bowed my head to hide my face, and found her hand in mine and kissed
+it.
+
+"Ah!" she said, and slowly withdrew her hand. She leant forward with her
+arm on the sofa-back, and looked very intently into my face. I felt the
+most damnable scoundrel in the world as I returned her gaze. The thought
+of Isabel's darkly shining eyes seemed like a physical presence between
+us....
+
+"Tell me," I said presently, to break the intolerable tension, "tell me
+plainly what you mean by this."
+
+I sat a little away from her, and then took my teacup in hand, with an
+odd effect of defending myself. "Have you been reading that old book of
+mine?" I asked.
+
+"That and the paper. I took a complete set from the beginning down
+to Durham with me. I have read it over, thought it over. I didn't
+understand--what you were teaching."
+
+There was a little pause.
+
+"It all seems so plain to me now," she said, "and so true."
+
+I was profoundly disconcerted. I put down my teacup, stood up in the
+middle of the hearthrug, and began talking. "I'm tremendously glad,
+Margaret, that you've come to see I'm not altogether perverse," I began.
+I launched out into a rather trite and windy exposition of my views, and
+she sat close to me on the sofa, looking up into my face, hanging on my
+words, a deliberate and invincible convert.
+
+"Yes," she said, "yes."...
+
+I had never doubted my new conceptions before; now I doubted them
+profoundly. But I went on talking. It's the grim irony in the lives of
+all politicians, writers, public teachers, that once the audience is at
+their feet, a new loyalty has gripped them. It isn't their business to
+admit doubt and imperfections. They have to go on talking. And I was
+now so accustomed to Isabel's vivid interruptions, qualifications,
+restatements, and confirmations....
+
+Margaret and I dined together at home. She made me open out my political
+projects to her. "I have been foolish," she said. "I want to help."
+
+And by some excuse I have forgotten she made me come to her room. I
+think it was some book I had to take her, some American book I had
+brought back with me, and mentioned in our talk. I walked in with it,
+and put it down on the table and turned to go.
+
+"Husband!" she cried, and held out her slender arms to me. I was
+compelled to go to her and kiss her, and she twined them softly about my
+neck and drew me to her and kissed me. I disentangled them very gently,
+and took each wrist and kissed it, and the backs of her hands.
+
+"Good-night," I said. There came a little pause. "Good-night, Margaret,"
+I repeated, and walked very deliberately and with a kind of sham
+preoccupation to the door.
+
+I did not look at her, but I could feel her standing, watching me. If I
+had looked up, she would, I knew, have held out her arms to me....
+
+At the very outset that secret, which was to touch no one but Isabel and
+myself, had reached out to stab another human being.
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+The whole world had changed for Isabel and me; and we tried to pretend
+that nothing had changed except a small matter between us. We believed
+quite honestly at that time that it was possible to keep this thing
+that had happened from any reaction at all, save perhaps through some
+magically enhanced vigour in our work, upon the world about us! Seen in
+retrospect, one can realise the absurdity of this belief; within a week
+I realised it; but that does not alter the fact that we did believe as
+much, and that people who are deeply in love and unable to marry will
+continue to believe so to the very end of time. They will continue to
+believe out of existence every consideration that separates them until
+they have come together. Then they will count the cost, as we two had to
+do.
+
+I am telling a story, and not propounding theories in this book; and
+chiefly I am telling of the ideas and influences and emotions that
+have happened to me--me as a sort of sounding board for my world. The
+moralist is at liberty to go over my conduct with his measure and
+say, "At this point or at that you went wrong, and you ought to have
+done"--so-and-so. The point of interest to the statesman is that it
+didn't for a moment occur to us to do so-and-so when the time for doing
+it came. It amazes me now to think how little either of us troubled
+about the established rights or wrongs of the situation. We hadn't an
+atom of respect for them, innate or acquired. The guardians of public
+morals will say we were very bad people; I submit in defence that they
+are very bad guardians--provocative guardians.... And when at last there
+came a claim against us that had an effective validity for us, we were
+in the full tide of passionate intimacy.
+
+I had a night of nearly sleepless perplexity after Margaret's return.
+She had suddenly presented herself to me like something dramatically
+recalled, fine, generous, infinitely capable of feeling. I was amazed
+how much I had forgotten her. In my contempt for vulgarised and
+conventionalised honour I had forgotten that for me there was such
+a reality as honour. And here it was, warm and near to me, living,
+breathing, unsuspecting. Margaret's pride was my honour, that I had had
+no right even to imperil.
+
+I do not now remember if I thought at that time of going to Isabel and
+putting this new aspect of the case before her. Perhaps I did. Perhaps
+I may have considered even then the possibility of ending what had so
+freshly and passionately begun. If I did, it vanished next day at
+the sight of her. Whatever regrets came in the darkness, the daylight
+brought an obstinate confidence in our resolution again. We would, we
+declared, "pull the thing off." Margaret must not know. Margaret should
+not know. If Margaret did not know, then no harm whatever would be done.
+We tried to sustain that....
+
+For a brief time we had been like two people in a magic cell, magically
+cut off from the world and full of a light of its own, and then we began
+to realise that we were not in the least cut off, that the world was all
+about us and pressing in upon us, limiting us, threatening us, resuming
+possession of us. I tried to ignore the injury to Margaret of her
+unreciprocated advances. I tried to maintain to myself that this hidden
+love made no difference to the now irreparable breach between husband
+and wife. But I never spoke of it to Isabel or let her see that aspect
+of our case. How could I? The time for that had gone....
+
+Then in new shapes and relations came trouble. Distressful elements
+crept in by reason of our unavoidable furtiveness; we ignored them,
+hid them from each other, and attempted to hide them from ourselves.
+Successful love is a thing of abounding pride, and we had to be secret.
+It was delightful at first to be secret, a whispering, warm conspiracy;
+then presently it became irksome and a little shameful. Her essential
+frankness of soul was all against the masks and falsehoods that many
+women would have enjoyed. Together in our secrecy we relaxed, then in
+the presence of other people again it was tiresome to have to watch
+for the careless, too easy phrase, to snatch back one's hand from the
+limitless betrayal of a light, familiar touch.
+
+Love becomes a poor thing, at best a poor beautiful thing, if it
+develops no continuing and habitual intimacy. We were always meeting,
+and most gloriously loving and beginning--and then we had to snatch at
+remorseless ticking watches, hurry to catch trains, and go back to this
+or that. That is all very well for the intrigues of idle people perhaps,
+but not for an intense personal relationship. It is like lighting a
+candle for the sake of lighting it, over and over again, and each time
+blowing it out. That, no doubt, must be very amusing to children playing
+with the matches, but not to people who love warm light, and want it in
+order to do fine and honourable things together. We had achieved--I
+give the ugly phrase that expresses the increasing discolouration in my
+mind--"illicit intercourse." To end at that, we now perceived, wasn't in
+our style. But where were we to end?...
+
+Perhaps we might at this stage have given it up. I think if we could
+have seen ahead and around us we might have done so. But the glow of our
+cell blinded us.... I wonder what might have happened if at that time we
+had given it up.... We propounded it, we met again in secret to discuss
+it, and our overpowering passion for one another reduced that meeting to
+absurdity....
+
+Presently the idea of children crept between us. It came in from all our
+conceptions of life and public service; it was, we found, in the quality
+of our minds that physical love without children is a little weak,
+timorous, more than a little shameful. With imaginative people there
+very speedily comes a time when that realisation is inevitable. We
+hadn't thought of that before--it isn't natural to think of that before.
+We hadn't known. There is no literature in English dealing with such
+things.
+
+There is a necessary sequence of phases in love. These came in their
+order, and with them, unanticipated tarnishings on the first bright
+perfection of our relations. For a time these developing phases were
+no more than a secret and private trouble between us, little shadows
+spreading by imperceptible degrees across that vivid and luminous cell.
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+The Handitch election flung me suddenly into prominence.
+
+It is still only two years since that struggle, and I will not trouble
+the reader with a detailed history of events that must be quite
+sufficiently present in his mind for my purpose already. Huge stacks of
+journalism have dealt with Handitch and its significance. For the reader
+very probably, as for most people outside a comparatively small circle,
+it meant my emergence from obscurity. We obtruded no editor's name in
+the BLUE WEEKLY; I had never as yet been on the London hoardings. Before
+Handitch I was a journalist and writer of no great public standing;
+after Handitch, I was definitely a person, in the little group of
+persons who stood for the Young Imperialist movement. Handitch was, to a
+very large extent, my affair. I realised then, as a man comes to do, how
+much one can still grow after seven and twenty. In the second election
+I was a man taking hold of things; at Kinghamstead I had been simply a
+young candidate, a party unit, led about the constituency, told to
+do this and that, and finally washed in by the great Anti-Imperialist
+flood, like a starfish rolling up a beach.
+
+My feminist views had earnt the mistrust of the party, and I do not
+think I should have got the chance of Handitch or indeed any chance at
+all of Parliament for a long time, if it had not been that the seat with
+its long record of Liberal victories and its Liberal majority of 3642 at
+the last election, offered a hopeless contest. The Liberal dissensions
+and the belated but by no means contemptible Socialist candidate were
+providential interpositions. I think, however, the conduct of Gane,
+Crupp, and Tarvrille in coming down to fight for me, did count
+tremendously in my favour. "We aren't going to win, perhaps," said
+Crupp, "but we are going to talk." And until the very eve of victory, we
+treated Handitch not so much as a battlefield as a hoarding. And so it
+was the Endowment of Motherhood as a practical form of Eugenics got into
+English politics.
+
+Plutus, our agent, was scared out of his wits when the thing began.
+
+"They're ascribing all sorts of queer ideas to you about the Family," he
+said.
+
+"I think the Family exists for the good of the children," I said; "is
+that queer?"
+
+"Not when you explain it--but they won't let you explain it. And about
+marriage--?"
+
+"I'm all right about marriage--trust me."
+
+"Of course, if YOU had children," said Plutus, rather
+inconsiderately....
+
+They opened fire upon me in a little electioneering rag call
+the HANDITCH SENTINEL, with a string of garbled quotations and
+misrepresentations that gave me an admirable text for a speech. I spoke
+for an hour and ten minutes with a more and more crumpled copy of the
+SENTINEL in my hand, and I made the fullest and completest exposition
+of the idea of endowing motherhood that I think had ever been made up
+to that time in England. Its effect on the press was extraordinary. The
+Liberal papers gave me quite unprecedented space under the impression
+that I had only to be given rope to hang myself; the Conservatives cut
+me down or tried to justify me; the whole country was talking. I had had
+a pamphlet in type upon the subject, and I revised this carefully and
+put it on the book-stalls within three days. It sold enormously and
+brought me bushels of letters. We issued over three thousand in Handitch
+alone. At meeting after meeting I was heckled upon nothing else. Long
+before polling day Plutus was converted.
+
+"It's catching on like old age pensions," he said. "We've dished the
+Liberals! To think that such a project should come from our side!"
+
+But it was only with the declaration of the poll that my battle was won.
+No one expected more than a snatch victory, and I was in by over fifteen
+hundred. At one bound Cossington's papers passed from apologetics varied
+by repudiation to triumphant praise. "A renascent England, breeding
+men," said the leader in his chief daily on the morning after the
+polling, and claimed that the Conservatives had been ever the pioneers
+in sanely bold constructive projects.
+
+I came up to London with a weary but rejoicing Margaret by the night
+train.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+To any one who did not know of that glowing secret between Isabel and
+myself, I might well have appeared at that time the most successful and
+enviable of men. I had recovered rapidly from an uncongenial start
+in political life; I had become a considerable force through the BLUE
+WEEKLY, and was shaping an increasingly influential body of opinion; I
+had re-entered Parliament with quite dramatic distinction, and in spite
+of a certain faltering on the part of the orthodox Conservatives
+towards the bolder elements in our propaganda, I had loyal and unenvious
+associates who were making me a power in the party. People were coming
+to our group, understandings were developing. It was clear we should
+play a prominent part in the next general election, and that, given a
+Conservative victory, I should be assured of office. The world opened
+out to me brightly and invitingly. Great schemes took shape in my mind,
+always more concrete, always more practicable; the years ahead seemed
+falling into order, shining with the credible promise of immense
+achievement.
+
+And at the heart of it all, unseen and unsuspected, was the secret of my
+relations with Isabel--like a seed that germinates and thrusts, thrusts
+relentlessly.
+
+From the onset of the Handitch contest onward, my meetings with her had
+been more and more pervaded by the discussion of our situation. It had
+innumerable aspects. It was very present to us that we wanted to be
+together as much as possible--we were beginning to long very much for
+actual living together in the same house, so that one could come as
+it were carelessly--unawares--upon the other, busy perhaps about some
+trivial thing. We wanted to feel each other in the daily atmosphere.
+Preceding our imperatively sterile passion, you must remember, outside
+it, altogether greater than it so far as our individual lives were
+concerned, there had grown and still grew an enormous affection and
+intellectual sympathy between us. We brought all our impressions and all
+our ideas to each other, to see them in each other's light. It is hard
+to convey that quality of intellectual unison to any one who has not
+experienced it. I thought more and more in terms of conversation with
+Isabel; her possible comments upon things would flash into my mind,
+oh!--with the very sound of her voice.
+
+I remember, too, the odd effect of seeing her in the distance going
+about Handitch, like any stranger canvasser; the queer emotion of her
+approach along the street, the greeting as she passed. The morning of
+the polling she vanished from the constituency. I saw her for an instant
+in the passage behind our Committee rooms.
+
+"Going?" said I.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"Stay it out. I want you to see the fun. I remember--the other time."
+
+She didn't answer for a moment or so, and stood with face averted.
+
+"It's Margaret's show," she said abruptly. "If I see her smiling there
+like a queen by your side--! She did--last time. I remember." She caught
+at a sob and dashed her hand across her face impatiently. "Jealous fool,
+mean and petty, jealous fool!... Good luck, old man, to you! You're
+going to win. But I don't want to see the end of it all the same...."
+
+"Good-bye!" said I, clasping her hand as some supporter appeared in the
+passage....
+
+I came back to London victorious, and a little flushed and coarse with
+victory; and so soon as I could break away I went to Isabel's flat and
+found her white and worn, with the stain of secret weeping about her
+eyes. I came into the room to her and shut the door.
+
+"You said I'd win," I said, and held out my arms.
+
+She hugged me closely for a moment.
+
+"My dear," I whispered, "it's nothing--without you--nothing!"
+
+We didn't speak for some seconds. Then she slipped from my hold. "Look!"
+she said, smiling like winter sunshine. "I've had in all the morning
+papers--the pile of them, and you--resounding."
+
+"It's more than I dared hope."
+
+"Or I."
+
+She stood for a moment still smiling bravely, and then she was sobbing
+in my arms. "The bigger you are--the more you show," she said--"the more
+we are parted. I know, I know--"
+
+I held her close to me, making no answer.
+
+Presently she became still. "Oh, well," she said, and wiped her eyes and
+sat down on the little sofa by the fire; and I sat down beside her.
+
+"I didn't know all there was in love," she said, staring at the coals,
+"when we went love-making."
+
+I put my arm behind her and took a handful of her dear soft hair in my
+hand and kissed it.
+
+"You've done a great thing this time," she said. "Handitch will make
+you."
+
+"It opens big chances," I said. "But why are you weeping, dear one?"
+
+"Envy," she said, "and love."
+
+"You're not lonely?"
+
+"I've plenty to do--and lots of people."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I want you."
+
+"You've got me."
+
+She put her arm about me and kissed me. "I want you," she said, "just as
+if I had nothing of you. You don't understand--how a woman wants a man.
+I thought once if I just gave myself to you it would be enough. It was
+nothing--it was just a step across the threshold. My dear, every moment
+you are away I ache for you--ache! I want to be about when it isn't
+love-making or talk. I want to be doing things for you, and watching
+you when you're not thinking of me. All those safe, careless, intimate
+things. And something else--" She stopped. "Dear, I don't want to bother
+you. I just want you to know I love you...."
+
+She caught my head in her hands and kissed it, then stood up abruptly.
+
+I looked up at her, a little perplexed.
+
+"Dear heart," said I, "isn't this enough? You're my councillor, my
+colleague, my right hand, the secret soul of my life--"
+
+"And I want to darn your socks," she said, smiling back at me.
+
+"You're insatiable."
+
+She smiled "No," she said. "I'm not insatiable, Master. But I'm a woman
+in love. And I'm finding out what I want, and what is necessary to
+me--and what I can't have. That's all."
+
+"We get a lot."
+
+"We want a lot. You and I are greedy people for the things we like,
+Master. It's very evident we've got nearly all we can ever have of one
+another--and I'm not satisfied."
+
+"What more is there?
+
+"For you--very little. I wonder. For me--every thing. Yes--everything.
+You didn't mean it, Master; you didn't know any more than I did when I
+began, but love between a man and a woman is sometimes very one-sided.
+Fearfully one-sided! That's all...."
+
+"Don't YOU ever want children?" she said abruptly.
+
+"I suppose I do."
+
+"You don't!"
+
+"I haven't thought of them."
+
+"A man doesn't, perhaps. But I have.... I want them--like hunger.
+YOUR children, and home with you. Really, continually you! That's the
+trouble.... I can't have 'em, Master, and I can't have you."
+
+She was crying, and through her tears she laughed.
+
+"I'm going to make a scene," she said, "and get this over. I'm so
+discontented and miserable; I've got to tell you. It would come between
+us if I didn't. I'm in love with you, with everything--with all my
+brains. I'll pull through all right. I'll be good, Master, never you
+fear. But to-day I'm crying out with all my being. This election--You're
+going up; you're going on. In these papers--you're a great big fact.
+It's suddenly come home to me. At the back of my mind I've always had
+the idea I was going to have you somehow presently for myself--I mean to
+have you to go long tramps with, to keep house for, to get meals for,
+to watch for of an evening. It's a sort of habitual background to my
+thought of you. And it's nonsense--utter nonsense!" She stopped. She was
+crying and choking. "And the child, you know--the child!"
+
+I was troubled beyond measure, but Handitch and its intimations were
+clear and strong.
+
+"We can't have that," I said.
+
+"No," she said, "we can't have that."
+
+"We've got our own things to do."
+
+"YOUR things," she said.
+
+"Aren't they yours too?"
+
+"Because of you," she said.
+
+"Aren't they your very own things?"
+
+"Women don't have that sort of very own thing. Indeed, it's true!
+And think! You've been down there preaching the goodness of children,
+telling them the only good thing in a state is happy, hopeful children,
+working to free mothers and children--"
+
+"And we give our own children to do it?" I said.
+
+"Yes," she said. "And sometimes I think it's too much to give--too much
+altogether.... Children get into a woman's brain--when she mustn't have
+them, especially when she must never hope for them. Think of the child
+we might have now!--the little creature with soft, tender skin, and
+little hands and little feet! At times it haunts me. It comes and says,
+Why wasn't I given life? I can hear it in the night.... The world is
+full of such little ghosts, dear lover--little things that asked for
+life and were refused. They clamour to me. It's like a little fist
+beating at my heart. Love children, beautiful children. Little cold
+hands that tear at my heart! Oh, my heart and my lord!" She was holding
+my arm with both her hands and weeping against it, and now she drew
+herself to my shoulder and wept and sobbed in my embrace. "I shall never
+sit with your child on my knee and you beside me-never, and I am a woman
+and your lover!..."
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+But the profound impossibility of our relation was now becoming more and
+more apparent to us. We found ourselves seeking justification, clinging
+passionately to a situation that was coldly, pitilessly, impossible and
+fated. We wanted quite intensely to live together and have a child, but
+also we wanted very many other things that were incompatible with these
+desires. It was extraordinarily difficult to weigh our political and
+intellectual ambitions against those intimate wishes. The weights kept
+altering according as one found oneself grasping this valued thing or
+that. It wasn't as if we could throw everything aside for our love,
+and have that as we wanted it. Love such as we bore one another isn't
+altogether, or even chiefly, a thing in itself--it is for the most part
+a value set upon things. Our love was interwoven with all our other
+interests; to go out of the world and live in isolation seemed to us
+like killing the best parts of each other; we loved the sight of each
+other engaged finely and characteristically, we knew each other best
+as activities. We had no delusions about material facts; we didn't want
+each other alive or dead, we wanted each other fully alive. We wanted
+to do big things together, and for us to take each other openly and
+desperately would leave us nothing in the world to do. We wanted
+children indeed passionately, but children with every helpful chance in
+the world, and children born in scandal would be handicapped at every
+turn. We wanted to share a home, and not a solitude.
+
+And when we were at this stage of realisation, began the intimations
+that we were found out, and that scandal was afoot against us....
+
+I heard of it first from Esmeer, who deliberately mentioned it,
+with that steady grey eye of his watching me, as an instance of the
+preposterous falsehoods people will circulate. It came to Isabel
+almost simultaneously through a married college friend, who made it her
+business to demand either confirmation or denial. It filled us both with
+consternation. In the surprise of the moment Isabel admitted her secret,
+and her friend went off "reserving her freedom of action."
+
+Discovery broke out in every direction. Friends with grave faces and
+an atmosphere of infinite tact invaded us both. Other friends ceased to
+invade either of us. It was manifest we had become--we knew not how--a
+private scandal, a subject for duologues, an amazement, a perplexity,
+a vivid interest. In a few brief weeks it seemed London passed from
+absolute unsuspiciousness to a chattering exaggeration of its knowledge
+of our relations.
+
+It was just the most inappropriate time for that disclosure. The long
+smouldering antagonism to my endowment of motherhood ideas had flared
+up into an active campaign in the EXPURGATOR, and it would be altogether
+disastrous to us if I should be convicted of any personal irregularity.
+It was just because of the manifest and challenging respectability of my
+position that I had been able to carry the thing as far as I had done.
+Now suddenly my fortunes had sprung a leak, and scandal was pouring
+in.... It chanced, too, that a wave of moral intolerance was sweeping
+through London, one of those waves in which the bitterness of the
+consciously just finds an ally in the panic of the undiscovered. A
+certain Father Blodgett had been preaching against social corruption
+with extraordinary force, and had roused the Church of England people
+to a kind of competition in denunciation. The old methods of the
+Anti-Socialist campaign had been renewed, and had offered far too wide
+a scope and too tempting an opportunity for private animosity, to be
+restricted to the private affairs of the Socialists. I had intimations
+of an extensive circulation of "private and confidential" letters....
+
+I think there can be nothing else in life quite like the unnerving
+realisation that rumour and scandal are afoot about one. Abruptly
+one's confidence in the solidity of the universe disappears. One
+walks silenced through a world that one feels to be full of inaudible
+accusations. One cannot challenge the assault, get it out into the open,
+separate truth and falsehood. It slinks from you, turns aside its face.
+Old acquaintances suddenly evaded me, made extraordinary excuses;
+men who had presumed on the verge of my world and pestered me with an
+intrusive enterprise, now took the bold step of flat repudiation. I
+became doubtful about the return of a nod, retracted all those tentacles
+of easy civility that I had hitherto spread to the world. I still grow
+warm with amazed indignation when I recall that Edward Crampton, meeting
+me full on the steps of the Climax Club, cut me dead. "By God!" I cried,
+and came near catching him by the throat and wringing out of him what
+of all good deeds and bad, could hearten him, a younger man than I and
+empty beyond comparison, to dare to play the judge to me. And then I had
+an open slight from Mrs. Millingham, whom I had counted on as one counts
+upon the sunrise. I had not expected things of that sort; they were
+disconcerting beyond measure; it was as if the world were giving way
+beneath my feet, as though something failed in the essential confidence
+of life, as though a hand of wet ice had touched my heart. Similar
+things were happening to Isabel. Yet we went on working, visiting,
+meeting, trying to ignore this gathering of implacable forces against
+us.
+
+For a time I was perplexed beyond measure to account for this campaign.
+Then I got a clue. The centre of diffusion was the Bailey household. The
+Baileys had never forgiven me my abandonment of the young Liberal group
+they had done so much to inspire and organise; their dinner-table had
+long been a scene of hostile depreciation of the BLUE WEEKLY and all its
+allies; week after week Altiora proclaimed that I was "doing nothing,"
+and found other causes for our bye-election triumphs; I counted Chambers
+Street a dangerous place for me. Yet, nevertheless, I was astonished to
+find them using a private scandal against me. They did. I think Handitch
+had filled up the measure of their bitterness, for I had not only
+abandoned them, but I was succeeding beyond even their power of
+misrepresentation. Always I had been a wasp in their spider's web,
+difficult to claim as a tool, uncritical, antagonistic. I admired their
+work and devotion enormously, but I had never concealed my contempt for
+a certain childish vanity they displayed, and for the frequent puerility
+of their political intrigues. I suppose contempt galls more than
+injuries, and anyhow they had me now. They had me. Bailey, I found,
+was warning fathers of girls against me as a "reckless libertine," and
+Altiora, flushed, roguish, and dishevelled, was sitting on her fender
+curb after dinner, and pledging little parties of five or six women at a
+time with infinite gusto not to let the matter go further. Our cell was
+open to the world, and a bleak, distressful daylight streaming in.
+
+I had a gleam of a more intimate motive in Altiora from the reports that
+came to me. Isabel had been doing a series of five or six articles in
+the POLITICAL REVIEW in support of our campaign, the POLITICAL REVIEW
+which had hitherto been loyally Baileyite. Quite her best writing up to
+the present, at any rate, is in those papers, and no doubt Altiora had
+had not only to read her in those invaded columns, but listen to her
+praises in the mouths of the tactless influential. Altiora, like so many
+people who rely on gesture and vocal insistence in conversation, writes
+a poor and slovenly prose and handles an argument badly; Isabel has her
+University training behind her and wrote from the first with the stark
+power of a clear-headed man. "Now we know," said Altiora, with just a
+gleam of malice showing through her brightness, "now we know who helps
+with the writing!"
+
+She revealed astonishing knowledge.
+
+For a time I couldn't for the life of me discover her sources. I had,
+indeed, a desperate intention of challenging her, and then I bethought
+me of a youngster named Curmain, who had been my supplemental typist and
+secretary for a time, and whom I had sent on to her before the days of
+our breach. "Of course!" said I, "Curmain!" He was a tall, drooping,
+sidelong youth with sandy hair, a little forward head, and a long
+thin neck. He stole stamps, and, I suspected, rifled my private letter
+drawer, and I found him one day on a turn of the stairs looking guilty
+and ruffled with a pretty Irish housemaid of Margaret's manifestly in
+a state of hot indignation. I saw nothing, but I felt everything in the
+air between them. I hate this pestering of servants, but at the same
+time I didn't want Curmain wiped out of existence, so I had packed him
+off without unnecessary discussion to Altiora. He was quick and cheap
+anyhow, and I thought her general austerity ought to redeem him if
+anything could; the Chambers Street housemaid wasn't for any man's
+kissing and showed it, and the stamps and private letters were looked
+after with an efficiency altogether surpassing mine. And Altiora, I've
+no doubt left now whatever, pumped this young undesirable about me,
+and scenting a story, had him to dinner alone one evening to get to the
+bottom of the matter. She got quite to the bottom of it,--it must have
+been a queer duologue. She read Isabel's careless, intimate letters
+to me, so to speak, by this proxy, and she wasn't ashamed to use this
+information in the service of the bitterness that had sprung up in her
+since our political breach. It was essentially a personal bitterness; it
+helped no public purpose of theirs to get rid of me. My downfall in
+any public sense was sheer waste,--the loss of a man. She knew she was
+behaving badly, and so, when it came to remonstrance, she behaved worse.
+She'd got names and dates and places; the efficiency of her information
+was irresistible. And she set to work at it marvellously. Never before,
+in all her pursuit of efficient ideals, had Altiora achieved such levels
+of efficiency. I wrote a protest that was perhaps ill-advised and angry,
+I went to her and tried to stop her. She wouldn't listen, she wouldn't
+think, she denied and lied, she behaved like a naughty child of six
+years old which has made up its mind to be hurtful. It wasn't only, I
+think, that she couldn't bear our political and social influence; she
+also--I realised at that interview couldn't bear our loving. It seemed
+to her the sickliest thing,--a thing quite unendurable. While such
+things were, the virtue had gone out of her world.
+
+I've the vividest memory of that call of mine. She'd just come in and
+taken off her hat, and she was grey and dishevelled and tired, and in
+a business-like dress of black and crimson that didn't suit her and
+was muddy about the skirts; she'd a cold in her head and sniffed
+penetratingly, she avoided my eye as she talked and interrupted
+everything I had to say; she kept stabbing fiercely at the cushions of
+her sofa with a long hat-pin and pretending she was overwhelmed with
+grief at the DEBACLE she was deliberately organising.
+
+"Then part," she cried, "part. If you don't want a smashing up,--part!
+You two have got to be parted. You've got never to see each other ever,
+never to speak." There was a zest in her voice. "We're not circulating
+stories," she denied. "No! And Curmain never told us anything--Curmain
+is an EXCELLENT young man; oh! a quite excellent young man. You
+misjudged him altogether."...
+
+I was equally unsuccessful with Bailey. I caught the little wretch in
+the League Club, and he wriggled and lied. He wouldn't say where he had
+got his facts, he wouldn't admit he had told any one. When I gave him
+the names of two men who had come to me astonished and incredulous,
+he attempted absurdly to make me think they had told HIM. He did his
+horrible little best to suggest that honest old Quackett, who had just
+left England for the Cape, was the real scandalmonger. That struck me
+as mean, even for Bailey. I've still the odd vivid impression of his
+fluting voice, excusing the inexcusable, his big, shifty face evading
+me, his perspiration-beaded forehead, the shrugging shoulders, and the
+would-be exculpatory gestures--Houndsditch gestures--of his enormous
+ugly hands.
+
+"I can assure you, my dear fellow," he said; "I can assure you we've
+done everything to shield you--everything."...
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Isabel came after dinner one evening and talked in the office. She made
+a white-robed, dusky figure against the deep blues of my big window. I
+sat at my desk and tore a quill pen to pieces as I talked.
+
+"The Baileys don't intend to let this drop," I said. "They mean that
+every one in London is to know about it."
+
+"I know."
+
+"Well!" I said.
+
+"Dear heart," said Isabel, facing it, "it's no good waiting for things
+to overtake us; we're at the parting of the ways."
+
+"What are we to do?"
+
+"They won't let us go on."
+
+"Damn them!"
+
+"They are ORGANISING scandal."
+
+"It's no good waiting for things to overtake us," I echoed; "they have
+overtaken us." I turned on her. "What do you want to do?"
+
+"Everything," she said. "Keep you and have our work. Aren't we Mates?"
+
+"We can't."
+
+"And we can't!"
+
+"I've got to tell Margaret," I said.
+
+"Margaret!"
+
+"I can't bear the idea of any one else getting in front with it. I've
+been wincing about Margaret secretly--"
+
+"I know. You'll have to tell her--and make your peace with her."
+
+She leant back against the bookcases under the window.
+
+"We've had some good times, Master;" she said, with a sigh in her voice.
+
+And then for a long time we stared at one another in silence.
+
+"We haven't much time left," she said.
+
+"Shall we bolt?" I said.
+
+"And leave all this?" she asked, with her eyes going round the room.
+"And that?" And her head indicated Westminster. "No!"
+
+I said no more of bolting.
+
+"We've got to screw ourselves up to surrender," she said.
+
+"Something."
+
+"A lot."
+
+"Master," she said, "it isn't all sex and stuff between us?"
+
+"No!"
+
+"I can't give up the work. Our work's my life."
+
+We came upon another long pause.
+
+"No one will believe we've ceased to be lovers--if we simply do," she
+said.
+
+"We shouldn't."
+
+"We've got to do something more parting than that."
+
+I nodded, and again we paused. She was coming to something.
+
+"I could marry Shoesmith," she said abruptly.
+
+"But--" I objected.
+
+"He knows. It wasn't fair. I told him."
+
+"Oh, that explains," I said. "There's been a kind of sulkiness--But--you
+told him?"
+
+She nodded. "He's rather badly hurt," she said. "He's been a good
+friend to me. He's curiously loyal. But something, something he said one
+day--forced me to let him know.... That's been the beastliness of all
+this secrecy. That's the beastliness of all secrecy. You have to spring
+surprises on people. But he keeps on. He's steadfast. He'd already
+suspected. He wants me very badly to marry him...."
+
+"But you don't want to marry him?"
+
+"I'm forced to think of it."
+
+"But does he want to marry you at that? Take you as a present from the
+world at large?--against your will and desire?... I don't understand
+him."
+
+"He cares for me."
+
+"How?"
+
+"He thinks this is a fearful mess for me. He wants to pull it straight."
+
+We sat for a time in silence, with imaginations that obstinately refused
+to take up the realities of this proposition.
+
+"I don't want you to marry Shoesmith," I said at last.
+
+"Don't you like him?"
+
+"Not as your husband."
+
+"He's a very clever and sturdy person--and very generous and devoted to
+me."
+
+"And me?"
+
+"You can't expect that. He thinks you are wonderful--and, naturally,
+that you ought not to have started this."
+
+"I've a curious dislike to any one thinking that but myself. I'm quite
+ready to think it myself."
+
+"He'd let us be friends--and meet."
+
+"Let us be friends!" I cried, after a long pause. "You and me!"
+
+"He wants me to be engaged soon. Then, he says, he can go round fighting
+these rumours, defending us both--and force a quarrel on the Baileys."
+
+"I don't understand him," I said, and added, "I don't understand you."
+
+I was staring at her face. It seemed white and set in the dimness.
+
+"Do you really mean this, Isabel?" I asked.
+
+"What else is there to do, my dear?--what else is there to do at all?
+I've been thinking day and night. You can't go away with me. You can't
+smash yourself suddenly in the sight of all men. I'd rather die than
+that should happen. Look what you are becoming in the country! Look at
+all you've built up!--me helping. I wouldn't let you do it if you could.
+I wouldn't let you--if it were only for Margaret's sake. THIS... closes
+the scandal, closes everything."
+
+"It closes all our life together," I cried.
+
+She was silent.
+
+"It never ought to have begun," I said.
+
+She winced. Then abruptly she was on her knees before me, with her hands
+upon my shoulder and her eyes meeting mine.
+
+"My dear," she said very earnestly, "don't misunderstand me! Don't think
+I'm retreating from the things we've done! Our love is the best thing I
+could ever have had from life. Nothing can ever equal it; nothing could
+ever equal the beauty and delight you and I have had together. Never!
+You have loved me; you do love me...."
+
+No one could ever know how to love you as I have loved you; no one could
+ever love me as you have loved me, my king. And it's just because it's
+been so splendid, dear; it's just because I'd die rather than have a
+tithe of all this wiped out of my life again--for it's made me, it's all
+I am--dear, it's years since I began loving you--it's just because of
+its goodness that I want not to end in wreckage now, not to end in
+the smashing up of all the big things I understand in you and love in
+you....
+
+"What is there for us if we keep on and go away?" she went on. "All
+the big interests in our lives will vanish--everything. We shall become
+specialised people--people overshadowed by a situation. We shall be
+an elopement, a romance--all our breadth and meaning gone! People will
+always think of it first when they think of us; all our work and aims
+will be warped by it and subordinated to it. Is it good enough, dear?
+Just to specialise.... I think of you. We've got a case, a passionate
+case, the best of cases, but do we want to spend all our lives defending
+it and justifying it? And there's that other life. I know now you care
+for Margaret--you care more than you think you do. You have said fine
+things of her. I've watched you about her. Little things have dropped
+from you. She's given her life for you; she's nothing without you.
+You feel that to your marrow all the time you are thinking about these
+things. Oh, I'm not jealous, dear. I love you for loving her. I love you
+in relation to her. But there it is, an added weight against us, another
+thing worth saving."
+
+Presently, I remember, she sat back on her heels and looked up into
+my face. "We've done wrong--and parting's paying. It's time to pay.
+We needn't have paid, if we'd kept to the track.... You and I, Master,
+we've got to be men."
+
+"Yes," I said; "we've got to be men."
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+I was driven to tell Margaret about our situation by my intolerable
+dread that otherwise the thing might come to her through some stupid and
+clumsy informant. She might even meet Altiora, and have it from her.
+
+I can still recall the feeling of sitting at my desk that night in that
+large study of mine in Radnor Square, waiting for Margaret to come home.
+It was oddly like the feeling of a dentist's reception-room; only it was
+for me to do the dentistry with clumsy, cruel hands. I had left the door
+open so that she would come in to me.
+
+I heard her silken rustle on the stairs at last, and then she was in the
+doorway. "May I come in?" she said.
+
+"Do," I said, and turned round to her.
+
+"Working?" she said.
+
+"Hard," I answered. "Where have YOU been?"
+
+"At the Vallerys'. Mr. Evesham was talking about you. They were all
+talking. I don't think everybody knew who I was. Just Mrs. Mumble I'd
+been to them. Lord Wardenham doesn't like you."
+
+"He doesn't."
+
+"But they all feel you're rather big, anyhow. Then I went on to Park
+Lane to hear a new pianist and some other music at Eva's."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then I looked in at the Brabants' for some midnight tea before I came
+on here. They'd got some writers--and Grant was there."
+
+"You HAVE been flying round...."
+
+There was a little pause between us.
+
+I looked at her pretty, unsuspecting face, and at the slender grace of
+her golden-robed body. What gulfs there were between us! "You've been
+amused," I said.
+
+"It's been amusing. You've been at the House?"
+
+"The Medical Education Bill kept me."...
+
+After all, why should I tell her? She'd got to a way of living that
+fulfilled her requirements. Perhaps she'd never hear. But all that day
+and the day before I'd been making up my mind to do the thing.
+
+"I want to tell you something," I said. "I wish you'd sit down for a
+moment or so."...
+
+Once I had begun, it seemed to me I had to go through with it.
+
+Something in the quality of my voice gave her an intimation of unusual
+gravity. She looked at me steadily for a moment and sat down slowly in
+my armchair.
+
+"What is it?" she said.
+
+I went on awkwardly. "I've got to tell you--something extraordinarily
+distressing," I said.
+
+She was manifestly altogether unaware.
+
+"There seems to be a good deal of scandal abroad--I've only recently
+heard of it--about myself--and Isabel."
+
+"Isabel!"
+
+I nodded.
+
+"What do they say?" she asked.
+
+It was difficult, I found, to speak.
+
+"They say she's my mistress."
+
+"Oh! How abominable!"
+
+She spoke with the most natural indignation. Our eyes met.
+
+"We've been great friends," I said.
+
+"Yes. And to make THAT of it. My poor dear! But how can they?" She
+paused and looked at me. "It's so incredible. How can any one believe
+it? I couldn't."
+
+She stopped, with her distressed eyes regarding me. Her expression
+changed to dread. There was a tense stillness for a second, perhaps.
+
+I turned my face towards the desk, and took up and dropped a handful of
+paper fasteners.
+
+"Margaret," I said, "I'm afraid you'll have to believe it."
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Margaret sat very still. When I looked at her again, her face was very
+white, and her distressed eyes scrutinised me. Her lips quivered as she
+spoke. "You really mean--THAT?" she said.
+
+I nodded.
+
+"I never dreamt."
+
+"I never meant you to dream."
+
+"And that is why--we've been apart?"
+
+I thought. "I suppose it is."
+
+"Why have you told me now?"
+
+"Those rumours. I didn't want any one else to tell you."
+
+"Or else it wouldn't have mattered?"
+
+"No."
+
+She turned her eyes from me to the fire. Then for a moment she looked
+about the room she had made for me, and then quite silently, with a
+childish quivering of her lips, with a sort of dismayed distress upon
+her face, she was weeping. She sat weeping in her dress of cloth of
+gold, with her bare slender arms dropped limp over the arms of her
+chair, and her eyes averted from me, making no effort to stay or staunch
+her tears. "I am sorry, Margaret," I said. "I was in love.... I did not
+understand...."
+
+Presently she asked: "What are you going to do?"
+
+"You see, Margaret, now it's come to be your affair--I want to know what
+you--what you want."
+
+"You want to leave me?"
+
+"If you want me to, I must."
+
+"Leave Parliament--leave all the things you are doing,--all this fine
+movement of yours?"
+
+"No." I spoke sullenly. "I don't want to leave anything. I want to stay
+on. I've told you, because I think we--Isabel and I, I mean--have got to
+drive through a storm of scandal anyhow. I don't know how far things may
+go, how much people may feel, and I can't, I can't have you unconscious,
+unarmed, open to any revelation--"
+
+She made no answer.
+
+"When the thing began--I knew it was stupid but I thought it was a
+thing that wouldn't change, wouldn't be anything but itself, wouldn't
+unfold--consequences.... People have got hold of these vague rumours....
+Directly it reached any one else but--but us two--I saw it had to come
+to you."
+
+I stopped. I had that distressful feeling I have always had with
+Margaret, of not being altogether sure she heard, of being doubtful
+if she understood. I perceived that once again I had struck at her and
+shattered a thousand unsubstantial pinnacles. And I couldn't get at
+her, to help her, or touch her mind! I stood up, and at my movement she
+moved. She produced a dainty little handkerchief, and made an effort to
+wipe her face with it, and held it to her eyes. "Oh, my Husband!" she
+sobbed.
+
+"What do you mean to do?" she said, with her voice muffled by her
+handkerchief.
+
+"We're going to end it," I said.
+
+Something gripped me tormentingly as I said that. I drew a chair beside
+her and sat down. "You and I, Margaret, have been partners," I began.
+"We've built up this life of ours together; I couldn't have done it
+without you. We've made a position, created a work--"
+
+She shook her head. "You," she said.
+
+"You helping. I don't want to shatter it--if you don't want it
+shattered. I can't leave my work. I can't leave you. I want you to
+have--all that you have ever had. I've never meant to rob you. I've made
+an immense and tragic blunder. You don't know how things took us, how
+different they seemed! My character and accident have conspired--We'll
+pay--in ourselves, not in our public service."
+
+I halted again. Margaret remained very still.
+
+"I want you to understand that the thing is at an end. It is definitely
+at an end. We--we talked--yesterday. We mean to end it altogether." I
+clenched my hands. "She's--she's going to marry Arnold Shoesmith."
+
+I wasn't looking now at Margaret any more, but I heard the rustle of her
+movement as she turned on me.
+
+"It's all right," I said, clinging to my explanation. "We're doing
+nothing shabby. He knows. He will. It's all as right--as things can
+be now. We're not cheating any one, Margaret. We're doing things
+straight--now. Of course, you know.... We shall--we shall have to make
+sacrifices. Give things up pretty completely. Very completely.... We
+shall have not to see each other for a time, you know. Perhaps not a
+long time. Two or three years. Or write--or just any of that sort of
+thing ever--"
+
+Some subconscious barrier gave way in me. I found myself crying
+uncontrollably--as I have never cried since I was a little child. I was
+amazed and horrified at myself. And wonderfully, Margaret was on her
+knees beside me, with her arms about me, mingling her weeping with mine.
+"Oh, my Husband!" she cried, "my poor Husband! Does it hurt you so? I
+would do anything! Oh, the fool I am! Dear, I love you. I love you over
+and away and above all these jealous little things!"
+
+She drew down my head to her as a mother might draw down the head of
+a son. She caressed me, weeping bitterly with me. "Oh! my dear," she
+sobbed, "my dear! I've never seen you cry! I've never seen you cry.
+Ever! I didn't know you could. Oh! my dear! Can't you have her, my dear,
+if you want her? I can't bear it! Let me help you, dear. Oh! my Husband!
+My Man! I can't bear to have you cry!" For a time she held me in
+silence.
+
+"I've thought this might happen, I dreamt it might happen. You two, I
+mean. It was dreaming put it into my head. When I've seen you together,
+so glad with each other.... Oh! Husband mine, believe me! believe me!
+I'm stupid, I'm cold, I'm only beginning to realise how stupid and cold,
+but all I want in all the world is to give my life to you."...
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+"We can't part in a room," said Isabel.
+
+"We'll have one last talk together," I said, and planned that we should
+meet for a half a day between Dover and Walmer and talk ourselves out.
+I still recall that day very well, recall even the curious exaltation of
+grief that made our mental atmosphere distinctive and memorable. We had
+seen so much of one another, had become so intimate, that we talked of
+parting even as we parted with a sense of incredible remoteness. We went
+together up over the cliffs, and to a place where they fall towards the
+sea, past the white, quaint-lanterned lighthouses of the South Foreland.
+There, in a kind of niche below the crest, we sat talking. It was a
+spacious day, serenely blue and warm, and on the wrinkled water remotely
+below a black tender and six hooded submarines came presently, and
+engaged in mysterious manoeuvers. Shrieking gulls and chattering
+jackdaws circled over us and below us, and dived and swooped; and a
+skerry of weedy, fallen chalk appeared, and gradually disappeared again,
+as the tide fell and rose.
+
+We talked and thought that afternoon on every aspect of our relations.
+It seems to me now we talked so wide and far that scarcely an issue in
+the life between man and woman can arise that we did not at least touch
+upon. Lying there at Isabel's feet, I have become for myself a symbol of
+all this world-wide problem between duty and conscious, passionate love
+the world has still to solve. Because it isn't solved; there's a wrong
+in it either way.. .. The sky, the wide horizon, seemed to lift us out
+of ourselves until we were something representative and general. She was
+womanhood become articulate, talking to her lover.
+
+"I ought," I said, "never to have loved you."
+
+"It wasn't a thing planned," she said.
+
+"I ought never to have let our talk slip to that, never to have turned
+back from America."
+
+"I'm glad we did it," she said. "Don't think I repent."
+
+I looked at her.
+
+"I will never repent," she said. "Never!" as though she clung to her
+life in saying it.
+
+I remember we talked for a long time of divorce. It seemed to us then,
+and it seems to us still, that it ought to have been possible for
+Margaret to divorce me, and for me to marry without the scandalous and
+ugly publicity, the taint and ostracism that follow such a readjustment.
+We went on to the whole perplexing riddle of marriage. We criticised
+the current code, how muddled and conventionalised it had become, how
+modified by subterfuges and concealments and new necessities, and the
+increasing freedom of women. "It's all like Bromstead when the building
+came," I said; for I had often talked to her of that early impression of
+purpose dissolving again into chaotic forces. "There is no clear right
+in the world any more. The world is Byzantine. The justest man to-day
+must practise a tainted goodness."
+
+These questions need discussion--a magnificent frankness of
+discussion--if any standards are again to establish an effective hold
+upon educated people. Discretions, as I have said already, will never
+hold any one worth holding--longer than they held us. Against every
+"shalt not" there must be a "why not" plainly put,--the "why not"
+largest and plainest, the law deduced from its purpose. "You and I,
+Isabel," I said, "have always been a little disregardful of duty, partly
+at least because the idea of duty comes to us so ill-clad. Oh! I know
+there's an extravagant insubordinate strain in us, but that wasn't all.
+I wish humbugs would leave duty alone. I wish all duty wasn't covered
+with slime. That's where the real mischief comes in. Passion can always
+contrive to clothe itself in beauty, strips itself splendid. That
+carried us. But for all its mean associations there is this duty....
+
+"Don't we come rather late to it?"
+
+"Not so late that it won't be atrociously hard to do."
+
+"It's queer to think of now," said Isabel. "Who could believe we did all
+we have done honestly? Well, in a manner honestly. Who could believe we
+thought this might be hidden? Who could trace it all step by step from
+the time when we found that a certain boldness in our talk was pleasing?
+We talked of love.... Master, there's not much for us to do in the way
+of Apologia that any one will credit. And yet if it were possible to
+tell the very heart of our story....
+
+"Does Margaret really want to go on with you?" she asked--"shield
+you--knowing of... THIS?"
+
+"I'm certain. I don't understand--just as I don't understand Shoesmith,
+but she does. These people walk on solid ground which is just thin air
+to us. They've got something we haven't got. Assurances? I wonder."...
+
+Then it was, or later, we talked of Shoesmith, and what her life might
+be with him.
+
+"He's good," she said; "he's kindly. He's everything but magic. He's the
+very image of the decent, sober, honourable life. You can't say a thing
+against him or I--except that something--something in his imagination,
+something in the tone of his voice--fails for me. Why don't I love
+him?--he's a better man than you! Why don't you? IS he a better man than
+you? He's usage, he's honour, he's the right thing, he's the breed and
+the tradition,--a gentleman. You're your erring, incalculable self. I
+suppose we women will trust this sort and love your sort to the very end
+of time...."
+
+We lay side by side and nibbled at grass stalks as we talked. It seemed
+enormously unreasonable to us that two people who had come to the pitch
+of easy and confident affection and happiness that held between us
+should be obliged to part and shun one another, or murder half the
+substance of their lives. We felt ourselves crushed and beaten by an
+indiscriminating machine which destroys happiness in the service of
+jealousy. "The mass of people don't feel these things in quite the same
+manner as we feel them," she said. "Is it because they're different in
+grain, or educated out of some primitive instinct?"
+
+"It's because we've explored love a little, and they know no more
+than the gateway," I said. "Lust and then jealousy; their simple
+conception--and we have gone past all that and wandered hand in
+hand...."
+
+I remember that for a time we watched two of that larger sort of gull,
+whose wings are brownish-white, circle and hover against the blue. And
+then we lay and looked at a band of water mirror clear far out to sea,
+and wondered why the breeze that rippled all the rest should leave it so
+serene.
+
+"And in this State of ours," I resumed.
+
+"Eh!" said Isabel, rolling over into a sitting posture and looking out
+at the horizon. "Let's talk no more of things we can never see. Talk to
+me of the work you are doing and all we shall do--after we have parted.
+We've said too little of that. We've had our red life, and it's over.
+Thank Heaven!--though we stole it! Talk about your work, dear, and the
+things we'll go on doing--just as though we were still together. We'll
+still be together in a sense--through all these things we have in
+common."
+
+And so we talked of politics and our outlook. We were interested to the
+pitch of self-forgetfulness. We weighed persons and forces, discussed
+the probabilities of the next general election, the steady drift of
+public opinion in the north and west away from Liberalism towards us.
+It was very manifest that in spite of Wardenham and the EXPURGATOR, we
+should come into the new Government strongly. The party had no one else,
+all the young men were formally or informally with us; Esmeer would have
+office, Lord Tarvrille, I... and very probably there would be something
+for Shoesmith. "And for my own part," I said, "I count on backing on the
+Liberal side. For the last two years we've been forcing competition in
+constructive legislation between the parties. The Liberals have not been
+long in following up our Endowment of Motherhood lead. They'll have to
+give votes and lip service anyhow. Half the readers of the BLUE WEEKLY,
+they say, are Liberals....
+
+"I remember talking about things of this sort with old Willersley," I
+said, "ever so many years ago. It was some place near Locarno, and we
+looked down the lake that shone weltering--just as now we look over the
+sea. And then we dreamt in an indistinct featureless way of all that you
+and I are doing now."
+
+"I!" said Isabel, and laughed.
+
+"Well, of some such thing," I said, and remained for awhile silent,
+thinking of Locarno.
+
+I recalled once more the largeness, the release from small personal
+things that I had felt in my youth; statecraft became real and wonderful
+again with the memory, the gigantic handling of gigantic problems. I
+began to talk out my thoughts, sitting up beside her, as I could never
+talk of them to any one but Isabel; began to recover again the
+purpose that lay under all my political ambitions and adjustments and
+anticipations. I saw the State, splendid and wide as I had seen it in
+that first travel of mine, but now it was no mere distant prospect of
+spires and pinnacles, but populous with fine-trained, bold-thinking,
+bold-doing people. It was as if I had forgotten for a long time and now
+remembered with amazement.
+
+At first, I told her, I had been altogether at a loss how I could do
+anything to battle against the aimless muddle of our world; I had
+wanted a clue--until she had come into my life questioning, suggesting,
+unconsciously illuminating. "But I have done nothing," she protested. I
+declared she had done everything in growing to education under my eyes,
+in reflecting again upon all the processes that had made myself, so
+that instead of abstractions and blue-books and bills and devices, I had
+realised the world of mankind as a crowd needing before all things fine
+women and men. We'd spoilt ourselves in learning that, but anyhow we had
+our lesson. Before her I was in a nineteenth-century darkness, dealing
+with the nation as if it were a crowd of selfish men, forgetful of women
+and children and that shy wild thing in the hearts of men, love, which
+must be drawn upon as it has never been drawn upon before, if the State
+is to live. I saw now how it is possible to bring the loose factors of a
+great realm together, to create a mind of literature and thought in it,
+and the expression of a purpose to make it self-conscious and fine.
+I had it all clear before me, so that at a score of points I could
+presently begin. The BLUE WEEKLY was a centre of force. Already we had
+given Imperialism a criticism, and leavened half the press from our
+columns. Our movement consolidated and spread. We should presently come
+into power. Everything moved towards our hands. We should be able to get
+at the schools, the services, the universities, the church; enormously
+increase the endowment of research, and organise what was sorely wanted,
+a criticism of research; contrive a closer contact between the press and
+creative intellectual life; foster literature, clarify, strengthen the
+public consciousness, develop social organisation and a sense of the
+State. Men were coming to us every day, brilliant young peers like Lord
+Dentonhill, writers like Carnot and Cresswell. It filled me with pride
+to win such men. "We stand for so much more than we seem to stand for,"
+I said. I opened my heart to her, so freely that I hesitate to open my
+heart even to the reader, telling of projects and ambitions I cherished,
+of my consciousness of great powers and widening opportunities....
+
+Isabel watched me as I talked.
+
+She too, I think, had forgotten these things for a while. For it is
+curious and I think a very significant thing that since we had become
+lovers, we had talked very little of the broader things that had once so
+strongly gripped our imaginations.
+
+"It's good," I said, "to talk like this to you, to get back to youth and
+great ambitions with you. There have been times lately when politics has
+seemed the pettiest game played with mean tools for mean ends--and none
+the less so that the happiness of three hundred million people might be
+touched by our follies. I talk to no one else like this.... And now I
+think of parting, I think but of how much more I might have talked to
+you."...
+
+Things drew to an end at last, but after we had spoken of a thousand
+things.
+
+"We've talked away our last half day," I said, staring over my shoulder
+at the blazing sunset sky behind us. "Dear, it's been the last day of
+our lives for us.... It doesn't seem like the last day of our lives. Or
+any day."
+
+"I wonder how it will feel?" said Isabel.
+
+"It will be very strange at first--not to be able to tell you things."
+
+"I've a superstition that after--after we've parted--if ever I go into
+my room and talk, you'll hear. You'll be--somewhere."
+
+"I shall be in the world--yes."
+
+"I don't feel as though these days ahead were real. Here we are, here we
+remain."
+
+"Yes, I feel that. As though you and I were two immortals, who didn't
+live in time and space at all, who never met, who couldn't part, and
+here we lie on Olympus. And those two poor creatures who did meet, poor
+little Richard Remington and Isabel Rivers, who met and loved too much
+and had to part, they part and go their ways, and we lie here and watch
+them, you and I. She'll cry, poor dear."
+
+"She'll cry. She's crying now!"
+
+"Poor little beasts! I think he'll cry too. He winces. He could--for
+tuppence. I didn't know he had lachrymal glands at all until a little
+while ago. I suppose all love is hysterical--and a little foolish. Poor
+mites! Silly little pitiful creatures! How we have blundered! Think how
+we must look to God! Well, we'll pity them, and then we'll inspire him
+to stiffen up again--and do as we've determined he shall do. We'll see
+it through,--we who lie here on the cliff. They'll be mean at times, and
+horrid at times; we know them! Do you see her, a poor little fine lady
+in a great house,--she sometimes goes to her room and writes."
+
+"She writes for his BLUE WEEKLY still."
+
+"Yes. Sometimes--I hope. And he's there in the office with a bit of her
+copy in his hand."
+
+"Is it as good as if she still talked it over with him before she wrote
+it? Is it?"
+
+"Better, I think. Let's play it's better--anyhow. It may be that talking
+over was rather mixed with love-making. After all, love-making is joy
+rather than magic. Don't let's pretend about that even.... Let's go on
+watching him. (I don't see why her writing shouldn't be better. Indeed I
+don't.) See! There he goes down along the Embankment to Westminster just
+like a real man, for all that he's smaller than a grain of dust. What is
+running round inside that speck of a head of his? Look at him going past
+the Policemen, specks too--selected large ones from the country. I think
+he's going to dinner with the Speaker--some old thing like that. Is his
+face harder or commoner or stronger?--I can't quite see.... And now he's
+up and speaking in the House. Hope he'll hold on to the thread. He'll
+have to plan his speeches to the very end of his days--and learn the
+headings."
+
+"Isn't she up in the women's gallery to hear him?"
+
+"No. Unless it's by accident."
+
+"She's there," she said.
+
+"Well, by accident it happens. Not too many accidents, Isabel. Never any
+more adventures for us, dear, now. No!... They play the game, you know.
+They've begun late, but now they've got to. You see it's not so
+very hard for them since you and I, my dear, are here always, always
+faithfully here on this warm cliff of love accomplished, watching and
+helping them under high heaven. It isn't so VERY hard. Rather good in
+some ways. Some people HAVE to be broken a little. Can you see Altiora
+down there, by any chance?"
+
+"She's too little to be seen," she said.
+
+"Can you see the sins they once committed?"
+
+"I can only see you here beside me, dear--for ever. For all my life,
+dear, till I die. Was that--the sin?"...
+
+I took her to the station, and after she had gone I was to drive to
+Dover, and cross to Calais by the night boat. I couldn't, I felt, return
+to London. We walked over the crest and down to the little station of
+Martin Mill side by side, talking at first in broken fragments, for the
+most part of unimportant things.
+
+"None of this," she said abruptly, "seems in the slightest degree real
+to me. I've got no sense of things ending."
+
+"We're parting," I said.
+
+"We're parting--as people part in a play. It's distressing. But I don't
+feel as though you and I were really never to see each other again for
+years. Do you?"
+
+I thought. "No," I said.
+
+"After we've parted I shall look to talk it over with you."
+
+"So shall I."
+
+"That's absurd."
+
+"Absurd."
+
+"I feel as if you'd always be there, just about where you are now.
+Invisible perhaps, but there. We've spent so much of our lives joggling
+elbows."...
+
+"Yes. Yes. I don't in the least realise it. I suppose I shall begin to
+when the train goes out of the station. Are we wanting in imagination,
+Isabel?"
+
+"I don't know. We've always assumed it was the other way about."
+
+"Even when the train goes out of the station--! I've seen you into so
+many trains."
+
+"I shall go on thinking of things to say to you--things to put in your
+letters. For years to come. How can I ever stop thinking in that way
+now? We've got into each other's brains."
+
+"It isn't real," I said; "nothing is real. The world's no more than a
+fantastic dream. Why are we parting, Isabel?"
+
+"I don't know. It seems now supremely silly. I suppose we have to. Can't
+we meet?--don't you think we shall meet even in dreams?"
+
+"We'll meet a thousand times in dreams," I said.
+
+"I wish we could dream at the same time," said Isabel.... "Dream walks.
+I can't believe, dear, I shall never have a walk with you again."
+
+"If I'd stayed six months in America," I said, "we might have walked
+long walks and talked long talks for all our lives."
+
+"Not in a world of Baileys," said Isabel. "And anyhow--"
+
+She stopped short. I looked interrogation.
+
+"We've loved," she said.
+
+I took her ticket, saw to her luggage, and stood by the door of the
+compartment. "Good-bye," I said a little stiffly, conscious of the
+people upon the platform. She bent above me, white and dusky, looking at
+me very steadfastly.
+
+"Come here," she whispered. "Never mind the porters. What can they know?
+Just one time more--I must."
+
+She rested her hand against the door of the carriage and bent down upon
+me, and put her cold, moist lips to mine.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ THE BREAKING POINT
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+And then we broke down. We broke our faith with both Margaret and
+Shoesmith, flung career and duty out of our lives, and went away
+together.
+
+It is only now, almost a year after these events, that I can begin to
+see what happened to me. At the time it seemed to me I was a rational,
+responsible creature, but indeed I had not parted from her two days
+before I became a monomaniac to whom nothing could matter but Isabel.
+Every truth had to be squared to that obsession, every duty. It astounds
+me to think how I forgot Margaret, forgot my work, forgot everything
+but that we two were parted. I still believe that with better chances
+we might have escaped the consequences of the emotional storm that
+presently seized us both. But we had no foresight of that, and no
+preparation for it, and our circumstances betrayed us. It was partly
+Shoesmith's unwisdom in delaying his marriage until after the end of the
+session--partly my own amazing folly in returning within four days to
+Westminster. But we were all of us intent upon the defeat of scandal
+and the complete restoration of appearances. It seemed necessary that
+Shoesmith's marriage should not seem to be hurried, still more necessary
+that I should not vanish inexplicably. I had to be visible with Margaret
+in London just as much as possible; we went to restaurants, we visited
+the theatre; we could even contemplate the possibility of my presence at
+the wedding. For that, however, we had schemed a weekend visit to Wales,
+and a fictitious sprained ankle at the last moment which would justify
+my absence....
+
+I cannot convey to you the intolerable wretchedness and rebellion of
+my separation from Isabel. It seemed that in the past two years all
+my thoughts had spun commisures to Isabel's brain and I could think of
+nothing that did not lead me surely to the need of the one intimate I
+had found in the world. I came back to the House and the office and my
+home, I filled all my days with appointments and duty, and it did not
+save me in the least from a lonely emptiness such as I had never felt
+before in all my life. I had little sleep. In the daytime I did a
+hundred things, I even spoke in the House on two occasions, and by my
+own low standards spoke well, and it seemed to me that I was going about
+in my own brain like a hushed survivor in a house whose owner lies dead
+upstairs.
+
+I came to a crisis after that wild dinner of Tarvrille's. Something in
+that stripped my soul bare.
+
+It was an occasion made absurd and strange by the odd accident that the
+house caught fire upstairs while we were dining below. It was a men's
+dinner--"A dinner of all sorts," said Tarvrille, when he invited me;
+"everything from Evesham and Gane to Wilkins the author, and Heaven
+knows what will happen!" I remember that afterwards Tarvrille was
+accused of having planned the fire to make his dinner a marvel and a
+memory. It was indeed a wonderful occasion, and I suppose if I had not
+been altogether drenched in misery, I should have found the same wild
+amusement in it that glowed in all the others. There were one or two
+university dons, Lord George Fester, the racing man, Panmure, the
+artist, two or three big City men, Weston Massinghay and another
+prominent Liberal whose name I can't remember, the three men Tarvrille
+had promised and Esmeer, Lord Wrassleton, Waulsort, the member for
+Monckton, Neal and several others. We began a little coldly, with
+duologues, but the conversation was already becoming general--so far as
+such a long table permitted--when the fire asserted itself.
+
+It asserted itself first as a penetrating and emphatic smell of burning
+rubber,--it was caused by the fusing of an electric wire. The reek
+forced its way into the discussion of the Pekin massacres that had
+sprung up between Evesham, Waulsort, and the others at the end of the
+table. "Something burning," said the man next to me.
+
+"Something must be burning," said Panmure.
+
+Tarvrille hated undignified interruptions. He had a particularly
+imperturbable butler with a cadaverous sad face and an eye of rigid
+disapproval. He spoke to this individual over his shoulder. "Just see,
+will you," he said, and caught up the pause in the talk to his left.
+
+Wilkins was asking questions, and I, too, was curious. The story of the
+siege of the Legations in China in the year 1900 and all that followed
+upon that, is just one of those disturbing interludes in history that
+refuse to join on to that general scheme of protestation by which
+civilisation is maintained. It is a break in the general flow of
+experience as disconcerting to statecraft as the robbery of my knife and
+the scuffle that followed it had been to me when I was a boy at Penge.
+It is like a tear in a curtain revealing quite unexpected backgrounds. I
+had never given the business a thought for years; now this talk brought
+back a string of pictures to my mind; how the reliefs arrived and the
+plundering began, how section after section of the International Army
+was drawn into murder and pillage, how the infection spread upward
+until the wives of Ministers were busy looting, and the very sentinels
+stripped and crawled like snakes into the Palace they were set to guard.
+It did not stop at robbery, men were murdered, women, being plundered,
+were outraged, children were butchered, strong men had found themselves
+with arms in a lawless, defenceless city, and this had followed. Now it
+was all recalled.
+
+"Respectable ladies addicted to district visiting at home were as bad as
+any one," said Panmure. "Glazebrook told me of one--flushed like a woman
+at a bargain sale, he said--and when he pointed out to her that the silk
+she'd got was bloodstained, she just said, 'Oh, bother!' and threw it
+aside and went back...."
+
+We became aware that Tarvrille's butler had returned. We tried not to
+seem to listen.
+
+"Beg pardon, m'lord," he said. "The house IS on fire, m'lord."
+
+"Upstairs, m'lord."
+
+"Just overhead, m'lord."
+
+"The maids are throwing water, m'lord, and I've telephoned FIRE."
+
+"No, m'lord, no immediate danger."
+
+"It's all right," said Tarvrille to the table generally. "Go on! It's
+not a general conflagration, and the fire brigade won't be five minutes.
+Don't see that it's our affair. The stuff's insured. They say old Lady
+Paskershortly was dreadful. Like a harpy. The Dowager Empress had shown
+her some little things of hers. Pet things--hidden away. Susan went
+straight for them--used to take an umbrella for the silks. Born
+shoplifter."
+
+It was evident he didn't want his dinner spoilt, and we played up
+loyally.
+
+"This is recorded history," said Wilkins,--"practically. It makes one
+wonder about unrecorded history. In India, for example."
+
+But nobody touched that.
+
+"Thompson," said Tarvrille to the imperturbable butler, and indicating
+the table generally, "champagne. Champagne. Keep it going."
+
+"M'lord," and Thompson marshalled his assistants.
+
+Some man I didn't know began to remember things about Mandalay. "It's
+queer," he said, "how people break out at times;" and told his story
+of an army doctor, brave, public-spirited, and, as it happened,
+deeply religious, who was caught one evening by the excitement of
+plundering--and stole and hid, twisted the wrist of a boy until it
+broke, and was afterwards overcome by wild remorse.
+
+I watched Evesham listening intently. "Strange," he said, "very strange.
+We are such stuff as thieves are made of. And in China, too, they
+murdered people--for the sake of murdering. Apart, so to speak, from
+mercenary considerations. I'm afraid there's no doubt of it in certain
+cases. No doubt at all. Young soldiers fresh from German high schools
+and English homes!"
+
+"Did OUR people?" asked some patriot.
+
+"Not so much. But I'm afraid there were cases.... Some of the Indian
+troops were pretty bad."
+
+Gane picked up the tale with confirmations.
+
+It is all printed in the vividest way as a picture upon my memory, so
+that were I a painter I think I could give the deep rich browns and warm
+greys beyond the brightly lit table, the various distinguished faces,
+strongly illuminated, interested and keen, above the black and white of
+evening dress, the alert menservants with their heavier, clean-shaved
+faces indistinctly seen in the dimness behind. Then this was coloured
+emotionally for me by my aching sense of loss and sacrifice, and by
+the chance trend of our talk to the breaches and unrealities of the
+civilised scheme. We seemed a little transitory circle of light in a
+universe of darkness and violence; an effect to which the diminishing
+smell of burning rubber, the trampling of feet overhead, the swish
+of water, added enormously. Everybody--unless, perhaps, it was
+Evesham--drank rather carelessly because of the suppressed excitement of
+our situation, and talked the louder and more freely.
+
+"But what a flimsy thing our civilisation is!" said Evesham; "a mere
+thin net of habits and associations!"
+
+"I suppose those men came back," said Wilkins.
+
+"Lady Paskershortly did!" chuckled Evesham.
+
+"How do they fit it in with the rest of their lives?" Wilkins
+speculated. "I suppose there's Pekin-stained police officers,
+Pekin-stained J. P.'s--trying petty pilferers in the severest
+manner."...
+
+Then for a time things became preposterous. There was a sudden cascade
+of water by the fireplace, and then absurdly the ceiling began to rain
+upon us, first at this point and then that. "My new suit!" cried some
+one. "Perrrrrr-up pe-rr"--a new vertical line of blackened water would
+establish itself and form a spreading pool upon the gleaming cloth. The
+men nearest would arrange catchment areas of plates and flower bowls.
+"Draw up!" said Tarvrille, "draw up. That's the bad end of the table!"
+He turned to the imperturbable butler. "Take round bath towels," he
+said; and presently the men behind us were offering--with inflexible
+dignity--"Port wine, Sir. Bath towel, Sir!" Waulsort, with streaks of
+blackened water on his forehead, was suddenly reminded of a wet year
+when he had followed the French army manoeuvres. An animated dispute
+sprang up between him and Neal about the relative efficiency of the new
+French and German field guns. Wrassleton joined in and a little drunken
+shrivelled Oxford don of some sort with a black-splashed shirt front who
+presently silenced them all by the immensity and particularity of his
+knowledge of field artillery. Then the talk drifted to Sedan and the
+effect of dead horses upon drinking-water, which brought Wrassleton
+and Weston Massinghay into a dispute of great vigour and emphasis. "The
+trouble in South Africa," said Weston Massinghay, "wasn't that we didn't
+boil our water. It was that we didn't boil our men. The Boers drank the
+same stuff we did. THEY didn't get dysentery."
+
+That argument went on for some time. I was attacked across the table by
+a man named Burshort about my Endowment of Motherhood schemes, but
+in the gaps of that debate I could still hear Weston Massinghay
+at intervals repeat in a rather thickened voice: "THEY didn't get
+dysentery."
+
+I think Evesham went early. The rest of us clustered more and more
+closely towards the drier end of the room, the table was pushed along,
+and the area beneath the extinguished conflagration abandoned to a
+tinkling, splashing company of pots and pans and bowls and baths.
+Everybody was now disposed to be hilarious and noisy, to say startling
+and aggressive things; we must have sounded a queer clamour to a
+listener in the next room. The devil inspired them to begin baiting me.
+"Ours isn't the Tory party any more," said Burshort. "Remington has made
+it the Obstetric Party."
+
+"That's good!" said Weston Massinghay, with all his teeth gleaming; "I
+shall use that against you in the House!"
+
+"I shall denounce you for abusing private confidences if you do," said
+Tarvrille.
+
+"Remington wants us to give up launching Dreadnoughts and launch babies
+instead," Burshort urged. "For the price of one Dreadnought--"
+
+The little shrivelled don who had been omniscient about guns joined in
+the baiting, and displayed himself a venomous creature. Something in
+his eyes told me he knew Isabel and hated me for it. "Love and fine
+thinking," he began, a little thickly, and knocking over a wine-glass
+with a too easy gesture. "Love and fine thinking. Two things don't go
+together. No philosophy worth a damn ever came out of excesses of love.
+Salt Lake City--Piggott--Ag--Agapemone again--no works to matter."
+
+Everybody laughed.
+
+"Got to rec'nise these facts," said my assailant. "Love and fine think'n
+pretty phrase--attractive. Suitable for p'litical dec'rations. Postcard,
+Christmas, gilt lets, in a wreath of white flow's. Not oth'wise
+valu'ble."
+
+I made some remark, I forget what, but he overbore me.
+
+Real things we want are Hate--Hate and COARSE think'n. I b'long to the
+school of Mrs. F's Aunt--"
+
+"What?" said some one, intent.
+
+"In 'Little Dorrit,'" explained Tarvrille; "go on!"
+
+"Hate a fool," said my assailant.
+
+Tarvrille glanced at me. I smiled to conceal the loss of my temper.
+
+"Hate," said the little man, emphasising his point with a clumsy fist.
+"Hate's the driving force. What's m'rality?--hate of rotten goings
+on. What's patriotism?--hate of int'loping foreigners. What's
+Radicalism?--hate of lords. What's Toryism?--hate of disturbance. It's
+all hate--hate from top to bottom. Hate of a mess. Remington owned it
+the other day, said he hated a mu'll. There you are! If you couldn't
+get hate into an election, damn it (hic) people wou'n't poll. Poll for
+love!--no' me!"
+
+He paused, but before any one could speak he had resumed.
+
+"Then this about fine thinking. Like going into a bear pit armed with a
+tagle--talgent--talgent galv'nometer. Like going to fight a mad dog with
+Shasepear and the Bible. Fine thinking--what we want is the thickes'
+thinking we can get. Thinking that stands up alone. Taf Reform means
+work for all, thassort of thing."
+
+The gentleman from Cambridge paused. "YOU a flag!" he said. "I'd as soon
+go to ba'ell und' wet tissue paper!"
+
+My best answer on the spur of the moment was:
+
+"The Japanese did." Which was absurd.
+
+I went on to some other reply, I forget exactly what, and the talk of
+the whole table drew round me. It was an extraordinary revelation to me.
+Every one was unusually careless and outspoken, and it was amazing how
+manifestly they echoed the feeling of this old Tory spokesman. They were
+quite friendly to me, they regarded me and the BLUE WEEKLY as valuable
+party assets for Toryism, but it was clear they attached no more
+importance to what were my realities than they did to the remarkable
+therapeutic claims of Mrs. Eddy. They were flushed and amused, perhaps
+they went a little too far in their resolves to draw me, but they left
+the impression on my mind of men irrevocably set upon narrow and cynical
+views of political life. For them the political struggle was a game,
+whose counters were human hate and human credulity; their real aim was
+just every one's aim, the preservation of the class and way of living to
+which their lives were attuned. They did not know how tired I was, how
+exhausted mentally and morally, nor how cruel their convergent attack
+on me chanced to be. But my temper gave way, I became tart and fierce,
+perhaps my replies were a trifle absurd, and Tarvrille, with that quick
+eye and sympathy of his, came to the rescue. Then for a time I sat
+silent and drank port wine while the others talked. The disorder of
+the room, the still dripping ceiling, the noise, the displaced ties and
+crumpled shirts of my companions, jarred on my tormented nerves....
+
+It was long past midnight when we dispersed. I remember Tarvrille coming
+with me into the hall, and then suggesting we should go upstairs to see
+the damage. A manservant carried up two flickering candles for us.
+One end of the room was gutted, curtains, hangings, several chairs and
+tables were completely burnt, the panelling was scorched and warped,
+three smashed windows made the candles flare and gutter, and some scraps
+of broken china still lay on the puddled floor.
+
+As we surveyed this, Lady Tarvrille appeared, back from some party,
+a slender, white-cloaked, satin-footed figure with amazed blue eyes
+beneath her golden hair. I remember how stupidly we laughed at her
+surprise.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+I parted from Panmure at the corner of Aldington Street, and went my way
+alone. But I did not go home, I turned westward and walked for a long
+way, and then struck northward aimlessly. I was too miserable to go to
+my house.
+
+I wandered about that night like a man who has discovered his Gods
+are dead. I can look back now detached yet sympathetic upon that wild
+confusion of moods and impulses, and by it I think I can understand, oh!
+half the wrongdoing and blundering in the world.
+
+I do not feel now the logical force of the process that must have
+convinced me then that I had made my sacrifice and spent my strength in
+vain. At no time had I been under any illusion that the Tory party had
+higher ideals than any other party, yet it came to me like a thing newly
+discovered that the men I had to work with had for the most part no such
+dreams, no sense of any collective purpose, no atom of the faith I held.
+They were just as immediately intent upon personal ends, just as limited
+by habits of thought, as the men in any other group or party. Perhaps I
+had slipped unawares for a time into the delusions of a party man--but I
+do not think so.
+
+No, it was the mood of profound despondency that had followed upon the
+abrupt cessation of my familiar intercourse with Isabel, that gave this
+fact that had always been present in my mind its quality of devastating
+revelation. It seemed as though I had never seen before nor suspected
+the stupendous gap between the chaotic aims, the routine, the
+conventional acquiescences, the vulgarisations of the personal life, and
+that clearly conscious development and service of a collective thought
+and purpose at which my efforts aimed. I had thought them but a little
+way apart, and now I saw they were separated by all the distance
+between earth and heaven. I saw now in myself and every one around me,
+a concentration upon interests close at hand, an inability to detach
+oneself from the provocations, tendernesses, instinctive hates, dumb
+lusts and shy timidities that touched one at every point; and, save
+for rare exalted moments, a regardlessness of broader aims and remoter
+possibilities that made the white passion of statecraft seem as
+unearthly and irrelevant to human life as the story an astronomer will
+tell, half proven but altogether incredible, of habitable planets and
+answering intelligences, suns' distances uncounted across the deep. It
+seemed to me I had aspired too high and thought too far, had mocked my
+own littleness by presumption, had given the uttermost dear reality of
+life for a theoriser's dream.
+
+All through that wandering agony of mine that night a dozen threads of
+thought interwove; now I was a soul speaking in protest to God against
+a task too cold and high for it, and now I was an angry man, scorned and
+pointed upon, who had let life cheat him of the ultimate pride of his
+soul. Now I was the fool of ambition, who opened his box of gold to find
+blank emptiness, and now I was a spinner of flimsy thoughts, whose web
+tore to rags at a touch. I realised for the first time how much I had
+come to depend upon the mind and faith of Isabel, how she had confirmed
+me and sustained me, how little strength I had to go on with our
+purposes now that she had vanished from my life. She had been the
+incarnation of those great abstractions, the saving reality, the voice
+that answered back. There was no support that night in the things that
+had been. We were alone together on the cliff for ever more!--that was
+very pretty in its way, but it had no truth whatever that could help
+me now, no ounce of sustaining value. I wanted Isabel that night, no
+sentiment or memory of her, but Isabel alive,--to talk to me, to touch
+me, to hold me together. I wanted unendurably the dusky gentleness of
+her presence, the consolation of her voice.
+
+We were alone together on the cliff! I startled a passing cabman into
+interest by laughing aloud at that magnificent and characteristic
+sentimentality. What a lie it was, and how satisfying it had been! That
+was just where we shouldn't remain. We of all people had no distinction
+from that humanity whose lot is to forget. We should go out to other
+interests, new experiences, new demands. That tall and intricate fabric
+of ambitious understandings we had built up together in our intimacy
+would be the first to go; and last perhaps to endure with us would be
+a few gross memories of sights and sounds, and trivial incidental
+excitements....
+
+I had a curious feeling that night that I had lost touch with life for
+a long time, and had now been reminded of its quality. That infernal
+little don's parody of my ruling phrase, "Hate and coarse thinking,"
+stuck in my thoughts like a poisoned dart, a centre of inflammation.
+Just as a man who is debilitated has no longer the vitality to resist
+an infection, so my mind, slackened by the crisis of my separation from
+Isabel, could find no resistance to his emphatic suggestion. It seemed
+to me that what he had said was overpoweringly true, not only of
+contemporary life, but of all possible human life. Love is the rare
+thing, the treasured thing; you lock it away jealously and watch, and
+well you may; hate and aggression and force keep the streets and rule
+the world. And fine thinking is, in the rough issues of life, weak
+thinking, is a balancing indecisive process, discovers with disloyal
+impartiality a justice and a defect on each disputing side. "Good honest
+men," as Dayton calls them, rule the world, with a way of thinking
+out decisions like shooting cartloads of bricks, and with a steadfast
+pleasure in hostility. Dayton liked to call his antagonists "blaggards
+and scoundrels"--it justified his opposition--the Lords were
+"scoundrels," all people richer than he were "scoundrels," all
+Socialists, all troublesome poor people; he liked to think of jails and
+justice being done. His public spirit was saturated with the sombre
+joys of conflict and the pleasant thought of condign punishment for
+all recalcitrant souls. That was the way of it, I perceived. That had
+survival value, as the biologists say. He was fool enough in politics to
+be a consistent and happy politician....
+
+Hate and coarse thinking; how the infernal truth of the phrase beat me
+down that night! I couldn't remember that I had known this all along,
+and that it did not really matter in the slightest degree. I had worked
+it all out long ago in other terms, when I had seen how all parties
+stood for interests inevitably, and how the purpose in life achieves
+itself, if it achieves itself at all, as a bye product of the war
+of individuals and classes. Hadn't I always known that science and
+philosophy elaborate themselves in spite of all the passion and
+narrowness of men, in spite of the vanities and weakness of their
+servants, in spite of all the heated disorder of contemporary things?
+Wasn't it my own phrase to speak of "that greater mind in men, in which
+we are but moments and transitorily lit cells?" Hadn't I known that the
+spirit of man still speaks like a thing that struggles out of mud and
+slime, and that the mere effort to speak means choking and disaster?
+Hadn't I known that we who think without fear and speak without
+discretion will not come to our own for the next two thousand years?
+
+It was the last was most forgotten of all that faith mislaid. Before
+mankind, in my vision that night, stretched new centuries of confusion,
+vast stupid wars, hastily conceived laws, foolish temporary triumphs
+of order, lapses, set-backs, despairs, catastrophes, new beginnings, a
+multitudinous wilderness of time, a nigh plotless drama of wrong-headed
+energies. In order to assuage my parting from Isabel we had set
+ourselves to imagine great rewards for our separation, great personal
+rewards; we had promised ourselves success visible and shining in our
+lives. To console ourselves in our separation we had made out of
+the BLUE WEEKLY and our young Tory movement preposterously enormous
+things-as though those poor fertilising touches at the soil were indeed
+the germinating seeds of the millennium, as though a million lives such
+as ours had not to contribute before the beginning of the beginning.
+That poor pretence had failed. That magnificent proposition shrivelled
+to nothing in the black loneliness of that night.
+
+I saw that there were to be no such compensations. So far as my real
+services to mankind were concerned I had to live an unrecognised
+and unrewarded life. If I made successes it would be by the way. Our
+separation would alter nothing of that. My scandal would cling to me
+now for all my life, a thing affecting relationships, embarrassing and
+hampering my spirit. I should follow the common lot of those who live by
+the imagination, and follow it now in infinite loneliness of soul; the
+one good comforter, the one effectual familiar, was lost to me for
+ever; I should do good and evil together, no one caring to understand;
+I should produce much weary work, much bad-spirited work, much absolute
+evil; the good in me would be too often ill-expressed and missed or
+misinterpreted. In the end I might leave one gleaming flake or so amidst
+the slag heaps for a moment of postmortem sympathy. I was afraid beyond
+measure of my derelict self. Because I believed with all my soul in love
+and fine thinking that did not mean that I should necessarily either
+love steadfastly or think finely. I remember how I fell talking to
+God--I think I talked out loud. "Why do I care for these things?"
+I cried, "when I can do so little! Why am I apart from the jolly
+thoughtless fighting life of men? These dreams fade to nothingness, and
+leave me bare!"
+
+I scolded. "Why don't you speak to a man, show yourself? I thought I
+had a gleam of you in Isabel,--and then you take her away. Do you really
+think I can carry on this game alone, doing your work in darkness and
+silence, living in muddled conflict, half living, half dying?"
+
+Grotesque analogies arose in my mind. I discovered a strange parallelism
+between my now tattered phrase of "Love and fine thinking" and the
+"Love and the Word" of Christian thought. Was it possible the Christian
+propaganda had at the outset meant just that system of attitudes I had
+been feeling my way towards from the very beginning of my life? Had
+I spent a lifetime making my way back to Christ? It mocks humanity
+to think how Christ has been overlaid. I went along now, recalling
+long-neglected phrases and sentences; I had a new vision of that great
+central figure preaching love with hate and coarse thinking even in the
+disciples about Him, rising to a tidal wave at last in that clamour for
+Barabbas, and the public satisfaction in His fate....
+
+It's curious to think that hopeless love and a noisy disordered dinner
+should lead a man to these speculations, but they did. "He DID mean
+that!" I said, and suddenly thought of what a bludgeon they'd made
+of His Christianity. Athwart that perplexing, patient enigma sitting
+inaudibly among publicans and sinners, danced and gibbered a long
+procession of the champions of orthodoxy. "He wasn't human," I said,
+and remembered that last despairing cry, "My God! My God! why hast Thou
+forsaken Me?"
+
+"Oh, HE forsakes every one," I said, flying out as a tired mind will,
+with an obvious repartee....
+
+I passed at a bound from such monstrous theology to a towering rage
+against the Baileys. In an instant and with no sense of absurdity I
+wanted--in the intervals of love and fine thinking--to fling about that
+strenuously virtuous couple; I wanted to kick Keyhole of the PEEPSHOW
+into the gutter and make a common massacre of all the prosperous
+rascaldom that makes a trade and rule of virtue. I can still feel that
+transition. In a moment I had reached that phase of weakly decisive
+anger which is for people of my temperament the concomitant of
+exhaustion.
+
+"I will have her," I cried. "By Heaven! I WILL have her! Life mocks me
+and cheats me. Nothing can be made good to me again.... Why shouldn't I
+save what I can? I can't save myself without her...."
+
+I remember myself--as a sort of anti-climax to that--rather tediously
+asking my way home. I was somewhere in the neighbourhood of Holland
+Park....
+
+It was then between one and two. I felt that I could go home now without
+any risk of meeting Margaret. It had been the thought of returning to
+Margaret that had sent me wandering that night. It is one of the ugliest
+facts I recall about that time of crisis, the intense aversion I felt
+for Margaret. No sense of her goodness, her injury and nobility, and
+the enormous generosity of her forgiveness, sufficed to mitigate that.
+I hope now that in this book I am able to give something of her silvery
+splendour, but all through this crisis I felt nothing of that. There was
+a triumphant kindliness about her that I found intolerable. She meant to
+be so kind to me, to offer unstinted consolation, to meet my needs, to
+supply just all she imagined Isabel had given me.
+
+When I left Tarvrille's, I felt I could anticipate exactly how she would
+meet my homecoming. She would be perplexed by my crumpled shirt front,
+on which I had spilt some drops of wine; she would overlook that by an
+effort, explain it sentimentally, resolve it should make no difference
+to her. She would want to know who had been present, what we had talked
+about, show the alertest interest in whatever it was--it didn't matter
+what.... No, I couldn't face her.
+
+So I did not reach my study until two o'clock.
+
+There, I remember, stood the new and very beautiful old silver
+candlesticks that she had set there two days since to please me--the
+foolish kindliness of it! But in her search for expression, Margaret
+heaped presents upon me. She had fitted these candlesticks with electric
+lights, and I must, I suppose, have lit them to write my note to Isabel.
+"Give me a word--the world aches without you," was all I scrawled,
+though I fully meant that she should come to me. I knew, though I ought
+not to have known, that now she had left her flat, she was with the
+Balfes--she was to have been married from the Balfes--and I sent my
+letter there. And I went out into the silent square and posted the note
+forthwith, because I knew quite clearly that if I left it until morning
+I should never post it at all.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+I had a curious revulsion of feeling that morning of our meeting. (Of
+all places for such a clandestine encounter she had chosen the bridge
+opposite Buckingham Palace.) Overnight I had been full of self pity, and
+eager for the comfort of Isabel's presence. But the ill-written scrawl
+in which she had replied had been full of the suggestion of her own
+weakness and misery. And when I saw her, my own selfish sorrows were
+altogether swept away by a wave of pitiful tenderness. Something had
+happened to her that I did not understand. She was manifestly ill. She
+came towards me wearily, she who had always borne herself so bravely;
+her shoulders seemed bent, and her eyes were tired, and her face white
+and drawn. All my life has been a narrow self-centred life; no brothers,
+no sisters or children or weak things had ever yet made any intimate
+appeal to me, and suddenly--I verily believe for the first time in my
+life!--I felt a great passion of protective ownership; I felt that here
+was something that I could die to shelter, something that meant more
+than joy or pride or splendid ambitions or splendid creation to me, a
+new kind of hold upon me, a new power in the world. Some sealed fountain
+was opened in my breast. I knew that I could love Isabel broken, Isabel
+beaten, Isabel ugly and in pain, more than I could love any sweet
+or delightful or glorious thing in life. I didn't care any more for
+anything in the world but Isabel, and that I should protect her. I
+trembled as I came near her, and could scarcely speak to her for the
+emotion that filled me....
+
+"I had your letter," I said.
+
+"I had yours."
+
+"Where can we talk?"
+
+I remember my lame sentences. "We'll have a boat. That's best here."
+
+I took her to the little boat-house, and there we hired a boat, and
+I rowed in silence under the bridge and into the shade of a tree. The
+square grey stone masses of the Foreign Office loomed through the twigs,
+I remember, and a little space of grass separated us from the pathway
+and the scrutiny of passers-by. And there we talked.
+
+"I had to write to you," I said.
+
+"I had to come."
+
+"When are you to be married?"
+
+"Thursday week."
+
+"Well?" I said. "But--can we?"
+
+She leant forward and scrutinised my face with eyes wide open. "What do
+you mean?" she said at last in a whisper.
+
+"Can we stand it? After all?"
+
+I looked at her white face. "Can you?" I said.
+
+She whispered. "Your career?"
+
+Then suddenly her face was contorted,--she wept silently, exactly as a
+child tormented beyond endurance might suddenly weep....
+
+"Oh! I don't care," I cried, "now. I don't care. Damn the whole system
+of things! Damn all this patching of the irrevocable! I want to take
+care of you, Isabel! and have you with me."
+
+"I can't stand it," she blubbered.
+
+"You needn't stand it. I thought it was best for you.... I thought
+indeed it was best for you. I thought even you wanted it like that."
+
+"Couldn't I live alone--as I meant to do?"
+
+"No," I said, "you couldn't. You're not strong enough. I've thought of
+that; I've got to shelter you."
+
+"And I want you," I went on. "I'm not strong enough--I can't stand life
+without you."
+
+She stopped weeping, she made a great effort to control herself, and
+looked at me steadfastly for a moment. "I was going to kill myself," she
+whispered. "I was going to kill myself quietly--somehow. I meant to wait
+a bit and have an accident. I thought--you didn't understand. You were a
+man, and couldn't understand...."
+
+"People can't do as we thought we could do," I said. "We've gone too far
+together."
+
+"Yes," she said, and I stared into her eyes.
+
+"The horror of it," she whispered. "The horror of being handed over.
+It's just only begun to dawn upon me, seeing him now as I do. He tries
+to be kind to me.... I didn't know. I felt adventurous before.... It
+makes me feel like all the women in the world who have ever been owned
+and subdued.... It's not that he isn't the best of men, it's because I'm
+a part of you.... I can't go through with it. If I go through with it, I
+shall be left--robbed of pride--outraged--a woman beaten...."
+
+"I know," I said, "I know."
+
+"I want to live alone.... I don't care for anything now but just escape.
+If you can help me...."
+
+"I must take you away. There's nothing for us but to go away together."
+
+"But your work," she said; "your career! Margaret! Our promises!"
+
+"We've made a mess of things, Isabel--or things have made a mess of us.
+I don't know which. Our flags are in the mud, anyhow. It's too late
+to save those other things! They have to go. You can't make terms with
+defeat. I thought it was Margaret needed me most. But it's you. And I
+need you. I didn't think of that either. I haven't a doubt left in the
+world now. We've got to leave everything rather than leave each other.
+I'm sure of it. Now we have gone so far. We've got to go right down to
+earth and begin again.... Dear, I WANT disgrace with you...."
+
+So I whispered to her as she sat crumpled together on the faded cushions
+of the boat, this white and weary young woman who had been so valiant
+and careless a girl. "I don't care," I said. "I don't care for anything,
+if I can save you out of the wreckage we have made together."
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+The next day I went to the office of the BLUE WEEKLY in order to get as
+much as possible of its affairs in working order before I left London
+with Isabel. I just missed Shoesmith in the lower office. Upstairs I
+found Britten amidst a pile of outside articles, methodically reading
+the title of each and sometimes the first half-dozen lines, and either
+dropping them in a growing heap on the floor for a clerk to return, or
+putting them aside for consideration. I interrupted him, squatted on
+the window-sill of the open window, and sketched out my ideas for the
+session.
+
+"You're far-sighted," he remarked at something of mine which reached out
+ahead.
+
+"I like to see things prepared," I answered.
+
+"Yes," he said, and ripped open the envelope of a fresh aspirant.
+
+I was silent while he read.
+
+"You're going away with Isabel Rivers," he said abruptly.
+
+"Well!" I said, amazed.
+
+"I know," he said, and lost his breath. "Not my business. Only--"
+
+It was queer to find Britten afraid to say a thing.
+
+"It's not playing the game," he said.
+
+"What do you know?"
+
+"Everything that matters."
+
+"Some games," I said, "are too hard to play."
+
+There came a pause between us.
+
+"I didn't know you were watching all this," I said.
+
+"Yes," he answered, after a pause, "I've watched."
+
+"Sorry--sorry you don't approve."
+
+"It means smashing such an infernal lot of things, Remington."
+
+I did not answer.
+
+"You're going away then?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Soon?"
+
+"Right away."
+
+"There's your wife."
+
+"I know."
+
+"Shoesmith--whom you're pledged to in a manner. You've just picked him
+out and made him conspicuous. Every one will know. Oh! of course--it's
+nothing to you. Honour--"
+
+"I know."
+
+"Common decency."
+
+I nodded.
+
+"All this movement of ours. That's what I care for most.... It's come to
+be a big thing, Remington."
+
+"That will go on."
+
+"We have a use for you--no one else quite fills it. No one.... I'm not
+sure it will go on."
+
+"Do you think I haven't thought of all these things?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders, and rejected two papers unread.
+
+"I knew," he remarked, "when you came back from America. You were alight
+with it." Then he let his bitterness gleam for a moment. "But I thought
+you would stick to your bargain."
+
+"It's not so much choice as you think," I said.
+
+"There's always a choice."
+
+"No," I said.
+
+He scrutinised my face.
+
+"I can't live without her--I can't work. She's all mixed up with
+this--and everything. And besides, there's things you can't understand.
+There's feelings you've never felt.... You don't understand how much
+we've been to one another."
+
+Britten frowned and thought.
+
+"Some things one's GOT to do," he threw out.
+
+"Some things one can't do."
+
+"These infernal institutions--"
+
+"Some one must begin," I said.
+
+He shook his head. "Not YOU," he said. "No!"
+
+He stretched out his hands on the desk before him, and spoke again.
+
+"Remington," he said, "I've thought of this business day and night too.
+It matters to me. It matters immensely to me. In a way--it's a thing
+one doesn't often say to a man--I've loved you. I'm the sort of man who
+leads a narrow life.... But you've been something fine and good for me,
+since that time, do you remember? when we talked about Mecca together."
+
+I nodded.
+
+"Yes. And you'll always be something fine and good for me anyhow. I know
+things about you,--qualities--no mere act can destroy them.. .. Well, I
+can tell you, you're doing wrong. You're going on now like a man who is
+hypnotised and can't turn round. You're piling wrong on wrong. It was
+wrong for you two people ever to be lovers."
+
+He paused.
+
+"It gripped us hard," I said.
+
+"Yes!--but in your position! And hers! It was vile!"
+
+"You've not been tempted."
+
+"How do you know? Anyhow--having done that, you ought to have stood the
+consequences and thought of other people. You could have ended it at the
+first pause for reflection. You didn't. You blundered again. You kept
+on. You owed a certain secrecy to all of us! You didn't keep it.
+You were careless. You made things worse. This engagement and this
+publicity!--Damn it, Remington!"
+
+"I know," I said, with smarting eyes. "Damn it! with all my heart! It
+came of trying to patch.... You CAN'T patch."
+
+"And now, as I care for anything under heaven, Remington, you two ought
+to stand these last consequences--and part. You ought to part. Other
+people have to stand things! Other people have to part. You ought to.
+You say--what do you say? It's loss of so much life to lose each other.
+So is losing a hand or a leg. But it's what you've incurred. Amputate.
+Take your punishment--After all, you chose it."
+
+"Oh, damn!" I said, standing up and going to the window.
+
+"Damn by all means. I never knew a topic so full of justifiable damns.
+But you two did choose it. You ought to stick to your undertaking."
+
+I turned upon him with a snarl in my voice. "My dear Britten!" I cried.
+"Don't I KNOW I'm doing wrong? Aren't I in a net? Suppose I don't go!
+Is there any right in that? Do you think we're going to be much to
+ourselves or any one after this parting? I've been thinking all
+last night of this business, trying it over and over again from the
+beginning. How was it we went wrong? Since I came back from America--I
+grant you THAT--but SINCE, there's never been a step that wasn't forced,
+that hadn't as much right in it or more, as wrong. You talk as though I
+was a thing of steel that could bend this way or that and never change.
+You talk as though Isabel was a cat one could give to any kind of
+owner.... We two are things that change and grow and alter all the time.
+We're--so interwoven that being parted now will leave us just misshapen
+cripples.... You don't know the motives, you don't know the rush and
+feel of things, you don't know how it was with us, and how it is with
+us. You don't know the hunger for the mere sight of one another; you
+don't know anything."
+
+Britten looked at his finger-nails closely. His red face puckered to
+a wry frown. "Haven't we all at times wanted the world put back?" he
+grunted, and looked hard and close at one particular nail.
+
+There was a long pause.
+
+"I want her," I said, "and I'm going to have her. I'm too tired for
+balancing the right or wrong of it any more. You can't separate them.
+I saw her yesterday.... She's--ill.... I'd take her now, if death were
+just outside the door waiting for us."
+
+"Torture?"
+
+I thought. "Yes."
+
+"For her?"
+
+"There isn't," I said.
+
+"If there was?"
+
+I made no answer.
+
+"It's blind Want. And there's nothing ever been put into you to stand
+against it. What are you going to do with the rest of your lives?"
+
+"No end of things."
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"I don't believe you are right," I said. "I believe we can save
+something--"
+
+Britten shook his head. "Some scraps of salvage won't excuse you," he
+said.
+
+His indignation rose. "In the middle of life!" he said. "No man has a
+right to take his hand from the plough!"
+
+He leant forward on his desk and opened an argumentative palm. "You
+know, Remington," he said, "and I know, that if this could be fended off
+for six months--if you could be clapped in prison, or got out of the way
+somehow,--until this marriage was all over and settled down for a year,
+say--you know then you two could meet, curious, happy, as friends.
+Saved! You KNOW it."
+
+I turned and stared at him. "You're wrong, Britten," I said. "And does
+it matter if we could?"
+
+I found that in talking to him I could frame the apologetics I had not
+been able to find for myself alone.
+
+"I am certain of one thing, Britten. It is our duty not to hush up this
+scandal."
+
+He raised his eyebrows. I perceived now the element of absurdity in me,
+but at the time I was as serious as a man who is burning.
+
+"It's our duty," I went on, "to smash now openly in the sight of every
+one. Yes! I've got that as clean and plain--as prison whitewash. I am
+convinced that we have got to be public to the uttermost now--I mean
+it--until every corner of our world knows this story, knows it fully,
+adds it to the Parnell story and the Ashton Dean story and the Carmel
+story and the Witterslea story, and all the other stories that have
+picked man after man out of English public life, the men with active
+imaginations, the men of strong initiative. To think this tottering
+old-woman ridden Empire should dare to waste a man on such a score! You
+say I ought to be penitent--"
+
+Britten shook his head and smiled very faintly.
+
+"I'm boiling with indignation," I said. "I lay in bed last night and
+went through it all. What in God's name was to be expected of us but
+what has happened? I went through my life bit by bit last night, I
+recalled all I've had to do with virtue and women, and all I was told
+and how I was prepared. I was born into cowardice and debasement. We all
+are. Our generation's grimy with hypocrisy. I came to the most beautiful
+things in life--like peeping Tom of Coventry. I was never given a light,
+never given a touch of natural manhood by all this dingy, furtive,
+canting, humbugging English world. Thank God! I'll soon be out of it!
+The shame of it! The very savages in Australia initiate their children
+better than the English do to-day. Neither of us was ever given a
+view of what they call morality that didn't make it show as shabby
+subservience, as the meanest discretion, an abject submission to
+unreasonable prohibitions! meek surrender of mind and body to the
+dictation of pedants and old women and fools. We weren't taught--we
+were mumbled at! And when we found that the thing they called unclean,
+unclean, was Pagan beauty--God! it was a glory to sin, Britten, it was a
+pride and splendour like bathing in the sunlight after dust and grime!"
+
+"Yes," said Britten. "That's all very well--"
+
+I interrupted him. "I know there's a case--I'm beginning to think it a
+valid case against us; but we never met it! There's a steely pride in
+self restraint, a nobility of chastity, but only for those who see and
+think and act--untrammeled and unafraid. The other thing, the current
+thing, why! it's worth as much as the chastity of a monkey kept in a
+cage by itself!" I put my foot in a chair, and urged my case upon him.
+"This is a dirty world, Britten, simply because it is a muddled world,
+and the thing you call morality is dirtier now than the thing you call
+immorality. Why don't the moralists pick their stuff out of the slime
+if they care for it, and wipe it?--damn them! I am burning now to say:
+'Yes, we did this and this,' to all the world. All the world!... I
+will!"
+
+Britten rubbed the palm of his hand on the corner of his desk. "That's
+all very well, Remington," he said. "You mean to go."
+
+He stopped and began again. "If you didn't know you were in the wrong
+you wouldn't be so damned rhetorical. You're in the wrong. It's as plain
+to you as it is to me. You're leaving a big work, you're leaving a wife
+who trusted you, to go and live with your jolly mistress.... You won't
+see you're a statesman that matters, that no single man, maybe, might
+come to such influence as you in the next ten years. You're throwing
+yourself away and accusing your country of rejecting you."
+
+He swung round upon his swivel at me. "Remington," he said, "have you
+forgotten the immense things our movement means?"
+
+I thought. "Perhaps I am rhetorical," I said.
+
+"But the things we might achieve! If you'd only stay now--even now! Oh!
+you'd suffer a little socially, but what of that? You'd be able to go
+on--perhaps all the better for hostility of the kind you'd get. You
+know, Remington--you KNOW."
+
+I thought and went back to his earlier point. "If I am rhetorical,
+at any rate it's a living feeling behind it. Yes, I remember all the
+implications of our aims--very splendid, very remote. But just now it's
+rather like offering to give a freezing man the sunlit Himalayas from
+end to end in return for his camp-fire. When you talk of me and my jolly
+mistress, it isn't fair. That misrepresents everything. I'm not going
+out of this--for delights. That's the sort of thing men like Snuffles
+and Keyhole imagine--that excites them! When I think of the things
+these creatures think! Ugh! But YOU know better? You know that physical
+passion that burns like a fire--ends clean. I'm going for love,
+Britten--if I sinned for passion. I'm going, Britten, because when I saw
+her the other day she HURT me. She hurt me damnably, Britten.... I've
+been a cold man--I've led a rhetorical life--you hit me with that
+word!--I put things in a windy way, I know, but what has got hold of
+me at last is her pain. She's ill. Don't you understand? She's a sick
+thing--a weak thing. She's no more a goddess than I'm a god.... I'm
+not in love with her now; I'm RAW with love for her. I feel like a man
+that's been flayed. I have been flayed.... You don't begin to imagine
+the sort of helpless solicitude.... She's not going to do things easily;
+she's ill. Her courage fails.... It's hard to put things when one isn't
+rhetorical, but it's this, Britten--there are distresses that matter
+more than all the delights or achievements in the world.... I made
+her what she is--as I never made Margaret. I've made her--I've broken
+her.... I'm going with my own woman. The rest of my life and England,
+and so forth, must square itself to that...."
+
+For a long time, as it seemed, we remained silent and motionless. We'd
+said all we had to say. My eyes caught a printed slip upon the desk
+before him, and I came back abruptly to the paper.
+
+I picked up this galley proof. It was one of Winter's essays. "This
+man goes on doing first-rate stuff," I said. "I hope you will keep him
+going."
+
+He did not answer for a moment or so. "I'll keep him going," he said at
+last with a sigh.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+I have a letter Margaret wrote me within a week of our flight. I cannot
+resist transcribing some of it here, because it lights things as no word
+of mine can do. It is a string of nearly inconsecutive thoughts written
+in pencil in a fine, tall, sprawling hand. Its very inconsecutiveness is
+essential. Many words are underlined. It was in answer to one from me;
+but what I wrote has passed utterly from my mind....
+
+"Certainly," she says, "I want to hear from you, but I do not want
+to see you. There's a sort of abstract YOU that I want to go on with.
+Something I've made out of you.... I want to know things about you--but
+I don't want to see or feel or imagine. When some day I have got rid
+of my intolerable sense of proprietorship, it may be different. Then
+perhaps we may meet again. I think it is even more the loss of our
+political work and dreams that I am feeling than the loss of your
+presence. Aching loss. I thought so much of the things we were DOING for
+the world--had given myself so unreservedly. You've left me with nothing
+to DO. I am suddenly at loose ends....
+
+"We women are trained to be so dependent on a man. I've got no life of
+my own at all. It seems now to me that I wore my clothes even for you
+and your schemes....
+
+"After I have told myself a hundred times why this has happened, I ask
+again, 'Why did he give things up? Why did he give things up?'...
+
+"It is just as though you were wilfully dead....
+
+"Then I ask again and again whether this thing need have happened at
+all, whether if I had had a warning, if I had understood better, I might
+not have adapted myself to your restless mind and made this catastrophe
+impossible....
+
+"Oh, my dear! why hadn't you the pluck to hurt me at the beginning, and
+tell me what you thought of me and life? You didn't give me a chance;
+not a chance. I suppose you couldn't. All these things you and I stood
+away from. You let my first repugnances repel you....
+
+"It is strange to think after all these years that I should be asking
+myself, do I love you? have I loved you? In a sense I think I HATE
+you. I feel you have taken my life, dragged it in your wake for a time,
+thrown it aside. I am resentful. Unfairly resentful, for why should I
+exact that you should watch and understand my life, when clearly I have
+understood so little of yours. But I am savage--savage at the wrecking
+of all you were to do.
+
+"Oh, why--why did you give things up?
+
+"No human being is his own to do what he likes with. You were not
+only pledged to my tiresome, ineffectual companionship, but to great
+purposes. They ARE great purposes....
+
+"If only I could take up your work as you leave it, with the strength
+you had--then indeed I feel I could let you go--you and your young
+mistress.... All that matters so little to me....
+
+"Yet I think I must indeed love you yourself in my slower way. At times
+I am mad with jealousy at the thought of all I hadn't the wit to give
+you.... I've always hidden my tears from you--and what was in my heart.
+It's my nature to hide--and you, you want things brought to you to see.
+You are so curious as to be almost cruel. You don't understand reserves.
+You have no mercy with restraints and reservations. You are not really
+a CIVILISED man at all. You hate pretences--and not only pretences but
+decent coverings....
+
+"It's only after one has lost love and the chance of loving that slow
+people like myself find what they might have done. Why wasn't I bold and
+reckless and abandoned? It's as reasonable to ask that, I suppose, as to
+ask why my hair is fair....
+
+"I go on with these perhapses over and over again here when I find
+myself alone....
+
+"My dear, my dear, you can't think of the desolation of things--I shall
+never go back to that house we furnished together, that was to have been
+the laboratory (do you remember calling it a laboratory?) in which you
+were to forge so much of the new order....
+
+"But, dear, if I can help you--even now--in any way--help both of you, I
+mean.... It tears me when I think of you poor and discredited. You will
+let me help you if I can--it will be the last wrong not to let me do
+that....
+
+"You had better not get ill. If you do, and I hear of it--I shall come
+after you with a troupe of doctor's and nurses. If I am a failure as a
+wife, no one has ever said I was anything but a success as a district
+visitor...."
+
+There are other sheets, but I cannot tell whether they were written
+before or after the ones from which I have quoted. And most of them
+have little things too intimate to set down. But this oddly penetrating
+analysis of our differences must, I think, be given.
+
+"There are all sorts of things I can't express about this and want to.
+There's this difference that has always been between us, that you like
+nakedness and wildness, and I, clothing and restraint. It goes through
+everything. You are always TALKING of order and system, and the splendid
+dream of the order that might replace the muddled system you hate, but
+by a sort of instinct you seem to want to break the law. I've watched
+you so closely. Now I want to obey laws, to make sacrifices, to follow
+rules. I don't want to make, but I do want to keep. You are at once
+makers and rebels, you and Isabel too. You're bad people--criminal
+people, I feel, and yet full of something the world must have. You're
+so much better than me, and so much viler. It may be there is no making
+without destruction, but it seems to me sometimes that it is nothing
+but an instinct for lawlessness that drives you. You remind me--do you
+remember?--of that time we went from Naples to Vesuvius, and walked
+over the hot new lava there. Do you remember how tired I was? I know it
+disappointed you that I was tired. One walked there in spite of the heat
+because there was a crust; like custom, like law. But directly a crust
+forms on things, you are restless to break down to the fire again.
+You talk of beauty, both of you, as something terrible, mysterious,
+imperative. YOUR beauty is something altogether different from anything
+I know or feel. It has pain in it. Yet you always speak as though it was
+something I ought to feel and am dishonest not to feel. MY beauty is
+a quiet thing. You have always laughed at my feeling for old-fashioned
+chintz and blue china and Sheraton. But I like all these familiar USED
+things. My beauty is STILL beauty, and yours, is excitement. I
+know nothing of the fascination of the fire, or why one should go
+deliberately out of all the decent fine things of life to run dangers
+and be singed and tormented and destroyed. I don't understand...."
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+I remember very freshly the mood of our departure from London, the
+platform of Charing Cross with the big illuminated clock overhead, the
+bustle of porters and passengers with luggage, the shouting of newsboys
+and boys with flowers and sweets, and the groups of friends seeing
+travellers off by the boat train. Isabel sat very quiet and still in the
+compartment, and I stood upon the platform with the door open, with
+a curious reluctance to take the last step that should sever me from
+London's ground. I showed our tickets, and bought a handful of red roses
+for her. At last came the guards crying: "Take your seats," and I got
+in and closed the door on me. We had, thank Heaven! a compartment to
+ourselves. I let down the window and stared out.
+
+There was a bustle of final adieux on the platform, a cry of "Stand
+away, please, stand away!" and the train was gliding slowly and smoothly
+out of the station.
+
+I looked out upon the river as the train rumbled with slowly gathering
+pace across the bridge, and the bobbing black heads of the pedestrians
+in the footway, and the curve of the river and the glowing great hotels,
+and the lights and reflections and blacknesses of that old, familiar
+spectacle. Then with a common thought, we turned our eyes westward to
+where the pinnacles of Westminster and the shining clock tower rose hard
+and clear against the still, luminous sky.
+
+"They'll be in Committee on the Reformatory Bill to-night," I said, a
+little stupidly.
+
+"And so," I added, "good-bye to London!"
+
+We said no more, but watched the south-side streets below--bright gleams
+of lights and movement, and the dark, dim, monstrous shapes of houses
+and factories. We ran through Waterloo Station, London Bridge, New
+Cross, St. John's. We said never a word. It seemed to me that for a time
+we had exhausted our emotions. We had escaped, we had cut our knot,
+we had accepted the last penalty of that headlong return of mine from
+Chicago a year and a half ago. That was all settled. That harvest of
+feelings we had reaped. I thought now only of London, of London as the
+symbol of all we were leaving and all we had lost in the world. I felt
+nothing now but an enormous and overwhelming regret....
+
+The train swayed and rattled on its way. We ran through old Bromstead,
+where once I had played with cities and armies on the nursery floor. The
+sprawling suburbs with their scattered lights gave way to dim tree-set
+country under a cloud-veiled, intermittently shining moon. We passed
+Cardcaster Place. Perhaps old Wardingham, that pillar of the old
+Conservatives, was there, fretting over his unsuccessful struggle with
+our young Toryism. Little he recked of this new turn of the wheel and
+how it would confirm his contempt of all our novelties. Perhaps some
+faint intimation drew him to the window to see behind the stems of the
+young fir trees that bordered his domain, the little string of lighted
+carriage windows gliding southward....
+
+Suddenly I began to realise just what it was we were doing.
+
+And now, indeed, I knew what London had been to me, London where I
+had been born and educated, the slovenly mother of my mind and all my
+ambitions, London and the empire! It seemed to me we must be going
+out to a world that was utterly empty. All our significance fell from
+us--and before us was no meaning any more. We were leaving London; my
+hand, which had gripped so hungrily upon its complex life, had been
+forced from it, my fingers left their hold. That was over. I should
+never have a voice in public affairs again. The inexorable unwritten
+law which forbids overt scandal sentenced me. We were going out to a
+new life, a life that appeared in that moment to be a mere shrivelled
+remnant of me, a mere residuum of sheltering and feeding and seeing
+amidst alien scenery and the sound of unfamiliar tongues. We were going
+to live cheaply in a foreign place, so cut off that I meet now the
+merest stray tourist, the commonest tweed-clad stranger with a mixture
+of shyness and hunger.... And suddenly all the schemes I was leaving
+appeared fine and adventurous and hopeful as they had never done before.
+How great was this purpose I had relinquished, this bold and subtle
+remaking of the English will! I had doubted so many things, and now
+suddenly I doubted my unimportance, doubted my right to this suicidal
+abandonment. Was I not a trusted messenger, greatly trusted and
+favoured, who had turned aside by the way? Had I not, after all, stood
+for far more than I had thought; was I not filching from that dear great
+city of my birth and life, some vitally necessary thing, a key, a link,
+a reconciling clue in her political development, that now she might seek
+vaguely for in vain? What is one life against the State? Ought I not
+to have sacrificed Isabel and all my passion and sorrow for Isabel, and
+held to my thing--stuck to my thing?
+
+I heard as though he had spoken it in the carriage Britten's "It WAS
+a good game." No end of a game. And for the first time I imagined the
+faces and voices of Crupp and Esmeer and Gane when they learnt of
+this secret flight, this flight of which they were quite unwarned. And
+Shoesmith might be there in the house,--Shoesmith who was to have been
+married in four days--the thing might hit him full in front of any kind
+of people. Cruel eyes might watch him. Why the devil hadn't I written
+letters to warn them all? I could have posted them five minutes before
+the train started. I had never thought to that moment of the immense
+mess they would be in; how the whole edifice would clatter about their
+ears. I had a sudden desire to stop the train and go back for a day,
+for two days, to set that negligence right. My brain for a moment
+brightened, became animated and prolific of ideas. I thought of a
+brilliant line we might have taken on that confounded Reformatory
+Bill....
+
+That sort of thing was over....
+
+What indeed wasn't over? I passed to a vaguer, more multitudinous
+perception of disaster, the friends I had lost already since Altiora
+began her campaign, the ampler remnant whom now I must lose. I thought
+of people I had been merry with, people I had worked with and played
+with, the companions of talkative walks, the hostesses of houses that
+had once glowed with welcome for us both. I perceived we must lose them
+all. I saw life like a tree in late autumn that had once been rich and
+splendid with friends--and now the last brave dears would be hanging on
+doubtfully against the frosty chill of facts, twisting and tortured in
+the universal gale of indignation, trying to evade the cold blast of the
+truth. I had betrayed my party, my intimate friend, my wife, the
+wife whose devotion had made me what I was. For awhile the figure of
+Margaret, remote, wounded, shamed, dominated my mind, and the thought of
+my immense ingratitude. Damn them! they'd take it out of her too. I had
+a feeling that I wanted to go straight back and grip some one by the
+throat, some one talking ill of Margaret. They'd blame her for not
+keeping me, for letting things go so far.... I wanted the whole world
+to know how fine she was. I saw in imagination the busy, excited
+dinner tables at work upon us all, rather pleasantly excited, brightly
+indignant, merciless.
+
+Well, it's the stuff we are!...
+
+Then suddenly, stabbing me to the heart, came a vision of Margaret's
+tears and the sound of her voice saying, "Husband mine! Oh! husband
+mine! To see you cry!"...
+
+I came out of a cloud of thoughts to discover the narrow compartment,
+with its feeble lamp overhead, and our rugs and hand-baggage swaying on
+the rack, and Isabel, very still in front of me, gripping my wilting red
+roses tightly in her bare and ringless hand.
+
+For a moment I could not understand her attitude, and then I perceived
+she was sitting bent together with her head averted from the light to
+hide the tears that were streaming down her face. She had not got her
+handkerchief out for fear that I should see this, but I saw her tears,
+dark drops of tears, upon her sleeve....
+
+I suppose she had been watching my expression, divining my thoughts.
+
+For a time I stared at her and was motionless, in a sort of still and
+weary amazement. Why had we done this injury to one another? WHY? Then
+something stirred within me.
+
+"ISABEL!" I whispered.
+
+She made no sign.
+
+"Isabel!" I repeated, and then crossed over to her and crept closely to
+her, put my arm about her, and drew her wet cheek to mine.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The New Machiavelli, by Herbert George Wells
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW MACHIAVELLI ***
+
+***** This file should be named 1047.txt or 1047.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/0/4/1047/
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/old/1047.zip b/old/1047.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..60fbe8f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1047.zip
diff --git a/old/old/nmchv10.txt b/old/old/nmchv10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..120a85c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/old/nmchv10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,16711 @@
+Project Gutenberg's Etext of The New Machiavelli, by H. G. Wells
+#11 in our series by H. G. Wells
+
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
+the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!!
+
+Please take a look at the important information in this header.
+We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
+electronic path open for the next readers.  Do not remove this.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*
+
+Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
+further information is included below.  We need your donations.
+
+
+The New Machiavelli 
+
+by H. G. Wells  [Herbert George Wells]
+
+September, 1997  [Etext #1047]
+
+
+Project Gutenberg's Etext of The New Machiavelli, by H. G. Wells
+******This file should be named nmchv10.txt or nmchv10.zip******
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, nmchv11.txt.
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, nmchv10a.txt.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
+all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
+copyright notice is included.  Therefore, we do NOT keep these books
+in compliance with any particular paper edition, usually otherwise.
+
+
+We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance
+of the official release dates, for time for better editing.
+
+Please note:  neither this list nor its contents are final till
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.  To be sure you have an
+up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes
+in the first week of the next month.  Since our ftp program has
+a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a
+look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a
+new copy has at least one byte more or less.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+fifty hours is one conservative estimate for how long it we take
+to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour this year as we release thirty-two text
+files per month, or 384 more Etexts in 1997 for a total of 1000+
+If these reach just 10% of the computerized population, then the
+total should reach over 100 billion Etexts given away.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
+Files by the December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000=Trillion]
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only 10% of the present number of computer users.  2001
+should have at least twice as many computer users as that, so it
+will require us reaching less than 5% of the users in 2001.
+
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+
+All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/CMU": and are
+tax deductible to the extent allowable by law.  (CMU = Carnegie-
+Mellon University).
+
+For these and other matters, please mail to:
+
+Project Gutenberg
+P. O. Box  2782
+Champaign, IL 61825
+
+When all other email fails try our Executive Director:
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+We would prefer to send you this information by email
+(Internet, Bitnet, Compuserve, ATTMAIL or MCImail).
+
+******
+If you have an FTP program (or emulator), please
+FTP directly to the Project Gutenberg archives:
+[Mac users, do NOT point and click. . .type]
+
+ftp uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu
+login:  anonymous
+password:  your@login
+cd etext/etext90 through /etext96
+or cd etext/articles [get suggest gut for more information]
+dir [to see files]
+get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
+GET INDEX?00.GUT
+for a list of books
+and
+GET NEW GUT for general information
+and
+MGET GUT* for newsletters.
+
+**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**
+(Three Pages)
+
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
+you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-
+tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor
+Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at
+Carnegie-Mellon University (the "Project").  Among other
+things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
+under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this
+etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
+officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
+and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
+indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
+[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
+or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-
+     cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
+     net profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Association/Carnegie-Mellon
+     University" within the 60 days following each
+     date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)
+     your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,
+scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
+free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
+you can think of.  Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg
+Association / Carnegie-Mellon University".
+
+*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
+
+by H. G. Wells
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+BOOK THE FIRST
+
+THE MAKING OF A MAN
+
+I.   CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
+II.  BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER
+III. SCHOLASTIC
+IV.  ADOLESCENCE
+
+
+BOOK THE SECOND
+
+MARGARET
+
+I.   MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE
+II.  MARGARET IN LONDON
+III. MARGARET IN VENICE
+IV.  THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER
+
+
+BOOK THE THIRD
+
+THE HEART OF POLITICS
+
+I.   THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN
+II.  SEEKING ASSOCIATES
+III. SECESSION
+IV.  THE BESETTING OF SEX
+
+
+BOOK THE FOURTH
+
+ISABEL
+
+I.   LOVE AND SUCCESS
+II.  THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION
+III. THE BREAKING POINT
+
+
+
+BOOK THE FIRST
+
+THE MAKING OF A MAN
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST
+
+CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
+
+
+1
+
+Since I came to this place I have been very restless, wasting my 
+energies in the futile beginning of ill-conceived books.  One does 
+not settle down very readily at two and forty to a new way of 
+living, and I have found myself with the teeming interests of the 
+life I have abandoned still buzzing like a swarm of homeless bees in 
+my head.  My mind has been full of confused protests and 
+justifications.  In any case I should have found difficulties enough 
+in expressing the complex thing I have to tell, but it has added 
+greatly to my trouble that I have a great analogue, that a certain 
+Niccolo Machiavelli chanced to fall out of politics at very much the 
+age I have reached, and wrote a book to engage the restlessness of 
+his mind, very much as I have wanted to do.  He wrote about the 
+relation of the great constructive spirit in politics to individual 
+character and weaknesses, and so far his achievement lies like a 
+deep rut in the road of my intention.  It has taken me far astray.  
+It is a matter of many weeks now--diversified indeed by some long 
+drives into the mountains behind us and a memorable sail to Genoa 
+across the blue and purple waters that drowned Shelley--since I 
+began a laboured and futile imitation of "The Prince."  I sat up 
+late last night with the jumbled accumulation; and at last made a 
+little fire of olive twigs and burnt it all, sheet by sheet--to 
+begin again clear this morning.
+
+But incidentally I have re-read most of Machiavelli, not excepting 
+those scandalous letters of his to Vettori, and it seems to me, now 
+that I have released myself altogether from his literary precedent, 
+that he still has his use for me.  In spite of his vast prestige I 
+claim kindred with him and set his name upon my title-page, in 
+partial intimation of the matter of my story.  He takes me with 
+sympathy not only by reason of the dream he pursued and the humanity 
+of his politics, but by the mixture of his nature.  His vices come 
+in, essential to my issue.  He is dead and gone, all his immediate 
+correlations to party and faction have faded to insignificance, 
+leaving only on the one hand his broad method and conceptions, and 
+upon the other his intimate living personality, exposed down to its 
+salacious corners as the soul of no contemporary can ever be 
+exposed.  Of those double strands it is I have to write, of the 
+subtle protesting perplexing play of instinctive passion and desire 
+against too abstract a dream of statesmanship.  But things that 
+seemed to lie very far apart in Machiavelli's time have come near to 
+one another; it is no simple story of white passions struggling 
+against the red that I have to tell.
+
+The state-making dream is a very old dream indeed in the world's 
+history.  It plays too small a part in novels.  Plato and Confucius 
+are but the highest of a great host of minds that have had a kindred 
+aspiration, have dreamt of a world of men better ordered, happier, 
+finer, securer.  They imagined cities grown more powerful and 
+peoples made rich and multitudinous by their efforts, they thought 
+in terms of harbours and shining navies, great roads engineered 
+marvellously, jungles cleared and deserts conquered, the ending of 
+muddle and diseases and dirt and misery; the ending of confusions 
+that waste human possibilities; they thought of these things with 
+passion and desire as other men think of the soft lines and tender 
+beauty of women.  Thousands of men there are to-day almost mastered 
+by this white passion of statecraft, and in nearly every one who 
+reads and thinks you could find, I suspect, some sort of answering 
+response.  But in every one it presents itself extraordinarily 
+entangled and mixed up with other, more intimate things.
+
+It was so with Machiavelli.  I picture him at San Casciano as he 
+lived in retirement upon his property after the fall of the 
+Republic, perhaps with a twinge of the torture that punished his 
+conspiracy still lurking in his limbs.  Such twinges could not stop 
+his dreaming.  Then it was "The Prince" was written.  All day he 
+went about his personal affairs, saw homely neighbours, dealt with 
+his family, gave vent to everyday passions.  He would sit in the 
+shop of Donato del Corno gossiping curiously among vicious company, 
+or pace the lonely woods of his estate, book in hand, full of bitter 
+meditations.  In the evening he returned home and went to his study.  
+At the entrance, he says, he pulled off his peasant clothes covered 
+with the dust and dirt of that immediate life, washed himself, put 
+on his "noble court dress," closed the door on the world of toiling 
+and getting, private loving, private hating and personal regrets, 
+sat down with a sigh of contentment to those wider dreams.
+
+I like to think of him so, with brown books before him lit by the 
+light of candles in silver candlesticks, or heading some new chapter 
+of "The Prince," with a grey quill in his clean fine hand.
+
+So writing, he becomes a symbol for me, and the less none because of 
+his animal humour, his queer indecent side, and because of such 
+lapses into utter meanness as that which made him sound the note of 
+the begging-letter writer even in his "Dedication," reminding His 
+Magnificence very urgently, as if it were the gist of his matter, of 
+the continued malignity of fortune in his affairs.  These flaws 
+complete him.  They are my reason for preferring him as a symbol to 
+Plato, of whose indelicate side we know nothing, and whose 
+correspondence with Dionysius of Syracuse has perished; or to 
+Confucius who travelled China in search of a Prince he might 
+instruct, with lapses and indignities now lost in the mists of ages. 
+They have achieved the apotheosis of individual forgetfulness, and 
+Plato has the added glory of that acquired beauty, that bust of the 
+Indian Bacchus which is now indissolubly mingled with his tradition.  
+They have passed into the world of the ideal, and every humbug takes 
+his freedoms with their names.  But Machiavelli, more recent and 
+less popular, is still all human and earthly, a fallen brother--and 
+at the same time that nobly dressed and nobly dreaming writer at the 
+desk.
+
+That vision of the strengthened and perfected state is protagonist 
+in my story.  But as I re-read "The Prince" and thought out the 
+manner of my now abandoned project, I came to perceive how that stir 
+and whirl of human thought one calls by way of embodiment the French 
+Revolution, has altered absolutely the approach to such a question.  
+Machiavelli, like Plato and Pythagoras and Confucius two hundred odd 
+decades before him, saw only one method by which a thinking man, 
+himself not powerful, might do the work of state building, and that 
+was by seizing the imagination of a Prince.  Directly these men 
+turned their thoughts towards realisation, their attitudes became--
+what shall I call it?--secretarial.  Machiavelli, it is true, had 
+some little doubts about the particular Prince he wanted, whether it 
+was Caesar Borgia of Giuliano or Lorenzo, but a Prince it had to be.  
+Before I saw clearly the differences of our own time I searched my 
+mind for the modern equivalent of a Prince.  At various times I 
+redrafted a parallel dedication to the Prince of Wales, to the 
+Emperor William, to Mr. Evesham, to a certain newspaper proprietor 
+who was once my schoolfellow at City Merchants', to Mr. J. D. 
+Rockefeller--all of them men in their several ways and circumstances 
+and possibilities, princely.  Yet in every case my pen bent of its 
+own accord towards irony because--because, although at first I did 
+not realise it, I myself am just as free to be a prince.  The appeal 
+was unfair.  The old sort of Prince, the old little principality has 
+vanished from the world.  The commonweal is one man's absolute 
+estate and responsibility no more.  In Machiavelli's time it was 
+indeed to an extreme degree one man's affair.  But the days of the 
+Prince who planned and directed and was the source and centre of all 
+power are ended.  We are in a condition of affairs infinitely more 
+complex, in which every prince and statesman is something of a 
+servant and every intelligent human being something of a Prince.  No 
+magnificent pensive Lorenzos remain any more in this world for 
+secretarial hopes.
+
+In a sense it is wonderful how power has vanished, in a sense 
+wonderful how it has increased.  I sit here, an unarmed discredited 
+man, at a small writing-table in a little defenceless dwelling among 
+the vines, and no human being can stop my pen except by the 
+deliberate self-immolation of murdering me, nor destroy its fruits 
+except by theft and crime.  No King, no council, can seize and 
+torture me; no Church, no nation silence me.  Such powers of 
+ruthless and complete suppression have vanished.  But that is not 
+because power has diminished, but because it has increased and 
+become multitudinous, because it has dispersed itself and 
+specialised.  It is no longer a negative power we have, but 
+positive; we cannot prevent, but we can do.  This age, far beyond 
+all previous ages, is full of powerful men, men who might, if they 
+had the will for it, achieve stupendous things.
+
+The things that might be done to-day!  The things indeed that are 
+being done!  It is the latter that give one so vast a sense of the 
+former.  When I think of the progress of physical and mechanical 
+science, of medicine and sanitation during the last century, when I 
+measure the increase in general education and average efficiency, 
+the power now available for human service, the merely physical 
+increment, and compare it with anything that has ever been at man's 
+disposal before, and when I think of what a little straggling, 
+incidental, undisciplined and uncoordinated minority of inventors, 
+experimenters, educators, writers and organisers has achieved this 
+development of human possibilities, achieved it in spite of the 
+disregard and aimlessness of the huge majority, and the passionate 
+resistance of the active dull, my imagination grows giddy with 
+dazzling intimations of the human splendours the justly organised 
+state may yet attain.  I glimpse for a bewildering instant the 
+heights that may be scaled, the splendid enterprises made possible.
+
+But the appeal goes out now in other forms, in a book that catches 
+at thousands of readers for the eye of a Prince diffused.  It is the 
+old appeal indeed for the unification of human effort, the ending of 
+confusions, but instead of the Machiavellian deference to a 
+flattered lord, a man cries out of his heart to the unseen 
+fellowship about him.  The last written dedication of all those I 
+burnt last night, was to no single man, but to the socially 
+constructive passion--in any man. . . .
+
+There is, moreover, a second great difference in kind between my 
+world and Machiavelli's.  We are discovering women.  It is as if 
+they had come across a vast interval since his time, into the very 
+chamber of the statesman.
+
+
+2
+
+In Machiavelli's outlook the interest of womanhood was in a region 
+of life almost infinitely remote from his statecraft.  They were the 
+vehicle of children, but only Imperial Rome and the new world of to-
+day have ever had an inkling of the significance that might give 
+them in the state.  They did their work, he thought, as the ploughed 
+earth bears its crops.  Apart from their function of fertility they 
+gave a humorous twist to life, stimulated worthy men to toil, and 
+wasted the hours of Princes.  He left the thought of women outside 
+with his other dusty things when he went into his study to write, 
+dismissed them from his mind.  But our modern world is burthened 
+with its sense of the immense, now half articulate, significance of 
+women.  They stand now, as it were, close beside the silver 
+candlesticks, speaking as Machiavelli writes, until he stays his pen 
+and turns to discuss his writing with them.
+
+It is this gradual discovery of sex as a thing collectively 
+portentous that I have to mingle with my statecraft if my picture is 
+to be true which has turned me at length from a treatise to the 
+telling of my own story.  In my life I have paralleled very closely 
+the slow realisations that are going on in the world about me.  I 
+began life ignoring women, they came to me at first perplexing and 
+dishonouring; only very slowly and very late in my life and after 
+misadventure, did I gauge the power and beauty of the love of man 
+and woman and learnt how it must needs frame a justifiable vision of 
+the ordered world.  Love has brought me to disaster, because my 
+career had been planned regardless of its possibility and value.  
+But Machiavelli, it seems to me, when he went into his study, left 
+not only the earth of life outside but its unsuspected soul.
+
+
+3
+
+Like Machiavelli at San Casciano, if I may take this analogy one 
+step further, I too am an exile.  Office and leading are closed to 
+me.  The political career that promised so much for me is shattered 
+and ended for ever.
+
+I look out from this vine-wreathed veranda under the branches of a 
+stone pine; I see wide and far across a purple valley whose sides 
+are terraced and set with houses of pine and ivory, the Gulf of 
+Liguria gleaming sapphire blue, and cloud-like baseless mountains 
+hanging in the sky, and I think of lank and coaly steamships heaving 
+on the grey rollers of the English Channel and darkling streets wet 
+with rain, I recall as if I were back there the busy exit from 
+Charing Cross, the cross and the money-changers' offices, the 
+splendid grime of giant London and the crowds going perpetually to 
+and fro, the lights by night and the urgency and eventfulness of 
+that great rain-swept heart of the modern world.
+
+It is difficult to think we have left that--for many years if not 
+for ever.  In thought I walk once more in Palace Yard and hear the 
+clink and clatter of hansoms and the quick quiet whirr of motors; I 
+go in vivid recent memories through the stir in the lobbies, I sit 
+again at eventful dinners in those old dining-rooms like cellars 
+below the House--dinners that ended with shrill division bells, I 
+think of huge clubs swarming and excited by the bulletins of that 
+electoral battle that was for me the opening opportunity.  I see the 
+stencilled names and numbers go up on the green baize, constituency 
+after constituency, amidst murmurs or loud shouting. . . .
+
+It is over for me now and vanished.  That opportunity will come no 
+more.  Very probably you have heard already some crude inaccurate 
+version of our story and why I did not take office, and have formed 
+your partial judgement on me.  And so it is I sit now at my stone 
+table, half out of life already, in a warm, large, shadowy leisure, 
+splashed with sunlight and hung with vine tendrils, with paper 
+before me to distil such wisdom as I can, as Machiavelli in his 
+exile sought to do, from the things I have learnt and felt during 
+the career that has ended now in my divorce.
+
+I climbed high and fast from small beginnings.  I had the mind of my 
+party.  I do not know where I might not have ended, but for this red 
+blaze that came out of my unguarded nature and closed my career for 
+ever.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND
+
+BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER
+
+
+1
+
+I dreamt first of states and cities and political things when I was 
+a little boy in knickerbockers.
+
+When I think of how such things began in my mind, there comes back 
+to me the memory of an enormous bleak room with its ceiling going up 
+to heaven and its floor covered irregularly with patched and 
+defective oilcloth and a dingy mat or so and a "surround" as they 
+call it, of dark stained wood.  Here and there against the wall are 
+trunks and boxes.  There are cupboards on either side of the 
+fireplace and bookshelves with books above them, and on the wall and 
+rather tattered is a large yellow-varnished geological map of the 
+South of England.  Over the mantel is a huge lump of white coral 
+rock and several big fossil bones, and above that hangs the portrait 
+of a brainy gentleman, sliced in half and displaying an interior of 
+intricate detail and much vigour of coloring.  It is the floor I 
+think of chiefly; over the oilcloth of which, assumed to be land, 
+spread towns and villages and forts of wooden bricks; there are 
+steep square hills (geologically, volumes of Orr's CYCLOPAEDIA OF 
+THE SCIENCES) and the cracks and spaces of the floor and the bare 
+brown surround were the water channels and open sea of that 
+continent of mine.
+
+I still remember with infinite gratitude the great-uncle to whom I 
+owe my bricks.  He must have been one of those rare adults who have 
+not forgotten the chagrins and dreams of childhood.  He was a 
+prosperous west of England builder; including my father he had three 
+nephews, and for each of them he caused a box of bricks to be made 
+by an out-of-work carpenter, not the insufficient supply of the 
+toyshop, you understand, but a really adequate quantity of bricks 
+made out of oak and shaped and smoothed, bricks about five inches by 
+two and a half by one, and half-bricks and quarter-bricks to 
+correspond.  There were hundreds of them, many hundreds.  I could 
+build six towers as high as myself with them, and there seemed quite 
+enough for every engineering project I could undertake.  I could 
+build whole towns with streets and houses and churches and citadels; 
+I could bridge every gap in the oilcloth and make causeways over 
+crumpled spaces (which I feigned to be morasses), and on a keel of 
+whole bricks it was possible to construct ships to push over the 
+high seas to the remotest port in the room.  And a disciplined 
+population, that rose at last by sedulous begging on birthdays and 
+all convenient occasions to well over two hundred, of lead sailors 
+and soldiers, horse, foot and artillery, inhabited this world.
+
+Justice has never been done to bricks and soldiers by those who 
+write about toys.  The praises of the toy theatre have been a common 
+theme for essayists, the planning of the scenes, the painting and 
+cutting out of the caste, penny plain twopence coloured, the stink 
+and glory of the performance and the final conflagration.  I had 
+such a theatre once, but I never loved it nor hoped for much from 
+it; my bricks and soldiers were my perpetual drama.  I recall an 
+incessant variety of interests.  There was the mystery and charm of 
+the complicated buildings one could make, with long passages and 
+steps and windows through which one peeped into their intricacies, 
+and by means of slips of card one could make slanting ways in them, 
+and send marbles rolling from top to base and thence out into the 
+hold of a waiting ship.  Then there were the fortresses and gun 
+emplacements and covered ways in which one's soldiers went.  And 
+there was commerce; the shops and markets and store-rooms full of 
+nasturtium seed, thrift seed, lupin beans and suchlike provender 
+from the garden; such stuff one stored in match-boxes and pill-
+boxes, or packed in sacks of old glove fingers tied up with thread 
+and sent off by waggons along the great military road to the 
+beleaguered fortress on the Indian frontier beyond the worn places 
+that were dismal swamps.  And there were battles on the way.
+
+That great road is still clear in my memory.  I was given, I forget 
+by what benefactor, certain particularly fierce red Indians of lead--
+I have never seen such soldiers since--and for these my father 
+helped me to make tepees of brown paper, and I settled them in a 
+hitherto desolate country under the frowning nail-studded cliffs of 
+an ancient trunk.  Then I conquered them and garrisoned their land.  
+(Alas! they died, no doubt through contact with civilisation--one my 
+mother trod on--and their land became a wilderness again and was 
+ravaged for a time by a clockwork crocodile of vast proportions.)  
+And out towards the coal-scuttle was a region near the impassable 
+thickets of the ragged hearthrug where lived certain china Zulus 
+brandishing spears, and a mountain country of rudely piled bricks 
+concealing the most devious and enchanting caves and several mines 
+of gold and silver paper.  Among these rocks a number of survivors 
+from a Noah's Ark made a various, dangerous, albeit frequently 
+invalid and crippled fauna, and I was wont to increase the 
+uncultivated wildness of this region further by trees of privet-
+twigs from the garden hedge and box from the garden borders.  By 
+these territories went my Imperial Road carrying produce to and fro, 
+bridging gaps in the oilcloth, tunnelling through Encyclopaedic 
+hills--one tunnel was three volumes long--defended as occasion 
+required by camps of paper tents or brick blockhouses, and ending at 
+last in a magnificently engineered ascent to a fortress on the 
+cliffs commanding the Indian reservation.
+
+My games upon the floor must have spread over several years and 
+developed from small beginnings, incorporating now this suggestion 
+and now that.  They stretch, I suppose, from seven to eleven or 
+twelve.  I played them intermittently, and they bulk now in the 
+retrospect far more significantly than they did at the time.  I 
+played them in bursts, and then forgot them for long periods; 
+through the spring and summer I was mostly out of doors, and school 
+and classes caught me early.  And in the retrospect I see them all 
+not only magnified and transfigured, but fore-shortened and confused 
+together.  A clockwork railway, I seem to remember, came and went; 
+one or two clockwork boats, toy sailing ships that, being keeled, 
+would do nothing but lie on their beam ends on the floor; a 
+detestable lot of cavalrymen, undersized and gilt all over, given me 
+by a maiden aunt, and very much what one might expect from an aunt, 
+that I used as Nero used his Christians to ornament my public 
+buildings; and I finally melted some into fratricidal bullets, and 
+therewith blew the rest to flat splashes of lead by means of a brass 
+cannon in the garden.
+
+I find this empire of the floor much more vivid and detailed in my 
+memory now than many of the owners of the skirts and legs and boots 
+that went gingerly across its territories.  Occasionally, alas! they 
+stooped to scrub, abolishing in one universal destruction the slow 
+growth of whole days of civilised development.  I still remember the 
+hatred and disgust of these catastrophes.  Like Noah I was given 
+warnings.  Did I disregard them, coarse red hands would descend, 
+plucking garrisons from fortresses and sailors from ships, jumbling 
+them up in their wrong boxes, clumsily so that their rifles and 
+swords were broken, sweeping the splendid curves of the Imperial 
+Road into heaps of ruins, casting the jungle growth of Zululand into 
+the fire.
+
+Well, Master Dick," the voice of this cosmic calamity would say, 
+"you ought to have put them away last night.  No! I can't wait until 
+you've sailed them all away in ships.  I got my work to do, and do 
+it I will."
+
+And in no time all my continents and lands were swirling water and 
+swiping strokes of house-flannel.
+
+That was the worst of my giant visitants, but my mother too, dear 
+lady, was something of a terror to this microcosm.  She wore spring-
+sided boots, a kind of boot now vanished, I believe, from the world, 
+with dull bodies and shiny toes, and a silk dress with flounces that 
+were very destructive to the more hazardous viaducts of the Imperial 
+Road.  She was always, I seem to remember, fetching me; fetching me 
+for a meal, fetching me for a walk or, detestable absurdity! 
+fetching me for a wash and brush up, and she never seemed to 
+understand anything whatever of the political Systems across which 
+she came to me.  Also she forbade all toys on Sundays except the 
+bricks for church-building and the soldiers for church parade, or a 
+Scriptural use of the remains of the Noah's Ark mixed up with a 
+wooden Swiss dairy farm.  But she really did not know whether a 
+thing was a church or not unless it positively bristled with cannon, 
+and many a Sunday afternoon have I played Chicago (with the fear of 
+God in my heart) under an infidel pretence that it was a new sort of 
+ark rather elaborately done.
+
+Chicago, I must explain, was based upon my father's description of 
+the pig slaughterings in that city and certain pictures I had seen.  
+You made your beasts--which were all the ark lot really, 
+provisionally conceived as pigs--go up elaborate approaches to a 
+central pen, from which they went down a cardboard slide four at a 
+time, and dropped most satisfyingly down a brick shaft, and pitter-
+litter over some steep steps to where a head slaughterman (ne Noah) 
+strung a cotton loop round their legs and sent them by pin hooks 
+along a wire to a second slaughterman with a chipped foot (formerly 
+Mrs. Noah) who, if I remember rightly, converted them into Army 
+sausage by means of a portion of the inside of an old alarum clock.
+
+My mother did not understand my games, but my father did.  He wore 
+bright-coloured socks and carpet slippers when he was indoors--my 
+mother disliked boots in the house--and he would sit down on my 
+little chair and survey the microcosm on the floor with admirable 
+understanding and sympathy.
+
+It was he gave me most of my toys and, I more than suspect, most of 
+my ideas.  "Here's some corrugated iron," he would say, "suitable 
+for roofs and fencing," and hand me a lump of that stiff crinkled 
+paper that is used for packing medicine bottles.  Or, "Dick, do you 
+see the tiger loose near the Imperial Road?--won't do for your 
+cattle ranch."  And I would find a bright new lead tiger like a 
+special creation at large in the world, and demanding a hunting 
+expedition and much elaborate effort to get him safely housed in the 
+city menagerie beside the captured dragon crocodile, tamed now, and 
+his key lost and the heart and spring gone out of him.
+
+And to the various irregular reading of my father I owe the 
+inestimable blessing of never having a boy's book in my boyhood 
+except those of Jules Verne.  But my father used to get books for 
+himself and me from the Bromstead Institute, Fenimore Cooper and 
+Mayne Reid and illustrated histories; one of the Russo-Turkish war 
+and one of Napier's expedition to Abyssinia I read from end to end; 
+Stanley and Livingstone, lives of Wellington, Napoleon and 
+Garibaldi, and back volumes of PUNCH, from which I derived 
+conceptions of foreign and domestic politics it has taken years of 
+adult reflection to correct.  And at home permanently we had Wood's 
+NATURAL HISTORY, a brand-new illustrated Green's HISTORY OF THE 
+ENGLISH PEOPLE, Irving's COMPANIONS OF COLUMBUS, a great number of 
+unbound parts of some geographical work, a VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD I 
+think it was called, with pictures of foreign places, and Clarke's 
+NEW TESTAMENT with a map of Palestine, and a variety of other 
+informing books bought at sales.  There was a Sowerby's BOTANY also, 
+with thousands of carefully tinted pictures of British plants, and 
+one or two other important works in the sitting-room.  I was allowed 
+to turn these over and even lie on the floor with them on Sundays 
+and other occasions of exceptional cleanliness.
+
+And in the attic I found one day a very old forgotten map after the 
+fashion of a bird's-eye view, representing the Crimea, that 
+fascinated me and kept me for hours navigating its waters with a 
+pin.
+
+
+2
+
+My father was a lank-limbed man in easy shabby tweed clothes and 
+with his hands in his trouser pockets.  He was a science teacher, 
+taking a number of classes at the Bromstead Institute in Kent under 
+the old Science and Art Department, and "visiting" various schools; 
+and our resources were eked out by my mother's income of nearly a 
+hundred pounds a year, and by his inheritance of a terrace of three 
+palatial but structurally unsound stucco houses near Bromstead 
+Station.
+
+They were big clumsy residences in the earliest Victorian style, 
+interminably high and with deep damp  basements  and  downstairs  
+coal-cellars  and kitchens  that suggested  an architect  
+vindictively devoted to the discomfort of the servant class.  If so, 
+he had overreached himself and defeated his end, for no servant 
+would stay in them unless for exceptional wages or exceptional 
+tolerance of inefficiency or exceptional freedom in repartee.  Every 
+storey in the house was from twelve to fifteen feet high (which 
+would have been cool and pleasant in a hot climate), and the stairs 
+went steeply up, to end at last in attics too inaccessible for 
+occupation.  The ceilings had vast plaster cornices of classical 
+design, fragments of which would sometimes fall unexpectedly, and 
+the wall-papers were bold and gigantic in pattern and much 
+variegated by damp and ill-mended rents.
+
+As my father was quite unable to let more than one of these houses 
+at a time, and that for the most part to eccentric and undesirable 
+tenants, he thought it politic to live in one of the two others, and 
+devote the rent he received from the let one, when it was let, to 
+the incessant necessary repairing of all three.  He also did some of 
+the repairing himself and, smoking a bull-dog pipe the while, which 
+my mother would not allow him to do in the house, he cultivated 
+vegetables in a sketchy, unpunctual and not always successful manner 
+in the unoccupied gardens.  The three houses faced north, and the 
+back of the one we occupied was covered by a grape-vine that 
+yielded, I remember, small green grapes for pies in the spring, and 
+imperfectly ripe black grapes in favourable autumns for the purposes 
+of dessert. The grape-vine played an important part in my life, for 
+my father broke his neck while he was pruning it, when I was 
+thirteen.
+
+My father was what is called a man of ideas, but they were not 
+always good ideas.  My grandfather had been a private schoolmaster 
+and one of the founders of the College of Preceptors, and my father 
+had assisted him in his school until increasing competition and 
+diminishing attendance had made it evident that the days of small 
+private schools kept by unqualified persons were numbered.  
+Thereupon my father had roused himself and had qualified as a 
+science teacher under the Science and Art Department, which in these 
+days had charge of the scientific and artistic education of the mass 
+of the English population, and had thrown himself into science 
+teaching and the earning of government grants therefor with great if 
+transitory zeal and success.
+
+I do not remember anything of my father's earlier and more energetic 
+time.  I was the child of my parents' middle years; they married 
+when my father was thirty-five and my mother past forty, and I saw 
+only the last decadent phase of his educational career.
+
+The Science and Art Department has vanished altogether from the 
+world, and people are forgetting it now with the utmost readiness 
+and generosity.  Part of its substance and staff and spirit survive, 
+more or less completely digested into the Board of Education.
+
+The world does move on, even in its government.  It is wonderful how 
+many of the clumsy and limited governing bodies of my youth and 
+early manhood have given place now to more scientific and efficient 
+machinery.  When I was a boy, Bromstead, which is now a borough, was 
+ruled by a strange body called a Local Board--it was the Age of 
+Boards--and I still remember indistinctly my father rejoicing at the 
+breakfast-table over the liberation of London from the corrupt and 
+devastating control of a Metropolitan Board of Works.  Then there 
+were also School Boards; I was already practically in politics 
+before the London School Board was absorbed by the spreading 
+tentacles of the London County Council.
+
+It gives a measure of the newness of our modern ideas of the State 
+to remember that the very beginnings of public education lie within 
+my father's lifetime, and that many most intelligent and patriotic 
+people were shocked beyond measure at the State doing anything of 
+the sort.  When he was born, totally illiterate people who could 
+neither read a book nor write more than perhaps a clumsy signature, 
+were to be found everywhere in England; and great masses of the 
+population were getting no instruction at all.  Only a few schools 
+flourished upon the patronage of exceptional parents; all over the 
+country the old endowed grammar schools were to be found sinking and 
+dwindling; many of them had closed altogether.  In the new great 
+centres of population multitudes of children were sweated in the 
+factories, darkly ignorant and wretched and the under-equipped and 
+under-staffed National and British schools, supported by voluntary 
+contributions and sectarian rivalries, made an ineffectual fight 
+against this festering darkness.  It was a condition of affairs 
+clamouring for remedies, but there was an immense amount of 
+indifference and prejudice to be overcome before any remedies were 
+possible.  Perhaps some day some industrious and lucid historian 
+will disentangle all the muddle of impulses and antagonisms, the 
+commercialism, utilitarianism, obstinate conservatism, humanitarian 
+enthusiasm, out of which our present educational organisation arose.  
+I have long since come to believe it necessary that all new social 
+institutions should be born in confusion, and that at first they 
+should present chiefly crude and ridiculous aspects.  The distrust 
+of government in the Victorian days was far too great, and the 
+general intelligence far too low, to permit the State to go about 
+the new business it was taking up in a businesslike way, to train 
+teachers, build and equip schools, endow pedagogic research, and 
+provide properly written school-books.  These things it was felt 
+MUST be provided by individual and local effort, and since it was 
+manifest that it was individual and local effort that were in 
+default, it was reluctantly agreed to stimulate them by money 
+payments.  The State set up a machinery of examination both in 
+Science and Art and for the elementary schools; and payments, known 
+technically as grants, were made in accordance with the examination 
+results attained, to such schools as Providence might see fit to 
+send into the world.  In this way it was felt the Demand would be 
+established that would, according to the beliefs of that time, 
+inevitably ensure the Supply.  An industry of "Grant earning" was 
+created, and this would give education as a necessary by-product.
+
+In the end this belief was found to need qualification, but Grant-
+earning was still in full activity when I was a small boy.  So far 
+as the Science and Art Department and my father are concerned, the 
+task of examination was entrusted to eminent scientific men, for the 
+most part quite unaccustomed to teaching.  You see, if they also 
+were teaching similar classes to those they examined, it was feared 
+that injustice might be done.  Year after year these eminent persons 
+set questions and employed subordinates to read and mark the 
+increasing thousands of answers that ensued, and having no doubt the 
+national ideal of fairness well developed in their minds, they were 
+careful each year to re-read the preceding papers before composing 
+the current one, in order to see what it was usual to ask.  As a 
+result of this, in the course of a few years the recurrence and 
+permutation of questions became almost calculable, and since the 
+practical object of the teaching was to teach people not science, 
+but how to write answers to these questions, the industry of Grant-
+earning assumed a form easily distinguished from any kind of genuine 
+education whatever.
+
+Other remarkable compromises had also to be made with the spirit of 
+the age.  The unfortunate conflict between Religion and Science 
+prevalent at this time was mitigated, if I remember rightly, by 
+making graduates in arts and priests in the established church 
+Science Teachers EX OFFICIO, and leaving local and private 
+enterprise to provide schools, diagrams, books, material, according 
+to the conceptions of efficiency prevalent in the district.  Private 
+enterprise made a particularly good thing of the books.  A number of 
+competing firms of publishers sprang into existence specialising in 
+Science and Art Department work; they set themselves to produce 
+text-books that should supply exactly the quantity and quality of 
+knowledge necessary for every stage of each of five and twenty 
+subjects into which desirable science was divided, and copies and 
+models and instructions that should give precisely the method and 
+gestures esteemed as proficiency in art.  Every section of each book 
+was written in the idiom found to be most satisfactory to the 
+examiners, and test questions extracted from papers set in former 
+years were appended to every chapter.  By means of these last the 
+teacher was able to train his class to the very highest level of 
+grant-earning efficiency, and very naturally he cast all other 
+methods of exposition aside.  First he posed his pupils with 
+questions and then dictated model replies.
+
+That was my father's method of instruction.  I attended his classes 
+as an elementary grant-earner from the age of ten until his death, 
+and it is so I remember him, sitting on the edge of a table, 
+smothering a yawn occasionally and giving out the infallible 
+formulae to the industriously scribbling class sitting in rows of 
+desks before him.  Occasionally be would slide to his feet and go to 
+a blackboard on an easel and draw on that very slowly and 
+deliberately in coloured chalks a diagram for the class to copy in 
+coloured pencils, and sometimes he would display a specimen or 
+arrange an experiment for them to see.  The room in the Institute in 
+which he taught was equipped with a certain amount of apparatus 
+prescribed as necessary for subject this and subject that by the 
+Science and Art Department, and this my father would supplement with 
+maps and diagrams and drawings of his own.
+
+But he never really did experiments, except that in the class in 
+systematic botany he sometimes made us tease common flowers to 
+pieces.  He did not do experiments if he could possibly help it, 
+because in the first place they used up time and gas for the Bunsen 
+burner and good material in a ruinous fashion, and in the second 
+they were, in his rather careless and sketchy hands, apt to endanger 
+the apparatus of the Institute and even the lives of his students.  
+Then thirdly, real experiments involved washing up.  And moreover 
+they always turned out wrong, and sometimes misled the too observant 
+learner very seriously and opened demoralising controversies.  Quite 
+early in life I acquired an almost ineradicable sense of the 
+unscientific perversity of Nature and the impassable gulf that is 
+fixed between systematic science and elusive fact.  I knew, for 
+example, that in science, whether it be subject XII., Organic 
+Chemistry, or subject XVII., Animal Physiology, when you blow into a 
+glass of lime water it instantly becomes cloudy, and if you continue 
+to blow it clears again, whereas in truth you may blow into the 
+stuff from the lime-water bottle until you are crimson in the face 
+and painful under the ears, and it never becomes cloudy at all.  And 
+I knew, too, that in science if you put potassium chlorate into a 
+retort and heat it over a Bunsen burner, oxygen is disengaged and 
+may be collected over water, whereas in real life if you do anything 
+of the sort the vessel cracks with a loud report, the potassium 
+chlorate descends sizzling upon the flame, the experimenter says 
+"Oh! Damn!" with astonishing heartiness and distinctness, and a lady 
+student in the back seats gets up and leaves the room.
+
+Science is the organised conquest of Nature, and I can quite 
+understand that ancient libertine refusing to cooperate in her own 
+undoing.  And I can quite understand, too, my father's preference 
+for what he called an illustrative experiment, which was simply an 
+arrangement of the apparatus in front of the class with nothing 
+whatever by way of material, and the Bunsen burner clean and cool, 
+and then a slow luminous description of just what you did put in it 
+when you were so ill-advised as to carry the affair beyond 
+illustration, and just exactly what ought anyhow to happen when you 
+did.  He had considerable powers of vivid expression, so that in 
+this way he could make us see all he described.  The class, freed 
+from any unpleasant nervous tension, could draw this still life 
+without flinching, and if any part was too difficult to draw, then 
+my father would produce a simplified version on the blackboard to be 
+copied instead.  And he would also write on the blackboard any 
+exceptionally difficult but grant-earning words, such as 
+"empyreumatic" or "botryoidal."
+
+Some words in constant use he rarely explained.  I remember once 
+sticking up my hand and asking him in the full flow of description, 
+"Please, sir, what is flocculent?"
+
+"The precipitate is."
+
+"Yes, sir, but what does it mean?"
+
+"Oh! flocculent! " said my father, "flocculent!  Why--" he extended 
+his hand and arm and twiddled his fingers for a second in the air.  
+"Like that," he said.
+
+I thought the explanation sufficient, but he paused for a moment 
+after giving it.  "As in a flock bed, you know," he added and 
+resumed his discourse.
+
+
+3
+
+My father, I am afraid, carried a natural incompetence in practical 
+affairs to an exceptionally high level.  He combined practical 
+incompetence, practical enterprise and a thoroughly sanguine 
+temperament, in a manner that I have never seen paralleled in any 
+human being.  He was always trying to do new things in the briskest 
+manner, under the suggestion of books or papers or his own 
+spontaneous imagination, and as he had never been trained to do 
+anything whatever in his life properly, his futilities were 
+extensive and thorough.  At one time he nearly gave up his classes 
+for intensive culture, so enamoured was he of its possibilities; the 
+peculiar pungency of the manure he got, in pursuit of a chemical 
+theory of his own, has scarred my olfactory memories for a lifetime.  
+The intensive culture phase is very clear in my memory; it came near 
+the end of his career and when I was between eleven and twelve.  I 
+was mobilised to gather caterpillars on several occasions, and 
+assisted in nocturnal raids upon the slugs by lantern-light that 
+wrecked my preparation work for school next day.  My father dug up 
+both lawns, and trenched and manured in spasms of immense vigour 
+alternating with periods of paralysing distaste for the garden.  And 
+for weeks he talked about eight hundred pounds an acre at every 
+meal.
+
+A garden, even when it is not exasperated by intensive methods, is a 
+thing as exacting as a baby, its moods have to he watched; it does 
+not wait upon the cultivator's convenience, but has times of its 
+own.  Intensive culture greatly increases this disposition to 
+trouble mankind; it makes a garden touchy and hysterical, a drugged 
+and demoralised and over-irritated garden.  My father got at cross 
+purposes with our two patches at an early stage.  Everything grew 
+wrong from the first to last, and if my father's manures intensified 
+nothing else, they certainly intensified the Primordial Curse.  The 
+peas were eaten in the night before they were three inches high, the 
+beans bore nothing but blight, the only apparent result of a 
+spraying of the potatoes was to develop a PENCHANT in the cat for 
+being ill indoors, the cucumber frames were damaged by the 
+catapulting of boys going down the lane at the back, and all your 
+cucumbers were mysteriously embittered.  That lane with its 
+occasional passers-by did much to wreck the intensive scheme, 
+because my father always stopped work and went indoors if any one 
+watched him.  His special manure was apt to arouse a troublesome 
+spirit of inquiry in hardy natures.
+
+In digging his rows and shaping his patches he neglected the guiding 
+string and trusted to his eye altogether too much, and the 
+consequent obliquity and the various wind-breaks and scare-crows he 
+erected, and particularly an irrigation contrivance he began and 
+never finished by which everything was to be watered at once by 
+means of pieces of gutter from the roof and outhouses of Number 2, 
+and a large and particularly obstinate clump of elder-bushes in the 
+abolished hedge that he had failed to destroy entirely either by axe 
+or by fire, combined to give the gardens under intensive culture a 
+singularly desolate and disorderly appearance.  He took steps 
+towards the diversion of our house drain under the influence of the 
+Sewage Utilisation Society; but happily he stopped in time.  He 
+hardly completed any of the operations he began; something else 
+became more urgent or simply he tired; a considerable area of the 
+Number 2 territory was never even dug up.
+
+In the end the affair irritated him beyond endurance.  Never was a 
+man less horticulturally-minded.  The clamour of these vegetables he 
+had launched into the world for his service and assistance, wore out 
+his patience.  He would walk into the garden the happiest of men 
+after a day or so of disregard, talking to me of history perhaps or 
+social organisation, or summarising some book he had read.  He 
+talked to me of anything that interested him, regardless of my 
+limitations.  Then he would begin to note the growth of the weeds.  
+"This won't do," he would say and pull up a handful.
+
+More weeding would follow and the talk would become fragmentary.  
+His hands would become earthy, his nails black, weeds would snap off 
+in his careless grip, leaving the roots behind.  The world would 
+darken.  He would look at his fingers with disgusted astonishment.  
+"CURSE these weeds!" he would say from his heart.  His discourse was 
+at an end.
+
+I have memories, too, of his sudden unexpected charges into the 
+tranquillity of the house, his hands and clothes intensively 
+enriched.  He would come in like a whirlwind.  "This damned stuff 
+all over me and the Agricultural Chemistry Class at six!  Bah!  
+AAAAAAH!"
+
+My mother would never learn not to attempt to break him of swearing 
+on such occasions.  She would remain standing a little stiffly in 
+the scullery refusing to assist him to the adjectival towel he 
+sought.
+
+"If you say such things--"
+
+He would dance with rage and hurl the soap about.  "The towel!" he 
+would cry, flicking suds from big fingers in every direction; "the 
+towel! I'll let the blithering class slide if you don't give me the 
+towel!  I'll give up everything, I tell you--everything!" . . .
+
+At last with the failure of the lettuces came the breaking point.  I 
+was in the little arbour learning Latin irregular verbs when it 
+happened.  I can see him still, his peculiar tenor voice still 
+echoes in my brain, shouting his opinion of intensive culture for 
+all the world to hear, and slashing away at that abominable mockery 
+of a crop with a hoe.  We had tied them up with bast only a week or 
+so before, and now half were rotten and half had shot up into tall 
+slender growths.  He had the hoe in both hands and slogged.  Great 
+wipes he made, and at each stroke he said, "Take that!"
+
+The air was thick with flying fragments of abortive salad.  It was a 
+fantastic massacre.  It was the French Revolution of that cold 
+tyranny, the vindictive overthrow of the pampered vegetable 
+aristocrats.  After he had assuaged his passion upon them, he turned 
+for other prey; he kicked holes in two of our noblest marrows, 
+flicked off the heads of half a row of artichokes, and shied the hoe 
+with a splendid smash into the cucumber frame.  Something of the awe 
+of that moment returns to me as I write of it.
+
+Well, my boy," he said, approaching with an expression of beneficent 
+happiness, "I've done with gardening.  Let's go for a walk like 
+reasonable beings.  I've had enough of this"--his face was convulsed 
+for an instant with bitter resentment--"  Pandering to cabbages."
+
+
+4
+
+That afternoon's walk sticks in my memory for many reasons.  One is 
+that we went further than I had ever been before; far beyond Keston 
+and nearly to Seven-oaks, coming back by train from Dunton Green, 
+and the other is that my father as he went along talked about 
+himself, not so much to me as to himself, and about life and what he 
+had done with it.  He monologued so that at times he produced an 
+effect of weird world-forgetfulness.  I listened puzzled, and at 
+that time not upderstanding many things that afterwards became plain 
+to me.  It is only in recent years that I have discovered the pathos 
+of that monologue; how friendless my father was and uncompanioned in 
+his thoughts and feelings, and what a hunger he may have felt for 
+the sympathy of the undeveloped youngster who trotted by his side.
+
+"I'm no gardener," he said, "I'm no anything.  Why the devil did I 
+start gardening?
+
+"I suppose man was created to mind a garden. . .  But the Fall let 
+us out of that!  What was I created for?  God! what was I created 
+for? . . .
+
+"Slaves to matter!  Minding inanimate things!  It doesn't suit me, 
+you know.  I've got no hands and no patience.  I've mucked about 
+with life.  Mucked about with life."  He suddenly addressed himself 
+to me, and for an instant I started like an eavesdropper discovered.  
+"Whatever you do, boy, whatever you do, make a Plan.  Make a good 
+Plan and stick to it.  Find out what life is about--I never have--
+and set yourself to do whatever you ought to do.  I admit it's a 
+puzzle. . . .
+
+"Those damned houses have been the curse of my life.  Stucco white 
+elephants!  Beastly cracked stucco with stains of green--black and 
+green.  Conferva and soot. . . .  Property, they are! . . .  Beware 
+of Things, Dick, beware of Things!  Before you know where you are 
+you are waiting on them and minding them.  They'll eat your life up.  
+Eat up your hours and your blood and energy!  When those houses came 
+to me, I ought to have sold them--or fled the country.  I ought to 
+have cleared out.  Sarcophagi--eaters of men!  Oh! the hours and 
+days of work, the nights of anxiety those vile houses have cost me!  
+The painting!  It worked up my arms; it got all over me.  I stank of 
+it.  It made me ill.  It isn't living--it's minding. . . .
+
+"Property's the curse of life.  Property!  Ugh!  Look at this 
+country all cut up into silly little parallelograms, look at all 
+those villas we passed just now and those potato patches and that 
+tarred shanty and the hedge!  Somebody's minding every bit of it 
+like a dog tied to a cart's tail.  Patching it and bothering about 
+it.  Bothering!  Yapping at every passer-by.  Look at that notice-
+board!  One rotten worried little beast wants to keep us other 
+rotten little beasts off HIS patch,--God knows why!  Look at the 
+weeds in it.  Look at the mended fence! . . .  There's no property 
+worth having, Dick, but money.  That's only good to spend.  All 
+these things.  Human souls buried under a cartload of blithering 
+rubbish. . . .
+
+"I'm not a fool, Dick.  I have qualities, imagination, a sort of go.  
+I ought to have made a better thing of life.
+
+"I'm sure I could have done things.  Only the old people pulled my 
+leg.  They started me wrong.  They never started me at all.  I only 
+began to find out what life was like when I was nearly forty.
+
+"If I'd gone to a university; if I'd had any sort of sound training, 
+if I hadn't slipped into the haphazard places that came easiest. . . .
+
+"Nobody warned me.  Nobody.  It isn't a world we live in, Dick; it's 
+a cascade of accidents; it's a chaos exasperated by policemen!  YOU 
+be warned in time, Dick.  You stick to a plan.  Don't wait for any 
+one to show you the way.  Nobody will.  There isn't a way till you 
+make one.  Get education, get a good education.  Fight your way to 
+the top.  It's your only chance.  I've watched you.  You'll do no 
+good at digging and property minding.  There isn't a neighbour in 
+Bromstead won't be able to skin you at suchlike games.  You and I 
+are the brainy unstable kind, topside or nothing.  And if ever those 
+blithering houses come to you--don't have 'em.  Give them away!  
+Dynamite 'em--and off!  LIVE, Dick!  I'll get rid of them for you if 
+I can, Dick, but remember what I say." . . .
+
+So it was my father discoursed, if not in those particular words, 
+yet exactly in that manner, as he slouched along the southward road, 
+with resentful eyes becoming less resentful as he talked, and 
+flinging out clumsy illustrative motions at the outskirts of 
+Bromstead as we passed along them.  That afternoon he hated 
+Bromstead, from its foot-tiring pebbles up.  He had no illusions 
+about Bromstead or himself.  I have the clearest impression of him 
+in his garden-stained tweeds with a deer-stalker hat on the back of 
+his head and presently a pipe sometimes between his teeth and 
+sometimes in his gesticulating hand, as he became diverted by his 
+talk from his original exasperation. . . .
+
+This particular afternoon is no doubt mixed up in my memory with 
+many other afternoons; all sorts of things my father said and did at 
+different times have got themselves referred to it; it filled me at 
+the time with a great unprecedented sense of fellowship and it has 
+become the symbol now for all our intercourse together.  If I didn't 
+understand the things he said, I did the mood he was in.  He gave me 
+two very broad ideas in that talk and the talks I have mingled with 
+it; he gave them to me very clearly and they have remained 
+fundamental in my mind; one a sense of the extraordinary confusion 
+and waste and planlessness of the human life that went on all about 
+us; and the other of a great ideal of order and economy which he 
+called variously Science and Civilisation, and which, though I do 
+not remember that he ever used that word, I suppose many people 
+nowadays would identify with Socialism,--as the Fabians expound it.
+
+He was not very definite about this Science, you must understand, 
+but he seemed always to be waving his hand towards it,--just as his 
+contemporary Tennyson seems always to be doing--he belonged to his 
+age and mostly his talk was destructive of the limited beliefs of 
+his time, he led me to infer rather than actually told me that this 
+Science was coming, a spirit of light and order, to the rescue of a 
+world groaning and travailing in muddle for the want of it. . . .
+
+
+5
+
+When I think of Bromstead nowadays I find it inseparably bound up 
+with the disorders of my father's gardening, and the odd patchings 
+and paintings that disfigured his houses.  It was all of a piece 
+with that.
+
+Let me try and give something of the quality of Bromstead and 
+something of its history.  It is the quality and history of a 
+thousand places round and about London, and round and about the 
+other great centres of population in the world.  Indeed it is in a 
+measure the quality of the whole of this modern world from which we 
+who have the statesman's passion struggle to evolve, and dream still 
+of evolving order.
+
+First, then, you must think of Bromstead a hundred and fifty years 
+ago, as a narrow irregular little street of thatched houses strung 
+out on the London and Dover Road, a little mellow sample unit of a 
+social order that had a kind of completeness, at its level, of its 
+own.  At that time its population numbered a little under two 
+thousand people, mostly engaged in agricultural work or in trades 
+serving agriculture.  There was a blacksmith, a saddler, a chemist, 
+a doctor, a barber, a linen-draper (who brewed his own beer); a 
+veterinary surgeon, a hardware shop, and two capacious inns.  Round 
+and about it were a number of pleasant gentlemen's seats, whose 
+owners went frequently to London town in their coaches along the 
+very tolerable high-road.  The church was big enough to hold the 
+whole population, were people minded to go to church, and indeed a 
+large proportion did go, and all who married were married in it, and 
+everybody, to begin with, was christened at its font and buried at 
+last in its yew-shaded graveyard.  Everybody knew everybody in the 
+place.  It was, in fact, a definite place and a real human community 
+in those days.  There was a pleasant old market-house in the middle 
+of the town with a weekly market, and an annual fair at which much 
+cheerful merry making and homely intoxication occurred; there was a 
+pack of hounds which hunted within five miles of London Bridge, and 
+the local gentry would occasionally enliven the place with valiant 
+cricket matches for a hundred guineas a side, to the vast excitement 
+of the entire population.  It was very much the same sort of place 
+that it had been for three or four centuries.  A Bromstead Rip van 
+Winkle from 1550 returning in 1750 would have found most of the old 
+houses still as he had known them, the same trades a little improved 
+and differentiated one from the other, the same roads rather more 
+carefully tended, the Inns not very much altered, the ancient 
+familiar market-house.  The occasional wheeled traffic would have 
+struck him as the most remarkable difference, next perhaps to the 
+swaggering painted stone monuments instead of brasses and the 
+protestant severity of the communion-table in the parish church,--
+both from the material point of view very little things.  A Rip van 
+Winkle from 1350, again, would have noticed scarcely greater 
+changes; fewer clergy, more people, and particularly more people of 
+the middling sort; the glass in the windows of many of the houses, 
+the stylish chimneys springing up everywhere would have impressed 
+him, and suchlike details.  The place would have had the same 
+boundaries, the same broad essential features, would have been still 
+itself in the way that a man is still himself after he has "filled 
+out" a little and grown a longer beard and changed his clothes.
+
+But after 1750 something got hold of the world, something that was 
+destined to alter the scale of every human affair.
+
+That something was machinery and a vague energetic disposition to 
+improve material things.  In another part of England ingenious 
+people were beginning to use coal in smelting iron, and were 
+producing metal in abundance and metal castings in sizes that had 
+hitherto been unattainable.  Without warning or preparation, 
+increment involving countless possibilities of further increment was 
+coming to the strength of horses and men.   "Power," all 
+unsuspected, was flowing like a drug into the veins of the social 
+body.
+
+Nobody seems to have perceived this coming of power, and nobody had 
+calculated its probable consequences.  Suddenly, almost 
+inadvertently, people found themselves doing things that would have 
+amazed their ancestors.  They began to construct wheeled vehicles 
+much more easily and cheaply than they had ever done before, to make 
+up roads and move things about that had formerly been esteemed too 
+heavy for locomotion, to join woodwork with iron nails instead of 
+wooden pegs, to achieve all sorts of mechanical possibilities, to 
+trade more freely and manufacture on a larger scale, to send goods 
+abroad in a wholesale and systematic way, to bring back commodities 
+from overseas, not simply spices and fine commodities, but goods in 
+bulk.  The new influence spread to agriculture, iron appliances 
+replaced wooden, breeding of stock became systematic, paper-making 
+and printing increased and cheapened.  Roofs of slate and tile 
+appeared amidst and presently prevailed over the original Bromstead 
+thatch, the huge space of Common to the south was extensively 
+enclosed, and what had been an ill-defined horse-track to Dover, 
+only passable by adventurous coaches in dry weather, became the 
+Dover Road, and was presently the route first of one and then of 
+several daily coaches.  The High Street was discovered to be too 
+tortuous for these awakening energies, and a new road cut off its 
+worst contortions.  Residential villas appeared occupied by retired 
+tradesmen and widows, who esteemed the place healthy, and by others 
+of a strange new unoccupied class of people who had money invested 
+in joint-stock enterprises.  First one and then several boys' 
+boarding-schools came, drawing their pupils from London,--my 
+grandfather's was one of these.  London, twelve miles to the north-
+west, was making itself felt more and more.
+
+But this was only the beginning of the growth period, the first 
+trickle of the coming flood of mechanical power.  Away in the north 
+they were casting iron in bigger and bigger forms, working their way 
+to the production of steel on a large scale, applying power in 
+factories.  Bromstead had almost doubted in size again long before 
+the railway came; there was hardly any thatch left in the High 
+Street, but instead were houses with handsome brass-knockered front 
+doors and several windows, and shops with shop-fronts all of square 
+glass panes, and the place was lighted publicly now by oil lamps--
+previously only one flickering lamp outside each of the coaching 
+inns had broken the nocturnal darkness.  And there was talk, it long 
+remained talk,--of gas.  The gasworks came in 1834, and about that 
+date my father's three houses must have been built convenient for 
+the London Road.  They mark nearly the beginning of the real 
+suburban quality; they were let at first to City people still 
+engaged in business.
+
+And then hard on the gasworks had come the railway and cheap coal; 
+there was a wild outbreak of brickfields upon the claylands to the 
+east, and the Great Growth had begun in earnest.  The agricultural 
+placidities that had formerly come to the very borders of the High 
+Street were broken up north, west and south, by new roads.  This 
+enterprising person and then that began to "run up" houses, 
+irrespective of every other enterprising person who was doing the 
+same thing.  A Local Board came into existence, and with much 
+hesitation and penny-wise economy inaugurated drainage works.  Rates 
+became a common topic, a fact of accumulating importance.  Several 
+chapels of zinc and iron appeared, and also a white new church in 
+commercial Gothic upon the common, and another of red brick in the 
+residential district out beyond the brickfields towards Chessington.
+
+The population doubled again and doubled again, and became 
+particularly teeming in the prolific "working-class" district about 
+the deep-rutted, muddy, coal-blackened roads between the gasworks, 
+Blodgett's laundries, and the railway goods-yard.  Weekly 
+properties, that is to say small houses built by small property 
+owners and let by the week, sprang up also in the Cage Fields, and 
+presently extended right up the London Road.  A single national 
+school in an inconvenient situation set itself inadequately to 
+collect subscriptions and teach the swarming, sniffing, grimy 
+offspring of this dingy new population to read.  The villages of 
+Beckington, which used to be three miles to the west, and Blamely 
+four miles to the east of Bromstead, were experiencing similar 
+distensions and proliferations, and grew out to meet us.  All effect 
+of locality or community had gone from these places long before I 
+was born; hardly any one knew any one; there was no general meeting 
+place any more, the old fairs were just common nuisances haunted by 
+gypsies, van showmen, Cheap Jacks and London roughs, the churches 
+were incapable of a quarter of the population.  One or two local 
+papers of shameless veniality reported the proceedings of the local 
+Bench and the local Board, compelled tradesmen who were interested 
+in these affairs to advertise, used the epithet "Bromstedian" as one 
+expressing peculiar virtues, and so maintained in the general mind a 
+weak tradition of some local quality that embraced us all.  Then the 
+parish graveyard filled up and became a scandal, and an ambitious 
+area with an air of appetite was walled in by a Bromstead Cemetery 
+Company, and planted with suitably high-minded and sorrowful 
+varieties of conifer.  A stonemason took one of the earlier villas 
+with a front garden at the end of the High Street, and displayed a 
+supply of urns on pillars and headstones and crosses in stone, 
+marble, and granite, that would have sufficed to commemorate in 
+elaborate detail the entire population of Bromstead as one found it 
+in 1750.
+
+The cemetery was made when I was a little boy of five or six; I was 
+in the full tide of building and growth from the first; the second 
+railway with its station at Bromstead North and the drainage 
+followed when I was ten or eleven, and all my childish memories are 
+of digging and wheeling, of woods invaded by building, roads gashed 
+open and littered with iron pipes amidst a fearful smell of gas, of 
+men peeped at and seen toiling away deep down in excavations, of 
+hedges broken down and replaced by planks, of wheelbarrows and 
+builders' sheds, of rivulets overtaken and swallowed up by drain-
+pipes.  Big trees, and especially elms, cleared of undergrowth and 
+left standing amid such things, acquired a peculiar tattered 
+dinginess rather in the quality of needy widow women who have seen 
+happier days.
+
+The Ravensbrook of my earlier memories was a beautiful stream.  It 
+came into my world out of a mysterious Beyond, out of a garden, 
+splashing brightly down a weir which had once been the weir of a 
+mill.  (Above the weir and inaccessible there were bulrushes growing 
+in splendid clumps, and beyond that, pampas grass, yellow and 
+crimson spikes of hollyhock, and blue suggestions of wonderland.)  
+From the pool at the foot of this initial cascade it flowed in a 
+leisurely fashion beside a footpath,--there were two pretty thatchcd 
+cottages on the left, and here were ducks, and there were willows on 
+the right,--and so came to where great trees grew on high banks on 
+either hand and bowed closer, and at last met overhead.  This part 
+was difficult to reach because of an old fence, but a little boy 
+might glimpse that long cavern of greenery by wading.  Either I have 
+actually seen kingfishers there, or my father has described them so 
+accurately to me that he inserted them into my memory.  I remember 
+them there anyhow.  Most of that overhung part I never penetrated at 
+all, but followed the field path with my mother and met the stream 
+again, where beyond there were flat meadows, Roper's meadows.  The 
+Ravensbrook went meandering across the middle of these, now between 
+steep banks, and now with wide shallows at the bends where the 
+cattle waded and drank.  Yellow and purple loose-strife and ordinary 
+rushes grew in clumps along the bank, and now and then a willow.  On 
+rare occasions of rapture one might see a rat cleaning his whiskers 
+at the water's edge.  The deep places were rich with tangled weeds, 
+and in them fishes lurked--to me they were big fishes--water-boatmen 
+and water-beetles traversed the calm surface of these still deeps; 
+in one pool were yellow lilies and water-soldiers, and in the shoaly 
+places hovering fleets of small fry basked in the sunshine--to 
+vanish in a flash at one's shadow.  In one place, too, were Rapids, 
+where the stream woke with a start from a dreamless brooding into 
+foaming panic and babbled and hastened.  Well do I remember that 
+half-mile of rivulet; all other rivers and cascades have their 
+reference to it for me.  And after I was eleven, and before we left 
+Bromstead, all the delight and beauty of it was destroyed.
+
+The volume of its water decreased abruptly--I suppose the new 
+drainage works that linked us up with Beckington, and made me first 
+acquainted with the geological quality of the London clay, had to do 
+with that--until only a weak uncleansing trickle remained.  That at 
+first did not strike me as a misfortune.  An adventurous small boy 
+might walk dryshod in places hitherto inaccessible.  But hard upon 
+that came the pegs, the planks and carts and devastation.  Roper's 
+meadows, being no longer in fear of floods, were now to be slashed 
+out into parallelograms of untidy road, and built upon with rows of 
+working-class cottages.  The roads came,--horribly; the houses 
+followed.  They seemed to rise in the night.  People moved into them 
+as soon as the roofs were on, mostly workmen and their young wives, 
+and already in a year some of these raw houses stood empty again 
+from defaulting tenants, with windows broken and wood-work warping 
+and rotting.  The Ravensbrook became a dump for old iron, rusty 
+cans, abandoned boots and the like, and was a river only when 
+unusual rains filled it for a day or so with an inky flood of 
+surface water. . . .
+
+That indeed was my most striking perception in the growth of 
+Bromstead.  The Ravensbrook had been important to my imaginative 
+life; that way had always been my first choice in all my walks with 
+my mother, and its rapid swamping by the new urban growth made it 
+indicative of all the other things that had happened just before my 
+time, or were still, at a less dramatic pace, happening.  I realised 
+that building was the enemy.  I began to understand why in every 
+direction out of Bromstead one walked past scaffold-poles into 
+litter, why fragments of broken brick and cinder mingled in every 
+path, and the significance of the universal notice-boards, either 
+white and new or a year old and torn and battered, promising sites, 
+proffering houses to be sold or let, abusing and intimidating 
+passers-by for fancied trespass, and protecting rights of way.
+
+It is difficult to disentangle now what I understood at this time 
+and what I have since come to understand, but it seems to me that 
+even in those childish days I was acutely aware of an invading and 
+growing disorder.  The serene rhythms of the old established 
+agriculture, I see now, were everywhere being replaced by 
+cultivation under notice and snatch crops; hedges ceased to be 
+repaired, and were replaced by cheap iron railings or chunks of 
+corrugated iron; more and more hoardings sprang up, and contributed 
+more and more to the nomad tribes of filthy paper scraps that flew 
+before the wind and overspread the country.  The outskirts of 
+Bromstead were a maze of exploitation roads that led nowhere, that 
+ended in tarred fences studded with nails (I don't remember barbed 
+wire in those days; I think the Zeitgeist did not produce that until 
+later), and in trespass boards that used vehement language.  Broken 
+glass, tin cans, and ashes and paper abounded.  Cheap glass, cheap 
+tin, abundant fuel, and a free untaxed Press had rushed upon a world 
+quite unprepared to dispose of these blessings when the fulness of 
+enjoyment was past.
+
+I suppose one might have persuaded oneself that all this was but the 
+replacement of an ancient tranquillity, or at least an ancient 
+balance, by a new order.  Only to my eyes, quickened by my father's 
+intimations, it was manifestly no order at all.  It was a multitude 
+of incoordinated fresh starts, each more sweeping and destructive 
+than the last, and none of them ever really worked out to a ripe and 
+satisfactory completion.  Each left a legacy of products, houses, 
+humanity, or what not, in its wake.  It was a sort of progress that 
+had bolted; it was change out of hand, and going at an unprecedented 
+pace nowhere in particular.
+
+No, the Victorian epoch was not the dawn of a new era; it was a 
+hasty, trial experiment, a gigantic experiment of the most slovenly 
+and wasteful kind.  I suppose it was necessary; I suppose all things 
+are necessary.  I suppose that before men will discipline themselves 
+to learn and plan, they must first see in a hundred convincing forms 
+the folly and muddle that come from headlong, aimless and haphazard 
+methods.  The nineteenth century was an age of demonstrations, some 
+of them very impressive demonstrations, of the powers that have come 
+to mankind, but of permanent achievement, what will our descendants 
+cherish?  It is hard to estimate what grains of precious metal may 
+not be found in a mud torrent of human production on so large a 
+scale, but will any one, a hundred years from now, consent to live 
+in the houses the Victorians built, travel by their roads or 
+railways, value the furnishings they made to live among or esteem, 
+except for curious or historical reasons, their prevalent art and 
+the clipped and limited literature that satisfied their souls?
+
+That age which bore me was indeed a world full of restricted and 
+undisciplined people, overtaken by power, by possessions and great 
+new freedoms, and unable to make any civilised use of them whatever; 
+stricken now by this idea and now by that, tempted first by one 
+possession and then another to ill-considered attempts; it was my 
+father's exploitahon of his villa gardens on the wholesale level.  
+The whole of Bromstead as I remember it, and as I saw it last--it is 
+a year ago now--is a dull useless boiling-up of human activities, an 
+immense clustering of futilities.  It is as unfinished as ever; the 
+builders' roads still run out and end in mid-field in their old 
+fashion; the various enterprises jumble in the same hopeless 
+contradiction, if anything intensified.  Pretentious villas jostle 
+slums, and public-house and tin tabernacle glower at one another 
+across the cat-haunted lot that intervenes.  Roper's meadows are now 
+quite frankly a slum; back doors and sculleries gape towards the 
+railway, their yards are hung with tattered washing unashamed; and 
+there seem to be more boards by the railway every time I pass, 
+advertising pills and pickles, tonics and condiments, and suchlike 
+solicitudes of a people with no natural health nor appetite left in 
+them. . . .
+
+Well, we have to do better.  Failure is not failure nor waste wasted 
+if it sweeps away illusion and lights the road to a plan.
+
+
+6
+
+Chaotic indiscipline, ill-adjusted effort, spasmodic aims, these 
+give the quality of all my Bromstead memories.  The crowning one of 
+them all rises to desolating tragedy.  I remember now the wan spring 
+sunshine of that Sunday morning, the stiff feeling of best clothes 
+and aggressive cleanliness and formality, when I and my mother 
+returned from church to find my father dead.  He had been pruning 
+the grape vine.  He had never had a ladder long enough to reach the 
+sill of the third-floor windows--at house-painting times he had 
+borrowed one from the plumber who mixed his paint--and he had in his 
+own happy-go-lucky way contrived a combination of the garden fruit 
+ladder with a battered kitchen table that served all sorts of odd 
+purposes in an outhouse.  He had stayed up this arrangement by means 
+of the garden roller, and the roller had at the critical moment--
+rolled.  He was lying close by the garden door with his head queerly 
+bent back against a broken and twisted rainwater pipe, an expression 
+of pacific contentment on his face, a bamboo curtain rod with a 
+tableknife tied to end of it, still gripped in his hand.  We had 
+been rapping for some time at the front door unable to make him 
+hear, and then we came round by the door in the side trellis into 
+the garden and so discovered him.
+
+"Arthur!"  I remember my mother crying with the strangest break in 
+her voice, "What are you doing there?  Arthur!  And--SUNDAY!"
+
+I was coming behind her, musing remotely, when the quality of her 
+voice roused me.  She stood as if she could not go near him.  He had 
+always puzzled her so, he and his ways, and this seemed only another 
+enigma.  Then the truth dawned on her, she shrieked as if afraid of 
+him, ran a dozen steps back towards the trellis door and stopped and 
+clasped her ineffectual gloved hands, leaving me staring blankly, 
+too astonished for feeling, at the carelessly flung limbs.
+
+The same idea came to me also.  I ran to her.  "Mother!" I cried, 
+pale to the depths of my spirit, "IS HE DEAD?"
+
+I had been thinking two minutes before of the cold fruit pie that 
+glorified our Sunday dinner-table, and how I might perhaps get into 
+the tree at the end of the garden to read in the afternoon.  Now an 
+immense fact had come down like a curtain and blotted out all my 
+childish world.  My father was lying dead before my eyes. . . .   I 
+perceived that my mother was helpless and that things must he done.
+
+"Mother!" I said, "we must get Doctor Beaseley,--and carry him 
+indoors."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD
+
+SCHOLASTIC
+
+
+1
+
+My formal education began in a small preparatory school in 
+Bromstead.  I went there as a day boy.  The charge for my 
+instruction was mainly set off by the periodic visits of my father 
+with a large bag of battered fossils to lecture to us upon geology.  
+I was one of those fortunate youngsters who take readily to school 
+work, I had a good memory, versatile interests and a considerable 
+appetite for commendation, and when I was barely twelve I got a 
+scholarship at the City Merchants School and was entrusted with a 
+scholar's railway season ticket to Victoria.  After my father's 
+death a large and very animated and solidly built uncle in tweeds 
+from Staffordshire, Uncle Minter, my mother's sister's husband, with 
+a remarkable accent and remarkable vowel sounds, who had plunged 
+into the Bromstead home once or twice for the night but who was 
+otherwise unknown to me, came on the scene, sold off the three gaunt 
+houses with the utmost gusto, invested the proceeds and my father's 
+life insurance money, and got us into a small villa at Penge within 
+sight of that immense facade of glass and iron, the Crystal Palace.  
+Then he retired in a mood of good-natured contempt to his native 
+habitat again.  We stayed at Penge until my mother's death.
+
+School became a large part of the world to me, absorbing my time and 
+interest, and I never acquired that detailed and intimate knowledge 
+of Penge and the hilly villadom round about, that I have of the town 
+and outskirts of Bromstead.
+
+It was a district of very much the same character, but it was more 
+completely urbanised and nearer to the centre of things; there were 
+the same unfinished roads, the same occasional disconcerted hedges 
+and trees, the same butcher's horse grazing under a builder's 
+notice-board, the same incidental lapses into slum.  The Crystal 
+Palace grounds cut off a large part of my walking radius to the west 
+with impassable fences and forbiddingly expensive turnstiles, but it 
+added to the ordinary spectacle of meteorology a great variety of 
+gratuitous fireworks which banged and flared away of a night after 
+supper and drew me abroad to see them better.  Such walks as I took, 
+to Croydon, Wembledon, West Wickham and Greenwich, impressed upon me 
+the interminable extent of London's residential suburbs; mile after 
+mile one went, between houses, villas, rows of cottages, streets of 
+shops, under railway arches, over railway bridges.  I have forgotten 
+the detailed local characteristics--if there were any--of much of 
+that region altogether.  I was only there two years, and half my 
+perambulations occurred at dusk or after dark.  But with Penge I 
+associate my first realisations of the wonder and beauty of twilight 
+and night, the effect of dark walls reflecting lamplight, and the 
+mystery of blue haze-veiled hillsides of houses, the glare of shops 
+by night, the glowing steam and streaming sparks of railway trains 
+and railway signals lit up in the darkness.  My first rambles in the 
+evening occurred at Penge--I was becoming a big and independent-
+spirited boy--and I began my experience of smoking during these 
+twilight prowls with the threepenny packets of American cigarettes 
+then just appearing in the world.
+
+My life centred upon the City Merchants School.  Usually I caught 
+the eight-eighteen for Victoria, I had a midday meal and tea; four 
+nights a week I stayed for preparation, and often I was not back 
+home again until within an hour of my bedtime.  I spent my half 
+holidays at school in order to play cricket and football.  This, and 
+a pretty voracious appetite for miscellaneous reading which was 
+fostered by the Penge Middleton Library, did not leave me much 
+leisure for local topography.  On Sundays also I sang in the choir 
+at St. Martin's Church, and my mother did not like me to walk out 
+alone on the Sabbath afternoon, she herself slumbered, so that I 
+wrote or read at home.  I must confess I was at home as little as I 
+could contrive.
+
+Home, after my father's death, had become a very quiet and 
+uneventful place indeed.  My mother had either an unimaginative 
+temperament or her mind was greatly occupied with private religious 
+solicitudes, and I remember her talking to me but little, and that 
+usually upon topics I was anxious to evade.  I had developed my own 
+view about low-Church theology long before my father's death, and my 
+meditation upon that event had finished my secret estrangement from 
+my mother's faith.  My reason would not permit even a remote chance 
+of his being in hell, he was so manifestly not evil, and this 
+religion would not permit him a remote chance of being out yet.  
+When I was a little boy my mother had taught me to read and write 
+and pray and had done many things for me, indeed she persisted in 
+washing me and even in making my clothes until I rebelled against 
+these things as indignities.  But our minds parted very soon.  She 
+never began to understand the mental processes of my play, she never 
+interested herself in my school life and work, she could not 
+understand things I said; and she came, I think, quite insensibly to 
+regard me with something of the same hopeless perplexity she had 
+felt towards my father.
+
+Him she must have wedded under considerable delusions.  I do not 
+think he deceived her, indeed, nor do I suspect him of mercenariness 
+in their union; but no doubt he played up to her requirements in the 
+half ingenuous way that was and still is the quality of most wooing, 
+and presented himself as a very brisk and orthodox young man.  I 
+wonder why nearly all lovemaking has to be fraudulent.  Afterwards 
+he must have disappointed her cruelly by letting one aspect after 
+another of his careless, sceptical, experimental temperament appear.  
+Her mind was fixed and definite, she embodied all that confidence in 
+church and decorum and the assurances of the pulpit which was 
+characteristic of the large mass of the English people--for after 
+all, the rather low-Church section WAS the largest single mass--in 
+early Victorian times.  She had dreams, I suspect, of going to 
+church with him side by side; she in a little poke bonnet and a 
+large flounced crinoline, all mauve and magenta and starched under a 
+little lace-trimmed parasol, and he in a tall silk hat and peg-top 
+trousers and a roll-collar coat, and looking rather like the Prince 
+Consort,--white angels almost visibly raining benedictions on their 
+amiable progress.  Perhaps she dreamt gently of much-belaced babies 
+and an interestingly pious (but not too dissenting or fanatical) 
+little girl or boy or so, also angel-haunted.  And I think, too, she 
+must have seen herself ruling a seemly "home of taste," with a 
+vivarium in the conservatory that opened out of the drawing-room, or 
+again, making preserves in the kitchen.  My father's science-
+teaching, his diagrams of disembowelled humanity, his pictures of 
+prehistoric beasts that contradicted the Flood, his disposition 
+towards soft shirts and loose tweed suits, his inability to use a 
+clothes brush, his spasmodic reading fits and his bulldog pipes, 
+must have jarred cruelly with her rather unintelligent 
+anticipations.  His wild moments of violent temper when he would 
+swear and smash things, absurd almost lovable storms that passed 
+like summer thunder, must have been starkly dreadful to her.  She 
+was constitutionally inadaptable, and certainly made no attempt to 
+understand or tolerate these outbreaks.  She tried them by her 
+standards, and by her standards they were wrong.  Her standards hid 
+him from her.  The blazing things he said rankled in her mind 
+unforgettably.
+
+As I remember them together they chafed constantly.  Her attitude to 
+nearly all his moods and all his enterprises was a sceptical 
+disapproval.  She treated him as something that belonged to me and 
+not to her.  "YOUR father," she used to call him, as though I had 
+got him for her.
+
+She had married late and she had, I think, become mentally self-
+subsisting before her marriage.  Even in those Herne Hill days I 
+used to wonder what was going on in her mind, and I find that old 
+speculative curiosity return as I write this.  She took a 
+considerable interest in the housework that our generally 
+servantless condition put upon her--she used to have a charwoman in 
+two or three times a week--but she did not do it with any great 
+skill.  She covered most of our furniture with flouncey ill-fitting 
+covers, and she cooked plainly and without very much judgment.  The 
+Penge house, as it contained nearly all our Bromstead things, was 
+crowded with furniture, and is chiefly associated in my mind with 
+the smell of turpentine, a condiment she used very freely upon the 
+veneered mahogany pieces.  My mother had an equal dread of "blacks" 
+by day and the "night air," so that our brightly clean windows were 
+rarely open.
+
+She took a morning paper, and she would open it and glance at the 
+headlines, but she did not read it until the afternoon and then, I 
+think, she was interested only in the more violent crimes, and in 
+railway and mine disasters and in the minutest domesticities of the 
+Royal Family.  Most of the books at home were my father's, and I do 
+not think she opened any of them.  She had one or two volumes that 
+dated from her own youth, and she tried in vain to interest me in 
+them; there was Miss Strickland's QUEENS OF ENGLAND, a book I 
+remember with particular animosity, and QUEECHY and the WIDE WIDE 
+WORLD.  She made these books of hers into a class apart by sewing 
+outer covers upon them of calico and figured muslin.  To me in these 
+habiliments they seemed not so much books as confederated old 
+ladies.
+
+My mother was also very punctual with her religious duties, and 
+rejoiced to watch me in the choir.
+
+On winter evenings she occupied an armchair on the other side of the 
+table at which I sat, head on hand reading, and she would be darning 
+stockings or socks or the like.  We achieved an effect of rather 
+stuffy comfortableness that was soporific, and in a passive way I 
+think she found these among her happy times.  On such occasions she 
+was wont to put her work down on her knees and fall into a sort of 
+thoughtless musing that would last for long intervals and rouse my 
+curiosity.  For like most young people I could not imagine mental 
+states without definite forms.
+
+She carried on a correspondence with a number of cousins and 
+friends, writing letters in a slanting Italian hand and dealing 
+mainly with births, marriages and deaths, business starts (in the 
+vaguest terms) and the distresses of bankruptcy.
+
+And yet, you know, she did have a curious intimate life of her own 
+that I suspected nothing of at the time, that only now becomes 
+credible to me.  She kept a diary that is still in my possession, a 
+diary of fragmentary entries in a miscellaneous collection of pocket 
+books.  She put down the texts of the sermons she heard, and queer 
+stiff little comments on casual visitors,--" Miss G. and much noisy 
+shrieking talk about games and such frivolities and CROQUAY.  A. 
+delighted and VERY ATTENTIVE."  Such little human entries abound.  
+She had an odd way of never writing a name, only an initial; my 
+father is always "A.," and I am always "D."  It is manifest she 
+followed the domestic events in the life of the Princess of Wales, 
+who is now Queen Mother, with peculiar interest and sympathy.  "Pray 
+G. all may be well," she writes in one such crisis.
+
+But there are things about myself that I still find too poignant to 
+tell easily, certain painful and clumsy circumstances of my birth in 
+very great detail, the distresses of my infantile ailments.  Then 
+later I find such things as this: "Heard D.  s----."  The "s" is 
+evidently "swear "--"  G. bless and keep my boy from evil."  And 
+again, with the thin handwriting shaken by distress: "D. would not 
+go to church, and hardened his heart and said wicked infidel things, 
+much disrespect of the clergy.  The anthem is tiresome!!!  That men 
+should set up to be wiser than their maker!!!"  Then trebly 
+underlined: "I FEAR HIS FATHER'S TEACHING."  Dreadful little tangle 
+of misapprehensions and false judgments!  More comforting for me to 
+read, "D. very kind and good.  He grows more thoughtful every day."  
+I suspect myself of forgotten hypocrisies.
+
+At just one point my mother's papers seem to dip deeper.  I think 
+the death of my father must have stirred her for the first time for 
+many years to think for herself.  Even she could not go on living in 
+any peace at all, believing that he had indeed been flung headlong 
+into hell.  Of this gnawing solicitude she never spoke to me, never, 
+and for her diary also she could find no phrases.  But on a loose 
+half-sheet of notepaper between its pages I find this passage that 
+follows, written very carefully.  I do not know whose lines they are 
+nor how she came upon them.  They run:--
+
+     "And if there be no meeting past the grave;
+      If all is darkness, silence, yet 'tis rest.
+      Be not afraid ye waiting hearts that weep,
+      For God still giveth His beloved sleep,
+      And if an endless sleep He wills, so best."
+
+That scrap of verse amazed me when I read it.  I could even wonder 
+if my mother really grasped the import of what she had copied out.  
+It affected me as if a stone-deaf person had suddenly turned and 
+joined in a whispered conversation.  It set me thinking how far a 
+mind in its general effect quite hopelessly limited, might range.  
+After that I went through all her diaries, trying to find something 
+more than a conventional term of tenderness for my father.  But I 
+found nothing.  And yet somehow there grew upon me the realisation 
+that there had been love. . . .  Her love for me, on the other hand, 
+was abundantly expressed.
+
+I knew nothing of that secret life of feeling at the time; such 
+expression as it found was all beyond my schoolboy range.  I did not 
+know when I pleased her and I did not know when I distressed her.  
+Chiefly I was aware of my mother as rather dull company, as a mind 
+thorny with irrational conclusions and incapable of explication, as 
+one believing quite wilfully and irritatingly in impossible things.  
+So I suppose it had to be; life was coming to me in new forms and 
+with new requirements.  It was essential to our situation that we 
+should fail to understand.  After this space of years I have come to 
+realisations and attitudes that dissolve my estrangement from her, I 
+can pierce these barriers, I can see her and feel her as a loving 
+and feeling and desiring and muddle-headed person.  There are times 
+when I would have her alive again, if only that I might be kind to 
+her for a little while and give her some return for the narrow 
+intense affection, the tender desires, she evidently lavished so 
+abundantly on me.  But then again I ask how I could make that 
+return?  And I realise the futility of such dreaming.  Her demand 
+was rigid, and to meet it I should need to act and lie.
+
+So she whose blood fed me, whose body made me, lies in my memory as 
+I saw her last, fixed, still, infinitely intimate, infinitely 
+remote. . . .
+
+My own case with my mother, however, does not awaken the same regret 
+I feel when I think of how she misjudged and irked my father, and 
+turned his weaknesses into thorns for her own tormenting.  I wish I 
+could look back without that little twinge to two people who were 
+both in their different quality so good.  But goodness that is 
+narrow is a pedestrian and ineffectual goodness.  Her attitude to my 
+father seems to me one of the essentially tragic things that have 
+come to me personally, one of those things that nothing can 
+transfigure, that REMAIN sorrowful, that I cannot soothe with any 
+explanation, for as I remember him he was indeed the most lovable of 
+weak spasmodic men.  But my mother had been trained in a hard and 
+narrow system that made evil out of many things not in the least 
+evil, and inculcated neither kindliness nor charity.  All their 
+estrangement followed from that.
+
+These cramping cults do indeed take an enormous toll of human love 
+and happiness, and not only that but what we Machiavellians must 
+needs consider, they make frightful breaches in human solidarity.  I 
+suppose I am a deeply religious man, as men of my quality go, but I 
+hate more and more, as I grow older, the shadow of intolerance cast 
+by religious organisations.  All my life has been darkened by 
+irrational intolerance, by arbitrary irrational prohibitions and 
+exclusions.  Mahometanism with its fierce proselytism, has, I 
+suppose, the blackest record of uncharitableness, but most of the 
+Christian sects are tainted, tainted to a degree beyond any of the 
+anterior paganisms, with this same hateful quality.  It is their 
+exclusive claim that sends them wrong, the vain ambition that 
+inspires them all to teach a uniform one-sided God and be the one 
+and only gateway to salvation.  Deprecation of all outside the 
+household of faith, an organised undervaluation of heretical 
+goodness and lovableness, follows, necessarily.  Every petty 
+difference is exaggerated to the quality of a saving grace or a 
+damning defect.  Elaborate precautions are taken to shield the 
+believer's mind against broad or amiable suggestions; the faithful 
+are deterred by dark allusions, by sinister warnings, from books, 
+from theatres, from worldly conversation, from all the kindly 
+instruments that mingle human sympathy.  For only by isolating its 
+flock can the organisation survive.
+
+Every month there came to my mother a little magazine called, if I 
+remember rightly, the HOME CHURCHMAN, with the combined authority of 
+print and clerical commendation.  It was the most evil thing that 
+ever came into the house, a very devil, a thin little pamphlet with 
+one woodcut illustration on the front page of each number; now the 
+uninviting visage of some exponent of the real and only doctrine and 
+attitudes, now some coral strand in act of welcoming the 
+missionaries of God's mysterious preferences, now a new church in 
+the Victorian Gothic.  The vile rag it was!  A score of vices that 
+shun the policeman have nothing of its subtle wickedness.  It was an 
+outrage upon the natural kindliness of men.  The contents were all 
+admirably adjusted to keep a spirit in prison.  Their force of 
+sustained suggestion was tremendous.  There would be dreadful 
+intimations of the swift retribution that fell upon individuals for 
+Sabbath-breaking, and upon nations for weakening towards Ritualism, 
+or treating Roman Catholics as tolerable human beings; there would 
+be great rejoicings over the conversion of alleged Jews, and 
+terrible descriptions of the death-beds of prominent infidels with 
+boldly invented last words,--the most unscrupulous lying; there 
+would be the appallingly edifying careers of "early piety" 
+lusciously described, or stories of condemned criminals who traced 
+their final ruin unerringly to early laxities of the kind that leads 
+people to give up subscribing to the HOME CHURCHMAN.
+
+Every month that evil spirit brought about a slump in our mutual 
+love.  My mother used to read the thing and become depressed and 
+anxious for my spiritual welfare, used to be stirred to 
+unintelligent pestering. . . .
+
+
+2
+
+A few years ago I met the editor of this same HOME CHURCHMAN.  It 
+was at one of the weekly dinners of that Fleet Street dining club, 
+the Blackfriars.
+
+I heard the paper's name with a queer little shock and surveyed the 
+man with interest.  No doubt he was only a successor of the purveyor 
+of discords who darkened my boyhood.  It was amazing to find an 
+influence so terrible embodied in a creature so palpably petty.  He 
+was seated some way down a table at right angles to the one at which 
+I sat, a man of mean appearance with a greyish complexion, thin, 
+with a square nose, a heavy wiry moustache and a big Adam's apple 
+sticking out between the wings of his collar.  He ate with 
+considerable appetite and unconcealed relish, and as his jaw was 
+underhung, he chummed and made the moustache wave like reeds in the 
+swell of a steamer.  It gave him a conscientious look.  After dinner 
+he a little forced himself upon me.  At that time, though the shadow 
+of my scandal was already upon me, I still seemed to be shaping for 
+great successes, and he was glad to be in conversation with me and 
+anxious to intimate political sympathy and support.  I tried to make 
+him talk of the HOME CHURCHMAN and the kindred publications he ran, 
+but he was manifestly ashamed of his job so far as I was concerned.
+
+"One wants," he said, pitching himself as he supposed in my key, "to 
+put constructive ideas into our readers, but they are narrow, you 
+know, very narrow.  Very."  He made his moustache and lips express 
+judicious regret.  "One has to consider them carefully, one has to 
+respect their attitudes.  One dare not go too far with them.  One 
+has to feel one's way."
+
+He chummed and the moustache bristled.
+
+A hireling, beyond question, catering for a demand.  I gathered 
+there was a home in Tufnell Park, and three boys to be fed and 
+clothed and educated. . . .
+
+I had the curiosity to buy a copy of his magazine afterwards, and it 
+seemed much the same sort of thing that had worried my mother in my 
+boyhood.  There was the usual Christian hero, this time with mutton-
+chop whiskers and a long bare upper lip.  The Jesuits, it seemed, 
+were still hard at it, and Heaven frightfully upset about the Sunday 
+opening of museums and the falling birth-rate, and as touchy and 
+vindictive as ever.  There were two vigorous paragraphs upon the 
+utter damnableness of the Rev. R. J. Campbell, a contagious 
+damnableness I gathered, one wasn't safe within a mile of Holborn 
+Viaduct, and a foul-mouthed attack on poor little Wilkins the 
+novelist--who was being baited by the moralists at that time for 
+making one of his big women characters, not being in holy wedlock, 
+desire a baby and say so. . . .
+
+The broadening of human thought is a slow and complex process.  We 
+do go on, we do get on.  But when one thinks that people are living 
+and dying now, quarrelling and sulking, misled and misunderstanding, 
+vaguely fearful, condemning and thwarting one another in the close 
+darknesses of these narrow cults--Oh, God! one wants a gale out of 
+Heaven, one wants a great wind from the sea!
+
+
+3
+
+While I lived at Penge two little things happened to me, trivial in 
+themselves and yet in their quality profoundly significant.  They 
+had this in common, that they pierced the texture of the life I was 
+quietly taking for granted and let me see through it into realities--
+realities I had indeed known about before but never realised.  Each 
+of these experiences left me with a sense of shock, with all the 
+values in my life perplexingly altered, attempting readjustment.  
+One of these disturbing and illuminating events was that I was 
+robbed of a new pocket-knife and the other that I fell in love.  It 
+was altogether surprising to me to be robbed.  You see, as an only 
+child I had always been fairly well looked after and protected, and 
+the result was an amazing confidence in the practical goodness of 
+the people one met in the world.  I knew there were robbers in the 
+world, just as I knew there were tigers; that I was ever likely to 
+meet robber or tiger face to face seemed equally impossible.
+
+The knife as I remember it was a particularly jolly one with all 
+sorts of instruments in it, tweezers and a thing for getting a stone 
+out of the hoof of a horse, and a corkscrew; it had cost me a 
+carefuly accumulated half-crown, and amounted indeed to a new 
+experience in knives.  I had had it for two or three days, and then 
+one afternoon I dropped it through a hole in my pocket on a footpath 
+crossing a field between Penge and Anerley.  I heard it fall in the 
+way one does without at the time appreciating what had happened, 
+then, later, before I got home, when my hand wandered into my pocket 
+to embrace the still dear new possession I found it gone, and 
+instantly that memory of something hitting the ground sprang up into 
+consciousness.  I went back and commenced a search.  Almost 
+immediately I was accosted by the leader of a little gang of four or 
+five extremely dirty and ragged boys of assorted sizes and slouching 
+carriage who were coming from the Anerley direction.
+
+"Lost anythink, Matey?" said he.
+
+I explained.
+
+"'E's dropped 'is knife," said my interlocutor, and joined in the 
+search.
+
+"What sort of 'andle was it, Matey?" said a small white-faced 
+sniffing boy in a big bowler hat.
+
+I supplied the information.  His sharp little face scrutinised the 
+ground about us.
+
+"GOT it," he said, and pounced.
+
+"Give it 'ere," said the big boy hoarsely, and secured it.
+
+I walked towards him serenely confident that he would hand it over 
+to me, and that all was for the best in the best of all possible 
+worlds.
+
+"No bloomin' fear!" he said, regarding me obliquely.  "Oo said it 
+was your knife?"
+
+Remarkable doubts assailed me.  "Of course it's my knife," I said.  
+The other boys gathered round me.
+
+"This ain't your knife," said the big boy, and spat casually.
+
+"I dropped it just now."
+
+"Findin's keepin's, I believe," said the big boy.
+
+"Nonsense," I said.  "Give me my knife."
+
+"'Ow many blades it got?"
+
+"Three."
+
+"And what sort of 'andle?"
+
+"Bone."
+
+"Got a corkscrew like?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Ah!  This ain't your knife no'ow.  See?"
+
+He made no offer to show it to me.  My breath went.
+
+"Look here!" I said.  "I saw that kid pick it up.  It IS my knife."
+
+"Rot!" said the big boy, and slowly, deliberately put my knife into 
+his trouser pocket.
+
+I braced my soul for battle.  All civilisation was behind me, but I 
+doubt if it kept the colour in my face.  I buttoned my jacket and 
+clenched my fists and advanced on my antagonist--he had, I suppose, 
+the advantage of two years of age and three inches of height.  "Hand 
+over that knife," I said.
+
+Then one of the smallest of the band assailed me with extraordinary 
+vigour and swiftness from behind, had an arm round my neck and a 
+knee in my back before I had the slightest intimation of attack, and 
+so got me down.  "I got 'im, Bill," squeaked this amazing little 
+ruffian.  My nose was flattened by a dirty hand, and as I struck out 
+and hit something like sacking, some one kicked my elbow.  Two or 
+three seemed to be at me at the same time.  Then I rolled over and 
+sat up to discover them all making off, a ragged flight, footballing 
+my cap, my City Merchants' cap, amongst them.  I leapt to my feet in 
+a passion of indignation and pursued them.
+
+But I did not overtake them.  We are beings of mixed composition, 
+and I doubt if mine was a single-minded pursuit.  I knew that honour 
+required me to pursue, and I had a vivid impression of having just 
+been down in the dust with a very wiry and active and dirty little 
+antagonist of disagreeable odour and incredible and incalculable 
+unscrupulousness, kneeling on me and gripping my arm and neck.  I 
+wanted of course to be even with him, but also I doubted if catching 
+him would necessarily involve that.  They kicked my cap into the 
+ditch at the end of the field, and made off compactly along a cinder 
+lane while I turned aside to recover my dishonoured headdress.  As I 
+knocked the dust out of that and out of my jacket, and brushed my 
+knees and readjusted my very crumpled collar, I tried to focus this 
+startling occurrence in my mind.
+
+I had vague ideas of going to a policeman or of complaining at a 
+police station, but some boyish instinct against informing prevented 
+that.  No doubt I entertained ideas of vindictive pursuit and 
+murderous reprisals.  And I was acutely enraged whenever I thought 
+of my knife.  The thing indeed rankled in my mind for weeks and 
+weeks, and altered all the flavour of my world for me.  It was the 
+first time I glimpsed the simple brute violence that lurks and peeps 
+beneath our civilisation.  A certain kindly complacency of attitude 
+towards the palpably lower classes was qualified for ever
+
+
+4
+
+But the other experience was still more cardinal.  It was the first 
+clear intimation of a new motif in life, the sex motif, that was to 
+rise and increase and accumulate power and enrichment and interweave 
+with and at last dominate all my life.
+
+It was when I was nearly fifteen this happened.  It is inseparably 
+connected in my mind with the dusk of warm September evenings.  I 
+never met the girl I loved by daylight, and I have forgotten her 
+name.  It was some insignificant name.
+
+Yet the peculiar quality of the adventure keeps it shining darkly 
+like some deep coloured gem in the common setting of my memories.  
+It came as something new and strange, something that did not join on 
+to anything else in my life or connect with any of my thoughts or 
+beliefs or habits; it was a wonder, a mystery, a discovery about 
+myself, a discovery about the whole world.  Only in after years did 
+sexual feeling lose that isolation and spread itself out to 
+illuminate and pervade and at last possess the whole broad vision of 
+life.
+
+It was in that phase of an urban youth's development, the phase of 
+the cheap cigarette, that this thing happened.  One evening I came 
+by chance on a number of young people promenading by the light of a 
+row of shops towards Beckington, and, with all the glory of a 
+glowing cigarette between my lips, I joined their strolling number.  
+These twilight parades of young people, youngsters chiefly of the 
+lower middle-class, are one of the odd social developments of the 
+great suburban growths--unkindly critics, blind to the inner 
+meanings of things, call them, I believe, Monkeys' Parades--the shop 
+apprentices, the young work girls, the boy clerks and so forth, 
+stirred by mysterious intimations, spend their first-earned money 
+upon collars and ties, chiffon hats, smart lace collars, walking-
+sticks, sunshades or cigarettes, and come valiantly into the vague 
+transfiguring mingling of gaslight and evening, to walk up and down, 
+to eye meaningly, even to accost and make friends.  It is a queer 
+instinctive revolt from the narrow limited friendless homes in which 
+so many find themselves, a going out towards something, romance if 
+you will, beauty, that has suddenly become a need--a need that 
+hitherto has lain dormant and unsuspected.  They promenade.
+
+Vulgar!--it is as vulgar as the spirit that calls the moth abroad in 
+the evening and lights the body of the glow-worm in the night.  I 
+made my way through the throng, a little contemptuously as became a 
+public schoolboy, my hands in my pockets--none of your cheap canes 
+for me!--and very careful of the lie of my cigarette upon my lips.  
+And two girls passed me, one a little taller than the other, with 
+dim warm-tinted faces under clouds of dark hair and with dark eyes 
+like pools reflecting stars.
+
+I half turned, and the shorter one glanced back at me over her 
+shoulder--I could draw you now the pose of her cheek and neck and 
+shoulder--and instantly I was as passionately in love with the girl 
+as I have ever been before or since, as any man ever was with any 
+woman.  I turned about and followed them, I flung away my cigarette 
+ostentatiously and lifted my school cap and spoke to them.
+
+The girl answered shyly with her dark eyes on my face.  What I said 
+and what she said I cannot remember, but I have little doubt it was 
+something absolutely vapid.  It really did not matter; the thing was 
+we had met.  I felt as I think a new-hatched moth must feel when 
+suddenly its urgent headlong searching brings it in tremulous 
+amazement upon its mate.
+
+We met, covered from each other, with all the nets of civilisation 
+keeping us apart.  We walked side by side.
+
+It led to scarcely more than that.  I think we met four or five 
+times altogether, and always with her nearly silent elder sister on 
+the other side of her.  We walked on the last two occasions arm in 
+arm, furtively caressing each other's hands, we went away from the 
+glare of the shops into the quiet roads of villadom, and there we 
+whispered instead of talking and looked closely into one another's 
+warm and shaded face.  "Dear," I whispered very daringly, and she 
+answered, "Dear!"  We had a vague sense that we wanted more of that 
+quality of intimacy and more.  We wanted each other as one wants 
+beautiful music again or to breathe again the scent of flowers.
+
+And that is all there was between us.  The events are nothing, the 
+thing that matters is the way in which this experience stabbed 
+through the common stuff of life and left it pierced, with a light, 
+with a huge new interest shining through the rent.
+
+When I think of it I can recall even now the warm mystery of her 
+face, her lips a little apart, lips that I never kissed, her soft 
+shadowed throat, and I feel again the sensuous stir of her 
+proximity. . . .
+
+Those two girls never told me their surname nor let me approach 
+their house.  They made me leave them at the corner of a road of 
+small houses near Penge Station.  And quite abruptly, without any 
+intimation, they vanished and came to the meeting place no more, 
+they vanished as a moth goes out of a window into the night, and 
+left me possessed of an intolerable want. . . .
+
+The affair pervaded my existence for many weeks.  I could not do my 
+work and I could not rest at home.  Night after night I promenaded 
+up and down that Monkeys' Parade full of an unappeasable desire, 
+with a thwarted sense of something just begun that ought to have 
+gone on.  I went backwards and forwards on the way to the vanishing 
+place, and at last explored the forbidden road that had swallowed 
+them up.  But I never saw her again, except that later she came to 
+me, my symbol of womanhood, in dreams.  How my blood was stirred!  I 
+lay awake of nights whispering in the darkness for her.  I prayed 
+for her.
+
+Indeed that girl, who probably forgot the last vestiges of me when 
+her first real kiss came to her, ruled and haunted me, gave a Queen 
+to my imagination and a texture to all my desires until I became a 
+man.
+
+I generalised her at last.  I suddenly discovered that poetry was 
+about her and that she was the key to all that had hitherto seemed 
+nonsense about love.  I took to reading novels, and if the heroine 
+could not possibly be like her, dusky and warm and starlike, I put 
+the book aside. . . .
+
+I hesitate and add here one other confession.  I want to tell this 
+thing because it seems to me we are altogether too restrained and 
+secretive about such matters.  The cardinal thing in life sneaks in 
+to us darkly and shamefully like a thief in the night.
+
+One day during my Cambridge days--it must have been in my first year 
+before I knew Hatherleigh--I saw in a print-shop window near the 
+Strand an engraving of a girl that reminded me sharply of Penge and 
+its dusky encounter.  It was just a half length of a bare-
+shouldered, bare-breasted Oriental with arms akimbo, smiling 
+faintly.  I looked at it, went my way, then turned back and bought 
+it.  I felt I must have it.  The odd thing is that I was more than a 
+little shamefaced about it.  I did not have it framed and hung in my 
+room open to the criticism of my friends, but I kept it in the 
+drawer of my writing-table.  And I kept that drawer locked for a 
+year.  It speedily merged with and became identified with the dark 
+girl of Penge.  That engraving became in a way my mistress.  Often 
+when I had sported my oak and was supposed to be reading, I was 
+sitting with it before me.
+
+Obeying some instinct I kept the thing very secret indeed.  For a 
+time nobody suspected what was locked in my drawer nor what was 
+locked in me.  I seemed as sexless as my world required.
+
+
+5
+
+These things stabbed through my life, intimations of things above 
+and below and before me.  They had an air of being no more than 
+incidents, interruptions.
+
+The broad substance of my existence at this time was the City 
+Merchants School.  Home was a place where I slept and read, and the 
+mooning explorations of the south-eastern postal district which 
+occupied the restless evenings and spare days of my vacations mere 
+interstices, giving glimpses of enigmatical lights and distant 
+spaces between the woven threads of a school-boy's career.  School 
+life began for me every morning at Herne Hill, for there I was 
+joined by three or four other boys and the rest of the way we went 
+together.  Most of the streets and roads we traversed in our 
+morning's walk from Victoria are still intact, the storms of 
+rebuilding that have submerged so much of my boyhood's London have 
+passed and left them, and I have revived the impression of them 
+again and again in recent years as I have clattered dinnerward in a 
+hansom or hummed along in a motor cab to some engagement.  The main 
+gate still looks out with the same expression of ancient well-
+proportioned kindliness upon St. Margaret's Close.  There are 
+imposing new science laboratories in Chambers Street indeed, but the 
+old playing fields are unaltered except for the big electric trams 
+that go droning and spitting blue flashes along the western 
+boundary.  I know Ratten, the new Head, very well, but I have not 
+been inside the school to see if it has changed at all since I went 
+up to Cambridge.
+
+I took all they put before us very readily as a boy, for I had a 
+mind of vigorous appetite, but since I have grown mentally to man's 
+estate and developed a more and more comprehensive view of our 
+national process and our national needs, I am more and more struck 
+by the oddity of the educational methods pursued, their aimless 
+disconnectedness from the constructive forces in the community.  I 
+suppose if we are to view the public school as anything more than an 
+institution that has just chanced to happen, we must treat it as 
+having a definite function towards the general scheme of the nation, 
+as being in a sense designed to take the crude young male of the 
+more or less responsible class, to correct his harsh egotisms, 
+broaden his outlook, give him a grasp of the contemporary 
+developments he will presently be called upon to influence and 
+control, and send him on to the university to be made a leading and 
+ruling social man.  It is easy enough to carp at schoolmasters and 
+set up for an Educational Reformer, I know, but still it is 
+impossible not to feel how infinitely more effectually--given 
+certain impossibilities perhaps--the job might be done.
+
+My memory of school has indeed no hint whatever of that quality of 
+elucidation it seems reasonable to demand from it.  Here all about 
+me was London, a vast inexplicable being, a vortex of gigantic 
+forces, that filled and overwhelmed me with impressions, that 
+stirred my imagination to a perpetual vague enquiry; and my school 
+not only offered no key to it, but had practically no comment to 
+make upon it at all.  We were within three miles of Westminster and 
+Charing Cross, the government offices of a fifth of mankind were all 
+within an hour's stroll, great economic changes were going on under 
+our eyes, now the hoardings flamed with election placards, now the 
+Salvation Army and now the unemployed came trailing in procession 
+through the winter-grey streets, now the newspaper placards outside 
+news-shops told of battles in strange places, now of amazing 
+discoveries, now of sinister crimes, abject squalor and poverty, 
+imperial splendour and luxury, Buckingham Palace, Rotten Row, 
+Mayfair, the slums of Pimlico, garbage-littered streets of bawling 
+costermongers, the inky silver of the barge-laden Thames--such was 
+the background of our days.  We went across St. Margaret's Close and 
+through the school gate into a quiet puerile world apart from all 
+these things.  We joined in the earnest acquirement of all that was 
+necessary for Greek epigrams and Latin verse, and for the rest 
+played games.  We dipped down into something clear and elegantly 
+proportioned and time-worn and for all its high resolve of stalwart 
+virility a little feeble, like our blackened and decayed portals by 
+Inigo Jones.
+
+Within, we were taught as the chief subjects of instruction, Latin 
+and Greek.  We were taught very badly because the men who taught us 
+did not habitually use either of these languages, nobody uses them 
+any more now except perhaps for the Latin of a few Levantine 
+monasteries.  At the utmost our men read them.  We were taught these 
+languages because long ago Latin had been the language of 
+civilisation; the one way of escape from the narrow and localised 
+life had lain in those days through Latin, and afterwards Greek had 
+come in as the vehicle of a flood of new and amazing ideas.  Once 
+these two languages had been the sole means of initiation to the 
+detached criticism and partial comprehension of the world.  I can 
+imagine the fierce zeal of our first Heads, Gardener and Roper, 
+teaching Greek like passionate missionaries, as a progressive 
+Chinaman might teach English to the boys of Pekin, clumsily, 
+impatiently, with rod and harsh urgency, but sincerely, 
+patriotically, because they felt that behind it lay revelations, the 
+irresistible stimulus to a new phase of history.  That was long ago.  
+A new great world, a vaster Imperialism had arisen about the school, 
+had assimilated all these amazing and incredible ideas, had gone on 
+to new and yet more amazing developments of its own.  But the City 
+Merchants School still made the substance of its teaching Latin and 
+Greek, still, with no thought of rotating crops, sowed in a dream 
+amidst the harvesting.
+
+There is no fierceness left in the teaching now.  Just after I went 
+up to Trinity, Gates, our Head, wrote a review article in defence of 
+our curriculum.  In this, among other indiscretions, he asserted 
+that it was impossible to write good English without an illuminating 
+knowledge of the classic tongues, and he split an infinitive and 
+failed to button up a sentence in saying so.  His main argument 
+conceded every objection a reasonable person could make to the City 
+Merchants' curriculum.  He admitted that translation had now placed 
+all the wisdom of the past at a common man's disposal, that scarcely 
+a field of endeavour remained in which modern work had not long 
+since passed beyond the ancient achievement.  He disclaimed any 
+utility.  But there was, he said, a peculiar magic in these 
+grammatical exercises no other subjects of instruction possessed.  
+Nothing else provided the same strengthening and orderly discipline 
+for the mind.
+
+He said that, knowing the Senior Classics he did, himself a Senior 
+Classic!
+
+Yet in a dim confused way I think be was making out a case.  In 
+schools as we knew them, and with the sort of assistant available, 
+the sort of assistant who has been trained entirely on the old 
+lines, he could see no other teaching so effectual in developing 
+attention, restraint, sustained constructive effort and various yet 
+systematic adjustment.  And that was as far as his imagination could 
+go.
+
+It is infinitely easier to begin organised human affairs than end 
+them; the curriculum and the social organisation of the English 
+public school are the crowning instances of that.  They go on 
+because they have begun.  Schools are not only immortal institutions 
+but reproductive ones.  Our founder, Jabez Arvon, knew nothing, I am 
+sure, of Gates' pedagogic values and would, I feel certain, have 
+dealt with them disrespectfully.  But public schools and university 
+colleges sprang into existence correlated, the scholars went on to 
+the universities and came back to teach the schools, to teach as 
+they themselves had been taught, before they had ever made any real 
+use of the teaching; the crowd of boys herded together, a crowd 
+perpetually renewed and unbrokenly the same, adjusted itself by 
+means of spontaneously developed institutions.  In a century, by its 
+very success, this revolutionary innovation of Renascence public 
+schools had become an immense tradition woven closely into the 
+fabric of the national life.  Intelligent and powerful people ceased 
+to talk Latin or read Greek, they had got what was wanted, but that 
+only left the schoolmaster the freer to elaborate his point.  Since 
+most men of any importance or influence in the country had been 
+through the mill, it was naturally a little difficult to persuade 
+them that it was not quite the best and most ennobling mill the wit 
+of man could devise.  And, moreover, they did not want their 
+children made strange to them.  There was all the machinery and all 
+the men needed to teach the old subjects, and none to teach whatever 
+new the critic might propose.  Such science instruction as my father 
+gave seemed indeed the uninviting alternative to the classical 
+grind.  It was certainly an altogether inferior instrument at that 
+time.
+
+So it was I occupied my mind with the exact study of dead languages 
+for seven long years.  It was the strangest of detachments.  We 
+would sit under the desk of such a master as Topham like creatures 
+who had fallen into an enchanted pit, and he would do his 
+considerable best to work us up to enthusiasm for, let us say, a 
+Greek play.  If we flagged he would lash himself to revive us.  He 
+would walk about the class-room mouthing great lines in a rich roar, 
+and asking us with a flushed face and shining eyes if it was not 
+"GLORIOUS."  The very sight of Greek letters brings back to me the 
+dingy, faded, ink-splashed quality of our class-room, the banging of 
+books, Topham's disordered hair, the sheen of his alpaca gown, his 
+deep unmusical intonations and the wide striding of his creaking 
+boots.  Glorious!  And being plastic human beings we would consent 
+that it was glorious, and some of us even achieved an answering 
+reverberation and a sympathetic flush.  I at times responded freely.   
+We all accepted from him unquestioningly that these melodies, these 
+strange sounds, exceeded any possibility of beauty that lay in the 
+Gothic intricacy, the splash and glitter, the jar and recovery, the 
+stabbing lights, the heights and broad distances of our English 
+tongue.  That indeed was the chief sin of him.  It was not that he 
+was for Greek and Latin, but that he was fiercely against every 
+beauty that was neither classic nor deferred to classical canons.
+
+And what exactly did we make of it, we seniors who understood it 
+best?  We visualised dimly through that dust and the grammatical 
+difficulties, the spectacle of the chorus chanting grotesquely, 
+helping out protagonist and antagonist, masked and buskined, with 
+the telling of incomprehensible parricides, of inexplicable incest, 
+of gods faded beyond symbolism, of that Relentless Law we did not 
+believe in for a moment, that no modern western European can believe 
+in.  We thought of the characters in the unconvincing wigs and 
+costumes of our school performance.  No Gilbert Murray had come as 
+yet to touch these things to life again.  It was like the ghost of 
+an antiquarian's toy theatre, a ghost that crumbled and condensed 
+into a gritty dust of construing as one looked at it.
+
+Marks, shindies, prayers and punishments, all flavoured with the 
+leathery stuffiness of time-worn Big Hall. . . .
+
+And then out one would come through our grey old gate into the 
+evening light and the spectacle of London hurrying like a cataract, 
+London in black and brown and blue and gleaming silver, roaring like 
+the very loom of Time.  We came out into the new world no teacher 
+has yet had the power and courage to grasp and expound.  Life and 
+death sang all about one, joys and fears on such a scale, in such an 
+intricacy as never Greek nor Roman knew.  The interminable 
+procession of horse omnibuses went lumbering past, bearing countless 
+people we knew not whence, we knew not whither.  Hansoms clattered, 
+foot passengers jostled one, a thousand appeals of shop and boarding 
+caught the eye.  The multi-coloured lights of window and street 
+mingled with the warm glow of the declining day under the softly 
+flushing London skies; the ever-changing placards, the shouting 
+news-vendors, told of a kaleidoscopic drama all about the globe.  
+One did not realise what had happened to us, but the voice of Topham 
+was suddenly drowned and lost, he and his minute, remote 
+gesticulations. . . .
+
+That submerged and isolated curriculum did not even join on to 
+living interests where it might have done so.   We were left 
+absolutely to the hints of the newspapers, to casual political 
+speeches, to the cartoons of the comic papers or a chance reading of 
+some Socialist pamphlet for any general ideas whatever about the 
+huge swirling world process in which we found ourselves.  I always 
+look back with particular exasperation to the cessation of our 
+modern history at the year 1815.  There it pulled up abruptly, as 
+though it had come upon something indelicate. . . .
+
+But, after all, what would Topham or Flack have made of the huge 
+adjustments of the nineteenth century?  Flack was the chief 
+cricketer on the staff; he belonged to that great cult which 
+pretends that the place of this or that county in the struggle for 
+the championship is a matter of supreme importance to boys.  He 
+obliged us to affect a passionate interest in the progress of county 
+matches, to work up unnatural enthusiasms.  What a fuss there would 
+be when some well-trained boy, panting as if from Marathon, appeared 
+with an evening paper!  "I say, you chaps, Middlesex all out for a 
+hundred and five!"
+
+Under Flack's pressure I became, I confess, a cricket humbug of the 
+first class.  I applied myself industriously year by year to 
+mastering scores and averages; I pretended that Lords or the Oval 
+were the places nearest Paradise for me.  (I never went to either.)  
+Through a slight mistake about the county boundary I adopted Surrey 
+for my loyalty, though as a matter of fact we were by some five 
+hundred yards or so in Kent.  It did quite as well for my purposes.  
+I bowled rather straight and fast, and spent endless hours acquiring 
+the skill to bowl Flack out.  He was a bat in the Corinthian style, 
+rich and voluminous, and succumbed very easily to a low shooter or 
+an unexpected Yorker, hut usually he was caught early by long leg.  
+The difficulty was to bowl him before he got caught.  He loved to 
+lift a ball to leg.  After one had clean bowled him at the practice 
+nets one deliberately gave him a ball to leg just to make him feel 
+nice again.
+
+Flack went about a world of marvels dreaming of leg hits.  He has 
+been observed, going across the Park on his way to his highly 
+respectable club in Piccadilly, to break from profound musings into 
+a strange brief dance that ended with an imaginary swipe with his 
+umbrella, a roofer, over the trees towards Buckingham Palace.  The 
+hit accomplished, Flack resumed his way.
+
+Inadequately instructed foreigners would pass him in terror, 
+needlessly alert.
+
+
+6
+
+These schoolmasters move through my memory as always a little 
+distant and more than a little incomprehensible.  Except when they 
+wore flannels, I saw them almost always in old college caps and 
+gowns, a uniform which greatly increased their detachment from the 
+world of actual men.  Gates, the head, was a lean loose-limbed man, 
+rather stupid I discovered when I reached the Sixth and came into 
+contact with him, but honest, simple and very eager to be liberal-
+minded.  He was bald, with an almost conical baldness, with a 
+grizzled pointed beard, small featured and, under the stresses of a 
+Zeitgeist that demanded liberality, with an expression of puzzled 
+but resolute resistance to his own unalterable opinions.  He made a 
+tall dignified figure in his gown.  In my junior days he spoke to me 
+only three or four times, and then he annoyed me by giving me a 
+wrong surname; it was a sore point because I was an outsider and not 
+one of the old school families, the Shoesmiths, the Naylors, the 
+Marklows, the Tophams, the Pevises and suchlike, who came generation 
+after generation.  I recall him most vividly against the background 
+of faded brown book-backs in the old library in which we less 
+destructive seniors were trusted to work, with the light from the 
+stained-glass window falling in coloured patches on his face.  It 
+gave him the appearance of having no colour of his own.  He had a 
+habit of scratching the beard on his cheek as he talked, and he used 
+to come and consult us about things and invariably do as we said.  
+That, in his phraseology, was "maintaining the traditions of the 
+school."
+
+He had indeed an effect not of a man directing a school, but of a 
+man captured and directed by a school.  Dead and gone Elizabethans 
+had begotten a monster that could carry him about in its mouth.
+
+Yet being a man, as I say, with his hair a little stirred by a 
+Zeitgeist that made for change, Gates did at times display a 
+disposition towards developments.  City Merchants had no modern 
+side, and utilitarian spirits were carping in the PALL MALL GAZETTE 
+and elsewhere at the omissions from our curriculum, and particularly 
+at our want of German.   Moreover, four classes still worked 
+together with much clashing and uproar in the old Big Hall that had 
+once held in a common tumult the entire school.  Gates used to come 
+and talk to us older fellows about these things.
+
+"I don't wish to innovate unduly," he used to say.  But we ought to 
+get in some German, you know,--for those who like it.  The army men 
+will be wanting it some of these days."
+
+He referred to the organisation of regular evening preparation for 
+the lower boys in Big Hall as a "revolutionary change," but he 
+achieved it, and he declared he began the replacement of the hacked 
+wooden tables, at which the boys had worked since Tudor days, by 
+sloping desks with safety inkpots and scientifically adjustable 
+seats, "with grave misgivings."  And though he never birched a boy 
+in his life, and was, I am convinced, morally incapable of such a 
+scuffle, he retained the block and birch in the school through all 
+his term of office, and spoke at the Headmasters' Conference in 
+temperate approval of corporal chastisement, comparing it, dear 
+soul! to the power of the sword. . . .
+
+I wish I could, in some measure and without tediousness, convey the 
+effect of his discourses to General Assembly in Big Hall.  But that 
+is like trying to draw the obverse and reverse of a sixpence worn to 
+complete illegibility.  His tall fine figure stood high on the days, 
+his thoughtful tenor filled the air as he steered his hazardous way 
+through sentences that dragged inconclusive tails and dropped 
+redundant prepositions.  And he pleaded ever so urgently, ever so 
+finely, that what we all knew for Sin was sinful, and on the whole 
+best avoided altogether, and so went on with deepening notes and 
+even with short arresting gestures of the right arm and hand, to 
+stir and exhort us towards goodness, towards that modern, 
+unsectarian goodness, goodness in general and nothing in particular, 
+which the Zeitgeist seemed to indicate in those transitional years.
+
+
+7
+
+The school never quite got hold of me.  Partly I think that was 
+because I was a day-boy and so freer than most of the boys, partly 
+because of a temperamental disposition to see things in my own way 
+and have my private dreams, partly because I was a little 
+antagonised by the family traditions that ran through the school.  I 
+was made to feel at first that I was a rank outsider, and I never 
+quite forgot it.  I suffered very little bullying, and I never had a 
+fight--in all my time there were only three fights--but I followed 
+my own curiosities.  I was already a very keen theologian and 
+politician before I was fifteen.  I was also intensely interested in 
+modern warfare.  I read the morning papers in the Reading Room 
+during the midday recess, never missed the illustrated weeklies, and 
+often when I could afford it I bought a PALL MALL GAZETTE on my way 
+home.
+
+I do not think that I was very exceptional in that; most intelligent 
+boys, I believe, want naturally to be men, and are keenly interested 
+in men's affairs.  There is not the universal passion for a 
+magnified puerility among them it is customary to assume.  I was 
+indeed a voracious reader of everything but boys' books--which I 
+detested--and fiction.  I read histories, travel, popular science 
+and controversy with particular zest, and I loved maps.  School work 
+and school games were quite subordinate affairs for me.  I worked 
+well and made a passable figure at games, and I do not think I was 
+abnormally insensitive to the fine quality of our school, to the 
+charm of its mediaeval nucleus, its Gothic cloisters, its scraps of 
+Palladian and its dignified Georgian extensions; the contrast of the 
+old quiet, that in spite of our presence pervaded it everywhere, 
+with the rushing and impending London all about it, was indeed a 
+continual pleasure to me.  But these things were certainly not the 
+living and central interests of my life.
+
+I had to conceal my wider outlook to a certain extent--from the 
+masters even more than from the boys.  Indeed I only let myself go 
+freely with one boy, Britten, my especial chum, the son of the 
+Agent-General for East Australia.  We two discovered in a chance 
+conversation A PROPOS of a map in the library that we were both of 
+us curious why there were Malays in Madagascar, and how the Mecca 
+pilgrims came from the East Indies before steamships were available.  
+Neither of us had suspected that there was any one at all in the 
+school who knew or cared a rap about the Indian Ocean, except as 
+water on the way to India.  But Britten had come up through the Suez 
+Canal, and his ship had spoken a pilgrim ship on the way.  It gave 
+him a startling quality of living knowledge.  From these pilgrims we 
+got to a comparative treatment of religions, and from that, by a 
+sudden plunge, to entirely sceptical and disrespectful confessions 
+concerning Gates' last outbreak of simple piety in School Assembly.  
+We became congenial intimates from that hour.
+
+The discovery of Britten happened to me when we were both in the 
+Lower Fifth.  Previously there had been a watertight compartment 
+between the books I read and the thoughts they begot on the one hand 
+and human intercourse on the other.  Now I really began my higher 
+education, and aired and examined and developed in conversation the 
+doubts, the ideas, the interpretations that had been forming in my 
+mind.  As we were both day-boys with a good deal of control over our 
+time we organised walks and expeditions together, and my habit of 
+solitary and rather vague prowling gave way to much more definite 
+joint enterprises.  I went several times to his house, he was the 
+youngest of several brothers, one of whom was a medical student and 
+let us assist at the dissection of a cat, and once or twice in 
+vacation time he came to Penge, and we went with parcels of 
+provisions to do a thorough day in the grounds and galleries of the 
+Crystal Palace, ending with the fireworks at close quarters.  We 
+went in a river steamboat down to Greenwich, and fired by that made 
+an excursion to Margate and back; we explored London docks and 
+Bethnal Green Museum, Petticoat Lane and all sorts of out-of-the-way 
+places together.
+
+We confessed shyly to one another a common secret vice, "Phantom 
+warfare."  When we walked alone, especially in the country, we had 
+both developed the same practice of fighting an imaginary battle 
+about us as we walked.  As we went along we were generals, and our 
+attacks pushed along on either side, crouching and gathering behind 
+hedges, cresting ridges, occupying copses, rushing open spaces, 
+fighting from house to house.  The hillsides about Penge were 
+honeycombed in my imagination with the pits and trenches I had 
+created to cheek a victorious invader coming out of Surrey.  For him 
+West Kensington was chiefly important as the scene of a desperate 
+and successful last stand of insurrectionary troops (who had seized 
+the Navy, the Bank and other advantages) against a royalist army--
+reinforced by Germans--advancing for reasons best known to 
+themselves by way of Harrow and Ealing.  It is a secret and solitary 
+game, as we found when we tried to play it together.  We made a 
+success of that only once.  All the way down to Margate we schemed 
+defences and assailed and fought them as we came back against the 
+sunset.  Afterwards we recapitulated all that conflict by means of a 
+large scale map of the Thames and little paper ironclads in plan cut 
+out of paper.
+
+A subsequent revival of these imaginings was brought about by 
+Britten's luck in getting, through a friend of his father's, 
+admission for us both to the spectacle of volunteer officers 
+fighting the war game in Caxton Hall.  We developed a war game of 
+our own at Britten's home with nearly a couple of hundred lead 
+soldiers, some excellent spring cannons that shot hard and true at 
+six yards, hills of books and a constantly elaborated set of rules.  
+For some months that occupied an immense proportion of our leisure.  
+Some of our battles lasted several days.  We kept the game a 
+profound secret from the other fellows.  They would not have 
+understood.
+
+And we also began, it was certainly before we were sixteen, to 
+write, for the sake of writing.  We liked writing.  We had 
+discovered Lamb and the best of the middle articles in such weeklies 
+as the SATURDAY GAZETTE, and we imitated them.  Our minds were full 
+of dim uncertain things we wanted to drag out into the light of 
+expression.  Britten had got hold of IN MEMORIAM, and I had 
+disinterred Pope's ESSAY ON MAN and RABBI BEN EZRA, and these things 
+had set our theological and cosmic solicitudes talking.  I was 
+somewhere between sixteen and eighteen, I know, when he and I walked 
+along the Thames Embankment confessing shamefully to one another 
+that we had never read Lucretius.  We thought every one who mattered 
+had read Lucretius.
+
+When I was nearly sixteen my mother was taken ill very suddenly, and 
+died of some perplexing complaint that involved a post-mortem 
+examination; it was, I think, the trouble that has since those days 
+been recognised as appendicitis.  This led to a considerable change 
+in my circumstances; the house at Penge was given up, and my 
+Staffordshire uncle arranged for me to lodge during school terms 
+with a needy solicitor and his wife in Vicars Street, S. W., about a 
+mile and a half from the school.  So it was I came right into 
+London; I had almost two years of London before I went to Cambridge.
+
+Tehose were our great days together.  Afterwards we were torn apart; 
+Britten went to Oxford, and our circumstances never afterwards threw 
+us continuously together until the days of the BLUE WEEKLY.
+
+As boys, we walked together, read and discussed the same books, 
+pursued the same enquiries.  We got a reputation as inseparables and 
+the nickname of the Rose and the Lily, for Britten was short and 
+thick-set with dark close curling hair and a ruddy Irish type of 
+face; I was lean and fair-haired and some inches taller than he.  
+Our talk ranged widely and yet had certain very definite 
+limitations.  We were amazingly free with politics and religion, we 
+went to that little meeting-house of William Morris's at Hammersmith 
+and worked out the principles of Socialism pretty thoroughly, and we 
+got up the Darwinian theory with the help of Britten's medical-
+student brother and the galleries of the Natural History Museum in 
+Cromwell Road.  Those wonderful cases on the ground floor 
+illustrating mimicry, dimorphism and so forth, were new in our 
+times, and we went through them with earnest industry and tried over 
+our Darwinism in the light of that.  Such topics we did 
+exhaustively.  But on the other hand I do not remember any 
+discussion whatever of human sex or sexual relationships.  There, in 
+spite of intense secret curiosities, our lips were sealed by a 
+peculiar shyness.  And I do not believe we ever had occasion either 
+of us to use the word "love."  It was not only that we were 
+instinctively shy of the subject, but that we were mightily ashamed 
+of the extent of our ignorance and uncertainty in these matters.  We 
+evaded them elaborately with an assumption of exhaustive knowledge.
+
+We certainly had no shyness about theology.  We marked the 
+emancipation of our spirits from the frightful teachings that had 
+oppressed our boyhood, by much indulgence in blasphemous wit.  We 
+had a secret literature of irreverent rhymes, and a secret art of 
+theological caricature.  Britten's father had delighted his family 
+by reading aloud from Dr. Richard Garnett's TWILIGHT OF THE GODS, 
+and Britten conveyed the precious volume to me.  That and the BAB 
+BALLADS were the inspiration of some of our earliest lucubrations.
+
+For an imaginative boy the first experience of writing is like a 
+tiger's first taste of blood, and our literary flowerings led very 
+directly to the revival of the school magazine, which had been 
+comatose for some years.  But there we came upon a disappointment.
+
+
+8
+
+In that revival we associated certain other of the Sixth Form boys, 
+and notably one for whom our enterprise was to lay the foundations 
+of a career that has ended in the House of Lords, Arthur Cossington, 
+now Lord Paddockhurst.  Cossington was at that time a rather heavy, 
+rather good-looking boy who was chiefly eminent in cricket, an 
+outsider even as we were and preoccupied no doubt, had we been 
+sufficiently detached to observe him, with private imaginings very 
+much of the same quality and spirit as our own.  He was, we were 
+inclined to think, rather a sentimentalist, rather a poseur, he 
+affected a concise emphatic styl, played chess very well, betrayed 
+a belief in will-power, and earned Britten's secret hostility, 
+Britten being a sloven, by the invariable neatness of his collars 
+and ties.  He came into our magazine with a vigour that we found 
+extremely surprising and unwelcome.
+
+Britten and I had wanted to write.  We had indeed figured our 
+project modestly as a manuscript magazine of satirical, liberal and 
+brilliant literature by which in some rather inexplicable way the 
+vague tumult of ideas that teemed within us was to find form and 
+expression; Cossington, it was manifest from the outset, wanted 
+neither to write nor writing, but a magazine.  I remember the 
+inaugural meeting in Shoesmith major's study--we had had great 
+trouble in getting it together--and how effectually Cossington 
+bolted with the proposal.
+
+"I think we fellows ought to run a magazine," said Cossington.  "The 
+school used to have one.  A school like this ought to have a 
+magazine."
+
+"The last one died in '84," said Shoesmith from the hearthrug.  
+"Called the OBSERVER.  Rot rather."
+
+"Bad title," said Cossington.
+
+"There was a TATLER before that," said Britten, sitting on the 
+writing table at the window that was closed to deaden the cries of 
+the Lower School at play, and clashing his boots together.
+
+"We want something suggestive of City Merchants."
+
+"CITY MERCHANDIZE," said Britten.
+
+"Too fanciful.  What of ARVONIAN?  Richard Arvon was our founder, 
+and it seems almost a duty--"
+
+"They call them all -usians or -onians," said Britten.
+
+"I like CITY MERCHANDIZE," I said.  "We could probably find a 
+quotation to suggest--oh! mixed good things."
+
+Cossington regarded me abstractedly.
+
+Don't want to put the accent on the City, do we?" said Shoesmith, 
+who had a feeling for county families, and Naylor supported him by a 
+murmur of approval.
+
+"We ought to call it the ARVONIAN," decided Cossington, "and we 
+might very well have underneath, 'With which is incorporated the 
+OBSERVER.'  That picks up the old traditions, makes an appeal to old 
+boys and all that, and it gives us something to print under the 
+title."
+
+I still held out for CITY MERCHANDIZE, which had taken my fancy.  
+"Some of the chaps' people won't like it," said Naylor, "certain not 
+to.  And it sounds Rum."
+
+"Sounds Weird," said a boy who had not hitherto spoken.
+
+"We aren't going to do anything Queer," said Shoesmith, pointedly 
+not looking at Britten.
+
+The question of the title had manifestly gone against us.  "Oh! HAVE 
+it ARVONIAN," I said.
+
+"And next, what size shall we have?" said Cossington.
+
+"Something like MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE--or LONGMANS'; LONGMANS' is 
+better because it has a whole page, not columns.  It makes no end of 
+difference to one's effects."
+
+"What effects?" asked Shoesmith abruptly.
+
+"Oh! a pause or a white line or anything.  You've got to write 
+closer for a double column.  It's nuggetty.  You can't get a swing 
+on your prose."  I had discussed this thoroughly with Britten.
+
+"If the fellows are going to write--" began Britten.
+
+"We ought to keep off fine writing," said Shoesmith.  "It's cheek.  
+I vote we don't have any."
+
+"We sha'n't get any," said Cossington, and then as an olive branch 
+to me, "unless Remington does a bit.  Or Britten.  But it's no good 
+making too much space for it."
+
+"We ought to be very careful about the writing," said Shoesmith.   
+"We don't want to give ourselves away."
+
+"I vote we ask old Topham to see us through," said Naylor.
+
+Britten groaned aloud and every one regarded him.  "Greek epigrams 
+on the fellows' names," he said.  " Small beer in ancient bottles.  
+Let's get a stuffed broody hen to SIT on the magazine."
+
+"We might do worse than a Greek epigram," said Cossington.  "One in 
+each number.  It--it impresses parents and keeps up our classieal 
+tradition.  And the masters CAN help.  We don't want to antagonise 
+them.  Of course--we've got to dcpartmentalise.  Writing is only one 
+section of the thing.  The ARVONIAN has to stand for the school.  
+There's questions of space and questions of expense.  We can't turn 
+out a great chunk of printed prose like--like wet cold toast and 
+call it a magazine."
+
+Britten writhed, appreciating the image.
+
+"There's to be a section of sports.  YOU must do that."
+
+"I'm not going to do any fine writing," said Shoesmith.
+
+"What you've got to do is just to list all the chaps and put a note 
+to their play:--'Naylor minor must pass more.  Football isn't the 
+place for extreme individualism.'  'Ammersham shapes well as half-
+back.'  Things like that."
+
+"I could do that all right," said Shoesmith, brightening and 
+manifestly hecoming pregnant with judgments.
+
+"One great thing about a magazine of this sort," said Cossington, 
+"is to mention just as many names as you can in each number.  It 
+keeps the interest alive.  Chaps will turn it over looking for their 
+own little bit.  Then it all lights up for them."
+
+"Do you want any reports of matches?" Shoesmith broke from his 
+meditation.
+
+"Rather.  With comments."
+
+"Naylor surpassed himself and negotiated the lemon safely home," 
+said Shoesmith.
+
+"Shut it," said Naylor modestly.
+
+"Exactly," said Cossington.  "That gives us three features," 
+touching them off on his fingers, "Epigram, Literary Section, 
+Sports.  Then we want a section to shove anything into, a joke, a 
+notice of anything that's going on.  So on.  Our Note Book."
+
+"Oh, Hell!" said Britten, and clashed his boots, to the silent 
+disapproval of every one.
+
+"Then we want an editorial."
+
+"A WHAT?" cried Britten, with a note of real terror in his voice.
+
+"Well, don't we?  Unless we have our Note Book to begin on the front 
+page.  It gives a scrappy effect to do that.  We want something 
+manly and straightforward and a bit thoughtful, about Patriotism, 
+say, or ESPRIT DE CORPS, or After-Life."
+
+I looked at Britten.  Hitherto we had not considered Cossington 
+mattered very much in the world.
+
+He went over us as a motor-car goes over a dog.  There was a sort of 
+energy about him, a new sort of energy to us; we had never realised 
+that anything of the sort existed in the world.  We were hopelessly 
+at a disadvantage.  Almost instantly we had developed a clear and 
+detailed vision of a magazine made up of everything that was most 
+acceptable in the magazines that flourished in the adult world about 
+us, and had determined to make it a success.  He had by a kind of 
+instinct, as it were, synthetically plagiarised every successful 
+magazine and breathed into this dusty mixture the breath of life.  
+He was elected at his own suggestion managing director, with the 
+earnest support of Shoesmith and Naylor, and conducted the magazine 
+so successfully and brilliantly that he even got a whole back page 
+of advertisements from the big sports shop in Holborn, and made the 
+printers pay at the same rate for a notice of certain books of their 
+own which they said they had inserted by inadvertency to fill up 
+space.  The only literary contribution in the first number was a 
+column by Topham in faultless stereotyped English in depreciation of 
+some fancied evil called Utilitarian Studies and ending with that 
+noble old quotation:--
+
+
+"To the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome."
+
+
+And Flack crowded us out of number two with a bright little paper on 
+the "Humours of Cricket," and the Head himself was profusely 
+thoughtful all over the editorial under the heading of "The School 
+Chapel; and How it Seems to an Old Boy."
+
+Britten and I found it difficult to express to each other with any 
+grace or precision what we felt about that magazine.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH
+
+ADOLESCENCE
+
+
+1
+
+I find it very difficult to trace how form was added to form and 
+interpretation followed interpretation in my ever-spreading, ever-
+deepening, ever-multiplying and enriching vision of this world into 
+which I had been born.  Every day added its impressions, its hints, 
+its subtle explications to the growing understanding.  Day after day 
+the living interlacing threads of a mind weave together.  Every 
+morning now for three weeks and more (for to-day is Thursday and I 
+started on a Tuesday) I have been trying to convey some idea of the 
+factors and early influences by which my particular scrap of 
+subjective tapestry was shaped, to show the child playing on the 
+nursery floor, the son perplexed by his mother, gazing aghast at his 
+dead father, exploring interminable suburbs, touched by first 
+intimations of the sexual mystery, coming in with a sort of confused 
+avidity towards the centres of the life of London.  It is only by 
+such an effort to write it down that one realises how marvellously 
+crowded, how marvellously analytical and synthetic those ears must 
+be.  One begins with the little child to whom the sky is a roof of 
+blue, the world a screen of opaque and disconnected facts, the home 
+a thing eternal, and "being good" just simple obedience to 
+unquestioned authority; and one comes at last to the vast world of 
+one's adult perception, pierced deep by flaring searchlights of 
+partial understanding, here masked by mists, here refracted and 
+distorted through half translucent veils, here showing broad 
+prospects and limitless vistas and here impenetrably dark.
+
+I recall phases of deep speculation, doubts and even prayers by 
+night, and strange occasions when by a sort of hypnotic 
+contemplation of nothingness I sought to pierce the web of 
+appearances about me.  It is hard to measure these things in 
+receding perspective, and now I cannot trace, so closely has mood 
+succeeded and overlaid and obliterated mood, the phases by which an 
+utter horror of death was replaced by the growing realisation of its 
+necessity and dignity.  Difficulty of the imagination with infinite 
+space, infinite time, entangled my mind; and moral distress for the 
+pain and suffering of bygone ages that made all thought of 
+reformation in the future seem but the grimmest irony upon now 
+irreparable wrongs.  Many an intricate perplexity of these 
+broadening years did not so much get settled as cease to matter.  
+Life crowded me away from it.
+
+I have confessed myself a temerarious theologian, and in that 
+passage from boyhood to manhood I ranged widely in my search for 
+some permanently satisfying Truth.  That, too, ceased after a time 
+to be urgently interesting.  I came at last into a phase that 
+endures to this day, of absolute tranquillity, of absolute 
+confidence in whatever that Incomprehensible Comprehensive which 
+must needs be the substratum of all things, may be.  Feeling OF IT, 
+feeling BY IT, I cannot feel afraid of it.  I think I had got quite 
+clearly and finally to that adjustment long before my Cambridge days 
+were done.  I am sure that the evil in life is transitory and finite 
+like an accident or distress in the nursery; that God is my Father 
+and that I may trust Him, even though life hurts so that one must 
+needs cry out at it, even though it shows no consequence but 
+failure, no promise but pain. . . .
+
+But while I was fearless of theology I must confess it was 
+comparatively late before I faced and dared to probe the secrecies 
+of sex.  I was afraid of sex.  I had an instinctive perception that 
+it would be a large and difficult thing in my life, but my early 
+training was all in the direction of regarding it as an irrelevant 
+thing, as something disconnected from all the broad significances of 
+life, as hostile and disgraceful in its quality.  The world was 
+never so emasculated in thought, I suppose, as it was in the 
+Victorian time. . . .
+
+I was afraid to think either of sex or (what I have always found 
+inseparable from a kind of sexual emotion) beauty.  Even as a boy I 
+knew the thing as a haunting and alluring mystery that I tried to 
+keep away from.  Its dim presence obsessed me none the less for 
+all the extravagant decency, the stimulating silences of my 
+upbringing. . . .
+
+The plaster Venuses and Apollos that used to adorn the vast aisle 
+and huge grey terraces of the Crystal Palace were the first 
+intimations of the beauty of the body that ever came into my life.  
+As I write of it I feel again the shameful attraction of those 
+gracious forms.  I used to look at them not simply, but curiously 
+and askance.  Once at least in my later days at Penge, I spent a 
+shilling in admission chiefly for the sake of them. . . .
+
+The strangest thing of all my odd and solitary upbringing seems to 
+me now that swathing up of all the splendours of the flesh, that 
+strange combination of fanatical terrorism and shyness that fenced 
+me about with prohibitions.  It caused me to grow up, I will not say 
+blankly ignorant, but with an ignorance blurred and dishonoured by 
+shame, by enigmatical warnings, by cultivated aversions, an 
+ignorance in which a fascinated curiosity and desire struggled like 
+a thing in a net.  I knew so little and I felt so much.  There was 
+indeed no Aphrodite at all in my youthful Pantheon, but instead 
+there was a mysterious and minatory gap.  I have told how at last a 
+new Venus was born in my imagination out of gas lamps and the 
+twilight, a Venus with a cockney accent and dark eyes shining out of 
+the dusk, a Venus who was a warm, passion-stirring atmosphere rather 
+than incarnate in a body.  And I have told, too, how I bought a 
+picture.
+
+All this was a thing apart from the rest of my life, a locked 
+avoided chamber. . . .
+
+It was not until my last year at Trinity that I really broke down 
+the barriers of this unwholesome silence and brought my secret 
+broodings to the light of day.  Then a little set of us plunged 
+suddenly into what we called at first sociological discussion.  I 
+can still recall even the physical feeling of those first tentative 
+talks.  I remember them mostly as occurring in the rooms of Ted 
+Hatherleigh, who kept at the corner by the Trinity great gate, but 
+we also used to talk a good deal at a man's in King's, a man named, 
+if I remember rightly, Redmayne.  The atmosphere of Hatherleigh's 
+rooms was a haze of tobacco smoke against a background brown and 
+deep.  He professed himself a socialist with anarchistic leanings--
+he had suffered the martyrdom of ducking for it--and a huge French 
+May-day poster displaying a splendid proletarian in red and black on 
+a barricade against a flaring orange sky, dominated his decorations.  
+Hatherleigh affected a fine untidiness, and all the place, even the 
+floor, was littered with books, for the most part open and face 
+downward; deeper darknesses were supplied by a discarded gown and 
+our caps, all conscientiously battered, Hatherleigh's flopped like 
+an elephant's ear and inserted quill pens supported the corners of 
+mine; the highlights of the picture came chiefly as reflections from 
+his chequered blue mugs full of audit ale.  We sat on oak chairs, 
+except the four or five who crowded on a capacious settle, we drank 
+a lot of beer and were often fuddled, and occasionally quite drunk, 
+and we all smoked reckless-looking pipes,--there was a transient 
+fashion among us for corn cobs for which Mark Twain, I think, was 
+responsible.  Our little excesses with liquor were due far more to 
+conscience than appetite, indicated chiefly a resolve to break away 
+from restraints that we suspected were keeping us off the 
+instructive knife-edges of life.  Hatherleigh was a good Englishman 
+of the premature type with a red face, a lot of hair, a deep voice 
+and an explosive plunging manner, and it was he who said one 
+evening--Heaven knows how we got to it--" Look here, you know, it's 
+all Rot, this Shutting Up about Women.  We OUGHT to talk about them.  
+What are we going to do about them?  It's got to come.  We're all 
+festering inside about it.  Let's out with it.  There's too much 
+Decency altogether about this Infernal University!"
+
+We rose to his challenge a little awkwardly and our first talk was 
+clumsy, there were flushed faces and red ears, and I remember 
+Hatherleigh broke out into a monologue on decency.  "Modesty and 
+Decency," said Hatherleigh, "are Oriental vices.  The Jews brought 
+them to Europe.  They're Semitic, just like our monasticism here and 
+the seclusion of women and mutilating the dead on a battlefield.  
+And all that sort of thing."
+
+Hatherleigh's mind progressed by huge leaps, leaps that were usually 
+wildly inaccurate, and for a time we engaged hotly upon the topic of 
+those alleged mutilations and the Semitic responsibility for 
+decency.  Hatherleigh tried hard to saddle the Semitic race with the 
+less elegant war customs of the Soudan and the northwest frontier of 
+India, and quoted Doughty, at that time a little-known author, and 
+Cunninghame Graham to show that the Arab was worse than a county-
+town spinster in his regard for respectability.  But his case was 
+too preposterous, and Esmeer, with his shrill penetrating voice and 
+his way of pointing with all four long fingers flat together, 
+carried the point against him.  He quoted Cato and Roman law and the 
+monasteries of Thibet.
+
+"Well, anyway," said Hatherleigh, escaping from our hands like an 
+intellectual frog, "Semitic or not, I've got no use for decency."
+
+We argued points and Hatherleigh professed an unusually balanced and 
+tolerating attitude.  "I don't mind a certain refinement and 
+dignity," he admitted generously.  "What I object to is this 
+spreading out of decency until it darkens the whole sky, until it 
+makes a man's father afraid to speak of the most important things, 
+until it makes a man afraid to look a frank book in the face or 
+think--even think! until it leads to our coming to--to the business 
+at last with nothing but a few prohibitions, a few hints, a lot of 
+dirty jokes and, and "--he waved a hand and seemed to seek and catch 
+his image in the air--" oh, a confounded buttered slide of 
+sentiment, to guide us.  I tell you I'm going to think about it and 
+talk about it until I see a little more daylight than I do at 
+present.  I'm twenty-two.  Things might happen to me anywhen.  You 
+men can go out into the world if you like, to sin like fools and 
+marry like fools, not knowing what you are doing and ashamed to ask.  
+You'll take the consequences, too, I expect, pretty meekly, 
+sniggering a bit, sentimentalising a bit, like--like Cambridge 
+humorists. . . .  I mean to know what I'm doing."
+
+He paused to drink, and I think I cut in with ideas of my own.  But 
+one is apt to forget one's own share in a talk, I find, more than 
+one does the clear-cut objectivity of other people's, and I do not 
+know how far I contributed to this discussion that followed.  I am, 
+however, pretty certain that it was then that ideal that we were 
+pleased to call aristocracy and which soon became the common 
+property of our set was developed.  It was Esmeer, I know, who laid 
+down and maintained the proposition that so far as minds went there 
+were really only two sorts of man in the world, the aristocrat and 
+the man who subdues his mind to other people's.
+
+"'I couldn't THINK of it, Sir,'" said Esmeer in his elucidatory 
+tones; "that's what a servant says.  His mind even is broken in to 
+run between fences, and he admits it.  WE'VE got to he able to think 
+of anything.  And 'such things aren't for the Likes of Us!'  That's 
+another servant's saying.  Well, everything IS for the Likes of Us.  
+If we see fit, that is."
+
+A small fresh-coloured man in grey objected.
+
+"Well," exploded Hatherleigh, "if that isn't so what the deuce are 
+we up here for?  Instead of working in mines?  If some things aren't 
+to be thought about ever!  We've got the privilege of all these 
+extra years for getting things straight in our heads, and then we 
+won't use 'em.  Good God! what do you think a university's for?" . . .
+
+Esmeer's idea came with an effect of real emancipation to several of 
+us.  We were not going to be afraid of ideas any longer, we were 
+going to throw down every barrier of prohibition and take them in 
+and see what came of it.  We became for a time even intemperately 
+experimental, and one of us, at the bare suggestion of an eminent 
+psychic investigator, took hashish and very nearly died of it within 
+a fortnight of our great elucidation.
+
+The chief matter of our interchanges was of course the discussion of 
+sex.  Once the theme had been opened it became a sore place in our 
+intercourse; none of us seemed able to keep away from it.  Our 
+imaginations got astir with it.  We made up for lost time and went 
+round it and through it and over it exhaustively.  I recall 
+prolonged discussion of polygamy on the way to Royston, muddy 
+November tramps to Madingley, when amidst much profanity from 
+Hatherleigh at the serious treatment of so obsolete a matter, we 
+weighed the reasons, if any, for the institution of marriage.  The 
+fine dim night-time spaces of the Great Court are bound up with the 
+inconclusive finales of mighty hot-eared wrangles; the narrows of 
+Trinity Street and Petty Cury and Market Hill have their particular 
+associations for me with that spate of confession and free speech, 
+that almost painful goal delivery of long pent and crappled and 
+sometimes crippled ideas.
+
+And we went on a reading party that Easter to a place called 
+Pulborough in Sussex, where there is a fishing inn and a river that 
+goes under a bridge.  It was a late Easter and a blazing one, and we 
+boated and bathed and talked of being Hellenic and the beauty of the 
+body until at moments it seemed to us that we were destined to 
+restore the Golden Age, by the simple abolition of tailors and 
+outfitters.
+
+Those undergraduate talks! how rich and glorious they seemed, how 
+splendidly new the ideas that grew and multiplied in our seething 
+minds!  We made long afternoon and evening raids over the Downs 
+towards Arundel, and would come tramping back through the still keen 
+moonlight singing and shouting.  We formed romantic friendships with 
+one another, and grieved more or less convincingly that there were 
+no splendid women fit to be our companions in the world.  But 
+Hatherleigh, it seemed, had once known a girl whose hair was 
+gloriously red.  "My God!" said Hatherleigh to convey the quality of 
+her; just simply and with projectile violence: "My God!
+
+Benton had heard of a woman who lived with a man refusing to be 
+married to him--we thought that splendid beyond measure,--I cannot 
+now imagine why.  She was "like a tender goddess," Benton said.  A 
+sort of shame came upon us in the dark in spite of our liberal 
+intentions when Benton committed himself to that.  And after such 
+talk we would fall upon great pauses of emotional dreaming, and if 
+by chance we passed a girl in a governess cart, or some farmer's 
+daughter walking to the station, we became alertly silent or 
+obstreperously indifferent to her.  For might she not be just that 
+one exception to the banal decency, the sickly pointless 
+conventionality, the sham modesty of the times in which we lived?
+
+We felt we stood for a new movement, not realising how perennially 
+this same emancipation returns to those ancient courts beside the 
+Cam.  We were the anti-decency party, we discovered a catch phrase 
+that we flourished about in the Union and made our watchword, 
+namely, "stark fact."  We hung nude pictures in our rooms much as if 
+they had been flags, to the earnest concern of our bedders, and I 
+disinterred my long-kept engraving and had it framed in fumed oak, 
+and found for it a completer and less restrained companion, a 
+companion I never cared for in the slightest degree. . . .
+
+This efflorescence did not prevent, I think indeed it rather helped, 
+our more formal university work, for most of us took firsts, and 
+three of us got Fellowships in one year or another.  There was 
+Benton who had a Research Fellowship and went to Tubingen, there was 
+Esmeer and myself who both became Residential Fellows.  I had taken 
+the Mental and Moral Science Tripos (as it was then), and three 
+years later I got a lectureship in political science.  In those days 
+it was disguised in the cloak of Political Economy.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+It was our affectation to be a little detached from the main stream 
+of undergraduate life.  We worked pretty hard, but by virtue of our 
+beer, our socialism and suchlike heterodoxy, held ourselves to be 
+differentiated from the swatting reading man.  None of us, except 
+Baxter, who was a rowing blue, a rather abnormal blue with an 
+appetite for ideas, took games seriously enough to train, and on the 
+other hand we intimated contempt for the rather mediocre, 
+deliberately humorous, consciously gentlemanly and consciously wild 
+undergraduate men who made up the mass of Cambridge life.  After the 
+manner of youth we were altogether too hard on our contemporaries.  
+We battered our caps and tore our gowns lest they should seem new, 
+and we despised these others extremely for doing exactly the same 
+things; we had an idea of ourselves and resented beyond measure a 
+similar weakness in these our brothers.
+
+There was a type, or at least there seemed to us to be a type--I'm a 
+little doubtful at times now whether after all we didn't create it--
+for which Hatherleigh invented the nickname the "Pinky Dinkys," 
+intending thereby both contempt and abhorrence in almost equal 
+measure.  The Pinky Dinky summarised all that we particularly did 
+not want to be, and also, I now perceive, much of what we were and 
+all that we secretly dreaded becoming.
+
+But it is hard to convey the Pinky Dinky idea, for all that it meant 
+so much to us.  We spent one evening at least during that reading 
+party upon the Pinky Dinky; we sat about our one fire after a walk 
+in the rain--it was our only wet day--smoked our excessively virile 
+pipes, and elaborated the natural history of the Pinky Dinky.  We 
+improvised a sort of Pinky Dinky litany, and Hatherleigh supplied 
+deep notes for the responses.
+
+"The Pinky Dinky extracts a good deal of amusement from life," said 
+some one.
+
+"Damned prig! " said Hatherleigh.
+
+"The Pinky Dinky arises in the Union and treats the question with a 
+light gay touch.  He makes the weird ones mad.  But sometimes he 
+cannot go on because of the amusement he extracts."
+
+"I want to shy books at the giggling swine," said Hatherleigh.
+
+"The Pinky Dinky says suddenly while he is making the tea, 'We're 
+all being frightfully funny.  It's time for you to say something 
+now.'"
+
+"The Pinky Dinky shakes his head and says: 'I'm afraid I shall never 
+be a responsible being.'  And he really IS frivolous."
+
+"Frivolous but not vulgar," said Esmeer.
+
+"Pinky Dinkys are chaps who've had their buds nipped," said 
+Hatherleigh.  "They're Plebs and they know it.  They haven't the 
+Guts to get hold of things.  And so they worry up all those silly 
+little jokes of theirs to carry it off." . . .
+
+We tried bad ones for a time, viciously flavoured.
+
+Pinky Dinkys are due to over-production of the type that ought to 
+keep outfitters' shops.  Pinky Dinkys would like to keep outfitters' 
+shops with whimsy 'scriptions on the boxes and make your bill out 
+funny, and not be snobs to customers, no!--not even if they had 
+titles."
+
+"Every Pinky Dinky's people are rather good people, and better than 
+most Pinky Dinky's people.  But he does not put on side."
+
+"Pinky Dinkys become playful at the sight of women."
+
+"'Croquet's my game,' said the Pinky Dinky, and felt a man 
+condescended."
+
+"But what the devil do they think they're up to, anyhow?" roared old 
+Hatherleigh suddenly, dropping plump into bottomless despair.
+
+We felt we had still failed to get at the core of the mystery of the 
+Pinky Dinky.
+
+We tried over things about his religion.  "The Pinky Dinky goes to 
+King's Chapel, and sits and feels in the dusk.  Solemn things!  Oh 
+HUSH!  He wouldn't tell you--"
+
+"He COULDN'T tell you."
+
+"Religion is so sacred to him he never talks about it, never reads 
+about it, never thinks about it.  Just feels!"
+
+"But in his heart of hearts, oh! ever so deep, the Pinky Dinky has a 
+doubt--"
+
+Some one protested.
+
+"Not a vulgar doubt," Esmeer went on, "but a kind of hesitation 
+whether the Ancient of Days is really exactly what one would call 
+good form. . . .  There's a lot of horrid coarseness got into the 
+world somehow.  SOMEBODY put it there. . . .  And anyhow there's no 
+particular reason why a man should be seen about with Him.  He's 
+jolly Awful of course and all that--"
+
+"The Pinky Dinky for all his fun and levity has a clean mind."
+
+"A thoroughly clean mind.  Not like Esmeer's--the Pig!"
+
+"If once he began to think about sex, how could he be comfortable at 
+croquet?"
+
+"It's their Damned Modesty," said Hatherleigh suddenly, "that's 
+what's the matter with the Pinky Dinky.  It's Mental Cowardice 
+dressed up as a virtue and taking the poor dears in.  Cambridge is 
+soaked with it; it's some confounded local bacillus.  Like the thing 
+that gives a flavour to Havana cigars.  He comes up here to be made 
+into a man and a ruler of the people, and he thinks it shows a nice 
+disposition not to take on the job!  How the Devil is a great Empire 
+to be run with men like him?"
+
+"All his little jokes and things," said Esmeer regarding his feet on 
+the fender, "it's just a nervous sniggering--because he's afraid. . . .  
+Oxford's no better."
+
+"What's he afraid of?" said I.
+
+"God knows!" exploded Hatherleigh and stared at the fire.
+
+"LIFE!" said Esmeer.  "And so in a way are we," he added, and made a 
+thoughtful silence for a time.
+
+"I say," began Carter, who was doing the Natural Science Tripos, 
+"what is the adult form of the Pinky Dinky?"
+
+But there we were checked by our ignorance of the world.
+
+"What is the adult form of any of us?" asked Benton, voicing the 
+thought that had arrested our flow.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+I do not remember that we ever lifted our criticism to the dons and 
+the organisation of the University.  I think we took them for 
+granted.  When I look back at my youth I am always astonished by the 
+multitude of things that we took for granted.  It seemed to us that 
+Cambridge was in the order of things, for all the world like having 
+eyebrows or a vermiform appendix.  Now with the larger scepticism of 
+middle age I can entertain very fundamental doubts about these old 
+universities.  Indeed I had a scheme--
+
+I do not see what harm I can do now by laying bare the purpose of 
+the political combinations I was trying to effect.
+
+My educational scheme was indeed the starting-point of all the big 
+project of conscious public reconstruction at which I aimed.  I 
+wanted to build up a new educational machine altogether for the 
+governing class out of a consolidated system of special public 
+service schools.  I meant to get to work upon this whatever office I 
+was given in the new government.  I could have begun my plan from 
+the Admiralty or the War Office quite as easily as from the 
+Education Office.  I am firmly convinced it is hopeless to think of 
+reforming the old public schools and universities to meet the needs 
+of a modern state, they send their roots too deep and far, the cost 
+would exceed any good that could possibly be effected, and so I have 
+sought a way round this invincible obstacle.  I do think it would be 
+quite practicable to side-track, as the Americans say, the whole 
+system by creating hardworking, hard-living, modern and scientific 
+boys' schools, first for the Royal Navy and then for the public 
+service generally, and as they grew, opening them to the public 
+without any absolute obligation to subsequent service.  
+Simultaneously with this it would not be impossible to develop a new 
+college system with strong faculties in modern philosophy, modern 
+history, European literature and criticism, physical and biological 
+science, education and sociology.
+
+We could in fact create a new liberal education in this way, and cut 
+the umbilicus of the classical languages for good and all.  I should 
+have set this going, and trusted it to correct or kill the old 
+public schools and the Oxford and Cambridge tradition altogether.  I 
+had men in my mind to begin the work, and I should have found 
+others.  I should have aimed at making a hard-trained, capable, 
+intellectually active, proud type of man.  Everything else would 
+have been made subservient to that.  I should have kept my grip on 
+the men through their vacation, and somehow or other I would have 
+contrived a young woman to match them.  I think I could have seen to 
+it effectually enough that they didn't get at croquet and tennis 
+with the vicarage daughters and discover sex in the Peeping Tom 
+fashion I did, and that they realised quite early in life that it 
+isn't really virile to reek of tobacco.  I should have had military 
+manoeuvres, training ships, aeroplane work, mountaineering and so 
+forth, in the place of the solemn trivialities of games, and I 
+should have fed and housed my men clean and very hard--where there 
+wasn't any audit ale, no credit tradesmen, and plenty of high 
+pressure douches. . . .
+
+I have revisited Cambridge and Oxford time after time since I came 
+down, and so far as the Empire goes, I want to get clear of those 
+two places. . . .
+
+Always I renew my old feelings, a physical oppression, a sense of 
+lowness and dampness almost exactly like the feeling of an 
+underground room where paper moulders and leaves the wall, a feeling 
+of ineradicable contagion in the Gothic buildings, in the narrow 
+ditch-like rivers, in those roads and roads of stuffy little villas.  
+Those little villas have destroyed all the good of the old monastic 
+system and none of its evil. . . .
+
+Some of the most charming people in the world live in them, but 
+their collective effect is below the quality of any individual among 
+them.  Cambridge is a world of subdued tones, of excessively subtle 
+humours, of prim conduct and free thinking; it fears the Parent, but 
+it has no fear of God; it offers amidst surroundings that vary 
+between disguises and antiquarian charm the inflammation of 
+literature's purple draught; one hears there a peculiar thin scandal 
+like no other scandal in the world--a covetous scandal--so that I am 
+always reminded of Ibsen in Cambridge.  In Cambridge and the plays 
+of Ibsen alone does it seem appropriate for the heroine before the 
+great crisis of life to "enter, take off her overshoes, and put her 
+wet umbrella upon the writing desk." . . .
+
+We have to make a new Academic mind for modern needs, and the last 
+thing to make it out of, I am convinced, is the old Academic mind.  
+One might as soon try to fake the old VICTORY at Portsmouth into a 
+line of battleship again.  Besides which the old Academic mind, like 
+those old bathless, damp Gothic colleges, is much too delightful in 
+its peculiar and distinctive way to damage by futile patching.
+
+My heart warms to a sense of affectionate absurdity as I recall dear 
+old Codger, surely the most "unleaderly" of men.  No more than from 
+the old Schoolmen, his kindred, could one get from him a School for 
+Princes.  Yet apart from his teaching he was as curious and adorable 
+as a good Netsuke.  Until quite recently he was a power in 
+Cambridge, he could make and bar and destroy, and in a way he has 
+become the quintessence of Cambridge in my thoughts.
+
+I see him on his way to the morning's lecture, with his plump 
+childish face, his round innocent eyes, his absurdly non-prehensile 
+fat hand carrying his cap, his grey trousers braced up much too 
+high, his feet a trifle inturned, and going across the great court 
+with a queer tripping pace that seemed cultivated even to my naive 
+undergraduate eye.  Or I see him lecturing.  He lectured walking up 
+and down between the desks, talking in a fluting rapid voice, and 
+with the utmost lucidity.  If he could not walk up and down he could 
+not lecture.  His mind and voice had precisely the fluid quality of 
+some clear subtle liquid; one felt it could flow round anything and 
+overcome nothing.  And its nimble eddies were wonderful!  Or again I 
+recall him drinking port with little muscular movements in his neck 
+and cheek and chin and his brows knit--very judicial, very 
+concentrated, preparing to say the apt just thing; it was the last 
+thing he would have told a lie about.
+
+When I think of Codger I am reminded of an inscription I saw on some 
+occasion in Regent's Park above two eyes scarcely more limpidly 
+innocent than his--"Born in the Menagerie."  Never once since Codger 
+began to display the early promise of scholarship at the age of 
+eight or more, had he been outside the bars.  His utmost travel had 
+been to lecture here and lecture there.  His student phase had 
+culminated in papers of quite exceptional brilliance, and he had 
+gone on to lecture with a cheerful combination of wit and mannerism 
+that had made him a success from the beginning.  He has lectured 
+ever since.  He lectures still.  Year by year he has become plumper, 
+more rubicund and more and more of an item for the intelligent 
+visitor to see.  Even in my time he was pointed out to people as 
+part of our innumerable enrichments, and obviously he knew it.  He 
+has become now almost the leading Character in a little donnish 
+world of much too intensely appreciated Characters.
+
+He boasted he took no exercise, and also of his knowledge of port 
+wine.  Of other wines he confessed quite frankly he had no "special 
+knowledge."  Beyond these things he had little pride except that he 
+claimed to have read every novel by a woman writer that had ever 
+entered the Union Library.  This, however, he held to be remarkable 
+rather than ennobling, and such boasts as he made of it were tinged 
+with playfulness.  Certainly he had a scholar's knowledge of the 
+works of Miss Marie Corelli, Miss Braddon, Miss Elizabeth Glyn and 
+Madame Sarah Grand that would have astonished and flattered those 
+ladies enormously, and he loved nothing so much in his hours of 
+relaxation as to propound and answer difficult questions upon their 
+books.  Tusher of King's was his ineffectual rival in this field, 
+their bouts were memorable and rarely other than glorious for 
+Codger; but then Tusher spread himself too much, he also undertook 
+to rehearse whole pages out of Bradshaw, and tell you with all the 
+changes how to get from any station to any station in Great Britain 
+by the nearest and cheapest routes. . . .
+
+Codger lodged with a little deaf innocent old lady, Mrs. Araminta 
+Mergle, who was understood to be herself a very redoubtable 
+Character in the Gyp-Bedder class; about her he related quietly 
+absurd anecdotes.  He displayed a marvellous invention in ascribing 
+to her plausible expressions of opinion entirely identical in import 
+with those of the Oxford and Harvard Pragmatists, against whom he 
+waged a fierce obscure war. . . .
+
+It was Codger's function to teach me philosophy, philosophy! the 
+intimate wisdom of things.  He dealt in a variety of Hegelian stuff 
+like nothing else in the world, but marvellously consistent with 
+itself.  It was a wonderful web he spun out of that queer big active 
+childish brain that had never lusted nor hated nor grieved nor 
+feared nor passionately loved,--a web of iridescent threads.  He had 
+luminous final theories about Love and Death and Immortality, odd 
+matters they seemed for him to think about! and all his woven 
+thoughts lay across my perception of the realities of things, as 
+flimsy and irrelevant and clever and beautiful, oh!--as a dew-wet 
+spider's web slung in the morning sunshine across the black mouth of 
+a gun. . . .
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+All through those years of development I perceive now there must 
+have been growing in me, slowly, irregularly, assimilating to itself 
+all the phrases and forms of patriotism, diverting my religious 
+impulses, utilising my esthetic tendencies, my dominating idea, the 
+statesman's idea, that idea of social service which is the 
+protagonist of my story, that real though complex passion for 
+Making, making widely and greatly, cities, national order, 
+civilisation, whose interplay with all those other factors in life I 
+have set out to present.  It was growing in me--as one's bones grow, 
+no man intending it.
+
+I have tried to show how, quite early in my life, the fact of 
+disorderliness, the conception of social life as being a 
+multitudinous confusion out of hand, came to me.  One always of 
+course simplifies these things in the telling, but I do not think I 
+ever saw the world at large in any other terms.  I never at any 
+stage entertamed the idea which sustained my mother, and which 
+sustains so many people in the world,--the idea that the universe, 
+whatever superficial discords it may present, is as a matter of fact 
+"all right," is being steered to definite ends by a serene and 
+unquestionable God.  My mother thought that Order prevailed, and 
+that disorder was just incidental and foredoomed rebellion; I feel 
+and have always felt that order rebels against and struggles against 
+disorder, that order has an up-hill job, in gardens, experiments, 
+suburbs, everything alike; from the very beginnings of my experience 
+I discovered hostility to order, a constant escaping from control.
+
+The current of living and contemporary ideas in which my mind was 
+presently swimming made all in the same direction; in place of my 
+mother's attentive, meticulous but occasionally extremely irascible 
+Providence, the talk was all of the Struggle for Existenc and the 
+survival not of the Best--that was nonsense, but of the fittest to 
+survive.
+
+The attempts to rehabilitate Faith in the form of the 
+Individualist's LAISSEZ FAIRE never won upon me.  I disliked Herbert 
+Spencer all my life until I read his autobiography, and then I 
+laughed a little and loved him.  I remember as early as the City 
+Merchants' days how Britten and I scoffed at that pompous question-
+begging word "Evolution," having, so to speak, found it out.  
+Evolution, some illuminating talker had remarked at the Britten 
+lunch table, had led not only to man, but to the liver-fluke and 
+skunk, obviously it might lead anywhere; order came into things only 
+through the struggling mind of man.  That lit things wonderfully for 
+us.  When I went up to Cambridge I was perfectly clear that life was 
+a various and splendid disorder of forces that the spirit of man 
+sets itself to tame.  I have never since fallen away from that 
+persuasion.
+
+I do not think I was exceptionally precocious in reaching these 
+conclusions and a sort of religious finality for myself by eighteen 
+or nineteen.  I know men and women vary very much in these matters, 
+just as children do in learning to talk.  Some will chatter at 
+eighteen months and some will hardly speak until three, and the 
+thing has very little to do with their subsequent mental quality.  
+So it is with young people; some will begin their religious, their 
+social, their sexual interests at fourteen, some not until far on in 
+the twenties.  Britten and I belonged to one of the precocious 
+types, and Cossington very probably to another.  It wasn't that 
+there was anything priggish about any of us; we should have been 
+prigs to have concealed our spontaneous interests and ape the 
+theoretical boy.
+
+The world of man centred for my imagination in London, it still 
+centres there; the real and present world, that is to say, as 
+distinguished from the wonder-lands of atomic and microscopic 
+science and the stars and future time.  I had travelled scarcely at 
+all, I had never crossed the Channel, but I had read copiously and I 
+had formed a very good working idea of this round globe with its 
+mountains and wildernesses and forests and all the sorts and 
+conditions of human life that were scattered over its surface.  It 
+was all alive, I felt, and changing every day; how it was changing, 
+and the changes men might bring about, fascinated my mind beyond 
+measure.
+
+I used to find a charm in old maps that showed The World as Known to 
+the Ancients, and I wish I could now without any suspicion of self-
+deception write down compactly the world as it was known to me at 
+nineteen.  So far as extension went it was, I fancy, very like the 
+world I know now at forty-two; I had practically all the mountains 
+and seas, boundaries and races, products and possibilities that I 
+have now.  But its intension was very different.  All the interval 
+has been increasing and deepening my social knowledge, replacing 
+crude and second-hand impressions by felt and realised distinctions.
+
+In 1895--that was my last year with Britten, for I went up to 
+Cambridge in September--my vision of the world had much the same 
+relation to the vision I have to-day that an ill-drawn daub of a 
+mask has to the direct vision of a human face.  Britten and I looked 
+at our world and saw--what did we see?  Forms and colours side by 
+side that we had no suspicion were interdependent.  We had no 
+conception of the roots of things nor of the reaction of things.  It 
+did not seem to us, for example, that business had anything to do 
+with government, or that money and means affected the heroic issues 
+of war.  There were no wagons in our war game, and where there were 
+guns, there it was assumed the ammunition was gathered together.  
+Finance again was a sealed book to us; we did not so much connect it 
+with the broad aspects of human affairs as regard it as a sort of 
+intrusive nuisance to be earnestly ignored by all right-minded men.  
+We had no conception of the quality of politics, nor how "interests" 
+came into such affairs; we believed men were swayed by purely 
+intellectual convictions and were either right or wrong, honest or 
+dishonest (in which ease they deserved to be shot), good or bad.  We 
+knew nothing of mental inertia, and could imagine the opinion of a 
+whole nation changed by one lucid and convincing exposition.  We 
+were capable of the most incongruous transfers from the scroll of 
+history to our own times, we could suppose Brixton ravaged and 
+Hampstead burnt in civil wars for the succession to the throne, or 
+Cheapside a lane of death and the front of the Mansion House set 
+about with guillotines in the course of an accurately transposed 
+French Revolution.  We rebuilt London by Act of Parliament, and once 
+in a mood of hygienic enterprise we transferred its population EN 
+MASSE to the North Downs by an order of the Local Government Board.  
+We thought nothing of throwing religious organisations out of 
+employment or superseding all the newspapers by freely distributed 
+bulletins.  We could contemplate the possibility of laws abolishing 
+whole classes; we were equal to such a dream as the peaceful and 
+orderly proclamation of Communism from the steps of St. Paul's 
+Cathedral, after the passing of a simply worded bill,--a close and 
+not unnaturally an exciting division carrying the third reading.  I 
+remember quite distinctly evolving that vision.  We were then fully 
+fifteen and we were perfectly serious about it.  We were not fools; 
+it was simply that as yet we had gathered no experience at all of 
+the limits and powers of legislation and conscious collective 
+intention. . . .
+
+I think this statement does my boyhood justice, and yet I have my 
+doubts.  It is so hard now to say what one understood and what one 
+did not understand.  It isn't only that every day changed one's 
+general outlook, but also that a boy fluctuates between phases of 
+quite adult understanding and phases of tawdrily magnificent 
+puerility.  Sometimes I myself was in those tumbrils that went along 
+Cheapside to the Mansion House, a Sydney Cartonesque figure, a white 
+defeated Mirabean; sometimes it was I who sat judging and condemning 
+and ruling (sleeping in my clothes and feeding very simply) the soul 
+and autocrat of the Provisional Government, which occupied, of all 
+inconvenient places! the General Post Office at St. Martin's-le-
+Grand! . . .
+
+I cannot trace the development of my ideas at Cambridge, but I 
+believe the mere physical fact of going two hours' journey away from 
+London gave that place for the first time an effect of unity in my 
+imagination.  I got outside London.  It became tangible instead of 
+being a frame almost as universal as sea and sky.
+
+At Cambridge my ideas ceased to live in a duologue; in exchange for 
+Britten, with whom, however, I corresponded lengthily, stylishly and 
+self-consciously for some years, I had now a set of congenial 
+friends.  I got talk with some of the younger dons, I learnt to 
+speak in the Union, and in my little set we were all pretty busily 
+sharpening each other's wits and correcting each other's 
+interpretations.  Cambridge made politics personal and actual.  At 
+City Merchants' we had had no sense of effective contact; we 
+boasted, it is true, an under secretary and a colonial governor 
+among our old boys, but they were never real to us; such 
+distinguished sons as returned to visit the old school were allusive 
+and pleasant in the best Pinky Dinky style, and pretended to be in 
+earnest about nothing but our football and cricket, to mourn the 
+abolition of "water," and find a shuddering personal interest in the 
+ancient swishing block.  At Cambridge I felt for the first time that 
+I touched the thing that was going on.  Real living statesmen came 
+down to debate in the Union, the older dons had been their college 
+intimates, their sons and nephews expounded them to us and made them 
+real to us.  They invited us to entertain ideas; I found myself for 
+the first time in my life expected to read and think and discuss, my 
+secret vice had become a virtue.
+
+That combination-room world is at last larger and more populous and 
+various than the world of schoolmasters.  The Shoesmiths and Naylors 
+who had been the aristocracy of City Merchants' fell into their 
+place in my mind; they became an undistinguished mass on the more 
+athletic side of Pinky Dinkyism, and their hostility to ideas and to 
+the expression of ideas ceased to limit and trouble me.  The 
+brighter men of each generation stay up; these others go down to 
+propagate their tradition, as the fathers of families, as mediocre 
+professional men, as assistant masters in schools.  Cambridge which 
+perfects them is by the nature of things least oppressed by them,--
+except when it comes to a vote in Convocation.
+
+We were still in those days under the shadow of the great 
+Victorians.  I never saw Gladstone (as I never set eyes on the old 
+Queen), but he had resigned office only a year before I went up to 
+Trinity, and the Combination Rooms were full of personal gossip 
+about him and Disraeli and the other big figures of the gladiatorial 
+stage of Parlimentary history, talk that leaked copiously into such 
+sets as mine.  The ceiling of our guest chamber at Trinity was 
+glorious with the arms of Sir William Harcourt, whose Death Duties 
+had seemed at first like a socialist dawn.  Mr. Evesham we asked to 
+come to the Union every year, Masters, Chamberlain and the old Duke 
+of Devonshire; they did not come indeed, but their polite refusals 
+brought us all, as it were, within personal touch of them.  One 
+heard of cabinet councils and meetings at country houses.  Some of 
+us, pursuing such interests, went so far as to read political 
+memoirs and the novels of Disraeli and Mrs. Humphry Ward.  From 
+gossip, example and the illustrated newspapers one learnt something 
+of the way in which parties were split, coalitions formed, how 
+permanent officials worked and controlled their ministers, how 
+measures were brought forward and projects modified.
+
+And while I was getting the great leading figures on the political 
+stage, who had been presented to me in my schooldays not so much as 
+men as the pantomimic monsters of political caricature, while I was 
+getting them reduced in my imagination to the stature of humanity, 
+and their motives to the quality of impulses like my own, I was also 
+acquiring in my Tripos work a constantly developing and enriching 
+conception of the world of men as a complex of economic, 
+intellectual and moral processes. . . .
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Socialism is an intellectual Proteus, but to the men of my 
+generation it came as the revolt of the workers.  Rodbertus we never 
+heard of and the Fabian Society we did not understand; Marx and 
+Morris, the Chicago Anarchists, JUSTICE and Social Democratic 
+Federation (as it was then) presented socialism to our minds.  
+Hatherleigh was the leading exponent of the new doctrines in 
+Trinity, and the figure upon his wall of a huge-muscled, black-
+haired toiler swaggering sledgehammer in hand across a revolutionary 
+barricade, seemed the quintessence of what he had to expound.  
+Landlord and capitalist had robbed and enslaved the workers, and 
+were driving them quite automatically to inevitable insurrection.  
+They would arise and the capitalist system would flee and vanish 
+like the mists before the morning, like the dews before the sunrise, 
+giving place in the most simple and obvious manner to an era of 
+Right and Justice and Virtue and Well Being, and in short a 
+Perfectly Splendid Time.
+
+I had already discussed this sort of socialism under the guidance of 
+Britten, before I went up to Cambridge.  It was all mixed up with 
+ideas about freedom and natural virtue and a great scorn for kings, 
+titles, wealth and officials, and it was symbolised by the red ties 
+we wore.  Our simple verdict on existing arrangements was that they 
+were "all wrong."  The rich were robbers and knew it, kings and 
+princes were usurpers and knew it, religious teachers were impostors 
+in league with power, the economic system was an elaborate plot on 
+the part of the few to expropriate the many.  We went about feeling 
+scornful of all the current forms of life, forms that esteemed 
+themselves solid, that were, we knew, no more than shapes painted on 
+a curtain that was presently to be torn aside. . . .
+
+It was Hatherleigh's poster and his capacity for overstating things, 
+I think, that first qualified my simple revolutionary enthusiasm.  
+Perhaps also I had met with Fabian publications, but if I did I 
+forget the circumstances.  And no doubt my innate constructiveness 
+with its practical corollary of an analytical treatment of the 
+material supplied, was bound to push me on beyond this melodramatic 
+interpretation of human affairs.
+
+I compared that Working Man of the poster with any sort of working 
+man I knew.  I perceived that the latter was not going to change, 
+and indeed could not under any stimulus whatever be expected to 
+change, into the former.  It crept into my mind as slowly and surely 
+as the dawn creeps into a room that the former was not, as I had at 
+first rather glibly assumed, an "ideal," but a complete 
+misrepresentation of the quality and possibilities of things.
+
+I do not know now whether it was during my school-days or at 
+Cambridge that I first began not merely to see the world as a great 
+contrast of rich and poor, but to feel the massive effect of that 
+multitudinous majority of people who toil continually, who are for 
+ever anxious about ways and means, who are restricted, ill clothed, 
+ill fed and ill housed, who have limited outlooks and continually 
+suffer misadventures, hardships and distresses through the want of 
+money.  My lot had fallen upon the fringe of the possessing 
+minority; if I did not know the want of necessities I knew 
+shabbiness, and the world that let me go on to a university 
+education intimated very plainly that there was not a thing beyond 
+the primary needs that my stimulated imagination might demand that 
+it would not be an effort for me to secure.  A certain aggressive 
+radicalism against the ruling and propertied classes followed almost 
+naturally from my circumstances.  It did not at first connect itself 
+at all with the perception of a planless disorder in human affairs 
+that had been forced upon me by the atmosphere of my upbringing, nor 
+did it link me in sympathy with any of the profounder realities of 
+poverty.  It was a personal independent thing.  The dingier people 
+one saw in the back streets and lower quarters of Bromstead and 
+Penge, the drift of dirty children, ragged old women, street 
+loafers, grimy workers that made the social background of London, 
+the stories one heard of privation and sweating, only joined up very 
+slowly with the general propositions I was making about life.  We 
+could become splendidly eloquent about the social revolution and the 
+triumph of the Proletariat after the Class war, and it was only by a 
+sort of inspiration that it came to me that my bedder, a garrulous 
+old thing with a dusty black bonnet over one eye and an 
+ostentatiously clean apron outside the dark mysteries that clothed 
+her, or the cheeky little ruffians who yelled papers about the 
+streets, were really material to such questions.
+
+Directly any of us young socialists of Trinity found ourselves in 
+immediate contact with servants or cadgers or gyps or bedders or 
+plumbers or navvies or cabmen or railway porters we became 
+unconsciously and unthinkingly aristocrats.  Our voices altered, our 
+gestures altered.  We behaved just as all the other men, rich or 
+poor, swatters or sportsmen or Pinky Dinkys, behaved, and exactly as 
+we were expected to behave.  On the whole it is a population of poor 
+quality round about Cambridge, rather stunted and spiritless and 
+very difficult to idealise.  That theoretical Working Man of ours!--
+if we felt the clash at all we explained it, I suppose, by assuming 
+that he came from another part of the country; Esmeer, I remember, 
+who lived somewhere in the Fens, was very eloquent about the Cornish 
+fishermen, and Hatherleigh, who was a Hampshire man, assured us we 
+ought to know the Scottish miner.  My private fancy was for the 
+Lancashire operative because of his co-operative societies, and 
+because what Lancashire thinks to-day England thinks to-morrow. . . .  
+And also I had never been in Lancashire.
+
+By little increments of realisation it was that the profounder 
+verities of the problem of socialism came to me.  It helped me very 
+much that I had to go down to the Potteries several times to discuss 
+my future with my uncle and guardian; I walked about and saw Bursley 
+Wakes and much of the human aspects of organised industrialism at 
+close quarters for the first time.  The picture of a splendid 
+Working Man cheated out of his innate glorious possibilities, and 
+presently to arise and dash this scoundrelly and scandalous system 
+of private ownership to fragments, began to give place to a 
+limitless spectacle of inefficiency, to a conception of millions of 
+people not organised as they should be, not educated as they should 
+be, not simply prevented from but incapable of nearly every sort of 
+beauty, mostly kindly and well meaning, mostly incompetent, mostly 
+obstinate, and easily humbugged and easily diverted.  Even the 
+tragic and inspiring idea of Marx, that the poor were nearing a 
+limit of painful experience, and awakening to a sense of intolerable 
+wrongs, began to develop into the more appalling conception that the 
+poor were simply in a witless uncomfortable inconclusive way--
+"muddling along"; that they wanted nothing very definitely nor very 
+urgently, that mean fears enslaved them and mean satisfactions 
+decoyed them, that they took the very gift of life itself with a 
+spiritless lassitude, hoarding it, being rather anxious not to lose 
+it than to use it in any way whatever.
+
+The complete development of that realisation was the work of many 
+years.  I had only the first intimations at Cambridge.  But I did 
+have intimations.  Most acutely do I remember the doubts that 
+followed the visit of Chris Robinson.  Chris Robinson was heralded 
+by such heroic anticipations, and he was so entirely what we had not 
+anticipated.
+
+Hatherleigh got him to come, arranged a sort of meeting for him at 
+Redmayne's rooms in King's, and was very proud and proprietorial.  
+It failed to stir Cambridge at all profoundly.  Beyond a futile 
+attempt to screw up Hatherleigh made by some inexpert duffers who 
+used nails instead of screws and gimlets, there was no attempt to 
+rag.  Next day Chris Robinson went and spoke at Bennett Hall in 
+Newnham College, and left Cambridge in the evening amidst the cheers 
+of twenty men or so.  Socialism was at such a low ebb politically in 
+those days that it didn't even rouse men to opposition.
+
+And there sat Chris under that flamboyant and heroic Worker of the 
+poster, a little wrinkled grey-bearded apologetic man in ready-made 
+clothes, with watchful innocent brown eyes and a persistent and 
+invincible air of being out of his element.  He sat with his stout 
+boots tucked up under his chair, and clung to a teacup and saucer 
+and looked away from us into the fire, and we all sat about on 
+tables and chair-arms and windowsills and boxes and anywhere except 
+upon chairs after the manner of young men.  The only other chair 
+whose seat was occupied was the one containing his knitted woollen 
+comforter and his picturesque old beach-photographer's hat.  We were 
+all shy and didn't know how to take hold of him now we had got him, 
+and, which was disconcertingly unanticipated, he was manifestly 
+having the same difficulty with us.  We had expected to be gripped.
+
+"I'll not be knowing what to say to these Chaps," he repeated with a 
+north-country quality in his speech.
+
+We made reassuring noises.
+
+The Ambassador of the Workers stirred his tea earnestly through an 
+uncomfortable pause.
+
+"I'd best tell 'em something of how things are in Lancashire, what 
+with the new machines and all that," he speculated at last with red 
+reflections in his thoughtful eyes.
+
+We had an inexcusable dread that perhaps he would make a mess of the 
+meeting.
+
+But when he was no longer in the unaccustomed meshes of refined 
+conversation, but speaking with an audience before him, he became a 
+different man.  He declared he would explain to us just exactly what 
+socialism was, and went on at once to an impassioned contrast of 
+social conditions.  "You young men," he said "come from homes of 
+luxury; every need you feel is supplied--"
+
+We sat and stood and sprawled about him, occupying every inch of 
+Redmayne's floor space except the hearthrug-platform, and we 
+listened to him and thought him over.  He was the voice of wrongs 
+that made us indignant and eager.  We forgot for a time that he had 
+been shy and seemed not a little incompetent, his provincial accent 
+became a beauty of his earnest speech, we were carried away by his 
+indignations.  We looked with shining eyes at one another and at the 
+various dons who had dropped in and were striving to maintain a 
+front of judicious severity.  We felt more and more that social 
+injustice must cease, and cease forthwith.  We felt we could not 
+sleep upon it.  At the end we clapped and murmured our applause and 
+wanted badly to cheer.
+
+Then like a lancet stuck into a bladder came the heckling.  Denson, 
+that indolent, liberal-minded sceptic, did most of the questioning.  
+He lay contorted in a chair, with his ugly head very low, his legs 
+crossed and his left boot very high, and he pointed his remarks with 
+a long thin hand and occasionally adjusted the unstable glasses that 
+hid his watery eyes.  "I don't want to carp," he began.  "The 
+present system, I admit, stands condemned.  Every present system 
+always HAS stood condemned in the minds of intelligent men.  But 
+where it seems to me you get thin, is just where everybody has been 
+thin, and that's when you come to the remedy."
+
+"Socialism," said Chris Robinson, as if it answered everything, and 
+Hatherleigh said "Hear! Hear!" very resolutely.
+
+"I suppose I OUGHT to take that as an answer," said Denson, getting 
+his shoulder-blades well down to the seat of his chair; "but I 
+don't.  I don't, you know.  It's rather a shame to cross-examine you 
+after this fine address of yours"--Chris Robinson on the hearthrug 
+made acquiescent and inviting noises--"but the real question 
+remains how exactly are you going to end all these wrongs?  There 
+are the admimstrative questions.  If you abolish the private owner, 
+I admit you abolish a very complex and clumsy way of getting 
+businesses run, land controlled and things in general administered, 
+but you don't get rid of the need of administration, you know."
+
+"Democracy," said Chris Robinson.
+
+"Organised somehow," said Denson.  "And it's just the How perplexes 
+me.  I can quite easily imagine a socialist state administered in a 
+sort of scrambling tumult that would be worse than anything we have 
+got now.
+
+"Nothing could be worse than things are now," said Chris Robinson.  
+"I have seen little children--"
+
+"I submit life on an ill-provisioned raft, for example, could easily 
+be worse--or life in a beleagured town."
+
+Murmurs.
+
+They wrangled for some time, and it had the effect upon me of coming 
+out from the glow of a good matinee performance into the cold 
+daylight of late afternoon.  Chris Robinson did not shine in 
+conflict with Denson; he was an orator and not a dialectician, and 
+he missed Denson's points and displayed a disposition to plunge into 
+untimely pathos and indignation.  And Denson hit me curiously hard 
+with one of his shafts.  "Suppose," he said, "you found yourself 
+prime minister--"
+
+I looked at Chris Robinson, bright-eyed and his hair a little 
+ruffled and his whole being rhetorical, and measured him against the 
+huge machine of government muddled and mysterious.  Oh! but I was 
+perplexed!
+
+And then we took him back to Hatherleigh's rooms and drank beer and 
+smoked about him while he nursed his knee with hairy wristed hands 
+that protruded from his flannel shirt, and drank lemonade under the 
+cartoon of that emancipated Worker, and we had a great discursive 
+talk with him.
+
+"Eh! you should see our big meetings up north?" he said.
+
+Denson had ruffled him and worried him a good deal, and ever and 
+again he came back to that discussion.  "It's all very easy for your 
+learned men to sit and pick holes," he said, "while the children 
+suffer and die.  They don't pick holes up north.  They mean 
+business."
+
+He talked, and that was the most interesting part of it all, of his 
+going to work in a factory when he was twelve--" when you Chaps were 
+all with your mammies "--and how he had educated himself of nights 
+until he would fall asleep at his reading.
+
+"It's made many of us keen for all our lives," he remarked, "all 
+that clemming for education.  Why! I longed all through one winter 
+to read a bit of Darwin.  I must know about this Darwin if I die for 
+it, I said.  And I couldno' get the book."
+
+Hatherleigh made an enthusiastic noise and drank beer at him with 
+round eyes over the mug.
+
+"Well, anyhow I wasted no time on Greek and Latin," said Chris 
+Robinson.  "And one learns to go straight at a thing without 
+splitting straws.  One gets hold of the Elementals."
+
+(Well, did they?  That was the gist of my perplexity.)
+
+"One doesn't quibble," he said, returning to his rankling memory of 
+Denson, "while men decay and starve."
+
+"But suppose," I said, suddenly dropping into opposition, "the 
+alternatve is to risk a worse disaster--or do something patently 
+futile."
+
+"I don't follow that," said Chris Robinson.  "We don't propose 
+anything futile, so far as I can see."
+
+
+6
+
+
+The prevailing force in my undergraduate days was not Socialism but 
+Kiplingism.  Our set was quite exceptional in its socialistic 
+professions.  And we were all, you must understand, very distinctly 
+Imperialists also, and professed a vivid sense of the "White Man's 
+Burden."
+
+It is a little difficult now to get back to the feelings of that 
+period; Kipling has since been so mercilessly and exhaustively 
+mocked, criticised and torn to shreds;--never was a man so violently 
+exalted and then, himself assisting, so relentlessly called down.  
+But in the middle nineties this spectacled and moustached little 
+figure with its heavy chin and its general effect of vehement 
+gesticulation, its wild shouts of boyish enthusiasm for effective 
+force, its lyric delight in the sounds and colours, in the very 
+odours of empire, its wonderful discovery of machinery and cotton 
+waste and the under officer and the engineer, and "shop" as a poetic 
+dialect, became almost a national symbol.  He got hold of us 
+wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling and haunting quotations, he 
+stirred Britten and myself to futile imitations, he coloured the 
+very idiom of our conversation.  He rose to his climax with his 
+"Recessional," while I was still an undergraduate.
+
+What did he give me exactly?
+
+He helped to broaden my geographical sense immensely, and he 
+provided phrases for just that desire for discipline and devotion 
+and organised effort the Socialism of our time failed to express, 
+that the current socialist movement still fails, I think, to 
+express.  The sort of thing that follows, for example, tore 
+something out of my inmost nature and gave it a shape, and I took it 
+back from him shaped and let much of the rest of him, the tumult and 
+the bullying, the hysteria and the impatience, the incoherence and 
+inconsistency, go uncriticised for the sake of it:--
+
+
+"Keep ye the Law--be swift in all obedience--
+Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford,
+Make ye sure to each his own
+That he reap where he hath sown;
+By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord!"
+
+
+And then again, and for all our later criticism, this sticks in my 
+mind, sticks there now as quintessential wisdom:
+
+
+The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood an' stone;
+'E don't obey no orders unless they is 'is own;
+'E keeps 'is side-arms awful: 'e leaves 'em all about
+An' then comes up the regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out.
+     All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,
+     All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less,
+     All along of abby-nay, kul, an' hazar-ho,
+     Mind you keep your rifle an' yourself jus' so!"
+
+
+It is after all a secondary matter that Kipling, not having been 
+born and brought up in Bromstead and Penge, and the war in South 
+Africa being yet in the womb of time, could quite honestly entertain 
+the now remarkable delusion that England had her side-arms at that 
+time kept anything but "awful."  He learnt better, and we all learnt 
+with him in the dark years of exasperating and humiliating struggle 
+that followed, and I do not see that we fellow learners are 
+justified in turning resentfully upon him for a common ignorance and 
+assumption. . . .
+
+South Africa seems always painted on the back cloth of my Cambridge 
+memories.  How immense those disasters seemed at the time, disasters 
+our facile English world has long since contrived in any edifying or 
+profitable sense to forget!  How we thrilled to the shouting 
+newspaper sellers as the first false flush of victory gave place to 
+the realisation of defeat.  Far away there our army showed itself 
+human, mortal and human in the sight of all the world, the pleasant 
+officers we had imagined would change to wonderful heroes at the 
+first crackling of rifles, remained the pleasant, rather incompetent 
+men they had always been, failing to imagine, failing to plan and 
+co-operate, failing to grip.  And the common soldiers, too, they 
+were just what our streets and country-side had made them, no sudden 
+magic came out of the war bugles for them.  Neither splendid nor 
+disgraceful were they,--just ill-trained and fairly plucky and 
+wonderfully good-tempered men--paying for it.  And how it lowered 
+our vitality all that first winter to hear of Nicholson's Nek, and 
+then presently close upon one another, to realise the bloody waste 
+of Magersfontein, the shattering retreat from Stormberg, Colenso--
+Colenso, that blundering battle, with White, as it seemed, in 
+Ladysmith near the point of surrender! and so through the long 
+unfolding catalogue of bleak disillusionments, of aching, 
+unconcealed anxiety lest worse should follow.  To advance upon your 
+enemy singing about his lack of cleanliness and method went out of 
+fashion altogether!  The dirty retrogressive Boer vanished from our 
+scheme of illusion.
+
+All through my middle Cambridge period, the guns boomed and the 
+rifles crackled away there on the veldt, and the horsemen rode and 
+the tale of accidents and blundering went on.  Men, mules, horses, 
+stores and money poured into South Africa, and the convalescent 
+wounded streamed home.  I see it in my memory as if I had looked at 
+it through a window instead of through the pages of the illustrated 
+papers; I recall as if I had been there the wide open spaces, the 
+ragged hillsides, the open order attacks of helmeted men in khaki, 
+the scarce visible smoke of the guns, the wrecked trains in great 
+lonely places, the burnt isolated farms, and at last the blockhouses 
+and the fences of barbed wire uncoiling and spreading for endless 
+miles across the desert, netting the elusive enemy until at last, 
+though he broke the meshes again and again, we had him in the toils.  
+If one's attention strayed in the lecture-room it wandered to those 
+battle-fields.
+
+And that imagined panorama of war unfolds to an accompaniment of 
+yelling newsboys in the narrow old Cambridge streets, of the flicker 
+of papers hastily bought and torn open in the twilight, of the 
+doubtful reception of doubtful victories, and the insensate 
+rejoicings at last that seemed to some of us more shameful than 
+defeats. . . .
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+A book that stands out among these memories, that stimulated me 
+immensely so that I forced it upon my companions, half in the spirit 
+of propaganda and half to test it by their comments, was Meredith's 
+ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS.  It is one of the books that have made me.  
+In that I got a supplement and corrective of Kipling.  It was the 
+first detached and adverse criticism of the Englishman I had ever 
+encountered.  It must have been published already nine or ten years 
+when I read it.  The country had paid no heed to it, had gone on to 
+the expensive lessons of the War because of the dull aversion our 
+people feel for all such intimations, and so I could read it as a 
+book justified.  The war endorsed its every word for me, underlined 
+each warning indication of the gigantic dangers that gathered 
+against our system across the narrow seas.  It discovered Europe to 
+me, as watching and critical.
+
+But while I could respond to all its criticisms of my country's 
+intellectual indolence, of my country's want of training and 
+discipline and moral courage, I remember that the idea that on the 
+continent there were other peoples going ahead of us, mentally alert 
+while we fumbled, disciplined while we slouched, aggressive and 
+preparing to bring our Imperial pride to a reckoning, was extremely 
+novel and distasteful to me.  It set me worrying of nights.  It put 
+all my projects for social and political reconstruction upon a new 
+uncomfortable footing.  It made them no longer merely desirable but 
+urgent.  Instead of pride and the love of making one might own to a 
+baser motive.  Under Kipling's sway I had a little forgotten the 
+continent of Europe, treated it as a mere envious echo to our own 
+world-wide display.  I began now to have a disturbing sense as it 
+were of busy searchlights over the horizon. . . .
+
+One consequence of the patriotic chagrin Meredith produced in me was 
+an attempt to belittle his merit.  "It isn't a good novel, anyhow," 
+I said.
+
+The charge I brought against it was, I remember, a lack of unity.  
+It professed to be a study of the English situation in the early 
+nineties, but it was all deflected, I said, and all the interest was 
+confused by the story of Victor Radnor's fight with society to 
+vindicate the woman he had loved and never married.  Now in the 
+retrospect and with a mind full of bitter enlightenment, I can do 
+Meredith justice, and admit the conflict was not only essential but 
+cardinal in his picture, that the terrible inflexibility of the rich 
+aunts and the still more terrible claim of Mrs. Burman Radnor, the 
+"infernal punctilio," and Dudley Sowerby's limitations, were the 
+central substance of that inalertness the book set itself to assail.  
+So many things have been brought together in my mind that were once 
+remotely separated.  A people that will not valiantly face and 
+understand and admit love and passion can understand nothing 
+whatever.  But in those days what is now just obvious truth to me 
+was altogether outside my range of comprehension. . . .
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+As I seek to recapitulate the interlacing growth of my apprehension 
+of the world, as I flounder among the half-remembered developments 
+that found me a crude schoolboy and left me a man, there comes out, 
+as if it stood for all the rest, my first holiday abroad.  That did 
+not happen until I was twenty-two.  I was a fellow of Trinity, and 
+the Peace of Vereeniging had just been signed.
+
+I went with a man named Willersley, a man some years senior to 
+myself, who had just missed a fellowship and the higher division of 
+the Civil Service, and who had become an enthusiastic member of the 
+London School Board, upon which the cumulative vote and the support 
+of the "advanced" people had placed him.  He had, like myself, a 
+small independent income that relieved him of any necessity to earn 
+a living, and he had a kindred craving for social theorising and 
+some form of social service.  He had sought my acquaintance after 
+reading a paper of mine (begotten by the visit of Chris Robinson) on 
+the limits of pure democracy.  It had marched with some thoughts of 
+his own.
+
+We went by train to Spiez on the Lake of Thun, then up the Gemmi, 
+and thence with one or two halts and digressions and a little modest 
+climbing we crossed over by the Antrona pass (on which we were 
+benighted) into Italy, and by way of Domo D'ossola and the Santa 
+Maria Maggiore valley to Cannobio, and thence up the lake to Locarno 
+(where, as I shall tell, we stayed some eventful days) and so up the 
+Val Maggia and over to Airolo and home.
+
+As I write of that long tramp of ours, something of its freshness 
+and enlargement returns to me.  I feel again the faint pleasant 
+excitement of the boat train, the trampling procession of people 
+with hand baggage and laden porters along the platform of the 
+Folkestone pier, the scarcely perceptible swaying of the moored boat 
+beneath our feet.  Then, very obvious and simple, the little emotion 
+of standing out from the homeland and seeing the long white Kentish 
+cliffs recede.  One walked about the boat doing one's best not to 
+feel absurdly adventurous, and presently a movement of people 
+directed one's attention to a white lighthouse on a cliff to the 
+east of us, coming up suddenly; and then one turned to scan the 
+little different French coast villages, and then, sliding by in a 
+pale sunshine came a long wooden pier with oddly dressed children 
+upon it, and the clustering town of Boulogne.
+
+One took it all with the outward calm that became a young man of 
+nearly three and twenty, but one was alive to one's finger-tips with 
+pleasing little stimulations.  The custom house examination excited 
+one, the strangeness of a babble in a foreign tongue; one found the 
+French of City Merchants' and Cambridge a shy and viscous flow, and 
+then one was standing in the train as it went slowly through the 
+rail-laid street to Boulogne Ville, and one looked out at the world 
+in French, porters in blouses, workmen in enormous purple trousers, 
+police officers in peaked caps instead of helmets and romantically 
+cloaked, big carts, all on two wheels instead of four, green 
+shuttered casements instead of sash windows, and great numbers of 
+neatly dressed women in economical mourning.
+
+"Oh! there's a priest!" one said, and was betrayed into suchlike 
+artless cries.
+
+It was a real other world, with different government and different 
+methods, and in the night one was roused from uneasy slumbers and 
+sat blinking and surly, wrapped up in one's couverture and with 
+one's oreiller all awry, to encounter a new social phenomenon, the 
+German official, so different in manner from the British; and when 
+one woke again after that one had come to Bale, and out one tumbled 
+to get coffee in Switzerland. . . .
+
+I have been over that route dozens of times since, but it still 
+revives a certain lingering youthfulness, a certain sense of 
+cheerful release in me.
+
+I remember that I and Willersley became very sociological as we ran 
+on to Spiez, and made all sorts of generalisations from the steeply 
+sloping fields on the hillsides, and from the people we saw on 
+platforms and from little differences in the way things were done.
+
+The clean prosperity of Bale and Switzerland, the big clean 
+stations, filled me with patriotic misgivings, as I thought of the 
+vast dirtiness of London, the mean dirtiness of Cambridgeshire.  It 
+came to me that perhaps my scheme of international values was all 
+wrong, that quite stupendous possibilities and challenges for us and 
+our empire might be developing here--and I recalled Meredith's 
+Skepsey in France with a new understanding.
+
+Willersley had dressed himself in a world-worn Norfolk suit of 
+greenish grey tweeds that ended unfamiliarly at his rather 
+impending, spectacled, intellectual visage.  I didn't, I remember, 
+like the contrast of him with the drilled Swiss and Germans about 
+us.  Convict coloured stockings and vast hobnail boots finished him 
+below, and all his luggage was a borrowed rucksac that he had tied 
+askew.  He did not want to shave in the train, but I made him at one 
+of the Swiss stations--I dislike these Oxford slovenlinesses--and 
+then confound him! he cut himself and bled. . . .
+
+Next morning we were breathing a thin exhilarating air that seemed 
+to have washed our very veins to an incredible cleanliness, and 
+eating hard-boiled eggs in a vast clear space of rime-edged rocks, 
+snow-mottled, above a blue-gashed glacier.  All about us the 
+monstrous rock surfaces rose towards the shining peaks above, and 
+there were winding moraines from which the ice had receded, and then 
+dark clustering fir trees far below.
+
+I had an extraordinary feeling of having come out of things, of 
+being outside.
+
+"But this is the round world!" I said, with a sense of never having 
+perceived it before; "this is the round world!"
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+That holiday was full of big comprehensive effects; the first view 
+of the Rhone valley and the distant Valaisian Alps, for example, 
+which we saw from the shoulder of the mountain above the Gemmi, and 
+the early summer dawn breaking over Italy as we moved from our 
+night's crouching and munched bread and chocolate and stretched our 
+stiff limbs among the tumbled and precipitous rocks that hung over 
+Lake Cingolo, and surveyed the winding tiring rocky track going down 
+and down to Antronapiano.
+
+And our thoughts were as comprehensive as our impressions.  
+Willersley's mind abounded in historical matter; he had an 
+inaccurate abundant habit of topographical reference; he made me see 
+and trace and see again the Roman Empire sweep up these winding 
+valleys, and the coming of the first great Peace among the warring 
+tribes of men. . . .
+
+In the retrospect each of us seems to have been talking about our 
+outlook almost continually.  Each of us, you see, was full of the 
+same question, very near and altogether predominant to us, the 
+question: "What am I going to do with my life?"  He saw it almost as 
+importantly as I, but from a different angle, because his choice was 
+largely made and mine still hung in the balance.
+
+"I feel we might do so many things," I said, "and everything that 
+calls one, calls one away from something else."
+
+Willersley agreed without any modest disavowals.
+
+"We have got to think out," he said, "just what we are and what we 
+are up to.  We've got to do that now.  And then--it's one of those 
+questions it is inadvisable to reopen subsequently."
+
+He beamed at me through his glasses.  The sententious use of long 
+words was a playful habit with him, that and a slight deliberate 
+humour, habits occasional Extension Lecturing was doing very much to 
+intensify.
+
+"You've made your decision?"
+
+He nodded with a peculiar forward movement of his head.
+
+"How would you put it?"
+
+"Social Service--education.  Whatever else matters or doesn't 
+matter, it seems to me there is one thing we MUST have and increase, 
+and that is the number of people who can think a little--and have "--
+he beamed again--" an adequate sense of causation."
+
+"You're sure it's worth while."
+
+"For me--certainly.  I don't discuss that any more."
+
+"I don't limit myself too narrowly," he added.  "After all, the work 
+is all one.  We who know, we who feel, are building the great modern 
+state, joining wall to wall and way to way, the new great England 
+rising out of the decaying old . . . we are the real statesmen--I 
+like that use of 'statesmen.'. . ."
+
+"Yes," I said with many doubts.  "Yes, of course. . . ."
+
+Willersley is middle-aged now, with silver in his hair and a 
+deepening benevolence in his always amiable face, and he has very 
+fairly kept his word.  He has lived for social service and to do 
+vast masses of useful, undistinguished, fertilising work.  Think of 
+the days of arid administrative plodding and of contention still 
+more arid and unrewarded, that he must have spent!  His little 
+affectations of gesture and manner, imitative affectations for the 
+most part, have increased, and the humorous beam and the humorous 
+intonations have become a thing he puts on every morning like an old 
+coat.  His devotion is mingled with a considerable whimsicality, and 
+they say he is easily flattered by subordinates and easily offended 
+into opposition by colleagues; he has made mistakes at times and 
+followed wrong courses, still there he is, a flat contradiction to 
+all the ordinary doctrine of motives, a man who has foregone any 
+chances of wealth and profit, foregone any easier paths to 
+distinction, foregone marriage and parentage, in order to serve the 
+community.  He does it without any fee or reward except his personal 
+self-satisfaction in doing this work, and he does it without any 
+hope of future joys and punishments, for he is an implacable 
+Rationalist.  No doubt he idealises himself a little, and dreams of 
+recognition.  No doubt he gets his pleasure from a sense of power, 
+from the spending and husbanding of large sums of public money, and 
+from the inevitable proprietorship he must feel in the fair, fine, 
+well-ordered schools he has done so much to develop.  "But for me," 
+he can say, "there would have been a Job about those diagrams, and 
+that subject or this would have been less ably taught." . . .
+
+The fact remains that for him the rewards have been adequate, if not 
+to content at any rate to keep him working.  Of course he covets the 
+notice of the world he has served, as a lover covets the notice of 
+his mistress.  Of course he thinks somewhere, somewhen, he will get 
+credit.  Only last year I heard some men talking of him, and they 
+were noting, with little mean smiles, how he had shown himself self-
+conscious while there was talk of some honorary degree-giving or 
+other; it would, I have no doubt, please him greatly if his work 
+were to flower into a crimson gown in some Academic parterre.  Why 
+shouldn't it?  But that is incidental vanity at the worst; he goes 
+on anyhow.  Most men don't.
+
+But we had our walk twenty years and more ago now.  He was oldish 
+even then as a young man, just as he is oldish still in middle age.  
+Long may his industrious elderliness flourish for the good of the 
+world!  He lectured a little in conversation then; he lectures more 
+now and listens less, toilsomely disentangling what you already 
+understand, giving you in detail the data you know; these are things 
+like callosities that come from a man's work.
+
+Our long three weeks' talk comes back to me as a memory of ideas and 
+determinations slowly growing, all mixed up with a smell of wood 
+smoke and pine woods and huge precipices and remote gleams of snow-
+fields and the sound of cascading torrents rushing through deep 
+gorges far below.  It is mixed, too, with gossips with waitresses 
+and fellow travellers, with my first essays in colloquial German and 
+Italian, with disputes about the way to take, and other things that 
+I will tell of in another section.  But the white passion of human 
+service was our dominant theme.  Not simply perhaps nor altogether 
+unselfishly, but quite honestly, and with at least a frequent self-
+forgetfulness, did we want to do fine and noble things, to help in 
+their developing, to lessen misery, to broaden and exalt life.  It 
+is very hard--perhaps it is impossible--to present in a page or two 
+the substance and quality of nearly a month's conversation, 
+conversation that is casual and discursive in form, that ranges 
+carelessly from triviality to immensity, and yet is constantly 
+resuming a constructive process, as workmen on a wall loiter and 
+jest and go and come back, and all the while build.
+
+We got it more and more definite that the core of our purpose 
+beneath all its varied aspects must needs be order and discipline.  
+"Muddle," said I, "is the enemy."  That remains my belief to this 
+day.  Clearness and order, light and foresight, these things I know 
+for Good.  It was muddle had just given us all the still freshly 
+painful disasters and humiliations of the war, muddle that gives us 
+the visibly sprawling disorder of our cities and industrial country-
+side, muddle that gives us the waste of life, the limitations, 
+wretchedness and unemployment of the poor.  Muddle!  I remember 
+myself quoting Kipling--
+
+
+    "All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,
+     All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less."
+
+
+"We build the state," we said over and over again.  "That is what we 
+are for--servants of the new reorganisation!"
+
+We planned half in earnest and half Utopianising, a League of Social 
+Service.
+
+We talked of the splendid world of men that might grow out of such 
+unpaid and ill-paid work as we were setting our faces to do.  We 
+spoke of the intricate difficulties, the monstrous passive 
+resistances, the hostilities to such a development as we conceived 
+our work subserved, and we spoke with that underlying confidence in 
+the invincibility of the causes we adopted that is natural to young 
+and scarcely tried men.
+
+We talked much of the detailed life of politics so far as it was 
+known to us, and there Willersley was more experienced and far 
+better informed than I; we discussed possible combinations and 
+possible developments, and the chances of some great constructive 
+movement coming from the heart-searchings the Boer war had 
+occasioned.  We would sink to gossip--even at the Suetonius level.  
+Willersley would decline towards illuminating anecdotes that I 
+capped more or less loosely from my private reading.  We were 
+particularly wise, I remember, upon the management of newspapers, 
+because about that we knew nothing whatever.  We perceived that 
+great things were to be done through newspapers.  We talked of 
+swaying opinion and moving great classes to massive action.
+
+Men are egotistical even in devotion.  All our splendid projects 
+were thickset with the first personal pronoun.  We both could write, 
+and all that we said in general terms was reflected in the 
+particular in our minds; it was ourselves we saw, and no others, 
+writing and speaking that moving word.  We had already produced 
+manuscript and passed the initiations of proof reading; I had been a 
+frequent speaker in the Union, and Willersley was an active man on 
+the School Board.  Our feet were already on the lower rungs that led 
+up and up.  He was six and twenty, and I twenty-two.  We intimated 
+our individual careers in terms of bold expectation.  I had 
+prophetic glimpses of walls and hoardings clamorous with "Vote for 
+Remington," and Willersley no doubt saw himself chairman of this 
+committee and that, saying a few slightly ironical words after the 
+declaration of the poll, and then sitting friendly beside me on the 
+government benches.  There was nothing impossible in such dreams.  
+Why not the Board of Education for him?  My preference at that time 
+wavered between the Local Government Board--I had great ideas about 
+town-planning, about revisions of municipal areas and re-organised 
+internal transit--and the War Office.  I swayed strongly towards the 
+latter as the journey progressed.  My educational bias came later.
+
+The swelling ambitions that have tramped over Alpine passes!  How 
+many of them, like mine, have come almost within sight of 
+realisation before they failed?
+
+There were times when we posed like young gods (of unassuming 
+exterior), and times when we were full of the absurdest little 
+solicitudes about our prospects.  There were times when one surveyed 
+the whole world of men as if it was a little thing at one's feet, 
+and by way of contrast I remember once lying in bed--it must have 
+been during this holiday, though I cannot for the life of me fix 
+where--and speculating whether perhaps some day I might not be a 
+K. C. B., Sir Richard Remington, K. C. B., M. P.
+
+But the big style prevailed. . . .
+
+We could not tell from minute to minute whether we were planning for 
+a world of solid reality, or telling ourselves fairy tales about 
+this prospect of life.  So much seemed possible, and everything we 
+could think of so improbable.  There were lapses when it seemed to 
+me I could never be anything but just the entirely unimportant and 
+undistinguished young man I was for ever and ever.  I couldn't even 
+think of myself as five and thirty.
+
+Once I remember Willersley going over a list of failures, and why 
+they had failed--but young men in the twenties do not know much 
+about failures.
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+Willersley and I professed ourselves Socialists, but by this time I 
+knew my Rodbertus as well as my Marx, and there was much in our 
+socialism that would have shocked Chris Robinson as much as anything 
+in life could have shocked him.  Socialism as a simple democratic 
+cry we had done with for ever.  We were socialists because 
+Individualism for us meant muddle, meant a crowd of separated, 
+undisciplined little people all obstinately and ignorantly doing 
+things jarringly, each one in his own way.  "Each," I said quoting 
+words of my father's that rose apt in my memory, "snarling from his 
+own little bit of property, like a dog tied to a cart's tail."
+
+"Essentially," said Willersley, "essentially we're for conscription, 
+in peace and war alike.  The man who owns property is a public 
+official and has to behave as such.  That's the gist of socialism as 
+I understand it."
+
+"Or be dismissed from his post," I said, " and replaced by some 
+better sort of official.  A man's none the less an official because 
+he's irresponsible.  What he does with his property affects people 
+just the same.  Private!  No one is really private but an outlaw. . . .
+
+Order and devotion were the very essence of our socialism, and a 
+splendid collective vigour and happiness its end.  We projected an 
+ideal state, an organised state as confident and powerful as modern 
+science, as balanced and beautiful as a body, as beneficent as 
+sunshine, the organised state that should end muddle for ever; it 
+ruled all our ideals and gave form to all our ambitions.
+
+Every man was to be definitely related to that, to have his 
+predominant duty to that.  Such was the England renewed we had in 
+mind, and how to serve that end, to subdue undisciplined worker and 
+undisciplined wealth to it, and make the Scientific Commonweal, 
+King, was the continuing substance of our intercourse.
+
+
+
+11
+
+
+Every day the wine of the mountains was stronger in our blood, and 
+the flush of our youth deeper.  We would go in the morning sunlight 
+along some narrow Alpine mule-path shouting large suggestions for 
+national re-organisation, and weighing considerations as lightly as 
+though the world was wax in our hands.  "Great England," we said in 
+effect, over and over again, "and we will be among the makers!  
+England renewed!  The country has been warned; it has learnt its 
+lesson.  The disasters and anxieties of the war have sunk in.  
+England has become serious. . . .  Oh! there are big things before 
+us to do; big enduring things!"
+
+One evening we walked up to the loggia of a little pilgrimage 
+church, I forget its name, that stands out on a conical hill at the 
+head of a winding stair above the town of Locarno.  Down below the 
+houses clustered amidst a confusion of heat-bitten greenery.   I had 
+been sitting silently on the parapet, looking across to the purple 
+mountain masses where Switzerland passes into Italy, and the drift 
+of our talk seemed suddenly to gather to a head.
+
+I broke into speech, giving form to the thoughts that had been 
+accumulating.  My words have long since passed out of my memory, the 
+phrases of familiar expression have altered for me, but the 
+substance remains as clear as ever.  I said how we were in our 
+measure emperors and kings, men undriven, free to do as we pleased 
+with life; we classed among the happy ones, our bread and common 
+necessities were given us for nothing, we had abilities,--it wasn't 
+modesty but cowardice to behave as if we hadn't--and Fortune watched 
+us to see what we might do with opportunity and the world.
+
+"There are so many things to do, you see," began Willersley, in his 
+judicial lecturer's voice.
+
+"So many things we may do," I interrupted, "with all these years 
+before us. . . .  We're exceptional men.  It's our place, our duty, 
+to do things."
+
+"Here anyhow," I said, answering the faint amusement of his face; 
+"I've got no modesty.  Everything conspires to set me up.  Why 
+should I run about like all those grubby little beasts down there, 
+seeking nothing but mean little vanities and indulgencies--and then 
+take credit for modesty?  I KNOW I am capable.  I KNOW I have 
+imagination.  Modesty!  I know if I don't attempt the very biggest 
+things in life I am a damned shirk.  The very biggest!  Somebody has 
+to attempt them.  I feel like a loaded gun that is only a little 
+perplexed because it has to find out just where to aim itself. . . ."
+
+The lake and the frontier villages, a white puff of steam on the 
+distant railway to Luino, the busy boats and steamers trailing 
+triangular wakes of foam, the long vista eastward towards 
+battlemented Bellinzona, the vast mountain distances, now tinged 
+with sunset light, behind this nearer landscape, and the southward 
+waters with remote coast towns shining dimly, waters that merged at 
+last in a luminous golden haze, made a broad panoramic spectacle.  
+It was as if one surveyed the world,--and it was like the games I 
+used to set out upon my nursery floor.  I was exalted by it; I felt 
+larger than men.  So kings should feel.
+
+That sense of largness came to me then, and it has come to me since, 
+again and again, a splendid intimation or a splendid vanity.  Once, 
+I remember, when I looked at Genoa from the mountain crest behind 
+the town and saw that multitudinous place in all its beauty of width 
+and abundance and clustering human effort, and once as I was 
+steaming past the brown low hills of Staten Island towards the 
+towering vigour and clamorous vitality of New York City, that mood 
+rose to its quintessence.  And once it came to me, as I shall tell, 
+on Dover cliffs.  And a hundred times when I have thought of England 
+as our country might be, with no wretched poor, no wretched rich, a 
+nation armed and ordered, trained and purposeful amidst its vales 
+and rivers, that emotion of collective ends and collective purposes 
+has returned to me.  I felt as great as humanity.  For a brief 
+moment I was humanity, looking at the world I had made and had still 
+to make. . . .
+
+
+
+12
+
+
+And mingled with these dreams of power and patriotic service there 
+was another series of a different quality and a different colour, 
+like the antagonistic colour of a shot silk.  The white life and the 
+red life, contrasted and interchanged, passing swiftly at a turn 
+from one to another, and refusing ever to mingle peacefully one with 
+the other.  I was asking myself openly and distinctly: what are you 
+going to do for the world?  What are you going to do with yourself? 
+and with an increasing strength and persistence Nature in spite of 
+my averted attention was asking me in penetrating undertones: what 
+are you going to do about this other fundamental matter, the beauty 
+of girls and women and your desire for them?
+
+I have told of my sisterless youth and the narrow circumstances of 
+my upbringing.  It made all women-kind mysterious to me.  If it had 
+not been for my Staffordshire cousins I do not think I should have 
+known any girls at all until I was twenty.  Of Staffordshire I will 
+tell a little later.  But I can remember still how through all those 
+ripening years, the thought of women's beauty, their magic presence 
+in the world beside me and the unknown, untried reactions of their 
+intercourse, grew upon me and grew, as a strange presence grows in a 
+room when one is occupied by other things.  I busied myself and 
+pretended to be wholly occupied, and there the woman stood, full 
+half of life neglected, and it seemed to my averted mind sometimes 
+that she was there clad and dignified and divine, and sometimes 
+Aphrodite shining and commanding, and sometimes that Venus who 
+stoops and allures.
+
+This travel abroad seemed to have released a multitude of things in 
+my mind; the clear air, the beauty of the sunshine, the very blue of 
+the glaciers made me feel my body and quickened all those 
+disregarded dreams.  I saw the sheathed beauty of women's forms all 
+about me, in the cheerful waitresses at the inns, in the pedestrians 
+one encountered in the tracks, in the chance fellow travellers at 
+the hotel tables.  "Confound it!" said I, and talked all the more 
+zealously of that greater England that was calling us.
+
+I remember that we passed two Germans, an old man and a tall fair 
+girl, father and daughter, who were walking down from Saas.   She 
+came swinging and shining towards us, easy and strong.  I worshipped 
+her as she approached.
+
+"Gut Tag!" said Willersley, removing his hat.
+
+"Morgen!" said the old man, saluting.
+
+I stared stockishly at the girl, who passed with an indifferent 
+face.
+
+That sticks in my mind as a picture remains in a room, it has kept 
+there bright and fresh as a thing seen yesterday, for twenty 
+years. . . .
+
+I flirted hesitatingly once or twice with comely serving girls, and 
+was a little ashamed lest Willersley should detect the keen interest 
+I took in them, and then as we came over the pass from Santa Maria 
+Maggiore to Cannobio, my secret preoccupation took me by surprise 
+and flooded me and broke down my pretences.
+
+The women in that valley are very beautiful--women vary from valley 
+to valley in the Alps and are plain and squat here and divinities 
+five miles away--and as we came down we passed a group of five or 
+six of them resting by the wayside.  Their burthens were beside 
+them, and one like Ceres held a reaping hook in her brown hand.  She 
+watched us approaching and smiled faintly, her eyes at mine.
+
+There was some greeting, and two of them laughed together.
+
+We passed.
+
+"Glorious girls they were," said Willersley, and suddenly an immense 
+sense of boredom enveloped me.  I saw myself striding on down that 
+winding road, talking of politics and parties and bills of 
+parliament and all sorts of dessicated things.  That road seemed to 
+me to wind on for ever down to dust and infinite dreariness.  I knew 
+it for a way of death.  Reality was behind us.
+
+Willersley set himself to draw a sociological moral.  "I'm not so 
+sure," he said in a voice of intense discriminations, "after all, 
+that agricultural work isn't good for women."
+
+"Damn agricultural work!" I said, and broke out into a vigorous 
+cursing of all I held dear.  "Fettered things we are!" I cried.  "I 
+wonder why I stand it!"
+
+"Stand what?"
+
+"Why don't I go back and make love to those girls and let the world 
+and you and everything go hang?  Deep breasts and rounded limbs--and 
+we poor emasculated devils go tramping by with the blood of youth in 
+us! . . ."
+
+"I'm not quite sure, Remington," said Willersley, looking at me with 
+a deliberately quaint expression over his glasses, "that picturesque 
+scenery is altogether good for your morals."
+
+That fever was still in my blood when we came to Locarno.
+
+
+
+13
+
+
+Along the hot and dusty lower road between the Orrido of Traffiume 
+and Cannobio Willersley had developed his first blister.  And partly 
+because of that and partly because there was a bag at the station 
+that gave us the refreshment of clean linen and partly because of 
+the lazy lower air into which we had come, we decided upon three or 
+four days' sojourn in the Empress Hotel.
+
+We dined that night at a table-d'hote, and I found myself next to an 
+Englishwoman who began a conversation that was resumed presently in 
+the hotel lounge.  She was a woman of perhaps thirty-three or 
+thirty-four, slenderly built, with a warm reddish skin and very 
+abundant fair golden hair, the wife of a petulant-looking heavy-
+faced man of perhaps fifty-three, who smoked a cigar and dozed over 
+his coffee and presently went to bed.  "He always goes to bed like 
+that," she confided startlingly.  "He sleeps after all his meals.  I 
+never knew such a man to sleep."
+
+Then she returned to our talk, whatever it was.
+
+We had begun at the dinner table with itineraries and the usual 
+topographical talk, and she had envied our pedestrian travel.  "My 
+husband doesn't walk," she said.  "His heart is weak and he cannot 
+manage the hills."
+
+There was something friendly and adventurous in her manner; she 
+conveyed she liked me, and when presently Willersley drifted off to 
+write letters our talk sank at once to easy confidential undertones.  
+I felt enterprising, and indeed it is easy to be daring with people 
+one has never seen before and may never see again.  I said I loved 
+beautiful scenery and all beautiful things, and the pointing note in 
+my voice made her laugh.  She told me I had bold eyes, and so far as 
+I can remember I said she made them bold.  "Blue they are," she 
+remarked, smiling archly.  "I like blue eyes."  Then I think we 
+compared ages, and she said she was the Woman of Thirty, "George 
+Moore's Woman of Thirty."
+
+I had not read George Moore at the time, but I pretended to 
+understand.
+
+That, I think, was our limit that evening.  She went to bed, smiling 
+good-night quite prettily down the big staircase, and I and 
+Willersley went out to smoke in the garden.  My head was full of 
+her, and I found it necessary to talk about her.  So I made her a 
+problem in sociology.  "Who the deuce are these people?" I said, and 
+how do they get a living?  They seem to have plenty of money.  He 
+strikes me as being--Willersley, what is a drysalter?  I think he's 
+a retired drysalter."
+
+Willersley theorised while I thought of the woman and that 
+provocative quality of dash she had displayed.  The next day at 
+lunch she and I met like old friends.  A huge mass of private 
+thinking during the interval had been added to our effect upon one 
+another.  We talked for a time of insignificant things.
+
+"What do you do," she asked rather quickly, "after lunch?  Take a 
+siesta?"
+
+"Sometimes," I said, and hung for a moment eye to eye.
+
+We hadn't a doubt of each other, but my heart was beating like a 
+steamer propeller when it lifts out of the water.
+
+"Do you get a view from your room?" she asked after a pause.
+
+"It's on the third floor, Number seventeen, near the staircase.  My 
+friend's next door."
+
+She began to talk of books.  She was interested in Christian 
+Science, she said, and spoke of a book.  I forget altogether what 
+that book was called, though I remember to this day with the utmost 
+exactness the purplish magenta of its cover.  She said she would 
+lend it to me and hesitated.
+
+Wlllersley wanted to go for an expedition across the lake that 
+afternoon, but I refused.  He made some other proposals that I 
+rejected abruptly.  " I shall write in my room," I said.
+
+"Why not write down here?"
+
+"I shall write in my room," I snarled like a thwarted animal, and he 
+looked at me curiously.  "Very well," he said; "then I'll make some 
+notes and think about that order of ours out under the magnolias."
+
+I hovered about the lounge for a time buying postcards and 
+feverishly restless, watching the movements of the other people.  
+Finally I went up to my room and sat down by the windows, staring 
+out.  There came a little tap at the unlocked door and in an 
+instant, like the go of a taut bowstring, I was up and had it open.
+
+"Here is that book," she said, and we hesitated.
+
+"COME IN!" I whispered, trembling from head to foot.
+
+"You're just a boy," she said in a low tone.
+
+I did not feel a bit like a lover, I felt like a burglar with the 
+safe-door nearly opened.  "Come in," I said almost impatiently, for 
+anyone might be in the passage, and I gripped her wrist and drew her 
+towards me.
+
+"What do you mean?" she answered with a faint smile on her lips, and 
+awkward and yielding.
+
+I shut the door behind her, still holding her with one hand, then 
+turned upon her--she was laughing nervously--and without a word drew 
+her to me and kissed her.  And I remember that as I kissed her she 
+made a little noise almost like the purring miaow with which a cat 
+will greet one and her face, close to mine, became solemn and 
+tender.
+
+She was suddenly a different being from the discontented wife who 
+had tapped a moment since on my door, a woman transfigured. . . .
+
+That evening I came down to dinner a monster of pride, for behold! I 
+was a man.  I felt myself the most wonderful and unprecedented of 
+adventurers.  It was hard to believe that any one in the world 
+before had done as much.  My mistress and I met smiling, we carried 
+things off admirably, and it seemed to me that Willersley was the 
+dullest old dog in the world.  I wanted to give him advice.  I 
+wanted to give him derisive pokes.  After dinner and coffee in the 
+lounge I was too excited and hilarious to go to bed, I made him come 
+with me down to the cafe under the arches by the pier, and there 
+drank beer and talked extravagant nonsense about everything under 
+the sun, in order not to talk about the happenings of the afternoon.  
+All the time something shouted within me: "I am a man!  I am a 
+man!" . . .
+
+"What shall we do to-morrow?" said he.
+
+"I'm for loafing," I said.  "Let's row in the morning and spend to-
+morrow afternoon just as we did to-day."
+
+"They say the church behind the town is worth seeing."
+
+"We'll go up about sunset; that's the best time for it.  We can 
+start about five."
+
+We heard music, and went further along the arcade to discover a 
+place where girls in operatic Swiss peasant costume were singing and 
+dancing on a creaking, protesting little stage.  I eyed their 
+generous display of pink neck and arm with the seasoned eye of a man 
+who has lived in the world.  Life was perfectly simple and easy, I 
+felt, if one took it the right way.
+
+Next day Willersley wanted to go on, but I delayed.  Altogether I 
+kept him back four days.  Then abruptly my mood changed, and we 
+decided to start early the following morning.  I remember, though a 
+little indistinctly, the feeling of my last talk with that woman 
+whose surname, odd as it may seem, either I never learnt or I have 
+forgotten.  (Her christian name was Milly.)  She was tired and 
+rather low-spirited, and disposed to be sentimental, and for the 
+first time in our intercourse I found myself liking her for the sake 
+of her own personality.  There was something kindly and generous 
+appearing behind the veil of naive and uncontrolled sensuality she 
+had worn.  There was a curious quality of motherliness in her 
+attitude to me that something in my nature answered and approved.  
+She didn't pretend to keep it up that she had yielded to my 
+initiative.  "I've done you no harm," she said a little doubtfully, 
+an odd note for a man's victim!  And, "we've had a good time.  You 
+have liked me, haven't you?"
+
+She interested me in her lonely dissatisfied life; she was childless 
+and had no hope of children, and her husband was the only son of a 
+rich meat salesman, very mean, a mighty smoker--"he reeks of it," 
+she said, "always"--and interested in nothing but golf, billiards 
+(which he played very badly), pigeon shooting, convivial Free 
+Masonry and Stock Exchange punting.  Mostly they drifted about the 
+Riviera.  Her mother had contrived her marriage when she was 
+eighteen.  They were the first samples I ever encountered of the 
+great multitude of functionless property owners which encumbers 
+modern civilisation--but at the time I didn't think much of that 
+aspect of them. . . .
+
+I tell all this business as it happened without comment, because I 
+have no comment to make.  It was all strange to me, strange rather 
+than wonderful, and, it may be, some dream of beauty died for ever 
+in those furtive meetings; it happened to me, and I could scarcely 
+have been more irresponsible in the matter or controlled events less 
+if I had been suddenly pushed over a cliff into water.  I swam, of 
+course--finding myself in it.  Things tested me, and I reacted, as I 
+have told.  The bloom of my innocence, if ever there had been such a 
+thing, was gone.  And here is the remarkable thing about it; at the 
+time and for some days I was over-weeningly proud; I have never been 
+so proud before or since; I felt I had been promoted to virility; I 
+was unable to conceal my exultation from Willersley.  It was a mood 
+of shining shameless ungracious self-approval.  As he and I went 
+along in the cool morning sunshine by the rice fields in the throat 
+of the Val Maggia a silence fell between us.
+
+"You know?" I said abruptly,--"about that woman?"
+
+Willersley did not answer for a moment.  He looked at me over the 
+corner of his spectacles.
+
+"Things went pretty far?" he asked.
+
+"Oh! all the way!" and I had a twinge of fatuous pride in my 
+unpremeditated achievement.
+
+"She came to your room?"
+
+I nodded.
+
+"I heard her.  I heard her whispering. . . .  The whispering and 
+rustling and so on.  I was in my room yesterday. . . .  Any one 
+might have heard you."
+
+I went on with my head in the air.
+
+"You might have been caught, and that would have meant endless 
+trouble.  You might have incurred all sorts of consequences.  What 
+did you know about her? . . .  We have wasted four days in that hot 
+close place.  When we found that League of Social Service we were 
+talking about," he said with a determined eye upon me, "chastity 
+will be first among the virtues prescribed."
+
+"I shall form a rival league," I said a little damped.  "I'm hanged 
+if I give up a single desire in me until I know why."
+
+He lifted his chin and stared before him through his glasses at 
+nothing.  "There are some things," he said, "that a man who means to 
+work--to do great public services--MUST turn his back upon.  I'm not 
+discussing the rights or wrongs of this sort of thing.  It happens 
+to be the conditions we work under.  It will probably always be so.  
+If you want to experiment in that way, if you want even to discuss 
+it,--out you go from political life.  You must know that's so. . . .  
+You're a strange man, Remington, with a kind of kink in you.  You've 
+a sort of force.  You might happen to do immense things. . . .  
+Only--"
+
+He stopped.  He had said all that he had forced himself to say.
+
+"I mean to take myself as I am," I said.  "I'm going to get 
+experience for humanity out of all my talents--and bury nothing."
+
+Willersley twisted his face to its humorous expression.  "I doubt if 
+sexual proclivities," he said drily, come within the scope of the 
+parable."
+
+I let that go for a little while.  Then I broke out.  "Sex!" said I, 
+"is a fundamental thing in life.  We went through all this at 
+Trinity.  I'm going to look at it, experience it, think about it--
+and get it square with the rest of life.  Career and Politics must 
+take their chances of that.  It's part of the general English 
+slackness that they won't look this in the face.  Gods! what a 
+muffled time we're coming out of!  Sex means breeding, and breeding 
+is a necessary function in a nation.  The Romans broke up upon that.  
+The Americans fade out amidst their successes.  Eugenics--"
+
+"THAT wasn't Eugenics," said Willersley.
+
+"It was a woman," I said after a little interval, feeling oddly that 
+I had failed altogether to answer him, and yet had a strong dumb 
+case against him.
+
+
+
+BOOK THE SECOND
+
+MARGARET
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST
+
+MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE
+
+
+1
+
+I must go back a little way with my story.  In the previous book I 
+have described the kind of education that happens to a man of my 
+class nowadays, and it has been convenient to leap a phase in my 
+experience that I must now set out at length.  I want to tell in 
+this second hook how I came to marry, and to do that I must give 
+something of the atmosphere in which I first met my wife and some 
+intimations of the forces that went to her making.  I met her in 
+Staffordshire while I was staying with that uncle of whom I have 
+already spoken, the uncle who sold my father's houses and settled my 
+mother in Penge.  Margaret was twenty then and I was twenty-two.
+
+It was just before the walking tour in Switzerland that opened up so 
+much of the world to me.  I saw her once, for an afternoon, and 
+circumstances so threw her up in relief that I formed a very vivid 
+memory of her.  She was in the sharpest contrast with the industrial 
+world about her; she impressed me as a dainty blue flower might do, 
+come upon suddenly on a clinker heap.  She remained in my mind at 
+once a perplexing interrogation and a symbol. . . .
+
+But first I must tell of my Staffordshire cousins and the world that 
+served as a foil for her.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+I first went to stay with my cousins when I was an awkward youth of 
+sixteen, wearing deep mourning for my mother.  My uncle wanted to 
+talk things over with me, he said, and if he could, to persuade me 
+to go into business instead of going up to Cambridge.
+
+I remember that visit on account of all sorts of novel things, but 
+chiefly, I think, because it was the first time I encountered 
+anything that deserves to be spoken of as wealth.  For the first 
+time in my life I had to do with people who seemed to have endless 
+supplies of money, unlimited good clothes, numerous servants; whose 
+daily life was made up of things that I had hitherto considered to 
+be treats or exceptional extravagances.  My cousins of eighteen and 
+nineteen took cabs, for instance, with the utmost freedom, and 
+travelled first-class in the local trains that run up and down the 
+district of the Five Towns with an entire unconsciousness of the 
+magnificence, as it seemed to me, of such a proceeding.
+
+The family occupied a large villa in Newcastle, with big lawns 
+before it and behind, a shrubbery with quite a lot of shrubs, a 
+coach house and stable, and subordinate dwelling-places for the 
+gardener and the coachman.  Every bedroom contained a gas heater and 
+a canopied brass bedstead, and had a little bathroom attached 
+equipped with the porcelain baths and fittings my uncle 
+manufactured, bright and sanitary and stamped with his name, and the 
+house was furnished throughout with chairs and tables in bright 
+shining wood, soft and prevalently red Turkish carpets, cosy 
+corners, curtained archways, gold-framed landscapes, overmantels, a 
+dining-room sideboard like a palace with a large Tantalus, and 
+electric light fittings of a gay and expensive quality.  There was a 
+fine billiard-room on the ground floor with three comfortable sofas 
+and a rotating bookcase containing an excellent collection of the 
+English and American humorists from THREE MEN IN A BOAT to the 
+penultimate Mark Twain.  There was also a conservatory opening out 
+of the dining-room, to which the gardener brought potted flowers in 
+their season. . . .
+
+My aunt was a little woman with a scared look and a cap that would 
+get over one eye, not very like my mother, and nearly eight years 
+her junior; she was very much concerned with keeping everything 
+nice, and unmercifully bullied by my two cousins, who took after 
+their father and followed the imaginations of their own hearts.  
+They were tall, dark, warmly flushed girls handsome rather than 
+pretty.  Gertrude, the eldest and tallest, had eyes that were almost 
+black; Sibyl was of a stouter build, and her eyes, of which she was 
+shamelessly proud, were dark blue.  Sibyl's hair waved, and 
+Gertrude's was severely straight.  They treated me on my first visit 
+with all the contempt of the adolescent girl for a boy a little 
+younger and infinitely less expert in the business of life than 
+herself.  They were very busy with the writings of notes and certain 
+mysterious goings and comings of their own, and left me very much to 
+my own devices.  Their speech in my presence was full of 
+unfathomable allusions.  They were the sort of girls who will talk 
+over and through an uninitiated stranger with the pleasantest sense 
+of superiority.
+
+I met them at breakfast and at lunch and at the half-past six 
+o'clock high tea that formed the third chief meal of the day.  I 
+heard them rattling off the compositions of Chaminade and Moskowski, 
+with great decision and effect, and hovered on the edge of tennis 
+foursomes where it was manifest to the dullest intelligence that my 
+presence was unnecessary.  Then I went off to find some readable 
+book in the place, but apart from miscellaneous popular novels, some 
+veterinary works, a number of comic books, old bound volumes of THE 
+ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS and a large, popular illustrated History of 
+England, there was very little to be found.  My anut talked to me in 
+a casual feeble way, chiefly about my motber's last illness.  The 
+two bad seen very little of each other for many years; she made no 
+secret of it that the ineligible qualities of my father were the 
+cause of the estrangement.  The only other society in the house 
+during the day was an old and rather decayed Skye terrier in 
+constant conflict with what were no doubt imaginary fleas.  I took 
+myself off for a series of walks, and acquired a considerable 
+knowledge of the scenery and topography of the Potteries.
+
+It puzzled my aunt that I did not go westward, where it was country-
+side and often quite pretty, with hedgerows and fields and copses 
+and flowers.  But always I went eastward, where in a long valley 
+industrialism smokes and sprawls.  That was the stuff to which I 
+turned by nature, to the human effort, and the accumulation and jar 
+of men's activities.  And in such a country as that valley social 
+and economic relations were simple and manifest.  Instead of the 
+limitless confusion of London's population, in which no man can 
+trace any but the most slender correlation between rich and poor, in 
+which everyone seems disconnected and adrift from everyone, you can 
+see here the works, the potbank or the ironworks or what not, and 
+here close at hand the congested, meanly-housed workers, and at a 
+little distance a small middle-class quarter, and again remoter, the 
+big house of the employer.  It was like a very simplified diagram--
+after the untraceable confusion of London.
+
+I prowled alone, curious and interested, through shabby back streets 
+of mean little homes; I followed canals, sometimes canals of 
+mysteriously heated waters with ghostly wisps of steam rising 
+against blackened walls or a distant prospect of dustbin-fed 
+vegetable gardens, I saw the women pouring out from the potbanks, 
+heard the hooters summoning the toilers to work, lost my way upon 
+slag heaps as big as the hills of the south country, dodged trains 
+at manifestly dangerous level crossings, and surveyed across dark 
+intervening spaces, the flaming uproar, the gnome-like activities of 
+iron foundries.  I heard talk of strikes and rumours of strikes, and 
+learnt from the columns of some obscure labour paper I bought one 
+day, of the horrors of the lead poisoning that was in those days one 
+of the normal risks of certain sorts of pottery workers.  Then back 
+I came, by the ugly groaning and clanging steam tram of that period, 
+to my uncle's house and lavish abundance of money and more or less 
+furtive flirtations and the tinkle of Moskowski and Chaminade.  It 
+was, I say, diagrammatic.  One saw the expropriator and the 
+expropriated--as if Marx had arranged the picture.  It was as 
+jumbled and far more dingy and disastrous than any of the confusions 
+of building and development that had surrounded my youth at 
+Bromstead and Penge, but it had a novel quality of being explicable.  
+I found great virtue in the word "exploitation."
+
+There stuck in my mind as if it was symbolical of the whole thing 
+the twisted figure of a man, whose face had been horribly scalded--I 
+can't describe how, except that one eye was just expressionless 
+white--and he ground at an organ bearing a card which told in weak 
+and bitterly satirical phrasing that he had been scalded by the hot 
+water from the tuyeres of the blast furnace of Lord Pandram's works.  
+He had been scalded and quite inadequately compensated and 
+dismissed.  And Lord Pandram was worth half a million.
+
+That upturned sightless white eye of his took possession of my 
+imagination.  I don't think that even then I was swayed by any crude 
+melodramatic conception of injustice.  I was quite prepared to 
+believe the card wasn't a punctiliously accurate statement of fact, 
+and that a case could be made out for Lord Pandram.  Still there in 
+the muddy gutter, painfully and dreadfully, was the man, and he was 
+smashed and scalded and wretched, and he ground his dismal 
+hurdygurdy with a weary arm, calling upon Heaven and the passer-by 
+for help, for help and some sort of righting--one could not imagine 
+quite what.  There he was as a fact, as a by-product of the system 
+that heaped my cousins with trinkets and provided the comic novels 
+and the abundant cigars and spacious billiard-room of my uncle's 
+house.  I couldn't disconnect him and them.
+
+My uncle on his part did nothing to conceal the state of war that 
+existed between himself and his workers, and the mingled contempt 
+and animosity he felt from them.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Prosperity had overtaken my uncle.  So quite naturally he believed 
+that every man who was not as prosperous as he was had only himself 
+to blame.  He was rich and he had left school and gone into his 
+father's business at fifteen, and that seemed to him the proper age 
+at which everyone's education should terminate.  He was very anxious 
+to dissuade me from going up to Cambridge, and we argued 
+intermittently through all my visit.
+
+I had remembered him as a big and buoyant man, striding 
+destructively about the nursery floor of my childhood, and saluting 
+my existence by slaps, loud laughter, and questions about half 
+herrings and half eggs subtly framed to puzzle and confuse my mind.  
+I didn't see him for some years until my father's death, and then he 
+seemed rather smaller, though still a fair size, yellow instead of 
+red and much less radiantly aggressive.  This altered effect was due 
+not so much to my own changed perspectives, I fancy, as to the facts 
+that he was suffering for continuous cigar smoking, and being taken 
+in hand by his adolescent daughters who had just returned from 
+school.
+
+During my first visit there was a perpetual series of--the only word 
+is rows, between them and him.  Up to the age of fifteen or 
+thereabouts, he had maintamed his ascendancy over them by simple 
+old-fashioned physical chastisement.  Then after an interlude of a 
+year it had dawned upon them that power had mysteriously departed 
+from him.  He had tried stopping their pocket money, but they found 
+their mother financially amenable; besides which it was fundamental 
+to my uncle's attitude that he should give them money freely.  Not 
+to do so would seem like admitting a difficulty in making it.  So 
+that after he had stopped their allowances for the fourth time Sybil 
+and Gertrude were prepared to face beggary without a qualm.  It had 
+been his pride to give them the largest allowance of any girls at 
+the school, not even excepting the granddaughter of Fladden the 
+Borax King, and his soul recoiled from this discipline as it had 
+never recoiled from the ruder method of the earlier phase.  Both 
+girls had developed to a high pitch in their mutual recriminations a 
+gift for damaging retort, and he found it an altogether deadlier 
+thing than the power of the raised voice that had always cowed my 
+aunt.  Whenever he became heated with them, they frowned as if 
+involuntarily, drew in their breath sharply, said: "Daddy, you 
+really must not say --" and corrected his pronunciation.  Then, at a 
+great advantage, they resumed the discussion. . . .
+
+My uncle's views about Cambridge, however, were perfectly clear and 
+definite.  It was waste of time and money.  It was all damned 
+foolery.  Did they make a man a better business man?  Not a bit of 
+it.  He gave instances.  It spoilt a man for business by giving him 
+"false ideas."  Some men said that at college a man formed useful 
+friendships.  What use were friendships to a business man?  He might 
+get to know lords, but, as my uncle pointed out, a lord's 
+requirements in his line of faience were little greater than a 
+common  man's.  If college introduced him to hotel proprietors there 
+might be something in it.  Perhaps it helped a man into Parliament, 
+Parliament still being a confused retrogressive corner in the world 
+where lawyers and suchlike sheltered themselves from the onslaughts 
+of common-sense behind a fog of Latin and Greek and twaddle and 
+tosh; but I wasn't the sort to go into Parliament, unless I meant to 
+be a lawyer.  Did I mean to be a lawyer?  It cost no end of money, 
+and was full of uncertainties, and there were no judges nor great 
+solicitors among my relations.  "Young chaps think they get on by 
+themselves," said my uncle.  It isn't so.  Not unless they take 
+their coats off.  I took mine off before I was your age by nigh a 
+year."
+
+We were at cross purposes from the outset, because I did not think 
+men lived to make money; and I was obtuse to the hints he was 
+throwing out at the possibilities of his own potbank, not willfully 
+obtuse, but just failing to penetrate his meaning.  Whatever City 
+Merchants had or had not done for me, Flack, Topham and old Gates 
+had certainly barred my mistaking the profitable production and sale 
+of lavatory basins and bathroom fittings for the highest good.  It 
+was only upon reflection that it dawned upon me that the splendid 
+chance for a young fellow with my uncle, "me, having no son of my 
+own," was anything but an illustration for comparison with my own 
+chosen career.
+
+I still remember very distinctly my uncle's talk,--he loved to speak 
+"reet Staffordshire"--his rather flabby face with the mottled 
+complexion that told of crude ill-regulated appetites, his clumsy 
+gestures--he kept emphasising his points by prodding at me with his 
+finger--the ill-worn, costly, grey tweed clothes, the watch chain of 
+plain solid gold, and soft felt hat thrust back from his head.  He 
+tackled me first in the garden after lunch, and then tried to raise 
+me to enthusiasm by taking me to his potbank and showing me its 
+organisation, from the dusty grinding mills in which whitened men 
+worked and coughed, through the highly ventilated glazing room in 
+which strangely masked girls looked ashamed of themselves,--"They'll 
+risk death, the fools, to show their faces to a man," said my uncle, 
+quite audibly--to the firing kilns and the glazing kilns, and so 
+round the whole place to the railway siding and the gratifying 
+spectacle of three trucks laden with executed orders.
+
+Then we went up a creaking outside staircase to his little office, 
+and he showed off before me for a while, with one or two 
+subordinates and the telephone.
+
+"None of your Gas," he said, "all this.  It's Real every bit of it.  
+Hard cash and hard glaze."
+
+"Yes," I said, with memories of a carelessly read pamphlet in my 
+mind, and without any satirical intention, "I suppose you MUST use 
+lead in your glazes?"
+
+Whereupon I found I had tapped the ruling grievance of my uncle's 
+life.  He hated leadless glazes more than he hated anything, except 
+the benevolent people who had organised the agitation for their use.  
+"Leadless glazes ain't only fit for buns," he said.  "Let me tell 
+you, my boy--"
+
+He began in a voice of bland persuasiveness that presently warmed to 
+anger, to explain the whole matter.  I hadn't the rights of the 
+matter at all.  Firstly, there was practically no such thing as lead 
+poisoning.  Secondly, not everyone was liable to lead poisoning, and 
+it would be quite easy to pick out the susceptible types--as soon as 
+they had it--and put them to other work.  Thirdly, the evil effects 
+of lead poisoning were much exaggerated.  Fourthly, and this was in 
+a particularly confidential undertone, many of the people liked to 
+get lead poisoning, especially the women, because it caused 
+abortion.  I might not believe it, but he knew it for a fact.  
+Fifthly, the work-people simply would not learn the gravity of the 
+danger, and would eat with unwashed hands, and incur all sorts of 
+risks, so that as my uncle put it: "the fools deserve what they 
+get."  Sixthly, he and several associated firms had organised a 
+simple and generous insurance scheme against lead-poisoning risks.  
+Seventhly, he never wearied in rational (as distinguished from 
+excessive, futile and expensive) precautions against the disease.  
+Eighthly, in the ill-equipped shops of his minor competitors lead 
+poisoning was a frequent and virulent evil, and people had 
+generalised from these exceptional cases.  The small shops, he 
+hazarded, looking out of the cracked and dirty window at distant 
+chimneys, might be advantageously closed. . . .
+
+"But what's the good of talking?" said my uncle, getting off the 
+table on which he had been sitting.  "Seems to me there'll come a 
+time when a master will get fined if he don't run round the works 
+blowing his girls noses for them.  That's about what it'll come to."
+
+He walked to the black mantelpiece and stood on the threadbare rug, 
+and urged me not to be misled by the stories of prejudiced and 
+interested enemies of our national industries.
+
+"They'll get a strike one of these days, of employers, and then 
+we'll see a bit," he said.  "They'll drive Capital abroad and then 
+they'll whistle to get it back again." . . .
+
+He led the way down the shaky wooden steps and cheered up to tell me 
+of his way of checking his coal consumption.  He exchanged a 
+ferocious greeting with one or two workpeople, and so we came out of 
+the factory gates into the ugly narrow streets, paved with a 
+peculiarly hard diapered brick of an unpleasing inky-blue colour, 
+and bordered with the mean and squalid homes of his workers.  Doors 
+stood open and showed grimy interiors, and dirty ill-clad children 
+played in the kennel.
+
+We passed a sickly-looking girl with a sallow face, who dragged her 
+limbs and peered at us dimly with painful eyes.  She stood back, as 
+partly blinded people will do, to allow us to pass, although there 
+was plenty of room for us.
+
+I glanced back at her.
+
+"THAT'S ploombism " said my uncle casually.
+
+"What?" said I.
+
+"Ploombism.  And the other day I saw a fool of a girl, and what 
+d'you think?  She'd got a basin that hadn't been fired, a cracked 
+piece of biscuit it was, up on the shelf over her head, just all 
+over glaze, killing glaze, man, and she was putting up her hand if 
+you please, and eating her dinner out of it.  Got her dinner in it!
+
+"Eating her dinner out of it," he repeated in loud and bitter tones, 
+and punched me hard in the ribs.
+
+"And then they comes to THAT--and grumbles.  And the fools up in 
+Westminster want you to put in fans here and fans there--the Longton 
+fools have. . . .  And then eating their dinners out of it all the 
+time!" . . .
+
+At high tea that night--my uncle was still holding out against 
+evening dinner--Sibyl and Gertrude made what was evidently a 
+concerted demand for a motorcar.
+
+"You've got your mother's brougham," he said, that's good enough for 
+you."  But he seemed shaken by the fact that some Burslem rival was 
+launching out with the new invention.  "He spoils his girls," he 
+remarked.  "He's a fool," and became thoughtful.
+
+Afterwards he asked me to come to him into his study; it was a room 
+with a writing-desk and full of pieces of earthenware and suchlike 
+litter, and we had our great row about Cambridge.
+
+"Have you thought things over, Dick?" he said.
+
+"I think I'll go to Trinity, Uncle," I said firmly.  "I want to go 
+to Trinity.  It is a great college."
+
+He was manifestly chagrined.  "You're a fool," he said.
+
+I made no answer.
+
+"You're a damned fool," he said.  "But I suppose you've got to do 
+it.  You could have come here--That don't matter, though, now. . .  
+You'll have your time and spend your money, and be a poor half-
+starved clergyman, mucking about with the women all the day and 
+afraid to have one of your own ever, or you'll be a schoolmaster or 
+some such fool for the rest of your life.  Or some newspaper chap.   
+That's what you'll get from Cambridge.  I'm half a mind not to let 
+you.  Eh?  More than half a mind. . . ."
+
+"You've got to do the thing you can," he said, after a pause, "and 
+likely it's what you're fitted for."
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+I paid several short visits to Staffordshire during my Cambridge 
+days, and always these relations of mine produced the same effect of 
+hardness.   My uncle's thoughts had neither atmosphere nor mystery.   
+He lived in a different universe from the dreams of scientific 
+construction that filled my mind.  He could as easily have 
+understood Chinese poetry.  His motives were made up of intense 
+rivalries with other men of his class and kind, a few vindictive 
+hates springing from real and fancied slights, a habit of 
+acquisition that had become a second nature, a keen love both of 
+efficiency and display in his own affairs.  He seemed to me to have 
+no sense of the state, no sense and much less any love of beauty, no 
+charity and no sort of religious feeling whatever.  He had strong 
+bodily appetites, he ate and drank freely, smoked a great deal, and 
+occasionally was carried off by his passions for a "bit of a spree" 
+to Birmingham or Liverpool or Manchester.  The indulgences of these 
+occasions were usually followed by a period of reaction, when he was 
+urgent for the suppression of nudity in the local Art Gallery and a 
+harsh and forcible elevation of the superficial morals of the 
+valley.  And he spoke of the ladies who ministered to the delights 
+of his jolly-dog period, when he spoke of them at all, by the 
+unprintable feminine equivalent.  My aunt he treated with a kindly 
+contempt and considerable financial generosity, but his daughters 
+tore his heart; he was so proud of them, so glad to find them money 
+to spend, so resolved to own them, so instinctively jealous of every 
+man who came near them.
+
+My uncle has been the clue to a great number of men for me.  He was 
+an illuminating extreme.  I have learnt what not to expect from them 
+through him, and to comprehend resentments and dangerous sudden 
+antagonisms I should have found incomprehensible in their more 
+complex forms, if I had not first seen them in him in their feral 
+state.
+
+With his soft felt hat at the back of his head, his rather heavy, 
+rather mottled face, his rationally thick boots and slouching tweed-
+clad form, a little round-shouldered and very obstinate looking, he 
+strolls through all my speculations sucking his teeth audibly, and 
+occasionally throwing out a shrewd aphorism, the intractable 
+unavoidable ore of the new civilisation.
+
+Essentially he was simple.  Generally speaking, he hated and 
+despised in equal measure whatever seemed to suggest that he 
+personally was not the most perfect human being conceivable.  He 
+hated all education after fifteen because he had had no education 
+after fifteen, he hated all people who did not have high tea until 
+he himself under duress gave up high tea, he hated every game except 
+football, which he had played and could judge, he hated all people 
+who spoke foreign languages because he knew no language but 
+Staffordshire, he hated all foreigners because he was English, and 
+all foreign ways because they were not his ways.  Also he hated 
+particularly, and in this order, Londoner's, Yorkshiremen, Scotch, 
+Welch and Irish, because they were not "reet Staffordshire," and he 
+hated all other Staffordshire men as insufficiently "reet."  He 
+wanted to have all his own women inviolate, and to fancy he had a 
+call upon every other woman in the world.  He wanted to have the 
+best cigars and the best brandy in the world to consume or give away 
+magnificently, and every one else to have inferior ones.  (His 
+billiard table was an extra large size, specially made and very 
+inconvenient.)  And he hated Trade Unions because they interfered 
+with his autocratic direction of his works, and his workpeople 
+because they were not obedient and untiring mechanisms to do his 
+bidding.  He was, in fact, a very naive, vigorous human being.  He 
+was about as much civilised, about as much tamed to the ideas of 
+collective action and mutual consideration as a Central African 
+negro.
+
+There are hordes of such men as he throughout all the modern 
+industrial world.  You will find the same type with the slightest 
+modifications in the Pas de Calais or Rhenish Prussia or New Jersey 
+or North Italy.  No doubt you would find it in New Japan.  These men 
+have raised themselves up from the general mass of untrained, 
+uncultured, poorish people in a hard industrious selfish struggle.  
+To drive others they have had first to drive themselves.  They have 
+never yet had occasion nor leisure to think of the state or social 
+life as a whole, and as for dreams or beauty, it was a condition of 
+survival that they should ignore such cravings.  All the distinctive 
+qualities of my uncle can be thought of as dictated by his 
+conditions; his success and harshness, the extravagances that 
+expressed his pride in making money, the uncongenial luxury that 
+sprang from rivalry, and his self-reliance, his contempt for broad 
+views, his contempt for everything that he could not understand.
+
+His daughters were the inevitable children of his life.  Queer girls 
+they were!  Curiously "spirited" as people phrase it, and curiously 
+limited.  During my Cambridge days I went down to Staffordshire 
+several times.  My uncle, though he still resented my refusal to go 
+into his business, was also in his odd way proud of me.  I was his 
+nephew and poor relation, and yet there I was, a young gentleman 
+learning all sorts of unremunerative things in the grandest manner, 
+"Latin and mook," while the sons of his neighhours, not nephews 
+merely, but sons, stayed unpolished in their native town.  Every 
+time I went down I found extensive changes and altered relations, 
+and before I had settled down to them off I went again.  I don't 
+think I was one person to them; I was a series of visitors.  There 
+is a gulf of ages between a gaunt schoolboy of sixteen in unbecoming 
+mourning and two vividly self-conscious girls of eighteen and 
+nineteen, but a Cambridge "man" of two and twenty with a first and 
+good tennis and a growing social experience, is a fair contemporary 
+for two girls of twenty-three and twenty-four.
+
+A motor-car appeared, I think in my second visit, a bottle-green 
+affair that opened behind, had dark purple cushions, and was 
+controlled mysteriously by a man in shiny black costume and a flat 
+cap.  The high tea had been shifted to seven and rechristened 
+dinner, but my uncle would not dress nor consent to have wine; and 
+after one painful experiment, I gathered, and a scene, he put his 
+foot down and prohibited any but high-necked dresses.
+
+"Daddy's perfectly impossible," Sybil told me.
+
+The foot had descended vehemently!  "My own daughters!" he had said, 
+"dressed up like --"--and had arrested himself and fumbled and 
+decided to say--"actresses, and showin' their fat arms for every 
+fool to stare at!"  Nor would he have any people invited to dinner.  
+He didn't, he had explained, want strangers poking about in his 
+house when he came home tired.  So such calling as occurred went on 
+during his absence in the afternoon.
+
+One of the peculiarities of the life of these ascendant families of 
+the industrial class to which wealth has come, is its tremendous 
+insulations.  There were no customs of intercourse in the Five 
+Towns.   All the isolated prosperities of the district sprang from 
+economising, hard driven homes, in which there was neither time nor 
+means for hospitality.  Social intercourse centred very largely upon 
+the church or chapel, and the chapels were better at bringing people 
+together than the Establishment to which my cousins belonged.  Their 
+chief outlet to the wider world lay therefore through the 
+acquaintances they had formed at school, and through two much less 
+prosperous families of relations who lived at Longton and Hanley.  A 
+number of gossiping friendships with old school mates were "kept 
+up," and my cousins would "spend the afternoon" or even spend the 
+day with these; such occasions led to other encounters and 
+interlaced with the furtive correspondences and snatched meetings 
+that formed the emotional thread of their lives.  When the billiard 
+table had been new, my uncle had taken to asking in a few approved 
+friends for an occasional game, but mostly the billiard-room was for 
+glory and the girls.  Both of them played very well.  They never, so 
+far as I know, dined out, and when at last after bitter domestic 
+conflicts they began to go to dances, they went with the quavering 
+connivance of my aunt, and changed into ball frocks at friends' 
+houses on the way.  There was a tennis club that formed a convenient 
+afternoon rendezvous, and I recall that in the period of my earlier 
+visits the young bloods of the district found much satisfaction in 
+taking girls for drives in dog-carts and suchlike high-wheeled 
+vehicles, a disposition that died in tangled tandems at the 
+apparition of motor-car's.
+
+My aunt and uncle had conceived no plans in life for their daughters 
+at all.  In the undifferentiated industrial community from which 
+they had sprung, girls got married somehow, and it did not occur to 
+them that the concentration of property that had made them wealthy, 
+had cut their children off from the general social sea in which 
+their own awkward meeting had occurred, without necessarily opening 
+any other world in exchange.  My uncle was too much occupied with 
+the works and his business affairs and his private vices to 
+philosophise about his girls; he wanted them just to keep girls, 
+preferably about sixteen, and to be a sort of animated flowers and 
+make home bright and be given things.  He was irritated that they 
+would not remain at this, and still more irritated that they failed 
+to suppress altogether their natural interest in young men.  The 
+tandems would be steered by weird and devious routes to evade the 
+bare chance of his bloodshot eye.  My aunt seemed to have no ideas 
+whatever about what was likely to happen to her children.  She had 
+indeed no ideas about anything; she took her husband and the days as 
+they came.
+
+I can see now the pathetic difficulty of my cousins' position in 
+life; the absence of any guidance or instruction or provision for 
+their development.  They supplemented the silences of home by the 
+conversation of schoolfellows and the suggestions of popular 
+fiction.  They had to make what they could out of life with such 
+hints as these.  The church was far too modest to offer them any 
+advice.  It was obtruded upon my mind upon my first visit that they 
+were both carrying on correspondences and having little furtive 
+passings and seeings and meetings with the mysterious owners of 
+certain initials, S. and L. K., and, if I remember rightly, "the R. 
+N." brothers and cousins, I suppose, of their friends.  The same 
+thing was going on, with a certain intensification, at my next 
+visit, excepting only that the initials were different.  But when I 
+came again their methods were maturer or I was no longer a 
+negligible quantity, and the notes and the initials were no longer 
+flaunted quite so openly in my face.
+
+My cousins had worked it out from the indications of their universe 
+that the end of life is to have a "good time."  They used the 
+phrase.  That and the drives in dog-carts were only the first of 
+endless points of resemblance between them and the commoner sort of 
+American girl.  When some years ago I paid my first and only visit 
+to America I seemed to recover my cousins' atmosphere as soon as I 
+entered the train at Euston.  There were three girls in my 
+compartment supplied with huge decorated cases of sweets, and being 
+seen off by a company of friends, noisily arch and eager about the 
+"steamer letters" they would get at Liverpool; they were the very 
+soul-sisters of my cousins.  The chief elements of a good time, as 
+my cousins judged it, as these countless thousands of rich young 
+women judge it, are a petty eventfulness, laughter, and to feel that 
+you are looking well and attracting attention.  Shopping is one of 
+its leading joys.  You buy things, clothes and trinkets for yourself 
+and presents for your friends.  Presents always seemed to be flying 
+about in that circle; flowers and boxes of sweets were common 
+currency.  My cousins were always getting and giving, my uncle 
+caressed them with parcels and cheques.  They kissed him and he 
+exuded sovereigns as a stroked APHIS exudes honey.  It was like the 
+new language of the Academy of Lagado to me, and I never learnt how 
+to express myself in it, for nature and training make me feel 
+encumbered to receive presents and embarrassed in giving them.  But 
+then, like my father, I hate and distrust possessions.
+
+Of the quality of their private imagination I never learnt anything; 
+I suppose it followed the lines of the fiction they read and was 
+romantic and sentimental.  So far as marriage went, the married 
+state seemed at once very attractive and dreadfully serious to them, 
+composed in equal measure of becoming important and becoming old.  I 
+don't know what they thought about children.  I doubt if they 
+thought about them at all.  It was very secret if they did.
+
+As for the poor and dingy people all about them, my cousins were 
+always ready to take part in a Charitable Bazaar.  They were unaware 
+of any economic correlation of their own prosperity and that 
+circumambient poverty, and they knew of Trade Unions simply as 
+disagreeable external things that upset my uncle's temper.  They 
+knew of nothing wrong in social life at all except that there were 
+"Agitators."  It surprised them a little, I think, that Agitators 
+were not more drastically put down.  But they had a sort of 
+instinctive dread of social discussion as of something that might 
+breach the happiness of their ignorance. . . .
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+My cousins did more than illustrate Marx for me; they also undertook 
+a stage of my emotional education.  Their method in that as in 
+everything else was extremely simple, but it took my inexperience by 
+surprise.
+
+It must have been on my third visit that Sybil took me in hand.  
+Hitherto I seemed to have seen her only in profile, but now she 
+became almost completely full face, manifestly regarded me with 
+those violet eyes of hers.  She passed me things I needed at 
+breakfast--it was the first morning of my visit--before I asked for 
+them.
+
+When young men are looked at by pretty cousins, they become 
+intensely aware of those cousins.   It seemed to me that I had 
+always admired Sybil's eyes very greatly, and that there was 
+something in her temperament congenial to mine.  It was odd I had 
+not noted it on my previous visits.
+
+We walked round the garden somewhen that morning, and talked about 
+Cambridge.  She asked quite a lot of questions about my work and my 
+ambitions.  She said she had always felt sure I was clever.
+
+The conversation languished a little, and we picked some flowers for 
+the house.  Then she asked if I could run.  I conceded her various 
+starts and we raced up and down the middle garden path.   Then, a 
+little breathless, we went into the new twenty-five guinea summer-
+house at the end of the herbaceous border.
+
+We sat side by side, pleasantly hidden from the house, and she 
+became anxious about her hair, which was slightly and prettily 
+disarranged, and asked me to help her with the adjustment of a 
+hairpin.  I had never in my life been so near the soft curly hair 
+and the dainty eyebrow and eyelid and warm soft cheek of a girl, and 
+I was stirred--
+
+It stirs me now to recall it.
+
+I became a battleground of impulses and inhibitions.
+
+"Thank you," said my cousin, and moved a little away from me.
+
+She began to talk about friendship, and lost her thread and forgot 
+the little electric stress between us in a rather meandering 
+analysis of her principal girl friends.
+
+But afterwards she resumed her purpose.
+
+I went to bed that night with one propostion overshadowing 
+everything else in my mind, namely, that kissing my cousin Sybil was 
+a difficult, but not impossible, achievement.  I do not recall any 
+shadow of a doubt whether on the whole it was worth doing.  The 
+thing had come into my existence, disturbing and interrupting its 
+flow exactly as a fever does.  Sybil had infected me with herself.
+
+The next day matters came to a crisis in the little upstairs 
+sitting-room which had been assigned me as a study during my visit.  
+I was working up there, or rather trying to work in spite of the 
+outrageous capering of some very primitive elements in my brain, 
+when she came up to me, under a transparent pretext of looking for a 
+book.
+
+I turned round and then got up at the sight of her.  I quite forget 
+what our conversation was about, but I know she led me to believe I 
+might kiss her.  Then when I attempted to do so she averted her 
+face.
+
+"How COULD you?" she said; "I didn't mean that!"
+
+That remained the state of our relations for two days.  I developed 
+a growing irritation with and resentment against cousin Sybil, 
+combined with an intense desire to get that kiss for which I 
+hungered and thirsted.  Cousin Sybil went about in the happy 
+persuasion that I was madly in love with her, and her game, so far 
+as she was concerned, was played and won.  It wasn't until I had 
+fretted for two days that I realised that I was being used for the 
+commonest form of excitement possible to a commonplace girl; that 
+dozens perhaps of young men had played the part of Tantalus at 
+cousin Sybil's lips.  I walked about my room at nights, damning her 
+and calling her by terms which on the whole she rather deserved, 
+while Sybil went to sleep pitying "poor old Dick!"
+
+"Damn it!" I said, "I WILL be equal with you."
+
+But I never did equalise the disadvantage, and perhaps it's as well, 
+for I fancy that sort of revenge cuts both people too much for a 
+rational man to seek it. . . .   
+
+"Why are men so silly?" said cousin Sybil next morning, wriggling 
+back with down-bent head to release herself from what should have 
+been a compelling embrace.
+
+"Confound it!" I said with a flash of clear vision.  "You STARTED 
+this game."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+She stood back against a hedge of roses, a little flushed and 
+excited and interested, and ready for the delightful defensive if I 
+should renew my attack.
+
+"Beastly hot for scuffling," I said, white with anger.  "I don't 
+know whether I'm so keen on kissing you, Sybil, after all.  I just 
+thought you wanted me to."
+
+I could have whipped her, and my voice stung more than my words.
+
+Our eyes met; a real hatred in hers leaping up to meet mine.
+
+"Let's play tennis," I said, after a moment's pause.
+
+"No," she answered shortly, "I'm going indoors."
+
+"Very well."
+
+And that ended the affair with Sybil.
+
+I was still in the full glare of this disillusionment when Gertrude 
+awoke from some preoccupation to an interest in my existence.  She 
+developed a disposition to touch my hand by accident, and let her 
+fingers rest in contact with it for a moment,--she had pleasant soft 
+hands;--she began to drift into summer houses with me, to let her 
+arm rest trustfully against mine, to ask questions about Cambridge.  
+They were much the same questions that Sybil had asked.  But I 
+controlled myself and maintained a profile of intelligent and 
+entirely civil indifference to her blandishments.
+
+What Gertrude made of it came out one evening in some talk--I forget 
+about what--with Sybil.
+
+"Oh, Dick!" said Gertrude a little impatiently, "Dick's Pi."
+
+And I never disillusioned her by any subsequent levity from this 
+theory of my innate and virginal piety.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+It was against this harsh and crude Staffordshire background that I 
+think I must have seen Margaret for the first time.  I say I think 
+because it is quite possible that we had passed each other in the 
+streets of Cambridge, no doubt with that affectation of mutual 
+disregard which was once customary between undergraduates and 
+Newnham girls.  But if that was so I had noted nothing of the 
+slender graciousness that shone out so pleasingly against the 
+bleaker midland surroundings.
+
+She was a younger schoolfellow of my cousins', and the step-daughter 
+of Seddon, a prominent solicitor of Burslem.  She was not only not 
+in my cousins' generation but not in their set, she was one of a 
+small hardworking group who kept immaculate note-books, and did as 
+much as is humanly possible of that insensate pile of written work 
+that the Girls' Public School movement has inflicted upon school-
+girls.  She really learnt French and German admirably and 
+thoroughly, she got as far in mathematics as an unflinching industry 
+can carry any one with no great natural aptitude, and she went up to 
+Bennett Hall, Newnham, after the usual conflict with her family, to 
+work for the History Tripos.
+
+There in her third year she made herself thoroughly ill through 
+overwork, so ill that she had to give up Newnham altogether and go 
+abroad with her stepmother.  She made herself ill, as so many girls 
+do in those university colleges, through the badness of her home and 
+school training.  She thought study must needs be a hard straining 
+of the mind.  She worried her work, she gave herself no leisure to 
+see it as a whole, she felt herself not making headway and she cut 
+her games and exercise in order to increase her hours of toil, and 
+worked into the night.  She carried a knack of laborious 
+thoroughness into the blind alleys and inessentials of her subject.  
+It didn't need the badness of the food for which Bennett Hall is 
+celebrated and the remarkable dietary of nocturnal cocoa, cakes and 
+soft biscuits with which the girls have supplemented it, to ensure 
+her collapse.  Her mother brought her home, fretting and distressed, 
+and then finding her hopelessly unhappy at home, took her and her 
+half-brother, a rather ailing youngster of ten who died three years 
+later, for a journey to Italy.
+
+Italy did much to assuage Margaret's chagrin.  I think all three of 
+them had a very good time there.  At home Mr. Seddon, her step-
+father, played the part of a well-meaning blight by reason of the 
+moods that arose from nervous dyspepsia.  They went to Florence, 
+equipped with various introductions and much sound advice from 
+sympathetic Cambridge friends, and having acquired an ease in Italy 
+there, went on to Siena, Orvieto, and at last Rome.  They returned, 
+if I remember rightly, by Pisa, Genoa, Milan and Paris.  Six months 
+or more they had had abroad, and now Margaret was back in Burslem, 
+in health again and consciously a very civilised person.
+
+New ideas were abroad, it was Maytime and a spring of abundant 
+flowers--daffodils were particularly good that year--and Mrs. Seddon 
+celebrated her return by giving an afternoon reception at short 
+notice, with the clear intention of letting every one out into the 
+garden if the weather held.
+
+The Seddons had a big old farmhouse modified to modern ideas of 
+comfort on the road out towards Misterton, with an orchard that had 
+been rather pleasantly subdued from use to ornament.  It had rich 
+blossoming cherry and apple trees.  Large patches of grass full of 
+nodding yellow trumpets had been left amidst the not too precisely 
+mown grass, which was as it were grass path with an occasional lapse 
+into lawn or glade.  And Margaret, hatless, with the fair hair above 
+her thin, delicately pink face very simply done, came to meet our 
+rather too consciously dressed party,--we had come in the motor four 
+strong, with my aunt in grey silk.  Margaret wore a soft flowing 
+flowered blue dress of diaphanous material, all unconnected with the 
+fashion and tied with pretty ribbons, like a slenderer, unbountiful 
+Primavera.
+
+It was one of those May days that ape the light and heat of summer, 
+and I remember disconnectedly quite a number of brightly lit figures 
+and groups walking about, and a white gate between orchard and 
+garden and a large lawn with an oak tree and a red Georgian house 
+with a verandah and open French windows, through which the tea 
+drinking had come out upon the moss-edged flagstones even as Mrs. 
+Seddon had planned.
+
+The party was almost entirely feminine except for a little curate 
+with a large head, a good voice and a radiant manner, who was 
+obviously attracted by Margaret, and two or three young husbands 
+still sufficiently addicted to their wives to accompany them.  One 
+of them I recall as a quite romantic figure with abundant blond 
+curly hair on which was poised a grey felt hat encircled by a 
+refined black band.  He wore, moreover, a loose rich shot silk tie 
+of red and purple, a long frock coat, grey trousers and brown shoes, 
+and presently he removed his hat and carried it in one hand.  There 
+were two tennis-playing youths besides myself.  There was also one 
+father with three daughters in anxious control, a father of the old 
+school scarcely half broken in, reluctant, rebellious and 
+consciously and conscientiously "reet Staffordshire."  The daughters 
+were all alert to suppress the possible plungings, the undesirable 
+humorous impulses of this almost feral guest.  They nipped his very 
+gestures in the bud.  The rest of the people were mainly mothers 
+with daughters--daughters of all ages, and a scattering of aunts, 
+and there was a tendency to clotting, parties kept together and 
+regarded parties suspiciously.  Mr. Seddon was in hiding, I think, 
+all the time, though not formally absent.
+
+Matters centred upon the tea in the long room of the French windows, 
+where four trim maids went to and fro busily between the house and 
+the clumps of people seated or standing before it; and tennis and 
+croquet were intermittently visible and audible beyond a bank of 
+rockwork rich with the spikes and cups and bells of high spring.
+
+Mrs.  Seddon presided at the tea urn, and Margaret partly assisted 
+and partly talked to me and my cousin Sibyl--Gertrude had found a 
+disused and faded initial and was partnering him at tennis in a 
+state of gentle revival--while their mother exercised a divided 
+chaperonage from a seat near Mrs. Seddon.  The little curate, 
+stirring a partially empty cup of tea, mingled with our party, and 
+preluded, I remember, every observation he made by a vigorous 
+resumption of stirring.
+
+We talked of Cambridge, and Margaret kept us to it.  The curate was 
+a Selwyn man and had taken a pass degree in theology, but Margaret 
+had come to Gaylord's lecturers in Trinity for a term before her 
+breakdown, and understood these differences.  She had the eagerness 
+of an exile to hear the old familiar names of places and 
+personalities.  We capped familiar anecdotes and were enthusiastic 
+about Kings' Chapel and the Backs, and the curate, addressing 
+himself more particularly to Sibyl, told a long confused story 
+illustrative of his disposition to reckless devilry (of a pure-
+minded kindly sort) about upsetting two canoes quite needlessly on 
+the way to Grantchester.
+
+I can still see Margaret as I saw her that afternoon, see her fresh 
+fair face, with the little obliquity of the upper lip, and her brow 
+always slightly knitted, and her manner as of one breathlessly shy 
+but determined.  She had rather open blue eyes, and she spoke in an 
+even musical voice with the gentlest of stresses and the ghost of a 
+lisp.  And it was true, she gathered, that Cambridge still existed.  
+"I went to Grantchester," she said, "last year, and had tea under 
+the apple-blossom.  I didn't think then I should have to come down."  
+(It was that started the curate upon his anecdote.)
+
+"I've seen a lot of pictures, and learnt a lot about them--at the 
+Pitti and the Brera,--the Brera is wonderful--wonderful places,--but 
+it isn't like real study," she was saying presently. . . .  "We 
+bought bales of photographs," she said.
+
+I thought the bales a little out of keeping.
+
+But fair-haired and quite simply and yet graciously and fancifully 
+dressed, talking of art and beautiful things and a beautiful land, 
+and with so much manifest regret for learning denied, she seemed a 
+different kind of being altogether from my smart, hard, high-
+coloured, black-haired and resolutely hatted cousin; she seemed 
+translucent beside Gertrude.  Even the little twist and droop of her 
+slender body was a grace to me.
+
+I liked her from the moment I saw her, and set myself to interest 
+and please her as well as I knew how.
+
+We recalled a case of ragging that had rustled the shrubs of 
+Newnham, and then Chris Robinson's visit--he had given a talk to 
+Bennett Hall also--and our impression of him.
+
+"He disappointed me, too," said Margaret.
+
+I was moved to tell Margaret something of my own views in the matter 
+of social progress, and she listened--oh! with a kind of urged 
+attention, and her brow a little more knitted, very earnestly.  The 
+little curate desisted from the appendices and refuse heaps and 
+general debris of his story, and made himself look very alert and 
+intelligent.
+
+"We did a lot of that when I was up in the eighties," he said.  "I'm 
+glad Imperialism hasn't swamped you fellows altogether."
+
+Gertrude, looking bright and confident, came to join our talk from 
+the shrubbery; the initial, a little flushed and evidently in a 
+state of refreshed relationship, came with her, and a cheerful lady 
+in pink and more particularly distinguished by a pink bonnet joined 
+our little group.  Gertrude had been sipping admiration and was not 
+disposed to play a passive part in the talk.
+
+"Socialism!" she cried, catching the word.  "It's well Pa isn't 
+here.  He has Fits when people talk of socialism.  Fits!"
+
+The initial laughed in a general kind of way.
+
+The curate said there was socialism AND socialism, and looked at 
+Margaret to gauge whether he had been too bold in this utterance.  
+But she was all, he perceived, for broad-mindness, and he stirred 
+himself (and incidentally his tea) to still more liberality of 
+expression.  He said the state of the poor was appalling, simply 
+appalling; that there were times when he wanted to shatter the whole 
+system, "only," he said, turning to me appealingly, "What have we 
+got to put in its place?"
+
+"The thing that exists is always the more evident alternative," I 
+said.
+
+The little curate looked at it for a moment.  "Precisely," he said 
+explosively, and turned stirring and with his head a little on one 
+side, to hear what Margaret was saying.
+
+Margaret was saying, with a swift blush and an effect of daring, 
+that she had no doubt she was a socialist.
+
+"And wearing a gold chain!" said Gertrude, "And drinking out of 
+eggshell!  I like that!"
+
+I came to Margaret's rescue.  "It doesn't follow that because one's 
+a socialist one ought to dress in sackcloth and ashes."
+
+The initial coloured deeply, and having secured my attention by 
+prodding me slightly with the wrist of the hand that held his 
+teacup, cleared his throat and suggested that "one ought to be 
+consistent."
+
+I perceived we were embarked upon a discussion of the elements.  We 
+began an interesting little wrangle one of those crude discussions 
+of general ideas that are dear to the heart of youth.  I and 
+Margaret supported one another as socialists, Gertrude and Sybil and 
+the initial maintained an anti-socialist position, the curate 
+attempted a cross-bench position with an air of intending to come 
+down upon us presently with a casting vote.  He reminded us of a 
+number of useful principles too often overlooked in argument, that 
+in a big question like this there was much to be said on both sides, 
+that if every one did his or her duty to every one about them there 
+would be no difficulty with social problems at all, that over and 
+above all enactments we needed moral changes in people themselves.  
+My cousin Gertrude was a difficult controversialist to manage, being 
+unconscious of inconsistency in statement and absolutely impervious 
+to reply.  Her standpoint was essentially materialistic; she didn't 
+see why she shouldn't have a good time because other people didn't; 
+they would have a good time, she was sure, if she didn't.  She said 
+that if we did give up everything we had to other people, they 
+wouldn't very likely know what to do with it.  She asked if we were 
+so fond of work-people, why we didn't go and live among them, and 
+expressed the inflexible persuasion that if we HAD socialism, 
+everything would be just the same again in ten years' time.  She 
+also threw upon us the imputation of ingratitude for a beautiful 
+world by saying that so far as she was concerned she didn't want to 
+upset everything.  She was contented with things as they were, thank 
+you.
+
+The discussion led in some way that I don't in the least recall now, 
+and possibly by abrupt transitions, to a croquet foursome in which 
+Margaret involved the curate without involving herself, and then 
+stood beside me on the edge of the lawn while the others played.  We 
+watched silently for a moment.
+
+"I HATE that sort of view," she said suddenly in a confidential 
+undertone, with her delicate pink flush returning.
+
+"It's want of imagination," I said.
+
+"To think we are just to enjoy ourselves," she went on; "just to go 
+on dressing and playing and having meals and spending money!"  She 
+seemed to be referring not simply to my cousins, but to the whole 
+world of industry and property about us.  "But what is one to do?" 
+she asked.  "I do wish I had not had to come down.  It's all so 
+pointless here.  There seems to be nothing going forward, no ideas, 
+no dreams.  No one here seems to feel quite what I feel, the sort of 
+need there is for MEANING in things.  I hate things without 
+meaning."
+
+"Don't you do--local work?"
+
+"I suppose I shall.  I suppose I must find something.  Do you think--
+if one were to attempt some sort of propaganda?"
+
+"Could you--?" I began a little doubtfully.
+
+"I suppose I couldn't," she answered, after a thoughtful moment.  "I 
+suppose it would come to nothing.  And yet I feel there is so much 
+to be done for the world, so much one ought to be doing. . . .  I 
+want to do something for the world."
+
+I can see her now as she stood there with her brows nearly frowning, 
+her blue eyes looking before her, her mouth almost petulant.  "One 
+feels that there are so many things going on--out of one's reach," 
+she said.
+
+I went back in the motor-car with my mind full of her, the quality 
+of delicate discontent, the suggestion of exile.  Even a kind of 
+weakness in her was sympathetic.  She told tremendously against her 
+background.  She was, I say, like a protesting blue flower upon a 
+cinder heap.  It is curious, too, how she connects and mingles with 
+the furious quarrel I had with my uncle that very evening.  That 
+came absurdly.  Indirectly Margaret was responsible.  My mind was 
+running on ideas she had revived and questions she had set 
+clamouring, and quite inadvertently in my attempt to find solutions 
+I talked so as to outrage his profoundest feelings. . . .
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+What a preposterous shindy that was!
+
+I sat with him in the smoking-room, propounding what I considered to 
+be the most indisputable and non-contentious propositions 
+conceivable--until, to my infinite amazement, he exploded and called 
+me a "damned young puppy."
+
+It was seismic.
+
+"Tremendously interesting time," I said, "just in the beginning of 
+making a civilisation."
+
+"Ah!" he said, with an averted face, and nodded, leaning forward 
+over his cigar.
+
+I had not the remotest thought of annoying him.
+
+"Monstrous muddle of things we have got," I said, "jumbled streets, 
+ugly population, ugly factories--"
+
+"You'd do a sight better if you had to do with it," said my uncle, 
+regarding me askance.
+
+"Not me.  But a world that had a collective plan and knew where it 
+meant to be going would do a sight better, anyhow.  We're all 
+swimming in a flood of ill-calculated chances--"
+
+"You'll be making out I organised that business down there--by 
+chance--next," said my uncle, his voice thick with challenge.
+
+I went on as though I was back in Trinity.
+
+"There's a lot of chance in the making of all great businesses," I 
+said.
+
+My uncle remarked that that showed how much I knew about businesses.   
+If chance made businesses, why was it that he always succeeded and 
+grew while those fools Ackroyd and Sons always took second place?  
+He showed a disposition to tell the glorious history of how once 
+Ackroyd's overshadowed him, and how now he could buy up Ackroyd's 
+three times over.  But I wanted to get out what was in my mind.
+
+"Oh!" I said, "as between man and man and business and business, 
+some of course get the pull by this quality or that--but it's forces 
+quite outside the individual case that make the big part of any 
+success under modern conditions.  YOU never invented pottery, nor 
+any process in pottery that matters a rap in your works; it wasn't 
+YOUR foresight that joined all England up with railways and made it 
+possible to organise production on an altogether different scale.  
+You really at the utmost can't take credit for much more than being 
+the sort of man who happened to fit what happened to be the 
+requirements of the time, and who happened to be in a position to 
+take advantage of them--"
+
+It was then my uncle cried out and called me a damned young puppy, 
+and became involved in some unexpected trouble of his own.
+
+I woke up as it were from my analysis of the situation to discover 
+him bent over a splendid spittoon, cursing incoherently, retching a 
+little, and spitting out the end of his cigar which he had bitten 
+off in his last attempt at self-control, and withal fully prepared 
+as soon as he had cleared for action to give me just all that he 
+considered to be the contents of his mind upon the condition of 
+mine.
+
+Well, why shouldn't I talk my mind to him?  He'd never had an 
+outside view of himself for years, and I resolved to stand up to 
+him.  We went at it hammer and tongs!  It became clear that he 
+supposed me to be a Socialist, a zealous, embittered hater of all 
+ownership--and also an educated man of the vilest, most 
+pretentiously superior description.   His principal grievance was 
+that I thought I knew everything; to that he recurred again and 
+again. . . .
+
+We had been maintaining an armed truce with each other since my 
+resolve to go up to Cambridge, and now we had out all that had 
+accumulated between us.  There had been stupendous accumulations. . . .
+
+The particular things we said and did in that bawlmg encounter 
+matter nothing at all in this story.  I can't now estimate how near 
+we came to fisticuffs.  It ended with my saying, after a pungent 
+reminder of benefits conferred and remembered, that I didn't want to 
+stay another hour in his house.  I went upstairs, in a state of 
+puerile fury, to pack and go off to the Railway Hotel, while he, 
+with ironical civility, telephoned for a cab.
+
+"Good riddance!" shouted my uncle, seeing me off into the night.
+
+On the face of it our row was preposterous, but the underlying 
+reality of our quarrel was the essential antagonism, it seemed to 
+me, in all human affairs, the antagonism between ideas and the 
+established method, that is to say, between ideas and the rule of 
+thumb.  The world I hate is the rule-of-thumb world, the thing I and 
+my kind of people exist for primarily is to battle with that, to 
+annoy it, disarrange it, reconstruct it.  We question everything, 
+disturb anything that cannot give a clear justification to our 
+questioning, because we believe inherently that our sense of 
+disorder implies the possibility of a better order.  Of course we 
+are detestable.  My uncle was of that other vaster mass who accept 
+everything for the thing it seems to be, hate enquiry and analysis 
+as a tramp hates washing, dread and resist change, oppose 
+experiment, despise science.  The world is our battleground; and all 
+history, all literature that matters, all science, deals with this 
+conflict of the thing that is and the speculative "if" that will 
+destroy it.
+
+But that is why I did not see Margaret Seddon again for five years.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND
+
+MARGARET IN LONDON
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+I was twenty-seven when I met Margaret again, and the intervening 
+five years had been years of vigorous activity for me, if not of 
+very remarkable growth.  When I saw her again, I could count myself 
+a grown man.  I think, indeed, I counted myself more completely 
+grown than I was.  At any rate, by all ordinary standards, I had 
+"got on" very well, and my ideas, if they had not changed very 
+greatly, had become much more definite and my ambitions clearer and 
+bolder.
+
+I had long since abandoned my fellowship and come to London.  I had 
+published two books that had been talked about, written several 
+articles, and established a regular relationship with the WEEKLY 
+REVIEW and the EVENING GAZETTE.  I was a member of the Eighty Club 
+and learning to adapt the style of the Cambridge Union to larger 
+uses.  The London world had opened out to me very readily.  I had 
+developed a pleasant variety of social connections.  I had made the 
+acquaintance of Mr. Evesham, who had been attracted by my NEW RULER, 
+and who talked about it and me, and so did a very great deal to make 
+a way for me into the company of prominent and amusing people.  I 
+dined out quite frequently.  The glitter and interest of good London 
+dinner parties became a common experience.  I liked the sort of 
+conversation one got at them extremely, the little glow of duologues 
+burning up into more general discussions, the closing-in of the men 
+after the going of the women, the sage, substantial masculine 
+gossiping, the later resumption of effective talk with some pleasant 
+woman, graciously at her best.  I had a wide range of houses; 
+Cambridge had linked me to one or two correlated sets of artistic 
+and literary people, and my books and Mr. Evesham and opened to me 
+the big vague world of "society."  I wasn't aggressive nor 
+particularly snobbish nor troublesome, sometimes I talked well, and 
+if I had nothing interesting to say I said as little as possible, 
+and I had a youthful gravity of manner that was liked by hostesses.  
+And the other side of my nature that first flared through the cover 
+of restraints at Locarno, that too had had opportunity to develop 
+along the line London renders practicable.  I had had my experiences 
+and secrets and adventures among that fringe of ill-mated or erratic 
+or discredited women the London world possesses.  The thing had long 
+ago ceased to be a matter of magic or mystery, and had become a 
+question of appetites and excitement, and among other things the 
+excitement of not being found out.
+
+I write rather doubtfully of my growing during this period.  Indeed 
+I find it hard to judge whether I can say that I grew at all in any 
+real sense of the word, between three and twenty and twenty-seven.  
+It seems to me now to have been rather a phase of realisation and 
+clarification.  All the broad lines of my thought were laid down, I 
+am sure, by the date of my Locarno adventure, but in those five 
+years I discussed things over and over again with myself and others, 
+filled out with concrete fact forms I had at first apprehended 
+sketchily and conversationally, measured my powers against my ideals 
+and the forces in the world about me.  It was evident that many men 
+no better than myself and with no greater advantages than mine had 
+raised themselves to influential and even decisive positions in the 
+worlds of politics and thought.  I was gathering the confidence and 
+knowledge necessary to attack the world in the large manner; I found 
+I could write, and that people would let me write if I chose, as one 
+having authority and not as the scribes.  Socially and politically 
+and intellectually I knew myself for an honest man, and that quite 
+without any deliberation on my part this showed and made things easy 
+for me.  People trusted my good faith from the beginning--for all 
+that I came from nowhere and had no better position than any 
+adventurer.
+
+But the growth process was arrested, I was nothing bigger at twenty-
+seven than at twenty-two, however much saner and stronger, and any 
+one looking closely into my mind during that period might well have 
+imagined growth finished altogether.  It is particularly evident to 
+me now that I came no nearer to any understanding of women during 
+that time.  That Locarno affair was infinitely more to me than I had 
+supposed.  It ended something--nipped something in the bud perhaps--
+took me at a stride from a vague, fine, ignorant, closed world of 
+emotion to intrigue and a perfectly definite and limited sensuality.  
+It ended my youth, and for a time it prevented my manhood.  I had 
+never yet even peeped at the sweetest, profoundest thing in the 
+world, the heart and meaning of a girl, or dreamt with any quality 
+of reality of a wife or any such thing as a friend among womanhood.  
+My vague anticipation of such things in life had vanished 
+altogether.  I turned away from their possibility.  It seemed to me 
+I knew what had to be known about womankind.  I wanted to work hard, 
+to get on to a position in which I could develop and forward my 
+constructive projects.  Women, I thought, had nothing to do with 
+that.  It seemed clear I could not marry for some years; I was 
+attractive to certain types of women, I had vanity enough to give me 
+an agreeable confidence in love-making, and I went about seeking a 
+convenient mistress quite deliberately, some one who should serve my 
+purpose and say in the end, like that kindly first mistress of mine, 
+"I've done you no harm," and so release me.  It seemed the only wise 
+way of disposing of urgencies that might otherwise entangle and 
+wreck the career I was intent upon.
+
+I don't apologise for, or defend my mental and moral phases.  So it 
+was I appraised life and prepared to take it, and so it is a 
+thousand ambitious men see it to-day. . . .
+
+For the rest these five years were a period of definition.  My 
+political conceptions were perfectly plain and honest.  I had one 
+constant desire ruling my thoughts.  I meant to leave England and 
+the empire better ordered than I found it, to organise and 
+discipline, to build up a constructive and controlling State out of 
+my world's confusions.  We had, I saw, to suffuse education with 
+public intention, to develop a new better-living generation with a 
+collectivist habit of thought, to link now chaotic activities in 
+every human affair, and particularly to catch that escaped, world-
+making, world-ruining, dangerous thing, industrial and financial 
+enterprise, and bring it back to the service of the general good.  I 
+had then the precise image that still serves me as a symbol for all 
+I wish to bring about, the image of an engineer building a lock in a 
+swelling torrent--with water pressure as his only source of power.  
+My thoughts and acts were habitually turned to that enterprise; it 
+gave shape and direction to all my life.  The problem that most 
+engaged my mind during those years was the practical and personal 
+problem of just where to apply myself to serve this almost innate 
+purpose.  How was I, a child of this confusion, struggling upward 
+through the confusion, to take hold of things?   Somewhere between 
+politics and literature my grip must needs be found, but where?  
+Always I seem to have been looking for that in those opening years, 
+and disregarding everything else to discover it.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+The Baileys, under whose auspices I met Margaret again, were in the 
+sharpest contrast with the narrow industrialism of the Staffordshire 
+world.  They were indeed at the other extreme of the scale, two 
+active self-centred people, excessively devoted to the public 
+service.  It was natural I should gravitate to them, for they seemed 
+to stand for the maturer, more disciplined, better informed 
+expression of all I was then urgent to attempt to do.  The bulk of 
+their friends were politicians or public officials, they described 
+themselves as publicists--a vague yet sufficiently significant term.  
+They lived and worked in a hard little house in Chambers Street, 
+Westminster, and made a centre for quite an astonishing amount of 
+political and social activity.
+
+Willersley took me there one evening.  The place was almost 
+pretentiously matter-of-fact and unassuming.  The narrow passage-
+hall, papered with some ancient yellowish paper, grained to imitate 
+wood, was choked with hats and cloaks and an occasional feminine 
+wrap.  Motioned rather than announced by a tall Scotch servant 
+woman, the only domestic I ever remember seeing there, we made our 
+way up a narrow staircase past the open door of a small study packed 
+with blue-books, to discover Altiora Bailey receiving before the 
+fireplace in her drawing-room.   She was a tall commanding figure, 
+splendid but a little untidy in black silk and red beads, with dark 
+eyes that had no depths, with a clear hard voice that had an almost 
+visible prominence, aquiline features and straight black hair that 
+was apt to get astray, that was now astray like the head feathers of 
+an eagle in a gale.  She stood with her hands behind her back, and 
+talked in a high tenor of a projected Town Planning Bill with Blupp, 
+who was practically in those days the secretary of the local 
+Government Board.  A very short broad man with thick ears and fat 
+white hands writhing intertwined behind him, stood with his back to 
+us, eager to bark interruptions into Altiora's discourse.  A slender 
+girl in pale blue, manifestly a young political wife, stood with one 
+foot on the fender listening with an expression of entirely puzzled 
+propitiation.  A tall sandy-bearded bishop with the expression of a 
+man in a trance completed this central group.
+
+The room was one of those long apartments once divided by folding 
+doors, and reaching from back to front, that are common upon the 
+first floors of London houses.  Its walls were hung with two or 
+three indifferent water colours, there was scarcely any furniture 
+but a sofa or so and a chair, and the floor, severely carpeted with 
+matting, was crowded with a curious medley of people, men 
+predominating.  Several were in evening dress, but most had the 
+morning garb of the politician; the women were either severely 
+rational or radiantly magnificent.  Willersley pointed out to me the 
+wife of the Secretary of State for War, and I recognised the Duchess 
+of Clynes, who at that time cultivated intellectuality.  I looked 
+round, identifying a face here or there, and stepping back trod on 
+some one's toe, and turned to find it belonged to the Right Hon. G. 
+B. Mottisham, dear to the PUNCH caricaturists.  He received my 
+apology with that intentional charm that is one of his most 
+delightful traits, and resumed his discussion.  Beside him was 
+Esmeer of Trinity, whom I had not seen since my Cambridge days. . . .
+
+Willersley found an ex-member of the School Board for whom he had 
+affinities, and left me to exchange experiences and comments upon 
+the company with Esmeer.  Esmeer was still a don; but he was 
+nibbling, he said, at certain negotiations with the TIMES that might 
+bring him down to London.  He wanted to come to London.  "We peep at 
+things from Cambridge," he said.
+
+"This sort of thing," I said, "makes London necessary.  It's the 
+oddest gathering."
+
+"Every one comes here," said Esmeer.  "Mostly we hate them like 
+poison--jealousy--and little irritations--Altiora can be a horror at 
+times--but we HAVE to come."
+
+"Things are being done?"
+
+"Oh!--no doubt of it.  It's one of the parts of the British 
+machinery--that doesn't show. . . .  But nobody else could do it.
+
+"Two people," said Esmeer, "who've planned to be a power--in an 
+original way.  And by Jove! they've done it!"
+
+I did not for some time pick out Oscar Bailey, and then Esmeer 
+showed him to me in elaborately confidential talk in a corner with a 
+distinguished-looking stranger wearing a ribbon.  Oscar had none of 
+the fine appearance of his wife; he was a short sturdy figure with a 
+rounded protruding abdomen and a curious broad, flattened, clean-
+shaven face that seemed nearly all forehead.  He was of Anglo-
+Hungarian extraction, and I have always fancied something Mongolian 
+in his type.  He peered up with reddish swollen-looking eyes over 
+gilt-edged glasses that were divided horizontally into portions of 
+different refractive power, and he talking in an ingratiating 
+undertone, with busy thin lips, an eager lisp and nervous movements 
+of the hand.
+
+People say that thirty years before at Oxford he was almost exactly 
+the same eager, clever little man he was when I first met him.  He 
+had come up to Balliol bristling with extraordinary degrees and 
+prizes capturned in provincial and Irish and Scotch universities--
+and had made a name for himself as the most formidable dealer in 
+exact fact the rhetoricians of the Union had ever had to encounter.  
+From Oxford he had gone on to a position in the Higher Division of 
+the Civil Service, I think in the War Office, and had speedily made 
+a place for himself as a political journalist.  He was a 
+particularly neat controversialist, and very full of political and 
+sociological ideas.  He had a quite astounding memory for facts and 
+a mastery of detailed analysis, and the time afforded scope for 
+these gifts.  The later eighties were full of politico-social 
+discussion, and he became a prominent name upon the contents list of 
+the NINETEENTH CENTURY, the FORTNIGHTLY and CONTEMPORARY chiefly as 
+a half sympathetic but frequently very damaging critic of the 
+socialism of that period.  He won the immense respect of every one 
+specially interested in social and political questions, he soon 
+achieved the limited distinction that is awarded such capacity, and 
+at that I think he would have remained for the rest of his life if 
+he had not encountered Altiora.
+
+But Altiora Macvitie was an altogether exceptional woman, an 
+extraordinary mixture of qualities, the one woman in the world who 
+could make something more out of Bailey than that.  She had much of 
+the vigour and handsomeness of a slender impudent young man, and an 
+unscrupulousness altogether feminine.  She was one of those women 
+who are waiting in--what is the word?--muliebrity.  She had courage 
+and initiative and a philosophical way of handling questions, and 
+she could be bored by regular work like a man.  She was entirely 
+unfitted for her sex's sphere.  She was neither uncertain, coy nor 
+hard to please, and altogether too stimulating and aggressive for 
+any gentleman's hours of ease.  Her cookery would have been about as 
+sketchy as her handwriting, which was generally quite illegible, and 
+she would have made, I feel sure, a shocking bad nurse.  Yet you 
+mustn't imagine she was an inelegant or unbeautiful woman, and she 
+is inconceivable to me in high collars or any sort of masculine 
+garment.  But her soul was bony, and at the base of her was a vanity 
+gaunt and greedy!  When she wasn't in a state of personal untidiness 
+that was partly a protest against the waste of hours exacted by the 
+toilet and partly a natural disinclination, she had a gypsy 
+splendour of black and red and silver all her own.  And somewhen in 
+the early nineties she met and married Bailey.
+
+I know very little about her early years.  She was the only daughter 
+of Sir Deighton Macvitie, who applied the iodoform process to 
+cotton, and only his subsequent unfortunate attempts to become a 
+Cotton King prevented her being a very rich woman.  As it was she 
+had a tolerable independence.  She came into prominence as one of 
+the more able of the little shoal of young women who were led into 
+politico-philanthropic activities by the influence of the earlier 
+novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward--the Marcella crop.   She went 
+"slumming" with distinguished vigour, which was quite usual in those 
+days--and returned from her experiences as an amateur flower girl 
+with clear and original views about the problem--which is and always 
+had been unusual.  She had not married, I suppose because her 
+standards were high, and men are cowards and with an instinctive 
+appetite for muliebrity.  She had kept house for her father by 
+speaking occasionally to the housekeeper, butler and cook her mother 
+had left her, and gathering the most interesting dinner parties she 
+could, and had married off four orphan nieces in a harsh and 
+successful manner.  After her father's smash and death she came out 
+as a writer upon social questions and a scathing critic of the 
+Charity Organisation Society, and she was three and thirty and a 
+little at loose ends when she met Oscar Bailey, so to speak, in the 
+CONTEMPORARY REVIEW.  The lurking woman in her nature was fascinated 
+by the ease and precision with which the little man rolled over all 
+sorts of important and authoritative people, she was the first to 
+discover a sort of imaginative bigness in his still growing mind, 
+the forehead perhaps carried him off physically, and she took 
+occasion to meet and subjugate him, and, so soon as he had 
+sufficiently recovered from his abject humility and a certain panic 
+at her attentions, marry him.
+
+This had opened a new phase in the lives of Bailey and herself.  The 
+two supplemented each other to an extraordinary extent.  Their 
+subsequent career was, I think, almost entirely her invention.  She 
+was aggressive, imaginative, and had a great capacity for ideas, 
+while he was almost destitute of initiative, and could do nothing 
+with ideas except remember and discuss them.  She was, if not exact, 
+at least indolent, with a strong disposition to save energy by 
+sketching--even her handwriting showed that--while he was 
+inexhaustibly industrious with a relentless invariable caligraphy 
+that grew larger and clearer as the years passed by.  She had a 
+considerable power of charming; she could be just as nice to people--
+and incidentally just as nasty--as she wanted to be.  He was always 
+just the same, a little confidential and SOTTO VOCE, artlessly rude 
+and egoistic in an undignified way.  She had considerable social 
+experience, good social connections, and considerable social 
+ambition, while he had none of these things.  She saw in a flash her 
+opportunity to redeem his defects, use his powers, and do large, 
+novel, rather startling things.  She ran him.  Her marriage, which 
+shocked her friends and relations beyond measure--for a time they 
+would only speak of Bailey as "that gnome"--was a stroke of genius, 
+and forthwith they proceeded to make themselves the most formidable 
+and distinguished couple conceivable.  P. B. P., she boasted, was 
+engraved inside their wedding rings, Pro Bono Publico, and she meant 
+it to be no idle threat.  She had discovered very early that the 
+last thing influential people will do is to work.  Everything in 
+their lives tends to make them dependent upon a supply of 
+confidently administered detail.  Their business is with the window 
+and not the stock behind, and in the end they are dependent upon the 
+stock behind for what goes into the window.  She linked with that 
+the fact that Bailey had a mind as orderly as a museum, and an 
+invincible power over detail.  She saw that if two people took the 
+necessary pains to know the facts of government and administration 
+with precision, to gather together knowledge that was dispersed and 
+confused, to be able to say precisely what had to be done and what 
+avoided in this eventuality or that, they would necessarily become a 
+centre of reference for all sorts of legislative proposals and 
+political expedients, and she went unhesitatingly upon that.
+
+Bailey, under her vigorous direction, threw up his post in the Civil 
+Service and abandoned sporadic controversies, and they devoted 
+themselves to the elaboration and realisation of this centre of 
+public information she had conceived as their role.  They set out to 
+study the methods and organisation and realities of government in 
+the most elaborate manner.  They did the work as no one had ever 
+hitherto dreamt of doing it.  They planned the research on a 
+thoroughly satisfying scale, and arranged their lives almost 
+entirely for it.  They took that house in Chambers Street and 
+furnished it with severe economy, they discovered that Scotch 
+domestic who is destined to be the guardian and tyrant of their 
+declining years, and they set to work.  Their first book, "The 
+Permanent Official," fills three plump volumes, and took them and 
+their two secretaries upwards of four years to do.  It is an 
+amazingly good book, an enduring achievement.  In a hundred 
+directions the history and the administrative treatment of the 
+public service was clarified for all time. . . .
+
+They worked regularly every morning from nine to twelve, they 
+lunched lightly but severely, in the afternoon they "took exercise" 
+or Bailey attended meetings of the London School Board, on which he 
+served, he said, for the purposes of study--he also became a railway 
+director for the same end.  In the late afternoon Altiora was at 
+home to various callers, and in the evening came dinner or a 
+reception or both.
+
+Her dinners and gatherings were a very important feature in their 
+scheme.  She got together all sorts of interesting people in or 
+about the public service, she mixed the obscurely efficient with the 
+ill-instructed famous and the rudderless rich, got together in one 
+room more of the factors in our strange jumble of a public life than 
+had ever met easily before.  She fed them with a shameless austerity 
+that kept the conversation brilliant, on a soup, a plain fish, and 
+mutton or boiled fowl and milk pudding, with nothing to drink but 
+whisky and soda, and hot and cold water, and milk and lemonade.  
+Everybody was soon very glad indeed to come to that.  She boasted 
+how little her housekeeping cost her, and sought constantly for 
+fresh economies that would enable her, she said, to sustain an 
+additional private secretary.  Secretaries were the Baileys' one 
+extravagance, they loved to think of searches going on in the 
+British Museum, and letters being cleared up and precis made 
+overhead, while they sat in the little study and worked together, 
+Bailey with a clockwork industry, and Altiora in splendid flashes 
+between intervals of cigarettes and meditation.  "All efficient 
+public careers," said Altiora, "consist in the proper direction of 
+secretaries."
+
+"If everything goes well I shall have another secretary next year," 
+Altiora told me.  "I wish I could refuse people dinner napkins.  
+Imagine what it means in washing!  I dare most things. . . .  But as 
+it is, they stand a lot of hardship here."
+
+"There's something of the miser in both these people," said Esmeer, 
+and the thing was perfectly true.  For, after all, the miser is 
+nothing more than a man who either through want of imagination or 
+want of suggestion misapplies to a base use a natural power of 
+concentration upon one end.  The concentration itself is neither 
+good nor evil, but a power that can be used in either way.  And the 
+Baileys gathered and reinvested usuriously not money, but knowledge 
+of the utmost value in human affairs.  They produced an effect of 
+having found themselves--completely.  One envied them at times 
+extraordinarily.  I was attracted, I was dazzled--and at the same 
+time there was something about Bailey's big wrinkled forehead, his 
+lisping broad mouth, the gestures of his hands and an uncivil 
+preoccupation I could not endure. . . .
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Their effect upon me was from the outset very considerable.
+
+Both of them found occasion on that first visit of mine to talk to 
+me about my published writings and particularly about my then just 
+published book THE NEW RULER, which had interested them very much.  
+It fell in indeed so closely with their own way of thinking that I 
+doubt if they ever understood how independently I had arrived at my 
+conclusions.  It was their weakness to claim excessively.  That 
+irritation, however, came later.  We discovered each other 
+immensely; for a time it produced a tremendous sense of kindred and 
+cooperation.
+
+Altiora, I remember, maintained that there existed a great army of 
+such constructive-minded people as ourselves--as yet undiscovered by 
+one another.
+
+"It's like boring a tunnel through a mountain," said Oscar, "and 
+presently hearing the tapping of the workers from the other end."
+
+"If you didn't know of them beforehand," I said, "it might be a 
+rather badly joined tunnel."
+
+"Exactly," said Altiora with a high note, "and that's why we all 
+want to find out each other. . . ."
+
+They didn't talk like that on our first encounter, but they urged me 
+to lunch with them next day, and then it was we went into things.  A 
+woman Factory Inspector and the Educational Minister for New 
+Banksland and his wife were also there, but I don't remember they 
+made any contribution to the conversation.  The Baileys saw to that.  
+They kept on at me in an urgent litigious way.
+
+"We have read your book," each began--as though it had been a joint 
+function.  "And we consider--"
+
+"Yes," I protested, "I think--"
+
+ That was a secondary matter.
+
+"They did not consider," said Altiora, raising her voice and going 
+right over me, that I had allowed sufficiently for the inevitable 
+development of an official administrative class in the modern 
+state."
+
+"Nor of its importance," echoed Oscar.
+
+That, they explained in a sort of chorus, was the cardinal idea of 
+their lives, what they were up to, what they stood for.  "We want to 
+suggest to you," they said--and I found this was a stock opening of 
+theirs--"that from the mere necessities of convenience elected 
+bodies MUST avail themselves more and more of the services of expert 
+officials.  We have that very much in mind.  The more complicated 
+and technical affairs become, the less confidence will the elected 
+official have in himself.  We want to suggest that these expert 
+officials must necessarily develop into a new class and a very 
+powerful class in the community.  We want to organise that.  It may 
+be THE power of the future.  They will necessarily have to have very 
+much of a common training.  We consider ourselves as amateur unpaid 
+precursors of such a class." . . .
+
+The vision they displayed for my consideration as the aim of public-
+spirited endeavour, seemed like a harder, narrower, more specialised 
+version of the idea of a trained and disciplined state that 
+Willersley and I had worked out in the Alps.  They wanted things 
+more organised, more correlated with government and a collective 
+purpose, just as we did, but they saw it not in terms of a growing 
+collective understanding, but in terms of functionaries, legislative 
+change, and methods of administration. . . .
+
+It wasn't clear at first how we differed.  The Baileys were very 
+anxious to win me to co-operation, and I was quite prepared at first 
+to identify their distinctive expressions with phrases of my own, 
+and so we came very readily into an alliance that was to last some 
+years, and break at last very painfully.  Altiora manifestly liked 
+me, I was soon discussing with her the perplexity I found in placing 
+myself efficiently in the world, the problem of how to take hold of 
+things that occupied my thoughts, and she was sketching out careers 
+for my consideration, very much as an architect on his first visit 
+sketches houses, considers requirements, and puts before you this 
+example and that of the more or less similar thing already done. . . .
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+It is easy to see how much in common there was between the Baileys 
+and me, and how natural it was that I should become a constant 
+visitor at their house and an ally of theirs in many enterprises.  
+It is not nearly so easy to define the profound antagonism of spirit 
+that also held between us.  There was a difference in texture, a 
+difference in quality.  How can I express it?  The shapes of our 
+thoughts were the same, but the substance quite different.  It was 
+as if they had made in china or cast iron what I had made in 
+transparent living matter.  (The comparison is manifestly from my 
+point of view.)  Certain things never seemed to show through their 
+ideas that were visible, refracted perhaps and distorted, but 
+visible always through mine.
+
+I thought for a time the essential difference lay in our relation to 
+beauty.  With me beauty is quite primary in life; I like truth, 
+order and goodness, wholly because they are beautiful or lead 
+straight to beautiful consequences.  The Baileys either hadn't got 
+that or they didn't see it.  They seemed at times to prefer things 
+harsh and ugly.  That puzzled me extremely.  The esthetic quality of 
+many of their proposals, the "manners" of their work, so to speak, 
+were at times as dreadful as--well, War Office barrack architecture.  
+A caricature by its exaggerated statements will sometimes serve to 
+point a truth by antagonising falsity and falsity.  I remember 
+talking to a prominent museum official in need of more public funds 
+for the work he had in hand.  I mentioned the possibility of 
+enlisting Bailey's influence.
+
+"Oh, we don't want Philistines like that infernal Bottle-Imp running 
+us," he said hastily, and would hear of no concerted action for the 
+end he had in view.  "I'd rather not have the extension.
+
+"You see," he went on to explain, "Bailey's wanting in the 
+essentials."
+
+"What essentials?" said I.
+
+"Oh! he'd be like a nasty oily efficient little machine for some 
+merely subordinate necessity among all my delicate stuff.  He'd do 
+all we wanted no doubt in the way of money and powers--and he'd do 
+it wrong and mess the place for ever.  Hands all black, you know.  
+He's just a means.  Just a very aggressive and unmanageable means.  
+This isn't a plumber's job. . . ."
+
+I stuck to my argument.
+
+"I don't LIKE him," said the official conclusively, and it seemed to 
+me at the time he was just blind prejudice speaking. . . .
+
+I came nearer the truth of the matter as I came to realise that our 
+philosophies differed profoundly.  That isn't a very curable 
+difference,--once people have grown up.  Theirs was a philosophy 
+devoid of FINESSE.  Temperamentally the Baileys were specialised, 
+concentrated, accurate, while I am urged either by some Inner force 
+or some entirely assimilated influence in my training, always to 
+round off and shadow my outlines.  I hate them hard.  I would 
+sacrifice detail to modelling always, and the Baileys, it seemed to 
+me, loved a world as flat and metallic as Sidney Cooper's cows.  If 
+they had the universe in hand I know they would take down all the 
+trees and put up stamped tin green shades and sunlight accumulators.  
+Altiora thought trees hopelessly irregular and sea cliffs a great 
+mistake. . . .   I got things clearer as time went on.  Though it 
+was an Hegelian mess of which I had partaken at Codger's table by 
+way of a philosophical training, my sympathies have always been 
+Pragmatist.  I belong almost by nature to that school of Pragmatism 
+that, following the medieval Nominalists, bases itself upon a denial 
+of the reality of classes, and of the validity of general laws.  The 
+Baileys classified everything.  They were, in the scholastic sense--
+which so oddly contradicts the modern use of the word�"Realists."  
+They believed classes were REAL and independent of their 
+individuals.  This is the common habit of all so-called educated 
+people who have no metaphysical aptitude and no metaphysical 
+training.  It leads them to a progressive misunderstanding of the 
+world.  It was a favourite trick of Altiora's to speak of everybody 
+as a "type"; she saw men as samples moving; her dining-room became a 
+chamber of representatives.  It gave a tremendously scientific air 
+to many of their generalisations, using "scientific" in its 
+nineteenth-century uncritical Herbert Spencer sense, an air that 
+only began to disappear when you thought them over again in terms of 
+actuality and the people one knew. . . .
+
+At the Baileys' one always seemed to be getting one's hands on the 
+very strings that guided the world.  You heard legislation projected 
+to affect this "type" and that; statistics marched by you with sin 
+and shame and injustice and misery reduced to quite manageable 
+percentages, you found men who were to frame or amend bills in grave 
+and intimate exchange with Bailey's omniscience, you heard Altiora 
+canvassing approaching resignations and possible appointments that 
+might make or mar a revolution in administrative methods, and doing 
+it with a vigorous directness that manifestly swayed the decision; 
+and you felt you were in a sort of signal box with levers all about 
+you, and the world outside there, albeit a little dark and 
+mysterious beyond the window, running on its lines in ready 
+obedience to these unhesitating lights, true and steady to trim 
+termini.
+
+And then with all this administrative fizzle, this pseudo-scientific 
+administrative chatter, dying away in your head, out you went into 
+the limitless grimy chaos of London streets and squares, roads and 
+avenues lined with teeming houses, each larger than the Chambers 
+Street house and at least equally alive, you saw the chaotic clamour 
+of hoardings, the jumble of traffic, the coming and going of 
+mysterious myriads, you heard the rumble of traffic like the noise 
+of a torrent; a vague incessant murmur of cries and voices, wanton 
+crimes and accidents bawled at you from the placards; imperative 
+unaccountable fashions swaggered triumphant in dazzling windows of 
+the shops; and you found yourself swaying back to the opposite 
+conviction that the huge formless spirit of the world it was that 
+held the strings and danced the puppets on the Bailey stage. . . .
+
+Under the lamps you were jostled by people like my Staffordshire 
+uncle out for a spree, you saw shy youths conversing with 
+prostitutes, you passed young lovers pairing with an entire 
+disregard of the social suitability of the "types" they might blend 
+or create, you saw men leaning drunken against lamp-posts whom you 
+knew for the "type" that will charge with fixed bayonets into the 
+face of death, and you found yourself unable to imagine little 
+Bailey achieving either drunkenness or the careless defiance of 
+annihilation.  You realised that quite a lot of types were 
+underrepresented in Chambers Street, that feral and obscure and 
+altogether monstrous forces must be at work, as yet altogether 
+unassimilated by those neat administrative reorganisations.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Altiora, I remember, preluded Margaret's reappearance by announcing 
+her as a "new type."
+
+I was accustomed to go early to the Baileys' dinners in those days, 
+for a preliminary gossip with Altiora in front of her drawing-room 
+fire.  One got her alone, and that early arrival was a little sign 
+of appreciation she valued.  She had every woman's need of followers 
+and servants.
+
+"I'm going to send you down to-night," she said, "with a very 
+interesting type indeed--one of the new generation of serious gals.  
+Middle-class origin--and quite well off.  Rich in fact.  Her step-
+father was a solicitor and something of an ENTREPRENEUR towards the 
+end, I fancy--in the Black Country.  There was a little brother 
+died, and she's lost her mother quite recently.  Quite on her own, 
+so to speak.  She's never been out into society very much, and 
+doesn't seem really very anxious to go. . . .  Not exactly an 
+intellectual person, you know, but quiet, and great force of 
+character.  Came up to London on her own and came to us--someone had 
+told her we were the sort of people to advise her--to ask what to 
+do.  I'm sure she'll interest you."
+
+"What CAN people of that sort do?" I asked.  "Is she capable of 
+investigation?"
+
+Altiora compressed her lips and shook her head.  She always did 
+shake her head when you asked that of anyone.
+
+"Of course what she ought to do," said Altiora, with her silk dress 
+pulled back from her knee before the fire, and with a lift of her 
+voice towards a chuckle at her daring way of putting things, "is to 
+marry a member of Parliament and see he does his work. . . .  
+Perhaps she will.  It's a very exceptional gal who can do anything 
+by herself--quite exceptional.  The more serious they are--without 
+being exceptional--the more we want them to marry."
+
+Her exposition was truncated by the entry of the type in question.
+
+"Well!" cried Altiora turning, and with a high note of welcome, 
+"HERE you are!"
+
+Margaret had gained in dignity and prettiness by the lapse of five 
+years, and she was now very beautifully and richly and simply 
+dressed.  Her fair hair had been done in some way that made it seem 
+softer and more abundant than it was in my memory, and a gleam of 
+purple velvet-set diamonds showed amidst its mist of little golden 
+and brown lines.  Her dress was of white and violet, the last trace 
+of mourning for her mother, and confessed the gracious droop of her 
+tall and slender body.  She did not suggest Staffordshire at all, 
+and I was puzzled for a moment to think where I had met her.  Her 
+sweetly shaped mouth with the slight obliquity of the lip and the 
+little kink in her brow were extraordinarily familiar to me.  But 
+she had either been prepared by Altiora or she remembered my name.  
+"We met," she said, "while my step-father was alive--at Misterton.  
+You came to see us"; and instantly I recalled the sunshine between 
+the apple blossom and a slender pale blue girlish shape among the 
+daffodils, like something that had sprung from a bulb itself.  I 
+recalled at once that I had found her very interesting, though I did 
+not clearly remember how it was she had interested me.
+
+Other guests arrived--it was one of Altiora's boldly blended 
+mixtures of people with ideas and people with influence or money who 
+might perhaps be expected to resonate to them.  Bailey came down 
+late with an air of hurry, and was introduced to Margaret and said 
+absolutely nothing to her--there being no information either to 
+receive or impart and nothing to do--but stood snatching his left 
+cheek until I rescued him and her, and left him free to congratulate 
+the new Lady Snape on her husband's K. C. B.
+
+I took Margaret down.  We achieved no feats of mutual expression, 
+except that it was abundantly clear we were both very pleased and 
+interested to meet again, and that we had both kept memories of each 
+other.  We made that Misterton tea-party and the subsequent 
+marriages of my cousins and the world of Burslem generally, matter 
+for quite an agreeable conversation until at last Altiora, following 
+her invariable custom, called me by name imperatively out of our 
+duologue.  "Mr. Remington," she said, "we want your opinion--" in 
+her entirely characteristic effort to get all the threads of 
+conversation into her own hands for the climax that always wound up 
+her dinners.  How the other women used to hate those concluding 
+raids of hers!  I forget most of the other people at that dinner, 
+nor can I recall what the crowning rally was about.  It didn't in 
+any way join on to my impression of Margaret.
+
+In the drawing-room of the matting floor I rejoined her, with 
+Altiora's manifest connivance, and in the interval I had been 
+thinking of our former meeting.
+
+"Do you find London," I asked, "give you more opportunity for doing 
+things and learning things than Burslem?"
+
+She showed at once she appreciated my allusion to her former 
+confidences.  "I was very discontented then," she said and paused.  
+"I've really only been in London for a few months.  It's so 
+different.  In Burslem, life seems all business and getting--without 
+any reason.  One went on and it didn't seem to mean anything.  At 
+least anything that mattered. . . .  London seems to be so full of 
+meanings--all mixed up together."
+
+She knitted her brows over her words and smiled appealingly at the 
+end as if for consideration for her inadequate expression, 
+appealingly and almost humorously.
+
+I looked understandingly at her.  "We have all," I agreed, "to come 
+to London."
+
+"One sees so much distress," she added, as if she felt she had 
+completely omitted something, and needed a codicil.
+
+"What are you doing in London?"
+
+"I'm thinking of studying.  Some social question.  I thought perhaps 
+I might go and study social conditions as Mrs. Bailey did, go 
+perhaps as a work-girl or see the reality of living in, but Mrs. 
+Bailey thought perhaps it wasn't quite my work."
+
+"Are you studying?"
+
+"I'm going to a good many lectures, and perhaps I shall take up a 
+regular course at the Westminster School of Politics and Sociology.  
+But Mrs. Bailey doesn't seem to believe very much in that either."
+
+Her faintly whimsical smile returned.  "I seem rather indefinite," 
+she apologised, "but one does not want to get entangled in things 
+one can't do.  One--one has so many advantages, one's life seems to 
+be such a trust and such a responsibility--"
+
+She stopped.
+
+"A man gets driven into work," I said.
+
+"It must be splendid to be Mrs. Bailey," she replied with a glance 
+of envious admiration across the room.
+
+"SHE has no doubts, anyhow," I remarked.
+
+"She HAD," said Margaret with the pride of one who has received 
+great confidences.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+"You've met before?" said Altiora, a day or so later.
+
+I explained when.
+
+"You find her interesting?"
+
+I saw in a flash that Altiora meant to marry me to Margaret.
+
+Her intention became much clearer as the year developed.  Altiora 
+was systematic even in matters that evade system.  I was to marry 
+Margaret, and freed from the need of making an income I was to come 
+into politics--as an exponent of Baileyism.  She put it down with 
+the other excellent and advantageous things that should occupy her 
+summer holiday.  It was her pride and glory to put things down and 
+plan them out in detail beforehand, and I'm not quite sure that she 
+did not even mark off the day upon which the engagement was to be 
+declared.  If she did, I disappointed her.  We didn't come to an 
+engagement, in spite of the broadest hints and the glaring 
+obviousness of everything, that summer.
+
+Every summer the Baileys went out of London to some house they hired 
+or borrowed, leaving their secretaries toiling behind, and they went 
+on working hard in the mornings and evenings and taking exercise in 
+the open air in the afternoon.  They cycled assiduously and went for 
+long walks at a trot, and raided and studied (and incidentally 
+explained themselves to) any social "types" that lived in the 
+neighbourhood.  One invaded type, resentful under research, 
+described them with a dreadful aptness as Donna Quixote and Sancho 
+Panza--and himself as a harmless windmill, hurting no one and 
+signifying nothing.  She did rather tilt at things.  This particular 
+summer they were at a pleasant farmhouse in level country near 
+Pangbourne, belonging to the Hon. Wilfrid Winchester, and they asked 
+me to come down to rooms in the neighbourhood--Altiora took them for 
+a month for me in August--and board with them upon extremely 
+reasonable terms; and when I got there I found Margaret sitting in a 
+hammock at Altiora's feet.  Lots of people, I gathered, were coming 
+and going in the neighbourhood, the Ponts were in a villa on the 
+river, and the Rickhams' houseboat was to moor for some days; but 
+these irruptions did not impede a great deal of duologue between 
+Margaret and myself.
+
+Altiora was efficient rather than artistic in her match-making.  She 
+sent us off for long walks together--Margaret was a fairly good 
+walker--she exhumed some defective croquet things and incited us to 
+croquet, not understanding that detestable game is the worst 
+stimulant for lovers in the world.  And Margaret and I were always 
+getting left about, and finding ourselves for odd half-hours in the 
+kitchen-garden with nothing to do except talk, or we were told with 
+a wave of the hand to run away and amuse each other.
+
+Altiora even tried a picnic in canoes, knowing from fiction rather 
+than imagination or experience the conclusive nature of such 
+excursions.  But there she fumbled at the last moment, and elected 
+at the river's brink to share a canoe with me.  Bailey showed so 
+much zeal and so little skill--his hat fell off and he became 
+miraculously nothing but paddle-clutching hands and a vast wrinkled 
+brow--that at last he had to be paddled ignominiously by Margaret, 
+while Altiora, after a phase of rigid discretion, as nearly as 
+possible drowned herself--and me no doubt into the bargain--with a 
+sudden lateral gesture of the arm to emphasise the high note with 
+which she dismissed the efficiency of the Charity Organisation 
+Society.  We shipped about an inch of water and sat in it for the 
+rest of the time, an inconvenience she disregarded heroically.  We 
+had difficulties in landing Oscar from his frail craft upon the ait 
+of our feasting,--he didn't balance sideways and was much alarmed, 
+and afterwards, as Margaret had a pain in her back, I took him in my 
+canoe, let him hide his shame with an ineffectual but not positively 
+harmful paddle, and towed the other by means of the joined painters.  
+Still it was the fault of the inadequate information supplied in the 
+books and not of Altiora that that was not the date of my betrothal.
+
+I find it not a little difficult to state what kept me back from 
+proposing marriage to Margaret that summer, and what urged me 
+forward at last to marry her.  It is so much easier to remember 
+one's resolutions than to remember the moods and suggestions that 
+produced them.
+
+Marrying and getting married was, I think, a pretty simple affair to 
+Altiora; it was something that happened to the adolescent and 
+unmarried when you threw them together under the circumstances of 
+health, warmth and leisure.  It happened with the kindly and 
+approving smiles of the more experienced elders who had organised 
+these proximities.  The young people married, settled down, children 
+ensued, and father and mother turned their minds, now decently and 
+properly disillusioned, to other things.  That to Altiora was the 
+normal sexual life, and she believed it to be the quality of the 
+great bulk of the life about her.
+
+One of the great barriers to human understanding is the wide 
+temperamental difference one finds in the values of things relating 
+to sex.  It is the issue upon which people most need training in 
+charity and imaginative sympathy.  Here are no universal standards 
+at all, and indeed for no single man nor woman does there seem to be 
+any fixed standard, so much do the accidents of circumstances and 
+one's physical phases affect one's interpretations.  There is 
+nothing in the whole range of sexual fact that may not seem 
+supremely beautiful or humanly jolly or magnificently wicked or 
+disgusting or trivial or utterly insignificant, according to the eye 
+that sees or the mood that colours.  Here is something that may fill 
+the skies and every waking hour or be almost completely banished 
+from a life.  It may be everything on Monday and less than nothing 
+on Saturday.  And we make our laws and rules as though in these 
+matters all men and women were commensurable one with another, with 
+an equal steadfast passion and an equal constant duty. . . .
+
+I don't know what dreams Altiora may have had in her schoolroom 
+days, I always suspected her of suppressed and forgotten phases, but 
+certainly her general effect now was of an entirely passionless 
+worldliness in these matters.  Indeed so far as I could get at her, 
+she regarded sexual passion as being hardly more legitimate in a 
+civilised person than--let us say--homicidal mania.  She must have 
+forgotten--and Bailey too.  I suspect she forgot before she married 
+him.  I don't suppose either of them had the slightest intimation of 
+the dimensions sexual love can take in the thoughts of the great 
+majority of people with whom they come in contact.  They loved in 
+their way--an intellectual way it was and a fond way--but it had no 
+relation to beauty and physical sensation--except that there seemed 
+a decree of exile against these things.  They got their glow in high 
+moments of altruistic ambition--and in moments of vivid worldly 
+success.  They sat at opposite ends of their dinner table with so 
+and so "captured," and so and so, flushed with a mutual approval.  
+They saw people in love forgetful and distraught about them, and 
+just put it down to forgetfulness and distraction.  At any rate 
+Altiora manifestly viewed my situation and Margaret's with an 
+abnormal and entirely misleading simplicity.  There was the girl, 
+rich, with an acceptable claim to be beautiful, shiningly virtuous, 
+quite capable of political interests, and there was I, talented, 
+ambitious and full of political and social passion, in need of just 
+the money, devotion and regularisation Margaret could provide.  We 
+were both unmarried--white sheets of uninscribed paper.  Was there 
+ever a simpler situation?  What more could we possibly want?
+
+She was even a little offended at the inconclusiveness that did not 
+settle things at Pangbourne.  I seemed to her, I suspect, to reflect 
+upon her judgment and good intentions.
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+I didn't see things with Altiora's simplicity.
+
+I admired Margaret very much, I was fully aware of all that she and 
+I might give each other; indeed so far as Altiora went we were quite 
+in agreement.  But what seemed solid ground to Altiora and the 
+ultimate footing of her emasculated world, was to me just the 
+superficial covering of a gulf--oh! abysses of vague and dim, and 
+yet stupendously significant things.
+
+I couldn't dismiss the interests and the passion of sex as Altiora 
+did.  Work, I agreed, was important; career and success; but deep 
+unanalysable instincts told me this preoccupation was a thing quite 
+as important; dangerous, interfering, destructive indeed, but none 
+the less a dominating interest in life.  I have told how flittingly 
+and uninvited it came like a moth from the outer twilight into my 
+life, how it grew in me with my manhood, how it found its way to 
+speech and grew daring, and led me at last to experience.  After 
+that adventure at Locarno sex and the interests and desires of sex 
+never left me for long at peace.  I went on with my work and my 
+career, and all the time it was like--like someone talking ever and 
+again in a room while one tries to write.
+
+There were times when I could have wished the world a world all of 
+men, so greatly did this unassimilated series of motives and 
+curiosities hamper me; and times when I could have wished the world 
+all of women.  I seemed always to be seeking something in women, in 
+girls, and I was never clear what it was I was seeking.  But never--
+even at my coarsest--was I moved by physical desire alone.  Was I 
+seeking help and fellowship?  Was I seeking some intimacy with 
+beauty?  It was a thing too formless to state, that I seemed always 
+desiring to attain and never attaining.  Waves of gross sensuousness 
+arose out of this preoccupation, carried me to a crisis of 
+gratification or disappointment that was clearly not the needed 
+thing; they passed and left my mind free again for a time to get on 
+with the permanent pursuits of my life.  And then presently this 
+solicitude would have me again, an irrelevance as it seemed, and yet 
+a constantly recurring demand.
+
+I don't want particularly to dwell upon things that are disagreeable 
+for others to read, but I cannot leave them out of my story and get 
+the right proportions of the forces I am balancing.  I was no 
+abnormal man, and that world of order we desire to make must be 
+built of such stuff as I was and am and can beget.  You cannot have 
+a world of Baileys; it would end in one orderly generation.  
+Humanity is begotten in Desire, lives by Desire.
+
+
+     "Love which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb;
+      Love which is lust, is the Call from the Gloom."
+
+
+I echo Henley.
+
+I suppose the life of celibacy which the active, well-fed, well-
+exercised and imaginatively stirred young man of the educated 
+classes is supposed to lead from the age of nineteen or twenty, when 
+Nature certainly meant him to marry, to thirty or more, when 
+civilisation permits him to do so, is the most impossible thing in 
+the world.  We deal here with facts that are kept secret and 
+obscure, but I doubt for my own part if more than one man out of 
+five in our class satisfies that ideal demand.  The rest are even as 
+I was, and Hatherleigh and Esmeer and all the men I knew.  I draw no 
+lessons and offer no panacea; I have to tell the quality of life, 
+and this is how it is.  This is how it will remain until men and 
+women have the courage to face the facts of life.
+
+I was no systematic libertine, you must understand; things happened 
+to me and desire drove me.  Any young man would have served for that 
+Locarno adventure, and after that what had been a mystic and 
+wonderful thing passed rapidly into a gross, manifestly misdirected 
+and complicating one.  I can count a meagre tale of five illicit 
+loves in the days of my youth, to include that first experience, and 
+of them all only two were sustained relationships.  Besides these 
+five "affairs," on one or two occasions I dipped so low as the inky 
+dismal sensuality of the streets, and made one of those pairs of 
+correlated figures, the woman in her squalid finery sailing 
+homeward, the man modestly aloof and behind, that every night in the 
+London year flit by the score of thousands across the sight of the 
+observant. . . .
+
+How ugly it is to recall; ugly and shameful now without 
+qualification!  Yet at the time there was surely something not 
+altogether ugly in it--something that has vanished, some fine thing 
+mortally ailing.
+
+One such occasion I recall as if it were a vision deep down in a 
+pit, as if it had happened in another state of existence to someone 
+else.  And yet it is the sort of thing that has happened, once or 
+twice at least, to half the men in London who have been in a 
+position to make it possible.  Let me try and give you its peculiar 
+effect.  Man or woman, you ought to know of it.
+
+Figure to yourself a dingy room, somewhere in that network of 
+streets that lies about Tottenham Court Road, a dingy bedroom lit by 
+a solitary candle and carpeted with scraps and patches, with 
+curtains of cretonne closing the window, and a tawdry ornament of 
+paper in the grate.  I sit on a bed beside a weary-eyed, fair-
+haired, sturdy young woman, half undressed, who is telling me in 
+broken German something that my knowledge of German is at first 
+inadequate to understand. . . .
+
+I thought she was boasting about her family, and then slowly the 
+meaning came to me.  She was a Lett from near Libau in Courland, and 
+she was telling me--just as one tells something too strange for 
+comment or emotion--how her father had been shot and her sister 
+outraged and murdered before her eyes.
+
+It was as if one had dipped into something primordial and stupendous 
+beneath the smooth and trivial surfaces of life.  There was I, you 
+know, the promising young don from Cambridge, who wrote quite 
+brilliantly about politics and might presently get into Parliament, 
+with my collar and tie in my hand, and a certain sense of shameful 
+adventure fading out of my mind.
+
+"Ach Gott!" she sighed by way of comment, and mused deeply for a 
+moment before she turned her face to me, as to something forgotten 
+and remembered, and assumed the half-hearted meretricious smile.
+
+"Bin ich eine hubsche?" she asked like one who repeats a lesson.
+
+I was moved to crave her pardon and come away.
+
+"Bin ich eine hubsche?" she asked a little anxiously, laying a 
+detaining hand upon me, and evidently not understanding a word of 
+what I was striving to say.
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+I find it extraordinarily difficult to recall the phases by which I 
+passed from my first admiration of Margaret's earnestness and 
+unconscious daintiness to an intimate acquaintance.  The earlier 
+encounters stand out clear and hard, but then the impressions become 
+crowded and mingle not only with each other but with all the 
+subsequent developments of relationship, the enormous evolutions of 
+interpretation and comprehension between husband and wife.  Dipping 
+into my memories is like dipping into a ragbag, one brings out this 
+memory or that, with no intimation of how they came in time or what 
+led to them and joined them together.  And they are all mixed up 
+with subsequent associations, with sympathies and discords, habits 
+of intercourse, surprises and disappointments and discovered 
+misunderstandings.  I know only that always my feelings for Margaret 
+were complicatel feelings, woven of many and various strands.
+
+It is one of the curious neglected aspects of life how at the same 
+time and in relation to the same reality we can have in our minds 
+streams of thought at quite different levels.  We can be at the same 
+time idealising a person and seeing and criticising that person 
+quite coldly and clearly, and we slip unconsciously from level to 
+level and produce all sorts of inconsistent acts.  In a sense I had 
+no illusions about Margaret; in a sense my conception of Margaret 
+was entirely poetic illusion.  I don't think I was ever blind to 
+certain defects of hers, and quite as certainly they didn't seem to 
+matter in the slightest degree.  Her mind had a curious want of 
+vigour, "flatness" is the only word; she never seemed to escape from 
+her phrase; her way of thinking, her way of doing was indecisive; 
+she remained in her attitude, it did not flow out to easy, 
+confirmatory action.
+
+I saw this quite clearly, and when we walked and talked together I 
+seemed always trying for animation in her and never finding it.  I 
+would state my ideas.  "I know," she would say, "I know."
+
+I talked about myself and she listened wonderfully, but she made no 
+answering revelations.  I talked politics, and she remarked with her 
+blue eyes wide and earnest: "Every WORD you say seems so just."
+
+I admired her appearance tremendously but--I can only express it by 
+saying I didn't want to touch her.  Her fair hair was always 
+delectably done.  It flowed beautifully over her pretty small ears, 
+and she would tie its fair coilings with fillets of black or blue 
+velvet that carried pretty buckles of silver and paste.  The light, 
+the faint down on her brow and cheek was delightful.  And it was 
+clear to me that I made her happy.
+
+My sense of her deficiencies didn't stand in the way of my falling 
+at last very deeply in love with her.  Her very shortcomings seemed 
+to offer me something. . . .
+
+She stood in my mind for goodness--and for things from which it 
+seemed to me my hold was slipping.
+
+She seemed to promise a way of escape from the deepening opposition 
+in me between physical passions and the constructive career, the 
+career of wide aims and human service, upon which I had embarked.  
+All the time that I was seeing her as a beautiful, fragile, rather 
+ineffective girl, I was also seeing her just as consciously as a 
+shining slender figure, a radiant reconciliation, coming into my 
+darkling disorders of lust and impulse.  I could understand clearly 
+that she was incapable of the most necessary subtleties of political 
+thought, and yet I could contemplate praying to her and putting all 
+the intricate troubles of my life at her feet.
+
+Before the reappearance of Margaret in my world at all an unwonted 
+disgust with the consequences and quality of my passions had arisen 
+in my mind.  Among other things that moment with the Lettish girl 
+haunted me persistently.  I would see myself again and again sitting 
+amidst those sluttish surroundings, collar and tie in hand, while 
+her heavy German words grouped themselves to a slowly apprehended 
+meaning.  I would feel again with a fresh stab of remorse, that this 
+was not a flash of adventure, this was not seeing life in any 
+permissible sense, but a dip into tragedy, dishonour, hideous 
+degradation, and the pitiless cruelty of a world as yet uncontrolled 
+by any ordered will.
+
+"Good God!" I put it to myself, "that I should finish the work those 
+Cossacks had begun!  I who want order and justice before everything!  
+There's no way out of it, no decent excuse!  If I didn't think, I 
+ought to have thought!" . . .
+
+How did I get to it?" . . .  I would ransack the phases of my 
+development from the first shy unveiling of a hidden wonder to the 
+last extremity as a man will go through muddled account books to 
+find some disorganising error. . . .
+
+I was also involved at that time--I find it hard to place these 
+things in the exact order of their dates because they were so 
+disconnected with the regular progress of my work and life--in an 
+intrigue, a clumsy, sensuous, pretentious, artificially stimulated 
+intrigue, with a Mrs. Larrimer, a woman living separated from her 
+husband.  I will not go into particulars of that episode, nor how we 
+quarrelled and chafed one another.  She was at once unfaithful and 
+jealous and full of whims about our meetings; she was careless of 
+our secret, and vulgarised our relationship by intolerable 
+interpretations; except for some glowing moments of gratification, 
+except for the recurrent and essentially vicious desire that drew us 
+back to each other again, we both fretted at a vexatious and 
+unexpectedly binding intimacy.  The interim was full of the quality 
+of work delayed, of time and energy wasted, of insecure precautions 
+against scandal and exposure.  Disappointment is almost inherent in 
+illicit love.  I had, and perhaps it was part of her recurrent 
+irritation also, a feeling as though one had followed something fine 
+and beautiful into a net--into bird lime!  These furtive scuffles, 
+this sneaking into shabby houses of assignation, was what we had 
+made out of the suggestion of pagan beauty; this was the reality of 
+our vision of nymphs and satyrs dancing for the joy of life amidst 
+incessant sunshine.  We had laid hands upon the wonder and glory of 
+bodily love and wasted them. . . .
+
+It was the sense of waste, of finely beautiful possibilities getting 
+entangled and marred for ever that oppressed me.  I had missed, I 
+had lost.  I did not turn from these things after the fashion of the 
+Baileys, as one turns from something low and embarrassing.  I felt 
+that these great organic forces were still to be wrought into a 
+harmony with my constructive passion.  I felt too that I was not 
+doing it.  I had not understood the forces in this struggle nor its 
+nature, and as I learnt I failed.  I had been started wrong, I had 
+gone on wrong, in a world that was muddled and confused, full of 
+false counsel and erratic shames and twisted temptations.  I learnt 
+to see it so by failures that were perhaps destroying any chance of 
+profit in my lessons.  Moods of clear keen industry alternated with 
+moods of relapse and indulgence and moods of dubiety and remorse.  I 
+was not going on as the Baileys thought I was going on.  There were 
+times when the blindness of the Baileys irritated me intensely. 
+Beneath the ostensible success of those years, between twenty-three 
+and twenty-eight, this rottenness, known to scarcely any one but 
+myself, grew and spread.  My sense of the probability of a collapse 
+intensified.  I knew indeed now, even as Willersley had prophesied 
+five years before, that I was entangling myself in something that 
+might smother all my uses in the world.  Down there among those 
+incommunicable difficulties, I was puzzled and blundering.  I was 
+losing my hold upon things; the chaotic and adventurous element in 
+life was spreading upward and getting the better of me, over-
+mastering me and all my will to rule and make. . . .  And the 
+strength, the drugging urgency of the passion!
+
+Margaret shone at times in my imagination like a radiant angel in a 
+world of mire and disorder, in a world of cravings, hot and dull red 
+like scars inflamed. . . .
+
+I suppose it was because I had so great a need of such help as her 
+whiteness proffered, that I could ascribe impossible perfections to 
+her, a power of intellect, a moral power and patience to which she, 
+poor fellow mortal, had indeed no claim.  If only a few of us WERE 
+angels and freed from the tangle of effort, how easy life might be!  
+I wanted her so badly, so very badly, to be what I needed.  I wanted 
+a woman to save me.  I forced myself to see her as I wished to see 
+her.  Her tepidities became infinite delicacies, her mental 
+vagueness an atmospheric realism.  The harsh precisions of the 
+Baileys and Altiora's blunt directness threw up her fineness into 
+relief and made a grace of every weakness.
+
+Mixed up with the memory of times when I talked with Margaret as one 
+talks politely to those who are hopelessly inferior in mental 
+quality, explaining with a false lucidity, welcoming and encouraging 
+the feeblest response, when possible moulding and directing, are 
+times when I did indeed, as the old phrase goes, worship the ground 
+she trod on.  I was equally honest and unconscious of inconsistency 
+at each extreme.  But in neither phase could I find it easy to make 
+love to Margaret.  For in the first I did not want to, though I 
+talked abundantly to her of marriage and so forth, and was a little 
+puzzled at myself for not going on to some personal application, and 
+in the second she seemed inaccessible, I felt I must make 
+confessions and put things before her that would be the grossest 
+outrage upon the noble purity I attributed to her.
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+I went to Margaret at last to ask her to marry me, wrought up to the 
+mood of one who stakes his life on a cast.  Separated from her, and 
+with the resonance of an evening of angry recriminations with Mrs. 
+Larrimer echoing in my mind, I discovered myself to be quite 
+passionately in love with Margaret.  Last shreds of doubt vanished.  
+It has always been a feature of our relationship that Margaret 
+absent means more to me than Margaret present; her memory distils 
+from its dross and purifies in me.  All my criticisms and 
+qualifications of her vanished into some dark corner of my mind.  
+She was the lady of my salvation; I must win my way to her or 
+perish.
+
+I went to her at last, for all that I knew she loved me, in 
+passionate self-abasement, white and a-tremble.  She was staying 
+with the Rockleys at Woking, for Shena Rockley had been at Bennett 
+Hall with her and they had resumed a close intimacy; and I went down 
+to her on an impulse, unheralded.  I was kept waiting for some 
+minutes, I remember, in a little room upon which a conservatory 
+opened, a conservatory full of pots of large mauve-edged, white 
+cyclamens in flower.  And there was a big lacquer cabinet, a Chinese 
+thing, I suppose, of black and gold against the red-toned wall.  To 
+this day the thought of Margaret is inseparably bound up with the 
+sight of a cyclamen's back-turned petals.
+
+She came in, looking pale and drooping rather more than usual.  I 
+suddenly realised that Altiora's hint of a disappointment leading to 
+positive illness was something more than a vindictive comment.  She 
+closed the door and came across to me and took and dropped my hand 
+and stood still.  "What is it you want with me?" she asked.
+
+The speech I had been turning over and over in my mind on the way 
+vanished at the sight of her.
+
+"I want to talk to you," I answered lamely.
+
+For some seconds neither of us said a word.
+
+"I want to tell you things about my life," I began.
+
+She answered with a scarcely audible "yes."
+
+"I almost asked you to marry me at Pangbourne," I plunged.  "I 
+didn't.  I didn't because--because you had too much to give me."
+
+"Too much!" she echoed, "to give you!"  She had lifted her eyes to 
+my face and the colour was coming into her cheeks.
+
+"Don't misunderstand me," I said hastily.  "I want to tell you 
+things, things you don't know.  Don't answer me.  I want to tell 
+you."
+
+She stood before the fireplace with her ultimate answer shining 
+through the quiet of her face.  "Go on," she said, very softly.  It 
+was so pitilessly manifest she was resolved to idealise the 
+situation whatever I might say.  I began walking up and down the 
+room between those cyclamens and the cabinet.  There were little 
+gold fishermen on the cabinet fishing from little islands that each 
+had a pagoda and a tree, and there were also men in boats or 
+something, I couldn't determine what, and some obscure sub-office in 
+my mind concerned itself with that quite intently.  Yet I seem to 
+have been striving with all my being to get words for the truth of 
+things.  "You see," I emerged, "you make everything possible to me.  
+You can give me help and sympathy, support, understanding.  You know 
+my political ambitions.  You know all that I might do in the world.  
+I do so intensely want to do constructive things, big things 
+perhaps, in this wild jumble. . . .  Only you don't know a bit what 
+I am.  I want to tell you what I am.  I'm complex. . . .  I'm 
+streaked."
+
+I glanced at her, and she was regarding me with an expression of 
+blissful disregard for any meaning I was seeking to convey.
+
+"You see," I said, "I'm a bad man."
+
+She sounded a note of valiant incredulity.
+
+Everything seemed to be slipping away from me.  I pushed on to the 
+ugly facts that remained over from the wreck of my interpretation.  
+"What has held me back," I said, "is the thought that you could not 
+possibly understand certain things in my life.  Men are not pure as 
+women are.  I have had love affairs.  I mean I have had affairs.  
+Passion--desire.  You see, I have had a mistress, I have been 
+entangled--"
+
+She seemed about to speak, but I interrupted.  "I'm not telling 
+you," I said, "what I meant to tell you.  I want you to know clearly 
+that there is another side to my life, a dirty side.  Deliberately I 
+say, dirty.  It didn't seem so at first--"
+
+I stopped blankly.  "Dirty," I thought, was the most idiotic choice 
+of words to have made.
+
+I had never in any tolerable sense of the word been dirty.
+
+"I drifted into this--as men do," I said after a little pause and 
+stopped again.
+
+She was looking at me with her wide blue eyes.
+
+"Did you imagine," she began, "that I thought you--that I expected--"
+
+"But how can you know?"
+
+"I know.  I do know."
+
+"But--" I began.
+
+"I know," she persisted, dropping her eyelids.  "Of course I know," 
+and nothing could have convinced me more completely that she did not 
+know.
+
+"All men--" she generalised.  "A woman does not understand these 
+temptations."
+
+I was astonished beyond measure at her way of taking my confession. 
+. . .
+
+"Of course," she said, hesitating a little over a transparent 
+difficulty, "it is all over and past."
+
+"It's all over and past," I answered.
+
+There was a little pause.
+
+"I don't want to know," she said.  "None of that seems to matter now 
+in the slightest degree."
+
+She looked up and smiled as though we had exchanged some acceptable 
+commonplaces.  "Poor dear!" she said, dismissing everything, and put 
+out her arms, and it seemed to me that I could hear the Lettish girl 
+in the background--doomed safety valve of purity in this intolerable 
+world--telling something in indistinguishable German--I know not 
+what nor why. . . .
+
+I took Margaret in my arms and kissed her.  Her eyes were wet with 
+tears.  She clung to me and was near, I felt, to sobbing.
+
+"I have loved you," she whispered presently, "Oh! ever since we met 
+in Misterton--six years and more ago."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD
+
+MARGARET IN VENICE
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+There comes into my mind a confused memory of conversations with 
+Margaret; we must have had dozens altogether, and they mix in now 
+for the most part inextricably not only with one another, but with 
+later talks and with things we discussed at Pangbourne.  We had the 
+immensest anticipations of the years and opportunities that lay 
+before us.  I was now very deeply in love with her indeed.  I felt 
+not that I had cleaned up my life but that she had.  We called each 
+other "confederate" I remember, and made during our brief engagement 
+a series of visits to the various legislative bodies in London, the 
+County Council, the House of Commons, where we dined with Villiers, 
+and the St. Pancras Vestry, where we heard Shaw speaking.  I was 
+full of plans and so was she of the way in which we were to live and 
+work.  We were to pay back in public service whatever excess of 
+wealth beyond his merits old Seddon's economic advantage had won for 
+him from the toiling people in the potteries.  The end of the Boer 
+War was so recent that that blessed word "efficiency" echoed still 
+in people's minds and thoughts.  Lord Roseberry in a memorable 
+oration had put it into the heads of the big outer public, but the 
+Baileys with a certain show of justice claimed to have set it going 
+in the channels that took it to him--if as a matter of fact it was 
+taken to him.  But then it was their habit to make claims of that 
+sort.  They certainly did their share to keep "efficient" going.  
+Altiora's highest praise was "thoroughly efficient."  We were to be 
+a "thoroughly efficient" political couple of the "new type."  She 
+explained us to herself and Oscar, she explained us to ourselves, 
+she explained us to the people who came to her dinners and 
+afternoons until the world was highly charged with explanation and 
+expectation, and the proposal that I should be the Liberal candidate 
+for the Kinghamstead Division seemed the most natural development in 
+the world.
+
+I was full of the ideal of hard restrained living and relentless 
+activity, and throughout a beautiful November at Venice, where 
+chiefly we spent our honeymoon, we turned over and over again and 
+discussed in every aspect our conception of a life tremendously 
+focussed upon the ideal of social service.
+
+Most clearly there stands out a picture of ourselves talking in a 
+gondola on our way to Torcella.  Far away behind us the smoke of 
+Murano forms a black stain upon an immense shining prospect of 
+smooth water, water as unruffled and luminous as the sky above, a 
+mirror on which rows of posts and distant black high-stemmed, swan-
+necked boats with their minutely clear swinging gondoliers, float 
+aerially.  Remote and low before us rises the little tower of our 
+destination.  Our men swing together and their oars swirl leisurely 
+through the water, hump back in the rowlocks, splash sharply and go 
+swishing back again.  Margaret lies back on cushions, with her face 
+shaded by a holland parasol, and I sit up beside her.
+
+"You see," I say, and in spite of Margaret's note of perfect 
+acquiescence I feel myself reasoning against an indefinable 
+antagonism, "it is so easy to fall into a slack way with life.  
+There may seem to be something priggish in a meticulous discipline, 
+but otherwise it is so easy to slip into indolent habits--and to be 
+distracted from one's purpose.  The country, the world, wants men to 
+serve its constructive needs, to work out and carry out plans.  For 
+a man who has to make a living the enemy is immediate necessity; for 
+people like ourselves it's--it's the constant small opportunity of 
+agreeable things."
+
+"Frittering away," she says, "time and strength."
+
+"That is what I feel.  It's so pleasant to pretend one is simply 
+modest, it looks so foolish at times to take one's self too 
+seriously.  We've GOT to take ourselves seriously."
+
+She endorses my words with her eyes.
+
+"I feel I can do great things with life."
+
+"I KNOW you can."
+
+"But that's only to be done by concentrating one's life upon one 
+main end.  We have to plan our days, to make everything subserve our 
+scheme."
+
+"I feel," she answers softly, "we ought to give--every hour."
+
+Her face becomes dreamy.  "I WANT to give every hour," she adds.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+That holiday in Venice is set in my memory like a little artificial 
+lake in uneven confused country, as something very bright and 
+skylike, and discontinuous with all about it.  The faded quality of 
+the very sunshine of that season, the mellow discoloured palaces and 
+places, the huge, time-ripened paintings of departed splendours, the 
+whispering, nearly noiseless passage of hearse-black gondolas, for 
+the horrible steam launch had not yet ruined Venice, the stilled 
+magnificences of the depopulated lagoons, the universal autumn, made 
+me feel altogether in recess from the teeming uproars of reality.  
+There was not a dozen people all told, no Americans and scarcely any 
+English, to dine in the big cavern of a dining-room, with its vistas 
+of separate tables, its distempered walls and its swathed 
+chandeliers.  We went about seeing beautiful things, accepting 
+beauty on every hand, and taking it for granted that all was well 
+with ourselves and the world.  It was ten days or a fortnight before 
+I became fretful and anxious for action; a long tranquillity for 
+such a temperament as mine.
+
+Our pleasures were curiously impersonal, a succession of shared 
+aesthetic appreciation threads all that time.  Our honeymoon was no 
+exultant coming together, no mutual shout of "YOU!"  We were almost 
+shy with one another, and felt the relief of even a picture to help 
+us out.  It was entirely in my conception of things that I should be 
+very watchful not to shock or distress Margaret or press the 
+sensuous note.  Our love-making had much of the tepid smoothness of 
+the lagoons.  We talked in delicate innuendo of what should be 
+glorious freedoms.  Margaret had missed Verona and Venice in her 
+previous Italian journey--fear of the mosquito had driven her mother 
+across Italy to the westward route--and now she could fill up her 
+gaps and see the Titians and Paul Veroneses she already knew in 
+colourless photographs, the Carpaccios, (the St. George series 
+delighted her beyond measure,) the Basaitis and that great statue of 
+Bartolomeo Colleoni that Ruskin praised.
+
+But since I am not a man to look at pictures and architectural 
+effects day after day, I did watch Margaret very closely and store a 
+thousand memories of her.  I can see her now, her long body drooping 
+a little forward, her sweet face upraised to some discovered 
+familiar masterpiece and shining with a delicate enthusiasm.  I can 
+hear again the soft cadences of her voice murmuring commonplace 
+comments, for she had no gift of expressing the shapeless 
+satisfaction these things gave her.
+
+Margaret, I perceived, was a cultivated person, the first cultivated 
+person with whom I had ever come into close contact.  She was 
+cultivated and moral, and I, I now realise, was never either of 
+these things.  She was passive, and I am active.  She did not simply 
+and naturally look for beauty but she had been incited to look for 
+it at school, and took perhaps a keener interest in books and 
+lectures and all the organisation of beautiful things than she did 
+in beauty itself; she found much of her delight in being guided to 
+it.  Now a thing ceases to be beautiful to me when some finger points 
+me out its merits.  Beauty is the salt of life, but I take my beauty 
+as a wild beast gets its salt, as a constituent of the meal. . . .
+
+And besides, there was that between us that should have seemed more 
+beautiful than any picture. . . .
+
+So we went about Venice tracking down pictures and spiral staircases 
+and such-like things, and my brains were busy all the time with such 
+things as a comparison of Venice and its nearest modern equivalent, 
+New York, with the elaboration of schemes of action when we returned 
+to London, with the development of a theory of Margaret.
+
+Our marriage had done this much at least, that it had fused and 
+destroyed those two independent ways of thinking about her that had 
+gone on in my mind hitherto.  Suddenly she had become very near to 
+me, and a very big thing, a sort of comprehensive generalisation 
+behind a thousand questions, like the sky or England.  The judgments 
+and understandings that had worked when she was, so to speak, miles 
+away from my life, had now to be altogether revised.  Trifling 
+things began to matter enormously, that she had a weak and easily 
+fatigued back, for example, or that when she knitted her brows and 
+stammered a little in talking, it didn't really mean that an 
+exquisite significance struggled for utterance.
+
+We visited pictures in the mornings chiefly.  In the afternoon, 
+unless we were making a day-long excursion in a gondola, Margaret 
+would rest for an hour while I prowled about in search of English 
+newspapers, and then we would go to tea in the Piazza San Marco and 
+watch the drift of people feeding the pigeons and going into the 
+little doors beneath the sunlit arches and domes of Saint Mark's.  
+Then perhaps we would stroll on the Piazzetta, or go out into the 
+sunset in a gondola.  Margaret became very interested in the shops 
+that abound under the colonnades and decided at last to make an 
+extensive purchase of table glass.  "These things," she said, are 
+quite beautiful, and far cheaper than anything but the most ordinary 
+looking English ware."  I was interested in her idea, and a good 
+deal charmed by the delightful qualities of tinted shape, slender 
+handle and twisted stem.  I suggested we should get not simply 
+tumblers and wineglasses but bedroom waterbottles, fruit- and sweet-
+dishes, water-jugs, and in the end we made quite a business-like 
+afternoon of it.
+
+I was beginning now to long quite definitely for events.  Energy was 
+accumulating in me, and worrying me for an outlet.  I found the 
+TIMES and the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the other papers I managed to get 
+hold of, more and more stimulating.  I nearly wrote to the former 
+paper one day in answer to a letter by Lord Grimthorpe--I forget now 
+upon what point.  I chafed secretly against this life of tranquil 
+appreciations more and more.  I found my attitudes of restrained and 
+delicate affection for Margaret increasingly difficult to sustain.  
+I surprised myself and her by little gusts of irritability, gusts 
+like the catspaws before a gale.  I was alarmed at these symptoms.
+
+One night when Margaret had gone up to her room, I put on a light 
+overcoat, went out into the night and prowled for a long time 
+through the narrow streets, smoking and thinking.  I returned and 
+went and sat on the edge of her bed to talk to her.
+
+"Look here, Margaret," I said; "this is all very well, but I'm 
+restless."
+
+"Restless! " she said with a faint surprise in her voice.
+
+"Yes.  I think I want exercise.  I've got a sort of feeling--I've 
+never had it before--as though I was getting fat."
+
+"My dear!" she cried.
+
+"I want to do things;--ride horses, climb mountains, take the devil 
+out of myself."
+
+She watched me thoughtfully.
+
+"Couldn't we DO something?" she said.
+
+Do what?
+
+"I don't know.  Couldn't we perhaps go away from here soon--and walk 
+in the mountains--on our way home."
+
+I thought.  "There seems to be no exercise at all in this place."
+
+"Isn't there some walk?"
+
+"I wonder," I answered.  "We might walk to Chioggia perhaps, along 
+the Lido."  And we tried that, but the long stretch of beach 
+fatigued Margaret's back, and gave her blisters, and we never got 
+beyond Malamocco. . . .
+
+A day or so after we went out to those pleasant black-robed, bearded 
+Armenians in their monastery at Saint Lazzaro, and returned towards 
+sundown.  We fell into silence.  "PIU LENTO," said Margaret to the 
+gondolier, and released my accumulated resolution.
+
+"Let us go back to London," I said abruptly.
+
+Margaret looked at me with surprised blue eyes.
+
+"This is beautiful beyond measure, you know," I said, sticking to my 
+point, "but I have work to do."
+
+She was silent for some seconds.  "I had forgotten," she said.
+
+"So had I," I sympathised, and took her hand.  "Suddenly I have 
+remembered."
+
+She remained quite still.  "There is so much to be done," I said, 
+almost apologetically.
+
+She looked long away from me across the lagoon and at last sighed, 
+like one who has drunk deeply, and turned to me.
+
+"I suppose one ought not to be so happy," she said.  "Everything has 
+been so beautiful and so simple and splendid.  And clean.  It has 
+been just With You--the time of my life.  It's a pity such things 
+must end.  But the world is calling you, dear. . . .  I ought not to 
+have forgotten it.  I thought you were resting--and thinking.  But 
+if you are rested.--Would you like us to start to-morrow?"
+
+She looked at once so fragile and so devoted that on the spur of the 
+moment I relented, and we stayed in Venice four more days.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH
+
+THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+Margaret had already taken a little house in Radnor Square, 
+Westminster, before our marriage, a house that seemed particularly 
+adaptable to our needs as public-spirited efficients; it had been 
+very pleasantly painted and papered under Margaret's instructions, 
+white paint and clean open purples and green predominating, and now 
+we set to work at once upon the interesting business of arranging 
+and--with our Venetian glass as a beginning--furnishing it.  We had 
+been fairly fortunate with our wedding presents, and for the most 
+part it was open to us to choose just exactly what we would have and 
+just precisely where we would put it.
+
+Margaret had a sense of form and colour altogether superior to mine, 
+and so quite apart from the fact that it was her money equipped us, 
+I stood aside from all these matters and obeyed her summons to a 
+consultation only to endorse her judgment very readily.  Until 
+everything was settled I went every day to my old rooms in Vincent 
+Square and worked at a series of papers that were originally 
+intended for the FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW, the papers that afterwards 
+became my fourth book, "New Aspects of Liberalism."
+
+I still remember as delightful most of the circumstances of getting 
+into 79, Radnor Square.  The thin flavour of indecision about 
+Margaret disappeared altogether in a shop; she had the precisest 
+ideas of what she wanted, and the devices of the salesman did not 
+sway her.  It was very pleasant to find her taking things out of my 
+hands with a certain masterfulness, and showing the distinctest 
+determination to make a house in which I should be able to work in 
+that great project of "doing something for the world."
+
+"And I do want to make things pretty about us," she said.  "You 
+don't think it wrong to have things pretty?"
+
+"I want them so."
+
+"Altiora has things hard."
+
+"Altiora," I answered, "takes a pride in standing ugly and 
+uncomfortable things.  But I don't see that they help her.  Anyhow 
+they won't help me."
+
+So Margaret went to the best shops and got everything very simple 
+and very good.  She bought some pictures very well indeed; there was 
+a little Sussex landscape, full of wind and sunshine, by Nicholson, 
+for my study, that hit my taste far better than if I had gone out to 
+get some such expression for myself.
+
+"We will buy a picture just now and then," she said, "sometimes--
+when we see one."
+
+I would come back through the January mire or fog from Vincent 
+Square to the door of 79, and reach it at last with a quite childish 
+appreciation of the fact that its solid Georgian proportions and its 
+fine brass furnishings belonged to MY home; I would use my latchkey 
+and discover Margaret in the warm-lit, spacious hall with a 
+partially opened packing-case, fatigued but happy, or go up to have 
+tea with her out of the right tea things, "come at last," or be told 
+to notice what was fresh there.  It wasn't simply that I had never 
+had a house before, but I had really never been, except in the most 
+transitory way, in any house that was nearly so delightful as mine 
+promised to be.  Everything was fresh and bright, and softly and 
+harmoniously toned.  Downstairs we had a green dining-room with 
+gleaming silver, dark oak, and English colour-prints; above was a 
+large drawing-room that could be made still larger by throwing open 
+folding doors, and it was all carefully done in greys and blues, for 
+the most part with real Sheraton supplemented by Sheraton so 
+skilfully imitated by an expert Margaret had discovered as to be 
+indistinguishable except to a minute scrutiny.  And for me, above 
+this and next to my bedroom, there was a roomy study, with specially 
+thick stair-carpet outside and thick carpets in the bedroom overhead 
+and a big old desk for me to sit at and work between fire and 
+window, and another desk specially made for me by that expert if I 
+chose to stand and write, and open bookshelves and bookcases and 
+every sort of convenient fitting.  There were electric heaters 
+beside the open fire, and everything was put for me to make tea at 
+any time--electric kettle, infuser, biscuits and fresh butter, so 
+that I could get up and work at any hour of the day or night.  I 
+could do no work in this apartment for a long time, I was so 
+interested in the perfection of its arrangements.  And when I 
+brought in my books and papers from Vincent Square, Margaret seized 
+upon all the really shabby volumes and had them re-bound in a fine 
+official-looking leather.
+
+I can remember sitting down at that desk and looking round me and 
+feeling with a queer effect of surprise that after all even a place 
+in the Cabinet, though infinitely remote, was nevertheless in the 
+same large world with these fine and quietly expensive things.
+
+On the same floor Margaret had a "den," a very neat and pretty den 
+with good colour-prints of Botticellis and Carpaccios, and there was 
+a third apartment for sectarial purposes should the necessity for 
+them arise, with a severe-looking desk equipped with patent files.  
+And Margaret would come flitting into the room to me, or appear 
+noiselessly standing, a tall gracefully drooping form, in the wide 
+open doorway.  "Is everything right, dear?" she would ask.
+
+"Come in," I would say, "I'm sorting out papers."
+
+She would come to the hearthrug.
+
+"I mustn't disturb you," she would remark.
+
+"I'm not busy yet."
+
+"Things are getting into order.  Then we must make out a time-table 
+as the Baileys do, and BEGIN!"
+
+Altiora came in to see us once or twice, and a number of serious 
+young wives known to Altiora called and were shown over the house, 
+and discussed its arrangements with Margaret.  They were all 
+tremendously keen on efficient arrangements.
+
+"A little pretty," said Altiora, with the faintest disapproval, 
+"still--"
+
+It was clear she thought we should grow out of that.  From the day 
+of our return we found other people's houses open to us and eager 
+for us.  We went out of London for week-ends and dined out, and 
+began discussing our projects for reciprocating these hospitalities.  
+As a single man unattached, I had had a wide and miscellaneous 
+social range, but now I found myself falling into place in a set.  
+For a time I acquiesced in this.  I went very little to my clubs, 
+the Climax and the National Liberal, and participated in no bachelor 
+dinners at all.  For a time, too, I dropped out of the garrulous 
+literary and journalistic circles I had frequented.  I put up for 
+the Reform, not so much for the use of the club as a sign of serious 
+and substantial political standing.  I didn't go up to Cambridge, I 
+remember, for nearly a year, so occupied was I with my new 
+adjustments.
+
+The people we found ourselves among at this time were people, to put 
+it roughly, of the Parliamentary candidate class, or people already 
+actually placed in the political world.  They ranged between very 
+considerable wealth and such a hard, bare independence as old 
+Willersley and the sister who kept house for him possessed.  There 
+were quite a number of young couples like ourselves, a little 
+younger and more artless, or a little older and more established.  
+Among the younger men I had a sort of distinction because of my 
+Cambridge reputation and my writing, and because, unlike them, I was 
+an adventurer and had won and married my way into their circles 
+instead of being naturally there.  They couldn't quite reckon upon 
+what I should do; they felt I had reserves of experience and 
+incalculable traditions.  Close to us were the Cramptons, Willie 
+Crampton, who has since been Postmaster-General, rich and very 
+important in Rockshire, and his younger brother Edward, who has 
+specialised in history and become one of those unimaginative men of 
+letters who are the glory of latter-day England.  Then there was 
+Lewis, further towards Kensington, where his cousins the Solomons 
+and the Hartsteins lived, a brilliant representative of his race, 
+able, industrious and invariably uninspired, with a wife a little in 
+revolt against the racial tradition of feminine servitude and 
+inclined to the suffragette point of view, and Bunting Harblow, an 
+old blue, and with an erratic disposition well under the control of 
+the able little cousin he had married.  I had known all these men, 
+but now (with Altiora floating angelically in benediction) they 
+opened their hearts to me and took me into their order.  They were 
+all like myself, prospective Liberal candidates, with a feeling that 
+the period of wandering in the wilderness of opposition was drawing 
+near its close.  They were all tremendously keen upon social and 
+political service, and all greatly under the sway of the ideal of a 
+simple, strenuous life, a life finding its satisfactions in 
+political achievements and distinctions.  The young wives were as 
+keen about it as the young husbands, Margaret most of all, and I--
+whatever elements in me didn't march with the attitudes and habits 
+of this set were very much in the background during that time.
+
+We would give little dinners and have evening gatherings at which 
+everything was very simple and very good, with a slight but 
+perceptible austerity, and there was more good fruit and flowers and 
+less perhaps in the way of savouries, patties and entrees than was 
+customary.  Sherry we banished, and Marsala and liqueurs, and there 
+was always good home-made lemonade available.  No men waited, but 
+very expert parlourmaids.  Our meat was usually Welsh mutton--I 
+don't know why, unless that mountains have ever been the last refuge 
+of the severer virtues.  And we talked politics and books and ideas 
+and Bernard Shaw (who was a department by himself and supposed in 
+those days to be ethically sound at bottom), and mingled with the 
+intellectuals--I myself was, as it were, a promoted intellectual.
+
+The Cramptons had a tendency to read good things aloud on their less 
+frequented receptions, but I have never been able to participate 
+submissively in this hyper-digestion of written matter, and 
+generally managed to provoke a disruptive debate.  We were all very 
+earnest to make the most of ourselves and to be and do, and I wonder 
+still at times, with an unassuaged perplexity, how it is that in 
+that phase of utmost earnestness I have always seemed to myself to 
+be most remote from reality.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+I look back now across the detaching intervention of sixteen crowded 
+years, critically and I fancy almost impartially, to those 
+beginnings of my married life.  I try to recall something near to 
+their proper order the developing phases of relationship.  I am 
+struck most of all by the immense unpremeditated, generous-spirited 
+insincerities upon which Margaret and I were building.
+
+It seems to me that here I have to tell perhaps the commonest 
+experience of all among married educated people, the deliberate, 
+shy, complex effort to fill the yawning gaps in temperament as they 
+appear, the sustained, failing attempt to bridge abysses, level 
+barriers, evade violent pressures.  I have come these latter years 
+of my life to believe that it is possible for a man and woman to be 
+absolutely real with one another, to stand naked souled to each 
+other, unashamed and unafraid, because of the natural all-glorifying 
+love between them.  It is possible to love and be loved untroubling, 
+as a bird flies through the air.  But it is a rare and intricate 
+chance that brings two people within sight of that essential union, 
+and for the majority marriage must adjust itself on other terms.  
+Most coupled people never really look at one another.  They look a 
+little away to preconceived ideas.  And each from the first days of 
+love-making HIDES from the other, is afraid of disappointing, afraid 
+of offending, afraid of discoveries in either sense.  They build not 
+solidly upon the rock of truth, but upon arches and pillars and 
+queer provisional supports that are needed to make a common 
+foundation, and below in the imprisoned darknesses, below the fine 
+fabric they sustain together begins for each of them a cavernous 
+hidden life.  Down there things may be prowling that scarce ever 
+peep out to consciousness except in the grey half-light of sleepless 
+nights, passions that flash out for an instant in an angry glance 
+and are seen no more, starved victims and beautiful dreams bricked 
+up to die.  For the most of us there is no jail delivery of those 
+inner depths, and the life above goes on to its honourable end.
+
+I have told how I loved Margaret and how I came to marry her.  
+Perhaps already unintentionally I have indicated the quality of the 
+injustice our marriage did us both.  There was no kindred between us 
+and no understanding.  We were drawn to one another by the 
+unlikeness of our quality, by the things we misunderstood in each 
+other.  I know a score of couples who have married in that fashion.
+
+Modern conditions and modern ideas, and in particular the intenser 
+and subtler perceptions of modern life, press more and more heavily 
+upon a marriage tie whose fashion comes from an earlier and less 
+discriminating time.  When the wife was her husband's subordinate, 
+meeting him simply and uncritically for simple ends, when marriage 
+was a purely domestic relationship, leaving thought and the vivid 
+things of life almost entirely to the unencumbered man, mental and 
+temperamental incompatibilities mattered comparatively little.  But 
+now the wife, and particularly the loving childless wife, 
+unpremeditatedly makes a relentless demand for a complete 
+association, and the husband exacts unthought of delicacies of 
+understanding and co-operation.  These are stupendous demands.  
+People not only think more fully and elaborately about life than 
+they ever did before, but marriage obliges us to make that ever more 
+accidented progress a three-legged race of carelessly assorted 
+couples. . . .
+
+Our very mental texture was different.  I was rough-minded, to use 
+the phrase of William James, primary and intuitive and illogical; 
+she was tender-minded, logical, refined and secondary.  She was 
+loyal to pledge and persons, sentimental and faithful; I am loyal to 
+ideas and instincts, emotional and scheming.  My imagination moves 
+in broad gestures; her's was delicate with a real dread of 
+extravagance.  My quality is sensuous and ruled by warm impulses; 
+hers was discriminating and essentially inhibitory.  I like the 
+facts of the case and to mention everything; I like naked bodies and 
+the jolly smells of things.  She abounded in reservations, in 
+circumlocutions and evasions, in keenly appreciated secondary 
+points.  Perhaps the reader knows that Tintoretto in the National 
+Gallery, the Origin of the Milky Way.  It is an admirable test of 
+tempera-mental quality.  In spite of my early training I have come 
+to regard that picture as altogether delightful; to Margaret it has 
+always been "needlessly offensive."  In that you have our 
+fundamental breach.  She had a habit, by no means rare, of damning 
+what she did not like or find sympathetic in me on the score that it 
+was not my "true self," and she did not so much accept the universe 
+as select from it and do her best to ignore the rest.  And also I 
+had far more initiative than had she.  This is no catalogue of 
+rights and wrongs, or superiorities and inferiorities; it is a 
+catalogue of differences between two people linked in a relationship 
+that constantly becomes more intolerant of differences.
+
+This is how we stood to each other, and none of it was clear to 
+either of us at the outset.  To begin with, I found myself reserving 
+myself from her, then slowly apprehending a jarring between our 
+minds and what seemed to me at first a queer little habit of 
+misunderstanding in her. . . .
+
+It did not hinder my being very fond of her. . . .
+
+Where our system of reservation became at once most usual and most 
+astounding was in our personal relations.  It is not too much to say 
+that in that regard we never for a moment achieved sincerity with 
+one another during the first six years of our life together.  It 
+goes even deeper than that, for in my effort to realise the ideal of 
+my marriage I ceased even to attempt to be sincere with myself.  I 
+would not admit my own perceptions and interpretations.  I tried to 
+fit myself to her thinner and finer determinations.  There are 
+people who will say with a note of approval that I was learning to 
+conquer myself.  I record that much without any note of approval. . . .
+
+For some years I never deceived Margaret about any concrete fact 
+nor, except for the silence about my earlier life that she had 
+almost forced upon me, did I hide any concrete fact that seemed to 
+affect her, but from the outset I was guilty of immense spiritual 
+concealments, my very marriage was based, I see now, on a spiritual 
+subterfuge; I hid moods from her, pretended feelings. . . .
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+The interest and excitement of setting-up a house, of walking about 
+it from room to room and from floor to floor, or sitting at one's 
+own dinner table and watching one's wife control conversation with a 
+pretty, timid resolution, of taking a place among the secure and 
+free people of our world, passed almost insensibly into the interest 
+and excitement of my Parliamentary candidature for the Kinghamstead 
+Division, that shapeless chunk of agricultural midland between the 
+Great Western and the North Western railways.  I was going to "take 
+hold" at last, the Kinghamstead Division was my appointed handle.  I 
+was to find my place in the rather indistinctly sketched 
+constructions that were implicit in the minds of all our circle.  
+The precise place I had to fill and the precise functions I had to 
+discharge were not as yet very clear, but all that, we felt sure, 
+would become plain as things developed.
+
+A few brief months of vague activities of "nursing" gave place to 
+the excitements of the contest that followed the return of Mr. 
+Camphell-Bannerman to power in 1905.  So far as the Kinghamstead 
+Division was concerned it was a depressed and tepid battle.  I went 
+about the constituency making three speeches that were soon 
+threadbare, and an odd little collection of people worked for me; 
+two solicitors, a cheap photographer, a democratic parson, a number 
+of dissenting ministers, the Mayor of Kinghamstead, a Mrs. Bulger, 
+the widow of an old Chartist who had grown rich through electric 
+traction patents, Sir Roderick Newton, a Jew who had bought 
+Calersham Castle, and old Sir Graham Rivers, that sturdy old 
+soldier, were among my chief supporters.  We had headquarters in 
+each town and village, mostly there were empty shops we leased 
+temporarily, and there at least a sort of fuss and a coming and 
+going were maintained.  The rest of the population stared in a state 
+of suspended judgment as we went about the business.  The country 
+was supposed to be in a state of intellectual conflict and 
+deliberate decision, in history it will no doubt figure as a 
+momentous conflict.  Yet except for an occasional flare of bill-
+sticking or a bill in a window or a placard-plastered motor-car or 
+an argumentative group of people outside a public-house or a 
+sluggish movement towards the schoolroom or village hall, there was 
+scarcely a sign that a great empire was revising its destinies.  Now 
+and then one saw a canvasser on a doorstep.  For the most part 
+people went about their business with an entirely irresponsible 
+confidence in the stability of the universe.  At times one felt a 
+little absurd with one's flutter of colours and one's air of saving 
+the country.
+
+My opponent was a quite undistinguished Major-General who relied 
+upon his advocacy of Protection, and was particularly anxious we 
+should avoid "personalities" and fight the constituency in a 
+gentlemanly spirit.  He was always writing me notes, apologising for 
+excesses on the part of his supporters, or pointing out the 
+undesirability of some course taken by mine.
+
+My speeches had been planned upon broad lines, but they lost touch 
+with these as the polling approached.  To begin with I made a real 
+attempt to put what was in my mind before the people I was to supply 
+with a political voice.  I spoke of the greatness of our empire and 
+its destinies, of the splendid projects and possibilities of life 
+and order that lay before the world, of all that a resolute and 
+constructive effort might do at the present time.  "We are building 
+a state," I said, "secure and splendid, we are in the dawn of the 
+great age of mankind."  Sometimes that would get a solitary "'Ear! 
+'ear!"  Then having created, as I imagined, a fine atmosphere, I 
+turned upon the history of the last Conservative administration and 
+brought it into contrast with the wide occasions of the age; 
+discussed its failure to control the grasping financiers in South 
+Africa, its failure to release public education from sectarian 
+squabbles, its misconduct of the Boer War, its waste of the world's 
+resources. . . .
+
+It soon became manifest that my opening and my general spaciousness 
+of method bored my audiences a good deal.  The richer and wider my 
+phrases the thinner sounded my voice in these non-resonating 
+gatherings.  Even the platform supporters grew restive 
+unconsciously, and stirred and coughed.  They did not recognise 
+themselves as mankind.  Building an empire, preparing a fresh stage 
+in the history of humanity, had no appeal for them.  They were 
+mostly everyday, toiling people, full of small personal solicitudes, 
+and they came to my meetings, I think, very largely as a relaxation.  
+This stuff was not relaxing.  They did not think politics was a 
+great constructive process, they thought it was a kind of dog-fight.  
+They wanted fun, they wanted spice, they wanted hits, they wanted 
+also a chance to say "'Ear', 'ear!" in an intelligent and honourable 
+manner and clap their hands and drum with their feet.  The great 
+constructive process in history gives so little scope for clapping 
+and drumming and saying "'Ear, 'ear!"  One might as well think of 
+hounding on the solar system.
+
+So after one or two attempts to lift my audiences to the level of 
+the issues involved, I began to adapt myself to them.  I cut down my 
+review of our imperial outlook and destinies more and more, and 
+developed a series of hits and anecdotes and--what shall I call 
+them?--"crudifications" of the issue.  My helper's congratulated me 
+on the rapid improvement of my platform style.  I ceased to speak of 
+the late Prime Minister with the respect I bore him, and began to 
+fall in with the popular caricature of him as an artful rabbit-
+witted person intent only on keeping his leadership, in spite of the 
+vigorous attempts of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain to oust him therefrom.  
+I ceased to qualify my statement that Protection would make food 
+dearer for the agricultural labourer.  I began to speak of Mr. 
+Alfred Lyttelton as an influence at once insane and diabolical, as a 
+man inspired by a passionate desire to substitute manacled but still 
+criminal Chinese for honest British labourers throughout the world.  
+And when it came to the mention of our own kindly leader, of Mr. 
+John Burns or any one else of any prominence at all on our side I 
+fell more and more into the intonation of one who mentions the high 
+gods.  And I had my reward in brighter meetings and readier and 
+readier applause.
+
+One goes on from phase to phase in these things.
+
+"After all," I told myself, "if one wants to get to Westminster one 
+must follow the road that leads there," but I found the road 
+nevertheless rather unexpectedly distasteful.  "When one gets 
+there," I said, "then it is one begins."
+
+But I would lie awake at nights with that sore throat and headache 
+and fatigue which come from speaking in ill-ventilated rooms, and 
+wondering how far it was possible to educate a whole people to great 
+political ideals.  Why should political work always rot down to 
+personalities and personal appeals in this way?  Life is, I suppose, 
+to begin with and end with a matter of personalities, from 
+personalities all our broader interests arise and to personalities 
+they return.  All our social and political effort, all of it, is 
+like trying to make a crowd of people fall into formation.  The 
+broader lines appear, but then come a rush and excitement and 
+irrelevancy, and forthwith the incipient order has vanished and the 
+marshals must begin the work over again!
+
+My memory of all that time is essentially confusion.  There was a 
+frightful lot of tiresome locomotion in it; for the Kinghamstead 
+Division is extensive, abounding in ill-graded and badly metalled 
+cross-roads and vicious little hills, and singularly unpleasing to 
+the eye in a muddy winter.  It is sufficiently near to London to 
+have undergone the same process of ill-regulated expansion that made 
+Bromstead the place it is.  Several of its overgrown villages have 
+developed strings of factories and sidings along the railway lines, 
+and there is an abundance of petty villas.  There seemed to be no 
+place at which one could take hold of more than this or that element 
+of the population.  Now we met in a meeting-house, now in a Masonic 
+Hall or Drill Hall; I also did a certain amount of open-air speaking 
+in the dinner hour outside gas-works and groups of factories.  Some 
+special sort of people was, as it were, secreted in response to each 
+special appeal.  One said things carefully adjusted to the 
+distinctive limitations of each gathering.  Jokes of an incredible 
+silliness and shallowness drifted about us.  Our advisers made us 
+declare that if we were elected we would live in the district, and 
+one hasty agent had bills printed, "If Mr. Remington is elected he 
+will live here."  The enemy obtained a number of these bills and 
+stuck them on outhouses, pigstyes, dog-kennels; you cannot imagine 
+how irksome the repetition of that jest became.  The vast drifting 
+indifference in between my meetings impressed me more and more.  I 
+realised the vagueness of my own plans as I had never done before I 
+brought them to the test of this experience.  I was perplexed by the 
+riddle of just how far I was, in any sense of the word, taking hold 
+at all, how far I wasn't myself flowing into an accepted groove.
+
+Margaret was troubled by no such doubts.  She was clear I had to go 
+into Parliament on the side of Liberalism and the light, as against 
+the late Government and darkness.  Essential to the memory of my 
+first contest, is the memory of her clear bright face, very resolute 
+and grave, helping me consciously, steadfastly, with all her 
+strength.  Her quiet confidence, while I was so dissatisfied, worked 
+curiously towards the alienation of my sympathies.  I felt she had 
+no business to be so sure of me.  I had moments of vivid resentment 
+at being thus marched towards Parliament.
+
+I seemed now always to be discovering alien forces of character in 
+her.  Her way of taking life diverged from me more and more.  She 
+sounded amazing, independent notes.  She bought some particularly 
+costly furs for the campaign that roused enthusiasm whenever she 
+appeared.  She also made me a birthday present in November of a 
+heavily fur-trimmed coat and this she would make me remove as I went 
+on to the platform, and hold over her arm until I was ready to 
+resume it.  It was fearfully heavy for her and she liked it to be 
+heavy for her.  That act of servitude was in essence a towering 
+self-assertion.  I would glance sideways while some chairman 
+floundered through his introduction and see the clear blue eye with 
+which she regarded the audience, which existed so far as she was 
+concerned merely to return me to Parliament.  It was a friendly eye, 
+provided they were not silly or troublesome.  But it kindled a 
+little at the hint of a hostile question.  After we had come so far 
+and taken so much trouble!
+
+She constituted herself the dragoman of our political travels.  In 
+hotels she was serenely resolute for the quietest and the best, she 
+rejected all their proposals for meals and substituted a severely 
+nourishing dietary of her own, and even in private houses she 
+astonished me by her tranquil insistence upon special comforts and 
+sustenance.  I can see her face now as it would confront a hostess, 
+a little intent, but sweetly resolute and assured.
+
+Since our marriage she had read a number of political memoirs, and 
+she had been particularly impressed by the career of Mrs. Gladstone.  
+I don't think it occurred to her to compare and contrast my quality 
+with that of Mrs. Gladstone's husband.  I suspect her of a 
+deliberate intention of achieving parallel results by parallel 
+methods.  I was to be Gladstonised.  Gladstone it appeared used to 
+lubricate his speeches with a mixture--if my memory serves me right--
+of egg beaten up in sherry, and Margaret was very anxious I should 
+take a leaf from that celebrated book.  She wanted, I know, to hold 
+the glass in her hand while I was speaking.
+
+But here I was firm.  "No," I said, very decisively, "simply I won't 
+stand that.  It's a matter of conscience.  I shouldn't feel--
+democratic.  I'll take my chance of the common water in the carafe 
+on the chairman's table."
+
+"I DO wish you wouldn't," she said, distressed.
+
+It was absurd to feel irritated; it was so admirable of her, a 
+little childish, infinitely womanly and devoted and fine--and I see 
+now how pathetic.  But I could not afford to succumb to her.  I 
+wanted to follow my own leading, to see things clearly, and this 
+reassuring pose of a high destiny, of an almost terribly efficient 
+pursuit of a fixed end when as a matter of fact I had a very 
+doubtful end and an aim as yet by no means fixed, was all too 
+seductive for dalliance. . . .
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+And into all these things with the manner of a trifling and casual 
+incident comes the figure of Isabel Rivers.  My first impressions of 
+her were of a rather ugly and ungainly, extraordinarily interesting 
+schoolgirl with a beautiful quick flush under her warm brown skin, 
+who said and did amusing and surprising things.  When first I saw 
+her she was riding a very old bicycle downhill with her feet on the 
+fork of the frame--it seemed to me to the public danger, but 
+afterwards I came to understand the quality of her nerve better--and 
+on the third occasion she was for her own private satisfaction 
+climbing a tree.  On the intervening occasion we had what seems now 
+to have been a long sustained conversation about the political 
+situation and the books and papers I had written.
+
+I wonder if it was.
+
+What a delightful mixture of child and grave woman she was at that 
+time, and how little I reckoned on the part she would play in my 
+life!  And since she has played that part, how impossible it is to 
+tell now of those early days!  Since I wrote that opening paragraph 
+to this section my idle pen has been, as it were, playing by itself 
+and sketching faces on the blotting pad--one impish wizened visage 
+is oddly like little Bailey--and I have been thinking cheek on fist 
+amidst a limitless wealth of memories.  She sits below me on the low 
+wall under the olive trees with our little child in her arms.  She 
+is now the central fact in my life.  It still seems a little 
+incredible that that should be so.  She has destroyed me as a 
+politician, brought me to this belated rebeginning of life.  When I 
+sit down and try to make her a girl again, I feel like the Arabian 
+fisherman who tried to put the genius back into the pot from which 
+it had spread gigantic across the skies. . . .
+
+I have a very clear vision of her rush downhill past our labouring 
+ascendant car--my colours fluttered from handle-bar and shoulder-
+knot--and her waving hand and the sharp note of her voice.  She 
+cried out something, I don't know what, some greeting.
+
+"What a pretty girl!" said Margaret.
+
+Parvill, the cheap photographer, that industrious organiser for whom 
+by way of repayment I got those magic letters, that knighthood of 
+the underlings, "J. P." was in the car with us and explained her to 
+us.  "One of the best workers you have," he said. . . .
+
+And then after a toilsome troubled morning we came, rather cross 
+from the strain of sustained amiability, to Sir Graham Rivers' 
+house.  It seemed all softness and quiet--I recall dead white 
+panelling and oval mirrors horizontally set and a marble fireplace 
+between white marble-blind Homer and marble-blind Virgil, very grave 
+and fine--and how Isabel came in to lunch in a shapeless thing like 
+a blue smock that made her bright quick-changing face seem yellow 
+under her cloud of black hair.  Her step-sister was there, Miss 
+Gamer, to whom the house was to descend, a well-dressed lady of 
+thirty, amiably disavowing responsibility for Isabel in every phrase 
+and gesture.  And there was a very pleasant doctor, an Oxford man, 
+who seemed on excellent terms with every one.  It was manifest that 
+he was in the habit of sparring with the girl, but on this occasion 
+she wasn't sparring and refused to be teased into a display in spite 
+of the taunts of either him or her father.  She was, they discovered 
+with rising eyebrows, shy.  It seemed an opportunity too rare for 
+them to miss.  They proclaimed her enthusiasm for me in a way that 
+brought a flush to her cheek and a look into her eye between appeal 
+and defiance.  They declared she had read my books, which I thought 
+at the time was exaggeration, their dry political quality was so 
+distinctly not what one was accustomed to regard as schoolgirl 
+reading.  Miss Gamer protested to protect her, "When once in a blue 
+moon Isabel is well-behaved. . . .!"
+
+Except for these attacks I do not remember much of the conversation 
+at table; it was, I know, discursive and concerned with the sort of 
+topographical and social and electioneering fact natural to such a 
+visit.  Old Rivers struck me as a delightful person, modestly 
+unconscious of his doubly-earned V. C. and the plucky defence of 
+Kardin-Bergat that won his baronetcy.  He was that excellent type, 
+the soldier radical, and we began that day a friendship that was 
+only ended by his death in the hunting-field three years later.  He 
+interested Margaret into a disregard of my plate and the fact that I 
+had secured the illegal indulgence of Moselle.  After lunch we went 
+for coffee into another low room, this time brown panelled and 
+looking through French windows on a red-walled garden, graceful even 
+in its winter desolation.  And there the conversation suddenly 
+picked up and became good.  It had fallen to a pause, and the 
+doctor, with an air of definitely throwing off a mask and wrecking 
+an established tranquillity, remarked: "Very probably you Liberals 
+will come in, though I'm not sure you'll come in so mightily as you 
+think, but what you do when you do come in passes my comprehension."
+
+"There's good work sometimes," said Sir Graham, "in undoing."
+
+"You can't govern a great empire by amending and repealing the Acts 
+of your predecessors," said the doctor.
+
+There came that kind of pause that happens when a subject is 
+broached too big and difficult for the gathering.  Margaret's blue 
+eyes regarded the speaker with quiet disapproval for a moment, and 
+then came to me in the not too confident hope that I would snub him 
+out of existence with some prompt rhetorical stroke.  A voice spoke 
+out of the big arm-chair.
+
+"We'll do things," said Isabel.
+
+The doctor's eye lit with the joy of the fisherman who strikes his 
+fish at last.  "What will you do?" he asked her.
+
+"Every one knows we're a mixed lot," said Isabel.
+
+"Poor old chaps like me!" interjected the general.
+
+"But that's not a programme," said the doctor.
+
+"But Mr. Remington has published a programme," said Isabel.
+
+The doctor cocked half an eye at me.
+
+"In some review," the girl went on.  "After all, we're not going to 
+elect the whole Liberal party in the Kinghamstead Division.  I'm a 
+Remington-ite!"
+
+"But the programme," said the doctor, "the programme--"
+
+"In front of Mr. Remington!"
+
+"Scandal always comes home at last," said the doctor.  "Let him hear 
+the worst."
+
+"I'd like to hear," I said.  "Electioneering shatters convictions 
+and enfeebles the mind."
+
+"Not mine," said Isabel stoutly.  "I mean--Well, anyhow I take it 
+Mr. Remington stands for constructing a civilised state out of this 
+muddle."
+
+"THIS muddle," protested the doctor with an appeal of the eye to the 
+beautiful long room and the ordered garden outside the bright clean 
+windows.
+
+"Well, THAT muddle, if you like!  There's a slum within a mile of us 
+already.  The dust and blacks get worse and worse, Sissie?"
+
+"They do," agreed Miss Gamer.
+
+"Mr. Remington stands for construction, order, education, discipline."
+
+"And you?" said the doctor.
+
+"I'm a good Remington-ite."
+
+"Discipline!" said the doctor.
+
+"Oh!" said Isabel.  "At times one has to be--Napoleonic.  They want 
+to libel me, Mr. Remington.  A political worker can't always be in 
+time for meals, can she?  At times one has to make--splendid cuts."
+
+Miss Gamer said something indistinctly.
+
+"Order, education, discipline," said Sir Graham.  "Excellent things!  
+But I've a sort of memory--in my young days--we talked about 
+something called liberty."
+
+"Liberty under the law," I said, with an unexpected approving murmur 
+from Margaret, and took up the defence.  "The old Liberal definition 
+of liberty was a trifle uncritical.  Privilege and legal 
+restrictions are not the only enemies of liberty.  An uneducated, 
+underbred, and underfed propertyless man is a man who has lost the 
+possibility of liberty.  There's no liberty worth a rap for him.  A 
+man who is swimming hopelessly for life wants nothing but the 
+liberty to get out of the water; he'll give every other liberty for 
+it--until he gets out."
+
+Sir Graham took me up and we fell into a discussion of the changing 
+qualities of Liberalism.  It was a good give-and-take talk, 
+extraordinarily refreshing after the nonsense and crowding secondary 
+issues of the electioneering outside.  We all contributed more or 
+less except Miss Gamer; Margaret followed with knitted brows and 
+occasional interjections.  "People won't SEE that," for example, and 
+"It all seems so plain to me."  The doctor showed himself clever but 
+unsubstantial and inconsistent.  Isabel sat back with her black mop 
+of hair buried deep in the chair looking quickly from face to face.  
+Her colour came and went with her vivid intellectual excitement; 
+occasionally she would dart a word, usually a very apt word, like a 
+lizard's tongue into the discussion.  I remember chiefly that a 
+chance illustration betrayed that she had read Bishop Burnet. . . .
+
+After that it was not surprising that Isabel should ask for a lift 
+in our car as far as the Lurky Committee Room, and that she should 
+offer me quite sound advice EN ROUTE upon the intellectual 
+temperament of the Lurky gasworkers.
+
+On the third occasion that I saw Isabel she was, as I have said, 
+climbing a tree--and a very creditable tree--for her own private 
+satisfaction.  It was a lapse from the high seriousness of politics, 
+and I perceived she felt that I might regard it as such and attach 
+too much importance to it.  I had some difficulty in reassuring her.  
+And it's odd to note now--it has never occurred to me before--that 
+from that day to this I do not think I have ever reminded Isabel of 
+that encounter.
+
+And after that memory she seems to be flickering about always in the 
+election, an inextinguishable flame; now she flew by on her bicycle, 
+now she dashed into committee rooms, now she appeared on doorsteps 
+in animated conversation with dubious voters; I took every chance I 
+could to talk to her--I had never met anything like her before in 
+the world, and she interested me immensely--and before the polling 
+day she and I had become, in the frankest simplicity, fast 
+friends. . . .
+
+That, I think, sets out very fairly the facts of our early 
+relationship.  But it is hard to get it true, either in form or 
+texture, because of the bright, translucent, coloured, and 
+refracting memories that come between.  One forgets not only the 
+tint and quality of thoughts and impressions through that 
+intervening haze, one forgets them altogether.  I don't remember now 
+that I ever thought in those days of passionate love or the 
+possibility of such love between us.  I may have done so again and 
+again.  But I doubt it very strongly.  I don't think I ever thought 
+of such aspects.  I had no more sense of any danger between us, 
+seeing the years and things that separated us, than I could have had 
+if she had been an intelligent bright-eyed bird.  Isabel came into 
+my life as a new sort of thing; she didn't join on at all to my 
+previous experiences of womanhood.  They were not, as I have 
+laboured to explain, either very wide or very penetrating 
+experiences, on the whole, "strangled dinginess" expresses them, but 
+I do not believe they were narrower or shallower than those of many 
+other men of my class.  I thought of women as pretty things and 
+beautiful things, pretty rather than beautiful, attractive and at 
+times disconcertingly attractive, often bright and witty, but, 
+because of the vast reservations that hid them from me, wanting, 
+subtly and inevitably wanting, in understanding.  My idealisation of 
+Margaret had evaporated insensibly after our marriage.  The shrine I 
+had made for her in my private thoughts stood at last undisguisedly 
+empty.  But Isabel did not for a moment admit of either idealisation 
+or interested contempt.  She opened a new sphere of womanhood to me.  
+With her steady amber-brown eyes, her unaffected interest in 
+impersonal things, her upstanding waistless blue body, her energy, 
+decision and courage, she seemed rather some new and infinitely 
+finer form of boyhood than a feminine creature, as I had come to 
+measure femininity.  She was my perfect friend.  Could I have 
+foreseen, had my world been more wisely planned, to this day we 
+might have been such friends.
+
+She seemed at that time unconscious of sex, though she has told me 
+since how full she was of protesting curiosities and restrained 
+emotions.  She spoke, as indeed she has always spoken, simply, 
+clearly, and vividly; schoolgirl slang mingled with words that 
+marked ample voracious reading, and she moved quickly with the free 
+directness of some graceful young animal.  She took many of the easy 
+freedoms a man or a sister might have done with me.  She would touch 
+my arm, lay a hand on my shoulder as I sat, adjust the lapel of a 
+breast-pocket as she talked to me.  She says now she loved me always 
+from the beginning.  I doubt if there was a suspicion of that in her 
+mind those days.  I used to find her regarding me with the clearest, 
+steadiest gaze in the world, exactly like the gaze of some nice 
+healthy innocent animal in a forest, interested, inquiring, 
+speculative, but singularly untroubled. . . .
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Polling day came after a last hoarse and dingy crescendo.  The 
+excitement was not of the sort that makes one forget one is tired 
+out.  The waiting for the end of the count has left a long blank 
+mark on my memory, and then everyone was shaking my hand and 
+repeating: "Nine hundred and seventy-six."
+
+My success had been a foregone conclusion since the afternoon, but 
+we all behaved as though we had not been anticipating this result 
+for hours, as though any other figures but nine hundred and seventy-
+six would have meant something entirely different.  "Nine hundred 
+and seventy-six!" said Margaret.  "They didn't expect three 
+hundred."
+
+"Nine hundred and seventy-six," said a little short man with a 
+paper.  "It means a big turnover.  Two dozen short of a thousand, 
+you know."
+
+A tremendous hullaboo began outside, and a lot of fresh people came 
+into the room.
+
+Isabel, flushed but not out of breath, Heaven knows where she had 
+sprung from at that time of night! was running her hand down my 
+sleeve almost caressingly, with the innocent bold affection of a 
+girl.  "Got you in!" she said.  "It's been no end of a lark."
+
+"And now," said I, "I must go and be constructive."
+
+"Now you must go and be constructive," she said.
+
+"You've got to live here," she added.
+
+"By Jove! yes," I said.  "We'll have to house hunt."
+
+"I shall read all your speeches."
+
+She hesitated.
+
+"I wish I was you," she said, and said it as though it was not 
+exactly the thing she was meaning to say.
+
+"They want you to speak," said Margaret, with something unsaid in 
+her face.
+
+"You must come out with me," I answered, putting my arm through 
+hers, and felt someone urging me to the French windows that gave on 
+the balcony.
+
+"If you think--" she said, yielding gladly
+
+"Oh, RATHER!" said I.
+
+The Mayor of Kinghamstead, a managing little man with no great 
+belief in my oratorical powers, was sticking his face up to mine.
+
+"It's all over," he said, " and you've won.  Say all the nice things 
+you can and say them plainly."
+
+I turned and handed Margaret out through the window and stood 
+looking over the Market-place, which was more than half filled with 
+swaying people.  The crowd set up a roar of approval at the sight of 
+us, tempered by a little booing.  Down in one corner of the square a 
+fight was going on for a flag, a fight that even the prospect of a 
+speech could not instantly check.  "Speech!" cried voices, "Speech!" 
+and then a brief "boo-oo-oo" that was drowned in a cascade of shouts 
+and cheers.  The conflict round the flag culminated in the smashing 
+of a pane of glass in the chemist's window and instantly sank to 
+peace.
+
+"Gentlemen voters of the Kinghamstead Division," I began.
+
+"Votes for Women!" yelled a voice, amidst laughter--the first time I 
+remember hearing that memorable war-cry.
+
+"Three cheers for Mrs. Remington!"
+
+"Mrs. Remington asks me to thank you," I said, amidst further uproar 
+and reiterated cries of "Speech!"
+
+Then silence came with a startling swiftness.
+
+Isabel was still in my mind, I suppose.  "I shall go to 
+Westminster," I began.  I sought for some compelling phrase and 
+could not find one.  "To do my share," I went on, "in building up a 
+great and splendid civilisation."
+
+I paused, and there was a weak gust of cheering, and then a renewal 
+of booing.
+
+"This election," I said, " has been the end and the beginning of 
+much.  New ideas are abroad--"
+
+"Chinese labour," yelled a voice, and across the square swept a 
+wildfire of booting and bawling.
+
+It is one of the few occasions when I quite lost my hold on a 
+speech.  I glanced sideways and saw the Mayor of Kinghamstead 
+speaking behind his hand to Parvill.  By a happy chance Parvill 
+caught my eye.
+
+"What do they want?" I asked.
+
+"Eh?"
+
+"What do they want?"
+
+"Say something about general fairness--the other side," prompted 
+Parvill, flattered but a little surprised by my appeal.  I pulled 
+myself hastily into a more popular strain with a gross eulogy of my 
+opponent's good taste.
+
+"Chinese labour!" cried the voice again.
+
+"You've given that notice to quit," I answered.
+
+The Market-place roared delight, but whether that delight expressed 
+hostility to Chinamen or hostility to their practical enslavement no 
+student of the General Election of 1906 has ever been able to 
+determine.  Certainly one of the most effective posters on our side 
+displayed a hideous yellow face, just that and nothing more.  There 
+was not even a legend to it.  How it impressed the electorate we did 
+not know, but that it impressed the electorate profoundly there can 
+be no disputing.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+Kinghamstead was one of the earliest constituencies fought, and we 
+came back--it must have been Saturday--triumphant but very tired, to 
+our house in Radnor Square.  In the train we read the first 
+intimations that the victory of our party was likely to be a 
+sweeping one.
+
+Then came a period when one was going about receiving and giving 
+congratulations and watching the other men arrive, very like a boy 
+who has returned to school with the first batch after the holidays.  
+The London world reeked with the General Election; it had invaded 
+the nurseries.  All the children of one's friends had got big maps 
+of England cut up into squares to represent constituencies and were 
+busy sticking gummed blue labels over the conquered red of Unionism 
+that had hitherto submerged the country.  And there were also orange 
+labels, if I remember rightly, to represent the new Labour party, 
+and green for the Irish.  I engaged myself to speak at one or two 
+London meetings, and lunched at the Reform, which was fairly tepid, 
+and dined and spent one or two tumultuous evenings at the National 
+Liberal Club, which was in active eruption.  The National Liberal 
+became feverishly congested towards midnight as the results of the 
+counting came dropping in.  A big green-baize screen had been fixed 
+up at one end of the large smoking-room with the names of the 
+constituencies that were voting that day, and directly the figures 
+came to hand, up they went, amidst cheers that at last lost their 
+energy through sheer repetition, whenever there was record of a 
+Liberal gain.  I don't remember what happened when there was a 
+Liberal loss; I don't think that any were announced while I was 
+there.
+
+How packed and noisy the place was, and what a reek of tobacco and 
+whisky fumes we made!  Everybody was excited and talking, making 
+waves of harsh confused sound that beat upon one's ears, and every 
+now and then hoarse voices would shout for someone to speak.  Our 
+little set was much in evidence.  Both the Cramptons were in, Lewis, 
+Bunting Harblow.  We gave brief addresses attuned to this excitement 
+and the late hour, amidst much enthusiasm.
+
+Now we can DO things!" I said amidst a rapture of applause.  Men I 
+did not know from Adam held up glasses and nodded to me in solemn 
+fuddled approval as I came down past them into the crowd again.
+
+Men were betting whether the Unionists would lose more or less than 
+two hundred seats.
+
+"I wonder just what we shall do with it all," I heard one sceptic 
+speculating. . . .
+
+After these orgies I would get home very tired and excited, and find 
+it difficult to get to sleep.  I would lie and speculate about what 
+it was we WERE going to do.  One hadn't anticipated quite such a 
+tremendous accession to power for one's party.  Liberalism was 
+swirling in like a flood. . . .
+
+I found the next few weeks very unsatisfactory and distressing.  I 
+don't clearly remember what it was I had expected; I suppose the 
+fuss and strain of the General Election had built up a feeling that 
+my return would in some way put power into my hands, and instead I 
+found myself a mere undistinguished unit in a vast but rather vague 
+majority.  There were moments when I felt very distinctly that a 
+majority could be too big a crowd altogether.  I had all my work 
+still before me, I had achieved nothing as yet but opportunity, and 
+a very crowded opportunity it was at that.  Everyone about me was 
+chatting Parliament and appointments; one breathed distracting and 
+irritating speculations as to what would be done and who would be 
+asked to do it.  I was chiefly impressed by what was unlikely to be 
+done and by the absence of any general plan of legislation to hold 
+us all together.  I found the talk about Parliamentary procedure and 
+etiquette particularly trying.  We dined with the elder Cramptons 
+one evening, and old Sir Edward was lengthily sage about what the 
+House liked, what it didn't like, what made a good impression and 
+what a bad one.  "A man shouldn't speak more than twice in his first 
+session, and not at first on too contentious a topic," said Sir 
+Edward.  "No."
+
+"Very much depends on manner.  The House hates a lecturer.  There's 
+a sort of airy earnestness--"
+
+He waved his cigar to eke out his words.
+
+"Little peculiarities of costume count for a great deal.  I could 
+name one man who spent three years living down a pair of 
+spatterdashers.  On the other hand--a thing like that--if it catches 
+the eye of the PUNCH man, for example, may be your making."
+
+He went off into a lengthy speculation of why the House had come to 
+like an originally unpopular Irishman named Biggar. . . .
+
+The opening of Parliament gave me some peculiar moods.  I began to 
+feel more and more like a branded sheep.  We were sworn in in 
+batches, dozens and scores of fresh men, trying not to look too 
+fresh under the inspection of policemen and messengers, all of us 
+carrying new silk hats and wearing magisterial coats.  It is one of 
+my vivid memories from this period, the sudden outbreak of silk hats 
+in the smoking-room of the National Liberal Club.  At first I 
+thought there must have been a funeral.  Familiar faces that one had 
+grown to know under soft felt hats, under bowlers, under liberal-
+minded wide brims, and above artistic ties and tweed jackets, 
+suddenly met one, staring with the stern gaze of self-consciousness, 
+from under silk hats of incredible glossiness.  There was a 
+disposition to wear the hat much too forward, I thought, for a good 
+Parliamentary style.
+
+There was much play with the hats all through; a tremendous 
+competition to get in first and put hats on coveted seats.  A memory 
+hangs about me of the House in the early afternoon, an inhumane 
+desolation inhabited almost entirely by silk hats.  The current use 
+of cards to secure seats came later.  There were yards and yards of 
+empty green benches with hats and hats and hats distributed along 
+them, resolute-looking top hats, lax top hats with a kind of shadowy 
+grin under them, sensible top bats brim upward, and one scandalous 
+incontinent that had rolled from the front Opposition bench right to 
+the middle of the floor.  A headless hat is surely the most soulless 
+thing in the world, far worse even than a skull. . . .
+
+At last, in a leisurely muddled manner we got to the Address; and I 
+found myself packed in a dense elbowing crowd to the right of the 
+Speaker's chair; while the attenuated Opposition, nearly leaderless 
+after the massacre, tilted its brim to its nose and sprawled at its 
+ease amidst its empty benches.
+
+There was a tremendous hullaboo about something, and I craned to see 
+over the shoulder of the man in front.  ''Order, order, order!"
+
+"What's it about?" I asked.
+
+The man in front of me was clearly no better informed, and then I 
+gathered from a slightly contemptuous Scotchman beside me that it 
+was Chris Robinson had walked between the bonourable member in 
+possession of the house and the Speaker.  I caught a glimpse of him 
+blushingly whispering about his misadventure to a colleague.  He was 
+just that same little figure I had once assisted to entertain at 
+Cambridge, but grey-haired now, and still it seemed with the same 
+knitted muffler he had discarded for a reckless half-hour while he 
+talked to us in Hatherleigh's rooms.
+
+It dawned upon me that I wasn't particularly wanted in the House, 
+and that I should get all I needed of the opening speeches next day 
+from the TIMES.
+
+I made my way out and was presently walking rather aimlessly through 
+the outer lobby.
+
+I caught myself regarding the shadow that spread itself out before 
+me, multiplied itself in blue tints of various intensity, shuffled 
+itself like a pack of cards under the many lights, the square 
+shoulders, the silk hat, already worn with a parliamentary tilt 
+backward; I found I was surveying this statesmanlike outline with a 
+weak approval.  "A MEMBER!" I felt the little cluster of people that 
+were scattered about the lobby must be saying.
+
+"Good God!" I said in hot reaction, "what am I doing here?"
+
+It was one of those moments infinitely trivial in themselves, that 
+yet are cardinal in a man's life.  It came to me with extreme 
+vividness that it wasn't so much that I had got hold of something as 
+that something had got hold of me.  I distinctly recall the rebound 
+of my mind.  Whatever happened in this Parliament, I at least would 
+attempt something.  "By God!" I said, "I won't be overwhelmed.  I am 
+here to do something, and do something I will!"
+
+But I felt that for the moment I could not remain in the House.
+
+I went out by myself with my thoughts into the night.  It was a 
+chilling night, and rare spots of rain were falling.  I glanced over 
+my shoulder at the lit windows of the Lords.  I walked, I remember, 
+westward, and presently came to the Grosvenar Embankment and 
+followed it, watching the glittering black rush of the river and the 
+dark, dimly lit barges round which the water swirled.  Across the 
+river was the hunched sky-line of Doulton's potteries, and a kiln 
+flared redly.  Dimly luminous trams were gliding amidst a dotted 
+line of lamps, and two little trains crawled into Waterloo station.  
+Mysterious black figures came by me and were suddenly changed to the 
+commonplace at the touch of the nearer lamps.  It was a big confused 
+world, I felt, for a man to lay his hands upon.
+
+I remember I crossed Vauxhall Bridge and stood for a time watching 
+the huge black shapes in the darkness under the gas-works.  A shoal 
+of coal barges lay indistinctly on the darkly shining mud and water 
+below, and a colossal crane was perpetually hauling up coal into 
+mysterious blacknesses above, and dropping the empty clutch back to 
+the barges.  Just one or two minute black featureless figures of men 
+toiled amidst these monster shapes.  They did not seem to be 
+controlling them but only moving about among them.  These gas-works 
+have a big chimney that belches a lurid flame into the night, a 
+livid shivering bluish flame, shot with strange crimson streaks. . . .
+
+On the other side of Lambeth Bridge broad stairs go down to the 
+lapping water of the river; the lower steps are luminous under the 
+lamps and one treads unwarned into thick soft Thames mud.  They seem 
+to be purely architectural steps, they lead nowhere, they have an 
+air of absolute indifference to mortal ends.
+
+Those shapes and large inhuman places--for all of mankind that one 
+sees at night about Lambeth is minute and pitiful beside the 
+industrial monsters that snort and toil there--mix up inextricably 
+with my memories of my first days as a legislator.  Black figures 
+drift by me, heavy vans clatter, a newspaper rough tears by on a 
+motor bicycle, and presently, on the Albert Embankment, every seat 
+has its one or two outcasts huddled together and slumbering.
+
+"These things come, these things go," a whispering voice urged upon 
+me, "as once those vast unmeaning Saurians whose bones encumber 
+museums came and went rejoicing noisily in fruitless lives." . . .
+
+Fruitless lives!--was that the truth of it all? . . .
+
+Later I stood within sight of the Houses of Parliament in front of 
+the colonnades of St Thomas's Hospital.  I leant on the parapet 
+close by a lamp-stand of twisted dolphins--and I prayed!
+
+I remember the swirl of the tide upon the water, and how a string of 
+barges presently came swinging and bumping round as high-water 
+turned to ebb.  That sudden change of position and my brief 
+perplexity at it, sticks like a paper pin through the substance of 
+my thoughts.  It was then I was moved to prayer.  I prayed that 
+night that life might not be in vain, that in particular I might not 
+live in vain.  I prayed for strength and faith, that the monstrous 
+blundering forces in life might not overwhelm me, might not beat me 
+back to futility and a meaningless acquiescence in existent things.  
+I knew myself for the weakling I was, I knew that nevertheless it 
+was set for me to make such order as I could out of these disorders, 
+and my task cowed me, gave me at the thought of it a sense of 
+yielding feebleness.
+
+"Break me, O God," I prayed at last, "disgrace me, torment me, 
+destroy me as you will, but save me from self-complacency and little 
+interests and little successes and the life that passes like the 
+shadow of a dream."
+
+
+
+BOOK THE THIRD
+
+THE HEART OF POLITICS
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST
+
+THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+I have been planning and replanning, writing and rewriting, this 
+next portion of my book for many days.  I perceive I must leave it 
+raw edged and ill joined.  I have learnt something of the 
+impossibility of History.  For all I have had to tell is the story 
+of one man's convictions and aims and how they reacted upon his 
+life; and I find it too subtle and involved and intricate for the 
+doing.  I find it taxes all my powers to convey even the main forms 
+and forces in that development.  It is like looking through moving 
+media of changing hue and variable refraction at something vitally 
+unstable.  Broad theories and generalisations are mingled with 
+personal influences, with prevalent prejudices; and not only 
+coloured but altered by phases of hopefulness and moods of 
+depression.  The web is made up of the most diverse elements, beyond 
+treatment multitudinous. . . .  For a week or so I desisted 
+altogether, and walked over the mountains and returned to sit 
+through the warm soft mornings among the shaded rocks above this 
+little perched-up house of ours, discussing my difficulties with 
+Isabel and I think on the whole complicating them further in the 
+effort to simplify them to manageable and stateable elements.
+
+Let me, nevertheless, attempt a rough preliminary analysis of this 
+confused process.  A main strand is quite easily traceable.  This 
+main strand is the story of my obvious life, my life as it must have 
+looked to most of my acquaintances.  It presents you with a young 
+couple, bright, hopeful, and energetic, starting out under Altiora's 
+auspices to make a career.  You figure us well dressed and active, 
+running about in motor-cars, visiting in great people's houses, 
+dining amidst brilliant companies, going to the theatre, meeting in 
+the lobby.  Margaret wore hundreds of beautiful dresses.  We must 
+have had an air of succeeding meritoriously during that time.
+
+We did very continually and faithfully serve our joint career.  I 
+thought about it a great deal, and did and refrained from doing ten 
+thousand things for the sake of it.  I kept up a solicitude for it, 
+as it were by inertia, long after things had happened and changes 
+occurred in me that rendered its completion impossible.  Under 
+certain very artless pretences, we wanted steadfastly to make a 
+handsome position in the world, achieve respect, SUCCEED.  Enormous 
+unseen changes had been in progress for years in my mind and the 
+realities of my life, before our general circle could have had any 
+inkling of their existence, or suspected the appearances of our 
+life.  Then suddenly our proceedings began to be deflected, our 
+outward unanimity visibly strained and marred by the insurgence of 
+these so long-hidden developments.
+
+That career had its own hidden side, of course; but when I write of 
+these unseen factors I do not mean that but something altogether 
+broader.  I do not mean the everyday pettinesses which gave the 
+cynical observer scope and told of a narrower, baser aspect of the 
+fair but limited ambitions of my ostensible self.  This "sub-
+careerist" element noted little things that affected the career, 
+made me suspicious of the rivalry of so-and-so, propitiatory to so-
+and-so, whom, as a matter of fact, I didn't respect or feel in the 
+least sympathetic towards; guarded with that man, who for all his 
+charm and interest wasn't helpful, and a little touchy at the 
+appearance of neglect from that.  No, I mean something greater and 
+not something smaller when I write of a hidden life.
+
+In the ostensible self who glowed under the approbation of Altiora 
+Bailey, and was envied and discussed, praised and depreciated, in 
+the House and in smoking-room gossip, you really have as much of a 
+man as usually figures in a novel or an obituary notice.  But I am 
+tremendously impressed now in the retrospect by the realisation of 
+how little that frontage represented me, and just how little such 
+frontages do represent the complexities of the intelligent 
+contemporary.  Behind it, yet struggling to disorganise and alter 
+it, altogether, was a far more essential reality, a self less 
+personal, less individualised, and broader in its references.  Its 
+aims were never simply to get on; it had an altogether different 
+system of demands and satisfactions.  It was critical, curious, more 
+than a little unfeeling--and relentlessly illuminating.
+
+It is just the existence and development of this more generalised 
+self-behind-the-frontage that is making modern life so much more 
+subtle and intricate to render, and so much more hopeful in its 
+relations to the perplexities of the universe.  I see this mental 
+and spiritual hinterland vary enormously in the people about me, 
+from a type which seems to keep, as people say, all its goods in the 
+window, to others who, like myself, come to regard the ostensible 
+existence more and more as a mere experimental feeder and agent for 
+that greater personality behind.  And this back-self has its history 
+of phases, its crises and happy accidents and irrevocable 
+conclusions, more or less distinct from the adventures and 
+achievements of the ostensible self.  It meets persons and phrases, 
+it assimilates the spirit of a book, it is startled into new 
+realisations by some accident that seems altogether irrelevant to 
+the general tenor of one's life.  Its increasing independence of the 
+ostensible career makes it the organ of corrective criticism; it 
+accumulates disturbing energy.  Then it breaks our overt promises 
+and repudiates our pledges, coming down at last like an overbearing 
+mentor upon the small engagements of the pupil.
+
+In the life of the individual it takes the role that the growth of 
+philosophy, science, and creative literature may play in the 
+development of mankind.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+It is curious to recall how Britten helped shatter that obvious, 
+lucidly explicable presentation of myself upon which I had embarked 
+with Margaret.  He returned to revive a memory of adolescent dreams 
+and a habit of adolescent frankness; he reached through my shallow 
+frontage as no one else seemed capable of doing, and dragged that 
+back-self into relation with it.
+
+I remember very distinctly a dinner and a subsequent walk with him 
+which presents itself now as altogether typical of the quality of 
+his influence.
+
+I had come upon him one day while lunching with Somers and Sutton at 
+the Playwrights' Club, and had asked him to dinner on the spur of 
+the moment.  He was oddly the same curly-headed, red-faced 
+ventriloquist, and oddly different, rather seedy as well as untidy, 
+and at first a little inclined to make comparisons with my sleek 
+successfulness.  But that disposition presently evaporated, and his 
+talk was good and fresh and provocative.  And something that had 
+long been straining at its checks in my mind flapped over, and he 
+and I found ourselves of one accord.
+
+Altiora wasn't at this dinner.  When she came matters were apt to 
+become confusedly strenuous.  There was always a slight and 
+ineffectual struggle at the end on the part of Margaret to 
+anticipate Altiora's overpowering tendency to a rally and the 
+establishment of some entirely unjustifiable conclusion by a COUP-
+DE-MAIN.  When, however, Altiora was absent, the quieter influence 
+of the Cramptons prevailed; temperance and information for its own 
+sake prevailed excessively over dinner and the play of thought. . . .  
+Good Lord! what bores the Cramptons were!  I wonder I endured 
+them as I did.  They had all of them the trick of lying in wait 
+conversationally; they had no sense of the self-exposures, the 
+gallant experiments in statement that are necessary for good 
+conversation.  They would watch one talking with an expression 
+exactly like peeping through bushes.  Then they would, as it were, 
+dash out, dissent succinctly, contradict some secondary fact, and 
+back to cover.  They gave one twilight nerves.  Their wives were 
+easier but still difficult at a stretch; they talked a good deal 
+about children and servants, but with an air caught from Altiora of 
+making observations upon sociological types.  Lewis gossiped about 
+the House in an entirely finite manner.  He never raised a 
+discussion; nobody ever raised a discussion.  He would ask what we 
+thought of Evesham's question that afternoon, and Edward would say 
+it was good, and Mrs. Willie, who had been behind the grille, would 
+think it was very good, and then Willie, parting the branches, would 
+say rather conclusively that he didn't think it was very much good, 
+and I would deny hearing the question in order to evade a profitless 
+statement of views in that vacuum, and then we would cast about in 
+our minds for some other topic of equal interest. . . .
+
+On this occasion Altiora was absent, and to qualify our Young 
+Liberal bleakness we had Mrs. Millingham, with her white hair and 
+her fresh mind and complexion, and Esmeer.  Willie Crampton was with 
+us, but not his wife, who was having her third baby on principle; 
+his brother Edward was present, and the Lewises, and of course the 
+Bunting Harblows.  There was also some other lady.  I remember her 
+as pale blue, but for the life of me I cannot remember her name.
+
+Quite early there was a little breeze between Edward Crampton and 
+Esmeer, who had ventured an opinion about the partition of Poland.  
+Edward was at work then upon the seventh volume of his monumental 
+Life of Kosciusko, and a little impatient with views perhaps not 
+altogether false but betraying a lamentable ignorance of accessible 
+literature.  At any rate, his correction of Esmeer was magisterial.  
+After that there was a distinct and not altogether delightful pause, 
+and then some one, it may have been the pale-blue lady, asked Mrs. 
+Lewis whether her aunt Lady Carmixter had returned from her rest-
+and-sun-cure in Italy.  That led to a rather anxiously sustained 
+talk about regimen, and Willie told us how he had profited by the 
+no-breakfast system.  It had increased his power of work enormously.  
+He could get through ten hours a day now without inconvenience.
+
+"What do you do?" said Esmeer abruptly.
+
+"Oh! no end of work.  There's all the estate and looking after 
+things."
+
+"But publicly?"
+
+"I asked three questions yesterday.  And for one of them I had to 
+consult nine books!"
+
+We were drifting, I could see, towards Doctor Haig's system of 
+dietary, and whether the exclusion or inclusion of fish and chicken 
+were most conducive to high efficiency, when Britten, who had 
+refused lemonade and claret and demanded Burgundy, broke out, and 
+was discovered to be demanding in his throat just what we Young 
+Liberals thought we were up to?
+
+"I want," said Britten, repeating his challenge a little louder, "to 
+hear just exactly what you think you are doing in Parliament?"
+
+Lewis laughed nervously, and thought we were "Seeking the Good of 
+the Community."
+
+"HOW?"
+
+"Beneficient Legislation," said Lewis.
+
+"Beneficient in what direction?" insisted Britten.  "I want to know 
+where you think you are going."
+
+"Amelioration of Social Conditions," said Lewis.
+
+"That's only a phrase!"
+
+"You wouldn't have me sketch bills at dinner?"
+
+"I'd like you to indicate directions," said Britten, and waited.
+
+"Upward and On," said Lewis with conscious neatness, and turned to 
+ask Mrs. Bunting Harblow about her little boy's French.
+
+For a time talk frothed over Britten's head, but the natural 
+mischief in Mrs. Millingham had been stirred, and she was presently 
+echoing his demand in lisping, quasi-confidential undertones.  "What 
+ARE we Liberals doing?"  Then Esmeer fell in with the 
+revolutionaries.
+
+To begin with, I was a little shocked by this clamour for 
+fundamentals--and a little disconcerted.  I had the experience that 
+I suppose comes to every one at times of discovering oneself 
+together with two different sets of people with whom one has 
+maintained two different sets of attitudes.  It had always been, I 
+perceived, an instinctive suppression in our circle that we 
+shouldn't be more than vague about our political ideals.  It had 
+almost become part of my morality to respect this convention.  It 
+was understood we were all working hard, and keeping ourselves fit, 
+tremendously fit, under Altiora's inspiration, Pro Bono Publico.  
+Bunting Harblow had his under-secretaryship, and Lewis was on the 
+verge of the Cabinet, and these things we considered to be in the 
+nature of confirmations. . . .  It added to tbe discomfort of the 
+situation that these plunging enquiries were being made in the 
+presence of our wives.
+
+The rebel section of our party forced the talk.
+
+Edward Crampton was presently declaring--I forget in what relation: 
+"The country is with us."
+
+My long-controlled hatred of the Cramptons' stereotyped phrases 
+about the Country and the House got the better of me.  I showed my 
+cloven hoof to my friends for the first time.
+
+"We don't respect the Country as we used to do," I said.  "We 
+haven't the same belief we used to have in the will of the people.  
+It's no good, Crampton, trying to keep that up.  We Liberals know as 
+a matter of fact--nowadays every one knows--that the monster that 
+brought us into power has, among other deficiencies, no head.  We've 
+got to give it one--if possible with brains and a will.  That lies 
+in the future.  For the present if the country is with us, it means 
+merely that we happen to have hold of its tether."
+
+Lewis was shocked.  A "mandate" from the Country was sacred to his 
+system of pretences.
+
+Britten wasn't subdued by his first rebuff; presently he was at us 
+again.  There were several attempts to check his outbreak of 
+interrogation; I remember the Cramptons asked questions about the 
+welfare of various cousins of Lewis who were unknown to the rest of 
+us, and Margaret tried to engage Britten in a sympathetic discussion 
+of the Arts and Crafts exhibition.  But Britten and Esmeer were 
+persistent, Mrs. Millingham was mischievous, and in the end our 
+rising hopes of Young Liberalism took to their thickets for good, 
+while we talked all over them of the prevalent vacuity of political 
+intentions.  Margaret was perplexed by me.  It is only now I 
+perceive just how perplexing I must have been.  "Of course, she said 
+with that faint stress of apprehension in her eyes, one must have 
+aims."  And, "it isn't always easy to put everything into phrases."  
+"Don't be long," said Mrs. Edward Crampton to her hsuband as the 
+wives trooped out.  And afterwards when we went upstairs I had an 
+indefinable persuasion that the ladies had been criticising 
+Britten's share in our talk in an altogether unfavourable spirit.  
+Mrs. Edward evidently thought him aggressive and impertinent, and 
+Margaret with a quiet firmness that brooked no resistance, took him 
+at once into a corner and showed him Italian photographs by Coburn.  
+We dispersed early.
+
+I walked with Britten along the Chelsea back streets towards 
+Battersea Bridge--he lodged on the south side.
+
+"Mrs. Millingham's a dear," he began.
+
+"She's a dear."
+
+"I liked her demand for a hansom because a four-wheeler was too 
+safe."
+
+"She was worked up," I said.  "She's a woman of faultless character, 
+but her instincts, as Altiora would say, are anarchistic--when she 
+gives them a chance."
+
+"So she takes it out in hansom cabs."
+
+"Hansom cabs."
+
+"She's wise," said Britten. . . .
+
+"I hope, Remington," he went on after a pause, "I didn't rag your 
+other guests too much.  I've a sort of feeling at moments--
+Remington, those chaps are so infernally not--not bloody.  It's part 
+of a man's duty sometimes at least to eat red beef and get drunk.  
+How is he to understand government if he doesn't?  It scares me to 
+think of your lot--by a sort of misapprehension--being in power.  A 
+kind of neuralgia in the head, by way of government.  I don't 
+understand where YOU come in.  Those others--they've no lusts.  
+Their ideal is anaemia.  You and I, we had at least a lust to take 
+hold of life and make something of it.  They--they want to take hold 
+of life and make nothing of it.  They want to cut out all the 
+stimulants.  Just as though life was anything else but a reaction to 
+stimulation!" . . .
+
+He began to talk of his own life.  He had had ill-fortune through 
+most of it.  He was poor and unsuccessful, and a girl he had been 
+very fond of had been attacked and killed by a horse in a field in a 
+very horrible manner.  These things had wounded and tortured him, 
+but they hadn't broken him.  They had, it seemed to me, made a kind 
+of crippled and ugly demigod of him.  He was, I began to perceive, 
+so much better than I had any right to expect.  At first I had been 
+rather struck by his unkempt look, and it made my reaction all the 
+stronger.  There was about him something, a kind of raw and bleeding 
+faith in the deep things of life, that stirred me profoundly as he 
+showed it.  My set of people had irritated him and disappointed him.  
+I discovered at his touch how they irritated him.  He reproached me 
+boldly.  He made me feel ashamed of my easy acquiescences as I 
+walked in my sleek tall neatness beside his rather old coat, his 
+rather battered hat, his sturdier shorter shape, and listened to his 
+denunciations of our self-satisfied New Liberalism and 
+Progressivism.
+
+"It has the same relation to progress--the reality of progress--that 
+the things they paint on door panels in the suburbs have to art and 
+beauty.  There's a sort of filiation. . . .  Your Altiora's just the 
+political equivalent of the ladies who sell traced cloth for 
+embroidery; she's a dealer in Refined Social Reform for the Parlour.  
+The real progress, Remington, is a graver thing and a painfuller 
+thing and a slower thing altogether.  Look!  THAT"--and he pointed 
+to where under a boarding in the light of a gas lamp a dingy 
+prostitute stood lurking--" was in Babylon and Nineveh.  Your little 
+lot make believe there won't be anything of the sort after this 
+Parliament!  They're going to vanish at a few top notes from Altiora 
+Bailey!  Remington!--it's foolery.  It's prigs at play.  It's make-
+believe, make-believe!  Your people there haven't got hold of 
+things, aren't beginning to get hold of things, don't know anything 
+of life at all, shirk life, avoid life, get in little bright clean 
+rooms and talk big over your bumpers of lemonade while the Night 
+goes by outside--untouched.  Those Crampton fools slink by all 
+this,"--he waved at the woman again--"pretend it doesn't exist, or 
+is going to be banished root and branch by an Act to keep children 
+in the wet outside public-houses.  Do you think they really care, 
+Remington?  I don't.  It's make-believe.  What they want to do, what 
+Lewis wants to do, what Mrs. Bunting Harblow wants her husband to 
+do, is to sit and feel very grave and necessary and respected on the 
+Government benches.  They think of putting their feet out like 
+statesmen, and tilting shiny hats with becoming brims down over 
+their successful noses.  Presentation portrait to a club at fifty.  
+That's their Reality.  That's their scope.  They don't, it's 
+manifest, WANT to think beyond that.  The things there ARE, 
+Remington, they'll never face! the wonder and the depth of life,--
+lust, and the night-sky,--pain."
+
+"But the good intention," I pleaded, "the Good Will!"
+
+"Sentimentality," said Britten.  "No Good Will is anything but 
+dishonesty unless it frets and burns and hurts and destroys a man.  
+That lot of yours have nothing but a good will to think they have 
+good will.  Do you think they lie awake of nights searching their 
+hearts as we do?  Lewis?  Crampton?  Or those neat, admiring, 
+satisfied little wives?  See how they shrank from the probe!"
+
+"We all," I said, "shrink from the probe."
+
+"God help us!" said Britten. . . .
+
+"We are but vermin at the best, Remington," he broke out," and the 
+greatest saint only a worm that has lifted its head for a moment 
+from the dust.  We are damned, we are meant to be damned, coral 
+animalculae building upward, upward in a sea of damnation.  But of 
+all the damned things that ever were damned, your damned shirking, 
+temperate, sham-efficient, self-satisfied, respectable, make-
+believe, Fabian-spirited Young Liberal is tbe utterly damnedest."  
+He paused for a moment, and resumed in an entirely different note: 
+"Which is why I was so surprised, Remington, to find YOU in this 
+set!"
+
+"You're just the old plunger you used to be, Britten," I said.  " 
+You're going too far with all your might for the sake of the damns.  
+Like a donkey that drags its cart up a bank to get thistles.  
+There's depths in Liberalism--"
+
+"We were talking about Liberals."
+
+"Liberty!"
+
+"Liberty!  What do YOOR little lot know of liberty?"
+
+"What does any little lot know of liberty?"
+
+"It waits outside, too big for our understanding.  Like the night 
+and the stars.  And lust, Remington! lust and bitterness!  Don't I 
+know them? with all the sweetness and hope of life bitten and 
+trampled, the dear eyes and the brain that loved and understood--and 
+my poor mumble of a life going on!  I'm within sight of being a 
+drunkard, Remington!  I'm a failure by most standards!  Life has cut 
+me to the bone.  But I'm not afraid of it any more.  I've paid 
+something of the price, I've seen something of the meaning."
+
+He flew off at a tangent.  "I'd rather die in Delirium Tremens," he 
+cried, "than be a Crampton or a Lewis. . . ."
+
+"Make-believe.  Make-believe."  The phrase and Britten's squat 
+gestures haunted me as I walked homeward alone.  I went to my room 
+and stood before my desk and surveyed papers and files and 
+Margaret's admirable equipment of me.
+
+I perceived in the lurid light of Britten's suggestions that so it 
+was Mr. George Alexander would have mounted a statesman's private 
+room. . . .
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+I was never at any stage a loyal party man.  I doubt if party will 
+ever again be the force it was during the eighteenth and nineteenth 
+centuries.  Men are becoming increasingly constructive and 
+selective, less patient under tradition and the bondage of initial 
+circumstances.  As education becomes more universal and liberating, 
+men will sort themselves more and more by their intellectual 
+temperaments and less and less by their accidental associations.  
+The past will rule them less; the future more.  It is not simply 
+party but school and college and county and country that lose their 
+glamour.  One does not hear nearly as much as our forefathers did of 
+the "old Harrovian," "old Arvonian," "old Etonian" claim to this or 
+that unfair advantage or unearnt sympathy.  Even the Scotch and the 
+Devonians weaken a little in their clannishness.  A widening sense 
+of fair play destroys such things.  They follow freemasonry down--
+freemasonry of which one is chiefly reminded nowadays in England by 
+propitiatory symbols outside shady public-houses. . . .
+
+There is, of course, a type of man which clings very obstinately to 
+party ties.  These are the men with strong reproductive imaginations 
+and no imaginative initiative, such men as Cladingbowl, for example, 
+or Dayton.  They are the scholars-at-large in life.  For them the 
+fact that the party system has been essential in the history of 
+England for two hundred years gives it an overwhelming glamour.  
+They have read histories and memoirs, they see the great grey pile 
+of Westminster not so much for what it is as for what it was, rich 
+with dramatic memories, populous with glorious ghosts, phrasing 
+itself inevitably in anecdotes and quotations.  It seems almost 
+scandalous that new things should continue to happen, swamping with 
+strange qualities the savour of these old associations.
+
+That Mr. Ramsay Macdonald should walk through Westminster Hall, 
+thrust himself, it may be, through the very piece of space that once 
+held Charles the Martyr pleading for his life, seems horrible 
+profanation to Dayton, a last posthumous outrage; and he would, I 
+think, like to have the front benches left empty now for ever, or at 
+most adorned with laureated ivory tablets: "Here Dizzy sat," and "On 
+this Spot William Ewart Gladstone made his First Budget Speech."  
+Failing this, he demands, if only as signs of modesty and respect on 
+the part of the survivors, meticulous imitation.  "Mr. G.," he 
+murmurs, "would not have done that," and laments a vanished subtlety 
+even while Mr. Evesham is speaking.  He is always gloomily disposed 
+to lapse into wonderings about what things are coming to, wonderings 
+that have no grain of curiosity.  His conception of perfect conduct 
+is industrious persistence along the worn-down, well-marked grooves 
+of the great recorded days.  So infinitely more important to him is 
+the documented, respected thing than the elusive present.
+
+Cladingbowl and Dayton do not shine in the House, though Cladingbowl 
+is a sound man on a committee, and Dayton keeps the OLD COUNTRY 
+GAZETTE, the most gentlemanly paper in London.  They prevail, 
+however, in their clubs at lunch time.  There, with the pleasant 
+consciousness of a morning's work free from either zeal or shirking, 
+they mingle with permanent officials, prominent lawyers, even a few 
+of the soberer type of business men, and relax their minds in the 
+discussion of the morning paper, of the architecture of the West 
+End, and of the latest public appointments, of golf, of holiday 
+resorts, of the last judicial witticisms and forensic "crushers."  
+The New Year and Birthday honours lists are always very sagely and 
+exhaustively considered, and anecdotes are popular and keenly 
+judged.  They do not talk of the things that are really active in 
+their minds, but in the formal and habitual manner they suppose to 
+be proper to intelligent but still honourable men.  Socialism, 
+individual money matters, and religion are forbidden topics, and sex 
+and women only in so far as they appear in the law courts.  It is to 
+me the strangest of conventions, this assumption of unreal loyalties 
+and traditional respects, this repudiation and concealment of 
+passionate interests.  It is like wearing gloves in summer fields, 
+or bathing in a gown, or falling in love with the heroine of a 
+novel, or writing under a pseudonym, or becoming a masked Tuareg. . . .
+
+It is not, I think, that men of my species are insensitive to the 
+great past that is embodied in Westminster and its traditions; we 
+are not so much wanting in the historical sense as alive to the 
+greatness of our present opportunities and the still vaster future 
+that is possible to us.  London is the most interesting, beautiful, 
+and wonderful city in the world to me, delicate in her incidental 
+and multitudinous littleness, and stupendous in her pregnant 
+totality; I cannot bring myself to use her as a museum or an old 
+bookshop.  When I think of Whitehall that little affair on the 
+scaffold outside the Banqueting Hall seems trivial and remote in 
+comparison with the possibilities that offer themselves to my 
+imagination within the great grey Government buildings close at 
+hand.
+
+It gives me a qualm of nostalgia even to name those places now.  I 
+think of St. Stephen's tower streaming upwards into the misty London 
+night and the great wet quadrangle of New Palace Yard, from which 
+the hansom cabs of my first experiences were ousted more and more by 
+taxicabs as the second Parliament of King Edward the Seventh aged; I 
+think of the Admiralty and War office with their tall Marconi masts 
+sending out invisible threads of direction to the armies in the 
+camps, to great fleets about the world.  The crowded, darkly shining 
+river goes flooding through my memory once again, on to those narrow 
+seas that part us from our rival nations; I see quadrangles and 
+corridors of spacious grey-toned offices in which undistinguished 
+little men and little files of papers link us to islands in the 
+tropics, to frozen wildernesses gashed for gold, to vast temple-
+studded plains, to forest worlds and mountain worlds, to ports and 
+fortresses and lighthouses and watch-towers and grazing lands and 
+corn lands all about the globe.  Once more I traverse Victoria 
+Street, grimy and dark, where the Agents of the Empire jostle one 
+another, pass the big embassies in the West End with their flags and 
+scutcheons, follow the broad avenue that leads to Buckingham Palace, 
+witness the coming and going of troops and officials and guests 
+along it from every land on earth. . . .  Interwoven in the texture 
+of it all, mocking, perplexing, stimulating beyond measure, is the 
+gleaming consciousness, the challenging knowledge: "You and your 
+kind might still, if you could but grasp it here, mould all the 
+destiny of Man!"
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+My first three years in Parliament were years of active discontent.  
+The little group of younger Liberals to which I belonged was very 
+ignorant of the traditions and qualities of our older leaders, and 
+quite out of touch with the mass of the party.  For a time 
+Parliament was enormously taken up with moribund issues and old 
+quarrels.  The early Educational legislation was sectarian and 
+unenterprising, and the Licensing Bill went little further than the 
+attempted rectification of a Conservative mistake.  I was altogether 
+for the nationalisation of the public-houses, and of this end the 
+Bill gave no intimations.  It was just beer-baiting.  I was 
+recalcitrant almost from the beginning, and spoke against the 
+Government so early as the second reading of the first Education 
+Bill, the one the Lords rejected in 1906.  I went a little beyond my 
+intention in the heat of speaking,--it is a way with inexperienced 
+man.  I called the Bill timid, narrow, a mere sop to the jealousies 
+of sects and little-minded people.  I contrasted its aim and methods 
+with the manifest needs of the time.
+
+I am not a particularly good speaker; after the manner of a writer I 
+worry to find my meaning too much; but this was one of my successes.  
+I spoke after dinner and to a fairly full House, for people were 
+already a little curious about me because of my writings.  Several 
+of the Conservative leaders were present and stayed, and Mr. 
+Evesham, I remember, came ostentatiously to hear me, with that 
+engaging friendliness of his, and gave me at the first chance an 
+approving "Hear, Hear!"  I can still recall quite distinctly my two 
+futile attempts to catch the Speaker's eye before I was able to 
+begin, the nervous quiver of my rather too prepared opening, the 
+effect of hearing my own voice and my subconscious wonder as to what 
+I could possibly be talking about, the realisation that I was 
+getting on fairly well, the immense satisfaction afterwards of 
+having on the whole brought it off, and the absurd gratitude I felt 
+for that encouraging cheer.
+
+Addressing the House of Commons is like no other public speaking in 
+the world.  Its semi-colloquial methods give it an air of being 
+easy, but its shifting audience, the comings and goings and 
+hesitations of members behind the chair--not mere audience units, 
+but men who matter--the desolating emptiness that spreads itself 
+round the man who fails to interest, the little compact, disciplined 
+crowd in the strangers' gallery, the light, elusive, flickering 
+movements high up behind the grill, the wigged, attentive, weary 
+Speaker, the table and the mace and the chapel-like Gothic 
+background with its sombre shadows, conspire together, produce a 
+confused, uncertain feeling in me, as though I was walking upon a 
+pavement full of trap-doors and patches of uncovered morass.  A 
+misplaced, well-meant "Hear, Hear!" is apt to be extraordinarily 
+disconcerting, and under no other circumstances have I had to speak 
+with quite the same sideways twist that the arrangement of the House 
+imposes.  One does not recognise one's own voice threading out into 
+the stirring brown.  Unless I was excited or speaking to the mind of 
+some particular person in the house, I was apt to lose my feeling of 
+an auditor.  I had no sense of whither my sentences were going, such 
+as one has with a public meeting well under one's eye.  And to lose 
+one's sense of an auditor is for a man of my temperament to lose 
+one's sense of the immediate, and to become prolix and vague with 
+qualifications.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+My discontents with the Liberal party and my mental exploration of 
+the quality of party generally is curiously mixed up with certain 
+impressions of things and people in the National Liberal Club.  The 
+National Liberal Club is Liberalism made visible in the flesh--and 
+Doultonware.  It is an extraordinary big club done in a bold, 
+wholesale, shiny, marbled style, richly furnished with numerous 
+paintings, steel engravings, busts, and full-length statues of the 
+late Mr. Gladstone; and its spacious dining-rooms, its long, hazy, 
+crowded smoking-room with innumerable little tables and groups of 
+men in armchairs, its magazine room and library upstairs, have just 
+that undistinguished and unconcentrated diversity which is for me 
+the Liberal note.  The pensive member sits and hears perplexing 
+dialects and even fragments of foreign speech, and among the 
+clustering masses of less insistent whites his roving eye catches 
+profiles and complexions that send his mind afield to Calcutta or 
+Rangoon or the West Indies or Sierra Leone or the Cape. . . .
+
+I was not infrequently that pensive member.  I used to go to the 
+Club to doubt about Liberalism.
+
+About two o'clock in the day the great smoking-room is crowded with 
+countless little groups.  They sit about small round tables, or in 
+circles of chairs, and the haze of tobacco seems to prolong the 
+great narrow place, with its pillars and bays, to infinity.  Some of 
+the groups are big, as many as a dozen men talk in loud tones; some 
+are duologues, and there is always a sprinkling of lonely, 
+dissociated men.  At first one gets an impression of men going from 
+group to group and as it were linking them, but as one watches 
+closely one finds that these men just visit three or four groups at 
+the outside, and know nothing of the others.  One begins to perceive 
+more and more distinctly that one is dealing with a sort of human 
+mosaic; that each patch in that great place is of a different 
+quality and colour from the next and never to be mixed with it.  
+Most clubs have a common link, a lowest common denominator in the 
+Club Bore, who spares no one, but even the National Liberal bores 
+are specialised and sectional.  As one looks round one sees here a 
+clump of men from the North Country or the Potteries, here an island 
+of South London politicians, here a couple of young Jews ascendant 
+from Whitechapel, here a circle of journalists and writers, here a 
+group of Irish politicians, here two East Indians, here a priest or 
+so, here a clump of old-fashioned Protestants, here a little knot of 
+eminent Rationalists indulging in a blasphemous story SOTTO VOCE.  
+Next them are a group of anglicised Germans and highly specialised 
+chess-players, and then two of the oddest-looking persons--bulging 
+with documents and intent upon extraordinary business transactions 
+over long cigars. . . .
+
+I would listen to a stormy sea of babblement, and try to extract 
+some constructive intimations.  Every now and then I got a whiff of 
+politics.  It was clear they were against the Lords--against 
+plutocrats--against Cossington's newspapers--against the brewers. . . .  
+It was tremendously clear what they were against.  The trouble 
+was to find out what on earth they were for! . . .
+
+As I sat and thought, the streaked and mottled pillars and wall, the 
+various views, aspects, and portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, the 
+partitions of polished mahogany, the yellow-vested waiters, would 
+dissolve and vanish, and I would have a vision of this sample of 
+miscellaneous men of limited, diverse interests and a universal 
+littleness of imagination enlarged, unlimited, no longer a sample 
+but a community, spreading, stretching out to infinity--all in 
+little groups and duologues and circles, all with their special and 
+narrow concerns, all with their backs to most of the others.
+
+What but a common antagonism would ever keep these multitudes 
+together?  I understood why modern electioneering is more than half 
+of it denunciation.  Let us condemn, if possible, let us obstruct 
+and deprive, but not let us do.  There is no real appeal to the 
+commonplace mind in "Let us do."  That calls for the creative 
+imagination, and few have been accustomed to respond to that call.  
+The other merely needs jealousy and bate, of which there are great 
+and easily accessible reservoirs in every human heart. . . .
+
+I remember that vision of endless, narrow, jealous individuality 
+very vividly.  A seething limitlessness it became at last, like a 
+waste place covered by crawling locusts that men sweep up by the 
+sackload and drown by the million in ditches. . . .
+
+Grotesquely against it came the lean features, the sidelong shy 
+movements of Edward Crampton, seated in a circle of talkers close at 
+hand.  I had a whiff of his strained, unmusical voice, and behold! 
+he was saying something about the "Will of the People. . . ." 
+
+The immense and wonderful disconnectednesses of human life!  I 
+forgot the smoke and jabber of the club altogether; I became a 
+lonely spirit flung aloft by some queer accident, a stone upon a 
+ledge in some high and rocky wilderness, and below as far as the eye 
+could reach stretched the swarming infinitesimals of humanity, like 
+grass upon the field, like pebbles upon unbounded beaches.  Was 
+there ever to be in human life more than that endless struggling 
+individualism?  Was there indeed some giantry, some immense valiant 
+synthesis, still to come--or present it might be and still unseen by 
+me, or was this the beginning and withal the last phase of 
+mankind? . . .
+
+I glimpsed for a while the stupendous impudence of our ambitions, 
+the tremendous enterprise to which the modern statesman is 
+implicitly addressed.  I was as it were one of a little swarm of 
+would-be reef builders looking back at the teeming slime upon the 
+ocean floor.  All the history of mankind, all the history of life, 
+has been and will be the story of something struggling out of the 
+indiscriminated abyss, struggling to exist and prevail over and 
+comprehend individual lives--an effort of insidious attraction, an 
+idea of invincible appeal.  That something greater than ourselves, 
+which does not so much exist as seek existence, palpitating between 
+being and not-being, how marvellous it is!  It has worn the form and 
+visage of ten thousand different gods, sought a shape for itself in 
+stone and ivory and music and wonderful words, spoken more and more 
+clearly of a mystery of love, a mystery of unity, dabbling meanwhile 
+in blood and cruelty beyond the common impulses of men.  It is 
+something that comes and goes, like a light that shines and is 
+withdrawn, withdrawn so completely that one doubts if it has ever 
+been. . . .
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+I would mark with a curious interest the stray country member of the 
+club up in town for a night or so.  My mind would be busy with 
+speculations about him, about his home, his family, his reading, his 
+horizons, his innumerable fellows who didn't belong and never came 
+up.  I would fill in the outline of him with memories of my uncle 
+and his Staffordshire neighbours.  He was perhaps Alderman This or 
+Councillor That down there, a great man in his ward, J. P. within 
+seven miles of the boundary of the borough, and a God in his home.  
+Here he was nobody, and very shy, and either a little too arrogant 
+or a little too meek towards our very democratic mannered but still 
+livened waiters.  Was he perhaps the backbone of England?  He over-
+ate himself lest he should appear mean, went through our Special 
+Dinner conscientiously, drank, unless he was teetotal, of unfamiliar 
+wines, and did his best, in spite of the rules, to tip.  Afterwards, 
+in a state of flushed repletion, he would have old brandy, black 
+coffee, and a banded cigar, or in the name of temperance omit the 
+brandy and have rather more coffee, in the smoking-room.  I would 
+sit and watch that stiff dignity of self-indulgence, and wonder, 
+wonder. . . .
+
+An infernal clairvoyance would come to me.  I would have visions of 
+him in relation to his wife, checking always, sometimes bullying, 
+sometimes being ostentatiously "kind"; I would see him glance 
+furtively at his domestic servants upon his staircase, or stiffen 
+his upper lip against the reluctant, protesting business employee.  
+We imaginative people are base enough, heaven knows, but it is only 
+in rare moods of bitter penetration that we pierce down to the baser 
+lusts, the viler shames, the everlasting lying and muddle-headed 
+self-justification of the dull.
+
+I would turn my eyes down the crowded room and see others of him and 
+others.  What did he think he was up to?  Did he for a moment 
+realise that his presence under that ceramic glory of a ceiling with 
+me meant, if it had any rational meaning at all, that we were 
+jointly doing something with the nation and the empire and 
+mankind? . . .  How on earth could any one get hold of him, make 
+any noble use of him?  He didn't read beyond his newspaper.  He 
+never thought, but only followed imaginings in his heart.  He never 
+discussed.  At the first hint of discussion his temper gave way.  
+He was, I knew, a deep, thinly-covered tank of resentments and 
+quite irrational moral rages.  Yet withal I would have to resist 
+an impulse to go over to him and nudge him and say to him, "Look 
+here!  What indeed do you think we are doing with the nation and 
+the empire and mankind?  You know--MANKIND!"
+
+I wonder what reply I should have got.
+
+So far as any average could be struck and so far as any backbone 
+could be located, it seemed to me that this silent, shy, replete, 
+sub-angry, middle-class sentimentalist was in his endless species 
+and varieties and dialects the backbone of our party.  So far as I 
+could be considered as representing anything in the House, I 
+pretended to sit for the elements of HIM. . . .
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+For a time I turned towards the Socialists.  They at least had an 
+air of coherent intentions.  At that time Socialism had come into 
+politics again after a period of depression and obscurity, with a 
+tremendous ECLAT.  There was visibly a following of Socialist 
+members to Chris Robinson; mysteriously uncommunicative gentlemen in 
+soft felt hats and short coats and square-toed boots who replied to 
+casual advances a little surprisingly in rich North Country 
+dialects.  Members became aware of a "seagreen incorruptible," as 
+Colonel Marlow put it to me, speaking on the Address, a slender 
+twisted figure supporting itself on a stick and speaking with a fire 
+that was altogether revolutionary.  This was Philip Snowden, the 
+member for Blackburn.  They had come in nearly forty strong 
+altogether, and with an air of presently meaning to come in much 
+stronger.  They were only one aspect of what seemed at that time a 
+big national movement.  Socialist societies, we gathered, were 
+springing up all over the country, and every one was inquiring about 
+Socialism and discussing Socialism.  It had taken the Universities 
+with particular force, and any youngster with the slightest 
+intellectual pretension was either actively for or brilliantly 
+against.  For a time our Young Liberal group was ostentatiously 
+sympathetic. . . .
+
+When I think of the Socialists there comes a vivid memory of certain 
+evening gatherings at our house. . . .
+
+These gatherings had been organised by Margaret as the outcome of a 
+discussion at the Baileys'.  Altiora had been very emphatic and 
+uncharitable upon the futility of the Socialist movement.  It seemed 
+that even the leaders fought shy of dinner-parties.
+
+"They never meet each other," said Altiora, "much less people on the 
+other side.  How can they begin to understand politics until they do 
+that?"
+
+"Most of them have totally unpresentable wives," said Altiora, 
+"totally!" and quoted instances, "and they WILL bring them.  Or they 
+won't come!  Some of the poor creatures have scarcely learnt their 
+table manners.  They just make holes in the talk. . . ."
+
+I thought there was a great deal of truth beneath Altiora's 
+outburst.  The presentation of the Socialist case seemed very 
+greatly crippled by the want of a common intimacy in its leaders; 
+the want of intimacy didn't at first appear to be more than an 
+accident, and our talk led to Margaret's attempt to get acquaintance 
+and easy intercourse afoot among them and between them and the Young 
+Liberals of our group.  She gave a series of weekly dinners, 
+planned, I think, a little too accurately upon Altiora's model, and 
+after each we had as catholic a reception as we could contrive.
+
+Our receptions were indeed, I should think, about as catholic as 
+receptions could be.  Margaret found herself with a weekly houseful 
+of insoluble problems in intercourse.  One did one's best, but one 
+got a nightmare feeling as the evening wore on.
+
+It was one of the few unanimities of these parties that every one 
+should be a little odd in appearance, funny about the hair or the 
+tie or the shoes or more generally, and that bursts of violent 
+aggression should alternate with an attitude entirely defensive.  A 
+number of our guests had an air of waiting for a clue that never 
+came, and stood and sat about silently, mildly amused but not a bit 
+surprised that we did not discover their distinctive Open-Sesames.  
+There was a sprinkling of manifest seers and prophetesses in 
+shapeless garments, far too many, I thought, for really easy social 
+intercourse, and any conversation at any moment was liable to become 
+oracular.  One was in a state of tension from first to last; the 
+most innocent remark seemed capable of exploding resentment, and 
+replies came out at the most unexpected angles.  We Young Liberals 
+went about puzzled but polite to the gathering we had evoked.  The 
+Young Liberals' tradition is on the whole wonderfully discreet, 
+superfluous steam is let out far away from home in the Balkans or 
+Africa, and the neat, stiff figures of the Cramptons, Bunting 
+Harblow, and Lewis, either in extremely well-cut morning coats 
+indicative of the House, or in what is sometimes written of as 
+"faultless evening dress," stood about on those evenings, they and 
+their very quietly and simply and expensively dressed little wives, 
+like a datum line amidst lakes and mountains.
+
+I didn't at first see the connection between systematic social 
+reorganisation and arbitrary novelties in dietary and costume, just 
+as I didn't realise why the most comprehensive constructive projects 
+should appear to be supported solely by odd and exceptional 
+personalities.  On one of these evenings a little group of rather 
+jolly-looking pretty young people seated themselves for no 
+particular reason in a large circle on the floor of my study, and 
+engaged, so far as I could judge, in the game of Hunt the Meaning, 
+the intellectual equivalent of Hunt the Slipper.  It must have been 
+that same evening I came upon an unbleached young gentleman before 
+the oval mirror on the landing engaged in removing the remains of an 
+anchovy sandwich from his protruded tongue--visible ends of cress 
+having misled him into the belief that he was dealing with 
+doctrinally permissible food.  It was not unusual to be given hand-
+bills and printed matter by our guests, but there I had the 
+advantage over Lewis, who was too tactful to refuse the stuff, too 
+neatly dressed to pocket it, and had no writing-desk available upon 
+which he could relieve himself in a manner flattering to the giver.  
+So that his hands got fuller and fuller.  A relentless, compact 
+little woman in what Margaret declared to be an extremely expensive 
+black dress has also printed herself on my memory; she had set her 
+heart upon my contributing to a weekly periodical in the lentil 
+interest with which she was associated, and I spent much time and 
+care in evading her.
+
+Mingling with the more hygienic types were a number of Anti-Puritan 
+Socialists, bulging with bias against temperance, and breaking out 
+against austere methods of living all over their faces.  Their 
+manner was packed with heartiness.  They were apt to choke the 
+approaches to the little buffet Margaret had set up downstairs, and 
+there engage in discussions of Determinism--it always seemed to be 
+Determinism--which became heartier and noisier, but never 
+acrimonious even in the small hours.  It seemed impossible to settle 
+about this Determinism of theirs--ever.  And there were worldly 
+Socialists also.  I particularly recall a large, active, buoyant, 
+lady-killing individual with an eyeglass borne upon a broad black 
+ribbon, who swam about us one evening.  He might have been a 
+slightly frayed actor, in his large frock-coat, his white waistcoat, 
+and the sort of black and white check trousers that twinkle.  He had 
+a high-pitched voice with aristocratic intonations, and he seemed to 
+be in a perpetual state of interrogation.  "What are we all he-a 
+for?" he would ask only too audibly.  "What are we doing he-a?  
+What's the connection?"
+
+What WAS the connection?
+
+We made a special effort with our last assembly in June, 1907.  We 
+tried to get something like a representative collection of the 
+parliamentary leaders of Socialism, the various exponents of 
+Socialist thought and a number of Young Liberal thinkers into one 
+room.  Dorvil came, and Horatio Bulch; Featherstonehaugh appeared 
+for ten minutes and talked charmingly to Margaret and then vanished 
+again; there was Wilkins the novelist and Toomer and Dr. Tumpany.  
+Chris Robinson stood about for a time in a new comforter, and 
+Magdeberg and Will Pipes and five or six Labour members.  And on our 
+side we had our particular little group, Bunting Harblow, Crampton, 
+Lewis, all looking as broad-minded and open to conviction as they 
+possibly could, and even occasionally talking out from their bushes 
+almost boldly.  But the gathering as a whole refused either to 
+mingle or dispute, and as an experiment in intercourse the evening 
+was a failure.  Unexpected dissociations appeared between Socialists 
+one had supposed friendly.  I could not have imagined it was 
+possible for half so many people to turn their backs on everybody 
+else in such small rooms as ours.  But the unsaid things those backs 
+expressed broke out, I remarked, with refreshed virulence in the 
+various organs of the various sections of the party next week.
+
+I talked, I rememher, with Dr. Tumpany, a large young man in a still 
+larger professional frock-coat, and with a great shock of very fair 
+hair, who was candidate for some North Country constituency.  We 
+discussed the political outlook, and, like so many Socialists at 
+that time, he was full of vague threatenings against the Liberal 
+party.  I was struck by a thing in him that I had already observed 
+less vividly in many others of these Socialist leaders, and which 
+gave me at last a clue to the whole business.  He behaved exactly 
+like a man in possession of valuable patent rights, who wants to be 
+dealt with.  He had an air of having a corner in ideas.  Then it 
+flashed into my head that the whole Socialist movement was an 
+attempted corner in ideas. . . .
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+Late that night I found myself alone with Margaret amid the debris 
+of the gathering.
+
+I sat before the fire, hands in pockets, and Margaret, looking white 
+and weary, came and leant upon the mantel.
+
+"Oh, Lord!" said Margaret.
+
+I agreed.  Then I resumed my meditation.
+
+"Ideas," I said, "count for more than I thought in the world."
+
+Margaret regarded me with that neutral expression behind which she 
+was accustomed to wait for clues.
+
+"When you think of the height and depth and importance and wisdom of 
+the Socialist ideas, and see the men who are running them," I 
+explained. . . .  "A big system of ideas like Socialism grows up out 
+of the obvious common sense of our present conditions.  It's as 
+impersonal as science.  All these men--They've given nothing to it.  
+They're just people who have pegged out claims upon a big 
+intellectual No-Man's-Land--and don't feel quite sure of the law.  
+There's a sort of quarrelsome uneasiness. . . .  If we professed 
+Socialism do you think they'd welcome us?  Not a man of them!  
+They'd feel it was burglary. . . ." 
+
+"Yes," said Margaret, looking into the fire.  "That is just what I 
+felt about them all the evening. . . .  Particularly Dr. Tumpany."
+
+"We mustn't confuse Socialism with the Socialists, I said; "that's 
+the moral of it.  I suppose if God were to find He had made a 
+mistake in dates or something, and went back and annihilated 
+everybody from Owen onwards who was in any way known as a Socialist 
+leader or teacher, Socialism would be exactly where it is and what 
+it is to-day--a growing realisation of constructive needs in every 
+man's mind, and a little corner in party politics.  So, I suppose, 
+it will always be. . . .  But they WERE a damned lot, Margaret!"
+
+I looked up at the little noise she made.  "TWICE!" she said, 
+smiling indulgently, "to-day!"  (Even the smile was Altiora's.)
+
+I returned to my thoughts.  They WERE a damned human lot.  It was an 
+excellent word in that connection. . . .
+
+But the ideas marched on, the ideas marched on, just as though men's 
+brains were no more than stepping-stones, just as though some great 
+brain in which we are all little cells and corpuscles was thinking 
+them! . . .
+
+"I don't think there is a man among them who makes me feel he is 
+trustworthy," said Margaret; "unless it is Featherstonehaugh."
+
+I sat taking in this proposition.
+
+"They'll never help us, I feel," said Margaret.
+
+"Us?"
+
+"The Liberals."
+
+"Oh, damn the Liberals!" I said.  "They'll never even help 
+themselves."
+
+"I don't think I could possibly get on with any of those people," 
+said Margaret, after a pause.
+
+She remained for a time looking down at me and, I could feel, 
+perplexed by me, but I wanted to go on with my thinking, and so I 
+did not look up, and presently she stooped to my forehead and kissed 
+me and went rustling softly to her room.
+
+I remained in my study for a long time with my thoughts 
+crystallising out. . . .
+
+It was then, I think, that I first apprehended clearly how that 
+opposition to which I have already alluded of the immediate life and 
+the mental hinterland of a man, can be applied to public and social 
+affairs.  The ideas go on--and no person or party succeeds in 
+embodying them.  The reality of human progress never comes to the 
+surface, it is a power in the deeps, an undertow.  It goes on in 
+silence while men think, in studies where they write self-
+forgetfully, in laboratories under the urgency of an impersonal 
+curiosity, in the rare illumination of honest talk, in moments of 
+emotional insight, in thoughtful reading, but not in everyday 
+affairs.  Everyday affairs and whatever is made an everyday affair, 
+are transactions of the ostensible self, the being of habits, 
+interests, usage.  Temper, vanity, hasty reaction to imitation, 
+personal feeling, are their substance.  No man can abolish his 
+immediate self and specialise in the depths; if he attempt that, he 
+simply turns himself into something a little less than the common 
+man.  He may have an immense hinterland, but that does not absolve 
+him from a frontage.  That is the essential error of the specialist 
+philosopher, the specialist teacher, the specialist publicist.  They 
+repudiate frontage; claim to be pure hinterland.  That is what 
+bothered me about Codger, about those various schoolmasters who had 
+prepared me for life, about the Baileys and their dream of an 
+official ruling class.  A human being who is a philosopher in the 
+first place, a teacher in the first place, or a statesman in the 
+first place, is thereby and inevitably, though he bring God-like 
+gifts to the pretence--a quack.  These are attempts to live deep-
+side shallow, inside out.  They produce merely a new pettiness.  To 
+understand Socialism, again, is to gain a new breadth of outlook; to 
+join a Socialist organisation is to join a narrow cult which is not 
+even tolerably serviceable in presenting or spreading the ideas for 
+which it stands. . . .
+
+I perceived I had got something quite fundamental here.  It had 
+taken me some years to realise the true relation of the great 
+constructive ideas that swayed me not only to political parties, but 
+to myself.  I had been disposed to identify the formulae of some one 
+party with social construction, and to regard the other as 
+necessarily anti-constructive, just as I had been inclined to follow 
+the Baileys in the self-righteousness of supposing myself to be 
+wholly constructive.  But I saw now that every man of intellectual 
+freedom and vigour is necessarily constructive-minded nowadays, and 
+that no man is disinterestedly so.  Each one of us repeats in 
+himself the conflict of the race between the splendour of its 
+possibilities and its immediate associations.  We may be shaping 
+immortal things, but we must sleep and answer the dinner gong, and 
+have our salt of flattery and self-approval.  In politics a man 
+counts not for what he is in moments of imaginative expansion, but 
+for his common workaday, selfish self; and political parties are 
+held together not by a community of ultimate aims, but by the 
+stabler bond of an accustomed life.  Everybody almost is for 
+progress in general, and nearly everybody is opposed to any change, 
+except in so far as gross increments are change, in his particular 
+method of living and behaviour.  Every party stands essentially for 
+the interests and mental usages of some definite class or group of 
+classes in the exciting community, and every party has its 
+scientific-minded and constructive leading section, with well-
+defined hinterlands formulating its social functions in a public-
+spirited form, and its superficial-minded following confessing its 
+meannesses and vanities and prejudices.  No class will abolish 
+itself, materially alter its way of life, or drastically reconstruct 
+itself, albeit no class is indisposed to co-operate in the unlimited 
+socialisation of any other class.  In that capacity for aggression 
+upon other classes lies the essential driving force of modern 
+affairs.  The instincts, the persons, the parties, and vanities sway 
+and struggle.  The ideas and understandings march on and achieve 
+themselves for all--in spite of every one. . . .
+
+The methods and traditions of British politics maintain the form of 
+two great parties, with rider groups seeking to gain specific ends 
+in the event of a small Government majority.  These two main parties 
+are more or less heterogeneous in composition.  Each, however, has 
+certain necessary characteristics.  The Conservative Party has 
+always stood quite definitely for the established propertied 
+interests.  The land-owner, the big lawyer, the Established Church, 
+and latterly the huge private monopoly of the liquor trade which has 
+been created by temperance legislation, are the essential 
+Conservatives.  Interwoven now with the native wealthy are the 
+families of the great international usurers, and a vast 
+miscellaneous mass of financial enterprise.  Outside the range of 
+resistance implied by these interests, the Conservative Party has 
+always shown itself just as constructive and collectivist as any 
+other party.  The great landowners have been as well-disposed 
+towards the endowment of higher education, and as willing to co-
+operate with the Church in protective and mildly educational 
+legislation for children and the working class, as any political 
+section.  The financiers, too, are adventurous-spirited and eager 
+for mechanical progress and technical efficiency.  They are prepared 
+to spend public money upon research, upon ports and harbours and 
+public communications, upon sanitation and hygienic organisation.  A 
+certain rude benevolence of public intention is equally 
+characteristic of the liquor trade.  Provided his comfort leads to 
+no excesses of temperance, the liquor trade is quite eager to see 
+the common man prosperous, happy, and with money to spend in a bar.  
+All sections of the party are aggressively patriotic and favourably 
+inclined to the idea of an upstanding, well-fed, and well-exercised 
+population in uniform.  Of course there are reactionary landowners 
+and old-fashioned country clergy, full of localised self-importance, 
+jealous even of the cottager who can read, but they have neither the 
+power nor the ability to retard the constructive forces in the party 
+as a whole.  On the other hand, when matters point to any definitely 
+confiscatory proposal, to the public ownership and collective 
+control of land, for example, or state mining and manufactures, or 
+the nationalisation of the so-called public-house or extended 
+municipal enterprise, or even to an increase of the taxation of 
+property, then the Conservative Party presents a nearly adamantine 
+bar.  It does not stand for, it IS, the existing arrangement in 
+these affairs.
+
+Even more definitely a class party is the Labour Party, whose 
+immediate interest is to raise wages, shorten hours of labor, 
+increase employment, and make better terms for the working-man 
+tenant and working-man purchaser.  Its leaders are no doubt 
+constructive minded, but the mass of the following is naturally 
+suspicious of education and discipline, hostile to the higher 
+education, and--except for an obvious antagonism to employers and 
+property owners--almost destitute of ideas.  What else can it be?  
+It stands for the expropriated multitude, whose whole situation and 
+difficulty arise from its individual lack of initiative and 
+organising power.  It favours the nationalisation of land and 
+capital with no sense of the difficulties involved in the process; 
+but, on the other hand, the equally reasonable socialisation of 
+individuals which is implied by military service is steadily and 
+quite naturally and quite illogically opposed by it.  It is only in 
+recent years that Labour has emerged as a separate party from the 
+huge hospitable caravanserai of Liberalism, and there is still a 
+very marked tendency to step back again into that multitudinous 
+assemblage.
+
+For multitudinousness has always been the Liberal characteristic.  
+Liberalism never has been nor ever can be anything but a diversified 
+crowd.  Liberalism has to voice everything that is left out by these 
+other parties.  It is the party against the predominating interests.  
+It is at once the party of the failing and of the untried; it is the 
+party of decadence and hope.  From its nature it must be a vague and 
+planless association in comparison with its antagonist, neither so 
+constructive on the one hand, nor on the other so competent to 
+hinder the inevitable constructions of the civilised state.  
+Essentially it is the party of criticism, the "Anti" party.  It is a 
+system of hostilities and objections that somehow achieves at times 
+an elusive common soul.  It is a gathering together of all the 
+smaller interests which find themselves at a disadvantage against 
+the big established classes, the leasehold tenant as against the 
+landowner, the retail tradesman as against the merchant and the 
+moneylender, the Nonconformist as against the Churchman, the small 
+employer as against the demoralising hospitable publican, the man 
+without introductions and broad connections against the man who has 
+these things.  It is the party of the many small men against the 
+fewer prevailing men.  It has no more essential reason for loving 
+the Collectivist state than the Conservatives; the small dealer is 
+doomed to absorption in that just as much as the large owner; but it 
+resorts to the state against its antagonists as in the middle ages 
+common men pitted themselves against the barons by siding with the 
+king.  The Liberal Party is the party against "class privilege" 
+because it represents no class advantages, but it is also the party 
+that is on the whole most set against Collective control because it 
+represents no established responsilibity.  It is constructive only 
+so far as its antagonism to the great owner is more powerful than 
+its jealousy of the state.  It organises only because organisation 
+is forced upon it by the organisation of its adversaries.  It lapses 
+in and out of alliance with Labour as it sways between hostility to 
+wealth and hostility to public expenditure. . . .
+
+Every modern European state will have in some form or other these 
+three parties: the resistent, militant, authoritative, dull, and 
+unsympathetic party of establishment and success, the rich party; 
+the confused, sentimental, spasmodic, numerous party of the small, 
+struggling, various, undisciplined men, the poor man's party; and a 
+third party sometimes detaching itself from the second and sometimes 
+reuniting with it, the party of the altogether expropriated masses, 
+the proletarians, Labour.  Change Conservative and Liberal to 
+Republican and Democrat, for example, and you have the conditions in 
+the United States.  The Crown or a dethroned dynasty, the 
+Established Church or a dispossessed church, nationalist secessions, 
+the personalities of party leaders, may break up, complicate, and 
+confuse the self-expression of these three necessary divisions in 
+the modern social drama, the analyst will make them out none the 
+less for that. . . .
+
+And then I came back as if I came back to a refrain;--the ideas go 
+on--as though we are all no more than little cells and corpuscles in 
+some great brain beyond our understanding. . . .
+
+So it was I sat and thought my problem out. . . .  I still remember 
+my satisfaction at seeing things plainly at last.  It was like 
+clouds dispersing to show the sky.  Constructive ideas, of course, 
+couldn't hold a party together alone, "interests and habits, not 
+ideas," I had that now, and so the great constructive scheme of 
+Socialism, invading and inspiring all parties, was necessarily 
+claimed only by this collection of odds and ends, this residuum of 
+disconnected and exceptional people.  This was true not only of the 
+Socialist idea, but of the scientific idea, the idea of veracity--of 
+human confidence in humanity--of all that mattered in human life 
+outside the life of individuals. . . .  The only real party that 
+would ever profess Socialism was the Labour Party, and that in the 
+entirely one-sided form of an irresponsible and non-constructive 
+attack on property.  Socialism in that mutilated form, the teeth and 
+claws without the eyes and brain, I wanted as little as I wanted 
+anything in the world.
+
+Perfectly clear it was, perfectly clear, and why hadn't I seen it 
+before? . . .  I looked at my watch, and it was half-past two.
+
+I yawned, stretched, got up and went to bed.
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+My ideas about statecraft have passed through three main phases to 
+the final convictions that remain.  There was the first immediacy of 
+my dream of ports and harbours and cities, railways, roads, and 
+administered territories--the vision I had seen in the haze from 
+that little church above Locarno.  Slowly that had passed into a 
+more elaborate legislative constructiveness, which had led to my 
+uneasy association with the Baileys and the professedly constructive 
+Young Liberals.  To get that ordered life I had realised the need of 
+organisation, knowledge, expertness, a wide movement of co-ordinated 
+methods.  On the individual side I thought that a life of urgent 
+industry, temperance, and close attention was indicated by my 
+perception of these ends.  I married Margaret and set to work.  But 
+something in my mind refused from the outset to accept these 
+determinations as final.  There was always a doubt lurking below, 
+always a faint resentment, a protesting criticism, a feeling of 
+vitally important omissions.
+
+I arrived at last at the clear realisation that my political 
+associates, and I in my association with them, were oddly narrow, 
+priggish, and unreal, that the Socialists with whom we were 
+attempting co-operation were preposterously irrelevant to their own 
+theories, that my political life didn't in some way comprehend more 
+than itself, that rather perplexingly I was missing the thing I was 
+seeking.  Britten's footnotes to Altiora's self-assertions, her fits 
+of energetic planning, her quarrels and rallies and vanities, his 
+illuminating attacks on Cramptonism and the heavy-spirited 
+triviality of such Liberalism as the Children's Charter, served to 
+point my way to my present conclusions.  I had been trying to deal 
+all along with human progress as something immediate in life, 
+something to be immediately attacked by political parties and groups 
+pointing primarily to that end.  I now began to see that just as in 
+my own being there was the rather shallow, rather vulgar, self-
+seeking careerist, who wore an admirable silk hat and bustled self-
+consciously through the lobby, and a much greater and indefinitely 
+growing unpublished personality behind him--my hinterland, I have 
+called it--so in human affairs generally the permanent reality is 
+also a hinterland, which is never really immediate, which draws 
+continually upon human experience and influences human action more 
+and more, but which is itself never the actual player upon the 
+stage.  It is the unseen dramatist who never takes a call.  Now it 
+was just through the fact that our group about the Baileys didn't 
+understand this, that with a sort of frantic energy they were trying 
+to develop that sham expert officialdom of theirs to plan, regulate, 
+and direct the affairs of humanity, that the perplexing note of 
+silliness and shallowness that I had always felt and felt now most 
+acutely under Britten's gibes, came in.  They were neglecting human 
+life altogether in social organisation.
+
+In the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth of 
+statesmanship.  It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and 
+all organising spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange 
+and achieve.  Priests, schools of thought, political schemers, 
+leaders of men, have always slipped into the error of assuming that 
+they can think out the whole--or at any rate completely think out 
+definite parts--of the purpose and future of man, clearly and 
+finally; they have set themselves to legislate and construct on that 
+assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions 
+of reality, they have taken to dogma, persecution, training, 
+pruning, secretive education; and all the stupidities of self-
+sufficient energy.  In the passion of their good intentions they 
+have not hesitated to conceal fact, suppress thought, crush 
+disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimental desires.  And so 
+it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with the making, that 
+any extension of social organisation is at present achieved.
+
+Directly, however, this idea of an emancipation from immediacy is 
+grasped, directly the dominating importance of this critical, less 
+personal, mental hinterland in the individual and of the collective 
+mind in the race is understood, the whole problem of the statesman 
+and his attitude towards politics gain a new significance, and 
+becomes accessible to a new series of solutions.  He wants no longer 
+to "fix up," as people say, human affairs, but to devote his forces 
+to the development of that needed intellectual life without which 
+all his shallow attempts at fixing up are futile.  He ceases to 
+build on the sands, and sets himself to gather foundations.
+
+You see, I began in my teens by wanting to plan and build cities and 
+harbours for mankind; I ended in the middle thirties by desiring 
+only to serve and increase a general process of thought, a process 
+fearless, critical, real-spirited, that would in its own time give 
+cities, harbours, air, happiness, everything at a scale and quality 
+and in a light altogether beyond the match-striking imaginations of 
+a contemporary mind.  I wanted freedom of speech and suggestion, 
+vigour of thought, and the cultivation of that impulse of veracity 
+that lurks more or less discouraged in every man.  With that I felt 
+there must go an emotion.  I hit upon a phrase that became at last 
+something of a refrain in my speech and writings, to convey the 
+spirit that I felt was at the very heart of real human progress--
+love and fine thinking.
+
+(I suppose that nowadays no newspaper in England gets through a week 
+without the repetition of that phrase.)
+
+My convictions crystallised more and more definitely upon this.  The 
+more of love and fine thinking the better for men, I said; the less, 
+the worse.  And upon this fresh basis I set myself to examine what I 
+as a politician might do.  I perceived I was at last finding an 
+adequate expression for all that was in me, for those forces that 
+had rebelled at the crude presentations of Bromstead, at the 
+secrecies and suppressions of my youth, at the dull unrealities of 
+City Merchants, at the conventions and timidities of the Pinky 
+Dinkys, at the philosophical recluse of Trinity and the phrases and 
+tradition-worship of my political associates.  None of these things 
+were half alive, and I wanted life to be intensely alive and awake.  
+I wanted thought like an edge of steel and desire like a flame.  The 
+real work before mankind now, I realised once and for all, is the 
+enlargement of human expression, the release and intensification of 
+human thought, the vivider utilisation of experience and the 
+invigoration of research--and whatever one does in human affairs has 
+or lacks value as it helps or hinders that.
+
+With that I had got my problem clear, and the solution, so far as I 
+was concerned, lay in finding out the point in the ostensible life 
+of politics at which I could most subserve these ends.  I was still 
+against the muddles of Bromstead, but I had hunted them down now to 
+their essential form.  The jerry-built slums, the roads that went 
+nowhere, the tarred fences, litigious notice-boards and barbed wire 
+fencing, the litter and the heaps of dump, were only the outward 
+appearances whose ultimate realities were jerry-built conclusions, 
+hasty purposes, aimless habits of thought, and imbecile bars and 
+prohibitions in the thoughts and souls of men.  How are we through 
+politics to get at that confusion?
+
+We want to invigorate and reinvigorate education.  We want to create 
+a sustained counter effort to the perpetual tendency of all 
+educational organisations towards classicalism, secondary issues, 
+and the evasion of life.
+
+We want to stimulate the expression of life through art and 
+literature, and its exploration through research.
+
+We want to make the best and finest thought accessible to every one, 
+and more particularly to create and sustain an enormous free 
+criticism, without which art, literature, and research alike 
+degenerate into tradition or imposture.
+
+Then all the other problems which are now so insoluble, destitution, 
+disease, the difficulty of maintaining international peace, the 
+scarcely faced possibility of making life generally and continually 
+beautiful, become--EASY. . . .
+
+It was clear to me that the most vital activities in which I could 
+engage would be those which most directly affected the Church, 
+public habits of thought, education, organised research, literature, 
+and the channels of general discussion.  I had to ask myself how my 
+position as Liberal member for Kinghamstead squared with and 
+conduced to this essential work.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND
+
+SEEKING ASSOCIATES
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+I have told of my gradual abandonment of the pretensions and habits 
+of party Liberalism.  In a sense I was moving towards aristocracy.  
+Regarding the development of the social and individual mental 
+hinterland as the essential thing in human progress, I passed on 
+very naturally to the practical assumption that we wanted what I may 
+call "hinterlanders."  Of course I do not mean by aristocracy the 
+changing unorganised medley of rich people and privileged people who 
+dominate the civilised world of to-day, but as opposed to this, a 
+possibility of co-ordinating the will of the finer individuals, by 
+habit and literature, into a broad common aim.  We must have an 
+aristocracy--not of privilege, but of understanding and purpose--or 
+mankind will fail.  I find this dawning more and more clearly when I 
+look through my various writings of the years between 1903 and 1910.  
+I was already emerging to plain statements in 1908.
+
+I reasoned after this fashion.  The line of human improvement and 
+the expansion of human life lies in the direction of education and 
+finer initiatives.  If humanity cannot develop an education far 
+beyond anything that is now provided, if it cannot collectively 
+invent devices and solve problems on a much richer, broader scale 
+than it does at the present time, it cannot hope to achieve any very 
+much finer order or any more general happiness than it now enjoys.  
+We must believe, therefore, that it CAN develop such a training and 
+education, or we must abandon secular constructive hope.  And here 
+my peculiar difficulty as against crude democracy comes in.  If 
+humanity at large is capable of that high education and those 
+creative freedoms our hope demands, much more must its better and 
+more vigorous types be so capable.  And if those who have power and 
+leisure now, and freedom to respond to imaginative appeals, cannot 
+be won to the idea of collective self-development, then the whole of 
+humanity cannot be won to that.  From that one passes to what has 
+become my general conception in politics, the conception of the 
+constructive imagination working upon the vast complex of powerful 
+people, clever people, enterprising people, influential people, 
+amidst whom power is diffused to-day, to produce that self-
+conscious, highly selective, open-minded, devoted aristocratic 
+culture, which seems to me to be the necessary next phase in the 
+development of human affairs.  I see human progress, not as the 
+spontaneous product of crowds of raw minds swayed by elementary 
+needs, but as a natural but elaborate result of intricate human 
+interdependencies, of human energy and curiosity liberated and 
+acting at leisure, of human passions and motives, modified and 
+redirected by literature and art. . . .
+
+But now the reader will understand how it came about that, 
+disappointed by the essential littleness of Liberalism, and 
+disillusioned about the representative quality of the professed 
+Socialists, I turned my mind more and more to a scrutiny of the big 
+people, the wealthy and influential people, against whom Liberalism 
+pits its forces.  I was asking myself definitely whether, after all, 
+it was not my particular job to work through them and not against 
+them.  Was I not altogether out of my element as an Anti-?  Weren't 
+there big bold qualities about these people that common men lack, 
+and the possibility of far more splendid dreams?  Were they really 
+the obstacles, might they not be rather the vehicles of the possible 
+new braveries of life?
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+The faults of the Imperialist movement were obvious enough.  The 
+conception of the Boer War had been clumsy and puerile, the costly 
+errors of that struggle appalling, and the subsequent campaign of 
+Mr. Chamberlain for Tariff Reform seemed calculated to combine the 
+financial adventurers of the Empire in one vast conspiracy against 
+the consumer.  The cant of Imperialism was easy to learn and use; it 
+was speedily adopted by all sorts of base enterprises and turned to 
+all sorts of base ends.  But a big child is permitted big mischief, 
+and my mind was now continually returning to the persuasion that 
+after all in some development of the idea of Imperial patriotism 
+might be found that wide, rough, politically acceptable expression 
+of a constructive dream capable of sustaining a great educational 
+and philosophical movement such as no formula of Liberalism 
+supplied.  The fact that it readily took vulgar forms only witnessed 
+to its strong popular appeal.  Mixed in with the noisiness and 
+humbug of the movement there appeared a real regard for social 
+efficiency, a real spirit of animation and enterprise.  There 
+suddenly appeared in my world--I saw them first, I think, in 1908--a 
+new sort of little boy, a most agreeable development of the 
+slouching, cunning, cigarette-smoking, town-bred youngster, a small 
+boy in a khaki hat, and with bare knees and athletic bearing, 
+earnestly engaged in wholesome and invigorating games up to and 
+occasionally a little beyond his strength--the Boy Scout.  I liked 
+the Boy Scout, and I find it difficult to express how much it 
+mattered to me, with my growing bias in favour of deliberate 
+national training, that Liberalism hadn't been able to produce, and 
+had indeed never attempted to produce, anything of this kind.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+In those days there existed a dining club called--there was some 
+lost allusion to the exorcism of party feeling in its title--the 
+Pentagram Circle.  It included Bailey and Dayton and myself, Sir 
+Herbert Thorns, Lord Charles Kindling, Minns the poet, Gerbault the 
+big railway man, Lord Gane, fresh from the settlement of Framboya, 
+and Rumbold, who later became Home Secretary and left us.  We were 
+men of all parties and very various experiences, and our object was 
+to discuss the welfare of the Empire in a disinterested spirit.  We 
+dined monthly at the Mermaid in Westminster, and for a couple of 
+years we kept up an average attendance of ten out of fourteen.  The 
+dinner-time was given up to desultory conversation, and it is odd 
+how warm and good the social atmosphere of that little gathering 
+became as time went on; then over the dessert, so soon as the 
+waiters had swept away the crumbs and ceased to fret us, one of us 
+would open with perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes' exposition of 
+some specially prepared question, and after him we would deliver 
+ourselves in turn, each for three or four minutes.  When every one 
+present had spoken once talk became general again, and it was rare 
+we emerged upon Hendon Street before midnight.  Sometimes, as my 
+house was conveniently near, a knot of men would come home with me 
+and go on talking and smoking in my dining-room until two or three.  
+We had Fred Neal, that wild Irish journalist, among us towards the 
+end, and his stupendous flow of words materially prolonged our 
+closing discussions and made our continuance impossible.
+
+I learned very much and very many things at those dinners, but more 
+particularly did I become familiarised with the habits of mind of 
+such men as Neal, Crupp, Gane, and the one or two other New 
+Imperialists who belonged to us.  They were nearly all like Bailey 
+Oxford men, though mostly of a younger generation, and they were all 
+mysteriously and inexplicably advocates of Tariff Reform, as if it 
+were the principal instead of at best a secondary aspect of 
+constructive policy.  They seemed obsessed by the idea that streams 
+of trade could be diverted violently so as to link the parts of the 
+Empire by common interests, and they were persuaded, I still think 
+mistakenly, that Tariff Reform would have an immense popular appeal.  
+They were also very keen on military organisation, and with a 
+curious little martinet twist in their minds that boded ill for that 
+side of public liberty.  So much against them.  But they were 
+disposed to spend money much more generously on education and 
+research of all sorts than our formless host of Liberals seemed 
+likely to do; and they were altogether more accessible than the 
+Young Liberals to bold, constructive ideas affecting the 
+universities and upper classes.  The Liberals are abjectly afraid of 
+the universities.  I found myself constantly falling into line with 
+these men in our discussions, and more and more hostile to Dayton's 
+sentimentalising evasions of definite schemes and Minns' trust in 
+such things as the "Spirit of our People" and the "General Trend of 
+Progress."  It wasn't that I thought them very much righter than 
+their opponents; I believe all definite party "sides" at any time 
+are bound to be about equally right and equally lop-sided; but that 
+I thought I could get more out of them and what was more important 
+to me, more out of myself if I co-operated with them.  By 1908 I had 
+already arrived at a point where I could be definitely considering a 
+transfer of my political allegiance.
+
+These abstract questions are inseparably interwoven with my memory 
+of a shining long white table, and our hock bottles and burgundy 
+bottles, and bottles of Perrier and St. Galmier and the disturbed 
+central trophy of dessert, and scattered glasses and nut-shells and 
+cigarette-ends and menu-cards used for memoranda.  I see old Dayton 
+sitting back and cocking his eye to the ceiling in a way he had 
+while he threw warmth into the ancient platitudes of Liberalism, and 
+Minns leaning forward, and a little like a cockatoo with a taste for 
+confidences, telling us in a hushed voice of his faith in the 
+Destiny of Mankind.  Thorns lounges, rolling his round face and 
+round eyes from speaker to speaker and sounding the visible depths 
+of misery whenever Neal begins.  Gerbault and Gane were given to 
+conversation in undertones, and Bailey pursued mysterious purposes 
+in lisping whispers.  It was Crupp attracted me most.  He had, as 
+people say, his eye on me from the beginning.  He used to speak at 
+me, and drifted into a custom of coming home with me very regularly 
+for an after-talk.
+
+He opened his heart to me.
+
+"Neither of us," he said, "are dukes, and neither of us are horny-
+handed sons of toil.  We want to get hold of the handles, and to do 
+that, one must go where the power is, and give it just as 
+constructive a twist as we can.  That's MY Toryism."
+
+"Is it Kindling's--or Gerbault's?"
+
+"No.  But theirs is soft, and mine's hard.  Mine will wear theirs 
+out.  You and I and Bailey are all after the same thing, and why 
+aren't we working together?"
+
+"Are you a Confederate?" I asked suddenly.
+
+"That's a secret nobody tells," he said.
+
+"What are the Confederates after?"
+
+"Making aristocracy work, I suppose.  Just as, I gather, you want to 
+do." . . .
+
+The Confederates were being heard of at that time.  They were at 
+once attractive and repellent to me, an odd secret society whose 
+membership nobody knew, pledged, it was said, to impose Tariff 
+Reform and an ample constructive policy upon the Conservatives.  In 
+the press, at any rate, they had an air of deliberately organised 
+power.  I have no doubt the rumour of them greatly influenced my 
+ideas. . . .
+
+In the end I made some very rapid decisions, but for nearly two 
+years I was hesitating.  Hesitations were inevitable in such a 
+matter.  I was not dealing with any simple question of principle, 
+but with elusive and fluctuating estimates of the trend of diverse 
+forces and of the nature of my own powers.  All through that period 
+I was asking over and over again: how far are these Confederates 
+mere dreamers?  How far--and this was more vital--are they rendering 
+lip-service to social organisations?  Is it true they desire war 
+because it confirms the ascendency of their class?  How far can 
+Conservatism be induced to plan and construct before it resists the 
+thrust towards change.  Is it really in bulk anything more than a 
+mass of prejudice and conceit, cynical indulgence, and a hard 
+suspicion of and hostility to the expropriated classes in the 
+community?
+
+That is a research which yields no statistics, an enquiry like 
+asking what is the ruling colour of a chameleon.  The shadowy answer 
+varied with my health, varied with my mood and the conduct of the 
+people I was watching.  How fine can people be?  How generous?--not 
+incidentally, but all round?  How far can you educate sons beyond 
+the outlook of their fathers, and how far lift a rich, proud, self-
+indulgent class above the protests of its business agents and 
+solicitors and its own habits and vanity?  Is chivalry in a class 
+possible?--was it ever, indeed, or will it ever indeed be possible?  
+Is the progress that seems attainable in certain directions worth 
+the retrogression that may be its price?
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+It was to the Pentagram Circle that I first broached the new 
+conceptions that were developing in my mind.  I count the evening of 
+my paper the beginning of the movement that created the BLUE WEEKLY 
+and our wing of the present New Tory party.  I do that without any 
+excessive egotism, because my essay was no solitary man's 
+production; it was my reaction to forces that had come to me very 
+large through my fellow-members; its quick reception by them showed 
+that I was, so to speak, merely the first of the chestnuts to pop.  
+The atmospheric quality of the evening stands out very vividly in my 
+memory.  The night, I remember, was warmly foggy when after midnight 
+we went to finish our talk at my house.
+
+We had recently changed the rules of the club to admit visitors, and 
+so it happened that I had brought Britten, and Crupp introduced 
+Arnold Shoesmith, my former schoolfellow at City Merchants, and now 
+the wealthy successor of his father and elder brother.  I remember 
+his heavy, inexpressively handsome face lighting to his rare smile 
+at the sight of me, and how little I dreamt of the tragic 
+entanglement that was destined to involve us both.  Gane was 
+present, and Esmeer, a newly-added member, but I think Bailey was 
+absent.  Either he was absent, or he said something so entirely 
+characteristic and undistinguished that it has left no impression on 
+my mind.
+
+I had broken a little from the traditions of the club even in my 
+title, which was deliberately a challenge to the liberal idea: it 
+was, "The World Exists for Exceptional People."  It is not the title 
+I should choose now--for since that time I have got my phrase of 
+"mental hinterlander" into journalistic use.  I should say now, "The 
+World Exists for Mental Hinterland."
+
+The notes I made of that opening have long since vanished with a 
+thousand other papers, but some odd chance has preserved and brought 
+with me to Italy the menu for the evening; its back black with the 
+scrawled notes I made of the discussion for my reply.  I found it 
+the other day among some letters from Margaret and a copy of the 
+1909 Report of the Poor Law Commission, also rich with pencilled 
+marginalia.
+
+My opening was a criticism of the democratic idea and method, upon 
+lines such as I have already sufficiently indicated in the preceding 
+sections.  I remember how old Dayton fretted in his chair, and 
+tushed and pished at that, even as I gave it, and afterwards we were 
+treated to one of his platitudinous harangues, he sitting back in 
+his chair with that small obstinate eye of his fixed on the ceiling, 
+and a sort of cadaverous glow upon his face, repeating--quite 
+regardless of all my reasoning and all that had been said by others 
+in the debate--the sacred empty phrases that were his soul's refuge 
+from reality.  "You may think it very clever," he said with a nod of 
+his head to mark his sense of his point, "not to Trust in the 
+People.  I do."  And so on.  Nothing in his life or work had ever 
+shown that he did trust in the people, but that was beside the mark.  
+He was the party Liberal, and these were the party incantations.
+
+After my preliminary attack on vague democracy I went on to show 
+that all human life was virtually aristocratic; people must either 
+recognise aristocracy in general or else follow leaders, which is 
+aristocracy in particular, and so I came to my point that the 
+reality of human progress lay necessarily through the establishment 
+of freedoms for the human best and a collective receptivity and 
+understanding.  There was a disgusted grunt from Dayton, "Superman 
+rubbish--Nietzsche.  Shaw!  Ugh!"  I sailed on over him to my next 
+propositions.  The prime essential in a progressive civilisation was 
+the establishment of a more effective selective process for the 
+privilege of higher education, and the very highest educational 
+opportunity for the educable.  We were too apt to patronise 
+scholarship winners, as though a scholarship was toffee given as a 
+reward for virtue.  It wasn't any reward at all; it was an 
+invitation to capacity.  We had no more right to drag in virtue, or 
+any merit but quality, than we had to involve it in a search for the 
+tallest man.  We didn't want a mere process for the selection of 
+good as distinguished from gifted and able boys--"No, you DON'T," 
+from Dayton--we wanted all the brilliant stuff in the world 
+concentrated upon the development of the world.  Just to exasperate 
+Dayton further I put in a plea for gifts as against character in 
+educational, artistic, and legislative work.  "Good teaching," I 
+said, "is better than good conduct.  We are becoming idiotic about 
+character."
+
+Dayton was too moved to speak.  He slewed round upon me an eye of 
+agonised aversion.
+
+I expatiated on the small proportion of the available ability that 
+is really serving humanity to-day.  "I suppose to-day all the 
+thought, all the art, all the increments of knowledge that matter, 
+are supplied so far as the English-speaking community is concerned 
+by--how many?--by three or four thousand individuals.  ('Less,' said 
+Thorns.)  To be more precise, by the mental hinterlands of three or 
+four thousand individuals.  We who know some of the band entertain 
+no illusions as to their innate rarity.  We know that they are just 
+the few out of many, the few who got in our world of chance and 
+confusion, the timely stimulus, the apt suggestion at the fortunate 
+moment, the needed training, the leisure.  The rest are lost in the 
+crowd, fail through the defects of their qualities, become 
+commonplace workmen and second-rate professional men, marry 
+commonplace wives, are as much waste as the driftage of superfluous 
+pollen in a pine forest is waste."
+
+"Decent honest lives!" said Dayton to his bread-crumbs, with his 
+chin in his necktie.  "WASTE!"
+
+"And the people who do get what we call opportunity get it usually 
+in extremely limited and cramping forms.  No man lives a life of 
+intellectual productivity alone; he needs not only material and 
+opportunity, but helpers, resonators.  Round and about what I might 
+call the REAL men, you want the sympathetic cooperators, who help by 
+understanding.  It isn't that our--SALT of three or four thousand is 
+needlessly rare; it is sustained by far too small and 
+undifferentiated a public.  Most of the good men we know are not 
+really doing the very best work of their gifts; nearly all are a 
+little adapted, most are shockingly adapted to some second-best use.  
+Now, I take it, this is the very centre and origin of the muddle, 
+futility, and unhappiness that distresses us; it's the cardinal 
+problem of the state--to discover, develop, and use the exceptional 
+gifts of men.  And I see that best done--I drift more and more away 
+from the common stuff of legislative and administrative activity--by 
+a quite revolutionary development of the educational machinery, but 
+by a still more unprecedented attempt to keep science going, to keep 
+literature going, and to keep what is the necessary spur of all 
+science and literature, an intelligent and appreciative criticism 
+going.  You know none of these things have ever been kept going 
+hitherto; they've come unexpectedly and inexplicably."
+
+"Hear, hear!" from Dayton, cough, nodding of the head, and an 
+expression of mystical profundity.
+
+"They've lit up a civilisation and vanished, to give place to 
+darkness again.  Now the modern state doesn't mean to go back to 
+darkness again--and so it's got to keep its light burning."  I went 
+on to attack the present organisation of our schools and 
+universities, which seemed elaborately designed to turn the well-
+behaved, uncritical, and uncreative men of each generation into the 
+authoritative leaders of the next, and I suggested remedies upon 
+lines that I have already indicated in the earlier chapters of this 
+story. . . .
+
+So far I had the substance of the club with me, but I opened new 
+ground and set Crupp agog by confessing my doubt from which party or 
+combination of groups these developments of science and literature 
+and educational organisation could most reasonably be expected.  I 
+looked up to find Crupp's dark little eye intent upon me.
+
+There I left it to them.
+
+We had an astonishingly good discussion; Neal burst once, but we 
+emerged from his flood after a time, and Dayton had his interlude.  
+The rest was all close, keen examination of my problem.
+
+I see Crupp now with his arm bent before him on the table in a way 
+we had, as though it was jointed throughout its length like a 
+lobster's antenna, his plump, short-fingered hand crushing up a 
+walnut shell into smaller and smaller fragments.  "Remington," he 
+said, "has given us the data for a movement, a really possible 
+movement.  It's not only possible, but necessary--urgently 
+necessary, I think, if the Empire is to go on."
+
+"We're working altogether too much at the social basement in 
+education and training," said Gane.  "Remington is right about our 
+neglect of the higher levels."
+
+Britten made a good contribution with an analysis of what he called 
+the spirit of a country and what made it.  "The modern community 
+needs its serious men to be artistic and its artists to be taken 
+seriously," I remember his saying.  "The day has gone by for either 
+dull responsibility or merely witty art."
+
+I remember very vividly how Shoesmith harped on an idea I had thrown 
+out of using some sort of review or weekly to express and elaborate 
+these conceptions of a new, severer, aristocratic culture.
+
+"It would have to be done amazingly well," said Britten, and my mind 
+went back to my school days and that ancient enterprise of ours, and 
+how Cossington had rushed it.  Well, Cossington had too many papers 
+nowadays to interfere with us, and we perhaps had learnt some 
+defensive devices.
+
+"But this thing has to be linked to some political party," said 
+Crupp, with his eye on me.  "You can't get away from that.  The 
+Liberals," he added, "have never done anything for research or 
+literature."
+
+"They had a Royal Commission on the Dramatic Censorship," said 
+Thorns, with a note of minute fairness.  "It shows what they were 
+made of," he added.
+
+"It's what I've told Remington again and again," said Crupp, "we've 
+got to pick up the tradition of aristocracy, reorganise it, and make 
+it work.  But he's certainly suggested a method."
+
+"There won't be much aristocracy to pick up," said Dayton, darkly to 
+the ceiling, "if the House of Lords throws out the Budget."
+
+"All the more reason for picking it up," said Neal.  "For we can't 
+do without it."
+
+"Will they go to the bad, or will they rise from the ashes, 
+aristocrats indeed--if the Liberals come in overwhelmingly?" said 
+Britten.
+
+"It's we who might decide that," said Crupp, insidiously.
+
+"I agree," said Gane.
+
+"No one can tell," said Thorns.  "I doubt if they will get beaten."
+
+It was an odd, fragmentary discussion that night.  We were all with 
+ideas in our minds at once fine and imperfect.  We threw out 
+suggestions that showed themselves at once far inadequate, and we 
+tried to qualify them by minor self-contradictions.  Britten, I 
+think, got more said than any one.  "You all seem to think you want 
+to organise people, particular groups and classes of individuals," 
+he insisted.  "It isn't that.  That's the standing error of 
+politicians.  You want to organise a culture.  Civilisation isn't a 
+matter of concrete groupings; it's a matter of prevailing ideas.  
+The problem is how to make bold, clear ideas prevail.  The question 
+for Remington and us is just what groups of people will most help 
+this culture forward."
+
+"Yes, but how are the Lords going to behave?" said Crupp.  "You 
+yourself were asking that a little while ago."
+
+"If they win or if they lose," Gane maintained, "there will be a 
+movement to reorganise aristocracy--Reform of the House of Lords, 
+they'll call the political form of it."
+
+"Bailey thinks that," said some one.
+
+"The labour people want abolition," said some one.  "Let 'em," said 
+Thorns.
+
+He became audible, sketching a possibility of action.
+
+"Suppose all of us were able to work together.  It's just one of 
+those indeterminate, confused, eventful times ahead when a steady 
+jet of ideas might produce enormous results."
+
+"Leave me out of it," said Dayton, "IF you please."
+
+"We should," said Thorns under his breath.
+
+I took up Crupp's initiative, I remember, and expanded it.
+
+"I believe we could do--extensive things," I insisted.
+
+"Revivals and revisions of Toryism have been tried so often," said 
+Thorns, "from the Young England movement onward."
+
+"Not one but has produced its enduring effects," I said.  "It's the 
+peculiarity of English conservatism that it's persistently 
+progressive and rejuvenescent."
+
+I think it must have been about that point that Dayton fled our 
+presence, after some clumsy sentence that I decided upon reflection 
+was intended to remind me of my duty to my party.
+
+Then I remember Thorns firing doubts at me obliquely across the 
+table.  "You can't run a country through its spoilt children," he 
+said.  "What you call aristocrats are really spoilt children.  
+They've had too much of everything, except bracing experience."
+
+"Children can always be educated," said Crupp.
+
+"I said SPOILT children," said Thorns.
+
+"Look here, Thorns!" said I.  "If this Budget row leads to a storm, 
+and these big people get their power clipped, what's going to 
+happen?  Have you thought of that?  When they go out lock, stock, 
+and barrel, who comes in?"
+
+"Nature abhors a Vacuum," said Crupp, supporting me.
+
+"Bailey's trained officials," suggested Gane.
+
+"Quacks with a certificate of approval from Altiora," said Thorns.  
+"I admit the horrors of the alternative.  There'd be a massacre in 
+three years."
+
+"One may go on trying possibilities for ever," I said.  "One thing 
+emerges.  Whatever accidents happen, our civilisation needs, and 
+almost consciously needs, a culture of fine creative minds, and all 
+the necessary tolerances, opennesses, considerations, that march 
+with that.  For my own part, I think that is the Most Vital Thing.  
+Build your ship of state as you will; get your men as you will; I 
+concentrate on what is clearly the affair of my sort of man,--I want 
+to ensure the quality of the quarter deck."
+
+"Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, suddenly--his first remark for a long 
+time.  "A first-rate figure," said Shoesmith, gripping it.
+
+"Our danger is in missing that," I went on.  "Muddle isn't ended by 
+transferring power from the muddle-headed few to the muddle-headed 
+many, and then cheating the many out of it again in the interests of 
+a bureaucracy of sham experts.  But that seems the limit of the 
+liberal imagination.  There is no real progress in a country, except 
+a rise in the level of its free intellectual activity.  All other 
+progress is secondary and dependant.  If you take on Bailey's dreams 
+of efficient machinery and a sort of fanatical discipline with no 
+free-moving brains behind it, confused ugliness becomes rigid 
+ugliness,--that's all.  No doubt things are moving from looseness to 
+discipline, and from irresponsible controls to organised controls--
+and also and rather contrariwise everything is becoming as people 
+say, democratised; but all the more need in that, for an ark in 
+which the living element may be saved."
+
+"Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, faint but pursuing.
+
+It must have been in my house afterwards that Shoesmith became 
+noticeable.  He seemed trying to say something vague and difficult 
+that he didn't get said at all on that occasion.  "We could do 
+immense things with a weekly," he repeated, echoing Neal, I think.  
+And there he left off and became a mute expressiveness, and it was 
+only afterwards, when I was in bed, that I saw we had our capitalist 
+in our hands. . . .
+
+We parted that night on my doorstep in a tremendous glow--but in 
+that sort of glow one doesn't act upon without much reconsideration, 
+and it was some months before I made my decision to follow up the 
+indications of that opening talk.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+I find my thoughts lingering about the Pentagram Circle.  In my 
+developments it played a large part, not so much by starting new 
+trains of thought as by confirming the practicability of things I 
+had already hesitatingly entertained.  Discussion with these other 
+men so prominently involved in current affairs endorsed views that 
+otherwise would have seemed only a little less remote from actuality 
+than the guardians of Plato or the labour laws of More.  Among other 
+questions that were never very distant from our discussions, that 
+came apt to every topic, was the true significance of democracy, 
+Tariff Reform as a method of international hostility, and the 
+imminence of war.  On the first issue I can still recall little 
+Bailey, glib and winking, explaining that democracy was really just 
+a dodge for getting assent to the ordinances of the expert official 
+by means of the polling booth.  "If they don't like things," said 
+he, "they can vote for the opposition candidate and see what happens 
+then--and that, you see, is why we don't want proportional 
+representation to let in the wild men."  I opened my eyes--the lids 
+had dropped for a moment under the caress of those smooth sounds--to 
+see if Bailey's artful forefinger wasn't at the side of his 
+predominant nose.
+
+The international situation exercised us greatly.  Our meetings were 
+pervaded by the feeling that all things moved towards a day of 
+reckoning with Germany, and I was largely instrumental in keeping up 
+the suggestion that India was in a state of unstable equilibrium, 
+that sooner or later something must happen there--something very 
+serious to our Empire.  Dayton frankly detested these topics.  He 
+was full of that old Middle Victorian persuasion that whatever is 
+inconvenient or disagreeable to the English mind could be 
+annihilated by not thinking about it.  He used to sit low in his 
+chair and look mulish.  "Militarism," he would declare in a tone of 
+the utmost moral fervour, is a curse.  It's an unmitigated curse."  
+Then he would cough shortly and twitch his head back and frown, and 
+seem astonished beyond measure that after this conclusive statement 
+we could still go on talking of war.
+
+All our Imperialists were obsessed by the thought of international 
+conflict, and their influence revived for a time those uneasinesses 
+that had been aroused in me for the first time by my continental 
+journey with Willersley and by Meredith's "One of Our Conquerors."  
+That quite justifiable dread of a punishment for all the slackness, 
+mental dishonesty, presumption, mercenary respectability and 
+sentimentalised commercialism of the Victorian period, at the hands 
+of the better organised, more vigorous, and now far more highly 
+civilised peoples of Central Europe, seemed to me to have both a 
+good and bad series of consequences.  It seemed the only thing 
+capable of bracing English minds to education, sustained 
+constructive effort and research; but on the other hand it produced 
+the quality of a panic, hasty preparation, impatience of thought, a 
+wasteful and sometimes quite futile immediacy.  In 1909, for 
+example, there was a vast clamour for eight additional Dreadnoughts--
+
+
+     "We want eight
+      And we won't wait,"
+
+
+but no clamour at all about our national waste of inventive talent, 
+our mean standard of intellectual attainment, our disingenuous 
+criticism, and the consequent failure to distinguish men of the 
+quality needed to carry on the modern type of war.  Almost 
+universally we have the wrong men in our places of responsibility 
+and the right men in no place at all, almost universally we have 
+poorly qualified, hesitating, and resentful subordinates, because 
+our criticism is worthless and, so habitually as to be now almost 
+unconsciously, dishonest.  Germany is beating England in every 
+matter upon which competition is possible, because she attended 
+sedulously to her collective mind for sixty pregnant years, because 
+in spite of tremendous defects she is still far more anxious for 
+quality in achievement than we are.  I remember saying that in my 
+paper.  From that, I remember, I went on to an image that had 
+flashed into my mind.  "The British Empire," I said, "is like some 
+of those early vertebrated monsters, the Brontosaurus and the 
+Atlantosaurus and such-like; it sacrifices intellect to character; 
+its backbone, that is to say,--especially in the visceral region--is 
+bigger than its cranium.  It's no accident that things are so.  
+We've worked for backbone.  We brag about backbone, and if the 
+joints are anchylosed so much the better.  We're still but only half 
+awake to our error.  You can't change that suddenly."
+
+"Turn it round and make it go backwards," interjected Thorns.
+
+"It's trying to do that," I said, "in places."
+
+And afterwards Crupp declared I had begotten a nightmare which 
+haunted him of nights; he was trying desperately and belatedly to 
+blow a brain as one blows soap-bubbles on such a mezoroic saurian as 
+I had conjured up, while the clumsy monster's fate, all teeth and 
+brains, crept nearer and nearer. . . .
+
+I've grown, I think, since those days out of the urgency of that 
+apprehension.  I still think a European war, and conceivably a very 
+humiliating war for England, may occur at no very distant date, but 
+I do not think there is any such heroic quality in our governing 
+class as will make that war catastrophic.  The prevailing spirit in 
+English life--it is one of the essential secrets of our imperial 
+endurance--is one of underbred aggression in prosperity and 
+diplomatic compromise in moments of danger; we bully haughtily where 
+we can and assimilate where we must.  It is not for nothing that our 
+upper and middle-class youth is educated by teachers of the highest 
+character, scholars and gentlemen, men who can pretend quite 
+honestly that Darwinism hasn't upset the historical fall of man, 
+that cricket is moral training, and that Socialism is an outrage 
+upon the teachings of Christ.  A sort of dignified dexterity of 
+evasion is the national reward.  Germany, with a larger population, 
+a vigorous and irreconcilable proletariat, a bolder intellectual 
+training, a harsher spirit, can scarcely fail to drive us at last to 
+a realisation of intolerable strain.  So we may never fight at all.  
+The war of preparations that has been going on for thirty years may 
+end like a sham-fight at last in an umpire's decision.  We shall 
+proudly but very firmly take the second place.  For my own part, 
+since I love England as much as I detest her present lethargy of 
+soul, I pray for a chastening war--I wouldn't mind her flag in the 
+dirt if only her spirit would come out of it.  So I was able to 
+shake off that earlier fear of some final and irrevocable 
+destruction truncating all my schemes.  At the most, a European war 
+would be a dramatic episode in the reconstruction I had in view.
+
+In India, too, I no longer foresee, as once I was inclined to see, 
+disaster.  The English rule in India is surely one of the most 
+extraordinary accidents that has ever happened in history.  We are 
+there like a man who has fallen off a ladder on to the neck of an 
+elephant, and doesn't know what to do or how to get down.  Until 
+something happens he remains.  Our functions in India are absurd.  
+We English do not own that country, do not even rule it.  We make 
+nothing happen; at the most we prevent things happening.  We 
+suppress our own literature there.  Most English people cannot even 
+go to this land they possess; the authorities would prevent it.  If 
+Messrs. Perowne or Cook organised a cheap tour of Manchester 
+operatives, it would be stopped.  No one dare bring the average 
+English voter face to face with the reality of India, or let the 
+Indian native have a glimpse of the English voter.  In my time I 
+have talked to English statesmen, Indian officials and ex-officials, 
+viceroys, soldiers, every one who might be supposed to know what 
+India signifies, and I have prayed them to tell me what they thought 
+we were up to there.  I am not writing without my book in these 
+matters.  And beyond a phrase or so about "even-handed justice"--and 
+look at our sedition trials!--they told me nothing.  Time after time 
+I have heard of that apocryphal native ruler in the north-west, who, 
+when asked what would happen if we left India, replied that in a 
+week his men would be in the saddle, and in six months not a rupee 
+nor a virgin would he left in Lower Bengal.  That is always given as 
+our conclusive justification.  But is it our business to preserve 
+the rupees and virgins of Lower Bengal in a sort of magic 
+inconclusiveness?  Better plunder than paralysis, better fire and 
+sword than futility.  Our flag is spread over the peninsula, without 
+plans, without intentions--a vast preventive.  The sum total of our 
+policy is to arrest any discussion, any conferences that would 
+enable the Indians to work out a tolerable scheme of the future for 
+themselves.  But that does not arrest the resentment of men held 
+back from life.  Consider what it must be for the educated Indian 
+sitting at the feast of contemporary possibilities with his mouth 
+gagged and his hands bound behind him!  The spirit of insurrection 
+breaks out in spite of espionage and seizures.  Our conflict for 
+inaction develops stupendous absurdities.  The other day the British 
+Empire was taking off and examining printed cotton stomach wraps for 
+seditious emblems and inscriptions. . . .
+
+In some manner we shall have to come out of India.  We have had our 
+chance, and we have demonstrated nothing but the appalling dulness 
+of our national imagination.  We are not good enough to do anything 
+with India.  Codger and Flack, and Gates and Dayton, Cladingbowl in 
+the club, and the HOME CHURCHMAN in the home, cant about 
+"character," worship of strenuous force and contempt of truth; for 
+the sake of such men and things as these, we must abandon in fact, 
+if not in appearance, that empty domination.  Had we great schools 
+and a powerful teaching, could we boast great men, had we the spirit 
+of truth and creation in our lives, then indeed it might be 
+different.  But a race that bears a sceptre must carry gifts to 
+justify it.
+
+It does not follow that we shall be driven catastrophically from 
+India.  That was my earlier mistake.  We are not proud enough in our 
+bones to be ruined by India as Spain was by her empire.  We may be 
+able to abandon India with an air of still remaining there.  It is 
+our new method.  We train our future rulers in the public schools to 
+have a very wholesome respect for strength, and as soon as a power 
+arises in India in spite of us, be it a man or a culture, or a 
+native state, we shall he willing to deal with it.  We may or may 
+not have a war, but our governing class will be quick to learn when 
+we are beaten.  Then they will repeat our South African diplomacy, 
+and arrange for some settlement that will abandon the reality, such 
+as it is, and preserve the semblance of power.  The conqueror DE 
+FACTO will become the new "loyal Briton," and the democracy at home 
+will be invited to celebrate our recession--triumphantly.  I am no 
+believer in the imminent dissolution of our Empire; I am less and 
+less inclined to see in either India or Germany the probability of 
+an abrupt truncation of those slow intellectual and moral 
+constructions which are the essentials of statecraft.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+I sit writing in this little loggia to the sound of dripping water--
+this morning we had rain, and the roof of our little casa is still 
+not dry, there are pools in the rocks under the sweet chestnuts, and 
+the torrent that crosses the salita is full and boastful,--and I try 
+to recall the order of my impressions during that watching, dubious 
+time, before I went over to the Conservative Party.  I was trying--
+chaotic task--to gauge the possibilities inherent in the quality of 
+the British aristocracy.  There comes a broad spectacular effect of 
+wide parks, diversified by woods and bracken valleys, and dappled 
+with deer; of great smooth lawns shaded by ancient trees; of big 
+facades of sunlit buildings dominating the country side; of large 
+fine rooms full of handsome, easy-mannered people.  As a sort of 
+representative picture to set off against those other pictures of 
+Liberals and of Socialists I have given, I recall one of those huge 
+assemblies the Duchess of Clynes inaugurated at Stamford House.  The 
+place itself is one of the vastest private houses in London, a huge 
+clustering mass of white and gold saloons with polished floors and 
+wonderful pictures, and staircases and galleries on a Gargantuan 
+scale.  And there she sought to gather all that was most 
+representative of English activities, and did, in fact, in those 
+brilliant nocturnal crowds, get samples of nearly every section of 
+our social and intellectual life, with a marked predominance upon 
+the political and social side.
+
+I remember sitting in one of the recesses at the end of the big 
+saloon with Mrs. Redmondson, one of those sharp-minded, beautiful 
+rich women one meets so often in London, who seem to have done 
+nothing and to be capable of everything, and we watched the crowd--
+uniforms and splendours were streaming in from a State ball--and 
+exchanged information.  I told her about the politicians and 
+intellectuals, and she told me about the aristocrats, and we 
+sharpened our wit on them and counted the percentage of beautiful 
+people among the latter, and wondered if the general effect of 
+tallness was or was not an illusion.
+
+They were, we agreed, for the most part bigger than the average of 
+people in London, and a handsome lot, even when they were not subtly 
+individualised.  "They look so well nurtured," I said, "well cared 
+for.  I like their quiet, well-trained movements, their pleasant 
+consideration for each other."
+
+"Kindly, good tempered, and at bottom utterly selfish," she said, 
+"like big, rather carefully trained, rather pampered children.  What 
+else can you expect from them?"
+
+"They are good tempered, anyhow," I witnessed, "and that's an 
+achievement.  I don't think I could ever be content under a bad-
+tempered, sentimentalism, strenuous Government.  That's why I 
+couldn't stand the Roosevelt REGIME in America.  One's chief 
+surprise when one comes across these big people for the first time 
+is their admirable easiness and a real personal modesty.  I confess 
+I admire them.  Oh! I like them.  I wouldn't at all mind, I believe, 
+giving over the country to this aristocracy--given SOMETHING--"
+
+"Which they haven't got."
+
+"Which they haven't got--or they'd be the finest sort of people in 
+the world."
+
+"That something?" she inquired.
+
+"I don't know.  I've been puzzling my wits to know.  They've done 
+all sorts of things--"
+
+"That's Lord Wrassleton," she interrupted, "whose leg was broken--
+you remember?--at Spion Kop."
+
+"It's healed very well.  I like the gold lace and the white glove 
+resting, with quite a nice awkwardness, on the sword.  When I was a 
+little boy I wanted to wear clothes like that.  And the stars!  He's 
+got the V. C.  Most of these people here have at any rate shown 
+pluck, you know--brought something off."
+
+"Not quite enough," she suggested.
+
+"I think that's it," I said.  "Not quite enough--not quite hard 
+enough," I added.
+
+She laughed and looked at me.  "You'd like to make us," she said.
+
+"What?"
+
+"Hard."
+
+"I don't think you'll go on if you don't get hard."
+
+"We shan't be so pleasant if we do."
+
+"Well, there my puzzled wits come in again.  I don't see why an 
+aristocracy shouldn't be rather hard trained, and yet kindly.  I'm 
+not convinced that the resources of education are exhausted.  I want 
+to better this, because it already looks so good."
+
+"How are we to do it?" asked Mrs. Redmondson.
+
+"Oh, there you have me!  I've been spending my time lately in trying 
+to answer that!  It makes me quarrel with"--I held up my fingers and 
+ticked the items off--"the public schools, the private tutors, the 
+army exams, the Universities, the Church, the general attitude of 
+the country towards science and literature--"
+
+"We all do," said Mrs. Redmondson.  "We can't begin again at the 
+beginning," she added.
+
+"Couldn't one," I nodded at the assembly in general, start a 
+movement?
+
+"There's the Confederates," she said, with a faint smile that masked 
+a gleam of curiosity. . . .  "You want," she said, "to say to the 
+aristocracy, 'Be aristocrats.  NOBLESSE OBLIGE.'  Do you remember 
+what happened to the monarch who was told to 'Be a King'?"
+
+"Well," I said, "I want an aristocracy."
+
+"This," she said, smiling, "is the pick of them.  The backwoodsmen 
+are off the stage.  These are the brilliant ones--the smart and the 
+blues. . . .  They cost a lot of money, you know."
+
+So far Mrs. Redmondson, but the picture remained full of things not 
+stated in our speech.  They were on the whole handsome people, 
+charitable minded, happy, and easy.  They led spacious lives, and 
+there was something free and fearless about their bearing that I 
+liked extremely.  The women particularly were wide-reading, fine-
+thinking.  Mrs. Redmondson talked as fully and widely and boldly as 
+a man, and with those flashes of intuition, those startling, sudden 
+delicacies of perception few men display.  I liked, too, the 
+relations that held between women and men, their general tolerance, 
+their antagonism to the harsh jealousies that are the essence of the 
+middle-class order. . . .
+
+After all, if one's aim resolved itself into the development of a 
+type and culture of men, why shouldn't one begin at this end?
+
+It is very easy indeed to generalise about a class or human beings, 
+but much harder to produce a sample.  Was old Lady Forthundred, for 
+instance, fairly a sample?  I remember her as a smiling, magnificent 
+presence, a towering accumulation of figure and wonderful shimmering 
+blue silk and black lace and black hair, and small fine features and 
+chins and chins and chins, disposed in a big cane chair with wraps 
+and cushions upon the great terrace of Champneys.  Her eye was blue 
+and hard, and her accent and intonation were exactly what you would 
+expect from a rather commonplace dressmaker pretending to be 
+aristocratic.  I was, I am afraid, posing a little as the 
+intelligent but respectful inquirer from below investigating the 
+great world, and she was certainly posing as my informant.  She 
+affected a cynical coarseness.  She developed a theory on the 
+governance of England, beautifully frank and simple.  "Give 'um all 
+a peerage when they get twenty thousand a year," she maintained.  
+"That's my remedy."
+
+In my new role of theoretical aristocrat I felt a little abashed.
+
+"Twenty thousand," she repeated with conviction.
+
+It occurred to me that I was in the presence of the aristocratic 
+theory currently working as distinguished from my as yet 
+unformulated intentions.
+
+"You'll get a lot of loafers and scamps among 'um," said Lady 
+Forthundred.  "You get loafers and scamps everywhere, but you'll get 
+a lot of men who'll work hard to keep things together, and that's 
+what we're all after, isn't ut?
+
+"It's not an ideal arrangement."
+
+"Tell me anything better," said Lady Forthundred.
+
+On the whole, and because she refused emphatically to believe in 
+education, Lady Forthundred scored.
+
+We had been discussing Cossington's recent peerage, for Cossington, 
+my old schoolfellow at City Merchants', and my victor in the affair 
+of the magazine, had clambered to an amazing wealth up a piled heap 
+of energetically pushed penny and halfpenny magazines, and a group 
+of daily newspapers.  I had expected to find the great lady hostile 
+to the new-comer, but she accepted him, she gloried in him.
+
+"We're a peerage," she said, "but none of us have ever had any 
+nonsense about nobility."
+
+She turned and smiled down on me.  "We English," she said, "are a 
+practical people.  We assimilate 'um."
+
+"Then, I suppose, they don't give trouble?"
+
+"Then they don't give trouble."
+
+"They learn to shoot?"
+
+"And all that," said Lady Forthundred.  "Yes.  And things go on.  
+Sometimes better than others, but they go on--somehow.  It depends 
+very much on the sort of butler who pokes 'um about."
+
+I suggested that it might be possible to get a secure twenty 
+thousand a year by at least detrimental methods--socially speaking.
+
+"We must take the bad and the good of 'um," said Lady Forthundred, 
+courageously. . . .
+
+Now, was she a sample?  It happened she talked.  What was there in 
+the brains of the multitude of her first, second, third, fourth, and 
+fifth cousins, who didn't talk, who shone tall, and bearing 
+themselves finely, against a background of deft, attentive maids and 
+valets, on every spacious social scene?  How did things look to 
+them?
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+Side by side with Lady Forthundred, it is curious to put Evesham 
+with his tall, bent body, his little-featured almost elvish face, 
+his unequal mild brown eyes, his gentle manner, his sweet, amazing 
+oratory.  He led all these people wonderfully.  He was always 
+curious and interested about life, wary beneath a pleasing 
+frankness--and I tormented my brain to get to the bottom of him.  
+For a long time he was the most powerful man in England under the 
+throne; he had the Lords in his hand, and a great majority in the 
+Commons, and the discontents and intrigues that are the concomitants 
+of an overwhelming party advantage broke against him as waves break 
+against a cliff.  He foresaw so far in these matters that it seemed 
+he scarcely troubled to foresee.  He brought political art to the 
+last triumph of naturalness.  Always for me he has been the typical 
+aristocrat, so typical and above the mere forms of aristocracy, that 
+he remained a commoner to the end of his days.
+
+I had met him at the beginning of my career; he read some early 
+papers of mine, and asked to see me, and I conceived a flattered 
+liking for him that strengthened to a very strong feeling indeed.  
+He seemed to me to stand alone without an equal, the greatest man in 
+British political life.  Some men one sees through and understands, 
+some one cannot see into or round because they are of opaque clay, 
+but about Evesham I had a sense of things hidden as it were by depth 
+and mists, because he was so big and atmospheric a personality.  No 
+other contemporary has had that effect upon me.  I've sat beside him 
+at dinners, stayed in houses with him--he was in the big house party 
+at Champneys--talked to him, sounded him, watching him as I sat 
+beside him.  I could talk to him with extraordinary freedom and a 
+rare sense of being understood.  Other men have to be treated in a 
+special manner; approached through their own mental dialect, 
+flattered by a minute regard for what they have said and done.  
+Evesham was as widely and charitably receptive as any man I have 
+ever met.  The common politicians beside him seemed like rows of 
+stuffy little rooms looking out upon the sea.
+
+And what was he up to?  What did HE think we were doing with 
+Mankind?  That I thought worth knowing.
+
+I remember his talking on one occasion at the Hartsteins', at a 
+dinner so tremendously floriferous and equipped that we were almost 
+forced into duologues, about the possible common constructive 
+purpose in politics.
+
+"I feel so much," he said, "that the best people in every party 
+converge.  We don't differ at Westminster as they do in the country 
+towns.  There's a sort of extending common policy that goes on under 
+every government, because on the whole it's the right thing to do, 
+and people know it.  Things that used to be matters of opinion 
+become matters of science--and cease to be party questions."
+
+He instanced education.
+
+"Apart," said I, "from the religious question."
+
+"Apart from the religious question."
+
+He dropped that aspect with an easy grace, and went on with his 
+general theme that political conflict was the outcome of 
+uncertainty.  "Directly you get a thing established, so that people 
+can say, 'Now this is Right,' with the same conviction that people 
+can say water is a combination of oxygen and hydrogen, there's no 
+more to be said.  The thing has to be done. . . ." 
+
+And to put against this effect of Evesham, broad and humanely 
+tolerant, posing as the minister of a steadily developing 
+constructive conviction, there are other memories.
+
+Have I not seen him in the House, persistent, persuasive, 
+indefatigable, and by all my standards wickedly perverse, leaning 
+over the table with those insistent movements of his hand upon it, 
+or swaying forward with a grip upon his coat lapel, fighting with a 
+diabolical skill to preserve what are in effect religious tests, 
+tests he must have known would outrage and humiliate and injure the 
+consciences of a quarter--and that perhaps the best quarter--of the 
+youngsters who come to the work of elementary education?
+
+In playing for points in the game of party advantage Evesham 
+displayed at times a quite wicked unscrupulousness in the use of his 
+subtle mind.  I would sit on the Liberal benches and watch him, and 
+listen to his urbane voice, fascinated by him.  Did he really care?  
+Did anything matter to him?  And if it really mattered nothing, why 
+did he trouble to serve the narrowness and passion of his side?  Or 
+did he see far beyond my scope, so that this petty iniquity was 
+justified by greater, remoter ends of which I had no intimation?
+
+They accused him of nepotism.  His friends and family were certainly 
+well cared for.  In private life he was full of an affectionate 
+intimacy; he pleased by being charmed and pleased.  One might think 
+at times there was no more of him than a clever man happily 
+circumstanced, and finding an interest and occupation in politics.  
+And then came a glimpse of thought, of imagination, like the sight 
+of a soaring eagle through a staircase skylight.  Oh, beyond 
+question he was great!  No other contemporary politician had his 
+quality.  In no man have I perceived so sympathetically the great 
+contrast between warm, personal things and the white dream of 
+statecraft.  Except that he had it seemed no hot passions, but only 
+interests and fine affections and indolences, he paralleled the 
+conflict of my life.  He saw and thought widely and deeply; but at 
+times it seemed to me his greatness stood over and behind the 
+reality of his life, like some splendid servant, thinking his own 
+thoughts, who waits behind a lesser master's chair. . . .
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+Of course, when Evesham talked of this ideal of the organised state 
+becoming so finely true to practicability and so clearly stated as 
+to have the compelling conviction of physical science, he spoke 
+quite after my heart.  Had he really embodied the attempt to realise 
+that, I could have done no more than follow him blindly.  But 
+neither he nor I embodied that, and there lies the gist of my story.  
+And when it came to a study of others among the leading Tories and 
+Imperialists the doubt increased, until with some at last it was 
+possible to question whether they had any imaginative conception of 
+constructive statecraft at all; whether they didn't opaquely accept 
+the world for what it was, and set themselves single-mindedly to 
+make a place for themselves and cut a figure in it.
+
+There were some very fine personalities among them: there were the 
+great peers who had administered Egypt, India, South Africa, 
+Framboya--Cromer, Kitchener, Curzon, Milner, Gane, for example.  So 
+far as that easier task of holding sword and scales had gone, they 
+had shown the finest qualities, but they had returned to the 
+perplexing and exacting problem of the home country, a little 
+glorious, a little too simply bold.  They wanted to arm and they 
+wanted to educate, but the habit of immediate necessity made them 
+far more eager to arm than to educate, and their experience of 
+heterogeneous controls made them overrate the need for obedience in 
+a homogeneous country.  They didn't understand raw men, ill-trained 
+men, uncertain minds, and intelligent women; and these are the 
+things that matter in England. . . .  There were also the great 
+business adventurers, from Cranber to Cossington (who was now Lord 
+Paddockhurst).  My mind remained unsettled, and went up and down the 
+scale between a belief in their far-sighted purpose and the 
+perception of crude vanities, coarse ambitions, vulgar 
+competitiveness, and a mere habitual persistence in the pursuit of 
+gain.  For a time I saw a good deal of Cossington--I wish I had kept 
+a diary of his talk and gestures, to mark how he could vary from day 
+to day between a POSEUR, a smart tradesman, and a very bold and 
+wide-thinking political schemer.  He had a vanity of sweeping 
+actions, motor car pounces, Napoleonic rushes, that led to violent 
+ineffectual changes in the policy of his papers, and a haunting 
+pursuit by parallel columns in the liberal press that never abashed 
+him in the slightest degree.  By an accident I plumbed the folly in 
+him--but I feel I never plumbed his wisdom.  I remember him one day 
+after a lunch at the Barhams' saying suddenly, out of profound 
+meditation over the end of a cigar, one of those sentences that seem 
+to light the whole interior being of a man.  "Some day," he said 
+softly, rather to himself than to me, and A PROPOS of nothing--"some 
+day I will raise the country."
+
+"Why not?" I said, after a pause, and leant across him for the 
+little silver spirit-lamp, to light my cigarette. . . .
+
+Then the Tories had for another section the ancient creations, and 
+again there were the financial peers, men accustomed to reserve, and 
+their big lawyers, accustomed to--well, qualified statement.  And 
+below the giant personalities of the party were the young bloods, 
+young, adventurous men of the type of Lord Tarvrille, who had seen 
+service in South Africa, who had travelled and hunted; explorers, 
+keen motorists, interested in aviation, active in army organisation.  
+Good, brown-faced stuff they were, but impervious to ideas outside 
+the range of their activities, more ignorant of science than their 
+chaffeurs, and of the quality of English people than welt-
+politicians; contemptuous of school and university by reason of the 
+Gateses and Flacks and Codgers who had come their way, witty, light-
+hearted, patriotic at the Kipling level, with a certain aptitude for 
+bullying.  They varied in insensible gradations between the noble 
+sportsmen on the one hand, and men like Gane and the Tories of our 
+Pentagram club on the other.  You perceive how a man might exercise 
+his mind in the attempt to strike an average of public 
+serviceability in this miscellany!  And mixed up with these, mixed 
+up sometimes in the same man, was the pure reactionary, whose 
+predominant idea was that the village schools should confine 
+themselves to teaching the catechism, hat-touching and courtesying, 
+and be given a holiday whenever beaters were in request. . . .
+
+I find now in my mind as a sort of counterpoise to Evesham the 
+figure of old Lord Wardingham, asleep in the largest armchair in the 
+library of Stamford Court after lunch.  One foot rested on one of 
+those things--I think they are called gout stools.  He had been 
+playing golf all the morning and wearied a weak instep; at lunch he 
+had sat at my table and talked in the overbearing manner permitted 
+to irascible important men whose insteps are painful.  Among other 
+things he had flouted the idea that women would ever understand 
+statecraft or be more than a nuisance in politics, denied flatly 
+that Hindoos were capable of anything whatever except excesses in 
+population, regretted he could not censor picture galleries and 
+circulating libraries, and declared that dissenters were people who 
+pretended to take theology seriously with the express purpose of 
+upsetting the entirely satisfactory compromise of the Established 
+Church.  "No sensible people, with anything to gain or lose, argue 
+about religion," he said.  "They mean mischief."  Having delivered 
+his soul upon these points, and silenced the little conversation to 
+the left of him from which they had arisen, he became, after an 
+appreciative encounter with a sanguinary woodcock, more amiable, 
+responded to some respectful initiatives of Crupp's, and related a 
+number of classical anecdotes of those blighting snubs, vindictive 
+retorts and scandalous miscarriages of justice that are so dear to 
+the forensic mind.  Now he reposed.  He was breathing heavily with 
+his mouth a little open and his head on one side.  One whisker was 
+turned back against the comfortable padding.  His plump strong hands 
+gripped the arms of his chair, and his frown was a little assuaged.  
+How tremendously fed up he looked!  Honours, wealth, influence, 
+respect, he had them all.  How scornful and hard it had made his 
+unguarded expression!
+
+I note without comment that it didn't even occur to me then to wake 
+him up and ask him what HE was up to with mankind.
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+One countervailing influence to my drift to Toryism in those days 
+was Margaret's quite religious faith in the Liberals.  I realised 
+that slowly and with a mild astonishment.  It set me, indeed, even 
+then questioning my own change of opinion.  We came at last 
+incidentally, as our way was, to an exchange of views.  It was as 
+nearly a quarrel as we had before I came over to the Conservative 
+side.  It was at Champneys, and I think during the same visit that 
+witnessed my exploration of Lady Forthundred.  It arose indirectly, 
+I think, out of some comments of mine upon our fellow-guests, but it 
+is one of those memories of which the scene and quality remain more 
+vivid than the things said, a memory without any very definite 
+beginning or end.  It was afternoon, in the pause between tea and 
+the dressing bell, and we were in Margaret's big silver-adorned, 
+chintz-bright room, looking out on the trim Italian garden. . . .  
+Yes, the beginning of it has escaped me altogether, but I remember 
+it as an odd exceptional little wrangle.
+
+At first we seem to have split upon the moral quality of the 
+aristocracy, and I had an odd sense that in some way too feminine 
+for me to understand our hostess had aggrieved her.  She said, I 
+know, that Champneys distressed her; made her "eager for work and 
+reality again."
+
+"But aren't these people real?"
+
+"They're so superficial, so extravagant!"
+
+I said I was not shocked by their unreality.  They seemed the least 
+affected people I had ever met.  "And are they really so 
+extravagant?" I asked, and put it to her that her dresses cost quite 
+as much as any other woman's in the house.
+
+"It's not only their dresses," Margaret parried.  "It's the scale 
+and spirit of things."
+
+I questioned that.  "They're cynical," said Margaret, staring before 
+her out of the window.
+
+I challenged her, and she quoted the Brabants, about whom there had 
+been an ancient scandal.  She'd heard of it from Altiora, and it was 
+also Altiora who'd given her a horror of Lord Carnaby, who was also 
+with us.  "You know his reputation," said Margaret.  "That Normandy 
+girl.  Every one knows about it.  I shiver when I look at him.  He 
+seems--oh! like something not of OUR civilisation.  He WILL come and 
+say little things to me."
+
+"Offensive things?"
+
+"No, politenesses and things.  Of course his manners are--quite 
+right.  That only makes it worse, I think.  It shows he might have 
+helped--all that happened.  I do all I can to make him see I don't 
+like him.  But none of the others make the slightest objection to 
+him."
+
+"Perhaps these people imagine something might be said for him."
+
+"That's just it," said Margaret.
+
+"Charity," I suggested.
+
+"I don't like that sort of toleration."
+
+I was oddly annoyed.  "Like eating with publicans and sinners," I 
+said.  "No! . . .
+
+But scandals, and the contempt for rigid standards their condonation 
+displayed, weren't more than the sharp edge of the trouble.  "It's 
+their whole position, their selfish predominance, their class 
+conspiracy against the mass of people," said Margaret.  "When I sit 
+at dinner in that splendid room, with its glitter and white 
+reflections and candlelight, and its flowers and its wonderful 
+service and its candelabra of solid gold, I seem to feel the slums 
+and the mines and the over-crowded cottages stuffed away under the 
+table."
+
+I reminded Margaret that she was not altogether innocent of unearned 
+increment.
+
+"But aren't we doing our best to give it back?" she said.
+
+I was moved to question her.  "Do you really think," I asked, "that 
+the Tories and peers and rich people are to blame for social 
+injustice as we have it to-day?  Do you really see politics as a 
+struggle of light on the Liberal side against darkness on the Tory?"
+
+"They MUST know," said Margaret.
+
+I found myself questioning that.  I see now that to Margaret it must 
+have seemed the perversest carping against manifest things, but at 
+the time I was concentrated simply upon the elucidation of her view 
+and my own; I wanted to get at her conception in the sharpest, 
+hardest lines that were possible.  It was perfectly clear that she 
+saw Toryism as the diabolical element in affairs.  The thing showed 
+in its hopeless untruth all the clearer for the fine, clean emotion 
+with which she gave it out to me.  My sleeping peer in the library 
+at Stamford Court and Evesham talking luminously behind the 
+Hartstein flowers embodied the devil, and my replete citizen sucking 
+at his cigar in the National Liberal Club, Willie Crampton 
+discussing the care and management of the stomach over a specially 
+hygienic lemonade, and Dr. Tumpany in his aggressive frock-coat 
+pegging out a sort of copyright in Socialism, were the centre and 
+wings of the angelic side.  It was nonsense.  But how was I to put 
+the truth to her?
+
+"I don't see things at all as you do," I said.  "I don't see things 
+in the same way."
+
+"Think of the poor," said Margaret, going off at a tangent.
+
+"Think of every one," I said.  "We Liberals have done more mischief 
+through well-intentioned benevolence than all the selfishness in the 
+world could have done.  We built up the liquor interest."
+
+"WE!" cried Margaret.  "How can you say that?  It's against us."
+
+"Naturally.  But we made it a monopoly in our clumsy efforts to 
+prevent people drinking what they liked, because it interfered with 
+industrial regularity--"
+
+"Oh!" cried Margaret, stung; and I could see she thought I was 
+talking mere wickedness.
+
+"That's it," I said.
+
+"But would you have people drink whatever they pleased?"
+
+"Certainly.  What right have I to dictate to other men and women?"
+
+"But think of the children!"
+
+"Ah! there you have the folly of modern Liberalism, its half-
+cunning, half-silly way of getting at everything in a roundabout 
+fashion.  If neglecting children is an offence, and it IS an 
+offence, then deal with it as such, but don't go badgering and 
+restricting people who sell something that may possibly in some 
+cases lead to a neglect of children.  If drunkenness is an offence, 
+punish it, but don't punish a man for selling honest drink that 
+perhaps after all won't make any one drunk at all.  Don't intensify 
+the viciousness of the public-house by assuming the place isn't fit 
+for women and children.  That's either spite or folly.  Make the 
+public-house FIT for women and children.  Make it a real public-
+house.  If we Liberals go on as we are going, we shall presently 
+want to stop the sale of ink and paper because those things tempt 
+men to forgery.  We do already threaten the privacy of the post 
+because of betting tout's letters.  The drift of all that kind of 
+thing is narrow, unimaginative, mischievous, stupid. . . ."
+
+I stopped short and walked to the window and surveyed a pretty 
+fountain, facsimile of one in Verona, amidst trim-cut borderings of 
+yew.  Beyond, and seen between the stems of ilex trees, was a great 
+blaze of yellow flowers. . . .
+
+"But prevention," I heard Margaret behind me, "is the essence of our 
+work."
+
+I turned.  "There's no prevention but education.  There's no 
+antiseptics in life but love and fine thinking.  Make people fine, 
+make fine people.  Don't be afraid.  These Tory leaders are better 
+people individually than the average; why cast them for the villains 
+of the piece?  The real villain in the piece--in the whole human 
+drama--is the muddle-headedness, and it matters very little if it's 
+virtuous-minded or wicked.  I want to get at muddle-headedness.  If 
+I could do that I could let all that you call wickedness in the 
+world run about and do what it jolly well pleased.  It would matter 
+about as much as a slightly neglected dog--in an otherwise well-
+managed home."
+
+My thoughts had run away with me.
+
+"I can't understand you," said Margaret, in the profoundest 
+distress.  "I can't understand how it is you are coming to see 
+things like this."
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+The moods of a thinking man in politics are curiously evasive and 
+difficult to describe.  Neither the public nor the historian will 
+permit the statesman moods.  He has from the first to assume he has 
+an Aim, a definite Aim, and to pretend to an absolute consistency 
+with that.  Those subtle questionings about the very fundamentals of 
+life which plague us all so relentlessly nowadays are supposed to be 
+silenced.  He lifts his chin and pursues his Aim explicitly in the 
+sight of all men.  Those who have no real political experience can 
+scarcely imagine the immense mental and moral strain there is 
+between one's everyday acts and utterances on the one hand and the 
+"thinking-out" process on the other.  It is perplexingly difficult 
+to keep in your mind, fixed and firm, a scheme essentially complex, 
+to keep balancing a swaying possibility while at the same time under 
+jealous, hostile, and stupid observation you tread your part in the 
+platitudinous, quarrelsome, ill-presented march of affairs. . . .
+
+The most impossible of all autobiographies is an intellectual 
+autobiography.  I have thrown together in the crudest way the 
+elements of the problem I struggled with, but I can give no record 
+of the subtle details; I can tell nothing of the long vacillations 
+between Protean values, the talks and re-talks, the meditations, the 
+bleak lucidities of sleepless nights. . . .
+
+And yet these things I have struggled with must be thought out, and, 
+to begin with, they must be thought out in this muddled, 
+experimenting way.  To go into a study to think about statecraft is 
+to turn your back on the realities you are constantly needing to 
+feel and test and sound if your thinking is to remain vital; to 
+choose an aim and pursue it in despite of all subsequent 
+questionings is to bury the talent of your mind.  It is no use 
+dealing with the intricate as though it were simple, to leap 
+haphazard at the first course of action that presents itself; the 
+whole world of politicians is far too like a man who snatches a 
+poker to a failing watch.  It is easy to say he wants to "get 
+something done," but the only sane thing to do for the moment is to 
+put aside that poker and take thought and get a better implement. . . .
+
+One of the results of these fundamental preoccupations of mine was a 
+curious irritability towards Margaret that I found difficult to 
+conceal.  It was one of the incidental cruelties of our position 
+that this should happen.  I was in such doubt myself, that I had no 
+power to phrase things for her in a form she could use.  Hitherto I 
+had stage-managed our "serious" conversations.  Now I was too much 
+in earnest and too uncertain to go on doing this.  I avoided talk 
+with her.  Her serene, sustained confidence in vague formulae and 
+sentimental aspirations exasperated me; her want of sympathetic 
+apprehension made my few efforts to indicate my changing attitudes 
+distressing and futile.  It wasn't that I was always thinking right, 
+and that she was always saying wrong.  It was that I was struggling 
+to get hold of a difficult thing that was, at any rate, half true, I 
+could not gauge how true, and that Margaret's habitual phrasing 
+ignored these elusive elements of truth, and without premeditation 
+fitted into the weaknesses of my new intimations, as though they had 
+nothing but weaknesses.  It was, for example, obvious that these big 
+people, who were the backbone of Imperialism and Conservatism, were 
+temperamentally lax, much more indolent, much more sensuous, than 
+our deliberately virtuous Young Liberals.  I didn't want to be 
+reminded of that, just when I was in full effort to realise the 
+finer elements in their composition.  Margaret classed them and 
+disposed of them.  It was our incurable differences in habits and 
+gestures of thought coming between us again.
+
+The desert of misunderstanding widened.  I was forced back upon 
+myself and my own secret councils.  For a time I went my way alone; 
+an unmixed evil for both of us.  Except for that Pentagram evening, 
+a series of talks with Isabel Rivers, who was now becoming more and 
+more important in my intellectual life, and the arguments I 
+maintained with Crupp, I never really opened my mind at all during 
+that period of indecisions, slow abandonments, and slow 
+acquisitions.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD
+
+SECESSION
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+At last, out of a vast accumulation of impressions, decision 
+distilled quite suddenly.  I succumbed to Evesham and that dream of 
+the right thing triumphant through expression.  I determined I would 
+go over to the Conservatives, and use my every gift and power on the 
+side of such forces on that side as made for educational 
+reorganisation, scientific research, literature, criticism, and 
+intellectual development.  That was in 1909.  I judged the Tories 
+were driving straight at a conflict with the country, and I thought 
+them bound to incur an electoral defeat.  I under-estimated their 
+strength in the counties.  There would follow, I calculated, a 
+period of profound reconstruction in method and policy alike.  I was 
+entirely at one with Crupp in perceiving in this an immense 
+opportunity for the things we desired.  An aristocracy quickened by 
+conflict and on the defensive, and full of the idea of justification 
+by reconstruction, might prove altogether more apt for thought and 
+high professions than Mrs. Redmondson's spoilt children.  Behind the 
+now inevitable struggle for a reform of the House of Lords, there 
+would be great heart searchings and educational endeavour.  On that 
+we reckoned. . . .
+
+At last we talked it out to the practical pitch, and Crupp and 
+Shoesmith, and I and Gane, made our definite agreement together. . . .
+
+I emerged from enormous silences upon Margaret one evening.
+
+She was just back from the display of some new musicians at the 
+Hartsteins.  I remember she wore a dress of golden satin, very rich-
+looking and splendid.  About her slender neck there was a rope of 
+gold-set amber beads.  Her hair caught up and echoed and returned 
+these golden notes.  I, too, was in evening dress, but where I had 
+been escapes me,--some forgotten dinner, I suppose.  I went into her 
+room.  I remember I didn't speak for some moments.  I went across to 
+the window and pulled the blind aside, and looked out upon the 
+railed garden of the square, with its shrubs and shadowed turf 
+gleaming pallidly and irregularly in the light of the big electric 
+standard in the corner.
+
+"Margaret," I said, "I think I shall break with the party."
+
+She made no answer.  I turned presently, a movement of enquiry.
+
+"I was afraid you meant to do that," she said.
+
+"I'm out of touch," I explained.  "Altogether."
+
+"Oh! I know."
+
+"It places me in a difficult position," I said.
+
+Margaret stood at her dressing-table, looking steadfastly at herself 
+in the glass, and with her fingers playing with a litter of 
+stoppered bottles of tinted glass.  "I was afraid it was coming to 
+this," she said.
+
+"In a way," I said, "we've been allies.  I owe my seat to you.  I 
+couldn't have gone into Parliament. . . ."
+
+"I don't want considerations like that to affect us," she 
+interrupted.
+
+There was a pause.  She sat down in a chair by her dressing-table, 
+lifted an ivory hand-glass, and put it down again.
+
+"I wish," she said, with something like a sob in her voice, "it were 
+possible that you shouldn't do this."  She stopped abruptly, and I 
+did not look at her, because I could feel the effort she was making 
+to control herself.
+
+"I thought," she began again, "when you came into Parliament--"
+
+There came another silence.  "It's all gone so differently," she 
+said.  "Everything has gone so differently."
+
+I had a sudden memory of her, shining triumphant after the 
+Kinghampstead election, and for the first time I realised just how 
+perplexing and disappointing my subsequent career must have been to 
+her.
+
+"I'm not doing this without consideration," I said.
+
+"I know," she said, in a voice of despair, "I've seen it coming.  
+But--I still don't understand it.  I don't understand how you can go 
+over."
+
+"My ideas have changed and developed," I said.
+
+I walked across to her bearskin hearthrug, and stood by the mantel.
+
+"To think that you," she said; "you who might have been leader--"  
+She could not finish it.  "All the forces of reaction," she threw 
+out.
+
+"I don't think they are the forces of reaction," I said.  "I think I 
+can find work to do--better work on that side."
+
+"Against us!" she said.  "As if progress wasn't hard enough!  As if 
+it didn't call upon every able man!"
+
+"I don't think Liberalism has a monopoly of progress."
+
+She did not answer that.  She sat quite still looking in front of 
+her.  "WHY have you gone over?" she asked abruptly as though I had 
+said nothing.
+
+There came a silence that I was impelled to end.  I began a stiff 
+dissertation from the hearthrug.  "I am going over, because I think 
+I may join in an intellectual renascence on the Conservative side.  
+I think that in the coming struggle there will be a partial and 
+altogether confused and demoralising victory for democracy, that 
+will stir the classes which now dominate the Conservative party into 
+an energetic revival.  They will set out to win back, and win back.  
+Even if my estimate of con-temporary forces is wrong and they win, 
+they will still be forced to reconstruct their outlook.  A war 
+abroad will supply the chastening if home politics fail.  The effort 
+at renascence is bound to come by either alternative.  I believe I 
+can do more in relation to that effort than in any other connexion 
+in the world of politics at the present time.  That's my case, 
+Margaret."
+
+She certainly did not grasp what I said.  "And so you will throw 
+aside all the beginnings, all the beliefs and pledges--" Again her 
+sentence remained incomplete.  "I doubt if even, once you have gone 
+over, they will welcome you."
+
+"That hardly matters."
+
+I made an effort to resume my speech.
+
+"I came into Parliament, Margaret," I said, "a little prematurely.  
+Still--I suppose it was only by coming into Parliament that I could 
+see things as I do now in terms of personality and imaginative 
+range. . . ." I stopped.  Her stiff, unhappy, unlistening silence 
+broke up my disquisition.
+
+"After all," I remarked, "most of this has been implicit in my 
+writings."
+
+She made no sign of admission.
+
+"What are you going to do?" she asked.
+
+"Keep my seat for a time and make the reasons of my breach clear.  
+Then either I must resign or--probably this new Budget will lead to 
+a General Election.  It's evidently meant to strain the Lords and 
+provoke a quarrel."
+
+"You might, I think, have stayed to fight for the Budget."
+
+"I'm not," I said, "so keen against the Lords."
+
+On that we halted.
+
+"But what are you going to do?" she asked.
+
+"I shall make my quarrel over some points in the Budget.  I can't 
+quite tell you yet where my chance will come.  Then I shall either 
+resign my seat--or if things drift to dissolution I shall stand 
+again."
+
+"It's political suicide."
+
+"Not altogether."
+
+"I can't imagine you out of Parliament again.  It's just like--like 
+undoing all we have done.  What will you do?"
+
+"Write.  Make a new, more definite place for myself.  You know, of 
+course, there's already a sort of group about Crupp and Gane."
+
+Margaret seemed lost for a time in painful thought.
+
+"For me," she said at last, "our political work has been a religion--
+it has been more than a religion."
+
+I heard in silence.  I had no form of protest available against the 
+implications of that.
+
+"And then I find you turning against all we aimed to do--talking of 
+going over, almost lightly--to those others." . . .
+
+She was white-lipped as she spoke.  In the most curious way she had 
+captured the moral values of the situation.  I found myself 
+protesting ineffectually against her fixed conviction.  "It's 
+because I think my duty lies in this change that I make it," I said.
+
+"I don't see how you can say that," she replied quietly.
+
+There was another pause between us.
+
+"Oh!" she said and clenched her hand upon the table.  "That it 
+should have come to this!"
+
+She was extraordinarily dignified and extraordinarily absurd.  She 
+was hurt and thwarted beyond measure.  She had no place in her 
+ideas, I thought, for me.  I could see how it appeared to her, but I 
+could not make her see anything of the intricate process that had 
+brought me to this divergence.  The opposition of our intellectual 
+temperaments was like a gag in my mouth.  What was there for me to 
+say?  A flash of intuition told me that behind her white dignity was 
+a passionate disappointment, a shattering of dreams that needed 
+before everything else the relief of weeping.
+
+"I've told you," I said awkwardly, "as soon as I could."
+
+There was another long silence.  "So that is how we stand," I said 
+with an air of having things defined.  I walked slowly to the door.
+
+She had risen and stood now staring in front of her.
+
+"Good-night," I said, making no movement towards our habitual kiss.
+
+"Good-night," she answered in a tragic note. . . .
+
+I closed the door softly.  I remained for a moment or so on the big 
+landing, hesitating between my bedroom and my study.  As I did so I 
+heard the soft rustle of her movement and the click of the key in 
+her bedroom door.  Then everything was still. . . .
+
+She hid her tears from me.  Something gripped my heart at the 
+thought.
+
+"Damnation!" I said wincing.  "Why the devil can't people at least 
+THINK in the same manner?"
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+And that insufficient colloquy was the beginning of a prolonged 
+estrangement between us.  It was characteristic of our relations 
+that we never reopened the discussion.  The thing had been in the 
+air for some time; we had recognised it now; the widening breach 
+between us was confessed.  My own feelings were curiously divided.  
+It is remarkable that my very real affection for Margaret only 
+became evident to me with this quarrel.  The changes of the heart 
+are very subtle changes.  I am quite unaware how or when my early 
+romantic love for her purity and beauty and high-principled devotion 
+evaporated from my life; but I do know that quite early in my 
+parliamentary days there had come a vague, unconfessed resentment at 
+the tie that seemed to hold me in servitude to her standards of 
+private living and public act.  I felt I was caught, and none the 
+less so because it had been my own act to rivet on my shackles.  So 
+long as I still held myself bound to her that resentment grew.  Now, 
+since I had broken my bonds and taken my line it withered again, and 
+I could think of Margaret with a returning kindliness.
+
+But I still felt embarrassment with her.  I felt myself dependent 
+upon her for house room and food and social support, as it were 
+under false pretences.  I would have liked to have separated our 
+financial affairs altogether.  But I knew that to raise the issue 
+would have seemed a last brutal indelicacy.  So I tried almost 
+furtively to keep my personal expenditure within the scope of the 
+private income I made by writing, and we went out together in her 
+motor brougham, dined and made appearances, met politely at 
+breakfast--parted at night with a kiss upon her cheek.  The locking 
+of her door upon me, which at that time I quite understood, which I 
+understand now, became for a time in my mind, through some obscure 
+process of the soul, an offence.  I never crossed the landing to her 
+room again.
+
+In all this matter, and, indeed, in all my relations with Margaret, 
+I perceive now I behaved badly and foolishly.  My manifest blunder 
+is that I, who was several years older than she, much subtler and in 
+many ways wiser, never in any measure sought to guide and control 
+her.  After our marriage I treated her always as an equal, and let 
+her go her way; held her responsible for all the weak and 
+ineffective and unfortunate things she said and did to me.  She 
+wasn't clever enough to justify that.  It wasn't fair to expect her 
+to sympathise, anticipate, and understand.  I ought to have taken 
+care of her, roped her to me when it came to crossing the difficult 
+places.  If I had loved her more, and wiselier and more tenderly, if 
+there had not been the consciousness of my financial dependence on 
+her always stiffening my pride, I think she would have moved with me 
+from the outset, and left the Liberals with me.  But she did not get 
+any inkling of the ends I sought in my change of sides.  It must 
+have seemed to her inexplicable perversity.  She had, I knew--for 
+surely I knew it then--an immense capacity for loyalty and devotion.  
+There she was with these treasures untouched, neglected and 
+perplexed.  A woman who loves wants to give.  It is the duty and 
+business of the man she has married for love to help her to help and 
+give.  But I was stupid.  My eyes had never been opened.  I was 
+stiff with her and difficult to her, because even on my wedding 
+morning there had been, deep down in my soul, voiceless though 
+present, something weakly protesting, a faint perception of wrong-
+doing, the infinitesimally small, slow-multiplying germs of shame.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+I made my breach with the party on the Budget.
+
+In many ways I was disposed to regard the 1909 Budget as a fine 
+piece of statecraft.  Its production was certainly a very unexpected 
+display of vigour on the Liberal side.  But, on the whole, this 
+movement towards collectivist organisation on the part of the 
+Liberals rather strengthened than weakened my resolve to cross the 
+floor of the house.  It made it more necessary, I thought, to leaven 
+the purely obstructive and reactionary elements that were at once 
+manifest in the opposition.  I assailed the land taxation proposals 
+in one main speech, and a series of minor speeches in committee.  
+The line of attack I chose was that the land was a great public 
+service that needed to be controlled on broad and far-sighted lines.  
+I had no objection to its nationalisation, but I did object most 
+strenuously to the idea of leaving it in private hands, and 
+attempting to produce beneficial social results through the pressure 
+of taxation upon the land-owning class.  That might break it up in 
+an utterly disastrous way.  The drift of the government proposals 
+was all in the direction of sweating the landowner to get immediate 
+values from his property, and such a course of action was bound to 
+give us an irritated and vindictive land-owning class, the class 
+upon which we had hitherto relied--not unjustifiably--for certain 
+broad, patriotic services and an influence upon our collective 
+judgments that no other class seemed prepared to exercise.  Abolish 
+landlordism if you will, I said, buy it out, but do not drive it to 
+a defensive fight, and leave it still sufficiently strong and 
+wealthy to become a malcontent element in your state.  You have 
+taxed and controlled the brewer and the publican until the outraged 
+Liquor Interest has become a national danger.  You now propose to do 
+the same thing on a larger scale.  You turn a class which has many 
+fine and truly aristocratic traditions towards revolt, and there is 
+nothing in these or any other of your proposals that shows any sense 
+of the need for leadership to replace these traditional leaders you 
+are ousting.  This was the substance of my case, and I hammered at 
+it not only in the House, but in the press. . . .
+
+The Kinghampstead division remained for some time insensitive to my 
+defection.
+
+Then it woke up suddenly, and began, in the columns of the 
+KINGSHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN, an indignant, confused outcry.  I was 
+treated to an open letter, signed Junius Secundus," and I replied in 
+provocative terms.  There were two thinly attended public meetings 
+at different ends of the constituency, and then I had a 
+correspondence with my old friend Parvill, the photographer, which 
+ended in my seeing a deputation.
+
+My impression is that it consisted of about eighteen or twenty 
+people.  They had had to come upstairs to me and they were 
+manifestly full of indignation and a little short of breath.  There 
+was Parvill himself, J.P., dressed wholly in black--I think to mark 
+his sense of the occasion--and curiously suggestive in his respect 
+for my character and his concern for the honourableness of the 
+KINGHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN editor, of Mark Antony at the funeral of 
+Cesar.  There was Mrs. Bulger, also in mourning; she had never 
+abandoned the widow's streamers since the death of her husband ten 
+years ago, and her loyalty to Liberalism of the severest type was 
+part as it were of her weeds.  There was a nephew of Sir Roderick 
+Newton, a bright young Hebrew of the graver type, and a couple of 
+dissenting ministers in high collars and hats that stopped halfway 
+between the bowler of this world and the shovel-hat of heaven.  
+There was also a young solicitor from Lurky done in the horsey 
+style, and there was a very little nervous man with a high brow and 
+a face contracting below as though the jawbones and teeth had been 
+taken out and the features compressed.  The rest of the deputation, 
+which included two other public-spirited ladies and several 
+ministers of religion, might have been raked out of any omnibus 
+going Strandward during the May meetings.  They thrust Parvill 
+forward as spokesman, and manifested a strong disposition to say 
+"Hear, hear!" to his more strenuous protests provided my eye wasn't 
+upon them at the time.
+
+I regarded this appalling deputation as Parvill's apologetic but 
+quite definite utterances drew to an end.  I had a moment of vision.  
+Behind them I saw the wonderful array of skeleton forces that stand 
+for public opinion, that are as much public opinion as exists indeed 
+at the present time.  The whole process of politics which bulks so 
+solidly in history seemed for that clairvoyant instant but a froth 
+of petty motives above abysms of indifference. . . .
+
+Some one had finished.  I perceived I had to speak.
+
+"Very well," I said, "I won't keep you long in replying.  I'll 
+resign if there isn't a dissolution before next February, and if 
+there is I shan't stand again.  You don't want the bother and 
+expense of a bye-election (approving murmurs) if it can be avoided.  
+But I may tell you plainly now that I don't think it will be 
+necessary for me to resign, and the sooner you find my successor the 
+better for the party.  The Lords are in a corner; they've got to 
+fight now or never, and I think they will throw out the Budget.  
+Then they will go on fighting.  It is a fight that will last for 
+years.  They have a sort of social discipline, and you haven't.  You 
+Liberals will find yourselves with a country behind you, vaguely 
+indignant perhaps, but totally unprepared with any ideas whatever in 
+the matter, face to face with the problem of bringing the British 
+constitution up-to-date.  Anything may happen, provided only that it 
+is sufficiently absurd.  If the King backs the Lords--and I don't 
+see why he shouldn't--you have no Republican movement whatever to 
+fall back upon.  You lost it during the Era of Good Taste.  The 
+country, I say, is destitute of ideas, and you have no ideas to give 
+it.  I don't see what you will do. . . .  For my own part, I mean to 
+spend a year or so between a window and my writingdesk."
+
+I paused.  "I think, gentlemen," began Parvill, "that we hear all 
+this with very great regret. . . ."
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+My estrangement from Margaret stands in my memory now as something 
+that played itself out within the four walls of our house in Radnor 
+Square, which was, indeed, confined to those limits.  I went to and 
+fro between my house and the House of Commons, and the dining-rooms 
+and clubs and offices in which we were preparing our new 
+developments, in a state of aggressive and energetic dissociation, 
+in the nascent state, as a chemist would say.  I was free now, and 
+greedy for fresh combination.  I had a tremendous sense of released 
+energies.  I had got back to the sort of thing I could do, and to 
+the work that had been shaping itself for so long in my imagination.  
+Our purpose now was plain, bold, and extraordinarily congenial.  We 
+meant no less than to organise a new movement in English thought and 
+life, to resuscitate a Public Opinion and prepare the ground for a 
+revised and renovated ruling culture.
+
+For a time I seemed quite wonderfully able to do whatever I wanted 
+to do.  Shoesmith responded to my first advances.  We decided to 
+create a weekly paper as our nucleus, and Crupp and I set to work 
+forthwith to collect a group of writers and speakers, including 
+Esmeer, Britten, Lord Gane, Neal, and one or two younger men, which 
+should constitute a more or less definite editorial council about 
+me, and meet at a weekly lunch on Tuesday to sustain our general co-
+operations.  We marked our claim upon Toryism even in the colour of 
+our wrapper, and spoke of ourselves collectively as the Blue 
+Weeklies.  But our lunches were open to all sorts of guests, and our 
+deliberations were never of a character to control me effectively in 
+my editorial decisions.  My only influential councillor at first was 
+old Britten, who became my sub-editor.  It was curious how we two 
+had picked up our ancient intimacy again and resumed the easy give 
+and take of our speculative dreaming schoolboy days.
+
+For a time my life centred altogether upon this journalistic work.  
+Britten was an experienced journalist, and I had most of the 
+necessary instincts for the business.  We meant to make the paper 
+right and good down to the smallest detail, and we set ourselves at 
+this with extraordinary zeal.  It wasn't our intention to show our 
+political motives too markedly at first, and through all the dust 
+storm and tumult and stress of the political struggle of 1910, we 
+made a little intellectual oasis of good art criticism and good 
+writing.  It was the firm belief of nearly all of us that the Lords 
+were destined to be beaten badly in 1910, and our game was the 
+longer game of reconstruction that would begin when the shouting and 
+tumult of that immediate conflict were over.  Meanwhile we had to 
+get into touch with just as many good minds as possible.
+
+As we felt our feet, I developed slowly and carefully a broadly 
+conceived and consistent political attitude.  As I will explain 
+later, we were feminist from the outset, though that caused 
+Shoesmith and Gane great searching of heart; we developed Esmeer's 
+House of Lords reform scheme into a general cult of the aristocratic 
+virtues, and we did much to humanise and liberalise the narrow 
+excellencies of that Break-up of the Poor Law agitation, which had 
+been organised originally by Beatrice and Sidney Webb.  In addition, 
+without any very definite explanation to any one but Esmeer and 
+Isabel Rivers, and as if it was quite a small matter, I set myself 
+to secure a uniform philosophical quality in our columns.
+
+That, indeed, was the peculiar virtue and characteristic of the BLUE 
+WEEKLY.  I was now very definitely convinced that much of the 
+confusion and futility of contemporary thought was due to the 
+general need of metaphysical training. . . .  The great mass of 
+people--and not simply common people, but people active and 
+influential in intellectual things--are still quite untrained in the 
+methods of thought and absolutely innocent of any criticism of 
+method; it is scarcely a caricature to call their thinking a crazy 
+patchwork, discontinuous and chaotic.  They arrive at conclusions by 
+a kind of accident, and do not suspect any other way may be found to 
+their attainment.  A stage above this general condition stands that 
+minority of people who have at some time or other discovered general 
+terms and a certain use for generalisations.  They are--to fall back 
+on the ancient technicality--Realists of a crude sort.  When I say 
+Realist of course I mean Realist as opposed to Nominalist, and not 
+Realist in the almost diametrically different sense of opposition to 
+Idealist.  Such are the Baileys; such, to take their great 
+prototype, was Herbert Spencer (who couldn't read Kant); such are 
+whole regiments of prominent and entirely self-satisfied 
+contemporaries.  They go through queer little processes of 
+definition and generalisation and deduction with the completest 
+belief in the validity of the intellectual instrument they are 
+using.  They are Realists--Cocksurists--in matter of fact; 
+sentimentalists in behaviour.  The Baileys having got to this 
+glorious stage in mental development--it is glorious because it has 
+no doubts--were always talking about training "Experts" to apply the 
+same simple process to all the affairs of mankind.  Well, Realism 
+isn't the last word of human wisdom.  Modest-minded people, doubtful 
+people, subtle people, and the like--the kind of people William 
+James writes of as "tough-minded," go on beyond this methodical 
+happiness, and are forever after critical of premises and terms.  
+They are truer--and less confident.  They have reached scepticism 
+and the artistic method.  They have emerged into the new Nominalism.
+
+Both Isabel and I believe firmly that these differences of 
+intellectual method matter profoundly in the affairs of mankind, 
+that the collective mind of this intricate complex modern state can 
+only function properly upon neo-Nominalist lines.  This has always 
+been her side of our mental co-operation rather than mine.  Her mind 
+has the light movement that goes so often with natural mental power; 
+she has a wonderful art in illustration, and, as the reader probably 
+knows already, she writes of metaphysical matters with a rare charm 
+and vividness.  So far there has been no collection of her papers 
+published, but they are to be found not only in the BLUE WEEKLY 
+columns but scattered about the monthlies; many people must be 
+familiar with her style.  It was an intention we did much to realise 
+before our private downfall, that we would use the BLUE WEEKLY to 
+maintain a stream of suggestion against crude thinking, and at last 
+scarcely a week passed but some popular distinction, some large 
+imposing generalisation, was touched to flaccidity by her pen or 
+mine. . . .
+
+I was at great pains to give my philosophical, political, and social 
+matter the best literary and critical backing we could get in 
+London.  I hunted sedulously for good descriptive writing and good 
+criticism; I was indefatigable in my readiness to hear and consider, 
+if not to accept advice; I watched every corner of the paper, and 
+had a dozen men alert to get me special matter of the sort that 
+draws in the unattached reader.  The chief danger on the literary 
+side of a weekly is that it should fall into the hands of some 
+particular school, and this I watched for closely.  It seems 
+impossible to get vividness of apprehension and breadth of view 
+together in the same critic.  So it falls to the wise editor to 
+secure the first and impose the second.  Directly I detected the 
+shrill partisan note in our criticism, the attempt to puff a poor 
+thing because it was "in the right direction," or damn a vigorous 
+piece of work because it wasn't, I tackled the man and had it out 
+with him.  Our pay was good enough for that to matter a good deal. . . .
+
+Our distinctive little blue and white poster kept up its neat 
+persistent appeal to the public eye, and before 1911 was out, the 
+BLUE WEEKLY was printing twenty pages of publishers' advertisements, 
+and went into all the clubs in London and three-quarters of the 
+country houses where week-end parties gather together.  Its sale by 
+newsagents and bookstalls grew steadily.  One got more and more the 
+reassuring sense of being discussed, and influencing discussion.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Our office was at the very top of a big building near the end of 
+Adelphi Terrace; the main window beside my desk, a big undivided 
+window of plate glass, looked out upon Cleopatra's Needle, the 
+corner of the Hotel Cecil, the fine arches of Waterloo Bridge, and 
+the long sweep of south bank with its shot towers and chimneys, past 
+Bankside to the dimly seen piers of the great bridge below the 
+Tower.  The dome of St. Paul's just floated into view on the left 
+against the hotel facade.  By night and day, in every light and 
+atmosphere, it was a beautiful and various view, alive as a 
+throbbing heart; a perpetual flow of traffic ploughed and splashed 
+the streaming silver of the river, and by night the shapes of things 
+became velvet black and grey, and the water a shining mirror of 
+steel, wearing coruscating gems of light.  In the foreground the 
+Embankment trams sailed glowing by, across the water advertisements 
+flashed and flickered, trains went and came and a rolling drift of 
+smoke reflected unseen fires.  By day that spectacle was sometimes a 
+marvel of shining wet and wind-cleared atmosphere, sometimes a 
+mystery of drifting fog, sometimes a miracle of crowded details, 
+minutely fine.
+
+As I think of that view, so variously spacious in effect, I am back 
+there, and this sunlit paper might be lamp-lit and lying on my old 
+desk.  I see it all again, feel it all again.  In the foreground is 
+a green shaded lamp and crumpled galley slips and paged proofs and 
+letters, two or three papers in manuscript, and so forth.  In the 
+shadows are chairs and another table bearing papers and books, a 
+rotating bookcase dimly seen, a long window seat black in the 
+darkness, and then the cool unbroken spectacle of the window.  How 
+often I would watch some tram-car, some string of barges go from me 
+slowly out of sight.  The people were black animalculae by day, 
+clustering, collecting, dispersing, by night, they were phantom 
+face-specks coming, vanishing, stirring obscurely between light and 
+shade.
+
+I recall many hours at my desk in that room before the crisis came, 
+hours full of the peculiar happiness of effective strenuous work.  
+Once some piece of writing went on, holding me intent and forgetful 
+of time until I looked up from the warm circle of my electric lamp 
+to see the eastward sky above the pale silhouette of the Tower 
+Bridge, flushed and banded brightly with the dawn.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH
+
+THE BESETTING OF SEX
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+Art is selection and so is most autobiography.  But I am concerned 
+with a more tangled business than selection, I want to show a 
+contemporary man in relation to the state and social usage, and the 
+social organism in relation to that man.  To tell my story at all I 
+have to simplify.  I have given now the broad lines of my political 
+development, and how I passed from my initial liberal-socialism to 
+the conception of a constructive aristocracy.  I have tried to set 
+that out in the form of a man discovering himself.  Incidentally 
+that self-development led to a profound breach with my wife.  One 
+has read stories before of husband and wife speaking severally two 
+different languages and coming to an understanding.  But Margaret 
+and I began in her dialect, and, as I came more and more to use my 
+own, diverged.
+
+I had thought when I married that the matter of womankind had ended 
+for me.  I have tried to tell all that sex and women had been to me 
+up to my married life with Margaret and our fatal entanglement, 
+tried to show the queer, crippled, embarrassed and limited way in 
+which these interests break upon the life of a young man under 
+contemporary conditions.  I do not think my lot was a very 
+exceptional one.  I missed the chance of sisters and girl playmates, 
+but that is not an uncommon misadventure in an age of small 
+families; I never came to know any woman at all intimately until I 
+was married to Margaret.  My earlier love affairs were encounters of 
+sex, under conditions of furtiveness and adventure that made them 
+things in themselves, restricted and unilluminating.  From a boyish 
+disposition to be mystical and worshipping towards women I had 
+passed into a disregardful attitude, as though women were things 
+inferior or irrelevant, disturbers in great affairs.  For a time 
+Margaret had blotted out all other women; she was so different and 
+so near; she was like a person who stands suddenly in front of a 
+little window through which one has been surveying a crowd.  She 
+didn't become womankind for me so much as eliminate womankind from 
+my world. . . .  And then came this secret separation. . . .
+
+Until this estrangement and the rapid and uncontrollable development 
+of my relations with Isabel which chanced to follow it, I seemed to 
+have solved the problem of women by marriage and disregard.  I 
+thought these things were over.  I went about my career with 
+Margaret beside me, her brow slightly knit, her manner faintly 
+strenuous, helping, helping; and if we had not altogether abolished 
+sex we had at least so circumscribed and isolated it that it would 
+not have affected the general tenor of our lives in the slightest 
+degree if we had.
+
+And then, clothing itself more and more in the form of Isabel and 
+her problems, this old, this fundamental obsession of my life 
+returned.  The thing stole upon my mind so that I was unaware of its 
+invasion and how it was changing our long intimacy.  I have already 
+compared the lot of the modern publicist to Machiavelli writing in 
+his study; in his day women and sex were as disregarded in these 
+high affairs as, let us say, the chemistry of air or the will of the 
+beasts in the fields; in ours the case has altogether changed, and 
+woman has come now to stand beside the tall candles, half in the 
+light, half in the mystery of the shadows, besetting, interrupting, 
+demanding unrelentingly an altogether unprecedented attention.  I 
+feel that in these matters my life has been almost typical of my 
+time.  Woman insists upon her presence.  She is no longer a mere 
+physical need, an aesthetic bye-play, a sentimental background; she 
+is a moral and intellectual necessity in a man's life.  She comes to 
+the politician and demands, Is she a child or a citizen?  Is she a 
+thing or a soul?  She comes to the individual man, as she came to me 
+and asks, Is she a cherished weakling or an equal mate, an 
+unavoidable helper?  Is she to be tried and trusted or guarded and 
+controlled, bond or free?  For if she is a mate, one must at once 
+trust more and exact more, exacting toil, courage, and the hardest, 
+most necessary thing of all, the clearest, most shameless, 
+explicitness of understanding. . . .
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+In all my earlier imaginings of statecraft I had tacitly assumed 
+either that the relations of the sexes were all right or that anyhow 
+they didn't concern the state.  It was a matter they, whoever "they" 
+were, had to settle among themselves.  That sort of disregard was 
+possible then.  But even before 1906 there were endless intimations 
+that the dams holding back great reservoirs of discussion were 
+crumbling.  We political schemers were ploughing wider than any one 
+had ploughed before in the field of social reconstruction.  We had 
+also, we realised, to plough deeper.  We had to plough down at last 
+to the passionate elements of sexual relationship and examine and 
+decide upon them.
+
+The signs multiplied.  In a year or so half the police of the 
+metropolis were scarce sufficient to protect the House from one 
+clamorous aspect of the new problem.  The members went about 
+Westminster with an odd, new sense of being beset.  A good 
+proportion of us kept up the pretence that the Vote for Women was an 
+isolated fad, and the agitation an epidemic madness that would 
+presently pass.  But it was manifest to any one who sought more than 
+comfort in the matter that the streams of women and sympathisers and 
+money forthcoming marked far deeper and wider things than an idle 
+fancy for the franchise.  The existing laws and conventions of 
+relationship between Man and Woman were just as unsatisfactory a 
+disorder as anything else in our tumbled confusion of a world, and 
+that also was coming to bear upon statecraft.
+
+My first parliament was the parliament of the Suffragettes.  I don't 
+propose to tell here of that amazing campaign, with its absurdities 
+and follies, its courage and devotion.  There were aspects of that 
+unquenchable agitation that were absolutely heroic and aspects that 
+were absolutely pitiful.  It was unreasonable, unwise, and, except 
+for its one central insistence, astonishingly incoherent.  It was 
+amazingly effective.  The very incoherence of the demand witnessed, 
+I think, to the forces that lay behind it.  It wasn't a simple 
+argument based on a simple assumption; it was the first crude 
+expression of a great mass and mingling of convergent feelings, of a 
+widespread, confused persuasion among modern educated women that the 
+conditions of their relations with men were oppressive, ugly, 
+dishonouring, and had to be altered.  They had not merely adopted 
+the Vote as a symbol of equality; it was fairly manifest to me that, 
+given it, they meant to use it, and to use it perhaps even 
+vindictively and blindly, as a weapon against many things they had 
+every reason to hate. . . .
+
+I remember, with exceptional vividness, that great night early in 
+the session of 1909, when--I think it was--fifty or sixty women went 
+to prison.  I had been dining at the Barham's, and Lord Barham and I 
+came down from the direction of St. James's Park into a crowd and a 
+confusion outside the Caxton Hall.  We found ourselves drifting with 
+an immense multitude towards Parliament Square and parallel with a 
+silent, close-packed column of girls and women, for the most part 
+white-faced and intent.  I still remember the effect of their faces 
+upon me.  It was quite different from the general effect of staring 
+about and divided attention one gets in a political procession of 
+men.  There was an expression of heroic tension.
+
+There had been a pretty deliberate appeal on the part of the women's 
+organisers to the Unemployed, who had been demonstrating throughout 
+that winter, to join forces with the movement, and the result was 
+shown in the quality of the crowd upon the pavement.  It was an 
+ugly, dangerous-looking crowd, but as yet good-tempered and 
+sympathetic.  When at last we got within sight of the House the 
+square was a seething seat of excited people, and the array of 
+police on horse and on foot might have been assembled for a 
+revolutionary outbreak.  There were dense masses of people up 
+Whitehall, and right on to Westminster Bridge.  The scuffle that 
+ended in the arrests was the poorest explosion to follow such 
+stupendous preparations. . . .
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Later on in that year the women began a new attack.  Day and night, 
+and all through the long nights of the Budget sittings, at all the 
+piers of the gates of New Palace Yard and at St. Stephen's Porch, 
+stood women pickets, and watched us silently and reproachfully as we 
+went to and fro.  They were women of all sorts, though, of course, 
+the independent worker-class predominated.  There were grey-headed 
+old ladies standing there, sturdily charming in the rain; battered-
+looking, ambiguous women, with something of the desperate bitterness 
+of battered women showing in their eyes; north-country factory 
+girls; cheaply-dressed suburban women; trim, comfortable mothers of 
+families; valiant-eyed girl graduates and undergraduates; lank, 
+hungry-looking creatures, who stirred one's imagination; one very 
+dainty little woman in deep mourning, I recall, grave and steadfast, 
+with eyes fixed on distant things.  Some of those women looked 
+defiant, some timidly aggressive, some full of the stir of 
+adventure, some drooping with cold and fatigue.  The supply never 
+ceased.  I had a mortal fear that somehow the supply might halt or 
+cease.  I found that continual siege of the legislature 
+extraordinarily impressive--infinitely more impressive than the 
+feeble-forcible "ragging" of the more militant section.  I thought 
+of the appeal that must be going through the country, summoning the 
+women from countless scattered homes, rooms, colleges, to 
+Westminster.
+
+I remember too the petty little difficulty I felt whether I should 
+ignore these pickets altogether, or lift a hat as I hurried past 
+with averted eyes, or look them in the face as I did so.  Towards 
+the end the House evoked an etiquette of salutation.
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+There was a tendency, even on the part of its sympathisers, to treat 
+the whole suffrage agitation as if it were a disconnected issue, 
+irrelevant to all other broad developments of social and political 
+life.  We struggled, all of us, to ignore the indicating finger it 
+thrust out before us.  "Your schemes, for all their bigness," it 
+insisted to our reluctant, averted minds, "still don't go down to 
+the essential things. . . ."
+
+We have to go deeper, or our inadequate children's insufficient 
+children will starve amidst harvests of earless futility.  That 
+conservatism which works in every class to preserve in its 
+essentials the habitual daily life is all against a profounder 
+treatment of political issues.  The politician, almost as absurdly 
+as the philosopher, tends constantly, in spite of magnificent 
+preludes, vast intimations, to specialise himself out of the reality 
+he has so stupendously summoned--he bolts back to littleness.  The 
+world has to be moulded anew, he continues to admit, but without, he 
+adds, any risk of upsetting his week-end visits, his morning cup of 
+tea. . . .
+
+The discussion of the relations of men and women disturbs every one.  
+It reacts upon the private life of every one who attempts it.  And 
+at any particular time only a small minority have a personal 
+interest in changing the established state of affairs.  Habit and 
+interest are in a constantly recruited majority against conscious 
+change and adjustment in these matters.  Drift rules us.  The great 
+mass of people, and an overwhelming proportion of influential 
+people, are people who have banished their dreams and made their 
+compromise.  Wonderful and beautiful possibilities are no longer to 
+be thought about.  They have given up any aspirations for intense 
+love, their splendid offspring, for keen delights, have accepted a 
+cultivated kindliness and an uncritical sense of righteousness as 
+their compensation.  It's a settled affair with them, a settled, 
+dangerous affair.  Most of them fear, and many hate, the slightest 
+reminder of those abandoned dreams.  As Dayton once said to the 
+Pentagram Circle, when we were discussing the problem of a universal 
+marriage and divorce law throughout the Empire, "I am for leaving 
+all these things alone."  And then, with a groan in his voice, 
+"Leave them alone!  Leave them all alone!"
+
+That was his whole speech for the evening, in a note of suppressed 
+passion, and presently, against all our etiquette, he got up and 
+went out.
+
+For some years after my marriage, I too was for leaving them alone.  
+I developed a dread and dislike for romance, for emotional music, 
+for the human figure in art--turning my heart to landscape.  I 
+wanted to sneer at lovers and their ecstasies, and was uncomfortable 
+until I found the effective sneer.  In matters of private morals 
+these were my most uncharitable years.  I didn't want to think of 
+these things any more for ever.  I hated the people whose talk or 
+practice showed they were not of my opinion.  I wanted to believe 
+that their views were immoral and objectionable and contemptible, 
+because I had decided to treat them as at that level.  I was, in 
+fact, falling into the attitude of the normal decent man.
+
+And yet one cannot help thinking!  The sensible moralised man finds 
+it hard to escape the stream of suggestion that there are still 
+dreams beyond these commonplace acquiescences,--the appeal of beauty 
+suddenly shining upon one, the mothlike stirrings of serene summer 
+nights, the sweetness of distant music. . . .
+
+It is one of the paradoxical factors in our public life at the 
+present time, which penalises abandonment to love so abundantly and 
+so heavily, that power, influence and control fall largely to 
+unencumbered people and sterile people and people who have married 
+for passionless purposes, people whose very deficiency in feeling 
+has left them free to follow ambition, people beautyblind, who don't 
+understand what it is to fall in love, what it is to desire children 
+or have them, what it is to feel in their blood and bodies the 
+supreme claim of good births and selective births above all other 
+affairs in life, people almost of necessity averse from this most 
+fundamental aspect of existence. . . .
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+It wasn't, however, my deepening sympathy with and understanding of 
+the position of women in general, or the change in my ideas about 
+all these intimate things my fast friendship with Isabel was 
+bringing about, that led me to the heretical views I have in the 
+last five years dragged from the region of academic and timid 
+discussion into the field of practical politics.  Those influences, 
+no doubt, have converged to the same end, and given me a powerful 
+emotional push upon my road, but it was a broader and colder view of 
+things that first determined me in my attempt to graft the Endowment 
+of Motherhood in some form or other upon British Imperialism.  Now 
+that I am exiled from the political world, it is possible to 
+estimate just how effectually that grafting has been done.
+
+I have explained how the ideas of a trained aristocracy and a 
+universal education grew to paramount importance in my political 
+scheme.  It is but a short step from this to the question of the 
+quantity and quality of births in the community, and from that again 
+to these forbidden and fear-beset topics of marriage, divorce, and 
+the family organisation.  A sporadic discussion of these aspects had 
+been going on for years, a Eugenic society existed, and articles on 
+the Falling Birth Rate, and the Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit 
+were staples of the monthly magazines.  But beyond an intermittent 
+scolding of prosperous childless people in general--one never 
+addressed them in particular--nothing was done towards arresting 
+those adverse processes.  Almost against my natural inclination, I 
+found myself forced to go into these things.  I came to the 
+conclusion that under modern conditions the isolated private family, 
+based on the existing marriage contract, was failing in its work.  
+It wasn't producing enough children, and children good enough and 
+well trained enough for the demands of the developing civilised 
+state.  Our civilisation was growing outwardly, and decaying in its 
+intimate substance, and unless it was presently to collapse, some 
+very extensive and courageous reorganisation was needed.  The old 
+haphazard system of pairing, qualified more and more by worldly 
+discretions, no longer secures a young population numerous enough or 
+good enough for the growing needs and possibilities of our Empire.  
+Statecraft sits weaving splendid garments, no doubt, but with a 
+puny, ugly, insufficient baby in the cradle.
+
+No one so far has dared to take up this problem as a present 
+question for statecraft, but it comes unheralded, unadvocated, and 
+sits at every legislative board.  Every improvement is provisional 
+except the improvement of the race, and it became more and more 
+doubtful to me if we were improving the race at all!  Splendid and 
+beautiful and courageous people must come together and have 
+children, women with their fine senses and glorious devotion must be 
+freed from the net that compels them to be celibate, compels them to 
+be childless and useless, or to bear children ignobly to men whom 
+need and ignorance and the treacherous pressure of circumstances 
+have forced upon them.  We all know that, and so few dare even to 
+whisper it for fear that they should seem, in seeking to save the 
+family, to threaten its existence.  It is as if a party of pigmies 
+in a not too capacious room had been joined by a carnivorous giant--
+and decided to go on living happily by cutting him dead. . . .
+
+The problem the developing civilised state has to solve is how it 
+can get the best possible increase under the best possible 
+conditions.  I became more and more convinced that the independent 
+family unit of to-day, in which the man is master of the wife and 
+owner of the children, in which all are dependent upon him, 
+subordinated to his enterprises and liable to follow his fortunes up 
+or down, does not supply anything like the best conceivable 
+conditions.  We want to modernise the family footing altogether.  An 
+enormous premium both in pleasure and competitive efficiency is put 
+upon voluntary childlessness, and enormous inducements are held out 
+to women to subordinate instinctive and selective preferences to 
+social and material considerations.
+
+The practical reaction of modern conditions upon the old tradition 
+of the family is this: that beneath the pretence that nothing is 
+changing, secretly and with all the unwholesomeness of secrecy 
+everything is changed.  Offspring fall away, the birth rate falls 
+and falls most among just the most efficient and active and best 
+adapted classes in the community.  The species is recruited from 
+among its failures and from among less civilised aliens.  
+Contemporary civilisations are in effect burning the best of their 
+possible babies in the furnaces that run the machinery.  In the 
+United States the native Anglo-American strain has scarcely 
+increased at all since 1830, and in most Western European countries 
+the same is probably true of the ablest and most energetic elements 
+in the community.  The women of these classes still remain legally 
+and practically dependent and protected, with the only natural 
+excuse for their dependence gone. . . .
+
+The modern world becomes an immense spectacle of unsatisfactory 
+groupings; here childless couples bored to death in the hopeless 
+effort to sustain an incessant honeymoon, here homes in which a 
+solitary child grows unsocially, here small two or three-child homes 
+that do no more than continue the culture of the parents at a great 
+social cost, here numbers of unhappy educated but childless married 
+women, here careless, decivilised fecund homes, here orphanages and 
+asylums for the heedlessly begotten.  It is just the disorderly 
+proliferation of Bromstead over again, in lives instead of in 
+houses.
+
+What is the good, what is the common sense, of rectifying 
+boundaries, pushing research and discovery, building cities, 
+improving all the facilities of life, making great fleets, waging 
+wars, while this aimless decadence remains the quality of the 
+biological outlook? . . .
+
+It is difficult now to trace how I changed from my early aversion 
+until I faced this mass of problems.  But so far back as 1910 I had 
+it clear in my mind that I would rather fail utterly than 
+participate in all the surrenders of mind and body that are implied 
+in Dayton's snarl of "Leave it alone; leave it all alone!"  Marriage 
+and the begetting and care of children, is the very ground substance 
+in the life of the community.  In a world in which everything 
+changes, in which fresh methods, fresh adjustments and fresh ideas 
+perpetually renew the circumstances of life, it is preposterous that 
+we should not even examine into these matters, should rest content 
+to be ruled by the uncriticised traditions of a barbaric age.
+
+Now, it seems to me that the solution of this problem is also the 
+solution of the woman's individual problem.  The two go together, 
+are right and left of one question.  The only conceivable way out 
+from our IMPASSE lies in the recognition of parentage, that is to 
+say of adequate mothering, as no longer a chance product of 
+individual passions but a service rendered to the State.  Women must 
+become less and less subordinated to individual men, since this 
+works out in a more or less complete limitation, waste, and 
+sterilisation of their essentially social function; they must become 
+more and more subordinated as individually independent citizens to 
+the collective purpose.  Or, to express the thing by a familiar 
+phrase, the highly organised, scientific state we desire must, if it 
+is to exist at all, base itself not upon the irresponsible man-ruled 
+family, but upon the matriarchal family, the citizen-ship and 
+freedom of women and the public endowment of motherhood.
+
+After two generations of confused and experimental revolt it grows 
+clear to modern women that a conscious, deliberate motherhood and 
+mothering is their special function in the State, and that a 
+personal subordination to an individual man with an unlimited power 
+of control over this intimate and supreme duty is a degradation.  No 
+contemporary woman of education put to the test is willing to 
+recognise any claim a man can make upon her but the claim of her 
+freely-given devotion to him.  She wants the reality of her choice 
+and she means "family" while a man too often means only possession.  
+This alters the spirit of the family relationships fundamentally.  
+Their form remains just what it was when woman was esteemed a 
+pretty, desirable, and incidentally a child-producing, chattel.  
+Against these time-honoured ideas the new spirit of womanhood 
+struggles in shame, astonishment, bitterness, and tears. . . .
+
+I confess myself altogether feminist.  I have no doubts in the 
+matter.  I want this coddling and browbeating of women to cease.  I 
+want to see women come in, free and fearless, to a full 
+participation in the collective purpose of mankind.  Women, I am 
+convinced, are as fine as men; they can be as wise as men; they are 
+capable of far greater devotion than men.  I want to see them 
+citizens, with a marriage law framed primarily for them and for 
+their protection and the good of the race, and not for men's 
+satisfactions.  I want to see them bearing and rearing good children 
+in the State as a generously rewarded public duty and service, 
+choosing their husbands freely and discerningly, and in no way 
+enslaved by or subordinated to the men they have chosen.  The social 
+consciousness of women seems to me an unworked, an almost untouched 
+mine of wealth for the constructive purpose of the world.  I want to 
+change the respective values of the family group altogether, and 
+make the home indeed the women's kingdom and the mother the owner 
+and responsible guardian of her children.
+
+It is no use pretending that this is not novel and revolutionary; it 
+is.  The Endowment of Motherhood implies a new method of social 
+organization, a rearrangement of the social unit, untried in human 
+expericnce--as untried as electric traction was or flying in 1800.  
+Of course, it may work out to modify men's ideas of marriage 
+profoundly.  To me that is a secondary consideration.  I do not 
+believe that particular assertion myself, because I am convinced 
+that a practical monogamy is a psychological necessity to the mass 
+of civilised people.  But even if I did believe it I should still 
+keep to my present line, because it is the only line that will 
+prevent a highly organised civilisation from ending in biological 
+decay.  The public Endowment of Motherhood is the only possible way 
+which will ensure the permanently developing civilised state at 
+which all constructive minds are aiming.  A point is reached in the 
+life-history of a civilisation when either this reconstruction must 
+be effected or the quality and MORALE of the population prove 
+insufficient for the needs of the developing organisation.  It is 
+not so much moral decadence that will destroy us as moral 
+inadaptability.  The old code fails under the new needs.  The only 
+alternative to this profound reconstruction is a decay in human 
+quality and social collapse.  Either this unprecedented 
+rearrangement must be achieved by our civilisation, or it must 
+presently come upon a phase of disorder and crumble and perish, as 
+Rome perished, as France declines, as the strain of the Pilgrim 
+Fathers dwindles out of America.  Whatever hope there may be in the 
+attempt therefore, there is no alternative to the attempt.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+I wanted political success now dearly enough, but not at the price 
+of constructive realities.  These questions were no doubt 
+monstrously dangerous in the political world; there wasn't a 
+politician alive who didn't look scared at the mention of "The 
+Family," but if raising these issues were essential to the social 
+reconstructions on which my life was set, that did not matter.  It 
+only implied that I should take them up with deliberate caution.  
+There was no release because of risk or difficulty.
+
+The question of whether I should commit myself to some open project 
+in this direction was going on in my mind concurrently with my 
+speculations about a change of party, like bass and treble in a 
+complex piece of music.  The two drew to a conclusion together.  I 
+would not only go over to Imperialism, but I would attempt to 
+biologise Imperialism.
+
+I thought at first that I was undertaking a monstrous uphill task.  
+But as I came to look into the possibilities of the matter, a strong 
+persuasion grew up in my mind that this panic fear of legislative 
+proposals affecting the family basis was excessive, that things were 
+much riper for development in this direction than old-experienced 
+people out of touch with the younger generation imagined, that to 
+phrase the thing in a parliamentary fashion, "something might be 
+done in the constituencies" with the Endowment of Motherhood 
+forthwith, provided only that it was made perfectly clear that 
+anything a sane person could possibly intend by "morality" was left 
+untouched by these proposals.
+
+I went to work very carefully.  I got Roper of the DAILY TELEPHONE 
+and Burkett of the DIAL to try over a silly-season discussion of 
+State Help for Mothers, and I put a series of articles on eugenics, 
+upon the fall in the birth-rate, and similar topics in the BLUE 
+WEEKLY, leading up to a tentative and generalised advocacy of the 
+public endowment of the nation's children.  I was more and more 
+struck by the acceptance won by a sober and restrained presentation 
+of this suggestion.
+
+And then, in the fourth year of the BLUE WEEKLY'S career, came the 
+Handitch election, and I was forced by the clamour of my antagonist, 
+and very willingly forced, to put my convictions to the test.  I 
+returned triumphantly to Westminster with the Public Endowment of 
+Motherhood as part of my open profession and with the full approval 
+of the party press.  Applauding benches of Imperialists cheered me 
+on my way to the table between the whips.
+
+That second time I took the oath I was not one of a crowd of new 
+members, but salient, an event, a symbol of profound changes and new 
+purposes in the national life.
+
+Here it is my political book comes to an end, and in a sense my book 
+ends altogether.  For the rest is but to tell how I was swept out of 
+this great world of political possibilities.  I close this Third 
+Book as I opened it, with an admission of difficulties and 
+complexities, but now with a pile of manuscript before me I have to 
+confess them unsurmounted and still entangled.
+
+Yet my aim was a final simplicity.  I have sought to show my growing 
+realisation that the essential quality of all political and social 
+effort is the development of a great race mind behind the interplay 
+of individual lives.  That is the collective human reality, the 
+basis of morality, the purpose of devotion.  To that our lives must 
+be given, from that will come the perpetual fresh release and 
+further ennoblement of individual lives. . . .
+
+I have wanted to make that idea of a collective mind play in this 
+book the part United Italy plays in Machiavelli's PRINCE.  I have 
+called it the hinterland of reality, shown it accumulating a 
+dominating truth and rightness which must force men's now sporadic 
+motives more and more into a disciplined and understanding relation 
+to a plan.  And I have tried to indicate how I sought to serve this 
+great clarification of our confusions. . . .
+
+Now I come back to personality and the story of my self-betrayal, 
+and how it is I have had to leave all that far-reaching scheme of 
+mine, a mere project and beginning for other men to take or leave as 
+it pleases them.
+
+
+
+BOOK THE FOURTH
+
+ISABEL
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST
+
+LOVE AND SUCCESS
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+I come to the most evasive and difficult part of my story, which is 
+to tell how Isabel and I have made a common wreck of our joint 
+lives.
+
+It is not the telling of one simple disastrous accident.  There was 
+a vein in our natures that led to this collapse, gradually and at 
+this point and that it crept to the surface.  One may indeed see our 
+destruction--for indeed politically we could not be more extinct if 
+we had been shot dead--in the form of a catastrophe as disconnected 
+and conclusive as a meteoric stone falling out of heaven upon two 
+friends and crushing them both.  But I do not think that is true to 
+our situation or ourselves.  We were not taken by surprise.  The 
+thing was in us and not from without, it was akin to our way of 
+thinking and our habitual attitudes; it had, for all its impulsive 
+effect, a certain necessity.  We might have escaped no doubt, as two 
+men at a hundred yards may shoot at each other with pistols for a 
+considerable time and escape.  But it isn't particularly reasonable 
+to talk of the contrariety of fate if they both get hit.
+
+Isabel and I were dangerous to each other for several years of 
+friendship, and not quite unwittingly so.
+
+In writing this, moreover, there is a very great difficulty in 
+steering my way between two equally undesirable tones in the 
+telling.  In the first place I do not want to seem to confess my 
+sins with a penitence I am very doubtful if I feel.  Now that I have 
+got Isabel we can no doubt count the cost of it and feel 
+unquenchable regrets, but I am not sure whether, if we could be put 
+back now into such circumstances as we were in a year ago, or two 
+years ago, whether with my eyes fully open I should not do over 
+again very much as I did.  And on the other hand I do not want to 
+justify the things we have done.  We are two bad people--if there is 
+to be any classification of good and bad at all, we have acted 
+badly, and quite apart from any other considerations we've largely 
+wasted our own very great possibilities.  But it is part of a queer 
+humour that underlies all this, that I find myself slipping again 
+and again into a sentimental treatment of our case that is as 
+unpremeditated as it is insincere.  When I am a little tired after a 
+morning's writing I find the faint suggestion getting into every 
+other sentence that our blunders and misdeeds embodied, after the 
+fashion of the prophet Hosea, profound moral truths.  Indeed, I feel 
+so little confidence in my ability to keep this altogether out of my 
+book that I warn the reader here that in spite of anything he may 
+read elsewhere in the story, intimating however shyly an esoteric 
+and exalted virtue in our proceedings, the plain truth of this 
+business is that Isabel and I wanted each other with a want entirely 
+formless, inconsiderate, and overwhelming.  And though I could tell 
+you countless delightful and beautiful things about Isabel, were 
+this a book in her praise, I cannot either analyse that want or 
+account for its extreme intensity.
+
+I will confess that deep in my mind there is a belief in a sort of 
+wild rightness about any love that is fraught with beauty, but that 
+eludes me and vanishes again, and is not, I feel, to be put with the 
+real veracities and righteousnesses and virtues in the paddocks and 
+menageries of human reason. . . .
+
+We have already a child, and Margaret was childless, and I find 
+myself prone to insist upon that, as if it was a justification.  
+But, indeed, when we became lovers there was small thought of 
+Eugenics between us.  Ours was a mutual and not a philoprogenitive 
+passion.  Old Nature behind us may have had such purposes with us, 
+but it is not for us to annex her intentions by a moralising 
+afterthought.  There isn't, in fact, any decent justification for us 
+whatever--at that the story must stand.
+
+But if there is no justification there is at least a very effective 
+excuse in the mental confusedness of our time.  The evasion of that 
+passionately thorough exposition of belief and of the grounds of 
+morality, which is the outcome of the mercenary religious 
+compromises of the late Vatican period, the stupid suppression of 
+anything but the most timid discussion of sexual morality in our 
+literature and drama, the pervading cultivated and protected muddle-
+headedness, leaves mentally vigorous people with relatively enormous 
+possibilities of destruction and little effective help.  They find 
+themselves confronted by the habits and prejudices of manifestly 
+commonplace people, and by that extraordinary patched-up 
+Christianity, the cult of a "Bromsteadised" deity, diffused, 
+scattered, and aimless, which hides from examination and any 
+possibility of faith behind the plea of good taste.  A god about 
+whom there is delicacy is far worse than no god at all.  We are 
+FORCED to be laws unto ourselves and to live experimentally.  It is 
+inevitable that a considerable fraction of just that bolder, more 
+initiatory section of the intellectual community, the section that 
+can least be spared from the collective life in a period of trial 
+and change, will drift into such emotional crises and such disaster 
+as overtook us.  Most perhaps will escape, but many will go down, 
+many more than the world can spare.  It is the unwritten law of all 
+our public life, and the same holds true of America, that an honest 
+open scandal ends a career.  England in the last quarter of a 
+century has wasted half a dozen statesmen on this score; she would, 
+I believe, reject Nelson now if he sought to serve her.  Is it 
+wonderful that to us fretting here in exile this should seem the 
+cruellest as well as the most foolish elimination of a necessary 
+social element?  It destroys no vice; for vice hides by nature.  It 
+not only rewards dullness as if it were positive virtue, but sets an 
+enormous premium upon hypocrisy.  That is my case, and that is why I 
+am telling this side of my story with so much explicitness.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+Ever since the Kinghamstead election I had maintained what seemed a 
+desultory friendship with Isabel.  At first it was rather Isabel 
+kept it up than I.  Whenever Margaret and I went down to that villa, 
+with its three or four acres of garden and shrubbery about it, which 
+fulfilled our election promise to live at Kinghamstead, Isabel would 
+turn up in a state of frank cheerfulness, rejoicing at us, and talk 
+all she was reading and thinking to me, and stay for all the rest of 
+the day.  In her shameless liking for me she was as natural as a 
+savage.  She would exercise me vigorously at tennis, while Margaret 
+lay and rested her back in the afternoon, or guide me for some long 
+ramble that dodged the suburban and congested patches of the 
+constituency with amazing skill.  She took possession of me in that 
+unabashed, straight-minded way a girl will sometimes adopt with a 
+man, chose my path or criticised my game with a motherly solicitude 
+for my welfare that was absurd and delightful.  And we talked.  We 
+discussed and criticised the stories of novels, scraps of history, 
+pictures, social questions, socialism, the policy of the Government.  
+She was young and most unevenly informed, but she was amazingly 
+sharp and quick and good.  Never before in my life had I known a 
+girl of her age, or a woman of her quality.  I had never dreamt 
+there was such talk in the world.  Kinghamstead became a lightless 
+place when she went to Oxford.  Heaven knows how much that may not 
+have precipitated my abandonment of the seat!
+
+She went to Ridout College, Oxford, and that certainly weighed with 
+me when presently after my breach with the Liberals various little 
+undergraduate societies began to ask for lectures and discussions.  
+I favoured Oxford.  I declared openly I did so because of her.  At 
+that time I think we neither of us suspected the possibility of 
+passion that lay like a coiled snake in the path before us.  It 
+seemed to us that we had the quaintest, most delightful friendship 
+in the world; she was my pupil, and I was her guide, philosopher, 
+and friend.  People smiled indulgently--even Margaret smiled 
+indulgently--at our attraction for one another.
+
+Such friendships are not uncommon nowadays--among easy-going, 
+liberal-minded people.  For the most part, there's no sort of harm, 
+as people say, in them.  The two persons concerned are never 
+supposed to think of the passionate love that hovers so close to the 
+friendship, or if they do, then they banish the thought.  I think we 
+kept the thought as permanently in exile as any one could do.  If it 
+did in odd moments come into our heads we pretended elaborately it 
+wasn't there.
+
+Only we were both very easily jealous of each other's attention, and 
+tremendously insistent upon each other's preference.
+
+I remember once during the Oxford days an intimation that should 
+have set me thinking, and I suppose discreetly disentangling myself.  
+It was one Sunday afternoon, and it must have been about May, for 
+the trees and shrubs of Ridout College were gay with blossom, and 
+fresh with the new sharp greens of spring.  I had walked talking 
+with Isabel and a couple of other girls through the wide gardens of 
+the place, seen and criticised the new brick pond, nodded to the 
+daughter of this friend and that in the hammocks under the trees, 
+and picked a way among the scattered tea-parties on the lawn to our 
+own circle on the grass under a Siberian crab near the great bay 
+window.  There I sat and ate great quantities of cake, and discussed 
+the tactics of the Suffragettes.  I had made some comments upon the 
+spirit of the movement in an address to the men in Pembroke, and it 
+had got abroad, and a group of girls and women dons were now having 
+it out with me.
+
+I forget the drift of the conversation, or what it was made Isabel 
+interrupt me.  She did interrupt me.  She bad been lying prone on 
+the ground at my right hand, chin on fists, listening thoughtfully, 
+and I was sitting beside old Lady Evershead on a garden seat.  I 
+turned to Isabel's voice, and saw her face uplifted, and her dear 
+cheeks and nose and forehead all splashed and barred with sunlight 
+and the shadows of the twigs of the trees behind me.  And something--
+an infinite tenderness, stabbed me.  It was a keen physical 
+feeling, like nothing I had ever felt before.  It had a quality of 
+tears in it.  For the first time in my narrow and concentrated life 
+another human being had really thrust into my being and gripped my 
+very heart.
+
+Our eyes met perplexed for an extraordinary moment.  Then I turned 
+back and addressed myself a little stiffly to the substance of her 
+intervention.  For some time I couldn't look at her again.
+
+From that time forth I knew I loved Isabel beyond measure.
+
+Yet it is curious that it never occurred to me for a year or so that 
+this was likely to be a matter of passion between us.  I have told 
+how definitely I put my imagination into harness in those matters at 
+my marriage, and I was living now in a world of big interests, where 
+there is neither much time nor inclination for deliberate love-
+making.  I suppose there is a large class of men who never meet a 
+girl or a woman without thinking of sex, who meet a friend's 
+daughter and decide: "Mustn't get friendly with her--wouldn't DO," 
+and set invisible bars between themselves and all the wives in the 
+world.  Perhaps that is the way to live.  Perhaps there is no other 
+method than this effectual annihilation of half--and the most 
+sympathetic and attractive half--of the human beings in the world, 
+so far as any frank intercourse is concerned.  I am quite convinced 
+anyhow that such a qualified intimacy as ours, such a drifting into 
+the sense of possession, such untrammeled conversation with an 
+invisible, implacable limit set just where the intimacy glows, it is 
+no kind of tolerable compromise.  If men and women are to go so far 
+together, they must be free to go as far as they may want to go, 
+without the vindictive destruction that has come upon us.  On the 
+basis of the accepted codes the jealous people are right, and the 
+liberal-minded ones are playing with fire.  If people are not to 
+love, then they must be kept apart.  If they are not to be kept 
+apart, then we must prepare for an unprecedented toleration of 
+lovers.
+
+Isabel was as unforeseeing as I to begin with, but sex marches into 
+the life of an intelligent girl with demands and challenges far more 
+urgent than the mere call of curiosity and satiable desire that 
+comes to a young man.  No woman yet has dared to tell the story of 
+that unfolding.  She attracted men, and she encouraged them, and 
+watched them, and tested them, and dismissed them, and concealed the 
+substance of her thoughts about them in the way that seems 
+instinctive in a natural-minded girl.  There was even an engagement--
+amidst the protests and disapproval of the college authorities.  I 
+never saw the man, though she gave me a long history of the affair, 
+to which I listened with a forced and insincere sympathy.  She 
+struck me oddly as taking the relationship for a thing in itself, 
+and regardless of its consequences.  After a time she became silent 
+about him, and then threw him over; and by that time, I think, for 
+all that she was so much my junior, she knew more about herself and 
+me than I was to know for several years to come.
+
+We didn't see each other for some months after my resignation, but 
+we kept up a frequent correspondence.  She said twice over that she 
+wanted to talk to me, that letters didn't convey what one wanted to 
+say, and I went up to Oxford pretty definitely to see her--though I 
+combined it with one or two other engagements--somewhere in 
+February.  Insensibly she had become important enough for me to make 
+journeys for her.
+
+But we didn't see very much of one another on that occasion.  There 
+was something in the air between us that made a faint embarrassment; 
+the mere fact, perhaps, that she had asked me to come up.
+
+A year before she would have dashed off with me quite unscrupulously 
+to talk alone, carried me off to her room for an hour with a minute 
+of chaperonage to satisfy the rules.  Now there was always some one 
+or other near us that it seemed impossible to exorcise.
+
+We went for a walk on the Sunday afternoon with old Fortescue, K. 
+C., who'd come up to see his two daughters, both great friends of 
+Isabel's, and some mute inglorious don whose name I forget, but who 
+was in a state of marked admiration for her.  The six of us played a 
+game of conversational entanglements throughout, and mostly I was 
+impressing the Fortescue girls with the want of mental concentration 
+possible in a rising politician.  We went down Carfex, I remember, 
+to Folly Bridge, and inspected the Barges, and then back by way of 
+Merton to the Botanic Gardens and Magdalen Bridge.  And in the 
+Botanic Gardens she got almost her only chance with me.
+
+"Last months at Oxford," she said.
+
+"And then?" I asked.
+
+"I'm coming to London," she said.
+
+"To write?"
+
+She was silent for a moment.  Then she said abruptly, with that 
+quick flush of hers and a sudden boldness in her eyes: "I'm going to 
+work with you.  Why shouldn't I?"
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Here, again, I suppose I had a fair warning of the drift of things.  
+I seem to remember myself in the train to Paddington, sitting with a 
+handful of papers--galley proofs for the BLUE WEEKLY, I suppose--on 
+my lap, and thinking about her and that last sentence of hers, and 
+all that it might mean to me.
+
+It is very hard to recall even the main outline of anything so 
+elusive as a meditation.  I know that the idea of working with her 
+gripped me, fascinated me.  That my value in her life seemed growing 
+filled me with pride and a kind of gratitude.  I was already in no 
+doubt that her value in my life was tremendous.  It made it none the 
+less, that in those days I was obsessed by the idea that she was 
+transitory, and bound to go out of my life again.  It is no good 
+trying to set too fine a face upon this complex business, there is 
+gold and clay and sunlight and savagery in every love story, and a 
+multitude of elvish elements peeped out beneath the fine rich 
+curtain of affection that masked our future.  I've never properly 
+weighed how immensely my vanity was gratified by her clear 
+preference for me.  Nor can I for a moment determine how much 
+deliberate intention I hide from myself in this affair.
+
+Certainly I think some part of me must have been saying in the 
+train: "Leave go of her.  Get away from her.  End this now."  I 
+can't have been so stupid as not to have had that in my mind. . . .
+
+If she had been only a beautiful girl in love with me, I think I 
+could have managed the situation.  Once or twice since my marriage 
+and before Isabel became of any significance in my life, there had 
+been incidents with other people, flashes of temptation--no telling 
+is possible of the thing resisted.  I think that mere beauty and 
+passion would not have taken me.  But between myself and Isabel 
+things were incurably complicated by the intellectual sympathy we 
+had, the jolly march of our minds together.  That has always 
+mattered enormously.  I should have wanted her company nearly as 
+badly if she had been some crippled old lady; we would have hunted 
+shoulder to shoulder, as two men.  Only two men would never have had 
+the patience and readiness for one another we two had.  I had never 
+for years met any one with whom I could be so carelessly sure of 
+understanding or to whom I could listen so easily and fully.  She 
+gave me, with an extraordinary completeness, that rare, precious 
+effect of always saying something fresh, and yet saying it so that 
+it filled into and folded about all the little recesses and corners 
+of my mind with an infinite, soft familiarity.  It is impossible to 
+explain that.  It is like trying to explain why her voice, her voice 
+heard speaking to any one--heard speaking in another room--pleased 
+my ears.
+
+She was the only Oxford woman who took a first that year.  She spent 
+the summer in Scotland and Yorkshire, writing to me continually of 
+all she now meant to do, and stirring my imagination.  She came to 
+London for the autumn session.  For a time she stayed with old Lady 
+Colbeck, but she fell out with her hostess when it became clear she 
+wanted to write, not novels, but journalism, and then she set every 
+one talking by taking a flat near Victoria and installing as her 
+sole protector an elderly German governess she had engaged through a 
+scholastic agency.  She began writing, not in that copious flood the 
+undisciplined young woman of gifts is apt to produce, but in exactly 
+the manner of an able young man, experimenting with forms, 
+developing the phrasing of opinions, taking a definite line.  She 
+was, of course, tremendously discussed.  She was disapproved of, but 
+she was invited out to dinner.  She got rather a reputation for the 
+management of elderly distinguished men.  It was an odd experience 
+to follow Margaret's soft rustle of silk into some big drawing-room 
+and discover my snub-nosed girl in the blue sack transformed into a 
+shining creature in the soft splendour of pearls and ivory-white and 
+lace, and with a silver band about her dusky hair.
+
+For a time we did not meet very frequently, though always she 
+professed an unblushing preference for my company, and talked my 
+views and sought me out.  Then her usefulness upon the BLUE WEEKLY 
+began to link us closelier.  She would come up to the office, and 
+sit by the window, and talk over the proofs of the next week's 
+articles, going through my intentions with a keen investigatory 
+scalpel.  Her talk always puts me in mind of a steel blade.  Her 
+writing became rapidly very good; she had a wit and a turn of the 
+phrase that was all her own.  We seemed to have forgotten the little 
+shadow of embarrassment that had fallen over our last meeting at 
+Oxford.  Everything seemed natural and easy between us in those 
+days; a little unconventional, but that made it all the brighter.
+
+We developed something like a custom of walks, about once a week or 
+so, and letters and notes became frequent.  I won't pretend things 
+were not keenly personal between us, but they had an air of being 
+innocently mental.  She used to call me "Master" in our talks, a 
+monstrous and engaging flattery, and I was inordinately proud to 
+have her as my pupil.  Who wouldn't have been?  And we went on at 
+that distance for a long time--until within a year of the Handitch 
+election.
+
+After Lady Colbeck threw her up as altogether too "intellectual" for 
+comfortable control, Isabel was taken up by the Balfes in a less 
+formal and compromising manner, and week-ended with them and their 
+cousin Leonora Sparling, and spent large portions of her summer with 
+them in Herefordshire.  There was a lover or so in that time, men 
+who came a little timidly at this brilliant young person with the 
+frank manner and the Amazonian mind, and, she declared, received her 
+kindly refusals with manifest relief.  And Arnold Shoesmith struck 
+up a sort of friendship that oddly imitated mine.  She took a liking 
+to him because he was clumsy and shy and inexpressive; she embarked 
+upon the dangerous interest of helping him to find his soul.  I had 
+some twinges of jealousy about that.  I didn't see the necessity of 
+him.  He invaded her time, and I thought that might interfere with 
+her work.  If their friendship stole some hours from Isabel's 
+writing, it did not for a long while interfere with our walks or our 
+talks, or the close intimacy we had together.
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+Then suddenly Isabel and I found ourselves passionately in love.
+
+The change came so entirely without warning or intention that I find 
+it impossible now to tell the order of its phases.  What disturbed 
+pebble started the avalanche I cannot trace.  Perhaps it was simply 
+that the barriers between us and this masked aspect of life had been 
+wearing down unperceived.
+
+And there came a change in Isabel.  It was like some change in the 
+cycle of nature, like the onset of spring--a sharp brightness, an 
+uneasiness.  She became restless with her work; little encounters 
+with men began to happen, encounters not quite in the quality of the 
+earlier proposals; and then came an odd incident of which she told 
+me, but somehow, I felt, didn't tell me completely.  She told me all 
+she was able to tell me.  She had been at a dance at the Ropers', 
+and a man, rather well known in London, had kissed her.  The thing 
+amazed her beyond measure.  It was the sort of thing immediately 
+possible between any man and any woman, that one never expects to 
+happen until it happens.  It had the surprising effect of a judge 
+generally known to be bald suddenly whipping off his wig in court.  
+No absolutely unexpected revelation could have quite the same 
+quality of shock.  She went through the whole thing to me with a 
+remarkable detachment, told me how she had felt--and the odd things 
+it seemed to open to her.
+
+"I WANT to be kissed, and all that sort of thing," she avowed.  "I 
+suppose every woman does."
+
+She added after a pause: "And I don't want any one to do it."
+
+This struck me as queerly expressive of the woman's attitude to 
+these things.  "Some one presently will--solve that," I said.
+
+"Some one will perhaps."
+
+I was silent.
+
+"Some one will," she said, almost viciously.  "And then we'll have 
+to stop these walks and talks of ours, dear Master. . . .  I'll be 
+sorry to give them up."
+
+"It's part of the requirements of the situation," I said, "that he 
+should be--oh, very interesting!  He'll start, no doubt, all sorts 
+of new topics, and open no end of attractive vistas. . . .  You 
+can't, you know, always go about in a state of pupillage."
+
+"I don't think I can," said Isabel.  "But it's only just recently 
+I've begun to doubt about it."
+
+I remember these things being said, but just how much we saw and 
+understood, and just how far we were really keeping opaque to each 
+other then, I cannot remember.  But it must have been quite soon 
+after this that we spent nearly a whole day together at Kew Gardens, 
+with the curtains up and the barriers down, and the thing that had 
+happened plain before our eyes.  I don't remember we ever made any 
+declaration.  We just assumed the new footing. . . .
+
+It was a day early in that year--I think in January, because there 
+was thin, crisp snow on the grass, and we noted that only two other 
+people had been to the Pagoda that day.  I've a curious impression 
+of greenish colour, hot, moist air and huge palm fronds about very 
+much of our talk, as though we were nearly all the time in the 
+Tropical House.  But I also remember very vividly looking at certain 
+orange and red spray-like flowers from Patagonia, which could not 
+have been there.  It is a curious thing that I do not remember we 
+made any profession of passionate love for one another; we talked as 
+though the fact of our intense love for each other had always been 
+patent between us.  There was so long and frank an intimacy between 
+us that we talked far more like brother and sister or husband and 
+wife than two people engaged in the war of the sexes.  We wanted to 
+know what we were going to do, and whatever we did we meant to do in 
+the most perfect concert.  We both felt an extraordinary accession 
+of friendship and tenderness then, and, what again is curious, very 
+little passion.  But there was also, in spite of the perplexities we 
+faced, an immense satisfaction about that day.  It was as if we had 
+taken off something that had hindered our view of each other, like 
+people who unvizard to talk more easily at a masked ball.
+
+I've had since to view our relations from the standpoint of the 
+ordinary observer.  I find that vision in the most preposterous 
+contrast with all that really went on between us.  I suppose there I 
+should figure as a wicked seducer, while an unprotected girl 
+succumbed to my fascinations.  As a matter of fact, it didn't occur 
+to us that there was any personal inequality between us.  I knew her 
+for my equal mentally; in so many things she was beyond comparison 
+cleverer than I; her courage outwent mine.  The quick leap of her 
+mind evoked a flash of joy in mine like the response of an induction 
+wire; her way of thinking was like watching sunlight reflected from 
+little waves upon the side of a boat, it was so bright, so mobile, 
+so variously and easily true to its law.  In the back of our minds 
+we both had a very definite belief that making love is full of 
+joyous, splendid, tender, and exciting possibilities, and we had to 
+discuss why we shouldn't be to the last degree lovers.
+
+Now, what I should like to print here, if it were possible, in all 
+the screaming emphasis of red ink, is this: that the circumstances 
+of my upbringing and the circumstances of Isabel's upbringing had 
+left not a shadow of belief or feeling that the utmost passionate 
+love between us was in itself intrinsically WRONG.  I've told with 
+the fullest particularity just all that I was taught or found out 
+for myself in these matters, and Isabel's reading and thinking, and 
+the fierce silences of her governesses and the breathless warnings 
+of teachers, and all the social and religious influences that had 
+been brought to bear upon her, had worked out to the same void of 
+conviction.  The code had failed with us altogether.  We didn't for 
+a moment consider anything but the expediency of what we both, for 
+all our quiet faces and steady eyes, wanted most passionately to do.
+
+Well, here you have the state of mind of whole brigades of people, 
+and particularly of young people, nowadays.  The current morality 
+hasn't gripped them; they don't really believe in it at all.  They 
+may render it lip-service, but that is quite another thing.  There 
+are scarcely any tolerable novels to justify its prohibitions; its 
+prohibitions do, in fact, remain unjustified amongst these ugly 
+suppressions.  You may, if you choose, silence the admission of this 
+in literature and current discussion; you will not prevent it 
+working out in lives.  People come up to the great moments of 
+passion crudely unaware, astoundingly unprepared as no really 
+civilised and intelligently planned community would let any one be 
+unprepared.  They find themselves hedged about with customs that 
+have no organic hold upon them, and mere discretions all generous 
+spirits are disposed to despise.
+
+Consider the infinite absurdities of it!  Multitudes of us are 
+trying to run this complex modern community on a basis of "Hush" 
+without explaining to our children or discussing with them anything 
+about love and marriage at all.  Doubt and knowledge creep about in 
+enforced darknesses and silences.  We are living upon an ancient 
+tradition which everybody doubts and nobody has ever analysed.  We 
+affect a tremendous and cultivated shyness and delicacy about 
+imperatives of the most arbitrary appearance.  What ensues?  What 
+did ensue with us, for example?  On the one hand was a great desire, 
+robbed of any appearance of shame and grossness by the power of 
+love, and on the other hand, the possible jealousy of so and so, the 
+disapproval of so and so, material risks and dangers.  It is only in 
+the retrospect that we have been able to grasp something of the 
+effectual case against us.  The social prohibition lit by the 
+intense glow of our passion, presented itself as preposterous, 
+irrational, arbitrary, and ugly, a monster fit only for mockery.  We 
+might be ruined!  Well, there is a phase in every love affair, a 
+sort of heroic hysteria, when death and ruin are agreeable additions 
+to the prospect.  It gives the business a gravity, a solemnity.  
+Timid people may hesitate and draw back with a vague instinctive 
+terror of the immensity of the oppositions they challenge, but 
+neither Isabel nor I are timid people.
+
+We weighed what was against us.  We decided just exactly as scores 
+of thousands of people have decided in this very matter, that if it 
+were possible to keep this thing to ourselves, there was nothing 
+against it.  And so we took our first step.  With the hunger of love 
+in us, it was easy to conclude we might be lovers, and still keep 
+everything to ourselves.  That cleared our minds of the one 
+persistent obstacle that mattered to us--the haunting presence of 
+Margaret.
+
+And then we found, as all those scores of thousands of people 
+scattered about us have found, that we could not keep it to 
+ourselves.  Love will out.  All the rest of this story is the 
+chronicle of that.  Love with sustained secrecy cannot be love.  It 
+is just exactly the point people do not understand.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+But before things came to that pass, some months and many phases and 
+a sudden journey to America intervened.
+
+"This thing spells disaster," I said.  "You are too big and I am too 
+big to attempt this secrecy.  Think of the intolerable possibility 
+of being found out!  At any cost we have to stop--even at the cost 
+of parting."
+
+"Just because we may be found out!"
+
+"Just because we may be found out."
+
+"Master, I shouldn't in the least mind being found out with you.  
+I'm afraid--I'd be proud."
+
+"Wait till it happens."
+
+There followed a struggle of immense insincerity between us.  It is 
+hard to tell who urged and who resisted.
+
+She came to me one night to the editorial room of the BLUE WEEKLY, 
+and argued and kissed me with wet salt lips, and wept in my arms; 
+she told me that now passionate longing for me and my intimate life 
+possessed her, so that she could not work, could not think, could 
+not endure other people for the love of me. . . .
+
+I fled absurdly.  That is the secret of the futile journey to 
+America that puzzled all my friends.
+
+I ran away from Isabel.  I took hold of the situation with all my 
+strength, put in Britten with sketchy, hasty instructions to edit 
+the paper, and started headlong and with luggage, from which, among 
+other things, my shaving things were omitted, upon a tour round the 
+world.
+
+Preposterous flight that was!  I remember as a thing almost farcical 
+my explanations to Margaret, and how frantically anxious I was to 
+prevent the remote possibility of her coming with me, and how I 
+crossed in the TUSCAN, a bad, wet boat, and mixed seasickness with 
+ungovernable sorrow.  I wept--tears.  It was inexpressibly queer and 
+ridiculous--and, good God! how I hated my fellow-passengers!
+
+New York inflamed and excited me for a time, and when things 
+slackened, I whirled westward to Chicago--eating and drinking, I 
+remember, in the train from shoals of little dishes, with a sort of 
+desperate voracity.  I did the queerest things to distract myself--
+no novelist would dare to invent my mental and emotional muddle.  
+Chicago also held me at first, amazing lapse from civilisation that 
+the place is! and then abruptly, with hosts expecting me, and 
+everything settled for some days in Denver, I found myself at the 
+end of my renunciations, and turned and came back headlong to 
+London.
+
+Let me confess it wasn't any sense of perfect and incurable trust 
+and confidence that brought me back, or any idea that now I had 
+strength to refrain.  It was a sudden realisation that after all the 
+separation might succeed; some careless phrasing in one of her 
+jealously read letters set that idea going in my mind--the haunting 
+perception that I might return to London and find it empty of the 
+Isabel who had pervaded it.  Honour, discretion, the careers of both 
+of us, became nothing at the thought.  I couldn't conceive my life 
+resuming there without Isabel.  I couldn't, in short, stand it.
+
+I don't even excuse my return.  It is inexcusable.  I ought to have 
+kept upon my way westward--and held out.  I couldn't.  I wanted 
+Isabel, and I wanted her so badly now that everything else in the 
+world was phantom-like until that want was satisfied.  Perhaps you 
+have never wanted anything like that.  I went straight to her.
+
+But here I come to untellable things.  There is no describing the 
+reality of love.  The shapes of things are nothing, the actual 
+happenings are nothing, except that somehow there falls a light upon 
+them and a wonder.  Of how we met, and the thrill of the adventure, 
+the curious bright sense of defiance, the joy of having dared, I 
+can't tell--I can but hint of just one aspect, of what an amazing 
+LARK--it's the only word--it seemed to us.  The beauty which was the 
+essence of it, which justifies it so far as it will bear 
+justification, eludes statement.
+
+What can a record of contrived meetings, of sundering difficulties 
+evaded and overcome, signify here?  Or what can it convey to say 
+that one looked deep into two dear, steadfast eyes, or felt a heart 
+throb and beat, or gripped soft hair softly in a trembling hand?  
+Robbed of encompassing love, these things are of no more value than 
+the taste of good wine or the sight of good pictures, or the hearing 
+of music,--just sensuality and no more.  No one can tell love--we 
+can only tell the gross facts of love and its consequences.  Given 
+love--given mutuality, and one has effected a supreme synthesis and 
+come to a new level of life--but only those who know can know.  This 
+business has brought me more bitterness and sorrow than I had ever 
+expected to bear, but even now I will not say that I regret that 
+wilful home-coming altogether.  We loved--to the uttermost.  Neither 
+of us could have loved any one else as we did and do love one 
+another.  It was ours, that beauty; it existed only between us when 
+we were close together, for no one in the world ever to know save 
+ourselves.
+
+My return to the office sticks out in my memory with an extreme 
+vividness, because of the wild eagle of pride that screamed within 
+me.  It was Tuesday morning, and though not a soul in London knew of 
+it yet except Isabel, I had been back in England a week.  I came in 
+upon Britten and stood in the doorway.
+
+"GOD!" he said at the sight of me.
+
+"I'm back," I said.
+
+He looked at my excited face with those red-brown eyes of his.  
+Silently I defied him to speak his mind.
+
+"Where did you turn back?" he said at last.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+I had to tell what were, so far as I can remember my first positive 
+lies to Margaret in explaining that return.  I had written to her 
+from Chicago and again from New York, saying that I felt I ought to 
+be on the spot in England for the new session, and that I was coming 
+back--presently.  I concealed the name of my boat from her, and made 
+a calculated prevarication when I announced my presence in London.  
+I telephoned before I went back for my rooms to be prepared.  She 
+was, I knew, with the Bunting Harblows in Durham, and when she came 
+back to Radnor Square I had been at home a day.
+
+I remember her return so well.
+
+My going away and the vivid secret of the present had wiped out from 
+my mind much of our long estrangement.  Something, too, had changed 
+in her.  I had had some hint of it in her letters, but now I saw it 
+plainly.  I came out of my study upon the landing when I heard the 
+turmoil of her arrival below, and she came upstairs with a quickened 
+gladness.  It was a cold March, and she was dressed in unfamiliar 
+dark furs that suited her extremely and reinforced the delicate 
+flush of her sweet face.  She held out both her hands to me, and 
+drew me to her unhesitatingly and kissed me.
+
+"So glad you are back, dear," she said.  "Oh! so very glad you are 
+back."
+
+I returned her kiss with a queer feeling at my heart, too 
+undifferentiated to be even a definite sense of guilt or meanness.  
+I think it was chiefly amazement--at the universe--at myself.
+
+"I never knew what it was to be away from you," she said.
+
+I perceived suddenly that she had resolved to end our estrangement.  
+She put herself so that my arm came caressingly about her.
+
+"These are jolly furs," I said.
+
+"I got them for you."
+
+The parlourmaid appeared below dealing with the maid and the luggage 
+cab.
+
+"Tell me all about America," said Margaret.  "I feel as though you'd 
+been away six year's."
+
+We went arm in arm into our little sitting-room, and I took off the 
+fur's for her and sat down upon the chintz-covered sofa by the fire.  
+She had ordered tea, and came and sat by me.  I don't know what I 
+had expected, but of all things I had certainly not expected this 
+sudden abolition of our distances.
+
+"I want to know all about America," she repeated, with her eyes 
+scrutinising me.  "Why did you come back?"
+
+I repeated the substance of my letters rather lamely, and she sat 
+listening.
+
+"But why did you turn back--without going to Denver?"
+
+"I wanted to come back.  I was restless."
+
+"Restlessness," she said, and thought.  "You were restless in 
+Venice.  You said it was restlessness took you to America."
+
+Again she studied me.  She turned a little awkwardly to her tea 
+things, and poured needless water from the silver kettle into the 
+teapot.  Then she sat still for some moments looking at the equipage 
+with expressionless eyes.  I saw her hand upon the edge of the table 
+tremble slightly.  I watched her closely.  A vague uneasiness 
+possessed me.  What might she not know or guess?
+
+She spoke at last with an effort.  "I wish you were in Parliament 
+again," she said.  "Life doesn't give you events enough."
+
+"If I was in Parliament again, I should be on the Conservative 
+side."
+
+"I know," she said, and was still more thoughtful.
+
+"Lately," she began, and paused.  "Lately I've been reading--you."
+
+I didn't help her out with what she had to say.  I waited.
+
+"I didn't understand what you were after.  I had misjudged.  I 
+didn't know.  I think perhaps I was rather stupid."  Her eyes were 
+suddenly shining with tears.  "You didn't give me much chance to 
+understand."
+
+She turned upon me suddenly with a voice full of tears.
+
+"Husband," she said abruptly, holding her two hands out to me, "I 
+want to begin over again!"
+
+I took her hands, perplexed beyond measure.  "My dear!" I said.
+
+"I want to begin over again."
+
+I bowed my head to hide my face, and found her hand in mine and 
+kissed it.
+
+"Ah!" she said, and slowly withdrew her hand.  She leant forward 
+with her arm on the sofa-back, and looked very intently into my 
+face.  I felt the most damnable scoundrel in the world as I returned 
+her gaze.  The thought of Isabel's darkly shining eyes seemed like a 
+physical presence between us. . . .
+
+"Tell me," I said presently, to break the intolerable tension, "tell 
+me plainly what you mean by this."
+
+I sat a little away from her, and then took my teacup in hand, with 
+an odd effect of defending myself.  "Have you been reading that old 
+book of mine?" I asked.
+
+"That and the paper.  I took a complete set from the beginning down 
+to Durham with me.  I have read it over, thought it over.  I didn't 
+understand--what you were teaching."
+
+There was a little pause.
+
+"It all seems so plain to me now," she said, "and so true."
+
+I was profoundly disconcerted.  I put down my teacup, stood up in 
+the middle of the hearthrug, and began talking.  "I'm tremendously 
+glad, Margaret, that you've come to see I'm not altogether 
+perverse," I began.  I launched out into a rather trite and windy 
+exposition of my views, and she sat close to me on the sofa, looking 
+up into my face, hanging on my words, a deliberate and invincible 
+convert.
+
+"Yes," she said, "yes." . . .
+
+I had never doubted my new conceptions before; now I doubted them 
+profoundly.  But I went on talking.  It's the grim irony in the 
+lives of all politicians, writers, public teachers, that once the 
+audience is at their feet, a new loyalty has gripped them.  It isn't 
+their business to admit doubt and imperfections.  They have to go on 
+talking.  And I was now so accustomed to Isabel's vivid interruptions, 
+qualifications, restatements, and confirmations. . . .
+
+Margaret and I dined together at home.  She made me open out my 
+political projects to her.  "I have been foolish," she said.  "I 
+want to help."
+
+And by some excuse I have forgotten she made me come to her room.  I 
+think it was some book I had to take her, some American book I had 
+brought back with me, and mentioned in our talk.  I walked in with 
+it, and put it down on the table and turned to go.
+
+"Husband!" she cried, and held out her slender arms to me.  I was 
+compelled to go to her and kiss her, and she twined them softly 
+about my neck and drew me to her and kissed me.  I disentangled them 
+very gently, and took each wrist and kissed it, and the backs of her 
+hands.
+
+"Good-night," I said.  There came a little pause.  "Good-night, 
+Margaret," I repeated, and walked very deliberately and with a kind 
+of sham preoccupation to the door.
+
+I did not look at her, but I could feel her standing, watching me.  
+If I had looked up, she would, I knew, have held out her arms to 
+me. . . .
+
+At the very outset that secret, which was to touch no one but Isabel 
+and myself, had reached out to stab another human being.
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+The whole world had changed for Isabel and me; and we tried to 
+pretend that nothing had changed except a small matter between us.  
+We believed quite honestly at that time that it was possible to keep 
+this thing that had happened from any reaction at all, save perhaps 
+through some magically enhanced vigour in our work, upon the world 
+about us!  Seen in retrospect, one can realise the absurdity of this 
+belief; within a week I realised it; but that does not alter the 
+fact that we did believe as much, and that people who are deeply in 
+love and unable to marry will continue to believe so to the very end 
+of time.  They will continue to believe out of existence every 
+consideration that separates them until they have come together.  
+Then they will count the cost, as we two had to do.
+
+I am telling a story, and not propounding theories in this book; and 
+chiefly I am telling of the ideas and influences and emotions that 
+have happened to me--me as a sort of sounding board for my world.  
+The moralist is at liberty to go over my conduct with his measure 
+and say, "At this point or at that you went wrong, and you ought to 
+have done"--so-and-so.  The point of interest to the statesman is 
+that it didn't for a moment occur to us to do so-and-so when the 
+time for doing it came.  It amazes me now to think how little either 
+of us troubled about the established rights or wrongs of the 
+situation.  We hadn't an atom of respect for them, innate or 
+acquired.  The guardians of public morals will say we were very bad 
+people; I submit in defence that they are very bad guardians--
+provocative guardians. . . .  And when at last there came a claim 
+against us that had an effective validity for us, we were in the 
+full tide of passionate intimacy.
+
+I had a night of nearly sleepless perplexity after Margaret's 
+return.  She had suddenly presented herself to me like something 
+dramatically recalled, fine, generous, infinitely capable of 
+feeling.  I was amazed how much I had forgotten her.  In my contempt 
+for vulgarised and conventionalised honour I had forgotten that for 
+me there was such a reality as honour.  And here it was, warm and 
+near to me, living, breathing, unsuspecting.  Margaret's pride was 
+my honour, that I had had no right even to imperil.
+
+I do not now remember if I thought at that time of going to Isabel 
+and putting this new aspect of the case before her.  Perhaps I did.  
+Perhaps I may have considered even then the possibility of ending 
+what had so freshly and passionately begun.  If I did, it vanished 
+next day at the sight of her.  Whatever regrets came in the 
+darkness, the daylight brought an obstinate confidence in our 
+resolution again.  We would, we declared, "pull the thing off."  
+Margaret must not know.  Margaret should not know.  If Margaret did 
+not know, then no harm whatever would be done.  We tried to sustain 
+that. . . .
+
+For a brief time we had been like two people in a magic cell, 
+magically cut off from the world and full of a light of its own, and 
+then we began to realise that we were not in the least cut off, that 
+the world was all about us and pressing in upon us, limiting us, 
+threatening us, resuming possession of us.  I tried to ignore the 
+injury to Margaret of her unreciprocated advances.  I tried to 
+maintain to myself that this hidden love made no difference to the 
+now irreparable breach between husband and wife.  But I never spoke 
+of it to Isabel or let her see that aspect of our case.  How could 
+I?  The time for that had gone. . . .
+
+Then in new shapes and relations came trouble.  Distressful elements 
+crept in by reason of our unavoidable furtiveness; we ignored them, 
+hid them from each other, and attempted to hide them from ourselves.  
+Successful love is a thing of abounding pride, and we had to be 
+secret.  It was delightful at first to be secret, a whispering, warm 
+conspiracy; then presently it became irksome and a little shameful.  
+Her essential frankness of soul was all against the masks and 
+falsehoods that many women would have enjoyed.  Together in our 
+secrecy we relaxed, then in the presence of other people again it 
+was tiresome to have to watch for the careless, too easy phrase, to 
+snatch back one's hand from the limitless betrayal of a light, 
+familiar touch.
+
+Love becomes a poor thing, at best a poor beautiful thing, if it 
+develops no continuing and habitual intimacy.  We were always 
+meeting, and most gloriously loving and beginning--and then we had 
+to snatch at remorseless ticking watches, hurry to catch trains, and 
+go back to this or that.  That is all very well for the intrigues of 
+idle people perhaps, but not for an intense personal relationship.  
+It is like lighting a candle for the sake of lighting it, over and 
+over again, and each time blowing it out.  That, no doubt, must be 
+very amusing to children playing with the matches, but not to people 
+who love warm light, and want it in order to do fine and honourable 
+things together.  We had achieved--I give the ugly phrase that 
+expresses the increasing discolouration in my mind--"illicit 
+intercourse."  To end at that, we now perceived, wasn't in our 
+style.  But where were we to end? . . .
+
+Perhaps we might at this stage have given it up.  I think if we 
+could have seen ahead and around us we might have done so.  But the 
+glow of our cell blinded us. . . .  I wonder what might have 
+happened if at that time we had given it up. . . .  We propounded 
+it, we met again in secret to discuss it, and our overpowering 
+passion for one another reduced that meeting to absurdity. . . .
+
+Presently the idea of children crept between us.  It came in from 
+all our conceptions of life and public service; it was, we found, in 
+the quality of our minds that physical love without children is a 
+little weak, timorous, more than a little shameful.  With 
+imaginative people there very speedily comes a time when that 
+realisation is inevitable.  We hadn't thought of that before--it 
+isn't natural to think of that before.  We hadn't known.  There is 
+no literature in English dealing with such things.
+
+There is a necessary sequence of phases in love.  These came in 
+their order, and with them, unanticipated tarnishings on the first 
+bright perfection of our relations.  For a time these developing 
+phases were no more than a secret and private trouble between us, 
+little shadows spreading by imperceptible degrees across that vivid 
+and luminous cell.
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+The Handitch election flung me suddenly into prominence.
+
+It is still only two years since that struggle, and I will not 
+trouble the reader with a detailed history of events that must be 
+quite sufficiently present in his mind for my purpose already.  Huge 
+stacks of journalism have dealt with Handitch and its significance.  
+For the reader very probably, as for most people outside a 
+comparatively small circle, it meant my emergence from obscurity.  
+We obtruded no editor's name in the BLUE WEEKLY; I had never as yet 
+been on the London hoardings.  Before Handitch I was a journalist 
+and writer of no great public standing; after Handitch, I was 
+definitely a person, in the little group of persons who stood for 
+the Young Imperialist movement.  Handitch was, to a very large 
+extent, my affair.  I realised then, as a man comes to do, how much 
+one can still grow after seven and twenty.  In the second election I 
+was a man taking hold of things; at Kinghamstead I had been simply a 
+young candidate, a party unit, led about the constituency, told to 
+do this and that, and finally washed in by the great Anti-
+Imperialist flood, like a starfish rolling up a beach.
+
+My feminist views had earnt the mistrust of the party, and I do not 
+think I should have got the chance of Handitch or indeed any chance 
+at all of Parliament for a long time, if it had not been that the 
+seat with its long record of Liberal victories and its Liberal 
+majority of 3642 at the last election, offered a hopeless contest.  
+The Liberal dissensions and the belated but by no means contemptible 
+Socialist candidate were providential interpositions.  I think, 
+however, the conduct of Gane, Crupp, and Tarvrille in coming down to 
+fight for me, did count tremendously in my favour.  "We aren't going 
+to win, perhaps," said Crupp, "but we are going to talk."  And until 
+the very eve of victory, we treated Handitch not so much as a 
+battlefield as a hoarding.  And so it was the Endowment of 
+Motherhood as a practical form of Eugenics got into English 
+politics.
+
+Plutus, our agent, was scared out of his wits when the thing began.
+
+"They're ascribing all sorts of queer ideas to you about the 
+Family," he said.
+
+"I think the Family exists for the good of the children," I said; 
+"is that queer?"
+
+"Not when you explain it--but they won't let you explain it.  And 
+about marriage--?"
+
+"I'm all right about marriage--trust me."
+
+"Of course, if YOU had children," said Plutus, rather 
+inconsiderately. . . .
+
+They opened fire upon me in a little electioneering rag call the 
+HANDITCH SENTINEL, with a string of garbled quotations and 
+misrepresentations that gave me an admirable text for a speech.  I 
+spoke for an hour and ten minutes with a more and more crumpled copy 
+of the SENTINEL in my hand, and I made the fullest and completest 
+exposition of the idea of endowing motherhood that I think had ever 
+been made up to that time in England.  Its effect on the press was 
+extraordinary.  The Liberal papers gave me quite unprecedented space 
+under the impression that I had only to be given rope to hang 
+myself; the Conservatives cut me down or tried to justify me; the 
+whole country was talking.  I had had a pamphlet in type upon the 
+subject, and I revised this carefully and put it on the book-stalls 
+within three days.  It sold enormously and brought me bushels of 
+letters.  We issued over three thousand in Handitch alone.  At 
+meeting after meeting I was heckled upon nothing else.  Long before 
+polling day Plutus was converted.
+
+"It's catching on like old age pensions," he said.  "We've dished 
+the Liberals!  To think that such a project should come from our 
+side!"
+
+But it was only with the declaration of the poll that my battle was 
+won.  No one expected more than a snatch victory, and I was in by 
+over fifteen hundred.  At one bound Cossington's papers passed from 
+apologetics varied by repudiation to triumphant praise.  "A 
+renascent England, breeding men," said the leader in his chief daily 
+on the morning after the polling, and claimed that the Conservatives 
+had been ever the pioneers in sanely bold constructive projects.
+
+I came up to London with a weary but rejoicing Margaret by the night 
+train.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND
+
+THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+To any one who did not know of that glowing secret between Isabel 
+and myself, I might well have appeared at that time the most 
+successful and enviable of men.  I had recovered rapidly from an 
+uncongenial start in political life; I had become a considerable 
+force through the BLUE WEEKLY, and was shaping an increasingly 
+influential body of opinion; I had re-entered Parliament with quite 
+dramatic distinction, and in spite of a certain faltering on the 
+part of the orthodox Conservatives towards the bolder elements in 
+our propaganda, I had loyal and unenvious associates who were making 
+me a power in the party.  People were coming to our group, 
+understandings were developing.  It was clear we should play a 
+prominent part in the next general election, and that, given a 
+Conservative victory, I should be assured of office.  The world 
+opened out to me brightly and invitingly.  Great schemes took shape 
+in my mind, always more concrete, always more practicable; the years 
+ahead seemed falling into order, shining with the credible promise 
+of immense achievement.
+
+And at the heart of it all, unseen and unsuspected, was the secret 
+of my relations with Isabel--like a seed that germinates and 
+thrusts, thrusts relentlessly.
+
+From the onset of the Handitch contest onward, my meetings with her 
+had been more and more pervaded by the discussion of our situation.  
+It had innumerable aspects.  It was very present to us that we 
+wanted to be together as much as possible--we were beginning to long 
+very much for actual living together in the same house, so that one 
+could come as it were carelessly--unawares--upon the other, busy 
+perhaps about some trivial thing.  We wanted to feel each other in 
+the daily atmosphere.  Preceding our imperatively sterile passion, 
+you must remember, outside it, altogether greater than it so far as 
+our individual lives were concerned, there had grown and still grew 
+an enormous affection and intellectual sympathy between us.  We 
+brought all our impressions and all our ideas to each other, to see 
+them in each other's light.  It is hard to convey that quality of 
+intellectual unison to any one who has not experienced it.  I 
+thought more and more in terms of conversation with Isabel; her 
+possible comments upon things would flash into my mind, oh!--with 
+the very sound of her voice.
+
+I remember, too, the odd effect of seeing her in the distance going 
+about Handitch, like any stranger canvasser; the queer emotion of 
+her approach along the street, the greeting as she passed.  The 
+morning of the polling she vanished from the constituency.  I saw 
+her for an instant in the passage behind our Committee rooms.
+
+"Going?" said I.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"Stay it out.  I want you to see the fun.  I remember--the other 
+time."
+
+She didn't answer for a moment or so, and stood with face averted.
+
+"It's Margaret's show," she said abruptly.  "If I see her smiling 
+there like a queen by your side--!  She did--last time.  I 
+remember."  She caught at a sob and dashed her hand across her face 
+impatiently.  "Jealous fool, mean and petty, jealous fool! . . .  
+Good luck, old man, to you!  You're going to win.  But I don't want 
+to see the end of it all the same. . . ."
+
+"Good-bye!" said I, clasping her hand as some supporter appeared in 
+the passage. . . .
+
+I came back to London victorious, and a little flushed and coarse 
+with victory; and so soon as I could break away I went to Isabel's 
+flat and found her white and worn, with the stain of secret weeping 
+about her eyes.  I came into the room to her and shut the door.
+
+"You said I'd win," I said, and held out my arms.
+
+She hugged me closely for a moment.
+
+"My dear," I whispered, "it's nothing--without you--nothing!"
+
+We didn't speak for some seconds.  Then she slipped from my hold.  
+"Look!" she said, smiling like winter sunshine.  "I've had in all 
+the morning papers--the pile of them, and you--resounding."
+
+"It's more than I dared hope."
+
+"Or I."
+
+She stood for a moment still smiling bravely, and then she was 
+sobbing in my arms.  "The bigger you are--the more you show," she 
+said--" the more we are parted.  I know, I know--"
+
+I held her close to me, making no answer.
+
+Presently she became still.  "Oh, well," she said, and wiped her 
+eyes and sat down on the little sofa by the fire; and I sat down 
+beside her.
+
+"I didn't know all there was in love," she said, staring at the 
+coals, "when we went love-making."
+
+I put my arm behind her and took a handful of her dear soft hair in 
+my hand and kissed it.
+
+"You've done a great thing this time," she said.  "Handitch will 
+make you."
+
+"It opens big chances," I said.  "But why are you weeping, dear 
+one?"
+
+"Envy," she said, "and love."
+
+"You're not lonely?"
+
+"I've plenty to do--and lots of people."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I want you."
+
+"You've got me."
+
+She put her arm about me and kissed me.  "I want you," she said, 
+"just as if I had nothing of you.  You don't understand--how a woman 
+wants a man.  I thought once if I just gave myself to you it would 
+be enough.  It was nothing--it was just a step across the threshold.  
+My dear, every moment you are away I ache for you--ache!  I want to 
+be about when it isn't love-making or talk.  I want to be doing 
+things for you, and watching you when you're not thinking of me.  
+All those safe, careless, intimate things.  And something else--" 
+She stopped.  "Dear, I don't want to bother you.  I just want you to 
+know I love you. . . ."
+
+She caught my head in her hands and kissed it, then stood up 
+abruptly.
+
+I looked up at her, a little perplexed.
+
+"Dear heart," said I, "isn't this enough?  You're my councillor, my 
+colleague, my right hand, the secret soul of my life--"
+
+"And I want to darn your socks," she said, smiling back at me.
+
+"You're insatiable."
+
+She smiled "No," she said.  "I'm not insatiable, Master.  But I'm a 
+woman in love.  And I'm finding out what I want, and what is 
+necessary to me--and what I can't have.  That's all."
+
+"We get a lot."
+
+"We want a lot.  You and I are greedy people for the things we like, 
+Master.  It's very evident we've got nearly all we can ever have of 
+one another--and I'm not satisfied."
+
+"What more is there?
+
+"For you--very little.  I wonder.  For me--every thing.  Yes--
+everything.  You didn't mean it, Master; you didn't know any more 
+than I did when I began, but love between a man and a woman is 
+sometimes very one-sided.  Fearfully one-sided!  That's all. . . ."
+
+"Don't YOU ever want children?" she said abruptly.
+
+"I suppose I do."
+
+"You don't!"
+
+"I haven't thought of them."
+
+"A man doesn't, perhaps.  But I have. . . .  I want them--like 
+hunger.  YOUR children, and home with you.  Really, continually you!  
+That's the trouble. . . .  I can't have 'em, Master, and I can't 
+have you."
+
+She was crying, and through her tears she laughed.
+
+"I'm going to make a scene," she said, "and get this over.  I'm so 
+discontented and miserable; I've got to tell you.  It would come 
+between us if I didn't.  I'm in love with you, with everything--with 
+all my brains.  I'll pull through all right.  I'll be good, Master, 
+never you fear.  But to-day I'm crying out with all my being.  This 
+election--You're going up; you're going on.  In these papers--you're 
+a great big fact.  It's suddenly come home to me.  At the back of my 
+mind I've always had the idea I was going to have you somehow 
+presently for myself--I mean to have you to go long tramps with, to 
+keep house for, to get meals for, to watch for of an evening.  It's 
+a sort of habitual background to my thought of you.  And it's 
+nonsense--utter nonsense!"  She stopped.  She was crying and 
+choking.  "And the child, you know--the child!"
+
+I was troubled beyond measure, but Handitch and its intimations were 
+clear and strong.
+
+"We can't have that," I said.
+
+"No," she said, "we can't have that."
+
+"We've got our own things to do."
+
+"YOUR things," she said.
+
+"Aren't they yours too?"
+
+"Because of you," she said.
+
+"Aren't they your very own things?"
+
+"Women don't have that sort of very own thing.  Indeed, it's true!  
+And think!  You've been down there preaching the goodness of 
+children, telling them the only good thing in a state is happy, 
+hopeful children, working to free mothers and children--"
+
+"And we give our own children to do it?" I said.
+
+"Yes," she said.  "And sometimes I think it's too much to give--too 
+much altogether. . . .  Children get into a woman's brain--when she 
+mustn't have them, especially when she must never hope for them.  
+Think of the child we might have now!--the little creature with 
+soft, tender skin, and little hands and little feet!  At times it 
+haunts me.  It comes and says, Why wasn't I given life?  I can hear 
+it in the night. . . .  The world is full of such little ghosts, 
+dear lover--little things that asked for life and were refused.  
+They clamour to me.  It's like a little fist beating at my heart.  
+Love children, beautiful children.  Little cold hands that tear at 
+my heart!  Oh, my heart and my lord!"  She was holding my arm with 
+both her hands and weeping against it, and now she drew herself to 
+my shoulder and wept and sobbed in my embrace.  "I shall never sit 
+with your child on my knee and you beside me-never, and I am a woman 
+and your lover! . . ."
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+But the profound impossibility of our relation was now becoming more 
+and more apparent to us.  We found ourselves seeking justification, 
+clinging passionately to a situation that was coldly, pitilessly, 
+impossible and fated.  We wanted quite intensely to live together 
+and have a child, but also we wanted very many other things that 
+were incompatible with these desires.  It was extraordinarily 
+difficult to weigh our political and intellectual ambitions against 
+those intimate wishes.  The weights kept altering according as one 
+found oneself grasping this valued thing or that.  It wasn't as if 
+we could throw everything aside for our love, and have that as we 
+wanted it.  Love such as we bore one another isn't altogether, or 
+even chiefly, a thing in itself--it is for the most part a value set 
+upon things.  Our love was interwoven with all our other interests; 
+to go out of the world and live in isolation seemed to us like 
+killing the best parts of each other; we loved the sight of each 
+other engaged finely and characteristically, we knew each other best 
+as activities.  We had no delusions about material facts; we didn't 
+want each other alive or dead, we wanted each other fully alive.  We 
+wanted to do big things together, and for us to take each other 
+openly and desperately would leave us nothing in the world to do.  
+We wanted children indeed passionately, but children with every 
+helpful chance in the world, and children born in scandal would be 
+handicapped at every turn.  We wanted to share a home, and not a 
+solitude.
+
+And when we were at this stage of realisation, began the intimations 
+that we were found out, and that scandal was afoot against us. . . .
+
+I heard of it first from Esmeer, who deliberately mentioned it, with 
+that steady grey eye of his watching me, as an instance of the 
+preposterous falsehoods people will circulate.  It came to Isabel 
+almost simultaneously through a married college friend, who made it 
+her business to demand either confirmation or denial.  It filled us 
+both with consternation.  In the surprise of the moment Isabel 
+admitted her secret, and her friend went off "reserving her freedom 
+of action."
+
+Discovery broke out in every direction.  Friends with grave faces 
+and an atmosphere of infinite tact invaded us both.  Other friends 
+ceased to invade either of us.  It was manifest we had become--we 
+knew not how--a private scandal, a subject for duologues, an 
+amazement, a perplexity, a vivid interest.  In a few brief weeks it 
+seemed London passed from absolute unsuspiciousness to a chattering 
+exaggeration of its knowledge of our relations.
+
+It was just the most inappropriate time for that disclosure.  The 
+long smouldering antagonism to my endowment of motherhood ideas had 
+flared up into an active campaign in the EXPURGATOR, and it would be 
+altogether disastrous to us if I should be convicted of any personal 
+irregularity.  It was just because of the manifest and challenging 
+respectability of my position that I had been able to carry the 
+thing as far as I had done.  Now suddenly my fortunes had sprung a 
+leak, and scandal was pouring in. . . .  It chanced, too, that a 
+wave of moral intolerance was sweeping through London, one of those 
+waves in which the bitterness of the consciously just finds an ally 
+in the panic of the undiscovered.  A certain Father Blodgett had 
+been preaching against social corruption with extraordinary force, 
+and had roused the Church of England people to a kind of competition 
+in denunciation.  The old methods of the Anti-Socialist campaign had 
+been renewed, and had offered far too wide a scope and too tempting 
+an opportunity for private animosity, to be restricted to the 
+private affairs of the Socialists.  I had intimations of an 
+extensive circulation of "private and confidential" letters. . . .
+
+I think there can be nothing else in life quite like the unnerving 
+realisation that rumour and scandal are afoot about one.  Abruptly 
+one's confidence in the solidity of the universe disappears.  One 
+walks silenced through a world that one feels to be full of 
+inaudible accusations.  One cannot challenge the assault, get it out 
+into the open, separate truth and falsehood.  It slinks from you, 
+turns aside its face.  Old acquaintances suddenly evaded me, made 
+extraordinary excuses; men who had presumed on the verge of my world 
+and pestered me with an intrusive enterprise, now took the bold step 
+of flat repudiation.  I became doubtful about the return of a nod, 
+retracted all those tentacles of easy civility that I had hitherto 
+spread to the world.  I still grow warm with amazed indignation when 
+I recall that Edward Crampton, meeting me full on the steps of the 
+Climax Club, cut me dead.  "By God!" I cried, and came near catching 
+him by the throat and wringing out of him what of all good deeds and 
+bad, could hearten him, a younger man than I and empty beyond 
+comparison, to dare to play the judge to me.  And then I had an open 
+slight from Mrs. Millingham, whom I had counted on as one counts 
+upon the sunrise.  I had not expected things of that sort; they were 
+disconcerting beyond measure; it was as if the world were giving way 
+beneath my feet, as though something failed in the essential 
+confidence of life, as though a hand of wet ice had touched my 
+heart.  Similar things were happening to Isabel.  Yet we went on 
+working, visiting, meeting, trying to ignore this gathering of 
+implacable forces against us.
+
+For a time I was perplexed beyond measure to account for this 
+campaign.  Then I got a clue.  The centre of diffusion was the 
+Bailey household.  The Baileys had never forgiven me my abandonment 
+of the young Liberal group they had done so much to inspire and 
+organise; their dinner-table had long been a scene of hostile 
+depreciation of the BLUE WEEKLY and all its allies; week after week 
+Altiora proclaimed that I was "doing nothing," and found other 
+causes for our bye-election triumphs; I counted Chambers Street a 
+dangerous place for me.  Yet, nevertheless, I was astonished to find 
+them using a private scandal against me.  They did.  I think 
+Handitch had filled up the measure of their bitterness, for I had 
+not only abandoned them, but I was succeeding beyond even their 
+power of misrepresentation.  Always I had been a wasp in their 
+spider's web, difficult to claim as a tool, uncritical, 
+antagonistic.  I admired their work and devotion enormously, but I 
+had never concealed my contempt for a certain childish vanity they 
+displayed, and for the frequent puerility of their political 
+intrigues.  I suppose contempt galls more than injuries, and anyhow 
+they had me now.  They had me.  Bailey, I found, was warning fathers 
+of girls against me as a "reckless libertine," and Altiora, flushed, 
+roguish, and dishevelled, was sitting on her fender curb after 
+dinner, and pledging little parties of five or six women at a time 
+with infinite gusto not to let the matter go further.  Our cell was 
+open to the world, and a bleak, distressful daylight streaming in.
+
+I had a gleam of a more intimate motive in Altiora from the reports 
+that came to me.  Isabel had been doing a series of five or six 
+articles in the POLITICAL REVIEW in support of our campaign, the 
+POLITICAL REVIEW which had hitherto been loyally Baileyite.  Quite 
+her best writing up to the present, at any rate, is in those papers, 
+and no doubt Altiora had had not only to read her in those invaded 
+columns, but listen to her praises in the mouths of the tactless 
+influential.  Altiora, like so many people who rely on gesture and 
+vocal insistence in conversation, writes a poor and slovenly prose 
+and handles an argument badly; Isabel has her University training 
+behind her and wrote from the first with the stark power of a clear-
+headed man.  "Now we know," said Altiora, with just a gleam of 
+malice showing through her brightness, "now we know who helps with 
+the writing!"
+
+She revealed astonishing knowledge.
+
+For a time I couldn't for the life of me discover her sources.  I 
+had, indeed, a desperate intention of challenging her, and then I 
+bethought me of a youngster named Curmain, who had been my 
+supplemental typist and secretary for a time, and whom I had sent on 
+to her before the days of our breach.  "Of course!" said I, 
+"Curmain!"  He was a tall, drooping, sidelong youth with sandy hair, 
+a little forward head, and a long thin neck.  He stole stamps, and, 
+I suspected, rifled my private letter drawer, and I found him one 
+day on a turn of the stairs looking guilty and ruffled with a pretty 
+Irish housemaid of Margaret's manifestly in a state of hot 
+indignation.  I saw nothing, but I felt everything in the air 
+between them.  I hate this pestering of servants, but at the same 
+time I didn't want Curmain wiped out of existence, so I had packed 
+him off without unnecessary discussion to Altiora.  He was quick and 
+cheap anyhow, and I thought her general austerity ought to redeem 
+him if anything could; the Chambers Street housemaid wasn't for any 
+man's kissing and showed it, and the stamps and private letters were 
+looked after with an efficiency altogether surpassing mine.  And 
+Altiora, I've no doubt left now whatever, pumped this young 
+undesirable about me, and scenting a story, had him to dinner alone 
+one evening to get to the bottom of the matter.  She got quite to 
+the bottom of it,--it must have been a queer duologue.  She read 
+Isabel's careless, intimate letters to me, so to speak, by this 
+proxy, and she wasn't ashamed to use this information in the service 
+of the bitterness that had sprung up in her since our political 
+breach.  It was essentially a personal bitterness; it helped no 
+public purpose of theirs to get rid of me.  My downfall in any 
+public sense was sheer waste,--the loss of a man.  She knew she was 
+behaving badly, and so, when it came to remonstrance, she behaved 
+worse.  She'd got names and dates and places; the efficiency of her 
+information was irresistible.  And she set to work at it 
+marvellously.  Never before, in all her pursuit of efficient ideals, 
+had Altiora achieved such levels of efficiency.  I wrote a protest 
+that was perhaps ill-advised and angry, I went to her and tried to 
+stop her.  She wouldn't listen, she wouldn't think, she denied and 
+lied, she behaved like a naughty child of six years old which has 
+made up its mind to be hurtful.  It wasn't only, I think, that she 
+couldn't bear our political and social influence; she also--I 
+realised at that interview couldn't bear our loving.  It seemed to 
+her the sickliest thing,--a thing quite unendurable.  While such 
+things were, the virtue had gone out of her world.
+
+I've the vividest memory of that call of mine.  She'd just come in 
+and taken off her hat, and she was grey and dishevelled and tired, 
+and in a business-like dress of black and crimson that didn't suit 
+her and was muddy about the skirts; she'd a cold in her head and 
+sniffed penetratingly, she avoided my eye as she talked and 
+interrupted everything I had to say; she kept stabbing fiercely at 
+the cushions of her sofa with a long hat-pin and pretending she was 
+overwhelmed with grief at the DEBACLE she was deliberately 
+organising.
+
+"Then part," she cried, "part.  If you don't want a smashing up,--
+part!  You two have got to be parted.  You've got never to see each 
+other ever, never to speak."  There was a zest in her voice.  "We're 
+not circulating stories," she denied.  "No!  And Curmain never told 
+us anything--Curmain is an EXCELLENT young man; oh! a quite 
+excellent young man.  You misjudged him altogether." . . .
+
+I was equally unsuccessful with Bailey.  I caught the little wretch 
+in the League Club, and he wriggled and lied.  He wouldn't say where 
+he had got his facts, he wouldn't admit he had told any one.  When I 
+gave him the names of two men who had come to me astonished and 
+incredulous, he attempted absurdly to make me think they had told 
+HIM.  He did his horrible little best to suggest that honest old 
+Quackett, who had just left England for the Cape, was the real 
+scandalmonger.  That struck me as mean, even for Bailey.  I've still 
+the odd vivid impression of his fluting voice, excusing the 
+inexcusable, his big, shifty face evading me, his perspiration-
+beaded forehead, the shrugging shoulders, and the would-be 
+exculpatory gestures--Houndsditch gestures--of his enormous ugly 
+hands.
+
+"I can assure you, my dear fellow," he said; "I can assure you we've 
+done everything to shield you--everything." . . .
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Isabel came after dinner one evening and talked in the office.  She 
+made a white-robed, dusky figure against the deep blues of my big 
+window.  I sat at my desk and tore a quill pen to pieces as I 
+talked.
+
+"The Baileys don't intend to let this drop," I said.  "They mean 
+that every one in London is to know about it."
+
+"I know."
+
+"Well!" I said.
+
+"Dear heart," said Isabel, facing it, "it's no good waiting for 
+things to overtake us; we're at the parting of the ways."
+
+"What are we to do?"
+
+"They won't let us go on."
+
+"Damn them!"
+
+"They are ORGANISING scandal."
+
+"It's no good waiting for things to overtake us," I echoed; "they 
+have overtaken us."  I turned on her.  "What do you want to do?"
+
+"Everything," she said.  "Keep you and have our work.  Aren't we 
+Mates?"
+
+"We can't."
+
+"And we can't!"
+
+"I've got to tell Margaret," I said.
+
+"Margaret!"
+
+"I can't bear the idea of any one else getting in front with it.  
+I've been wincing about Margaret secretly--"
+
+"I know.  You'll have to tell her--and make your peace with her."
+
+She leant back against the bookcases under the window.
+
+"We've had some good times, Master;" she said, with a sigh in her 
+voice.
+
+And then for a long time we stared at one another in silence.
+
+"We haven't much time left," she said.
+
+"Shall we bolt?" I said.
+
+"And leave all this?" she asked, with her eyes going round the room.  
+"And that?"  And her head indicated Westminster.  "No!"
+
+I said no more of bolting.
+
+"We've got to screw ourselves up to surrender," she said.
+
+"Something."
+
+"A lot."
+
+"Master," she said, "it isn't all sex and stuff between us?"
+
+"No!"
+
+"I can't give up the work.  Our work's my life."
+
+We came upon another long pause.
+
+"No one will believe we've ceased to be lovers--if we simply do," 
+she said.
+
+"We shouldn't."
+
+"We've got to do something more parting than that."
+
+I nodded, and again we paused.  She was coming to something.
+
+"I could marry Shoesmith," she said abruptly.
+
+"But--" I objected.
+
+"He knows.  It wasn't fair.  I told him."
+
+"Oh, that explains," I said.  "There's been a kind of sulkiness--
+But--you told him?"
+
+She nodded.  "He's rather badly hurt," she said.  "He's been a good 
+friend to me.  He's curiously loyal.  But something, something he 
+said one day--forced me to let him know. . . .  That's been the 
+beastliness of all this secrecy.  That's the beastliness of all 
+secrecy.  You have to spring surprises on people.  But he keeps on.  
+He's steadfast.  He'd already suspected.  He wants me very badly to 
+marry him. . . ."
+
+"But you don't want to marry him?"
+
+"I'm forced to think of it."
+
+"But does he want to marry you at that?  Take you as a present from 
+the world at large?--against your will and desire? . . .  I don't 
+understand him."
+
+"He cares for me."
+
+"How?"
+
+"He thinks this is a fearful mess for me.  He wants to pull it 
+straight."
+
+We sat for a time in silence, with imaginations that obstinately 
+refused to take up the realities of this proposition.
+
+"I don't want you to marry Shoesmith," I said at last.
+
+"Don't you like him?"
+
+"Not as your husband."
+
+"He's a very clever and sturdy person--and very generous and devoted 
+to me."
+
+"And me?"
+
+"You can't expect that.  He thinks you are wonderful--and, 
+naturally, that you ought not to have started this."
+
+"I've a curious dislike to any one thinking that but myself.  I'm 
+quite ready to think it myself."
+
+"He'd let us be friends--and meet."
+
+"Let us be friends!" I cried, after a long pause.  "You and me!"
+
+"He wants me to be engaged soon.  Then, he says, he can go round 
+fighting these rumours, defending us both--and force a quarrel on 
+the Baileys."
+
+"I don't understand him," I said, and added, "I don't understand 
+you."
+
+I was staring at her face.  It seemed white and set in the dimness.
+
+"Do you really mean this, Isabel?" I asked.
+
+"What else is there to do, my dear?--what else is there to do at 
+all?  I've been thinking day and night.  You can't go away with me.  
+You can't smash yourself suddenly in the sight of all men.  I'd 
+rather die than that should happen.  Look what you are becoming in 
+the country!  Look at all you've built up!--me helping.  I wouldn't 
+let you do it if you could.  I wouldn't let you--if it were only for 
+Margaret's sake.  THIS . . . closes the scandal, closes everything."
+
+"It closes all our life together," I cried.
+
+She was silent.
+
+"It never ought to have begun," I said.
+
+She winced.  Then abruptly she was on her knees before me, with her 
+hands upon my shoulder and her eyes meeting mine.
+
+"My dear," she said very earnestly, "don't misunderstand me!  Don't 
+think I'm retreating from the things we've done!  Our love is the 
+best thing I could ever have had from life.  Nothing can ever equal 
+it; nothing could ever equal the beauty and delight you and I have 
+had together.  Never!  You have loved me; you do love me. . . .
+
+No one could ever know how to love you as I have loved you; no one 
+could ever love me as you have loved me, my king.  And it's just 
+because it's been so splendid, dear; it's just because I'd die 
+rather than have a tithe of all this wiped out of my life again--for 
+it's made me, it's all I am--dear, it's years since I began loving 
+you--it's just because of its goodness that I want not to end in 
+wreckage now, not to end in the smashing up of all the big things I 
+understand in you and love in you. . . .
+
+"What is there for us if we keep on and go away?" she went on.  "All 
+the big interests in our lives will vanish--everything.  We shall 
+become specialised people--people overshadowed by a situation.  We 
+shall be an elopement, a romance--all our breadth and meaning gone!  
+People will always think of it first when they think of us; all our 
+work and aims will be warped by it and subordinated to it.  Is it 
+good enough, dear?  Just to specialise. . . .  I think of you.  
+We've got a case, a passionate case, the best of cases, but do we 
+want to spend all our lives defending it and justifying it?  And 
+there's that other life.  I know now you care for Margaret--you care 
+more than you think you do.  You have said fine things of her.  I've 
+watched you about her.  Little things have dropped from you.  She's 
+given her life for you; she's nothing without you.  You feel that to 
+your marrow all the time you are thinking about these things.  Oh, 
+I'm not jealous, dear.  I love you for loving her.  I love you in 
+relation to her.  But there it is, an added weight against us, 
+another thing worth saving."
+
+Presently, I remember, she sat back on her heels and looked up into 
+my face.  "We've done wrong--and parting's paying.  It's time to 
+pay.  We needn't have paid, if we'd kept to the track. . . .  You 
+and I, Master, we've got to be men."
+
+"Yes," I said; "we've got to be men."
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+I was driven to tell Margaret about our situation by my intolerable 
+dread that otherwise the thing might come to her through some stupid 
+and clumsy informant.  She might even meet Altiora, and have it from 
+her.
+
+I can still recall the feeling of sitting at my desk that night in 
+that large study of mine in Radnor Square, waiting for Margaret to 
+come home.  It was oddly like the feeling of a dentist's reception-
+room; only it was for me to do the dentistry with clumsy, cruel 
+hands.  I had left the door open so that she would come in to me.
+
+I heard her silken rustle on the stairs at last, and then she was in 
+the doorway.  "May I come in?" she said.
+
+"Do," I said, and turned round to her.
+
+"Working?" she said.
+
+"Hard," I answered.  "Where have YOU been?"
+
+"At the Vallerys'.  Mr. Evesham was talking about you.  They were 
+all talking.  I don't think everybody knew who I was.  Just Mrs. 
+Mumble I'd been to them.  Lord Wardenham doesn't like you."
+
+"He doesn't."
+
+"But they all feel you're rather big, anyhow.  Then I went on to 
+Park Lane to hear a new pianist and some other music at Eva's."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then I looked in at the Brabants' for some midnight tea before I 
+came on here.  They'd got some writers--and Grant was there."
+
+"You HAVE been flying round. . . ."
+
+There was a little pause between us.
+
+I looked at her pretty, unsuspecting face, and at the slender grace 
+of her golden-robed body.  What gulfs there were between us!  
+"You've been amused," I said.
+
+"It's been amusing.  You've been at the House?"
+
+"The Medical Education Bill kept me." . . .
+
+After all, why should I tell her?  She'd got to a way of living that 
+fulfilled her requirements.  Perhaps she'd never hear.  But all that 
+day and the day before I'd been making up my mind to do the thing.
+
+"I want to tell you something," I said.  "I wish you'd sit down for 
+a moment or so." . . .
+
+Once I had begun, it seemed to me I had to go through with it.
+
+Something in the quality of my voice gave her an intimation of 
+unusual gravity.  She looked at me steadily for a moment and sat 
+down slowly in my armchair.
+
+"What is it?" she said.
+
+I went on awkwardly.  "I've got to tell you--something 
+extraordinarily distressing," I said.
+
+She was manifestly altogether unaware.
+
+"There seems to be a good deal of scandal abroad--I've only recently 
+heard of it--about myself--and Isabel."
+
+"Isabel!"
+
+I nodded.
+
+"What do they say?" she asked.
+
+It was difficult, I found, to speak.
+
+"They say she's my mistress."
+
+"Oh!  How abominable!"
+
+She spoke with the most natural indignation.  Our eyes met.
+
+"We've been great friends," I said.
+
+"Yes.  And to make THAT of it.  My poor dear!  But how can they?"  
+She paused and looked at me.  It's so incredible.  How can any one 
+believe it?  I couldn't."
+
+She stopped, with her distressed eyes regarding me.  Her expression 
+changed to dread.  There was a tense stillness for a second, 
+perhaps.
+
+I turned my face towards the desk, and took up and dropped a handful 
+of paper fasteners.
+
+"Margaret," I said, " I'm afraid you'll have to believe it."
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Margaret sat very still.  When I looked at her again, her face was 
+very white, and her distressed eyes scrutinised me.  Her lips 
+quivered as she spoke.  "You really mean--THAT?" she said.
+
+I nodded.
+
+"I never dreamt."
+
+"I never meant you to dream."
+
+"And that is why--we've been apart?"
+
+I thought.  "I suppose it is."
+
+"Why have you told me now?"
+
+"Those rumours.  I didn't want any one else to tell you."
+
+"Or else it wouldn't have mattered?"
+
+"No."
+
+She turned her eyes from me to the fire.  Then for a moment she 
+looked about the room she had made for me, and then quite silently, 
+with a childish quivering of her lips, with a sort of dismayed 
+distress upon her face, she was weeping.  She sat weeping in her 
+dress of cloth of gold, with her bare slender arms dropped limp over 
+the arms of her chair, and her eyes averted from me, making no 
+effort to stay or staunch her tears.  "I am sorry, Margaret," I 
+said.  "I was in love. . . .  I did not understand. . . ."
+
+Presently she asked: "What are you going to do?"
+
+"You see, Margaret, now it's come to be your affair--I want to know 
+what you--what you want."
+
+"You want to leave me?"
+
+"If you want me to, I must."
+
+"Leave Parliament--leave all the things you are doing,--all this 
+fine movement of yours?"
+
+"No." I spoke sullenly.  "I don't want to leave anything.  I want to 
+stay on.  I've told you, because I think we--Isabel and I, I mean--
+have got to drive through a storm of scandal anyhow.  I don't know 
+how far things may go, how much people may feel, and I can't, I 
+can't have you unconscious, unarmed, open to any revelation--"
+
+She made no answer.
+
+"When the thing began--I knew it was stupid but I thought it was a 
+thing that wouldn't change, wouldn't be anything but itself, 
+wouldn't unfold--consequences. . . .  People have got hold of these 
+vague rumours. . . .  Directly it reached any one else but--but us 
+two--I saw it had to come to you."
+
+I stopped.  I had that distressful feeling I have always had with 
+Margaret, of not being altogether sure she heard, of being doubtful 
+if she understood.  I perceived that once again I had struck at her 
+and shattered a thousand unsubstantial pinnacles.  And I couldn't 
+get at her, to help her, or touch her mind!  I stood up, and at my 
+movement she moved.  She produced a dainty little handkerchief, and 
+made an effort to wipe her face with it, and held it to her eyes.  
+"Oh, my Husband!" she sobbed.
+
+"What do you mean to do?" she said, with her voice muffled by her 
+handkerchief.
+
+"We're going to end it," I said.
+
+Something gripped me tormentingly as I said that.  I drew a chair 
+beside her and sat down.  "You and I, Margaret, have been partners," 
+I began.  "We've built up this life of ours together; I couldn't 
+have done it without you.  We've made a position, created a work--"
+
+She shook her head.  "You," she said.
+
+"You helping.  I don't want to shatter it--if you don't want it 
+shattered.  I can't leave my work.  I can't leave you.  I want you 
+to have--all that you have ever had.  I've never meant to rob you.  
+I've made an immense and tragic blunder.  You don't know how things 
+took us, how different they seemed!  My character and accident have 
+conspired--We'll pay--in ourselves, not in our public service."
+
+I halted again.  Margaret remained very still.
+
+"I want you to understand that the thing is at an end.  It is 
+definitely at an end.  We--we talked--yesterday.  We mean to end it 
+altogether." I clenched my hands.  "She's--she's going to marry 
+Arnold Shoesmith."
+
+I wasn't looking now at Margaret any more, but I heard the rustle of 
+her movement as she turned on me.
+
+"It's all right," I said, clinging to my explanation.  "We're doing 
+nothing shabby.  He knows.  He will.  It's all as right--as things 
+can be now.  We're not cheating any one, Margaret.  We're doing 
+things straight--now.  Of course, you know. . . .  We shall--we 
+shall have to make sacrifices.  Give things up pretty completely.  
+Very completely. . . .  We shall have not to see each other for a 
+time, you know.  Perhaps not a long time.  Two or three years.  Or 
+write--or just any of that sort of thing ever--"
+
+Some subconscious barrier gave way in me.  I found myself crying 
+uncontrollably--as I have never cried since I was a little child.  I 
+was amazed and horrified at myself.  And wonderfully, Margaret was 
+on her knees beside me, with her arms about me, mingling her weeping 
+with mine.  "Oh, my Husband!" she cried, my poor Husband!  Does it 
+hurt you so?  I would do anything!  Oh, the fool I am!  Dear, I love 
+you.  I love you over and away and above all these jealous little 
+things!"
+
+She drew down my head to her as a mother might draw down the head of 
+a son.  She caressed me, weeping bitterly with me.  "Oh! my dear," 
+she sobbed, "my dear!  I've never seen you cry!  I've never seen you 
+cry.  Ever!  I didn't know you could.  Oh! my dear!  Can't you have 
+her, my dear, if you want her?  I can't bear it!  Let me help you, 
+dear.  Oh! my Husband!  My Man!  I can't bear to have you cry!"  For 
+a time she held me in silence.
+
+"I've thought this might happen, I dreamt it might happen.  You two, 
+I mean.  It was dreaming put it into my head.  When I've seen you 
+together, so glad with each other. . . .  Oh!  Husband mine, believe 
+me! believe me!  I'm stupid, I'm cold, I'm only beginning to realise 
+how stupid and cold, but all I want in all the world is to give my 
+life to you." . . .
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+"We can't part in a room," said Isabel.
+
+"We'll have one last talk together," I said, and planned that we 
+should meet for a half a day between Dover and Walmer and talk 
+ourselves out.  I still recall that day very well, recall even the 
+curious exaltation of grief that made our mental atmosphere 
+distinctive and memorable.  We had seen so much of one another, had 
+become so intimate, that we talked of parting even as we parted with 
+a sense of incredible remoteness.  We went together up over the 
+cliffs, and to a place where they fall towards the sea, past the 
+white, quaint-lanterned lighthouses of the South Foreland.  There, 
+in a kind of niche below the crest, we sat talking.  It was a 
+spacious day, serenely blue and warm, and on the wrinkled water 
+remotely below a black tender and six hooded submarines came 
+presently, and engaged in mysterious manoeuvers.  Shrieking gulls 
+and chattering jackdaws circled over us and below us, and dived and 
+swooped; and a skerry of weedy, fallen chalk appeared, and gradually 
+disappeared again, as the tide fell and rose.
+
+We talked and thought that afternoon on every aspect of our 
+relations.  It seems to me now we talked so wide and far that 
+scarcely an issue in the life between man and woman can arise that 
+we did not at least touch upon.  Lying there at Isabel's feet, I 
+have become for myself a symbol of all this world-wide problem 
+between duty and conscious, passionate love the world has still to 
+solve.  Because it isn't solved; there's a wrong in it either way. . 
+. .  The sky, the wide horizon, seemed to lift us out of ourselves 
+until we were something representative and general.  She was 
+womanhood become articulate, talking to her lover.
+
+"I ought," I said, "never to have loved you."
+
+"It wasn't a thing planned," she said.
+
+"I ought never to have let our talk slip to that, never to have 
+turned back from America."
+
+"I'm glad we did it," she said.  "Don't think I repent."
+
+I looked at her.
+
+"I will never repent," she said.  "Never!" as though she clung to 
+her life in saying it.
+
+I remember we talked for a long time of divorce.  It seemed to us 
+then, and it seems to us still, that it ought to have been possible 
+for Margaret to divorce me, and for me to marry without the 
+scandalous and ugly publicity, the taint and ostracism that follow 
+such a readjustment.  We went on to the whole perplexing riddle of 
+marriage.  We criticised the current code, how muddled and 
+conventionalised it had become, how modified by subterfuges and 
+concealments and new necessities, and the increasing freedom of 
+women.  "It's all like Bromstead when the building came," I said; 
+for I had often talked to her of that early impression of purpose 
+dissolving again into chaotic forces.  "There is no clear right in 
+the world any more.  The world is Byzantine.  The justest man to-day 
+must practise a tainted goodness."
+
+These questions need discussion--a magnificent frankness of 
+discussion--if any standards are again to establish an effective 
+hold upon educated people.  Discretions, as I have said already, 
+will never hold any one worth holding--longer than they held us.  
+Against every "shalt not" there must be a "why not" plainly put,--
+the "why not" largest and plainest, the law deduced from its 
+purpose.  "You and I, Isabel," I said, "have always been a little 
+disregardful of duty, partly at least because the idea of duty comes 
+to us so ill-clad.  Oh! I know there's an extravagant insubordinate 
+strain in us, but that wasn't all.  I wish humbugs would leave duty 
+alone.  I wish all duty wasn't covered with slime.  That's where the 
+real mischief comes in.  Passion can always contrive to clothe 
+itself in beauty, strips itself splendid.  That carried us.  But for 
+all its mean associations there is this duty. . . .
+
+"Don't we come rather late to it?"
+
+"Not so late that it won't be atrociously hard to do."
+
+"It's queer to think of now," said Isabel.  "Who could believe we 
+did all we have done honestly?  Well, in a manner honestly.  Who 
+could believe we thought this might be hidden?  Who could trace it 
+all step by step from the time when we found that a certain boldness 
+in our talk was pleasing?  We talked of love. . . .  Master, there's 
+not much for us to do in the way of Apologia that any one will 
+credit.  And yet if it were possible to tell the very heart of our 
+story. . . .
+
+"Does Margaret really want to go on with you?" she asked--"shield 
+you--knowing of . . . THIS?"
+
+"I'm certain.  I don't understand--just as I don't understand 
+Shoesmith, but she does.  These people walk on solid ground which is 
+just thin air to us.  They've got something we haven't got.  
+Assurances?  I wonder." . . .
+
+Then it was, or later, we talked of Shoesmith, and what her life 
+might be with him.
+
+"He's good," she said; "he's kindly.  He's everything but magic.  
+He's the very image of the decent, sober, honourable life.  You 
+can't say a thing against him or I--except that something--something 
+in his imagination, something in the tone of his voice--fails for 
+me.  Why don't I love him?--he's a better man than you!  Why don't 
+you?  IS he a better man than you?  He's usage, he's honour, he's 
+the right thing, he's the breed and the tradition,--a gentleman.  
+You're your erring, incalculable self.  I suppose we women will 
+trust this sort and love your sort to the very end of time. . . ."
+
+We lay side by side and nibbled at grass stalks as we talked.  It 
+seemed enormously unreasonable to us that two people who had come to 
+the pitch of easy and confident affection and happiness that held 
+between us should be obliged to part and shun one another, or murder 
+half the substance of their lives.  We felt ourselves crushed and 
+beaten by an indiscriminating machine which destroys happiness in 
+the service of jealousy.  "The mass of people don't feel these 
+things in quite the same manner as we feel them," she said.  "Is it 
+because they're different in grain, or educated out of some 
+primitive instinct?"
+
+"It's because we've explored love a little, and they know no more 
+than the gateway," I said.  "Lust and then jealousy; their simple 
+conception--and we have gone past all that and wandered hand in 
+hand. . . ."
+
+I remember that for a time we watched two of that larger sort of 
+gull, whose wings are brownish-white, circle and hover against the 
+blue.  And then we lay and looked at a band of water mirror clear 
+far out to sea, and wondered why the breeze that rippled all the 
+rest should leave it so serene.
+
+"And in this State of ours," I resumed.
+
+"Eh!" said Isabel, rolling over into a sitting posture and looking 
+out at the horizon.  "Let's talk no more of things we can never see.  
+Talk to me of the work you are doing and all we shall do--after we 
+have parted.  We've said too little of that.  We've had our red 
+life, and it's over.  Thank Heaven!--though we stole it!  Talk about 
+your work, dear, and the things we'll go on doing--just as though we 
+were still together.  We'll still be together in a sense--through 
+all these things we have in common."
+
+And so we talked of politics and our outlook.  We were interested to 
+the pitch of self-forgetfulness.  We weighed persons and forces, 
+discussed the probabilities of the next general election, the steady 
+drift of public opinion in the north and west away from Liberalism 
+towards us.  It was very manifest that in spite of Wardenham and the 
+EXPURGATOR, we should come into the new Government strongly.  The 
+party had no one else, all the young men were formally or informally 
+with us; Esmeer would have office, Lord Tarvrille, I . . . and very 
+probably there would be something for Shoesmith.  "And for my own 
+part," I said, "I count on backing on the Liberal side.  For the 
+last two years we've been forcing competition in constructive 
+legislation between the parties.  The Liberals have not been long in 
+following up our Endowment of Motherhood lead.  They'll have to give 
+votes and lip service anyhow.  Half the readers of the BLUE WEEKLY, 
+they say, are Liberals. . . .
+
+"I remember talking about things of this sort with old Willersley," 
+I said, "ever so many years ago.  It was some place near Locarno, 
+and we looked down the lake that shone weltering--just as now we 
+look over the sea.  And then we dreamt in an indistinct featureless 
+way of all that you and I are doing now."
+
+"I!" said Isabel, and laughed.
+
+"Well, of some such thing," I said, and remained for awhile silent, 
+thinking of Locarno.
+
+I recalled once more the largeness, the release from small personal 
+things that I had felt in my youth; statecraft became real and 
+wonderful again with the memory, the gigantic handling of gigantic 
+problems.  I began to talk out my thoughts, sitting up beside her, 
+as I could never talk of them to any one but Isabel; began to 
+recover again the purpose that lay under all my political ambitions 
+and adjustments and anticipations.  I saw the State, splendid and 
+wide as I had seen it in that first travel of mine, but now it was 
+no mere distant prospect of spires and pinnacles, but populous with 
+fine-trained, bold-thinking, bold-doing people.  It was as if I had 
+forgotten for a long time and now remembered with amazement.
+
+At first, I told her, I had been altogether at a loss how I could do 
+anything to battle against the aimless muddle of our world; I had 
+wanted a clue--until she had come into my life questioning, 
+suggesting, unconsciously illuminating.  "But I have done nothing," 
+she protested.  I declared she had done everything in growing to 
+education under my eyes, in reflecting again upon all the processes 
+that had made myself, so that instead of abstractions and blue-books 
+and bills and devices, I had realised the world of mankind as a 
+crowd needing before all things fine women and men.  We'd spoilt 
+ourselves in learning that, but anyhow we had our lesson.  Before 
+her I was in a nineteenth-century darkness, dealing with the nation 
+as if it were a crowd of selfish men, forgetful of women and 
+children and that shy wild thing in the hearts of men, love, which 
+must be drawn upon as it has never been drawn upon before, if the 
+State is to live.  I saw now how it is possible to bring the loose 
+factors of a great realm together, to create a mind of literature 
+and thought in it, and the expression of a purpose to make it self-
+conscious and fine.  I had it all clear before me, so that at a 
+score of points I could presently begin.  The BLUE WEEKLY was a 
+centre of force.  Already we had given Imperialism a criticism, and 
+leavened half the press from our columns.  Our movement consolidated 
+and spread.  We should presently come into power.  Everything moved 
+towards our hands.  We should be able to get at the schools, the 
+services, the universities, the church; enormously increase the 
+endowment of research, and organise what was sorely wanted, a 
+criticism of research; contrive a closer contact between the press 
+and creative intellectual life; foster literature, clarify, 
+strengthen the public consciousness, develop social organisation and 
+a sense of the State.  Men were coming to us every day, brilliant 
+young peers like Lord Dentonhill, writers like Carnot and Cresswell.  
+It filled me with pride to win such men.  "We stand for so much more 
+than we seem to stand for," I said.  I opened my heart to her, so 
+freely that I hesitate to open my heart even to the reader, telling 
+of projects and ambitions I cherished, of my consciousness of great 
+powers and widening opportunities. . . .
+
+Isabel watched me as I talked.
+
+She too, I think, had forgotten these things for a while.  For it is 
+curious and I think a very significant thing that since we had 
+become lovers, we had talked very little of the broader things that 
+had once so strongly gripped our imaginations.
+
+"It's good," I said, "to talk like this to you, to get back to youth 
+and great ambitions with you.  There have been times lately when 
+politics has seemed the pettiest game played with mean tools for 
+mean ends--and none the less so that the happiness of three hundred 
+million people might be touched by our follies.  I talk to no one 
+else like this. . . .  And now I think of parting, I think but of 
+how much more I might have talked to you." . . .
+
+Things drew to an end at last, but after we had spoken of a thousand 
+things.
+
+"We've talked away our last half day," I said, staring over my 
+shoulder at the blazing sunset sky behind us.  "Dear, it's been the 
+last day of our lives for us. . . .  It doesn't seem like the last 
+day of our lives.  Or any day."
+
+"I wonder how it will feel?" said Isabel.
+
+"It will be very strange at first--not to be able to tell you 
+things."
+
+"I've a superstition that after--after we've parted--if ever I go 
+into my room and talk, you'll hear.  You'll be--somewhere."
+
+"I shall be in the world--yes."
+
+"I don't feel as though these days ahead were real.  Here we are, 
+here we remain."
+
+"Yes, I feel that.  As though you and I were two immortals, who 
+didn't live in time and space at all, who never met, who couldn't 
+part, and here we lie on Olympus.  And those two poor creatures who 
+did meet, poor little Richard Remington and Isabel Rivers, who met 
+and loved too much and had to part, they part and go their ways, and 
+we lie here and watch them, you and I.  She'll cry, poor dear."
+
+"She'll cry.  She's crying now!"
+
+"Poor little beasts!  I think he'll cry too.  He winces.  He could--
+for tuppence.  I didn't know he had lachrymal glands at all until a 
+little while ago.  I suppose all love is hysterical--and a little 
+foolish.  Poor mites!  Silly little pitiful creatures!  How we have 
+blundered!  Think how we must look to God!  Well, we'll pity them, 
+and then we'll inspire him to stiffen up again--and do as we've 
+determined he shall do.  We'll see it through,--we who lie here on 
+the cliff.  They'll be mean at times, and horrid at times; we know 
+them!  Do you see her, a poor little fine lady in a great house,--
+she sometimes goes to her room and writes."
+
+"She writes for his BLUE WEEKLY still."
+
+"Yes.  Sometimes--I hope.  And he's there in the office with a bit 
+of her copy in his hand."
+
+"Is it as good as if she still talked it over with him before she 
+wrote it?  Is it?"
+
+"Better, I think.  Let's play it's better--anyhow.  It may be that 
+talking over was rather mixed with love-making.  After all, love-
+making is joy rather than magic.  Don't let's pretend about that 
+even. . . .  Let's go on watching him.  (I don't see why her writing 
+shouldn't be better.  Indeed I don't.) See!  There he goes down 
+along the Embankment to Westminster just like a real man, for all 
+that he's smaller than a grain of dust.  What is running round 
+inside that speck of a head of his?  Look at him going past the 
+Policemen, specks too--selected large ones from the country.  I 
+think he's going to dinner with the Speaker--some old thing like 
+that.  Is his face harder or commoner or stronger?--I can't quite 
+see. . . .  And now he's up and speaking in the House.  Hope he'll 
+hold on to the thread.  He'll have to plan his speeches to the very 
+end of his days--and learn the headings."
+
+"Isn't she up in the women's gallery to hear him?"
+
+"No.  Unless it's by accident."
+
+"She's there," she said.
+
+"Well, by accident it happens.  Not too many accidents, Isabel.  
+Never any more adventures for us, dear, now.  No! . . .  They play 
+the game, you know.  They've begun late, but now they've got to.  
+You see it's not so very hard for them since you and I, my dear, are 
+here always, always faithfully here on this warm cliff of love 
+accomplished, watching and helping them under high heaven.  It isn't 
+so VERY hard.  Rather good in some ways.  Some people HAVE to be 
+broken a little.  Can you see Altiora down there, by any chance?"
+
+"She's too little to be seen," she said.
+
+"Can you see the sins they once committed?"
+
+"I can only see you here beside me, dear--for ever.  For all my 
+life, dear, till I die.  Was that--the sin?" . . .
+
+I took her to the station, and after she had gone I was to drive to 
+Dover, and cross to Calais by the night boat.  I couldn't, I felt, 
+return to London.  We walked over the crest and down to the little 
+station of Martin Mill side by side, talking at first in broken 
+fragments, for the most part of unimportant things.
+
+"None of this," she said abruptly, "seems in the slightest degree 
+real to me.  I've got no sense of things ending."
+
+"We're parting," I said.
+
+"We're parting--as people part in a play.  It's distressing.  But I 
+don't feel as though you and I were really never to see each other 
+again for years.  Do you?"
+
+I thought.  "No," I said.
+
+"After we've parted I shall look to talk it over with you."
+
+"So shall I."
+
+"That's absurd."
+
+"Absurd."
+
+"I feel as if you'd always he there, just about where you are now.  
+Invisible perhaps, but there.  We've spent so much of our lives 
+joggling elbows." . . .
+
+"Yes.  Yes.  I don't in the least realise it.  I suppose I shall 
+begin to when the train goes out of the station.  Are we wanting in 
+imagination, Isabel?"
+
+"I don't know.  We've always assumed it was the other way about."
+
+"Even when the train goes out of the station--!  I've seen you into 
+so many trains."
+
+"I shall go on thinking of things to say to you--things to put in 
+your letters.  For years to come.  How can I ever stop thinking in 
+that way now?  We've got into each other's brains."
+
+"It isn't real," I said; "nothing is real.  The world's no more than 
+a fantastic dream.  Why are we parting, Isabel?"
+
+"I don't know.  It seems now supremely silly.  I suppose we have to.  
+Can't we meet?--don't you think we shall meet even in dreams?"
+
+"We'll meet a thousand times in dreams," I said.
+
+"I wish we could dream at the same time," said Isabel. . . .  "Dream 
+walks.  I can't believe, dear, I shall never have a walk with you 
+again."
+
+"If I'd stayed six months in America," I said, "we might have walked 
+long walks and talked long talks for all our lives."
+
+"Not in a world of Baileys," said Isabel.  "And anyhow--"
+
+She stopped short.  I looked interrogation.
+
+"We've loved," she said.
+
+I took her ticket, saw to her luggage, and stood by the door of the 
+compartment.  "Good-bye," I said a little stiffly, conscious of the 
+people upon the platform.  She bent above me, white and dusky, 
+looking at me very steadfastly.
+
+"Come here," she whispered.  "Never mind the porters.  What can they 
+know?  Just one time more--I must."
+
+She rested her hand against the door of the carriage and bent down 
+upon me, and put her cold, moist lips to mine.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD
+
+THE BREAKING POINT
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+And then we broke down.  We broke our faith with both Margaret and 
+Shoesmith, flung career and duty out of our lives, and went away 
+together.
+
+It is only now, almost a year after these events, that I can begin 
+to see what happened to me.  At the time it seemed to me I was a 
+rational, responsible creature, but indeed I had not parted from her 
+two days before I became a monomaniac to whom nothing could matter 
+but Isabel.  Every truth had to be squared to that obsession, every 
+duty.  It astounds me to think how I forgot Margaret, forgot my 
+work, forgot everything but that we two were parted.  I still 
+believe that with better chances we might have escaped the 
+consequences of the emotional storm that presently seized us both.  
+But we had no foresight of that, and no preparation for it, and our 
+circumstances betrayed us.  It was partly Shoesmith's unwisdom in 
+delaying his marriage until after the end of the session--partly my 
+own amazing folly in returning within four days to Westminster.  But 
+we were all of us intent upon the defeat of scandal and the complete 
+restoration of appearances.  It seemed necessary that Shoesmith's 
+marriage should not seem to be hurried, still more necessary that I 
+should not vanish inexplicably.  I had to be visible with Margaret 
+in London just as much as possible; we went to restaurants, we 
+visited the theatre; we could even contemplate the possibility of my 
+presence at the wedding.  For that, however, we had schemed a 
+weekend visit to Wales, and a fictitious sprained ankle at the last 
+moment which would justify my absence. . . .
+
+I cannot convey to you the intolerable wretchedness and rebellion of 
+my separation from Isabel.  It seemed that in the past two years all 
+my thoughts had spun commisures to Isabel's brain and I could think 
+of nothing that did not lead me surely to the need of the one 
+intimate I had found in the world.  I came back to the House and the 
+office and my home, I filled all my days with appointments and duty, 
+and it did not save me in the least from a lonely emptiness such as 
+I had never felt before in all my life.  I had little sleep.  In the 
+daytime I did a hundred things, I even spoke in the House on two 
+occasions, and by my own low standards spoke well, and it seemed to 
+me that I was going about in my own brain like a hushed survivor in 
+a house whose owner lies dead upstairs.
+
+I came to a crisis after that wild dinner of Tarvrille's.  Something 
+in that stripped my soul bare.
+
+It was an occasion made absurd and strange by the odd accident that 
+the house caught fire upstairs while we were dining below.  It was a 
+men's dinner--"  A dinner of all sorts," said Tarvrille, when he 
+invited me; "everything from Evesham and Gane to Wilkins the author, 
+and Heaven knows what will happen!"  I remember that afterwards 
+Tarvrille was accused of having planned the fire to make his dinner 
+a marvel and a memory.  It was indeed a wonderful occasion, and I 
+suppose if I had not been altogether drenched in misery, I should 
+have found the same wild amusement in it that glowed in all the 
+others.  There were one or two university dons, Lord George Fester, 
+the racing man, Panmure, the artist, two or three big City men, 
+Weston Massinghay and another prominent Liberal whose name I can't 
+remember, the three men Tarvrille had promised and Esmeer, Lord 
+Wrassleton, Waulsort, the member for Monckton, Neal and several 
+others.  We began a little coldly, with duologues, but the 
+conversation was already becoming general--so far as such a long 
+table permitted--when the fire asserted itself.
+
+It asserted itself first as a penetrating and emphatic smell of 
+burning rubber,--it was caused by the fusing of an electric wire.  
+The reek forced its way into the discussion of the Pekin massacres 
+that had sprung up between Evesham, Waulsort, and the others at the 
+end of the table.  "Something burning," said the man next to me.
+
+"Something must be burning," said Panmure.
+
+Tarvrille hated undignified interruptions.  He had a particularly 
+imperturbable butler with a cadaverous sad face and an eye of rigid 
+disapproval.  He spoke to this individual over his shoulder.  "Just 
+see, will you," he said, and caught up the pause in the talk to his 
+left.
+
+Wilkins was asking questions, and I, too, was curious.  The story of 
+the siege of the Legations in China in the year 1900 and all that 
+followed upon that, is just one of those disturbing interludes in 
+history that refuse to join on to that general scheme of 
+protestation by which civilisation is maintained.  It is a break in 
+the general flow of experience as disconcerting to statecraft as the 
+robbery of my knife and the scuffle that followed it had been to me 
+when I was a boy at Penge.  It is like a tear in a curtain revealing 
+quite unexpected backgrounds.  I had never given the business a 
+thought for years; now this talk brought back a string of pictures 
+to my mind; how the reliefs arrived and the plundering began, how 
+section after section of the International Army was drawn into 
+murder and pillage, how the infection spread upward until the wives 
+of Ministers were busy looting, and the very sentinels stripped and 
+crawled like snakes into the Palace they were set to guard.  It did 
+not stop at robbery, men were murdered, women, being plundered, were 
+outraged, children were butchered, strong men had found themselves 
+with arms in a lawless, defenceless city, and this had followed.  
+Now it was all recalled.
+
+"Respectable ladies addicted to district visiting at home were as 
+bad as any one," said Panmure.  "Glazebrook told me of one--flushed 
+like a woman at a bargain sale, he said--and when he pointed out to 
+her that the silk she'd got was bloodstained, she just said, 'Oh, 
+bother!' and threw it aside and went back. . . ."
+
+We became aware that Tarvrille's butler had returned.  We tried not 
+to seem to listen.
+
+"Beg pardon, m'lord," he said.  "The house IS on fire, m'lord."
+
+"Upstairs, m'lord."
+
+"Just overhead, m'lord."
+
+"The maids are throwing water, m'lord, and I've telephoned FIRE."
+
+"No, m'lord, no immediate danger."
+
+"It's all right," said Tarvrille to the table generally.  Go on!  
+It's not a general conflagration, and the fire brigade won't be five 
+minutes.  Don't see that it's our affair.  The stuff's insured.  
+They say old Lady Paskershortly was dreadful.  Like a harpy.  The 
+Dowager Empress had shown her some little things of hers.  Pet 
+things--hidden away.  Susan went straight for them--used to take an 
+umbrella for the silks.  Born shoplifter."
+
+It was evident he didn't want his dinner spoilt, and we played up 
+loyally.
+
+"This is recorded history," said Wilkins,--" practically.  It makes 
+one wonder about unrecorded history.  In India, for example."
+
+But nobody touched that.
+
+"Thompson," said Tarvrille to the imperturbable butler, and 
+indicating the table generally, "champagne.  Champagne.  Keep it 
+going."
+
+"M'lord," and Thompson marshalled his assistants.
+
+Some man I didn't know began to remember things about Mandalay.  
+"It's queer," he said, "how people break out at times;" and told his 
+story of an army doctor, brave, public-spirited, and, as it 
+happened, deeply religious, who was caught one evening by the 
+excitement of plundering--and stole and hid, twisted the wrist of a 
+boy until it broke, and was afterwards overcome by wild remorse.
+
+I watched Evesham listening intently.  "Strange," he said, "very 
+strange.  We are such stuff as thieves are made of.  And in China, 
+too, they murdered people--for the sake of murdering.  Apart, so to 
+speak, from mercenary considerations.  I'm afraid there's no doubt 
+of it in certain cases.  No doubt at all.  Young soldiers fresh from 
+German high schools and English homes!"
+
+"Did OUR people?" asked some patriot.
+
+"Not so much.  But I'm afraid there were cases. . . .  Some of the 
+Indian troops were pretty bad."
+
+Gane picked up the tale with confirmations.
+
+It is all printed in the vividest way as a picture upon my memory, 
+so that were I a painter I think I could give the deep rich browns 
+and warm greys beyond the brightly lit table, the various 
+distinguished faces, strongly illuminated, interested and keen, 
+above the black and white of evening dress, the alert menservants 
+with their heavier, clean-shaved faces indistinctly seen in the 
+dimness behind.  Then this was coloured emotionally for me by my 
+aching sense of loss and sacrifice, and by the chance trend of our 
+talk to the breaches and unrealities of the civilised scheme.  We 
+seemed a little transitory circle of light in a universe of darkness 
+and violence; an effect to which the diminishing smell of burning 
+rubber, the trampling of feet overhead, the swish of water, added 
+enormously.  Everybody--unless, perhaps, it was Evesham--drank 
+rather carelessly because of the suppressed excitement of our 
+situation, and talked the louder and more freely.
+
+"But what a flimsy thing our civilisation is!" said Evesham; "a mere 
+thin net of habits and associations!"
+
+"I suppose those men came back," said Wilkins.
+
+"Lady Paskershortly did!" chuckled Evesham.
+
+"How do they fit it in with the rest of their lives?"  Wilkins 
+speculated.  "I suppose there's Pekin-stained police officers, 
+Pekin-stained J. P.'s--trying petty pilferers in the severest 
+manner." . . .
+
+Then for a time things became preposterous.  There was a sudden 
+cascade of water by the fireplace, and then absurdly the ceiling 
+began to rain upon us, first at this point and then that.  "My new 
+suit!" cried some one.  "Perrrrrr-up pe-rr"--a new vertical line of 
+blackened water would establish itself and form a spreading pool 
+upon the gleaming cloth.  The men nearest would arrange catchment 
+areas of plates and flower bowls.  "Draw up!" said Tarvrille, "draw 
+up.  That's the bad end of the table!"  He turned to the 
+imperturbable butler.  "Take round bath towels," he said; and 
+presently the men behind us were offering--with inflexible dignity--
+"Port wine, Sir.  Bath towel, Sir!"  Waulsort, with streaks of 
+blackened water on his forehead, was suddenly reminded of a wet year 
+when he had followed the French army manoeuvres.  An animated 
+dispute sprang up between him and Neal about the relative efficiency 
+of the new French and German field guns.  Wrassleton joined in and a 
+little drunken shrivelled Oxford don of some sort with a black-
+splashed shirt front who presently silenced them all by the 
+immensity and particularity of his knowledge of field artillery.  
+Then the talk drifted to Sedan and the effect of dead horses upon 
+drinking-water, which brought Wrassleton and Weston Massinghay into 
+a dispute of great vigour and emphasis.  "The trouble in South 
+Africa," said Weston Massinghay, "wasn't that we didn't boil our 
+water.  It was that we didn't boil our men.  The Boers drank the 
+same stuff we did.  THEY didn't get dysentery."
+
+That argument went on for some time.  I was attacked across the 
+table by a man named Burshort about my Endowment of Motherhood 
+schemes, but in the gaps of that debate I could still hear Weston 
+Massinghay at intervals repeat in a rather thickened voice: "THEY 
+didn't get dysentery."
+
+I think Evesham went early.  The rest of us clustered more and more 
+closely towards the drier end of the room, the table was pushed 
+along, and the area beneath the extinguished conflagration abandoned 
+to a tinkling, splashing company of pots and pans and bowls and 
+baths.  Everybody was now disposed to be hilarious and noisy, to say 
+startling and aggressive things; we must have sounded a queer 
+clamour to a listener in the next room.  The devil inspired them to 
+begin baiting me.  "Ours isn't the Tory party any more," said 
+Burshort.  "Remington has made it the Obstetric Party."
+
+"That's good!" said Weston Massinghay, with all his teeth gleaming; 
+"I shall use that against you in the House!"
+
+"I shall denounce you for abusing private confidences if you do," 
+said Tarvrille.
+
+"Remington wants us to give up launching Dreadnoughts and launch 
+babies instead," Burshort urged.  "For the price of one Dreadnought--"
+
+The little shrivelled don who had been omniscient about guns joined 
+in the baiting, and displayed himself a venomous creature.  
+Something in his eyes told me he knew Isabel and hated me for it.  
+"Love and fine thinking," he began, a little thickly, and knocking 
+over a wine-glass with a too easy gesture.  "Love and fine thinking.  
+Two things don't go together.  No philosophy worth a damn ever came 
+out of excesses of love.  Salt Lake City--Piggott--Ag--Agapemone 
+again--no works to matter."
+
+Everybody laughed.
+
+"Got to rec'nise these facts," said my assailant.  "Love and fine 
+think'n pretty phrase--attractive.  Suitable for p'litical 
+dec'rations.  Postcard, Christmas, gilt lets, in a wreath of white 
+flow's.  Not oth'wise valu'ble."
+
+I made some remark, I forget what, but he overbore me.
+
+Real things we want are Hate--Hate and COARSE think'n.  I b'long to 
+the school of Mrs. F's Aunt--"
+
+"What?" said some one, intent.
+
+"In 'Little Dorrit,'" explained Tarvrille; "go on!"
+
+"Hate a fool," said my assailant.
+
+Tarvrille glanced at me.  I smiled to conceal the loss of my temper.
+
+"Hate," said the little man, emphasising his point with a clumsy 
+fist.  "Hate's the driving force.  What's m'rality?--hate of rotten 
+goings on.  What's patriotism?--hate of int'loping foreigners.  
+What's Radicalism?--hate of lords.  What's Toryism?--hate of 
+disturbance.  It's all hate--hate from top to bottom.  Hate of a 
+mess.  Remington owned it the other day, said he hated a mu'll.  
+There you are!  If you couldn't get hate into an election, damn it 
+(hic) people wou'n't poll.  Poll for love!--no' me!"
+
+He paused, but before any one could speak he had resumed.
+
+"Then this about fine thinking.  Like going into a bear pit armed 
+with a tagle--talgent--talgent galv'nometer.  Like going to fight a 
+mad dog with Shasepear and the Bible.  Fine thinking--what we want 
+is the thickes' thinking we can get.  Thinking that stands up alone.  
+Taf Reform means work for all, thassort of thing."
+
+The gentleman from Cambridge paused.  "YOU a flag!" he said.  "I'd 
+as soon go to ba'ell und' wet tissue paper!"
+
+My best answer on the spur of the moment was:
+
+"The Japanese did."  Which was absurd.
+
+I went on to some other reply, I forget exactly what, and the talk 
+of the whole table drew round me.  It was an extraordinary 
+revelation to me.  Every one was unusually careless and outspoken, 
+and it was amazing how manifestly they echoed the feeling of this 
+old Tory spokesman.  They were quite friendly to me, they regarded 
+me and the BLUE WEEKLY as valuable party assets for Toryism, but it 
+was clear they attached no more importance to what were my realities 
+than they did to the remarkable therapeutic claims of Mrs. Eddy.  
+They were flushed and amused, perhaps they went a little too far in 
+their resolves to draw me, but they left the impression on my mind 
+of men irrevocably set upon narrow and cynical views of political 
+life.  For them the political struggle was a game, whose counters 
+were human hate and human credulity; their real aim was just every 
+one's aim, the preservation of the class and way of living to which 
+their lives were attuned.  They did not know how tired I was, how 
+exhausted mentally and morally, nor how cruel their convergent 
+attack on me chanced to be.  But my temper gave way, I became tart 
+and fierce, perhaps my replies were a trifle absurd, and Tarvrille, 
+with that quick eye and sympathy of his, came to the rescue.  Then 
+for a time I sat silent and drank port wine while the others talked.  
+The disorder of the room, the still dripping ceiling, the noise, the 
+displaced ties and crumpled shirts of my companions, jarred on my 
+tormented nerves. . . . 
+
+It was long past midnight when we dispersed.  I remember Tarvrille 
+coming with me into the hall, and then suggesting we should go 
+upstairs to see the damage.  A manservant carried up two flickering 
+candles for us.  One end of the room was gutted, curtains, hangings, 
+several chairs and tables were completely burnt, the panelling was 
+scorched and warped, three smashed windows made the candles flare 
+and gutter, and some scraps of broken china still lay on the puddled 
+floor.
+
+As we surveyed this, Lady Tarvrille appeared, back from some party, 
+a slender, white-cloaked, satin-footed figure with amazed blue eyes 
+beneath her golden hair.  I remember how stupidly we laughed at her 
+surprise.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+I parted from Panmure at the corner of Aldington Street, and went my 
+way alone.  But I did not go home, I turned westward and walked for 
+a long way, and then struck northward aimlessly.  I was too 
+miserable to go to my house.
+
+I wandered about that night like a man who has discovered his Gods 
+are dead.  I can look back now detached yet sympathetic upon that 
+wild confusion of moods and impulses, and by it I think I can 
+understand, oh! half the wrongdoing and blundering in the world.
+
+I do not feel now the logical force of the process that must have 
+convinced me then that I had made my sacrifice and spent my strength 
+in vain.  At no time had I been under any illusion that the Tory 
+party had higher ideals than any other party, yet it came to me like 
+a thing newly discovered that the men I had to work with had for the 
+most part no such dreams, no sense of any collective purpose, no 
+atom of the faith I held.  They were just as immediately intent upon 
+personal ends, just as limited by habits of thought, as the men in 
+any other group or party.  Perhaps I had slipped unawares for a time 
+into the delusions of a party man--but I do not think so.
+
+No, it was the mood of profound despondency that had followed upon 
+the abrupt cessation of my familiar intercourse with Isabel, that 
+gave this fact that had always been present in my mind its quality 
+of devastating revelation.  It seemed as though I had never seen 
+before nor suspected the stupendous gap between the chaotic aims, 
+the routine, the conventional acquiescences, the vulgarisations of 
+the personal life, and that clearly conscious development and 
+service of a collective thought and purpose at which my efforts 
+aimed.  I had thought them but a little way apart, and now I saw 
+they were separated by all the distance between earth and heaven.  I 
+saw now in myself and every one around me, a concentration upon 
+interests close at hand, an inability to detach oneself from the 
+provocations, tendernesses, instinctive hates, dumb lusts and shy 
+timidities that touched one at every point; and, save for rare 
+exalted moments, a regardlessness of broader aims and remoter 
+possibilities that made the white passion of statecraft seem as 
+unearthly and irrelevant to human life as the story an astronomer 
+will tell, half proven but altogether incredible, of habitable 
+planets and answering intelligences, suns' distances uncounted 
+across the deep.  It seemed to me I had aspired too high and thought 
+too far, had mocked my own littleness by presumption, had given the 
+uttermost dear reality of life for a theoriser's dream.
+
+All through that wandering agony of mine that night a dozen threads 
+of thought interwove; now I was a soul speaking in protest to God 
+against a task too cold and high for it, and now I was an angry man, 
+scorned and pointed upon, who had let life cheat him of the ultimate 
+pride of his soul.  Now I was the fool of ambition, who opened his 
+box of gold to find blank emptiness, and now I was a spinner of 
+flimsy thoughts, whose web tore to rags at a touch.  I realised for 
+the first time how much I had come to depend upon the mind and faith 
+of Isabel, how she had confirmed me and sustained me, how little 
+strength I had to go on with our purposes now that she had vanished 
+from my life.  She had been the incarnation of those great 
+abstractions, the saving reality, the voice that answered back.  
+There was no support that night in the things that had been.  We 
+were alone together on the cliff for ever more!--that was very 
+pretty in its way, but it had no truth whatever that could help me 
+now, no ounce of sustaining value.  I wanted Isabel that night, no 
+sentiment or memory of her, but Isabel alive,--to talk to me, to 
+touch me, to hold me together.  I wanted unendurably the dusky 
+gentleness of her presence, the consolation of her voice.
+
+We were alone together on the cliff!  I startled a passing cabman 
+into interest by laughing aloud at that magnificent and 
+characteristic sentimentality.  What a lie it was, and how 
+satisfying it had been!  That was just where we shouldn't remain.  
+We of all people had no distinction from that humanity whose lot is 
+to forget.  We should go out to other interests, new experiences, 
+new demands.  That tall and intricate fabric of ambitious 
+understandings we had built up together in our intimacy would be the 
+first to go; and last perhaps to endure with us would be a few gross 
+memories of sights and sounds, and trivial incidental excitements. . . .
+
+I had a curious feeling that night that I had lost touch with life 
+for a long time, and had now been reminded of its quality.  That 
+infernal little don's parody of my ruling phrase, "Hate and coarse 
+thinking," stuck in my thoughts like a poisoned dart, a centre of 
+inflammation.  Just as a man who is debilitated has no longer the 
+vitality to resist an infection, so my mind, slackened by the crisis 
+of my separation from Isabel, could find no resistance to his 
+emphatic suggestion.  It seemed to me that what he had said was 
+overpoweringly true, not only of contemporary life, but of all 
+possible human life.  Love is the rare thing, the treasured thing; 
+you lock it away jealously and watch, and well you may; hate and 
+aggression and force keep the streets and rule the world.  And fine 
+thinking is, in the rough issues of life, weak thinking, is a 
+balancing indecisive process, discovers with disloyal impartiality a 
+justice and a defect on each disputing side.  "Good honest men," as 
+Dayton calls them, rule the world, with a way of thinking out 
+decisions like shooting cartloads of bricks, and with a steadfast 
+pleasure in hostility.  Dayton liked to call his antagonists 
+"blaggards and scoundrels"--it justified his opposition--the Lords 
+were "scoundrels," all people richer than be were "scoundrels," all 
+Socialists, all troublesome poor people; he liked to think of jails 
+and justice being done.  His public spirit was saturated with the 
+sombre joys of conflict and the pleasant thought of condign 
+punishment for all recalcitrant souls.  That was the way of it, I 
+perceived.  That had survival value, as the biologists say.  He was 
+fool enough in politics to be a consistent and happy politician. . . .
+
+Hate and coarse thinking; how the infernal truth of the phrase beat 
+me down that night!  I couldn't remember that I had known this all 
+along, and that it did not really matter in the slightest degree.  I 
+had worked it all out long ago in other terms, when I had seen how 
+all parties stood for interests inevitably, and how the purpose in 
+life achieves itself, if it achieves itself at all, as a bye product 
+of the war of individuals and classes.  Hadn't I always known that 
+science and philosophy elaborate themselves in spite of all the 
+passion and narrowness of men, in spite of the vanities and weakness 
+of their servants, in spite of all the heated disorder of 
+contemporary things?  Wasn't it my own phrase to speak of "that 
+greater mind in men, in which we are but moments and transitorily 
+lit cells?"  Hadn't I known that the spirit of man still speaks like 
+a thing that struggles out of mud and slime, and that the mere 
+effort to speak means choking and disaster?  Hadn't I known that we 
+who think without fear and speak without discretion will not come to 
+our own for the next two thousand years?
+
+It was the last was most forgotten of all that faith mislaid.  
+Before mankind, in my vision that night, stretched new centuries of 
+confusion, vast stupid wars, hastily conceived laws, foolish 
+temporary triumphs of order, lapses, set-backs, despairs, 
+catastrophes, new beginnings, a multitudinous wilderness of time, a 
+nigh plotless drama of wrong-headed energies.  In order to assuage 
+my parting from Isabel we had set ourselves to imagine great rewards 
+for our separation, great personal rewards; we had promised 
+ourselves success visible and shining in our lives.  To console 
+ourselves in our separation we had made out of the BLUE WEEKLY and 
+our young Tory movement preposterously enormous things-as though 
+those poor fertilising touches at the soil were indeed the 
+germinating seeds of the millennium, as though a million lives such 
+as ours had not to contribute before the beginning of the beginning.  
+That poor pretence had failed.  That magnificent proposition 
+shrivelled to nothing in the black loneliness of that night.
+
+I saw that there were to be no such compensations.  So far as my 
+real services to mankind were concerned I had to live an 
+unrecognised and unrewarded life.  If I made successes it would be 
+by the way.  Our separation would alter nothing of that.  My scandal 
+would cling to me now for all my life, a thing affecting 
+relationships, embarrassing and hampering my spirit.  I should 
+follow the common lot of those who live by the imagination, and 
+follow it now in infinite loneliness of soul; the one good 
+comforter, the one effectual familiar, was lost to me for ever; I 
+should do good and evil together, no one caring to understand; I 
+should produce much weary work, much bad-spirited work, much 
+absolute evil; the good in me would be too often ill-expressed and 
+missed or misinterpreted.  In the end I might leave one gleaming 
+flake or so amidst the slag heaps for a moment of postmortem 
+sympathy.  I was afraid beyond measure of my derelict self.  Because 
+I believed with all my soul in love and fine thinking that did not 
+mean that I should necessarily either love steadfastly or think 
+finely.  I remember how I fell talking to God--I think I talked out 
+loud.  "Why do I care for these things?" I cried, "when I can do so 
+little!  Why am I apart from the jolly thoughtless fighting life of 
+men?  These dreams fade to nothingness, and leave me bare!"
+
+I scolded.  "Why don't you speak to a man, show yourself?  I thought 
+I had a gleam of you in Isabel,--and then you take her away.  Do you 
+really think I can carry on this game alone, doing your work in 
+darkness and silence, living in muddled conflict, half living, half 
+dying?"
+
+Grotesque analogies arose in my mind.  I discovered a strange 
+parallelism between my now tattered phrase of "Love and fine 
+thinking" and the "Love and the Word" of Christian thought.  Was it 
+possible the Christian propaganda had at the outset meant just that 
+system of attitudes I had been feeling my way towards from the very 
+beginning of my life?  Had I spent a lifetime making my way back to 
+Christ?  It mocks humanity to think how Christ has been overlaid.  I 
+went along now, recalling long-neglected phrases and sentences; I 
+had a new vision of that great central figure preaching love with 
+hate and coarse thinking even in the disciples about Him, rising to 
+a tidal wave at last in that clamour for Barabbas, and the public 
+satisfaction in His fate. . . .
+
+It's curious to think that hopeless love and a noisy disordered 
+dinner should lead a man to these speculations, but they did.  "He 
+DID mean that!" I said, and suddenly thought of what a bludgeon 
+they'd made of His Christianity.  Athwart that perplexing, patient 
+enigma sitting inaudibly among publicans and sinners, danced and 
+gibbered a long procession of the champions of orthodoxy.  "He 
+wasn't human," I said, and remembered that last despairing cry, "My 
+God!  My God! why hast Thou forsaken Me?"
+
+"Oh, HE forsakes every one," I said, flying out as a tired mind 
+will, with an obvious repartee. . . .
+
+I passed at a bound from such monstrous theology to a towering rage 
+against the Baileys.  In an instant and with no sense of absurdity I 
+wanted--in the intervals of love and fine thinking--to fling about 
+that strenuously virtuous couple; I wanted to kick Keyhole of the 
+PEEPSHOW into the gutter and make a common massacre of all the 
+prosperous rascaldom that makes a trade and rule of virtue.  I can 
+still feel that transition.  In a moment I had reached that phase of 
+weakly decisive anger which is for people of my temperament the 
+concomitant of exhaustion.
+
+"I will have her," I cried.  "By Heaven!  I WILL have her!  Life 
+mocks me and cheats me.  Nothing can be made good to me again. . . .  
+Why shouldn't I save what I can?  I can't save myself without 
+her. . . ."
+
+I remember myself--as a sort of anti-climax to that--rather 
+tediously asking my way home.  I was somewhere in the neighbourhood 
+of Holland Park. . . .
+
+It was then between one and two.  I felt that I could go home now 
+without any risk of meeting Margaret.  It had been the thought of 
+returning to Margaret that had sent me wandering that night.  It is 
+one of the ugliest facts I recall about that time of crisis, the 
+intense aversion I felt for Margaret.  No sense of her goodness, her 
+injury and nobility, and the enormous generosity of her forgiveness, 
+sufficed to mitigate that.  I hope now that in this book I am able 
+to give something of her silvery splendour, but all through this 
+crisis I felt nothing of that.  There was a triumphant kindliness 
+about her that I found intolerable.  She meant to be so kind to me, 
+to offer unstinted consolation, to meet my needs, to supply just all 
+she imagined Isabel had given me.
+
+When I left Tarvrille's, I felt I could anticipate exactly how she 
+would meet my homecoming.  She would be perplexed by my crumpled 
+shirt front, on which I had spilt some drops of wine; she would 
+overlook that by an effort, explain it sentimentally, resolve it 
+should make no difference to her.  She would want to know who had 
+been present, what we had talked about, show the alertest interest 
+in whatever it was--it didn't matter what. . . .  No, I couldn't 
+face her.
+
+So I did not reach my study until two o'clock.
+
+There, I remember, stood the new and very beautiful old silver 
+candlesticks that she had set there two days since to please me--the 
+foolish kindliness of it!  But in her search for expression, 
+Margaret heaped presents upon me.  She had fitted these candlesticks 
+with electric lights, and I must, I suppose, have lit them to write 
+my note to Isabel.  "Give me a word--the world aches without you," 
+was all I scrawled, though I fully meant that she should come to me.  
+I knew, though I ought not to have known, that now she had left her 
+flat, she was with the Balfes--she was to have been married from the 
+Balfes--and I sent my letter there.  And I went out into the silent 
+square and posted the note forthwith, because I knew quite clearly 
+that if I left it until morning I should never post it at all.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+I had a curious revulsion of feeling that morning of our meeting.  
+(Of all places for such a clandestine encounter she had chosen the 
+bridge opposite Buckingham Palace.)  Overnight I had been full of 
+self pity, and eager for the comfort of Isabel's presence.  But the 
+ill-written scrawl in which she had replied had been full of the 
+suggestion of her own weakness and misery.  And when I saw her, my 
+own selfish sorrows were altogether swept away by a wave of pitiful 
+tenderness.  Something had happened to her that I did not 
+understand.  She was manifestly ill.  She came towards me wearily, 
+she who had always borne herself so bravely; her shoulders seemed 
+bent, and her eyes were tired, and her face white and drawn.  All my 
+life has been a narrow self-centred life; no brothers, no sisters or 
+children or weak things had ever yet made any intimate appeal to me, 
+and suddenly--I verily believe for the first time in my life!--I 
+felt a great passion of protective ownership; I felt that here was 
+something that I could die to shelter, something that meant more 
+than joy or pride or splendid ambitions or splendid creation to me, 
+a new kind of hold upon me, a new power in the world.  Some sealed 
+fountain was opened in my breast.  I knew that I could love Isabel 
+broken, Isabel beaten, Isabel ugly and in pain, more than I could 
+love any sweet or delightful or glorious thing in life.  I didn't 
+care any more for anything in the world but Isabel, and that I 
+should protect her.  I trembled as I came near her, and could 
+scarcely speak to her for the emotion that filled me. . . .
+
+"I had your letter," I said.
+
+"I had yours."
+
+"Where can we talk?"
+
+I remember my lame sentences.  "We'll have a boat.  That's best 
+here."
+
+I took her to the little boat-house, and there we hired a boat, and 
+I rowed in silence under the bridge and into the shade of a tree.  
+The square grey stone masses of the Foreign Office loomed through 
+the twigs, I remember, and a little space of grass separated us from 
+the pathway and the scrutiny of passers-by.  And there we talked.
+
+"I had to write to you," I said.
+
+"I had to come."
+
+"When are you to be married?"
+
+"Thursday week."
+
+"Well?" I said.  "But--can we?"
+
+She leant forward and scrutinised my face with eyes wide open.  
+"What do you mean?" she said at last in a whisper.
+
+"Can we stand it?  After all?"
+
+I looked at her white face.  "Can you?" I said.
+
+She whispered.  "Your career?"
+
+Then suddenly her face was contorted,--she wept silently, exactly as 
+a child tormented beyond endurance might suddenly weep. . . .
+
+"Oh! I don't care," I cried, "now.  I don't care.  Damn the whole 
+system of things!  Damn all this patching of the irrevocable!  I 
+want to take care of you, Isabel! and have you with me."
+
+"I can't stand it," she blubbered.
+
+"You needn't stand it.  I thought it was best for you. . . .  I 
+thought indeed it was best for you.  I thought even you wanted it 
+like that."
+
+"Couldn't I live alone--as I meant to do?"
+
+"No," I said, "you couldn't.  You're not strong enough.  I've 
+thought of that; I've got to shelter you."
+
+"And I want you," I went on.  "I'm not strong enough--I can't stand 
+life without you."
+
+She stopped weeping, she made a great effort to control herself, and 
+looked at me steadfastly for a moment.  "I was going to kill 
+myself," she whispered.  "I was going to kill myself quietly--
+somehow.  I meant to wait a bit and have an accident.  I thought--
+you didn't understand.  You were a man, and couldn't understand. . . ."
+
+"People can't do as we thought we could do," I said.  "We've gone 
+too far together."
+
+"Yes," she said, and I stared into her eyes.
+
+"The horror of it," she whispered.  "The horror of being handed 
+over.  It's just only begun to dawn upon me, seeing him now as I do.  
+He tries to be kind to me. . . .  I didn't know.  I felt adventurous 
+before. . . .  It makes me feel like all the women in the world who 
+have ever been owned and subdued. . . .  It's not that he isn't the 
+best of men, it's because I'm a part of you. . . .  I can't go 
+through with it.  If I go through with it, I shall be left--robbed 
+of pride--outraged--a woman beaten. . . ." 
+
+"I know," I said, "I know."
+
+"I want to live alone. . . .  I don't care for anything now but just 
+escape.  If you can help me. . . ."
+
+"I must take you away.  There's nothing for us but to go away 
+together."
+
+"But your work," she said; "your career!  Margaret!  Our promises!"
+
+"We've made a mess of things, Isabel--or things have made a mess of 
+us.  I don't know which.  Our flags are in the mud, anyhow.  It's 
+too late to save those other things!  They have to go.  You can't 
+make terms with defeat.  I thought it was Margaret needed me most.  
+But it's you.  And I need you.  I didn't think of that either.  I 
+haven't a doubt left in the world now.  We've got to leave 
+everything rather than leave each other.  I'm sure of it.  Now we 
+have gone so far.  We've got to go right down to earth and begin 
+again. . . .  Dear, I WANT disgrace with you. . . ."
+
+So I whispered to her as she sat crumpled together on the faded 
+cushions of the boat, this white and weary young woman who had been 
+so valiant and careless a girl.  "I don't care," I said.  "I don't 
+care for anything, if I can save you out of the wreckage we have 
+made together."
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+The next day I went to the office of the BLUE WEEKLY in order to get 
+as much as possible of its affairs in working order before I left 
+London with Isabel.  I just missed Shoesmith in the lower office.  
+Upstairs I found Britten amidst a pile of outside articles, 
+methodically reading the title of each and sometimes the first half-
+dozen lines, and either dropping them in a growing heap on the floor 
+for a clerk to return, or putting them aside for consideration.  I 
+interrupted him, squatted on the window-sill of the open window, and 
+sketched out my ideas for the session.
+
+"You're far-sighted," he remarked at something of mine which reached 
+out ahead.
+
+"I like to see things prepared," I answered.
+
+"Yes," he said, and ripped open the envelope of a fresh aspirant.
+
+I was silent while he read.
+
+"You're going away with Isabel Rivers," he said abruptly.
+
+"Well!" I said, amazed.
+
+"I know," he said, and lost his breath.  "Not my business.  Only--"
+
+It was queer to find Britten afraid to say a thing.
+
+"It's not playing the game," he said.
+
+"What do you know?"
+
+"Everything that matters."
+
+"Some games," I said, "are too hard to play."
+
+There came a pause between us.
+
+"I didn't know you were watching all this," I said.
+
+"Yes," he answered, after a pause, "I've watched."
+
+"Sorry--sorry you don't approve."
+
+"It means smashing such an infernal lot of things, Remington."
+
+I did not answer.
+
+"You're going away then?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Soon?"
+
+"Right away."
+
+"There's vour wife."
+
+"I know."
+
+"Shoesmith--whom you're pledged to in a manner.  You've just picked 
+him out and made him conspicuous.  Every one will know.  Oh! of 
+course--it's nothing to you.  Honour--"
+
+"I know."
+
+"Common decency."
+
+I nodded.
+
+"All this movement of ours.  That's what I care for most. . . .  
+It's come to be a big thing, Remington."
+
+"That will go on."
+
+"We have a use for you--no one else quite fills it.  No one. . . .  
+I'm not sure it will go on."
+
+"Do you think I haven't thought of all these things?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders, and rejected two papers unread.
+
+"I knew," he remarked, "when you came back from America.  You were 
+alight with it." Then he let his bitterness gleam for a moment.  
+"But I thought you would stick to your bargain."
+
+"It's not so much choice as you think," I said.
+
+"There's always a choice."
+
+"No," I said.
+
+He scrutinised my face.
+
+"I can't live without her--I can't work.  She's all mixed up with 
+this--and everything.  And besides, there's things you can't 
+understand.  There's feelings you've never felt. . . .  You don't 
+understand how much we've been to one another."
+
+Britten frowned and thought.
+
+"Some things one's GOT to do," he threw out.
+
+"Some things one can't do."
+
+"These infernal institutions--"
+
+"Some one must begin," I said.
+
+He shook his head.  "Not YOU," he said.  "No!"
+
+He stretched out his hands on the desk before him, and spoke again.
+
+"Remington," he said, "I've thought of this business day and night 
+too.  It matters to me.  It matters immensely to me.  In a way--it's 
+a thing one doesn't often say to a man--I've loved you.  I'm the 
+sort of man who leads a narrow life. . . .  But you've been 
+something fine and good for me, since that time, do you remember? 
+when we talked about Mecca together."
+
+I nodded.
+
+"Yes.  And you'll always be something fine and good for me anyhow.  
+I know things about you,--qualities--no mere act can destroy them. . 
+. .  Well, I can tell you, you're doing wrong.  You're going on now 
+like a man who is hypnotised and can't turn round.  You're piling 
+wrong on wrong.  It was wrong for you two people ever to be lovers."
+
+He paused.
+
+"It gripped us hard," I said.
+
+"Yes!--but in your position!  And hers!  It was vile!"
+
+"You've not been tempted."
+
+"How do you know?  Anyhow--having done that, you ought to have stood 
+the consequences and thought of other people.  You could have ended 
+it at the first pause for reflection.  You didn't.  You blundered 
+again.  You kept on.  You owed a certain secrecy to all of us!  You 
+didn't keep it.  You were careless.  You made things worse.  This 
+engagement and this publicity!--Damn it, Remington!"
+
+"I know," I said, with smarting eyes.  "Damn it ! with all my heart!  
+It came of trying to patch. . . .  You CAN'T patch."
+
+"And now, as I care for anything under heaven, Remington, you two 
+ought to stand these last consequences--and part.  You ought to 
+part.  Other people have to stand things!  Other people have to 
+part.  You ought to.  You say--what do you say?  It's loss of so 
+much life to lose each other.  So is losing a hand or a leg.  But 
+it's what you've incurred.  Amputate.  Take your punishment--After 
+all, you chose it."
+
+"Oh, damn!" I said, standing up and going to the window.
+
+"Damn by all means.  I never knew a topic so full of justifiable 
+damns.  But you two did choose it.  You ought to stick to your 
+undertaking."
+
+I turned upon him with a snarl in my voice.  "My dear Britten!" I 
+cried.  "Don't I KNOW I'm doing wrong?  Aren't I in a net?  Suppose 
+I don't go!  Is there any right in that?  Do you think we're going 
+to be much to ourselves or any one after this parting?  I've been 
+thinking all last night of this business, trying it over and over 
+again from the beginning.  How was it we went wrong?  Since I came 
+back from America--I grant you THAT--but SINCE, there's never been a 
+step that wasn't forced, that hadn't as much right in it or more, as 
+wrong.  You talk as though I was a thing of steel that could bend 
+this way or that and never change.  You talk as though Isabel was a 
+cat one could give to any kind of owner. . . .  We two are things 
+that change and grow and alter all the time.  We're--so interwoven 
+that being parted now will leave us just misshapen cripples. . . .  
+You don't know the motives, you don't know the rush and feel of 
+things, you don't know how it was with us, and how it is with us.  
+You don't know the hunger for the mere sight of one another; you 
+don't know anything."
+
+Britten looked at his finger-nails closely.  His red face puckered 
+to a wry frown.  "Haven't we all at times wanted the world put 
+back?" he grunted, and looked hard and close at one particular nail.
+
+There was a long pause.
+
+"I want her," I said, "and I'm going to have her.  I'm too tired for 
+balancing the right or wrong of it any more.  You can't separate 
+them.  I saw her yesterday. . . .  She's--ill. . . .  I'd take her 
+now, if death were just outside the door waiting for us."
+
+"Torture?"
+
+I thought.  "Yes."
+
+"For her?"
+
+"There isn't," I said.
+
+"If there was?"
+
+I made no answer.
+
+"It's blind Want.  And there's nothing ever been put into you to 
+stand against it.  What are you going to do with the rest of your 
+lives?"
+
+"No end of things."
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"I don't believe you are right," I said.  "I believe we can save 
+something--"
+
+Britten shook his head.  "Some scraps of salvage won't excuse you," 
+he said.
+
+His indignation rose.  "In the middle of life!" he said.  "No man 
+has a right to take his hand from the plough!"
+
+He leant forward on his desk and opened an argumentative palm.  "You 
+know, Remington," he said, "and I know, that if this could be fended 
+off for six months--if you could be clapped in prison, or got out of 
+the way somehow,--until this marriage was all over and settled down 
+for a year, say--you know then you two could meet, curious, happy, 
+as friends.  Saved!  You KNOW it."
+
+I turned and stared at him.  "You're wrong, Britten," I said.  "And 
+does it matter if we could?"
+
+I found that in talking to him I could frame the apologetics I had 
+not been able to find for myself alone.
+
+"I am certain of one thing, Britten.  It is our duty not to hush up 
+this scandal."
+
+He raised his eyebrows.  I perceived now the element of absurdity in 
+me, but at the time I was as serious as a man who is burning.
+
+"It's our duty," I went on, "to smash now openly in the sight of 
+every one.  Yes!  I've got that as clean and plain--as prison 
+whitewash.  I am convinced that we have got to be public to the 
+uttermost now--I mean it--until every corner of our world knows this 
+story, knows it fully, adds it to the Parnell story and the Ashton 
+Dean story and the Carmel story and the Witterslea story, and all 
+the other stories that have picked man after man out of English 
+public life, the men with active imaginations, the men of strong 
+initiative.  To think this tottering old-woman ridden Empire should 
+dare to waste a man on such a score!  You say I ought to be 
+penitent--"
+
+Britten shook his head and smiled very faintly.
+
+"I'm boiling with indignation," I said.  " I lay in bed last night 
+and went through it all.  What in God's name was to be expected of 
+us but what has happened?  I went through my life bit by bit last 
+night, I recalled all I've had to do with virtue and women, and all 
+I was told and how I was prepared.  I was born into cowardice and 
+debasement.  We all are.  Our generation's grimy with hypocrisy.  I 
+came to the most beautiful things in life--like peeping Tom of 
+Coventry.  I was never given a light, never given a touch of natural 
+manhood by all this dingy, furtive, canting, humbugging English 
+world.  Thank God! I'll soon be out of it!  The shame of it!  The 
+very savages in Australia initiate their children better than the 
+English do to-day.  Neither of us was ever given a view of what they 
+call morality that didn't make it show as shabby subservience, as 
+the meanest discretion, an abject submission to unreasonable 
+prohibitions! meek surrender of mind and body to the dictation of 
+pedants and old women and fools.  We weren't taught--we were mumbled 
+at!  And when we found that the thing they called unclean, unclean, 
+was Pagan beauty--God! it was a glory to sin, Britten, it was a 
+pride and splendour like bathing in the sunlight after dust and 
+grime!"
+
+"Yes," said Britten.  "That's all very well--"
+
+I interrupted him.  "I know there's a case--I'm beginning to think 
+it a valid case against us; but we never met it!  There's a steely 
+pride in self restraint,  a nobility of chastity, but only for those 
+who see and think and act--untrammeled and unafraid.  The other 
+thing, the current thing, why! it's worth as much as the chastity of 
+a monkey kept in a cage by itself!"  I put my foot in a chair, and 
+urged my case upon him.  "This is a dirty world, Britten, simply 
+because it is a muddled world, and the thing you call morality is 
+dirtier now than the thing you call immorality.  Why don't the 
+moralists pick their stuff out of the slime if they care for it, and 
+wipe it?--damn them!  I am burning now to say: 'Yes, we did this and 
+this,' to all the world.  All the world! . . .  I will!"
+
+Britten rubbed the palm of his hand on the corner of his desk.  
+"That's all very well, Remington," he said.  "You mean to go."
+
+He stopped and began again.  "If you didn't know you were in the 
+wrong you wouldn't be so damned rhetorical.  You're in the wrong.  
+It's as plain to you as it is to me.  You're leaving a big work, 
+you're leaving a wife who trusted you, to go and live with your 
+jolly mistress. . . .  You won't see you're a statesman that 
+matters, that no single man, maybe, might come to such influence as 
+you in the next ten years.  You're throwing yourself away and 
+accusing your country of rejecting you."
+
+He swung round upon his swivel at me.  "Remington," he said, "have 
+you forgotten the immense things our movement means?"
+
+I thought.  "Perhaps I am rhetorical," I said.
+
+"But the things we might achieve!  If you'd only stay now--even now!  
+Oh! you'd suffer a little socially, but what of that?  You'd be able 
+to go on--perhaps all the better for hostility of the kind you'd 
+get.  You know, Remington--you KNOW."
+
+I thought and went back to his earlier point.  "If I am rhetorical, 
+at any rate it's a living feeling behind it.  Yes, I remember all 
+the implications of our aims--very splendid, very remote.  But just 
+now it's rather like offering to give a freezing man the sunlit 
+Himalayas from end to end in return for his camp-fire.  When you 
+talk of me and my jolly mistress, it isn't fair.  That misrepresents 
+everything.  I'm not going out of this--for delights.  That's the 
+sort of thing men like Snuffles and Keyhole imagine--that excites 
+them!  When I think of the things these creatures think!  Ugh!  But 
+YOU know better?  You know that physical passion that burns like a 
+fire--ends clean.  I'm going for love, Britten--if I sinned for 
+passion.  I'm going, Britten, because when I saw her the other day 
+she HURT me.  She hurt me damnably, Britten. . . .  I've been a cold 
+man--I've led a rhetorical life--you hit me with that word!--I put 
+things in a windy way, I know, but what has got hold of me at last 
+is her pain.  She's ill.  Don't you understand?  She's a sick thing--
+a weak thing.  She's no more a goddess than I'm a god. . . .  I'm 
+not in love with her now; I'm RAW with love for her.  I feel like a 
+man that's been flayed.  I have been flayed. . . .  You don't begin 
+to imagine the sort of helpless solicitude. . . .  She's not going 
+to do things easily; she's ill.  Her courage fails. . . .  It's hard 
+to put things when one isn't rhetorical, but it's this, Britten--
+there are distresses that matter more than all the delights or 
+achievements in the world. . . .  I made her what she is--as I never 
+made Margaret.  I've made her--I've broken her. . . .  I'm going 
+with my own woman.  The rest of my life and England, and so forth, 
+must square itself to that. . . ."
+
+For a long time, as it seemed, we remained silent and motionless.  
+We'd said all we had to say.  My eyes caught a printed slip upon the 
+desk before him, and I came back abruptly to the paper.
+
+I picked up this galley proof.  It was one of Winter's essays.  
+"This man goes on doing first-rate stuff," I said.  "I hope you will 
+keep him going."
+
+He did not answer for a moment or so.  "I'll keep him going," he 
+said at last with a sigh.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+I have a letter Margaret wrote me within a week of our flight.  I 
+cannot resist transcribing some of it here, because it lights things 
+as no word of mine can do.  It is a string of nearly inconsecutive 
+thoughts written in pencil in a fine, tall, sprawling hand.  Its 
+very inconsecutiveness is essential.  Many words are underlined.  It 
+was in answer to one from me; but what I wrote has passed utterly 
+from my mind. . . .
+
+"Certainly," she says, "I want to hear from you, but I do not want 
+to see you.  There's a sort of abstract YOU that I want to go on 
+with.  Something I've made out of you. . . .  I want to know things 
+about you--but I don't want to see or feel or imagine.  When some 
+day I have got rid of my intolerable sense of proprietorship, it may 
+be different.  Then perhaps we may meet again.  I think it is even 
+more the loss of our political work and dreams that I am feeling 
+than the loss of your presence.  Aching loss.  I thought so much of 
+the things we were DOING for the world--had given myself so 
+unreservedly.  You've left me with nothing to DO.  I am suddenly at 
+loose ends. . . .
+
+"We women are trained to be so dependent on a man.  I've got no life 
+of my own at all.  It seems now to me that I wore my clothes even 
+for you and your schemes. . . .
+
+"After I have told myself a hundred times why this has happened, I 
+ask again, 'Why did he give things up?  Why did he give things 
+up?' . . .
+
+"It is just as though you were wilfully dead. . . .
+
+"Then I ask again and again whether this thing need have happened at 
+all, whether if I had had a warning, if I had understood better, I 
+might not have adapted myself to your restless mind and made this 
+catastrophe impossible. . . .
+
+"Oh, my dear! why hadn't you the pluck to hurt me at the beginning, 
+and tell me what you thought of me and life?  You didn't give me a 
+chance; not a chance.  I suppose you couldn't.  All these things you 
+and I stood away from.  You let my first repugnances repel you. . . .
+
+"It is strange to think after all these years that I should be 
+asking myself, do I love you? have I loved you?  In a sense I think 
+I HATE you.  I feel you have taken my life, dragged it in your wake 
+for a time, thrown it aside.  I am resentful.  Unfairly resentful, 
+for why should I exact that you should watch and understand my life, 
+when clearly I have understood so little of yours.  But I am savage--
+savage at the wrecking of all you were to do.
+
+"Oh, why--why did you give things up?
+
+"No human being is his own to do what he likes with.  You were not 
+only pledged to my tiresome, ineffectual companionship, but to great 
+purposes.  They ARE great purposes. . . .
+
+"If only I could take up your work as you leave it, with the 
+strength you had--then indeed I feel I could let you go--you and 
+your young mistress. . . .  All that matters so little to me. . . .
+
+"Yet I think I must indeed love you yourself in my slower way.  At 
+times I am mad with jealousy at the thought of all I hadn't the wit 
+to give you. . . .  I've always hidden my tears from you--and what 
+was in my heart.  It's my nature to hide--and you, you want things 
+brought to you to see.  You are so curious as to be almost cruel.  
+You don't understand reserves.  You have no mercy with restraints 
+and reservations.  You arc not really a CIVILISED man at all.  You 
+hate pretences--and not only pretences but decent coverings. . . .
+
+"It's only after one has lost love and the chance of loving that 
+slow people like myself find what they might have done.  Why wasn't 
+I bold and reckless and abandoned?  It's as reasonable to ask that, 
+I suppose, as to ask why my hair is fair. . . .
+
+"I go on with these perhapses over and over again here when I find 
+myself alone. . . .
+
+"My dear, my dear, you can't think of the desolation of things--I 
+shall never go back to that house we furnished together, that was to 
+have been the laboratory (do you remember calling it a laboratory?) 
+in which you were to forge so much of the new order. . . .
+
+"But, dear, if I can help you--even now--in any way--help both of 
+you, I mean. . . .  It tears me when I think of you poor and 
+discredited.  You will let me help you if I can--it will be the last 
+wrong not to let me do that. . . .
+
+"You had better not get ill.  If you do, and I hear of it--I shall 
+come after you with a troupe of doctor's and nurses.  If I am a 
+failure as a wife, no one has ever said I was anything but a success 
+as a district visitor. . . ."
+
+There are other sheets, but I cannot tell whether they were written 
+before or after the ones from which I have quoted.  And most of them 
+have little things too intimate to set down.  But this oddly 
+penetrating analysis of our differences must, I think, be given.
+
+"There are all sorts of things I can't express about this and want 
+to.  There's this difference that has always been between us, that 
+you like nakedness and wildness, and I, clothing and restraint.  It 
+goes through everything.  You are always TALKING of order and 
+system, and the splendid dream of the order that might replace the 
+muddled system you hate, but by a sort of instinct you seem to want 
+to break the law.  I've watched you so closely.  Now I want to obey 
+laws, to make sacrifices, to follow rules.  I don't want to make, 
+but I do want to keep.  You are at once makers and rebels, you and 
+Isabel too.  You're bad people--criminal people, I feel, and yet 
+full of something the world must have.  You're so much better than 
+me, and so much viler.  It may be there is no making without 
+destruction, but it seems to me sometimes that it is nothing but an 
+instinct for lawlessness that drives you.  You remind me--do you 
+remember?--of that time we went from Naples to Vesuvius, and walked 
+over the hot new lava there.  Do you remember how tired I was?  I 
+know it disappointed you that I was tired.  One walked there in 
+spite of the heat because there was a crust; like custom, like law.  
+But directly a crust forms on things, you are restless to break down 
+to the fire again.  You talk of beauty, both of you, as something 
+terrible, mysterious, imperative.  YOUR beauty is something 
+altogether different from anything I know or feel.  It has pain in 
+it.  Yet you always speak as though it was something I ought to feel 
+and am dishonest not to feel.  MY beauty is a quiet thing.  You have 
+always laughed at my feeling for old-fashioned chintz and blue china 
+and Sheraton.  But I like all these familiar USED things.  My beauty 
+is STILL beauty, and yours, is excitement.  I know nothing of the 
+fascination of the fire, or why one should go deliberately out of 
+all the decent fine things of life to run dangers and be singed and 
+tormented and destroyed.  I don't understand. . . ."
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+I remember very freshly the mood of our departure from London, the 
+platform of Charing Cross with the big illuminated clock overhead, 
+the bustle of porters and passengers with luggage, the shouting of 
+newsboys and boys with flowers and sweets, and the groups of friends 
+seeing travellers off by the boat train.  Isabel sat very quiet and 
+still in the compartment, and I stood upon the platform with the 
+door open, with a curious reluctance to take the last step that 
+should sever me from London's ground.  I showed our tickets, and 
+bought a handful of red roses for her.  At last came the guards 
+crying: "Take your seats," and I got in and closed the door on me.  
+We had, thank Heaven! a compartment to ourselves.  I let down the 
+window and stared out.
+
+There was a bustle of final adieux on the platform, a cry of "Stand 
+away, please, stand away!" and the train was gliding slowly and 
+smoothly out of the station.
+
+I looked out upon the river as the train rumbled with slowly 
+gathering pace across the bridge, and the bobbing black heads of the 
+pedestrians in the footway, and the curve of the river and the 
+glowing great hotels, and the lights and reflections and blacknesses 
+of that old, familiar spectacle.  Then with a common thought, we 
+turned our eyes westward to where the pinnacles of Westminster and 
+the shining clock tower rose hard and clear against the still, 
+luminous sky.
+
+"They'll be in Committee on the Reformatory Bill to-night," I said, 
+a little stupidly.
+
+"And so," I added, "good-bye to London!"
+
+We said no more, but watched the south-side streets below--bright 
+gleams of lights and movement, and the dark, dim, monstrous shapes 
+of houses and factories.  We ran through Waterloo Station, London 
+Bridge, New Cross, St. John's.  We said never a word.  It seemed to 
+me that for a time we had exhausted our emotions.  We had escaped, 
+we had cut our knot, we had accepted the last penalty of that 
+headlong return of mine from Chicago a year and a half ago.  That 
+was all settled.  That harvest of feelings we had reaped.  I thought 
+now only of London, of London as the symbol of all we were leaving 
+and all we had lost in the world.  I felt nothing now but an 
+enormous and overwhelming regret. . . .
+
+The train swayed and rattled on its way.  We ran through old 
+Bromstead, where once I had played with cities and armies on the 
+nursery floor.  The sprawling suburbs with their scattered lights 
+gave way to dim tree-set country under a cloud-veiled, 
+intermittently shining moon.  We passed Cardcaster Place.  Perhaps 
+old Wardingham, that pillar of the old Conservatives, was there, 
+fretting over his unsuccessful struggle with our young Toryism.  
+Little he recked of this new turn of the wheel and how it would 
+confirm his contempt of all our novelties.  Perhaps some faint 
+intimation drew him to the window to see behind the stems of the 
+young fir trees that bordered his domain, the little string of 
+lighted carriage windows gliding southward. . . .
+
+Suddenly I began to realise just what it was we were doing.
+
+And now, indeed, I knew what London had been to me, London where I 
+had been born and educated, the slovenly mother of my mind and all 
+my ambitions, London and the empire!  It seemed to me we must be 
+going out to a world that was utterly empty.  All our significance 
+fell from us--and before us was no meaning any more.  We were 
+leaving London; my hand, which had gripped so hungrily upon its 
+complex life, had been forced from it, my fingers left their hold.  
+That was over.  I should never have a voice in public affairs again.  
+The inexorable unwritten law which forbids overt scandal sentenced 
+me.  We were going out to a new life, a life that appeared in that 
+moment to be a mere shrivelled remnant of me, a mere residuum of 
+sheltering and feeding and seeing amidst alien scenery and the sound 
+of unfamiliar tongues.  We were going to live cheaply in a foreign 
+place, so cut off that I meet now the merest stray tourist, the 
+commonest tweed-clad stranger with a mixture of shyness and hunger. . . .  
+And suddenly all the schemes I was leaving appeared fine and 
+adventurous and hopeful as they had never done before.  How great 
+was this purpose I had relinquished, this bold and subtle remaking 
+of the English will!  I had doubted so many things, and now suddenly 
+I doubted my unimportance, doubted my right to this suicidal 
+abandonment.  Was I not a trusted messenger, greatly trusted and 
+favoured, who had turned aside by the way?  Had I not, after all, 
+stood for far more than I had thought; was I not filching from that 
+dear great city of my birth and life, some vitally necessary thing, 
+a key, a link, a reconciling clue in her political development, that 
+now she might seek vaguely for in vain?  What is one life against 
+the State?  Ought I not to have sacrificed Isabel and all my passion 
+and sorrow for Isabel, and held to my thing--stuck to my thing?
+
+I heard as though he had spoken it in the carriage Britten's "It WAS 
+a good game.  No end of a game.  And for the first time I imagined 
+the faces and voices of Crupp and Esmeer and Gane when they learnt 
+of this secret flight, this flight of which they were quite 
+unwarned.  And Shoesmith might he there in the house,--Shoesmith who 
+was to have been married in four days--the thing might hit him full 
+in front of any kind of people.  Cruel eyes might watch him.  Why 
+the devil hadn't I written letters to warn them all?  I could have 
+posted them five minutes before the train started.  I had never 
+thought to that moment of the immense mess they would be in; how the 
+whole edifice would clatter about their ears.  I had a sudden desire 
+to stop the train and go back for a day, for two days, to set that 
+negligence right.  My brain for a moment brightened, became animated 
+and prolific of ideas.  I thought of a brilliant line we might have 
+taken on that confounded Reformatory Bill. . . .
+
+That sort of thing was over. . . .
+
+What indeed wasn't over?  I passed to a vaguer, more multitudinous 
+perception of disaster, the friends I had lost already since Altiora 
+began her campaign, the ampler remnant whom now I must lose.  I 
+thought of people I had been merry with, people I had worked with 
+and played with, the companions of talkative walks, the hostesses of 
+houses that had once glowed with welcome for us both.  I perceived 
+we must lose them all.  I saw life like a tree in late autumn that 
+had once been rich and splendid with friends--and now the last brave 
+dears would be hanging on doubtfully against the frosty chill of 
+facts, twisting and tortured in the universal gale of indignation, 
+trying to evade the cold blast of the truth.  I had betrayed my 
+party, my intimate friend, my wife, the wife whose devotion had made 
+me what I was.  For awhile the figure of Margaret, remote, wounded, 
+shamed, dominated my mind, and the thought of my immense 
+ingratitude.  Damn them! they'd take it out of her too.  I had a 
+feeling that I wanted to go straight back and grip some one by the 
+throat, some one talking ill of Margaret.  They'd blame her for not 
+keeping me, for letting things go so far. . . .  I wanted the whole 
+world to know how fine she was.  I saw in imagination the busy, 
+excited dinner tables at work upon us all, rather pleasantly 
+excited, brightly indignant, merciless.
+
+Well, it's the stuff we are! . . .
+
+Then suddenly, stabbing me to the heart, came a vision of Margaret's 
+tears and the sound of her voice saying, "Husband mine! Oh! husband 
+mine!  To see you cry!" . . .
+
+I came out of a cloud of thoughts to discover the narrow 
+compartment, with its feeble lamp overhead, and our rugs and hand-
+baggage swaying on the rack, and Isabel, very still in front of me, 
+gripping my wilting red roses tightly in her bare and ringless hand.
+
+For a moment I could not understand her attitude, and then I 
+perceived she was sitting bent together with her head averted from 
+the light to hide the tears that were streaming down her face.  She 
+had not got her handkerchief out for fear that I should see this, 
+but I saw her tears, dark drops of tears, upon her sleeve. . . .
+
+I suppose she had been watching my expression, divining my thoughts.
+
+For a time I stared at her and was motionless, in a sort of still 
+and weary amazement.  Why had we done this injury to one another?  
+WHY?  Then something stirred within me.
+
+"ISABEL!" I whispered.
+
+She made no sign.
+
+"Isabel!" I repeated, and then crossed over to her and crept closely 
+to her, put my arm about her, and drew her wet cheek to mine.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Etext of The New Machiavelli, by H. G. Wells
+
diff --git a/old/old/nmchv10.zip b/old/old/nmchv10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..edc20e0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/old/nmchv10.zip
diff --git a/old/old/nmchv11.txt b/old/old/nmchv11.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..758de58
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/old/nmchv11.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,16714 @@
+Project Gutenberg's Etext of The New Machiavelli, by H. G. Wells
+#11 in our series by H. G. Wells
+
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
+the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!!
+
+Please take a look at the important information in this header.
+We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
+electronic path open for the next readers.  Do not remove this.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*
+
+Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
+further information is included below.  We need your donations.
+
+
+The New Machiavelli
+
+by H. G. Wells  [Herbert George Wells]
+
+September, 1997  [Etext #1047]
+[Date last updated: September 12, 2003]
+
+
+Project Gutenberg's Etext of The New Machiavelli, by H. G. Wells
+******This file should be named nmchv10.txt or nmchv10.zip******
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, nmchv11.txt.
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, nmchv10a.txt.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
+all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
+copyright notice is included.  Therefore, we do NOT keep these books
+in compliance with any particular paper edition, usually otherwise.
+
+
+We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance
+of the official release dates, for time for better editing.
+
+Please note:  neither this list nor its contents are final till
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.  To be sure you have an
+up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes
+in the first week of the next month.  Since our ftp program has
+a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a
+look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a
+new copy has at least one byte more or less.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+fifty hours is one conservative estimate for how long it we take
+to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour this year as we release thirty-two text
+files per month, or 384 more Etexts in 1997 for a total of 1000+
+If these reach just 10% of the computerized population, then the
+total should reach over 100 billion Etexts given away.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
+Files by the December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000=Trillion]
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only 10% of the present number of computer users.  2001
+should have at least twice as many computer users as that, so it
+will require us reaching less than 5% of the users in 2001.
+
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+
+All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/CMU": and are
+tax deductible to the extent allowable by law.  (CMU = Carnegie-
+Mellon University).
+
+For these and other matters, please mail to:
+
+Project Gutenberg
+P. O. Box  2782
+Champaign, IL 61825
+
+When all other email fails try our Executive Director:
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+We would prefer to send you this information by email
+(Internet, Bitnet, Compuserve, ATTMAIL or MCImail).
+
+******
+If you have an FTP program (or emulator), please
+FTP directly to the Project Gutenberg archives:
+[Mac users, do NOT point and click. . .type]
+
+ftp uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu
+login:  anonymous
+password:  your@login
+cd etext/etext90 through /etext96
+or cd etext/articles [get suggest gut for more information]
+dir [to see files]
+get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
+GET INDEX?00.GUT
+for a list of books
+and
+GET NEW GUT for general information
+and
+MGET GUT* for newsletters.
+
+**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**
+(Three Pages)
+
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
+you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-
+tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor
+Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at
+Carnegie-Mellon University (the "Project").  Among other
+things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
+under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this
+etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
+officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
+and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
+indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
+[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
+or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-
+     cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
+     net profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Association/Carnegie-Mellon
+     University" within the 60 days following each
+     date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)
+     your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,
+scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
+free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
+you can think of.  Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg
+Association / Carnegie-Mellon University".
+
+*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
+
+by H. G. Wells
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+BOOK THE FIRST
+
+THE MAKING OF A MAN
+
+I.   CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
+II.  BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER
+III. SCHOLASTIC
+IV.  ADOLESCENCE
+
+
+BOOK THE SECOND
+
+MARGARET
+
+I.   MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE
+II.  MARGARET IN LONDON
+III. MARGARET IN VENICE
+IV.  THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER
+
+
+BOOK THE THIRD
+
+THE HEART OF POLITICS
+
+I.   THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN
+II.  SEEKING ASSOCIATES
+III. SECESSION
+IV.  THE BESETTING OF SEX
+
+
+BOOK THE FOURTH
+
+ISABEL
+
+I.   LOVE AND SUCCESS
+II.  THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION
+III. THE BREAKING POINT
+
+
+
+BOOK THE FIRST
+
+THE MAKING OF A MAN
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST
+
+CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
+
+
+1
+
+Since I came to this place I have been very restless, wasting my
+energies in the futile beginning of ill-conceived books.  One does
+not settle down very readily at two and forty to a new way of
+living, and I have found myself with the teeming interests of the
+life I have abandoned still buzzing like a swarm of homeless bees in
+my head.  My mind has been full of confused protests and
+justifications.  In any case I should have found difficulties enough
+in expressing the complex thing I have to tell, but it has added
+greatly to my trouble that I have a great analogue, that a certain
+Niccolo Machiavelli chanced to fall out of politics at very much the
+age I have reached, and wrote a book to engage the restlessness of
+his mind, very much as I have wanted to do.  He wrote about the
+relation of the great constructive spirit in politics to individual
+character and weaknesses, and so far his achievement lies like a
+deep rut in the road of my intention.  It has taken me far astray.
+It is a matter of many weeks now--diversified indeed by some long
+drives into the mountains behind us and a memorable sail to Genoa
+across the blue and purple waters that drowned Shelley--since I
+began a laboured and futile imitation of "The Prince."  I sat up
+late last night with the jumbled accumulation; and at last made a
+little fire of olive twigs and burnt it all, sheet by sheet--to
+begin again clear this morning.
+
+But incidentally I have re-read most of Machiavelli, not excepting
+those scandalous letters of his to Vettori, and it seems to me, now
+that I have released myself altogether from his literary precedent,
+that he still has his use for me.  In spite of his vast prestige I
+claim kindred with him and set his name upon my title-page, in
+partial intimation of the matter of my story.  He takes me with
+sympathy not only by reason of the dream he pursued and the humanity
+of his politics, but by the mixture of his nature.  His vices come
+in, essential to my issue.  He is dead and gone, all his immediate
+correlations to party and faction have faded to insignificance,
+leaving only on the one hand his broad method and conceptions, and
+upon the other his intimate living personality, exposed down to its
+salacious corners as the soul of no contemporary can ever be
+exposed.  Of those double strands it is I have to write, of the
+subtle protesting perplexing play of instinctive passion and desire
+against too abstract a dream of statesmanship.  But things that
+seemed to lie very far apart in Machiavelli's time have come near to
+one another; it is no simple story of white passions struggling
+against the red that I have to tell.
+
+The state-making dream is a very old dream indeed in the world's
+history.  It plays too small a part in novels.  Plato and Confucius
+are but the highest of a great host of minds that have had a kindred
+aspiration, have dreamt of a world of men better ordered, happier,
+finer, securer.  They imagined cities grown more powerful and
+peoples made rich and multitudinous by their efforts, they thought
+in terms of harbours and shining navies, great roads engineered
+marvellously, jungles cleared and deserts conquered, the ending of
+muddle and diseases and dirt and misery; the ending of confusions
+that waste human possibilities; they thought of these things with
+passion and desire as other men think of the soft lines and tender
+beauty of women.  Thousands of men there are to-day almost mastered
+by this white passion of statecraft, and in nearly every one who
+reads and thinks you could find, I suspect, some sort of answering
+response.  But in every one it presents itself extraordinarily
+entangled and mixed up with other, more intimate things.
+
+It was so with Machiavelli.  I picture him at San Casciano as he
+lived in retirement upon his property after the fall of the
+Republic, perhaps with a twinge of the torture that punished his
+conspiracy still lurking in his limbs.  Such twinges could not stop
+his dreaming.  Then it was "The Prince" was written.  All day he
+went about his personal affairs, saw homely neighbours, dealt with
+his family, gave vent to everyday passions.  He would sit in the
+shop of Donato del Corno gossiping curiously among vicious company,
+or pace the lonely woods of his estate, book in hand, full of bitter
+meditations.  In the evening he returned home and went to his study.
+At the entrance, he says, he pulled off his peasant clothes covered
+with the dust and dirt of that immediate life, washed himself, put
+on his "noble court dress," closed the door on the world of toiling
+and getting, private loving, private hating and personal regrets,
+sat down with a sigh of contentment to those wider dreams.
+
+I like to think of him so, with brown books before him lit by the
+light of candles in silver candlesticks, or heading some new chapter
+of "The Prince," with a grey quill in his clean fine hand.
+
+So writing, he becomes a symbol for me, and the less none because of
+his animal humour, his queer indecent side, and because of such
+lapses into utter meanness as that which made him sound the note of
+the begging-letter writer even in his "Dedication," reminding His
+Magnificence very urgently, as if it were the gist of his matter, of
+the continued malignity of fortune in his affairs.  These flaws
+complete him.  They are my reason for preferring him as a symbol to
+Plato, of whose indelicate side we know nothing, and whose
+correspondence with Dionysius of Syracuse has perished; or to
+Confucius who travelled China in search of a Prince he might
+instruct, with lapses and indignities now lost in the mists of ages.
+They have achieved the apotheosis of individual forgetfulness, and
+Plato has the added glory of that acquired beauty, that bust of the
+Indian Bacchus which is now indissolubly mingled with his tradition.
+They have passed into the world of the ideal, and every humbug takes
+his freedoms with their names.  But Machiavelli, more recent and
+less popular, is still all human and earthly, a fallen brother--and
+at the same time that nobly dressed and nobly dreaming writer at the
+desk.
+
+That vision of the strengthened and perfected state is protagonist
+in my story.  But as I re-read "The Prince" and thought out the
+manner of my now abandoned project, I came to perceive how that stir
+and whirl of human thought one calls by way of embodiment the French
+Revolution, has altered absolutely the approach to such a question.
+Machiavelli, like Plato and Pythagoras and Confucius two hundred odd
+decades before him, saw only one method by which a thinking man,
+himself not powerful, might do the work of state building, and that
+was by seizing the imagination of a Prince.  Directly these men
+turned their thoughts towards realisation, their attitudes became--
+what shall I call it?--secretarial.  Machiavelli, it is true, had
+some little doubts about the particular Prince he wanted, whether it
+was Caesar Borgia of Giuliano or Lorenzo, but a Prince it had to be.
+Before I saw clearly the differences of our own time I searched my
+mind for the modern equivalent of a Prince.  At various times I
+redrafted a parallel dedication to the Prince of Wales, to the
+Emperor William, to Mr. Evesham, to a certain newspaper proprietor
+who was once my schoolfellow at City Merchants', to Mr. J. D.
+Rockefeller--all of them men in their several ways and circumstances
+and possibilities, princely.  Yet in every case my pen bent of its
+own accord towards irony because--because, although at first I did
+not realise it, I myself am just as free to be a prince.  The appeal
+was unfair.  The old sort of Prince, the old little principality has
+vanished from the world.  The commonweal is one man's absolute
+estate and responsibility no more.  In Machiavelli's time it was
+indeed to an extreme degree one man's affair.  But the days of the
+Prince who planned and directed and was the source and centre of all
+power are ended.  We are in a condition of affairs infinitely more
+complex, in which every prince and statesman is something of a
+servant and every intelligent human being something of a Prince.  No
+magnificent pensive Lorenzos remain any more in this world for
+secretarial hopes.
+
+In a sense it is wonderful how power has vanished, in a sense
+wonderful how it has increased.  I sit here, an unarmed discredited
+man, at a small writing-table in a little defenceless dwelling among
+the vines, and no human being can stop my pen except by the
+deliberate self-immolation of murdering me, nor destroy its fruits
+except by theft and crime.  No King, no council, can seize and
+torture me; no Church, no nation silence me.  Such powers of
+ruthless and complete suppression have vanished.  But that is not
+because power has diminished, but because it has increased and
+become multitudinous, because it has dispersed itself and
+specialised.  It is no longer a negative power we have, but
+positive; we cannot prevent, but we can do.  This age, far beyond
+all previous ages, is full of powerful men, men who might, if they
+had the will for it, achieve stupendous things.
+
+The things that might be done to-day!  The things indeed that are
+being done!  It is the latter that give one so vast a sense of the
+former.  When I think of the progress of physical and mechanical
+science, of medicine and sanitation during the last century, when I
+measure the increase in general education and average efficiency,
+the power now available for human service, the merely physical
+increment, and compare it with anything that has ever been at man's
+disposal before, and when I think of what a little straggling,
+incidental, undisciplined and uncoordinated minority of inventors,
+experimenters, educators, writers and organisers has achieved this
+development of human possibilities, achieved it in spite of the
+disregard and aimlessness of the huge majority, and the passionate
+resistance of the active dull, my imagination grows giddy with
+dazzling intimations of the human splendours the justly organised
+state may yet attain.  I glimpse for a bewildering instant the
+heights that may be scaled, the splendid enterprises made possible.
+
+But the appeal goes out now in other forms, in a book that catches
+at thousands of readers for the eye of a Prince diffused.  It is the
+old appeal indeed for the unification of human effort, the ending of
+confusions, but instead of the Machiavellian deference to a
+flattered lord, a man cries out of his heart to the unseen
+fellowship about him.  The last written dedication of all those I
+burnt last night, was to no single man, but to the socially
+constructive passion--in any man. . . .
+
+There is, moreover, a second great difference in kind between my
+world and Machiavelli's.  We are discovering women.  It is as if
+they had come across a vast interval since his time, into the very
+chamber of the statesman.
+
+
+2
+
+In Machiavelli's outlook the interest of womanhood was in a region
+of life almost infinitely remote from his statecraft.  They were the
+vehicle of children, but only Imperial Rome and the new world of to-
+day have ever had an inkling of the significance that might give
+them in the state.  They did their work, he thought, as the ploughed
+earth bears its crops.  Apart from their function of fertility they
+gave a humorous twist to life, stimulated worthy men to toil, and
+wasted the hours of Princes.  He left the thought of women outside
+with his other dusty things when he went into his study to write,
+dismissed them from his mind.  But our modern world is burthened
+with its sense of the immense, now half articulate, significance of
+women.  They stand now, as it were, close beside the silver
+candlesticks, speaking as Machiavelli writes, until he stays his pen
+and turns to discuss his writing with them.
+
+It is this gradual discovery of sex as a thing collectively
+portentous that I have to mingle with my statecraft if my picture is
+to be true which has turned me at length from a treatise to the
+telling of my own story.  In my life I have paralleled very closely
+the slow realisations that are going on in the world about me.  I
+began life ignoring women, they came to me at first perplexing and
+dishonouring; only very slowly and very late in my life and after
+misadventure, did I gauge the power and beauty of the love of man
+and woman and learnt how it must needs frame a justifiable vision of
+the ordered world.  Love has brought me to disaster, because my
+career had been planned regardless of its possibility and value.
+But Machiavelli, it seems to me, when he went into his study, left
+not only the earth of life outside but its unsuspected soul.
+
+
+3
+
+Like Machiavelli at San Casciano, if I may take this analogy one
+step further, I too am an exile.  Office and leading are closed to
+me.  The political career that promised so much for me is shattered
+and ended for ever.
+
+I look out from this vine-wreathed veranda under the branches of a
+stone pine; I see wide and far across a purple valley whose sides
+are terraced and set with houses of pine and ivory, the Gulf of
+Liguria gleaming sapphire blue, and cloud-like baseless mountains
+hanging in the sky, and I think of lank and coaly steamships heaving
+on the grey rollers of the English Channel and darkling streets wet
+with rain, I recall as if I were back there the busy exit from
+Charing Cross, the cross and the money-changers' offices, the
+splendid grime of giant London and the crowds going perpetually to
+and fro, the lights by night and the urgency and eventfulness of
+that great rain-swept heart of the modern world.
+
+It is difficult to think we have left that--for many years if not
+for ever.  In thought I walk once more in Palace Yard and hear the
+clink and clatter of hansoms and the quick quiet whirr of motors; I
+go in vivid recent memories through the stir in the lobbies, I sit
+again at eventful dinners in those old dining-rooms like cellars
+below the House--dinners that ended with shrill division bells, I
+think of huge clubs swarming and excited by the bulletins of that
+electoral battle that was for me the opening opportunity.  I see the
+stencilled names and numbers go up on the green baize, constituency
+after constituency, amidst murmurs or loud shouting. . . .
+
+It is over for me now and vanished.  That opportunity will come no
+more.  Very probably you have heard already some crude inaccurate
+version of our story and why I did not take office, and have formed
+your partial judgement on me.  And so it is I sit now at my stone
+table, half out of life already, in a warm, large, shadowy leisure,
+splashed with sunlight and hung with vine tendrils, with paper
+before me to distil such wisdom as I can, as Machiavelli in his
+exile sought to do, from the things I have learnt and felt during
+the career that has ended now in my divorce.
+
+I climbed high and fast from small beginnings.  I had the mind of my
+party.  I do not know where I might not have ended, but for this red
+blaze that came out of my unguarded nature and closed my career for
+ever.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND
+
+BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER
+
+
+1
+
+I dreamt first of states and cities and political things when I was
+a little boy in knickerbockers.
+
+When I think of how such things began in my mind, there comes back
+to me the memory of an enormous bleak room with its ceiling going up
+to heaven and its floor covered irregularly with patched and
+defective oilcloth and a dingy mat or so and a "surround" as they
+call it, of dark stained wood.  Here and there against the wall are
+trunks and boxes.  There are cupboards on either side of the
+fireplace and bookshelves with books above them, and on the wall and
+rather tattered is a large yellow-varnished geological map of the
+South of England.  Over the mantel is a huge lump of white coral
+rock and several big fossil bones, and above that hangs the portrait
+of a brainy gentleman, sliced in half and displaying an interior of
+intricate detail and much vigour of coloring.  It is the floor I
+think of chiefly; over the oilcloth of which, assumed to be land,
+spread towns and villages and forts of wooden bricks; there are
+steep square hills (geologically, volumes of Orr's CYCLOPAEDIA OF
+THE SCIENCES) and the cracks and spaces of the floor and the bare
+brown surround were the water channels and open sea of that
+continent of mine.
+
+I still remember with infinite gratitude the great-uncle to whom I
+owe my bricks.  He must have been one of those rare adults who have
+not forgotten the chagrins and dreams of childhood.  He was a
+prosperous west of England builder; including my father he had three
+nephews, and for each of them he caused a box of bricks to be made
+by an out-of-work carpenter, not the insufficient supply of the
+toyshop, you understand, but a really adequate quantity of bricks
+made out of oak and shaped and smoothed, bricks about five inches by
+two and a half by one, and half-bricks and quarter-bricks to
+correspond.  There were hundreds of them, many hundreds.  I could
+build six towers as high as myself with them, and there seemed quite
+enough for every engineering project I could undertake.  I could
+build whole towns with streets and houses and churches and citadels;
+I could bridge every gap in the oilcloth and make causeways over
+crumpled spaces (which I feigned to be morasses), and on a keel of
+whole bricks it was possible to construct ships to push over the
+high seas to the remotest port in the room.  And a disciplined
+population, that rose at last by sedulous begging on birthdays and
+all convenient occasions to well over two hundred, of lead sailors
+and soldiers, horse, foot and artillery, inhabited this world.
+
+Justice has never been done to bricks and soldiers by those who
+write about toys.  The praises of the toy theatre have been a common
+theme for essayists, the planning of the scenes, the painting and
+cutting out of the caste, penny plain twopence coloured, the stink
+and glory of the performance and the final conflagration.  I had
+such a theatre once, but I never loved it nor hoped for much from
+it; my bricks and soldiers were my perpetual drama.  I recall an
+incessant variety of interests.  There was the mystery and charm of
+the complicated buildings one could make, with long passages and
+steps and windows through which one peeped into their intricacies,
+and by means of slips of card one could make slanting ways in them,
+and send marbles rolling from top to base and thence out into the
+hold of a waiting ship.  Then there were the fortresses and gun
+emplacements and covered ways in which one's soldiers went.  And
+there was commerce; the shops and markets and store-rooms full of
+nasturtium seed, thrift seed, lupin beans and suchlike provender
+from the garden; such stuff one stored in match-boxes and pill-
+boxes, or packed in sacks of old glove fingers tied up with thread
+and sent off by waggons along the great military road to the
+beleaguered fortress on the Indian frontier beyond the worn places
+that were dismal swamps.  And there were battles on the way.
+
+That great road is still clear in my memory.  I was given, I forget
+by what benefactor, certain particularly fierce red Indians of lead--
+I have never seen such soldiers since--and for these my father
+helped me to make tepees of brown paper, and I settled them in a
+hitherto desolate country under the frowning nail-studded cliffs of
+an ancient trunk.  Then I conquered them and garrisoned their land.
+(Alas! they died, no doubt through contact with civilisation--one my
+mother trod on--and their land became a wilderness again and was
+ravaged for a time by a clockwork crocodile of vast proportions.)
+And out towards the coal-scuttle was a region near the impassable
+thickets of the ragged hearthrug where lived certain china Zulus
+brandishing spears, and a mountain country of rudely piled bricks
+concealing the most devious and enchanting caves and several mines
+of gold and silver paper.  Among these rocks a number of survivors
+from a Noah's Ark made a various, dangerous, albeit frequently
+invalid and crippled fauna, and I was wont to increase the
+uncultivated wildness of this region further by trees of privet-
+twigs from the garden hedge and box from the garden borders.  By
+these territories went my Imperial Road carrying produce to and fro,
+bridging gaps in the oilcloth, tunnelling through Encyclopaedic
+hills--one tunnel was three volumes long--defended as occasion
+required by camps of paper tents or brick blockhouses, and ending at
+last in a magnificently engineered ascent to a fortress on the
+cliffs commanding the Indian reservation.
+
+My games upon the floor must have spread over several years and
+developed from small beginnings, incorporating now this suggestion
+and now that.  They stretch, I suppose, from seven to eleven or
+twelve.  I played them intermittently, and they bulk now in the
+retrospect far more significantly than they did at the time.  I
+played them in bursts, and then forgot them for long periods;
+through the spring and summer I was mostly out of doors, and school
+and classes caught me early.  And in the retrospect I see them all
+not only magnified and transfigured, but fore-shortened and confused
+together.  A clockwork railway, I seem to remember, came and went;
+one or two clockwork boats, toy sailing ships that, being keeled,
+would do nothing but lie on their beam ends on the floor; a
+detestable lot of cavalrymen, undersized and gilt all over, given me
+by a maiden aunt, and very much what one might expect from an aunt,
+that I used as Nero used his Christians to ornament my public
+buildings; and I finally melted some into fratricidal bullets, and
+therewith blew the rest to flat splashes of lead by means of a brass
+cannon in the garden.
+
+I find this empire of the floor much more vivid and detailed in my
+memory now than many of the owners of the skirts and legs and boots
+that went gingerly across its territories.  Occasionally, alas! they
+stooped to scrub, abolishing in one universal destruction the slow
+growth of whole days of civilised development.  I still remember the
+hatred and disgust of these catastrophes.  Like Noah I was given
+warnings.  Did I disregard them, coarse red hands would descend,
+plucking garrisons from fortresses and sailors from ships, jumbling
+them up in their wrong boxes, clumsily so that their rifles and
+swords were broken, sweeping the splendid curves of the Imperial
+Road into heaps of ruins, casting the jungle growth of Zululand into
+the fire.
+
+"Well, Master Dick," the voice of this cosmic calamity would say,
+"you ought to have put them away last night.  No! I can't wait until
+you've sailed them all away in ships.  I got my work to do, and do
+it I will."
+
+And in no time all my continents and lands were swirling water and
+swiping strokes of house-flannel.
+
+That was the worst of my giant visitants, but my mother too, dear
+lady, was something of a terror to this microcosm.  She wore spring-
+sided boots, a kind of boot now vanished, I believe, from the world,
+with dull bodies and shiny toes, and a silk dress with flounces that
+were very destructive to the more hazardous viaducts of the Imperial
+Road.  She was always, I seem to remember, fetching me; fetching me
+for a meal, fetching me for a walk or, detestable absurdity!
+fetching me for a wash and brush up, and she never seemed to
+understand anything whatever of the political Systems across which
+she came to me.  Also she forbade all toys on Sundays except the
+bricks for church-building and the soldiers for church parade, or a
+Scriptural use of the remains of the Noah's Ark mixed up with a
+wooden Swiss dairy farm.  But she really did not know whether a
+thing was a church or not unless it positively bristled with cannon,
+and many a Sunday afternoon have I played Chicago (with the fear of
+God in my heart) under an infidel pretence that it was a new sort of
+ark rather elaborately done.
+
+Chicago, I must explain, was based upon my father's description of
+the pig slaughterings in that city and certain pictures I had seen.
+You made your beasts--which were all the ark lot really,
+provisionally conceived as pigs--go up elaborate approaches to a
+central pen, from which they went down a cardboard slide four at a
+time, and dropped most satisfyingly down a brick shaft, and pitter-
+litter over some steep steps to where a head slaughterman (ne Noah)
+strung a cotton loop round their legs and sent them by pin hooks
+along a wire to a second slaughterman with a chipped foot (formerly
+Mrs. Noah) who, if I remember rightly, converted them into Army
+sausage by means of a portion of the inside of an old alarum clock.
+
+My mother did not understand my games, but my father did.  He wore
+bright-coloured socks and carpet slippers when he was indoors--my
+mother disliked boots in the house--and he would sit down on my
+little chair and survey the microcosm on the floor with admirable
+understanding and sympathy.
+
+It was he who gave me most of my toys and, I more than suspect, most
+of my ideas.  "Here's some corrugated iron," he would say, "suitable
+for roofs and fencing," and hand me a lump of that stiff crinkled
+paper that is used for packing medicine bottles.  Or, "Dick, do you
+see the tiger loose near the Imperial Road?--won't do for your
+cattle ranch."  And I would find a bright new lead tiger like a
+special creation at large in the world, and demanding a hunting
+expedition and much elaborate effort to get him safely housed in the
+city menagerie beside the captured dragon crocodile, tamed now, and
+his key lost and the heart and spring gone out of him.
+
+And to the various irregular reading of my father I owe the
+inestimable blessing of never having a boy's book in my boyhood
+except those of Jules Verne.  But my father used to get books for
+himself and me from the Bromstead Institute, Fenimore Cooper and
+Mayne Reid and illustrated histories; one of the Russo-Turkish war
+and one of Napier's expedition to Abyssinia I read from end to end;
+Stanley and Livingstone, lives of Wellington, Napoleon and
+Garibaldi, and back volumes of PUNCH, from which I derived
+conceptions of foreign and domestic politics it has taken years of
+adult reflection to correct.  And at home permanently we had Wood's
+NATURAL HISTORY, a brand-new illustrated Green's HISTORY OF THE
+ENGLISH PEOPLE, Irving's COMPANIONS OF COLUMBUS, a great number of
+unbound parts of some geographical work, a VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD I
+think it was called, with pictures of foreign places, and Clarke's
+NEW TESTAMENT with a map of Palestine, and a variety of other
+informing books bought at sales.  There was a Sowerby's BOTANY also,
+with thousands of carefully tinted pictures of British plants, and
+one or two other important works in the sitting-room.  I was allowed
+to turn these over and even lie on the floor with them on Sundays
+and other occasions of exceptional cleanliness.
+
+And in the attic I found one day a very old forgotten map after the
+fashion of a bird's-eye view, representing the Crimea, that
+fascinated me and kept me for hours navigating its waters with a
+pin.
+
+
+2
+
+My father was a lank-limbed man in easy shabby tweed clothes and
+with his hands in his trouser pockets.  He was a science teacher,
+taking a number of classes at the Bromstead Institute in Kent under
+the old Science and Art Department, and "visiting" various schools;
+and our resources were eked out by my mother's income of nearly a
+hundred pounds a year, and by his inheritance of a terrace of three
+palatial but structurally unsound stucco houses near Bromstead
+Station.
+
+They were big clumsy residences in the earliest Victorian style,
+interminably high and with deep damp  basements  and  downstairs
+coal-cellars  and kitchens  that suggested  an architect
+vindictively devoted to the discomfort of the servant class.  If so,
+he had overreached himself and defeated his end, for no servant
+would stay in them unless for exceptional wages or exceptional
+tolerance of inefficiency or exceptional freedom in repartee.  Every
+storey in the house was from twelve to fifteen feet high (which
+would have been cool and pleasant in a hot climate), and the stairs
+went steeply up, to end at last in attics too inaccessible for
+occupation.  The ceilings had vast plaster cornices of classical
+design, fragments of which would sometimes fall unexpectedly, and
+the wall-papers were bold and gigantic in pattern and much
+variegated by damp and ill-mended rents.
+
+As my father was quite unable to let more than one of these houses
+at a time, and that for the most part to eccentric and undesirable
+tenants, he thought it politic to live in one of the two others, and
+devote the rent he received from the let one, when it was let, to
+the incessant necessary repairing of all three.  He also did some of
+the repairing himself and, smoking a bull-dog pipe the while, which
+my mother would not allow him to do in the house, he cultivated
+vegetables in a sketchy, unpunctual and not always successful manner
+in the unoccupied gardens.  The three houses faced north, and the
+back of the one we occupied was covered by a grape-vine that
+yielded, I remember, small green grapes for pies in the spring, and
+imperfectly ripe black grapes in favourable autumns for the purposes
+of dessert. The grape-vine played an important part in my life, for
+my father broke his neck while he was pruning it, when I was
+thirteen.
+
+My father was what is called a man of ideas, but they were not
+always good ideas.  My grandfather had been a private schoolmaster
+and one of the founders of the College of Preceptors, and my father
+had assisted him in his school until increasing competition and
+diminishing attendance had made it evident that the days of small
+private schools kept by unqualified persons were numbered.
+Thereupon my father had roused himself and had qualified as a
+science teacher under the Science and Art Department, which in these
+days had charge of the scientific and artistic education of the mass
+of the English population, and had thrown himself into science
+teaching and the earning of government grants therefor with great if
+transitory zeal and success.
+
+I do not remember anything of my father's earlier and more energetic
+time.  I was the child of my parents' middle years; they married
+when my father was thirty-five and my mother past forty, and I saw
+only the last decadent phase of his educational career.
+
+The Science and Art Department has vanished altogether from the
+world, and people are forgetting it now with the utmost readiness
+and generosity.  Part of its substance and staff and spirit survive,
+more or less completely digested into the Board of Education.
+
+The world does move on, even in its government.  It is wonderful how
+many of the clumsy and limited governing bodies of my youth and
+early manhood have given place now to more scientific and efficient
+machinery.  When I was a boy, Bromstead, which is now a borough, was
+ruled by a strange body called a Local Board--it was the Age of
+Boards--and I still remember indistinctly my father rejoicing at the
+breakfast-table over the liberation of London from the corrupt and
+devastating control of a Metropolitan Board of Works.  Then there
+were also School Boards; I was already practically in politics
+before the London School Board was absorbed by the spreading
+tentacles of the London County Council.
+
+It gives a measure of the newness of our modern ideas of the State
+to remember that the very beginnings of public education lie within
+my father's lifetime, and that many most intelligent and patriotic
+people were shocked beyond measure at the State doing anything of
+the sort.  When he was born, totally illiterate people who could
+neither read a book nor write more than perhaps a clumsy signature,
+were to be found everywhere in England; and great masses of the
+population were getting no instruction at all.  Only a few schools
+flourished upon the patronage of exceptional parents; all over the
+country the old endowed grammar schools were to be found sinking and
+dwindling; many of them had closed altogether.  In the new great
+centres of population multitudes of children were sweated in the
+factories, darkly ignorant and wretched and the under-equipped and
+under-staffed National and British schools, supported by voluntary
+contributions and sectarian rivalries, made an ineffectual fight
+against this festering darkness.  It was a condition of affairs
+clamouring for remedies, but there was an immense amount of
+indifference and prejudice to be overcome before any remedies were
+possible.  Perhaps some day some industrious and lucid historian
+will disentangle all the muddle of impulses and antagonisms, the
+commercialism, utilitarianism, obstinate conservatism, humanitarian
+enthusiasm, out of which our present educational organisation arose.
+I have long since come to believe it necessary that all new social
+institutions should be born in confusion, and that at first they
+should present chiefly crude and ridiculous aspects.  The distrust
+of government in the Victorian days was far too great, and the
+general intelligence far too low, to permit the State to go about
+the new business it was taking up in a businesslike way, to train
+teachers, build and equip schools, endow pedagogic research, and
+provide properly written school-books.  These things it was felt
+MUST be provided by individual and local effort, and since it was
+manifest that it was individual and local effort that were in
+default, it was reluctantly agreed to stimulate them by money
+payments.  The State set up a machinery of examination both in
+Science and Art and for the elementary schools; and payments, known
+technically as grants, were made in accordance with the examination
+results attained, to such schools as Providence might see fit to
+send into the world.  In this way it was felt the Demand would be
+established that would, according to the beliefs of that time,
+inevitably ensure the Supply.  An industry of "Grant earning" was
+created, and this would give education as a necessary by-product.
+
+In the end this belief was found to need qualification, but Grant-
+earning was still in full activity when I was a small boy.  So far
+as the Science and Art Department and my father are concerned, the
+task of examination was entrusted to eminent scientific men, for the
+most part quite unaccustomed to teaching.  You see, if they also
+were teaching similar classes to those they examined, it was feared
+that injustice might be done.  Year after year these eminent persons
+set questions and employed subordinates to read and mark the
+increasing thousands of answers that ensued, and having no doubt the
+national ideal of fairness well developed in their minds, they were
+careful each year to re-read the preceding papers before composing
+the current one, in order to see what it was usual to ask.  As a
+result of this, in the course of a few years the recurrence and
+permutation of questions became almost calculable, and since the
+practical object of the teaching was to teach people not science,
+but how to write answers to these questions, the industry of Grant-
+earning assumed a form easily distinguished from any kind of genuine
+education whatever.
+
+Other remarkable compromises had also to be made with the spirit of
+the age.  The unfortunate conflict between Religion and Science
+prevalent at this time was mitigated, if I remember rightly, by
+making graduates in arts and priests in the established church
+Science Teachers EX OFFICIO, and leaving local and private
+enterprise to provide schools, diagrams, books, material, according
+to the conceptions of efficiency prevalent in the district.  Private
+enterprise made a particularly good thing of the books.  A number of
+competing firms of publishers sprang into existence specialising in
+Science and Art Department work; they set themselves to produce
+text-books that should supply exactly the quantity and quality of
+knowledge necessary for every stage of each of five and twenty
+subjects into which desirable science was divided, and copies and
+models and instructions that should give precisely the method and
+gestures esteemed as proficiency in art.  Every section of each book
+was written in the idiom found to be most satisfactory to the
+examiners, and test questions extracted from papers set in former
+years were appended to every chapter.  By means of these last the
+teacher was able to train his class to the very highest level of
+grant-earning efficiency, and very naturally he cast all other
+methods of exposition aside.  First he posed his pupils with
+questions and then dictated model replies.
+
+That was my father's method of instruction.  I attended his classes
+as an elementary grant-earner from the age of ten until his death,
+and it is so I remember him, sitting on the edge of a table,
+smothering a yawn occasionally and giving out the infallible
+formulae to the industriously scribbling class sitting in rows of
+desks before him.  Occasionally he would slide to his feet and go to
+a blackboard on an easel and draw on that very slowly and
+deliberately in coloured chalks a diagram for the class to copy in
+coloured pencils, and sometimes he would display a specimen or
+arrange an experiment for them to see.  The room in the Institute in
+which he taught was equipped with a certain amount of apparatus
+prescribed as necessary for subject this and subject that by the
+Science and Art Department, and this my father would supplement with
+maps and diagrams and drawings of his own.
+
+But he never really did experiments, except that in the class in
+systematic botany he sometimes made us tease common flowers to
+pieces.  He did not do experiments if he could possibly help it,
+because in the first place they used up time and gas for the Bunsen
+burner and good material in a ruinous fashion, and in the second
+they were, in his rather careless and sketchy hands, apt to endanger
+the apparatus of the Institute and even the lives of his students.
+Then thirdly, real experiments involved washing up.  And moreover
+they always turned out wrong, and sometimes misled the too observant
+learner very seriously and opened demoralising controversies.  Quite
+early in life I acquired an almost ineradicable sense of the
+unscientific perversity of Nature and the impassable gulf that is
+fixed between systematic science and elusive fact.  I knew, for
+example, that in science, whether it be subject XII., Organic
+Chemistry, or subject XVII., Animal Physiology, when you blow into a
+glass of lime-water it instantly becomes cloudy, and if you continue
+to blow it clears again, whereas in truth you may blow into the
+stuff from the lime-water bottle until you are crimson in the face
+and painful under the ears, and it never becomes cloudy at all.  And
+I knew, too, that in science if you put potassium chlorate into a
+retort and heat it over a Bunsen burner, oxygen is disengaged and
+may be collected over water, whereas in real life if you do anything
+of the sort the vessel cracks with a loud report, the potassium
+chlorate descends sizzling upon the flame, the experimenter says
+"Oh! Damn!" with astonishing heartiness and distinctness, and a lady
+student in the back seats gets up and leaves the room.
+
+Science is the organised conquest of Nature, and I can quite
+understand that ancient libertine refusing to co-operate in her own
+undoing.  And I can quite understand, too, my father's preference
+for what he called an illustrative experiment, which was simply an
+arrangement of the apparatus in front of the class with nothing
+whatever by way of material, and the Bunsen burner clean and cool,
+and then a slow luminous description of just what you did put in it
+when you were so ill-advised as to carry the affair beyond
+illustration, and just exactly what ought anyhow to happen when you
+did.  He had considerable powers of vivid expression, so that in
+this way he could make us see all he described.  The class, freed
+from any unpleasant nervous tension, could draw this still life
+without flinching, and if any part was too difficult to draw, then
+my father would produce a simplified version on the blackboard to be
+copied instead.  And he would also write on the blackboard any
+exceptionally difficult but grant-earning words, such as
+"empyreumatic" or "botryoidal."
+
+Some words in constant use he rarely explained.  I remember once
+sticking up my hand and asking him in the full flow of description,
+"Please, sir, what is flocculent?"
+
+"The precipitate is."
+
+"Yes, sir, but what does it mean?"
+
+"Oh! flocculent!" said my father, "flocculent!  Why--" he extended
+his hand and arm and twiddled his fingers for a second in the air.
+"Like that," he said.
+
+I thought the explanation sufficient, but he paused for a moment
+after giving it.  "As in a flock bed, you know," he added and
+resumed his discourse.
+
+
+3
+
+My father, I am afraid, carried a natural incompetence in practical
+affairs to an exceptionally high level.  He combined practical
+incompetence, practical enterprise and a thoroughly sanguine
+temperament, in a manner that I have never seen paralleled in any
+human being.  He was always trying to do new things in the briskest
+manner, under the suggestion of books or papers or his own
+spontaneous imagination, and as he had never been trained to do
+anything whatever in his life properly, his futilities were
+extensive and thorough.  At one time he nearly gave up his classes
+for intensive culture, so enamoured was he of its possibilities; the
+peculiar pungency of the manure he got, in pursuit of a chemical
+theory of his own, has scarred my olfactory memories for a lifetime.
+The intensive culture phase is very clear in my memory; it came near
+the end of his career and when I was between eleven and twelve.  I
+was mobilised to gather caterpillars on several occasions, and
+assisted in nocturnal raids upon the slugs by lantern-light that
+wrecked my preparation work for school next day.  My father dug up
+both lawns, and trenched and manured in spasms of immense vigour
+alternating with periods of paralysing distaste for the garden.  And
+for weeks he talked about eight hundred pounds an acre at every
+meal.
+
+A garden, even when it is not exasperated by intensive methods, is a
+thing as exacting as a baby, its moods have to be watched; it does
+not wait upon the cultivator's convenience, but has times of its
+own.  Intensive culture greatly increases this disposition to
+trouble mankind; it makes a garden touchy and hysterical, a drugged
+and demoralised and over-irritated garden.  My father got at cross
+purposes with our two patches at an early stage.  Everything grew
+wrong from the first to last, and if my father's manures intensified
+nothing else, they certainly intensified the Primordial Curse.  The
+peas were eaten in the night before they were three inches high, the
+beans bore nothing but blight, the only apparent result of a
+spraying of the potatoes was to develop a PENCHANT in the cat for
+being ill indoors, the cucumber frames were damaged by the
+catapulting of boys going down the lane at the back, and all your
+cucumbers were mysteriously embittered.  That lane with its
+occasional passers-by did much to wreck the intensive scheme,
+because my father always stopped work and went indoors if any one
+watched him.  His special manure was apt to arouse a troublesome
+spirit of inquiry in hardy natures.
+
+In digging his rows and shaping his patches he neglected the guiding
+string and trusted to his eye altogether too much, and the
+consequent obliquity and the various wind-breaks and scare-crows he
+erected, and particularly an irrigation contrivance he began and
+never finished by which everything was to be watered at once by
+means of pieces of gutter from the roof and outhouses of Number 2,
+and a large and particularly obstinate clump of elder-bushes in the
+abolished hedge that he had failed to destroy entirely either by axe
+or by fire, combined to give the gardens under intensive culture a
+singularly desolate and disorderly appearance.  He took steps
+towards the diversion of our house drain under the influence of the
+Sewage Utilisation Society; but happily he stopped in time.  He
+hardly completed any of the operations he began; something else
+became more urgent or simply he tired; a considerable area of the
+Number 2 territory was never even dug up.
+
+In the end the affair irritated him beyond endurance.  Never was a
+man less horticulturally-minded.  The clamour of these vegetables he
+had launched into the world for his service and assistance, wore out
+his patience.  He would walk into the garden the happiest of men
+after a day or so of disregard, talking to me of history perhaps or
+social organisation, or summarising some book he had read.  He
+talked to me of anything that interested him, regardless of my
+limitations.  Then he would begin to note the growth of the weeds.
+"This won't do," he would say and pull up a handful.
+
+More weeding would follow and the talk would become fragmentary.
+His hands would become earthy, his nails black, weeds would snap off
+in his careless grip, leaving the roots behind.  The world would
+darken.  He would look at his fingers with disgusted astonishment.
+"CURSE these weeds!" he would say from his heart.  His discourse was
+at an end.
+
+I have memories, too, of his sudden unexpected charges into the
+tranquillity of the house, his hands and clothes intensively
+enriched.  He would come in like a whirlwind.  "This damned stuff
+all over me and the Agricultural Chemistry Class at six!  Bah!
+AAAAAAH!"
+
+My mother would never learn not to attempt to break him of swearing
+on such occasions.  She would remain standing a little stiffly in
+the scullery refusing to assist him to the adjectival towel he
+sought.
+
+"If you say such things--"
+
+He would dance with rage and hurl the soap about.  "The towel!" he
+would cry, flicking suds from big fingers in every direction; "the
+towel! I'll let the blithering class slide if you don't give me the
+towel!  I'll give up everything, I tell you--everything!" . . .
+
+At last with the failure of the lettuces came the breaking point.  I
+was in the little arbour learning Latin irregular verbs when it
+happened.  I can see him still, his peculiar tenor voice still
+echoes in my brain, shouting his opinion of intensive culture for
+all the world to hear, and slashing away at that abominable mockery
+of a crop with a hoe.  We had tied them up with bast only a week or
+so before, and now half were rotten and half had shot up into tall
+slender growths.  He had the hoe in both hands and slogged.  Great
+wipes he made, and at each stroke he said, "Take that!"
+
+The air was thick with flying fragments of abortive salad.  It was a
+fantastic massacre.  It was the French Revolution of that cold
+tyranny, the vindictive overthrow of the pampered vegetable
+aristocrats.  After he had assuaged his passion upon them, he turned
+for other prey; he kicked holes in two of our noblest marrows,
+flicked off the heads of half a row of artichokes, and shied the hoe
+with a splendid smash into the cucumber frame.  Something of the awe
+of that moment returns to me as I write of it.
+
+"Well, my boy," he said, approaching with an expression of beneficent
+happiness, "I've done with gardening.  Let's go for a walk like
+reasonable beings.  I've had enough of this"--his face was convulsed
+for an instant with bitter resentment--"Pandering to cabbages."
+
+
+4
+
+That afternoon's walk sticks in my memory for many reasons.  One is
+that we went further than I had ever been before; far beyond Keston
+and nearly to Seven-oaks, coming back by train from Dunton Green,
+and the other is that my father as he went along talked about
+himself, not so much to me as to himself, and about life and what he
+had done with it.  He monologued so that at times he produced an
+effect of weird world-forgetfulness.  I listened puzzled, and at
+that time not understanding many things that afterwards became plain
+to me.  It is only in recent years that I have discovered the pathos
+of that monologue; how friendless my father was and uncompanioned in
+his thoughts and feelings, and what a hunger he may have felt for
+the sympathy of the undeveloped youngster who trotted by his side.
+
+"I'm no gardener," he said, "I'm no anything.  Why the devil did I
+start gardening?
+
+"I suppose man was created to mind a garden. . .  But the Fall let
+us out of that!  What was I created for?  God! what was I created
+for? . . .
+
+"Slaves to matter!  Minding inanimate things!  It doesn't suit me,
+you know.  I've got no hands and no patience.  I've mucked about
+with life.  Mucked about with life."  He suddenly addressed himself
+to me, and for an instant I started like an eavesdropper discovered.
+"Whatever you do, boy, whatever you do, make a Plan.  Make a good
+Plan and stick to it.  Find out what life is about--I never have--
+and set yourself to do whatever you ought to do.  I admit it's a
+puzzle. . . .
+
+"Those damned houses have been the curse of my life.  Stucco white
+elephants!  Beastly cracked stucco with stains of green--black and
+green.  Conferva and soot. . . .  Property, they are! . . .  Beware
+of Things, Dick, beware of Things!  Before you know where you are
+you are waiting on them and minding them.  They'll eat your life up.
+Eat up your hours and your blood and energy!  When those houses came
+to me, I ought to have sold them--or fled the country.  I ought to
+have cleared out.  Sarcophagi--eaters of men!  Oh! the hours and
+days of work, the nights of anxiety those vile houses have cost me!
+The painting!  It worked up my arms; it got all over me.  I stank of
+it.  It made me ill.  It isn't living--it's minding. . . .
+
+"Property's the curse of life.  Property!  Ugh!  Look at this
+country all cut up into silly little parallelograms, look at all
+those villas we passed just now and those potato patches and that
+tarred shanty and the hedge!  Somebody's minding every bit of it
+like a dog tied to a cart's tail.  Patching it and bothering about
+it.  Bothering!  Yapping at every passer-by.  Look at that notice-
+board!  One rotten worried little beast wants to keep us other
+rotten little beasts off HIS patch,--God knows why!  Look at the
+weeds in it.  Look at the mended fence! . . .  There's no property
+worth having, Dick, but money.  That's only good to spend.  All
+these things.  Human souls buried under a cartload of blithering
+rubbish. . . .
+
+"I'm not a fool, Dick.  I have qualities, imagination, a sort of go.
+I ought to have made a better thing of life.
+
+"I'm sure I could have done things.  Only the old people pulled my
+leg.  They started me wrong.  They never started me at all.  I only
+began to find out what life was like when I was nearly forty.
+
+"If I'd gone to a university; if I'd had any sort of sound training,
+if I hadn't slipped into the haphazard places that came easiest. . . .
+
+"Nobody warned me.  Nobody.  It isn't a world we live in, Dick; it's
+a cascade of accidents; it's a chaos exasperated by policemen!  YOU
+be warned in time, Dick.  You stick to a plan.  Don't wait for any
+one to show you the way.  Nobody will.  There isn't a way till you
+make one.  Get education, get a good education.  Fight your way to
+the top.  It's your only chance.  I've watched you.  You'll do no
+good at digging and property minding.  There isn't a neighbour in
+Bromstead won't be able to skin you at suchlike games.  You and I
+are the brainy unstable kind, topside or nothing.  And if ever those
+blithering houses come to you--don't have 'em.  Give them away!
+Dynamite 'em--and off!  LIVE, Dick!  I'll get rid of them for you if
+I can, Dick, but remember what I say." . . .
+
+So it was my father discoursed, if not in those particular words,
+yet exactly in that manner, as he slouched along the southward road,
+with resentful eyes becoming less resentful as he talked, and
+flinging out clumsy illustrative motions at the outskirts of
+Bromstead as we passed along them.  That afternoon he hated
+Bromstead, from its foot-tiring pebbles up.  He had no illusions
+about Bromstead or himself.  I have the clearest impression of him
+in his garden-stained tweeds with a deer-stalker hat on the back of
+his head and presently a pipe sometimes between his teeth and
+sometimes in his gesticulating hand, as he became diverted by his
+talk from his original exasperation. . . .
+
+This particular afternoon is no doubt mixed up in my memory with
+many other afternoons; all sorts of things my father said and did at
+different times have got themselves referred to it; it filled me at
+the time with a great unprecedented sense of fellowship and it has
+become the symbol now for all our intercourse together.  If I didn't
+understand the things he said, I did the mood he was in.  He gave me
+two very broad ideas in that talk and the talks I have mingled with
+it; he gave them to me very clearly and they have remained
+fundamental in my mind; one a sense of the extraordinary confusion
+and waste and planlessness of the human life that went on all about
+us; and the other of a great ideal of order and economy which he
+called variously Science and Civilisation, and which, though I do
+not remember that he ever used that word, I suppose many people
+nowadays would identify with Socialism,--as the Fabians expound it.
+
+He was not very definite about this Science, you must understand,
+but he seemed always to be waving his hand towards it,--just as his
+contemporary Tennyson seems always to be doing--he belonged to his
+age and mostly his talk was destructive of the limited beliefs of
+his time, he led me to infer rather than actually told me that this
+Science was coming, a spirit of light and order, to the rescue of a
+world groaning and travailing in muddle for the want of it. . . .
+
+
+5
+
+When I think of Bromstead nowadays I find it inseparably bound up
+with the disorders of my father's gardening, and the odd patchings
+and paintings that disfigured his houses.  It was all of a piece
+with that.
+
+Let me try and give something of the quality of Bromstead and
+something of its history.  It is the quality and history of a
+thousand places round and about London, and round and about the
+other great centres of population in the world.  Indeed it is in a
+measure the quality of the whole of this modern world from which we
+who have the statesman's passion struggle to evolve, and dream still
+of evolving order.
+
+First, then, you must think of Bromstead a hundred and fifty years
+ago, as a narrow irregular little street of thatched houses strung
+out on the London and Dover Road, a little mellow sample unit of a
+social order that had a kind of completeness, at its level, of its
+own.  At that time its population numbered a little under two
+thousand people, mostly engaged in agricultural work or in trades
+serving agriculture.  There was a blacksmith, a saddler, a chemist,
+a doctor, a barber, a linen-draper (who brewed his own beer); a
+veterinary surgeon, a hardware shop, and two capacious inns.  Round
+and about it were a number of pleasant gentlemen's seats, whose
+owners went frequently to London town in their coaches along the
+very tolerable high-road.  The church was big enough to hold the
+whole population, were people minded to go to church, and indeed a
+large proportion did go, and all who married were married in it, and
+everybody, to begin with, was christened at its font and buried at
+last in its yew-shaded graveyard.  Everybody knew everybody in the
+place.  It was, in fact, a definite place and a real human community
+in those days.  There was a pleasant old market-house in the middle
+of the town with a weekly market, and an annual fair at which much
+cheerful merry making and homely intoxication occurred; there was a
+pack of hounds which hunted within five miles of London Bridge, and
+the local gentry would occasionally enliven the place with valiant
+cricket matches for a hundred guineas a side, to the vast excitement
+of the entire population.  It was very much the same sort of place
+that it had been for three or four centuries.  A Bromstead Rip van
+Winkle from 1550 returning in 1750 would have found most of the old
+houses still as he had known them, the same trades a little improved
+and differentiated one from the other, the same roads rather more
+carefully tended, the Inns not very much altered, the ancient
+familiar market-house.  The occasional wheeled traffic would have
+struck him as the most remarkable difference, next perhaps to the
+swaggering painted stone monuments instead of brasses and the
+protestant severity of the communion-table in the parish church,--
+both from the material point of view very little things.  A Rip van
+Winkle from 1350, again, would have noticed scarcely greater
+changes; fewer clergy, more people, and particularly more people of
+the middling sort; the glass in the windows of many of the houses,
+the stylish chimneys springing up everywhere would have impressed
+him, and suchlike details.  The place would have had the same
+boundaries, the same broad essential features, would have been still
+itself in the way that a man is still himself after he has "filled
+out" a little and grown a longer beard and changed his clothes.
+
+But after 1750 something got hold of the world, something that was
+destined to alter the scale of every human affair.
+
+That something was machinery and a vague energetic disposition to
+improve material things.  In another part of England ingenious
+people were beginning to use coal in smelting iron, and were
+producing metal in abundance and metal castings in sizes that had
+hitherto been unattainable.  Without warning or preparation,
+increment involving countless possibilities of further increment was
+coming to the strength of horses and men.   "Power," all
+unsuspected, was flowing like a drug into the veins of the social
+body.
+
+Nobody seems to have perceived this coming of power, and nobody had
+calculated its probable consequences.  Suddenly, almost
+inadvertently, people found themselves doing things that would have
+amazed their ancestors.  They began to construct wheeled vehicles
+much more easily and cheaply than they had ever done before, to make
+up roads and move things about that had formerly been esteemed too
+heavy for locomotion, to join woodwork with iron nails instead of
+wooden pegs, to achieve all sorts of mechanical possibilities, to
+trade more freely and manufacture on a larger scale, to send goods
+abroad in a wholesale and systematic way, to bring back commodities
+from overseas, not simply spices and fine commodities, but goods in
+bulk.  The new influence spread to agriculture, iron appliances
+replaced wooden, breeding of stock became systematic, paper-making
+and printing increased and cheapened.  Roofs of slate and tile
+appeared amidst and presently prevailed over the original Bromstead
+thatch, the huge space of Common to the south was extensively
+enclosed, and what had been an ill-defined horse-track to Dover,
+only passable by adventurous coaches in dry weather, became the
+Dover Road, and was presently the route first of one and then of
+several daily coaches.  The High Street was discovered to be too
+tortuous for these awakening energies, and a new road cut off its
+worst contortions.  Residential villas appeared occupied by retired
+tradesmen and widows, who esteemed the place healthy, and by others
+of a strange new unoccupied class of people who had money invested
+in joint-stock enterprises.  First one and then several boys'
+boarding-schools came, drawing their pupils from London,--my
+grandfather's was one of these.  London, twelve miles to the north-
+west, was making itself felt more and more.
+
+But this was only the beginning of the growth period, the first
+trickle of the coming flood of mechanical power.  Away in the north
+they were casting iron in bigger and bigger forms, working their way
+to the production of steel on a large scale, applying power in
+factories.  Bromstead had almost doubted in size again long before
+the railway came; there was hardly any thatch left in the High
+Street, but instead were houses with handsome brass-knockered front
+doors and several windows, and shops with shop-fronts all of square
+glass panes, and the place was lighted publicly now by oil lamps--
+previously only one flickering lamp outside each of the coaching
+inns had broken the nocturnal darkness.  And there was talk, it long
+remained talk,--of gas.  The gasworks came in 1834, and about that
+date my father's three houses must have been built convenient for
+the London Road.  They mark nearly the beginning of the real
+suburban quality; they were let at first to City people still
+engaged in business.
+
+And then hard on the gasworks had come the railway and cheap coal;
+there was a wild outbreak of brickfields upon the claylands to the
+east, and the Great Growth had begun in earnest.  The agricultural
+placidities that had formerly come to the very borders of the High
+Street were broken up north, west and south, by new roads.  This
+enterprising person and then that began to "run up" houses,
+irrespective of every other enterprising person who was doing the
+same thing.  A Local Board came into existence, and with much
+hesitation and penny-wise economy inaugurated drainage works.  Rates
+became a common topic, a fact of accumulating importance.  Several
+chapels of zinc and iron appeared, and also a white new church in
+commercial Gothic upon the common, and another of red brick in the
+residential district out beyond the brickfields towards Chessington.
+
+The population doubled again and doubled again, and became
+particularly teeming in the prolific "working-class" district about
+the deep-rutted, muddy, coal-blackened roads between the gasworks,
+Blodgett's laundries, and the railway goods-yard.  Weekly
+properties, that is to say small houses built by small property
+owners and let by the week, sprang up also in the Cage Fields, and
+presently extended right up the London Road.  A single national
+school in an inconvenient situation set itself inadequately to
+collect subscriptions and teach the swarming, sniffing, grimy
+offspring of this dingy new population to read.  The villages of
+Beckington, which used to be three miles to the west, and Blamely
+four miles to the east of Bromstead, were experiencing similar
+distensions and proliferations, and grew out to meet us.  All effect
+of locality or community had gone from these places long before I
+was born; hardly any one knew any one; there was no general meeting
+place any more, the old fairs were just common nuisances haunted by
+gypsies, van showmen, Cheap Jacks and London roughs, the churches
+were incapable of a quarter of the population.  One or two local
+papers of shameless veniality reported the proceedings of the local
+Bench and the local Board, compelled tradesmen who were interested
+in these affairs to advertise, used the epithet "Bromstedian" as one
+expressing peculiar virtues, and so maintained in the general mind a
+weak tradition of some local quality that embraced us all.  Then the
+parish graveyard filled up and became a scandal, and an ambitious
+area with an air of appetite was walled in by a Bromstead Cemetery
+Company, and planted with suitably high-minded and sorrowful
+varieties of conifer.  A stonemason took one of the earlier villas
+with a front garden at the end of the High Street, and displayed a
+supply of urns on pillars and headstones and crosses in stone,
+marble, and granite, that would have sufficed to commemorate in
+elaborate detail the entire population of Bromstead as one found it
+in 1750.
+
+The cemetery was made when I was a little boy of five or six; I was
+in the full tide of building and growth from the first; the second
+railway with its station at Bromstead North and the drainage
+followed when I was ten or eleven, and all my childish memories are
+of digging and wheeling, of woods invaded by building, roads gashed
+open and littered with iron pipes amidst a fearful smell of gas, of
+men peeped at and seen toiling away deep down in excavations, of
+hedges broken down and replaced by planks, of wheelbarrows and
+builders' sheds, of rivulets overtaken and swallowed up by drain-
+pipes.  Big trees, and especially elms, cleared of undergrowth and
+left standing amid such things, acquired a peculiar tattered
+dinginess rather in the quality of needy widow women who have seen
+happier days.
+
+The Ravensbrook of my earlier memories was a beautiful stream.  It
+came into my world out of a mysterious Beyond, out of a garden,
+splashing brightly down a weir which had once been the weir of a
+mill.  (Above the weir and inaccessible there were bulrushes growing
+in splendid clumps, and beyond that, pampas grass, yellow and
+crimson spikes of hollyhock, and blue suggestions of wonderland.)
+From the pool at the foot of this initial cascade it flowed in a
+leisurely fashion beside a footpath,--there were two pretty thatched
+cottages on the left, and here were ducks, and there were willows on
+the right,--and so came to where great trees grew on high banks on
+either hand and bowed closer, and at last met overhead.  This part
+was difficult to reach because of an old fence, but a little boy
+might glimpse that long cavern of greenery by wading.  Either I have
+actually seen kingfishers there, or my father has described them so
+accurately to me that he inserted them into my memory.  I remember
+them there anyhow.  Most of that overhung part I never penetrated at
+all, but followed the field path with my mother and met the stream
+again, where beyond there were flat meadows, Roper's meadows.  The
+Ravensbrook went meandering across the middle of these, now between
+steep banks, and now with wide shallows at the bends where the
+cattle waded and drank.  Yellow and purple loose-strife and ordinary
+rushes grew in clumps along the bank, and now and then a willow.  On
+rare occasions of rapture one might see a rat cleaning his whiskers
+at the water's edge.  The deep places were rich with tangled weeds,
+and in them fishes lurked--to me they were big fishes--water-boatmen
+and water-beetles traversed the calm surface of these still deeps;
+in one pool were yellow lilies and water-soldiers, and in the shoaly
+places hovering fleets of small fry basked in the sunshine--to
+vanish in a flash at one's shadow.  In one place, too, were Rapids,
+where the stream woke with a start from a dreamless brooding into
+foaming panic and babbled and hastened.  Well do I remember that
+half-mile of rivulet; all other rivers and cascades have their
+reference to it for me.  And after I was eleven, and before we left
+Bromstead, all the delight and beauty of it was destroyed.
+
+The volume of its water decreased abruptly--I suppose the new
+drainage works that linked us up with Beckington, and made me first
+acquainted with the geological quality of the London clay, had to do
+with that--until only a weak uncleansing trickle remained.  That at
+first did not strike me as a misfortune.  An adventurous small boy
+might walk dryshod in places hitherto inaccessible.  But hard upon
+that came the pegs, the planks and carts and devastation.  Roper's
+meadows, being no longer in fear of floods, were now to be slashed
+out into parallelograms of untidy road, and built upon with rows of
+working-class cottages.  The roads came,--horribly; the houses
+followed.  They seemed to rise in the night.  People moved into them
+as soon as the roofs were on, mostly workmen and their young wives,
+and already in a year some of these raw houses stood empty again
+from defaulting tenants, with windows broken and wood-work warping
+and rotting.  The Ravensbrook became a dump for old iron, rusty
+cans, abandoned boots and the like, and was a river only when
+unusual rains filled it for a day or so with an inky flood of
+surface water. . . .
+
+That indeed was my most striking perception in the growth of
+Bromstead.  The Ravensbrook had been important to my imaginative
+life; that way had always been my first choice in all my walks with
+my mother, and its rapid swamping by the new urban growth made it
+indicative of all the other things that had happened just before my
+time, or were still, at a less dramatic pace, happening.  I realised
+that building was the enemy.  I began to understand why in every
+direction out of Bromstead one walked past scaffold-poles into
+litter, why fragments of broken brick and cinder mingled in every
+path, and the significance of the universal notice-boards, either
+white and new or a year old and torn and battered, promising sites,
+proffering houses to be sold or let, abusing and intimidating
+passers-by for fancied trespass, and protecting rights of way.
+
+It is difficult to disentangle now what I understood at this time
+and what I have since come to understand, but it seems to me that
+even in those childish days I was acutely aware of an invading and
+growing disorder.  The serene rhythms of the old established
+agriculture, I see now, were everywhere being replaced by
+cultivation under notice and snatch crops; hedges ceased to be
+repaired, and were replaced by cheap iron railings or chunks of
+corrugated iron; more and more hoardings sprang up, and contributed
+more and more to the nomad tribes of filthy paper scraps that flew
+before the wind and overspread the country.  The outskirts of
+Bromstead were a maze of exploitation roads that led nowhere, that
+ended in tarred fences studded with nails (I don't remember barbed
+wire in those days; I think the Zeitgeist did not produce that until
+later), and in trespass boards that used vehement language.  Broken
+glass, tin cans, and ashes and paper abounded.  Cheap glass, cheap
+tin, abundant fuel, and a free untaxed Press had rushed upon a world
+quite unprepared to dispose of these blessings when the fulness of
+enjoyment was past.
+
+I suppose one might have persuaded oneself that all this was but the
+replacement of an ancient tranquillity, or at least an ancient
+balance, by a new order.  Only to my eyes, quickened by my father's
+intimations, it was manifestly no order at all.  It was a multitude
+of incoordinated fresh starts, each more sweeping and destructive
+than the last, and none of them ever really worked out to a ripe and
+satisfactory completion.  Each left a legacy of products, houses,
+humanity, or what not, in its wake.  It was a sort of progress that
+had bolted; it was change out of hand, and going at an unprecedented
+pace nowhere in particular.
+
+No, the Victorian epoch was not the dawn of a new era; it was a
+hasty, trial experiment, a gigantic experiment of the most slovenly
+and wasteful kind.  I suppose it was necessary; I suppose all things
+are necessary.  I suppose that before men will discipline themselves
+to learn and plan, they must first see in a hundred convincing forms
+the folly and muddle that come from headlong, aimless and haphazard
+methods.  The nineteenth century was an age of demonstrations, some
+of them very impressive demonstrations, of the powers that have come
+to mankind, but of permanent achievement, what will our descendants
+cherish?  It is hard to estimate what grains of precious metal may
+not be found in a mud torrent of human production on so large a
+scale, but will any one, a hundred years from now, consent to live
+in the houses the Victorians built, travel by their roads or
+railways, value the furnishings they made to live among or esteem,
+except for curious or historical reasons, their prevalent art and
+the clipped and limited literature that satisfied their souls?
+
+That age which bore me was indeed a world full of restricted and
+undisciplined people, overtaken by power, by possessions and great
+new freedoms, and unable to make any civilised use of them whatever;
+stricken now by this idea and now by that, tempted first by one
+possession and then another to ill-considered attempts; it was my
+father's exploitation of his villa gardens on the wholesale level.
+The whole of Bromstead as I remember it, and as I saw it last--it is
+a year ago now--is a dull useless boiling-up of human activities, an
+immense clustering of futilities.  It is as unfinished as ever; the
+builders' roads still run out and end in mid-field in their old
+fashion; the various enterprises jumble in the same hopeless
+contradiction, if anything intensified.  Pretentious villas jostle
+slums, and public-house and tin tabernacle glower at one another
+across the cat-haunted lot that intervenes.  Roper's meadows are now
+quite frankly a slum; back doors and sculleries gape towards the
+railway, their yards are hung with tattered washing unashamed; and
+there seem to be more boards by the railway every time I pass,
+advertising pills and pickles, tonics and condiments, and suchlike
+solicitudes of a people with no natural health nor appetite left in
+them. . . .
+
+Well, we have to do better.  Failure is not failure nor waste wasted
+if it sweeps away illusion and lights the road to a plan.
+
+
+6
+
+Chaotic indiscipline, ill-adjusted effort, spasmodic aims, these
+give the quality of all my Bromstead memories.  The crowning one of
+them all rises to desolating tragedy.  I remember now the wan spring
+sunshine of that Sunday morning, the stiff feeling of best clothes
+and aggressive cleanliness and formality, when I and my mother
+returned from church to find my father dead.  He had been pruning
+the grape vine.  He had never had a ladder long enough to reach the
+sill of the third-floor windows--at house-painting times he had
+borrowed one from the plumber who mixed his paint--and he had in his
+own happy-go-lucky way contrived a combination of the garden fruit
+ladder with a battered kitchen table that served all sorts of odd
+purposes in an outhouse.  He had stayed up this arrangement by means
+of the garden roller, and the roller had at the critical moment--
+rolled.  He was lying close by the garden door with his head queerly
+bent back against a broken and twisted rainwater pipe, an expression
+of pacific contentment on his face, a bamboo curtain rod with a
+tableknife tied to end of it, still gripped in his hand.  We had
+been rapping for some time at the front door unable to make him
+hear, and then we came round by the door in the side trellis into
+the garden and so discovered him.
+
+"Arthur!"  I remember my mother crying with the strangest break in
+her voice, "What are you doing there?  Arthur!  And--SUNDAY!"
+
+I was coming behind her, musing remotely, when the quality of her
+voice roused me.  She stood as if she could not go near him.  He had
+always puzzled her so, he and his ways, and this seemed only another
+enigma.  Then the truth dawned on her, she shrieked as if afraid of
+him, ran a dozen steps back towards the trellis door and stopped and
+clasped her ineffectual gloved hands, leaving me staring blankly,
+too astonished for feeling, at the carelessly flung limbs.
+
+The same idea came to me also.  I ran to her.  "Mother!" I cried,
+pale to the depths of my spirit, "IS HE DEAD?"
+
+I had been thinking two minutes before of the cold fruit pie that
+glorified our Sunday dinner-table, and how I might perhaps get into
+the tree at the end of the garden to read in the afternoon.  Now an
+immense fact had come down like a curtain and blotted out all my
+childish world.  My father was lying dead before my eyes. . . .   I
+perceived that my mother was helpless and that things must be done.
+
+"Mother!" I said, "we must get Doctor Beaseley,--and carry him
+indoors."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD
+
+SCHOLASTIC
+
+
+1
+
+My formal education began in a small preparatory school in
+Bromstead.  I went there as a day boy.  The charge for my
+instruction was mainly set off by the periodic visits of my father
+with a large bag of battered fossils to lecture to us upon geology.
+I was one of those fortunate youngsters who take readily to school
+work, I had a good memory, versatile interests and a considerable
+appetite for commendation, and when I was barely twelve I got a
+scholarship at the City Merchants School and was entrusted with a
+scholar's railway season ticket to Victoria.  After my father's
+death a large and very animated and solidly built uncle in tweeds
+from Staffordshire, Uncle Minter, my mother's sister's husband, with
+a remarkable accent and remarkable vowel sounds, who had plunged
+into the Bromstead home once or twice for the night but who was
+otherwise unknown to me, came on the scene, sold off the three gaunt
+houses with the utmost gusto, invested the proceeds and my father's
+life insurance money, and got us into a small villa at Penge within
+sight of that immense facade of glass and iron, the Crystal Palace.
+Then he retired in a mood of good-natured contempt to his native
+habitat again.  We stayed at Penge until my mother's death.
+
+School became a large part of the world to me, absorbing my time and
+interest, and I never acquired that detailed and intimate knowledge
+of Penge and the hilly villadom round about, that I have of the town
+and outskirts of Bromstead.
+
+It was a district of very much the same character, but it was more
+completely urbanised and nearer to the centre of things; there were
+the same unfinished roads, the same occasional disconcerted hedges
+and trees, the same butcher's horse grazing under a builder's
+notice-board, the same incidental lapses into slum.  The Crystal
+Palace grounds cut off a large part of my walking radius to the west
+with impassable fences and forbiddingly expensive turnstiles, but it
+added to the ordinary spectacle of meteorology a great variety of
+gratuitous fireworks which banged and flared away of a night after
+supper and drew me abroad to see them better.  Such walks as I took,
+to Croydon, Wembledon, West Wickham and Greenwich, impressed upon me
+the interminable extent of London's residential suburbs; mile after
+mile one went, between houses, villas, rows of cottages, streets of
+shops, under railway arches, over railway bridges.  I have forgotten
+the detailed local characteristics--if there were any--of much of
+that region altogether.  I was only there two years, and half my
+perambulations occurred at dusk or after dark.  But with Penge I
+associate my first realisations of the wonder and beauty of twilight
+and night, the effect of dark walls reflecting lamplight, and the
+mystery of blue haze-veiled hillsides of houses, the glare of shops
+by night, the glowing steam and streaming sparks of railway trains
+and railway signals lit up in the darkness.  My first rambles in the
+evening occurred at Penge--I was becoming a big and independent-
+spirited boy--and I began my experience of smoking during these
+twilight prowls with the threepenny packets of American cigarettes
+then just appearing in the world.
+
+My life centred upon the City Merchants School.  Usually I caught
+the eight-eighteen for Victoria, I had a midday meal and tea; four
+nights a week I stayed for preparation, and often I was not back
+home again until within an hour of my bedtime.  I spent my half
+holidays at school in order to play cricket and football.  This, and
+a pretty voracious appetite for miscellaneous reading which was
+fostered by the Penge Middleton Library, did not leave me much
+leisure for local topography.  On Sundays also I sang in the choir
+at St. Martin's Church, and my mother did not like me to walk out
+alone on the Sabbath afternoon, she herself slumbered, so that I
+wrote or read at home.  I must confess I was at home as little as I
+could contrive.
+
+Home, after my father's death, had become a very quiet and
+uneventful place indeed.  My mother had either an unimaginative
+temperament or her mind was greatly occupied with private religious
+solicitudes, and I remember her talking to me but little, and that
+usually upon topics I was anxious to evade.  I had developed my own
+view about low-Church theology long before my father's death, and my
+meditation upon that event had finished my secret estrangement from
+my mother's faith.  My reason would not permit even a remote chance
+of his being in hell, he was so manifestly not evil, and this
+religion would not permit him a remote chance of being out yet.
+When I was a little boy my mother had taught me to read and write
+and pray and had done many things for me, indeed she persisted in
+washing me and even in making my clothes until I rebelled against
+these things as indignities.  But our minds parted very soon.  She
+never began to understand the mental processes of my play, she never
+interested herself in my school life and work, she could not
+understand things I said; and she came, I think, quite insensibly to
+regard me with something of the same hopeless perplexity she had
+felt towards my father.
+
+Him she must have wedded under considerable delusions.  I do not
+think he deceived her, indeed, nor do I suspect him of mercenariness
+in their union; but no doubt he played up to her requirements in the
+half ingenuous way that was and still is the quality of most wooing,
+and presented himself as a very brisk and orthodox young man.  I
+wonder why nearly all love-making has to be fraudulent.  Afterwards
+he must have disappointed her cruelly by letting one aspect after
+another of his careless, sceptical, experimental temperament appear.
+Her mind was fixed and definite, she embodied all that confidence in
+church and decorum and the assurances of the pulpit which was
+characteristic of the large mass of the English people--for after
+all, the rather low-Church section WAS the largest single mass--in
+early Victorian times.  She had dreams, I suspect, of going to
+church with him side by side; she in a little poke bonnet and a
+large flounced crinoline, all mauve and magenta and starched under a
+little lace-trimmed parasol, and he in a tall silk hat and peg-top
+trousers and a roll-collar coat, and looking rather like the Prince
+Consort,--white angels almost visibly raining benedictions on their
+amiable progress.  Perhaps she dreamt gently of much-belaced babies
+and an interestingly pious (but not too dissenting or fanatical)
+little girl or boy or so, also angel-haunted.  And I think, too, she
+must have seen herself ruling a seemly "home of taste," with a
+vivarium in the conservatory that opened out of the drawing-room, or
+again, making preserves in the kitchen.  My father's science-
+teaching, his diagrams of disembowelled humanity, his pictures of
+prehistoric beasts that contradicted the Flood, his disposition
+towards soft shirts and loose tweed suits, his inability to use a
+clothes brush, his spasmodic reading fits and his bulldog pipes,
+must have jarred cruelly with her rather unintelligent
+anticipations.  His wild moments of violent temper when he would
+swear and smash things, absurd almost lovable storms that passed
+like summer thunder, must have been starkly dreadful to her.  She
+was constitutionally inadaptable, and certainly made no attempt to
+understand or tolerate these outbreaks.  She tried them by her
+standards, and by her standards they were wrong.  Her standards hid
+him from her.  The blazing things he said rankled in her mind
+unforgettably.
+
+As I remember them together they chafed constantly.  Her attitude to
+nearly all his moods and all his enterprises was a sceptical
+disapproval.  She treated him as something that belonged to me and
+not to her.  "YOUR father," she used to call him, as though I had
+got him for her.
+
+She had married late and she had, I think, become mentally self-
+subsisting before her marriage.  Even in those Herne Hill days I
+used to wonder what was going on in her mind, and I find that old
+speculative curiosity return as I write this.  She took a
+considerable interest in the housework that our generally
+servantless condition put upon her--she used to have a charwoman in
+two or three times a week--but she did not do it with any great
+skill.  She covered most of our furniture with flouncey ill-fitting
+covers, and she cooked plainly and without very much judgment.  The
+Penge house, as it contained nearly all our Bromstead things, was
+crowded with furniture, and is chiefly associated in my mind with
+the smell of turpentine, a condiment she used very freely upon the
+veneered mahogany pieces.  My mother had an equal dread of "blacks"
+by day and the "night air," so that our brightly clean windows were
+rarely open.
+
+She took a morning paper, and she would open it and glance at the
+headlines, but she did not read it until the afternoon and then, I
+think, she was interested only in the more violent crimes, and in
+railway and mine disasters and in the minutest domesticities of the
+Royal Family.  Most of the books at home were my father's, and I do
+not think she opened any of them.  She had one or two volumes that
+dated from her own youth, and she tried in vain to interest me in
+them; there was Miss Strickland's QUEENS OF ENGLAND, a book I
+remember with particular animosity, and QUEECHY and the WIDE WIDE
+WORLD.  She made these books of hers into a class apart by sewing
+outer covers upon them of calico and figured muslin.  To me in these
+habiliments they seemed not so much books as confederated old
+ladies.
+
+My mother was also very punctual with her religious duties, and
+rejoiced to watch me in the choir.
+
+On winter evenings she occupied an armchair on the other side of the
+table at which I sat, head on hand reading, and she would be darning
+stockings or socks or the like.  We achieved an effect of rather
+stuffy comfortableness that was soporific, and in a passive way I
+think she found these among her happy times.  On such occasions she
+was wont to put her work down on her knees and fall into a sort of
+thoughtless musing that would last for long intervals and rouse my
+curiosity.  For like most young people I could not imagine mental
+states without definite forms.
+
+She carried on a correspondence with a number of cousins and
+friends, writing letters in a slanting Italian hand and dealing
+mainly with births, marriages and deaths, business starts (in the
+vaguest terms) and the distresses of bankruptcy.
+
+And yet, you know, she did have a curious intimate life of her own
+that I suspected nothing of at the time, that only now becomes
+credible to me.  She kept a diary that is still in my possession, a
+diary of fragmentary entries in a miscellaneous collection of pocket
+books.  She put down the texts of the sermons she heard, and queer
+stiff little comments on casual visitors,--"Miss G. and much noisy
+shrieking talk about games and such frivolities and CROQUAY.  A.
+delighted and VERY ATTENTIVE."  Such little human entries abound.
+She had an odd way of never writing a name, only an initial; my
+father is always "A.," and I am always "D."  It is manifest she
+followed the domestic events in the life of the Princess of Wales,
+who is now Queen Mother, with peculiar interest and sympathy.  "Pray
+G. all may be well," she writes in one such crisis.
+
+But there are things about myself that I still find too poignant to
+tell easily, certain painful and clumsy circumstances of my birth in
+very great detail, the distresses of my infantile ailments.  Then
+later I find such things as this: "Heard D.  s----."  The "s" is
+evidently "swear "--"G. bless and keep my boy from evil."  And
+again, with the thin handwriting shaken by distress: "D. would not
+go to church, and hardened his heart and said wicked infidel things,
+much disrespect of the clergy.  The anthem is tiresome!!!  That men
+should set up to be wiser than their maker!!!"  Then trebly
+underlined: "I FEAR HIS FATHER'S TEACHING."  Dreadful little tangle
+of misapprehensions and false judgments!  More comforting for me to
+read, "D. very kind and good.  He grows more thoughtful every day."
+I suspect myself of forgotten hypocrisies.
+
+At just one point my mother's papers seem to dip deeper.  I think
+the death of my father must have stirred her for the first time for
+many years to think for herself.  Even she could not go on living in
+any peace at all, believing that he had indeed been flung headlong
+into hell.  Of this gnawing solicitude she never spoke to me, never,
+and for her diary also she could find no phrases.  But on a loose
+half-sheet of notepaper between its pages I find this passage that
+follows, written very carefully.  I do not know whose lines they are
+nor how she came upon them.  They run:--
+
+     "And if there be no meeting past the grave;
+      If all is darkness, silence, yet 'tis rest.
+      Be not afraid ye waiting hearts that weep,
+      For God still giveth His beloved sleep,
+      And if an endless sleep He wills, so best."
+
+That scrap of verse amazed me when I read it.  I could even wonder
+if my mother really grasped the import of what she had copied out.
+It affected me as if a stone-deaf person had suddenly turned and
+joined in a whispered conversation.  It set me thinking how far a
+mind in its general effect quite hopelessly limited, might range.
+After that I went through all her diaries, trying to find something
+more than a conventional term of tenderness for my father.  But I
+found nothing.  And yet somehow there grew upon me the realisation
+that there had been love. . . .  Her love for me, on the other hand,
+was abundantly expressed.
+
+I knew nothing of that secret life of feeling at the time; such
+expression as it found was all beyond my schoolboy range.  I did not
+know when I pleased her and I did not know when I distressed her.
+Chiefly I was aware of my mother as rather dull company, as a mind
+thorny with irrational conclusions and incapable of explication, as
+one believing quite wilfully and irritatingly in impossible things.
+So I suppose it had to be; life was coming to me in new forms and
+with new requirements.  It was essential to our situation that we
+should fail to understand.  After this space of years I have come to
+realisations and attitudes that dissolve my estrangement from her, I
+can pierce these barriers, I can see her and feel her as a loving
+and feeling and desiring and muddle-headed person.  There are times
+when I would have her alive again, if only that I might be kind to
+her for a little while and give her some return for the narrow
+intense affection, the tender desires, she evidently lavished so
+abundantly on me.  But then again I ask how I could make that
+return?  And I realise the futility of such dreaming.  Her demand
+was rigid, and to meet it I should need to act and lie.
+
+So she whose blood fed me, whose body made me, lies in my memory as
+I saw her last, fixed, still, infinitely intimate, infinitely
+remote. . . .
+
+My own case with my mother, however, does not awaken the same regret
+I feel when I think of how she misjudged and irked my father, and
+turned his weaknesses into thorns for her own tormenting.  I wish I
+could look back without that little twinge to two people who were
+both in their different quality so good.  But goodness that is
+narrow is a pedestrian and ineffectual goodness.  Her attitude to my
+father seems to me one of the essentially tragic things that have
+come to me personally, one of those things that nothing can
+transfigure, that REMAIN sorrowful, that I cannot soothe with any
+explanation, for as I remember him he was indeed the most lovable of
+weak spasmodic men.  But my mother had been trained in a hard and
+narrow system that made evil out of many things not in the least
+evil, and inculcated neither kindliness nor charity.  All their
+estrangement followed from that.
+
+These cramping cults do indeed take an enormous toll of human love
+and happiness, and not only that but what we Machiavellians must
+needs consider, they make frightful breaches in human solidarity.  I
+suppose I am a deeply religious man, as men of my quality go, but I
+hate more and more, as I grow older, the shadow of intolerance cast
+by religious organisations.  All my life has been darkened by
+irrational intolerance, by arbitrary irrational prohibitions and
+exclusions.  Mahometanism with its fierce proselytism, has, I
+suppose, the blackest record of uncharitableness, but most of the
+Christian sects are tainted, tainted to a degree beyond any of the
+anterior paganisms, with this same hateful quality.  It is their
+exclusive claim that sends them wrong, the vain ambition that
+inspires them all to teach a uniform one-sided God and be the one
+and only gateway to salvation.  Deprecation of all outside the
+household of faith, an organised undervaluation of heretical
+goodness and lovableness, follows, necessarily.  Every petty
+difference is exaggerated to the quality of a saving grace or a
+damning defect.  Elaborate precautions are taken to shield the
+believer's mind against broad or amiable suggestions; the faithful
+are deterred by dark allusions, by sinister warnings, from books,
+from theatres, from worldly conversation, from all the kindly
+instruments that mingle human sympathy.  For only by isolating its
+flock can the organisation survive.
+
+Every month there came to my mother a little magazine called, if I
+remember rightly, the HOME CHURCHMAN, with the combined authority of
+print and clerical commendation.  It was the most evil thing that
+ever came into the house, a very devil, a thin little pamphlet with
+one woodcut illustration on the front page of each number; now the
+uninviting visage of some exponent of the real and only doctrine and
+attitudes, now some coral strand in act of welcoming the
+missionaries of God's mysterious preferences, now a new church in
+the Victorian Gothic.  The vile rag it was!  A score of vices that
+shun the policeman have nothing of its subtle wickedness.  It was an
+outrage upon the natural kindliness of men.  The contents were all
+admirably adjusted to keep a spirit in prison.  Their force of
+sustained suggestion was tremendous.  There would be dreadful
+intimations of the swift retribution that fell upon individuals for
+Sabbath-breaking, and upon nations for weakening towards Ritualism,
+or treating Roman Catholics as tolerable human beings; there would
+be great rejoicings over the conversion of alleged Jews, and
+terrible descriptions of the death-beds of prominent infidels with
+boldly invented last words,--the most unscrupulous lying; there
+would be the appallingly edifying careers of "early piety"
+lusciously described, or stories of condemned criminals who traced
+their final ruin unerringly to early laxities of the kind that leads
+people to give up subscribing to the HOME CHURCHMAN.
+
+Every month that evil spirit brought about a slump in our mutual
+love.  My mother used to read the thing and become depressed and
+anxious for my spiritual welfare, used to be stirred to
+unintelligent pestering. . . .
+
+
+2
+
+A few years ago I met the editor of this same HOME CHURCHMAN.  It
+was at one of the weekly dinners of that Fleet Street dining club,
+the Blackfriars.
+
+I heard the paper's name with a queer little shock and surveyed the
+man with interest.  No doubt he was only a successor of the purveyor
+of discords who darkened my boyhood.  It was amazing to find an
+influence so terrible embodied in a creature so palpably petty.  He
+was seated some way down a table at right angles to the one at which
+I sat, a man of mean appearance with a greyish complexion, thin,
+with a square nose, a heavy wiry moustache and a big Adam's apple
+sticking out between the wings of his collar.  He ate with
+considerable appetite and unconcealed relish, and as his jaw was
+underhung, he chummed and made the moustache wave like reeds in the
+swell of a steamer.  It gave him a conscientious look.  After dinner
+he a little forced himself upon me.  At that time, though the shadow
+of my scandal was already upon me, I still seemed to be shaping for
+great successes, and he was glad to be in conversation with me and
+anxious to intimate political sympathy and support.  I tried to make
+him talk of the HOME CHURCHMAN and the kindred publications he ran,
+but he was manifestly ashamed of his job so far as I was concerned.
+
+"One wants," he said, pitching himself as he supposed in my key, "to
+put constructive ideas into our readers, but they are narrow, you
+know, very narrow.  Very."  He made his moustache and lips express
+judicious regret.  "One has to consider them carefully, one has to
+respect their attitudes.  One dare not go too far with them.  One
+has to feel one's way."
+
+He chummed and the moustache bristled.
+
+A hireling, beyond question, catering for a demand.  I gathered
+there was a home in Tufnell Park, and three boys to be fed and
+clothed and educated. . . .
+
+I had the curiosity to buy a copy of his magazine afterwards, and it
+seemed much the same sort of thing that had worried my mother in my
+boyhood.  There was the usual Christian hero, this time with mutton-
+chop whiskers and a long bare upper lip.  The Jesuits, it seemed,
+were still hard at it, and Heaven frightfully upset about the Sunday
+opening of museums and the falling birth-rate, and as touchy and
+vindictive as ever.  There were two vigorous paragraphs upon the
+utter damnableness of the Rev. R. J. Campbell, a contagious
+damnableness I gathered, one wasn't safe within a mile of Holborn
+Viaduct, and a foul-mouthed attack on poor little Wilkins the
+novelist--who was being baited by the moralists at that time for
+making one of his big women characters, not being in holy wedlock,
+desire a baby and say so. . . .
+
+The broadening of human thought is a slow and complex process.  We
+do go on, we do get on.  But when one thinks that people are living
+and dying now, quarrelling and sulking, misled and misunderstanding,
+vaguely fearful, condemning and thwarting one another in the close
+darknesses of these narrow cults--Oh, God! one wants a gale out of
+Heaven, one wants a great wind from the sea!
+
+
+3
+
+While I lived at Penge two little things happened to me, trivial in
+themselves and yet in their quality profoundly significant.  They
+had this in common, that they pierced the texture of the life I was
+quietly taking for granted and let me see through it into realities--
+realities I had indeed known about before but never realised.  Each
+of these experiences left me with a sense of shock, with all the
+values in my life perplexingly altered, attempting readjustment.
+One of these disturbing and illuminating events was that I was
+robbed of a new pocket-knife and the other that I fell in love.  It
+was altogether surprising to me to be robbed.  You see, as an only
+child I had always been fairly well looked after and protected, and
+the result was an amazing confidence in the practical goodness of
+the people one met in the world.  I knew there were robbers in the
+world, just as I knew there were tigers; that I was ever likely to
+meet robber or tiger face to face seemed equally impossible.
+
+The knife as I remember it was a particularly jolly one with all
+sorts of instruments in it, tweezers and a thing for getting a stone
+out of the hoof of a horse, and a corkscrew; it had cost me a
+carefuly accumulated half-crown, and amounted indeed to a new
+experience in knives.  I had had it for two or three days, and then
+one afternoon I dropped it through a hole in my pocket on a footpath
+crossing a field between Penge and Anerley.  I heard it fall in the
+way one does without at the time appreciating what had happened,
+then, later, before I got home, when my hand wandered into my pocket
+to embrace the still dear new possession I found it gone, and
+instantly that memory of something hitting the ground sprang up into
+consciousness.  I went back and commenced a search.  Almost
+immediately I was accosted by the leader of a little gang of four or
+five extremely dirty and ragged boys of assorted sizes and slouching
+carriage who were coming from the Anerley direction.
+
+"Lost anythink, Matey?" said he.
+
+I explained.
+
+"'E's dropped 'is knife," said my interlocutor, and joined in the
+search.
+
+"What sort of 'andle was it, Matey?" said a small white-faced
+sniffing boy in a big bowler hat.
+
+I supplied the information.  His sharp little face scrutinised the
+ground about us.
+
+"GOT it," he said, and pounced.
+
+"Give it 'ere," said the big boy hoarsely, and secured it.
+
+I walked towards him serenely confident that he would hand it over
+to me, and that all was for the best in the best of all possible
+worlds.
+
+"No bloomin' fear!" he said, regarding me obliquely.  "Oo said it
+was your knife?"
+
+Remarkable doubts assailed me.  "Of course it's my knife," I said.
+The other boys gathered round me.
+
+"This ain't your knife," said the big boy, and spat casually.
+
+"I dropped it just now."
+
+"Findin's keepin's, I believe," said the big boy.
+
+"Nonsense," I said.  "Give me my knife."
+
+"'Ow many blades it got?"
+
+"Three."
+
+"And what sort of 'andle?"
+
+"Bone."
+
+"Got a corkscrew like?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Ah!  This ain't your knife no'ow.  See?"
+
+He made no offer to show it to me.  My breath went.
+
+"Look here!" I said.  "I saw that kid pick it up.  It IS my knife."
+
+"Rot!" said the big boy, and slowly, deliberately put my knife into
+his trouser pocket.
+
+I braced my soul for battle.  All civilisation was behind me, but I
+doubt if it kept the colour in my face.  I buttoned my jacket and
+clenched my fists and advanced on my antagonist--he had, I suppose,
+the advantage of two years of age and three inches of height.  "Hand
+over that knife," I said.
+
+Then one of the smallest of the band assailed me with extraordinary
+vigour and swiftness from behind, had an arm round my neck and a
+knee in my back before I had the slightest intimation of attack, and
+so got me down.  "I got 'im, Bill," squeaked this amazing little
+ruffian.  My nose was flattened by a dirty hand, and as I struck out
+and hit something like sacking, some one kicked my elbow.  Two or
+three seemed to be at me at the same time.  Then I rolled over and
+sat up to discover them all making off, a ragged flight, footballing
+my cap, my City Merchants' cap, amongst them.  I leapt to my feet in
+a passion of indignation and pursued them.
+
+But I did not overtake them.  We are beings of mixed composition,
+and I doubt if mine was a single-minded pursuit.  I knew that honour
+required me to pursue, and I had a vivid impression of having just
+been down in the dust with a very wiry and active and dirty little
+antagonist of disagreeable odour and incredible and incalculable
+unscrupulousness, kneeling on me and gripping my arm and neck.  I
+wanted of course to be even with him, but also I doubted if catching
+him would necessarily involve that.  They kicked my cap into the
+ditch at the end of the field, and made off compactly along a cinder
+lane while I turned aside to recover my dishonoured headdress.  As I
+knocked the dust out of that and out of my jacket, and brushed my
+knees and readjusted my very crumpled collar, I tried to focus this
+startling occurrence in my mind.
+
+I had vague ideas of going to a policeman or of complaining at a
+police station, but some boyish instinct against informing prevented
+that.  No doubt I entertained ideas of vindictive pursuit and
+murderous reprisals.  And I was acutely enraged whenever I thought
+of my knife.  The thing indeed rankled in my mind for weeks and
+weeks, and altered all the flavour of my world for me.  It was the
+first time I glimpsed the simple brute violence that lurks and peeps
+beneath our civilisation.  A certain kindly complacency of attitude
+towards the palpably lower classes was qualified for ever.
+
+
+4
+
+But the other experience was still more cardinal.  It was the first
+clear intimation of a new motif in life, the sex motif, that was to
+rise and increase and accumulate power and enrichment and interweave
+with and at last dominate all my life.
+
+It was when I was nearly fifteen this happened.  It is inseparably
+connected in my mind with the dusk of warm September evenings.  I
+never met the girl I loved by daylight, and I have forgotten her
+name.  It was some insignificant name.
+
+Yet the peculiar quality of the adventure keeps it shining darkly
+like some deep coloured gem in the common setting of my memories.
+It came as something new and strange, something that did not join on
+to anything else in my life or connect with any of my thoughts or
+beliefs or habits; it was a wonder, a mystery, a discovery about
+myself, a discovery about the whole world.  Only in after years did
+sexual feeling lose that isolation and spread itself out to
+illuminate and pervade and at last possess the whole broad vision of
+life.
+
+It was in that phase of an urban youth's development, the phase of
+the cheap cigarette, that this thing happened.  One evening I came
+by chance on a number of young people promenading by the light of a
+row of shops towards Beckington, and, with all the glory of a
+glowing cigarette between my lips, I joined their strolling number.
+These twilight parades of young people, youngsters chiefly of the
+lower middle-class, are one of the odd social developments of the
+great suburban growths--unkindly critics, blind to the inner
+meanings of things, call them, I believe, Monkeys' Parades--the shop
+apprentices, the young work girls, the boy clerks and so forth,
+stirred by mysterious intimations, spend their first-earned money
+upon collars and ties, chiffon hats, smart lace collars, walking-
+sticks, sunshades or cigarettes, and come valiantly into the vague
+transfiguring mingling of gaslight and evening, to walk up and down,
+to eye meaningly, even to accost and make friends.  It is a queer
+instinctive revolt from the narrow limited friendless homes in which
+so many find themselves, a going out towards something, romance if
+you will, beauty, that has suddenly become a need--a need that
+hitherto has lain dormant and unsuspected.  They promenade.
+
+Vulgar!--it is as vulgar as the spirit that calls the moth abroad in
+the evening and lights the body of the glow-worm in the night.  I
+made my way through the throng, a little contemptuously as became a
+public schoolboy, my hands in my pockets--none of your cheap canes
+for me!--and very careful of the lie of my cigarette upon my lips.
+And two girls passed me, one a little taller than the other, with
+dim warm-tinted faces under clouds of dark hair and with dark eyes
+like pools reflecting stars.
+
+I half turned, and the shorter one glanced back at me over her
+shoulder--I could draw you now the pose of her cheek and neck and
+shoulder--and instantly I was as passionately in love with the girl
+as I have ever been before or since, as any man ever was with any
+woman.  I turned about and followed them, I flung away my cigarette
+ostentatiously and lifted my school cap and spoke to them.
+
+The girl answered shyly with her dark eyes on my face.  What I said
+and what she said I cannot remember, but I have little doubt it was
+something absolutely vapid.  It really did not matter; the thing was
+we had met.  I felt as I think a new-hatched moth must feel when
+suddenly its urgent headlong searching brings it in tremulous
+amazement upon its mate.
+
+We met, covered from each other, with all the nets of civilisation
+keeping us apart.  We walked side by side.
+
+It led to scarcely more than that.  I think we met four or five
+times altogether, and always with her nearly silent elder sister on
+the other side of her.  We walked on the last two occasions arm in
+arm, furtively caressing each other's hands, we went away from the
+glare of the shops into the quiet roads of villadom, and there we
+whispered instead of talking and looked closely into one another's
+warm and shaded face.  "Dear," I whispered very daringly, and she
+answered, "Dear!"  We had a vague sense that we wanted more of that
+quality of intimacy and more.  We wanted each other as one wants
+beautiful music again or to breathe again the scent of flowers.
+
+And that is all there was between us.  The events are nothing, the
+thing that matters is the way in which this experience stabbed
+through the common stuff of life and left it pierced, with a light,
+with a huge new interest shining through the rent.
+
+When I think of it I can recall even now the warm mystery of her
+face, her lips a little apart, lips that I never kissed, her soft
+shadowed throat, and I feel again the sensuous stir of her
+proximity. . . .
+
+Those two girls never told me their surname nor let me approach
+their house.  They made me leave them at the corner of a road of
+small houses near Penge Station.  And quite abruptly, without any
+intimation, they vanished and came to the meeting place no more,
+they vanished as a moth goes out of a window into the night, and
+left me possessed of an intolerable want. . . .
+
+The affair pervaded my existence for many weeks.  I could not do my
+work and I could not rest at home.  Night after night I promenaded
+up and down that Monkeys' Parade full of an unappeasable desire,
+with a thwarted sense of something just begun that ought to have
+gone on.  I went backwards and forwards on the way to the vanishing
+place, and at last explored the forbidden road that had swallowed
+them up.  But I never saw her again, except that later she came to
+me, my symbol of womanhood, in dreams.  How my blood was stirred!  I
+lay awake of nights whispering in the darkness for her.  I prayed
+for her.
+
+Indeed that girl, who probably forgot the last vestiges of me when
+her first real kiss came to her, ruled and haunted me, gave a Queen
+to my imagination and a texture to all my desires until I became a
+man.
+
+I generalised her at last.  I suddenly discovered that poetry was
+about her and that she was the key to all that had hitherto seemed
+nonsense about love.  I took to reading novels, and if the heroine
+could not possibly be like her, dusky and warm and starlike, I put
+the book aside. . . .
+
+I hesitate and add here one other confession.  I want to tell this
+thing because it seems to me we are altogether too restrained and
+secretive about such matters.  The cardinal thing in life sneaks in
+to us darkly and shamefully like a thief in the night.
+
+One day during my Cambridge days--it must have been in my first year
+before I knew Hatherleigh--I saw in a print-shop window near the
+Strand an engraving of a girl that reminded me sharply of Penge and
+its dusky encounter.  It was just a half length of a bare-
+shouldered, bare-breasted Oriental with arms akimbo, smiling
+faintly.  I looked at it, went my way, then turned back and bought
+it.  I felt I must have it.  The odd thing is that I was more than a
+little shamefaced about it.  I did not have it framed and hung in my
+room open to the criticism of my friends, but I kept it in the
+drawer of my writing-table.  And I kept that drawer locked for a
+year.  It speedily merged with and became identified with the dark
+girl of Penge.  That engraving became in a way my mistress.  Often
+when I had sported my oak and was supposed to be reading, I was
+sitting with it before me.
+
+Obeying some instinct I kept the thing very secret indeed.  For a
+time nobody suspected what was locked in my drawer nor what was
+locked in me.  I seemed as sexless as my world required.
+
+
+5
+
+These things stabbed through my life, intimations of things above
+and below and before me.  They had an air of being no more than
+incidents, interruptions.
+
+The broad substance of my existence at this time was the City
+Merchants School.  Home was a place where I slept and read, and the
+mooning explorations of the south-eastern postal district which
+occupied the restless evenings and spare days of my vacations mere
+interstices, giving glimpses of enigmatical lights and distant
+spaces between the woven threads of a school-boy's career.  School
+life began for me every morning at Herne Hill, for there I was
+joined by three or four other boys and the rest of the way we went
+together.  Most of the streets and roads we traversed in our
+morning's walk from Victoria are still intact, the storms of
+rebuilding that have submerged so much of my boyhood's London have
+passed and left them, and I have revived the impression of them
+again and again in recent years as I have clattered dinnerward in a
+hansom or hummed along in a motor cab to some engagement.  The main
+gate still looks out with the same expression of ancient well-
+proportioned kindliness upon St. Margaret's Close.  There are
+imposing new science laboratories in Chambers Street indeed, but the
+old playing fields are unaltered except for the big electric trams
+that go droning and spitting blue flashes along the western
+boundary.  I know Ratten, the new Head, very well, but I have not
+been inside the school to see if it has changed at all since I went
+up to Cambridge.
+
+I took all they put before us very readily as a boy, for I had a
+mind of vigorous appetite, but since I have grown mentally to man's
+estate and developed a more and more comprehensive view of our
+national process and our national needs, I am more and more struck
+by the oddity of the educational methods pursued, their aimless
+disconnectedness from the constructive forces in the community.  I
+suppose if we are to view the public school as anything more than an
+institution that has just chanced to happen, we must treat it as
+having a definite function towards the general scheme of the nation,
+as being in a sense designed to take the crude young male of the
+more or less responsible class, to correct his harsh egotisms,
+broaden his outlook, give him a grasp of the contemporary
+developments he will presently be called upon to influence and
+control, and send him on to the university to be made a leading and
+ruling social man.  It is easy enough to carp at schoolmasters and
+set up for an Educational Reformer, I know, but still it is
+impossible not to feel how infinitely more effectually--given
+certain impossibilities perhaps--the job might be done.
+
+My memory of school has indeed no hint whatever of that quality of
+elucidation it seems reasonable to demand from it.  Here all about
+me was London, a vast inexplicable being, a vortex of gigantic
+forces, that filled and overwhelmed me with impressions, that
+stirred my imagination to a perpetual vague enquiry; and my school
+not only offered no key to it, but had practically no comment to
+make upon it at all.  We were within three miles of Westminster and
+Charing Cross, the government offices of a fifth of mankind were all
+within an hour's stroll, great economic changes were going on under
+our eyes, now the hoardings flamed with election placards, now the
+Salvation Army and now the unemployed came trailing in procession
+through the winter-grey streets, now the newspaper placards outside
+news-shops told of battles in strange places, now of amazing
+discoveries, now of sinister crimes, abject squalor and poverty,
+imperial splendour and luxury, Buckingham Palace, Rotten Row,
+Mayfair, the slums of Pimlico, garbage-littered streets of bawling
+costermongers, the inky silver of the barge-laden Thames--such was
+the background of our days.  We went across St. Margaret's Close and
+through the school gate into a quiet puerile world apart from all
+these things.  We joined in the earnest acquirement of all that was
+necessary for Greek epigrams and Latin verse, and for the rest
+played games.  We dipped down into something clear and elegantly
+proportioned and time-worn and for all its high resolve of stalwart
+virility a little feeble, like our blackened and decayed portals by
+Inigo Jones.
+
+Within, we were taught as the chief subjects of instruction, Latin
+and Greek.  We were taught very badly because the men who taught us
+did not habitually use either of these languages, nobody uses them
+any more now except perhaps for the Latin of a few Levantine
+monasteries.  At the utmost our men read them.  We were taught these
+languages because long ago Latin had been the language of
+civilisation; the one way of escape from the narrow and localised
+life had lain in those days through Latin, and afterwards Greek had
+come in as the vehicle of a flood of new and amazing ideas.  Once
+these two languages had been the sole means of initiation to the
+detached criticism and partial comprehension of the world.  I can
+imagine the fierce zeal of our first Heads, Gardener and Roper,
+teaching Greek like passionate missionaries, as a progressive
+Chinaman might teach English to the boys of Pekin, clumsily,
+impatiently, with rod and harsh urgency, but sincerely,
+patriotically, because they felt that behind it lay revelations, the
+irresistible stimulus to a new phase of history.  That was long ago.
+A new great world, a vaster Imperialism had arisen about the school,
+had assimilated all these amazing and incredible ideas, had gone on
+to new and yet more amazing developments of its own.  But the City
+Merchants School still made the substance of its teaching Latin and
+Greek, still, with no thought of rotating crops, sowed in a dream
+amidst the harvesting.
+
+There is no fierceness left in the teaching now.  Just after I went
+up to Trinity, Gates, our Head, wrote a review article in defence of
+our curriculum.  In this, among other indiscretions, he asserted
+that it was impossible to write good English without an illuminating
+knowledge of the classic tongues, and he split an infinitive and
+failed to button up a sentence in saying so.  His main argument
+conceded every objection a reasonable person could make to the City
+Merchants' curriculum.  He admitted that translation had now placed
+all the wisdom of the past at a common man's disposal, that scarcely
+a field of endeavour remained in which modern work had not long
+since passed beyond the ancient achievement.  He disclaimed any
+utility.  But there was, he said, a peculiar magic in these
+grammatical exercises no other subjects of instruction possessed.
+Nothing else provided the same strengthening and orderly discipline
+for the mind.
+
+He said that, knowing the Senior Classics he did, himself a Senior
+Classic!
+
+Yet in a dim confused way I think he was making out a case.  In
+schools as we knew them, and with the sort of assistant available,
+the sort of assistant who has been trained entirely on the old
+lines, he could see no other teaching so effectual in developing
+attention, restraint, sustained constructive effort and various yet
+systematic adjustment.  And that was as far as his imagination could
+go.
+
+It is infinitely easier to begin organised human affairs than end
+them; the curriculum and the social organisation of the English
+public school are the crowning instances of that.  They go on
+because they have begun.  Schools are not only immortal institutions
+but reproductive ones.  Our founder, Jabez Arvon, knew nothing, I am
+sure, of Gates' pedagogic values and would, I feel certain, have
+dealt with them disrespectfully.  But public schools and university
+colleges sprang into existence correlated, the scholars went on to
+the universities and came back to teach the schools, to teach as
+they themselves had been taught, before they had ever made any real
+use of the teaching; the crowd of boys herded together, a crowd
+perpetually renewed and unbrokenly the same, adjusted itself by
+means of spontaneously developed institutions.  In a century, by its
+very success, this revolutionary innovation of Renascence public
+schools had become an immense tradition woven closely into the
+fabric of the national life.  Intelligent and powerful people ceased
+to talk Latin or read Greek, they had got what was wanted, but that
+only left the schoolmaster the freer to elaborate his point.  Since
+most men of any importance or influence in the country had been
+through the mill, it was naturally a little difficult to persuade
+them that it was not quite the best and most ennobling mill the wit
+of man could devise.  And, moreover, they did not want their
+children made strange to them.  There was all the machinery and all
+the men needed to teach the old subjects, and none to teach whatever
+new the critic might propose.  Such science instruction as my father
+gave seemed indeed the uninviting alternative to the classical
+grind.  It was certainly an altogether inferior instrument at that
+time.
+
+So it was I occupied my mind with the exact study of dead languages
+for seven long years.  It was the strangest of detachments.  We
+would sit under the desk of such a master as Topham like creatures
+who had fallen into an enchanted pit, and he would do his
+considerable best to work us up to enthusiasm for, let us say, a
+Greek play.  If we flagged he would lash himself to revive us.  He
+would walk about the class-room mouthing great lines in a rich roar,
+and asking us with a flushed face and shining eyes if it was not
+"GLORIOUS."  The very sight of Greek letters brings back to me the
+dingy, faded, ink-splashed quality of our class-room, the banging of
+books, Topham's disordered hair, the sheen of his alpaca gown, his
+deep unmusical intonations and the wide striding of his creaking
+boots.  Glorious!  And being plastic human beings we would consent
+that it was glorious, and some of us even achieved an answering
+reverberation and a sympathetic flush.  I at times responded freely.
+We all accepted from him unquestioningly that these melodies, these
+strange sounds, exceeded any possibility of beauty that lay in the
+Gothic intricacy, the splash and glitter, the jar and recovery, the
+stabbing lights, the heights and broad distances of our English
+tongue.  That indeed was the chief sin of him.  It was not that he
+was for Greek and Latin, but that he was fiercely against every
+beauty that was neither classic nor deferred to classical canons.
+
+And what exactly did we make of it, we seniors who understood it
+best?  We visualised dimly through that dust and the grammatical
+difficulties, the spectacle of the chorus chanting grotesquely,
+helping out protagonist and antagonist, masked and buskined, with
+the telling of incomprehensible parricides, of inexplicable incest,
+of gods faded beyond symbolism, of that Relentless Law we did not
+believe in for a moment, that no modern western European can believe
+in.  We thought of the characters in the unconvincing wigs and
+costumes of our school performance.  No Gilbert Murray had come as
+yet to touch these things to life again.  It was like the ghost of
+an antiquarian's toy theatre, a ghost that crumbled and condensed
+into a gritty dust of construing as one looked at it.
+
+Marks, shindies, prayers and punishments, all flavoured with the
+leathery stuffiness of time-worn Big Hall. . . .
+
+And then out one would come through our grey old gate into the
+evening light and the spectacle of London hurrying like a cataract,
+London in black and brown and blue and gleaming silver, roaring like
+the very loom of Time.  We came out into the new world no teacher
+has yet had the power and courage to grasp and expound.  Life and
+death sang all about one, joys and fears on such a scale, in such an
+intricacy as never Greek nor Roman knew.  The interminable
+procession of horse omnibuses went lumbering past, bearing countless
+people we knew not whence, we knew not whither.  Hansoms clattered,
+foot passengers jostled one, a thousand appeals of shop and boarding
+caught the eye.  The multi-coloured lights of window and street
+mingled with the warm glow of the declining day under the softly
+flushing London skies; the ever-changing placards, the shouting
+news-vendors, told of a kaleidoscopic drama all about the globe.
+One did not realise what had happened to us, but the voice of Topham
+was suddenly drowned and lost, he and his minute, remote
+gesticulations. . . .
+
+That submerged and isolated curriculum did not even join on to
+living interests where it might have done so.   We were left
+absolutely to the hints of the newspapers, to casual political
+speeches, to the cartoons of the comic papers or a chance reading of
+some Socialist pamphlet for any general ideas whatever about the
+huge swirling world process in which we found ourselves.  I always
+look back with particular exasperation to the cessation of our
+modern history at the year 1815.  There it pulled up abruptly, as
+though it had come upon something indelicate. . . .
+
+But, after all, what would Topham or Flack have made of the huge
+adjustments of the nineteenth century?  Flack was the chief
+cricketer on the staff; he belonged to that great cult which
+pretends that the place of this or that county in the struggle for
+the championship is a matter of supreme importance to boys.  He
+obliged us to affect a passionate interest in the progress of county
+matches, to work up unnatural enthusiasms.  What a fuss there would
+be when some well-trained boy, panting as if from Marathon, appeared
+with an evening paper!  "I say, you chaps, Middlesex all out for a
+hundred and five!"
+
+Under Flack's pressure I became, I confess, a cricket humbug of the
+first class.  I applied myself industriously year by year to
+mastering scores and averages; I pretended that Lords or the Oval
+were the places nearest Paradise for me.  (I never went to either.)
+Through a slight mistake about the county boundary I adopted Surrey
+for my loyalty, though as a matter of fact we were by some five
+hundred yards or so in Kent.  It did quite as well for my purposes.
+I bowled rather straight and fast, and spent endless hours acquiring
+the skill to bowl Flack out.  He was a bat in the Corinthian style,
+rich and voluminous, and succumbed very easily to a low shooter or
+an unexpected Yorker, but usually he was caught early by long leg.
+The difficulty was to bowl him before he got caught.  He loved to
+lift a ball to leg.  After one had clean bowled him at the practice
+nets one deliberately gave him a ball to leg just to make him feel
+nice again.
+
+Flack went about a world of marvels dreaming of leg hits.  He has
+been observed, going across the Park on his way to his highly
+respectable club in Piccadilly, to break from profound musings into
+a strange brief dance that ended with an imaginary swipe with his
+umbrella, a roofer, over the trees towards Buckingham Palace.  The
+hit accomplished, Flack resumed his way.
+
+Inadequately instructed foreigners would pass him in terror,
+needlessly alert.
+
+
+6
+
+These schoolmasters move through my memory as always a little
+distant and more than a little incomprehensible.  Except when they
+wore flannels, I saw them almost always in old college caps and
+gowns, a uniform which greatly increased their detachment from the
+world of actual men.  Gates, the head, was a lean loose-limbed man,
+rather stupid I discovered when I reached the Sixth and came into
+contact with him, but honest, simple and very eager to be liberal-
+minded.  He was bald, with an almost conical baldness, with a
+grizzled pointed beard, small featured and, under the stresses of a
+Zeitgeist that demanded liberality, with an expression of puzzled
+but resolute resistance to his own unalterable opinions.  He made a
+tall dignified figure in his gown.  In my junior days he spoke to me
+only three or four times, and then he annoyed me by giving me a
+wrong surname; it was a sore point because I was an outsider and not
+one of the old school families, the Shoesmiths, the Naylors, the
+Marklows, the Tophams, the Pevises and suchlike, who came generation
+after generation.  I recall him most vividly against the background
+of faded brown book-backs in the old library in which we less
+destructive seniors were trusted to work, with the light from the
+stained-glass window falling in coloured patches on his face.  It
+gave him the appearance of having no colour of his own.  He had a
+habit of scratching the beard on his cheek as he talked, and he used
+to come and consult us about things and invariably do as we said.
+That, in his phraseology, was "maintaining the traditions of the
+school."
+
+He had indeed an effect not of a man directing a school, but of a
+man captured and directed by a school.  Dead and gone Elizabethans
+had begotten a monster that could carry him about in its mouth.
+
+Yet being a man, as I say, with his hair a little stirred by a
+Zeitgeist that made for change, Gates did at times display a
+disposition towards developments.  City Merchants had no modern
+side, and utilitarian spirits were carping in the PALL MALL GAZETTE
+and elsewhere at the omissions from our curriculum, and particularly
+at our want of German.   Moreover, four classes still worked
+together with much clashing and uproar in the old Big Hall that had
+once held in a common tumult the entire school.  Gates used to come
+and talk to us older fellows about these things.
+
+"I don't wish to innovate unduly," he used to say.  "But we ought to
+get in some German, you know,--for those who like it.  The army men
+will be wanting it some of these days."
+
+He referred to the organisation of regular evening preparation for
+the lower boys in Big Hall as a "revolutionary change," but he
+achieved it, and he declared he began the replacement of the hacked
+wooden tables, at which the boys had worked since Tudor days, by
+sloping desks with safety inkpots and scientifically adjustable
+seats, "with grave misgivings."  And though he never birched a boy
+in his life, and was, I am convinced, morally incapable of such a
+scuffle, he retained the block and birch in the school through all
+his term of office, and spoke at the Headmasters' Conference in
+temperate approval of corporal chastisement, comparing it, dear
+soul! to the power of the sword. . . .
+
+I wish I could, in some measure and without tediousness, convey the
+effect of his discourses to General Assembly in Big Hall.  But that
+is like trying to draw the obverse and reverse of a sixpence worn to
+complete illegibility.  His tall fine figure stood high on the days,
+his thoughtful tenor filled the air as he steered his hazardous way
+through sentences that dragged inconclusive tails and dropped
+redundant prepositions.  And he pleaded ever so urgently, ever so
+finely, that what we all knew for Sin was sinful, and on the whole
+best avoided altogether, and so went on with deepening notes and
+even with short arresting gestures of the right arm and hand, to
+stir and exhort us towards goodness, towards that modern,
+unsectarian goodness, goodness in general and nothing in particular,
+which the Zeitgeist seemed to indicate in those transitional years.
+
+
+7
+
+The school never quite got hold of me.  Partly I think that was
+because I was a day-boy and so freer than most of the boys, partly
+because of a temperamental disposition to see things in my own way
+and have my private dreams, partly because I was a little
+antagonised by the family traditions that ran through the school.  I
+was made to feel at first that I was a rank outsider, and I never
+quite forgot it.  I suffered very little bullying, and I never had a
+fight--in all my time there were only three fights--but I followed
+my own curiosities.  I was already a very keen theologian and
+politician before I was fifteen.  I was also intensely interested in
+modern warfare.  I read the morning papers in the Reading Room
+during the midday recess, never missed the illustrated weeklies, and
+often when I could afford it I bought a PALL MALL GAZETTE on my way
+home.
+
+I do not think that I was very exceptional in that; most intelligent
+boys, I believe, want naturally to be men, and are keenly interested
+in men's affairs.  There is not the universal passion for a
+magnified puerility among them it is customary to assume.  I was
+indeed a voracious reader of everything but boys' books--which I
+detested--and fiction.  I read histories, travel, popular science
+and controversy with particular zest, and I loved maps.  School work
+and school games were quite subordinate affairs for me.  I worked
+well and made a passable figure at games, and I do not think I was
+abnormally insensitive to the fine quality of our school, to the
+charm of its mediaeval nucleus, its Gothic cloisters, its scraps of
+Palladian and its dignified Georgian extensions; the contrast of the
+old quiet, that in spite of our presence pervaded it everywhere,
+with the rushing and impending London all about it, was indeed a
+continual pleasure to me.  But these things were certainly not the
+living and central interests of my life.
+
+I had to conceal my wider outlook to a certain extent--from the
+masters even more than from the boys.  Indeed I only let myself go
+freely with one boy, Britten, my especial chum, the son of the
+Agent-General for East Australia.  We two discovered in a chance
+conversation A PROPOS of a map in the library that we were both of
+us curious why there were Malays in Madagascar, and how the Mecca
+pilgrims came from the East Indies before steamships were available.
+Neither of us had suspected that there was any one at all in the
+school who knew or cared a rap about the Indian Ocean, except as
+water on the way to India.  But Britten had come up through the Suez
+Canal, and his ship had spoken a pilgrim ship on the way.  It gave
+him a startling quality of living knowledge.  From these pilgrims we
+got to a comparative treatment of religions, and from that, by a
+sudden plunge, to entirely sceptical and disrespectful confessions
+concerning Gates' last outbreak of simple piety in School Assembly.
+We became congenial intimates from that hour.
+
+The discovery of Britten happened to me when we were both in the
+Lower Fifth.  Previously there had been a watertight compartment
+between the books I read and the thoughts they begot on the one hand
+and human intercourse on the other.  Now I really began my higher
+education, and aired and examined and developed in conversation the
+doubts, the ideas, the interpretations that had been forming in my
+mind.  As we were both day-boys with a good deal of control over our
+time we organised walks and expeditions together, and my habit of
+solitary and rather vague prowling gave way to much more definite
+joint enterprises.  I went several times to his house, he was the
+youngest of several brothers, one of whom was a medical student and
+let us assist at the dissection of a cat, and once or twice in
+vacation time he came to Penge, and we went with parcels of
+provisions to do a thorough day in the grounds and galleries of the
+Crystal Palace, ending with the fireworks at close quarters.  We
+went in a river steamboat down to Greenwich, and fired by that made
+an excursion to Margate and back; we explored London docks and
+Bethnal Green Museum, Petticoat Lane and all sorts of out-of-the-way
+places together.
+
+We confessed shyly to one another a common secret vice, "Phantom
+warfare."  When we walked alone, especially in the country, we had
+both developed the same practice of fighting an imaginary battle
+about us as we walked.  As we went along we were generals, and our
+attacks pushed along on either side, crouching and gathering behind
+hedges, cresting ridges, occupying copses, rushing open spaces,
+fighting from house to house.  The hillsides about Penge were
+honeycombed in my imagination with the pits and trenches I had
+created to check a victorious invader coming out of Surrey.  For him
+West Kensington was chiefly important as the scene of a desperate
+and successful last stand of insurrectionary troops (who had seized
+the Navy, the Bank and other advantages) against a royalist army--
+reinforced by Germans--advancing for reasons best known to
+themselves by way of Harrow and Ealing.  It is a secret and solitary
+game, as we found when we tried to play it together.  We made a
+success of that only once.  All the way down to Margate we schemed
+defences and assailed and fought them as we came back against the
+sunset.  Afterwards we recapitulated all that conflict by means of a
+large scale map of the Thames and little paper ironclads in plan cut
+out of paper.
+
+A subsequent revival of these imaginings was brought about by
+Britten's luck in getting, through a friend of his father's,
+admission for us both to the spectacle of volunteer officers
+fighting the war game in Caxton Hall.  We developed a war game of
+our own at Britten's home with nearly a couple of hundred lead
+soldiers, some excellent spring cannons that shot hard and true at
+six yards, hills of books and a constantly elaborated set of rules.
+For some months that occupied an immense proportion of our leisure.
+Some of our battles lasted several days.  We kept the game a
+profound secret from the other fellows.  They would not have
+understood.
+
+And we also began, it was certainly before we were sixteen, to
+write, for the sake of writing.  We liked writing.  We had
+discovered Lamb and the best of the middle articles in such weeklies
+as the SATURDAY GAZETTE, and we imitated them.  Our minds were full
+of dim uncertain things we wanted to drag out into the light of
+expression.  Britten had got hold of IN MEMORIAM, and I had
+disinterred Pope's ESSAY ON MAN and RABBI BEN EZRA, and these things
+had set our theological and cosmic solicitudes talking.  I was
+somewhere between sixteen and eighteen, I know, when he and I walked
+along the Thames Embankment confessing shamefully to one another
+that we had never read Lucretius.  We thought every one who mattered
+had read Lucretius.
+
+When I was nearly sixteen my mother was taken ill very suddenly, and
+died of some perplexing complaint that involved a post-mortem
+examination; it was, I think, the trouble that has since those days
+been recognised as appendicitis.  This led to a considerable change
+in my circumstances; the house at Penge was given up, and my
+Staffordshire uncle arranged for me to lodge during school terms
+with a needy solicitor and his wife in Vicars Street, S. W., about a
+mile and a half from the school.  So it was I came right into
+London; I had almost two years of London before I went to Cambridge.
+
+Those were our great days together.  Afterwards we were torn apart;
+Britten went to Oxford, and our circumstances never afterwards threw
+us continuously together until the days of the BLUE WEEKLY.
+
+As boys, we walked together, read and discussed the same books,
+pursued the same enquiries.  We got a reputation as inseparables and
+the nickname of the Rose and the Lily, for Britten was short and
+thick-set with dark close curling hair and a ruddy Irish type of
+face; I was lean and fair-haired and some inches taller than he.
+Our talk ranged widely and yet had certain very definite
+limitations.  We were amazingly free with politics and religion, we
+went to that little meeting-house of William Morris's at Hammersmith
+and worked out the principles of Socialism pretty thoroughly, and we
+got up the Darwinian theory with the help of Britten's medical-
+student brother and the galleries of the Natural History Museum in
+Cromwell Road.  Those wonderful cases on the ground floor
+illustrating mimicry, dimorphism and so forth, were new in our
+times, and we went through them with earnest industry and tried over
+our Darwinism in the light of that.  Such topics we did
+exhaustively.  But on the other hand I do not remember any
+discussion whatever of human sex or sexual relationships.  There, in
+spite of intense secret curiosities, our lips were sealed by a
+peculiar shyness.  And I do not believe we ever had occasion either
+of us to use the word "love."  It was not only that we were
+instinctively shy of the subject, but that we were mightily ashamed
+of the extent of our ignorance and uncertainty in these matters.  We
+evaded them elaborately with an assumption of exhaustive knowledge.
+
+We certainly had no shyness about theology.  We marked the
+emancipation of our spirits from the frightful teachings that had
+oppressed our boyhood, by much indulgence in blasphemous wit.  We
+had a secret literature of irreverent rhymes, and a secret art of
+theological caricature.  Britten's father had delighted his family
+by reading aloud from Dr. Richard Garnett's TWILIGHT OF THE GODS,
+and Britten conveyed the precious volume to me.  That and the BAB
+BALLADS were the inspiration of some of our earliest lucubrations.
+
+For an imaginative boy the first experience of writing is like a
+tiger's first taste of blood, and our literary flowerings led very
+directly to the revival of the school magazine, which had been
+comatose for some years.  But there we came upon a disappointment.
+
+
+8
+
+In that revival we associated certain other of the Sixth Form boys,
+and notably one for whom our enterprise was to lay the foundations
+of a career that has ended in the House of Lords, Arthur Cossington,
+now Lord Paddockhurst.  Cossington was at that time a rather heavy,
+rather good-looking boy who was chiefly eminent in cricket, an
+outsider even as we were and preoccupied no doubt, had we been
+sufficiently detached to observe him, with private imaginings very
+much of the same quality and spirit as our own.  He was, we were
+inclined to think, rather a sentimentalist, rather a poseur, he
+affected a concise emphatic style, played chess very well, betrayed
+a belief in will-power, and earned Britten's secret hostility,
+Britten being a sloven, by the invariable neatness of his collars
+and ties.  He came into our magazine with a vigour that we found
+extremely surprising and unwelcome.
+
+Britten and I had wanted to write.  We had indeed figured our
+project modestly as a manuscript magazine of satirical, liberal and
+brilliant literature by which in some rather inexplicable way the
+vague tumult of ideas that teemed within us was to find form and
+expression; Cossington, it was manifest from the outset, wanted
+neither to write nor writing, but a magazine.  I remember the
+inaugural meeting in Shoesmith major's study--we had had great
+trouble in getting it together--and how effectually Cossington
+bolted with the proposal.
+
+"I think we fellows ought to run a magazine," said Cossington.  "The
+school used to have one.  A school like this ought to have a
+magazine."
+
+"The last one died in '84," said Shoesmith from the hearthrug.
+"Called the OBSERVER.  Rot rather."
+
+"Bad title," said Cossington.
+
+"There was a TATLER before that," said Britten, sitting on the
+writing table at the window that was closed to deaden the cries of
+the Lower School at play, and clashing his boots together.
+
+"We want something suggestive of City Merchants."
+
+"CITY MERCHANDIZE," said Britten.
+
+"Too fanciful.  What of ARVONIAN?  Richard Arvon was our founder,
+and it seems almost a duty--"
+
+"They call them all -usians or -onians," said Britten.
+
+"I like CITY MERCHANDIZE," I said.  "We could probably find a
+quotation to suggest--oh! mixed good things."
+
+Cossington regarded me abstractedly.
+
+"Don't want to put the accent on the City, do we?" said Shoesmith,
+who had a feeling for county families, and Naylor supported him by a
+murmur of approval.
+
+"We ought to call it the ARVONIAN," decided Cossington, "and we
+might very well have underneath, 'With which is incorporated the
+OBSERVER.'  That picks up the old traditions, makes an appeal to old
+boys and all that, and it gives us something to print under the
+title."
+
+I still held out for CITY MERCHANDIZE, which had taken my fancy.
+"Some of the chaps' people won't like it," said Naylor, "certain not
+to.  And it sounds Rum."
+
+"Sounds Weird," said a boy who had not hitherto spoken.
+
+"We aren't going to do anything Queer," said Shoesmith, pointedly
+not looking at Britten.
+
+The question of the title had manifestly gone against us.  "Oh! HAVE
+it ARVONIAN," I said.
+
+"And next, what size shall we have?" said Cossington.
+
+"Something like MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE--or LONGMANS'; LONGMANS' is
+better because it has a whole page, not columns.  It makes no end of
+difference to one's effects."
+
+"What effects?" asked Shoesmith abruptly.
+
+"Oh! a pause or a white line or anything.  You've got to write
+closer for a double column.  It's nuggetty.  You can't get a swing
+on your prose."  I had discussed this thoroughly with Britten.
+
+"If the fellows are going to write--" began Britten.
+
+"We ought to keep off fine writing," said Shoesmith.  "It's cheek.
+I vote we don't have any."
+
+"We sha'n't get any," said Cossington, and then as an olive branch
+to me, "unless Remington does a bit.  Or Britten.  But it's no good
+making too much space for it."
+
+"We ought to be very careful about the writing," said Shoesmith.
+"We don't want to give ourselves away."
+
+"I vote we ask old Topham to see us through," said Naylor.
+
+Britten groaned aloud and every one regarded him.  "Greek epigrams
+on the fellows' names," he said.  "Small beer in ancient bottles.
+Let's get a stuffed broody hen to SIT on the magazine."
+
+"We might do worse than a Greek epigram," said Cossington.  "One in
+each number.  It--it impresses parents and keeps up our classical
+tradition.  And the masters CAN help.  We don't want to antagonise
+them.  Of course--we've got to departmentalise.  Writing is only one
+section of the thing.  The ARVONIAN has to stand for the school.
+There's questions of space and questions of expense.  We can't turn
+out a great chunk of printed prose like--like wet cold toast and
+call it a magazine."
+
+Britten writhed, appreciating the image.
+
+"There's to be a section of sports.  YOU must do that."
+
+"I'm not going to do any fine writing," said Shoesmith.
+
+"What you've got to do is just to list all the chaps and put a note
+to their play:--'Naylor minor must pass more.  Football isn't the
+place for extreme individualism.'  'Ammersham shapes well as half-
+back.'  Things like that."
+
+"I could do that all right," said Shoesmith, brightening and
+manifestly becoming pregnant with judgments.
+
+"One great thing about a magazine of this sort," said Cossington,
+"is to mention just as many names as you can in each number.  It
+keeps the interest alive.  Chaps will turn it over looking for their
+own little bit.  Then it all lights up for them."
+
+"Do you want any reports of matches?" Shoesmith broke from his
+meditation.
+
+"Rather.  With comments."
+
+"Naylor surpassed himself and negotiated the lemon safely home,"
+said Shoesmith.
+
+"Shut it," said Naylor modestly.
+
+"Exactly," said Cossington.  "That gives us three features,"
+touching them off on his fingers, "Epigram, Literary Section,
+Sports.  Then we want a section to shove anything into, a joke, a
+notice of anything that's going on.  So on.  Our Note Book."
+
+"Oh, Hell!" said Britten, and clashed his boots, to the silent
+disapproval of every one.
+
+"Then we want an editorial."
+
+"A WHAT?" cried Britten, with a note of real terror in his voice.
+
+"Well, don't we?  Unless we have our Note Book to begin on the front
+page.  It gives a scrappy effect to do that.  We want something
+manly and straightforward and a bit thoughtful, about Patriotism,
+say, or ESPRIT DE CORPS, or After-Life."
+
+I looked at Britten.  Hitherto we had not considered Cossington
+mattered very much in the world.
+
+He went over us as a motor-car goes over a dog.  There was a sort of
+energy about him, a new sort of energy to us; we had never realised
+that anything of the sort existed in the world.  We were hopelessly
+at a disadvantage.  Almost instantly we had developed a clear and
+detailed vision of a magazine made up of everything that was most
+acceptable in the magazines that flourished in the adult world about
+us, and had determined to make it a success.  He had by a kind of
+instinct, as it were, synthetically plagiarised every successful
+magazine and breathed into this dusty mixture the breath of life.
+He was elected at his own suggestion managing director, with the
+earnest support of Shoesmith and Naylor, and conducted the magazine
+so successfully and brilliantly that he even got a whole back page
+of advertisements from the big sports shop in Holborn, and made the
+printers pay at the same rate for a notice of certain books of their
+own which they said they had inserted by inadvertency to fill up
+space.  The only literary contribution in the first number was a
+column by Topham in faultless stereotyped English in depreciation of
+some fancied evil called Utilitarian Studies and ending with that
+noble old quotation:--
+
+
+"To the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome."
+
+
+And Flack crowded us out of number two with a bright little paper on
+the "Humours of Cricket," and the Head himself was profusely
+thoughtful all over the editorial under the heading of "The School
+Chapel; and How it Seems to an Old Boy."
+
+Britten and I found it difficult to express to each other with any
+grace or precision what we felt about that magazine.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH
+
+ADOLESCENCE
+
+
+1
+
+I find it very difficult to trace how form was added to form and
+interpretation followed interpretation in my ever-spreading, ever-
+deepening, ever-multiplying and enriching vision of this world into
+which I had been born.  Every day added its impressions, its hints,
+its subtle explications to the growing understanding.  Day after day
+the living interlacing threads of a mind weave together.  Every
+morning now for three weeks and more (for to-day is Thursday and I
+started on a Tuesday) I have been trying to convey some idea of the
+factors and early influences by which my particular scrap of
+subjective tapestry was shaped, to show the child playing on the
+nursery floor, the son perplexed by his mother, gazing aghast at his
+dead father, exploring interminable suburbs, touched by first
+intimations of the sexual mystery, coming in with a sort of confused
+avidity towards the centres of the life of London.  It is only by
+such an effort to write it down that one realises how marvellously
+crowded, how marvellously analytical and synthetic those ears must
+be.  One begins with the little child to whom the sky is a roof of
+blue, the world a screen of opaque and disconnected facts, the home
+a thing eternal, and "being good" just simple obedience to
+unquestioned authority; and one comes at last to the vast world of
+one's adult perception, pierced deep by flaring searchlights of
+partial understanding, here masked by mists, here refracted and
+distorted through half translucent veils, here showing broad
+prospects and limitless vistas and here impenetrably dark.
+
+I recall phases of deep speculation, doubts and even prayers by
+night, and strange occasions when by a sort of hypnotic
+contemplation of nothingness I sought to pierce the web of
+appearances about me.  It is hard to measure these things in
+receding perspective, and now I cannot trace, so closely has mood
+succeeded and overlaid and obliterated mood, the phases by which an
+utter horror of death was replaced by the growing realisation of its
+necessity and dignity.  Difficulty of the imagination with infinite
+space, infinite time, entangled my mind; and moral distress for the
+pain and suffering of bygone ages that made all thought of
+reformation in the future seem but the grimmest irony upon now
+irreparable wrongs.  Many an intricate perplexity of these
+broadening years did not so much get settled as cease to matter.
+Life crowded me away from it.
+
+I have confessed myself a temerarious theologian, and in that
+passage from boyhood to manhood I ranged widely in my search for
+some permanently satisfying Truth.  That, too, ceased after a time
+to be urgently interesting.  I came at last into a phase that
+endures to this day, of absolute tranquillity, of absolute
+confidence in whatever that Incomprehensible Comprehensive which
+must needs be the substratum of all things, may be.  Feeling OF IT,
+feeling BY IT, I cannot feel afraid of it.  I think I had got quite
+clearly and finally to that adjustment long before my Cambridge days
+were done.  I am sure that the evil in life is transitory and finite
+like an accident or distress in the nursery; that God is my Father
+and that I may trust Him, even though life hurts so that one must
+needs cry out at it, even though it shows no consequence but
+failure, no promise but pain. . . .
+
+But while I was fearless of theology I must confess it was
+comparatively late before I faced and dared to probe the secrecies
+of sex.  I was afraid of sex.  I had an instinctive perception that
+it would be a large and difficult thing in my life, but my early
+training was all in the direction of regarding it as an irrelevant
+thing, as something disconnected from all the broad significances of
+life, as hostile and disgraceful in its quality.  The world was
+never so emasculated in thought, I suppose, as it was in the
+Victorian time. . . .
+
+I was afraid to think either of sex or (what I have always found
+inseparable from a kind of sexual emotion) beauty.  Even as a boy I
+knew the thing as a haunting and alluring mystery that I tried to
+keep away from.  Its dim presence obsessed me none the less for
+all the extravagant decency, the stimulating silences of my
+upbringing. . . .
+
+The plaster Venuses and Apollos that used to adorn the vast aisle
+and huge grey terraces of the Crystal Palace were the first
+intimations of the beauty of the body that ever came into my life.
+As I write of it I feel again the shameful attraction of those
+gracious forms.  I used to look at them not simply, but curiously
+and askance.  Once at least in my later days at Penge, I spent a
+shilling in admission chiefly for the sake of them. . . .
+
+The strangest thing of all my odd and solitary upbringing seems to
+me now that swathing up of all the splendours of the flesh, that
+strange combination of fanatical terrorism and shyness that fenced
+me about with prohibitions.  It caused me to grow up, I will not say
+blankly ignorant, but with an ignorance blurred and dishonoured by
+shame, by enigmatical warnings, by cultivated aversions, an
+ignorance in which a fascinated curiosity and desire struggled like
+a thing in a net.  I knew so little and I felt so much.  There was
+indeed no Aphrodite at all in my youthful Pantheon, but instead
+there was a mysterious and minatory gap.  I have told how at last a
+new Venus was born in my imagination out of gas lamps and the
+twilight, a Venus with a cockney accent and dark eyes shining out of
+the dusk, a Venus who was a warm, passion-stirring atmosphere rather
+than incarnate in a body.  And I have told, too, how I bought a
+picture.
+
+All this was a thing apart from the rest of my life, a locked
+avoided chamber. . . .
+
+It was not until my last year at Trinity that I really broke down
+the barriers of this unwholesome silence and brought my secret
+broodings to the light of day.  Then a little set of us plunged
+suddenly into what we called at first sociological discussion.  I
+can still recall even the physical feeling of those first tentative
+talks.  I remember them mostly as occurring in the rooms of Ted
+Hatherleigh, who kept at the corner by the Trinity great gate, but
+we also used to talk a good deal at a man's in King's, a man named,
+if I remember rightly, Redmayne.  The atmosphere of Hatherleigh's
+rooms was a haze of tobacco smoke against a background brown and
+deep.  He professed himself a socialist with anarchistic leanings--
+he had suffered the martyrdom of ducking for it--and a huge French
+May-day poster displaying a splendid proletarian in red and black on
+a barricade against a flaring orange sky, dominated his decorations.
+Hatherleigh affected a fine untidiness, and all the place, even the
+floor, was littered with books, for the most part open and face
+downward; deeper darknesses were supplied by a discarded gown and
+our caps, all conscientiously battered, Hatherleigh's flopped like
+an elephant's ear and inserted quill pens supported the corners of
+mine; the highlights of the picture came chiefly as reflections from
+his chequered blue mugs full of audit ale.  We sat on oak chairs,
+except the four or five who crowded on a capacious settle, we drank
+a lot of beer and were often fuddled, and occasionally quite drunk,
+and we all smoked reckless-looking pipes,--there was a transient
+fashion among us for corn cobs for which Mark Twain, I think, was
+responsible.  Our little excesses with liquor were due far more to
+conscience than appetite, indicated chiefly a resolve to break away
+from restraints that we suspected were keeping us off the
+instructive knife-edges of life.  Hatherleigh was a good Englishman
+of the premature type with a red face, a lot of hair, a deep voice
+and an explosive plunging manner, and it was he who said one
+evening--Heaven knows how we got to it--"Look here, you know, it's
+all Rot, this Shutting Up about Women.  We OUGHT to talk about them.
+What are we going to do about them?  It's got to come.  We're all
+festering inside about it.  Let's out with it.  There's too much
+Decency altogether about this Infernal University!"
+
+We rose to his challenge a little awkwardly and our first talk was
+clumsy, there were flushed faces and red ears, and I remember
+Hatherleigh broke out into a monologue on decency.  "Modesty and
+Decency," said Hatherleigh, "are Oriental vices.  The Jews brought
+them to Europe.  They're Semitic, just like our monasticism here and
+the seclusion of women and mutilating the dead on a battlefield.
+And all that sort of thing."
+
+Hatherleigh's mind progressed by huge leaps, leaps that were usually
+wildly inaccurate, and for a time we engaged hotly upon the topic of
+those alleged mutilations and the Semitic responsibility for
+decency.  Hatherleigh tried hard to saddle the Semitic race with the
+less elegant war customs of the Soudan and the northwest frontier of
+India, and quoted Doughty, at that time a little-known author, and
+Cunninghame Graham to show that the Arab was worse than a county-
+town spinster in his regard for respectability.  But his case was
+too preposterous, and Esmeer, with his shrill penetrating voice and
+his way of pointing with all four long fingers flat together,
+carried the point against him.  He quoted Cato and Roman law and the
+monasteries of Thibet.
+
+"Well, anyway," said Hatherleigh, escaping from our hands like an
+intellectual frog, "Semitic or not, I've got no use for decency."
+
+We argued points and Hatherleigh professed an unusually balanced and
+tolerating attitude.  "I don't mind a certain refinement and
+dignity," he admitted generously.  "What I object to is this
+spreading out of decency until it darkens the whole sky, until it
+makes a man's father afraid to speak of the most important things,
+until it makes a man afraid to look a frank book in the face or
+think--even think! until it leads to our coming to--to the business
+at last with nothing but a few prohibitions, a few hints, a lot of
+dirty jokes and, and "--he waved a hand and seemed to seek and catch
+his image in the air--"oh, a confounded buttered slide of
+sentiment, to guide us.  I tell you I'm going to think about it and
+talk about it until I see a little more daylight than I do at
+present.  I'm twenty-two.  Things might happen to me anywhen.  You
+men can go out into the world if you like, to sin like fools and
+marry like fools, not knowing what you are doing and ashamed to ask.
+You'll take the consequences, too, I expect, pretty meekly,
+sniggering a bit, sentimentalising a bit, like--like Cambridge
+humorists. . . .  I mean to know what I'm doing."
+
+He paused to drink, and I think I cut in with ideas of my own.  But
+one is apt to forget one's own share in a talk, I find, more than
+one does the clear-cut objectivity of other people's, and I do not
+know how far I contributed to this discussion that followed.  I am,
+however, pretty certain that it was then that ideal that we were
+pleased to call aristocracy and which soon became the common
+property of our set was developed.  It was Esmeer, I know, who laid
+down and maintained the proposition that so far as minds went there
+were really only two sorts of man in the world, the aristocrat and
+the man who subdues his mind to other people's.
+
+"'I couldn't THINK of it, Sir,'" said Esmeer in his elucidatory
+tones; "that's what a servant says.  His mind even is broken in to
+run between fences, and he admits it.  WE'VE got to be able to think
+of anything.  And 'such things aren't for the Likes of Us!'  That's
+another servant's saying.  Well, everything IS for the Likes of Us.
+If we see fit, that is."
+
+A small fresh-coloured man in grey objected.
+
+"Well," exploded Hatherleigh, "if that isn't so what the deuce are
+we up here for?  Instead of working in mines?  If some things aren't
+to be thought about ever!  We've got the privilege of all these
+extra years for getting things straight in our heads, and then we
+won't use 'em.  Good God! what do you think a university's for?" . . .
+
+Esmeer's idea came with an effect of real emancipation to several of
+us.  We were not going to be afraid of ideas any longer, we were
+going to throw down every barrier of prohibition and take them in
+and see what came of it.  We became for a time even intemperately
+experimental, and one of us, at the bare suggestion of an eminent
+psychic investigator, took hashish and very nearly died of it within
+a fortnight of our great elucidation.
+
+The chief matter of our interchanges was of course the discussion of
+sex.  Once the theme had been opened it became a sore place in our
+intercourse; none of us seemed able to keep away from it.  Our
+imaginations got astir with it.  We made up for lost time and went
+round it and through it and over it exhaustively.  I recall
+prolonged discussion of polygamy on the way to Royston, muddy
+November tramps to Madingley, when amidst much profanity from
+Hatherleigh at the serious treatment of so obsolete a matter, we
+weighed the reasons, if any, for the institution of marriage.  The
+fine dim night-time spaces of the Great Court are bound up with the
+inconclusive finales of mighty hot-eared wrangles; the narrows of
+Trinity Street and Petty Cury and Market Hill have their particular
+associations for me with that spate of confession and free speech,
+that almost painful goal delivery of long pent and crappled and
+sometimes crippled ideas.
+
+And we went on a reading party that Easter to a place called
+Pulborough in Sussex, where there is a fishing inn and a river that
+goes under a bridge.  It was a late Easter and a blazing one, and we
+boated and bathed and talked of being Hellenic and the beauty of the
+body until at moments it seemed to us that we were destined to
+restore the Golden Age, by the simple abolition of tailors and
+outfitters.
+
+Those undergraduate talks! how rich and glorious they seemed, how
+splendidly new the ideas that grew and multiplied in our seething
+minds!  We made long afternoon and evening raids over the Downs
+towards Arundel, and would come tramping back through the still keen
+moonlight singing and shouting.  We formed romantic friendships with
+one another, and grieved more or less convincingly that there were
+no splendid women fit to be our companions in the world.  But
+Hatherleigh, it seemed, had once known a girl whose hair was
+gloriously red.  "My God!" said Hatherleigh to convey the quality of
+her; just simply and with projectile violence: "My God!"
+
+Benton had heard of a woman who lived with a man refusing to be
+married to him--we thought that splendid beyond measure,--I cannot
+now imagine why.  She was "like a tender goddess," Benton said.  A
+sort of shame came upon us in the dark in spite of our liberal
+intentions when Benton committed himself to that.  And after such
+talk we would fall upon great pauses of emotional dreaming, and if
+by chance we passed a girl in a governess cart, or some farmer's
+daughter walking to the station, we became alertly silent or
+obstreperously indifferent to her.  For might she not be just that
+one exception to the banal decency, the sickly pointless
+conventionality, the sham modesty of the times in which we lived?
+
+We felt we stood for a new movement, not realising how perennially
+this same emancipation returns to those ancient courts beside the
+Cam.  We were the anti-decency party, we discovered a catch phrase
+that we flourished about in the Union and made our watchword,
+namely, "stark fact."  We hung nude pictures in our rooms much as if
+they had been flags, to the earnest concern of our bedders, and I
+disinterred my long-kept engraving and had it framed in fumed oak,
+and found for it a completer and less restrained companion, a
+companion I never cared for in the slightest degree. . . .
+
+This efflorescence did not prevent, I think indeed it rather helped,
+our more formal university work, for most of us took firsts, and
+three of us got Fellowships in one year or another.  There was
+Benton who had a Research Fellowship and went to Tubingen, there was
+Esmeer and myself who both became Residential Fellows.  I had taken
+the Mental and Moral Science Tripos (as it was then), and three
+years later I got a lectureship in political science.  In those days
+it was disguised in the cloak of Political Economy.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+It was our affectation to be a little detached from the main stream
+of undergraduate life.  We worked pretty hard, but by virtue of our
+beer, our socialism and suchlike heterodoxy, held ourselves to be
+differentiated from the swatting reading man.  None of us, except
+Baxter, who was a rowing blue, a rather abnormal blue with an
+appetite for ideas, took games seriously enough to train, and on the
+other hand we intimated contempt for the rather mediocre,
+deliberately humorous, consciously gentlemanly and consciously wild
+undergraduate men who made up the mass of Cambridge life.  After the
+manner of youth we were altogether too hard on our contemporaries.
+We battered our caps and tore our gowns lest they should seem new,
+and we despised these others extremely for doing exactly the same
+things; we had an idea of ourselves and resented beyond measure a
+similar weakness in these our brothers.
+
+There was a type, or at least there seemed to us to be a type--I'm a
+little doubtful at times now whether after all we didn't create it--
+for which Hatherleigh invented the nickname the "Pinky Dinkys,"
+intending thereby both contempt and abhorrence in almost equal
+measure.  The Pinky Dinky summarised all that we particularly did
+not want to be, and also, I now perceive, much of what we were and
+all that we secretly dreaded becoming.
+
+But it is hard to convey the Pinky Dinky idea, for all that it meant
+so much to us.  We spent one evening at least during that reading
+party upon the Pinky Dinky; we sat about our one fire after a walk
+in the rain--it was our only wet day--smoked our excessively virile
+pipes, and elaborated the natural history of the Pinky Dinky.  We
+improvised a sort of Pinky Dinky litany, and Hatherleigh supplied
+deep notes for the responses.
+
+"The Pinky Dinky extracts a good deal of amusement from life," said
+some one.
+
+"Damned prig!" said Hatherleigh.
+
+"The Pinky Dinky arises in the Union and treats the question with a
+light gay touch.  He makes the weird ones mad.  But sometimes he
+cannot go on because of the amusement he extracts."
+
+"I want to shy books at the giggling swine," said Hatherleigh.
+
+"The Pinky Dinky says suddenly while he is making the tea, 'We're
+all being frightfully funny.  It's time for you to say something
+now.'"
+
+"The Pinky Dinky shakes his head and says: 'I'm afraid I shall never
+be a responsible being.'  And he really IS frivolous."
+
+"Frivolous but not vulgar," said Esmeer.
+
+"Pinky Dinkys are chaps who've had their buds nipped," said
+Hatherleigh.  "They're Plebs and they know it.  They haven't the
+Guts to get hold of things.  And so they worry up all those silly
+little jokes of theirs to carry it off." . . .
+
+We tried bad ones for a time, viciously flavoured.
+
+Pinky Dinkys are due to over-production of the type that ought to
+keep outfitters' shops.  Pinky Dinkys would like to keep outfitters'
+shops with whimsy 'scriptions on the boxes and make your bill out
+funny, and not be snobs to customers, no!--not even if they had
+titles."
+
+"Every Pinky Dinky's people are rather good people, and better than
+most Pinky Dinky's people.  But he does not put on side."
+
+"Pinky Dinkys become playful at the sight of women."
+
+"'Croquet's my game,' said the Pinky Dinky, and felt a man
+condescended."
+
+"But what the devil do they think they're up to, anyhow?" roared old
+Hatherleigh suddenly, dropping plump into bottomless despair.
+
+We felt we had still failed to get at the core of the mystery of the
+Pinky Dinky.
+
+We tried over things about his religion.  "The Pinky Dinky goes to
+King's Chapel, and sits and feels in the dusk.  Solemn things!  Oh
+HUSH!  He wouldn't tell you--"
+
+"He COULDN'T tell you."
+
+"Religion is so sacred to him he never talks about it, never reads
+about it, never thinks about it.  Just feels!"
+
+"But in his heart of hearts, oh! ever so deep, the Pinky Dinky has a
+doubt--"
+
+Some one protested.
+
+"Not a vulgar doubt," Esmeer went on, "but a kind of hesitation
+whether the Ancient of Days is really exactly what one would call
+good form. . . .  There's a lot of horrid coarseness got into the
+world somehow.  SOMEBODY put it there. . . .  And anyhow there's no
+particular reason why a man should be seen about with Him.  He's
+jolly Awful of course and all that--"
+
+"The Pinky Dinky for all his fun and levity has a clean mind."
+
+"A thoroughly clean mind.  Not like Esmeer's--the Pig!"
+
+"If once he began to think about sex, how could he be comfortable at
+croquet?"
+
+"It's their Damned Modesty," said Hatherleigh suddenly, "that's
+what's the matter with the Pinky Dinky.  It's Mental Cowardice
+dressed up as a virtue and taking the poor dears in.  Cambridge is
+soaked with it; it's some confounded local bacillus.  Like the thing
+that gives a flavour to Havana cigars.  He comes up here to be made
+into a man and a ruler of the people, and he thinks it shows a nice
+disposition not to take on the job!  How the Devil is a great Empire
+to be run with men like him?"
+
+"All his little jokes and things," said Esmeer regarding his feet on
+the fender, "it's just a nervous sniggering--because he's afraid. . . .
+Oxford's no better."
+
+"What's he afraid of?" said I.
+
+"God knows!" exploded Hatherleigh and stared at the fire.
+
+"LIFE!" said Esmeer.  "And so in a way are we," he added, and made a
+thoughtful silence for a time.
+
+"I say," began Carter, who was doing the Natural Science Tripos,
+"what is the adult form of the Pinky Dinky?"
+
+But there we were checked by our ignorance of the world.
+
+"What is the adult form of any of us?" asked Benton, voicing the
+thought that had arrested our flow.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+I do not remember that we ever lifted our criticism to the dons and
+the organisation of the University.  I think we took them for
+granted.  When I look back at my youth I am always astonished by the
+multitude of things that we took for granted.  It seemed to us that
+Cambridge was in the order of things, for all the world like having
+eyebrows or a vermiform appendix.  Now with the larger scepticism of
+middle age I can entertain very fundamental doubts about these old
+universities.  Indeed I had a scheme--
+
+I do not see what harm I can do now by laying bare the purpose of
+the political combinations I was trying to effect.
+
+My educational scheme was indeed the starting-point of all the big
+project of conscious public reconstruction at which I aimed.  I
+wanted to build up a new educational machine altogether for the
+governing class out of a consolidated system of special public
+service schools.  I meant to get to work upon this whatever office I
+was given in the new government.  I could have begun my plan from
+the Admiralty or the War Office quite as easily as from the
+Education Office.  I am firmly convinced it is hopeless to think of
+reforming the old public schools and universities to meet the needs
+of a modern state, they send their roots too deep and far, the cost
+would exceed any good that could possibly be effected, and so I have
+sought a way round this invincible obstacle.  I do think it would be
+quite practicable to side-track, as the Americans say, the whole
+system by creating hardworking, hard-living, modern and scientific
+boys' schools, first for the Royal Navy and then for the public
+service generally, and as they grew, opening them to the public
+without any absolute obligation to subsequent service.
+Simultaneously with this it would not be impossible to develop a new
+college system with strong faculties in modern philosophy, modern
+history, European literature and criticism, physical and biological
+science, education and sociology.
+
+We could in fact create a new liberal education in this way, and cut
+the umbilicus of the classical languages for good and all.  I should
+have set this going, and trusted it to correct or kill the old
+public schools and the Oxford and Cambridge tradition altogether.  I
+had men in my mind to begin the work, and I should have found
+others.  I should have aimed at making a hard-trained, capable,
+intellectually active, proud type of man.  Everything else would
+have been made subservient to that.  I should have kept my grip on
+the men through their vacation, and somehow or other I would have
+contrived a young woman to match them.  I think I could have seen to
+it effectually enough that they didn't get at croquet and tennis
+with the vicarage daughters and discover sex in the Peeping Tom
+fashion I did, and that they realised quite early in life that it
+isn't really virile to reek of tobacco.  I should have had military
+manoeuvres, training ships, aeroplane work, mountaineering and so
+forth, in the place of the solemn trivialities of games, and I
+should have fed and housed my men clean and very hard--where there
+wasn't any audit ale, no credit tradesmen, and plenty of high
+pressure douches. . . .
+
+I have revisited Cambridge and Oxford time after time since I came
+down, and so far as the Empire goes, I want to get clear of those
+two places. . . .
+
+Always I renew my old feelings, a physical oppression, a sense of
+lowness and dampness almost exactly like the feeling of an
+underground room where paper moulders and leaves the wall, a feeling
+of ineradicable contagion in the Gothic buildings, in the narrow
+ditch-like rivers, in those roads and roads of stuffy little villas.
+Those little villas have destroyed all the good of the old monastic
+system and none of its evil. . . .
+
+Some of the most charming people in the world live in them, but
+their collective effect is below the quality of any individual among
+them.  Cambridge is a world of subdued tones, of excessively subtle
+humours, of prim conduct and free thinking; it fears the Parent, but
+it has no fear of God; it offers amidst surroundings that vary
+between disguises and antiquarian charm the inflammation of
+literature's purple draught; one hears there a peculiar thin scandal
+like no other scandal in the world--a covetous scandal--so that I am
+always reminded of Ibsen in Cambridge.  In Cambridge and the plays
+of Ibsen alone does it seem appropriate for the heroine before the
+great crisis of life to "enter, take off her overshoes, and put her
+wet umbrella upon the writing desk." . . .
+
+We have to make a new Academic mind for modern needs, and the last
+thing to make it out of, I am convinced, is the old Academic mind.
+One might as soon try to fake the old VICTORY at Portsmouth into a
+line of battleship again.  Besides which the old Academic mind, like
+those old bathless, damp Gothic colleges, is much too delightful in
+its peculiar and distinctive way to damage by futile patching.
+
+My heart warms to a sense of affectionate absurdity as I recall dear
+old Codger, surely the most "unleaderly" of men.  No more than from
+the old Schoolmen, his kindred, could one get from him a School for
+Princes.  Yet apart from his teaching he was as curious and adorable
+as a good Netsuke.  Until quite recently he was a power in
+Cambridge, he could make and bar and destroy, and in a way he has
+become the quintessence of Cambridge in my thoughts.
+
+I see him on his way to the morning's lecture, with his plump
+childish face, his round innocent eyes, his absurdly non-prehensile
+fat hand carrying his cap, his grey trousers braced up much too
+high, his feet a trifle inturned, and going across the great court
+with a queer tripping pace that seemed cultivated even to my naive
+undergraduate eye.  Or I see him lecturing.  He lectured walking up
+and down between the desks, talking in a fluting rapid voice, and
+with the utmost lucidity.  If he could not walk up and down he could
+not lecture.  His mind and voice had precisely the fluid quality of
+some clear subtle liquid; one felt it could flow round anything and
+overcome nothing.  And its nimble eddies were wonderful!  Or again I
+recall him drinking port with little muscular movements in his neck
+and cheek and chin and his brows knit--very judicial, very
+concentrated, preparing to say the apt just thing; it was the last
+thing he would have told a lie about.
+
+When I think of Codger I am reminded of an inscription I saw on some
+occasion in Regent's Park above two eyes scarcely more limpidly
+innocent than his--"Born in the Menagerie."  Never once since Codger
+began to display the early promise of scholarship at the age of
+eight or more, had he been outside the bars.  His utmost travel had
+been to lecture here and lecture there.  His student phase had
+culminated in papers of quite exceptional brilliance, and he had
+gone on to lecture with a cheerful combination of wit and mannerism
+that had made him a success from the beginning.  He has lectured
+ever since.  He lectures still.  Year by year he has become plumper,
+more rubicund and more and more of an item for the intelligent
+visitor to see.  Even in my time he was pointed out to people as
+part of our innumerable enrichments, and obviously he knew it.  He
+has become now almost the leading Character in a little donnish
+world of much too intensely appreciated Characters.
+
+He boasted he took no exercise, and also of his knowledge of port
+wine.  Of other wines he confessed quite frankly he had no "special
+knowledge."  Beyond these things he had little pride except that he
+claimed to have read every novel by a woman writer that had ever
+entered the Union Library.  This, however, he held to be remarkable
+rather than ennobling, and such boasts as he made of it were tinged
+with playfulness.  Certainly he had a scholar's knowledge of the
+works of Miss Marie Corelli, Miss Braddon, Miss Elizabeth Glyn and
+Madame Sarah Grand that would have astonished and flattered those
+ladies enormously, and he loved nothing so much in his hours of
+relaxation as to propound and answer difficult questions upon their
+books.  Tusher of King's was his ineffectual rival in this field,
+their bouts were memorable and rarely other than glorious for
+Codger; but then Tusher spread himself too much, he also undertook
+to rehearse whole pages out of Bradshaw, and tell you with all the
+changes how to get from any station to any station in Great Britain
+by the nearest and cheapest routes. . . .
+
+Codger lodged with a little deaf innocent old lady, Mrs. Araminta
+Mergle, who was understood to be herself a very redoubtable
+Character in the Gyp-Bedder class; about her he related quietly
+absurd anecdotes.  He displayed a marvellous invention in ascribing
+to her plausible expressions of opinion entirely identical in import
+with those of the Oxford and Harvard Pragmatists, against whom he
+waged a fierce obscure war. . . .
+
+It was Codger's function to teach me philosophy, philosophy! the
+intimate wisdom of things.  He dealt in a variety of Hegelian stuff
+like nothing else in the world, but marvellously consistent with
+itself.  It was a wonderful web he spun out of that queer big active
+childish brain that had never lusted nor hated nor grieved nor
+feared nor passionately loved,--a web of iridescent threads.  He had
+luminous final theories about Love and Death and Immortality, odd
+matters they seemed for him to think about! and all his woven
+thoughts lay across my perception of the realities of things, as
+flimsy and irrelevant and clever and beautiful, oh!--as a dew-wet
+spider's web slung in the morning sunshine across the black mouth of
+a gun. . . .
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+All through those years of development I perceive now there must
+have been growing in me, slowly, irregularly, assimilating to itself
+all the phrases and forms of patriotism, diverting my religious
+impulses, utilising my esthetic tendencies, my dominating idea, the
+statesman's idea, that idea of social service which is the
+protagonist of my story, that real though complex passion for
+Making, making widely and greatly, cities, national order,
+civilisation, whose interplay with all those other factors in life I
+have set out to present.  It was growing in me--as one's bones grow,
+no man intending it.
+
+I have tried to show how, quite early in my life, the fact of
+disorderliness, the conception of social life as being a
+multitudinous confusion out of hand, came to me.  One always of
+course simplifies these things in the telling, but I do not think I
+ever saw the world at large in any other terms.  I never at any
+stage entertained the idea which sustained my mother, and which
+sustains so many people in the world,--the idea that the universe,
+whatever superficial discords it may present, is as a matter of fact
+"all right," is being steered to definite ends by a serene and
+unquestionable God.  My mother thought that Order prevailed, and
+that disorder was just incidental and foredoomed rebellion; I feel
+and have always felt that order rebels against and struggles against
+disorder, that order has an up-hill job, in gardens, experiments,
+suburbs, everything alike; from the very beginnings of my experience
+I discovered hostility to order, a constant escaping from control.
+
+The current of living and contemporary ideas in which my mind was
+presently swimming made all in the same direction; in place of my
+mother's attentive, meticulous but occasionally extremely irascible
+Providence, the talk was all of the Struggle for Existence and the
+survival not of the Best--that was nonsense, but of the fittest to
+survive.
+
+The attempts to rehabilitate Faith in the form of the
+Individualist's LAISSEZ FAIRE never won upon me.  I disliked Herbert
+Spencer all my life until I read his autobiography, and then I
+laughed a little and loved him.  I remember as early as the City
+Merchants' days how Britten and I scoffed at that pompous question-
+begging word "Evolution," having, so to speak, found it out.
+Evolution, some illuminating talker had remarked at the Britten
+lunch table, had led not only to man, but to the liver-fluke and
+skunk, obviously it might lead anywhere; order came into things only
+through the struggling mind of man.  That lit things wonderfully for
+us.  When I went up to Cambridge I was perfectly clear that life was
+a various and splendid disorder of forces that the spirit of man
+sets itself to tame.  I have never since fallen away from that
+persuasion.
+
+I do not think I was exceptionally precocious in reaching these
+conclusions and a sort of religious finality for myself by eighteen
+or nineteen.  I know men and women vary very much in these matters,
+just as children do in learning to talk.  Some will chatter at
+eighteen months and some will hardly speak until three, and the
+thing has very little to do with their subsequent mental quality.
+So it is with young people; some will begin their religious, their
+social, their sexual interests at fourteen, some not until far on in
+the twenties.  Britten and I belonged to one of the precocious
+types, and Cossington very probably to another.  It wasn't that
+there was anything priggish about any of us; we should have been
+prigs to have concealed our spontaneous interests and ape the
+theoretical boy.
+
+The world of man centred for my imagination in London, it still
+centres there; the real and present world, that is to say, as
+distinguished from the wonder-lands of atomic and microscopic
+science and the stars and future time.  I had travelled scarcely at
+all, I had never crossed the Channel, but I had read copiously and I
+had formed a very good working idea of this round globe with its
+mountains and wildernesses and forests and all the sorts and
+conditions of human life that were scattered over its surface.  It
+was all alive, I felt, and changing every day; how it was changing,
+and the changes men might bring about, fascinated my mind beyond
+measure.
+
+I used to find a charm in old maps that showed The World as Known to
+the Ancients, and I wish I could now without any suspicion of self-
+deception write down compactly the world as it was known to me at
+nineteen.  So far as extension went it was, I fancy, very like the
+world I know now at forty-two; I had practically all the mountains
+and seas, boundaries and races, products and possibilities that I
+have now.  But its intension was very different.  All the interval
+has been increasing and deepening my social knowledge, replacing
+crude and second-hand impressions by felt and realised distinctions.
+
+In 1895--that was my last year with Britten, for I went up to
+Cambridge in September--my vision of the world had much the same
+relation to the vision I have to-day that an ill-drawn daub of a
+mask has to the direct vision of a human face.  Britten and I looked
+at our world and saw--what did we see?  Forms and colours side by
+side that we had no suspicion were interdependent.  We had no
+conception of the roots of things nor of the reaction of things.  It
+did not seem to us, for example, that business had anything to do
+with government, or that money and means affected the heroic issues
+of war.  There were no wagons in our war game, and where there were
+guns, there it was assumed the ammunition was gathered together.
+Finance again was a sealed book to us; we did not so much connect it
+with the broad aspects of human affairs as regard it as a sort of
+intrusive nuisance to be earnestly ignored by all right-minded men.
+We had no conception of the quality of politics, nor how "interests"
+came into such affairs; we believed men were swayed by purely
+intellectual convictions and were either right or wrong, honest or
+dishonest (in which case they deserved to be shot), good or bad.  We
+knew nothing of mental inertia, and could imagine the opinion of a
+whole nation changed by one lucid and convincing exposition.  We
+were capable of the most incongruous transfers from the scroll of
+history to our own times, we could suppose Brixton ravaged and
+Hampstead burnt in civil wars for the succession to the throne, or
+Cheapside a lane of death and the front of the Mansion House set
+about with guillotines in the course of an accurately transposed
+French Revolution.  We rebuilt London by Act of Parliament, and once
+in a mood of hygienic enterprise we transferred its population EN
+MASSE to the North Downs by an order of the Local Government Board.
+We thought nothing of throwing religious organisations out of
+employment or superseding all the newspapers by freely distributed
+bulletins.  We could contemplate the possibility of laws abolishing
+whole classes; we were equal to such a dream as the peaceful and
+orderly proclamation of Communism from the steps of St. Paul's
+Cathedral, after the passing of a simply worded bill,--a close and
+not unnaturally an exciting division carrying the third reading.  I
+remember quite distinctly evolving that vision.  We were then fully
+fifteen and we were perfectly serious about it.  We were not fools;
+it was simply that as yet we had gathered no experience at all of
+the limits and powers of legislation and conscious collective
+intention. . . .
+
+I think this statement does my boyhood justice, and yet I have my
+doubts.  It is so hard now to say what one understood and what one
+did not understand.  It isn't only that every day changed one's
+general outlook, but also that a boy fluctuates between phases of
+quite adult understanding and phases of tawdrily magnificent
+puerility.  Sometimes I myself was in those tumbrils that went along
+Cheapside to the Mansion House, a Sydney Cartonesque figure, a white
+defeated Mirabean; sometimes it was I who sat judging and condemning
+and ruling (sleeping in my clothes and feeding very simply) the soul
+and autocrat of the Provisional Government, which occupied, of all
+inconvenient places! the General Post Office at St. Martin's-le-
+Grand! . . .
+
+I cannot trace the development of my ideas at Cambridge, but I
+believe the mere physical fact of going two hours' journey away from
+London gave that place for the first time an effect of unity in my
+imagination.  I got outside London.  It became tangible instead of
+being a frame almost as universal as sea and sky.
+
+At Cambridge my ideas ceased to live in a duologue; in exchange for
+Britten, with whom, however, I corresponded lengthily, stylishly and
+self-consciously for some years, I had now a set of congenial
+friends.  I got talk with some of the younger dons, I learnt to
+speak in the Union, and in my little set we were all pretty busily
+sharpening each other's wits and correcting each other's
+interpretations.  Cambridge made politics personal and actual.  At
+City Merchants' we had had no sense of effective contact; we
+boasted, it is true, an under secretary and a colonial governor
+among our old boys, but they were never real to us; such
+distinguished sons as returned to visit the old school were allusive
+and pleasant in the best Pinky Dinky style, and pretended to be in
+earnest about nothing but our football and cricket, to mourn the
+abolition of "water," and find a shuddering personal interest in the
+ancient swishing block.  At Cambridge I felt for the first time that
+I touched the thing that was going on.  Real living statesmen came
+down to debate in the Union, the older dons had been their college
+intimates, their sons and nephews expounded them to us and made them
+real to us.  They invited us to entertain ideas; I found myself for
+the first time in my life expected to read and think and discuss, my
+secret vice had become a virtue.
+
+That combination-room world is at last larger and more populous and
+various than the world of schoolmasters.  The Shoesmiths and Naylors
+who had been the aristocracy of City Merchants' fell into their
+place in my mind; they became an undistinguished mass on the more
+athletic side of Pinky Dinkyism, and their hostility to ideas and to
+the expression of ideas ceased to limit and trouble me.  The
+brighter men of each generation stay up; these others go down to
+propagate their tradition, as the fathers of families, as mediocre
+professional men, as assistant masters in schools.  Cambridge which
+perfects them is by the nature of things least oppressed by them,--
+except when it comes to a vote in Convocation.
+
+We were still in those days under the shadow of the great
+Victorians.  I never saw Gladstone (as I never set eyes on the old
+Queen), but he had resigned office only a year before I went up to
+Trinity, and the Combination Rooms were full of personal gossip
+about him and Disraeli and the other big figures of the gladiatorial
+stage of Parlimentary history, talk that leaked copiously into such
+sets as mine.  The ceiling of our guest chamber at Trinity was
+glorious with the arms of Sir William Harcourt, whose Death Duties
+had seemed at first like a socialist dawn.  Mr. Evesham we asked to
+come to the Union every year, Masters, Chamberlain and the old Duke
+of Devonshire; they did not come indeed, but their polite refusals
+brought us all, as it were, within personal touch of them.  One
+heard of cabinet councils and meetings at country houses.  Some of
+us, pursuing such interests, went so far as to read political
+memoirs and the novels of Disraeli and Mrs. Humphry Ward.  From
+gossip, example and the illustrated newspapers one learnt something
+of the way in which parties were split, coalitions formed, how
+permanent officials worked and controlled their ministers, how
+measures were brought forward and projects modified.
+
+And while I was getting the great leading figures on the political
+stage, who had been presented to me in my schooldays not so much as
+men as the pantomimic monsters of political caricature, while I was
+getting them reduced in my imagination to the stature of humanity,
+and their motives to the quality of impulses like my own, I was also
+acquiring in my Tripos work a constantly developing and enriching
+conception of the world of men as a complex of economic,
+intellectual and moral processes. . . .
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Socialism is an intellectual Proteus, but to the men of my
+generation it came as the revolt of the workers.  Rodbertus we never
+heard of and the Fabian Society we did not understand; Marx and
+Morris, the Chicago Anarchists, JUSTICE and Social Democratic
+Federation (as it was then) presented socialism to our minds.
+Hatherleigh was the leading exponent of the new doctrines in
+Trinity, and the figure upon his wall of a huge-muscled, black-
+haired toiler swaggering sledgehammer in hand across a revolutionary
+barricade, seemed the quintessence of what he had to expound.
+Landlord and capitalist had robbed and enslaved the workers, and
+were driving them quite automatically to inevitable insurrection.
+They would arise and the capitalist system would flee and vanish
+like the mists before the morning, like the dews before the sunrise,
+giving place in the most simple and obvious manner to an era of
+Right and Justice and Virtue and Well Being, and in short a
+Perfectly Splendid Time.
+
+I had already discussed this sort of socialism under the guidance of
+Britten, before I went up to Cambridge.  It was all mixed up with
+ideas about freedom and natural virtue and a great scorn for kings,
+titles, wealth and officials, and it was symbolised by the red ties
+we wore.  Our simple verdict on existing arrangements was that they
+were "all wrong."  The rich were robbers and knew it, kings and
+princes were usurpers and knew it, religious teachers were impostors
+in league with power, the economic system was an elaborate plot on
+the part of the few to expropriate the many.  We went about feeling
+scornful of all the current forms of life, forms that esteemed
+themselves solid, that were, we knew, no more than shapes painted on
+a curtain that was presently to be torn aside. . . .
+
+It was Hatherleigh's poster and his capacity for overstating things,
+I think, that first qualified my simple revolutionary enthusiasm.
+Perhaps also I had met with Fabian publications, but if I did I
+forget the circumstances.  And no doubt my innate constructiveness
+with its practical corollary of an analytical treatment of the
+material supplied, was bound to push me on beyond this melodramatic
+interpretation of human affairs.
+
+I compared that Working Man of the poster with any sort of working
+man I knew.  I perceived that the latter was not going to change,
+and indeed could not under any stimulus whatever be expected to
+change, into the former.  It crept into my mind as slowly and surely
+as the dawn creeps into a room that the former was not, as I had at
+first rather glibly assumed, an "ideal," but a complete
+misrepresentation of the quality and possibilities of things.
+
+I do not know now whether it was during my school-days or at
+Cambridge that I first began not merely to see the world as a great
+contrast of rich and poor, but to feel the massive effect of that
+multitudinous majority of people who toil continually, who are for
+ever anxious about ways and means, who are restricted, ill clothed,
+ill fed and ill housed, who have limited outlooks and continually
+suffer misadventures, hardships and distresses through the want of
+money.  My lot had fallen upon the fringe of the possessing
+minority; if I did not know the want of necessities I knew
+shabbiness, and the world that let me go on to a university
+education intimated very plainly that there was not a thing beyond
+the primary needs that my stimulated imagination might demand that
+it would not be an effort for me to secure.  A certain aggressive
+radicalism against the ruling and propertied classes followed almost
+naturally from my circumstances.  It did not at first connect itself
+at all with the perception of a planless disorder in human affairs
+that had been forced upon me by the atmosphere of my upbringing, nor
+did it link me in sympathy with any of the profounder realities of
+poverty.  It was a personal independent thing.  The dingier people
+one saw in the back streets and lower quarters of Bromstead and
+Penge, the drift of dirty children, ragged old women, street
+loafers, grimy workers that made the social background of London,
+the stories one heard of privation and sweating, only joined up very
+slowly with the general propositions I was making about life.  We
+could become splendidly eloquent about the social revolution and the
+triumph of the Proletariat after the Class war, and it was only by a
+sort of inspiration that it came to me that my bedder, a garrulous
+old thing with a dusty black bonnet over one eye and an
+ostentatiously clean apron outside the dark mysteries that clothed
+her, or the cheeky little ruffians who yelled papers about the
+streets, were really material to such questions.
+
+Directly any of us young socialists of Trinity found ourselves in
+immediate contact with servants or cadgers or gyps or bedders or
+plumbers or navvies or cabmen or railway porters we became
+unconsciously and unthinkingly aristocrats.  Our voices altered, our
+gestures altered.  We behaved just as all the other men, rich or
+poor, swatters or sportsmen or Pinky Dinkys, behaved, and exactly as
+we were expected to behave.  On the whole it is a population of poor
+quality round about Cambridge, rather stunted and spiritless and
+very difficult to idealise.  That theoretical Working Man of ours!--
+if we felt the clash at all we explained it, I suppose, by assuming
+that he came from another part of the country; Esmeer, I remember,
+who lived somewhere in the Fens, was very eloquent about the Cornish
+fishermen, and Hatherleigh, who was a Hampshire man, assured us we
+ought to know the Scottish miner.  My private fancy was for the
+Lancashire operative because of his co-operative societies, and
+because what Lancashire thinks to-day England thinks to-morrow. . . .
+And also I had never been in Lancashire.
+
+By little increments of realisation it was that the profounder
+verities of the problem of socialism came to me.  It helped me very
+much that I had to go down to the Potteries several times to discuss
+my future with my uncle and guardian; I walked about and saw Bursley
+Wakes and much of the human aspects of organised industrialism at
+close quarters for the first time.  The picture of a splendid
+Working Man cheated out of his innate glorious possibilities, and
+presently to arise and dash this scoundrelly and scandalous system
+of private ownership to fragments, began to give place to a
+limitless spectacle of inefficiency, to a conception of millions of
+people not organised as they should be, not educated as they should
+be, not simply prevented from but incapable of nearly every sort of
+beauty, mostly kindly and well meaning, mostly incompetent, mostly
+obstinate, and easily humbugged and easily diverted.  Even the
+tragic and inspiring idea of Marx, that the poor were nearing a
+limit of painful experience, and awakening to a sense of intolerable
+wrongs, began to develop into the more appalling conception that the
+poor were simply in a witless uncomfortable inconclusive way--
+"muddling along"; that they wanted nothing very definitely nor very
+urgently, that mean fears enslaved them and mean satisfactions
+decoyed them, that they took the very gift of life itself with a
+spiritless lassitude, hoarding it, being rather anxious not to lose
+it than to use it in any way whatever.
+
+The complete development of that realisation was the work of many
+years.  I had only the first intimations at Cambridge.  But I did
+have intimations.  Most acutely do I remember the doubts that
+followed the visit of Chris Robinson.  Chris Robinson was heralded
+by such heroic anticipations, and he was so entirely what we had not
+anticipated.
+
+Hatherleigh got him to come, arranged a sort of meeting for him at
+Redmayne's rooms in King's, and was very proud and proprietorial.
+It failed to stir Cambridge at all profoundly.  Beyond a futile
+attempt to screw up Hatherleigh made by some inexpert duffers who
+used nails instead of screws and gimlets, there was no attempt to
+rag.  Next day Chris Robinson went and spoke at Bennett Hall in
+Newnham College, and left Cambridge in the evening amidst the cheers
+of twenty men or so.  Socialism was at such a low ebb politically in
+those days that it didn't even rouse men to opposition.
+
+And there sat Chris under that flamboyant and heroic Worker of the
+poster, a little wrinkled grey-bearded apologetic man in ready-made
+clothes, with watchful innocent brown eyes and a persistent and
+invincible air of being out of his element.  He sat with his stout
+boots tucked up under his chair, and clung to a teacup and saucer
+and looked away from us into the fire, and we all sat about on
+tables and chair-arms and windowsills and boxes and anywhere except
+upon chairs after the manner of young men.  The only other chair
+whose seat was occupied was the one containing his knitted woollen
+comforter and his picturesque old beach-photographer's hat.  We were
+all shy and didn't know how to take hold of him now we had got him,
+and, which was disconcertingly unanticipated, he was manifestly
+having the same difficulty with us.  We had expected to be gripped.
+
+"I'll not be knowing what to say to these Chaps," he repeated with a
+north-country quality in his speech.
+
+We made reassuring noises.
+
+The Ambassador of the Workers stirred his tea earnestly through an
+uncomfortable pause.
+
+"I'd best tell 'em something of how things are in Lancashire, what
+with the new machines and all that," he speculated at last with red
+reflections in his thoughtful eyes.
+
+We had an inexcusable dread that perhaps he would make a mess of the
+meeting.
+
+But when he was no longer in the unaccustomed meshes of refined
+conversation, but speaking with an audience before him, he became a
+different man.  He declared he would explain to us just exactly what
+socialism was, and went on at once to an impassioned contrast of
+social conditions.  "You young men," he said "come from homes of
+luxury; every need you feel is supplied--"
+
+We sat and stood and sprawled about him, occupying every inch of
+Redmayne's floor space except the hearthrug-platform, and we
+listened to him and thought him over.  He was the voice of wrongs
+that made us indignant and eager.  We forgot for a time that he had
+been shy and seemed not a little incompetent, his provincial accent
+became a beauty of his earnest speech, we were carried away by his
+indignations.  We looked with shining eyes at one another and at the
+various dons who had dropped in and were striving to maintain a
+front of judicious severity.  We felt more and more that social
+injustice must cease, and cease forthwith.  We felt we could not
+sleep upon it.  At the end we clapped and murmured our applause and
+wanted badly to cheer.
+
+Then like a lancet stuck into a bladder came the heckling.  Denson,
+that indolent, liberal-minded sceptic, did most of the questioning.
+He lay contorted in a chair, with his ugly head very low, his legs
+crossed and his left boot very high, and he pointed his remarks with
+a long thin hand and occasionally adjusted the unstable glasses that
+hid his watery eyes.  "I don't want to carp," he began.  "The
+present system, I admit, stands condemned.  Every present system
+always HAS stood condemned in the minds of intelligent men.  But
+where it seems to me you get thin, is just where everybody has been
+thin, and that's when you come to the remedy."
+
+"Socialism," said Chris Robinson, as if it answered everything, and
+Hatherleigh said "Hear! Hear!" very resolutely.
+
+"I suppose I OUGHT to take that as an answer," said Denson, getting
+his shoulder-blades well down to the seat of his chair; "but I
+don't.  I don't, you know.  It's rather a shame to cross-examine you
+after this fine address of yours"--Chris Robinson on the hearthrug
+made acquiescent and inviting noises--"but the real question
+remains how exactly are you going to end all these wrongs?  There
+are the administrative questions.  If you abolish the private owner,
+I admit you abolish a very complex and clumsy way of getting
+businesses run, land controlled and things in general administered,
+but you don't get rid of the need of administration, you know."
+
+"Democracy," said Chris Robinson.
+
+"Organised somehow," said Denson.  "And it's just the How perplexes
+me.  I can quite easily imagine a socialist state administered in a
+sort of scrambling tumult that would be worse than anything we have
+got now.
+
+"Nothing could be worse than things are now," said Chris Robinson.
+"I have seen little children--"
+
+"I submit life on an ill-provisioned raft, for example, could easily
+be worse--or life in a beleagured town."
+
+Murmurs.
+
+They wrangled for some time, and it had the effect upon me of coming
+out from the glow of a good matinee performance into the cold
+daylight of late afternoon.  Chris Robinson did not shine in
+conflict with Denson; he was an orator and not a dialectician, and
+he missed Denson's points and displayed a disposition to plunge into
+untimely pathos and indignation.  And Denson hit me curiously hard
+with one of his shafts.  "Suppose," he said, "you found yourself
+prime minister--"
+
+I looked at Chris Robinson, bright-eyed and his hair a little
+ruffled and his whole being rhetorical, and measured him against the
+huge machine of government muddled and mysterious.  Oh! but I was
+perplexed!
+
+And then we took him back to Hatherleigh's rooms and drank beer and
+smoked about him while he nursed his knee with hairy wristed hands
+that protruded from his flannel shirt, and drank lemonade under the
+cartoon of that emancipated Worker, and we had a great discursive
+talk with him.
+
+"Eh! you should see our big meetings up north?" he said.
+
+Denson had ruffled him and worried him a good deal, and ever and
+again he came back to that discussion.  "It's all very easy for your
+learned men to sit and pick holes," he said, "while the children
+suffer and die.  They don't pick holes up north.  They mean
+business."
+
+He talked, and that was the most interesting part of it all, of his
+going to work in a factory when he was twelve--"when you Chaps were
+all with your mammies "--and how he had educated himself of nights
+until he would fall asleep at his reading.
+
+"It's made many of us keen for all our lives," he remarked, "all
+that clemming for education.  Why! I longed all through one winter
+to read a bit of Darwin.  I must know about this Darwin if I die for
+it, I said.  And I could no' get the book."
+
+Hatherleigh made an enthusiastic noise and drank beer at him with
+round eyes over the mug.
+
+"Well, anyhow I wasted no time on Greek and Latin," said Chris
+Robinson.  "And one learns to go straight at a thing without
+splitting straws.  One gets hold of the Elementals."
+
+(Well, did they?  That was the gist of my perplexity.)
+
+"One doesn't quibble," he said, returning to his rankling memory of
+Denson, "while men decay and starve."
+
+"But suppose," I said, suddenly dropping into opposition, "the
+alternative is to risk a worse disaster--or do something patently
+futile."
+
+"I don't follow that," said Chris Robinson.  "We don't propose
+anything futile, so far as I can see."
+
+
+6
+
+
+The prevailing force in my undergraduate days was not Socialism but
+Kiplingism.  Our set was quite exceptional in its socialistic
+professions.  And we were all, you must understand, very distinctly
+Imperialists also, and professed a vivid sense of the "White Man's
+Burden."
+
+It is a little difficult now to get back to the feelings of that
+period; Kipling has since been so mercilessly and exhaustively
+mocked, criticised and torn to shreds;--never was a man so violently
+exalted and then, himself assisting, so relentlessly called down.
+But in the middle nineties this spectacled and moustached little
+figure with its heavy chin and its general effect of vehement
+gesticulation, its wild shouts of boyish enthusiasm for effective
+force, its lyric delight in the sounds and colours, in the very
+odours of empire, its wonderful discovery of machinery and cotton
+waste and the under officer and the engineer, and "shop" as a poetic
+dialect, became almost a national symbol.  He got hold of us
+wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling and haunting quotations, he
+stirred Britten and myself to futile imitations, he coloured the
+very idiom of our conversation.  He rose to his climax with his
+"Recessional," while I was still an undergraduate.
+
+What did he give me exactly?
+
+He helped to broaden my geographical sense immensely, and he
+provided phrases for just that desire for discipline and devotion
+and organised effort the Socialism of our time failed to express,
+that the current socialist movement still fails, I think, to
+express.  The sort of thing that follows, for example, tore
+something out of my inmost nature and gave it a shape, and I took it
+back from him shaped and let much of the rest of him, the tumult and
+the bullying, the hysteria and the impatience, the incoherence and
+inconsistency, go uncriticised for the sake of it:--
+
+
+"Keep ye the Law--be swift in all obedience--
+Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford,
+Make ye sure to each his own
+That he reap where he hath sown;
+By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord!"
+
+
+And then again, and for all our later criticism, this sticks in my
+mind, sticks there now as quintessential wisdom:
+
+
+"The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood an' stone;
+'E don't obey no orders unless they is 'is own;
+'E keeps 'is side-arms awful: 'e leaves 'em all about
+An' then comes up the regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out.
+     All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,
+     All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less,
+     All along of abby-nay, kul, an' hazar-ho,
+     Mind you keep your rifle an' yourself jus' so!"
+
+
+It is after all a secondary matter that Kipling, not having been
+born and brought up in Bromstead and Penge, and the war in South
+Africa being yet in the womb of time, could quite honestly entertain
+the now remarkable delusion that England had her side-arms at that
+time kept anything but "awful."  He learnt better, and we all learnt
+with him in the dark years of exasperating and humiliating struggle
+that followed, and I do not see that we fellow learners are
+justified in turning resentfully upon him for a common ignorance and
+assumption. . . .
+
+South Africa seems always painted on the back cloth of my Cambridge
+memories.  How immense those disasters seemed at the time, disasters
+our facile English world has long since contrived in any edifying or
+profitable sense to forget!  How we thrilled to the shouting
+newspaper sellers as the first false flush of victory gave place to
+the realisation of defeat.  Far away there our army showed itself
+human, mortal and human in the sight of all the world, the pleasant
+officers we had imagined would change to wonderful heroes at the
+first crackling of rifles, remained the pleasant, rather incompetent
+men they had always been, failing to imagine, failing to plan and
+co-operate, failing to grip.  And the common soldiers, too, they
+were just what our streets and country-side had made them, no sudden
+magic came out of the war bugles for them.  Neither splendid nor
+disgraceful were they,--just ill-trained and fairly plucky and
+wonderfully good-tempered men--paying for it.  And how it lowered
+our vitality all that first winter to hear of Nicholson's Nek, and
+then presently close upon one another, to realise the bloody waste
+of Magersfontein, the shattering retreat from Stormberg, Colenso--
+Colenso, that blundering battle, with White, as it seemed, in
+Ladysmith near the point of surrender! and so through the long
+unfolding catalogue of bleak disillusionments, of aching,
+unconcealed anxiety lest worse should follow.  To advance upon your
+enemy singing about his lack of cleanliness and method went out of
+fashion altogether!  The dirty retrogressive Boer vanished from our
+scheme of illusion.
+
+All through my middle Cambridge period, the guns boomed and the
+rifles crackled away there on the veldt, and the horsemen rode and
+the tale of accidents and blundering went on.  Men, mules, horses,
+stores and money poured into South Africa, and the convalescent
+wounded streamed home.  I see it in my memory as if I had looked at
+it through a window instead of through the pages of the illustrated
+papers; I recall as if I had been there the wide open spaces, the
+ragged hillsides, the open order attacks of helmeted men in khaki,
+the scarce visible smoke of the guns, the wrecked trains in great
+lonely places, the burnt isolated farms, and at last the blockhouses
+and the fences of barbed wire uncoiling and spreading for endless
+miles across the desert, netting the elusive enemy until at last,
+though he broke the meshes again and again, we had him in the toils.
+If one's attention strayed in the lecture-room it wandered to those
+battle-fields.
+
+And that imagined panorama of war unfolds to an accompaniment of
+yelling newsboys in the narrow old Cambridge streets, of the flicker
+of papers hastily bought and torn open in the twilight, of the
+doubtful reception of doubtful victories, and the insensate
+rejoicings at last that seemed to some of us more shameful than
+defeats. . . .
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+A book that stands out among these memories, that stimulated me
+immensely so that I forced it upon my companions, half in the spirit
+of propaganda and half to test it by their comments, was Meredith's
+ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS.  It is one of the books that have made me.
+In that I got a supplement and corrective of Kipling.  It was the
+first detached and adverse criticism of the Englishman I had ever
+encountered.  It must have been published already nine or ten years
+when I read it.  The country had paid no heed to it, had gone on to
+the expensive lessons of the War because of the dull aversion our
+people feel for all such intimations, and so I could read it as a
+book justified.  The war endorsed its every word for me, underlined
+each warning indication of the gigantic dangers that gathered
+against our system across the narrow seas.  It discovered Europe to
+me, as watching and critical.
+
+But while I could respond to all its criticisms of my country's
+intellectual indolence, of my country's want of training and
+discipline and moral courage, I remember that the idea that on the
+continent there were other peoples going ahead of us, mentally alert
+while we fumbled, disciplined while we slouched, aggressive and
+preparing to bring our Imperial pride to a reckoning, was extremely
+novel and distasteful to me.  It set me worrying of nights.  It put
+all my projects for social and political reconstruction upon a new
+uncomfortable footing.  It made them no longer merely desirable but
+urgent.  Instead of pride and the love of making one might own to a
+baser motive.  Under Kipling's sway I had a little forgotten the
+continent of Europe, treated it as a mere envious echo to our own
+world-wide display.  I began now to have a disturbing sense as it
+were of busy searchlights over the horizon. . . .
+
+One consequence of the patriotic chagrin Meredith produced in me was
+an attempt to belittle his merit.  "It isn't a good novel, anyhow,"
+I said.
+
+The charge I brought against it was, I remember, a lack of unity.
+It professed to be a study of the English situation in the early
+nineties, but it was all deflected, I said, and all the interest was
+confused by the story of Victor Radnor's fight with society to
+vindicate the woman he had loved and never married.  Now in the
+retrospect and with a mind full of bitter enlightenment, I can do
+Meredith justice, and admit the conflict was not only essential but
+cardinal in his picture, that the terrible inflexibility of the rich
+aunts and the still more terrible claim of Mrs. Burman Radnor, the
+"infernal punctilio," and Dudley Sowerby's limitations, were the
+central substance of that inalertness the book set itself to assail.
+So many things have been brought together in my mind that were once
+remotely separated.  A people that will not valiantly face and
+understand and admit love and passion can understand nothing
+whatever.  But in those days what is now just obvious truth to me
+was altogether outside my range of comprehension. . . .
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+As I seek to recapitulate the interlacing growth of my apprehension
+of the world, as I flounder among the half-remembered developments
+that found me a crude schoolboy and left me a man, there comes out,
+as if it stood for all the rest, my first holiday abroad.  That did
+not happen until I was twenty-two.  I was a fellow of Trinity, and
+the Peace of Vereeniging had just been signed.
+
+I went with a man named Willersley, a man some years senior to
+myself, who had just missed a fellowship and the higher division of
+the Civil Service, and who had become an enthusiastic member of the
+London School Board, upon which the cumulative vote and the support
+of the "advanced" people had placed him.  He had, like myself, a
+small independent income that relieved him of any necessity to earn
+a living, and he had a kindred craving for social theorising and
+some form of social service.  He had sought my acquaintance after
+reading a paper of mine (begotten by the visit of Chris Robinson) on
+the limits of pure democracy.  It had marched with some thoughts of
+his own.
+
+We went by train to Spiez on the Lake of Thun, then up the Gemmi,
+and thence with one or two halts and digressions and a little modest
+climbing we crossed over by the Antrona pass (on which we were
+benighted) into Italy, and by way of Domo D'ossola and the Santa
+Maria Maggiore valley to Cannobio, and thence up the lake to Locarno
+(where, as I shall tell, we stayed some eventful days) and so up the
+Val Maggia and over to Airolo and home.
+
+As I write of that long tramp of ours, something of its freshness
+and enlargement returns to me.  I feel again the faint pleasant
+excitement of the boat train, the trampling procession of people
+with hand baggage and laden porters along the platform of the
+Folkestone pier, the scarcely perceptible swaying of the moored boat
+beneath our feet.  Then, very obvious and simple, the little emotion
+of standing out from the homeland and seeing the long white Kentish
+cliffs recede.  One walked about the boat doing one's best not to
+feel absurdly adventurous, and presently a movement of people
+directed one's attention to a white lighthouse on a cliff to the
+east of us, coming up suddenly; and then one turned to scan the
+little different French coast villages, and then, sliding by in a
+pale sunshine came a long wooden pier with oddly dressed children
+upon it, and the clustering town of Boulogne.
+
+One took it all with the outward calm that became a young man of
+nearly three and twenty, but one was alive to one's finger-tips with
+pleasing little stimulations.  The custom house examination excited
+one, the strangeness of a babble in a foreign tongue; one found the
+French of City Merchants' and Cambridge a shy and viscous flow, and
+then one was standing in the train as it went slowly through the
+rail-laid street to Boulogne Ville, and one looked out at the world
+in French, porters in blouses, workmen in enormous purple trousers,
+police officers in peaked caps instead of helmets and romantically
+cloaked, big carts, all on two wheels instead of four, green
+shuttered casements instead of sash windows, and great numbers of
+neatly dressed women in economical mourning.
+
+"Oh! there's a priest!" one said, and was betrayed into suchlike
+artless cries.
+
+It was a real other world, with different government and different
+methods, and in the night one was roused from uneasy slumbers and
+sat blinking and surly, wrapped up in one's couverture and with
+one's oreiller all awry, to encounter a new social phenomenon, the
+German official, so different in manner from the British; and when
+one woke again after that one had come to Bale, and out one tumbled
+to get coffee in Switzerland. . . .
+
+I have been over that route dozens of times since, but it still
+revives a certain lingering youthfulness, a certain sense of
+cheerful release in me.
+
+I remember that I and Willersley became very sociological as we ran
+on to Spiez, and made all sorts of generalisations from the steeply
+sloping fields on the hillsides, and from the people we saw on
+platforms and from little differences in the way things were done.
+
+The clean prosperity of Bale and Switzerland, the big clean
+stations, filled me with patriotic misgivings, as I thought of the
+vast dirtiness of London, the mean dirtiness of Cambridgeshire.  It
+came to me that perhaps my scheme of international values was all
+wrong, that quite stupendous possibilities and challenges for us and
+our empire might be developing here--and I recalled Meredith's
+Skepsey in France with a new understanding.
+
+Willersley had dressed himself in a world-worn Norfolk suit of
+greenish grey tweeds that ended unfamiliarly at his rather
+impending, spectacled, intellectual visage.  I didn't, I remember,
+like the contrast of him with the drilled Swiss and Germans about
+us.  Convict coloured stockings and vast hobnail boots finished him
+below, and all his luggage was a borrowed rucksac that he had tied
+askew.  He did not want to shave in the train, but I made him at one
+of the Swiss stations--I dislike these Oxford slovenlinesses--and
+then confound him! he cut himself and bled. . . .
+
+Next morning we were breathing a thin exhilarating air that seemed
+to have washed our very veins to an incredible cleanliness, and
+eating hard-boiled eggs in a vast clear space of rime-edged rocks,
+snow-mottled, above a blue-gashed glacier.  All about us the
+monstrous rock surfaces rose towards the shining peaks above, and
+there were winding moraines from which the ice had receded, and then
+dark clustering fir trees far below.
+
+I had an extraordinary feeling of having come out of things, of
+being outside.
+
+"But this is the round world!" I said, with a sense of never having
+perceived it before; "this is the round world!"
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+That holiday was full of big comprehensive effects; the first view
+of the Rhone valley and the distant Valaisian Alps, for example,
+which we saw from the shoulder of the mountain above the Gemmi, and
+the early summer dawn breaking over Italy as we moved from our
+night's crouching and munched bread and chocolate and stretched our
+stiff limbs among the tumbled and precipitous rocks that hung over
+Lake Cingolo, and surveyed the winding tiring rocky track going down
+and down to Antronapiano.
+
+And our thoughts were as comprehensive as our impressions.
+Willersley's mind abounded in historical matter; he had an
+inaccurate abundant habit of topographical reference; he made me see
+and trace and see again the Roman Empire sweep up these winding
+valleys, and the coming of the first great Peace among the warring
+tribes of men. . . .
+
+In the retrospect each of us seems to have been talking about our
+outlook almost continually.  Each of us, you see, was full of the
+same question, very near and altogether predominant to us, the
+question: "What am I going to do with my life?"  He saw it almost as
+importantly as I, but from a different angle, because his choice was
+largely made and mine still hung in the balance.
+
+"I feel we might do so many things," I said, "and everything that
+calls one, calls one away from something else."
+
+Willersley agreed without any modest disavowals.
+
+"We have got to think out," he said, "just what we are and what we
+are up to.  We've got to do that now.  And then--it's one of those
+questions it is inadvisable to reopen subsequently."
+
+He beamed at me through his glasses.  The sententious use of long
+words was a playful habit with him, that and a slight deliberate
+humour, habits occasional Extension Lecturing was doing very much to
+intensify.
+
+"You've made your decision?"
+
+He nodded with a peculiar forward movement of his head.
+
+"How would you put it?"
+
+"Social Service--education.  Whatever else matters or doesn't
+matter, it seems to me there is one thing we MUST have and increase,
+and that is the number of people who can think a little--and have"--
+he beamed again--"an adequate sense of causation."
+
+"You're sure it's worth while."
+
+"For me--certainly.  I don't discuss that any more."
+
+"I don't limit myself too narrowly," he added.  "After all, the work
+is all one.  We who know, we who feel, are building the great modern
+state, joining wall to wall and way to way, the new great England
+rising out of the decaying old . . . we are the real statesmen--I
+like that use of 'statesmen.'. . ."
+
+"Yes," I said with many doubts.  "Yes, of course. . . ."
+
+Willersley is middle-aged now, with silver in his hair and a
+deepening benevolence in his always amiable face, and he has very
+fairly kept his word.  He has lived for social service and to do
+vast masses of useful, undistinguished, fertilising work.  Think of
+the days of arid administrative plodding and of contention still
+more arid and unrewarded, that he must have spent!  His little
+affectations of gesture and manner, imitative affectations for the
+most part, have increased, and the humorous beam and the humorous
+intonations have become a thing he puts on every morning like an old
+coat.  His devotion is mingled with a considerable whimsicality, and
+they say he is easily flattered by subordinates and easily offended
+into opposition by colleagues; he has made mistakes at times and
+followed wrong courses, still there he is, a flat contradiction to
+all the ordinary doctrine of motives, a man who has foregone any
+chances of wealth and profit, foregone any easier paths to
+distinction, foregone marriage and parentage, in order to serve the
+community.  He does it without any fee or reward except his personal
+self-satisfaction in doing this work, and he does it without any
+hope of future joys and punishments, for he is an implacable
+Rationalist.  No doubt he idealises himself a little, and dreams of
+recognition.  No doubt he gets his pleasure from a sense of power,
+from the spending and husbanding of large sums of public money, and
+from the inevitable proprietorship he must feel in the fair, fine,
+well-ordered schools he has done so much to develop.  "But for me,"
+he can say, "there would have been a Job about those diagrams, and
+that subject or this would have been less ably taught." . . .
+
+The fact remains that for him the rewards have been adequate, if not
+to content at any rate to keep him working.  Of course he covets the
+notice of the world he has served, as a lover covets the notice of
+his mistress.  Of course he thinks somewhere, somewhen, he will get
+credit.  Only last year I heard some men talking of him, and they
+were noting, with little mean smiles, how he had shown himself self-
+conscious while there was talk of some honorary degree-giving or
+other; it would, I have no doubt, please him greatly if his work
+were to flower into a crimson gown in some Academic parterre.  Why
+shouldn't it?  But that is incidental vanity at the worst; he goes
+on anyhow.  Most men don't.
+
+But we had our walk twenty years and more ago now.  He was oldish
+even then as a young man, just as he is oldish still in middle age.
+Long may his industrious elderliness flourish for the good of the
+world!  He lectured a little in conversation then; he lectures more
+now and listens less, toilsomely disentangling what you already
+understand, giving you in detail the data you know; these are things
+like callosities that come from a man's work.
+
+Our long three weeks' talk comes back to me as a memory of ideas and
+determinations slowly growing, all mixed up with a smell of wood
+smoke and pine woods and huge precipices and remote gleams of snow-
+fields and the sound of cascading torrents rushing through deep
+gorges far below.  It is mixed, too, with gossips with waitresses
+and fellow travellers, with my first essays in colloquial German and
+Italian, with disputes about the way to take, and other things that
+I will tell of in another section.  But the white passion of human
+service was our dominant theme.  Not simply perhaps nor altogether
+unselfishly, but quite honestly, and with at least a frequent self-
+forgetfulness, did we want to do fine and noble things, to help in
+their developing, to lessen misery, to broaden and exalt life.  It
+is very hard--perhaps it is impossible--to present in a page or two
+the substance and quality of nearly a month's conversation,
+conversation that is casual and discursive in form, that ranges
+carelessly from triviality to immensity, and yet is constantly
+resuming a constructive process, as workmen on a wall loiter and
+jest and go and come back, and all the while build.
+
+We got it more and more definite that the core of our purpose
+beneath all its varied aspects must needs be order and discipline.
+"Muddle," said I, "is the enemy."  That remains my belief to this
+day.  Clearness and order, light and foresight, these things I know
+for Good.  It was muddle had just given us all the still freshly
+painful disasters and humiliations of the war, muddle that gives us
+the visibly sprawling disorder of our cities and industrial country-
+side, muddle that gives us the waste of life, the limitations,
+wretchedness and unemployment of the poor.  Muddle!  I remember
+myself quoting Kipling--
+
+
+    "All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,
+     All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less."
+
+
+"We build the state," we said over and over again.  "That is what we
+are for--servants of the new reorganisation!"
+
+We planned half in earnest and half Utopianising, a League of Social
+Service.
+
+We talked of the splendid world of men that might grow out of such
+unpaid and ill-paid work as we were setting our faces to do.  We
+spoke of the intricate difficulties, the monstrous passive
+resistances, the hostilities to such a development as we conceived
+our work subserved, and we spoke with that underlying confidence in
+the invincibility of the causes we adopted that is natural to young
+and scarcely tried men.
+
+We talked much of the detailed life of politics so far as it was
+known to us, and there Willersley was more experienced and far
+better informed than I; we discussed possible combinations and
+possible developments, and the chances of some great constructive
+movement coming from the heart-searchings the Boer war had
+occasioned.  We would sink to gossip--even at the Suetonius level.
+Willersley would decline towards illuminating anecdotes that I
+capped more or less loosely from my private reading.  We were
+particularly wise, I remember, upon the management of newspapers,
+because about that we knew nothing whatever.  We perceived that
+great things were to be done through newspapers.  We talked of
+swaying opinion and moving great classes to massive action.
+
+Men are egotistical even in devotion.  All our splendid projects
+were thickset with the first personal pronoun.  We both could write,
+and all that we said in general terms was reflected in the
+particular in our minds; it was ourselves we saw, and no others,
+writing and speaking that moving word.  We had already produced
+manuscript and passed the initiations of proof reading; I had been a
+frequent speaker in the Union, and Willersley was an active man on
+the School Board.  Our feet were already on the lower rungs that led
+up and up.  He was six and twenty, and I twenty-two.  We intimated
+our individual careers in terms of bold expectation.  I had
+prophetic glimpses of walls and hoardings clamorous with "Vote for
+Remington," and Willersley no doubt saw himself chairman of this
+committee and that, saying a few slightly ironical words after the
+declaration of the poll, and then sitting friendly beside me on the
+government benches.  There was nothing impossible in such dreams.
+Why not the Board of Education for him?  My preference at that time
+wavered between the Local Government Board--I had great ideas about
+town-planning, about revisions of municipal areas and re-organised
+internal transit--and the War Office.  I swayed strongly towards the
+latter as the journey progressed.  My educational bias came later.
+
+The swelling ambitions that have tramped over Alpine passes!  How
+many of them, like mine, have come almost within sight of
+realisation before they failed?
+
+There were times when we posed like young gods (of unassuming
+exterior), and times when we were full of the absurdest little
+solicitudes about our prospects.  There were times when one surveyed
+the whole world of men as if it was a little thing at one's feet,
+and by way of contrast I remember once lying in bed--it must have
+been during this holiday, though I cannot for the life of me fix
+where--and speculating whether perhaps some day I might not be a
+K. C. B., Sir Richard Remington, K. C. B., M. P.
+
+But the big style prevailed. . . .
+
+We could not tell from minute to minute whether we were planning for
+a world of solid reality, or telling ourselves fairy tales about
+this prospect of life.  So much seemed possible, and everything we
+could think of so improbable.  There were lapses when it seemed to
+me I could never be anything but just the entirely unimportant and
+undistinguished young man I was for ever and ever.  I couldn't even
+think of myself as five and thirty.
+
+Once I remember Willersley going over a list of failures, and why
+they had failed--but young men in the twenties do not know much
+about failures.
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+Willersley and I professed ourselves Socialists, but by this time I
+knew my Rodbertus as well as my Marx, and there was much in our
+socialism that would have shocked Chris Robinson as much as anything
+in life could have shocked him.  Socialism as a simple democratic
+cry we had done with for ever.  We were socialists because
+Individualism for us meant muddle, meant a crowd of separated,
+undisciplined little people all obstinately and ignorantly doing
+things jarringly, each one in his own way.  "Each," I said quoting
+words of my father's that rose apt in my memory, "snarling from his
+own little bit of property, like a dog tied to a cart's tail."
+
+"Essentially," said Willersley, "essentially we're for conscription,
+in peace and war alike.  The man who owns property is a public
+official and has to behave as such.  That's the gist of socialism as
+I understand it."
+
+"Or be dismissed from his post," I said, "and replaced by some
+better sort of official.  A man's none the less an official because
+he's irresponsible.  What he does with his property affects people
+just the same.  Private!  No one is really private but an outlaw. . . ."
+
+Order and devotion were the very essence of our socialism, and a
+splendid collective vigour and happiness its end.  We projected an
+ideal state, an organised state as confident and powerful as modern
+science, as balanced and beautiful as a body, as beneficent as
+sunshine, the organised state that should end muddle for ever; it
+ruled all our ideals and gave form to all our ambitions.
+
+Every man was to be definitely related to that, to have his
+predominant duty to that.  Such was the England renewed we had in
+mind, and how to serve that end, to subdue undisciplined worker and
+undisciplined wealth to it, and make the Scientific Commonweal,
+King, was the continuing substance of our intercourse.
+
+
+
+11
+
+
+Every day the wine of the mountains was stronger in our blood, and
+the flush of our youth deeper.  We would go in the morning sunlight
+along some narrow Alpine mule-path shouting large suggestions for
+national reorganisation, and weighing considerations as lightly as
+though the world was wax in our hands.  "Great England," we said in
+effect, over and over again, "and we will be among the makers!
+England renewed!  The country has been warned; it has learnt its
+lesson.  The disasters and anxieties of the war have sunk in.
+England has become serious. . . .  Oh! there are big things before
+us to do; big enduring things!"
+
+One evening we walked up to the loggia of a little pilgrimage
+church, I forget its name, that stands out on a conical hill at the
+head of a winding stair above the town of Locarno.  Down below the
+houses clustered amidst a confusion of heat-bitten greenery.   I had
+been sitting silently on the parapet, looking across to the purple
+mountain masses where Switzerland passes into Italy, and the drift
+of our talk seemed suddenly to gather to a head.
+
+I broke into speech, giving form to the thoughts that had been
+accumulating.  My words have long since passed out of my memory, the
+phrases of familiar expression have altered for me, but the
+substance remains as clear as ever.  I said how we were in our
+measure emperors and kings, men undriven, free to do as we pleased
+with life; we classed among the happy ones, our bread and common
+necessities were given us for nothing, we had abilities,--it wasn't
+modesty but cowardice to behave as if we hadn't--and Fortune watched
+us to see what we might do with opportunity and the world.
+
+"There are so many things to do, you see," began Willersley, in his
+judicial lecturer's voice.
+
+"So many things we may do," I interrupted, "with all these years
+before us. . . .  We're exceptional men.  It's our place, our duty,
+to do things."
+
+"Here anyhow," I said, answering the faint amusement of his face;
+"I've got no modesty.  Everything conspires to set me up.  Why
+should I run about like all those grubby little beasts down there,
+seeking nothing but mean little vanities and indulgencies--and then
+take credit for modesty?  I KNOW I am capable.  I KNOW I have
+imagination.  Modesty!  I know if I don't attempt the very biggest
+things in life I am a damned shirk.  The very biggest!  Somebody has
+to attempt them.  I feel like a loaded gun that is only a little
+perplexed because it has to find out just where to aim itself. . . ."
+
+The lake and the frontier villages, a white puff of steam on the
+distant railway to Luino, the busy boats and steamers trailing
+triangular wakes of foam, the long vista eastward towards
+battlemented Bellinzona, the vast mountain distances, now tinged
+with sunset light, behind this nearer landscape, and the southward
+waters with remote coast towns shining dimly, waters that merged at
+last in a luminous golden haze, made a broad panoramic spectacle.
+It was as if one surveyed the world,--and it was like the games I
+used to set out upon my nursery floor.  I was exalted by it; I felt
+larger than men.  So kings should feel.
+
+That sense of largeness came to me then, and it has come to me since,
+again and again, a splendid intimation or a splendid vanity.  Once,
+I remember, when I looked at Genoa from the mountain crest behind
+the town and saw that multitudinous place in all its beauty of width
+and abundance and clustering human effort, and once as I was
+steaming past the brown low hills of Staten Island towards the
+towering vigour and clamorous vitality of New York City, that mood
+rose to its quintessence.  And once it came to me, as I shall tell,
+on Dover cliffs.  And a hundred times when I have thought of England
+as our country might be, with no wretched poor, no wretched rich, a
+nation armed and ordered, trained and purposeful amidst its vales
+and rivers, that emotion of collective ends and collective purposes
+has returned to me.  I felt as great as humanity.  For a brief
+moment I was humanity, looking at the world I had made and had still
+to make. . . .
+
+
+
+12
+
+
+And mingled with these dreams of power and patriotic service there
+was another series of a different quality and a different colour,
+like the antagonistic colour of a shot silk.  The white life and the
+red life, contrasted and interchanged, passing swiftly at a turn
+from one to another, and refusing ever to mingle peacefully one with
+the other.  I was asking myself openly and distinctly: what are you
+going to do for the world?  What are you going to do with yourself?
+and with an increasing strength and persistence Nature in spite of
+my averted attention was asking me in penetrating undertones: what
+are you going to do about this other fundamental matter, the beauty
+of girls and women and your desire for them?
+
+I have told of my sisterless youth and the narrow circumstances of
+my upbringing.  It made all women-kind mysterious to me.  If it had
+not been for my Staffordshire cousins I do not think I should have
+known any girls at all until I was twenty.  Of Staffordshire I will
+tell a little later.  But I can remember still how through all those
+ripening years, the thought of women's beauty, their magic presence
+in the world beside me and the unknown, untried reactions of their
+intercourse, grew upon me and grew, as a strange presence grows in a
+room when one is occupied by other things.  I busied myself and
+pretended to be wholly occupied, and there the woman stood, full
+half of life neglected, and it seemed to my averted mind sometimes
+that she was there clad and dignified and divine, and sometimes
+Aphrodite shining and commanding, and sometimes that Venus who
+stoops and allures.
+
+This travel abroad seemed to have released a multitude of things in
+my mind; the clear air, the beauty of the sunshine, the very blue of
+the glaciers made me feel my body and quickened all those
+disregarded dreams.  I saw the sheathed beauty of women's forms all
+about me, in the cheerful waitresses at the inns, in the pedestrians
+one encountered in the tracks, in the chance fellow travellers at
+the hotel tables.  "Confound it!" said I, and talked all the more
+zealously of that greater England that was calling us.
+
+I remember that we passed two Germans, an old man and a tall fair
+girl, father and daughter, who were walking down from Saas.   She
+came swinging and shining towards us, easy and strong.  I worshipped
+her as she approached.
+
+"Gut Tag!" said Willersley, removing his hat.
+
+"Morgen!" said the old man, saluting.
+
+I stared stockishly at the girl, who passed with an indifferent
+face.
+
+That sticks in my mind as a picture remains in a room, it has kept
+there bright and fresh as a thing seen yesterday, for twenty
+years. . . .
+
+I flirted hesitatingly once or twice with comely serving girls, and
+was a little ashamed lest Willersley should detect the keen interest
+I took in them, and then as we came over the pass from Santa Maria
+Maggiore to Cannobio, my secret preoccupation took me by surprise
+and flooded me and broke down my pretences.
+
+The women in that valley are very beautiful--women vary from valley
+to valley in the Alps and are plain and squat here and divinities
+five miles away--and as we came down we passed a group of five or
+six of them resting by the wayside.  Their burthens were beside
+them, and one like Ceres held a reaping hook in her brown hand.  She
+watched us approaching and smiled faintly, her eyes at mine.
+
+There was some greeting, and two of them laughed together.
+
+We passed.
+
+"Glorious girls they were," said Willersley, and suddenly an immense
+sense of boredom enveloped me.  I saw myself striding on down that
+winding road, talking of politics and parties and bills of
+parliament and all sorts of dessicated things.  That road seemed to
+me to wind on for ever down to dust and infinite dreariness.  I knew
+it for a way of death.  Reality was behind us.
+
+Willersley set himself to draw a sociological moral.  "I'm not so
+sure," he said in a voice of intense discriminations, "after all,
+that agricultural work isn't good for women."
+
+"Damn agricultural work!" I said, and broke out into a vigorous
+cursing of all I held dear.  "Fettered things we are!" I cried.  "I
+wonder why I stand it!"
+
+"Stand what?"
+
+"Why don't I go back and make love to those girls and let the world
+and you and everything go hang?  Deep breasts and rounded limbs--and
+we poor emasculated devils go tramping by with the blood of youth in
+us! . . ."
+
+"I'm not quite sure, Remington," said Willersley, looking at me with
+a deliberately quaint expression over his glasses, "that picturesque
+scenery is altogether good for your morals."
+
+That fever was still in my blood when we came to Locarno.
+
+
+
+13
+
+
+Along the hot and dusty lower road between the Orrido of Traffiume
+and Cannobio Willersley had developed his first blister.  And partly
+because of that and partly because there was a bag at the station
+that gave us the refreshment of clean linen and partly because of
+the lazy lower air into which we had come, we decided upon three or
+four days' sojourn in the Empress Hotel.
+
+We dined that night at a table-d'hote, and I found myself next to an
+Englishwoman who began a conversation that was resumed presently in
+the hotel lounge.  She was a woman of perhaps thirty-three or
+thirty-four, slenderly built, with a warm reddish skin and very
+abundant fair golden hair, the wife of a petulant-looking heavy-
+faced man of perhaps fifty-three, who smoked a cigar and dozed over
+his coffee and presently went to bed.  "He always goes to bed like
+that," she confided startlingly.  "He sleeps after all his meals.  I
+never knew such a man to sleep."
+
+Then she returned to our talk, whatever it was.
+
+We had begun at the dinner table with itineraries and the usual
+topographical talk, and she had envied our pedestrian travel.  "My
+husband doesn't walk," she said.  "His heart is weak and he cannot
+manage the hills."
+
+There was something friendly and adventurous in her manner; she
+conveyed she liked me, and when presently Willersley drifted off to
+write letters our talk sank at once to easy confidential undertones.
+I felt enterprising, and indeed it is easy to be daring with people
+one has never seen before and may never see again.  I said I loved
+beautiful scenery and all beautiful things, and the pointing note in
+my voice made her laugh.  She told me I had bold eyes, and so far as
+I can remember I said she made them bold.  "Blue they are," she
+remarked, smiling archly.  "I like blue eyes."  Then I think we
+compared ages, and she said she was the Woman of Thirty, "George
+Moore's Woman of Thirty."
+
+I had not read George Moore at the time, but I pretended to
+understand.
+
+That, I think, was our limit that evening.  She went to bed, smiling
+good-night quite prettily down the big staircase, and I and
+Willersley went out to smoke in the garden.  My head was full of
+her, and I found it necessary to talk about her.  So I made her a
+problem in sociology.  "Who the deuce are these people?" I said, "and
+how do they get a living?  They seem to have plenty of money.  He
+strikes me as being--Willersley, what is a drysalter?  I think he's
+a retired drysalter."
+
+Willersley theorised while I thought of the woman and that
+provocative quality of dash she had displayed.  The next day at
+lunch she and I met like old friends.  A huge mass of private
+thinking during the interval had been added to our effect upon one
+another.  We talked for a time of insignificant things.
+
+"What do you do," she asked rather quickly, "after lunch?  Take a
+siesta?"
+
+"Sometimes," I said, and hung for a moment eye to eye.
+
+We hadn't a doubt of each other, but my heart was beating like a
+steamer propeller when it lifts out of the water.
+
+"Do you get a view from your room?" she asked after a pause.
+
+"It's on the third floor, Number seventeen, near the staircase.  My
+friend's next door."
+
+She began to talk of books.  She was interested in Christian
+Science, she said, and spoke of a book.  I forget altogether what
+that book was called, though I remember to this day with the utmost
+exactness the purplish magenta of its cover.  She said she would
+lend it to me and hesitated.
+
+Willersley wanted to go for an expedition across the lake that
+afternoon, but I refused.  He made some other proposals that I
+rejected abruptly.  "I shall write in my room," I said.
+
+"Why not write down here?"
+
+"I shall write in my room," I snarled like a thwarted animal, and he
+looked at me curiously.  "Very well," he said; "then I'll make some
+notes and think about that order of ours out under the magnolias."
+
+I hovered about the lounge for a time buying postcards and
+feverishly restless, watching the movements of the other people.
+Finally I went up to my room and sat down by the windows, staring
+out.  There came a little tap at the unlocked door and in an
+instant, like the go of a taut bowstring, I was up and had it open.
+
+"Here is that book," she said, and we hesitated.
+
+"COME IN!" I whispered, trembling from head to foot.
+
+"You're just a boy," she said in a low tone.
+
+I did not feel a bit like a lover, I felt like a burglar with the
+safe-door nearly opened.  "Come in," I said almost impatiently, for
+anyone might be in the passage, and I gripped her wrist and drew her
+towards me.
+
+"What do you mean?" she answered with a faint smile on her lips, and
+awkward and yielding.
+
+I shut the door behind her, still holding her with one hand, then
+turned upon her--she was laughing nervously--and without a word drew
+her to me and kissed her.  And I remember that as I kissed her she
+made a little noise almost like the purring miaow with which a cat
+will greet one and her face, close to mine, became solemn and
+tender.
+
+She was suddenly a different being from the discontented wife who
+had tapped a moment since on my door, a woman transfigured. . . .
+
+That evening I came down to dinner a monster of pride, for behold! I
+was a man.  I felt myself the most wonderful and unprecedented of
+adventurers.  It was hard to believe that any one in the world
+before had done as much.  My mistress and I met smiling, we carried
+things off admirably, and it seemed to me that Willersley was the
+dullest old dog in the world.  I wanted to give him advice.  I
+wanted to give him derisive pokes.  After dinner and coffee in the
+lounge I was too excited and hilarious to go to bed, I made him come
+with me down to the cafe under the arches by the pier, and there
+drank beer and talked extravagant nonsense about everything under
+the sun, in order not to talk about the happenings of the afternoon.
+All the time something shouted within me: "I am a man!  I am a
+man!" . . .
+
+"What shall we do to-morrow?" said he.
+
+"I'm for loafing," I said.  "Let's row in the morning and spend to-
+morrow afternoon just as we did to-day."
+
+"They say the church behind the town is worth seeing."
+
+"We'll go up about sunset; that's the best time for it.  We can
+start about five."
+
+We heard music, and went further along the arcade to discover a
+place where girls in operatic Swiss peasant costume were singing and
+dancing on a creaking, protesting little stage.  I eyed their
+generous display of pink neck and arm with the seasoned eye of a man
+who has lived in the world.  Life was perfectly simple and easy, I
+felt, if one took it the right way.
+
+Next day Willersley wanted to go on, but I delayed.  Altogether I
+kept him back four days.  Then abruptly my mood changed, and we
+decided to start early the following morning.  I remember, though a
+little indistinctly, the feeling of my last talk with that woman
+whose surname, odd as it may seem, either I never learnt or I have
+forgotten.  (Her christian name was Milly.)  She was tired and
+rather low-spirited, and disposed to be sentimental, and for the
+first time in our intercourse I found myself liking her for the sake
+of her own personality.  There was something kindly and generous
+appearing behind the veil of naive and uncontrolled sensuality she
+had worn.  There was a curious quality of motherliness in her
+attitude to me that something in my nature answered and approved.
+She didn't pretend to keep it up that she had yielded to my
+initiative.  "I've done you no harm," she said a little doubtfully,
+an odd note for a man's victim!  And, "we've had a good time.  You
+have liked me, haven't you?"
+
+She interested me in her lonely dissatisfied life; she was childless
+and had no hope of children, and her husband was the only son of a
+rich meat salesman, very mean, a mighty smoker--"he reeks of it,"
+she said, "always"--and interested in nothing but golf, billiards
+(which he played very badly), pigeon shooting, convivial Free
+Masonry and Stock Exchange punting.  Mostly they drifted about the
+Riviera.  Her mother had contrived her marriage when she was
+eighteen.  They were the first samples I ever encountered of the
+great multitude of functionless property owners which encumbers
+modern civilisation--but at the time I didn't think much of that
+aspect of them. . . .
+
+I tell all this business as it happened without comment, because I
+have no comment to make.  It was all strange to me, strange rather
+than wonderful, and, it may be, some dream of beauty died for ever
+in those furtive meetings; it happened to me, and I could scarcely
+have been more irresponsible in the matter or controlled events less
+if I had been suddenly pushed over a cliff into water.  I swam, of
+course--finding myself in it.  Things tested me, and I reacted, as I
+have told.  The bloom of my innocence, if ever there had been such a
+thing, was gone.  And here is the remarkable thing about it; at the
+time and for some days I was over-weeningly proud; I have never been
+so proud before or since; I felt I had been promoted to virility; I
+was unable to conceal my exultation from Willersley.  It was a mood
+of shining shameless ungracious self-approval.  As he and I went
+along in the cool morning sunshine by the rice fields in the throat
+of the Val Maggia a silence fell between us.
+
+"You know?" I said abruptly,--"about that woman?"
+
+Willersley did not answer for a moment.  He looked at me over the
+corner of his spectacles.
+
+"Things went pretty far?" he asked.
+
+"Oh! all the way!" and I had a twinge of fatuous pride in my
+unpremeditated achievement.
+
+"She came to your room?"
+
+I nodded.
+
+"I heard her.  I heard her whispering. . . .  The whispering and
+rustling and so on.  I was in my room yesterday. . . .  Any one
+might have heard you."
+
+I went on with my head in the air.
+
+"You might have been caught, and that would have meant endless
+trouble.  You might have incurred all sorts of consequences.  What
+did you know about her? . . .  We have wasted four days in that hot
+close place.  When we found that League of Social Service we were
+talking about," he said with a determined eye upon me, "chastity
+will be first among the virtues prescribed."
+
+"I shall form a rival league," I said a little damped.  "I'm hanged
+if I give up a single desire in me until I know why."
+
+He lifted his chin and stared before him through his glasses at
+nothing.  "There are some things," he said, "that a man who means to
+work--to do great public services--MUST turn his back upon.  I'm not
+discussing the rights or wrongs of this sort of thing.  It happens
+to be the conditions we work under.  It will probably always be so.
+If you want to experiment in that way, if you want even to discuss
+it,--out you go from political life.  You must know that's so. . . .
+You're a strange man, Remington, with a kind of kink in you.  You've
+a sort of force.  You might happen to do immense things. . . .
+Only--"
+
+He stopped.  He had said all that he had forced himself to say.
+
+"I mean to take myself as I am," I said.  "I'm going to get
+experience for humanity out of all my talents--and bury nothing."
+
+Willersley twisted his face to its humorous expression.  "I doubt if
+sexual proclivities," he said drily, "come within the scope of the
+parable."
+
+I let that go for a little while.  Then I broke out.  "Sex!" said I,
+"is a fundamental thing in life.  We went through all this at
+Trinity.  I'm going to look at it, experience it, think about it--
+and get it square with the rest of life.  Career and Politics must
+take their chances of that.  It's part of the general English
+slackness that they won't look this in the face.  Gods! what a
+muffled time we're coming out of!  Sex means breeding, and breeding
+is a necessary function in a nation.  The Romans broke up upon that.
+The Americans fade out amidst their successes.  Eugenics--"
+
+"THAT wasn't Eugenics," said Willersley.
+
+"It was a woman," I said after a little interval, feeling oddly that
+I had failed altogether to answer him, and yet had a strong dumb
+case against him.
+
+
+
+BOOK THE SECOND
+
+MARGARET
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST
+
+MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE
+
+
+1
+
+I must go back a little way with my story.  In the previous book I
+have described the kind of education that happens to a man of my
+class nowadays, and it has been convenient to leap a phase in my
+experience that I must now set out at length.  I want to tell in
+this second hook how I came to marry, and to do that I must give
+something of the atmosphere in which I first met my wife and some
+intimations of the forces that went to her making.  I met her in
+Staffordshire while I was staying with that uncle of whom I have
+already spoken, the uncle who sold my father's houses and settled my
+mother in Penge.  Margaret was twenty then and I was twenty-two.
+
+It was just before the walking tour in Switzerland that opened up so
+much of the world to me.  I saw her once, for an afternoon, and
+circumstances so threw her up in relief that I formed a very vivid
+memory of her.  She was in the sharpest contrast with the industrial
+world about her; she impressed me as a dainty blue flower might do,
+come upon suddenly on a clinker heap.  She remained in my mind at
+once a perplexing interrogation and a symbol. . . .
+
+But first I must tell of my Staffordshire cousins and the world that
+served as a foil for her.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+I first went to stay with my cousins when I was an awkward youth of
+sixteen, wearing deep mourning for my mother.  My uncle wanted to
+talk things over with me, he said, and if he could, to persuade me
+to go into business instead of going up to Cambridge.
+
+I remember that visit on account of all sorts of novel things, but
+chiefly, I think, because it was the first time I encountered
+anything that deserves to be spoken of as wealth.  For the first
+time in my life I had to do with people who seemed to have endless
+supplies of money, unlimited good clothes, numerous servants; whose
+daily life was made up of things that I had hitherto considered to
+be treats or exceptional extravagances.  My cousins of eighteen and
+nineteen took cabs, for instance, with the utmost freedom, and
+travelled first-class in the local trains that run up and down the
+district of the Five Towns with an entire unconsciousness of the
+magnificence, as it seemed to me, of such a proceeding.
+
+The family occupied a large villa in Newcastle, with big lawns
+before it and behind, a shrubbery with quite a lot of shrubs, a
+coach house and stable, and subordinate dwelling-places for the
+gardener and the coachman.  Every bedroom contained a gas heater and
+a canopied brass bedstead, and had a little bathroom attached
+equipped with the porcelain baths and fittings my uncle
+manufactured, bright and sanitary and stamped with his name, and the
+house was furnished throughout with chairs and tables in bright
+shining wood, soft and prevalently red Turkish carpets, cosy
+corners, curtained archways, gold-framed landscapes, overmantels, a
+dining-room sideboard like a palace with a large Tantalus, and
+electric light fittings of a gay and expensive quality.  There was a
+fine billiard-room on the ground floor with three comfortable sofas
+and a rotating bookcase containing an excellent collection of the
+English and American humorists from THREE MEN IN A BOAT to the
+penultimate Mark Twain.  There was also a conservatory opening out
+of the dining-room, to which the gardener brought potted flowers in
+their season. . . .
+
+My aunt was a little woman with a scared look and a cap that would
+get over one eye, not very like my mother, and nearly eight years
+her junior; she was very much concerned with keeping everything
+nice, and unmercifully bullied by my two cousins, who took after
+their father and followed the imaginations of their own hearts.
+They were tall, dark, warmly flushed girls handsome rather than
+pretty.  Gertrude, the eldest and tallest, had eyes that were almost
+black; Sibyl was of a stouter build, and her eyes, of which she was
+shamelessly proud, were dark blue.  Sibyl's hair waved, and
+Gertrude's was severely straight.  They treated me on my first visit
+with all the contempt of the adolescent girl for a boy a little
+younger and infinitely less expert in the business of life than
+herself.  They were very busy with the writings of notes and certain
+mysterious goings and comings of their own, and left me very much to
+my own devices.  Their speech in my presence was full of
+unfathomable allusions.  They were the sort of girls who will talk
+over and through an uninitiated stranger with the pleasantest sense
+of superiority.
+
+I met them at breakfast and at lunch and at the half-past six
+o'clock high tea that formed the third chief meal of the day.  I
+heard them rattling off the compositions of Chaminade and Moskowski,
+with great decision and effect, and hovered on the edge of tennis
+foursomes where it was manifest to the dullest intelligence that my
+presence was unnecessary.  Then I went off to find some readable
+book in the place, but apart from miscellaneous popular novels, some
+veterinary works, a number of comic books, old bound volumes of THE
+ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS and a large, popular illustrated History of
+England, there was very little to be found.  My aunt talked to me in
+a casual feeble way, chiefly about my mother's last illness.  The
+two had seen very little of each other for many years; she made no
+secret of it that the ineligible qualities of my father were the
+cause of the estrangement.  The only other society in the house
+during the day was an old and rather decayed Skye terrier in
+constant conflict with what were no doubt imaginary fleas.  I took
+myself off for a series of walks, and acquired a considerable
+knowledge of the scenery and topography of the Potteries.
+
+It puzzled my aunt that I did not go westward, where it was country-
+side and often quite pretty, with hedgerows and fields and copses
+and flowers.  But always I went eastward, where in a long valley
+industrialism smokes and sprawls.  That was the stuff to which I
+turned by nature, to the human effort, and the accumulation and jar
+of men's activities.  And in such a country as that valley social
+and economic relations were simple and manifest.  Instead of the
+limitless confusion of London's population, in which no man can
+trace any but the most slender correlation between rich and poor, in
+which everyone seems disconnected and adrift from everyone, you can
+see here the works, the potbank or the ironworks or what not, and
+here close at hand the congested, meanly-housed workers, and at a
+little distance a small middle-class quarter, and again remoter, the
+big house of the employer.  It was like a very simplified diagram--
+after the untraceable confusion of London.
+
+I prowled alone, curious and interested, through shabby back streets
+of mean little homes; I followed canals, sometimes canals of
+mysteriously heated waters with ghostly wisps of steam rising
+against blackened walls or a distant prospect of dustbin-fed
+vegetable gardens, I saw the women pouring out from the potbanks,
+heard the hooters summoning the toilers to work, lost my way upon
+slag heaps as big as the hills of the south country, dodged trains
+at manifestly dangerous level crossings, and surveyed across dark
+intervening spaces, the flaming uproar, the gnome-like activities of
+iron foundries.  I heard talk of strikes and rumours of strikes, and
+learnt from the columns of some obscure labour paper I bought one
+day, of the horrors of the lead poisoning that was in those days one
+of the normal risks of certain sorts of pottery workers.  Then back
+I came, by the ugly groaning and clanging steam train of that period,
+to my uncle's house and lavish abundance of money and more or less
+furtive flirtations and the tinkle of Moskowski and Chaminade.  It
+was, I say, diagrammatic.  One saw the expropriator and the
+expropriated--as if Marx had arranged the picture.  It was as
+jumbled and far more dingy and disastrous than any of the confusions
+of building and development that had surrounded my youth at
+Bromstead and Penge, but it had a novel quality of being explicable.
+I found great virtue in the word "exploitation."
+
+There stuck in my mind as if it was symbolical of the whole thing
+the twisted figure of a man, whose face had been horribly scalded--I
+can't describe how, except that one eye was just expressionless
+white--and he ground at an organ bearing a card which told in weak
+and bitterly satirical phrasing that he had been scalded by the hot
+water from the tuyeres of the blast furnace of Lord Pandram's works.
+He had been scalded and quite inadequately compensated and
+dismissed.  And Lord Pandram was worth half a million.
+
+That upturned sightless white eye of his took possession of my
+imagination.  I don't think that even then I was swayed by any crude
+melodramatic conception of injustice.  I was quite prepared to
+believe the card wasn't a punctiliously accurate statement of fact,
+and that a case could be made out for Lord Pandram.  Still there in
+the muddy gutter, painfully and dreadfully, was the man, and he was
+smashed and scalded and wretched, and he ground his dismal
+hurdygurdy with a weary arm, calling upon Heaven and the passer-by
+for help, for help and some sort of righting--one could not imagine
+quite what.  There he was as a fact, as a by-product of the system
+that heaped my cousins with trinkets and provided the comic novels
+and the abundant cigars and spacious billiard-room of my uncle's
+house.  I couldn't disconnect him and them.
+
+My uncle on his part did nothing to conceal the state of war that
+existed between himself and his workers, and the mingled contempt
+and animosity he felt from them.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Prosperity had overtaken my uncle.  So quite naturally he believed
+that every man who was not as prosperous as he was had only himself
+to blame.  He was rich and he had left school and gone into his
+father's business at fifteen, and that seemed to him the proper age
+at which everyone's education should terminate.  He was very anxious
+to dissuade me from going up to Cambridge, and we argued
+intermittently through all my visit.
+
+I had remembered him as a big and buoyant man, striding
+destructively about the nursery floor of my childhood, and saluting
+my existence by slaps, loud laughter, and questions about half
+herrings and half eggs subtly framed to puzzle and confuse my mind.
+I didn't see him for some years until my father's death, and then he
+seemed rather smaller, though still a fair size, yellow instead of
+red and much less radiantly aggressive.  This altered effect was due
+not so much to my own changed perspectives, I fancy, as to the facts
+that he was suffering for continuous cigar smoking, and being taken
+in hand by his adolescent daughters who had just returned from
+school.
+
+During my first visit there was a perpetual series of--the only word
+is rows, between them and him.  Up to the age of fifteen or
+thereabouts, he had maintained his ascendancy over them by simple
+old-fashioned physical chastisement.  Then after an interlude of a
+year it had dawned upon them that power had mysteriously departed
+from him.  He had tried stopping their pocket money, but they found
+their mother financially amenable; besides which it was fundamental
+to my uncle's attitude that he should give them money freely.  Not
+to do so would seem like admitting a difficulty in making it.  So
+that after he had stopped their allowances for the fourth time Sybil
+and Gertrude were prepared to face beggary without a qualm.  It had
+been his pride to give them the largest allowance of any girls at
+the school, not even excepting the granddaughter of Fladden the
+Borax King, and his soul recoiled from this discipline as it had
+never recoiled from the ruder method of the earlier phase.  Both
+girls had developed to a high pitch in their mutual recriminations a
+gift for damaging retort, and he found it an altogether deadlier
+thing than the power of the raised voice that had always cowed my
+aunt.  Whenever he became heated with them, they frowned as if
+involuntarily, drew in their breath sharply, said: "Daddy, you
+really must not say--" and corrected his pronunciation.  Then, at a
+great advantage, they resumed the discussion. . . .
+
+My uncle's views about Cambridge, however, were perfectly clear and
+definite.  It was waste of time and money.  It was all damned
+foolery.  Did they make a man a better business man?  Not a bit of
+it.  He gave instances.  It spoilt a man for business by giving him
+"false ideas."  Some men said that at college a man formed useful
+friendships.  What use were friendships to a business man?  He might
+get to know lords, but, as my uncle pointed out, a lord's
+requirements in his line of faience were little greater than a
+common  man's.  If college introduced him to hotel proprietors there
+might be something in it.  Perhaps it helped a man into Parliament,
+Parliament still being a confused retrogressive corner in the world
+where lawyers and suchlike sheltered themselves from the onslaughts
+of common-sense behind a fog of Latin and Greek and twaddle and
+tosh; but I wasn't the sort to go into Parliament, unless I meant to
+be a lawyer.  Did I mean to be a lawyer?  It cost no end of money,
+and was full of uncertainties, and there were no judges nor great
+solicitors among my relations.  "Young chaps think they get on by
+themselves," said my uncle.  "It isn't so.  Not unless they take
+their coats off.  I took mine off before I was your age by nigh a
+year."
+
+We were at cross purposes from the outset, because I did not think
+men lived to make money; and I was obtuse to the hints he was
+throwing out at the possibilities of his own potbank, not willfully
+obtuse, but just failing to penetrate his meaning.  Whatever City
+Merchants had or had not done for me, Flack, Topham and old Gates
+had certainly barred my mistaking the profitable production and sale
+of lavatory basins and bathroom fittings for the highest good.  It
+was only upon reflection that it dawned upon me that the splendid
+chance for a young fellow with my uncle, "me, having no son of my
+own," was anything but an illustration for comparison with my own
+chosen career.
+
+I still remember very distinctly my uncle's talk,--he loved to speak
+"reet Staffordshire"--his rather flabby face with the mottled
+complexion that told of crude ill-regulated appetites, his clumsy
+gestures--he kept emphasising his points by prodding at me with his
+finger--the ill-worn, costly, grey tweed clothes, the watch chain of
+plain solid gold, and soft felt hat thrust back from his head.  He
+tackled me first in the garden after lunch, and then tried to raise
+me to enthusiasm by taking me to his potbank and showing me its
+organisation, from the dusty grinding mills in which whitened men
+worked and coughed, through the highly ventilated glazing room in
+which strangely masked girls looked ashamed of themselves,--"They'll
+risk death, the fools, to show their faces to a man," said my uncle,
+quite audibly--to the firing kilns and the glazing kilns, and so
+round the whole place to the railway siding and the gratifying
+spectacle of three trucks laden with executed orders.
+
+Then we went up a creaking outside staircase to his little office,
+and he showed off before me for a while, with one or two
+subordinates and the telephone.
+
+"None of your Gas," he said, "all this.  It's Real every bit of it.
+Hard cash and hard glaze."
+
+"Yes," I said, with memories of a carelessly read pamphlet in my
+mind, and without any satirical intention, "I suppose you MUST use
+lead in your glazes?"
+
+Whereupon I found I had tapped the ruling grievance of my uncle's
+life.  He hated leadless glazes more than he hated anything, except
+the benevolent people who had organised the agitation for their use.
+"Leadless glazes ain't only fit for buns," he said.  "Let me tell
+you, my boy--"
+
+He began in a voice of bland persuasiveness that presently warmed to
+anger, to explain the whole matter.  I hadn't the rights of the
+matter at all.  Firstly, there was practically no such thing as lead
+poisoning.  Secondly, not everyone was liable to lead poisoning, and
+it would be quite easy to pick out the susceptible types--as soon as
+they had it--and put them to other work.  Thirdly, the evil effects
+of lead poisoning were much exaggerated.  Fourthly, and this was in
+a particularly confidential undertone, many of the people liked to
+get lead poisoning, especially the women, because it caused
+abortion.  I might not believe it, but he knew it for a fact.
+Fifthly, the work-people simply would not learn the gravity of the
+danger, and would eat with unwashed hands, and incur all sorts of
+risks, so that as my uncle put it: "the fools deserve what they
+get."  Sixthly, he and several associated firms had organised a
+simple and generous insurance scheme against lead-poisoning risks.
+Seventhly, he never wearied in rational (as distinguished from
+excessive, futile and expensive) precautions against the disease.
+Eighthly, in the ill-equipped shops of his minor competitors lead
+poisoning was a frequent and virulent evil, and people had
+generalised from these exceptional cases.  The small shops, he
+hazarded, looking out of the cracked and dirty window at distant
+chimneys, might be advantageously closed. . . .
+
+"But what's the good of talking?" said my uncle, getting off the
+table on which he had been sitting.  "Seems to me there'll come a
+time when a master will get fined if he don't run round the works
+blowing his girls noses for them.  That's about what it'll come to."
+
+He walked to the black mantelpiece and stood on the threadbare rug,
+and urged me not to be misled by the stories of prejudiced and
+interested enemies of our national industries.
+
+"They'll get a strike one of these days, of employers, and then
+we'll see a bit," he said.  "They'll drive Capital abroad and then
+they'll whistle to get it back again." . . .
+
+He led the way down the shaky wooden steps and cheered up to tell me
+of his way of checking his coal consumption.  He exchanged a
+ferocious greeting with one or two workpeople, and so we came out of
+the factory gates into the ugly narrow streets, paved with a
+peculiarly hard diapered brick of an unpleasing inky-blue colour,
+and bordered with the mean and squalid homes of his workers.  Doors
+stood open and showed grimy interiors, and dirty ill-clad children
+played in the kennel.
+
+We passed a sickly-looking girl with a sallow face, who dragged her
+limbs and peered at us dimly with painful eyes.  She stood back, as
+partly blinded people will do, to allow us to pass, although there
+was plenty of room for us.
+
+I glanced back at her.
+
+"THAT'S ploombism," said my uncle casually.
+
+"What?" said I.
+
+"Ploombism.  And the other day I saw a fool of a girl, and what
+d'you think?  She'd got a basin that hadn't been fired, a cracked
+piece of biscuit it was, up on the shelf over her head, just all
+over glaze, killing glaze, man, and she was putting up her hand if
+you please, and eating her dinner out of it.  Got her dinner in it!
+
+"Eating her dinner out of it," he repeated in loud and bitter tones,
+and punched me hard in the ribs.
+
+"And then they comes to THAT--and grumbles.  And the fools up in
+Westminster want you to put in fans here and fans there--the Longton
+fools have. . . .  And then eating their dinners out of it all the
+time!" . . .
+
+At high tea that night--my uncle was still holding out against
+evening dinner--Sibyl and Gertrude made what was evidently a
+concerted demand for a motor-car.
+
+"You've got your mother's brougham," he said, "that's good enough for
+you."  But he seemed shaken by the fact that some Burslem rival was
+launching out with the new invention.  "He spoils his girls," he
+remarked.  "He's a fool," and became thoughtful.
+
+Afterwards he asked me to come to him into his study; it was a room
+with a writing-desk and full of pieces of earthenware and suchlike
+litter, and we had our great row about Cambridge.
+
+"Have you thought things over, Dick?" he said.
+
+"I think I'll go to Trinity, Uncle," I said firmly.  "I want to go
+to Trinity.  It is a great college."
+
+He was manifestly chagrined.  "You're a fool," he said.
+
+I made no answer.
+
+"You're a damned fool," he said.  "But I suppose you've got to do
+it.  You could have come here--That don't matter, though, now. . .
+You'll have your time and spend your money, and be a poor half-
+starved clergyman, mucking about with the women all the day and
+afraid to have one of your own ever, or you'll be a schoolmaster or
+some such fool for the rest of your life.  Or some newspaper chap.
+That's what you'll get from Cambridge.  I'm half a mind not to let
+you.  Eh?  More than half a mind. . . ."
+
+"You've got to do the thing you can," he said, after a pause, "and
+likely it's what you're fitted for."
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+I paid several short visits to Staffordshire during my Cambridge
+days, and always these relations of mine produced the same effect of
+hardness.   My uncle's thoughts had neither atmosphere nor mystery.
+He lived in a different universe from the dreams of scientific
+construction that filled my mind.  He could as easily have
+understood Chinese poetry.  His motives were made up of intense
+rivalries with other men of his class and kind, a few vindictive
+hates springing from real and fancied slights, a habit of
+acquisition that had become a second nature, a keen love both of
+efficiency and display in his own affairs.  He seemed to me to have
+no sense of the state, no sense and much less any love of beauty, no
+charity and no sort of religious feeling whatever.  He had strong
+bodily appetites, he ate and drank freely, smoked a great deal, and
+occasionally was carried off by his passions for a "bit of a spree"
+to Birmingham or Liverpool or Manchester.  The indulgences of these
+occasions were usually followed by a period of reaction, when he was
+urgent for the suppression of nudity in the local Art Gallery and a
+harsh and forcible elevation of the superficial morals of the
+valley.  And he spoke of the ladies who ministered to the delights
+of his jolly-dog period, when he spoke of them at all, by the
+unprintable feminine equivalent.  My aunt he treated with a kindly
+contempt and considerable financial generosity, but his daughters
+tore his heart; he was so proud of them, so glad to find them money
+to spend, so resolved to own them, so instinctively jealous of every
+man who came near them.
+
+My uncle has been the clue to a great number of men for me.  He was
+an illuminating extreme.  I have learnt what not to expect from them
+through him, and to comprehend resentments and dangerous sudden
+antagonisms I should have found incomprehensible in their more
+complex forms, if I had not first seen them in him in their feral
+state.
+
+With his soft felt hat at the back of his head, his rather heavy,
+rather mottled face, his rationally thick boots and slouching tweed-
+clad form, a little round-shouldered and very obstinate looking, he
+strolls through all my speculations sucking his teeth audibly, and
+occasionally throwing out a shrewd aphorism, the intractable
+unavoidable ore of the new civilisation.
+
+Essentially he was simple.  Generally speaking, he hated and
+despised in equal measure whatever seemed to suggest that he
+personally was not the most perfect human being conceivable.  He
+hated all education after fifteen because he had had no education
+after fifteen, he hated all people who did not have high tea until
+he himself under duress gave up high tea, he hated every game except
+football, which he had played and could judge, he hated all people
+who spoke foreign languages because he knew no language but
+Staffordshire, he hated all foreigners because he was English, and
+all foreign ways because they were not his ways.  Also he hated
+particularly, and in this order, Londoner's, Yorkshiremen, Scotch,
+Welch and Irish, because they were not "reet Staffordshire," and he
+hated all other Staffordshire men as insufficiently "reet."  He
+wanted to have all his own women inviolate, and to fancy he had a
+call upon every other woman in the world.  He wanted to have the
+best cigars and the best brandy in the world to consume or give away
+magnificently, and every one else to have inferior ones.  (His
+billiard table was an extra large size, specially made and very
+inconvenient.)  And he hated Trade Unions because they interfered
+with his autocratic direction of his works, and his workpeople
+because they were not obedient and untiring mechanisms to do his
+bidding.  He was, in fact, a very naive, vigorous human being.  He
+was about as much civilised, about as much tamed to the ideas of
+collective action and mutual consideration as a Central African
+negro.
+
+There are hordes of such men as he throughout all the modern
+industrial world.  You will find the same type with the slightest
+modifications in the Pas de Calais or Rhenish Prussia or New Jersey
+or North Italy.  No doubt you would find it in New Japan.  These men
+have raised themselves up from the general mass of untrained,
+uncultured, poorish people in a hard industrious selfish struggle.
+To drive others they have had first to drive themselves.  They have
+never yet had occasion nor leisure to think of the state or social
+life as a whole, and as for dreams or beauty, it was a condition of
+survival that they should ignore such cravings.  All the distinctive
+qualities of my uncle can be thought of as dictated by his
+conditions; his success and harshness, the extravagances that
+expressed his pride in making money, the uncongenial luxury that
+sprang from rivalry, and his self-reliance, his contempt for broad
+views, his contempt for everything that he could not understand.
+
+His daughters were the inevitable children of his life.  Queer girls
+they were!  Curiously "spirited" as people phrase it, and curiously
+limited.  During my Cambridge days I went down to Staffordshire
+several times.  My uncle, though he still resented my refusal to go
+into his business, was also in his odd way proud of me.  I was his
+nephew and poor relation, and yet there I was, a young gentleman
+learning all sorts of unremunerative things in the grandest manner,
+"Latin and mook," while the sons of his neighhours, not nephews
+merely, but sons, stayed unpolished in their native town.  Every
+time I went down I found extensive changes and altered relations,
+and before I had settled down to them off I went again.  I don't
+think I was one person to them; I was a series of visitors.  There
+is a gulf of ages between a gaunt schoolboy of sixteen in unbecoming
+mourning and two vividly self-conscious girls of eighteen and
+nineteen, but a Cambridge "man" of two and twenty with a first and
+good tennis and a growing social experience, is a fair contemporary
+for two girls of twenty-three and twenty-four.
+
+A motor-car appeared, I think in my second visit, a bottle-green
+affair that opened behind, had dark purple cushions, and was
+controlled mysteriously by a man in shiny black costume and a flat
+cap.  The high tea had been shifted to seven and rechristened
+dinner, but my uncle would not dress nor consent to have wine; and
+after one painful experiment, I gathered, and a scene, he put his
+foot down and prohibited any but high-necked dresses.
+
+"Daddy's perfectly impossible," Sybil told me.
+
+The foot had descended vehemently!  "My own daughters!" he had said,
+"dressed up like--"--and had arrested himself and fumbled and
+decided to say--"actresses, and showin' their fat arms for every
+fool to stare at!"  Nor would he have any people invited to dinner.
+He didn't, he had explained, want strangers poking about in his
+house when he came home tired.  So such calling as occurred went on
+during his absence in the afternoon.
+
+One of the peculiarities of the life of these ascendant families of
+the industrial class to which wealth has come, is its tremendous
+insulations.  There were no customs of intercourse in the Five
+Towns.   All the isolated prosperities of the district sprang from
+economising, hard driven homes, in which there was neither time nor
+means for hospitality.  Social intercourse centred very largely upon
+the church or chapel, and the chapels were better at bringing people
+together than the Establishment to which my cousins belonged.  Their
+chief outlet to the wider world lay therefore through the
+acquaintances they had formed at school, and through two much less
+prosperous families of relations who lived at Longton and Hanley.  A
+number of gossiping friendships with old school mates were "kept
+up," and my cousins would "spend the afternoon" or even spend the
+day with these; such occasions led to other encounters and
+interlaced with the furtive correspondences and snatched meetings
+that formed the emotional thread of their lives.  When the billiard
+table had been new, my uncle had taken to asking in a few approved
+friends for an occasional game, but mostly the billiard-room was for
+glory and the girls.  Both of them played very well.  They never, so
+far as I know, dined out, and when at last after bitter domestic
+conflicts they began to go to dances, they went with the quavering
+connivance of my aunt, and changed into ball frocks at friends'
+houses on the way.  There was a tennis club that formed a convenient
+afternoon rendezvous, and I recall that in the period of my earlier
+visits the young bloods of the district found much satisfaction in
+taking girls for drives in dog-carts and suchlike high-wheeled
+vehicles, a disposition that died in tangled tandems at the
+apparition of motor-car's.
+
+My aunt and uncle had conceived no plans in life for their daughters
+at all.  In the undifferentiated industrial community from which
+they had sprung, girls got married somehow, and it did not occur to
+them that the concentration of property that had made them wealthy,
+had cut their children off from the general social sea in which
+their own awkward meeting had occurred, without necessarily opening
+any other world in exchange.  My uncle was too much occupied with
+the works and his business affairs and his private vices to
+philosophise about his girls; he wanted them just to keep girls,
+preferably about sixteen, and to be a sort of animated flowers and
+make home bright and be given things.  He was irritated that they
+would not remain at this, and still more irritated that they failed
+to suppress altogether their natural interest in young men.  The
+tandems would be steered by weird and devious routes to evade the
+bare chance of his bloodshot eye.  My aunt seemed to have no ideas
+whatever about what was likely to happen to her children.  She had
+indeed no ideas about anything; she took her husband and the days as
+they came.
+
+I can see now the pathetic difficulty of my cousins' position in
+life; the absence of any guidance or instruction or provision for
+their development.  They supplemented the silences of home by the
+conversation of schoolfellows and the suggestions of popular
+fiction.  They had to make what they could out of life with such
+hints as these.  The church was far too modest to offer them any
+advice.  It was obtruded upon my mind upon my first visit that they
+were both carrying on correspondences and having little furtive
+passings and seeings and meetings with the mysterious owners of
+certain initials, S. and L. K., and, if I remember rightly, "the R.
+N." brothers and cousins, I suppose, of their friends.  The same
+thing was going on, with a certain intensification, at my next
+visit, excepting only that the initials were different.  But when I
+came again their methods were maturer or I was no longer a
+negligible quantity, and the notes and the initials were no longer
+flaunted quite so openly in my face.
+
+My cousins had worked it out from the indications of their universe
+that the end of life is to have a "good time."  They used the
+phrase.  That and the drives in dog-carts were only the first of
+endless points of resemblance between them and the commoner sort of
+American girl.  When some years ago I paid my first and only visit
+to America I seemed to recover my cousins' atmosphere as soon as I
+entered the train at Euston.  There were three girls in my
+compartment supplied with huge decorated cases of sweets, and being
+seen off by a company of friends, noisily arch and eager about the
+"steamer letters" they would get at Liverpool; they were the very
+soul-sisters of my cousins.  The chief elements of a good time, as
+my cousins judged it, as these countless thousands of rich young
+women judge it, are a petty eventfulness, laughter, and to feel that
+you are looking well and attracting attention.  Shopping is one of
+its leading joys.  You buy things, clothes and trinkets for yourself
+and presents for your friends.  Presents always seemed to be flying
+about in that circle; flowers and boxes of sweets were common
+currency.  My cousins were always getting and giving, my uncle
+caressed them with parcels and cheques.  They kissed him and he
+exuded sovereigns as a stroked APHIS exudes honey.  It was like the
+new language of the Academy of Lagado to me, and I never learnt how
+to express myself in it, for nature and training make me feel
+encumbered to receive presents and embarrassed in giving them.  But
+then, like my father, I hate and distrust possessions.
+
+Of the quality of their private imagination I never learnt anything;
+I suppose it followed the lines of the fiction they read and was
+romantic and sentimental.  So far as marriage went, the married
+state seemed at once very attractive and dreadfully serious to them,
+composed in equal measure of becoming important and becoming old.  I
+don't know what they thought about children.  I doubt if they
+thought about them at all.  It was very secret if they did.
+
+As for the poor and dingy people all about them, my cousins were
+always ready to take part in a Charitable Bazaar.  They were unaware
+of any economic correlation of their own prosperity and that
+circumambient poverty, and they knew of Trade Unions simply as
+disagreeable external things that upset my uncle's temper.  They
+knew of nothing wrong in social life at all except that there were
+"Agitators."  It surprised them a little, I think, that Agitators
+were not more drastically put down.  But they had a sort of
+instinctive dread of social discussion as of something that might
+breach the happiness of their ignorance. . . .
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+My cousins did more than illustrate Marx for me; they also undertook
+a stage of my emotional education.  Their method in that as in
+everything else was extremely simple, but it took my inexperience by
+surprise.
+
+It must have been on my third visit that Sybil took me in hand.
+Hitherto I seemed to have seen her only in profile, but now she
+became almost completely full face, manifestly regarded me with
+those violet eyes of hers.  She passed me things I needed at
+breakfast--it was the first morning of my visit--before I asked for
+them.
+
+When young men are looked at by pretty cousins, they become
+intensely aware of those cousins.   It seemed to me that I had
+always admired Sybil's eyes very greatly, and that there was
+something in her temperament congenial to mine.  It was odd I had
+not noted it on my previous visits.
+
+We walked round the garden somewhen that morning, and talked about
+Cambridge.  She asked quite a lot of questions about my work and my
+ambitions.  She said she had always felt sure I was clever.
+
+The conversation languished a little, and we picked some flowers for
+the house.  Then she asked if I could run.  I conceded her various
+starts and we raced up and down the middle garden path.   Then, a
+little breathless, we went into the new twenty-five guinea summer-
+house at the end of the herbaceous border.
+
+We sat side by side, pleasantly hidden from the house, and she
+became anxious about her hair, which was slightly and prettily
+disarranged, and asked me to help her with the adjustment of a
+hairpin.  I had never in my life been so near the soft curly hair
+and the dainty eyebrow and eyelid and warm soft cheek of a girl, and
+I was stirred--
+
+It stirs me now to recall it.
+
+I became a battleground of impulses and inhibitions.
+
+"Thank you," said my cousin, and moved a little away from me.
+
+She began to talk about friendship, and lost her thread and forgot
+the little electric stress between us in a rather meandering
+analysis of her principal girl friends.
+
+But afterwards she resumed her purpose.
+
+I went to bed that night with one proposition overshadowing
+everything else in my mind, namely, that kissing my cousin Sybil was
+a difficult, but not impossible, achievement.  I do not recall any
+shadow of a doubt whether on the whole it was worth doing.  The
+thing had come into my existence, disturbing and interrupting its
+flow exactly as a fever does.  Sybil had infected me with herself.
+
+The next day matters came to a crisis in the little upstairs
+sitting-room which had been assigned me as a study during my visit.
+I was working up there, or rather trying to work in spite of the
+outrageous capering of some very primitive elements in my brain,
+when she came up to me, under a transparent pretext of looking for a
+book.
+
+I turned round and then got up at the sight of her.  I quite forget
+what our conversation was about, but I know she led me to believe I
+might kiss her.  Then when I attempted to do so she averted her
+face.
+
+"How COULD you?" she said; "I didn't mean that!"
+
+That remained the state of our relations for two days.  I developed
+a growing irritation with and resentment against cousin Sybil,
+combined with an intense desire to get that kiss for which I
+hungered and thirsted.  Cousin Sybil went about in the happy
+persuasion that I was madly in love with her, and her game, so far
+as she was concerned, was played and won.  It wasn't until I had
+fretted for two days that I realised that I was being used for the
+commonest form of excitement possible to a commonplace girl; that
+dozens perhaps of young men had played the part of Tantalus at
+cousin Sybil's lips.  I walked about my room at nights, damning her
+and calling her by terms which on the whole she rather deserved,
+while Sybil went to sleep pitying "poor old Dick!"
+
+"Damn it!" I said, "I WILL be equal with you."
+
+But I never did equalise the disadvantage, and perhaps it's as well,
+for I fancy that sort of revenge cuts both people too much for a
+rational man to seek it. . . .
+
+"Why are men so silly?" said cousin Sybil next morning, wriggling
+back with down-bent head to release herself from what should have
+been a compelling embrace.
+
+"Confound it!" I said with a flash of clear vision.  "You STARTED
+this game."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+She stood back against a hedge of roses, a little flushed and
+excited and interested, and ready for the delightful defensive if I
+should renew my attack.
+
+"Beastly hot for scuffling," I said, white with anger.  "I don't
+know whether I'm so keen on kissing you, Sybil, after all.  I just
+thought you wanted me to."
+
+I could have whipped her, and my voice stung more than my words.
+
+Our eyes met; a real hatred in hers leaping up to meet mine.
+
+"Let's play tennis," I said, after a moment's pause.
+
+"No," she answered shortly, "I'm going indoors."
+
+"Very well."
+
+And that ended the affair with Sybil.
+
+I was still in the full glare of this disillusionment when Gertrude
+awoke from some preoccupation to an interest in my existence.  She
+developed a disposition to touch my hand by accident, and let her
+fingers rest in contact with it for a moment,--she had pleasant soft
+hands;--she began to drift into summer houses with me, to let her
+arm rest trustfully against mine, to ask questions about Cambridge.
+They were much the same questions that Sybil had asked.  But I
+controlled myself and maintained a profile of intelligent and
+entirely civil indifference to her blandishments.
+
+What Gertrude made of it came out one evening in some talk--I forget
+about what--with Sybil.
+
+"Oh, Dick!" said Gertrude a little impatiently, "Dick's Pi."
+
+And I never disillusioned her by any subsequent levity from this
+theory of my innate and virginal piety.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+It was against this harsh and crude Staffordshire background that I
+think I must have seen Margaret for the first time.  I say I think
+because it is quite possible that we had passed each other in the
+streets of Cambridge, no doubt with that affectation of mutual
+disregard which was once customary between undergraduates and
+Newnham girls.  But if that was so I had noted nothing of the
+slender graciousness that shone out so pleasingly against the
+bleaker midland surroundings.
+
+She was a younger schoolfellow of my cousins', and the step-daughter
+of Seddon, a prominent solicitor of Burslem.  She was not only not
+in my cousins' generation but not in their set, she was one of a
+small hardworking group who kept immaculate note-books, and did as
+much as is humanly possible of that insensate pile of written work
+that the Girls' Public School movement has inflicted upon school-
+girls.  She really learnt French and German admirably and
+thoroughly, she got as far in mathematics as an unflinching industry
+can carry any one with no great natural aptitude, and she went up to
+Bennett Hall, Newnham, after the usual conflict with her family, to
+work for the History Tripos.
+
+There in her third year she made herself thoroughly ill through
+overwork, so ill that she had to give up Newnham altogether and go
+abroad with her stepmother.  She made herself ill, as so many girls
+do in those university colleges, through the badness of her home and
+school training.  She thought study must needs be a hard straining
+of the mind.  She worried her work, she gave herself no leisure to
+see it as a whole, she felt herself not making headway and she cut
+her games and exercise in order to increase her hours of toil, and
+worked into the night.  She carried a knack of laborious
+thoroughness into the blind alleys and inessentials of her subject.
+It didn't need the badness of the food for which Bennett Hall is
+celebrated and the remarkable dietary of nocturnal cocoa, cakes and
+soft biscuits with which the girls have supplemented it, to ensure
+her collapse.  Her mother brought her home, fretting and distressed,
+and then finding her hopelessly unhappy at home, took her and her
+half-brother, a rather ailing youngster of ten who died three years
+later, for a journey to Italy.
+
+Italy did much to assuage Margaret's chagrin.  I think all three of
+them had a very good time there.  At home Mr. Seddon, her step-
+father, played the part of a well-meaning blight by reason of the
+moods that arose from nervous dyspepsia.  They went to Florence,
+equipped with various introductions and much sound advice from
+sympathetic Cambridge friends, and having acquired an ease in Italy
+there, went on to Siena, Orvieto, and at last Rome.  They returned,
+if I remember rightly, by Pisa, Genoa, Milan and Paris.  Six months
+or more they had had abroad, and now Margaret was back in Burslem,
+in health again and consciously a very civilised person.
+
+New ideas were abroad, it was Maytime and a spring of abundant
+flowers--daffodils were particularly good that year--and Mrs. Seddon
+celebrated her return by giving an afternoon reception at short
+notice, with the clear intention of letting every one out into the
+garden if the weather held.
+
+The Seddons had a big old farmhouse modified to modern ideas of
+comfort on the road out towards Misterton, with an orchard that had
+been rather pleasantly subdued from use to ornament.  It had rich
+blossoming cherry and apple trees.  Large patches of grass full of
+nodding yellow trumpets had been left amidst the not too precisely
+mown grass, which was as it were grass path with an occasional lapse
+into lawn or glade.  And Margaret, hatless, with the fair hair above
+her thin, delicately pink face very simply done, came to meet our
+rather too consciously dressed party,--we had come in the motor four
+strong, with my aunt in grey silk.  Margaret wore a soft flowing
+flowered blue dress of diaphanous material, all unconnected with the
+fashion and tied with pretty ribbons, like a slenderer, unbountiful
+Primavera.
+
+It was one of those May days that ape the light and heat of summer,
+and I remember disconnectedly quite a number of brightly lit figures
+and groups walking about, and a white gate between orchard and
+garden and a large lawn with an oak tree and a red Georgian house
+with a verandah and open French windows, through which the tea
+drinking had come out upon the moss-edged flagstones even as Mrs.
+Seddon had planned.
+
+The party was almost entirely feminine except for a little curate
+with a large head, a good voice and a radiant manner, who was
+obviously attracted by Margaret, and two or three young husbands
+still sufficiently addicted to their wives to accompany them.  One
+of them I recall as a quite romantic figure with abundant blond
+curly hair on which was poised a grey felt hat encircled by a
+refined black band.  He wore, moreover, a loose rich shot silk tie
+of red and purple, a long frock coat, grey trousers and brown shoes,
+and presently he removed his hat and carried it in one hand.  There
+were two tennis-playing youths besides myself.  There was also one
+father with three daughters in anxious control, a father of the old
+school scarcely half broken in, reluctant, rebellious and
+consciously and conscientiously "reet Staffordshire."  The daughters
+were all alert to suppress the possible plungings, the undesirable
+humorous impulses of this almost feral guest.  They nipped his very
+gestures in the bud.  The rest of the people were mainly mothers
+with daughters--daughters of all ages, and a scattering of aunts,
+and there was a tendency to clotting, parties kept together and
+regarded parties suspiciously.  Mr. Seddon was in hiding, I think,
+all the time, though not formally absent.
+
+Matters centred upon the tea in the long room of the French windows,
+where four trim maids went to and fro busily between the house and
+the clumps of people seated or standing before it; and tennis and
+croquet were intermittently visible and audible beyond a bank of
+rockwork rich with the spikes and cups and bells of high spring.
+
+Mrs.  Seddon presided at the tea urn, and Margaret partly assisted
+and partly talked to me and my cousin Sibyl--Gertrude had found a
+disused and faded initial and was partnering him at tennis in a
+state of gentle revival--while their mother exercised a divided
+chaperonage from a seat near Mrs. Seddon.  The little curate,
+stirring a partially empty cup of tea, mingled with our party, and
+preluded, I remember, every observation he made by a vigorous
+resumption of stirring.
+
+We talked of Cambridge, and Margaret kept us to it.  The curate was
+a Selwyn man and had taken a pass degree in theology, but Margaret
+had come to Gaylord's lecturers in Trinity for a term before her
+breakdown, and understood these differences.  She had the eagerness
+of an exile to hear the old familiar names of places and
+personalities.  We capped familiar anecdotes and were enthusiastic
+about Kings' Chapel and the Backs, and the curate, addressing
+himself more particularly to Sibyl, told a long confused story
+illustrative of his disposition to reckless devilry (of a pure-
+minded kindly sort) about upsetting two canoes quite needlessly on
+the way to Grantchester.
+
+I can still see Margaret as I saw her that afternoon, see her fresh
+fair face, with the little obliquity of the upper lip, and her brow
+always slightly knitted, and her manner as of one breathlessly shy
+but determined.  She had rather open blue eyes, and she spoke in an
+even musical voice with the gentlest of stresses and the ghost of a
+lisp.  And it was true, she gathered, that Cambridge still existed.
+"I went to Grantchester," she said, "last year, and had tea under
+the apple-blossom.  I didn't think then I should have to come down."
+(It was that started the curate upon his anecdote.)
+
+"I've seen a lot of pictures, and learnt a lot about them--at the
+Pitti and the Brera,--the Brera is wonderful--wonderful places,--but
+it isn't like real study," she was saying presently. . . .  "We
+bought bales of photographs," she said.
+
+I thought the bales a little out of keeping.
+
+But fair-haired and quite simply and yet graciously and fancifully
+dressed, talking of art and beautiful things and a beautiful land,
+and with so much manifest regret for learning denied, she seemed a
+different kind of being altogether from my smart, hard, high-
+coloured, black-haired and resolutely hatted cousin; she seemed
+translucent beside Gertrude.  Even the little twist and droop of her
+slender body was a grace to me.
+
+I liked her from the moment I saw her, and set myself to interest
+and please her as well as I knew how.
+
+We recalled a case of ragging that had rustled the shrubs of
+Newnham, and then Chris Robinson's visit--he had given a talk to
+Bennett Hall also--and our impression of him.
+
+"He disappointed me, too," said Margaret.
+
+I was moved to tell Margaret something of my own views in the matter
+of social progress, and she listened--oh! with a kind of urged
+attention, and her brow a little more knitted, very earnestly.  The
+little curate desisted from the appendices and refuse heaps and
+general debris of his story, and made himself look very alert and
+intelligent.
+
+"We did a lot of that when I was up in the eighties," he said.  "I'm
+glad Imperialism hasn't swamped you fellows altogether."
+
+Gertrude, looking bright and confident, came to join our talk from
+the shrubbery; the initial, a little flushed and evidently in a
+state of refreshed relationship, came with her, and a cheerful lady
+in pink and more particularly distinguished by a pink bonnet joined
+our little group.  Gertrude had been sipping admiration and was not
+disposed to play a passive part in the talk.
+
+"Socialism!" she cried, catching the word.  "It's well Pa isn't
+here.  He has Fits when people talk of socialism.  Fits!"
+
+The initial laughed in a general kind of way.
+
+The curate said there was socialism AND socialism, and looked at
+Margaret to gauge whether he had been too bold in this utterance.
+But she was all, he perceived, for broad-mindness, and he stirred
+himself (and incidentally his tea) to still more liberality of
+expression.  He said the state of the poor was appalling, simply
+appalling; that there were times when he wanted to shatter the whole
+system, "only," he said, turning to me appealingly, "What have we
+got to put in its place?"
+
+"The thing that exists is always the more evident alternative," I
+said.
+
+The little curate looked at it for a moment.  "Precisely," he said
+explosively, and turned stirring and with his head a little on one
+side, to hear what Margaret was saying.
+
+Margaret was saying, with a swift blush and an effect of daring,
+that she had no doubt she was a socialist.
+
+"And wearing a gold chain!" said Gertrude, "And drinking out of
+eggshell!  I like that!"
+
+I came to Margaret's rescue.  "It doesn't follow that because one's
+a socialist one ought to dress in sackcloth and ashes."
+
+The initial coloured deeply, and having secured my attention by
+prodding me slightly with the wrist of the hand that held his
+teacup, cleared his throat and suggested that "one ought to be
+consistent."
+
+I perceived we were embarked upon a discussion of the elements.  We
+began an interesting little wrangle one of those crude discussions
+of general ideas that are dear to the heart of youth.  I and
+Margaret supported one another as socialists, Gertrude and Sybil and
+the initial maintained an anti-socialist position, the curate
+attempted a cross-bench position with an air of intending to come
+down upon us presently with a casting vote.  He reminded us of a
+number of useful principles too often overlooked in argument, that
+in a big question like this there was much to be said on both sides,
+that if every one did his or her duty to every one about them there
+would be no difficulty with social problems at all, that over and
+above all enactments we needed moral changes in people themselves.
+My cousin Gertrude was a difficult controversialist to manage, being
+unconscious of inconsistency in statement and absolutely impervious
+to reply.  Her standpoint was essentially materialistic; she didn't
+see why she shouldn't have a good time because other people didn't;
+they would have a good time, she was sure, if she didn't.  She said
+that if we did give up everything we had to other people, they
+wouldn't very likely know what to do with it.  She asked if we were
+so fond of work-people, why we didn't go and live among them, and
+expressed the inflexible persuasion that if we HAD socialism,
+everything would be just the same again in ten years' time.  She
+also threw upon us the imputation of ingratitude for a beautiful
+world by saying that so far as she was concerned she didn't want to
+upset everything.  She was contented with things as they were, thank
+you.
+
+The discussion led in some way that I don't in the least recall now,
+and possibly by abrupt transitions, to a croquet foursome in which
+Margaret involved the curate without involving herself, and then
+stood beside me on the edge of the lawn while the others played.  We
+watched silently for a moment.
+
+"I HATE that sort of view," she said suddenly in a confidential
+undertone, with her delicate pink flush returning.
+
+"It's want of imagination," I said.
+
+"To think we are just to enjoy ourselves," she went on; "just to go
+on dressing and playing and having meals and spending money!"  She
+seemed to be referring not simply to my cousins, but to the whole
+world of industry and property about us.  "But what is one to do?"
+she asked.  "I do wish I had not had to come down.  It's all so
+pointless here.  There seems to be nothing going forward, no ideas,
+no dreams.  No one here seems to feel quite what I feel, the sort of
+need there is for MEANING in things.  I hate things without
+meaning."
+
+"Don't you do--local work?"
+
+"I suppose I shall.  I suppose I must find something.  Do you think--
+if one were to attempt some sort of propaganda?"
+
+"Could you--?" I began a little doubtfully.
+
+"I suppose I couldn't," she answered, after a thoughtful moment.  "I
+suppose it would come to nothing.  And yet I feel there is so much
+to be done for the world, so much one ought to be doing. . . .  I
+want to do something for the world."
+
+I can see her now as she stood there with her brows nearly frowning,
+her blue eyes looking before her, her mouth almost petulant.  "One
+feels that there are so many things going on--out of one's reach,"
+she said.
+
+I went back in the motor-car with my mind full of her, the quality
+of delicate discontent, the suggestion of exile.  Even a kind of
+weakness in her was sympathetic.  She told tremendously against her
+background.  She was, I say, like a protesting blue flower upon a
+cinder heap.  It is curious, too, how she connects and mingles with
+the furious quarrel I had with my uncle that very evening.  That
+came absurdly.  Indirectly Margaret was responsible.  My mind was
+running on ideas she had revived and questions she had set
+clamouring, and quite inadvertently in my attempt to find solutions
+I talked so as to outrage his profoundest feelings. . . .
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+What a preposterous shindy that was!
+
+I sat with him in the smoking-room, propounding what I considered to
+be the most indisputable and non-contentious propositions
+conceivable--until, to my infinite amazement, he exploded and called
+me a "damned young puppy."
+
+It was seismic.
+
+"Tremendously interesting time," I said, "just in the beginning of
+making a civilisation."
+
+"Ah!" he said, with an averted face, and nodded, leaning forward
+over his cigar.
+
+I had not the remotest thought of annoying him.
+
+"Monstrous muddle of things we have got," I said, "jumbled streets,
+ugly population, ugly factories--"
+
+"You'd do a sight better if you had to do with it," said my uncle,
+regarding me askance.
+
+"Not me.  But a world that had a collective plan and knew where it
+meant to be going would do a sight better, anyhow.  We're all
+swimming in a flood of ill-calculated chances--"
+
+"You'll be making out I organised that business down there--by
+chance--next," said my uncle, his voice thick with challenge.
+
+I went on as though I was back in Trinity.
+
+"There's a lot of chance in the making of all great businesses," I
+said.
+
+My uncle remarked that that showed how much I knew about businesses.
+If chance made businesses, why was it that he always succeeded and
+grew while those fools Ackroyd and Sons always took second place?
+He showed a disposition to tell the glorious history of how once
+Ackroyd's overshadowed him, and how now he could buy up Ackroyd's
+three times over.  But I wanted to get out what was in my mind.
+
+"Oh!" I said, "as between man and man and business and business,
+some of course get the pull by this quality or that--but it's forces
+quite outside the individual case that make the big part of any
+success under modern conditions.  YOU never invented pottery, nor
+any process in pottery that matters a rap in your works; it wasn't
+YOUR foresight that joined all England up with railways and made it
+possible to organise production on an altogether different scale.
+You really at the utmost can't take credit for much more than being
+the sort of man who happened to fit what happened to be the
+requirements of the time, and who happened to be in a position to
+take advantage of them--"
+
+It was then my uncle cried out and called me a damned young puppy,
+and became involved in some unexpected trouble of his own.
+
+I woke up as it were from my analysis of the situation to discover
+him bent over a splendid spittoon, cursing incoherently, retching a
+little, and spitting out the end of his cigar which he had bitten
+off in his last attempt at self-control, and withal fully prepared
+as soon as he had cleared for action to give me just all that he
+considered to be the contents of his mind upon the condition of
+mine.
+
+Well, why shouldn't I talk my mind to him?  He'd never had an
+outside view of himself for years, and I resolved to stand up to
+him.  We went at it hammer and tongs!  It became clear that he
+supposed me to be a Socialist, a zealous, embittered hater of all
+ownership--and also an educated man of the vilest, most
+pretentiously superior description.   His principal grievance was
+that I thought I knew everything; to that he recurred again and
+again. . . .
+
+We had been maintaining an armed truce with each other since my
+resolve to go up to Cambridge, and now we had out all that had
+accumulated between us.  There had been stupendous accumulations. . . .
+
+The particular things we said and did in that bawling encounter
+matter nothing at all in this story.  I can't now estimate how near
+we came to fisticuffs.  It ended with my saying, after a pungent
+reminder of benefits conferred and remembered, that I didn't want to
+stay another hour in his house.  I went upstairs, in a state of
+puerile fury, to pack and go off to the Railway Hotel, while he,
+with ironical civility, telephoned for a cab.
+
+"Good riddance!" shouted my uncle, seeing me off into the night.
+
+On the face of it our row was preposterous, but the underlying
+reality of our quarrel was the essential antagonism, it seemed to
+me, in all human affairs, the antagonism between ideas and the
+established method, that is to say, between ideas and the rule of
+thumb.  The world I hate is the rule-of-thumb world, the thing I and
+my kind of people exist for primarily is to battle with that, to
+annoy it, disarrange it, reconstruct it.  We question everything,
+disturb anything that cannot give a clear justification to our
+questioning, because we believe inherently that our sense of
+disorder implies the possibility of a better order.  Of course we
+are detestable.  My uncle was of that other vaster mass who accept
+everything for the thing it seems to be, hate enquiry and analysis
+as a tramp hates washing, dread and resist change, oppose
+experiment, despise science.  The world is our battleground; and all
+history, all literature that matters, all science, deals with this
+conflict of the thing that is and the speculative "if" that will
+destroy it.
+
+But that is why I did not see Margaret Seddon again for five years.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND
+
+MARGARET IN LONDON
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+I was twenty-seven when I met Margaret again, and the intervening
+five years had been years of vigorous activity for me, if not of
+very remarkable growth.  When I saw her again, I could count myself
+a grown man.  I think, indeed, I counted myself more completely
+grown than I was.  At any rate, by all ordinary standards, I had
+"got on" very well, and my ideas, if they had not changed very
+greatly, had become much more definite and my ambitions clearer and
+bolder.
+
+I had long since abandoned my fellowship and come to London.  I had
+published two books that had been talked about, written several
+articles, and established a regular relationship with the WEEKLY
+REVIEW and the EVENING GAZETTE.  I was a member of the Eighty Club
+and learning to adapt the style of the Cambridge Union to larger
+uses.  The London world had opened out to me very readily.  I had
+developed a pleasant variety of social connections.  I had made the
+acquaintance of Mr. Evesham, who had been attracted by my NEW RULER,
+and who talked about it and me, and so did a very great deal to make
+a way for me into the company of prominent and amusing people.  I
+dined out quite frequently.  The glitter and interest of good London
+dinner parties became a common experience.  I liked the sort of
+conversation one got at them extremely, the little glow of duologues
+burning up into more general discussions, the closing-in of the men
+after the going of the women, the sage, substantial masculine
+gossiping, the later resumption of effective talk with some pleasant
+woman, graciously at her best.  I had a wide range of houses;
+Cambridge had linked me to one or two correlated sets of artistic
+and literary people, and my books and Mr. Evesham and opened to me
+the big vague world of "society."  I wasn't aggressive nor
+particularly snobbish nor troublesome, sometimes I talked well, and
+if I had nothing interesting to say I said as little as possible,
+and I had a youthful gravity of manner that was liked by hostesses.
+And the other side of my nature that first flared through the cover
+of restraints at Locarno, that too had had opportunity to develop
+along the line London renders practicable.  I had had my experiences
+and secrets and adventures among that fringe of ill-mated or erratic
+or discredited women the London world possesses.  The thing had long
+ago ceased to be a matter of magic or mystery, and had become a
+question of appetites and excitement, and among other things the
+excitement of not being found out.
+
+I write rather doubtfully of my growing during this period.  Indeed
+I find it hard to judge whether I can say that I grew at all in any
+real sense of the word, between three and twenty and twenty-seven.
+It seems to me now to have been rather a phase of realisation and
+clarification.  All the broad lines of my thought were laid down, I
+am sure, by the date of my Locarno adventure, but in those five
+years I discussed things over and over again with myself and others,
+filled out with concrete fact forms I had at first apprehended
+sketchily and conversationally, measured my powers against my ideals
+and the forces in the world about me.  It was evident that many men
+no better than myself and with no greater advantages than mine had
+raised themselves to influential and even decisive positions in the
+worlds of politics and thought.  I was gathering the confidence and
+knowledge necessary to attack the world in the large manner; I found
+I could write, and that people would let me write if I chose, as one
+having authority and not as the scribes.  Socially and politically
+and intellectually I knew myself for an honest man, and that quite
+without any deliberation on my part this showed and made things easy
+for me.  People trusted my good faith from the beginning--for all
+that I came from nowhere and had no better position than any
+adventurer.
+
+But the growth process was arrested, I was nothing bigger at twenty-
+seven than at twenty-two, however much saner and stronger, and any
+one looking closely into my mind during that period might well have
+imagined growth finished altogether.  It is particularly evident to
+me now that I came no nearer to any understanding of women during
+that time.  That Locarno affair was infinitely more to me than I had
+supposed.  It ended something--nipped something in the bud perhaps--
+took me at a stride from a vague, fine, ignorant, closed world of
+emotion to intrigue and a perfectly definite and limited sensuality.
+It ended my youth, and for a time it prevented my manhood.  I had
+never yet even peeped at the sweetest, profoundest thing in the
+world, the heart and meaning of a girl, or dreamt with any quality
+of reality of a wife or any such thing as a friend among womanhood.
+My vague anticipation of such things in life had vanished
+altogether.  I turned away from their possibility.  It seemed to me
+I knew what had to be known about womankind.  I wanted to work hard,
+to get on to a position in which I could develop and forward my
+constructive projects.  Women, I thought, had nothing to do with
+that.  It seemed clear I could not marry for some years; I was
+attractive to certain types of women, I had vanity enough to give me
+an agreeable confidence in love-making, and I went about seeking a
+convenient mistress quite deliberately, some one who should serve my
+purpose and say in the end, like that kindly first mistress of mine,
+"I've done you no harm," and so release me.  It seemed the only wise
+way of disposing of urgencies that might otherwise entangle and
+wreck the career I was intent upon.
+
+I don't apologise for, or defend my mental and moral phases.  So it
+was I appraised life and prepared to take it, and so it is a
+thousand ambitious men see it to-day. . . .
+
+For the rest these five years were a period of definition.  My
+political conceptions were perfectly plain and honest.  I had one
+constant desire ruling my thoughts.  I meant to leave England and
+the empire better ordered than I found it, to organise and
+discipline, to build up a constructive and controlling State out of
+my world's confusions.  We had, I saw, to suffuse education with
+public intention, to develop a new better-living generation with a
+collectivist habit of thought, to link now chaotic activities in
+every human affair, and particularly to catch that escaped, world-
+making, world-ruining, dangerous thing, industrial and financial
+enterprise, and bring it back to the service of the general good.  I
+had then the precise image that still serves me as a symbol for all
+I wish to bring about, the image of an engineer building a lock in a
+swelling torrent--with water pressure as his only source of power.
+My thoughts and acts were habitually turned to that enterprise; it
+gave shape and direction to all my life.  The problem that most
+engaged my mind during those years was the practical and personal
+problem of just where to apply myself to serve this almost innate
+purpose.  How was I, a child of this confusion, struggling upward
+through the confusion, to take hold of things?   Somewhere between
+politics and literature my grip must needs be found, but where?
+Always I seem to have been looking for that in those opening years,
+and disregarding everything else to discover it.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+The Baileys, under whose auspices I met Margaret again, were in the
+sharpest contrast with the narrow industrialism of the Staffordshire
+world.  They were indeed at the other extreme of the scale, two
+active self-centred people, excessively devoted to the public
+service.  It was natural I should gravitate to them, for they seemed
+to stand for the maturer, more disciplined, better informed
+expression of all I was then urgent to attempt to do.  The bulk of
+their friends were politicians or public officials, they described
+themselves as publicists--a vague yet sufficiently significant term.
+They lived and worked in a hard little house in Chambers Street,
+Westminster, and made a centre for quite an astonishing amount of
+political and social activity.
+
+Willersley took me there one evening.  The place was almost
+pretentiously matter-of-fact and unassuming.  The narrow passage-
+hall, papered with some ancient yellowish paper, grained to imitate
+wood, was choked with hats and cloaks and an occasional feminine
+wrap.  Motioned rather than announced by a tall Scotch servant
+woman, the only domestic I ever remember seeing there, we made our
+way up a narrow staircase past the open door of a small study packed
+with blue-books, to discover Altiora Bailey receiving before the
+fireplace in her drawing-room.   She was a tall commanding figure,
+splendid but a little untidy in black silk and red beads, with dark
+eyes that had no depths, with a clear hard voice that had an almost
+visible prominence, aquiline features and straight black hair that
+was apt to get astray, that was now astray like the head feathers of
+an eagle in a gale.  She stood with her hands behind her back, and
+talked in a high tenor of a projected Town Planning Bill with Blupp,
+who was practically in those days the secretary of the local
+Government Board.  A very short broad man with thick ears and fat
+white hands writhing intertwined behind him, stood with his back to
+us, eager to bark interruptions into Altiora's discourse.  A slender
+girl in pale blue, manifestly a young political wife, stood with one
+foot on the fender listening with an expression of entirely puzzled
+propitiation.  A tall sandy-bearded bishop with the expression of a
+man in a trance completed this central group.
+
+The room was one of those long apartments once divided by folding
+doors, and reaching from back to front, that are common upon the
+first floors of London houses.  Its walls were hung with two or
+three indifferent water colours, there was scarcely any furniture
+but a sofa or so and a chair, and the floor, severely carpeted with
+matting, was crowded with a curious medley of people, men
+predominating.  Several were in evening dress, but most had the
+morning garb of the politician; the women were either severely
+rational or radiantly magnificent.  Willersley pointed out to me the
+wife of the Secretary of State for War, and I recognised the Duchess
+of Clynes, who at that time cultivated intellectuality.  I looked
+round, identifying a face here or there, and stepping back trod on
+some one's toe, and turned to find it belonged to the Right Hon. G.
+B. Mottisham, dear to the PUNCH caricaturists.  He received my
+apology with that intentional charm that is one of his most
+delightful traits, and resumed his discussion.  Beside him was
+Esmeer of Trinity, whom I had not seen since my Cambridge days. . . .
+
+Willersley found an ex-member of the School Board for whom he had
+affinities, and left me to exchange experiences and comments upon
+the company with Esmeer.  Esmeer was still a don; but he was
+nibbling, he said, at certain negotiations with the TIMES that might
+bring him down to London.  He wanted to come to London.  "We peep at
+things from Cambridge," he said.
+
+"This sort of thing," I said, "makes London necessary.  It's the
+oddest gathering."
+
+"Every one comes here," said Esmeer.  "Mostly we hate them like
+poison--jealousy--and little irritations--Altiora can be a horror at
+times--but we HAVE to come."
+
+"Things are being done?"
+
+"Oh!--no doubt of it.  It's one of the parts of the British
+machinery--that doesn't show. . . .  But nobody else could do it.
+
+"Two people," said Esmeer, "who've planned to be a power--in an
+original way.  And by Jove! they've done it!"
+
+I did not for some time pick out Oscar Bailey, and then Esmeer
+showed him to me in elaborately confidential talk in a corner with a
+distinguished-looking stranger wearing a ribbon.  Oscar had none of
+the fine appearance of his wife; he was a short sturdy figure with a
+rounded protruding abdomen and a curious broad, flattened, clean-
+shaven face that seemed nearly all forehead.  He was of Anglo-
+Hungarian extraction, and I have always fancied something Mongolian
+in his type.  He peered up with reddish swollen-looking eyes over
+gilt-edged glasses that were divided horizontally into portions of
+different refractive power, and he talking in an ingratiating
+undertone, with busy thin lips, an eager lisp and nervous movements
+of the hand.
+
+People say that thirty years before at Oxford he was almost exactly
+the same eager, clever little man he was when I first met him.  He
+had come up to Balliol bristling with extraordinary degrees and
+prizes capturned in provincial and Irish and Scotch universities--
+and had made a name for himself as the most formidable dealer in
+exact fact the rhetoricians of the Union had ever had to encounter.
+From Oxford he had gone on to a position in the Higher Division of
+the Civil Service, I think in the War Office, and had speedily made
+a place for himself as a political journalist.  He was a
+particularly neat controversialist, and very full of political and
+sociological ideas.  He had a quite astounding memory for facts and
+a mastery of detailed analysis, and the time afforded scope for
+these gifts.  The later eighties were full of politico-social
+discussion, and he became a prominent name upon the contents list of
+the NINETEENTH CENTURY, the FORTNIGHTLY and CONTEMPORARY chiefly as
+a half sympathetic but frequently very damaging critic of the
+socialism of that period.  He won the immense respect of every one
+specially interested in social and political questions, he soon
+achieved the limited distinction that is awarded such capacity, and
+at that I think he would have remained for the rest of his life if
+he had not encountered Altiora.
+
+But Altiora Macvitie was an altogether exceptional woman, an
+extraordinary mixture of qualities, the one woman in the world who
+could make something more out of Bailey than that.  She had much of
+the vigour and handsomeness of a slender impudent young man, and an
+unscrupulousness altogether feminine.  She was one of those women
+who are waiting in--what is the word?--muliebrity.  She had courage
+and initiative and a philosophical way of handling questions, and
+she could be bored by regular work like a man.  She was entirely
+unfitted for her sex's sphere.  She was neither uncertain, coy nor
+hard to please, and altogether too stimulating and aggressive for
+any gentleman's hours of ease.  Her cookery would have been about as
+sketchy as her handwriting, which was generally quite illegible, and
+she would have made, I feel sure, a shocking bad nurse.  Yet you
+mustn't imagine she was an inelegant or unbeautiful woman, and she
+is inconceivable to me in high collars or any sort of masculine
+garment.  But her soul was bony, and at the base of her was a vanity
+gaunt and greedy!  When she wasn't in a state of personal untidiness
+that was partly a protest against the waste of hours exacted by the
+toilet and partly a natural disinclination, she had a gypsy
+splendour of black and red and silver all her own.  And somewhen in
+the early nineties she met and married Bailey.
+
+I know very little about her early years.  She was the only daughter
+of Sir Deighton Macvitie, who applied the iodoform process to
+cotton, and only his subsequent unfortunate attempts to become a
+Cotton King prevented her being a very rich woman.  As it was she
+had a tolerable independence.  She came into prominence as one of
+the more able of the little shoal of young women who were led into
+politico-philanthropic activities by the influence of the earlier
+novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward--the Marcella crop.   She went
+"slumming" with distinguished vigour, which was quite usual in those
+days--and returned from her experiences as an amateur flower girl
+with clear and original views about the problem--which is and always
+had been unusual.  She had not married, I suppose because her
+standards were high, and men are cowards and with an instinctive
+appetite for muliebrity.  She had kept house for her father by
+speaking occasionally to the housekeeper, butler and cook her mother
+had left her, and gathering the most interesting dinner parties she
+could, and had married off four orphan nieces in a harsh and
+successful manner.  After her father's smash and death she came out
+as a writer upon social questions and a scathing critic of the
+Charity Organisation Society, and she was three and thirty and a
+little at loose ends when she met Oscar Bailey, so to speak, in the
+CONTEMPORARY REVIEW.  The lurking woman in her nature was fascinated
+by the ease and precision with which the little man rolled over all
+sorts of important and authoritative people, she was the first to
+discover a sort of imaginative bigness in his still growing mind,
+the forehead perhaps carried him off physically, and she took
+occasion to meet and subjugate him, and, so soon as he had
+sufficiently recovered from his abject humility and a certain panic
+at her attentions, marry him.
+
+This had opened a new phase in the lives of Bailey and herself.  The
+two supplemented each other to an extraordinary extent.  Their
+subsequent career was, I think, almost entirely her invention.  She
+was aggressive, imaginative, and had a great capacity for ideas,
+while he was almost destitute of initiative, and could do nothing
+with ideas except remember and discuss them.  She was, if not exact,
+at least indolent, with a strong disposition to save energy by
+sketching--even her handwriting showed that--while he was
+inexhaustibly industrious with a relentless invariable caligraphy
+that grew larger and clearer as the years passed by.  She had a
+considerable power of charming; she could be just as nice to people--
+and incidentally just as nasty--as she wanted to be.  He was always
+just the same, a little confidential and SOTTO VOCE, artlessly rude
+and egoistic in an undignified way.  She had considerable social
+experience, good social connections, and considerable social
+ambition, while he had none of these things.  She saw in a flash her
+opportunity to redeem his defects, use his powers, and do large,
+novel, rather startling things.  She ran him.  Her marriage, which
+shocked her friends and relations beyond measure--for a time they
+would only speak of Bailey as "that gnome"--was a stroke of genius,
+and forthwith they proceeded to make themselves the most formidable
+and distinguished couple conceivable.  P. B. P., she boasted, was
+engraved inside their wedding rings, Pro Bono Publico, and she meant
+it to be no idle threat.  She had discovered very early that the
+last thing influential people will do is to work.  Everything in
+their lives tends to make them dependent upon a supply of
+confidently administered detail.  Their business is with the window
+and not the stock behind, and in the end they are dependent upon the
+stock behind for what goes into the window.  She linked with that
+the fact that Bailey had a mind as orderly as a museum, and an
+invincible power over detail.  She saw that if two people took the
+necessary pains to know the facts of government and administration
+with precision, to gather together knowledge that was dispersed and
+confused, to be able to say precisely what had to be done and what
+avoided in this eventuality or that, they would necessarily become a
+centre of reference for all sorts of legislative proposals and
+political expedients, and she went unhesitatingly upon that.
+
+Bailey, under her vigorous direction, threw up his post in the Civil
+Service and abandoned sporadic controversies, and they devoted
+themselves to the elaboration and realisation of this centre of
+public information she had conceived as their role.  They set out to
+study the methods and organisation and realities of government in
+the most elaborate manner.  They did the work as no one had ever
+hitherto dreamt of doing it.  They planned the research on a
+thoroughly satisfying scale, and arranged their lives almost
+entirely for it.  They took that house in Chambers Street and
+furnished it with severe economy, they discovered that Scotch
+domestic who is destined to be the guardian and tyrant of their
+declining years, and they set to work.  Their first book, "The
+Permanent Official," fills three plump volumes, and took them and
+their two secretaries upwards of four years to do.  It is an
+amazingly good book, an enduring achievement.  In a hundred
+directions the history and the administrative treatment of the
+public service was clarified for all time. . . .
+
+They worked regularly every morning from nine to twelve, they
+lunched lightly but severely, in the afternoon they "took exercise"
+or Bailey attended meetings of the London School Board, on which he
+served, he said, for the purposes of study--he also became a railway
+director for the same end.  In the late afternoon Altiora was at
+home to various callers, and in the evening came dinner or a
+reception or both.
+
+Her dinners and gatherings were a very important feature in their
+scheme.  She got together all sorts of interesting people in or
+about the public service, she mixed the obscurely efficient with the
+ill-instructed famous and the rudderless rich, got together in one
+room more of the factors in our strange jumble of a public life than
+had ever met easily before.  She fed them with a shameless austerity
+that kept the conversation brilliant, on a soup, a plain fish, and
+mutton or boiled fowl and milk pudding, with nothing to drink but
+whisky and soda, and hot and cold water, and milk and lemonade.
+Everybody was soon very glad indeed to come to that.  She boasted
+how little her housekeeping cost her, and sought constantly for
+fresh economies that would enable her, she said, to sustain an
+additional private secretary.  Secretaries were the Baileys' one
+extravagance, they loved to think of searches going on in the
+British Museum, and letters being cleared up and precis made
+overhead, while they sat in the little study and worked together,
+Bailey with a clockwork industry, and Altiora in splendid flashes
+between intervals of cigarettes and meditation.  "All efficient
+public careers," said Altiora, "consist in the proper direction of
+secretaries."
+
+"If everything goes well I shall have another secretary next year,"
+Altiora told me.  "I wish I could refuse people dinner napkins.
+Imagine what it means in washing!  I dare most things. . . .  But as
+it is, they stand a lot of hardship here."
+
+"There's something of the miser in both these people," said Esmeer,
+and the thing was perfectly true.  For, after all, the miser is
+nothing more than a man who either through want of imagination or
+want of suggestion misapplies to a base use a natural power of
+concentration upon one end.  The concentration itself is neither
+good nor evil, but a power that can be used in either way.  And the
+Baileys gathered and reinvested usuriously not money, but knowledge
+of the utmost value in human affairs.  They produced an effect of
+having found themselves--completely.  One envied them at times
+extraordinarily.  I was attracted, I was dazzled--and at the same
+time there was something about Bailey's big wrinkled forehead, his
+lisping broad mouth, the gestures of his hands and an uncivil
+preoccupation I could not endure. . . .
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Their effect upon me was from the outset very considerable.
+
+Both of them found occasion on that first visit of mine to talk to
+me about my published writings and particularly about my then just
+published book THE NEW RULER, which had interested them very much.
+It fell in indeed so closely with their own way of thinking that I
+doubt if they ever understood how independently I had arrived at my
+conclusions.  It was their weakness to claim excessively.  That
+irritation, however, came later.  We discovered each other
+immensely; for a time it produced a tremendous sense of kindred and
+co-operation.
+
+Altiora, I remember, maintained that there existed a great army of
+such constructive-minded people as ourselves--as yet undiscovered by
+one another.
+
+"It's like boring a tunnel through a mountain," said Oscar, "and
+presently hearing the tapping of the workers from the other end."
+
+"If you didn't know of them beforehand," I said, "it might be a
+rather badly joined tunnel."
+
+"Exactly," said Altiora with a high note, "and that's why we all
+want to find out each other. . . ."
+
+They didn't talk like that on our first encounter, but they urged me
+to lunch with them next day, and then it was we went into things.  A
+woman Factory Inspector and the Educational Minister for New
+Banksland and his wife were also there, but I don't remember they
+made any contribution to the conversation.  The Baileys saw to that.
+They kept on at me in an urgent litigious way.
+
+"We have read your book," each began--as though it had been a joint
+function.  "And we consider--"
+
+"Yes," I protested, "I think--"
+
+ That was a secondary matter.
+
+"They did not consider," said Altiora, raising her voice and going
+right over me, that I had allowed sufficiently for the inevitable
+development of an official administrative class in the modern
+state."
+
+"Nor of its importance," echoed Oscar.
+
+That, they explained in a sort of chorus, was the cardinal idea of
+their lives, what they were up to, what they stood for.  "We want to
+suggest to you," they said--and I found this was a stock opening of
+theirs--"that from the mere necessities of convenience elected
+bodies MUST avail themselves more and more of the services of expert
+officials.  We have that very much in mind.  The more complicated
+and technical affairs become, the less confidence will the elected
+official have in himself.  We want to suggest that these expert
+officials must necessarily develop into a new class and a very
+powerful class in the community.  We want to organise that.  It may
+be THE power of the future.  They will necessarily have to have very
+much of a common training.  We consider ourselves as amateur unpaid
+precursors of such a class." . . .
+
+The vision they displayed for my consideration as the aim of public-
+spirited endeavour, seemed like a harder, narrower, more specialised
+version of the idea of a trained and disciplined state that
+Willersley and I had worked out in the Alps.  They wanted things
+more organised, more correlated with government and a collective
+purpose, just as we did, but they saw it not in terms of a growing
+collective understanding, but in terms of functionaries, legislative
+change, and methods of administration. . . .
+
+It wasn't clear at first how we differed.  The Baileys were very
+anxious to win me to co-operation, and I was quite prepared at first
+to identify their distinctive expressions with phrases of my own,
+and so we came very readily into an alliance that was to last some
+years, and break at last very painfully.  Altiora manifestly liked
+me, I was soon discussing with her the perplexity I found in placing
+myself efficiently in the world, the problem of how to take hold of
+things that occupied my thoughts, and she was sketching out careers
+for my consideration, very much as an architect on his first visit
+sketches houses, considers requirements, and puts before you this
+example and that of the more or less similar thing already done. . . .
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+It is easy to see how much in common there was between the Baileys
+and me, and how natural it was that I should become a constant
+visitor at their house and an ally of theirs in many enterprises.
+It is not nearly so easy to define the profound antagonism of spirit
+that also held between us.  There was a difference in texture, a
+difference in quality.  How can I express it?  The shapes of our
+thoughts were the same, but the substance quite different.  It was
+as if they had made in china or cast iron what I had made in
+transparent living matter.  (The comparison is manifestly from my
+point of view.)  Certain things never seemed to show through their
+ideas that were visible, refracted perhaps and distorted, but
+visible always through mine.
+
+I thought for a time the essential difference lay in our relation to
+beauty.  With me beauty is quite primary in life; I like truth,
+order and goodness, wholly because they are beautiful or lead
+straight to beautiful consequences.  The Baileys either hadn't got
+that or they didn't see it.  They seemed at times to prefer things
+harsh and ugly.  That puzzled me extremely.  The esthetic quality of
+many of their proposals, the "manners" of their work, so to speak,
+were at times as dreadful as--well, War Office barrack architecture.
+A caricature by its exaggerated statements will sometimes serve to
+point a truth by antagonising falsity and falsity.  I remember
+talking to a prominent museum official in need of more public funds
+for the work he had in hand.  I mentioned the possibility of
+enlisting Bailey's influence.
+
+"Oh, we don't want Philistines like that infernal Bottle-Imp running
+us," he said hastily, and would hear of no concerted action for the
+end he had in view.  "I'd rather not have the extension.
+
+"You see," he went on to explain, "Bailey's wanting in the
+essentials."
+
+"What essentials?" said I.
+
+"Oh! he'd be like a nasty oily efficient little machine for some
+merely subordinate necessity among all my delicate stuff.  He'd do
+all we wanted no doubt in the way of money and powers--and he'd do
+it wrong and mess the place for ever.  Hands all black, you know.
+He's just a means.  Just a very aggressive and unmanageable means.
+This isn't a plumber's job. . . ."
+
+I stuck to my argument.
+
+"I don't LIKE him," said the official conclusively, and it seemed to
+me at the time he was just blind prejudice speaking. . . .
+
+I came nearer the truth of the matter as I came to realise that our
+philosophies differed profoundly.  That isn't a very curable
+difference,--once people have grown up.  Theirs was a philosophy
+devoid of FINESSE.  Temperamentally the Baileys were specialised,
+concentrated, accurate, while I am urged either by some Inner force
+or some entirely assimilated influence in my training, always to
+round off and shadow my outlines.  I hate them hard.  I would
+sacrifice detail to modelling always, and the Baileys, it seemed to
+me, loved a world as flat and metallic as Sidney Cooper's cows.  If
+they had the universe in hand I know they would take down all the
+trees and put up stamped tin green shades and sunlight accumulators.
+Altiora thought trees hopelessly irregular and sea cliffs a great
+mistake. . . .   I got things clearer as time went on.  Though it
+was an Hegelian mess of which I had partaken at Codger's table by
+way of a philosophical training, my sympathies have always been
+Pragmatist.  I belong almost by nature to that school of Pragmatism
+that, following the medieval Nominalists, bases itself upon a denial
+of the reality of classes, and of the validity of general laws.  The
+Baileys classified everything.  They were, in the scholastic sense--
+which so oddly contradicts the modern use of the word "Realists."
+They believed classes were REAL and independent of their
+individuals.  This is the common habit of all so-called educated
+people who have no metaphysical aptitude and no metaphysical
+training.  It leads them to a progressive misunderstanding of the
+world.  It was a favourite trick of Altiora's to speak of everybody
+as a "type"; she saw men as samples moving; her dining-room became a
+chamber of representatives.  It gave a tremendously scientific air
+to many of their generalisations, using "scientific" in its
+nineteenth-century uncritical Herbert Spencer sense, an air that
+only began to disappear when you thought them over again in terms of
+actuality and the people one knew. . . .
+
+At the Baileys' one always seemed to be getting one's hands on the
+very strings that guided the world.  You heard legislation projected
+to affect this "type" and that; statistics marched by you with sin
+and shame and injustice and misery reduced to quite manageable
+percentages, you found men who were to frame or amend bills in grave
+and intimate exchange with Bailey's omniscience, you heard Altiora
+canvassing approaching resignations and possible appointments that
+might make or mar a revolution in administrative methods, and doing
+it with a vigorous directness that manifestly swayed the decision;
+and you felt you were in a sort of signal box with levers all about
+you, and the world outside there, albeit a little dark and
+mysterious beyond the window, running on its lines in ready
+obedience to these unhesitating lights, true and steady to trim
+termini.
+
+And then with all this administrative fizzle, this pseudo-scientific
+administrative chatter, dying away in your head, out you went into
+the limitless grimy chaos of London streets and squares, roads and
+avenues lined with teeming houses, each larger than the Chambers
+Street house and at least equally alive, you saw the chaotic clamour
+of hoardings, the jumble of traffic, the coming and going of
+mysterious myriads, you heard the rumble of traffic like the noise
+of a torrent; a vague incessant murmur of cries and voices, wanton
+crimes and accidents bawled at you from the placards; imperative
+unaccountable fashions swaggered triumphant in dazzling windows of
+the shops; and you found yourself swaying back to the opposite
+conviction that the huge formless spirit of the world it was that
+held the strings and danced the puppets on the Bailey stage. . . .
+
+Under the lamps you were jostled by people like my Staffordshire
+uncle out for a spree, you saw shy youths conversing with
+prostitutes, you passed young lovers pairing with an entire
+disregard of the social suitability of the "types" they might blend
+or create, you saw men leaning drunken against lamp-posts whom you
+knew for the "type" that will charge with fixed bayonets into the
+face of death, and you found yourself unable to imagine little
+Bailey achieving either drunkenness or the careless defiance of
+annihilation.  You realised that quite a lot of types were
+underrepresented in Chambers Street, that feral and obscure and
+altogether monstrous forces must be at work, as yet altogether
+unassimilated by those neat administrative reorganisations.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Altiora, I remember, preluded Margaret's reappearance by announcing
+her as a "new type."
+
+I was accustomed to go early to the Baileys' dinners in those days,
+for a preliminary gossip with Altiora in front of her drawing-room
+fire.  One got her alone, and that early arrival was a little sign
+of appreciation she valued.  She had every woman's need of followers
+and servants.
+
+"I'm going to send you down to-night," she said, "with a very
+interesting type indeed--one of the new generation of serious gals.
+Middle-class origin--and quite well off.  Rich in fact.  Her step-
+father was a solicitor and something of an ENTREPRENEUR towards the
+end, I fancy--in the Black Country.  There was a little brother
+died, and she's lost her mother quite recently.  Quite on her own,
+so to speak.  She's never been out into society very much, and
+doesn't seem really very anxious to go. . . .  Not exactly an
+intellectual person, you know, but quiet, and great force of
+character.  Came up to London on her own and came to us--someone had
+told her we were the sort of people to advise her--to ask what to
+do.  I'm sure she'll interest you."
+
+"What CAN people of that sort do?" I asked.  "Is she capable of
+investigation?"
+
+Altiora compressed her lips and shook her head.  She always did
+shake her head when you asked that of anyone.
+
+"Of course what she ought to do," said Altiora, with her silk dress
+pulled back from her knee before the fire, and with a lift of her
+voice towards a chuckle at her daring way of putting things, "is to
+marry a member of Parliament and see he does his work. . . .
+Perhaps she will.  It's a very exceptional gal who can do anything
+by herself--quite exceptional.  The more serious they are--without
+being exceptional--the more we want them to marry."
+
+Her exposition was truncated by the entry of the type in question.
+
+"Well!" cried Altiora turning, and with a high note of welcome,
+"HERE you are!"
+
+Margaret had gained in dignity and prettiness by the lapse of five
+years, and she was now very beautifully and richly and simply
+dressed.  Her fair hair had been done in some way that made it seem
+softer and more abundant than it was in my memory, and a gleam of
+purple velvet-set diamonds showed amidst its mist of little golden
+and brown lines.  Her dress was of white and violet, the last trace
+of mourning for her mother, and confessed the gracious droop of her
+tall and slender body.  She did not suggest Staffordshire at all,
+and I was puzzled for a moment to think where I had met her.  Her
+sweetly shaped mouth with the slight obliquity of the lip and the
+little kink in her brow were extraordinarily familiar to me.  But
+she had either been prepared by Altiora or she remembered my name.
+"We met," she said, "while my step-father was alive--at Misterton.
+You came to see us"; and instantly I recalled the sunshine between
+the apple blossom and a slender pale blue girlish shape among the
+daffodils, like something that had sprung from a bulb itself.  I
+recalled at once that I had found her very interesting, though I did
+not clearly remember how it was she had interested me.
+
+Other guests arrived--it was one of Altiora's boldly blended
+mixtures of people with ideas and people with influence or money who
+might perhaps be expected to resonate to them.  Bailey came down
+late with an air of hurry, and was introduced to Margaret and said
+absolutely nothing to her--there being no information either to
+receive or impart and nothing to do--but stood snatching his left
+cheek until I rescued him and her, and left him free to congratulate
+the new Lady Snape on her husband's K. C. B.
+
+I took Margaret down.  We achieved no feats of mutual expression,
+except that it was abundantly clear we were both very pleased and
+interested to meet again, and that we had both kept memories of each
+other.  We made that Misterton tea-party and the subsequent
+marriages of my cousins and the world of Burslem generally, matter
+for quite an agreeable conversation until at last Altiora, following
+her invariable custom, called me by name imperatively out of our
+duologue.  "Mr. Remington," she said, "we want your opinion--" in
+her entirely characteristic effort to get all the threads of
+conversation into her own hands for the climax that always wound up
+her dinners.  How the other women used to hate those concluding
+raids of hers!  I forget most of the other people at that dinner,
+nor can I recall what the crowning rally was about.  It didn't in
+any way join on to my impression of Margaret.
+
+In the drawing-room of the matting floor I rejoined her, with
+Altiora's manifest connivance, and in the interval I had been
+thinking of our former meeting.
+
+"Do you find London," I asked, "give you more opportunity for doing
+things and learning things than Burslem?"
+
+She showed at once she appreciated my allusion to her former
+confidences.  "I was very discontented then," she said and paused.
+"I've really only been in London for a few months.  It's so
+different.  In Burslem, life seems all business and getting--without
+any reason.  One went on and it didn't seem to mean anything.  At
+least anything that mattered. . . .  London seems to be so full of
+meanings--all mixed up together."
+
+She knitted her brows over her words and smiled appealingly at the
+end as if for consideration for her inadequate expression,
+appealingly and almost humorously.
+
+I looked understandingly at her.  "We have all," I agreed, "to come
+to London."
+
+"One sees so much distress," she added, as if she felt she had
+completely omitted something, and needed a codicil.
+
+"What are you doing in London?"
+
+"I'm thinking of studying.  Some social question.  I thought perhaps
+I might go and study social conditions as Mrs. Bailey did, go
+perhaps as a work-girl or see the reality of living in, but Mrs.
+Bailey thought perhaps it wasn't quite my work."
+
+"Are you studying?"
+
+"I'm going to a good many lectures, and perhaps I shall take up a
+regular course at the Westminster School of Politics and Sociology.
+But Mrs. Bailey doesn't seem to believe very much in that either."
+
+Her faintly whimsical smile returned.  "I seem rather indefinite,"
+she apologised, "but one does not want to get entangled in things
+one can't do.  One--one has so many advantages, one's life seems to
+be such a trust and such a responsibility--"
+
+She stopped.
+
+"A man gets driven into work," I said.
+
+"It must be splendid to be Mrs. Bailey," she replied with a glance
+of envious admiration across the room.
+
+"SHE has no doubts, anyhow," I remarked.
+
+"She HAD," said Margaret with the pride of one who has received
+great confidences.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+"You've met before?" said Altiora, a day or so later.
+
+I explained when.
+
+"You find her interesting?"
+
+I saw in a flash that Altiora meant to marry me to Margaret.
+
+Her intention became much clearer as the year developed.  Altiora
+was systematic even in matters that evade system.  I was to marry
+Margaret, and freed from the need of making an income I was to come
+into politics--as an exponent of Baileyism.  She put it down with
+the other excellent and advantageous things that should occupy her
+summer holiday.  It was her pride and glory to put things down and
+plan them out in detail beforehand, and I'm not quite sure that she
+did not even mark off the day upon which the engagement was to be
+declared.  If she did, I disappointed her.  We didn't come to an
+engagement, in spite of the broadest hints and the glaring
+obviousness of everything, that summer.
+
+Every summer the Baileys went out of London to some house they hired
+or borrowed, leaving their secretaries toiling behind, and they went
+on working hard in the mornings and evenings and taking exercise in
+the open air in the afternoon.  They cycled assiduously and went for
+long walks at a trot, and raided and studied (and incidentally
+explained themselves to) any social "types" that lived in the
+neighbourhood.  One invaded type, resentful under research,
+described them with a dreadful aptness as Donna Quixote and Sancho
+Panza--and himself as a harmless windmill, hurting no one and
+signifying nothing.  She did rather tilt at things.  This particular
+summer they were at a pleasant farmhouse in level country near
+Pangbourne, belonging to the Hon. Wilfrid Winchester, and they asked
+me to come down to rooms in the neighbourhood--Altiora took them for
+a month for me in August--and board with them upon extremely
+reasonable terms; and when I got there I found Margaret sitting in a
+hammock at Altiora's feet.  Lots of people, I gathered, were coming
+and going in the neighbourhood, the Ponts were in a villa on the
+river, and the Rickhams' houseboat was to moor for some days; but
+these irruptions did not impede a great deal of duologue between
+Margaret and myself.
+
+Altiora was efficient rather than artistic in her match-making.  She
+sent us off for long walks together--Margaret was a fairly good
+walker--she exhumed some defective croquet things and incited us to
+croquet, not understanding that detestable game is the worst
+stimulant for lovers in the world.  And Margaret and I were always
+getting left about, and finding ourselves for odd half-hours in the
+kitchen-garden with nothing to do except talk, or we were told with
+a wave of the hand to run away and amuse each other.
+
+Altiora even tried a picnic in canoes, knowing from fiction rather
+than imagination or experience the conclusive nature of such
+excursions.  But there she fumbled at the last moment, and elected
+at the river's brink to share a canoe with me.  Bailey showed so
+much zeal and so little skill--his hat fell off and he became
+miraculously nothing but paddle-clutching hands and a vast wrinkled
+brow--that at last he had to be paddled ignominiously by Margaret,
+while Altiora, after a phase of rigid discretion, as nearly as
+possible drowned herself--and me no doubt into the bargain--with a
+sudden lateral gesture of the arm to emphasise the high note with
+which she dismissed the efficiency of the Charity Organisation
+Society.  We shipped about an inch of water and sat in it for the
+rest of the time, an inconvenience she disregarded heroically.  We
+had difficulties in landing Oscar from his frail craft upon the ait
+of our feasting,--he didn't balance sideways and was much alarmed,
+and afterwards, as Margaret had a pain in her back, I took him in my
+canoe, let him hide his shame with an ineffectual but not positively
+harmful paddle, and towed the other by means of the joined painters.
+Still it was the fault of the inadequate information supplied in the
+books and not of Altiora that that was not the date of my betrothal.
+
+I find it not a little difficult to state what kept me back from
+proposing marriage to Margaret that summer, and what urged me
+forward at last to marry her.  It is so much easier to remember
+one's resolutions than to remember the moods and suggestions that
+produced them.
+
+Marrying and getting married was, I think, a pretty simple affair to
+Altiora; it was something that happened to the adolescent and
+unmarried when you threw them together under the circumstances of
+health, warmth and leisure.  It happened with the kindly and
+approving smiles of the more experienced elders who had organised
+these proximities.  The young people married, settled down, children
+ensued, and father and mother turned their minds, now decently and
+properly disillusioned, to other things.  That to Altiora was the
+normal sexual life, and she believed it to be the quality of the
+great bulk of the life about her.
+
+One of the great barriers to human understanding is the wide
+temperamental difference one finds in the values of things relating
+to sex.  It is the issue upon which people most need training in
+charity and imaginative sympathy.  Here are no universal standards
+at all, and indeed for no single man nor woman does there seem to be
+any fixed standard, so much do the accidents of circumstances and
+one's physical phases affect one's interpretations.  There is
+nothing in the whole range of sexual fact that may not seem
+supremely beautiful or humanly jolly or magnificently wicked or
+disgusting or trivial or utterly insignificant, according to the eye
+that sees or the mood that colours.  Here is something that may fill
+the skies and every waking hour or be almost completely banished
+from a life.  It may be everything on Monday and less than nothing
+on Saturday.  And we make our laws and rules as though in these
+matters all men and women were commensurable one with another, with
+an equal steadfast passion and an equal constant duty. . . .
+
+I don't know what dreams Altiora may have had in her schoolroom
+days, I always suspected her of suppressed and forgotten phases, but
+certainly her general effect now was of an entirely passionless
+worldliness in these matters.  Indeed so far as I could get at her,
+she regarded sexual passion as being hardly more legitimate in a
+civilised person than--let us say--homicidal mania.  She must have
+forgotten--and Bailey too.  I suspect she forgot before she married
+him.  I don't suppose either of them had the slightest intimation of
+the dimensions sexual love can take in the thoughts of the great
+majority of people with whom they come in contact.  They loved in
+their way--an intellectual way it was and a fond way--but it had no
+relation to beauty and physical sensation--except that there seemed
+a decree of exile against these things.  They got their glow in high
+moments of altruistic ambition--and in moments of vivid worldly
+success.  They sat at opposite ends of their dinner table with so
+and so "captured," and so and so, flushed with a mutual approval.
+They saw people in love forgetful and distraught about them, and
+just put it down to forgetfulness and distraction.  At any rate
+Altiora manifestly viewed my situation and Margaret's with an
+abnormal and entirely misleading simplicity.  There was the girl,
+rich, with an acceptable claim to be beautiful, shiningly virtuous,
+quite capable of political interests, and there was I, talented,
+ambitious and full of political and social passion, in need of just
+the money, devotion and regularisation Margaret could provide.  We
+were both unmarried--white sheets of uninscribed paper.  Was there
+ever a simpler situation?  What more could we possibly want?
+
+She was even a little offended at the inconclusiveness that did not
+settle things at Pangbourne.  I seemed to her, I suspect, to reflect
+upon her judgment and good intentions.
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+I didn't see things with Altiora's simplicity.
+
+I admired Margaret very much, I was fully aware of all that she and
+I might give each other; indeed so far as Altiora went we were quite
+in agreement.  But what seemed solid ground to Altiora and the
+ultimate footing of her emasculated world, was to me just the
+superficial covering of a gulf--oh! abysses of vague and dim, and
+yet stupendously significant things.
+
+I couldn't dismiss the interests and the passion of sex as Altiora
+did.  Work, I agreed, was important; career and success; but deep
+unanalysable instincts told me this preoccupation was a thing quite
+as important; dangerous, interfering, destructive indeed, but none
+the less a dominating interest in life.  I have told how flittingly
+and uninvited it came like a moth from the outer twilight into my
+life, how it grew in me with my manhood, how it found its way to
+speech and grew daring, and led me at last to experience.  After
+that adventure at Locarno sex and the interests and desires of sex
+never left me for long at peace.  I went on with my work and my
+career, and all the time it was like--like someone talking ever and
+again in a room while one tries to write.
+
+There were times when I could have wished the world a world all of
+men, so greatly did this unassimilated series of motives and
+curiosities hamper me; and times when I could have wished the world
+all of women.  I seemed always to be seeking something in women, in
+girls, and I was never clear what it was I was seeking.  But never--
+even at my coarsest--was I moved by physical desire alone.  Was I
+seeking help and fellowship?  Was I seeking some intimacy with
+beauty?  It was a thing too formless to state, that I seemed always
+desiring to attain and never attaining.  Waves of gross sensuousness
+arose out of this preoccupation, carried me to a crisis of
+gratification or disappointment that was clearly not the needed
+thing; they passed and left my mind free again for a time to get on
+with the permanent pursuits of my life.  And then presently this
+solicitude would have me again, an irrelevance as it seemed, and yet
+a constantly recurring demand.
+
+I don't want particularly to dwell upon things that are disagreeable
+for others to read, but I cannot leave them out of my story and get
+the right proportions of the forces I am balancing.  I was no
+abnormal man, and that world of order we desire to make must be
+built of such stuff as I was and am and can beget.  You cannot have
+a world of Baileys; it would end in one orderly generation.
+Humanity is begotten in Desire, lives by Desire.
+
+
+     "Love which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb;
+      Love which is lust, is the Call from the Gloom."
+
+
+I echo Henley.
+
+I suppose the life of celibacy which the active, well-fed, well-
+exercised and imaginatively stirred young man of the educated
+classes is supposed to lead from the age of nineteen or twenty, when
+Nature certainly meant him to marry, to thirty or more, when
+civilisation permits him to do so, is the most impossible thing in
+the world.  We deal here with facts that are kept secret and
+obscure, but I doubt for my own part if more than one man out of
+five in our class satisfies that ideal demand.  The rest are even as
+I was, and Hatherleigh and Esmeer and all the men I knew.  I draw no
+lessons and offer no panacea; I have to tell the quality of life,
+and this is how it is.  This is how it will remain until men and
+women have the courage to face the facts of life.
+
+I was no systematic libertine, you must understand; things happened
+to me and desire drove me.  Any young man would have served for that
+Locarno adventure, and after that what had been a mystic and
+wonderful thing passed rapidly into a gross, manifestly misdirected
+and complicating one.  I can count a meagre tale of five illicit
+loves in the days of my youth, to include that first experience, and
+of them all only two were sustained relationships.  Besides these
+five "affairs," on one or two occasions I dipped so low as the inky
+dismal sensuality of the streets, and made one of those pairs of
+correlated figures, the woman in her squalid finery sailing
+homeward, the man modestly aloof and behind, that every night in the
+London year flit by the score of thousands across the sight of the
+observant. . . .
+
+How ugly it is to recall; ugly and shameful now without
+qualification!  Yet at the time there was surely something not
+altogether ugly in it--something that has vanished, some fine thing
+mortally ailing.
+
+One such occasion I recall as if it were a vision deep down in a
+pit, as if it had happened in another state of existence to someone
+else.  And yet it is the sort of thing that has happened, once or
+twice at least, to half the men in London who have been in a
+position to make it possible.  Let me try and give you its peculiar
+effect.  Man or woman, you ought to know of it.
+
+Figure to yourself a dingy room, somewhere in that network of
+streets that lies about Tottenham Court Road, a dingy bedroom lit by
+a solitary candle and carpeted with scraps and patches, with
+curtains of cretonne closing the window, and a tawdry ornament of
+paper in the grate.  I sit on a bed beside a weary-eyed, fair-
+haired, sturdy young woman, half undressed, who is telling me in
+broken German something that my knowledge of German is at first
+inadequate to understand. . . .
+
+I thought she was boasting about her family, and then slowly the
+meaning came to me.  She was a Lett from near Libau in Courland, and
+she was telling me--just as one tells something too strange for
+comment or emotion--how her father had been shot and her sister
+outraged and murdered before her eyes.
+
+It was as if one had dipped into something primordial and stupendous
+beneath the smooth and trivial surfaces of life.  There was I, you
+know, the promising young don from Cambridge, who wrote quite
+brilliantly about politics and might presently get into Parliament,
+with my collar and tie in my hand, and a certain sense of shameful
+adventure fading out of my mind.
+
+"Ach Gott!" she sighed by way of comment, and mused deeply for a
+moment before she turned her face to me, as to something forgotten
+and remembered, and assumed the half-hearted meretricious smile.
+
+"Bin ich eine hubsche?" she asked like one who repeats a lesson.
+
+I was moved to crave her pardon and come away.
+
+"Bin ich eine hubsche?" she asked a little anxiously, laying a
+detaining hand upon me, and evidently not understanding a word of
+what I was striving to say.
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+I find it extraordinarily difficult to recall the phases by which I
+passed from my first admiration of Margaret's earnestness and
+unconscious daintiness to an intimate acquaintance.  The earlier
+encounters stand out clear and hard, but then the impressions become
+crowded and mingle not only with each other but with all the
+subsequent developments of relationship, the enormous evolutions of
+interpretation and comprehension between husband and wife.  Dipping
+into my memories is like dipping into a ragbag, one brings out this
+memory or that, with no intimation of how they came in time or what
+led to them and joined them together.  And they are all mixed up
+with subsequent associations, with sympathies and discords, habits
+of intercourse, surprises and disappointments and discovered
+misunderstandings.  I know only that always my feelings for Margaret
+were complicated feelings, woven of many and various strands.
+
+It is one of the curious neglected aspects of life how at the same
+time and in relation to the same reality we can have in our minds
+streams of thought at quite different levels.  We can be at the same
+time idealising a person and seeing and criticising that person
+quite coldly and clearly, and we slip unconsciously from level to
+level and produce all sorts of inconsistent acts.  In a sense I had
+no illusions about Margaret; in a sense my conception of Margaret
+was entirely poetic illusion.  I don't think I was ever blind to
+certain defects of hers, and quite as certainly they didn't seem to
+matter in the slightest degree.  Her mind had a curious want of
+vigour, "flatness" is the only word; she never seemed to escape from
+her phrase; her way of thinking, her way of doing was indecisive;
+she remained in her attitude, it did not flow out to easy,
+confirmatory action.
+
+I saw this quite clearly, and when we walked and talked together I
+seemed always trying for animation in her and never finding it.  I
+would state my ideas.  "I know," she would say, "I know."
+
+I talked about myself and she listened wonderfully, but she made no
+answering revelations.  I talked politics, and she remarked with her
+blue eyes wide and earnest: "Every WORD you say seems so just."
+
+I admired her appearance tremendously but--I can only express it by
+saying I didn't want to touch her.  Her fair hair was always
+delectably done.  It flowed beautifully over her pretty small ears,
+and she would tie its fair coilings with fillets of black or blue
+velvet that carried pretty buckles of silver and paste.  The light,
+the faint down on her brow and cheek was delightful.  And it was
+clear to me that I made her happy.
+
+My sense of her deficiencies didn't stand in the way of my falling
+at last very deeply in love with her.  Her very shortcomings seemed
+to offer me something. . . .
+
+She stood in my mind for goodness--and for things from which it
+seemed to me my hold was slipping.
+
+She seemed to promise a way of escape from the deepening opposition
+in me between physical passions and the constructive career, the
+career of wide aims and human service, upon which I had embarked.
+All the time that I was seeing her as a beautiful, fragile, rather
+ineffective girl, I was also seeing her just as consciously as a
+shining slender figure, a radiant reconciliation, coming into my
+darkling disorders of lust and impulse.  I could understand clearly
+that she was incapable of the most necessary subtleties of political
+thought, and yet I could contemplate praying to her and putting all
+the intricate troubles of my life at her feet.
+
+Before the reappearance of Margaret in my world at all an unwonted
+disgust with the consequences and quality of my passions had arisen
+in my mind.  Among other things that moment with the Lettish girl
+haunted me persistently.  I would see myself again and again sitting
+amidst those sluttish surroundings, collar and tie in hand, while
+her heavy German words grouped themselves to a slowly apprehended
+meaning.  I would feel again with a fresh stab of remorse, that this
+was not a flash of adventure, this was not seeing life in any
+permissible sense, but a dip into tragedy, dishonour, hideous
+degradation, and the pitiless cruelty of a world as yet uncontrolled
+by any ordered will.
+
+"Good God!" I put it to myself, "that I should finish the work those
+Cossacks had begun!  I who want order and justice before everything!
+There's no way out of it, no decent excuse!  If I didn't think, I
+ought to have thought!" . . .
+
+"How did I get to it?" . . .  I would ransack the phases of my
+development from the first shy unveiling of a hidden wonder to the
+last extremity as a man will go through muddled account books to
+find some disorganising error. . . .
+
+I was also involved at that time--I find it hard to place these
+things in the exact order of their dates because they were so
+disconnected with the regular progress of my work and life--in an
+intrigue, a clumsy, sensuous, pretentious, artificially stimulated
+intrigue, with a Mrs. Larrimer, a woman living separated from her
+husband.  I will not go into particulars of that episode, nor how we
+quarrelled and chafed one another.  She was at once unfaithful and
+jealous and full of whims about our meetings; she was careless of
+our secret, and vulgarised our relationship by intolerable
+interpretations; except for some glowing moments of gratification,
+except for the recurrent and essentially vicious desire that drew us
+back to each other again, we both fretted at a vexatious and
+unexpectedly binding intimacy.  The interim was full of the quality
+of work delayed, of time and energy wasted, of insecure precautions
+against scandal and exposure.  Disappointment is almost inherent in
+illicit love.  I had, and perhaps it was part of her recurrent
+irritation also, a feeling as though one had followed something fine
+and beautiful into a net--into bird lime!  These furtive scuffles,
+this sneaking into shabby houses of assignation, was what we had
+made out of the suggestion of pagan beauty; this was the reality of
+our vision of nymphs and satyrs dancing for the joy of life amidst
+incessant sunshine.  We had laid hands upon the wonder and glory of
+bodily love and wasted them. . . .
+
+It was the sense of waste, of finely beautiful possibilities getting
+entangled and marred for ever that oppressed me.  I had missed, I
+had lost.  I did not turn from these things after the fashion of the
+Baileys, as one turns from something low and embarrassing.  I felt
+that these great organic forces were still to be wrought into a
+harmony with my constructive passion.  I felt too that I was not
+doing it.  I had not understood the forces in this struggle nor its
+nature, and as I learnt I failed.  I had been started wrong, I had
+gone on wrong, in a world that was muddled and confused, full of
+false counsel and erratic shames and twisted temptations.  I learnt
+to see it so by failures that were perhaps destroying any chance of
+profit in my lessons.  Moods of clear keen industry alternated with
+moods of relapse and indulgence and moods of dubiety and remorse.  I
+was not going on as the Baileys thought I was going on.  There were
+times when the blindness of the Baileys irritated me intensely.
+Beneath the ostensible success of those years, between twenty-three
+and twenty-eight, this rottenness, known to scarcely any one but
+myself, grew and spread.  My sense of the probability of a collapse
+intensified.  I knew indeed now, even as Willersley had prophesied
+five years before, that I was entangling myself in something that
+might smother all my uses in the world.  Down there among those
+incommunicable difficulties, I was puzzled and blundering.  I was
+losing my hold upon things; the chaotic and adventurous element in
+life was spreading upward and getting the better of me, over-
+mastering me and all my will to rule and make. . . .  And the
+strength, the drugging urgency of the passion!
+
+Margaret shone at times in my imagination like a radiant angel in a
+world of mire and disorder, in a world of cravings, hot and dull red
+like scars inflamed. . . .
+
+I suppose it was because I had so great a need of such help as her
+whiteness proffered, that I could ascribe impossible perfections to
+her, a power of intellect, a moral power and patience to which she,
+poor fellow mortal, had indeed no claim.  If only a few of us WERE
+angels and freed from the tangle of effort, how easy life might be!
+I wanted her so badly, so very badly, to be what I needed.  I wanted
+a woman to save me.  I forced myself to see her as I wished to see
+her.  Her tepidities became infinite delicacies, her mental
+vagueness an atmospheric realism.  The harsh precisions of the
+Baileys and Altiora's blunt directness threw up her fineness into
+relief and made a grace of every weakness.
+
+Mixed up with the memory of times when I talked with Margaret as one
+talks politely to those who are hopelessly inferior in mental
+quality, explaining with a false lucidity, welcoming and encouraging
+the feeblest response, when possible moulding and directing, are
+times when I did indeed, as the old phrase goes, worship the ground
+she trod on.  I was equally honest and unconscious of inconsistency
+at each extreme.  But in neither phase could I find it easy to make
+love to Margaret.  For in the first I did not want to, though I
+talked abundantly to her of marriage and so forth, and was a little
+puzzled at myself for not going on to some personal application, and
+in the second she seemed inaccessible, I felt I must make
+confessions and put things before her that would be the grossest
+outrage upon the noble purity I attributed to her.
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+I went to Margaret at last to ask her to marry me, wrought up to the
+mood of one who stakes his life on a cast.  Separated from her, and
+with the resonance of an evening of angry recriminations with Mrs.
+Larrimer echoing in my mind, I discovered myself to be quite
+passionately in love with Margaret.  Last shreds of doubt vanished.
+It has always been a feature of our relationship that Margaret
+absent means more to me than Margaret present; her memory distils
+from its dross and purifies in me.  All my criticisms and
+qualifications of her vanished into some dark corner of my mind.
+She was the lady of my salvation; I must win my way to her or
+perish.
+
+I went to her at last, for all that I knew she loved me, in
+passionate self-abasement, white and a-tremble.  She was staying
+with the Rockleys at Woking, for Shena Rockley had been at Bennett
+Hall with her and they had resumed a close intimacy; and I went down
+to her on an impulse, unheralded.  I was kept waiting for some
+minutes, I remember, in a little room upon which a conservatory
+opened, a conservatory full of pots of large mauve-edged, white
+cyclamens in flower.  And there was a big lacquer cabinet, a Chinese
+thing, I suppose, of black and gold against the red-toned wall.  To
+this day the thought of Margaret is inseparably bound up with the
+sight of a cyclamen's back-turned petals.
+
+She came in, looking pale and drooping rather more than usual.  I
+suddenly realised that Altiora's hint of a disappointment leading to
+positive illness was something more than a vindictive comment.  She
+closed the door and came across to me and took and dropped my hand
+and stood still.  "What is it you want with me?" she asked.
+
+The speech I had been turning over and over in my mind on the way
+vanished at the sight of her.
+
+"I want to talk to you," I answered lamely.
+
+For some seconds neither of us said a word.
+
+"I want to tell you things about my life," I began.
+
+She answered with a scarcely audible "yes."
+
+"I almost asked you to marry me at Pangbourne," I plunged.  "I
+didn't.  I didn't because--because you had too much to give me."
+
+"Too much!" she echoed, "to give you!"  She had lifted her eyes to
+my face and the colour was coming into her cheeks.
+
+"Don't misunderstand me," I said hastily.  "I want to tell you
+things, things you don't know.  Don't answer me.  I want to tell
+you."
+
+She stood before the fireplace with her ultimate answer shining
+through the quiet of her face.  "Go on," she said, very softly.  It
+was so pitilessly manifest she was resolved to idealise the
+situation whatever I might say.  I began walking up and down the
+room between those cyclamens and the cabinet.  There were little
+gold fishermen on the cabinet fishing from little islands that each
+had a pagoda and a tree, and there were also men in boats or
+something, I couldn't determine what, and some obscure sub-office in
+my mind concerned itself with that quite intently.  Yet I seem to
+have been striving with all my being to get words for the truth of
+things.  "You see," I emerged, "you make everything possible to me.
+You can give me help and sympathy, support, understanding.  You know
+my political ambitions.  You know all that I might do in the world.
+I do so intensely want to do constructive things, big things
+perhaps, in this wild jumble. . . .  Only you don't know a bit what
+I am.  I want to tell you what I am.  I'm complex. . . .  I'm
+streaked."
+
+I glanced at her, and she was regarding me with an expression of
+blissful disregard for any meaning I was seeking to convey.
+
+"You see," I said, "I'm a bad man."
+
+She sounded a note of valiant incredulity.
+
+Everything seemed to be slipping away from me.  I pushed on to the
+ugly facts that remained over from the wreck of my interpretation.
+"What has held me back," I said, "is the thought that you could not
+possibly understand certain things in my life.  Men are not pure as
+women are.  I have had love affairs.  I mean I have had affairs.
+Passion--desire.  You see, I have had a mistress, I have been
+entangled--"
+
+She seemed about to speak, but I interrupted.  "I'm not telling
+you," I said, "what I meant to tell you.  I want you to know clearly
+that there is another side to my life, a dirty side.  Deliberately I
+say, dirty.  It didn't seem so at first--"
+
+I stopped blankly.  "Dirty," I thought, was the most idiotic choice
+of words to have made.
+
+I had never in any tolerable sense of the word been dirty.
+
+"I drifted into this--as men do," I said after a little pause and
+stopped again.
+
+She was looking at me with her wide blue eyes.
+
+"Did you imagine," she began, "that I thought you--that I expected--"
+
+"But how can you know?"
+
+"I know.  I do know."
+
+"But--" I began.
+
+"I know," she persisted, dropping her eyelids.  "Of course I know,"
+and nothing could have convinced me more completely that she did not
+know.
+
+"All men--" she generalised.  "A woman does not understand these
+temptations."
+
+I was astonished beyond measure at her way of taking my confession.
+. . .
+
+"Of course," she said, hesitating a little over a transparent
+difficulty, "it is all over and past."
+
+"It's all over and past," I answered.
+
+There was a little pause.
+
+"I don't want to know," she said.  "None of that seems to matter now
+in the slightest degree."
+
+She looked up and smiled as though we had exchanged some acceptable
+commonplaces.  "Poor dear!" she said, dismissing everything, and put
+out her arms, and it seemed to me that I could hear the Lettish girl
+in the background--doomed safety valve of purity in this intolerable
+world--telling something in indistinguishable German--I know not
+what nor why. . . .
+
+I took Margaret in my arms and kissed her.  Her eyes were wet with
+tears.  She clung to me and was near, I felt, to sobbing.
+
+"I have loved you," she whispered presently, "Oh! ever since we met
+in Misterton--six years and more ago."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD
+
+MARGARET IN VENICE
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+There comes into my mind a confused memory of conversations with
+Margaret; we must have had dozens altogether, and they mix in now
+for the most part inextricably not only with one another, but with
+later talks and with things we discussed at Pangbourne.  We had the
+immensest anticipations of the years and opportunities that lay
+before us.  I was now very deeply in love with her indeed.  I felt
+not that I had cleaned up my life but that she had.  We called each
+other "confederate" I remember, and made during our brief engagement
+a series of visits to the various legislative bodies in London, the
+County Council, the House of Commons, where we dined with Villiers,
+and the St. Pancras Vestry, where we heard Shaw speaking.  I was
+full of plans and so was she of the way in which we were to live and
+work.  We were to pay back in public service whatever excess of
+wealth beyond his merits old Seddon's economic advantage had won for
+him from the toiling people in the potteries.  The end of the Boer
+War was so recent that that blessed word "efficiency" echoed still
+in people's minds and thoughts.  Lord Roseberry in a memorable
+oration had put it into the heads of the big outer public, but the
+Baileys with a certain show of justice claimed to have set it going
+in the channels that took it to him--if as a matter of fact it was
+taken to him.  But then it was their habit to make claims of that
+sort.  They certainly did their share to keep "efficient" going.
+Altiora's highest praise was "thoroughly efficient."  We were to be
+a "thoroughly efficient" political couple of the "new type."  She
+explained us to herself and Oscar, she explained us to ourselves,
+she explained us to the people who came to her dinners and
+afternoons until the world was highly charged with explanation and
+expectation, and the proposal that I should be the Liberal candidate
+for the Kinghamstead Division seemed the most natural development in
+the world.
+
+I was full of the ideal of hard restrained living and relentless
+activity, and throughout a beautiful November at Venice, where
+chiefly we spent our honeymoon, we turned over and over again and
+discussed in every aspect our conception of a life tremendously
+focussed upon the ideal of social service.
+
+Most clearly there stands out a picture of ourselves talking in a
+gondola on our way to Torcella.  Far away behind us the smoke of
+Murano forms a black stain upon an immense shining prospect of
+smooth water, water as unruffled and luminous as the sky above, a
+mirror on which rows of posts and distant black high-stemmed, swan-
+necked boats with their minutely clear swinging gondoliers, float
+aerially.  Remote and low before us rises the little tower of our
+destination.  Our men swing together and their oars swirl leisurely
+through the water, hump back in the rowlocks, splash sharply and go
+swishing back again.  Margaret lies back on cushions, with her face
+shaded by a holland parasol, and I sit up beside her.
+
+"You see," I say, and in spite of Margaret's note of perfect
+acquiescence I feel myself reasoning against an indefinable
+antagonism, "it is so easy to fall into a slack way with life.
+There may seem to be something priggish in a meticulous discipline,
+but otherwise it is so easy to slip into indolent habits--and to be
+distracted from one's purpose.  The country, the world, wants men to
+serve its constructive needs, to work out and carry out plans.  For
+a man who has to make a living the enemy is immediate necessity; for
+people like ourselves it's--it's the constant small opportunity of
+agreeable things."
+
+"Frittering away," she says, "time and strength."
+
+"That is what I feel.  It's so pleasant to pretend one is simply
+modest, it looks so foolish at times to take one's self too
+seriously.  We've GOT to take ourselves seriously."
+
+She endorses my words with her eyes.
+
+"I feel I can do great things with life."
+
+"I KNOW you can."
+
+"But that's only to be done by concentrating one's life upon one
+main end.  We have to plan our days, to make everything subserve our
+scheme."
+
+"I feel," she answers softly, "we ought to give--every hour."
+
+Her face becomes dreamy.  "I WANT to give every hour," she adds.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+That holiday in Venice is set in my memory like a little artificial
+lake in uneven confused country, as something very bright and
+skylike, and discontinuous with all about it.  The faded quality of
+the very sunshine of that season, the mellow discoloured palaces and
+places, the huge, time-ripened paintings of departed splendours, the
+whispering, nearly noiseless passage of hearse-black gondolas, for
+the horrible steam launch had not yet ruined Venice, the stilled
+magnificences of the depopulated lagoons, the universal autumn, made
+me feel altogether in recess from the teeming uproars of reality.
+There was not a dozen people all told, no Americans and scarcely any
+English, to dine in the big cavern of a dining-room, with its vistas
+of separate tables, its distempered walls and its swathed
+chandeliers.  We went about seeing beautiful things, accepting
+beauty on every hand, and taking it for granted that all was well
+with ourselves and the world.  It was ten days or a fortnight before
+I became fretful and anxious for action; a long tranquillity for
+such a temperament as mine.
+
+Our pleasures were curiously impersonal, a succession of shared
+aesthetic appreciation threads all that time.  Our honeymoon was no
+exultant coming together, no mutual shout of "YOU!"  We were almost
+shy with one another, and felt the relief of even a picture to help
+us out.  It was entirely in my conception of things that I should be
+very watchful not to shock or distress Margaret or press the
+sensuous note.  Our love-making had much of the tepid smoothness of
+the lagoons.  We talked in delicate innuendo of what should be
+glorious freedoms.  Margaret had missed Verona and Venice in her
+previous Italian journey--fear of the mosquito had driven her mother
+across Italy to the westward route--and now she could fill up her
+gaps and see the Titians and Paul Veroneses she already knew in
+colourless photographs, the Carpaccios, (the St. George series
+delighted her beyond measure,) the Basaitis and that great statue of
+Bartolomeo Colleoni that Ruskin praised.
+
+But since I am not a man to look at pictures and architectural
+effects day after day, I did watch Margaret very closely and store a
+thousand memories of her.  I can see her now, her long body drooping
+a little forward, her sweet face upraised to some discovered
+familiar masterpiece and shining with a delicate enthusiasm.  I can
+hear again the soft cadences of her voice murmuring commonplace
+comments, for she had no gift of expressing the shapeless
+satisfaction these things gave her.
+
+Margaret, I perceived, was a cultivated person, the first cultivated
+person with whom I had ever come into close contact.  She was
+cultivated and moral, and I, I now realise, was never either of
+these things.  She was passive, and I am active.  She did not simply
+and naturally look for beauty but she had been incited to look for
+it at school, and took perhaps a keener interest in books and
+lectures and all the organisation of beautiful things than she did
+in beauty itself; she found much of her delight in being guided to
+it.  Now a thing ceases to be beautiful to me when some finger points
+me out its merits.  Beauty is the salt of life, but I take my beauty
+as a wild beast gets its salt, as a constituent of the meal. . . .
+
+And besides, there was that between us that should have seemed more
+beautiful than any picture. . . .
+
+So we went about Venice tracking down pictures and spiral staircases
+and such-like things, and my brains were busy all the time with such
+things as a comparison of Venice and its nearest modern equivalent,
+New York, with the elaboration of schemes of action when we returned
+to London, with the development of a theory of Margaret.
+
+Our marriage had done this much at least, that it had fused and
+destroyed those two independent ways of thinking about her that had
+gone on in my mind hitherto.  Suddenly she had become very near to
+me, and a very big thing, a sort of comprehensive generalisation
+behind a thousand questions, like the sky or England.  The judgments
+and understandings that had worked when she was, so to speak, miles
+away from my life, had now to be altogether revised.  Trifling
+things began to matter enormously, that she had a weak and easily
+fatigued back, for example, or that when she knitted her brows and
+stammered a little in talking, it didn't really mean that an
+exquisite significance struggled for utterance.
+
+We visited pictures in the mornings chiefly.  In the afternoon,
+unless we were making a day-long excursion in a gondola, Margaret
+would rest for an hour while I prowled about in search of English
+newspapers, and then we would go to tea in the Piazza San Marco and
+watch the drift of people feeding the pigeons and going into the
+little doors beneath the sunlit arches and domes of Saint Mark's.
+Then perhaps we would stroll on the Piazzetta, or go out into the
+sunset in a gondola.  Margaret became very interested in the shops
+that abound under the colonnades and decided at last to make an
+extensive purchase of table glass.  "These things," she said, "are
+quite beautiful, and far cheaper than anything but the most ordinary
+looking English ware."  I was interested in her idea, and a good
+deal charmed by the delightful qualities of tinted shape, slender
+handle and twisted stem.  I suggested we should get not simply
+tumblers and wineglasses but bedroom waterbottles, fruit- and sweet-
+dishes, water-jugs, and in the end we made quite a business-like
+afternoon of it.
+
+I was beginning now to long quite definitely for events.  Energy was
+accumulating in me, and worrying me for an outlet.  I found the
+TIMES and the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the other papers I managed to get
+hold of, more and more stimulating.  I nearly wrote to the former
+paper one day in answer to a letter by Lord Grimthorpe--I forget now
+upon what point.  I chafed secretly against this life of tranquil
+appreciations more and more.  I found my attitudes of restrained and
+delicate affection for Margaret increasingly difficult to sustain.
+I surprised myself and her by little gusts of irritability, gusts
+like the catspaws before a gale.  I was alarmed at these symptoms.
+
+One night when Margaret had gone up to her room, I put on a light
+overcoat, went out into the night and prowled for a long time
+through the narrow streets, smoking and thinking.  I returned and
+went and sat on the edge of her bed to talk to her.
+
+"Look here, Margaret," I said; "this is all very well, but I'm
+restless."
+
+"Restless!" she said with a faint surprise in her voice.
+
+"Yes.  I think I want exercise.  I've got a sort of feeling--I've
+never had it before--as though I was getting fat."
+
+"My dear!" she cried.
+
+"I want to do things;--ride horses, climb mountains, take the devil
+out of myself."
+
+She watched me thoughtfully.
+
+"Couldn't we DO something?" she said.
+
+Do what?
+
+"I don't know.  Couldn't we perhaps go away from here soon--and walk
+in the mountains--on our way home."
+
+I thought.  "There seems to be no exercise at all in this place."
+
+"Isn't there some walk?"
+
+"I wonder," I answered.  "We might walk to Chioggia perhaps, along
+the Lido."  And we tried that, but the long stretch of beach
+fatigued Margaret's back, and gave her blisters, and we never got
+beyond Malamocco. . . .
+
+A day or so after we went out to those pleasant black-robed, bearded
+Armenians in their monastery at Saint Lazzaro, and returned towards
+sundown.  We fell into silence.  "PIU LENTO," said Margaret to the
+gondolier, and released my accumulated resolution.
+
+"Let us go back to London," I said abruptly.
+
+Margaret looked at me with surprised blue eyes.
+
+"This is beautiful beyond measure, you know," I said, sticking to my
+point, "but I have work to do."
+
+She was silent for some seconds.  "I had forgotten," she said.
+
+"So had I," I sympathised, and took her hand.  "Suddenly I have
+remembered."
+
+She remained quite still.  "There is so much to be done," I said,
+almost apologetically.
+
+She looked long away from me across the lagoon and at last sighed,
+like one who has drunk deeply, and turned to me.
+
+"I suppose one ought not to be so happy," she said.  "Everything has
+been so beautiful and so simple and splendid.  And clean.  It has
+been just With You--the time of my life.  It's a pity such things
+must end.  But the world is calling you, dear. . . .  I ought not to
+have forgotten it.  I thought you were resting--and thinking.  But
+if you are rested.--Would you like us to start to-morrow?"
+
+She looked at once so fragile and so devoted that on the spur of the
+moment I relented, and we stayed in Venice four more days.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH
+
+THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+Margaret had already taken a little house in Radnor Square,
+Westminster, before our marriage, a house that seemed particularly
+adaptable to our needs as public-spirited efficients; it had been
+very pleasantly painted and papered under Margaret's instructions,
+white paint and clean open purples and green predominating, and now
+we set to work at once upon the interesting business of arranging
+and--with our Venetian glass as a beginning--furnishing it.  We had
+been fairly fortunate with our wedding presents, and for the most
+part it was open to us to choose just exactly what we would have and
+just precisely where we would put it.
+
+Margaret had a sense of form and colour altogether superior to mine,
+and so quite apart from the fact that it was her money equipped us,
+I stood aside from all these matters and obeyed her summons to a
+consultation only to endorse her judgment very readily.  Until
+everything was settled I went every day to my old rooms in Vincent
+Square and worked at a series of papers that were originally
+intended for the FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW, the papers that afterwards
+became my fourth book, "New Aspects of Liberalism."
+
+I still remember as delightful most of the circumstances of getting
+into 79, Radnor Square.  The thin flavour of indecision about
+Margaret disappeared altogether in a shop; she had the precisest
+ideas of what she wanted, and the devices of the salesman did not
+sway her.  It was very pleasant to find her taking things out of my
+hands with a certain masterfulness, and showing the distinctest
+determination to make a house in which I should be able to work in
+that great project of "doing something for the world."
+
+"And I do want to make things pretty about us," she said.  "You
+don't think it wrong to have things pretty?"
+
+"I want them so."
+
+"Altiora has things hard."
+
+"Altiora," I answered, "takes a pride in standing ugly and
+uncomfortable things.  But I don't see that they help her.  Anyhow
+they won't help me."
+
+So Margaret went to the best shops and got everything very simple
+and very good.  She bought some pictures very well indeed; there was
+a little Sussex landscape, full of wind and sunshine, by Nicholson,
+for my study, that hit my taste far better than if I had gone out to
+get some such expression for myself.
+
+"We will buy a picture just now and then," she said, "sometimes--
+when we see one."
+
+I would come back through the January mire or fog from Vincent
+Square to the door of 79, and reach it at last with a quite childish
+appreciation of the fact that its solid Georgian proportions and its
+fine brass furnishings belonged to MY home; I would use my latchkey
+and discover Margaret in the warm-lit, spacious hall with a
+partially opened packing-case, fatigued but happy, or go up to have
+tea with her out of the right tea things, "come at last," or be told
+to notice what was fresh there.  It wasn't simply that I had never
+had a house before, but I had really never been, except in the most
+transitory way, in any house that was nearly so delightful as mine
+promised to be.  Everything was fresh and bright, and softly and
+harmoniously toned.  Downstairs we had a green dining-room with
+gleaming silver, dark oak, and English colour-prints; above was a
+large drawing-room that could be made still larger by throwing open
+folding doors, and it was all carefully done in greys and blues, for
+the most part with real Sheraton supplemented by Sheraton so
+skilfully imitated by an expert Margaret had discovered as to be
+indistinguishable except to a minute scrutiny.  And for me, above
+this and next to my bedroom, there was a roomy study, with specially
+thick stair-carpet outside and thick carpets in the bedroom overhead
+and a big old desk for me to sit at and work between fire and
+window, and another desk specially made for me by that expert if I
+chose to stand and write, and open bookshelves and bookcases and
+every sort of convenient fitting.  There were electric heaters
+beside the open fire, and everything was put for me to make tea at
+any time--electric kettle, infuser, biscuits and fresh butter, so
+that I could get up and work at any hour of the day or night.  I
+could do no work in this apartment for a long time, I was so
+interested in the perfection of its arrangements.  And when I
+brought in my books and papers from Vincent Square, Margaret seized
+upon all the really shabby volumes and had them re-bound in a fine
+official-looking leather.
+
+I can remember sitting down at that desk and looking round me and
+feeling with a queer effect of surprise that after all even a place
+in the Cabinet, though infinitely remote, was nevertheless in the
+same large world with these fine and quietly expensive things.
+
+On the same floor Margaret had a "den," a very neat and pretty den
+with good colour-prints of Botticellis and Carpaccios, and there was
+a third apartment for sectarial purposes should the necessity for
+them arise, with a severe-looking desk equipped with patent files.
+And Margaret would come flitting into the room to me, or appear
+noiselessly standing, a tall gracefully drooping form, in the wide
+open doorway.  "Is everything right, dear?" she would ask.
+
+"Come in," I would say, "I'm sorting out papers."
+
+She would come to the hearthrug.
+
+"I mustn't disturb you," she would remark.
+
+"I'm not busy yet."
+
+"Things are getting into order.  Then we must make out a time-table
+as the Baileys do, and BEGIN!"
+
+Altiora came in to see us once or twice, and a number of serious
+young wives known to Altiora called and were shown over the house,
+and discussed its arrangements with Margaret.  They were all
+tremendously keen on efficient arrangements.
+
+"A little pretty," said Altiora, with the faintest disapproval,
+"still--"
+
+It was clear she thought we should grow out of that.  From the day
+of our return we found other people's houses open to us and eager
+for us.  We went out of London for week-ends and dined out, and
+began discussing our projects for reciprocating these hospitalities.
+As a single man unattached, I had had a wide and miscellaneous
+social range, but now I found myself falling into place in a set.
+For a time I acquiesced in this.  I went very little to my clubs,
+the Climax and the National Liberal, and participated in no bachelor
+dinners at all.  For a time, too, I dropped out of the garrulous
+literary and journalistic circles I had frequented.  I put up for
+the Reform, not so much for the use of the club as a sign of serious
+and substantial political standing.  I didn't go up to Cambridge, I
+remember, for nearly a year, so occupied was I with my new
+adjustments.
+
+The people we found ourselves among at this time were people, to put
+it roughly, of the Parliamentary candidate class, or people already
+actually placed in the political world.  They ranged between very
+considerable wealth and such a hard, bare independence as old
+Willersley and the sister who kept house for him possessed.  There
+were quite a number of young couples like ourselves, a little
+younger and more artless, or a little older and more established.
+Among the younger men I had a sort of distinction because of my
+Cambridge reputation and my writing, and because, unlike them, I was
+an adventurer and had won and married my way into their circles
+instead of being naturally there.  They couldn't quite reckon upon
+what I should do; they felt I had reserves of experience and
+incalculable traditions.  Close to us were the Cramptons, Willie
+Crampton, who has since been Postmaster-General, rich and very
+important in Rockshire, and his younger brother Edward, who has
+specialised in history and become one of those unimaginative men of
+letters who are the glory of latter-day England.  Then there was
+Lewis, further towards Kensington, where his cousins the Solomons
+and the Hartsteins lived, a brilliant representative of his race,
+able, industrious and invariably uninspired, with a wife a little in
+revolt against the racial tradition of feminine servitude and
+inclined to the suffragette point of view, and Bunting Harblow, an
+old blue, and with an erratic disposition well under the control of
+the able little cousin he had married.  I had known all these men,
+but now (with Altiora floating angelically in benediction) they
+opened their hearts to me and took me into their order.  They were
+all like myself, prospective Liberal candidates, with a feeling that
+the period of wandering in the wilderness of opposition was drawing
+near its close.  They were all tremendously keen upon social and
+political service, and all greatly under the sway of the ideal of a
+simple, strenuous life, a life finding its satisfactions in
+political achievements and distinctions.  The young wives were as
+keen about it as the young husbands, Margaret most of all, and I--
+whatever elements in me didn't march with the attitudes and habits
+of this set were very much in the background during that time.
+
+We would give little dinners and have evening gatherings at which
+everything was very simple and very good, with a slight but
+perceptible austerity, and there was more good fruit and flowers and
+less perhaps in the way of savouries, patties and entrees than was
+customary.  Sherry we banished, and Marsala and liqueurs, and there
+was always good home-made lemonade available.  No men waited, but
+very expert parlourmaids.  Our meat was usually Welsh mutton--I
+don't know why, unless that mountains have ever been the last refuge
+of the severer virtues.  And we talked politics and books and ideas
+and Bernard Shaw (who was a department by himself and supposed in
+those days to be ethically sound at bottom), and mingled with the
+intellectuals--I myself was, as it were, a promoted intellectual.
+
+The Cramptons had a tendency to read good things aloud on their less
+frequented receptions, but I have never been able to participate
+submissively in this hyper-digestion of written matter, and
+generally managed to provoke a disruptive debate.  We were all very
+earnest to make the most of ourselves and to be and do, and I wonder
+still at times, with an unassuaged perplexity, how it is that in
+that phase of utmost earnestness I have always seemed to myself to
+be most remote from reality.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+I look back now across the detaching intervention of sixteen crowded
+years, critically and I fancy almost impartially, to those
+beginnings of my married life.  I try to recall something near to
+their proper order the developing phases of relationship.  I am
+struck most of all by the immense unpremeditated, generous-spirited
+insincerities upon which Margaret and I were building.
+
+It seems to me that here I have to tell perhaps the commonest
+experience of all among married educated people, the deliberate,
+shy, complex effort to fill the yawning gaps in temperament as they
+appear, the sustained, failing attempt to bridge abysses, level
+barriers, evade violent pressures.  I have come these latter years
+of my life to believe that it is possible for a man and woman to be
+absolutely real with one another, to stand naked souled to each
+other, unashamed and unafraid, because of the natural all-glorifying
+love between them.  It is possible to love and be loved untroubling,
+as a bird flies through the air.  But it is a rare and intricate
+chance that brings two people within sight of that essential union,
+and for the majority marriage must adjust itself on other terms.
+Most coupled people never really look at one another.  They look a
+little away to preconceived ideas.  And each from the first days of
+love-making HIDES from the other, is afraid of disappointing, afraid
+of offending, afraid of discoveries in either sense.  They build not
+solidly upon the rock of truth, but upon arches and pillars and
+queer provisional supports that are needed to make a common
+foundation, and below in the imprisoned darknesses, below the fine
+fabric they sustain together begins for each of them a cavernous
+hidden life.  Down there things may be prowling that scarce ever
+peep out to consciousness except in the grey half-light of sleepless
+nights, passions that flash out for an instant in an angry glance
+and are seen no more, starved victims and beautiful dreams bricked
+up to die.  For the most of us there is no jail delivery of those
+inner depths, and the life above goes on to its honourable end.
+
+I have told how I loved Margaret and how I came to marry her.
+Perhaps already unintentionally I have indicated the quality of the
+injustice our marriage did us both.  There was no kindred between us
+and no understanding.  We were drawn to one another by the
+unlikeness of our quality, by the things we misunderstood in each
+other.  I know a score of couples who have married in that fashion.
+
+Modern conditions and modern ideas, and in particular the intenser
+and subtler perceptions of modern life, press more and more heavily
+upon a marriage tie whose fashion comes from an earlier and less
+discriminating time.  When the wife was her husband's subordinate,
+meeting him simply and uncritically for simple ends, when marriage
+was a purely domestic relationship, leaving thought and the vivid
+things of life almost entirely to the unencumbered man, mental and
+temperamental incompatibilities mattered comparatively little.  But
+now the wife, and particularly the loving childless wife,
+unpremeditatedly makes a relentless demand for a complete
+association, and the husband exacts unthought of delicacies of
+understanding and co-operation.  These are stupendous demands.
+People not only think more fully and elaborately about life than
+they ever did before, but marriage obliges us to make that ever more
+accidented progress a three-legged race of carelessly assorted
+couples. . . .
+
+Our very mental texture was different.  I was rough-minded, to use
+the phrase of William James, primary and intuitive and illogical;
+she was tender-minded, logical, refined and secondary.  She was
+loyal to pledge and persons, sentimental and faithful; I am loyal to
+ideas and instincts, emotional and scheming.  My imagination moves
+in broad gestures; her's was delicate with a real dread of
+extravagance.  My quality is sensuous and ruled by warm impulses;
+hers was discriminating and essentially inhibitory.  I like the
+facts of the case and to mention everything; I like naked bodies and
+the jolly smells of things.  She abounded in reservations, in
+circumlocutions and evasions, in keenly appreciated secondary
+points.  Perhaps the reader knows that Tintoretto in the National
+Gallery, the Origin of the Milky Way.  It is an admirable test of
+temperamental quality.  In spite of my early training I have come
+to regard that picture as altogether delightful; to Margaret it has
+always been "needlessly offensive."  In that you have our
+fundamental breach.  She had a habit, by no means rare, of damning
+what she did not like or find sympathetic in me on the score that it
+was not my "true self," and she did not so much accept the universe
+as select from it and do her best to ignore the rest.  And also I
+had far more initiative than had she.  This is no catalogue of
+rights and wrongs, or superiorities and inferiorities; it is a
+catalogue of differences between two people linked in a relationship
+that constantly becomes more intolerant of differences.
+
+This is how we stood to each other, and none of it was clear to
+either of us at the outset.  To begin with, I found myself reserving
+myself from her, then slowly apprehending a jarring between our
+minds and what seemed to me at first a queer little habit of
+misunderstanding in her. . . .
+
+It did not hinder my being very fond of her. . . .
+
+Where our system of reservation became at once most usual and most
+astounding was in our personal relations.  It is not too much to say
+that in that regard we never for a moment achieved sincerity with
+one another during the first six years of our life together.  It
+goes even deeper than that, for in my effort to realise the ideal of
+my marriage I ceased even to attempt to be sincere with myself.  I
+would not admit my own perceptions and interpretations.  I tried to
+fit myself to her thinner and finer determinations.  There are
+people who will say with a note of approval that I was learning to
+conquer myself.  I record that much without any note of approval. . . .
+
+For some years I never deceived Margaret about any concrete fact
+nor, except for the silence about my earlier life that she had
+almost forced upon me, did I hide any concrete fact that seemed to
+affect her, but from the outset I was guilty of immense spiritual
+concealments, my very marriage was based, I see now, on a spiritual
+subterfuge; I hid moods from her, pretended feelings. . . .
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+The interest and excitement of setting-up a house, of walking about
+it from room to room and from floor to floor, or sitting at one's
+own dinner table and watching one's wife control conversation with a
+pretty, timid resolution, of taking a place among the secure and
+free people of our world, passed almost insensibly into the interest
+and excitement of my Parliamentary candidature for the Kinghamstead
+Division, that shapeless chunk of agricultural midland between the
+Great Western and the North Western railways.  I was going to "take
+hold" at last, the Kinghamstead Division was my appointed handle.  I
+was to find my place in the rather indistinctly sketched
+constructions that were implicit in the minds of all our circle.
+The precise place I had to fill and the precise functions I had to
+discharge were not as yet very clear, but all that, we felt sure,
+would become plain as things developed.
+
+A few brief months of vague activities of "nursing" gave place to
+the excitements of the contest that followed the return of Mr.
+Camphell-Bannerman to power in 1905.  So far as the Kinghamstead
+Division was concerned it was a depressed and tepid battle.  I went
+about the constituency making three speeches that were soon
+threadbare, and an odd little collection of people worked for me;
+two solicitors, a cheap photographer, a democratic parson, a number
+of dissenting ministers, the Mayor of Kinghamstead, a Mrs. Bulger,
+the widow of an old Chartist who had grown rich through electric
+traction patents, Sir Roderick Newton, a Jew who had bought
+Calersham Castle, and old Sir Graham Rivers, that sturdy old
+soldier, were among my chief supporters.  We had headquarters in
+each town and village, mostly there were empty shops we leased
+temporarily, and there at least a sort of fuss and a coming and
+going were maintained.  The rest of the population stared in a state
+of suspended judgment as we went about the business.  The country
+was supposed to be in a state of intellectual conflict and
+deliberate decision, in history it will no doubt figure as a
+momentous conflict.  Yet except for an occasional flare of bill-
+sticking or a bill in a window or a placard-plastered motor-car or
+an argumentative group of people outside a public-house or a
+sluggish movement towards the schoolroom or village hall, there was
+scarcely a sign that a great empire was revising its destinies.  Now
+and then one saw a canvasser on a doorstep.  For the most part
+people went about their business with an entirely irresponsible
+confidence in the stability of the universe.  At times one felt a
+little absurd with one's flutter of colours and one's air of saving
+the country.
+
+My opponent was a quite undistinguished Major-General who relied
+upon his advocacy of Protection, and was particularly anxious we
+should avoid "personalities" and fight the constituency in a
+gentlemanly spirit.  He was always writing me notes, apologising for
+excesses on the part of his supporters, or pointing out the
+undesirability of some course taken by mine.
+
+My speeches had been planned upon broad lines, but they lost touch
+with these as the polling approached.  To begin with I made a real
+attempt to put what was in my mind before the people I was to supply
+with a political voice.  I spoke of the greatness of our empire and
+its destinies, of the splendid projects and possibilities of life
+and order that lay before the world, of all that a resolute and
+constructive effort might do at the present time.  "We are building
+a state," I said, "secure and splendid, we are in the dawn of the
+great age of mankind."  Sometimes that would get a solitary "'Ear!
+'ear!"  Then having created, as I imagined, a fine atmosphere, I
+turned upon the history of the last Conservative administration and
+brought it into contrast with the wide occasions of the age;
+discussed its failure to control the grasping financiers in South
+Africa, its failure to release public education from sectarian
+squabbles, its misconduct of the Boer War, its waste of the world's
+resources. . . .
+
+It soon became manifest that my opening and my general spaciousness
+of method bored my audiences a good deal.  The richer and wider my
+phrases the thinner sounded my voice in these non-resonating
+gatherings.  Even the platform supporters grew restive
+unconsciously, and stirred and coughed.  They did not recognise
+themselves as mankind.  Building an empire, preparing a fresh stage
+in the history of humanity, had no appeal for them.  They were
+mostly everyday, toiling people, full of small personal solicitudes,
+and they came to my meetings, I think, very largely as a relaxation.
+This stuff was not relaxing.  They did not think politics was a
+great constructive process, they thought it was a kind of dog-fight.
+They wanted fun, they wanted spice, they wanted hits, they wanted
+also a chance to say "'Ear', 'ear!" in an intelligent and honourable
+manner and clap their hands and drum with their feet.  The great
+constructive process in history gives so little scope for clapping
+and drumming and saying "'Ear, 'ear!"  One might as well think of
+hounding on the solar system.
+
+So after one or two attempts to lift my audiences to the level of
+the issues involved, I began to adapt myself to them.  I cut down my
+review of our imperial outlook and destinies more and more, and
+developed a series of hits and anecdotes and--what shall I call
+them?--"crudifications" of the issue.  My helper's congratulated me
+on the rapid improvement of my platform style.  I ceased to speak of
+the late Prime Minister with the respect I bore him, and began to
+fall in with the popular caricature of him as an artful rabbit-
+witted person intent only on keeping his leadership, in spite of the
+vigorous attempts of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain to oust him therefrom.
+I ceased to qualify my statement that Protection would make food
+dearer for the agricultural labourer.  I began to speak of Mr.
+Alfred Lyttelton as an influence at once insane and diabolical, as a
+man inspired by a passionate desire to substitute manacled but still
+criminal Chinese for honest British labourers throughout the world.
+And when it came to the mention of our own kindly leader, of Mr.
+John Burns or any one else of any prominence at all on our side I
+fell more and more into the intonation of one who mentions the high
+gods.  And I had my reward in brighter meetings and readier and
+readier applause.
+
+One goes on from phase to phase in these things.
+
+"After all," I told myself, "if one wants to get to Westminster one
+must follow the road that leads there," but I found the road
+nevertheless rather unexpectedly distasteful.  "When one gets
+there," I said, "then it is one begins."
+
+But I would lie awake at nights with that sore throat and headache
+and fatigue which come from speaking in ill-ventilated rooms, and
+wondering how far it was possible to educate a whole people to great
+political ideals.  Why should political work always rot down to
+personalities and personal appeals in this way?  Life is, I suppose,
+to begin with and end with a matter of personalities, from
+personalities all our broader interests arise and to personalities
+they return.  All our social and political effort, all of it, is
+like trying to make a crowd of people fall into formation.  The
+broader lines appear, but then come a rush and excitement and
+irrelevancy, and forthwith the incipient order has vanished and the
+marshals must begin the work over again!
+
+My memory of all that time is essentially confusion.  There was a
+frightful lot of tiresome locomotion in it; for the Kinghamstead
+Division is extensive, abounding in ill-graded and badly metalled
+cross-roads and vicious little hills, and singularly unpleasing to
+the eye in a muddy winter.  It is sufficiently near to London to
+have undergone the same process of ill-regulated expansion that made
+Bromstead the place it is.  Several of its overgrown villages have
+developed strings of factories and sidings along the railway lines,
+and there is an abundance of petty villas.  There seemed to be no
+place at which one could take hold of more than this or that element
+of the population.  Now we met in a meeting-house, now in a Masonic
+Hall or Drill Hall; I also did a certain amount of open-air speaking
+in the dinner hour outside gas-works and groups of factories.  Some
+special sort of people was, as it were, secreted in response to each
+special appeal.  One said things carefully adjusted to the
+distinctive limitations of each gathering.  Jokes of an incredible
+silliness and shallowness drifted about us.  Our advisers made us
+declare that if we were elected we would live in the district, and
+one hasty agent had bills printed, "If Mr. Remington is elected he
+will live here."  The enemy obtained a number of these bills and
+stuck them on outhouses, pigstyes, dog-kennels; you cannot imagine
+how irksome the repetition of that jest became.  The vast drifting
+indifference in between my meetings impressed me more and more.  I
+realised the vagueness of my own plans as I had never done before I
+brought them to the test of this experience.  I was perplexed by the
+riddle of just how far I was, in any sense of the word, taking hold
+at all, how far I wasn't myself flowing into an accepted groove.
+
+Margaret was troubled by no such doubts.  She was clear I had to go
+into Parliament on the side of Liberalism and the light, as against
+the late Government and darkness.  Essential to the memory of my
+first contest, is the memory of her clear bright face, very resolute
+and grave, helping me consciously, steadfastly, with all her
+strength.  Her quiet confidence, while I was so dissatisfied, worked
+curiously towards the alienation of my sympathies.  I felt she had
+no business to be so sure of me.  I had moments of vivid resentment
+at being thus marched towards Parliament.
+
+I seemed now always to be discovering alien forces of character in
+her.  Her way of taking life diverged from me more and more.  She
+sounded amazing, independent notes.  She bought some particularly
+costly furs for the campaign that roused enthusiasm whenever she
+appeared.  She also made me a birthday present in November of a
+heavily fur-trimmed coat and this she would make me remove as I went
+on to the platform, and hold over her arm until I was ready to
+resume it.  It was fearfully heavy for her and she liked it to be
+heavy for her.  That act of servitude was in essence a towering
+self-assertion.  I would glance sideways while some chairman
+floundered through his introduction and see the clear blue eye with
+which she regarded the audience, which existed so far as she was
+concerned merely to return me to Parliament.  It was a friendly eye,
+provided they were not silly or troublesome.  But it kindled a
+little at the hint of a hostile question.  After we had come so far
+and taken so much trouble!
+
+She constituted herself the dragoman of our political travels.  In
+hotels she was serenely resolute for the quietest and the best, she
+rejected all their proposals for meals and substituted a severely
+nourishing dietary of her own, and even in private houses she
+astonished me by her tranquil insistence upon special comforts and
+sustenance.  I can see her face now as it would confront a hostess,
+a little intent, but sweetly resolute and assured.
+
+Since our marriage she had read a number of political memoirs, and
+she had been particularly impressed by the career of Mrs. Gladstone.
+I don't think it occurred to her to compare and contrast my quality
+with that of Mrs. Gladstone's husband.  I suspect her of a
+deliberate intention of achieving parallel results by parallel
+methods.  I was to be Gladstonised.  Gladstone it appeared used to
+lubricate his speeches with a mixture--if my memory serves me right--
+of egg beaten up in sherry, and Margaret was very anxious I should
+take a leaf from that celebrated book.  She wanted, I know, to hold
+the glass in her hand while I was speaking.
+
+But here I was firm.  "No," I said, very decisively, "simply I won't
+stand that.  It's a matter of conscience.  I shouldn't feel--
+democratic.  I'll take my chance of the common water in the carafe
+on the chairman's table."
+
+"I DO wish you wouldn't," she said, distressed.
+
+It was absurd to feel irritated; it was so admirable of her, a
+little childish, infinitely womanly and devoted and fine--and I see
+now how pathetic.  But I could not afford to succumb to her.  I
+wanted to follow my own leading, to see things clearly, and this
+reassuring pose of a high destiny, of an almost terribly efficient
+pursuit of a fixed end when as a matter of fact I had a very
+doubtful end and an aim as yet by no means fixed, was all too
+seductive for dalliance. . . .
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+And into all these things with the manner of a trifling and casual
+incident comes the figure of Isabel Rivers.  My first impressions of
+her were of a rather ugly and ungainly, extraordinarily interesting
+schoolgirl with a beautiful quick flush under her warm brown skin,
+who said and did amusing and surprising things.  When first I saw
+her she was riding a very old bicycle downhill with her feet on the
+fork of the frame--it seemed to me to the public danger, but
+afterwards I came to understand the quality of her nerve better--and
+on the third occasion she was for her own private satisfaction
+climbing a tree.  On the intervening occasion we had what seems now
+to have been a long sustained conversation about the political
+situation and the books and papers I had written.
+
+I wonder if it was.
+
+What a delightful mixture of child and grave woman she was at that
+time, and how little I reckoned on the part she would play in my
+life!  And since she has played that part, how impossible it is to
+tell now of those early days!  Since I wrote that opening paragraph
+to this section my idle pen has been, as it were, playing by itself
+and sketching faces on the blotting pad--one impish wizened visage
+is oddly like little Bailey--and I have been thinking cheek on fist
+amidst a limitless wealth of memories.  She sits below me on the low
+wall under the olive trees with our little child in her arms.  She
+is now the central fact in my life.  It still seems a little
+incredible that that should be so.  She has destroyed me as a
+politician, brought me to this belated rebeginning of life.  When I
+sit down and try to make her a girl again, I feel like the Arabian
+fisherman who tried to put the genius back into the pot from which
+it had spread gigantic across the skies. . . .
+
+I have a very clear vision of her rush downhill past our labouring
+ascendant car--my colours fluttered from handle-bar and shoulder-
+knot--and her waving hand and the sharp note of her voice.  She
+cried out something, I don't know what, some greeting.
+
+"What a pretty girl!" said Margaret.
+
+Parvill, the cheap photographer, that industrious organiser for whom
+by way of repayment I got those magic letters, that knighthood of
+the underlings, "J. P." was in the car with us and explained her to
+us.  "One of the best workers you have," he said. . . .
+
+And then after a toilsome troubled morning we came, rather cross
+from the strain of sustained amiability, to Sir Graham Rivers'
+house.  It seemed all softness and quiet--I recall dead white
+panelling and oval mirrors horizontally set and a marble fireplace
+between white marble-blind Homer and marble-blind Virgil, very grave
+and fine--and how Isabel came in to lunch in a shapeless thing like
+a blue smock that made her bright quick-changing face seem yellow
+under her cloud of black hair.  Her step-sister was there, Miss
+Gamer, to whom the house was to descend, a well-dressed lady of
+thirty, amiably disavowing responsibility for Isabel in every phrase
+and gesture.  And there was a very pleasant doctor, an Oxford man,
+who seemed on excellent terms with every one.  It was manifest that
+he was in the habit of sparring with the girl, but on this occasion
+she wasn't sparring and refused to be teased into a display in spite
+of the taunts of either him or her father.  She was, they discovered
+with rising eyebrows, shy.  It seemed an opportunity too rare for
+them to miss.  They proclaimed her enthusiasm for me in a way that
+brought a flush to her cheek and a look into her eye between appeal
+and defiance.  They declared she had read my books, which I thought
+at the time was exaggeration, their dry political quality was so
+distinctly not what one was accustomed to regard as schoolgirl
+reading.  Miss Gamer protested to protect her, "When once in a blue
+moon Isabel is well-behaved. . . .!"
+
+Except for these attacks I do not remember much of the conversation
+at table; it was, I know, discursive and concerned with the sort of
+topographical and social and electioneering fact natural to such a
+visit.  Old Rivers struck me as a delightful person, modestly
+unconscious of his doubly-earned V. C. and the plucky defence of
+Kardin-Bergat that won his baronetcy.  He was that excellent type,
+the soldier radical, and we began that day a friendship that was
+only ended by his death in the hunting-field three years later.  He
+interested Margaret into a disregard of my plate and the fact that I
+had secured the illegal indulgence of Moselle.  After lunch we went
+for coffee into another low room, this time brown panelled and
+looking through French windows on a red-walled garden, graceful even
+in its winter desolation.  And there the conversation suddenly
+picked up and became good.  It had fallen to a pause, and the
+doctor, with an air of definitely throwing off a mask and wrecking
+an established tranquillity, remarked: "Very probably you Liberals
+will come in, though I'm not sure you'll come in so mightily as you
+think, but what you do when you do come in passes my comprehension."
+
+"There's good work sometimes," said Sir Graham, "in undoing."
+
+"You can't govern a great empire by amending and repealing the Acts
+of your predecessors," said the doctor.
+
+There came that kind of pause that happens when a subject is
+broached too big and difficult for the gathering.  Margaret's blue
+eyes regarded the speaker with quiet disapproval for a moment, and
+then came to me in the not too confident hope that I would snub him
+out of existence with some prompt rhetorical stroke.  A voice spoke
+out of the big armchair.
+
+"We'll do things," said Isabel.
+
+The doctor's eye lit with the joy of the fisherman who strikes his
+fish at last.  "What will you do?" he asked her.
+
+"Every one knows we're a mixed lot," said Isabel.
+
+"Poor old chaps like me!" interjected the general.
+
+"But that's not a programme," said the doctor.
+
+"But Mr. Remington has published a programme," said Isabel.
+
+The doctor cocked half an eye at me.
+
+"In some review," the girl went on.  "After all, we're not going to
+elect the whole Liberal party in the Kinghamstead Division.  I'm a
+Remington-ite!"
+
+"But the programme," said the doctor, "the programme--"
+
+"In front of Mr. Remington!"
+
+"Scandal always comes home at last," said the doctor.  "Let him hear
+the worst."
+
+"I'd like to hear," I said.  "Electioneering shatters convictions
+and enfeebles the mind."
+
+"Not mine," said Isabel stoutly.  "I mean--Well, anyhow I take it
+Mr. Remington stands for constructing a civilised state out of this
+muddle."
+
+"THIS muddle," protested the doctor with an appeal of the eye to the
+beautiful long room and the ordered garden outside the bright clean
+windows.
+
+"Well, THAT muddle, if you like!  There's a slum within a mile of us
+already.  The dust and blacks get worse and worse, Sissie?"
+
+"They do," agreed Miss Gamer.
+
+"Mr. Remington stands for construction, order, education, discipline."
+
+"And you?" said the doctor.
+
+"I'm a good Remington-ite."
+
+"Discipline!" said the doctor.
+
+"Oh!" said Isabel.  "At times one has to be--Napoleonic.  They want
+to libel me, Mr. Remington.  A political worker can't always be in
+time for meals, can she?  At times one has to make--splendid cuts."
+
+Miss Gamer said something indistinctly.
+
+"Order, education, discipline," said Sir Graham.  "Excellent things!
+But I've a sort of memory--in my young days--we talked about
+something called liberty."
+
+"Liberty under the law," I said, with an unexpected approving murmur
+from Margaret, and took up the defence.  "The old Liberal definition
+of liberty was a trifle uncritical.  Privilege and legal
+restrictions are not the only enemies of liberty.  An uneducated,
+underbred, and underfed propertyless man is a man who has lost the
+possibility of liberty.  There's no liberty worth a rap for him.  A
+man who is swimming hopelessly for life wants nothing but the
+liberty to get out of the water; he'll give every other liberty for
+it--until he gets out."
+
+Sir Graham took me up and we fell into a discussion of the changing
+qualities of Liberalism.  It was a good give-and-take talk,
+extraordinarily refreshing after the nonsense and crowding secondary
+issues of the electioneering outside.  We all contributed more or
+less except Miss Gamer; Margaret followed with knitted brows and
+occasional interjections.  "People won't SEE that," for example, and
+"It all seems so plain to me."  The doctor showed himself clever but
+unsubstantial and inconsistent.  Isabel sat back with her black mop
+of hair buried deep in the chair looking quickly from face to face.
+Her colour came and went with her vivid intellectual excitement;
+occasionally she would dart a word, usually a very apt word, like a
+lizard's tongue into the discussion.  I remember chiefly that a
+chance illustration betrayed that she had read Bishop Burnet. . . .
+
+After that it was not surprising that Isabel should ask for a lift
+in our car as far as the Lurky Committee Room, and that she should
+offer me quite sound advice EN ROUTE upon the intellectual
+temperament of the Lurky gasworkers.
+
+On the third occasion that I saw Isabel she was, as I have said,
+climbing a tree--and a very creditable tree--for her own private
+satisfaction.  It was a lapse from the high seriousness of politics,
+and I perceived she felt that I might regard it as such and attach
+too much importance to it.  I had some difficulty in reassuring her.
+And it's odd to note now--it has never occurred to me before--that
+from that day to this I do not think I have ever reminded Isabel of
+that encounter.
+
+And after that memory she seems to be flickering about always in the
+election, an inextinguishable flame; now she flew by on her bicycle,
+now she dashed into committee rooms, now she appeared on doorsteps
+in animated conversation with dubious voters; I took every chance I
+could to talk to her--I had never met anything like her before in
+the world, and she interested me immensely--and before the polling
+day she and I had become, in the frankest simplicity, fast
+friends. . . .
+
+That, I think, sets out very fairly the facts of our early
+relationship.  But it is hard to get it true, either in form or
+texture, because of the bright, translucent, coloured, and
+refracting memories that come between.  One forgets not only the
+tint and quality of thoughts and impressions through that
+intervening haze, one forgets them altogether.  I don't remember now
+that I ever thought in those days of passionate love or the
+possibility of such love between us.  I may have done so again and
+again.  But I doubt it very strongly.  I don't think I ever thought
+of such aspects.  I had no more sense of any danger between us,
+seeing the years and things that separated us, than I could have had
+if she had been an intelligent bright-eyed bird.  Isabel came into
+my life as a new sort of thing; she didn't join on at all to my
+previous experiences of womanhood.  They were not, as I have
+laboured to explain, either very wide or very penetrating
+experiences, on the whole, "strangled dinginess" expresses them, but
+I do not believe they were narrower or shallower than those of many
+other men of my class.  I thought of women as pretty things and
+beautiful things, pretty rather than beautiful, attractive and at
+times disconcertingly attractive, often bright and witty, but,
+because of the vast reservations that hid them from me, wanting,
+subtly and inevitably wanting, in understanding.  My idealisation of
+Margaret had evaporated insensibly after our marriage.  The shrine I
+had made for her in my private thoughts stood at last undisguisedly
+empty.  But Isabel did not for a moment admit of either idealisation
+or interested contempt.  She opened a new sphere of womanhood to me.
+With her steady amber-brown eyes, her unaffected interest in
+impersonal things, her upstanding waistless blue body, her energy,
+decision and courage, she seemed rather some new and infinitely
+finer form of boyhood than a feminine creature, as I had come to
+measure femininity.  She was my perfect friend.  Could I have
+foreseen, had my world been more wisely planned, to this day we
+might have been such friends.
+
+She seemed at that time unconscious of sex, though she has told me
+since how full she was of protesting curiosities and restrained
+emotions.  She spoke, as indeed she has always spoken, simply,
+clearly, and vividly; schoolgirl slang mingled with words that
+marked ample voracious reading, and she moved quickly with the free
+directness of some graceful young animal.  She took many of the easy
+freedoms a man or a sister might have done with me.  She would touch
+my arm, lay a hand on my shoulder as I sat, adjust the lapel of a
+breast-pocket as she talked to me.  She says now she loved me always
+from the beginning.  I doubt if there was a suspicion of that in her
+mind those days.  I used to find her regarding me with the clearest,
+steadiest gaze in the world, exactly like the gaze of some nice
+healthy innocent animal in a forest, interested, inquiring,
+speculative, but singularly untroubled. . . .
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Polling day came after a last hoarse and dingy crescendo.  The
+excitement was not of the sort that makes one forget one is tired
+out.  The waiting for the end of the count has left a long blank
+mark on my memory, and then everyone was shaking my hand and
+repeating: "Nine hundred and seventy-six."
+
+My success had been a foregone conclusion since the afternoon, but
+we all behaved as though we had not been anticipating this result
+for hours, as though any other figures but nine hundred and seventy-
+six would have meant something entirely different.  "Nine hundred
+and seventy-six!" said Margaret.  "They didn't expect three
+hundred."
+
+"Nine hundred and seventy-six," said a little short man with a
+paper.  "It means a big turnover.  Two dozen short of a thousand,
+you know."
+
+A tremendous hullaboo began outside, and a lot of fresh people came
+into the room.
+
+Isabel, flushed but not out of breath, Heaven knows where she had
+sprung from at that time of night! was running her hand down my
+sleeve almost caressingly, with the innocent bold affection of a
+girl.  "Got you in!" she said.  "It's been no end of a lark."
+
+"And now," said I, "I must go and be constructive."
+
+"Now you must go and be constructive," she said.
+
+"You've got to live here," she added.
+
+"By Jove! yes," I said.  "We'll have to house hunt."
+
+"I shall read all your speeches."
+
+She hesitated.
+
+"I wish I was you," she said, and said it as though it was not
+exactly the thing she was meaning to say.
+
+"They want you to speak," said Margaret, with something unsaid in
+her face.
+
+"You must come out with me," I answered, putting my arm through
+hers, and felt someone urging me to the French windows that gave on
+the balcony.
+
+"If you think--" she said, yielding gladly
+
+"Oh, RATHER!" said I.
+
+The Mayor of Kinghamstead, a managing little man with no great
+belief in my oratorical powers, was sticking his face up to mine.
+
+"It's all over," he said, "and you've won.  Say all the nice things
+you can and say them plainly."
+
+I turned and handed Margaret out through the window and stood
+looking over the Market-place, which was more than half filled with
+swaying people.  The crowd set up a roar of approval at the sight of
+us, tempered by a little booing.  Down in one corner of the square a
+fight was going on for a flag, a fight that even the prospect of a
+speech could not instantly check.  "Speech!" cried voices, "Speech!"
+and then a brief "boo-oo-oo" that was drowned in a cascade of shouts
+and cheers.  The conflict round the flag culminated in the smashing
+of a pane of glass in the chemist's window and instantly sank to
+peace.
+
+"Gentlemen voters of the Kinghamstead Division," I began.
+
+"Votes for Women!" yelled a voice, amidst laughter--the first time I
+remember hearing that memorable war-cry.
+
+"Three cheers for Mrs. Remington!"
+
+"Mrs. Remington asks me to thank you," I said, amidst further uproar
+and reiterated cries of "Speech!"
+
+Then silence came with a startling swiftness.
+
+Isabel was still in my mind, I suppose.  "I shall go to
+Westminster," I began.  I sought for some compelling phrase and
+could not find one.  "To do my share," I went on, "in building up a
+great and splendid civilisation."
+
+I paused, and there was a weak gust of cheering, and then a renewal
+of booing.
+
+"This election," I said, "has been the end and the beginning of
+much.  New ideas are abroad--"
+
+"Chinese labour," yelled a voice, and across the square swept a
+wildfire of booting and bawling.
+
+It is one of the few occasions when I quite lost my hold on a
+speech.  I glanced sideways and saw the Mayor of Kinghamstead
+speaking behind his hand to Parvill.  By a happy chance Parvill
+caught my eye.
+
+"What do they want?" I asked.
+
+"Eh?"
+
+"What do they want?"
+
+"Say something about general fairness--the other side," prompted
+Parvill, flattered but a little surprised by my appeal.  I pulled
+myself hastily into a more popular strain with a gross eulogy of my
+opponent's good taste.
+
+"Chinese labour!" cried the voice again.
+
+"You've given that notice to quit," I answered.
+
+The Market-place roared delight, but whether that delight expressed
+hostility to Chinamen or hostility to their practical enslavement no
+student of the General Election of 1906 has ever been able to
+determine.  Certainly one of the most effective posters on our side
+displayed a hideous yellow face, just that and nothing more.  There
+was not even a legend to it.  How it impressed the electorate we did
+not know, but that it impressed the electorate profoundly there can
+be no disputing.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+Kinghamstead was one of the earliest constituencies fought, and we
+came back--it must have been Saturday--triumphant but very tired, to
+our house in Radnor Square.  In the train we read the first
+intimations that the victory of our party was likely to be a
+sweeping one.
+
+Then came a period when one was going about receiving and giving
+congratulations and watching the other men arrive, very like a boy
+who has returned to school with the first batch after the holidays.
+The London world reeked with the General Election; it had invaded
+the nurseries.  All the children of one's friends had got big maps
+of England cut up into squares to represent constituencies and were
+busy sticking gummed blue labels over the conquered red of Unionism
+that had hitherto submerged the country.  And there were also orange
+labels, if I remember rightly, to represent the new Labour party,
+and green for the Irish.  I engaged myself to speak at one or two
+London meetings, and lunched at the Reform, which was fairly tepid,
+and dined and spent one or two tumultuous evenings at the National
+Liberal Club, which was in active eruption.  The National Liberal
+became feverishly congested towards midnight as the results of the
+counting came dropping in.  A big green-baize screen had been fixed
+up at one end of the large smoking-room with the names of the
+constituencies that were voting that day, and directly the figures
+came to hand, up they went, amidst cheers that at last lost their
+energy through sheer repetition, whenever there was record of a
+Liberal gain.  I don't remember what happened when there was a
+Liberal loss; I don't think that any were announced while I was
+there.
+
+How packed and noisy the place was, and what a reek of tobacco and
+whisky fumes we made!  Everybody was excited and talking, making
+waves of harsh confused sound that beat upon one's ears, and every
+now and then hoarse voices would shout for someone to speak.  Our
+little set was much in evidence.  Both the Cramptons were in, Lewis,
+Bunting Harblow.  We gave brief addresses attuned to this excitement
+and the late hour, amidst much enthusiasm.
+
+"Now we can DO things!" I said amidst a rapture of applause.  Men I
+did not know from Adam held up glasses and nodded to me in solemn
+fuddled approval as I came down past them into the crowd again.
+
+Men were betting whether the Unionists would lose more or less than
+two hundred seats.
+
+"I wonder just what we shall do with it all," I heard one sceptic
+speculating. . . .
+
+After these orgies I would get home very tired and excited, and find
+it difficult to get to sleep.  I would lie and speculate about what
+it was we WERE going to do.  One hadn't anticipated quite such a
+tremendous accession to power for one's party.  Liberalism was
+swirling in like a flood. . . .
+
+I found the next few weeks very unsatisfactory and distressing.  I
+don't clearly remember what it was I had expected; I suppose the
+fuss and strain of the General Election had built up a feeling that
+my return would in some way put power into my hands, and instead I
+found myself a mere undistinguished unit in a vast but rather vague
+majority.  There were moments when I felt very distinctly that a
+majority could be too big a crowd altogether.  I had all my work
+still before me, I had achieved nothing as yet but opportunity, and
+a very crowded opportunity it was at that.  Everyone about me was
+chatting Parliament and appointments; one breathed distracting and
+irritating speculations as to what would be done and who would be
+asked to do it.  I was chiefly impressed by what was unlikely to be
+done and by the absence of any general plan of legislation to hold
+us all together.  I found the talk about Parliamentary procedure and
+etiquette particularly trying.  We dined with the elder Cramptons
+one evening, and old Sir Edward was lengthily sage about what the
+House liked, what it didn't like, what made a good impression and
+what a bad one.  "A man shouldn't speak more than twice in his first
+session, and not at first on too contentious a topic," said Sir
+Edward.  "No."
+
+"Very much depends on manner.  The House hates a lecturer.  There's
+a sort of airy earnestness--"
+
+He waved his cigar to eke out his words.
+
+"Little peculiarities of costume count for a great deal.  I could
+name one man who spent three years living down a pair of
+spatterdashers.  On the other hand--a thing like that--if it catches
+the eye of the PUNCH man, for example, may be your making."
+
+He went off into a lengthy speculation of why the House had come to
+like an originally unpopular Irishman named Biggar. . . .
+
+The opening of Parliament gave me some peculiar moods.  I began to
+feel more and more like a branded sheep.  We were sworn in in
+batches, dozens and scores of fresh men, trying not to look too
+fresh under the inspection of policemen and messengers, all of us
+carrying new silk hats and wearing magisterial coats.  It is one of
+my vivid memories from this period, the sudden outbreak of silk hats
+in the smoking-room of the National Liberal Club.  At first I
+thought there must have been a funeral.  Familiar faces that one had
+grown to know under soft felt hats, under bowlers, under liberal-
+minded wide brims, and above artistic ties and tweed jackets,
+suddenly met one, staring with the stern gaze of self-consciousness,
+from under silk hats of incredible glossiness.  There was a
+disposition to wear the hat much too forward, I thought, for a good
+Parliamentary style.
+
+There was much play with the hats all through; a tremendous
+competition to get in first and put hats on coveted seats.  A memory
+hangs about me of the House in the early afternoon, an inhumane
+desolation inhabited almost entirely by silk hats.  The current use
+of cards to secure seats came later.  There were yards and yards of
+empty green benches with hats and hats and hats distributed along
+them, resolute-looking top hats, lax top hats with a kind of shadowy
+grin under them, sensible top bats brim upward, and one scandalous
+incontinent that had rolled from the front Opposition bench right to
+the middle of the floor.  A headless hat is surely the most soulless
+thing in the world, far worse even than a skull. . . .
+
+At last, in a leisurely muddled manner we got to the Address; and I
+found myself packed in a dense elbowing crowd to the right of the
+Speaker's chair; while the attenuated Opposition, nearly leaderless
+after the massacre, tilted its brim to its nose and sprawled at its
+ease amidst its empty benches.
+
+There was a tremendous hullaboo about something, and I craned to see
+over the shoulder of the man in front.  ''Order, order, order!"
+
+"What's it about?" I asked.
+
+The man in front of me was clearly no better informed, and then I
+gathered from a slightly contemptuous Scotchman beside me that it
+was Chris Robinson had walked between the honourable member in
+possession of the house and the Speaker.  I caught a glimpse of him
+blushingly whispering about his misadventure to a colleague.  He was
+just that same little figure I had once assisted to entertain at
+Cambridge, but grey-haired now, and still it seemed with the same
+knitted muffler he had discarded for a reckless half-hour while he
+talked to us in Hatherleigh's rooms.
+
+It dawned upon me that I wasn't particularly wanted in the House,
+and that I should get all I needed of the opening speeches next day
+from the TIMES.
+
+I made my way out and was presently walking rather aimlessly through
+the outer lobby.
+
+I caught myself regarding the shadow that spread itself out before
+me, multiplied itself in blue tints of various intensity, shuffled
+itself like a pack of cards under the many lights, the square
+shoulders, the silk hat, already worn with a parliamentary tilt
+backward; I found I was surveying this statesmanlike outline with a
+weak approval.  "A MEMBER!" I felt the little cluster of people that
+were scattered about the lobby must be saying.
+
+"Good God!" I said in hot reaction, "what am I doing here?"
+
+It was one of those moments infinitely trivial in themselves, that
+yet are cardinal in a man's life.  It came to me with extreme
+vividness that it wasn't so much that I had got hold of something as
+that something had got hold of me.  I distinctly recall the rebound
+of my mind.  Whatever happened in this Parliament, I at least would
+attempt something.  "By God!" I said, "I won't be overwhelmed.  I am
+here to do something, and do something I will!"
+
+But I felt that for the moment I could not remain in the House.
+
+I went out by myself with my thoughts into the night.  It was a
+chilling night, and rare spots of rain were falling.  I glanced over
+my shoulder at the lit windows of the Lords.  I walked, I remember,
+westward, and presently came to the Grosvenar Embankment and
+followed it, watching the glittering black rush of the river and the
+dark, dimly lit barges round which the water swirled.  Across the
+river was the hunched sky-line of Doulton's potteries, and a kiln
+flared redly.  Dimly luminous trams were gliding amidst a dotted
+line of lamps, and two little trains crawled into Waterloo station.
+Mysterious black figures came by me and were suddenly changed to the
+commonplace at the touch of the nearer lamps.  It was a big confused
+world, I felt, for a man to lay his hands upon.
+
+I remember I crossed Vauxhall Bridge and stood for a time watching
+the huge black shapes in the darkness under the gas-works.  A shoal
+of coal barges lay indistinctly on the darkly shining mud and water
+below, and a colossal crane was perpetually hauling up coal into
+mysterious blacknesses above, and dropping the empty clutch back to
+the barges.  Just one or two minute black featureless figures of men
+toiled amidst these monster shapes.  They did not seem to be
+controlling them but only moving about among them.  These gas-works
+have a big chimney that belches a lurid flame into the night, a
+livid shivering bluish flame, shot with strange crimson streaks. . . .
+
+On the other side of Lambeth Bridge broad stairs go down to the
+lapping water of the river; the lower steps are luminous under the
+lamps and one treads unwarned into thick soft Thames mud.  They seem
+to be purely architectural steps, they lead nowhere, they have an
+air of absolute indifference to mortal ends.
+
+Those shapes and large inhuman places--for all of mankind that one
+sees at night about Lambeth is minute and pitiful beside the
+industrial monsters that snort and toil there--mix up inextricably
+with my memories of my first days as a legislator.  Black figures
+drift by me, heavy vans clatter, a newspaper rough tears by on a
+motor bicycle, and presently, on the Albert Embankment, every seat
+has its one or two outcasts huddled together and slumbering.
+
+"These things come, these things go," a whispering voice urged upon
+me, "as once those vast unmeaning Saurians whose bones encumber
+museums came and went rejoicing noisily in fruitless lives." . . .
+
+Fruitless lives!--was that the truth of it all? . . .
+
+Later I stood within sight of the Houses of Parliament in front of
+the colonnades of St Thomas's Hospital.  I leant on the parapet
+close by a lamp-stand of twisted dolphins--and I prayed!
+
+I remember the swirl of the tide upon the water, and how a string of
+barges presently came swinging and bumping round as high-water
+turned to ebb.  That sudden change of position and my brief
+perplexity at it, sticks like a paper pin through the substance of
+my thoughts.  It was then I was moved to prayer.  I prayed that
+night that life might not be in vain, that in particular I might not
+live in vain.  I prayed for strength and faith, that the monstrous
+blundering forces in life might not overwhelm me, might not beat me
+back to futility and a meaningless acquiescence in existent things.
+I knew myself for the weakling I was, I knew that nevertheless it
+was set for me to make such order as I could out of these disorders,
+and my task cowed me, gave me at the thought of it a sense of
+yielding feebleness.
+
+"Break me, O God," I prayed at last, "disgrace me, torment me,
+destroy me as you will, but save me from self-complacency and little
+interests and little successes and the life that passes like the
+shadow of a dream."
+
+
+
+BOOK THE THIRD
+
+THE HEART OF POLITICS
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST
+
+THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+I have been planning and replanning, writing and rewriting, this
+next portion of my book for many days.  I perceive I must leave it
+raw edged and ill joined.  I have learnt something of the
+impossibility of History.  For all I have had to tell is the story
+of one man's convictions and aims and how they reacted upon his
+life; and I find it too subtle and involved and intricate for the
+doing.  I find it taxes all my powers to convey even the main forms
+and forces in that development.  It is like looking through moving
+media of changing hue and variable refraction at something vitally
+unstable.  Broad theories and generalisations are mingled with
+personal influences, with prevalent prejudices; and not only
+coloured but altered by phases of hopefulness and moods of
+depression.  The web is made up of the most diverse elements, beyond
+treatment multitudinous. . . .  For a week or so I desisted
+altogether, and walked over the mountains and returned to sit
+through the warm soft mornings among the shaded rocks above this
+little perched-up house of ours, discussing my difficulties with
+Isabel and I think on the whole complicating them further in the
+effort to simplify them to manageable and stateable elements.
+
+Let me, nevertheless, attempt a rough preliminary analysis of this
+confused process.  A main strand is quite easily traceable.  This
+main strand is the story of my obvious life, my life as it must have
+looked to most of my acquaintances.  It presents you with a young
+couple, bright, hopeful, and energetic, starting out under Altiora's
+auspices to make a career.  You figure us well dressed and active,
+running about in motor-cars, visiting in great people's houses,
+dining amidst brilliant companies, going to the theatre, meeting in
+the lobby.  Margaret wore hundreds of beautiful dresses.  We must
+have had an air of succeeding meritoriously during that time.
+
+We did very continually and faithfully serve our joint career.  I
+thought about it a great deal, and did and refrained from doing ten
+thousand things for the sake of it.  I kept up a solicitude for it,
+as it were by inertia, long after things had happened and changes
+occurred in me that rendered its completion impossible.  Under
+certain very artless pretences, we wanted steadfastly to make a
+handsome position in the world, achieve respect, SUCCEED.  Enormous
+unseen changes had been in progress for years in my mind and the
+realities of my life, before our general circle could have had any
+inkling of their existence, or suspected the appearances of our
+life.  Then suddenly our proceedings began to be deflected, our
+outward unanimity visibly strained and marred by the insurgence of
+these so long-hidden developments.
+
+That career had its own hidden side, of course; but when I write of
+these unseen factors I do not mean that but something altogether
+broader.  I do not mean the everyday pettinesses which gave the
+cynical observer scope and told of a narrower, baser aspect of the
+fair but limited ambitions of my ostensible self.  This "sub-
+careerist" element noted little things that affected the career,
+made me suspicious of the rivalry of so-and-so, propitiatory to so-
+and-so, whom, as a matter of fact, I didn't respect or feel in the
+least sympathetic towards; guarded with that man, who for all his
+charm and interest wasn't helpful, and a little touchy at the
+appearance of neglect from that.  No, I mean something greater and
+not something smaller when I write of a hidden life.
+
+In the ostensible self who glowed under the approbation of Altiora
+Bailey, and was envied and discussed, praised and depreciated, in
+the House and in smoking-room gossip, you really have as much of a
+man as usually figures in a novel or an obituary notice.  But I am
+tremendously impressed now in the retrospect by the realisation of
+how little that frontage represented me, and just how little such
+frontages do represent the complexities of the intelligent
+contemporary.  Behind it, yet struggling to disorganise and alter
+it, altogether, was a far more essential reality, a self less
+personal, less individualised, and broader in its references.  Its
+aims were never simply to get on; it had an altogether different
+system of demands and satisfactions.  It was critical, curious, more
+than a little unfeeling--and relentlessly illuminating.
+
+It is just the existence and development of this more generalised
+self-behind-the-frontage that is making modern life so much more
+subtle and intricate to render, and so much more hopeful in its
+relations to the perplexities of the universe.  I see this mental
+and spiritual hinterland vary enormously in the people about me,
+from a type which seems to keep, as people say, all its goods in the
+window, to others who, like myself, come to regard the ostensible
+existence more and more as a mere experimental feeder and agent for
+that greater personality behind.  And this back-self has its history
+of phases, its crises and happy accidents and irrevocable
+conclusions, more or less distinct from the adventures and
+achievements of the ostensible self.  It meets persons and phrases,
+it assimilates the spirit of a book, it is startled into new
+realisations by some accident that seems altogether irrelevant to
+the general tenor of one's life.  Its increasing independence of the
+ostensible career makes it the organ of corrective criticism; it
+accumulates disturbing energy.  Then it breaks our overt promises
+and repudiates our pledges, coming down at last like an overbearing
+mentor upon the small engagements of the pupil.
+
+In the life of the individual it takes the role that the growth of
+philosophy, science, and creative literature may play in the
+development of mankind.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+It is curious to recall how Britten helped shatter that obvious,
+lucidly explicable presentation of myself upon which I had embarked
+with Margaret.  He returned to revive a memory of adolescent dreams
+and a habit of adolescent frankness; he reached through my shallow
+frontage as no one else seemed capable of doing, and dragged that
+back-self into relation with it.
+
+I remember very distinctly a dinner and a subsequent walk with him
+which presents itself now as altogether typical of the quality of
+his influence.
+
+I had come upon him one day while lunching with Somers and Sutton at
+the Playwrights' Club, and had asked him to dinner on the spur of
+the moment.  He was oddly the same curly-headed, red-faced
+ventriloquist, and oddly different, rather seedy as well as untidy,
+and at first a little inclined to make comparisons with my sleek
+successfulness.  But that disposition presently evaporated, and his
+talk was good and fresh and provocative.  And something that had
+long been straining at its checks in my mind flapped over, and he
+and I found ourselves of one accord.
+
+Altiora wasn't at this dinner.  When she came matters were apt to
+become confusedly strenuous.  There was always a slight and
+ineffectual struggle at the end on the part of Margaret to
+anticipate Altiora's overpowering tendency to a rally and the
+establishment of some entirely unjustifiable conclusion by a COUP-
+DE-MAIN.  When, however, Altiora was absent, the quieter influence
+of the Cramptons prevailed; temperance and information for its own
+sake prevailed excessively over dinner and the play of thought. . . .
+Good Lord! what bores the Cramptons were!  I wonder I endured
+them as I did.  They had all of them the trick of lying in wait
+conversationally; they had no sense of the self-exposures, the
+gallant experiments in statement that are necessary for good
+conversation.  They would watch one talking with an expression
+exactly like peeping through bushes.  Then they would, as it were,
+dash out, dissent succinctly, contradict some secondary fact, and
+back to cover.  They gave one twilight nerves.  Their wives were
+easier but still difficult at a stretch; they talked a good deal
+about children and servants, but with an air caught from Altiora of
+making observations upon sociological types.  Lewis gossiped about
+the House in an entirely finite manner.  He never raised a
+discussion; nobody ever raised a discussion.  He would ask what we
+thought of Evesham's question that afternoon, and Edward would say
+it was good, and Mrs. Willie, who had been behind the grille, would
+think it was very good, and then Willie, parting the branches, would
+say rather conclusively that he didn't think it was very much good,
+and I would deny hearing the question in order to evade a profitless
+statement of views in that vacuum, and then we would cast about in
+our minds for some other topic of equal interest. . . .
+
+On this occasion Altiora was absent, and to qualify our Young
+Liberal bleakness we had Mrs. Millingham, with her white hair and
+her fresh mind and complexion, and Esmeer.  Willie Crampton was with
+us, but not his wife, who was having her third baby on principle;
+his brother Edward was present, and the Lewises, and of course the
+Bunting Harblows.  There was also some other lady.  I remember her
+as pale blue, but for the life of me I cannot remember her name.
+
+Quite early there was a little breeze between Edward Crampton and
+Esmeer, who had ventured an opinion about the partition of Poland.
+Edward was at work then upon the seventh volume of his monumental
+Life of Kosciusko, and a little impatient with views perhaps not
+altogether false but betraying a lamentable ignorance of accessible
+literature.  At any rate, his correction of Esmeer was magisterial.
+After that there was a distinct and not altogether delightful pause,
+and then some one, it may have been the pale-blue lady, asked Mrs.
+Lewis whether her aunt Lady Carmixter had returned from her rest-
+and-sun-cure in Italy.  That led to a rather anxiously sustained
+talk about regimen, and Willie told us how he had profited by the
+no-breakfast system.  It had increased his power of work enormously.
+He could get through ten hours a day now without inconvenience.
+
+"What do you do?" said Esmeer abruptly.
+
+"Oh! no end of work.  There's all the estate and looking after
+things."
+
+"But publicly?"
+
+"I asked three questions yesterday.  And for one of them I had to
+consult nine books!"
+
+We were drifting, I could see, towards Doctor Haig's system of
+dietary, and whether the exclusion or inclusion of fish and chicken
+were most conducive to high efficiency, when Britten, who had
+refused lemonade and claret and demanded Burgundy, broke out, and
+was discovered to be demanding in his throat just what we Young
+Liberals thought we were up to?
+
+"I want," said Britten, repeating his challenge a little louder, "to
+hear just exactly what you think you are doing in Parliament?"
+
+Lewis laughed nervously, and thought we were "Seeking the Good of
+the Community."
+
+"HOW?"
+
+"Beneficient Legislation," said Lewis.
+
+"Beneficient in what direction?" insisted Britten.  "I want to know
+where you think you are going."
+
+"Amelioration of Social Conditions," said Lewis.
+
+"That's only a phrase!"
+
+"You wouldn't have me sketch bills at dinner?"
+
+"I'd like you to indicate directions," said Britten, and waited.
+
+"Upward and On," said Lewis with conscious neatness, and turned to
+ask Mrs. Bunting Harblow about her little boy's French.
+
+For a time talk frothed over Britten's head, but the natural
+mischief in Mrs. Millingham had been stirred, and she was presently
+echoing his demand in lisping, quasi-confidential undertones.  "What
+ARE we Liberals doing?"  Then Esmeer fell in with the
+revolutionaries.
+
+To begin with, I was a little shocked by this clamour for
+fundamentals--and a little disconcerted.  I had the experience that
+I suppose comes to every one at times of discovering oneself
+together with two different sets of people with whom one has
+maintained two different sets of attitudes.  It had always been, I
+perceived, an instinctive suppression in our circle that we
+shouldn't be more than vague about our political ideals.  It had
+almost become part of my morality to respect this convention.  It
+was understood we were all working hard, and keeping ourselves fit,
+tremendously fit, under Altiora's inspiration, Pro Bono Publico.
+Bunting Harblow had his under-secretaryship, and Lewis was on the
+verge of the Cabinet, and these things we considered to be in the
+nature of confirmations. . . .  It added to the discomfort of the
+situation that these plunging enquiries were being made in the
+presence of our wives.
+
+The rebel section of our party forced the talk.
+
+Edward Crampton was presently declaring--I forget in what relation:
+"The country is with us."
+
+My long-controlled hatred of the Cramptons' stereotyped phrases
+about the Country and the House got the better of me.  I showed my
+cloven hoof to my friends for the first time.
+
+"We don't respect the Country as we used to do," I said.  "We
+haven't the same belief we used to have in the will of the people.
+It's no good, Crampton, trying to keep that up.  We Liberals know as
+a matter of fact--nowadays every one knows--that the monster that
+brought us into power has, among other deficiencies, no head.  We've
+got to give it one--if possible with brains and a will.  That lies
+in the future.  For the present if the country is with us, it means
+merely that we happen to have hold of its tether."
+
+Lewis was shocked.  A "mandate" from the Country was sacred to his
+system of pretences.
+
+Britten wasn't subdued by his first rebuff; presently he was at us
+again.  There were several attempts to check his outbreak of
+interrogation; I remember the Cramptons asked questions about the
+welfare of various cousins of Lewis who were unknown to the rest of
+us, and Margaret tried to engage Britten in a sympathetic discussion
+of the Arts and Crafts exhibition.  But Britten and Esmeer were
+persistent, Mrs. Millingham was mischievous, and in the end our
+rising hopes of Young Liberalism took to their thickets for good,
+while we talked all over them of the prevalent vacuity of political
+intentions.  Margaret was perplexed by me.  It is only now I
+perceive just how perplexing I must have been.  "Of course, she said
+with that faint stress of apprehension in her eyes, one must have
+aims."  And, "it isn't always easy to put everything into phrases."
+"Don't be long," said Mrs. Edward Crampton to her husband as the
+wives trooped out.  And afterwards when we went upstairs I had an
+indefinable persuasion that the ladies had been criticising
+Britten's share in our talk in an altogether unfavourable spirit.
+Mrs. Edward evidently thought him aggressive and impertinent, and
+Margaret with a quiet firmness that brooked no resistance, took him
+at once into a corner and showed him Italian photographs by Coburn.
+We dispersed early.
+
+I walked with Britten along the Chelsea back streets towards
+Battersea Bridge--he lodged on the south side.
+
+"Mrs. Millingham's a dear," he began.
+
+"She's a dear."
+
+"I liked her demand for a hansom because a four-wheeler was too
+safe."
+
+"She was worked up," I said.  "She's a woman of faultless character,
+but her instincts, as Altiora would say, are anarchistic--when she
+gives them a chance."
+
+"So she takes it out in hansom cabs."
+
+"Hansom cabs."
+
+"She's wise," said Britten. . . .
+
+"I hope, Remington," he went on after a pause, "I didn't rag your
+other guests too much.  I've a sort of feeling at moments--
+Remington, those chaps are so infernally not--not bloody.  It's part
+of a man's duty sometimes at least to eat red beef and get drunk.
+How is he to understand government if he doesn't?  It scares me to
+think of your lot--by a sort of misapprehension--being in power.  A
+kind of neuralgia in the head, by way of government.  I don't
+understand where YOU come in.  Those others--they've no lusts.
+Their ideal is anaemia.  You and I, we had at least a lust to take
+hold of life and make something of it.  They--they want to take hold
+of life and make nothing of it.  They want to cut out all the
+stimulants.  Just as though life was anything else but a reaction to
+stimulation!" . . .
+
+He began to talk of his own life.  He had had ill-fortune through
+most of it.  He was poor and unsuccessful, and a girl he had been
+very fond of had been attacked and killed by a horse in a field in a
+very horrible manner.  These things had wounded and tortured him,
+but they hadn't broken him.  They had, it seemed to me, made a kind
+of crippled and ugly demigod of him.  He was, I began to perceive,
+so much better than I had any right to expect.  At first I had been
+rather struck by his unkempt look, and it made my reaction all the
+stronger.  There was about him something, a kind of raw and bleeding
+faith in the deep things of life, that stirred me profoundly as he
+showed it.  My set of people had irritated him and disappointed him.
+I discovered at his touch how they irritated him.  He reproached me
+boldly.  He made me feel ashamed of my easy acquiescences as I
+walked in my sleek tall neatness beside his rather old coat, his
+rather battered hat, his sturdier shorter shape, and listened to his
+denunciations of our self-satisfied New Liberalism and
+Progressivism.
+
+"It has the same relation to progress--the reality of progress--that
+the things they paint on door panels in the suburbs have to art and
+beauty.  There's a sort of filiation. . . .  Your Altiora's just the
+political equivalent of the ladies who sell traced cloth for
+embroidery; she's a dealer in Refined Social Reform for the Parlour.
+The real progress, Remington, is a graver thing and a painfuller
+thing and a slower thing altogether.  Look!  THAT"--and he pointed
+to where under a boarding in the light of a gas lamp a dingy
+prostitute stood lurking--"was in Babylon and Nineveh.  Your little
+lot make believe there won't be anything of the sort after this
+Parliament!  They're going to vanish at a few top notes from Altiora
+Bailey!  Remington!--it's foolery.  It's prigs at play.  It's make-
+believe, make-believe!  Your people there haven't got hold of
+things, aren't beginning to get hold of things, don't know anything
+of life at all, shirk life, avoid life, get in little bright clean
+rooms and talk big over your bumpers of lemonade while the Night
+goes by outside--untouched.  Those Crampton fools slink by all
+this,"--he waved at the woman again--"pretend it doesn't exist, or
+is going to be banished root and branch by an Act to keep children
+in the wet outside public-houses.  Do you think they really care,
+Remington?  I don't.  It's make-believe.  What they want to do, what
+Lewis wants to do, what Mrs. Bunting Harblow wants her husband to
+do, is to sit and feel very grave and necessary and respected on the
+Government benches.  They think of putting their feet out like
+statesmen, and tilting shiny hats with becoming brims down over
+their successful noses.  Presentation portrait to a club at fifty.
+That's their Reality.  That's their scope.  They don't, it's
+manifest, WANT to think beyond that.  The things there ARE,
+Remington, they'll never face! the wonder and the depth of life,--
+lust, and the night-sky,--pain."
+
+"But the good intention," I pleaded, "the Good Will!"
+
+"Sentimentality," said Britten.  "No Good Will is anything but
+dishonesty unless it frets and burns and hurts and destroys a man.
+That lot of yours have nothing but a good will to think they have
+good will.  Do you think they lie awake of nights searching their
+hearts as we do?  Lewis?  Crampton?  Or those neat, admiring,
+satisfied little wives?  See how they shrank from the probe!"
+
+"We all," I said, "shrink from the probe."
+
+"God help us!" said Britten. . . .
+
+"We are but vermin at the best, Remington," he broke out,"and the
+greatest saint only a worm that has lifted its head for a moment
+from the dust.  We are damned, we are meant to be damned, coral
+animalculae building upward, upward in a sea of damnation.  But of
+all the damned things that ever were damned, your damned shirking,
+temperate, sham-efficient, self-satisfied, respectable, make-
+believe, Fabian-spirited Young Liberal is the utterly damnedest."
+He paused for a moment, and resumed in an entirely different note:
+"Which is why I was so surprised, Remington, to find YOU in this
+set!"
+
+"You're just the old plunger you used to be, Britten," I said.
+"You're going too far with all your might for the sake of the damns.
+Like a donkey that drags its cart up a bank to get thistles.
+There's depths in Liberalism--"
+
+"We were talking about Liberals."
+
+"Liberty!"
+
+"Liberty!  What do YOOR little lot know of liberty?"
+
+"What does any little lot know of liberty?"
+
+"It waits outside, too big for our understanding.  Like the night
+and the stars.  And lust, Remington! lust and bitterness!  Don't I
+know them? with all the sweetness and hope of life bitten and
+trampled, the dear eyes and the brain that loved and understood--and
+my poor mumble of a life going on!  I'm within sight of being a
+drunkard, Remington!  I'm a failure by most standards!  Life has cut
+me to the bone.  But I'm not afraid of it any more.  I've paid
+something of the price, I've seen something of the meaning."
+
+He flew off at a tangent.  "I'd rather die in Delirium Tremens," he
+cried, "than be a Crampton or a Lewis. . . ."
+
+"Make-believe.  Make-believe."  The phrase and Britten's squat
+gestures haunted me as I walked homeward alone.  I went to my room
+and stood before my desk and surveyed papers and files and
+Margaret's admirable equipment of me.
+
+I perceived in the lurid light of Britten's suggestions that so it
+was Mr. George Alexander would have mounted a statesman's private
+room. . . .
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+I was never at any stage a loyal party man.  I doubt if party will
+ever again be the force it was during the eighteenth and nineteenth
+centuries.  Men are becoming increasingly constructive and
+selective, less patient under tradition and the bondage of initial
+circumstances.  As education becomes more universal and liberating,
+men will sort themselves more and more by their intellectual
+temperaments and less and less by their accidental associations.
+The past will rule them less; the future more.  It is not simply
+party but school and college and county and country that lose their
+glamour.  One does not hear nearly as much as our forefathers did of
+the "old Harrovian," "old Arvonian," "old Etonian" claim to this or
+that unfair advantage or unearnt sympathy.  Even the Scotch and the
+Devonians weaken a little in their clannishness.  A widening sense
+of fair play destroys such things.  They follow freemasonry down--
+freemasonry of which one is chiefly reminded nowadays in England by
+propitiatory symbols outside shady public-houses. . . .
+
+There is, of course, a type of man which clings very obstinately to
+party ties.  These are the men with strong reproductive imaginations
+and no imaginative initiative, such men as Cladingbowl, for example,
+or Dayton.  They are the scholars-at-large in life.  For them the
+fact that the party system has been essential in the history of
+England for two hundred years gives it an overwhelming glamour.
+They have read histories and memoirs, they see the great grey pile
+of Westminster not so much for what it is as for what it was, rich
+with dramatic memories, populous with glorious ghosts, phrasing
+itself inevitably in anecdotes and quotations.  It seems almost
+scandalous that new things should continue to happen, swamping with
+strange qualities the savour of these old associations.
+
+That Mr. Ramsay Macdonald should walk through Westminster Hall,
+thrust himself, it may be, through the very piece of space that once
+held Charles the Martyr pleading for his life, seems horrible
+profanation to Dayton, a last posthumous outrage; and he would, I
+think, like to have the front benches left empty now for ever, or at
+most adorned with laureated ivory tablets: "Here Dizzy sat," and "On
+this Spot William Ewart Gladstone made his First Budget Speech."
+Failing this, he demands, if only as signs of modesty and respect on
+the part of the survivors, meticulous imitation.  "Mr. G.," he
+murmurs, "would not have done that," and laments a vanished subtlety
+even while Mr. Evesham is speaking.  He is always gloomily disposed
+to lapse into wonderings about what things are coming to, wonderings
+that have no grain of curiosity.  His conception of perfect conduct
+is industrious persistence along the worn-down, well-marked grooves
+of the great recorded days.  So infinitely more important to him is
+the documented, respected thing than the elusive present.
+
+Cladingbowl and Dayton do not shine in the House, though Cladingbowl
+is a sound man on a committee, and Dayton keeps the OLD COUNTRY
+GAZETTE, the most gentlemanly paper in London.  They prevail,
+however, in their clubs at lunch time.  There, with the pleasant
+consciousness of a morning's work free from either zeal or shirking,
+they mingle with permanent officials, prominent lawyers, even a few
+of the soberer type of business men, and relax their minds in the
+discussion of the morning paper, of the architecture of the West
+End, and of the latest public appointments, of golf, of holiday
+resorts, of the last judicial witticisms and forensic "crushers."
+The New Year and Birthday honours lists are always very sagely and
+exhaustively considered, and anecdotes are popular and keenly
+judged.  They do not talk of the things that are really active in
+their minds, but in the formal and habitual manner they suppose to
+be proper to intelligent but still honourable men.  Socialism,
+individual money matters, and religion are forbidden topics, and sex
+and women only in so far as they appear in the law courts.  It is to
+me the strangest of conventions, this assumption of unreal loyalties
+and traditional respects, this repudiation and concealment of
+passionate interests.  It is like wearing gloves in summer fields,
+or bathing in a gown, or falling in love with the heroine of a
+novel, or writing under a pseudonym, or becoming a masked Tuareg. . . .
+
+It is not, I think, that men of my species are insensitive to the
+great past that is embodied in Westminster and its traditions; we
+are not so much wanting in the historical sense as alive to the
+greatness of our present opportunities and the still vaster future
+that is possible to us.  London is the most interesting, beautiful,
+and wonderful city in the world to me, delicate in her incidental
+and multitudinous littleness, and stupendous in her pregnant
+totality; I cannot bring myself to use her as a museum or an old
+bookshop.  When I think of Whitehall that little affair on the
+scaffold outside the Banqueting Hall seems trivial and remote in
+comparison with the possibilities that offer themselves to my
+imagination within the great grey Government buildings close at
+hand.
+
+It gives me a qualm of nostalgia even to name those places now.  I
+think of St. Stephen's tower streaming upwards into the misty London
+night and the great wet quadrangle of New Palace Yard, from which
+the hansom cabs of my first experiences were ousted more and more by
+taxicabs as the second Parliament of King Edward the Seventh aged; I
+think of the Admiralty and War office with their tall Marconi masts
+sending out invisible threads of direction to the armies in the
+camps, to great fleets about the world.  The crowded, darkly shining
+river goes flooding through my memory once again, on to those narrow
+seas that part us from our rival nations; I see quadrangles and
+corridors of spacious grey-toned offices in which undistinguished
+little men and little files of papers link us to islands in the
+tropics, to frozen wildernesses gashed for gold, to vast temple-
+studded plains, to forest worlds and mountain worlds, to ports and
+fortresses and lighthouses and watch-towers and grazing lands and
+corn lands all about the globe.  Once more I traverse Victoria
+Street, grimy and dark, where the Agents of the Empire jostle one
+another, pass the big embassies in the West End with their flags and
+scutcheons, follow the broad avenue that leads to Buckingham Palace,
+witness the coming and going of troops and officials and guests
+along it from every land on earth. . . .  Interwoven in the texture
+of it all, mocking, perplexing, stimulating beyond measure, is the
+gleaming consciousness, the challenging knowledge: "You and your
+kind might still, if you could but grasp it here, mould all the
+destiny of Man!"
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+My first three years in Parliament were years of active discontent.
+The little group of younger Liberals to which I belonged was very
+ignorant of the traditions and qualities of our older leaders, and
+quite out of touch with the mass of the party.  For a time
+Parliament was enormously taken up with moribund issues and old
+quarrels.  The early Educational legislation was sectarian and
+unenterprising, and the Licensing Bill went little further than the
+attempted rectification of a Conservative mistake.  I was altogether
+for the nationalisation of the public-houses, and of this end the
+Bill gave no intimations.  It was just beer-baiting.  I was
+recalcitrant almost from the beginning, and spoke against the
+Government so early as the second reading of the first Education
+Bill, the one the Lords rejected in 1906.  I went a little beyond my
+intention in the heat of speaking,--it is a way with inexperienced
+man.  I called the Bill timid, narrow, a mere sop to the jealousies
+of sects and little-minded people.  I contrasted its aim and methods
+with the manifest needs of the time.
+
+I am not a particularly good speaker; after the manner of a writer I
+worry to find my meaning too much; but this was one of my successes.
+I spoke after dinner and to a fairly full House, for people were
+already a little curious about me because of my writings.  Several
+of the Conservative leaders were present and stayed, and Mr.
+Evesham, I remember, came ostentatiously to hear me, with that
+engaging friendliness of his, and gave me at the first chance an
+approving "Hear, Hear!"  I can still recall quite distinctly my two
+futile attempts to catch the Speaker's eye before I was able to
+begin, the nervous quiver of my rather too prepared opening, the
+effect of hearing my own voice and my subconscious wonder as to what
+I could possibly be talking about, the realisation that I was
+getting on fairly well, the immense satisfaction afterwards of
+having on the whole brought it off, and the absurd gratitude I felt
+for that encouraging cheer.
+
+Addressing the House of Commons is like no other public speaking in
+the world.  Its semi-colloquial methods give it an air of being
+easy, but its shifting audience, the comings and goings and
+hesitations of members behind the chair--not mere audience units,
+but men who matter--the desolating emptiness that spreads itself
+round the man who fails to interest, the little compact, disciplined
+crowd in the strangers' gallery, the light, elusive, flickering
+movements high up behind the grill, the wigged, attentive, weary
+Speaker, the table and the mace and the chapel-like Gothic
+background with its sombre shadows, conspire together, produce a
+confused, uncertain feeling in me, as though I was walking upon a
+pavement full of trap-doors and patches of uncovered morass.  A
+misplaced, well-meant "Hear, Hear!" is apt to be extraordinarily
+disconcerting, and under no other circumstances have I had to speak
+with quite the same sideways twist that the arrangement of the House
+imposes.  One does not recognise one's own voice threading out into
+the stirring brown.  Unless I was excited or speaking to the mind of
+some particular person in the house, I was apt to lose my feeling of
+an auditor.  I had no sense of whither my sentences were going, such
+as one has with a public meeting well under one's eye.  And to lose
+one's sense of an auditor is for a man of my temperament to lose
+one's sense of the immediate, and to become prolix and vague with
+qualifications.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+My discontents with the Liberal party and my mental exploration of
+the quality of party generally is curiously mixed up with certain
+impressions of things and people in the National Liberal Club.  The
+National Liberal Club is Liberalism made visible in the flesh--and
+Doultonware.  It is an extraordinary big club done in a bold,
+wholesale, shiny, marbled style, richly furnished with numerous
+paintings, steel engravings, busts, and full-length statues of the
+late Mr. Gladstone; and its spacious dining-rooms, its long, hazy,
+crowded smoking-room with innumerable little tables and groups of
+men in armchairs, its magazine room and library upstairs, have just
+that undistinguished and unconcentrated diversity which is for me
+the Liberal note.  The pensive member sits and hears perplexing
+dialects and even fragments of foreign speech, and among the
+clustering masses of less insistent whites his roving eye catches
+profiles and complexions that send his mind afield to Calcutta or
+Rangoon or the West Indies or Sierra Leone or the Cape. . . .
+
+I was not infrequently that pensive member.  I used to go to the
+Club to doubt about Liberalism.
+
+About two o'clock in the day the great smoking-room is crowded with
+countless little groups.  They sit about small round tables, or in
+circles of chairs, and the haze of tobacco seems to prolong the
+great narrow place, with its pillars and bays, to infinity.  Some of
+the groups are big, as many as a dozen men talk in loud tones; some
+are duologues, and there is always a sprinkling of lonely,
+dissociated men.  At first one gets an impression of men going from
+group to group and as it were linking them, but as one watches
+closely one finds that these men just visit three or four groups at
+the outside, and know nothing of the others.  One begins to perceive
+more and more distinctly that one is dealing with a sort of human
+mosaic; that each patch in that great place is of a different
+quality and colour from the next and never to be mixed with it.
+Most clubs have a common link, a lowest common denominator in the
+Club Bore, who spares no one, but even the National Liberal bores
+are specialised and sectional.  As one looks round one sees here a
+clump of men from the North Country or the Potteries, here an island
+of South London politicians, here a couple of young Jews ascendant
+from Whitechapel, here a circle of journalists and writers, here a
+group of Irish politicians, here two East Indians, here a priest or
+so, here a clump of old-fashioned Protestants, here a little knot of
+eminent Rationalists indulging in a blasphemous story SOTTO VOCE.
+Next them are a group of anglicised Germans and highly specialised
+chess-players, and then two of the oddest-looking persons--bulging
+with documents and intent upon extraordinary business transactions
+over long cigars. . . .
+
+I would listen to a stormy sea of babblement, and try to extract
+some constructive intimations.  Every now and then I got a whiff of
+politics.  It was clear they were against the Lords--against
+plutocrats--against Cossington's newspapers--against the brewers. . . .
+It was tremendously clear what they were against.  The trouble
+was to find out what on earth they were for! . . .
+
+As I sat and thought, the streaked and mottled pillars and wall, the
+various views, aspects, and portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, the
+partitions of polished mahogany, the yellow-vested waiters, would
+dissolve and vanish, and I would have a vision of this sample of
+miscellaneous men of limited, diverse interests and a universal
+littleness of imagination enlarged, unlimited, no longer a sample
+but a community, spreading, stretching out to infinity--all in
+little groups and duologues and circles, all with their special and
+narrow concerns, all with their backs to most of the others.
+
+What but a common antagonism would ever keep these multitudes
+together?  I understood why modern electioneering is more than half
+of it denunciation.  Let us condemn, if possible, let us obstruct
+and deprive, but not let us do.  There is no real appeal to the
+commonplace mind in "Let us do."  That calls for the creative
+imagination, and few have been accustomed to respond to that call.
+The other merely needs jealousy and bate, of which there are great
+and easily accessible reservoirs in every human heart. . . .
+
+I remember that vision of endless, narrow, jealous individuality
+very vividly.  A seething limitlessness it became at last, like a
+waste place covered by crawling locusts that men sweep up by the
+sackload and drown by the million in ditches. . . .
+
+Grotesquely against it came the lean features, the sidelong shy
+movements of Edward Crampton, seated in a circle of talkers close at
+hand.  I had a whiff of his strained, unmusical voice, and behold!
+he was saying something about the "Will of the People. . . ."
+
+The immense and wonderful disconnectednesses of human life!  I
+forgot the smoke and jabber of the club altogether; I became a
+lonely spirit flung aloft by some queer accident, a stone upon a
+ledge in some high and rocky wilderness, and below as far as the eye
+could reach stretched the swarming infinitesimals of humanity, like
+grass upon the field, like pebbles upon unbounded beaches.  Was
+there ever to be in human life more than that endless struggling
+individualism?  Was there indeed some giantry, some immense valiant
+synthesis, still to come--or present it might be and still unseen by
+me, or was this the beginning and withal the last phase of
+mankind? . . .
+
+I glimpsed for a while the stupendous impudence of our ambitions,
+the tremendous enterprise to which the modern statesman is
+implicitly addressed.  I was as it were one of a little swarm of
+would-be reef builders looking back at the teeming slime upon the
+ocean floor.  All the history of mankind, all the history of life,
+has been and will be the story of something struggling out of the
+indiscriminated abyss, struggling to exist and prevail over and
+comprehend individual lives--an effort of insidious attraction, an
+idea of invincible appeal.  That something greater than ourselves,
+which does not so much exist as seek existence, palpitating between
+being and not-being, how marvellous it is!  It has worn the form and
+visage of ten thousand different gods, sought a shape for itself in
+stone and ivory and music and wonderful words, spoken more and more
+clearly of a mystery of love, a mystery of unity, dabbling meanwhile
+in blood and cruelty beyond the common impulses of men.  It is
+something that comes and goes, like a light that shines and is
+withdrawn, withdrawn so completely that one doubts if it has ever
+been. . . .
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+I would mark with a curious interest the stray country member of the
+club up in town for a night or so.  My mind would be busy with
+speculations about him, about his home, his family, his reading, his
+horizons, his innumerable fellows who didn't belong and never came
+up.  I would fill in the outline of him with memories of my uncle
+and his Staffordshire neighbours.  He was perhaps Alderman This or
+Councillor That down there, a great man in his ward, J. P. within
+seven miles of the boundary of the borough, and a God in his home.
+Here he was nobody, and very shy, and either a little too arrogant
+or a little too meek towards our very democratic mannered but still
+livened waiters.  Was he perhaps the backbone of England?  He over-
+ate himself lest he should appear mean, went through our Special
+Dinner conscientiously, drank, unless he was teetotal, of unfamiliar
+wines, and did his best, in spite of the rules, to tip.  Afterwards,
+in a state of flushed repletion, he would have old brandy, black
+coffee, and a banded cigar, or in the name of temperance omit the
+brandy and have rather more coffee, in the smoking-room.  I would
+sit and watch that stiff dignity of self-indulgence, and wonder,
+wonder. . . .
+
+An infernal clairvoyance would come to me.  I would have visions of
+him in relation to his wife, checking always, sometimes bullying,
+sometimes being ostentatiously "kind"; I would see him glance
+furtively at his domestic servants upon his staircase, or stiffen
+his upper lip against the reluctant, protesting business employee.
+We imaginative people are base enough, heaven knows, but it is only
+in rare moods of bitter penetration that we pierce down to the baser
+lusts, the viler shames, the everlasting lying and muddle-headed
+self-justification of the dull.
+
+I would turn my eyes down the crowded room and see others of him and
+others.  What did he think he was up to?  Did he for a moment
+realise that his presence under that ceramic glory of a ceiling with
+me meant, if it had any rational meaning at all, that we were
+jointly doing something with the nation and the empire and
+mankind? . . .  How on earth could any one get hold of him, make
+any noble use of him?  He didn't read beyond his newspaper.  He
+never thought, but only followed imaginings in his heart.  He never
+discussed.  At the first hint of discussion his temper gave way.
+He was, I knew, a deep, thinly-covered tank of resentments and
+quite irrational moral rages.  Yet withal I would have to resist
+an impulse to go over to him and nudge him and say to him, "Look
+here!  What indeed do you think we are doing with the nation and
+the empire and mankind?  You know--MANKIND!"
+
+I wonder what reply I should have got.
+
+So far as any average could be struck and so far as any backbone
+could be located, it seemed to me that this silent, shy, replete,
+sub-angry, middle-class sentimentalist was in his endless species
+and varieties and dialects the backbone of our party.  So far as I
+could be considered as representing anything in the House, I
+pretended to sit for the elements of HIM. . . .
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+For a time I turned towards the Socialists.  They at least had an
+air of coherent intentions.  At that time Socialism had come into
+politics again after a period of depression and obscurity, with a
+tremendous ECLAT.  There was visibly a following of Socialist
+members to Chris Robinson; mysteriously uncommunicative gentlemen in
+soft felt hats and short coats and square-toed boots who replied to
+casual advances a little surprisingly in rich North Country
+dialects.  Members became aware of a "seagreen incorruptible," as
+Colonel Marlow put it to me, speaking on the Address, a slender
+twisted figure supporting itself on a stick and speaking with a fire
+that was altogether revolutionary.  This was Philip Snowden, the
+member for Blackburn.  They had come in nearly forty strong
+altogether, and with an air of presently meaning to come in much
+stronger.  They were only one aspect of what seemed at that time a
+big national movement.  Socialist societies, we gathered, were
+springing up all over the country, and every one was inquiring about
+Socialism and discussing Socialism.  It had taken the Universities
+with particular force, and any youngster with the slightest
+intellectual pretension was either actively for or brilliantly
+against.  For a time our Young Liberal group was ostentatiously
+sympathetic. . . .
+
+When I think of the Socialists there comes a vivid memory of certain
+evening gatherings at our house. . . .
+
+These gatherings had been organised by Margaret as the outcome of a
+discussion at the Baileys'.  Altiora had been very emphatic and
+uncharitable upon the futility of the Socialist movement.  It seemed
+that even the leaders fought shy of dinner-parties.
+
+"They never meet each other," said Altiora, "much less people on the
+other side.  How can they begin to understand politics until they do
+that?"
+
+"Most of them have totally unpresentable wives," said Altiora,
+"totally!" and quoted instances, "and they WILL bring them.  Or they
+won't come!  Some of the poor creatures have scarcely learnt their
+table manners.  They just make holes in the talk. . . ."
+
+I thought there was a great deal of truth beneath Altiora's
+outburst.  The presentation of the Socialist case seemed very
+greatly crippled by the want of a common intimacy in its leaders;
+the want of intimacy didn't at first appear to be more than an
+accident, and our talk led to Margaret's attempt to get acquaintance
+and easy intercourse afoot among them and between them and the Young
+Liberals of our group.  She gave a series of weekly dinners,
+planned, I think, a little too accurately upon Altiora's model, and
+after each we had as catholic a reception as we could contrive.
+
+Our receptions were indeed, I should think, about as catholic as
+receptions could be.  Margaret found herself with a weekly houseful
+of insoluble problems in intercourse.  One did one's best, but one
+got a nightmare feeling as the evening wore on.
+
+It was one of the few unanimities of these parties that every one
+should be a little odd in appearance, funny about the hair or the
+tie or the shoes or more generally, and that bursts of violent
+aggression should alternate with an attitude entirely defensive.  A
+number of our guests had an air of waiting for a clue that never
+came, and stood and sat about silently, mildly amused but not a bit
+surprised that we did not discover their distinctive Open-Sesames.
+There was a sprinkling of manifest seers and prophetesses in
+shapeless garments, far too many, I thought, for really easy social
+intercourse, and any conversation at any moment was liable to become
+oracular.  One was in a state of tension from first to last; the
+most innocent remark seemed capable of exploding resentment, and
+replies came out at the most unexpected angles.  We Young Liberals
+went about puzzled but polite to the gathering we had evoked.  The
+Young Liberals' tradition is on the whole wonderfully discreet,
+superfluous steam is let out far away from home in the Balkans or
+Africa, and the neat, stiff figures of the Cramptons, Bunting
+Harblow, and Lewis, either in extremely well-cut morning coats
+indicative of the House, or in what is sometimes written of as
+"faultless evening dress," stood about on those evenings, they and
+their very quietly and simply and expensively dressed little wives,
+like a datum line amidst lakes and mountains.
+
+I didn't at first see the connection between systematic social
+reorganisation and arbitrary novelties in dietary and costume, just
+as I didn't realise why the most comprehensive constructive projects
+should appear to be supported solely by odd and exceptional
+personalities.  On one of these evenings a little group of rather
+jolly-looking pretty young people seated themselves for no
+particular reason in a large circle on the floor of my study, and
+engaged, so far as I could judge, in the game of Hunt the Meaning,
+the intellectual equivalent of Hunt the Slipper.  It must have been
+that same evening I came upon an unbleached young gentleman before
+the oval mirror on the landing engaged in removing the remains of an
+anchovy sandwich from his protruded tongue--visible ends of cress
+having misled him into the belief that he was dealing with
+doctrinally permissible food.  It was not unusual to be given hand-
+bills and printed matter by our guests, but there I had the
+advantage over Lewis, who was too tactful to refuse the stuff, too
+neatly dressed to pocket it, and had no writing-desk available upon
+which he could relieve himself in a manner flattering to the giver.
+So that his hands got fuller and fuller.  A relentless, compact
+little woman in what Margaret declared to be an extremely expensive
+black dress has also printed herself on my memory; she had set her
+heart upon my contributing to a weekly periodical in the lentil
+interest with which she was associated, and I spent much time and
+care in evading her.
+
+Mingling with the more hygienic types were a number of Anti-Puritan
+Socialists, bulging with bias against temperance, and breaking out
+against austere methods of living all over their faces.  Their
+manner was packed with heartiness.  They were apt to choke the
+approaches to the little buffet Margaret had set up downstairs, and
+there engage in discussions of Determinism--it always seemed to be
+Determinism--which became heartier and noisier, but never
+acrimonious even in the small hours.  It seemed impossible to settle
+about this Determinism of theirs--ever.  And there were worldly
+Socialists also.  I particularly recall a large, active, buoyant,
+lady-killing individual with an eyeglass borne upon a broad black
+ribbon, who swam about us one evening.  He might have been a
+slightly frayed actor, in his large frock-coat, his white waistcoat,
+and the sort of black and white check trousers that twinkle.  He had
+a high-pitched voice with aristocratic intonations, and he seemed to
+be in a perpetual state of interrogation.  "What are we all he-a
+for?" he would ask only too audibly.  "What are we doing he-a?
+What's the connection?"
+
+What WAS the connection?
+
+We made a special effort with our last assembly in June, 1907.  We
+tried to get something like a representative collection of the
+parliamentary leaders of Socialism, the various exponents of
+Socialist thought and a number of Young Liberal thinkers into one
+room.  Dorvil came, and Horatio Bulch; Featherstonehaugh appeared
+for ten minutes and talked charmingly to Margaret and then vanished
+again; there was Wilkins the novelist and Toomer and Dr. Tumpany.
+Chris Robinson stood about for a time in a new comforter, and
+Magdeberg and Will Pipes and five or six Labour members.  And on our
+side we had our particular little group, Bunting Harblow, Crampton,
+Lewis, all looking as broad-minded and open to conviction as they
+possibly could, and even occasionally talking out from their bushes
+almost boldly.  But the gathering as a whole refused either to
+mingle or dispute, and as an experiment in intercourse the evening
+was a failure.  Unexpected dissociations appeared between Socialists
+one had supposed friendly.  I could not have imagined it was
+possible for half so many people to turn their backs on everybody
+else in such small rooms as ours.  But the unsaid things those backs
+expressed broke out, I remarked, with refreshed virulence in the
+various organs of the various sections of the party next week.
+
+I talked, I remember, with Dr. Tumpany, a large young man in a still
+larger professional frock-coat, and with a great shock of very fair
+hair, who was candidate for some North Country constituency.  We
+discussed the political outlook, and, like so many Socialists at
+that time, he was full of vague threatenings against the Liberal
+party.  I was struck by a thing in him that I had already observed
+less vividly in many others of these Socialist leaders, and which
+gave me at last a clue to the whole business.  He behaved exactly
+like a man in possession of valuable patent rights, who wants to be
+dealt with.  He had an air of having a corner in ideas.  Then it
+flashed into my head that the whole Socialist movement was an
+attempted corner in ideas. . . .
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+Late that night I found myself alone with Margaret amid the debris
+of the gathering.
+
+I sat before the fire, hands in pockets, and Margaret, looking white
+and weary, came and leant upon the mantel.
+
+"Oh, Lord!" said Margaret.
+
+I agreed.  Then I resumed my meditation.
+
+"Ideas," I said, "count for more than I thought in the world."
+
+Margaret regarded me with that neutral expression behind which she
+was accustomed to wait for clues.
+
+"When you think of the height and depth and importance and wisdom of
+the Socialist ideas, and see the men who are running them," I
+explained. . . .  "A big system of ideas like Socialism grows up out
+of the obvious common sense of our present conditions.  It's as
+impersonal as science.  All these men--They've given nothing to it.
+They're just people who have pegged out claims upon a big
+intellectual No-Man's-Land--and don't feel quite sure of the law.
+There's a sort of quarrelsome uneasiness. . . .  If we professed
+Socialism do you think they'd welcome us?  Not a man of them!
+They'd feel it was burglary. . . ."
+
+"Yes," said Margaret, looking into the fire.  "That is just what I
+felt about them all the evening. . . .  Particularly Dr. Tumpany."
+
+"We mustn't confuse Socialism with the Socialists," I said; "that's
+the moral of it.  I suppose if God were to find He had made a
+mistake in dates or something, and went back and annihilated
+everybody from Owen onwards who was in any way known as a Socialist
+leader or teacher, Socialism would be exactly where it is and what
+it is to-day--a growing realisation of constructive needs in every
+man's mind, and a little corner in party politics.  So, I suppose,
+it will always be. . . .  But they WERE a damned lot, Margaret!"
+
+I looked up at the little noise she made.  "TWICE!" she said,
+smiling indulgently, "to-day!"  (Even the smile was Altiora's.)
+
+I returned to my thoughts.  They WERE a damned human lot.  It was an
+excellent word in that connection. . . .
+
+But the ideas marched on, the ideas marched on, just as though men's
+brains were no more than stepping-stones, just as though some great
+brain in which we are all little cells and corpuscles was thinking
+them! . . .
+
+"I don't think there is a man among them who makes me feel he is
+trustworthy," said Margaret; "unless it is Featherstonehaugh."
+
+I sat taking in this proposition.
+
+"They'll never help us, I feel," said Margaret.
+
+"Us?"
+
+"The Liberals."
+
+"Oh, damn the Liberals!" I said.  "They'll never even help
+themselves."
+
+"I don't think I could possibly get on with any of those people,"
+said Margaret, after a pause.
+
+She remained for a time looking down at me and, I could feel,
+perplexed by me, but I wanted to go on with my thinking, and so I
+did not look up, and presently she stooped to my forehead and kissed
+me and went rustling softly to her room.
+
+I remained in my study for a long time with my thoughts
+crystallising out. . . .
+
+It was then, I think, that I first apprehended clearly how that
+opposition to which I have already alluded of the immediate life and
+the mental hinterland of a man, can be applied to public and social
+affairs.  The ideas go on--and no person or party succeeds in
+embodying them.  The reality of human progress never comes to the
+surface, it is a power in the deeps, an undertow.  It goes on in
+silence while men think, in studies where they write self-
+forgetfully, in laboratories under the urgency of an impersonal
+curiosity, in the rare illumination of honest talk, in moments of
+emotional insight, in thoughtful reading, but not in everyday
+affairs.  Everyday affairs and whatever is made an everyday affair,
+are transactions of the ostensible self, the being of habits,
+interests, usage.  Temper, vanity, hasty reaction to imitation,
+personal feeling, are their substance.  No man can abolish his
+immediate self and specialise in the depths; if he attempt that, he
+simply turns himself into something a little less than the common
+man.  He may have an immense hinterland, but that does not absolve
+him from a frontage.  That is the essential error of the specialist
+philosopher, the specialist teacher, the specialist publicist.  They
+repudiate frontage; claim to be pure hinterland.  That is what
+bothered me about Codger, about those various schoolmasters who had
+prepared me for life, about the Baileys and their dream of an
+official ruling class.  A human being who is a philosopher in the
+first place, a teacher in the first place, or a statesman in the
+first place, is thereby and inevitably, though he bring God-like
+gifts to the pretence--a quack.  These are attempts to live deep-
+side shallow, inside out.  They produce merely a new pettiness.  To
+understand Socialism, again, is to gain a new breadth of outlook; to
+join a Socialist organisation is to join a narrow cult which is not
+even tolerably serviceable in presenting or spreading the ideas for
+which it stands. . . .
+
+I perceived I had got something quite fundamental here.  It had
+taken me some years to realise the true relation of the great
+constructive ideas that swayed me not only to political parties, but
+to myself.  I had been disposed to identify the formulae of some one
+party with social construction, and to regard the other as
+necessarily anti-constructive, just as I had been inclined to follow
+the Baileys in the self-righteousness of supposing myself to be
+wholly constructive.  But I saw now that every man of intellectual
+freedom and vigour is necessarily constructive-minded nowadays, and
+that no man is disinterestedly so.  Each one of us repeats in
+himself the conflict of the race between the splendour of its
+possibilities and its immediate associations.  We may be shaping
+immortal things, but we must sleep and answer the dinner gong, and
+have our salt of flattery and self-approval.  In politics a man
+counts not for what he is in moments of imaginative expansion, but
+for his common workaday, selfish self; and political parties are
+held together not by a community of ultimate aims, but by the
+stabler bond of an accustomed life.  Everybody almost is for
+progress in general, and nearly everybody is opposed to any change,
+except in so far as gross increments are change, in his particular
+method of living and behaviour.  Every party stands essentially for
+the interests and mental usages of some definite class or group of
+classes in the exciting community, and every party has its
+scientific-minded and constructive leading section, with well-
+defined hinterlands formulating its social functions in a public-
+spirited form, and its superficial-minded following confessing its
+meannesses and vanities and prejudices.  No class will abolish
+itself, materially alter its way of life, or drastically reconstruct
+itself, albeit no class is indisposed to co-operate in the unlimited
+socialisation of any other class.  In that capacity for aggression
+upon other classes lies the essential driving force of modern
+affairs.  The instincts, the persons, the parties, and vanities sway
+and struggle.  The ideas and understandings march on and achieve
+themselves for all--in spite of every one. . . .
+
+The methods and traditions of British politics maintain the form of
+two great parties, with rider groups seeking to gain specific ends
+in the event of a small Government majority.  These two main parties
+are more or less heterogeneous in composition.  Each, however, has
+certain necessary characteristics.  The Conservative Party has
+always stood quite definitely for the established propertied
+interests.  The land-owner, the big lawyer, the Established Church,
+and latterly the huge private monopoly of the liquor trade which has
+been created by temperance legislation, are the essential
+Conservatives.  Interwoven now with the native wealthy are the
+families of the great international usurers, and a vast
+miscellaneous mass of financial enterprise.  Outside the range of
+resistance implied by these interests, the Conservative Party has
+always shown itself just as constructive and collectivist as any
+other party.  The great landowners have been as well-disposed
+towards the endowment of higher education, and as willing to co-
+operate with the Church in protective and mildly educational
+legislation for children and the working class, as any political
+section.  The financiers, too, are adventurous-spirited and eager
+for mechanical progress and technical efficiency.  They are prepared
+to spend public money upon research, upon ports and harbours and
+public communications, upon sanitation and hygienic organisation.  A
+certain rude benevolence of public intention is equally
+characteristic of the liquor trade.  Provided his comfort leads to
+no excesses of temperance, the liquor trade is quite eager to see
+the common man prosperous, happy, and with money to spend in a bar.
+All sections of the party are aggressively patriotic and favourably
+inclined to the idea of an upstanding, well-fed, and well-exercised
+population in uniform.  Of course there are reactionary landowners
+and old-fashioned country clergy, full of localised self-importance,
+jealous even of the cottager who can read, but they have neither the
+power nor the ability to retard the constructive forces in the party
+as a whole.  On the other hand, when matters point to any definitely
+confiscatory proposal, to the public ownership and collective
+control of land, for example, or state mining and manufactures, or
+the nationalisation of the so-called public-house or extended
+municipal enterprise, or even to an increase of the taxation of
+property, then the Conservative Party presents a nearly adamantine
+bar.  It does not stand for, it IS, the existing arrangement in
+these affairs.
+
+Even more definitely a class party is the Labour Party, whose
+immediate interest is to raise wages, shorten hours of labor,
+increase employment, and make better terms for the working-man
+tenant and working-man purchaser.  Its leaders are no doubt
+constructive minded, but the mass of the following is naturally
+suspicious of education and discipline, hostile to the higher
+education, and--except for an obvious antagonism to employers and
+property owners--almost destitute of ideas.  What else can it be?
+It stands for the expropriated multitude, whose whole situation and
+difficulty arise from its individual lack of initiative and
+organising power.  It favours the nationalisation of land and
+capital with no sense of the difficulties involved in the process;
+but, on the other hand, the equally reasonable socialisation of
+individuals which is implied by military service is steadily and
+quite naturally and quite illogically opposed by it.  It is only in
+recent years that Labour has emerged as a separate party from the
+huge hospitable caravanserai of Liberalism, and there is still a
+very marked tendency to step back again into that multitudinous
+assemblage.
+
+For multitudinousness has always been the Liberal characteristic.
+Liberalism never has been nor ever can be anything but a diversified
+crowd.  Liberalism has to voice everything that is left out by these
+other parties.  It is the party against the predominating interests.
+It is at once the party of the failing and of the untried; it is the
+party of decadence and hope.  From its nature it must be a vague and
+planless association in comparison with its antagonist, neither so
+constructive on the one hand, nor on the other so competent to
+hinder the inevitable constructions of the civilised state.
+Essentially it is the party of criticism, the "Anti" party.  It is a
+system of hostilities and objections that somehow achieves at times
+an elusive common soul.  It is a gathering together of all the
+smaller interests which find themselves at a disadvantage against
+the big established classes, the leasehold tenant as against the
+landowner, the retail tradesman as against the merchant and the
+moneylender, the Nonconformist as against the Churchman, the small
+employer as against the demoralising hospitable publican, the man
+without introductions and broad connections against the man who has
+these things.  It is the party of the many small men against the
+fewer prevailing men.  It has no more essential reason for loving
+the Collectivist state than the Conservatives; the small dealer is
+doomed to absorption in that just as much as the large owner; but it
+resorts to the state against its antagonists as in the middle ages
+common men pitted themselves against the barons by siding with the
+king.  The Liberal Party is the party against "class privilege"
+because it represents no class advantages, but it is also the party
+that is on the whole most set against Collective control because it
+represents no established responsilibity.  It is constructive only
+so far as its antagonism to the great owner is more powerful than
+its jealousy of the state.  It organises only because organisation
+is forced upon it by the organisation of its adversaries.  It lapses
+in and out of alliance with Labour as it sways between hostility to
+wealth and hostility to public expenditure. . . .
+
+Every modern European state will have in some form or other these
+three parties: the resistent, militant, authoritative, dull, and
+unsympathetic party of establishment and success, the rich party;
+the confused, sentimental, spasmodic, numerous party of the small,
+struggling, various, undisciplined men, the poor man's party; and a
+third party sometimes detaching itself from the second and sometimes
+reuniting with it, the party of the altogether expropriated masses,
+the proletarians, Labour.  Change Conservative and Liberal to
+Republican and Democrat, for example, and you have the conditions in
+the United States.  The Crown or a dethroned dynasty, the
+Established Church or a dispossessed church, nationalist secessions,
+the personalities of party leaders, may break up, complicate, and
+confuse the self-expression of these three necessary divisions in
+the modern social drama, the analyst will make them out none the
+less for that. . . .
+
+And then I came back as if I came back to a refrain;--the ideas go
+on--as though we are all no more than little cells and corpuscles in
+some great brain beyond our understanding. . . .
+
+So it was I sat and thought my problem out. . . .  I still remember
+my satisfaction at seeing things plainly at last.  It was like
+clouds dispersing to show the sky.  Constructive ideas, of course,
+couldn't hold a party together alone, "interests and habits, not
+ideas," I had that now, and so the great constructive scheme of
+Socialism, invading and inspiring all parties, was necessarily
+claimed only by this collection of odds and ends, this residuum of
+disconnected and exceptional people.  This was true not only of the
+Socialist idea, but of the scientific idea, the idea of veracity--of
+human confidence in humanity--of all that mattered in human life
+outside the life of individuals. . . .  The only real party that
+would ever profess Socialism was the Labour Party, and that in the
+entirely one-sided form of an irresponsible and non-constructive
+attack on property.  Socialism in that mutilated form, the teeth and
+claws without the eyes and brain, I wanted as little as I wanted
+anything in the world.
+
+Perfectly clear it was, perfectly clear, and why hadn't I seen it
+before? . . .  I looked at my watch, and it was half-past two.
+
+I yawned, stretched, got up and went to bed.
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+My ideas about statecraft have passed through three main phases to
+the final convictions that remain.  There was the first immediacy of
+my dream of ports and harbours and cities, railways, roads, and
+administered territories--the vision I had seen in the haze from
+that little church above Locarno.  Slowly that had passed into a
+more elaborate legislative constructiveness, which had led to my
+uneasy association with the Baileys and the professedly constructive
+Young Liberals.  To get that ordered life I had realised the need of
+organisation, knowledge, expertness, a wide movement of co-ordinated
+methods.  On the individual side I thought that a life of urgent
+industry, temperance, and close attention was indicated by my
+perception of these ends.  I married Margaret and set to work.  But
+something in my mind refused from the outset to accept these
+determinations as final.  There was always a doubt lurking below,
+always a faint resentment, a protesting criticism, a feeling of
+vitally important omissions.
+
+I arrived at last at the clear realisation that my political
+associates, and I in my association with them, were oddly narrow,
+priggish, and unreal, that the Socialists with whom we were
+attempting co-operation were preposterously irrelevant to their own
+theories, that my political life didn't in some way comprehend more
+than itself, that rather perplexingly I was missing the thing I was
+seeking.  Britten's footnotes to Altiora's self-assertions, her fits
+of energetic planning, her quarrels and rallies and vanities, his
+illuminating attacks on Cramptonism and the heavy-spirited
+triviality of such Liberalism as the Children's Charter, served to
+point my way to my present conclusions.  I had been trying to deal
+all along with human progress as something immediate in life,
+something to be immediately attacked by political parties and groups
+pointing primarily to that end.  I now began to see that just as in
+my own being there was the rather shallow, rather vulgar, self-
+seeking careerist, who wore an admirable silk hat and bustled self-
+consciously through the lobby, and a much greater and indefinitely
+growing unpublished personality behind him--my hinterland, I have
+called it--so in human affairs generally the permanent reality is
+also a hinterland, which is never really immediate, which draws
+continually upon human experience and influences human action more
+and more, but which is itself never the actual player upon the
+stage.  It is the unseen dramatist who never takes a call.  Now it
+was just through the fact that our group about the Baileys didn't
+understand this, that with a sort of frantic energy they were trying
+to develop that sham expert officialdom of theirs to plan, regulate,
+and direct the affairs of humanity, that the perplexing note of
+silliness and shallowness that I had always felt and felt now most
+acutely under Britten's gibes, came in.  They were neglecting human
+life altogether in social organisation.
+
+In the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth of
+statesmanship.  It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and
+all organising spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange
+and achieve.  Priests, schools of thought, political schemers,
+leaders of men, have always slipped into the error of assuming that
+they can think out the whole--or at any rate completely think out
+definite parts--of the purpose and future of man, clearly and
+finally; they have set themselves to legislate and construct on that
+assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions
+of reality, they have taken to dogma, persecution, training,
+pruning, secretive education; and all the stupidities of self-
+sufficient energy.  In the passion of their good intentions they
+have not hesitated to conceal fact, suppress thought, crush
+disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimental desires.  And so
+it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with the making, that
+any extension of social organisation is at present achieved.
+
+Directly, however, this idea of an emancipation from immediacy is
+grasped, directly the dominating importance of this critical, less
+personal, mental hinterland in the individual and of the collective
+mind in the race is understood, the whole problem of the statesman
+and his attitude towards politics gain a new significance, and
+becomes accessible to a new series of solutions.  He wants no longer
+to "fix up," as people say, human affairs, but to devote his forces
+to the development of that needed intellectual life without which
+all his shallow attempts at fixing up are futile.  He ceases to
+build on the sands, and sets himself to gather foundations.
+
+You see, I began in my teens by wanting to plan and build cities and
+harbours for mankind; I ended in the middle thirties by desiring
+only to serve and increase a general process of thought, a process
+fearless, critical, real-spirited, that would in its own time give
+cities, harbours, air, happiness, everything at a scale and quality
+and in a light altogether beyond the match-striking imaginations of
+a contemporary mind.  I wanted freedom of speech and suggestion,
+vigour of thought, and the cultivation of that impulse of veracity
+that lurks more or less discouraged in every man.  With that I felt
+there must go an emotion.  I hit upon a phrase that became at last
+something of a refrain in my speech and writings, to convey the
+spirit that I felt was at the very heart of real human progress--
+love and fine thinking.
+
+(I suppose that nowadays no newspaper in England gets through a week
+without the repetition of that phrase.)
+
+My convictions crystallised more and more definitely upon this.  The
+more of love and fine thinking the better for men, I said; the less,
+the worse.  And upon this fresh basis I set myself to examine what I
+as a politician might do.  I perceived I was at last finding an
+adequate expression for all that was in me, for those forces that
+had rebelled at the crude presentations of Bromstead, at the
+secrecies and suppressions of my youth, at the dull unrealities of
+City Merchants, at the conventions and timidities of the Pinky
+Dinkys, at the philosophical recluse of Trinity and the phrases and
+tradition-worship of my political associates.  None of these things
+were half alive, and I wanted life to be intensely alive and awake.
+I wanted thought like an edge of steel and desire like a flame.  The
+real work before mankind now, I realised once and for all, is the
+enlargement of human expression, the release and intensification of
+human thought, the vivider utilisation of experience and the
+invigoration of research--and whatever one does in human affairs has
+or lacks value as it helps or hinders that.
+
+With that I had got my problem clear, and the solution, so far as I
+was concerned, lay in finding out the point in the ostensible life
+of politics at which I could most subserve these ends.  I was still
+against the muddles of Bromstead, but I had hunted them down now to
+their essential form.  The jerry-built slums, the roads that went
+nowhere, the tarred fences, litigious notice-boards and barbed wire
+fencing, the litter and the heaps of dump, were only the outward
+appearances whose ultimate realities were jerry-built conclusions,
+hasty purposes, aimless habits of thought, and imbecile bars and
+prohibitions in the thoughts and souls of men.  How are we through
+politics to get at that confusion?
+
+We want to invigorate and reinvigorate education.  We want to create
+a sustained counter effort to the perpetual tendency of all
+educational organisations towards classicalism, secondary issues,
+and the evasion of life.
+
+We want to stimulate the expression of life through art and
+literature, and its exploration through research.
+
+We want to make the best and finest thought accessible to every one,
+and more particularly to create and sustain an enormous free
+criticism, without which art, literature, and research alike
+degenerate into tradition or imposture.
+
+Then all the other problems which are now so insoluble, destitution,
+disease, the difficulty of maintaining international peace, the
+scarcely faced possibility of making life generally and continually
+beautiful, become--EASY. . . .
+
+It was clear to me that the most vital activities in which I could
+engage would be those which most directly affected the Church,
+public habits of thought, education, organised research, literature,
+and the channels of general discussion.  I had to ask myself how my
+position as Liberal member for Kinghamstead squared with and
+conduced to this essential work.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND
+
+SEEKING ASSOCIATES
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+I have told of my gradual abandonment of the pretensions and habits
+of party Liberalism.  In a sense I was moving towards aristocracy.
+Regarding the development of the social and individual mental
+hinterland as the essential thing in human progress, I passed on
+very naturally to the practical assumption that we wanted what I may
+call "hinterlanders."  Of course I do not mean by aristocracy the
+changing unorganised medley of rich people and privileged people who
+dominate the civilised world of to-day, but as opposed to this, a
+possibility of co-ordinating the will of the finer individuals, by
+habit and literature, into a broad common aim.  We must have an
+aristocracy--not of privilege, but of understanding and purpose--or
+mankind will fail.  I find this dawning more and more clearly when I
+look through my various writings of the years between 1903 and 1910.
+I was already emerging to plain statements in 1908.
+
+I reasoned after this fashion.  The line of human improvement and
+the expansion of human life lies in the direction of education and
+finer initiatives.  If humanity cannot develop an education far
+beyond anything that is now provided, if it cannot collectively
+invent devices and solve problems on a much richer, broader scale
+than it does at the present time, it cannot hope to achieve any very
+much finer order or any more general happiness than it now enjoys.
+We must believe, therefore, that it CAN develop such a training and
+education, or we must abandon secular constructive hope.  And here
+my peculiar difficulty as against crude democracy comes in.  If
+humanity at large is capable of that high education and those
+creative freedoms our hope demands, much more must its better and
+more vigorous types be so capable.  And if those who have power and
+leisure now, and freedom to respond to imaginative appeals, cannot
+be won to the idea of collective self-development, then the whole of
+humanity cannot be won to that.  From that one passes to what has
+become my general conception in politics, the conception of the
+constructive imagination working upon the vast complex of powerful
+people, clever people, enterprising people, influential people,
+amidst whom power is diffused to-day, to produce that self-
+conscious, highly selective, open-minded, devoted aristocratic
+culture, which seems to me to be the necessary next phase in the
+development of human affairs.  I see human progress, not as the
+spontaneous product of crowds of raw minds swayed by elementary
+needs, but as a natural but elaborate result of intricate human
+interdependencies, of human energy and curiosity liberated and
+acting at leisure, of human passions and motives, modified and
+redirected by literature and art. . . .
+
+But now the reader will understand how it came about that,
+disappointed by the essential littleness of Liberalism, and
+disillusioned about the representative quality of the professed
+Socialists, I turned my mind more and more to a scrutiny of the big
+people, the wealthy and influential people, against whom Liberalism
+pits its forces.  I was asking myself definitely whether, after all,
+it was not my particular job to work through them and not against
+them.  Was I not altogether out of my element as an Anti-?  Weren't
+there big bold qualities about these people that common men lack,
+and the possibility of far more splendid dreams?  Were they really
+the obstacles, might they not be rather the vehicles of the possible
+new braveries of life?
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+The faults of the Imperialist movement were obvious enough.  The
+conception of the Boer War had been clumsy and puerile, the costly
+errors of that struggle appalling, and the subsequent campaign of
+Mr. Chamberlain for Tariff Reform seemed calculated to combine the
+financial adventurers of the Empire in one vast conspiracy against
+the consumer.  The cant of Imperialism was easy to learn and use; it
+was speedily adopted by all sorts of base enterprises and turned to
+all sorts of base ends.  But a big child is permitted big mischief,
+and my mind was now continually returning to the persuasion that
+after all in some development of the idea of Imperial patriotism
+might be found that wide, rough, politically acceptable expression
+of a constructive dream capable of sustaining a great educational
+and philosophical movement such as no formula of Liberalism
+supplied.  The fact that it readily took vulgar forms only witnessed
+to its strong popular appeal.  Mixed in with the noisiness and
+humbug of the movement there appeared a real regard for social
+efficiency, a real spirit of animation and enterprise.  There
+suddenly appeared in my world--I saw them first, I think, in 1908--a
+new sort of little boy, a most agreeable development of the
+slouching, cunning, cigarette-smoking, town-bred youngster, a small
+boy in a khaki hat, and with bare knees and athletic bearing,
+earnestly engaged in wholesome and invigorating games up to and
+occasionally a little beyond his strength--the Boy Scout.  I liked
+the Boy Scout, and I find it difficult to express how much it
+mattered to me, with my growing bias in favour of deliberate
+national training, that Liberalism hadn't been able to produce, and
+had indeed never attempted to produce, anything of this kind.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+In those days there existed a dining club called--there was some
+lost allusion to the exorcism of party feeling in its title--the
+Pentagram Circle.  It included Bailey and Dayton and myself, Sir
+Herbert Thorns, Lord Charles Kindling, Minns the poet, Gerbault the
+big railway man, Lord Gane, fresh from the settlement of Framboya,
+and Rumbold, who later became Home Secretary and left us.  We were
+men of all parties and very various experiences, and our object was
+to discuss the welfare of the Empire in a disinterested spirit.  We
+dined monthly at the Mermaid in Westminster, and for a couple of
+years we kept up an average attendance of ten out of fourteen.  The
+dinner-time was given up to desultory conversation, and it is odd
+how warm and good the social atmosphere of that little gathering
+became as time went on; then over the dessert, so soon as the
+waiters had swept away the crumbs and ceased to fret us, one of us
+would open with perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes' exposition of
+some specially prepared question, and after him we would deliver
+ourselves in turn, each for three or four minutes.  When every one
+present had spoken once talk became general again, and it was rare
+we emerged upon Hendon Street before midnight.  Sometimes, as my
+house was conveniently near, a knot of men would come home with me
+and go on talking and smoking in my dining-room until two or three.
+We had Fred Neal, that wild Irish journalist, among us towards the
+end, and his stupendous flow of words materially prolonged our
+closing discussions and made our continuance impossible.
+
+I learned very much and very many things at those dinners, but more
+particularly did I become familiarised with the habits of mind of
+such men as Neal, Crupp, Gane, and the one or two other New
+Imperialists who belonged to us.  They were nearly all like Bailey
+Oxford men, though mostly of a younger generation, and they were all
+mysteriously and inexplicably advocates of Tariff Reform, as if it
+were the principal instead of at best a secondary aspect of
+constructive policy.  They seemed obsessed by the idea that streams
+of trade could be diverted violently so as to link the parts of the
+Empire by common interests, and they were persuaded, I still think
+mistakenly, that Tariff Reform would have an immense popular appeal.
+They were also very keen on military organisation, and with a
+curious little martinet twist in their minds that boded ill for that
+side of public liberty.  So much against them.  But they were
+disposed to spend money much more generously on education and
+research of all sorts than our formless host of Liberals seemed
+likely to do; and they were altogether more accessible than the
+Young Liberals to bold, constructive ideas affecting the
+universities and upper classes.  The Liberals are abjectly afraid of
+the universities.  I found myself constantly falling into line with
+these men in our discussions, and more and more hostile to Dayton's
+sentimentalising evasions of definite schemes and Minns' trust in
+such things as the "Spirit of our People" and the "General Trend of
+Progress."  It wasn't that I thought them very much righter than
+their opponents; I believe all definite party "sides" at any time
+are bound to be about equally right and equally lop-sided; but that
+I thought I could get more out of them and what was more important
+to me, more out of myself if I co-operated with them.  By 1908 I had
+already arrived at a point where I could be definitely considering a
+transfer of my political allegiance.
+
+These abstract questions are inseparably interwoven with my memory
+of a shining long white table, and our hock bottles and burgundy
+bottles, and bottles of Perrier and St. Galmier and the disturbed
+central trophy of dessert, and scattered glasses and nut-shells and
+cigarette-ends and menu-cards used for memoranda.  I see old Dayton
+sitting back and cocking his eye to the ceiling in a way he had
+while he threw warmth into the ancient platitudes of Liberalism, and
+Minns leaning forward, and a little like a cockatoo with a taste for
+confidences, telling us in a hushed voice of his faith in the
+Destiny of Mankind.  Thorns lounges, rolling his round face and
+round eyes from speaker to speaker and sounding the visible depths
+of misery whenever Neal begins.  Gerbault and Gane were given to
+conversation in undertones, and Bailey pursued mysterious purposes
+in lisping whispers.  It was Crupp attracted me most.  He had, as
+people say, his eye on me from the beginning.  He used to speak at
+me, and drifted into a custom of coming home with me very regularly
+for an after-talk.
+
+He opened his heart to me.
+
+"Neither of us," he said, "are dukes, and neither of us are horny-
+handed sons of toil.  We want to get hold of the handles, and to do
+that, one must go where the power is, and give it just as
+constructive a twist as we can.  That's MY Toryism."
+
+"Is it Kindling's--or Gerbault's?"
+
+"No.  But theirs is soft, and mine's hard.  Mine will wear theirs
+out.  You and I and Bailey are all after the same thing, and why
+aren't we working together?"
+
+"Are you a Confederate?" I asked suddenly.
+
+"That's a secret nobody tells," he said.
+
+"What are the Confederates after?"
+
+"Making aristocracy work, I suppose.  Just as, I gather, you want to
+do." . . .
+
+The Confederates were being heard of at that time.  They were at
+once attractive and repellent to me, an odd secret society whose
+membership nobody knew, pledged, it was said, to impose Tariff
+Reform and an ample constructive policy upon the Conservatives.  In
+the press, at any rate, they had an air of deliberately organised
+power.  I have no doubt the rumour of them greatly influenced my
+ideas. . . .
+
+In the end I made some very rapid decisions, but for nearly two
+years I was hesitating.  Hesitations were inevitable in such a
+matter.  I was not dealing with any simple question of principle,
+but with elusive and fluctuating estimates of the trend of diverse
+forces and of the nature of my own powers.  All through that period
+I was asking over and over again: how far are these Confederates
+mere dreamers?  How far--and this was more vital--are they rendering
+lip-service to social organisations?  Is it true they desire war
+because it confirms the ascendency of their class?  How far can
+Conservatism be induced to plan and construct before it resists the
+thrust towards change.  Is it really in bulk anything more than a
+mass of prejudice and conceit, cynical indulgence, and a hard
+suspicion of and hostility to the expropriated classes in the
+community?
+
+That is a research which yields no statistics, an enquiry like
+asking what is the ruling colour of a chameleon.  The shadowy answer
+varied with my health, varied with my mood and the conduct of the
+people I was watching.  How fine can people be?  How generous?--not
+incidentally, but all round?  How far can you educate sons beyond
+the outlook of their fathers, and how far lift a rich, proud, self-
+indulgent class above the protests of its business agents and
+solicitors and its own habits and vanity?  Is chivalry in a class
+possible?--was it ever, indeed, or will it ever indeed be possible?
+Is the progress that seems attainable in certain directions worth
+the retrogression that may be its price?
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+It was to the Pentagram Circle that I first broached the new
+conceptions that were developing in my mind.  I count the evening of
+my paper the beginning of the movement that created the BLUE WEEKLY
+and our wing of the present New Tory party.  I do that without any
+excessive egotism, because my essay was no solitary man's
+production; it was my reaction to forces that had come to me very
+large through my fellow-members; its quick reception by them showed
+that I was, so to speak, merely the first of the chestnuts to pop.
+The atmospheric quality of the evening stands out very vividly in my
+memory.  The night, I remember, was warmly foggy when after midnight
+we went to finish our talk at my house.
+
+We had recently changed the rules of the club to admit visitors, and
+so it happened that I had brought Britten, and Crupp introduced
+Arnold Shoesmith, my former schoolfellow at City Merchants, and now
+the wealthy successor of his father and elder brother.  I remember
+his heavy, inexpressively handsome face lighting to his rare smile
+at the sight of me, and how little I dreamt of the tragic
+entanglement that was destined to involve us both.  Gane was
+present, and Esmeer, a newly-added member, but I think Bailey was
+absent.  Either he was absent, or he said something so entirely
+characteristic and undistinguished that it has left no impression on
+my mind.
+
+I had broken a little from the traditions of the club even in my
+title, which was deliberately a challenge to the liberal idea: it
+was, "The World Exists for Exceptional People."  It is not the title
+I should choose now--for since that time I have got my phrase of
+"mental hinterlander" into journalistic use.  I should say now, "The
+World Exists for Mental Hinterland."
+
+The notes I made of that opening have long since vanished with a
+thousand other papers, but some odd chance has preserved and brought
+with me to Italy the menu for the evening; its back black with the
+scrawled notes I made of the discussion for my reply.  I found it
+the other day among some letters from Margaret and a copy of the
+1909 Report of the Poor Law Commission, also rich with pencilled
+marginalia.
+
+My opening was a criticism of the democratic idea and method, upon
+lines such as I have already sufficiently indicated in the preceding
+sections.  I remember how old Dayton fretted in his chair, and
+tushed and pished at that, even as I gave it, and afterwards we were
+treated to one of his platitudinous harangues, he sitting back in
+his chair with that small obstinate eye of his fixed on the ceiling,
+and a sort of cadaverous glow upon his face, repeating--quite
+regardless of all my reasoning and all that had been said by others
+in the debate--the sacred empty phrases that were his soul's refuge
+from reality.  "You may think it very clever," he said with a nod of
+his head to mark his sense of his point, "not to Trust in the
+People.  I do."  And so on.  Nothing in his life or work had ever
+shown that he did trust in the people, but that was beside the mark.
+He was the party Liberal, and these were the party incantations.
+
+After my preliminary attack on vague democracy I went on to show
+that all human life was virtually aristocratic; people must either
+recognise aristocracy in general or else follow leaders, which is
+aristocracy in particular, and so I came to my point that the
+reality of human progress lay necessarily through the establishment
+of freedoms for the human best and a collective receptivity and
+understanding.  There was a disgusted grunt from Dayton, "Superman
+rubbish--Nietzsche.  Shaw!  Ugh!"  I sailed on over him to my next
+propositions.  The prime essential in a progressive civilisation was
+the establishment of a more effective selective process for the
+privilege of higher education, and the very highest educational
+opportunity for the educable.  We were too apt to patronise
+scholarship winners, as though a scholarship was toffee given as a
+reward for virtue.  It wasn't any reward at all; it was an
+invitation to capacity.  We had no more right to drag in virtue, or
+any merit but quality, than we had to involve it in a search for the
+tallest man.  We didn't want a mere process for the selection of
+good as distinguished from gifted and able boys--"No, you DON'T,"
+from Dayton--we wanted all the brilliant stuff in the world
+concentrated upon the development of the world.  Just to exasperate
+Dayton further I put in a plea for gifts as against character in
+educational, artistic, and legislative work.  "Good teaching," I
+said, "is better than good conduct.  We are becoming idiotic about
+character."
+
+Dayton was too moved to speak.  He slewed round upon me an eye of
+agonised aversion.
+
+I expatiated on the small proportion of the available ability that
+is really serving humanity to-day.  "I suppose to-day all the
+thought, all the art, all the increments of knowledge that matter,
+are supplied so far as the English-speaking community is concerned
+by--how many?--by three or four thousand individuals.  ('Less,' said
+Thorns.)  To be more precise, by the mental hinterlands of three or
+four thousand individuals.  We who know some of the band entertain
+no illusions as to their innate rarity.  We know that they are just
+the few out of many, the few who got in our world of chance and
+confusion, the timely stimulus, the apt suggestion at the fortunate
+moment, the needed training, the leisure.  The rest are lost in the
+crowd, fail through the defects of their qualities, become
+commonplace workmen and second-rate professional men, marry
+commonplace wives, are as much waste as the driftage of superfluous
+pollen in a pine forest is waste."
+
+"Decent honest lives!" said Dayton to his bread-crumbs, with his
+chin in his necktie.  "WASTE!"
+
+"And the people who do get what we call opportunity get it usually
+in extremely limited and cramping forms.  No man lives a life of
+intellectual productivity alone; he needs not only material and
+opportunity, but helpers, resonators.  Round and about what I might
+call the REAL men, you want the sympathetic cooperators, who help by
+understanding.  It isn't that our--SALT of three or four thousand is
+needlessly rare; it is sustained by far too small and
+undifferentiated a public.  Most of the good men we know are not
+really doing the very best work of their gifts; nearly all are a
+little adapted, most are shockingly adapted to some second-best use.
+Now, I take it, this is the very centre and origin of the muddle,
+futility, and unhappiness that distresses us; it's the cardinal
+problem of the state--to discover, develop, and use the exceptional
+gifts of men.  And I see that best done--I drift more and more away
+from the common stuff of legislative and administrative activity--by
+a quite revolutionary development of the educational machinery, but
+by a still more unprecedented attempt to keep science going, to keep
+literature going, and to keep what is the necessary spur of all
+science and literature, an intelligent and appreciative criticism
+going.  You know none of these things have ever been kept going
+hitherto; they've come unexpectedly and inexplicably."
+
+"Hear, hear!" from Dayton, cough, nodding of the head, and an
+expression of mystical profundity.
+
+"They've lit up a civilisation and vanished, to give place to
+darkness again.  Now the modern state doesn't mean to go back to
+darkness again--and so it's got to keep its light burning."  I went
+on to attack the present organisation of our schools and
+universities, which seemed elaborately designed to turn the well-
+behaved, uncritical, and uncreative men of each generation into the
+authoritative leaders of the next, and I suggested remedies upon
+lines that I have already indicated in the earlier chapters of this
+story. . . .
+
+So far I had the substance of the club with me, but I opened new
+ground and set Crupp agog by confessing my doubt from which party or
+combination of groups these developments of science and literature
+and educational organisation could most reasonably be expected.  I
+looked up to find Crupp's dark little eye intent upon me.
+
+There I left it to them.
+
+We had an astonishingly good discussion; Neal burst once, but we
+emerged from his flood after a time, and Dayton had his interlude.
+The rest was all close, keen examination of my problem.
+
+I see Crupp now with his arm bent before him on the table in a way
+we had, as though it was jointed throughout its length like a
+lobster's antenna, his plump, short-fingered hand crushing up a
+walnut shell into smaller and smaller fragments.  "Remington," he
+said, "has given us the data for a movement, a really possible
+movement.  It's not only possible, but necessary--urgently
+necessary, I think, if the Empire is to go on."
+
+"We're working altogether too much at the social basement in
+education and training," said Gane.  "Remington is right about our
+neglect of the higher levels."
+
+Britten made a good contribution with an analysis of what he called
+the spirit of a country and what made it.  "The modern community
+needs its serious men to be artistic and its artists to be taken
+seriously," I remember his saying.  "The day has gone by for either
+dull responsibility or merely witty art."
+
+I remember very vividly how Shoesmith harped on an idea I had thrown
+out of using some sort of review or weekly to express and elaborate
+these conceptions of a new, severer, aristocratic culture.
+
+"It would have to be done amazingly well," said Britten, and my mind
+went back to my school days and that ancient enterprise of ours, and
+how Cossington had rushed it.  Well, Cossington had too many papers
+nowadays to interfere with us, and we perhaps had learnt some
+defensive devices.
+
+"But this thing has to be linked to some political party," said
+Crupp, with his eye on me.  "You can't get away from that.  The
+Liberals," he added, "have never done anything for research or
+literature."
+
+"They had a Royal Commission on the Dramatic Censorship," said
+Thorns, with a note of minute fairness.  "It shows what they were
+made of," he added.
+
+"It's what I've told Remington again and again," said Crupp, "we've
+got to pick up the tradition of aristocracy, reorganise it, and make
+it work.  But he's certainly suggested a method."
+
+"There won't be much aristocracy to pick up," said Dayton, darkly to
+the ceiling, "if the House of Lords throws out the Budget."
+
+"All the more reason for picking it up," said Neal.  "For we can't
+do without it."
+
+"Will they go to the bad, or will they rise from the ashes,
+aristocrats indeed--if the Liberals come in overwhelmingly?" said
+Britten.
+
+"It's we who might decide that," said Crupp, insidiously.
+
+"I agree," said Gane.
+
+"No one can tell," said Thorns.  "I doubt if they will get beaten."
+
+It was an odd, fragmentary discussion that night.  We were all with
+ideas in our minds at once fine and imperfect.  We threw out
+suggestions that showed themselves at once far inadequate, and we
+tried to qualify them by minor self-contradictions.  Britten, I
+think, got more said than any one.  "You all seem to think you want
+to organise people, particular groups and classes of individuals,"
+he insisted.  "It isn't that.  That's the standing error of
+politicians.  You want to organise a culture.  Civilisation isn't a
+matter of concrete groupings; it's a matter of prevailing ideas.
+The problem is how to make bold, clear ideas prevail.  The question
+for Remington and us is just what groups of people will most help
+this culture forward."
+
+"Yes, but how are the Lords going to behave?" said Crupp.  "You
+yourself were asking that a little while ago."
+
+"If they win or if they lose," Gane maintained, "there will be a
+movement to reorganise aristocracy--Reform of the House of Lords,
+they'll call the political form of it."
+
+"Bailey thinks that," said some one.
+
+"The labour people want abolition," said some one.  "Let 'em," said
+Thorns.
+
+He became audible, sketching a possibility of action.
+
+"Suppose all of us were able to work together.  It's just one of
+those indeterminate, confused, eventful times ahead when a steady
+jet of ideas might produce enormous results."
+
+"Leave me out of it," said Dayton, "IF you please."
+
+"We should," said Thorns under his breath.
+
+I took up Crupp's initiative, I remember, and expanded it.
+
+"I believe we could do--extensive things," I insisted.
+
+"Revivals and revisions of Toryism have been tried so often," said
+Thorns, "from the Young England movement onward."
+
+"Not one but has produced its enduring effects," I said.  "It's the
+peculiarity of English conservatism that it's persistently
+progressive and rejuvenescent."
+
+I think it must have been about that point that Dayton fled our
+presence, after some clumsy sentence that I decided upon reflection
+was intended to remind me of my duty to my party.
+
+Then I remember Thorns firing doubts at me obliquely across the
+table.  "You can't run a country through its spoilt children," he
+said.  "What you call aristocrats are really spoilt children.
+They've had too much of everything, except bracing experience."
+
+"Children can always be educated," said Crupp.
+
+"I said SPOILT children," said Thorns.
+
+"Look here, Thorns!" said I.  "If this Budget row leads to a storm,
+and these big people get their power clipped, what's going to
+happen?  Have you thought of that?  When they go out lock, stock,
+and barrel, who comes in?"
+
+"Nature abhors a Vacuum," said Crupp, supporting me.
+
+"Bailey's trained officials," suggested Gane.
+
+"Quacks with a certificate of approval from Altiora," said Thorns.
+"I admit the horrors of the alternative.  There'd be a massacre in
+three years."
+
+"One may go on trying possibilities for ever," I said.  "One thing
+emerges.  Whatever accidents happen, our civilisation needs, and
+almost consciously needs, a culture of fine creative minds, and all
+the necessary tolerances, opennesses, considerations, that march
+with that.  For my own part, I think that is the Most Vital Thing.
+Build your ship of state as you will; get your men as you will; I
+concentrate on what is clearly the affair of my sort of man,--I want
+to ensure the quality of the quarter deck."
+
+"Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, suddenly--his first remark for a long
+time.  "A first-rate figure," said Shoesmith, gripping it.
+
+"Our danger is in missing that," I went on.  "Muddle isn't ended by
+transferring power from the muddle-headed few to the muddle-headed
+many, and then cheating the many out of it again in the interests of
+a bureaucracy of sham experts.  But that seems the limit of the
+liberal imagination.  There is no real progress in a country, except
+a rise in the level of its free intellectual activity.  All other
+progress is secondary and dependant.  If you take on Bailey's dreams
+of efficient machinery and a sort of fanatical discipline with no
+free-moving brains behind it, confused ugliness becomes rigid
+ugliness,--that's all.  No doubt things are moving from looseness to
+discipline, and from irresponsible controls to organised controls--
+and also and rather contrariwise everything is becoming as people
+say, democratised; but all the more need in that, for an ark in
+which the living element may be saved."
+
+"Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, faint but pursuing.
+
+It must have been in my house afterwards that Shoesmith became
+noticeable.  He seemed trying to say something vague and difficult
+that he didn't get said at all on that occasion.  "We could do
+immense things with a weekly," he repeated, echoing Neal, I think.
+And there he left off and became a mute expressiveness, and it was
+only afterwards, when I was in bed, that I saw we had our capitalist
+in our hands. . . .
+
+We parted that night on my doorstep in a tremendous glow--but in
+that sort of glow one doesn't act upon without much reconsideration,
+and it was some months before I made my decision to follow up the
+indications of that opening talk.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+I find my thoughts lingering about the Pentagram Circle.  In my
+developments it played a large part, not so much by starting new
+trains of thought as by confirming the practicability of things I
+had already hesitatingly entertained.  Discussion with these other
+men so prominently involved in current affairs endorsed views that
+otherwise would have seemed only a little less remote from actuality
+than the guardians of Plato or the labour laws of More.  Among other
+questions that were never very distant from our discussions, that
+came apt to every topic, was the true significance of democracy,
+Tariff Reform as a method of international hostility, and the
+imminence of war.  On the first issue I can still recall little
+Bailey, glib and winking, explaining that democracy was really just
+a dodge for getting assent to the ordinances of the expert official
+by means of the polling booth.  "If they don't like things," said
+he, "they can vote for the opposition candidate and see what happens
+then--and that, you see, is why we don't want proportional
+representation to let in the wild men."  I opened my eyes--the lids
+had dropped for a moment under the caress of those smooth sounds--to
+see if Bailey's artful forefinger wasn't at the side of his
+predominant nose.
+
+The international situation exercised us greatly.  Our meetings were
+pervaded by the feeling that all things moved towards a day of
+reckoning with Germany, and I was largely instrumental in keeping up
+the suggestion that India was in a state of unstable equilibrium,
+that sooner or later something must happen there--something very
+serious to our Empire.  Dayton frankly detested these topics.  He
+was full of that old Middle Victorian persuasion that whatever is
+inconvenient or disagreeable to the English mind could be
+annihilated by not thinking about it.  He used to sit low in his
+chair and look mulish.  "Militarism," he would declare in a tone of
+the utmost moral fervour, "is a curse.  It's an unmitigated curse."
+Then he would cough shortly and twitch his head back and frown, and
+seem astonished beyond measure that after this conclusive statement
+we could still go on talking of war.
+
+All our Imperialists were obsessed by the thought of international
+conflict, and their influence revived for a time those uneasinesses
+that had been aroused in me for the first time by my continental
+journey with Willersley and by Meredith's "One of Our Conquerors."
+That quite justifiable dread of a punishment for all the slackness,
+mental dishonesty, presumption, mercenary respectability and
+sentimentalised commercialism of the Victorian period, at the hands
+of the better organised, more vigorous, and now far more highly
+civilised peoples of Central Europe, seemed to me to have both a
+good and bad series of consequences.  It seemed the only thing
+capable of bracing English minds to education, sustained
+constructive effort and research; but on the other hand it produced
+the quality of a panic, hasty preparation, impatience of thought, a
+wasteful and sometimes quite futile immediacy.  In 1909, for
+example, there was a vast clamour for eight additional Dreadnoughts--
+
+
+     "We want eight
+      And we won't wait,"
+
+
+but no clamour at all about our national waste of inventive talent,
+our mean standard of intellectual attainment, our disingenuous
+criticism, and the consequent failure to distinguish men of the
+quality needed to carry on the modern type of war.  Almost
+universally we have the wrong men in our places of responsibility
+and the right men in no place at all, almost universally we have
+poorly qualified, hesitating, and resentful subordinates, because
+our criticism is worthless and, so habitually as to be now almost
+unconsciously, dishonest.  Germany is beating England in every
+matter upon which competition is possible, because she attended
+sedulously to her collective mind for sixty pregnant years, because
+in spite of tremendous defects she is still far more anxious for
+quality in achievement than we are.  I remember saying that in my
+paper.  From that, I remember, I went on to an image that had
+flashed into my mind.  "The British Empire," I said, "is like some
+of those early vertebrated monsters, the Brontosaurus and the
+Atlantosaurus and such-like; it sacrifices intellect to character;
+its backbone, that is to say,--especially in the visceral region--is
+bigger than its cranium.  It's no accident that things are so.
+We've worked for backbone.  We brag about backbone, and if the
+joints are anchylosed so much the better.  We're still but only half
+awake to our error.  You can't change that suddenly."
+
+"Turn it round and make it go backwards," interjected Thorns.
+
+"It's trying to do that," I said, "in places."
+
+And afterwards Crupp declared I had begotten a nightmare which
+haunted him of nights; he was trying desperately and belatedly to
+blow a brain as one blows soap-bubbles on such a mezoroic saurian as
+I had conjured up, while the clumsy monster's fate, all teeth and
+brains, crept nearer and nearer. . . .
+
+I've grown, I think, since those days out of the urgency of that
+apprehension.  I still think a European war, and conceivably a very
+humiliating war for England, may occur at no very distant date, but
+I do not think there is any such heroic quality in our governing
+class as will make that war catastrophic.  The prevailing spirit in
+English life--it is one of the essential secrets of our imperial
+endurance--is one of underbred aggression in prosperity and
+diplomatic compromise in moments of danger; we bully haughtily where
+we can and assimilate where we must.  It is not for nothing that our
+upper and middle-class youth is educated by teachers of the highest
+character, scholars and gentlemen, men who can pretend quite
+honestly that Darwinism hasn't upset the historical fall of man,
+that cricket is moral training, and that Socialism is an outrage
+upon the teachings of Christ.  A sort of dignified dexterity of
+evasion is the national reward.  Germany, with a larger population,
+a vigorous and irreconcilable proletariat, a bolder intellectual
+training, a harsher spirit, can scarcely fail to drive us at last to
+a realisation of intolerable strain.  So we may never fight at all.
+The war of preparations that has been going on for thirty years may
+end like a sham-fight at last in an umpire's decision.  We shall
+proudly but very firmly take the second place.  For my own part,
+since I love England as much as I detest her present lethargy of
+soul, I pray for a chastening war--I wouldn't mind her flag in the
+dirt if only her spirit would come out of it.  So I was able to
+shake off that earlier fear of some final and irrevocable
+destruction truncating all my schemes.  At the most, a European war
+would be a dramatic episode in the reconstruction I had in view.
+
+In India, too, I no longer foresee, as once I was inclined to see,
+disaster.  The English rule in India is surely one of the most
+extraordinary accidents that has ever happened in history.  We are
+there like a man who has fallen off a ladder on to the neck of an
+elephant, and doesn't know what to do or how to get down.  Until
+something happens he remains.  Our functions in India are absurd.
+We English do not own that country, do not even rule it.  We make
+nothing happen; at the most we prevent things happening.  We
+suppress our own literature there.  Most English people cannot even
+go to this land they possess; the authorities would prevent it.  If
+Messrs. Perowne or Cook organised a cheap tour of Manchester
+operatives, it would be stopped.  No one dare bring the average
+English voter face to face with the reality of India, or let the
+Indian native have a glimpse of the English voter.  In my time I
+have talked to English statesmen, Indian officials and ex-officials,
+viceroys, soldiers, every one who might be supposed to know what
+India signifies, and I have prayed them to tell me what they thought
+we were up to there.  I am not writing without my book in these
+matters.  And beyond a phrase or so about "even-handed justice"--and
+look at our sedition trials!--they told me nothing.  Time after time
+I have heard of that apocryphal native ruler in the north-west, who,
+when asked what would happen if we left India, replied that in a
+week his men would be in the saddle, and in six months not a rupee
+nor a virgin would be left in Lower Bengal.  That is always given as
+our conclusive justification.  But is it our business to preserve
+the rupees and virgins of Lower Bengal in a sort of magic
+inconclusiveness?  Better plunder than paralysis, better fire and
+sword than futility.  Our flag is spread over the peninsula, without
+plans, without intentions--a vast preventive.  The sum total of our
+policy is to arrest any discussion, any conferences that would
+enable the Indians to work out a tolerable scheme of the future for
+themselves.  But that does not arrest the resentment of men held
+back from life.  Consider what it must be for the educated Indian
+sitting at the feast of contemporary possibilities with his mouth
+gagged and his hands bound behind him!  The spirit of insurrection
+breaks out in spite of espionage and seizures.  Our conflict for
+inaction develops stupendous absurdities.  The other day the British
+Empire was taking off and examining printed cotton stomach wraps for
+seditious emblems and inscriptions. . . .
+
+In some manner we shall have to come out of India.  We have had our
+chance, and we have demonstrated nothing but the appalling dulness
+of our national imagination.  We are not good enough to do anything
+with India.  Codger and Flack, and Gates and Dayton, Cladingbowl in
+the club, and the HOME CHURCHMAN in the home, cant about
+"character," worship of strenuous force and contempt of truth; for
+the sake of such men and things as these, we must abandon in fact,
+if not in appearance, that empty domination.  Had we great schools
+and a powerful teaching, could we boast great men, had we the spirit
+of truth and creation in our lives, then indeed it might be
+different.  But a race that bears a sceptre must carry gifts to
+justify it.
+
+It does not follow that we shall be driven catastrophically from
+India.  That was my earlier mistake.  We are not proud enough in our
+bones to be ruined by India as Spain was by her empire.  We may be
+able to abandon India with an air of still remaining there.  It is
+our new method.  We train our future rulers in the public schools to
+have a very wholesome respect for strength, and as soon as a power
+arises in India in spite of us, be it a man or a culture, or a
+native state, we shall be willing to deal with it.  We may or may
+not have a war, but our governing class will be quick to learn when
+we are beaten.  Then they will repeat our South African diplomacy,
+and arrange for some settlement that will abandon the reality, such
+as it is, and preserve the semblance of power.  The conqueror DE
+FACTO will become the new "loyal Briton," and the democracy at home
+will be invited to celebrate our recession--triumphantly.  I am no
+believer in the imminent dissolution of our Empire; I am less and
+less inclined to see in either India or Germany the probability of
+an abrupt truncation of those slow intellectual and moral
+constructions which are the essentials of statecraft.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+I sit writing in this little loggia to the sound of dripping water--
+this morning we had rain, and the roof of our little casa is still
+not dry, there are pools in the rocks under the sweet chestnuts, and
+the torrent that crosses the salita is full and boastful,--and I try
+to recall the order of my impressions during that watching, dubious
+time, before I went over to the Conservative Party.  I was trying--
+chaotic task--to gauge the possibilities inherent in the quality of
+the British aristocracy.  There comes a broad spectacular effect of
+wide parks, diversified by woods and bracken valleys, and dappled
+with deer; of great smooth lawns shaded by ancient trees; of big
+facades of sunlit buildings dominating the country side; of large
+fine rooms full of handsome, easy-mannered people.  As a sort of
+representative picture to set off against those other pictures of
+Liberals and of Socialists I have given, I recall one of those huge
+assemblies the Duchess of Clynes inaugurated at Stamford House.  The
+place itself is one of the vastest private houses in London, a huge
+clustering mass of white and gold saloons with polished floors and
+wonderful pictures, and staircases and galleries on a Gargantuan
+scale.  And there she sought to gather all that was most
+representative of English activities, and did, in fact, in those
+brilliant nocturnal crowds, get samples of nearly every section of
+our social and intellectual life, with a marked predominance upon
+the political and social side.
+
+I remember sitting in one of the recesses at the end of the big
+saloon with Mrs. Redmondson, one of those sharp-minded, beautiful
+rich women one meets so often in London, who seem to have done
+nothing and to be capable of everything, and we watched the crowd--
+uniforms and splendours were streaming in from a State ball--and
+exchanged information.  I told her about the politicians and
+intellectuals, and she told me about the aristocrats, and we
+sharpened our wit on them and counted the percentage of beautiful
+people among the latter, and wondered if the general effect of
+tallness was or was not an illusion.
+
+They were, we agreed, for the most part bigger than the average of
+people in London, and a handsome lot, even when they were not subtly
+individualised.  "They look so well nurtured," I said, "well cared
+for.  I like their quiet, well-trained movements, their pleasant
+consideration for each other."
+
+"Kindly, good tempered, and at bottom utterly selfish," she said,
+"like big, rather carefully trained, rather pampered children.  What
+else can you expect from them?"
+
+"They are good tempered, anyhow," I witnessed, "and that's an
+achievement.  I don't think I could ever be content under a bad-
+tempered, sentimentalism, strenuous Government.  That's why I
+couldn't stand the Roosevelt REGIME in America.  One's chief
+surprise when one comes across these big people for the first time
+is their admirable easiness and a real personal modesty.  I confess
+I admire them.  Oh! I like them.  I wouldn't at all mind, I believe,
+giving over the country to this aristocracy--given SOMETHING--"
+
+"Which they haven't got."
+
+"Which they haven't got--or they'd be the finest sort of people in
+the world."
+
+"That something?" she inquired.
+
+"I don't know.  I've been puzzling my wits to know.  They've done
+all sorts of things--"
+
+"That's Lord Wrassleton," she interrupted, "whose leg was broken--
+you remember?--at Spion Kop."
+
+"It's healed very well.  I like the gold lace and the white glove
+resting, with quite a nice awkwardness, on the sword.  When I was a
+little boy I wanted to wear clothes like that.  And the stars!  He's
+got the V. C.  Most of these people here have at any rate shown
+pluck, you know--brought something off."
+
+"Not quite enough," she suggested.
+
+"I think that's it," I said.  "Not quite enough--not quite hard
+enough," I added.
+
+She laughed and looked at me.  "You'd like to make us," she said.
+
+"What?"
+
+"Hard."
+
+"I don't think you'll go on if you don't get hard."
+
+"We shan't be so pleasant if we do."
+
+"Well, there my puzzled wits come in again.  I don't see why an
+aristocracy shouldn't be rather hard trained, and yet kindly.  I'm
+not convinced that the resources of education are exhausted.  I want
+to better this, because it already looks so good."
+
+"How are we to do it?" asked Mrs. Redmondson.
+
+"Oh, there you have me!  I've been spending my time lately in trying
+to answer that!  It makes me quarrel with"--I held up my fingers and
+ticked the items off--"the public schools, the private tutors, the
+army exams, the Universities, the Church, the general attitude of
+the country towards science and literature--"
+
+"We all do," said Mrs. Redmondson.  "We can't begin again at the
+beginning," she added.
+
+"Couldn't one," I nodded at the assembly in general, start a
+movement?
+
+"There's the Confederates," she said, with a faint smile that masked
+a gleam of curiosity. . . .  "You want," she said, "to say to the
+aristocracy, 'Be aristocrats.  NOBLESSE OBLIGE.'  Do you remember
+what happened to the monarch who was told to 'Be a King'?"
+
+"Well," I said, "I want an aristocracy."
+
+"This," she said, smiling, "is the pick of them.  The backwoodsmen
+are off the stage.  These are the brilliant ones--the smart and the
+blues. . . .  They cost a lot of money, you know."
+
+So far Mrs. Redmondson, but the picture remained full of things not
+stated in our speech.  They were on the whole handsome people,
+charitable minded, happy, and easy.  They led spacious lives, and
+there was something free and fearless about their bearing that I
+liked extremely.  The women particularly were wide-reading, fine-
+thinking.  Mrs. Redmondson talked as fully and widely and boldly as
+a man, and with those flashes of intuition, those startling, sudden
+delicacies of perception few men display.  I liked, too, the
+relations that held between women and men, their general tolerance,
+their antagonism to the harsh jealousies that are the essence of the
+middle-class order. . . .
+
+After all, if one's aim resolved itself into the development of a
+type and culture of men, why shouldn't one begin at this end?
+
+It is very easy indeed to generalise about a class or human beings,
+but much harder to produce a sample.  Was old Lady Forthundred, for
+instance, fairly a sample?  I remember her as a smiling, magnificent
+presence, a towering accumulation of figure and wonderful shimmering
+blue silk and black lace and black hair, and small fine features and
+chins and chins and chins, disposed in a big cane chair with wraps
+and cushions upon the great terrace of Champneys.  Her eye was blue
+and hard, and her accent and intonation were exactly what you would
+expect from a rather commonplace dressmaker pretending to be
+aristocratic.  I was, I am afraid, posing a little as the
+intelligent but respectful inquirer from below investigating the
+great world, and she was certainly posing as my informant.  She
+affected a cynical coarseness.  She developed a theory on the
+governance of England, beautifully frank and simple.  "Give 'um all
+a peerage when they get twenty thousand a year," she maintained.
+"That's my remedy."
+
+In my new role of theoretical aristocrat I felt a little abashed.
+
+"Twenty thousand," she repeated with conviction.
+
+It occurred to me that I was in the presence of the aristocratic
+theory currently working as distinguished from my as yet
+unformulated intentions.
+
+"You'll get a lot of loafers and scamps among 'um," said Lady
+Forthundred.  "You get loafers and scamps everywhere, but you'll get
+a lot of men who'll work hard to keep things together, and that's
+what we're all after, isn't ut?
+
+"It's not an ideal arrangement."
+
+"Tell me anything better," said Lady Forthundred.
+
+On the whole, and because she refused emphatically to believe in
+education, Lady Forthundred scored.
+
+We had been discussing Cossington's recent peerage, for Cossington,
+my old schoolfellow at City Merchants', and my victor in the affair
+of the magazine, had clambered to an amazing wealth up a piled heap
+of energetically pushed penny and halfpenny magazines, and a group
+of daily newspapers.  I had expected to find the great lady hostile
+to the new-comer, but she accepted him, she gloried in him.
+
+"We're a peerage," she said, "but none of us have ever had any
+nonsense about nobility."
+
+She turned and smiled down on me.  "We English," she said, "are a
+practical people.  We assimilate 'um."
+
+"Then, I suppose, they don't give trouble?"
+
+"Then they don't give trouble."
+
+"They learn to shoot?"
+
+"And all that," said Lady Forthundred.  "Yes.  And things go on.
+Sometimes better than others, but they go on--somehow.  It depends
+very much on the sort of butler who pokes 'um about."
+
+I suggested that it might be possible to get a secure twenty
+thousand a year by at least detrimental methods--socially speaking.
+
+"We must take the bad and the good of 'um," said Lady Forthundred,
+courageously. . . .
+
+Now, was she a sample?  It happened she talked.  What was there in
+the brains of the multitude of her first, second, third, fourth, and
+fifth cousins, who didn't talk, who shone tall, and bearing
+themselves finely, against a background of deft, attentive maids and
+valets, on every spacious social scene?  How did things look to
+them?
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+Side by side with Lady Forthundred, it is curious to put Evesham
+with his tall, bent body, his little-featured almost elvish face,
+his unequal mild brown eyes, his gentle manner, his sweet, amazing
+oratory.  He led all these people wonderfully.  He was always
+curious and interested about life, wary beneath a pleasing
+frankness--and I tormented my brain to get to the bottom of him.
+For a long time he was the most powerful man in England under the
+throne; he had the Lords in his hand, and a great majority in the
+Commons, and the discontents and intrigues that are the concomitants
+of an overwhelming party advantage broke against him as waves break
+against a cliff.  He foresaw so far in these matters that it seemed
+he scarcely troubled to foresee.  He brought political art to the
+last triumph of naturalness.  Always for me he has been the typical
+aristocrat, so typical and above the mere forms of aristocracy, that
+he remained a commoner to the end of his days.
+
+I had met him at the beginning of my career; he read some early
+papers of mine, and asked to see me, and I conceived a flattered
+liking for him that strengthened to a very strong feeling indeed.
+He seemed to me to stand alone without an equal, the greatest man in
+British political life.  Some men one sees through and understands,
+some one cannot see into or round because they are of opaque clay,
+but about Evesham I had a sense of things hidden as it were by depth
+and mists, because he was so big and atmospheric a personality.  No
+other contemporary has had that effect upon me.  I've sat beside him
+at dinners, stayed in houses with him--he was in the big house party
+at Champneys--talked to him, sounded him, watching him as I sat
+beside him.  I could talk to him with extraordinary freedom and a
+rare sense of being understood.  Other men have to be treated in a
+special manner; approached through their own mental dialect,
+flattered by a minute regard for what they have said and done.
+Evesham was as widely and charitably receptive as any man I have
+ever met.  The common politicians beside him seemed like rows of
+stuffy little rooms looking out upon the sea.
+
+And what was he up to?  What did HE think we were doing with
+Mankind?  That I thought worth knowing.
+
+I remember his talking on one occasion at the Hartsteins', at a
+dinner so tremendously floriferous and equipped that we were almost
+forced into duologues, about the possible common constructive
+purpose in politics.
+
+"I feel so much," he said, "that the best people in every party
+converge.  We don't differ at Westminster as they do in the country
+towns.  There's a sort of extending common policy that goes on under
+every government, because on the whole it's the right thing to do,
+and people know it.  Things that used to be matters of opinion
+become matters of science--and cease to be party questions."
+
+He instanced education.
+
+"Apart," said I, "from the religious question."
+
+"Apart from the religious question."
+
+He dropped that aspect with an easy grace, and went on with his
+general theme that political conflict was the outcome of
+uncertainty.  "Directly you get a thing established, so that people
+can say, 'Now this is Right,' with the same conviction that people
+can say water is a combination of oxygen and hydrogen, there's no
+more to be said.  The thing has to be done. . . ."
+
+And to put against this effect of Evesham, broad and humanely
+tolerant, posing as the minister of a steadily developing
+constructive conviction, there are other memories.
+
+Have I not seen him in the House, persistent, persuasive,
+indefatigable, and by all my standards wickedly perverse, leaning
+over the table with those insistent movements of his hand upon it,
+or swaying forward with a grip upon his coat lapel, fighting with a
+diabolical skill to preserve what are in effect religious tests,
+tests he must have known would outrage and humiliate and injure the
+consciences of a quarter--and that perhaps the best quarter--of the
+youngsters who come to the work of elementary education?
+
+In playing for points in the game of party advantage Evesham
+displayed at times a quite wicked unscrupulousness in the use of his
+subtle mind.  I would sit on the Liberal benches and watch him, and
+listen to his urbane voice, fascinated by him.  Did he really care?
+Did anything matter to him?  And if it really mattered nothing, why
+did he trouble to serve the narrowness and passion of his side?  Or
+did he see far beyond my scope, so that this petty iniquity was
+justified by greater, remoter ends of which I had no intimation?
+
+They accused him of nepotism.  His friends and family were certainly
+well cared for.  In private life he was full of an affectionate
+intimacy; he pleased by being charmed and pleased.  One might think
+at times there was no more of him than a clever man happily
+circumstanced, and finding an interest and occupation in politics.
+And then came a glimpse of thought, of imagination, like the sight
+of a soaring eagle through a staircase skylight.  Oh, beyond
+question he was great!  No other contemporary politician had his
+quality.  In no man have I perceived so sympathetically the great
+contrast between warm, personal things and the white dream of
+statecraft.  Except that he had it seemed no hot passions, but only
+interests and fine affections and indolences, he paralleled the
+conflict of my life.  He saw and thought widely and deeply; but at
+times it seemed to me his greatness stood over and behind the
+reality of his life, like some splendid servant, thinking his own
+thoughts, who waits behind a lesser master's chair. . . .
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+Of course, when Evesham talked of this ideal of the organised state
+becoming so finely true to practicability and so clearly stated as
+to have the compelling conviction of physical science, he spoke
+quite after my heart.  Had he really embodied the attempt to realise
+that, I could have done no more than follow him blindly.  But
+neither he nor I embodied that, and there lies the gist of my story.
+And when it came to a study of others among the leading Tories and
+Imperialists the doubt increased, until with some at last it was
+possible to question whether they had any imaginative conception of
+constructive statecraft at all; whether they didn't opaquely accept
+the world for what it was, and set themselves single-mindedly to
+make a place for themselves and cut a figure in it.
+
+There were some very fine personalities among them: there were the
+great peers who had administered Egypt, India, South Africa,
+Framboya--Cromer, Kitchener, Curzon, Milner, Gane, for example.  So
+far as that easier task of holding sword and scales had gone, they
+had shown the finest qualities, but they had returned to the
+perplexing and exacting problem of the home country, a little
+glorious, a little too simply bold.  They wanted to arm and they
+wanted to educate, but the habit of immediate necessity made them
+far more eager to arm than to educate, and their experience of
+heterogeneous controls made them overrate the need for obedience in
+a homogeneous country.  They didn't understand raw men, ill-trained
+men, uncertain minds, and intelligent women; and these are the
+things that matter in England. . . .  There were also the great
+business adventurers, from Cranber to Cossington (who was now Lord
+Paddockhurst).  My mind remained unsettled, and went up and down the
+scale between a belief in their far-sighted purpose and the
+perception of crude vanities, coarse ambitions, vulgar
+competitiveness, and a mere habitual persistence in the pursuit of
+gain.  For a time I saw a good deal of Cossington--I wish I had kept
+a diary of his talk and gestures, to mark how he could vary from day
+to day between a POSEUR, a smart tradesman, and a very bold and
+wide-thinking political schemer.  He had a vanity of sweeping
+actions, motor car pounces, Napoleonic rushes, that led to violent
+ineffectual changes in the policy of his papers, and a haunting
+pursuit by parallel columns in the liberal press that never abashed
+him in the slightest degree.  By an accident I plumbed the folly in
+him--but I feel I never plumbed his wisdom.  I remember him one day
+after a lunch at the Barhams' saying suddenly, out of profound
+meditation over the end of a cigar, one of those sentences that seem
+to light the whole interior being of a man.  "Some day," he said
+softly, rather to himself than to me, and A PROPOS of nothing--"some
+day I will raise the country."
+
+"Why not?" I said, after a pause, and leant across him for the
+little silver spirit-lamp, to light my cigarette. . . .
+
+Then the Tories had for another section the ancient creations, and
+again there were the financial peers, men accustomed to reserve, and
+their big lawyers, accustomed to--well, qualified statement.  And
+below the giant personalities of the party were the young bloods,
+young, adventurous men of the type of Lord Tarvrille, who had seen
+service in South Africa, who had travelled and hunted; explorers,
+keen motorists, interested in aviation, active in army organisation.
+Good, brown-faced stuff they were, but impervious to ideas outside
+the range of their activities, more ignorant of science than their
+chaffeurs, and of the quality of English people than welt-
+politicians; contemptuous of school and university by reason of the
+Gateses and Flacks and Codgers who had come their way, witty, light-
+hearted, patriotic at the Kipling level, with a certain aptitude for
+bullying.  They varied in insensible gradations between the noble
+sportsmen on the one hand, and men like Gane and the Tories of our
+Pentagram club on the other.  You perceive how a man might exercise
+his mind in the attempt to strike an average of public
+serviceability in this miscellany!  And mixed up with these, mixed
+up sometimes in the same man, was the pure reactionary, whose
+predominant idea was that the village schools should confine
+themselves to teaching the catechism, hat-touching and courtesying,
+and be given a holiday whenever beaters were in request. . . .
+
+I find now in my mind as a sort of counterpoise to Evesham the
+figure of old Lord Wardingham, asleep in the largest armchair in the
+library of Stamford Court after lunch.  One foot rested on one of
+those things--I think they are called gout stools.  He had been
+playing golf all the morning and wearied a weak instep; at lunch he
+had sat at my table and talked in the overbearing manner permitted
+to irascible important men whose insteps are painful.  Among other
+things he had flouted the idea that women would ever understand
+statecraft or be more than a nuisance in politics, denied flatly
+that Hindoos were capable of anything whatever except excesses in
+population, regretted he could not censor picture galleries and
+circulating libraries, and declared that dissenters were people who
+pretended to take theology seriously with the express purpose of
+upsetting the entirely satisfactory compromise of the Established
+Church.  "No sensible people, with anything to gain or lose, argue
+about religion," he said.  "They mean mischief."  Having delivered
+his soul upon these points, and silenced the little conversation to
+the left of him from which they had arisen, he became, after an
+appreciative encounter with a sanguinary woodcock, more amiable,
+responded to some respectful initiatives of Crupp's, and related a
+number of classical anecdotes of those blighting snubs, vindictive
+retorts and scandalous miscarriages of justice that are so dear to
+the forensic mind.  Now he reposed.  He was breathing heavily with
+his mouth a little open and his head on one side.  One whisker was
+turned back against the comfortable padding.  His plump strong hands
+gripped the arms of his chair, and his frown was a little assuaged.
+How tremendously fed up he looked!  Honours, wealth, influence,
+respect, he had them all.  How scornful and hard it had made his
+unguarded expression!
+
+I note without comment that it didn't even occur to me then to wake
+him up and ask him what HE was up to with mankind.
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+One countervailing influence to my drift to Toryism in those days
+was Margaret's quite religious faith in the Liberals.  I realised
+that slowly and with a mild astonishment.  It set me, indeed, even
+then questioning my own change of opinion.  We came at last
+incidentally, as our way was, to an exchange of views.  It was as
+nearly a quarrel as we had before I came over to the Conservative
+side.  It was at Champneys, and I think during the same visit that
+witnessed my exploration of Lady Forthundred.  It arose indirectly,
+I think, out of some comments of mine upon our fellow-guests, but it
+is one of those memories of which the scene and quality remain more
+vivid than the things said, a memory without any very definite
+beginning or end.  It was afternoon, in the pause between tea and
+the dressing bell, and we were in Margaret's big silver-adorned,
+chintz-bright room, looking out on the trim Italian garden. . . .
+Yes, the beginning of it has escaped me altogether, but I remember
+it as an odd exceptional little wrangle.
+
+At first we seem to have split upon the moral quality of the
+aristocracy, and I had an odd sense that in some way too feminine
+for me to understand our hostess had aggrieved her.  She said, I
+know, that Champneys distressed her; made her "eager for work and
+reality again."
+
+"But aren't these people real?"
+
+"They're so superficial, so extravagant!"
+
+I said I was not shocked by their unreality.  They seemed the least
+affected people I had ever met.  "And are they really so
+extravagant?" I asked, and put it to her that her dresses cost quite
+as much as any other woman's in the house.
+
+"It's not only their dresses," Margaret parried.  "It's the scale
+and spirit of things."
+
+I questioned that.  "They're cynical," said Margaret, staring before
+her out of the window.
+
+I challenged her, and she quoted the Brabants, about whom there had
+been an ancient scandal.  She'd heard of it from Altiora, and it was
+also Altiora who'd given her a horror of Lord Carnaby, who was also
+with us.  "You know his reputation," said Margaret.  "That Normandy
+girl.  Every one knows about it.  I shiver when I look at him.  He
+seems--oh! like something not of OUR civilisation.  He WILL come and
+say little things to me."
+
+"Offensive things?"
+
+"No, politenesses and things.  Of course his manners are--quite
+right.  That only makes it worse, I think.  It shows he might have
+helped--all that happened.  I do all I can to make him see I don't
+like him.  But none of the others make the slightest objection to
+him."
+
+"Perhaps these people imagine something might be said for him."
+
+"That's just it," said Margaret.
+
+"Charity," I suggested.
+
+"I don't like that sort of toleration."
+
+I was oddly annoyed.  "Like eating with publicans and sinners," I
+said.  "No! . . ."
+
+But scandals, and the contempt for rigid standards their condonation
+displayed, weren't more than the sharp edge of the trouble.  "It's
+their whole position, their selfish predominance, their class
+conspiracy against the mass of people," said Margaret.  "When I sit
+at dinner in that splendid room, with its glitter and white
+reflections and candlelight, and its flowers and its wonderful
+service and its candelabra of solid gold, I seem to feel the slums
+and the mines and the over-crowded cottages stuffed away under the
+table."
+
+I reminded Margaret that she was not altogether innocent of unearned
+increment.
+
+"But aren't we doing our best to give it back?" she said.
+
+I was moved to question her.  "Do you really think," I asked, "that
+the Tories and peers and rich people are to blame for social
+injustice as we have it to-day?  Do you really see politics as a
+struggle of light on the Liberal side against darkness on the Tory?"
+
+"They MUST know," said Margaret.
+
+I found myself questioning that.  I see now that to Margaret it must
+have seemed the perversest carping against manifest things, but at
+the time I was concentrated simply upon the elucidation of her view
+and my own; I wanted to get at her conception in the sharpest,
+hardest lines that were possible.  It was perfectly clear that she
+saw Toryism as the diabolical element in affairs.  The thing showed
+in its hopeless untruth all the clearer for the fine, clean emotion
+with which she gave it out to me.  My sleeping peer in the library
+at Stamford Court and Evesham talking luminously behind the
+Hartstein flowers embodied the devil, and my replete citizen sucking
+at his cigar in the National Liberal Club, Willie Crampton
+discussing the care and management of the stomach over a specially
+hygienic lemonade, and Dr. Tumpany in his aggressive frock-coat
+pegging out a sort of copyright in Socialism, were the centre and
+wings of the angelic side.  It was nonsense.  But how was I to put
+the truth to her?
+
+"I don't see things at all as you do," I said.  "I don't see things
+in the same way."
+
+"Think of the poor," said Margaret, going off at a tangent.
+
+"Think of every one," I said.  "We Liberals have done more mischief
+through well-intentioned benevolence than all the selfishness in the
+world could have done.  We built up the liquor interest."
+
+"WE!" cried Margaret.  "How can you say that?  It's against us."
+
+"Naturally.  But we made it a monopoly in our clumsy efforts to
+prevent people drinking what they liked, because it interfered with
+industrial regularity--"
+
+"Oh!" cried Margaret, stung; and I could see she thought I was
+talking mere wickedness.
+
+"That's it," I said.
+
+"But would you have people drink whatever they pleased?"
+
+"Certainly.  What right have I to dictate to other men and women?"
+
+"But think of the children!"
+
+"Ah! there you have the folly of modern Liberalism, its half-
+cunning, half-silly way of getting at everything in a roundabout
+fashion.  If neglecting children is an offence, and it IS an
+offence, then deal with it as such, but don't go badgering and
+restricting people who sell something that may possibly in some
+cases lead to a neglect of children.  If drunkenness is an offence,
+punish it, but don't punish a man for selling honest drink that
+perhaps after all won't make any one drunk at all.  Don't intensify
+the viciousness of the public-house by assuming the place isn't fit
+for women and children.  That's either spite or folly.  Make the
+public-house FIT for women and children.  Make it a real public-
+house.  If we Liberals go on as we are going, we shall presently
+want to stop the sale of ink and paper because those things tempt
+men to forgery.  We do already threaten the privacy of the post
+because of betting tout's letters.  The drift of all that kind of
+thing is narrow, unimaginative, mischievous, stupid. . . ."
+
+I stopped short and walked to the window and surveyed a pretty
+fountain, facsimile of one in Verona, amidst trim-cut borderings of
+yew.  Beyond, and seen between the stems of ilex trees, was a great
+blaze of yellow flowers. . . .
+
+"But prevention," I heard Margaret behind me, "is the essence of our
+work."
+
+I turned.  "There's no prevention but education.  There's no
+antiseptics in life but love and fine thinking.  Make people fine,
+make fine people.  Don't be afraid.  These Tory leaders are better
+people individually than the average; why cast them for the villains
+of the piece?  The real villain in the piece--in the whole human
+drama--is the muddle-headedness, and it matters very little if it's
+virtuous-minded or wicked.  I want to get at muddle-headedness.  If
+I could do that I could let all that you call wickedness in the
+world run about and do what it jolly well pleased.  It would matter
+about as much as a slightly neglected dog--in an otherwise well-
+managed home."
+
+My thoughts had run away with me.
+
+"I can't understand you," said Margaret, in the profoundest
+distress.  "I can't understand how it is you are coming to see
+things like this."
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+The moods of a thinking man in politics are curiously evasive and
+difficult to describe.  Neither the public nor the historian will
+permit the statesman moods.  He has from the first to assume he has
+an Aim, a definite Aim, and to pretend to an absolute consistency
+with that.  Those subtle questionings about the very fundamentals of
+life which plague us all so relentlessly nowadays are supposed to be
+silenced.  He lifts his chin and pursues his Aim explicitly in the
+sight of all men.  Those who have no real political experience can
+scarcely imagine the immense mental and moral strain there is
+between one's everyday acts and utterances on the one hand and the
+"thinking-out" process on the other.  It is perplexingly difficult
+to keep in your mind, fixed and firm, a scheme essentially complex,
+to keep balancing a swaying possibility while at the same time under
+jealous, hostile, and stupid observation you tread your part in the
+platitudinous, quarrelsome, ill-presented march of affairs. . . .
+
+The most impossible of all autobiographies is an intellectual
+autobiography.  I have thrown together in the crudest way the
+elements of the problem I struggled with, but I can give no record
+of the subtle details; I can tell nothing of the long vacillations
+between Protean values, the talks and re-talks, the meditations, the
+bleak lucidities of sleepless nights. . . .
+
+And yet these things I have struggled with must be thought out, and,
+to begin with, they must be thought out in this muddled,
+experimenting way.  To go into a study to think about statecraft is
+to turn your back on the realities you are constantly needing to
+feel and test and sound if your thinking is to remain vital; to
+choose an aim and pursue it in despite of all subsequent
+questionings is to bury the talent of your mind.  It is no use
+dealing with the intricate as though it were simple, to leap
+haphazard at the first course of action that presents itself; the
+whole world of politicians is far too like a man who snatches a
+poker to a failing watch.  It is easy to say he wants to "get
+something done," but the only sane thing to do for the moment is to
+put aside that poker and take thought and get a better implement. . . .
+
+One of the results of these fundamental preoccupations of mine was a
+curious irritability towards Margaret that I found difficult to
+conceal.  It was one of the incidental cruelties of our position
+that this should happen.  I was in such doubt myself, that I had no
+power to phrase things for her in a form she could use.  Hitherto I
+had stage-managed our "serious" conversations.  Now I was too much
+in earnest and too uncertain to go on doing this.  I avoided talk
+with her.  Her serene, sustained confidence in vague formulae and
+sentimental aspirations exasperated me; her want of sympathetic
+apprehension made my few efforts to indicate my changing attitudes
+distressing and futile.  It wasn't that I was always thinking right,
+and that she was always saying wrong.  It was that I was struggling
+to get hold of a difficult thing that was, at any rate, half true, I
+could not gauge how true, and that Margaret's habitual phrasing
+ignored these elusive elements of truth, and without premeditation
+fitted into the weaknesses of my new intimations, as though they had
+nothing but weaknesses.  It was, for example, obvious that these big
+people, who were the backbone of Imperialism and Conservatism, were
+temperamentally lax, much more indolent, much more sensuous, than
+our deliberately virtuous Young Liberals.  I didn't want to be
+reminded of that, just when I was in full effort to realise the
+finer elements in their composition.  Margaret classed them and
+disposed of them.  It was our incurable differences in habits and
+gestures of thought coming between us again.
+
+The desert of misunderstanding widened.  I was forced back upon
+myself and my own secret councils.  For a time I went my way alone;
+an unmixed evil for both of us.  Except for that Pentagram evening,
+a series of talks with Isabel Rivers, who was now becoming more and
+more important in my intellectual life, and the arguments I
+maintained with Crupp, I never really opened my mind at all during
+that period of indecisions, slow abandonments, and slow
+acquisitions.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD
+
+SECESSION
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+At last, out of a vast accumulation of impressions, decision
+distilled quite suddenly.  I succumbed to Evesham and that dream of
+the right thing triumphant through expression.  I determined I would
+go over to the Conservatives, and use my every gift and power on the
+side of such forces on that side as made for educational
+reorganisation, scientific research, literature, criticism, and
+intellectual development.  That was in 1909.  I judged the Tories
+were driving straight at a conflict with the country, and I thought
+them bound to incur an electoral defeat.  I under-estimated their
+strength in the counties.  There would follow, I calculated, a
+period of profound reconstruction in method and policy alike.  I was
+entirely at one with Crupp in perceiving in this an immense
+opportunity for the things we desired.  An aristocracy quickened by
+conflict and on the defensive, and full of the idea of justification
+by reconstruction, might prove altogether more apt for thought and
+high professions than Mrs. Redmondson's spoilt children.  Behind the
+now inevitable struggle for a reform of the House of Lords, there
+would be great heart searchings and educational endeavour.  On that
+we reckoned. . . .
+
+At last we talked it out to the practical pitch, and Crupp and
+Shoesmith, and I and Gane, made our definite agreement together. . . .
+
+I emerged from enormous silences upon Margaret one evening.
+
+She was just back from the display of some new musicians at the
+Hartsteins.  I remember she wore a dress of golden satin, very rich-
+looking and splendid.  About her slender neck there was a rope of
+gold-set amber beads.  Her hair caught up and echoed and returned
+these golden notes.  I, too, was in evening dress, but where I had
+been escapes me,--some forgotten dinner, I suppose.  I went into her
+room.  I remember I didn't speak for some moments.  I went across to
+the window and pulled the blind aside, and looked out upon the
+railed garden of the square, with its shrubs and shadowed turf
+gleaming pallidly and irregularly in the light of the big electric
+standard in the corner.
+
+"Margaret," I said, "I think I shall break with the party."
+
+She made no answer.  I turned presently, a movement of enquiry.
+
+"I was afraid you meant to do that," she said.
+
+"I'm out of touch," I explained.  "Altogether."
+
+"Oh! I know."
+
+"It places me in a difficult position," I said.
+
+Margaret stood at her dressing-table, looking steadfastly at herself
+in the glass, and with her fingers playing with a litter of
+stoppered bottles of tinted glass.  "I was afraid it was coming to
+this," she said.
+
+"In a way," I said, "we've been allies.  I owe my seat to you.  I
+couldn't have gone into Parliament. . . ."
+
+"I don't want considerations like that to affect us," she
+interrupted.
+
+There was a pause.  She sat down in a chair by her dressing-table,
+lifted an ivory hand-glass, and put it down again.
+
+"I wish," she said, with something like a sob in her voice, "it were
+possible that you shouldn't do this."  She stopped abruptly, and I
+did not look at her, because I could feel the effort she was making
+to control herself.
+
+"I thought," she began again, "when you came into Parliament--"
+
+There came another silence.  "It's all gone so differently," she
+said.  "Everything has gone so differently."
+
+I had a sudden memory of her, shining triumphant after the
+Kinghampstead election, and for the first time I realised just how
+perplexing and disappointing my subsequent career must have been to
+her.
+
+"I'm not doing this without consideration," I said.
+
+"I know," she said, in a voice of despair, "I've seen it coming.
+But--I still don't understand it.  I don't understand how you can go
+over."
+
+"My ideas have changed and developed," I said.
+
+I walked across to her bearskin hearthrug, and stood by the mantel.
+
+"To think that you," she said; "you who might have been leader--"
+She could not finish it.  "All the forces of reaction," she threw
+out.
+
+"I don't think they are the forces of reaction," I said.  "I think I
+can find work to do--better work on that side."
+
+"Against us!" she said.  "As if progress wasn't hard enough!  As if
+it didn't call upon every able man!"
+
+"I don't think Liberalism has a monopoly of progress."
+
+She did not answer that.  She sat quite still looking in front of
+her.  "WHY have you gone over?" she asked abruptly as though I had
+said nothing.
+
+There came a silence that I was impelled to end.  I began a stiff
+dissertation from the hearthrug.  "I am going over, because I think
+I may join in an intellectual renascence on the Conservative side.
+I think that in the coming struggle there will be a partial and
+altogether confused and demoralising victory for democracy, that
+will stir the classes which now dominate the Conservative party into
+an energetic revival.  They will set out to win back, and win back.
+Even if my estimate of contemporary forces is wrong and they win,
+they will still be forced to reconstruct their outlook.  A war
+abroad will supply the chastening if home politics fail.  The effort
+at renascence is bound to come by either alternative.  I believe I
+can do more in relation to that effort than in any other connexion
+in the world of politics at the present time.  That's my case,
+Margaret."
+
+She certainly did not grasp what I said.  "And so you will throw
+aside all the beginnings, all the beliefs and pledges--" Again her
+sentence remained incomplete.  "I doubt if even, once you have gone
+over, they will welcome you."
+
+"That hardly matters."
+
+I made an effort to resume my speech.
+
+"I came into Parliament, Margaret," I said, "a little prematurely.
+Still--I suppose it was only by coming into Parliament that I could
+see things as I do now in terms of personality and imaginative
+range. . . ." I stopped.  Her stiff, unhappy, unlistening silence
+broke up my disquisition.
+
+"After all," I remarked, "most of this has been implicit in my
+writings."
+
+She made no sign of admission.
+
+"What are you going to do?" she asked.
+
+"Keep my seat for a time and make the reasons of my breach clear.
+Then either I must resign or--probably this new Budget will lead to
+a General Election.  It's evidently meant to strain the Lords and
+provoke a quarrel."
+
+"You might, I think, have stayed to fight for the Budget."
+
+"I'm not," I said, "so keen against the Lords."
+
+On that we halted.
+
+"But what are you going to do?" she asked.
+
+"I shall make my quarrel over some points in the Budget.  I can't
+quite tell you yet where my chance will come.  Then I shall either
+resign my seat--or if things drift to dissolution I shall stand
+again."
+
+"It's political suicide."
+
+"Not altogether."
+
+"I can't imagine you out of Parliament again.  It's just like--like
+undoing all we have done.  What will you do?"
+
+"Write.  Make a new, more definite place for myself.  You know, of
+course, there's already a sort of group about Crupp and Gane."
+
+Margaret seemed lost for a time in painful thought.
+
+"For me," she said at last, "our political work has been a religion--
+it has been more than a religion."
+
+I heard in silence.  I had no form of protest available against the
+implications of that.
+
+"And then I find you turning against all we aimed to do--talking of
+going over, almost lightly--to those others." . . .
+
+She was white-lipped as she spoke.  In the most curious way she had
+captured the moral values of the situation.  I found myself
+protesting ineffectually against her fixed conviction.  "It's
+because I think my duty lies in this change that I make it," I said.
+
+"I don't see how you can say that," she replied quietly.
+
+There was another pause between us.
+
+"Oh!" she said and clenched her hand upon the table.  "That it
+should have come to this!"
+
+She was extraordinarily dignified and extraordinarily absurd.  She
+was hurt and thwarted beyond measure.  She had no place in her
+ideas, I thought, for me.  I could see how it appeared to her, but I
+could not make her see anything of the intricate process that had
+brought me to this divergence.  The opposition of our intellectual
+temperaments was like a gag in my mouth.  What was there for me to
+say?  A flash of intuition told me that behind her white dignity was
+a passionate disappointment, a shattering of dreams that needed
+before everything else the relief of weeping.
+
+"I've told you," I said awkwardly, "as soon as I could."
+
+There was another long silence.  "So that is how we stand," I said
+with an air of having things defined.  I walked slowly to the door.
+
+She had risen and stood now staring in front of her.
+
+"Good-night," I said, making no movement towards our habitual kiss.
+
+"Good-night," she answered in a tragic note. . . .
+
+I closed the door softly.  I remained for a moment or so on the big
+landing, hesitating between my bedroom and my study.  As I did so I
+heard the soft rustle of her movement and the click of the key in
+her bedroom door.  Then everything was still. . . .
+
+She hid her tears from me.  Something gripped my heart at the
+thought.
+
+"Damnation!" I said wincing.  "Why the devil can't people at least
+THINK in the same manner?"
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+And that insufficient colloquy was the beginning of a prolonged
+estrangement between us.  It was characteristic of our relations
+that we never reopened the discussion.  The thing had been in the
+air for some time; we had recognised it now; the widening breach
+between us was confessed.  My own feelings were curiously divided.
+It is remarkable that my very real affection for Margaret only
+became evident to me with this quarrel.  The changes of the heart
+are very subtle changes.  I am quite unaware how or when my early
+romantic love for her purity and beauty and high-principled devotion
+evaporated from my life; but I do know that quite early in my
+parliamentary days there had come a vague, unconfessed resentment at
+the tie that seemed to hold me in servitude to her standards of
+private living and public act.  I felt I was caught, and none the
+less so because it had been my own act to rivet on my shackles.  So
+long as I still held myself bound to her that resentment grew.  Now,
+since I had broken my bonds and taken my line it withered again, and
+I could think of Margaret with a returning kindliness.
+
+But I still felt embarrassment with her.  I felt myself dependent
+upon her for house room and food and social support, as it were
+under false pretences.  I would have liked to have separated our
+financial affairs altogether.  But I knew that to raise the issue
+would have seemed a last brutal indelicacy.  So I tried almost
+furtively to keep my personal expenditure within the scope of the
+private income I made by writing, and we went out together in her
+motor brougham, dined and made appearances, met politely at
+breakfast--parted at night with a kiss upon her cheek.  The locking
+of her door upon me, which at that time I quite understood, which I
+understand now, became for a time in my mind, through some obscure
+process of the soul, an offence.  I never crossed the landing to her
+room again.
+
+In all this matter, and, indeed, in all my relations with Margaret,
+I perceive now I behaved badly and foolishly.  My manifest blunder
+is that I, who was several years older than she, much subtler and in
+many ways wiser, never in any measure sought to guide and control
+her.  After our marriage I treated her always as an equal, and let
+her go her way; held her responsible for all the weak and
+ineffective and unfortunate things she said and did to me.  She
+wasn't clever enough to justify that.  It wasn't fair to expect her
+to sympathise, anticipate, and understand.  I ought to have taken
+care of her, roped her to me when it came to crossing the difficult
+places.  If I had loved her more, and wiselier and more tenderly, if
+there had not been the consciousness of my financial dependence on
+her always stiffening my pride, I think she would have moved with me
+from the outset, and left the Liberals with me.  But she did not get
+any inkling of the ends I sought in my change of sides.  It must
+have seemed to her inexplicable perversity.  She had, I knew--for
+surely I knew it then--an immense capacity for loyalty and devotion.
+There she was with these treasures untouched, neglected and
+perplexed.  A woman who loves wants to give.  It is the duty and
+business of the man she has married for love to help her to help and
+give.  But I was stupid.  My eyes had never been opened.  I was
+stiff with her and difficult to her, because even on my wedding
+morning there had been, deep down in my soul, voiceless though
+present, something weakly protesting, a faint perception of wrong-
+doing, the infinitesimally small, slow-multiplying germs of shame.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+I made my breach with the party on the Budget.
+
+In many ways I was disposed to regard the 1909 Budget as a fine
+piece of statecraft.  Its production was certainly a very unexpected
+display of vigour on the Liberal side.  But, on the whole, this
+movement towards collectivist organisation on the part of the
+Liberals rather strengthened than weakened my resolve to cross the
+floor of the house.  It made it more necessary, I thought, to leaven
+the purely obstructive and reactionary elements that were at once
+manifest in the opposition.  I assailed the land taxation proposals
+in one main speech, and a series of minor speeches in committee.
+The line of attack I chose was that the land was a great public
+service that needed to be controlled on broad and far-sighted lines.
+I had no objection to its nationalisation, but I did object most
+strenuously to the idea of leaving it in private hands, and
+attempting to produce beneficial social results through the pressure
+of taxation upon the land-owning class.  That might break it up in
+an utterly disastrous way.  The drift of the government proposals
+was all in the direction of sweating the landowner to get immediate
+values from his property, and such a course of action was bound to
+give us an irritated and vindictive land-owning class, the class
+upon which we had hitherto relied--not unjustifiably--for certain
+broad, patriotic services and an influence upon our collective
+judgments that no other class seemed prepared to exercise.  Abolish
+landlordism if you will, I said, buy it out, but do not drive it to
+a defensive fight, and leave it still sufficiently strong and
+wealthy to become a malcontent element in your state.  You have
+taxed and controlled the brewer and the publican until the outraged
+Liquor Interest has become a national danger.  You now propose to do
+the same thing on a larger scale.  You turn a class which has many
+fine and truly aristocratic traditions towards revolt, and there is
+nothing in these or any other of your proposals that shows any sense
+of the need for leadership to replace these traditional leaders you
+are ousting.  This was the substance of my case, and I hammered at
+it not only in the House, but in the press. . . .
+
+The Kinghampstead division remained for some time insensitive to my
+defection.
+
+Then it woke up suddenly, and began, in the columns of the
+KINGSHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN, an indignant, confused outcry.  I was
+treated to an open letter, signed "Junius Secundus," and I replied in
+provocative terms.  There were two thinly attended public meetings
+at different ends of the constituency, and then I had a
+correspondence with my old friend Parvill, the photographer, which
+ended in my seeing a deputation.
+
+My impression is that it consisted of about eighteen or twenty
+people.  They had had to come upstairs to me and they were
+manifestly full of indignation and a little short of breath.  There
+was Parvill himself, J.P., dressed wholly in black--I think to mark
+his sense of the occasion--and curiously suggestive in his respect
+for my character and his concern for the honourableness of the
+KINGHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN editor, of Mark Antony at the funeral of
+Cesar.  There was Mrs. Bulger, also in mourning; she had never
+abandoned the widow's streamers since the death of her husband ten
+years ago, and her loyalty to Liberalism of the severest type was
+part as it were of her weeds.  There was a nephew of Sir Roderick
+Newton, a bright young Hebrew of the graver type, and a couple of
+dissenting ministers in high collars and hats that stopped halfway
+between the bowler of this world and the shovel-hat of heaven.
+There was also a young solicitor from Lurky done in the horsey
+style, and there was a very little nervous man with a high brow and
+a face contracting below as though the jawbones and teeth had been
+taken out and the features compressed.  The rest of the deputation,
+which included two other public-spirited ladies and several
+ministers of religion, might have been raked out of any omnibus
+going Strandward during the May meetings.  They thrust Parvill
+forward as spokesman, and manifested a strong disposition to say
+"Hear, hear!" to his more strenuous protests provided my eye wasn't
+upon them at the time.
+
+I regarded this appalling deputation as Parvill's apologetic but
+quite definite utterances drew to an end.  I had a moment of vision.
+Behind them I saw the wonderful array of skeleton forces that stand
+for public opinion, that are as much public opinion as exists indeed
+at the present time.  The whole process of politics which bulks so
+solidly in history seemed for that clairvoyant instant but a froth
+of petty motives above abysms of indifference. . . .
+
+Some one had finished.  I perceived I had to speak.
+
+"Very well," I said, "I won't keep you long in replying.  I'll
+resign if there isn't a dissolution before next February, and if
+there is I shan't stand again.  You don't want the bother and
+expense of a bye-election (approving murmurs) if it can be avoided.
+But I may tell you plainly now that I don't think it will be
+necessary for me to resign, and the sooner you find my successor the
+better for the party.  The Lords are in a corner; they've got to
+fight now or never, and I think they will throw out the Budget.
+Then they will go on fighting.  It is a fight that will last for
+years.  They have a sort of social discipline, and you haven't.  You
+Liberals will find yourselves with a country behind you, vaguely
+indignant perhaps, but totally unprepared with any ideas whatever in
+the matter, face to face with the problem of bringing the British
+constitution up-to-date.  Anything may happen, provided only that it
+is sufficiently absurd.  If the King backs the Lords--and I don't
+see why he shouldn't--you have no Republican movement whatever to
+fall back upon.  You lost it during the Era of Good Taste.  The
+country, I say, is destitute of ideas, and you have no ideas to give
+it.  I don't see what you will do. . . .  For my own part, I mean to
+spend a year or so between a window and my writingdesk."
+
+I paused.  "I think, gentlemen," began Parvill, "that we hear all
+this with very great regret. . . ."
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+My estrangement from Margaret stands in my memory now as something
+that played itself out within the four walls of our house in Radnor
+Square, which was, indeed, confined to those limits.  I went to and
+fro between my house and the House of Commons, and the dining-rooms
+and clubs and offices in which we were preparing our new
+developments, in a state of aggressive and energetic dissociation,
+in the nascent state, as a chemist would say.  I was free now, and
+greedy for fresh combination.  I had a tremendous sense of released
+energies.  I had got back to the sort of thing I could do, and to
+the work that had been shaping itself for so long in my imagination.
+Our purpose now was plain, bold, and extraordinarily congenial.  We
+meant no less than to organise a new movement in English thought and
+life, to resuscitate a Public Opinion and prepare the ground for a
+revised and renovated ruling culture.
+
+For a time I seemed quite wonderfully able to do whatever I wanted
+to do.  Shoesmith responded to my first advances.  We decided to
+create a weekly paper as our nucleus, and Crupp and I set to work
+forthwith to collect a group of writers and speakers, including
+Esmeer, Britten, Lord Gane, Neal, and one or two younger men, which
+should constitute a more or less definite editorial council about
+me, and meet at a weekly lunch on Tuesday to sustain our general co-
+operations.  We marked our claim upon Toryism even in the colour of
+our wrapper, and spoke of ourselves collectively as the Blue
+Weeklies.  But our lunches were open to all sorts of guests, and our
+deliberations were never of a character to control me effectively in
+my editorial decisions.  My only influential councillor at first was
+old Britten, who became my sub-editor.  It was curious how we two
+had picked up our ancient intimacy again and resumed the easy give
+and take of our speculative dreaming schoolboy days.
+
+For a time my life centred altogether upon this journalistic work.
+Britten was an experienced journalist, and I had most of the
+necessary instincts for the business.  We meant to make the paper
+right and good down to the smallest detail, and we set ourselves at
+this with extraordinary zeal.  It wasn't our intention to show our
+political motives too markedly at first, and through all the dust
+storm and tumult and stress of the political struggle of 1910, we
+made a little intellectual oasis of good art criticism and good
+writing.  It was the firm belief of nearly all of us that the Lords
+were destined to be beaten badly in 1910, and our game was the
+longer game of reconstruction that would begin when the shouting and
+tumult of that immediate conflict were over.  Meanwhile we had to
+get into touch with just as many good minds as possible.
+
+As we felt our feet, I developed slowly and carefully a broadly
+conceived and consistent political attitude.  As I will explain
+later, we were feminist from the outset, though that caused
+Shoesmith and Gane great searching of heart; we developed Esmeer's
+House of Lords reform scheme into a general cult of the aristocratic
+virtues, and we did much to humanise and liberalise the narrow
+excellencies of that Break-up of the Poor Law agitation, which had
+been organised originally by Beatrice and Sidney Webb.  In addition,
+without any very definite explanation to any one but Esmeer and
+Isabel Rivers, and as if it was quite a small matter, I set myself
+to secure a uniform philosophical quality in our columns.
+
+That, indeed, was the peculiar virtue and characteristic of the BLUE
+WEEKLY.  I was now very definitely convinced that much of the
+confusion and futility of contemporary thought was due to the
+general need of metaphysical training. . . .  The great mass of
+people--and not simply common people, but people active and
+influential in intellectual things--are still quite untrained in the
+methods of thought and absolutely innocent of any criticism of
+method; it is scarcely a caricature to call their thinking a crazy
+patchwork, discontinuous and chaotic.  They arrive at conclusions by
+a kind of accident, and do not suspect any other way may be found to
+their attainment.  A stage above this general condition stands that
+minority of people who have at some time or other discovered general
+terms and a certain use for generalisations.  They are--to fall back
+on the ancient technicality--Realists of a crude sort.  When I say
+Realist of course I mean Realist as opposed to Nominalist, and not
+Realist in the almost diametrically different sense of opposition to
+Idealist.  Such are the Baileys; such, to take their great
+prototype, was Herbert Spencer (who couldn't read Kant); such are
+whole regiments of prominent and entirely self-satisfied
+contemporaries.  They go through queer little processes of
+definition and generalisation and deduction with the completest
+belief in the validity of the intellectual instrument they are
+using.  They are Realists--Cocksurists--in matter of fact;
+sentimentalists in behaviour.  The Baileys having got to this
+glorious stage in mental development--it is glorious because it has
+no doubts--were always talking about training "Experts" to apply the
+same simple process to all the affairs of mankind.  Well, Realism
+isn't the last word of human wisdom.  Modest-minded people, doubtful
+people, subtle people, and the like--the kind of people William
+James writes of as "tough-minded," go on beyond this methodical
+happiness, and are forever after critical of premises and terms.
+They are truer--and less confident.  They have reached scepticism
+and the artistic method.  They have emerged into the new Nominalism.
+
+Both Isabel and I believe firmly that these differences of
+intellectual method matter profoundly in the affairs of mankind,
+that the collective mind of this intricate complex modern state can
+only function properly upon neo-Nominalist lines.  This has always
+been her side of our mental co-operation rather than mine.  Her mind
+has the light movement that goes so often with natural mental power;
+she has a wonderful art in illustration, and, as the reader probably
+knows already, she writes of metaphysical matters with a rare charm
+and vividness.  So far there has been no collection of her papers
+published, but they are to be found not only in the BLUE WEEKLY
+columns but scattered about the monthlies; many people must be
+familiar with her style.  It was an intention we did much to realise
+before our private downfall, that we would use the BLUE WEEKLY to
+maintain a stream of suggestion against crude thinking, and at last
+scarcely a week passed but some popular distinction, some large
+imposing generalisation, was touched to flaccidity by her pen or
+mine. . . .
+
+I was at great pains to give my philosophical, political, and social
+matter the best literary and critical backing we could get in
+London.  I hunted sedulously for good descriptive writing and good
+criticism; I was indefatigable in my readiness to hear and consider,
+if not to accept advice; I watched every corner of the paper, and
+had a dozen men alert to get me special matter of the sort that
+draws in the unattached reader.  The chief danger on the literary
+side of a weekly is that it should fall into the hands of some
+particular school, and this I watched for closely.  It seems
+impossible to get vividness of apprehension and breadth of view
+together in the same critic.  So it falls to the wise editor to
+secure the first and impose the second.  Directly I detected the
+shrill partisan note in our criticism, the attempt to puff a poor
+thing because it was "in the right direction," or damn a vigorous
+piece of work because it wasn't, I tackled the man and had it out
+with him.  Our pay was good enough for that to matter a good deal. . . .
+
+Our distinctive little blue and white poster kept up its neat
+persistent appeal to the public eye, and before 1911 was out, the
+BLUE WEEKLY was printing twenty pages of publishers' advertisements,
+and went into all the clubs in London and three-quarters of the
+country houses where week-end parties gather together.  Its sale by
+newsagents and bookstalls grew steadily.  One got more and more the
+reassuring sense of being discussed, and influencing discussion.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Our office was at the very top of a big building near the end of
+Adelphi Terrace; the main window beside my desk, a big undivided
+window of plate glass, looked out upon Cleopatra's Needle, the
+corner of the Hotel Cecil, the fine arches of Waterloo Bridge, and
+the long sweep of south bank with its shot towers and chimneys, past
+Bankside to the dimly seen piers of the great bridge below the
+Tower.  The dome of St. Paul's just floated into view on the left
+against the hotel facade.  By night and day, in every light and
+atmosphere, it was a beautiful and various view, alive as a
+throbbing heart; a perpetual flow of traffic ploughed and splashed
+the streaming silver of the river, and by night the shapes of things
+became velvet black and grey, and the water a shining mirror of
+steel, wearing coruscating gems of light.  In the foreground the
+Embankment trams sailed glowing by, across the water advertisements
+flashed and flickered, trains went and came and a rolling drift of
+smoke reflected unseen fires.  By day that spectacle was sometimes a
+marvel of shining wet and wind-cleared atmosphere, sometimes a
+mystery of drifting fog, sometimes a miracle of crowded details,
+minutely fine.
+
+As I think of that view, so variously spacious in effect, I am back
+there, and this sunlit paper might be lamp-lit and lying on my old
+desk.  I see it all again, feel it all again.  In the foreground is
+a green shaded lamp and crumpled galley slips and paged proofs and
+letters, two or three papers in manuscript, and so forth.  In the
+shadows are chairs and another table bearing papers and books, a
+rotating bookcase dimly seen, a long window seat black in the
+darkness, and then the cool unbroken spectacle of the window.  How
+often I would watch some tram-car, some string of barges go from me
+slowly out of sight.  The people were black animalculae by day,
+clustering, collecting, dispersing, by night, they were phantom
+face-specks coming, vanishing, stirring obscurely between light and
+shade.
+
+I recall many hours at my desk in that room before the crisis came,
+hours full of the peculiar happiness of effective strenuous work.
+Once some piece of writing went on, holding me intent and forgetful
+of time until I looked up from the warm circle of my electric lamp
+to see the eastward sky above the pale silhouette of the Tower
+Bridge, flushed and banded brightly with the dawn.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH
+
+THE BESETTING OF SEX
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+Art is selection and so is most autobiography.  But I am concerned
+with a more tangled business than selection, I want to show a
+contemporary man in relation to the state and social usage, and the
+social organism in relation to that man.  To tell my story at all I
+have to simplify.  I have given now the broad lines of my political
+development, and how I passed from my initial liberal-socialism to
+the conception of a constructive aristocracy.  I have tried to set
+that out in the form of a man discovering himself.  Incidentally
+that self-development led to a profound breach with my wife.  One
+has read stories before of husband and wife speaking severally two
+different languages and coming to an understanding.  But Margaret
+and I began in her dialect, and, as I came more and more to use my
+own, diverged.
+
+I had thought when I married that the matter of womankind had ended
+for me.  I have tried to tell all that sex and women had been to me
+up to my married life with Margaret and our fatal entanglement,
+tried to show the queer, crippled, embarrassed and limited way in
+which these interests break upon the life of a young man under
+contemporary conditions.  I do not think my lot was a very
+exceptional one.  I missed the chance of sisters and girl playmates,
+but that is not an uncommon misadventure in an age of small
+families; I never came to know any woman at all intimately until I
+was married to Margaret.  My earlier love affairs were encounters of
+sex, under conditions of furtiveness and adventure that made them
+things in themselves, restricted and unilluminating.  From a boyish
+disposition to be mystical and worshipping towards women I had
+passed into a disregardful attitude, as though women were things
+inferior or irrelevant, disturbers in great affairs.  For a time
+Margaret had blotted out all other women; she was so different and
+so near; she was like a person who stands suddenly in front of a
+little window through which one has been surveying a crowd.  She
+didn't become womankind for me so much as eliminate womankind from
+my world. . . .  And then came this secret separation. . . .
+
+Until this estrangement and the rapid and uncontrollable development
+of my relations with Isabel which chanced to follow it, I seemed to
+have solved the problem of women by marriage and disregard.  I
+thought these things were over.  I went about my career with
+Margaret beside me, her brow slightly knit, her manner faintly
+strenuous, helping, helping; and if we had not altogether abolished
+sex we had at least so circumscribed and isolated it that it would
+not have affected the general tenor of our lives in the slightest
+degree if we had.
+
+And then, clothing itself more and more in the form of Isabel and
+her problems, this old, this fundamental obsession of my life
+returned.  The thing stole upon my mind so that I was unaware of its
+invasion and how it was changing our long intimacy.  I have already
+compared the lot of the modern publicist to Machiavelli writing in
+his study; in his day women and sex were as disregarded in these
+high affairs as, let us say, the chemistry of air or the will of the
+beasts in the fields; in ours the case has altogether changed, and
+woman has come now to stand beside the tall candles, half in the
+light, half in the mystery of the shadows, besetting, interrupting,
+demanding unrelentingly an altogether unprecedented attention.  I
+feel that in these matters my life has been almost typical of my
+time.  Woman insists upon her presence.  She is no longer a mere
+physical need, an aesthetic bye-play, a sentimental background; she
+is a moral and intellectual necessity in a man's life.  She comes to
+the politician and demands, Is she a child or a citizen?  Is she a
+thing or a soul?  She comes to the individual man, as she came to me
+and asks, Is she a cherished weakling or an equal mate, an
+unavoidable helper?  Is she to be tried and trusted or guarded and
+controlled, bond or free?  For if she is a mate, one must at once
+trust more and exact more, exacting toil, courage, and the hardest,
+most necessary thing of all, the clearest, most shameless,
+explicitness of understanding. . . .
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+In all my earlier imaginings of statecraft I had tacitly assumed
+either that the relations of the sexes were all right or that anyhow
+they didn't concern the state.  It was a matter they, whoever "they"
+were, had to settle among themselves.  That sort of disregard was
+possible then.  But even before 1906 there were endless intimations
+that the dams holding back great reservoirs of discussion were
+crumbling.  We political schemers were ploughing wider than any one
+had ploughed before in the field of social reconstruction.  We had
+also, we realised, to plough deeper.  We had to plough down at last
+to the passionate elements of sexual relationship and examine and
+decide upon them.
+
+The signs multiplied.  In a year or so half the police of the
+metropolis were scarce sufficient to protect the House from one
+clamorous aspect of the new problem.  The members went about
+Westminster with an odd, new sense of being beset.  A good
+proportion of us kept up the pretence that the Vote for Women was an
+isolated fad, and the agitation an epidemic madness that would
+presently pass.  But it was manifest to any one who sought more than
+comfort in the matter that the streams of women and sympathisers and
+money forthcoming marked far deeper and wider things than an idle
+fancy for the franchise.  The existing laws and conventions of
+relationship between Man and Woman were just as unsatisfactory a
+disorder as anything else in our tumbled confusion of a world, and
+that also was coming to bear upon statecraft.
+
+My first parliament was the parliament of the Suffragettes.  I don't
+propose to tell here of that amazing campaign, with its absurdities
+and follies, its courage and devotion.  There were aspects of that
+unquenchable agitation that were absolutely heroic and aspects that
+were absolutely pitiful.  It was unreasonable, unwise, and, except
+for its one central insistence, astonishingly incoherent.  It was
+amazingly effective.  The very incoherence of the demand witnessed,
+I think, to the forces that lay behind it.  It wasn't a simple
+argument based on a simple assumption; it was the first crude
+expression of a great mass and mingling of convergent feelings, of a
+widespread, confused persuasion among modern educated women that the
+conditions of their relations with men were oppressive, ugly,
+dishonouring, and had to be altered.  They had not merely adopted
+the Vote as a symbol of equality; it was fairly manifest to me that,
+given it, they meant to use it, and to use it perhaps even
+vindictively and blindly, as a weapon against many things they had
+every reason to hate. . . .
+
+I remember, with exceptional vividness, that great night early in
+the session of 1909, when--I think it was--fifty or sixty women went
+to prison.  I had been dining at the Barham's, and Lord Barham and I
+came down from the direction of St. James's Park into a crowd and a
+confusion outside the Caxton Hall.  We found ourselves drifting with
+an immense multitude towards Parliament Square and parallel with a
+silent, close-packed column of girls and women, for the most part
+white-faced and intent.  I still remember the effect of their faces
+upon me.  It was quite different from the general effect of staring
+about and divided attention one gets in a political procession of
+men.  There was an expression of heroic tension.
+
+There had been a pretty deliberate appeal on the part of the women's
+organisers to the Unemployed, who had been demonstrating throughout
+that winter, to join forces with the movement, and the result was
+shown in the quality of the crowd upon the pavement.  It was an
+ugly, dangerous-looking crowd, but as yet good-tempered and
+sympathetic.  When at last we got within sight of the House the
+square was a seething seat of excited people, and the array of
+police on horse and on foot might have been assembled for a
+revolutionary outbreak.  There were dense masses of people up
+Whitehall, and right on to Westminster Bridge.  The scuffle that
+ended in the arrests was the poorest explosion to follow such
+stupendous preparations. . . .
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Later on in that year the women began a new attack.  Day and night,
+and all through the long nights of the Budget sittings, at all the
+piers of the gates of New Palace Yard and at St. Stephen's Porch,
+stood women pickets, and watched us silently and reproachfully as we
+went to and fro.  They were women of all sorts, though, of course,
+the independent worker-class predominated.  There were grey-headed
+old ladies standing there, sturdily charming in the rain; battered-
+looking, ambiguous women, with something of the desperate bitterness
+of battered women showing in their eyes; north-country factory
+girls; cheaply-dressed suburban women; trim, comfortable mothers of
+families; valiant-eyed girl graduates and undergraduates; lank,
+hungry-looking creatures, who stirred one's imagination; one very
+dainty little woman in deep mourning, I recall, grave and steadfast,
+with eyes fixed on distant things.  Some of those women looked
+defiant, some timidly aggressive, some full of the stir of
+adventure, some drooping with cold and fatigue.  The supply never
+ceased.  I had a mortal fear that somehow the supply might halt or
+cease.  I found that continual siege of the legislature
+extraordinarily impressive--infinitely more impressive than the
+feeble-forcible "ragging" of the more militant section.  I thought
+of the appeal that must be going through the country, summoning the
+women from countless scattered homes, rooms, colleges, to
+Westminster.
+
+I remember too the petty little difficulty I felt whether I should
+ignore these pickets altogether, or lift a hat as I hurried past
+with averted eyes, or look them in the face as I did so.  Towards
+the end the House evoked an etiquette of salutation.
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+There was a tendency, even on the part of its sympathisers, to treat
+the whole suffrage agitation as if it were a disconnected issue,
+irrelevant to all other broad developments of social and political
+life.  We struggled, all of us, to ignore the indicating finger it
+thrust out before us.  "Your schemes, for all their bigness," it
+insisted to our reluctant, averted minds, "still don't go down to
+the essential things. . . ."
+
+We have to go deeper, or our inadequate children's insufficient
+children will starve amidst harvests of earless futility.  That
+conservatism which works in every class to preserve in its
+essentials the habitual daily life is all against a profounder
+treatment of political issues.  The politician, almost as absurdly
+as the philosopher, tends constantly, in spite of magnificent
+preludes, vast intimations, to specialise himself out of the reality
+he has so stupendously summoned--he bolts back to littleness.  The
+world has to be moulded anew, he continues to admit, but without, he
+adds, any risk of upsetting his week-end visits, his morning cup of
+tea. . . .
+
+The discussion of the relations of men and women disturbs every one.
+It reacts upon the private life of every one who attempts it.  And
+at any particular time only a small minority have a personal
+interest in changing the established state of affairs.  Habit and
+interest are in a constantly recruited majority against conscious
+change and adjustment in these matters.  Drift rules us.  The great
+mass of people, and an overwhelming proportion of influential
+people, are people who have banished their dreams and made their
+compromise.  Wonderful and beautiful possibilities are no longer to
+be thought about.  They have given up any aspirations for intense
+love, their splendid offspring, for keen delights, have accepted a
+cultivated kindliness and an uncritical sense of righteousness as
+their compensation.  It's a settled affair with them, a settled,
+dangerous affair.  Most of them fear, and many hate, the slightest
+reminder of those abandoned dreams.  As Dayton once said to the
+Pentagram Circle, when we were discussing the problem of a universal
+marriage and divorce law throughout the Empire, "I am for leaving
+all these things alone."  And then, with a groan in his voice,
+"Leave them alone!  Leave them all alone!"
+
+That was his whole speech for the evening, in a note of suppressed
+passion, and presently, against all our etiquette, he got up and
+went out.
+
+For some years after my marriage, I too was for leaving them alone.
+I developed a dread and dislike for romance, for emotional music,
+for the human figure in art--turning my heart to landscape.  I
+wanted to sneer at lovers and their ecstasies, and was uncomfortable
+until I found the effective sneer.  In matters of private morals
+these were my most uncharitable years.  I didn't want to think of
+these things any more for ever.  I hated the people whose talk or
+practice showed they were not of my opinion.  I wanted to believe
+that their views were immoral and objectionable and contemptible,
+because I had decided to treat them as at that level.  I was, in
+fact, falling into the attitude of the normal decent man.
+
+And yet one cannot help thinking!  The sensible moralised man finds
+it hard to escape the stream of suggestion that there are still
+dreams beyond these commonplace acquiescences,--the appeal of beauty
+suddenly shining upon one, the mothlike stirrings of serene summer
+nights, the sweetness of distant music. . . .
+
+It is one of the paradoxical factors in our public life at the
+present time, which penalises abandonment to love so abundantly and
+so heavily, that power, influence and control fall largely to
+unencumbered people and sterile people and people who have married
+for passionless purposes, people whose very deficiency in feeling
+has left them free to follow ambition, people beautyblind, who don't
+understand what it is to fall in love, what it is to desire children
+or have them, what it is to feel in their blood and bodies the
+supreme claim of good births and selective births above all other
+affairs in life, people almost of necessity averse from this most
+fundamental aspect of existence. . . .
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+It wasn't, however, my deepening sympathy with and understanding of
+the position of women in general, or the change in my ideas about
+all these intimate things my fast friendship with Isabel was
+bringing about, that led me to the heretical views I have in the
+last five years dragged from the region of academic and timid
+discussion into the field of practical politics.  Those influences,
+no doubt, have converged to the same end, and given me a powerful
+emotional push upon my road, but it was a broader and colder view of
+things that first determined me in my attempt to graft the Endowment
+of Motherhood in some form or other upon British Imperialism.  Now
+that I am exiled from the political world, it is possible to
+estimate just how effectually that grafting has been done.
+
+I have explained how the ideas of a trained aristocracy and a
+universal education grew to paramount importance in my political
+scheme.  It is but a short step from this to the question of the
+quantity and quality of births in the community, and from that again
+to these forbidden and fear-beset topics of marriage, divorce, and
+the family organisation.  A sporadic discussion of these aspects had
+been going on for years, a Eugenic society existed, and articles on
+the Falling Birth Rate, and the Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit
+were staples of the monthly magazines.  But beyond an intermittent
+scolding of prosperous childless people in general--one never
+addressed them in particular--nothing was done towards arresting
+those adverse processes.  Almost against my natural inclination, I
+found myself forced to go into these things.  I came to the
+conclusion that under modern conditions the isolated private family,
+based on the existing marriage contract, was failing in its work.
+It wasn't producing enough children, and children good enough and
+well trained enough for the demands of the developing civilised
+state.  Our civilisation was growing outwardly, and decaying in its
+intimate substance, and unless it was presently to collapse, some
+very extensive and courageous reorganisation was needed.  The old
+haphazard system of pairing, qualified more and more by worldly
+discretions, no longer secures a young population numerous enough or
+good enough for the growing needs and possibilities of our Empire.
+Statecraft sits weaving splendid garments, no doubt, but with a
+puny, ugly, insufficient baby in the cradle.
+
+No one so far has dared to take up this problem as a present
+question for statecraft, but it comes unheralded, unadvocated, and
+sits at every legislative board.  Every improvement is provisional
+except the improvement of the race, and it became more and more
+doubtful to me if we were improving the race at all!  Splendid and
+beautiful and courageous people must come together and have
+children, women with their fine senses and glorious devotion must be
+freed from the net that compels them to be celibate, compels them to
+be childless and useless, or to bear children ignobly to men whom
+need and ignorance and the treacherous pressure of circumstances
+have forced upon them.  We all know that, and so few dare even to
+whisper it for fear that they should seem, in seeking to save the
+family, to threaten its existence.  It is as if a party of pigmies
+in a not too capacious room had been joined by a carnivorous giant--
+and decided to go on living happily by cutting him dead. . . .
+
+The problem the developing civilised state has to solve is how it
+can get the best possible increase under the best possible
+conditions.  I became more and more convinced that the independent
+family unit of to-day, in which the man is master of the wife and
+owner of the children, in which all are dependent upon him,
+subordinated to his enterprises and liable to follow his fortunes up
+or down, does not supply anything like the best conceivable
+conditions.  We want to modernise the family footing altogether.  An
+enormous premium both in pleasure and competitive efficiency is put
+upon voluntary childlessness, and enormous inducements are held out
+to women to subordinate instinctive and selective preferences to
+social and material considerations.
+
+The practical reaction of modern conditions upon the old tradition
+of the family is this: that beneath the pretence that nothing is
+changing, secretly and with all the unwholesomeness of secrecy
+everything is changed.  Offspring fall away, the birth rate falls
+and falls most among just the most efficient and active and best
+adapted classes in the community.  The species is recruited from
+among its failures and from among less civilised aliens.
+Contemporary civilisations are in effect burning the best of their
+possible babies in the furnaces that run the machinery.  In the
+United States the native Anglo-American strain has scarcely
+increased at all since 1830, and in most Western European countries
+the same is probably true of the ablest and most energetic elements
+in the community.  The women of these classes still remain legally
+and practically dependent and protected, with the only natural
+excuse for their dependence gone. . . .
+
+The modern world becomes an immense spectacle of unsatisfactory
+groupings; here childless couples bored to death in the hopeless
+effort to sustain an incessant honeymoon, here homes in which a
+solitary child grows unsocially, here small two or three-child homes
+that do no more than continue the culture of the parents at a great
+social cost, here numbers of unhappy educated but childless married
+women, here careless, decivilised fecund homes, here orphanages and
+asylums for the heedlessly begotten.  It is just the disorderly
+proliferation of Bromstead over again, in lives instead of in
+houses.
+
+What is the good, what is the common sense, of rectifying
+boundaries, pushing research and discovery, building cities,
+improving all the facilities of life, making great fleets, waging
+wars, while this aimless decadence remains the quality of the
+biological outlook? . . .
+
+It is difficult now to trace how I changed from my early aversion
+until I faced this mass of problems.  But so far back as 1910 I had
+it clear in my mind that I would rather fail utterly than
+participate in all the surrenders of mind and body that are implied
+in Dayton's snarl of "Leave it alone; leave it all alone!"  Marriage
+and the begetting and care of children, is the very ground substance
+in the life of the community.  In a world in which everything
+changes, in which fresh methods, fresh adjustments and fresh ideas
+perpetually renew the circumstances of life, it is preposterous that
+we should not even examine into these matters, should rest content
+to be ruled by the uncriticised traditions of a barbaric age.
+
+Now, it seems to me that the solution of this problem is also the
+solution of the woman's individual problem.  The two go together,
+are right and left of one question.  The only conceivable way out
+from our IMPASSE lies in the recognition of parentage, that is to
+say of adequate mothering, as no longer a chance product of
+individual passions but a service rendered to the State.  Women must
+become less and less subordinated to individual men, since this
+works out in a more or less complete limitation, waste, and
+sterilisation of their essentially social function; they must become
+more and more subordinated as individually independent citizens to
+the collective purpose.  Or, to express the thing by a familiar
+phrase, the highly organised, scientific state we desire must, if it
+is to exist at all, base itself not upon the irresponsible man-ruled
+family, but upon the matriarchal family, the citizen-ship and
+freedom of women and the public endowment of motherhood.
+
+After two generations of confused and experimental revolt it grows
+clear to modern women that a conscious, deliberate motherhood and
+mothering is their special function in the State, and that a
+personal subordination to an individual man with an unlimited power
+of control over this intimate and supreme duty is a degradation.  No
+contemporary woman of education put to the test is willing to
+recognise any claim a man can make upon her but the claim of her
+freely-given devotion to him.  She wants the reality of her choice
+and she means "family" while a man too often means only possession.
+This alters the spirit of the family relationships fundamentally.
+Their form remains just what it was when woman was esteemed a
+pretty, desirable, and incidentally a child-producing, chattel.
+Against these time-honoured ideas the new spirit of womanhood
+struggles in shame, astonishment, bitterness, and tears. . . .
+
+I confess myself altogether feminist.  I have no doubts in the
+matter.  I want this coddling and browbeating of women to cease.  I
+want to see women come in, free and fearless, to a full
+participation in the collective purpose of mankind.  Women, I am
+convinced, are as fine as men; they can be as wise as men; they are
+capable of far greater devotion than men.  I want to see them
+citizens, with a marriage law framed primarily for them and for
+their protection and the good of the race, and not for men's
+satisfactions.  I want to see them bearing and rearing good children
+in the State as a generously rewarded public duty and service,
+choosing their husbands freely and discerningly, and in no way
+enslaved by or subordinated to the men they have chosen.  The social
+consciousness of women seems to me an unworked, an almost untouched
+mine of wealth for the constructive purpose of the world.  I want to
+change the respective values of the family group altogether, and
+make the home indeed the women's kingdom and the mother the owner
+and responsible guardian of her children.
+
+It is no use pretending that this is not novel and revolutionary; it
+is.  The Endowment of Motherhood implies a new method of social
+organization, a rearrangement of the social unit, untried in human
+experience--as untried as electric traction was or flying in 1800.
+Of course, it may work out to modify men's ideas of marriage
+profoundly.  To me that is a secondary consideration.  I do not
+believe that particular assertion myself, because I am convinced
+that a practical monogamy is a psychological necessity to the mass
+of civilised people.  But even if I did believe it I should still
+keep to my present line, because it is the only line that will
+prevent a highly organised civilisation from ending in biological
+decay.  The public Endowment of Motherhood is the only possible way
+which will ensure the permanently developing civilised state at
+which all constructive minds are aiming.  A point is reached in the
+life-history of a civilisation when either this reconstruction must
+be effected or the quality and MORALE of the population prove
+insufficient for the needs of the developing organisation.  It is
+not so much moral decadence that will destroy us as moral
+inadaptability.  The old code fails under the new needs.  The only
+alternative to this profound reconstruction is a decay in human
+quality and social collapse.  Either this unprecedented
+rearrangement must be achieved by our civilisation, or it must
+presently come upon a phase of disorder and crumble and perish, as
+Rome perished, as France declines, as the strain of the Pilgrim
+Fathers dwindles out of America.  Whatever hope there may be in the
+attempt therefore, there is no alternative to the attempt.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+I wanted political success now dearly enough, but not at the price
+of constructive realities.  These questions were no doubt
+monstrously dangerous in the political world; there wasn't a
+politician alive who didn't look scared at the mention of "The
+Family," but if raising these issues were essential to the social
+reconstructions on which my life was set, that did not matter.  It
+only implied that I should take them up with deliberate caution.
+There was no release because of risk or difficulty.
+
+The question of whether I should commit myself to some open project
+in this direction was going on in my mind concurrently with my
+speculations about a change of party, like bass and treble in a
+complex piece of music.  The two drew to a conclusion together.  I
+would not only go over to Imperialism, but I would attempt to
+biologise Imperialism.
+
+I thought at first that I was undertaking a monstrous uphill task.
+But as I came to look into the possibilities of the matter, a strong
+persuasion grew up in my mind that this panic fear of legislative
+proposals affecting the family basis was excessive, that things were
+much riper for development in this direction than old-experienced
+people out of touch with the younger generation imagined, that to
+phrase the thing in a parliamentary fashion, "something might be
+done in the constituencies" with the Endowment of Motherhood
+forthwith, provided only that it was made perfectly clear that
+anything a sane person could possibly intend by "morality" was left
+untouched by these proposals.
+
+I went to work very carefully.  I got Roper of the DAILY TELEPHONE
+and Burkett of the DIAL to try over a silly-season discussion of
+State Help for Mothers, and I put a series of articles on eugenics,
+upon the fall in the birth-rate, and similar topics in the BLUE
+WEEKLY, leading up to a tentative and generalised advocacy of the
+public endowment of the nation's children.  I was more and more
+struck by the acceptance won by a sober and restrained presentation
+of this suggestion.
+
+And then, in the fourth year of the BLUE WEEKLY'S career, came the
+Handitch election, and I was forced by the clamour of my antagonist,
+and very willingly forced, to put my convictions to the test.  I
+returned triumphantly to Westminster with the Public Endowment of
+Motherhood as part of my open profession and with the full approval
+of the party press.  Applauding benches of Imperialists cheered me
+on my way to the table between the whips.
+
+That second time I took the oath I was not one of a crowd of new
+members, but salient, an event, a symbol of profound changes and new
+purposes in the national life.
+
+Here it is my political book comes to an end, and in a sense my book
+ends altogether.  For the rest is but to tell how I was swept out of
+this great world of political possibilities.  I close this Third
+Book as I opened it, with an admission of difficulties and
+complexities, but now with a pile of manuscript before me I have to
+confess them unsurmounted and still entangled.
+
+Yet my aim was a final simplicity.  I have sought to show my growing
+realisation that the essential quality of all political and social
+effort is the development of a great race mind behind the interplay
+of individual lives.  That is the collective human reality, the
+basis of morality, the purpose of devotion.  To that our lives must
+be given, from that will come the perpetual fresh release and
+further ennoblement of individual lives. . . .
+
+I have wanted to make that idea of a collective mind play in this
+book the part United Italy plays in Machiavelli's PRINCE.  I have
+called it the hinterland of reality, shown it accumulating a
+dominating truth and rightness which must force men's now sporadic
+motives more and more into a disciplined and understanding relation
+to a plan.  And I have tried to indicate how I sought to serve this
+great clarification of our confusions. . . .
+
+Now I come back to personality and the story of my self-betrayal,
+and how it is I have had to leave all that far-reaching scheme of
+mine, a mere project and beginning for other men to take or leave as
+it pleases them.
+
+
+
+BOOK THE FOURTH
+
+ISABEL
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST
+
+LOVE AND SUCCESS
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+I come to the most evasive and difficult part of my story, which is
+to tell how Isabel and I have made a common wreck of our joint
+lives.
+
+It is not the telling of one simple disastrous accident.  There was
+a vein in our natures that led to this collapse, gradually and at
+this point and that it crept to the surface.  One may indeed see our
+destruction--for indeed politically we could not be more extinct if
+we had been shot dead--in the form of a catastrophe as disconnected
+and conclusive as a meteoric stone falling out of heaven upon two
+friends and crushing them both.  But I do not think that is true to
+our situation or ourselves.  We were not taken by surprise.  The
+thing was in us and not from without, it was akin to our way of
+thinking and our habitual attitudes; it had, for all its impulsive
+effect, a certain necessity.  We might have escaped no doubt, as two
+men at a hundred yards may shoot at each other with pistols for a
+considerable time and escape.  But it isn't particularly reasonable
+to talk of the contrariety of fate if they both get hit.
+
+Isabel and I were dangerous to each other for several years of
+friendship, and not quite unwittingly so.
+
+In writing this, moreover, there is a very great difficulty in
+steering my way between two equally undesirable tones in the
+telling.  In the first place I do not want to seem to confess my
+sins with a penitence I am very doubtful if I feel.  Now that I have
+got Isabel we can no doubt count the cost of it and feel
+unquenchable regrets, but I am not sure whether, if we could be put
+back now into such circumstances as we were in a year ago, or two
+years ago, whether with my eyes fully open I should not do over
+again very much as I did.  And on the other hand I do not want to
+justify the things we have done.  We are two bad people--if there is
+to be any classification of good and bad at all, we have acted
+badly, and quite apart from any other considerations we've largely
+wasted our own very great possibilities.  But it is part of a queer
+humour that underlies all this, that I find myself slipping again
+and again into a sentimental treatment of our case that is as
+unpremeditated as it is insincere.  When I am a little tired after a
+morning's writing I find the faint suggestion getting into every
+other sentence that our blunders and misdeeds embodied, after the
+fashion of the prophet Hosea, profound moral truths.  Indeed, I feel
+so little confidence in my ability to keep this altogether out of my
+book that I warn the reader here that in spite of anything he may
+read elsewhere in the story, intimating however shyly an esoteric
+and exalted virtue in our proceedings, the plain truth of this
+business is that Isabel and I wanted each other with a want entirely
+formless, inconsiderate, and overwhelming.  And though I could tell
+you countless delightful and beautiful things about Isabel, were
+this a book in her praise, I cannot either analyse that want or
+account for its extreme intensity.
+
+I will confess that deep in my mind there is a belief in a sort of
+wild rightness about any love that is fraught with beauty, but that
+eludes me and vanishes again, and is not, I feel, to be put with the
+real veracities and righteousnesses and virtues in the paddocks and
+menageries of human reason. . . .
+
+We have already a child, and Margaret was childless, and I find
+myself prone to insist upon that, as if it was a justification.
+But, indeed, when we became lovers there was small thought of
+Eugenics between us.  Ours was a mutual and not a philoprogenitive
+passion.  Old Nature behind us may have had such purposes with us,
+but it is not for us to annex her intentions by a moralising
+afterthought.  There isn't, in fact, any decent justification for us
+whatever--at that the story must stand.
+
+But if there is no justification there is at least a very effective
+excuse in the mental confusedness of our time.  The evasion of that
+passionately thorough exposition of belief and of the grounds of
+morality, which is the outcome of the mercenary religious
+compromises of the late Vatican period, the stupid suppression of
+anything but the most timid discussion of sexual morality in our
+literature and drama, the pervading cultivated and protected muddle-
+headedness, leaves mentally vigorous people with relatively enormous
+possibilities of destruction and little effective help.  They find
+themselves confronted by the habits and prejudices of manifestly
+commonplace people, and by that extraordinary patched-up
+Christianity, the cult of a "Bromsteadised" deity, diffused,
+scattered, and aimless, which hides from examination and any
+possibility of faith behind the plea of good taste.  A god about
+whom there is delicacy is far worse than no god at all.  We are
+FORCED to be laws unto ourselves and to live experimentally.  It is
+inevitable that a considerable fraction of just that bolder, more
+initiatory section of the intellectual community, the section that
+can least be spared from the collective life in a period of trial
+and change, will drift into such emotional crises and such disaster
+as overtook us.  Most perhaps will escape, but many will go down,
+many more than the world can spare.  It is the unwritten law of all
+our public life, and the same holds true of America, that an honest
+open scandal ends a career.  England in the last quarter of a
+century has wasted half a dozen statesmen on this score; she would,
+I believe, reject Nelson now if he sought to serve her.  Is it
+wonderful that to us fretting here in exile this should seem the
+cruellest as well as the most foolish elimination of a necessary
+social element?  It destroys no vice; for vice hides by nature.  It
+not only rewards dullness as if it were positive virtue, but sets an
+enormous premium upon hypocrisy.  That is my case, and that is why I
+am telling this side of my story with so much explicitness.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+Ever since the Kinghamstead election I had maintained what seemed a
+desultory friendship with Isabel.  At first it was rather Isabel
+kept it up than I.  Whenever Margaret and I went down to that villa,
+with its three or four acres of garden and shrubbery about it, which
+fulfilled our election promise to live at Kinghamstead, Isabel would
+turn up in a state of frank cheerfulness, rejoicing at us, and talk
+all she was reading and thinking to me, and stay for all the rest of
+the day.  In her shameless liking for me she was as natural as a
+savage.  She would exercise me vigorously at tennis, while Margaret
+lay and rested her back in the afternoon, or guide me for some long
+ramble that dodged the suburban and congested patches of the
+constituency with amazing skill.  She took possession of me in that
+unabashed, straight-minded way a girl will sometimes adopt with a
+man, chose my path or criticised my game with a motherly solicitude
+for my welfare that was absurd and delightful.  And we talked.  We
+discussed and criticised the stories of novels, scraps of history,
+pictures, social questions, socialism, the policy of the Government.
+She was young and most unevenly informed, but she was amazingly
+sharp and quick and good.  Never before in my life had I known a
+girl of her age, or a woman of her quality.  I had never dreamt
+there was such talk in the world.  Kinghamstead became a lightless
+place when she went to Oxford.  Heaven knows how much that may not
+have precipitated my abandonment of the seat!
+
+She went to Ridout College, Oxford, and that certainly weighed with
+me when presently after my breach with the Liberals various little
+undergraduate societies began to ask for lectures and discussions.
+I favoured Oxford.  I declared openly I did so because of her.  At
+that time I think we neither of us suspected the possibility of
+passion that lay like a coiled snake in the path before us.  It
+seemed to us that we had the quaintest, most delightful friendship
+in the world; she was my pupil, and I was her guide, philosopher,
+and friend.  People smiled indulgently--even Margaret smiled
+indulgently--at our attraction for one another.
+
+Such friendships are not uncommon nowadays--among easy-going,
+liberal-minded people.  For the most part, there's no sort of harm,
+as people say, in them.  The two persons concerned are never
+supposed to think of the passionate love that hovers so close to the
+friendship, or if they do, then they banish the thought.  I think we
+kept the thought as permanently in exile as any one could do.  If it
+did in odd moments come into our heads we pretended elaborately it
+wasn't there.
+
+Only we were both very easily jealous of each other's attention, and
+tremendously insistent upon each other's preference.
+
+I remember once during the Oxford days an intimation that should
+have set me thinking, and I suppose discreetly disentangling myself.
+It was one Sunday afternoon, and it must have been about May, for
+the trees and shrubs of Ridout College were gay with blossom, and
+fresh with the new sharp greens of spring.  I had walked talking
+with Isabel and a couple of other girls through the wide gardens of
+the place, seen and criticised the new brick pond, nodded to the
+daughter of this friend and that in the hammocks under the trees,
+and picked a way among the scattered tea-parties on the lawn to our
+own circle on the grass under a Siberian crab near the great bay
+window.  There I sat and ate great quantities of cake, and discussed
+the tactics of the Suffragettes.  I had made some comments upon the
+spirit of the movement in an address to the men in Pembroke, and it
+had got abroad, and a group of girls and women dons were now having
+it out with me.
+
+I forget the drift of the conversation, or what it was made Isabel
+interrupt me.  She did interrupt me.  She had been lying prone on
+the ground at my right hand, chin on fists, listening thoughtfully,
+and I was sitting beside old Lady Evershead on a garden seat.  I
+turned to Isabel's voice, and saw her face uplifted, and her dear
+cheeks and nose and forehead all splashed and barred with sunlight
+and the shadows of the twigs of the trees behind me.  And something--
+an infinite tenderness, stabbed me.  It was a keen physical
+feeling, like nothing I had ever felt before.  It had a quality of
+tears in it.  For the first time in my narrow and concentrated life
+another human being had really thrust into my being and gripped my
+very heart.
+
+Our eyes met perplexed for an extraordinary moment.  Then I turned
+back and addressed myself a little stiffly to the substance of her
+intervention.  For some time I couldn't look at her again.
+
+From that time forth I knew I loved Isabel beyond measure.
+
+Yet it is curious that it never occurred to me for a year or so that
+this was likely to be a matter of passion between us.  I have told
+how definitely I put my imagination into harness in those matters at
+my marriage, and I was living now in a world of big interests, where
+there is neither much time nor inclination for deliberate love-
+making.  I suppose there is a large class of men who never meet a
+girl or a woman without thinking of sex, who meet a friend's
+daughter and decide: "Mustn't get friendly with her--wouldn't DO,"
+and set invisible bars between themselves and all the wives in the
+world.  Perhaps that is the way to live.  Perhaps there is no other
+method than this effectual annihilation of half--and the most
+sympathetic and attractive half--of the human beings in the world,
+so far as any frank intercourse is concerned.  I am quite convinced
+anyhow that such a qualified intimacy as ours, such a drifting into
+the sense of possession, such untrammeled conversation with an
+invisible, implacable limit set just where the intimacy glows, it is
+no kind of tolerable compromise.  If men and women are to go so far
+together, they must be free to go as far as they may want to go,
+without the vindictive destruction that has come upon us.  On the
+basis of the accepted codes the jealous people are right, and the
+liberal-minded ones are playing with fire.  If people are not to
+love, then they must be kept apart.  If they are not to be kept
+apart, then we must prepare for an unprecedented toleration of
+lovers.
+
+Isabel was as unforeseeing as I to begin with, but sex marches into
+the life of an intelligent girl with demands and challenges far more
+urgent than the mere call of curiosity and satiable desire that
+comes to a young man.  No woman yet has dared to tell the story of
+that unfolding.  She attracted men, and she encouraged them, and
+watched them, and tested them, and dismissed them, and concealed the
+substance of her thoughts about them in the way that seems
+instinctive in a natural-minded girl.  There was even an engagement--
+amidst the protests and disapproval of the college authorities.  I
+never saw the man, though she gave me a long history of the affair,
+to which I listened with a forced and insincere sympathy.  She
+struck me oddly as taking the relationship for a thing in itself,
+and regardless of its consequences.  After a time she became silent
+about him, and then threw him over; and by that time, I think, for
+all that she was so much my junior, she knew more about herself and
+me than I was to know for several years to come.
+
+We didn't see each other for some months after my resignation, but
+we kept up a frequent correspondence.  She said twice over that she
+wanted to talk to me, that letters didn't convey what one wanted to
+say, and I went up to Oxford pretty definitely to see her--though I
+combined it with one or two other engagements--somewhere in
+February.  Insensibly she had become important enough for me to make
+journeys for her.
+
+But we didn't see very much of one another on that occasion.  There
+was something in the air between us that made a faint embarrassment;
+the mere fact, perhaps, that she had asked me to come up.
+
+A year before she would have dashed off with me quite unscrupulously
+to talk alone, carried me off to her room for an hour with a minute
+of chaperonage to satisfy the rules.  Now there was always some one
+or other near us that it seemed impossible to exorcise.
+
+We went for a walk on the Sunday afternoon with old Fortescue, K.
+C., who'd come up to see his two daughters, both great friends of
+Isabel's, and some mute inglorious don whose name I forget, but who
+was in a state of marked admiration for her.  The six of us played a
+game of conversational entanglements throughout, and mostly I was
+impressing the Fortescue girls with the want of mental concentration
+possible in a rising politician.  We went down Carfex, I remember,
+to Folly Bridge, and inspected the Barges, and then back by way of
+Merton to the Botanic Gardens and Magdalen Bridge.  And in the
+Botanic Gardens she got almost her only chance with me.
+
+"Last months at Oxford," she said.
+
+"And then?" I asked.
+
+"I'm coming to London," she said.
+
+"To write?"
+
+She was silent for a moment.  Then she said abruptly, with that
+quick flush of hers and a sudden boldness in her eyes: "I'm going to
+work with you.  Why shouldn't I?"
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Here, again, I suppose I had a fair warning of the drift of things.
+I seem to remember myself in the train to Paddington, sitting with a
+handful of papers--galley proofs for the BLUE WEEKLY, I suppose--on
+my lap, and thinking about her and that last sentence of hers, and
+all that it might mean to me.
+
+It is very hard to recall even the main outline of anything so
+elusive as a meditation.  I know that the idea of working with her
+gripped me, fascinated me.  That my value in her life seemed growing
+filled me with pride and a kind of gratitude.  I was already in no
+doubt that her value in my life was tremendous.  It made it none the
+less, that in those days I was obsessed by the idea that she was
+transitory, and bound to go out of my life again.  It is no good
+trying to set too fine a face upon this complex business, there is
+gold and clay and sunlight and savagery in every love story, and a
+multitude of elvish elements peeped out beneath the fine rich
+curtain of affection that masked our future.  I've never properly
+weighed how immensely my vanity was gratified by her clear
+preference for me.  Nor can I for a moment determine how much
+deliberate intention I hide from myself in this affair.
+
+Certainly I think some part of me must have been saying in the
+train: "Leave go of her.  Get away from her.  End this now."  I
+can't have been so stupid as not to have had that in my mind. . . .
+
+If she had been only a beautiful girl in love with me, I think I
+could have managed the situation.  Once or twice since my marriage
+and before Isabel became of any significance in my life, there had
+been incidents with other people, flashes of temptation--no telling
+is possible of the thing resisted.  I think that mere beauty and
+passion would not have taken me.  But between myself and Isabel
+things were incurably complicated by the intellectual sympathy we
+had, the jolly march of our minds together.  That has always
+mattered enormously.  I should have wanted her company nearly as
+badly if she had been some crippled old lady; we would have hunted
+shoulder to shoulder, as two men.  Only two men would never have had
+the patience and readiness for one another we two had.  I had never
+for years met any one with whom I could be so carelessly sure of
+understanding or to whom I could listen so easily and fully.  She
+gave me, with an extraordinary completeness, that rare, precious
+effect of always saying something fresh, and yet saying it so that
+it filled into and folded about all the little recesses and corners
+of my mind with an infinite, soft familiarity.  It is impossible to
+explain that.  It is like trying to explain why her voice, her voice
+heard speaking to any one--heard speaking in another room--pleased
+my ears.
+
+She was the only Oxford woman who took a first that year.  She spent
+the summer in Scotland and Yorkshire, writing to me continually of
+all she now meant to do, and stirring my imagination.  She came to
+London for the autumn session.  For a time she stayed with old Lady
+Colbeck, but she fell out with her hostess when it became clear she
+wanted to write, not novels, but journalism, and then she set every
+one talking by taking a flat near Victoria and installing as her
+sole protector an elderly German governess she had engaged through a
+scholastic agency.  She began writing, not in that copious flood the
+undisciplined young woman of gifts is apt to produce, but in exactly
+the manner of an able young man, experimenting with forms,
+developing the phrasing of opinions, taking a definite line.  She
+was, of course, tremendously discussed.  She was disapproved of, but
+she was invited out to dinner.  She got rather a reputation for the
+management of elderly distinguished men.  It was an odd experience
+to follow Margaret's soft rustle of silk into some big drawing-room
+and discover my snub-nosed girl in the blue sack transformed into a
+shining creature in the soft splendour of pearls and ivory-white and
+lace, and with a silver band about her dusky hair.
+
+For a time we did not meet very frequently, though always she
+professed an unblushing preference for my company, and talked my
+views and sought me out.  Then her usefulness upon the BLUE WEEKLY
+began to link us closelier.  She would come up to the office, and
+sit by the window, and talk over the proofs of the next week's
+articles, going through my intentions with a keen investigatory
+scalpel.  Her talk always puts me in mind of a steel blade.  Her
+writing became rapidly very good; she had a wit and a turn of the
+phrase that was all her own.  We seemed to have forgotten the little
+shadow of embarrassment that had fallen over our last meeting at
+Oxford.  Everything seemed natural and easy between us in those
+days; a little unconventional, but that made it all the brighter.
+
+We developed something like a custom of walks, about once a week or
+so, and letters and notes became frequent.  I won't pretend things
+were not keenly personal between us, but they had an air of being
+innocently mental.  She used to call me "Master" in our talks, a
+monstrous and engaging flattery, and I was inordinately proud to
+have her as my pupil.  Who wouldn't have been?  And we went on at
+that distance for a long time--until within a year of the Handitch
+election.
+
+After Lady Colbeck threw her up as altogether too "intellectual" for
+comfortable control, Isabel was taken up by the Balfes in a less
+formal and compromising manner, and week-ended with them and their
+cousin Leonora Sparling, and spent large portions of her summer with
+them in Herefordshire.  There was a lover or so in that time, men
+who came a little timidly at this brilliant young person with the
+frank manner and the Amazonian mind, and, she declared, received her
+kindly refusals with manifest relief.  And Arnold Shoesmith struck
+up a sort of friendship that oddly imitated mine.  She took a liking
+to him because he was clumsy and shy and inexpressive; she embarked
+upon the dangerous interest of helping him to find his soul.  I had
+some twinges of jealousy about that.  I didn't see the necessity of
+him.  He invaded her time, and I thought that might interfere with
+her work.  If their friendship stole some hours from Isabel's
+writing, it did not for a long while interfere with our walks or our
+talks, or the close intimacy we had together.
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+Then suddenly Isabel and I found ourselves passionately in love.
+
+The change came so entirely without warning or intention that I find
+it impossible now to tell the order of its phases.  What disturbed
+pebble started the avalanche I cannot trace.  Perhaps it was simply
+that the barriers between us and this masked aspect of life had been
+wearing down unperceived.
+
+And there came a change in Isabel.  It was like some change in the
+cycle of nature, like the onset of spring--a sharp brightness, an
+uneasiness.  She became restless with her work; little encounters
+with men began to happen, encounters not quite in the quality of the
+earlier proposals; and then came an odd incident of which she told
+me, but somehow, I felt, didn't tell me completely.  She told me all
+she was able to tell me.  She had been at a dance at the Ropers',
+and a man, rather well known in London, had kissed her.  The thing
+amazed her beyond measure.  It was the sort of thing immediately
+possible between any man and any woman, that one never expects to
+happen until it happens.  It had the surprising effect of a judge
+generally known to be bald suddenly whipping off his wig in court.
+No absolutely unexpected revelation could have quite the same
+quality of shock.  She went through the whole thing to me with a
+remarkable detachment, told me how she had felt--and the odd things
+it seemed to open to her.
+
+"I WANT to be kissed, and all that sort of thing," she avowed.  "I
+suppose every woman does."
+
+She added after a pause: "And I don't want any one to do it."
+
+This struck me as queerly expressive of the woman's attitude to
+these things.  "Some one presently will--solve that," I said.
+
+"Some one will perhaps."
+
+I was silent.
+
+"Some one will," she said, almost viciously.  "And then we'll have
+to stop these walks and talks of ours, dear Master. . . .  I'll be
+sorry to give them up."
+
+"It's part of the requirements of the situation," I said, "that he
+should be--oh, very interesting!  He'll start, no doubt, all sorts
+of new topics, and open no end of attractive vistas. . . .  You
+can't, you know, always go about in a state of pupillage."
+
+"I don't think I can," said Isabel.  "But it's only just recently
+I've begun to doubt about it."
+
+I remember these things being said, but just how much we saw and
+understood, and just how far we were really keeping opaque to each
+other then, I cannot remember.  But it must have been quite soon
+after this that we spent nearly a whole day together at Kew Gardens,
+with the curtains up and the barriers down, and the thing that had
+happened plain before our eyes.  I don't remember we ever made any
+declaration.  We just assumed the new footing. . . .
+
+It was a day early in that year--I think in January, because there
+was thin, crisp snow on the grass, and we noted that only two other
+people had been to the Pagoda that day.  I've a curious impression
+of greenish colour, hot, moist air and huge palm fronds about very
+much of our talk, as though we were nearly all the time in the
+Tropical House.  But I also remember very vividly looking at certain
+orange and red spray-like flowers from Patagonia, which could not
+have been there.  It is a curious thing that I do not remember we
+made any profession of passionate love for one another; we talked as
+though the fact of our intense love for each other had always been
+patent between us.  There was so long and frank an intimacy between
+us that we talked far more like brother and sister or husband and
+wife than two people engaged in the war of the sexes.  We wanted to
+know what we were going to do, and whatever we did we meant to do in
+the most perfect concert.  We both felt an extraordinary accession
+of friendship and tenderness then, and, what again is curious, very
+little passion.  But there was also, in spite of the perplexities we
+faced, an immense satisfaction about that day.  It was as if we had
+taken off something that had hindered our view of each other, like
+people who unvizored to talk more easily at a masked ball.
+
+I've had since to view our relations from the standpoint of the
+ordinary observer.  I find that vision in the most preposterous
+contrast with all that really went on between us.  I suppose there I
+should figure as a wicked seducer, while an unprotected girl
+succumbed to my fascinations.  As a matter of fact, it didn't occur
+to us that there was any personal inequality between us.  I knew her
+for my equal mentally; in so many things she was beyond comparison
+cleverer than I; her courage outwent mine.  The quick leap of her
+mind evoked a flash of joy in mine like the response of an induction
+wire; her way of thinking was like watching sunlight reflected from
+little waves upon the side of a boat, it was so bright, so mobile,
+so variously and easily true to its law.  In the back of our minds
+we both had a very definite belief that making love is full of
+joyous, splendid, tender, and exciting possibilities, and we had to
+discuss why we shouldn't be to the last degree lovers.
+
+Now, what I should like to print here, if it were possible, in all
+the screaming emphasis of red ink, is this: that the circumstances
+of my upbringing and the circumstances of Isabel's upbringing had
+left not a shadow of belief or feeling that the utmost passionate
+love between us was in itself intrinsically WRONG.  I've told with
+the fullest particularity just all that I was taught or found out
+for myself in these matters, and Isabel's reading and thinking, and
+the fierce silences of her governesses and the breathless warnings
+of teachers, and all the social and religious influences that had
+been brought to bear upon her, had worked out to the same void of
+conviction.  The code had failed with us altogether.  We didn't for
+a moment consider anything but the expediency of what we both, for
+all our quiet faces and steady eyes, wanted most passionately to do.
+
+Well, here you have the state of mind of whole brigades of people,
+and particularly of young people, nowadays.  The current morality
+hasn't gripped them; they don't really believe in it at all.  They
+may render it lip-service, but that is quite another thing.  There
+are scarcely any tolerable novels to justify its prohibitions; its
+prohibitions do, in fact, remain unjustified amongst these ugly
+suppressions.  You may, if you choose, silence the admission of this
+in literature and current discussion; you will not prevent it
+working out in lives.  People come up to the great moments of
+passion crudely unaware, astoundingly unprepared as no really
+civilised and intelligently planned community would let any one be
+unprepared.  They find themselves hedged about with customs that
+have no organic hold upon them, and mere discretions all generous
+spirits are disposed to despise.
+
+Consider the infinite absurdities of it!  Multitudes of us are
+trying to run this complex modern community on a basis of "Hush"
+without explaining to our children or discussing with them anything
+about love and marriage at all.  Doubt and knowledge creep about in
+enforced darknesses and silences.  We are living upon an ancient
+tradition which everybody doubts and nobody has ever analysed.  We
+affect a tremendous and cultivated shyness and delicacy about
+imperatives of the most arbitrary appearance.  What ensues?  What
+did ensue with us, for example?  On the one hand was a great desire,
+robbed of any appearance of shame and grossness by the power of
+love, and on the other hand, the possible jealousy of so and so, the
+disapproval of so and so, material risks and dangers.  It is only in
+the retrospect that we have been able to grasp something of the
+effectual case against us.  The social prohibition lit by the
+intense glow of our passion, presented itself as preposterous,
+irrational, arbitrary, and ugly, a monster fit only for mockery.  We
+might be ruined!  Well, there is a phase in every love affair, a
+sort of heroic hysteria, when death and ruin are agreeable additions
+to the prospect.  It gives the business a gravity, a solemnity.
+Timid people may hesitate and draw back with a vague instinctive
+terror of the immensity of the oppositions they challenge, but
+neither Isabel nor I are timid people.
+
+We weighed what was against us.  We decided just exactly as scores
+of thousands of people have decided in this very matter, that if it
+were possible to keep this thing to ourselves, there was nothing
+against it.  And so we took our first step.  With the hunger of love
+in us, it was easy to conclude we might be lovers, and still keep
+everything to ourselves.  That cleared our minds of the one
+persistent obstacle that mattered to us--the haunting presence of
+Margaret.
+
+And then we found, as all those scores of thousands of people
+scattered about us have found, that we could not keep it to
+ourselves.  Love will out.  All the rest of this story is the
+chronicle of that.  Love with sustained secrecy cannot be love.  It
+is just exactly the point people do not understand.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+But before things came to that pass, some months and many phases and
+a sudden journey to America intervened.
+
+"This thing spells disaster," I said.  "You are too big and I am too
+big to attempt this secrecy.  Think of the intolerable possibility
+of being found out!  At any cost we have to stop--even at the cost
+of parting."
+
+"Just because we may be found out!"
+
+"Just because we may be found out."
+
+"Master, I shouldn't in the least mind being found out with you.
+I'm afraid--I'd be proud."
+
+"Wait till it happens."
+
+There followed a struggle of immense insincerity between us.  It is
+hard to tell who urged and who resisted.
+
+She came to me one night to the editorial room of the BLUE WEEKLY,
+and argued and kissed me with wet salt lips, and wept in my arms;
+she told me that now passionate longing for me and my intimate life
+possessed her, so that she could not work, could not think, could
+not endure other people for the love of me. . . .
+
+I fled absurdly.  That is the secret of the futile journey to
+America that puzzled all my friends.
+
+I ran away from Isabel.  I took hold of the situation with all my
+strength, put in Britten with sketchy, hasty instructions to edit
+the paper, and started headlong and with luggage, from which, among
+other things, my shaving things were omitted, upon a tour round the
+world.
+
+Preposterous flight that was!  I remember as a thing almost farcical
+my explanations to Margaret, and how frantically anxious I was to
+prevent the remote possibility of her coming with me, and how I
+crossed in the TUSCAN, a bad, wet boat, and mixed seasickness with
+ungovernable sorrow.  I wept--tears.  It was inexpressibly queer and
+ridiculous--and, good God! how I hated my fellow-passengers!
+
+New York inflamed and excited me for a time, and when things
+slackened, I whirled westward to Chicago--eating and drinking, I
+remember, in the train from shoals of little dishes, with a sort of
+desperate voracity.  I did the queerest things to distract myself--
+no novelist would dare to invent my mental and emotional muddle.
+Chicago also held me at first, amazing lapse from civilisation that
+the place is! and then abruptly, with hosts expecting me, and
+everything settled for some days in Denver, I found myself at the
+end of my renunciations, and turned and came back headlong to
+London.
+
+Let me confess it wasn't any sense of perfect and incurable trust
+and confidence that brought me back, or any idea that now I had
+strength to refrain.  It was a sudden realisation that after all the
+separation might succeed; some careless phrasing in one of her
+jealously read letters set that idea going in my mind--the haunting
+perception that I might return to London and find it empty of the
+Isabel who had pervaded it.  Honour, discretion, the careers of both
+of us, became nothing at the thought.  I couldn't conceive my life
+resuming there without Isabel.  I couldn't, in short, stand it.
+
+I don't even excuse my return.  It is inexcusable.  I ought to have
+kept upon my way westward--and held out.  I couldn't.  I wanted
+Isabel, and I wanted her so badly now that everything else in the
+world was phantom-like until that want was satisfied.  Perhaps you
+have never wanted anything like that.  I went straight to her.
+
+But here I come to untellable things.  There is no describing the
+reality of love.  The shapes of things are nothing, the actual
+happenings are nothing, except that somehow there falls a light upon
+them and a wonder.  Of how we met, and the thrill of the adventure,
+the curious bright sense of defiance, the joy of having dared, I
+can't tell--I can but hint of just one aspect, of what an amazing
+LARK--it's the only word--it seemed to us.  The beauty which was the
+essence of it, which justifies it so far as it will bear
+justification, eludes statement.
+
+What can a record of contrived meetings, of sundering difficulties
+evaded and overcome, signify here?  Or what can it convey to say
+that one looked deep into two dear, steadfast eyes, or felt a heart
+throb and beat, or gripped soft hair softly in a trembling hand?
+Robbed of encompassing love, these things are of no more value than
+the taste of good wine or the sight of good pictures, or the hearing
+of music,--just sensuality and no more.  No one can tell love--we
+can only tell the gross facts of love and its consequences.  Given
+love--given mutuality, and one has effected a supreme synthesis and
+come to a new level of life--but only those who know can know.  This
+business has brought me more bitterness and sorrow than I had ever
+expected to bear, but even now I will not say that I regret that
+wilful home-coming altogether.  We loved--to the uttermost.  Neither
+of us could have loved any one else as we did and do love one
+another.  It was ours, that beauty; it existed only between us when
+we were close together, for no one in the world ever to know save
+ourselves.
+
+My return to the office sticks out in my memory with an extreme
+vividness, because of the wild eagle of pride that screamed within
+me.  It was Tuesday morning, and though not a soul in London knew of
+it yet except Isabel, I had been back in England a week.  I came in
+upon Britten and stood in the doorway.
+
+"GOD!" he said at the sight of me.
+
+"I'm back," I said.
+
+He looked at my excited face with those red-brown eyes of his.
+Silently I defied him to speak his mind.
+
+"Where did you turn back?" he said at last.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+I had to tell what were, so far as I can remember my first positive
+lies to Margaret in explaining that return.  I had written to her
+from Chicago and again from New York, saying that I felt I ought to
+be on the spot in England for the new session, and that I was coming
+back--presently.  I concealed the name of my boat from her, and made
+a calculated prevarication when I announced my presence in London.
+I telephoned before I went back for my rooms to be prepared.  She
+was, I knew, with the Bunting Harblows in Durham, and when she came
+back to Radnor Square I had been at home a day.
+
+I remember her return so well.
+
+My going away and the vivid secret of the present had wiped out from
+my mind much of our long estrangement.  Something, too, had changed
+in her.  I had had some hint of it in her letters, but now I saw it
+plainly.  I came out of my study upon the landing when I heard the
+turmoil of her arrival below, and she came upstairs with a quickened
+gladness.  It was a cold March, and she was dressed in unfamiliar
+dark furs that suited her extremely and reinforced the delicate
+flush of her sweet face.  She held out both her hands to me, and
+drew me to her unhesitatingly and kissed me.
+
+"So glad you are back, dear," she said.  "Oh! so very glad you are
+back."
+
+I returned her kiss with a queer feeling at my heart, too
+undifferentiated to be even a definite sense of guilt or meanness.
+I think it was chiefly amazement--at the universe--at myself.
+
+"I never knew what it was to be away from you," she said.
+
+I perceived suddenly that she had resolved to end our estrangement.
+She put herself so that my arm came caressingly about her.
+
+"These are jolly furs," I said.
+
+"I got them for you."
+
+The parlourmaid appeared below dealing with the maid and the luggage
+cab.
+
+"Tell me all about America," said Margaret.  "I feel as though you'd
+been away six year's."
+
+We went arm in arm into our little sitting-room, and I took off the
+fur's for her and sat down upon the chintz-covered sofa by the fire.
+She had ordered tea, and came and sat by me.  I don't know what I
+had expected, but of all things I had certainly not expected this
+sudden abolition of our distances.
+
+"I want to know all about America," she repeated, with her eyes
+scrutinising me.  "Why did you come back?"
+
+I repeated the substance of my letters rather lamely, and she sat
+listening.
+
+"But why did you turn back--without going to Denver?"
+
+"I wanted to come back.  I was restless."
+
+"Restlessness," she said, and thought.  "You were restless in
+Venice.  You said it was restlessness took you to America."
+
+Again she studied me.  She turned a little awkwardly to her tea
+things, and poured needless water from the silver kettle into the
+teapot.  Then she sat still for some moments looking at the equipage
+with expressionless eyes.  I saw her hand upon the edge of the table
+tremble slightly.  I watched her closely.  A vague uneasiness
+possessed me.  What might she not know or guess?
+
+She spoke at last with an effort.  "I wish you were in Parliament
+again," she said.  "Life doesn't give you events enough."
+
+"If I was in Parliament again, I should be on the Conservative
+side."
+
+"I know," she said, and was still more thoughtful.
+
+"Lately," she began, and paused.  "Lately I've been reading--you."
+
+I didn't help her out with what she had to say.  I waited.
+
+"I didn't understand what you were after.  I had misjudged.  I
+didn't know.  I think perhaps I was rather stupid."  Her eyes were
+suddenly shining with tears.  "You didn't give me much chance to
+understand."
+
+She turned upon me suddenly with a voice full of tears.
+
+"Husband," she said abruptly, holding her two hands out to me, "I
+want to begin over again!"
+
+I took her hands, perplexed beyond measure.  "My dear!" I said.
+
+"I want to begin over again."
+
+I bowed my head to hide my face, and found her hand in mine and
+kissed it.
+
+"Ah!" she said, and slowly withdrew her hand.  She leant forward
+with her arm on the sofa-back, and looked very intently into my
+face.  I felt the most damnable scoundrel in the world as I returned
+her gaze.  The thought of Isabel's darkly shining eyes seemed like a
+physical presence between us. . . .
+
+"Tell me," I said presently, to break the intolerable tension, "tell
+me plainly what you mean by this."
+
+I sat a little away from her, and then took my teacup in hand, with
+an odd effect of defending myself.  "Have you been reading that old
+book of mine?" I asked.
+
+"That and the paper.  I took a complete set from the beginning down
+to Durham with me.  I have read it over, thought it over.  I didn't
+understand--what you were teaching."
+
+There was a little pause.
+
+"It all seems so plain to me now," she said, "and so true."
+
+I was profoundly disconcerted.  I put down my teacup, stood up in
+the middle of the hearthrug, and began talking.  "I'm tremendously
+glad, Margaret, that you've come to see I'm not altogether
+perverse," I began.  I launched out into a rather trite and windy
+exposition of my views, and she sat close to me on the sofa, looking
+up into my face, hanging on my words, a deliberate and invincible
+convert.
+
+"Yes," she said, "yes." . . .
+
+I had never doubted my new conceptions before; now I doubted them
+profoundly.  But I went on talking.  It's the grim irony in the
+lives of all politicians, writers, public teachers, that once the
+audience is at their feet, a new loyalty has gripped them.  It isn't
+their business to admit doubt and imperfections.  They have to go on
+talking.  And I was now so accustomed to Isabel's vivid interruptions,
+qualifications, restatements, and confirmations. . . .
+
+Margaret and I dined together at home.  She made me open out my
+political projects to her.  "I have been foolish," she said.  "I
+want to help."
+
+And by some excuse I have forgotten she made me come to her room.  I
+think it was some book I had to take her, some American book I had
+brought back with me, and mentioned in our talk.  I walked in with
+it, and put it down on the table and turned to go.
+
+"Husband!" she cried, and held out her slender arms to me.  I was
+compelled to go to her and kiss her, and she twined them softly
+about my neck and drew me to her and kissed me.  I disentangled them
+very gently, and took each wrist and kissed it, and the backs of her
+hands.
+
+"Good-night," I said.  There came a little pause.  "Good-night,
+Margaret," I repeated, and walked very deliberately and with a kind
+of sham preoccupation to the door.
+
+I did not look at her, but I could feel her standing, watching me.
+If I had looked up, she would, I knew, have held out her arms to
+me. . . .
+
+At the very outset that secret, which was to touch no one but Isabel
+and myself, had reached out to stab another human being.
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+The whole world had changed for Isabel and me; and we tried to
+pretend that nothing had changed except a small matter between us.
+We believed quite honestly at that time that it was possible to keep
+this thing that had happened from any reaction at all, save perhaps
+through some magically enhanced vigour in our work, upon the world
+about us!  Seen in retrospect, one can realise the absurdity of this
+belief; within a week I realised it; but that does not alter the
+fact that we did believe as much, and that people who are deeply in
+love and unable to marry will continue to believe so to the very end
+of time.  They will continue to believe out of existence every
+consideration that separates them until they have come together.
+Then they will count the cost, as we two had to do.
+
+I am telling a story, and not propounding theories in this book; and
+chiefly I am telling of the ideas and influences and emotions that
+have happened to me--me as a sort of sounding board for my world.
+The moralist is at liberty to go over my conduct with his measure
+and say, "At this point or at that you went wrong, and you ought to
+have done"--so-and-so.  The point of interest to the statesman is
+that it didn't for a moment occur to us to do so-and-so when the
+time for doing it came.  It amazes me now to think how little either
+of us troubled about the established rights or wrongs of the
+situation.  We hadn't an atom of respect for them, innate or
+acquired.  The guardians of public morals will say we were very bad
+people; I submit in defence that they are very bad guardians--
+provocative guardians. . . .  And when at last there came a claim
+against us that had an effective validity for us, we were in the
+full tide of passionate intimacy.
+
+I had a night of nearly sleepless perplexity after Margaret's
+return.  She had suddenly presented herself to me like something
+dramatically recalled, fine, generous, infinitely capable of
+feeling.  I was amazed how much I had forgotten her.  In my contempt
+for vulgarised and conventionalised honour I had forgotten that for
+me there was such a reality as honour.  And here it was, warm and
+near to me, living, breathing, unsuspecting.  Margaret's pride was
+my honour, that I had had no right even to imperil.
+
+I do not now remember if I thought at that time of going to Isabel
+and putting this new aspect of the case before her.  Perhaps I did.
+Perhaps I may have considered even then the possibility of ending
+what had so freshly and passionately begun.  If I did, it vanished
+next day at the sight of her.  Whatever regrets came in the
+darkness, the daylight brought an obstinate confidence in our
+resolution again.  We would, we declared, "pull the thing off."
+Margaret must not know.  Margaret should not know.  If Margaret did
+not know, then no harm whatever would be done.  We tried to sustain
+that. . . .
+
+For a brief time we had been like two people in a magic cell,
+magically cut off from the world and full of a light of its own, and
+then we began to realise that we were not in the least cut off, that
+the world was all about us and pressing in upon us, limiting us,
+threatening us, resuming possession of us.  I tried to ignore the
+injury to Margaret of her unreciprocated advances.  I tried to
+maintain to myself that this hidden love made no difference to the
+now irreparable breach between husband and wife.  But I never spoke
+of it to Isabel or let her see that aspect of our case.  How could
+I?  The time for that had gone. . . .
+
+Then in new shapes and relations came trouble.  Distressful elements
+crept in by reason of our unavoidable furtiveness; we ignored them,
+hid them from each other, and attempted to hide them from ourselves.
+Successful love is a thing of abounding pride, and we had to be
+secret.  It was delightful at first to be secret, a whispering, warm
+conspiracy; then presently it became irksome and a little shameful.
+Her essential frankness of soul was all against the masks and
+falsehoods that many women would have enjoyed.  Together in our
+secrecy we relaxed, then in the presence of other people again it
+was tiresome to have to watch for the careless, too easy phrase, to
+snatch back one's hand from the limitless betrayal of a light,
+familiar touch.
+
+Love becomes a poor thing, at best a poor beautiful thing, if it
+develops no continuing and habitual intimacy.  We were always
+meeting, and most gloriously loving and beginning--and then we had
+to snatch at remorseless ticking watches, hurry to catch trains, and
+go back to this or that.  That is all very well for the intrigues of
+idle people perhaps, but not for an intense personal relationship.
+It is like lighting a candle for the sake of lighting it, over and
+over again, and each time blowing it out.  That, no doubt, must be
+very amusing to children playing with the matches, but not to people
+who love warm light, and want it in order to do fine and honourable
+things together.  We had achieved--I give the ugly phrase that
+expresses the increasing discolouration in my mind--"illicit
+intercourse."  To end at that, we now perceived, wasn't in our
+style.  But where were we to end? . . .
+
+Perhaps we might at this stage have given it up.  I think if we
+could have seen ahead and around us we might have done so.  But the
+glow of our cell blinded us. . . .  I wonder what might have
+happened if at that time we had given it up. . . .  We propounded
+it, we met again in secret to discuss it, and our overpowering
+passion for one another reduced that meeting to absurdity. . . .
+
+Presently the idea of children crept between us.  It came in from
+all our conceptions of life and public service; it was, we found, in
+the quality of our minds that physical love without children is a
+little weak, timorous, more than a little shameful.  With
+imaginative people there very speedily comes a time when that
+realisation is inevitable.  We hadn't thought of that before--it
+isn't natural to think of that before.  We hadn't known.  There is
+no literature in English dealing with such things.
+
+There is a necessary sequence of phases in love.  These came in
+their order, and with them, unanticipated tarnishings on the first
+bright perfection of our relations.  For a time these developing
+phases were no more than a secret and private trouble between us,
+little shadows spreading by imperceptible degrees across that vivid
+and luminous cell.
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+The Handitch election flung me suddenly into prominence.
+
+It is still only two years since that struggle, and I will not
+trouble the reader with a detailed history of events that must be
+quite sufficiently present in his mind for my purpose already.  Huge
+stacks of journalism have dealt with Handitch and its significance.
+For the reader very probably, as for most people outside a
+comparatively small circle, it meant my emergence from obscurity.
+We obtruded no editor's name in the BLUE WEEKLY; I had never as yet
+been on the London hoardings.  Before Handitch I was a journalist
+and writer of no great public standing; after Handitch, I was
+definitely a person, in the little group of persons who stood for
+the Young Imperialist movement.  Handitch was, to a very large
+extent, my affair.  I realised then, as a man comes to do, how much
+one can still grow after seven and twenty.  In the second election I
+was a man taking hold of things; at Kinghamstead I had been simply a
+young candidate, a party unit, led about the constituency, told to
+do this and that, and finally washed in by the great Anti-
+Imperialist flood, like a starfish rolling up a beach.
+
+My feminist views had earnt the mistrust of the party, and I do not
+think I should have got the chance of Handitch or indeed any chance
+at all of Parliament for a long time, if it had not been that the
+seat with its long record of Liberal victories and its Liberal
+majority of 3642 at the last election, offered a hopeless contest.
+The Liberal dissensions and the belated but by no means contemptible
+Socialist candidate were providential interpositions.  I think,
+however, the conduct of Gane, Crupp, and Tarvrille in coming down to
+fight for me, did count tremendously in my favour.  "We aren't going
+to win, perhaps," said Crupp, "but we are going to talk."  And until
+the very eve of victory, we treated Handitch not so much as a
+battlefield as a hoarding.  And so it was the Endowment of
+Motherhood as a practical form of Eugenics got into English
+politics.
+
+Plutus, our agent, was scared out of his wits when the thing began.
+
+"They're ascribing all sorts of queer ideas to you about the
+Family," he said.
+
+"I think the Family exists for the good of the children," I said;
+"is that queer?"
+
+"Not when you explain it--but they won't let you explain it.  And
+about marriage--?"
+
+"I'm all right about marriage--trust me."
+
+"Of course, if YOU had children," said Plutus, rather
+inconsiderately. . . .
+
+They opened fire upon me in a little electioneering rag call the
+HANDITCH SENTINEL, with a string of garbled quotations and
+misrepresentations that gave me an admirable text for a speech.  I
+spoke for an hour and ten minutes with a more and more crumpled copy
+of the SENTINEL in my hand, and I made the fullest and completest
+exposition of the idea of endowing motherhood that I think had ever
+been made up to that time in England.  Its effect on the press was
+extraordinary.  The Liberal papers gave me quite unprecedented space
+under the impression that I had only to be given rope to hang
+myself; the Conservatives cut me down or tried to justify me; the
+whole country was talking.  I had had a pamphlet in type upon the
+subject, and I revised this carefully and put it on the book-stalls
+within three days.  It sold enormously and brought me bushels of
+letters.  We issued over three thousand in Handitch alone.  At
+meeting after meeting I was heckled upon nothing else.  Long before
+polling day Plutus was converted.
+
+"It's catching on like old age pensions," he said.  "We've dished
+the Liberals!  To think that such a project should come from our
+side!"
+
+But it was only with the declaration of the poll that my battle was
+won.  No one expected more than a snatch victory, and I was in by
+over fifteen hundred.  At one bound Cossington's papers passed from
+apologetics varied by repudiation to triumphant praise.  "A
+renascent England, breeding men," said the leader in his chief daily
+on the morning after the polling, and claimed that the Conservatives
+had been ever the pioneers in sanely bold constructive projects.
+
+I came up to London with a weary but rejoicing Margaret by the night
+train.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND
+
+THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+To any one who did not know of that glowing secret between Isabel
+and myself, I might well have appeared at that time the most
+successful and enviable of men.  I had recovered rapidly from an
+uncongenial start in political life; I had become a considerable
+force through the BLUE WEEKLY, and was shaping an increasingly
+influential body of opinion; I had re-entered Parliament with quite
+dramatic distinction, and in spite of a certain faltering on the
+part of the orthodox Conservatives towards the bolder elements in
+our propaganda, I had loyal and unenvious associates who were making
+me a power in the party.  People were coming to our group,
+understandings were developing.  It was clear we should play a
+prominent part in the next general election, and that, given a
+Conservative victory, I should be assured of office.  The world
+opened out to me brightly and invitingly.  Great schemes took shape
+in my mind, always more concrete, always more practicable; the years
+ahead seemed falling into order, shining with the credible promise
+of immense achievement.
+
+And at the heart of it all, unseen and unsuspected, was the secret
+of my relations with Isabel--like a seed that germinates and
+thrusts, thrusts relentlessly.
+
+From the onset of the Handitch contest onward, my meetings with her
+had been more and more pervaded by the discussion of our situation.
+It had innumerable aspects.  It was very present to us that we
+wanted to be together as much as possible--we were beginning to long
+very much for actual living together in the same house, so that one
+could come as it were carelessly--unawares--upon the other, busy
+perhaps about some trivial thing.  We wanted to feel each other in
+the daily atmosphere.  Preceding our imperatively sterile passion,
+you must remember, outside it, altogether greater than it so far as
+our individual lives were concerned, there had grown and still grew
+an enormous affection and intellectual sympathy between us.  We
+brought all our impressions and all our ideas to each other, to see
+them in each other's light.  It is hard to convey that quality of
+intellectual unison to any one who has not experienced it.  I
+thought more and more in terms of conversation with Isabel; her
+possible comments upon things would flash into my mind, oh!--with
+the very sound of her voice.
+
+I remember, too, the odd effect of seeing her in the distance going
+about Handitch, like any stranger canvasser; the queer emotion of
+her approach along the street, the greeting as she passed.  The
+morning of the polling she vanished from the constituency.  I saw
+her for an instant in the passage behind our Committee rooms.
+
+"Going?" said I.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"Stay it out.  I want you to see the fun.  I remember--the other
+time."
+
+She didn't answer for a moment or so, and stood with face averted.
+
+"It's Margaret's show," she said abruptly.  "If I see her smiling
+there like a queen by your side--!  She did--last time.  I
+remember."  She caught at a sob and dashed her hand across her face
+impatiently.  "Jealous fool, mean and petty, jealous fool! . . .
+Good luck, old man, to you!  You're going to win.  But I don't want
+to see the end of it all the same. . . ."
+
+"Good-bye!" said I, clasping her hand as some supporter appeared in
+the passage. . . .
+
+I came back to London victorious, and a little flushed and coarse
+with victory; and so soon as I could break away I went to Isabel's
+flat and found her white and worn, with the stain of secret weeping
+about her eyes.  I came into the room to her and shut the door.
+
+"You said I'd win," I said, and held out my arms.
+
+She hugged me closely for a moment.
+
+"My dear," I whispered, "it's nothing--without you--nothing!"
+
+We didn't speak for some seconds.  Then she slipped from my hold.
+"Look!" she said, smiling like winter sunshine.  "I've had in all
+the morning papers--the pile of them, and you--resounding."
+
+"It's more than I dared hope."
+
+"Or I."
+
+She stood for a moment still smiling bravely, and then she was
+sobbing in my arms.  "The bigger you are--the more you show," she
+said--"the more we are parted.  I know, I know--"
+
+I held her close to me, making no answer.
+
+Presently she became still.  "Oh, well," she said, and wiped her
+eyes and sat down on the little sofa by the fire; and I sat down
+beside her.
+
+"I didn't know all there was in love," she said, staring at the
+coals, "when we went love-making."
+
+I put my arm behind her and took a handful of her dear soft hair in
+my hand and kissed it.
+
+"You've done a great thing this time," she said.  "Handitch will
+make you."
+
+"It opens big chances," I said.  "But why are you weeping, dear
+one?"
+
+"Envy," she said, "and love."
+
+"You're not lonely?"
+
+"I've plenty to do--and lots of people."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I want you."
+
+"You've got me."
+
+She put her arm about me and kissed me.  "I want you," she said,
+"just as if I had nothing of you.  You don't understand--how a woman
+wants a man.  I thought once if I just gave myself to you it would
+be enough.  It was nothing--it was just a step across the threshold.
+My dear, every moment you are away I ache for you--ache!  I want to
+be about when it isn't love-making or talk.  I want to be doing
+things for you, and watching you when you're not thinking of me.
+All those safe, careless, intimate things.  And something else--"
+She stopped.  "Dear, I don't want to bother you.  I just want you to
+know I love you. . . ."
+
+She caught my head in her hands and kissed it, then stood up
+abruptly.
+
+I looked up at her, a little perplexed.
+
+"Dear heart," said I, "isn't this enough?  You're my councillor, my
+colleague, my right hand, the secret soul of my life--"
+
+"And I want to darn your socks," she said, smiling back at me.
+
+"You're insatiable."
+
+She smiled "No," she said.  "I'm not insatiable, Master.  But I'm a
+woman in love.  And I'm finding out what I want, and what is
+necessary to me--and what I can't have.  That's all."
+
+"We get a lot."
+
+"We want a lot.  You and I are greedy people for the things we like,
+Master.  It's very evident we've got nearly all we can ever have of
+one another--and I'm not satisfied."
+
+"What more is there?
+
+"For you--very little.  I wonder.  For me--every thing.  Yes--
+everything.  You didn't mean it, Master; you didn't know any more
+than I did when I began, but love between a man and a woman is
+sometimes very one-sided.  Fearfully one-sided!  That's all. . . ."
+
+"Don't YOU ever want children?" she said abruptly.
+
+"I suppose I do."
+
+"You don't!"
+
+"I haven't thought of them."
+
+"A man doesn't, perhaps.  But I have. . . .  I want them--like
+hunger.  YOUR children, and home with you.  Really, continually you!
+That's the trouble. . . .  I can't have 'em, Master, and I can't
+have you."
+
+She was crying, and through her tears she laughed.
+
+"I'm going to make a scene," she said, "and get this over.  I'm so
+discontented and miserable; I've got to tell you.  It would come
+between us if I didn't.  I'm in love with you, with everything--with
+all my brains.  I'll pull through all right.  I'll be good, Master,
+never you fear.  But to-day I'm crying out with all my being.  This
+election--You're going up; you're going on.  In these papers--you're
+a great big fact.  It's suddenly come home to me.  At the back of my
+mind I've always had the idea I was going to have you somehow
+presently for myself--I mean to have you to go long tramps with, to
+keep house for, to get meals for, to watch for of an evening.  It's
+a sort of habitual background to my thought of you.  And it's
+nonsense--utter nonsense!"  She stopped.  She was crying and
+choking.  "And the child, you know--the child!"
+
+I was troubled beyond measure, but Handitch and its intimations were
+clear and strong.
+
+"We can't have that," I said.
+
+"No," she said, "we can't have that."
+
+"We've got our own things to do."
+
+"YOUR things," she said.
+
+"Aren't they yours too?"
+
+"Because of you," she said.
+
+"Aren't they your very own things?"
+
+"Women don't have that sort of very own thing.  Indeed, it's true!
+And think!  You've been down there preaching the goodness of
+children, telling them the only good thing in a state is happy,
+hopeful children, working to free mothers and children--"
+
+"And we give our own children to do it?" I said.
+
+"Yes," she said.  "And sometimes I think it's too much to give--too
+much altogether. . . .  Children get into a woman's brain--when she
+mustn't have them, especially when she must never hope for them.
+Think of the child we might have now!--the little creature with
+soft, tender skin, and little hands and little feet!  At times it
+haunts me.  It comes and says, Why wasn't I given life?  I can hear
+it in the night. . . .  The world is full of such little ghosts,
+dear lover--little things that asked for life and were refused.
+They clamour to me.  It's like a little fist beating at my heart.
+Love children, beautiful children.  Little cold hands that tear at
+my heart!  Oh, my heart and my lord!"  She was holding my arm with
+both her hands and weeping against it, and now she drew herself to
+my shoulder and wept and sobbed in my embrace.  "I shall never sit
+with your child on my knee and you beside me-never, and I am a woman
+and your lover! . . ."
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+But the profound impossibility of our relation was now becoming more
+and more apparent to us.  We found ourselves seeking justification,
+clinging passionately to a situation that was coldly, pitilessly,
+impossible and fated.  We wanted quite intensely to live together
+and have a child, but also we wanted very many other things that
+were incompatible with these desires.  It was extraordinarily
+difficult to weigh our political and intellectual ambitions against
+those intimate wishes.  The weights kept altering according as one
+found oneself grasping this valued thing or that.  It wasn't as if
+we could throw everything aside for our love, and have that as we
+wanted it.  Love such as we bore one another isn't altogether, or
+even chiefly, a thing in itself--it is for the most part a value set
+upon things.  Our love was interwoven with all our other interests;
+to go out of the world and live in isolation seemed to us like
+killing the best parts of each other; we loved the sight of each
+other engaged finely and characteristically, we knew each other best
+as activities.  We had no delusions about material facts; we didn't
+want each other alive or dead, we wanted each other fully alive.  We
+wanted to do big things together, and for us to take each other
+openly and desperately would leave us nothing in the world to do.
+We wanted children indeed passionately, but children with every
+helpful chance in the world, and children born in scandal would be
+handicapped at every turn.  We wanted to share a home, and not a
+solitude.
+
+And when we were at this stage of realisation, began the intimations
+that we were found out, and that scandal was afoot against us. . . .
+
+I heard of it first from Esmeer, who deliberately mentioned it, with
+that steady grey eye of his watching me, as an instance of the
+preposterous falsehoods people will circulate.  It came to Isabel
+almost simultaneously through a married college friend, who made it
+her business to demand either confirmation or denial.  It filled us
+both with consternation.  In the surprise of the moment Isabel
+admitted her secret, and her friend went off "reserving her freedom
+of action."
+
+Discovery broke out in every direction.  Friends with grave faces
+and an atmosphere of infinite tact invaded us both.  Other friends
+ceased to invade either of us.  It was manifest we had become--we
+knew not how--a private scandal, a subject for duologues, an
+amazement, a perplexity, a vivid interest.  In a few brief weeks it
+seemed London passed from absolute unsuspiciousness to a chattering
+exaggeration of its knowledge of our relations.
+
+It was just the most inappropriate time for that disclosure.  The
+long smouldering antagonism to my endowment of motherhood ideas had
+flared up into an active campaign in the EXPURGATOR, and it would be
+altogether disastrous to us if I should be convicted of any personal
+irregularity.  It was just because of the manifest and challenging
+respectability of my position that I had been able to carry the
+thing as far as I had done.  Now suddenly my fortunes had sprung a
+leak, and scandal was pouring in. . . .  It chanced, too, that a
+wave of moral intolerance was sweeping through London, one of those
+waves in which the bitterness of the consciously just finds an ally
+in the panic of the undiscovered.  A certain Father Blodgett had
+been preaching against social corruption with extraordinary force,
+and had roused the Church of England people to a kind of competition
+in denunciation.  The old methods of the Anti-Socialist campaign had
+been renewed, and had offered far too wide a scope and too tempting
+an opportunity for private animosity, to be restricted to the
+private affairs of the Socialists.  I had intimations of an
+extensive circulation of "private and confidential" letters. . . .
+
+I think there can be nothing else in life quite like the unnerving
+realisation that rumour and scandal are afoot about one.  Abruptly
+one's confidence in the solidity of the universe disappears.  One
+walks silenced through a world that one feels to be full of
+inaudible accusations.  One cannot challenge the assault, get it out
+into the open, separate truth and falsehood.  It slinks from you,
+turns aside its face.  Old acquaintances suddenly evaded me, made
+extraordinary excuses; men who had presumed on the verge of my world
+and pestered me with an intrusive enterprise, now took the bold step
+of flat repudiation.  I became doubtful about the return of a nod,
+retracted all those tentacles of easy civility that I had hitherto
+spread to the world.  I still grow warm with amazed indignation when
+I recall that Edward Crampton, meeting me full on the steps of the
+Climax Club, cut me dead.  "By God!" I cried, and came near catching
+him by the throat and wringing out of him what of all good deeds and
+bad, could hearten him, a younger man than I and empty beyond
+comparison, to dare to play the judge to me.  And then I had an open
+slight from Mrs. Millingham, whom I had counted on as one counts
+upon the sunrise.  I had not expected things of that sort; they were
+disconcerting beyond measure; it was as if the world were giving way
+beneath my feet, as though something failed in the essential
+confidence of life, as though a hand of wet ice had touched my
+heart.  Similar things were happening to Isabel.  Yet we went on
+working, visiting, meeting, trying to ignore this gathering of
+implacable forces against us.
+
+For a time I was perplexed beyond measure to account for this
+campaign.  Then I got a clue.  The centre of diffusion was the
+Bailey household.  The Baileys had never forgiven me my abandonment
+of the young Liberal group they had done so much to inspire and
+organise; their dinner-table had long been a scene of hostile
+depreciation of the BLUE WEEKLY and all its allies; week after week
+Altiora proclaimed that I was "doing nothing," and found other
+causes for our bye-election triumphs; I counted Chambers Street a
+dangerous place for me.  Yet, nevertheless, I was astonished to find
+them using a private scandal against me.  They did.  I think
+Handitch had filled up the measure of their bitterness, for I had
+not only abandoned them, but I was succeeding beyond even their
+power of misrepresentation.  Always I had been a wasp in their
+spider's web, difficult to claim as a tool, uncritical,
+antagonistic.  I admired their work and devotion enormously, but I
+had never concealed my contempt for a certain childish vanity they
+displayed, and for the frequent puerility of their political
+intrigues.  I suppose contempt galls more than injuries, and anyhow
+they had me now.  They had me.  Bailey, I found, was warning fathers
+of girls against me as a "reckless libertine," and Altiora, flushed,
+roguish, and dishevelled, was sitting on her fender curb after
+dinner, and pledging little parties of five or six women at a time
+with infinite gusto not to let the matter go further.  Our cell was
+open to the world, and a bleak, distressful daylight streaming in.
+
+I had a gleam of a more intimate motive in Altiora from the reports
+that came to me.  Isabel had been doing a series of five or six
+articles in the POLITICAL REVIEW in support of our campaign, the
+POLITICAL REVIEW which had hitherto been loyally Baileyite.  Quite
+her best writing up to the present, at any rate, is in those papers,
+and no doubt Altiora had had not only to read her in those invaded
+columns, but listen to her praises in the mouths of the tactless
+influential.  Altiora, like so many people who rely on gesture and
+vocal insistence in conversation, writes a poor and slovenly prose
+and handles an argument badly; Isabel has her University training
+behind her and wrote from the first with the stark power of a clear-
+headed man.  "Now we know," said Altiora, with just a gleam of
+malice showing through her brightness, "now we know who helps with
+the writing!"
+
+She revealed astonishing knowledge.
+
+For a time I couldn't for the life of me discover her sources.  I
+had, indeed, a desperate intention of challenging her, and then I
+bethought me of a youngster named Curmain, who had been my
+supplemental typist and secretary for a time, and whom I had sent on
+to her before the days of our breach.  "Of course!" said I,
+"Curmain!"  He was a tall, drooping, sidelong youth with sandy hair,
+a little forward head, and a long thin neck.  He stole stamps, and,
+I suspected, rifled my private letter drawer, and I found him one
+day on a turn of the stairs looking guilty and ruffled with a pretty
+Irish housemaid of Margaret's manifestly in a state of hot
+indignation.  I saw nothing, but I felt everything in the air
+between them.  I hate this pestering of servants, but at the same
+time I didn't want Curmain wiped out of existence, so I had packed
+him off without unnecessary discussion to Altiora.  He was quick and
+cheap anyhow, and I thought her general austerity ought to redeem
+him if anything could; the Chambers Street housemaid wasn't for any
+man's kissing and showed it, and the stamps and private letters were
+looked after with an efficiency altogether surpassing mine.  And
+Altiora, I've no doubt left now whatever, pumped this young
+undesirable about me, and scenting a story, had him to dinner alone
+one evening to get to the bottom of the matter.  She got quite to
+the bottom of it,--it must have been a queer duologue.  She read
+Isabel's careless, intimate letters to me, so to speak, by this
+proxy, and she wasn't ashamed to use this information in the service
+of the bitterness that had sprung up in her since our political
+breach.  It was essentially a personal bitterness; it helped no
+public purpose of theirs to get rid of me.  My downfall in any
+public sense was sheer waste,--the loss of a man.  She knew she was
+behaving badly, and so, when it came to remonstrance, she behaved
+worse.  She'd got names and dates and places; the efficiency of her
+information was irresistible.  And she set to work at it
+marvellously.  Never before, in all her pursuit of efficient ideals,
+had Altiora achieved such levels of efficiency.  I wrote a protest
+that was perhaps ill-advised and angry, I went to her and tried to
+stop her.  She wouldn't listen, she wouldn't think, she denied and
+lied, she behaved like a naughty child of six years old which has
+made up its mind to be hurtful.  It wasn't only, I think, that she
+couldn't bear our political and social influence; she also--I
+realised at that interview couldn't bear our loving.  It seemed to
+her the sickliest thing,--a thing quite unendurable.  While such
+things were, the virtue had gone out of her world.
+
+I've the vividest memory of that call of mine.  She'd just come in
+and taken off her hat, and she was grey and dishevelled and tired,
+and in a business-like dress of black and crimson that didn't suit
+her and was muddy about the skirts; she'd a cold in her head and
+sniffed penetratingly, she avoided my eye as she talked and
+interrupted everything I had to say; she kept stabbing fiercely at
+the cushions of her sofa with a long hat-pin and pretending she was
+overwhelmed with grief at the DEBACLE she was deliberately
+organising.
+
+"Then part," she cried, "part.  If you don't want a smashing up,--
+part!  You two have got to be parted.  You've got never to see each
+other ever, never to speak."  There was a zest in her voice.  "We're
+not circulating stories," she denied.  "No!  And Curmain never told
+us anything--Curmain is an EXCELLENT young man; oh! a quite
+excellent young man.  You misjudged him altogether." . . .
+
+I was equally unsuccessful with Bailey.  I caught the little wretch
+in the League Club, and he wriggled and lied.  He wouldn't say where
+he had got his facts, he wouldn't admit he had told any one.  When I
+gave him the names of two men who had come to me astonished and
+incredulous, he attempted absurdly to make me think they had told
+HIM.  He did his horrible little best to suggest that honest old
+Quackett, who had just left England for the Cape, was the real
+scandalmonger.  That struck me as mean, even for Bailey.  I've still
+the odd vivid impression of his fluting voice, excusing the
+inexcusable, his big, shifty face evading me, his perspiration-
+beaded forehead, the shrugging shoulders, and the would-be
+exculpatory gestures--Houndsditch gestures--of his enormous ugly
+hands.
+
+"I can assure you, my dear fellow," he said; "I can assure you we've
+done everything to shield you--everything." . . .
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Isabel came after dinner one evening and talked in the office.  She
+made a white-robed, dusky figure against the deep blues of my big
+window.  I sat at my desk and tore a quill pen to pieces as I
+talked.
+
+"The Baileys don't intend to let this drop," I said.  "They mean
+that every one in London is to know about it."
+
+"I know."
+
+"Well!" I said.
+
+"Dear heart," said Isabel, facing it, "it's no good waiting for
+things to overtake us; we're at the parting of the ways."
+
+"What are we to do?"
+
+"They won't let us go on."
+
+"Damn them!"
+
+"They are ORGANISING scandal."
+
+"It's no good waiting for things to overtake us," I echoed; "they
+have overtaken us."  I turned on her.  "What do you want to do?"
+
+"Everything," she said.  "Keep you and have our work.  Aren't we
+Mates?"
+
+"We can't."
+
+"And we can't!"
+
+"I've got to tell Margaret," I said.
+
+"Margaret!"
+
+"I can't bear the idea of any one else getting in front with it.
+I've been wincing about Margaret secretly--"
+
+"I know.  You'll have to tell her--and make your peace with her."
+
+She leant back against the bookcases under the window.
+
+"We've had some good times, Master;" she said, with a sigh in her
+voice.
+
+And then for a long time we stared at one another in silence.
+
+"We haven't much time left," she said.
+
+"Shall we bolt?" I said.
+
+"And leave all this?" she asked, with her eyes going round the room.
+"And that?"  And her head indicated Westminster.  "No!"
+
+I said no more of bolting.
+
+"We've got to screw ourselves up to surrender," she said.
+
+"Something."
+
+"A lot."
+
+"Master," she said, "it isn't all sex and stuff between us?"
+
+"No!"
+
+"I can't give up the work.  Our work's my life."
+
+We came upon another long pause.
+
+"No one will believe we've ceased to be lovers--if we simply do,"
+she said.
+
+"We shouldn't."
+
+"We've got to do something more parting than that."
+
+I nodded, and again we paused.  She was coming to something.
+
+"I could marry Shoesmith," she said abruptly.
+
+"But--" I objected.
+
+"He knows.  It wasn't fair.  I told him."
+
+"Oh, that explains," I said.  "There's been a kind of sulkiness--
+But--you told him?"
+
+She nodded.  "He's rather badly hurt," she said.  "He's been a good
+friend to me.  He's curiously loyal.  But something, something he
+said one day--forced me to let him know. . . .  That's been the
+beastliness of all this secrecy.  That's the beastliness of all
+secrecy.  You have to spring surprises on people.  But he keeps on.
+He's steadfast.  He'd already suspected.  He wants me very badly to
+marry him. . . ."
+
+"But you don't want to marry him?"
+
+"I'm forced to think of it."
+
+"But does he want to marry you at that?  Take you as a present from
+the world at large?--against your will and desire? . . .  I don't
+understand him."
+
+"He cares for me."
+
+"How?"
+
+"He thinks this is a fearful mess for me.  He wants to pull it
+straight."
+
+We sat for a time in silence, with imaginations that obstinately
+refused to take up the realities of this proposition.
+
+"I don't want you to marry Shoesmith," I said at last.
+
+"Don't you like him?"
+
+"Not as your husband."
+
+"He's a very clever and sturdy person--and very generous and devoted
+to me."
+
+"And me?"
+
+"You can't expect that.  He thinks you are wonderful--and,
+naturally, that you ought not to have started this."
+
+"I've a curious dislike to any one thinking that but myself.  I'm
+quite ready to think it myself."
+
+"He'd let us be friends--and meet."
+
+"Let us be friends!" I cried, after a long pause.  "You and me!"
+
+"He wants me to be engaged soon.  Then, he says, he can go round
+fighting these rumours, defending us both--and force a quarrel on
+the Baileys."
+
+"I don't understand him," I said, and added, "I don't understand
+you."
+
+I was staring at her face.  It seemed white and set in the dimness.
+
+"Do you really mean this, Isabel?" I asked.
+
+"What else is there to do, my dear?--what else is there to do at
+all?  I've been thinking day and night.  You can't go away with me.
+You can't smash yourself suddenly in the sight of all men.  I'd
+rather die than that should happen.  Look what you are becoming in
+the country!  Look at all you've built up!--me helping.  I wouldn't
+let you do it if you could.  I wouldn't let you--if it were only for
+Margaret's sake.  THIS . . . closes the scandal, closes everything."
+
+"It closes all our life together," I cried.
+
+She was silent.
+
+"It never ought to have begun," I said.
+
+She winced.  Then abruptly she was on her knees before me, with her
+hands upon my shoulder and her eyes meeting mine.
+
+"My dear," she said very earnestly, "don't misunderstand me!  Don't
+think I'm retreating from the things we've done!  Our love is the
+best thing I could ever have had from life.  Nothing can ever equal
+it; nothing could ever equal the beauty and delight you and I have
+had together.  Never!  You have loved me; you do love me. . . ."
+
+No one could ever know how to love you as I have loved you; no one
+could ever love me as you have loved me, my king.  And it's just
+because it's been so splendid, dear; it's just because I'd die
+rather than have a tithe of all this wiped out of my life again--for
+it's made me, it's all I am--dear, it's years since I began loving
+you--it's just because of its goodness that I want not to end in
+wreckage now, not to end in the smashing up of all the big things I
+understand in you and love in you. . . .
+
+"What is there for us if we keep on and go away?" she went on.  "All
+the big interests in our lives will vanish--everything.  We shall
+become specialised people--people overshadowed by a situation.  We
+shall be an elopement, a romance--all our breadth and meaning gone!
+People will always think of it first when they think of us; all our
+work and aims will be warped by it and subordinated to it.  Is it
+good enough, dear?  Just to specialise. . . .  I think of you.
+We've got a case, a passionate case, the best of cases, but do we
+want to spend all our lives defending it and justifying it?  And
+there's that other life.  I know now you care for Margaret--you care
+more than you think you do.  You have said fine things of her.  I've
+watched you about her.  Little things have dropped from you.  She's
+given her life for you; she's nothing without you.  You feel that to
+your marrow all the time you are thinking about these things.  Oh,
+I'm not jealous, dear.  I love you for loving her.  I love you in
+relation to her.  But there it is, an added weight against us,
+another thing worth saving."
+
+Presently, I remember, she sat back on her heels and looked up into
+my face.  "We've done wrong--and parting's paying.  It's time to
+pay.  We needn't have paid, if we'd kept to the track. . . .  You
+and I, Master, we've got to be men."
+
+"Yes," I said; "we've got to be men."
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+I was driven to tell Margaret about our situation by my intolerable
+dread that otherwise the thing might come to her through some stupid
+and clumsy informant.  She might even meet Altiora, and have it from
+her.
+
+I can still recall the feeling of sitting at my desk that night in
+that large study of mine in Radnor Square, waiting for Margaret to
+come home.  It was oddly like the feeling of a dentist's reception-
+room; only it was for me to do the dentistry with clumsy, cruel
+hands.  I had left the door open so that she would come in to me.
+
+I heard her silken rustle on the stairs at last, and then she was in
+the doorway.  "May I come in?" she said.
+
+"Do," I said, and turned round to her.
+
+"Working?" she said.
+
+"Hard," I answered.  "Where have YOU been?"
+
+"At the Vallerys'.  Mr. Evesham was talking about you.  They were
+all talking.  I don't think everybody knew who I was.  Just Mrs.
+Mumble I'd been to them.  Lord Wardenham doesn't like you."
+
+"He doesn't."
+
+"But they all feel you're rather big, anyhow.  Then I went on to
+Park Lane to hear a new pianist and some other music at Eva's."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then I looked in at the Brabants' for some midnight tea before I
+came on here.  They'd got some writers--and Grant was there."
+
+"You HAVE been flying round. . . ."
+
+There was a little pause between us.
+
+I looked at her pretty, unsuspecting face, and at the slender grace
+of her golden-robed body.  What gulfs there were between us!
+"You've been amused," I said.
+
+"It's been amusing.  You've been at the House?"
+
+"The Medical Education Bill kept me." . . .
+
+After all, why should I tell her?  She'd got to a way of living that
+fulfilled her requirements.  Perhaps she'd never hear.  But all that
+day and the day before I'd been making up my mind to do the thing.
+
+"I want to tell you something," I said.  "I wish you'd sit down for
+a moment or so." . . .
+
+Once I had begun, it seemed to me I had to go through with it.
+
+Something in the quality of my voice gave her an intimation of
+unusual gravity.  She looked at me steadily for a moment and sat
+down slowly in my armchair.
+
+"What is it?" she said.
+
+I went on awkwardly.  "I've got to tell you--something
+extraordinarily distressing," I said.
+
+She was manifestly altogether unaware.
+
+"There seems to be a good deal of scandal abroad--I've only recently
+heard of it--about myself--and Isabel."
+
+"Isabel!"
+
+I nodded.
+
+"What do they say?" she asked.
+
+It was difficult, I found, to speak.
+
+"They say she's my mistress."
+
+"Oh!  How abominable!"
+
+She spoke with the most natural indignation.  Our eyes met.
+
+"We've been great friends," I said.
+
+"Yes.  And to make THAT of it.  My poor dear!  But how can they?"
+She paused and looked at me.  "It's so incredible.  How can any one
+believe it?  I couldn't."
+
+She stopped, with her distressed eyes regarding me.  Her expression
+changed to dread.  There was a tense stillness for a second,
+perhaps.
+
+I turned my face towards the desk, and took up and dropped a handful
+of paper fasteners.
+
+"Margaret," I said, "I'm afraid you'll have to believe it."
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Margaret sat very still.  When I looked at her again, her face was
+very white, and her distressed eyes scrutinised me.  Her lips
+quivered as she spoke.  "You really mean--THAT?" she said.
+
+I nodded.
+
+"I never dreamt."
+
+"I never meant you to dream."
+
+"And that is why--we've been apart?"
+
+I thought.  "I suppose it is."
+
+"Why have you told me now?"
+
+"Those rumours.  I didn't want any one else to tell you."
+
+"Or else it wouldn't have mattered?"
+
+"No."
+
+She turned her eyes from me to the fire.  Then for a moment she
+looked about the room she had made for me, and then quite silently,
+with a childish quivering of her lips, with a sort of dismayed
+distress upon her face, she was weeping.  She sat weeping in her
+dress of cloth of gold, with her bare slender arms dropped limp over
+the arms of her chair, and her eyes averted from me, making no
+effort to stay or staunch her tears.  "I am sorry, Margaret," I
+said.  "I was in love. . . .  I did not understand. . . ."
+
+Presently she asked: "What are you going to do?"
+
+"You see, Margaret, now it's come to be your affair--I want to know
+what you--what you want."
+
+"You want to leave me?"
+
+"If you want me to, I must."
+
+"Leave Parliament--leave all the things you are doing,--all this
+fine movement of yours?"
+
+"No." I spoke sullenly.  "I don't want to leave anything.  I want to
+stay on.  I've told you, because I think we--Isabel and I, I mean--
+have got to drive through a storm of scandal anyhow.  I don't know
+how far things may go, how much people may feel, and I can't, I
+can't have you unconscious, unarmed, open to any revelation--"
+
+She made no answer.
+
+"When the thing began--I knew it was stupid but I thought it was a
+thing that wouldn't change, wouldn't be anything but itself,
+wouldn't unfold--consequences. . . .  People have got hold of these
+vague rumours. . . .  Directly it reached any one else but--but us
+two--I saw it had to come to you."
+
+I stopped.  I had that distressful feeling I have always had with
+Margaret, of not being altogether sure she heard, of being doubtful
+if she understood.  I perceived that once again I had struck at her
+and shattered a thousand unsubstantial pinnacles.  And I couldn't
+get at her, to help her, or touch her mind!  I stood up, and at my
+movement she moved.  She produced a dainty little handkerchief, and
+made an effort to wipe her face with it, and held it to her eyes.
+"Oh, my Husband!" she sobbed.
+
+"What do you mean to do?" she said, with her voice muffled by her
+handkerchief.
+
+"We're going to end it," I said.
+
+Something gripped me tormentingly as I said that.  I drew a chair
+beside her and sat down.  "You and I, Margaret, have been partners,"
+I began.  "We've built up this life of ours together; I couldn't
+have done it without you.  We've made a position, created a work--"
+
+She shook her head.  "You," she said.
+
+"You helping.  I don't want to shatter it--if you don't want it
+shattered.  I can't leave my work.  I can't leave you.  I want you
+to have--all that you have ever had.  I've never meant to rob you.
+I've made an immense and tragic blunder.  You don't know how things
+took us, how different they seemed!  My character and accident have
+conspired--We'll pay--in ourselves, not in our public service."
+
+I halted again.  Margaret remained very still.
+
+"I want you to understand that the thing is at an end.  It is
+definitely at an end.  We--we talked--yesterday.  We mean to end it
+altogether." I clenched my hands.  "She's--she's going to marry
+Arnold Shoesmith."
+
+I wasn't looking now at Margaret any more, but I heard the rustle of
+her movement as she turned on me.
+
+"It's all right," I said, clinging to my explanation.  "We're doing
+nothing shabby.  He knows.  He will.  It's all as right--as things
+can be now.  We're not cheating any one, Margaret.  We're doing
+things straight--now.  Of course, you know. . . .  We shall--we
+shall have to make sacrifices.  Give things up pretty completely.
+Very completely. . . .  We shall have not to see each other for a
+time, you know.  Perhaps not a long time.  Two or three years.  Or
+write--or just any of that sort of thing ever--"
+
+Some subconscious barrier gave way in me.  I found myself crying
+uncontrollably--as I have never cried since I was a little child.  I
+was amazed and horrified at myself.  And wonderfully, Margaret was
+on her knees beside me, with her arms about me, mingling her weeping
+with mine.  "Oh, my Husband!" she cried, "my poor Husband!  Does it
+hurt you so?  I would do anything!  Oh, the fool I am!  Dear, I love
+you.  I love you over and away and above all these jealous little
+things!"
+
+She drew down my head to her as a mother might draw down the head of
+a son.  She caressed me, weeping bitterly with me.  "Oh! my dear,"
+she sobbed, "my dear!  I've never seen you cry!  I've never seen you
+cry.  Ever!  I didn't know you could.  Oh! my dear!  Can't you have
+her, my dear, if you want her?  I can't bear it!  Let me help you,
+dear.  Oh! my Husband!  My Man!  I can't bear to have you cry!"  For
+a time she held me in silence.
+
+"I've thought this might happen, I dreamt it might happen.  You two,
+I mean.  It was dreaming put it into my head.  When I've seen you
+together, so glad with each other. . . .  Oh!  Husband mine, believe
+me! believe me!  I'm stupid, I'm cold, I'm only beginning to realise
+how stupid and cold, but all I want in all the world is to give my
+life to you." . . .
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+"We can't part in a room," said Isabel.
+
+"We'll have one last talk together," I said, and planned that we
+should meet for a half a day between Dover and Walmer and talk
+ourselves out.  I still recall that day very well, recall even the
+curious exaltation of grief that made our mental atmosphere
+distinctive and memorable.  We had seen so much of one another, had
+become so intimate, that we talked of parting even as we parted with
+a sense of incredible remoteness.  We went together up over the
+cliffs, and to a place where they fall towards the sea, past the
+white, quaint-lanterned lighthouses of the South Foreland.  There,
+in a kind of niche below the crest, we sat talking.  It was a
+spacious day, serenely blue and warm, and on the wrinkled water
+remotely below a black tender and six hooded submarines came
+presently, and engaged in mysterious manoeuvers.  Shrieking gulls
+and chattering jackdaws circled over us and below us, and dived and
+swooped; and a skerry of weedy, fallen chalk appeared, and gradually
+disappeared again, as the tide fell and rose.
+
+We talked and thought that afternoon on every aspect of our
+relations.  It seems to me now we talked so wide and far that
+scarcely an issue in the life between man and woman can arise that
+we did not at least touch upon.  Lying there at Isabel's feet, I
+have become for myself a symbol of all this world-wide problem
+between duty and conscious, passionate love the world has still to
+solve.  Because it isn't solved; there's a wrong in it either way. .
+. .  The sky, the wide horizon, seemed to lift us out of ourselves
+until we were something representative and general.  She was
+womanhood become articulate, talking to her lover.
+
+"I ought," I said, "never to have loved you."
+
+"It wasn't a thing planned," she said.
+
+"I ought never to have let our talk slip to that, never to have
+turned back from America."
+
+"I'm glad we did it," she said.  "Don't think I repent."
+
+I looked at her.
+
+"I will never repent," she said.  "Never!" as though she clung to
+her life in saying it.
+
+I remember we talked for a long time of divorce.  It seemed to us
+then, and it seems to us still, that it ought to have been possible
+for Margaret to divorce me, and for me to marry without the
+scandalous and ugly publicity, the taint and ostracism that follow
+such a readjustment.  We went on to the whole perplexing riddle of
+marriage.  We criticised the current code, how muddled and
+conventionalised it had become, how modified by subterfuges and
+concealments and new necessities, and the increasing freedom of
+women.  "It's all like Bromstead when the building came," I said;
+for I had often talked to her of that early impression of purpose
+dissolving again into chaotic forces.  "There is no clear right in
+the world any more.  The world is Byzantine.  The justest man to-day
+must practise a tainted goodness."
+
+These questions need discussion--a magnificent frankness of
+discussion--if any standards are again to establish an effective
+hold upon educated people.  Discretions, as I have said already,
+will never hold any one worth holding--longer than they held us.
+Against every "shalt not" there must be a "why not" plainly put,--
+the "why not" largest and plainest, the law deduced from its
+purpose.  "You and I, Isabel," I said, "have always been a little
+disregardful of duty, partly at least because the idea of duty comes
+to us so ill-clad.  Oh! I know there's an extravagant insubordinate
+strain in us, but that wasn't all.  I wish humbugs would leave duty
+alone.  I wish all duty wasn't covered with slime.  That's where the
+real mischief comes in.  Passion can always contrive to clothe
+itself in beauty, strips itself splendid.  That carried us.  But for
+all its mean associations there is this duty. . . .
+
+"Don't we come rather late to it?"
+
+"Not so late that it won't be atrociously hard to do."
+
+"It's queer to think of now," said Isabel.  "Who could believe we
+did all we have done honestly?  Well, in a manner honestly.  Who
+could believe we thought this might be hidden?  Who could trace it
+all step by step from the time when we found that a certain boldness
+in our talk was pleasing?  We talked of love. . . .  Master, there's
+not much for us to do in the way of Apologia that any one will
+credit.  And yet if it were possible to tell the very heart of our
+story. . . .
+
+"Does Margaret really want to go on with you?" she asked--"shield
+you--knowing of . . . THIS?"
+
+"I'm certain.  I don't understand--just as I don't understand
+Shoesmith, but she does.  These people walk on solid ground which is
+just thin air to us.  They've got something we haven't got.
+Assurances?  I wonder." . . .
+
+Then it was, or later, we talked of Shoesmith, and what her life
+might be with him.
+
+"He's good," she said; "he's kindly.  He's everything but magic.
+He's the very image of the decent, sober, honourable life.  You
+can't say a thing against him or I--except that something--something
+in his imagination, something in the tone of his voice--fails for
+me.  Why don't I love him?--he's a better man than you!  Why don't
+you?  IS he a better man than you?  He's usage, he's honour, he's
+the right thing, he's the breed and the tradition,--a gentleman.
+You're your erring, incalculable self.  I suppose we women will
+trust this sort and love your sort to the very end of time. . . ."
+
+We lay side by side and nibbled at grass stalks as we talked.  It
+seemed enormously unreasonable to us that two people who had come to
+the pitch of easy and confident affection and happiness that held
+between us should be obliged to part and shun one another, or murder
+half the substance of their lives.  We felt ourselves crushed and
+beaten by an indiscriminating machine which destroys happiness in
+the service of jealousy.  "The mass of people don't feel these
+things in quite the same manner as we feel them," she said.  "Is it
+because they're different in grain, or educated out of some
+primitive instinct?"
+
+"It's because we've explored love a little, and they know no more
+than the gateway," I said.  "Lust and then jealousy; their simple
+conception--and we have gone past all that and wandered hand in
+hand. . . ."
+
+I remember that for a time we watched two of that larger sort of
+gull, whose wings are brownish-white, circle and hover against the
+blue.  And then we lay and looked at a band of water mirror clear
+far out to sea, and wondered why the breeze that rippled all the
+rest should leave it so serene.
+
+"And in this State of ours," I resumed.
+
+"Eh!" said Isabel, rolling over into a sitting posture and looking
+out at the horizon.  "Let's talk no more of things we can never see.
+Talk to me of the work you are doing and all we shall do--after we
+have parted.  We've said too little of that.  We've had our red
+life, and it's over.  Thank Heaven!--though we stole it!  Talk about
+your work, dear, and the things we'll go on doing--just as though we
+were still together.  We'll still be together in a sense--through
+all these things we have in common."
+
+And so we talked of politics and our outlook.  We were interested to
+the pitch of self-forgetfulness.  We weighed persons and forces,
+discussed the probabilities of the next general election, the steady
+drift of public opinion in the north and west away from Liberalism
+towards us.  It was very manifest that in spite of Wardenham and the
+EXPURGATOR, we should come into the new Government strongly.  The
+party had no one else, all the young men were formally or informally
+with us; Esmeer would have office, Lord Tarvrille, I . . . and very
+probably there would be something for Shoesmith.  "And for my own
+part," I said, "I count on backing on the Liberal side.  For the
+last two years we've been forcing competition in constructive
+legislation between the parties.  The Liberals have not been long in
+following up our Endowment of Motherhood lead.  They'll have to give
+votes and lip service anyhow.  Half the readers of the BLUE WEEKLY,
+they say, are Liberals. . . .
+
+"I remember talking about things of this sort with old Willersley,"
+I said, "ever so many years ago.  It was some place near Locarno,
+and we looked down the lake that shone weltering--just as now we
+look over the sea.  And then we dreamt in an indistinct featureless
+way of all that you and I are doing now."
+
+"I!" said Isabel, and laughed.
+
+"Well, of some such thing," I said, and remained for awhile silent,
+thinking of Locarno.
+
+I recalled once more the largeness, the release from small personal
+things that I had felt in my youth; statecraft became real and
+wonderful again with the memory, the gigantic handling of gigantic
+problems.  I began to talk out my thoughts, sitting up beside her,
+as I could never talk of them to any one but Isabel; began to
+recover again the purpose that lay under all my political ambitions
+and adjustments and anticipations.  I saw the State, splendid and
+wide as I had seen it in that first travel of mine, but now it was
+no mere distant prospect of spires and pinnacles, but populous with
+fine-trained, bold-thinking, bold-doing people.  It was as if I had
+forgotten for a long time and now remembered with amazement.
+
+At first, I told her, I had been altogether at a loss how I could do
+anything to battle against the aimless muddle of our world; I had
+wanted a clue--until she had come into my life questioning,
+suggesting, unconsciously illuminating.  "But I have done nothing,"
+she protested.  I declared she had done everything in growing to
+education under my eyes, in reflecting again upon all the processes
+that had made myself, so that instead of abstractions and blue-books
+and bills and devices, I had realised the world of mankind as a
+crowd needing before all things fine women and men.  We'd spoilt
+ourselves in learning that, but anyhow we had our lesson.  Before
+her I was in a nineteenth-century darkness, dealing with the nation
+as if it were a crowd of selfish men, forgetful of women and
+children and that shy wild thing in the hearts of men, love, which
+must be drawn upon as it has never been drawn upon before, if the
+State is to live.  I saw now how it is possible to bring the loose
+factors of a great realm together, to create a mind of literature
+and thought in it, and the expression of a purpose to make it self-
+conscious and fine.  I had it all clear before me, so that at a
+score of points I could presently begin.  The BLUE WEEKLY was a
+centre of force.  Already we had given Imperialism a criticism, and
+leavened half the press from our columns.  Our movement consolidated
+and spread.  We should presently come into power.  Everything moved
+towards our hands.  We should be able to get at the schools, the
+services, the universities, the church; enormously increase the
+endowment of research, and organise what was sorely wanted, a
+criticism of research; contrive a closer contact between the press
+and creative intellectual life; foster literature, clarify,
+strengthen the public consciousness, develop social organisation and
+a sense of the State.  Men were coming to us every day, brilliant
+young peers like Lord Dentonhill, writers like Carnot and Cresswell.
+It filled me with pride to win such men.  "We stand for so much more
+than we seem to stand for," I said.  I opened my heart to her, so
+freely that I hesitate to open my heart even to the reader, telling
+of projects and ambitions I cherished, of my consciousness of great
+powers and widening opportunities. . . .
+
+Isabel watched me as I talked.
+
+She too, I think, had forgotten these things for a while.  For it is
+curious and I think a very significant thing that since we had
+become lovers, we had talked very little of the broader things that
+had once so strongly gripped our imaginations.
+
+"It's good," I said, "to talk like this to you, to get back to youth
+and great ambitions with you.  There have been times lately when
+politics has seemed the pettiest game played with mean tools for
+mean ends--and none the less so that the happiness of three hundred
+million people might be touched by our follies.  I talk to no one
+else like this. . . .  And now I think of parting, I think but of
+how much more I might have talked to you." . . .
+
+Things drew to an end at last, but after we had spoken of a thousand
+things.
+
+"We've talked away our last half day," I said, staring over my
+shoulder at the blazing sunset sky behind us.  "Dear, it's been the
+last day of our lives for us. . . .  It doesn't seem like the last
+day of our lives.  Or any day."
+
+"I wonder how it will feel?" said Isabel.
+
+"It will be very strange at first--not to be able to tell you
+things."
+
+"I've a superstition that after--after we've parted--if ever I go
+into my room and talk, you'll hear.  You'll be--somewhere."
+
+"I shall be in the world--yes."
+
+"I don't feel as though these days ahead were real.  Here we are,
+here we remain."
+
+"Yes, I feel that.  As though you and I were two immortals, who
+didn't live in time and space at all, who never met, who couldn't
+part, and here we lie on Olympus.  And those two poor creatures who
+did meet, poor little Richard Remington and Isabel Rivers, who met
+and loved too much and had to part, they part and go their ways, and
+we lie here and watch them, you and I.  She'll cry, poor dear."
+
+"She'll cry.  She's crying now!"
+
+"Poor little beasts!  I think he'll cry too.  He winces.  He could--
+for tuppence.  I didn't know he had lachrymal glands at all until a
+little while ago.  I suppose all love is hysterical--and a little
+foolish.  Poor mites!  Silly little pitiful creatures!  How we have
+blundered!  Think how we must look to God!  Well, we'll pity them,
+and then we'll inspire him to stiffen up again--and do as we've
+determined he shall do.  We'll see it through,--we who lie here on
+the cliff.  They'll be mean at times, and horrid at times; we know
+them!  Do you see her, a poor little fine lady in a great house,--
+she sometimes goes to her room and writes."
+
+"She writes for his BLUE WEEKLY still."
+
+"Yes.  Sometimes--I hope.  And he's there in the office with a bit
+of her copy in his hand."
+
+"Is it as good as if she still talked it over with him before she
+wrote it?  Is it?"
+
+"Better, I think.  Let's play it's better--anyhow.  It may be that
+talking over was rather mixed with love-making.  After all, love-
+making is joy rather than magic.  Don't let's pretend about that
+even. . . .  Let's go on watching him.  (I don't see why her writing
+shouldn't be better.  Indeed I don't.) See!  There he goes down
+along the Embankment to Westminster just like a real man, for all
+that he's smaller than a grain of dust.  What is running round
+inside that speck of a head of his?  Look at him going past the
+Policemen, specks too--selected large ones from the country.  I
+think he's going to dinner with the Speaker--some old thing like
+that.  Is his face harder or commoner or stronger?--I can't quite
+see. . . .  And now he's up and speaking in the House.  Hope he'll
+hold on to the thread.  He'll have to plan his speeches to the very
+end of his days--and learn the headings."
+
+"Isn't she up in the women's gallery to hear him?"
+
+"No.  Unless it's by accident."
+
+"She's there," she said.
+
+"Well, by accident it happens.  Not too many accidents, Isabel.
+Never any more adventures for us, dear, now.  No! . . .  They play
+the game, you know.  They've begun late, but now they've got to.
+You see it's not so very hard for them since you and I, my dear, are
+here always, always faithfully here on this warm cliff of love
+accomplished, watching and helping them under high heaven.  It isn't
+so VERY hard.  Rather good in some ways.  Some people HAVE to be
+broken a little.  Can you see Altiora down there, by any chance?"
+
+"She's too little to be seen," she said.
+
+"Can you see the sins they once committed?"
+
+"I can only see you here beside me, dear--for ever.  For all my
+life, dear, till I die.  Was that--the sin?" . . .
+
+I took her to the station, and after she had gone I was to drive to
+Dover, and cross to Calais by the night boat.  I couldn't, I felt,
+return to London.  We walked over the crest and down to the little
+station of Martin Mill side by side, talking at first in broken
+fragments, for the most part of unimportant things.
+
+"None of this," she said abruptly, "seems in the slightest degree
+real to me.  I've got no sense of things ending."
+
+"We're parting," I said.
+
+"We're parting--as people part in a play.  It's distressing.  But I
+don't feel as though you and I were really never to see each other
+again for years.  Do you?"
+
+I thought.  "No," I said.
+
+"After we've parted I shall look to talk it over with you."
+
+"So shall I."
+
+"That's absurd."
+
+"Absurd."
+
+"I feel as if you'd always be there, just about where you are now.
+Invisible perhaps, but there.  We've spent so much of our lives
+joggling elbows." . . .
+
+"Yes.  Yes.  I don't in the least realise it.  I suppose I shall
+begin to when the train goes out of the station.  Are we wanting in
+imagination, Isabel?"
+
+"I don't know.  We've always assumed it was the other way about."
+
+"Even when the train goes out of the station--!  I've seen you into
+so many trains."
+
+"I shall go on thinking of things to say to you--things to put in
+your letters.  For years to come.  How can I ever stop thinking in
+that way now?  We've got into each other's brains."
+
+"It isn't real," I said; "nothing is real.  The world's no more than
+a fantastic dream.  Why are we parting, Isabel?"
+
+"I don't know.  It seems now supremely silly.  I suppose we have to.
+Can't we meet?--don't you think we shall meet even in dreams?"
+
+"We'll meet a thousand times in dreams," I said.
+
+"I wish we could dream at the same time," said Isabel. . . .  "Dream
+walks.  I can't believe, dear, I shall never have a walk with you
+again."
+
+"If I'd stayed six months in America," I said, "we might have walked
+long walks and talked long talks for all our lives."
+
+"Not in a world of Baileys," said Isabel.  "And anyhow--"
+
+She stopped short.  I looked interrogation.
+
+"We've loved," she said.
+
+I took her ticket, saw to her luggage, and stood by the door of the
+compartment.  "Good-bye," I said a little stiffly, conscious of the
+people upon the platform.  She bent above me, white and dusky,
+looking at me very steadfastly.
+
+"Come here," she whispered.  "Never mind the porters.  What can they
+know?  Just one time more--I must."
+
+She rested her hand against the door of the carriage and bent down
+upon me, and put her cold, moist lips to mine.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD
+
+THE BREAKING POINT
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+And then we broke down.  We broke our faith with both Margaret and
+Shoesmith, flung career and duty out of our lives, and went away
+together.
+
+It is only now, almost a year after these events, that I can begin
+to see what happened to me.  At the time it seemed to me I was a
+rational, responsible creature, but indeed I had not parted from her
+two days before I became a monomaniac to whom nothing could matter
+but Isabel.  Every truth had to be squared to that obsession, every
+duty.  It astounds me to think how I forgot Margaret, forgot my
+work, forgot everything but that we two were parted.  I still
+believe that with better chances we might have escaped the
+consequences of the emotional storm that presently seized us both.
+But we had no foresight of that, and no preparation for it, and our
+circumstances betrayed us.  It was partly Shoesmith's unwisdom in
+delaying his marriage until after the end of the session--partly my
+own amazing folly in returning within four days to Westminster.  But
+we were all of us intent upon the defeat of scandal and the complete
+restoration of appearances.  It seemed necessary that Shoesmith's
+marriage should not seem to be hurried, still more necessary that I
+should not vanish inexplicably.  I had to be visible with Margaret
+in London just as much as possible; we went to restaurants, we
+visited the theatre; we could even contemplate the possibility of my
+presence at the wedding.  For that, however, we had schemed a
+weekend visit to Wales, and a fictitious sprained ankle at the last
+moment which would justify my absence. . . .
+
+I cannot convey to you the intolerable wretchedness and rebellion of
+my separation from Isabel.  It seemed that in the past two years all
+my thoughts had spun commisures to Isabel's brain and I could think
+of nothing that did not lead me surely to the need of the one
+intimate I had found in the world.  I came back to the House and the
+office and my home, I filled all my days with appointments and duty,
+and it did not save me in the least from a lonely emptiness such as
+I had never felt before in all my life.  I had little sleep.  In the
+daytime I did a hundred things, I even spoke in the House on two
+occasions, and by my own low standards spoke well, and it seemed to
+me that I was going about in my own brain like a hushed survivor in
+a house whose owner lies dead upstairs.
+
+I came to a crisis after that wild dinner of Tarvrille's.  Something
+in that stripped my soul bare.
+
+It was an occasion made absurd and strange by the odd accident that
+the house caught fire upstairs while we were dining below.  It was a
+men's dinner--"A dinner of all sorts," said Tarvrille, when he
+invited me; "everything from Evesham and Gane to Wilkins the author,
+and Heaven knows what will happen!"  I remember that afterwards
+Tarvrille was accused of having planned the fire to make his dinner
+a marvel and a memory.  It was indeed a wonderful occasion, and I
+suppose if I had not been altogether drenched in misery, I should
+have found the same wild amusement in it that glowed in all the
+others.  There were one or two university dons, Lord George Fester,
+the racing man, Panmure, the artist, two or three big City men,
+Weston Massinghay and another prominent Liberal whose name I can't
+remember, the three men Tarvrille had promised and Esmeer, Lord
+Wrassleton, Waulsort, the member for Monckton, Neal and several
+others.  We began a little coldly, with duologues, but the
+conversation was already becoming general--so far as such a long
+table permitted--when the fire asserted itself.
+
+It asserted itself first as a penetrating and emphatic smell of
+burning rubber,--it was caused by the fusing of an electric wire.
+The reek forced its way into the discussion of the Pekin massacres
+that had sprung up between Evesham, Waulsort, and the others at the
+end of the table.  "Something burning," said the man next to me.
+
+"Something must be burning," said Panmure.
+
+Tarvrille hated undignified interruptions.  He had a particularly
+imperturbable butler with a cadaverous sad face and an eye of rigid
+disapproval.  He spoke to this individual over his shoulder.  "Just
+see, will you," he said, and caught up the pause in the talk to his
+left.
+
+Wilkins was asking questions, and I, too, was curious.  The story of
+the siege of the Legations in China in the year 1900 and all that
+followed upon that, is just one of those disturbing interludes in
+history that refuse to join on to that general scheme of
+protestation by which civilisation is maintained.  It is a break in
+the general flow of experience as disconcerting to statecraft as the
+robbery of my knife and the scuffle that followed it had been to me
+when I was a boy at Penge.  It is like a tear in a curtain revealing
+quite unexpected backgrounds.  I had never given the business a
+thought for years; now this talk brought back a string of pictures
+to my mind; how the reliefs arrived and the plundering began, how
+section after section of the International Army was drawn into
+murder and pillage, how the infection spread upward until the wives
+of Ministers were busy looting, and the very sentinels stripped and
+crawled like snakes into the Palace they were set to guard.  It did
+not stop at robbery, men were murdered, women, being plundered, were
+outraged, children were butchered, strong men had found themselves
+with arms in a lawless, defenceless city, and this had followed.
+Now it was all recalled.
+
+"Respectable ladies addicted to district visiting at home were as
+bad as any one," said Panmure.  "Glazebrook told me of one--flushed
+like a woman at a bargain sale, he said--and when he pointed out to
+her that the silk she'd got was bloodstained, she just said, 'Oh,
+bother!' and threw it aside and went back. . . ."
+
+We became aware that Tarvrille's butler had returned.  We tried not
+to seem to listen.
+
+"Beg pardon, m'lord," he said.  "The house IS on fire, m'lord."
+
+"Upstairs, m'lord."
+
+"Just overhead, m'lord."
+
+"The maids are throwing water, m'lord, and I've telephoned FIRE."
+
+"No, m'lord, no immediate danger."
+
+"It's all right," said Tarvrille to the table generally.  "Go on!
+It's not a general conflagration, and the fire brigade won't be five
+minutes.  Don't see that it's our affair.  The stuff's insured.
+They say old Lady Paskershortly was dreadful.  Like a harpy.  The
+Dowager Empress had shown her some little things of hers.  Pet
+things--hidden away.  Susan went straight for them--used to take an
+umbrella for the silks.  Born shoplifter."
+
+It was evident he didn't want his dinner spoilt, and we played up
+loyally.
+
+"This is recorded history," said Wilkins,--"practically.  It makes
+one wonder about unrecorded history.  In India, for example."
+
+But nobody touched that.
+
+"Thompson," said Tarvrille to the imperturbable butler, and
+indicating the table generally, "champagne.  Champagne.  Keep it
+going."
+
+"M'lord," and Thompson marshalled his assistants.
+
+Some man I didn't know began to remember things about Mandalay.
+"It's queer," he said, "how people break out at times;" and told his
+story of an army doctor, brave, public-spirited, and, as it
+happened, deeply religious, who was caught one evening by the
+excitement of plundering--and stole and hid, twisted the wrist of a
+boy until it broke, and was afterwards overcome by wild remorse.
+
+I watched Evesham listening intently.  "Strange," he said, "very
+strange.  We are such stuff as thieves are made of.  And in China,
+too, they murdered people--for the sake of murdering.  Apart, so to
+speak, from mercenary considerations.  I'm afraid there's no doubt
+of it in certain cases.  No doubt at all.  Young soldiers fresh from
+German high schools and English homes!"
+
+"Did OUR people?" asked some patriot.
+
+"Not so much.  But I'm afraid there were cases. . . .  Some of the
+Indian troops were pretty bad."
+
+Gane picked up the tale with confirmations.
+
+It is all printed in the vividest way as a picture upon my memory,
+so that were I a painter I think I could give the deep rich browns
+and warm greys beyond the brightly lit table, the various
+distinguished faces, strongly illuminated, interested and keen,
+above the black and white of evening dress, the alert menservants
+with their heavier, clean-shaved faces indistinctly seen in the
+dimness behind.  Then this was coloured emotionally for me by my
+aching sense of loss and sacrifice, and by the chance trend of our
+talk to the breaches and unrealities of the civilised scheme.  We
+seemed a little transitory circle of light in a universe of darkness
+and violence; an effect to which the diminishing smell of burning
+rubber, the trampling of feet overhead, the swish of water, added
+enormously.  Everybody--unless, perhaps, it was Evesham--drank
+rather carelessly because of the suppressed excitement of our
+situation, and talked the louder and more freely.
+
+"But what a flimsy thing our civilisation is!" said Evesham; "a mere
+thin net of habits and associations!"
+
+"I suppose those men came back," said Wilkins.
+
+"Lady Paskershortly did!" chuckled Evesham.
+
+"How do they fit it in with the rest of their lives?"  Wilkins
+speculated.  "I suppose there's Pekin-stained police officers,
+Pekin-stained J. P.'s--trying petty pilferers in the severest
+manner." . . .
+
+Then for a time things became preposterous.  There was a sudden
+cascade of water by the fireplace, and then absurdly the ceiling
+began to rain upon us, first at this point and then that.  "My new
+suit!" cried some one.  "Perrrrrr-up pe-rr"--a new vertical line of
+blackened water would establish itself and form a spreading pool
+upon the gleaming cloth.  The men nearest would arrange catchment
+areas of plates and flower bowls.  "Draw up!" said Tarvrille, "draw
+up.  That's the bad end of the table!"  He turned to the
+imperturbable butler.  "Take round bath towels," he said; and
+presently the men behind us were offering--with inflexible dignity--
+"Port wine, Sir.  Bath towel, Sir!"  Waulsort, with streaks of
+blackened water on his forehead, was suddenly reminded of a wet year
+when he had followed the French army manoeuvres.  An animated
+dispute sprang up between him and Neal about the relative efficiency
+of the new French and German field guns.  Wrassleton joined in and a
+little drunken shrivelled Oxford don of some sort with a black-
+splashed shirt front who presently silenced them all by the
+immensity and particularity of his knowledge of field artillery.
+Then the talk drifted to Sedan and the effect of dead horses upon
+drinking-water, which brought Wrassleton and Weston Massinghay into
+a dispute of great vigour and emphasis.  "The trouble in South
+Africa," said Weston Massinghay, "wasn't that we didn't boil our
+water.  It was that we didn't boil our men.  The Boers drank the
+same stuff we did.  THEY didn't get dysentery."
+
+That argument went on for some time.  I was attacked across the
+table by a man named Burshort about my Endowment of Motherhood
+schemes, but in the gaps of that debate I could still hear Weston
+Massinghay at intervals repeat in a rather thickened voice: "THEY
+didn't get dysentery."
+
+I think Evesham went early.  The rest of us clustered more and more
+closely towards the drier end of the room, the table was pushed
+along, and the area beneath the extinguished conflagration abandoned
+to a tinkling, splashing company of pots and pans and bowls and
+baths.  Everybody was now disposed to be hilarious and noisy, to say
+startling and aggressive things; we must have sounded a queer
+clamour to a listener in the next room.  The devil inspired them to
+begin baiting me.  "Ours isn't the Tory party any more," said
+Burshort.  "Remington has made it the Obstetric Party."
+
+"That's good!" said Weston Massinghay, with all his teeth gleaming;
+"I shall use that against you in the House!"
+
+"I shall denounce you for abusing private confidences if you do,"
+said Tarvrille.
+
+"Remington wants us to give up launching Dreadnoughts and launch
+babies instead," Burshort urged.  "For the price of one Dreadnought--"
+
+The little shrivelled don who had been omniscient about guns joined
+in the baiting, and displayed himself a venomous creature.
+Something in his eyes told me he knew Isabel and hated me for it.
+"Love and fine thinking," he began, a little thickly, and knocking
+over a wine-glass with a too easy gesture.  "Love and fine thinking.
+Two things don't go together.  No philosophy worth a damn ever came
+out of excesses of love.  Salt Lake City--Piggott--Ag--Agapemone
+again--no works to matter."
+
+Everybody laughed.
+
+"Got to rec'nise these facts," said my assailant.  "Love and fine
+think'n pretty phrase--attractive.  Suitable for p'litical
+dec'rations.  Postcard, Christmas, gilt lets, in a wreath of white
+flow's.  Not oth'wise valu'ble."
+
+I made some remark, I forget what, but he overbore me.
+
+Real things we want are Hate--Hate and COARSE think'n.  I b'long to
+the school of Mrs. F's Aunt--"
+
+"What?" said some one, intent.
+
+"In 'Little Dorrit,'" explained Tarvrille; "go on!"
+
+"Hate a fool," said my assailant.
+
+Tarvrille glanced at me.  I smiled to conceal the loss of my temper.
+
+"Hate," said the little man, emphasising his point with a clumsy
+fist.  "Hate's the driving force.  What's m'rality?--hate of rotten
+goings on.  What's patriotism?--hate of int'loping foreigners.
+What's Radicalism?--hate of lords.  What's Toryism?--hate of
+disturbance.  It's all hate--hate from top to bottom.  Hate of a
+mess.  Remington owned it the other day, said he hated a mu'll.
+There you are!  If you couldn't get hate into an election, damn it
+(hic) people wou'n't poll.  Poll for love!--no' me!"
+
+He paused, but before any one could speak he had resumed.
+
+"Then this about fine thinking.  Like going into a bear pit armed
+with a tagle--talgent--talgent galv'nometer.  Like going to fight a
+mad dog with Shasepear and the Bible.  Fine thinking--what we want
+is the thickes' thinking we can get.  Thinking that stands up alone.
+Taf Reform means work for all, thassort of thing."
+
+The gentleman from Cambridge paused.  "YOU a flag!" he said.  "I'd
+as soon go to ba'ell und' wet tissue paper!"
+
+My best answer on the spur of the moment was:
+
+"The Japanese did."  Which was absurd.
+
+I went on to some other reply, I forget exactly what, and the talk
+of the whole table drew round me.  It was an extraordinary
+revelation to me.  Every one was unusually careless and outspoken,
+and it was amazing how manifestly they echoed the feeling of this
+old Tory spokesman.  They were quite friendly to me, they regarded
+me and the BLUE WEEKLY as valuable party assets for Toryism, but it
+was clear they attached no more importance to what were my realities
+than they did to the remarkable therapeutic claims of Mrs. Eddy.
+They were flushed and amused, perhaps they went a little too far in
+their resolves to draw me, but they left the impression on my mind
+of men irrevocably set upon narrow and cynical views of political
+life.  For them the political struggle was a game, whose counters
+were human hate and human credulity; their real aim was just every
+one's aim, the preservation of the class and way of living to which
+their lives were attuned.  They did not know how tired I was, how
+exhausted mentally and morally, nor how cruel their convergent
+attack on me chanced to be.  But my temper gave way, I became tart
+and fierce, perhaps my replies were a trifle absurd, and Tarvrille,
+with that quick eye and sympathy of his, came to the rescue.  Then
+for a time I sat silent and drank port wine while the others talked.
+The disorder of the room, the still dripping ceiling, the noise, the
+displaced ties and crumpled shirts of my companions, jarred on my
+tormented nerves. . . .
+
+It was long past midnight when we dispersed.  I remember Tarvrille
+coming with me into the hall, and then suggesting we should go
+upstairs to see the damage.  A manservant carried up two flickering
+candles for us.  One end of the room was gutted, curtains, hangings,
+several chairs and tables were completely burnt, the panelling was
+scorched and warped, three smashed windows made the candles flare
+and gutter, and some scraps of broken china still lay on the puddled
+floor.
+
+As we surveyed this, Lady Tarvrille appeared, back from some party,
+a slender, white-cloaked, satin-footed figure with amazed blue eyes
+beneath her golden hair.  I remember how stupidly we laughed at her
+surprise.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+I parted from Panmure at the corner of Aldington Street, and went my
+way alone.  But I did not go home, I turned westward and walked for
+a long way, and then struck northward aimlessly.  I was too
+miserable to go to my house.
+
+I wandered about that night like a man who has discovered his Gods
+are dead.  I can look back now detached yet sympathetic upon that
+wild confusion of moods and impulses, and by it I think I can
+understand, oh! half the wrongdoing and blundering in the world.
+
+I do not feel now the logical force of the process that must have
+convinced me then that I had made my sacrifice and spent my strength
+in vain.  At no time had I been under any illusion that the Tory
+party had higher ideals than any other party, yet it came to me like
+a thing newly discovered that the men I had to work with had for the
+most part no such dreams, no sense of any collective purpose, no
+atom of the faith I held.  They were just as immediately intent upon
+personal ends, just as limited by habits of thought, as the men in
+any other group or party.  Perhaps I had slipped unawares for a time
+into the delusions of a party man--but I do not think so.
+
+No, it was the mood of profound despondency that had followed upon
+the abrupt cessation of my familiar intercourse with Isabel, that
+gave this fact that had always been present in my mind its quality
+of devastating revelation.  It seemed as though I had never seen
+before nor suspected the stupendous gap between the chaotic aims,
+the routine, the conventional acquiescences, the vulgarisations of
+the personal life, and that clearly conscious development and
+service of a collective thought and purpose at which my efforts
+aimed.  I had thought them but a little way apart, and now I saw
+they were separated by all the distance between earth and heaven.  I
+saw now in myself and every one around me, a concentration upon
+interests close at hand, an inability to detach oneself from the
+provocations, tendernesses, instinctive hates, dumb lusts and shy
+timidities that touched one at every point; and, save for rare
+exalted moments, a regardlessness of broader aims and remoter
+possibilities that made the white passion of statecraft seem as
+unearthly and irrelevant to human life as the story an astronomer
+will tell, half proven but altogether incredible, of habitable
+planets and answering intelligences, suns' distances uncounted
+across the deep.  It seemed to me I had aspired too high and thought
+too far, had mocked my own littleness by presumption, had given the
+uttermost dear reality of life for a theoriser's dream.
+
+All through that wandering agony of mine that night a dozen threads
+of thought interwove; now I was a soul speaking in protest to God
+against a task too cold and high for it, and now I was an angry man,
+scorned and pointed upon, who had let life cheat him of the ultimate
+pride of his soul.  Now I was the fool of ambition, who opened his
+box of gold to find blank emptiness, and now I was a spinner of
+flimsy thoughts, whose web tore to rags at a touch.  I realised for
+the first time how much I had come to depend upon the mind and faith
+of Isabel, how she had confirmed me and sustained me, how little
+strength I had to go on with our purposes now that she had vanished
+from my life.  She had been the incarnation of those great
+abstractions, the saving reality, the voice that answered back.
+There was no support that night in the things that had been.  We
+were alone together on the cliff for ever more!--that was very
+pretty in its way, but it had no truth whatever that could help me
+now, no ounce of sustaining value.  I wanted Isabel that night, no
+sentiment or memory of her, but Isabel alive,--to talk to me, to
+touch me, to hold me together.  I wanted unendurably the dusky
+gentleness of her presence, the consolation of her voice.
+
+We were alone together on the cliff!  I startled a passing cabman
+into interest by laughing aloud at that magnificent and
+characteristic sentimentality.  What a lie it was, and how
+satisfying it had been!  That was just where we shouldn't remain.
+We of all people had no distinction from that humanity whose lot is
+to forget.  We should go out to other interests, new experiences,
+new demands.  That tall and intricate fabric of ambitious
+understandings we had built up together in our intimacy would be the
+first to go; and last perhaps to endure with us would be a few gross
+memories of sights and sounds, and trivial incidental excitements. . . .
+
+I had a curious feeling that night that I had lost touch with life
+for a long time, and had now been reminded of its quality.  That
+infernal little don's parody of my ruling phrase, "Hate and coarse
+thinking," stuck in my thoughts like a poisoned dart, a centre of
+inflammation.  Just as a man who is debilitated has no longer the
+vitality to resist an infection, so my mind, slackened by the crisis
+of my separation from Isabel, could find no resistance to his
+emphatic suggestion.  It seemed to me that what he had said was
+overpoweringly true, not only of contemporary life, but of all
+possible human life.  Love is the rare thing, the treasured thing;
+you lock it away jealously and watch, and well you may; hate and
+aggression and force keep the streets and rule the world.  And fine
+thinking is, in the rough issues of life, weak thinking, is a
+balancing indecisive process, discovers with disloyal impartiality a
+justice and a defect on each disputing side.  "Good honest men," as
+Dayton calls them, rule the world, with a way of thinking out
+decisions like shooting cartloads of bricks, and with a steadfast
+pleasure in hostility.  Dayton liked to call his antagonists
+"blaggards and scoundrels"--it justified his opposition--the Lords
+were "scoundrels," all people richer than be were "scoundrels," all
+Socialists, all troublesome poor people; he liked to think of jails
+and justice being done.  His public spirit was saturated with the
+sombre joys of conflict and the pleasant thought of condign
+punishment for all recalcitrant souls.  That was the way of it, I
+perceived.  That had survival value, as the biologists say.  He was
+fool enough in politics to be a consistent and happy politician. . . .
+
+Hate and coarse thinking; how the infernal truth of the phrase beat
+me down that night!  I couldn't remember that I had known this all
+along, and that it did not really matter in the slightest degree.  I
+had worked it all out long ago in other terms, when I had seen how
+all parties stood for interests inevitably, and how the purpose in
+life achieves itself, if it achieves itself at all, as a bye product
+of the war of individuals and classes.  Hadn't I always known that
+science and philosophy elaborate themselves in spite of all the
+passion and narrowness of men, in spite of the vanities and weakness
+of their servants, in spite of all the heated disorder of
+contemporary things?  Wasn't it my own phrase to speak of "that
+greater mind in men, in which we are but moments and transitorily
+lit cells?"  Hadn't I known that the spirit of man still speaks like
+a thing that struggles out of mud and slime, and that the mere
+effort to speak means choking and disaster?  Hadn't I known that we
+who think without fear and speak without discretion will not come to
+our own for the next two thousand years?
+
+It was the last was most forgotten of all that faith mislaid.
+Before mankind, in my vision that night, stretched new centuries of
+confusion, vast stupid wars, hastily conceived laws, foolish
+temporary triumphs of order, lapses, set-backs, despairs,
+catastrophes, new beginnings, a multitudinous wilderness of time, a
+nigh plotless drama of wrong-headed energies.  In order to assuage
+my parting from Isabel we had set ourselves to imagine great rewards
+for our separation, great personal rewards; we had promised
+ourselves success visible and shining in our lives.  To console
+ourselves in our separation we had made out of the BLUE WEEKLY and
+our young Tory movement preposterously enormous things-as though
+those poor fertilising touches at the soil were indeed the
+germinating seeds of the millennium, as though a million lives such
+as ours had not to contribute before the beginning of the beginning.
+That poor pretence had failed.  That magnificent proposition
+shrivelled to nothing in the black loneliness of that night.
+
+I saw that there were to be no such compensations.  So far as my
+real services to mankind were concerned I had to live an
+unrecognised and unrewarded life.  If I made successes it would be
+by the way.  Our separation would alter nothing of that.  My scandal
+would cling to me now for all my life, a thing affecting
+relationships, embarrassing and hampering my spirit.  I should
+follow the common lot of those who live by the imagination, and
+follow it now in infinite loneliness of soul; the one good
+comforter, the one effectual familiar, was lost to me for ever; I
+should do good and evil together, no one caring to understand; I
+should produce much weary work, much bad-spirited work, much
+absolute evil; the good in me would be too often ill-expressed and
+missed or misinterpreted.  In the end I might leave one gleaming
+flake or so amidst the slag heaps for a moment of postmortem
+sympathy.  I was afraid beyond measure of my derelict self.  Because
+I believed with all my soul in love and fine thinking that did not
+mean that I should necessarily either love steadfastly or think
+finely.  I remember how I fell talking to God--I think I talked out
+loud.  "Why do I care for these things?" I cried, "when I can do so
+little!  Why am I apart from the jolly thoughtless fighting life of
+men?  These dreams fade to nothingness, and leave me bare!"
+
+I scolded.  "Why don't you speak to a man, show yourself?  I thought
+I had a gleam of you in Isabel,--and then you take her away.  Do you
+really think I can carry on this game alone, doing your work in
+darkness and silence, living in muddled conflict, half living, half
+dying?"
+
+Grotesque analogies arose in my mind.  I discovered a strange
+parallelism between my now tattered phrase of "Love and fine
+thinking" and the "Love and the Word" of Christian thought.  Was it
+possible the Christian propaganda had at the outset meant just that
+system of attitudes I had been feeling my way towards from the very
+beginning of my life?  Had I spent a lifetime making my way back to
+Christ?  It mocks humanity to think how Christ has been overlaid.  I
+went along now, recalling long-neglected phrases and sentences; I
+had a new vision of that great central figure preaching love with
+hate and coarse thinking even in the disciples about Him, rising to
+a tidal wave at last in that clamour for Barabbas, and the public
+satisfaction in His fate. . . .
+
+It's curious to think that hopeless love and a noisy disordered
+dinner should lead a man to these speculations, but they did.  "He
+DID mean that!" I said, and suddenly thought of what a bludgeon
+they'd made of His Christianity.  Athwart that perplexing, patient
+enigma sitting inaudibly among publicans and sinners, danced and
+gibbered a long procession of the champions of orthodoxy.  "He
+wasn't human," I said, and remembered that last despairing cry, "My
+God!  My God! why hast Thou forsaken Me?"
+
+"Oh, HE forsakes every one," I said, flying out as a tired mind
+will, with an obvious repartee. . . .
+
+I passed at a bound from such monstrous theology to a towering rage
+against the Baileys.  In an instant and with no sense of absurdity I
+wanted--in the intervals of love and fine thinking--to fling about
+that strenuously virtuous couple; I wanted to kick Keyhole of the
+PEEPSHOW into the gutter and make a common massacre of all the
+prosperous rascaldom that makes a trade and rule of virtue.  I can
+still feel that transition.  In a moment I had reached that phase of
+weakly decisive anger which is for people of my temperament the
+concomitant of exhaustion.
+
+"I will have her," I cried.  "By Heaven!  I WILL have her!  Life
+mocks me and cheats me.  Nothing can be made good to me again. . . .
+Why shouldn't I save what I can?  I can't save myself without
+her. . . ."
+
+I remember myself--as a sort of anti-climax to that--rather
+tediously asking my way home.  I was somewhere in the neighbourhood
+of Holland Park. . . .
+
+It was then between one and two.  I felt that I could go home now
+without any risk of meeting Margaret.  It had been the thought of
+returning to Margaret that had sent me wandering that night.  It is
+one of the ugliest facts I recall about that time of crisis, the
+intense aversion I felt for Margaret.  No sense of her goodness, her
+injury and nobility, and the enormous generosity of her forgiveness,
+sufficed to mitigate that.  I hope now that in this book I am able
+to give something of her silvery splendour, but all through this
+crisis I felt nothing of that.  There was a triumphant kindliness
+about her that I found intolerable.  She meant to be so kind to me,
+to offer unstinted consolation, to meet my needs, to supply just all
+she imagined Isabel had given me.
+
+When I left Tarvrille's, I felt I could anticipate exactly how she
+would meet my homecoming.  She would be perplexed by my crumpled
+shirt front, on which I had spilt some drops of wine; she would
+overlook that by an effort, explain it sentimentally, resolve it
+should make no difference to her.  She would want to know who had
+been present, what we had talked about, show the alertest interest
+in whatever it was--it didn't matter what. . . .  No, I couldn't
+face her.
+
+So I did not reach my study until two o'clock.
+
+There, I remember, stood the new and very beautiful old silver
+candlesticks that she had set there two days since to please me--the
+foolish kindliness of it!  But in her search for expression,
+Margaret heaped presents upon me.  She had fitted these candlesticks
+with electric lights, and I must, I suppose, have lit them to write
+my note to Isabel.  "Give me a word--the world aches without you,"
+was all I scrawled, though I fully meant that she should come to me.
+I knew, though I ought not to have known, that now she had left her
+flat, she was with the Balfes--she was to have been married from the
+Balfes--and I sent my letter there.  And I went out into the silent
+square and posted the note forthwith, because I knew quite clearly
+that if I left it until morning I should never post it at all.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+I had a curious revulsion of feeling that morning of our meeting.
+(Of all places for such a clandestine encounter she had chosen the
+bridge opposite Buckingham Palace.)  Overnight I had been full of
+self pity, and eager for the comfort of Isabel's presence.  But the
+ill-written scrawl in which she had replied had been full of the
+suggestion of her own weakness and misery.  And when I saw her, my
+own selfish sorrows were altogether swept away by a wave of pitiful
+tenderness.  Something had happened to her that I did not
+understand.  She was manifestly ill.  She came towards me wearily,
+she who had always borne herself so bravely; her shoulders seemed
+bent, and her eyes were tired, and her face white and drawn.  All my
+life has been a narrow self-centred life; no brothers, no sisters or
+children or weak things had ever yet made any intimate appeal to me,
+and suddenly--I verily believe for the first time in my life!--I
+felt a great passion of protective ownership; I felt that here was
+something that I could die to shelter, something that meant more
+than joy or pride or splendid ambitions or splendid creation to me,
+a new kind of hold upon me, a new power in the world.  Some sealed
+fountain was opened in my breast.  I knew that I could love Isabel
+broken, Isabel beaten, Isabel ugly and in pain, more than I could
+love any sweet or delightful or glorious thing in life.  I didn't
+care any more for anything in the world but Isabel, and that I
+should protect her.  I trembled as I came near her, and could
+scarcely speak to her for the emotion that filled me. . . .
+
+"I had your letter," I said.
+
+"I had yours."
+
+"Where can we talk?"
+
+I remember my lame sentences.  "We'll have a boat.  That's best
+here."
+
+I took her to the little boat-house, and there we hired a boat, and
+I rowed in silence under the bridge and into the shade of a tree.
+The square grey stone masses of the Foreign Office loomed through
+the twigs, I remember, and a little space of grass separated us from
+the pathway and the scrutiny of passers-by.  And there we talked.
+
+"I had to write to you," I said.
+
+"I had to come."
+
+"When are you to be married?"
+
+"Thursday week."
+
+"Well?" I said.  "But--can we?"
+
+She leant forward and scrutinised my face with eyes wide open.
+"What do you mean?" she said at last in a whisper.
+
+"Can we stand it?  After all?"
+
+I looked at her white face.  "Can you?" I said.
+
+She whispered.  "Your career?"
+
+Then suddenly her face was contorted,--she wept silently, exactly as
+a child tormented beyond endurance might suddenly weep. . . .
+
+"Oh! I don't care," I cried, "now.  I don't care.  Damn the whole
+system of things!  Damn all this patching of the irrevocable!  I
+want to take care of you, Isabel! and have you with me."
+
+"I can't stand it," she blubbered.
+
+"You needn't stand it.  I thought it was best for you. . . .  I
+thought indeed it was best for you.  I thought even you wanted it
+like that."
+
+"Couldn't I live alone--as I meant to do?"
+
+"No," I said, "you couldn't.  You're not strong enough.  I've
+thought of that; I've got to shelter you."
+
+"And I want you," I went on.  "I'm not strong enough--I can't stand
+life without you."
+
+She stopped weeping, she made a great effort to control herself, and
+looked at me steadfastly for a moment.  "I was going to kill
+myself," she whispered.  "I was going to kill myself quietly--
+somehow.  I meant to wait a bit and have an accident.  I thought--
+you didn't understand.  You were a man, and couldn't understand. . . ."
+
+"People can't do as we thought we could do," I said.  "We've gone
+too far together."
+
+"Yes," she said, and I stared into her eyes.
+
+"The horror of it," she whispered.  "The horror of being handed
+over.  It's just only begun to dawn upon me, seeing him now as I do.
+He tries to be kind to me. . . .  I didn't know.  I felt adventurous
+before. . . .  It makes me feel like all the women in the world who
+have ever been owned and subdued. . . .  It's not that he isn't the
+best of men, it's because I'm a part of you. . . .  I can't go
+through with it.  If I go through with it, I shall be left--robbed
+of pride--outraged--a woman beaten. . . ."
+
+"I know," I said, "I know."
+
+"I want to live alone. . . .  I don't care for anything now but just
+escape.  If you can help me. . . ."
+
+"I must take you away.  There's nothing for us but to go away
+together."
+
+"But your work," she said; "your career!  Margaret!  Our promises!"
+
+"We've made a mess of things, Isabel--or things have made a mess of
+us.  I don't know which.  Our flags are in the mud, anyhow.  It's
+too late to save those other things!  They have to go.  You can't
+make terms with defeat.  I thought it was Margaret needed me most.
+But it's you.  And I need you.  I didn't think of that either.  I
+haven't a doubt left in the world now.  We've got to leave
+everything rather than leave each other.  I'm sure of it.  Now we
+have gone so far.  We've got to go right down to earth and begin
+again. . . .  Dear, I WANT disgrace with you. . . ."
+
+So I whispered to her as she sat crumpled together on the faded
+cushions of the boat, this white and weary young woman who had been
+so valiant and careless a girl.  "I don't care," I said.  "I don't
+care for anything, if I can save you out of the wreckage we have
+made together."
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+The next day I went to the office of the BLUE WEEKLY in order to get
+as much as possible of its affairs in working order before I left
+London with Isabel.  I just missed Shoesmith in the lower office.
+Upstairs I found Britten amidst a pile of outside articles,
+methodically reading the title of each and sometimes the first half-
+dozen lines, and either dropping them in a growing heap on the floor
+for a clerk to return, or putting them aside for consideration.  I
+interrupted him, squatted on the window-sill of the open window, and
+sketched out my ideas for the session.
+
+"You're far-sighted," he remarked at something of mine which reached
+out ahead.
+
+"I like to see things prepared," I answered.
+
+"Yes," he said, and ripped open the envelope of a fresh aspirant.
+
+I was silent while he read.
+
+"You're going away with Isabel Rivers," he said abruptly.
+
+"Well!" I said, amazed.
+
+"I know," he said, and lost his breath.  "Not my business.  Only--"
+
+It was queer to find Britten afraid to say a thing.
+
+"It's not playing the game," he said.
+
+"What do you know?"
+
+"Everything that matters."
+
+"Some games," I said, "are too hard to play."
+
+There came a pause between us.
+
+"I didn't know you were watching all this," I said.
+
+"Yes," he answered, after a pause, "I've watched."
+
+"Sorry--sorry you don't approve."
+
+"It means smashing such an infernal lot of things, Remington."
+
+I did not answer.
+
+"You're going away then?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Soon?"
+
+"Right away."
+
+"There's your wife."
+
+"I know."
+
+"Shoesmith--whom you're pledged to in a manner.  You've just picked
+him out and made him conspicuous.  Every one will know.  Oh! of
+course--it's nothing to you.  Honour--"
+
+"I know."
+
+"Common decency."
+
+I nodded.
+
+"All this movement of ours.  That's what I care for most. . . .
+It's come to be a big thing, Remington."
+
+"That will go on."
+
+"We have a use for you--no one else quite fills it.  No one. . . .
+I'm not sure it will go on."
+
+"Do you think I haven't thought of all these things?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders, and rejected two papers unread.
+
+"I knew," he remarked, "when you came back from America.  You were
+alight with it." Then he let his bitterness gleam for a moment.
+"But I thought you would stick to your bargain."
+
+"It's not so much choice as you think," I said.
+
+"There's always a choice."
+
+"No," I said.
+
+He scrutinised my face.
+
+"I can't live without her--I can't work.  She's all mixed up with
+this--and everything.  And besides, there's things you can't
+understand.  There's feelings you've never felt. . . .  You don't
+understand how much we've been to one another."
+
+Britten frowned and thought.
+
+"Some things one's GOT to do," he threw out.
+
+"Some things one can't do."
+
+"These infernal institutions--"
+
+"Some one must begin," I said.
+
+He shook his head.  "Not YOU," he said.  "No!"
+
+He stretched out his hands on the desk before him, and spoke again.
+
+"Remington," he said, "I've thought of this business day and night
+too.  It matters to me.  It matters immensely to me.  In a way--it's
+a thing one doesn't often say to a man--I've loved you.  I'm the
+sort of man who leads a narrow life. . . .  But you've been
+something fine and good for me, since that time, do you remember?
+when we talked about Mecca together."
+
+I nodded.
+
+"Yes.  And you'll always be something fine and good for me anyhow.
+I know things about you,--qualities--no mere act can destroy them. .
+. .  Well, I can tell you, you're doing wrong.  You're going on now
+like a man who is hypnotised and can't turn round.  You're piling
+wrong on wrong.  It was wrong for you two people ever to be lovers."
+
+He paused.
+
+"It gripped us hard," I said.
+
+"Yes!--but in your position!  And hers!  It was vile!"
+
+"You've not been tempted."
+
+"How do you know?  Anyhow--having done that, you ought to have stood
+the consequences and thought of other people.  You could have ended
+it at the first pause for reflection.  You didn't.  You blundered
+again.  You kept on.  You owed a certain secrecy to all of us!  You
+didn't keep it.  You were careless.  You made things worse.  This
+engagement and this publicity!--Damn it, Remington!"
+
+"I know," I said, with smarting eyes.  "Damn it! with all my heart!
+It came of trying to patch. . . .  You CAN'T patch."
+
+"And now, as I care for anything under heaven, Remington, you two
+ought to stand these last consequences--and part.  You ought to
+part.  Other people have to stand things!  Other people have to
+part.  You ought to.  You say--what do you say?  It's loss of so
+much life to lose each other.  So is losing a hand or a leg.  But
+it's what you've incurred.  Amputate.  Take your punishment--After
+all, you chose it."
+
+"Oh, damn!" I said, standing up and going to the window.
+
+"Damn by all means.  I never knew a topic so full of justifiable
+damns.  But you two did choose it.  You ought to stick to your
+undertaking."
+
+I turned upon him with a snarl in my voice.  "My dear Britten!" I
+cried.  "Don't I KNOW I'm doing wrong?  Aren't I in a net?  Suppose
+I don't go!  Is there any right in that?  Do you think we're going
+to be much to ourselves or any one after this parting?  I've been
+thinking all last night of this business, trying it over and over
+again from the beginning.  How was it we went wrong?  Since I came
+back from America--I grant you THAT--but SINCE, there's never been a
+step that wasn't forced, that hadn't as much right in it or more, as
+wrong.  You talk as though I was a thing of steel that could bend
+this way or that and never change.  You talk as though Isabel was a
+cat one could give to any kind of owner. . . .  We two are things
+that change and grow and alter all the time.  We're--so interwoven
+that being parted now will leave us just misshapen cripples. . . .
+You don't know the motives, you don't know the rush and feel of
+things, you don't know how it was with us, and how it is with us.
+You don't know the hunger for the mere sight of one another; you
+don't know anything."
+
+Britten looked at his finger-nails closely.  His red face puckered
+to a wry frown.  "Haven't we all at times wanted the world put
+back?" he grunted, and looked hard and close at one particular nail.
+
+There was a long pause.
+
+"I want her," I said, "and I'm going to have her.  I'm too tired for
+balancing the right or wrong of it any more.  You can't separate
+them.  I saw her yesterday. . . .  She's--ill. . . .  I'd take her
+now, if death were just outside the door waiting for us."
+
+"Torture?"
+
+I thought.  "Yes."
+
+"For her?"
+
+"There isn't," I said.
+
+"If there was?"
+
+I made no answer.
+
+"It's blind Want.  And there's nothing ever been put into you to
+stand against it.  What are you going to do with the rest of your
+lives?"
+
+"No end of things."
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"I don't believe you are right," I said.  "I believe we can save
+something--"
+
+Britten shook his head.  "Some scraps of salvage won't excuse you,"
+he said.
+
+His indignation rose.  "In the middle of life!" he said.  "No man
+has a right to take his hand from the plough!"
+
+He leant forward on his desk and opened an argumentative palm.  "You
+know, Remington," he said, "and I know, that if this could be fended
+off for six months--if you could be clapped in prison, or got out of
+the way somehow,--until this marriage was all over and settled down
+for a year, say--you know then you two could meet, curious, happy,
+as friends.  Saved!  You KNOW it."
+
+I turned and stared at him.  "You're wrong, Britten," I said.  "And
+does it matter if we could?"
+
+I found that in talking to him I could frame the apologetics I had
+not been able to find for myself alone.
+
+"I am certain of one thing, Britten.  It is our duty not to hush up
+this scandal."
+
+He raised his eyebrows.  I perceived now the element of absurdity in
+me, but at the time I was as serious as a man who is burning.
+
+"It's our duty," I went on, "to smash now openly in the sight of
+every one.  Yes!  I've got that as clean and plain--as prison
+whitewash.  I am convinced that we have got to be public to the
+uttermost now--I mean it--until every corner of our world knows this
+story, knows it fully, adds it to the Parnell story and the Ashton
+Dean story and the Carmel story and the Witterslea story, and all
+the other stories that have picked man after man out of English
+public life, the men with active imaginations, the men of strong
+initiative.  To think this tottering old-woman ridden Empire should
+dare to waste a man on such a score!  You say I ought to be
+penitent--"
+
+Britten shook his head and smiled very faintly.
+
+"I'm boiling with indignation," I said.  "I lay in bed last night
+and went through it all.  What in God's name was to be expected of
+us but what has happened?  I went through my life bit by bit last
+night, I recalled all I've had to do with virtue and women, and all
+I was told and how I was prepared.  I was born into cowardice and
+debasement.  We all are.  Our generation's grimy with hypocrisy.  I
+came to the most beautiful things in life--like peeping Tom of
+Coventry.  I was never given a light, never given a touch of natural
+manhood by all this dingy, furtive, canting, humbugging English
+world.  Thank God! I'll soon be out of it!  The shame of it!  The
+very savages in Australia initiate their children better than the
+English do to-day.  Neither of us was ever given a view of what they
+call morality that didn't make it show as shabby subservience, as
+the meanest discretion, an abject submission to unreasonable
+prohibitions! meek surrender of mind and body to the dictation of
+pedants and old women and fools.  We weren't taught--we were mumbled
+at!  And when we found that the thing they called unclean, unclean,
+was Pagan beauty--God! it was a glory to sin, Britten, it was a
+pride and splendour like bathing in the sunlight after dust and
+grime!"
+
+"Yes," said Britten.  "That's all very well--"
+
+I interrupted him.  "I know there's a case--I'm beginning to think
+it a valid case against us; but we never met it!  There's a steely
+pride in self restraint,  a nobility of chastity, but only for those
+who see and think and act--untrammeled and unafraid.  The other
+thing, the current thing, why! it's worth as much as the chastity of
+a monkey kept in a cage by itself!"  I put my foot in a chair, and
+urged my case upon him.  "This is a dirty world, Britten, simply
+because it is a muddled world, and the thing you call morality is
+dirtier now than the thing you call immorality.  Why don't the
+moralists pick their stuff out of the slime if they care for it, and
+wipe it?--damn them!  I am burning now to say: 'Yes, we did this and
+this,' to all the world.  All the world! . . .  I will!"
+
+Britten rubbed the palm of his hand on the corner of his desk.
+"That's all very well, Remington," he said.  "You mean to go."
+
+He stopped and began again.  "If you didn't know you were in the
+wrong you wouldn't be so damned rhetorical.  You're in the wrong.
+It's as plain to you as it is to me.  You're leaving a big work,
+you're leaving a wife who trusted you, to go and live with your
+jolly mistress. . . .  You won't see you're a statesman that
+matters, that no single man, maybe, might come to such influence as
+you in the next ten years.  You're throwing yourself away and
+accusing your country of rejecting you."
+
+He swung round upon his swivel at me.  "Remington," he said, "have
+you forgotten the immense things our movement means?"
+
+I thought.  "Perhaps I am rhetorical," I said.
+
+"But the things we might achieve!  If you'd only stay now--even now!
+Oh! you'd suffer a little socially, but what of that?  You'd be able
+to go on--perhaps all the better for hostility of the kind you'd
+get.  You know, Remington--you KNOW."
+
+I thought and went back to his earlier point.  "If I am rhetorical,
+at any rate it's a living feeling behind it.  Yes, I remember all
+the implications of our aims--very splendid, very remote.  But just
+now it's rather like offering to give a freezing man the sunlit
+Himalayas from end to end in return for his camp-fire.  When you
+talk of me and my jolly mistress, it isn't fair.  That misrepresents
+everything.  I'm not going out of this--for delights.  That's the
+sort of thing men like Snuffles and Keyhole imagine--that excites
+them!  When I think of the things these creatures think!  Ugh!  But
+YOU know better?  You know that physical passion that burns like a
+fire--ends clean.  I'm going for love, Britten--if I sinned for
+passion.  I'm going, Britten, because when I saw her the other day
+she HURT me.  She hurt me damnably, Britten. . . .  I've been a cold
+man--I've led a rhetorical life--you hit me with that word!--I put
+things in a windy way, I know, but what has got hold of me at last
+is her pain.  She's ill.  Don't you understand?  She's a sick thing--
+a weak thing.  She's no more a goddess than I'm a god. . . .  I'm
+not in love with her now; I'm RAW with love for her.  I feel like a
+man that's been flayed.  I have been flayed. . . .  You don't begin
+to imagine the sort of helpless solicitude. . . .  She's not going
+to do things easily; she's ill.  Her courage fails. . . .  It's hard
+to put things when one isn't rhetorical, but it's this, Britten--
+there are distresses that matter more than all the delights or
+achievements in the world. . . .  I made her what she is--as I never
+made Margaret.  I've made her--I've broken her. . . .  I'm going
+with my own woman.  The rest of my life and England, and so forth,
+must square itself to that. . . ."
+
+For a long time, as it seemed, we remained silent and motionless.
+We'd said all we had to say.  My eyes caught a printed slip upon the
+desk before him, and I came back abruptly to the paper.
+
+I picked up this galley proof.  It was one of Winter's essays.
+"This man goes on doing first-rate stuff," I said.  "I hope you will
+keep him going."
+
+He did not answer for a moment or so.  "I'll keep him going," he
+said at last with a sigh.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+I have a letter Margaret wrote me within a week of our flight.  I
+cannot resist transcribing some of it here, because it lights things
+as no word of mine can do.  It is a string of nearly inconsecutive
+thoughts written in pencil in a fine, tall, sprawling hand.  Its
+very inconsecutiveness is essential.  Many words are underlined.  It
+was in answer to one from me; but what I wrote has passed utterly
+from my mind. . . .
+
+"Certainly," she says, "I want to hear from you, but I do not want
+to see you.  There's a sort of abstract YOU that I want to go on
+with.  Something I've made out of you. . . .  I want to know things
+about you--but I don't want to see or feel or imagine.  When some
+day I have got rid of my intolerable sense of proprietorship, it may
+be different.  Then perhaps we may meet again.  I think it is even
+more the loss of our political work and dreams that I am feeling
+than the loss of your presence.  Aching loss.  I thought so much of
+the things we were DOING for the world--had given myself so
+unreservedly.  You've left me with nothing to DO.  I am suddenly at
+loose ends. . . .
+
+"We women are trained to be so dependent on a man.  I've got no life
+of my own at all.  It seems now to me that I wore my clothes even
+for you and your schemes. . . .
+
+"After I have told myself a hundred times why this has happened, I
+ask again, 'Why did he give things up?  Why did he give things
+up?' . . .
+
+"It is just as though you were wilfully dead. . . .
+
+"Then I ask again and again whether this thing need have happened at
+all, whether if I had had a warning, if I had understood better, I
+might not have adapted myself to your restless mind and made this
+catastrophe impossible. . . .
+
+"Oh, my dear! why hadn't you the pluck to hurt me at the beginning,
+and tell me what you thought of me and life?  You didn't give me a
+chance; not a chance.  I suppose you couldn't.  All these things you
+and I stood away from.  You let my first repugnances repel you. . . .
+
+"It is strange to think after all these years that I should be
+asking myself, do I love you? have I loved you?  In a sense I think
+I HATE you.  I feel you have taken my life, dragged it in your wake
+for a time, thrown it aside.  I am resentful.  Unfairly resentful,
+for why should I exact that you should watch and understand my life,
+when clearly I have understood so little of yours.  But I am savage--
+savage at the wrecking of all you were to do.
+
+"Oh, why--why did you give things up?
+
+"No human being is his own to do what he likes with.  You were not
+only pledged to my tiresome, ineffectual companionship, but to great
+purposes.  They ARE great purposes. . . .
+
+"If only I could take up your work as you leave it, with the
+strength you had--then indeed I feel I could let you go--you and
+your young mistress. . . .  All that matters so little to me. . . .
+
+"Yet I think I must indeed love you yourself in my slower way.  At
+times I am mad with jealousy at the thought of all I hadn't the wit
+to give you. . . .  I've always hidden my tears from you--and what
+was in my heart.  It's my nature to hide--and you, you want things
+brought to you to see.  You are so curious as to be almost cruel.
+You don't understand reserves.  You have no mercy with restraints
+and reservations.  You are not really a CIVILISED man at all.  You
+hate pretences--and not only pretences but decent coverings. . . .
+
+"It's only after one has lost love and the chance of loving that
+slow people like myself find what they might have done.  Why wasn't
+I bold and reckless and abandoned?  It's as reasonable to ask that,
+I suppose, as to ask why my hair is fair. . . .
+
+"I go on with these perhapses over and over again here when I find
+myself alone. . . .
+
+"My dear, my dear, you can't think of the desolation of things--I
+shall never go back to that house we furnished together, that was to
+have been the laboratory (do you remember calling it a laboratory?)
+in which you were to forge so much of the new order. . . .
+
+"But, dear, if I can help you--even now--in any way--help both of
+you, I mean. . . .  It tears me when I think of you poor and
+discredited.  You will let me help you if I can--it will be the last
+wrong not to let me do that. . . .
+
+"You had better not get ill.  If you do, and I hear of it--I shall
+come after you with a troupe of doctor's and nurses.  If I am a
+failure as a wife, no one has ever said I was anything but a success
+as a district visitor. . . ."
+
+There are other sheets, but I cannot tell whether they were written
+before or after the ones from which I have quoted.  And most of them
+have little things too intimate to set down.  But this oddly
+penetrating analysis of our differences must, I think, be given.
+
+"There are all sorts of things I can't express about this and want
+to.  There's this difference that has always been between us, that
+you like nakedness and wildness, and I, clothing and restraint.  It
+goes through everything.  You are always TALKING of order and
+system, and the splendid dream of the order that might replace the
+muddled system you hate, but by a sort of instinct you seem to want
+to break the law.  I've watched you so closely.  Now I want to obey
+laws, to make sacrifices, to follow rules.  I don't want to make,
+but I do want to keep.  You are at once makers and rebels, you and
+Isabel too.  You're bad people--criminal people, I feel, and yet
+full of something the world must have.  You're so much better than
+me, and so much viler.  It may be there is no making without
+destruction, but it seems to me sometimes that it is nothing but an
+instinct for lawlessness that drives you.  You remind me--do you
+remember?--of that time we went from Naples to Vesuvius, and walked
+over the hot new lava there.  Do you remember how tired I was?  I
+know it disappointed you that I was tired.  One walked there in
+spite of the heat because there was a crust; like custom, like law.
+But directly a crust forms on things, you are restless to break down
+to the fire again.  You talk of beauty, both of you, as something
+terrible, mysterious, imperative.  YOUR beauty is something
+altogether different from anything I know or feel.  It has pain in
+it.  Yet you always speak as though it was something I ought to feel
+and am dishonest not to feel.  MY beauty is a quiet thing.  You have
+always laughed at my feeling for old-fashioned chintz and blue china
+and Sheraton.  But I like all these familiar USED things.  My beauty
+is STILL beauty, and yours, is excitement.  I know nothing of the
+fascination of the fire, or why one should go deliberately out of
+all the decent fine things of life to run dangers and be singed and
+tormented and destroyed.  I don't understand. . . ."
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+I remember very freshly the mood of our departure from London, the
+platform of Charing Cross with the big illuminated clock overhead,
+the bustle of porters and passengers with luggage, the shouting of
+newsboys and boys with flowers and sweets, and the groups of friends
+seeing travellers off by the boat train.  Isabel sat very quiet and
+still in the compartment, and I stood upon the platform with the
+door open, with a curious reluctance to take the last step that
+should sever me from London's ground.  I showed our tickets, and
+bought a handful of red roses for her.  At last came the guards
+crying: "Take your seats," and I got in and closed the door on me.
+We had, thank Heaven! a compartment to ourselves.  I let down the
+window and stared out.
+
+There was a bustle of final adieux on the platform, a cry of "Stand
+away, please, stand away!" and the train was gliding slowly and
+smoothly out of the station.
+
+I looked out upon the river as the train rumbled with slowly
+gathering pace across the bridge, and the bobbing black heads of the
+pedestrians in the footway, and the curve of the river and the
+glowing great hotels, and the lights and reflections and blacknesses
+of that old, familiar spectacle.  Then with a common thought, we
+turned our eyes westward to where the pinnacles of Westminster and
+the shining clock tower rose hard and clear against the still,
+luminous sky.
+
+"They'll be in Committee on the Reformatory Bill to-night," I said,
+a little stupidly.
+
+"And so," I added, "good-bye to London!"
+
+We said no more, but watched the south-side streets below--bright
+gleams of lights and movement, and the dark, dim, monstrous shapes
+of houses and factories.  We ran through Waterloo Station, London
+Bridge, New Cross, St. John's.  We said never a word.  It seemed to
+me that for a time we had exhausted our emotions.  We had escaped,
+we had cut our knot, we had accepted the last penalty of that
+headlong return of mine from Chicago a year and a half ago.  That
+was all settled.  That harvest of feelings we had reaped.  I thought
+now only of London, of London as the symbol of all we were leaving
+and all we had lost in the world.  I felt nothing now but an
+enormous and overwhelming regret. . . .
+
+The train swayed and rattled on its way.  We ran through old
+Bromstead, where once I had played with cities and armies on the
+nursery floor.  The sprawling suburbs with their scattered lights
+gave way to dim tree-set country under a cloud-veiled,
+intermittently shining moon.  We passed Cardcaster Place.  Perhaps
+old Wardingham, that pillar of the old Conservatives, was there,
+fretting over his unsuccessful struggle with our young Toryism.
+Little he recked of this new turn of the wheel and how it would
+confirm his contempt of all our novelties.  Perhaps some faint
+intimation drew him to the window to see behind the stems of the
+young fir trees that bordered his domain, the little string of
+lighted carriage windows gliding southward. . . .
+
+Suddenly I began to realise just what it was we were doing.
+
+And now, indeed, I knew what London had been to me, London where I
+had been born and educated, the slovenly mother of my mind and all
+my ambitions, London and the empire!  It seemed to me we must be
+going out to a world that was utterly empty.  All our significance
+fell from us--and before us was no meaning any more.  We were
+leaving London; my hand, which had gripped so hungrily upon its
+complex life, had been forced from it, my fingers left their hold.
+That was over.  I should never have a voice in public affairs again.
+The inexorable unwritten law which forbids overt scandal sentenced
+me.  We were going out to a new life, a life that appeared in that
+moment to be a mere shrivelled remnant of me, a mere residuum of
+sheltering and feeding and seeing amidst alien scenery and the sound
+of unfamiliar tongues.  We were going to live cheaply in a foreign
+place, so cut off that I meet now the merest stray tourist, the
+commonest tweed-clad stranger with a mixture of shyness and hunger. . . .
+And suddenly all the schemes I was leaving appeared fine and
+adventurous and hopeful as they had never done before.  How great
+was this purpose I had relinquished, this bold and subtle remaking
+of the English will!  I had doubted so many things, and now suddenly
+I doubted my unimportance, doubted my right to this suicidal
+abandonment.  Was I not a trusted messenger, greatly trusted and
+favoured, who had turned aside by the way?  Had I not, after all,
+stood for far more than I had thought; was I not filching from that
+dear great city of my birth and life, some vitally necessary thing,
+a key, a link, a reconciling clue in her political development, that
+now she might seek vaguely for in vain?  What is one life against
+the State?  Ought I not to have sacrificed Isabel and all my passion
+and sorrow for Isabel, and held to my thing--stuck to my thing?
+
+I heard as though he had spoken it in the carriage Britten's "It WAS
+a good game."  No end of a game.  And for the first time I imagined
+the faces and voices of Crupp and Esmeer and Gane when they learnt
+of this secret flight, this flight of which they were quite
+unwarned.  And Shoesmith might be there in the house,--Shoesmith who
+was to have been married in four days--the thing might hit him full
+in front of any kind of people.  Cruel eyes might watch him.  Why
+the devil hadn't I written letters to warn them all?  I could have
+posted them five minutes before the train started.  I had never
+thought to that moment of the immense mess they would be in; how the
+whole edifice would clatter about their ears.  I had a sudden desire
+to stop the train and go back for a day, for two days, to set that
+negligence right.  My brain for a moment brightened, became animated
+and prolific of ideas.  I thought of a brilliant line we might have
+taken on that confounded Reformatory Bill. . . .
+
+That sort of thing was over. . . .
+
+What indeed wasn't over?  I passed to a vaguer, more multitudinous
+perception of disaster, the friends I had lost already since Altiora
+began her campaign, the ampler remnant whom now I must lose.  I
+thought of people I had been merry with, people I had worked with
+and played with, the companions of talkative walks, the hostesses of
+houses that had once glowed with welcome for us both.  I perceived
+we must lose them all.  I saw life like a tree in late autumn that
+had once been rich and splendid with friends--and now the last brave
+dears would be hanging on doubtfully against the frosty chill of
+facts, twisting and tortured in the universal gale of indignation,
+trying to evade the cold blast of the truth.  I had betrayed my
+party, my intimate friend, my wife, the wife whose devotion had made
+me what I was.  For awhile the figure of Margaret, remote, wounded,
+shamed, dominated my mind, and the thought of my immense
+ingratitude.  Damn them! they'd take it out of her too.  I had a
+feeling that I wanted to go straight back and grip some one by the
+throat, some one talking ill of Margaret.  They'd blame her for not
+keeping me, for letting things go so far. . . .  I wanted the whole
+world to know how fine she was.  I saw in imagination the busy,
+excited dinner tables at work upon us all, rather pleasantly
+excited, brightly indignant, merciless.
+
+Well, it's the stuff we are! . . .
+
+Then suddenly, stabbing me to the heart, came a vision of Margaret's
+tears and the sound of her voice saying, "Husband mine! Oh! husband
+mine!  To see you cry!" . . .
+
+I came out of a cloud of thoughts to discover the narrow
+compartment, with its feeble lamp overhead, and our rugs and hand-
+baggage swaying on the rack, and Isabel, very still in front of me,
+gripping my wilting red roses tightly in her bare and ringless hand.
+
+For a moment I could not understand her attitude, and then I
+perceived she was sitting bent together with her head averted from
+the light to hide the tears that were streaming down her face.  She
+had not got her handkerchief out for fear that I should see this,
+but I saw her tears, dark drops of tears, upon her sleeve. . . .
+
+I suppose she had been watching my expression, divining my thoughts.
+
+For a time I stared at her and was motionless, in a sort of still
+and weary amazement.  Why had we done this injury to one another?
+WHY?  Then something stirred within me.
+
+"ISABEL!" I whispered.
+
+She made no sign.
+
+"Isabel!" I repeated, and then crossed over to her and crept closely
+to her, put my arm about her, and drew her wet cheek to mine.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Etext of The New Machiavelli, by H. G. Wells
+
+
+
diff --git a/old/old/nmchv11.zip b/old/old/nmchv11.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..91c36dd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/old/nmchv11.zip