The New Machiavelli

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!”