The New Machiavelli

“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.