THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Page 16

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 sawmyself 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 thwa
rted 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 feltmyself 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: "Iam a man! Iam 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 Iam," 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