THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Read online

  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 realhatred 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 w
as 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 feltherself 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' C
hapel 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