THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Read online

  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'mthinking 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 desirealone. 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 Iam 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