THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Read online

  paper in the grate. I sit on a bed beside a weary-eyed, fair-

  haired, sturdy young woman, half undressed, who is telling me in

  broken German something that my knowledge of German is at first

  inadequate to understand…

  I thought she was boasting about her family, and then slowly the

  meaning came to me. She was a Lett from near Libau in Courland, and

  she was telling me-just as one tells something too strange for

  comment or emotion-how her father had been shot and her sister

  outraged and murdered before her eyes.

  It was as if one had dipped into something primordial and stupendous

  beneath the smooth and trivial surfaces of life. There was I, you

  know, the promising young don from Cambridge, who wrote quite

  brilliantly about politics and might presently get into Parliament,

  with my collar and tie in my hand, and a certain sense of shameful

  adventure fading out of my mind.

  "Ach Gott!" she sighed by way of comment, and mused deeply for a

  moment before she turned her face to me, as to something forgotten

  and remembered, and assumed the half-hearted meretricious smile.

  "Bin ich eine hubsche?" she asked like one who repeats a lesson.

  I was moved to crave her pardon and come away.

  "Bin ich eine hubsche?" she asked a little anxiously, laying a

  detaining hand upon me, and evidently not understanding a word of

  what I was striving to say.

  8

  I find it extraordinarily difficult to recall the phases by which I

  passed from my first admiration of Margaret's earnestness and

  unconscious daintiness to an intimate acquaintance. The earlier

  encounters stand out clear and hard, but then the impressions become

  crowded and mingle not only with each other but with all the

  subsequent developments of relationship, the enormous evolutions of

  interpretation and comprehension between husband and wife. Dipping

  into my memories is like dipping into a ragbag, one brings out this

  memory or that, with no intimation of how they came in time or what

  led to them and joined them together. And they are all mixed up

  with subsequent associations, with sympathies and discords, habits

  of intercourse, surprises and disappointments and discovered

  misunderstandings. I know only that always my feelings for Margaret

  were complicatel feelings, woven of many and various strands.

  It is one of the curious neglected aspects of life how at the same

  time and in relation to the same reality we can have in our minds

  streams of thought at quite different levels. We can be at the same

  time idealising a person and seeing and criticising that person

  quite coldly and clearly, and we slip unconsciously from level to

  level and produce all sorts of inconsistent acts. In a sense I had

  no illusions about Margaret; in a sense my conception of Margaret

  was entirely poetic illusion. I don't think I was ever blind to

  certain defects of hers, and quite as certainly they didn't seem to

  matter in the slightest degree. Her mind had a curious want of

  vigour, "flatness" is the only word; she never seemed to escape from

  her phrase; her way of thinking, her way of doing was indecisive;

  she remained in her attitude, it did not flow out to easy,

  confirmatory action.

  I saw this quite clearly, and when we walked and talked together I

  seemed always trying for animation in her and never finding it. I

  would state my ideas. "I know," she would say, "I know."

  I talked about myself and she listened wonderfully, but she made no

  answering revelations. I talked politics, and she remarked with her

  blue eyes wide and earnest: "Every WORD you say seems so just."

  I admired her appearance tremendously but-I can only express it by

  saying I didn't want to touch her. Her fair hair was always

  delectably done. It flowed beautifully over her pretty small ears,

  and she would tie its fair coilings with fillets of black or blue

  velvet that carried pretty buckles of silver and paste. The light,

  the faint down on her brow and cheek was delightful. And it was

  clear to me that I made her happy.

  My sense of her deficiencies didn't stand in the way of my falling

  at last very deeply in love with her. Her very shortcomings seemed

  to offer me something…

  She stood in my mind for goodness-and for things from which it

  seemed to me my hold was slipping.

  She seemed to promise a way of escape from the deepening opposition

  in me between physical passions and the constructive career, the

  career of wide aims and human service, upon which I had embarked.

  All the time that I was seeing her as a beautiful, fragile, rather

  ineffective girl, I was also seeing her just as consciously as a

  shining slender figure, a radiant reconciliation, coming into my

  darkling disorders of lust and impulse. I could understand clearly

  that she was incapable of the most necessary subtleties of political

  thought, and yet I could contemplate praying to her and putting all

  the intricate troubles of my life at her feet.

  Before the reappearance of Margaret in my world at all an unwonted

  disgust with the consequences and quality of my passions had arisen

  in my mind. Among other things that moment with the Lettish girl

  haunted me persistently. I would seemyself again and again sitting

  amidst those sluttish surroundings, collar and tie in hand, while

  her heavy German words grouped themselves to a slowly apprehended

  meaning. I would feel again with a fresh stab of remorse, that this

  was not a flash of adventure, this was not seeing life in any

  permissible sense, but a dip into tragedy, dishonour, hideous

  degradation, and the pitiless cruelty of a world as yet uncontrolled

  by any ordered will.

  "Good God!" I put it to myself, "that I should finish the work those

  Cossacks had begun! I who want order and justice before everything!

  There's no way out of it, no decent excuse! If I didn't think, I

  ought to have thought!"…

  How did I get to it?"… I would ransack the phases of my

  development from the first shy unveiling of a hidden wonder to the

  last extremity as a man will go through muddled account books to

  find some disorganising error…

  I was also involved at that time-I find it hard to place these

  things in the exact order of their dates because they were so

  disconnected with the regular progress of my work and life-in an

  intrigue, a clumsy, sensuous, pretentious, artificially stimulated

  intrigue, with a Mrs. Larrimer, a woman living separated from her

  husband. I will not go into particulars of that episode, nor how we

  quarrelled and chafed one another. She was at once unfaithful and

  jealous and full of whims about our meetings; she was careless of

  our secret, and vulgarised our relationship by intolerable

  interpretations; except for some glowing moments of gratification,

  except for the recurrent and essentially vicious desire that drew us

  back to each other again, we both fretted at a vexatious and

  unexpectedly binding intimacy. The interim was full of the quality

  of work dela
yed, of time and energy wasted, of insecure precautions

  against scandal and exposure. Disappointment is almost inherent in

  illicit love. I had, and perhaps it was part of her recurrent

  irritation also, a feeling as though one had followed something fine

  and beautiful into a net-into bird lime! These furtive scuffles,

  this sneaking into shabby houses of assignation, was what we had

  made out of the suggestion of pagan beauty; this was the reality of

  our vision of nymphs and satyrs dancing for the joy of life amidst

  incessant sunshine. We had laid hands upon the wonder and glory of

  bodily love and wasted them…

  It was the sense of waste, of finely beautiful possibilities getting

  entangled and marred for ever that oppressed me. I had missed, I

  had lost. I did not turn from these things after the fashion of the

  Baileys, as one turns from something low and embarrassing. I felt

  that these great organic forces were still to be wrought into a

  harmony with my constructive passion. I felt too that I was not

  doing it. I had not understood the forces in this struggle nor its

  nature, and as I learnt I failed. I had been started wrong, I had

  gone on wrong, in a world that was muddled and confused, full of

  false counsel and erratic shames and twisted temptations. I learnt

  to see it so by failures that were perhaps destroying any chance of

  profit in my lessons. Moods of clear keen industry alternated with

  moods of relapse and indulgence and moods of dubiety and remorse. I

  was not going on as the Baileys thought I was going on. There were

  times when the blindness of the Baileys irritated me intensely.

  Beneath the ostensible success of those years, between twenty-three

  and twenty-eight, this rottenness, known to scarcely any one but

  myself, grew and spread. My sense of the probability of a collapse

  intensified. I knew indeed now, even as Willersley had prophesied

  five years before, that I was entangling myself in something that

  might smother all my uses in the world. Down there among those

  incommunicable difficulties, I was puzzled and blundering. I was

  losing my hold upon things; the chaotic and adventurous element in

  life was spreading upward and getting the better of me, over-

  mastering me and all my will to rule and make… And the

  strength, the drugging urgency of the passion!

  Margaret shone at times in my imagination like a radiant angel in a

  world of mire and disorder, in a world of cravings, hot and dull red

  like scars inflamed…

  I suppose it was because I had so great a need of such help as her

  whiteness proffered, that I could ascribe impossible perfections to

  her, a power of intellect, a moral power and patience to which she,

  poor fellow mortal, had indeed no claim. If only a few of us WERE

  angels and freed from the tangle of effort, how easy life might be!

  I wanted her so badly, so very badly, to be what I needed. I wanted

  a woman to save me. I forced myself to see her as I wished to see

  her. Her tepidities became infinite delicacies, her mental

  vagueness an atmospheric realism. The harsh precisions of the

  Baileys and Altiora's blunt directness threw up her fineness into

  relief and made a grace of every weakness.

  Mixed up with the memory of times when I talked with Margaret as one

  talks politely to those who are hopelessly inferior in mental

  quality, explaining with a false lucidity, welcoming and encouraging

  the feeblest response, when possible moulding and directing, are

  times when I did indeed, as the old phrase goes, worship the ground

  she trod on. I was equally honest and unconscious of inconsistency

  at each extreme. But in neither phase could I find it easy to make

  love to Margaret. For in the first I did not want to, though I

  talked abundantly to her of marriage and so forth, and was a little

  puzzled at myself for not going on to some personal application, and

  in the second she seemed inaccessible, I felt I must make

  confessions and put things before her that would be the grossest

  outrage upon the noble purity I attributed to her.

  9

  I went to Margaret at last to ask her to marry me, wrought up to the

  mood of one who stakes his life on a cast. Separated from her, and

  with the resonance of an evening of angry recriminations with Mrs.

  Larrimer echoing in my mind, I discovered myself to be quite

  passionately in love with Margaret. Last shreds of doubt vanished.

  It has always been a feature of our relationship that Margaret

  absent means more to me than Margaret present; her memory distils

  from its dross and purifies in me. All my criticisms and

  qualifications of her vanished into some dark corner of my mind.

  She was the lady of my salvation; I must win my way to her or

  perish.

  I went to her at last, for all that I knew she loved me, in

  passionate self-abasement, white and a-tremble. She was staying

  with the Rockleys at Woking, for Shena Rockley had been at Bennett

  Hall with her and they had resumed a close intimacy; and I went down

  to her on an impulse, unheralded. I was kept waiting for some

  minutes, I remember, in a little room upon which a conservatory

  opened, a conservatory full of pots of large mauve-edged, white

  cyclamens in flower. And there was a big lacquer cabinet, a Chinese

  thing, I suppose, of black and gold against the red-toned wall. To

  this day the thought of Margaret is inseparably bound up with the

  sight of a cyclamen's back-turned petals.

  She came in, looking pale and drooping rather more than usual. I

  suddenly realised that Altiora's hint of a disappointment leading to

  positive illness was something more than a vindictive comment. She

  closed the door and came across to me and took and dropped my hand

  and stood still. "What is it you want with me?" she asked.

  The speech I had been turning over and over in my mind on the way

  vanished at the sight of her.

  "I want to talk to you," I answered lamely.

  For some seconds neither of us said a word.

  "I want to tell you things about my life," I began.

  She answered with a scarcely audible "yes."

  "I almost asked you to marry me at Pangbourne," I plunged. "I

  didn't. I didn't because-because you had too much to give me."

  "Too much!" she echoed, "to give you!" She had lifted her eyes to

  my face and the colour was coming into her cheeks.

  "Don't misunderstand me," I said hastily. "I want to tell you

  things, things you don't know. Don't answer me. I want to tell

  you."

  She stood before the fireplace with her ultimate answer shining

  through the quiet of her face. "Go on," she said, very softly. It

  was so pitilessly manifest she was resolved to idealise the

  situation whatever I might say. I began walking up and down the

  room between those cyclamens and the cabinet. There were little

  gold fishermen on the cabinet fishing from little islands that each

  had a pagoda and a tree, and there were also men in boats or

  something, I couldn't determine what, and some obscure sub-office in

  my mind concerned itse
lf with that quite intently. Yet I seem to

  have been striving with all my being to get words for the truth of

  things. "You see," I emerged, "you make everything possible to me.

  You can give me help and sympathy, support, understanding. You know

  my political ambitions. You know all that I might do in the world.

  I do so intensely want to do constructive things, big things

  perhaps, in this wild jumble… Only you don't know a bit what

  I am. I want to tell you what Iam. I'm complex… I'm

  streaked."

  I glanced at her, and she was regarding me with an expression of

  blissful disregard for any meaning I was seeking to convey.

  "You see," I said, "I'm a bad man."

  She sounded a note of valiant incredulity.

  Everything seemed to be slipping away from me. I pushed on to the

  ugly facts that remained over from the wreck of my interpretation.

  "What has held me back," I said, "is the thought that you could not

  possibly understand certain things in my life. Men are not pure as

  women are. I have had love affairs. I mean I have had affairs.

  Passion-desire. You see, I have had a mistress, I have been

  entangled-"

  She seemed about to speak, but I interrupted. "I'm not telling

  you," I said, "what I meant to tell you. I want you to know clearly

  that there is another side to my life, a dirty side. Deliberately I

  say, dirty. It didn't seem so at first-"

  I stopped blankly. "Dirty," I thought, was the most idiotic choice

  of words to have made.

  I had never in any tolerable sense of the word been dirty.

  "I drifted into this-as men do," I said after a little pause and

  stopped again.

  She was looking at me with her wide blue eyes.

  "Did you imagine," she began, "that I thought you-that I expected-"

  "But how can you know?"

  "I know. I do know."

  "But-" I began.

  "I know," she persisted, dropping her eyelids. "Of course I know,"

  and nothing could have convinced me more completely that she did not

  know.

  "All men-" she generalised. "A woman does not understand these

  temptations."

  I was astonished beyond measure at her way of taking my confession.

  …

  "Of course," she said, hesitating a little over a transparent