THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Page 25

difficulty, "it is all over and past."

  "It's all over and past," I answered.

  There was a little pause.

  "I don't want to know," she said. "None of that seems to matter now

  in the slightest degree."

  She looked up and smiled as though we had exchanged some acceptable

  commonplaces. "Poor dear!" she said, dismissing everything, and put

  out her arms, and it seemed to me that I could hear the Lettish girl

  in the background-doomed safety valve of purity in this intolerable

  world-telling something in indistinguishable German-I know not

  what nor why…

  I took Margaret in my arms and kissed her. Her eyes were wet with

  tears. She clung to me and was near, I felt, to sobbing.

  "I have loved you," she whispered presently, "Oh! ever since we met

  in Misterton-six years and more ago."

  CHAPTER THE THIRD

  MARGARET IN VENICE

  1

  There comes into my mind a confusedmemory of conversations with

  Margaret; we must have had dozens altogether, and they mix in now

  for the most part inextricably not only with one another, but with

  later talks and with things we discussed at Pangbourne. We had the

  immensest anticipations of the years and opportunities that lay

  before us. I was now very deeply in love with her indeed. I felt

  not that I had cleaned up my life but that she had. We called each

  other "confederate" I remember, and made during our brief engagement

  a series of visits to the various legislative bodies in London, the

  County Council, the House of Commons, where we dined with Villiers,

  and the St. Pancras Vestry, where we heard Shaw speaking. I was

  full of plans and so was she of the way in which we were to live and

  work. We were to pay back in public service whatever excess of

  wealth beyond his merits old Seddon's economic advantage had won for

  him from the toiling people in the potteries. The end of the Boer

  War was so recent that that blessed word "efficiency" echoed still

  in people's minds and thoughts. Lord Roseberry in a memorable

  oration had put it into the heads of the big outer public, but the

  Baileys with a certain show of justice claimed to have set it going

  in the channels that took it to him-if as a matter of fact it was

  taken to him. But then it was their habit to make claims of that

  sort. They certainly did their share to keep "efficient" going.

  Altiora's highest praise was "thoroughly efficient." We were to be

  a "thoroughly efficient" political couple of the "new type." She

  explained us to herself and Oscar, she explained us to ourselves,

  she explained us to the people who came to her dinners and

  afternoons until the world was highly charged with explanation and

  expectation, and the proposal that I should be the Liberal candidate

  for the Kinghamstead Division seemed the most natural development in

  the world.

  I was full of the ideal of hard restrained living and relentless

  activity, and throughout a beautiful November at Venice, where

  chiefly we spent our honeymoon, we turned over and over again and

  discussed in every aspect our conception of a life tremendously

  focussed upon the ideal of social service.

  Most clearly there stands out a picture of ourselves talking in a

  gondola on our way to Torcella. Far away behind us the smoke of

  Murano forms a black stain upon an immense shining prospect of

  smooth water, water as unruffled and luminous as the sky above, a

  mirror on which rows of posts and distant black high-stemmed, swan-

  necked boats with their minutely clear swinging gondoliers, float

  aerially. Remote and low before us rises the little tower of our

  destination. Our men swing together and their oars swirl leisurely

  through the water, hump back in the rowlocks, splash sharply and go

  swishing back again. Margaret lies back on cushions, with her face

  shaded by a holland parasol, and I sit up beside her.

  "You see," I say, and in spite of Margaret's note of perfect

  acquiescence I feelmyself reasoning against an indefinable

  antagonism, "it is so easy to fall into a slack way with life.

  There may seem to be something priggish in a meticulous discipline,

  but otherwise it is so easy to slip into indolent habits-and to be

  distracted from one's purpose. The country, the world, wants men to

  serve its constructive needs, to work out and carry out plans. For

  a man who has to make a living the enemy is immediate necessity; for

  people like ourselves it's-it's the constant small opportunity of

  agreeable things."

  "Frittering away," she says, "time and strength."

  "That is what I feel. It's so pleasant to pretend one is simply

  modest, it looks so foolish at times to take one's self too

  seriously. We've GOT to take ourselves seriously."

  She endorses my words with her eyes.

  "I feel I can do great things with life."

  "I KNOW you can."

  "But that's only to be done by concentrating one's life upon one

  main end. We have to plan our days, to make everything subserve our

  scheme."

  "I feel," she answers softly, "we ought to give-every hour."

  Her face becomes dreamy. "I WANT to give every hour," she adds.

  2

  That holiday in Venice is set in my memory like a little artificial

  lake in uneven confused country, as something very bright and

  skylike, and discontinuous with all about it. The faded quality of

  the very sunshine of that season, the mellow discoloured palaces and

  places, the huge, time-ripened paintings of departed splendours, the

  whispering, nearly noiseless passage of hearse-black gondolas, for

  the horrible steam launch had not yet ruined Venice, the stilled

  magnificences of the depopulated lagoons, the universal autumn, made

  me feel altogether in recess from the teeming uproars of reality.

  There was not a dozen people all told, no Americans and scarcely any

  English, to dine in the big cavern of a dining-room, with its vistas

  of separate tables, its distempered walls and its swathed

  chandeliers. We went about seeing beautiful things, accepting

  beauty on every hand, and taking it for granted that all was well

  with ourselves and the world. It was ten days or a fortnight before

  I became fretful and anxious for action; a long tranquillity for

  such a temperament as mine.

  Our pleasures were curiously impersonal, a succession of shared

  aesthetic appreciation threads all that time. Our honeymoon was no

  exultant coming together, no mutual shout of "YOU!" We were almost

  shy with one another, and felt the relief of even a picture to help

  us out. It was entirely in my conception of things that I should be

  very watchful not to shock or distress Margaret or press the

  sensuous note. Our love-making had much of the tepid smoothness of

  the lagoons. We talked in delicate innuendo of what should be

  glorious freedoms. Margaret had missed Verona and Venice in her

  previous Italian journey-fear of the mosquito had driven her mother

  across Italy to the westward route-and now she could fill up her

  gaps and see the Titians and Paul Veroneses she a
lready knew in

  colourless photographs, the Carpaccios, (the St. George series

  delighted her beyond measure,) the Basaitis and that great statue of

  Bartolomeo Colleoni that Ruskin praised.

  But since Iam not a man to look at pictures and architectural

  effects day after day, I did watch Margaret very closely and store a

  thousand memories of her. I can see her now, her long body drooping

  a little forward, her sweet face upraised to some discovered

  familiar masterpiece and shining with a delicate enthusiasm. I can

  hear again the soft cadences of her voice murmuring commonplace

  comments, for she had no gift of expressing the shapeless

  satisfaction these things gave her.

  Margaret, I perceived, was a cultivated person, the first cultivated

  person with whom I had ever come into close contact. She was

  cultivated and moral, and I, I now realise, was never either of

  these things. She was passive, and Iam active. She did not simply

  and naturally look for beauty but she had been incited to look for

  it at school, and took perhaps a keener interest in books and

  lectures and all the organisation of beautiful things than she did

  in beauty itself; she found much of her delight in being guided to

  it. Now a thing ceases to be beautiful to me when some finger points

  me out its merits. Beauty is the salt of life, but I take my beauty

  as a wild beast gets its salt, as a constituent of the meal…

  And besides, there was that between us that should have seemed more

  beautiful than any picture…

  So we went about Venice tracking down pictures and spiral staircases

  and such-like things, and my brains were busy all the time with such

  things as a comparison of Venice and its nearest modern equivalent,

  New York, with the elaboration of schemes of action when we returned

  to London, with the development of a theory of Margaret.

  Our marriage had done this much at least, that it had fused and

  destroyed those two independent ways of thinking about her that had

  gone on in my mind hitherto. Suddenly she had become very near to

  me, and a very big thing, a sort of comprehensive generalisation

  behind a thousand questions, like the sky or England. The judgments

  and understandings that had worked when she was, so to speak, miles

  away from my life, had now to be altogether revised. Trifling

  things began to matter enormously, that she had a weak and easily

  fatigued back, for example, or that when she knitted her brows and

  stammered a little in talking, it didn't really mean that an

  exquisite significance struggled for utterance.

  We visited pictures in the mornings chiefly. In the afternoon,

  unless we were making a day-long excursion in a gondola, Margaret

  would rest for an hour while I prowled about in search of English

  newspapers, and then we would go to tea in the Piazza San Marco and

  watch the drift of people feeding the pigeons and going into the

  little doors beneath the sunlit arches and domes of Saint Mark's.

  Then perhaps we would stroll on the Piazzetta, or go out into the

  sunset in a gondola. Margaret became very interested in the shops

  that abound under the colonnades and decided at last to make an

  extensive purchase of table glass. "These things," she said, are

  quite beautiful, and far cheaper than anything but the most ordinary

  looking English ware." I was interested in her idea, and a good

  deal charmed by the delightful qualities of tinted shape, slender

  handle and twisted stem. I suggested we should get not simply

  tumblers and wineglasses but bedroom waterbottles, fruit- and sweet-

  dishes, water-jugs, and in the end we made quite a business-like

  afternoon of it.

  I was beginning now to long quite definitely for events. Energy was

  accumulating in me, and worrying me for an outlet. I found the

  TIMES and the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the other papers I managed to get

  hold of, more and more stimulating. I nearly wrote to the former

  paper one day in answer to a letter by Lord Grimthorpe-I forget now

  upon what point. I chafed secretly against this life of tranquil

  appreciations more and more. I found my attitudes of restrained and

  delicate affection for Margaret increasingly difficult to sustain.

  I surprised myself and her by little gusts of irritability, gusts

  like the catspaws before a gale. I was alarmed at these symptoms.

  One night when Margaret had gone up to her room, I put on a light

  overcoat, went out into the night and prowled for a long time

  through the narrow streets, smoking and thinking. I returned and

  went and sat on the edge of her bed to talk to her.

  "Look here, Margaret," I said; "this is all very well, but I'm

  restless."

  "Restless! " she said with a faint surprise in her voice.

  "Yes. I think I want exercise. I've got a sort of feeling-I've

  never had it before-as though I was getting fat."

  "My dear!" she cried.

  "I want to do things;-ride horses, climb mountains, take the devil

  out of myself."

  She watched me thoughtfully.

  "Couldn't we DO something?" she said.

  Do what?

  "I don't know. Couldn't we perhaps go away from here soon-and walk

  in the mountains-on our way home."

  I thought. "There seems to be no exercise at all in this place."

  "Isn't there some walk?"

  "I wonder," I answered. "We might walk to Chioggia perhaps, along

  the Lido." And we tried that, but the long stretch of beach

  fatigued Margaret's back, and gave her blisters, and we never got

  beyond Malamocco…

  A day or so after we went out to those pleasant black-robed, bearded

  Armenians in their monastery at Saint Lazzaro, and returned towards

  sundown. We fell into silence. "PIU LENTO," said Margaret to the

  gondolier, and released my accumulated resolution.

  "Let us go back to London," I said abruptly.

  Margaret looked at me with surprised blue eyes.

  "This is beautiful beyond measure, you know," I said, sticking to my

  point, "but I have work to do."

  She was silent for some seconds. "I had forgotten," she said.

  "So had I," I sympathised, and took her hand. "Suddenly I have

  remembered."

  She remained quite still. "There is so much to be done," I said,

  almost apologetically.

  She looked long away from me across the lagoon and at last sighed,

  like one who has drunk deeply, and turned to me.

  "I suppose one ought not to be so happy," she said. "Everything has

  been so beautiful and so simple and splendid. And clean. It has

  been just With You-the time of my life. It's a pity such things

  must end. But the world is calling you, dear… I ought not to

  have forgotten it. I thought you were resting-and thinking. But

  if you are rested.-Would you like us to start to-morrow?"

  She looked at once so fragile and so devoted that on the spur of the

  moment I relented, and we stayed in Venice four more days.

  CHAPTER THE FOURTH

  THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER

  1

  Margaret had already taken a little house in Radnor Square,

  Westminster, before
our marriage, a house that seemed particularly

  adaptable to our needs as public-spirited efficients; it had been

  very pleasantly painted and papered under Margaret's instructions,

  white paint and clean open purples and green predominating, and now

  we set to work at once upon the interesting business of arranging

  and-with our Venetian glass as a beginning-furnishing it. We had

  been fairly fortunate with our wedding presents, and for the most

  part it was open to us to choose just exactly what we would have and

  just precisely where we would put it.

  Margaret had a sense of form and colour altogether superior to mine,

  and so quite apart from the fact that it was her money equipped us,

  I stood aside from all these matters and obeyed her summons to a

  consultation only to endorse her judgment very readily. Until

  everything was settled I went every day to my old rooms in Vincent

  Square and worked at a series of papers that were originally

  intended for the FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW, the papers that afterwards

  became my fourth book, "New Aspects of Liberalism."

  I still remember as delightful most of the circumstances of getting

  into 79, Radnor Square. The thin flavour of indecision about

  Margaret disappeared altogether in a shop; she had the precisest

  ideas of what she wanted, and the devices of the salesman did not

  sway her. It was very pleasant to find her taking things out of my

  hands with a certain masterfulness, and showing the distinctest

  determination to make a house in which I should be able to work in

  that great project of "doing something for the world."

  "And I do want to make things pretty about us," she said. "You

  don't think it wrong to have things pretty?"

  "I want them so."

  "Altiora has things hard."

  "Altiora," I answered, "takes a pride in standing ugly and

  uncomfortable things. But I don't see that they help her. Anyhow

  they won't help me."

  So Margaret went to the best shops and got everything very simple

  and very good. She bought some pictures very well indeed; there was

  a little Sussex landscape, full of wind and sunshine, by Nicholson,

  for my study, that hit my taste far better than if I had gone out to