THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Page 26

  get some such expression for myself.

  "We will buy a picture just now and then," she said, "sometimes-

  when we see one."

  I would come back through the January mire or fog from Vincent

  Square to the door of 79, and reach it at last with a quite childish

  appreciation of the fact that its solid Georgian proportions and its

  fine brass furnishings belonged to MY home; I would use my latchkey

  and discover Margaret in the warm-lit, spacious hall with a

  partially opened packing-case, fatigued but happy, or go up to have

  tea with her out of the right tea things, "come at last," or be told

  to notice what was fresh there. It wasn't simply that I had never

  had a house before, but I had really never been, except in the most

  transitory way, in any house that was nearly so delightful as mine

  promised to be. Everything was fresh and bright, and softly and

  harmoniously toned. Downstairs we had a green dining-room with

  gleaming silver, dark oak, and English colour-prints; above was a

  large drawing-room that could be made still larger by throwing open

  folding doors, and it was all carefully done in greys and blues, for

  the most part with real Sheraton supplemented by Sheraton so

  skilfully imitated by an expert Margaret had discovered as to be

  indistinguishable except to a minute scrutiny. And for me, above

  this and next to my bedroom, there was a roomy study, with specially

  thick stair-carpet outside and thick carpets in the bedroom overhead

  and a big old desk for me to sit at and work between fire and

  window, and another desk specially made for me by that expert if I

  chose to stand and write, and open bookshelves and bookcases and

  every sort of convenient fitting. There were electric heaters

  beside the open fire, and everything was put for me to make tea at

  any time-electric kettle, infuser, biscuits and fresh butter, so

  that I could get up and work at any hour of the day or night. I

  could do no work in this apartment for a long time, I was so

  interested in the perfection of its arrangements. And when I

  brought in my books and papers from Vincent Square, Margaret seized

  upon all the really shabby volumes and had them re-bound in a fine

  official-looking leather.

  I can remember sitting down at that desk and looking round me and

  feeling with a queer effect of surprise that after all even a place

  in the Cabinet, though infinitely remote, was nevertheless in the

  same large world with these fine and quietly expensive things.

  On the same floor Margaret had a "den," a very neat and pretty den

  with good colour-prints of Botticellis and Carpaccios, and there was

  a third apartment for sectarial purposes should the necessity for

  them arise, with a severe-looking desk equipped with patent files.

  And Margaret would come flitting into the room to me, or appear

  noiselessly standing, a tall gracefully drooping form, in the wide

  open doorway. "Is everything right, dear?" she would ask.

  "Come in," I would say, "I'm sorting out papers."

  She would come to the hearthrug.

  "I mustn't disturb you," she would remark.

  "I'm not busy yet."

  "Things are getting into order. Then we must make out a time-table

  as the Baileys do, and BEGIN!"

  Altiora came in to see us once or twice, and a number of serious

  young wives known to Altiora called and were shown over the house,

  and discussed its arrangements with Margaret. They were all

  tremendously keen on efficient arrangements.

  "A little pretty," said Altiora, with the faintest disapproval,

  "still-"

  It was clear she thought we should grow out of that. From the day

  of our return we found other people's houses open to us and eager

  for us. We went out of London for week-ends and dined out, and

  began discussing our projects for reciprocating these hospitalities.

  As a single man unattached, I had had a wide and miscellaneous

  social range, but now I found myself falling into place in a set.

  For a time I acquiesced in this. I went very little to my clubs,

  the Climax and the National Liberal, and participated in no bachelor

  dinners at all. For a time, too, I dropped out of the garrulous

  literary and journalistic circles I had frequented. I put up for

  the Reform, not so much for the use of the club as a sign of serious

  and substantial political standing. I didn't go up to Cambridge, I

  remember, for nearly a year, so occupied was I with my new

  adjustments.

  The people we found ourselves among at this time were people, to put

  it roughly, of the Parliamentary candidate class, or people already

  actually placed in the political world. They ranged between very

  considerable wealth and such a hard, bare independence as old

  Willersley and the sister who kept house for him possessed. There

  were quite a number of young couples like ourselves, a little

  younger and more artless, or a little older and more established.

  Among the younger men I had a sort of distinction because of my

  Cambridge reputation and my writing, and because, unlike them, I was

  an adventurer and had won and married my way into their circles

  instead of being naturally there. They couldn't quite reckon upon

  what I should do; they felt I had reserves of experience and

  incalculable traditions. Close to us were the Cramptons, Willie

  Crampton, who has since been Postmaster-General, rich and very

  important in Rockshire, and his younger brother Edward, who has

  specialised in history and become one of those unimaginative men of

  letters who are the glory of latter-day England. Then there was

  Lewis, further towards Kensington, where his cousins the Solomons

  and the Hartsteins lived, a brilliant representative of his race,

  able, industrious and invariably uninspired, with a wife a little in

  revolt against the racial tradition of feminine servitude and

  inclined to the suffragette point of view, and Bunting Harblow, an

  old blue, and with an erratic disposition well under the control of

  the able little cousin he had married. I had known all these men,

  but now (with Altiora floating angelically in benediction) they

  opened their hearts to me and took me into their order. They were

  all like myself, prospective Liberal candidates, with a feeling that

  the period of wandering in the wilderness of opposition was drawing

  near its close. They were all tremendously keen upon social and

  political service, and all greatly under the sway of the ideal of a

  simple, strenuous life, a life finding its satisfactions in

  political achievements and distinctions. The young wives were as

  keen about it as the young husbands, Margaret most of all, and I-

  whatever elements in me didn't march with the attitudes and habits

  of this set were very much in the background during that time.

  We would give little dinners and have evening gatherings at which

  everything was very simple and very good, with a slight but

  perceptible austerity, and there was more good fruit and flowers and

  less perhaps in the way of savouries, patties and entrees than was

 
customary. Sherry we banished, and Marsala and liqueurs, and there

  was always good home-made lemonade available. No men waited, but

  very expert parlourmaids. Our meat was usually Welsh mutton-I

  don't know why, unless that mountains have ever been the last refuge

  of the severer virtues. And we talked politics and books and ideas

  and Bernard Shaw (who was a department by himself and supposed in

  those days to be ethically sound at bottom), and mingled with the

  intellectuals-I myself was, as it were, a promoted intellectual.

  The Cramptons had a tendency to read good things aloud on their less

  frequented receptions, but I have never been able to participate

  submissively in this hyper-digestion of written matter, and

  generally managed to provoke a disruptive debate. We were all very

  earnest to make the most of ourselves and to be and do, and I wonder

  still at times, with an unassuaged perplexity, how it is that in

  that phase of utmost earnestness I have always seemed to myself to

  be most remote from reality.

  2

  I look back now across the detaching intervention of sixteen crowded

  years, critically and I fancy almost impartially, to those

  beginnings of my married life. I try to recall something near to

  their proper order the developing phases of relationship. Iam

  struck most of all by the immense unpremeditated, generous-spirited

  insincerities upon which Margaret and I were building.

  It seems to me that here I have to tell perhaps the commonest

  experience of all among married educated people, the deliberate,

  shy, complex effort to fill the yawning gaps in temperament as they

  appear, the sustained, failing attempt to bridge abysses, level

  barriers, evade violent pressures. I have come these latter years

  of my life to believe that it is possible for a man and woman to be

  absolutely real with one another, to stand naked souled to each

  other, unashamed and unafraid, because of the natural all-glorifying

  love between them. It is possible to love and be loved untroubling,

  as a bird flies through the air. But it is a rare and intricate

  chance that brings two people within sight of that essential union,

  and for the majority marriage must adjust itself on other terms.

  Most coupled people never really look at one another. They look a

  little away to preconceived ideas. And each from the first days of

  love-making HIDES from the other, is afraid of disappointing, afraid

  of offending, afraid of discoveries in either sense. They build not

  solidly upon the rock of truth, but upon arches and pillars and

  queer provisional supports that are needed to make a common

  foundation, and below in the imprisoned darknesses, below the fine

  fabric they sustain together begins for each of them a cavernous

  hidden life. Down there things may be prowling that scarce ever

  peep out to consciousness except in the grey half-light of sleepless

  nights, passions that flash out for an instant in an angry glance

  and are seen no more, starved victims and beautiful dreams bricked

  up to die. For the most of us there is no jail delivery of those

  inner depths, and the life above goes on to its honourable end.

  I have told how I loved Margaret and how I came to marry her.

  Perhaps already unintentionally I have indicated the quality of the

  injustice our marriage did us both. There was no kindred between us

  and no understanding. We were drawn to one another by the

  unlikeness of our quality, by the things we misunderstood in each

  other. I know a score of couples who have married in that fashion.

  Modern conditions and modern ideas, and in particular the intenser

  and subtler perceptions of modern life, press more and more heavily

  upon a marriage tie whose fashion comes from an earlier and less

  discriminating time. When the wife was her husband's subordinate,

  meeting him simply and uncritically for simple ends, when marriage

  was a purely domestic relationship, leaving thought and the vivid

  things of life almost entirely to the unencumbered man, mental and

  temperamental incompatibilities mattered comparatively little. But

  now the wife, and particularly the loving childless wife,

  unpremeditatedly makes a relentless demand for a complete

  association, and the husband exacts unthought of delicacies of

  understanding and co-operation. These are stupendous demands.

  People not only think more fully and elaborately about life than

  they ever did before, but marriage obliges us to make that ever more

  accidented progress a three-legged race of carelessly assorted

  couples…

  Our very mental texture was different. I was rough-minded, to use

  the phrase of William James, primary and intuitive and illogical;

  she was tender-minded, logical, refined and secondary. She was

  loyal to pledge and persons, sentimental and faithful; Iam loyal to

  ideas and instincts, emotional and scheming. My imagination moves

  in broad gestures; her's was delicate with a real dread of

  extravagance. My quality is sensuous and ruled by warm impulses;

  hers was discriminating and essentially inhibitory. I like the

  facts of the case and to mention everything; I like naked bodies and

  the jolly smells of things. She abounded in reservations, in

  circumlocutions and evasions, in keenly appreciated secondary

  points. Perhaps the reader knows that Tintoretto in the National

  Gallery, the Origin of the Milky Way. It is an admirable test of

  tempera-mental quality. In spite of my early training I have come

  to regard that picture as altogether delightful; to Margaret it has

  always been "needlessly offensive." In that you have our

  fundamental breach. She had a habit, by no means rare, of damning

  what she did not like or find sympathetic in me on the score that it

  was not my "trueself," and she did not so much accept the universe

  as select from it and do her best to ignore the rest. And also I

  had far more initiative than had she. This is no catalogue of

  rights and wrongs, or superiorities and inferiorities; it is a

  catalogue of differences between two people linked in a relationship

  that constantly becomes more intolerant of differences.

  This is how we stood to each other, and none of it was clear to

  either of us at the outset. To begin with, I found myself reserving

  myself from her, then slowly apprehending a jarring between our

  minds and what seemed to me at first a queer little habit of

  misunderstanding in her…

  It did not hinder my being very fond of her…

  Where our system of reservation became at once most usual and most

  astounding was in our personal relations. It is not too much to say

  that in that regard we never for a moment achieved sincerity with

  one another during the first six years of our life together. It

  goes even deeper than that, for in my effort to realise the ideal of

  my marriage I ceased even to attempt to be sincere with myself. I

  would not admit my own perceptions and interpretations. I tried to

  fit myself to her thinner and finer determinations. There are

  people who will say with a note of approva
l that I was learning to

  conquer myself. I record that much without any note of approval…

  For some years I never deceived Margaret about any concrete fact

  nor, except for the silence about my earlier life that she had

  almost forced upon me, did I hide any concrete fact that seemed to

  affect her, but from the outset I was guilty of immense spiritual

  concealments, my very marriage was based, I see now, on a spiritual

  subterfuge; I hid moods from her, pretended feelings…

  3

  The interest and excitement of setting-up a house, of walking about

  it from room to room and from floor to floor, or sitting at one's

  own dinner table and watching one's wife control conversation with a

  pretty, timid resolution, of taking a place among the secure and

  free people of our world, passed almost insensibly into the interest

  and excitement of my Parliamentary candidature for the Kinghamstead

  Division, that shapeless chunk of agricultural midland between the

  Great Western and the North Western railways. I was going to "take

  hold" at last, the Kinghamstead Division was my appointed handle. I

  was to find my place in the rather indistinctly sketched

  constructions that were implicit in the minds of all our circle.

  The precise place I had to fill and the precise functions I had to

  discharge were not as yet very clear, but all that, we felt sure,

  would become plain as things developed.

  A few brief months of vague activities of "nursing" gave place to

  the excitements of the contest that followed the return of Mr.

  Camphell-Bannerman to power in 1905. So far as the Kinghamstead

  Division was concerned it was a depressed and tepid battle. I went

  about the constituency making three speeches that were soon

  threadbare, and an odd little collection of people worked for me;

  two solicitors, a cheap photographer, a democratic parson, a number

  of dissenting ministers, the Mayor of Kinghamstead, a Mrs. Bulger,

  the widow of an old Chartist who had grown rich through electric

  traction patents, Sir Roderick Newton, a Jew who had bought

  Calersham Castle, and old Sir Graham Rivers, that sturdy old

  soldier, were among my chief supporters. We had headquarters in

  each town and village, mostly there were empty shops we leased