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  it as an odd exceptional little wrangle.

  At first we seem to have split upon the moral quality of the

  aristocracy, and I had an odd sense that in some way too feminine

  for me to understand our hostess had aggrieved her. She said, I

  know, that Champneys distressed her; made her "eager for work and

  reality again."

  "But aren't these people real?"

  "They're so superficial, so extravagant!"

  I said I was not shocked by their unreality. They seemed the least

  affected people I had ever met. "And are they really so

  extravagant?" I asked, and put it to her that her dresses cost quite

  as much as any other woman's in the house.

  "It's not only their dresses," Margaret parried. "It's the scale

  and spirit of things."

  I questioned that. "They're cynical," said Margaret, staring before

  her out of the window.

  I challenged her, and she quoted the Brabants, about whom there had

  been an ancient scandal. She'd heard of it from Altiora, and it was

  also Altiora who'd given her a horror of Lord Carnaby, who was also

  with us. "You know his reputation," said Margaret. "That Normandy

  girl. Every one knows about it. I shiver when I look at him. He

  seems-oh! like something not of OUR civilisation. He WILL come and

  say little things to me."

  "Offensive things?"

  "No, politenesses and things. Of course his manners are-quite

  right. That only makes it worse, I think. It shows he might have

  helped-all that happened. I do all I can to make him see I don't

  like him. But none of the others make the slightest objection to

  him."

  "Perhaps these people imagine something might be said for him."

  "That's just it," said Margaret.

  "Charity," I suggested.

  "I don't like that sort of toleration."

  I was oddly annoyed. "Like eating with publicans and sinners," I

  said. "No!…

  But scandals, and the contempt for rigid standards their condonation

  displayed, weren't more than the sharp edge of the trouble. "It's

  their whole position, their selfish predominance, their class

  conspiracy against the mass of people," said Margaret. "When I sit

  at dinner in that splendid room, with its glitter and white

  reflections and candlelight, and its flowers and its wonderful

  service and its candelabra of solid gold, I seem to feel the slums

  and the mines and the over-crowded cottages stuffed away under the

  table."

  I reminded Margaret that she was not altogether innocent of unearned

  increment.

  "But aren't we doing our best to give it back?" she said.

  I was moved to question her. "Do you reallythink," I asked, "that

  the Tories and peers and rich people are to blame for social

  injustice as we have it to-day? Do you reallysee politics as a

  struggle of light on the Liberal side against darkness on the Tory?"

  "They MUST know," said Margaret.

  I found myself questioning that. I see now that to Margaret it must

  have seemed the perversest carping against manifest things, but at

  the time I was concentrated simply upon the elucidation of her view

  and my own; I wanted to get at her conception in the sharpest,

  hardest lines that were possible. It was perfectly clear that she

  saw Toryism as the diabolical element in affairs. The thing showed

  in its hopeless untruth all the clearer for the fine, clean emotion

  with which she gave it out to me. My sleeping peer in the library

  at Stamford Court and Evesham talking luminously behind the

  Hartstein flowers embodied the devil, and my replete citizen sucking

  at his cigar in the National Liberal Club, Willie Crampton

  discussing the care and management of the stomach over a specially

  hygienic lemonade, and Dr. Tumpany in his aggressive frock-coat

  pegging out a sort of right in Socialism, were the centre and

  wings of the angelic side. It was nonsense. But how was I to put

  the truth to her?

  "I don't see things at all as you do," I said. "I don't see things

  in the same way."

  "Think of the poor," said Margaret, going off at a tangent.

  "Think of every one," I said. "We Liberals have done more mischief

  through well-intentioned benevolence than all the selfishness in the

  world could have done. We built up the liquor interest."

  "WE!" cried Margaret. "How can you say that? It's against us."

  "Naturally. But we made it a monopoly in our clumsy efforts to

  prevent people drinking what they liked, because it interfered with

  industrial regularity-"

  "Oh!" cried Margaret, stung; and I could see she thought I was

  talking mere wickedness.

  "That's it," I said.

  "But would you have people drink whatever they pleased?"

  "Certainly. What right have I to dictate to other men and women?"

  "But think of the children!"

  "Ah! there you have the folly of modern Liberalism, its half-

  cunning, half-silly way of getting at everything in a roundabout

  fashion. If neglecting children is an offence, and it IS an

  offence, then deal with it as such, but don't go badgering and

  restricting people who sell something that may possibly in some

  cases lead to a neglect of children. If drunkenness is an offence,

  punish it, but don't punish a man for selling honest drink that

  perhaps after all won't make any one drunk at all. Don't intensify

  the viciousness of the public-house by assuming the place isn't fit

  for women and children. That's either spite or folly. Make the

  public-house FIT for women and children. Make it a real public-

  house. If we Liberals go on as we are going, we shall presently

  want to stop the sale of ink and paper because those things tempt

  men to forgery. We do already threaten the privacy of the post

  because of betting tout's letters. The drift of all that kind of

  thing is narrow, unimaginative, mischievous, stupid…"

  I stopped short and walked to the window and surveyed a pretty

  fountain, facsimile of one in Verona, amidst trim-cut borderings of

  yew. Beyond, and seen between the stems of ilex trees, was a great

  blaze of yellow flowers…

  "But prevention," I heard Margaret behind me, "is the essence of our

  work."

  I turned. "There's no prevention but education. There's no

  antiseptics in life but love and fine thinking. Make people fine,

  make fine people. Don't be afraid. These Tory leaders are better

  people individually than the average; why cast them for the villains

  of the piece? The real villain in the piece-in the whole human

  drama-is the muddle-headedness, and it matters very little if it's

  virtuous-minded or wicked. I want to get at muddle-headedness. If

  I could do that I could let all that you call wickedness in the

  world run about and do what it jolly well pleased. It would matter

  about as much as a slightly neglected dog-in an otherwise well-

  managed home."

  My thoughts had run away with me.

  "I can't understand you," said Margaret, in the profoundest

  distress. "I can't understand how it is you are coming to see

  things like this."

&
nbsp; 10

  The moods of a thinking man in politics are curiously evasive and

  difficult to describe. Neither the public nor the historian will

  permit the statesman moods. He has from the first to assume he has

  an Aim, a definite Aim, and to pretend to an absolute consistency

  with that. Those subtle questionings about the very fundamentals of

  life which plague us all so relentlessly nowadays are supposed to be

  silenced. He lifts his chin and pursues his Aim explicitly in the

  sight of all men. Those who have no real political experience can

  scarcely imagine the immense mental and moral strain there is

  between one's everyday acts and utterances on the one hand and the

  "thinking-out" process on the other. It is perplexingly difficult

  to keep in your mind, fixed and firm, a scheme essentially complex,

  to keep balancing a swaying possibility while at the same time under

  jealous, hostile, and stupid observation you tread your part in the

  platitudinous, quarrelsome, ill-presented march of affairs…

  The most impossible of all autobiographies is an intellectual

  autobiography. I have thrown together in the crudest way the

  elements of the problem I struggled with, but I can give no record

  of the subtle details; I can tell nothing of the long vacillations

  between Protean values, the talks and re-talks, the meditations, the

  bleak lucidities of sleepless nights…

  And yet these things I have struggled with must be thought out, and,

  to begin with, they must be thought out in this muddled,

  experimenting way. To go into a study to think about statecraft is

  to turn your back on the realities you are constantly needing to

  feel and test and sound if your thinking is to remain vital; to

  choose an aim and pursue it in despite of all subsequent

  questionings is to bury the talent of your mind. It is no use

  dealing with the intricate as though it were simple, to leap

  haphazard at the first course of action that presents itself; the

  whole world of politicians is far too like a man who snatches a

  poker to a failing watch. It is easy to say he wants to "get

  something done," but the only sane thing to do for the moment is to

  put aside that poker and take thought and get a better implement…

  One of the results of these fundamental preoccupations of mine was a

  curious irritability towards Margaret that I found difficult to

  conceal. It was one of the incidental cruelties of our position

  that this should happen. I was in such doubtmyself, that I had no

  power to phrase things for her in a form she could use. Hitherto I

  had stage-managed our "serious" conversations. Now I was too much

  in earnest and too uncertain to go on doing this. I avoided talk

  with her. Her serene, sustained confidence in vague formulae and

  sentimental aspirations exasperated me; her want of sympathetic

  apprehension made my few efforts to indicate my changing attitudes

  distressing and futile. It wasn't that I was always thinking right,

  and that she was always saying wrong. It was that I was struggling

  to get hold of a difficult thing that was, at any rate, half true, I

  could not gauge how true, and that Margaret's habitual phrasing

  ignored these elusive elements of truth, and without premeditation

  fitted into the weaknesses of my new intimations, as though they had

  nothing but weaknesses. It was, for example, obvious that these big

  people, who were the backbone of Imperialism and Conservatism, were

  temperamentally lax, much more indolent, much more sensuous, than

  our deliberately virtuous Young Liberals. I didn't want to be

  reminded of that, just when I was in full effort to realise the

  finer elements in their composition. Margaret classed them and

  disposed of them. It was our incurable differences in habits and

  gestures of thought coming between us again.

  The desert of misunderstanding widened. I was forced back upon

  myself and my own secret councils. For a time I went my way alone;

  an unmixed evil for both of us. Except for that Pentagram evening,

  a series of talks with Isabel Rivers, who was now becoming more and

  more important in my intellectual life, and the arguments I

  maintained with Crupp, I never really opened my mind at all during

  that period of indecisions, slow abandonments, and slow

  acquisitions.

  CHAPTER THE THIRD

  SECESSION

  1

  At last, out of a vast accumulation of impressions, decision

  distilled quite suddenly. I succumbed to Evesham and that dream of

  the right thing triumphant through expression. I determined I would

  go over to the Conservatives, and use my every gift and power on the

  side of such forces on that side as made for educational

  reorganisation, scientific research, literature, criticism, and

  intellectual development. That was in 1909. I judged the Tories

  were driving straight at a conflict with the country, and I thought

  them bound to incur an electoral defeat. I under-estimated their

  strength in the counties. There would follow, I calculated, a

  period of profound reconstruction in method and policy alike. I was

  entirely at one with Crupp in perceiving in this an immense

  opportunity for the things we desired. An aristocracy quickened by

  conflict and on the defensive, and full of the idea of justification

  by reconstruction, might prove altogether more apt for thought and

  high professions than Mrs. Redmondson's spoilt children. Behind the

  now inevitable struggle for a reform of the House of Lords, there

  would be great heart searchings and educational endeavour. On that

  we reckoned…

  At last we talked it out to the practical pitch, and Crupp and

  Shoesmith, and I and Gane, made our definite agreement together…

  I emerged from enormous silences upon Margaret one evening.

  She was just back from the display of some new musicians at the

  Hartsteins. I remember she wore a dress of golden satin, very rich-

  looking and splendid. About her slender neck there was a rope of

  gold-set amber beads. Her hair caught up and echoed and returned

  these golden notes. I, too, was in evening dress, but where I had

  been escapes me,-some forgotten dinner, I suppose. I went into her

  room. I remember I didn't speak for some moments. I went across to

  the window and pulled the blind aside, and looked out upon the

  railed garden of the square, with its shrubs and shadowed turf

  gleaming pallidly and irregularly in the light of the big electric

  standard in the corner.

  "Margaret," I said, "I think I shall break with the party."

  She made no answer. I turned presently, a movement of enquiry.

  "I was afraid you meant to do that," she said.

  "I'm out of touch," I explained. "Altogether."

  "Oh! I know."

  "It places me in a difficult position," I said.

  Margaret stood at her dressing-table, looking steadfastly at herself

  in the glass, and with her fingers playing with a litter of

  stoppered bottles of tinted glass. "I was afraid it was coming to

  this," she said.

  "In a way," I said, "we've been allies. I owe my
seat to you. I

  couldn't have gone into Parliament…"

  "I don't want considerations like that to affect us," she

  interrupted.

  There was a pause. She sat down in a chair by her dressing-table,

  lifted an ivory hand-glass, and put it down again.

  "I wish," she said, with something like a sob in her voice, "it were

  possible that you shouldn't do this." She stopped abruptly, and I

  did not look at her, because I could feel the effort she was making

  to control herself.

  "I thought," she began again, "when you came into Parliament-"

  There came another silence. "It's all gone so differently," she

  said. "Everything has gone so differently."

  I had a sudden memory of her, shining triumphant after the

  Kinghampstead election, and for the first time I realised just how

  perplexing and disappointing my subsequent career must have been to

  her.

  "I'm not doing this without consideration," I said.

  "I know," she said, in a voice of despair, "I've seen it coming.

  But-I still don't understand it. I don't understand how you can go

  over."

  "My ideas have changed and developed," I said.

  I walked across to her bearskin hearthrug, and stood by the mantel.

  "To think that you," she said; "you who might have been leader-"

  She could not finish it. "All the forces of reaction," she threw

  out.

  "I don't think they are the forces of reaction," I said. "I think I

  can find work to do-better work on that side."

  "Against us!" she said. "As if progress wasn't hard enough! As if

  it didn't call upon every able man!"

  "I don't think Liberalism has a monopoly of progress."

  She did not answer that. She sat quite still looking in front of

  her. "WHY have you gone over?" she asked abruptly as though I had

  said nothing.

  There came a silence that I was impelled to end. I began a stiff

  dissertation from the hearthrug. "Iam going over, because I think

  I may join in an intellectual renascence on the Conservative side.

  I think that in the coming struggle there will be a partial and

  altogether confused and demoralising victory for democracy, that

  will stir the classes which now dominate the Conservative party into

  an energetic revival. They will set out to win back, and win back.