THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Page 39

Even if my estimate of con-temporary forces is wrong and they win,

  they will still be forced to reconstruct their outlook. A war

  abroad will supply the chastening if home politics fail. The effort

  at renascence is bound to come by either alternative. I believe I

  can do more in relation to that effort than in any other connexion

  in the world of politics at the present time. That's my case,

  Margaret."

  She certainly did not grasp what I said. "And so you will throw

  aside all the beginnings, all the beliefs and pledges-" Again her

  sentence remained incomplete. "I doubt if even, once you have gone

  over, they will welcome you."

  "That hardly matters."

  I made an effort to resume my speech.

  "I came into Parliament, Margaret," I said, "a little prematurely.

  Still-I suppose it was only by coming into Parliament that I could

  see things as I do now in terms of personality and imaginative

  range…" I stopped. Her stiff, unhappy, unlistening silence

  broke up my disquisition.

  "After all," I remarked, "most of this has been implicit in my

  writings."

  She made no sign of admission.

  "What are you going to do?" she asked.

  "Keep my seat for a time and make the reasons of my breach clear.

  Then either I must resign or-probably this new Budget will lead to

  a General Election. It's evidently meant to strain the Lords and

  provoke a quarrel."

  "You might, I think, have stayed to fight for the Budget."

  "I'm not," I said, "so keen against the Lords."

  On that we halted.

  "But what are you going to do?" she asked.

  "I shall make my quarrel over some points in the Budget. I can't

  quite tell you yet where my chance will come. Then I shall either

  resign my seat-or if things drift to dissolution I shall stand

  again."

  "It's political suicide."

  "Not altogether."

  "I can't imagine you out of Parliament again. It's just like-like

  undoing all we have done. What will you do?"

  "Write. Make a new, more definite place for myself. You know, of

  course, there's already a sort of group about Crupp and Gane."

  Margaret seemed lost for a time in painfulthought.

  "For me," she said at last, "our political work has been a religion-

  it has been more than a religion."

  I heard in silence. I had no form of protest available against the

  implications of that.

  "And then I find you turning against all we aimed to do-talking of

  going over, almost lightly-to those others."…

  She was white-lipped as she spoke. In the most curious way she had

  captured the moral values of the situation. I found myself

  protesting ineffectually against her fixed conviction. "It's

  because I think my duty lies in this change that I make it," I said.

  "I don't see how you can say that," she replied quietly.

  There was another pause between us.

  "Oh!" she said and clenched her hand upon the table. "That it

  should have come to this!"

  She was extraordinarily dignified and extraordinarily absurd. She

  was hurt and thwarted beyond measure. She had no place in her

  ideas, I thought, for me. I could see how it appeared to her, but I

  could not make her see anything of the intricate process that had

  brought me to this divergence. The opposition of our intellectual

  temperaments was like a gag in my mouth. What was there for me to

  say? A flash of intuition told me that behind her white dignity was

  a passionate disappointment, a shattering of dreams that needed

  before everything else the relief of weeping.

  "I've told you," I said awkwardly, "as soon as I could."

  There was another long silence. "So that is how we stand," I said

  with an air of having things defined. I walked slowly to the door.

  She had risen and stood now staring in front of her.

  "Good-night," I said, making no movement towards our habitual kiss.

  "Good-night," she answered in a tragic note…

  I closed the door softly. I remained for a moment or so on the big

  landing, hesitating between my bedroom and my study. As I did so I

  heard the soft rustle of her movement and the click of the key in

  her bedroom door. Then everything was still…

  She hid her tears from me. Something gripped my heart at the

  thought.

  "Damnation!" I said wincing. "Why the devil can't people at least

  THINK in the same manner?"

  2

  And that insufficient colloquy was the beginning of a prolonged

  estrangement between us. It was characteristic of our relations

  that we never reopened the discussion. The thing had been in the

  air for some time; we had recognised it now; the widening breach

  between us was confessed. My own feelings were curiously divided.

  It is remarkable that my very real affection for Margaret only

  became evident to me with this quarrel. The changes of the heart

  are very subtle changes. Iam quite unaware how or when my early

  romantic love for her purity and beauty and high-principled devotion

  evaporated from my life; but I do know that quite early in my

  parliamentary days there had come a vague, unconfessed resentment at

  the tie that seemed to hold me in servitude to her standards of

  private living and public act. I felt I was caught, and none the

  less so because it had been my own act to rivet on my shackles. So

  long as I still held myself bound to her that resentment grew. Now,

  since I had broken my bonds and taken my line it withered again, and

  I could think of Margaret with a returning kindliness.

  But I still felt embarrassment with her. I feltmyself dependent

  upon her for house room and food and social support, as it were

  under false pretences. I would have liked to have separated our

  financial affairs altogether. But I knew that to raise the issue

  would have seemed a last brutal indelicacy. So I tried almost

  furtively to keep my personal expenditure within the scope of the

  private income I made by writing, and we went out together in her

  motor brougham, dined and made appearances, met politely at

  breakfast-parted at night with a kiss upon her cheek. The locking

  of her door upon me, which at that time I quite understood, which I

  understand now, became for a time in my mind, through some obscure

  process of the soul, an offence. I never crossed the landing to her

  room again.

  In all this matter, and, indeed, in all my relations with Margaret,

  I perceive now I behaved badly and foolishly. My manifest blunder

  is that I, who was several years older than she, much subtler and in

  many ways wiser, never in any measure sought to guide and control

  her. After our marriage I treated her always as an equal, and let

  her go her way; held her responsible for all the weak and

  ineffective and unfortunate things she said and did to me. She

  wasn't clever enough to justify that. It wasn't fair to expect her

  to sympathise, anticipate, and understand. I ought to have taken

  care of her, roped her to me when it came to crossing the difficult

  places. If I had loved her more, and wiselier and more te
nderly, if

  there had not been the consciousness of my financial dependence on

  her always stiffening my pride, I think she would have moved with me

  from the outset, and left the Liberals with me. But she did not get

  any inkling of the ends I sought in my change of sides. It must

  have seemed to her inexplicable perversity. She had, I knew-for

  surely I knew it then-an immense capacity for loyalty and devotion.

  There she was with these treasures untouched, neglected and

  perplexed. A woman who loves wants to give. It is the duty and

  business of the man she has married for love to help her to help and

  give. But I was stupid. My eyes had never been opened. I was

  stiff with her and difficult to her, because even on my wedding

  morning there had been, deep down in my soul, voiceless though

  present, something weakly protesting, a faint perception of wrong-

  doing, the infinitesimally small, slow-multiplying germs of shame.

  3

  I made my breach with the party on the Budget.

  In many ways I was disposed to regard the 1909 Budget as a fine

  piece of statecraft. Its production was certainly a very unexpected

  display of vigour on the Liberal side. But, on the whole, this

  movement towards collectivist organisation on the part of the

  Liberals rather strengthened than weakened my resolve to cross the

  floor of the house. It made it more necessary, I thought, to leaven

  the purely obstructive and reactionary elements that were at once

  manifest in the opposition. I assailed the land taxation proposals

  in one main speech, and a series of minor speeches in committee.

  The line of attack I chose was that the land was a great public

  service that needed to be controlled on broad and far-sighted lines.

  I had no objection to its nationalisation, but I did object most

  strenuously to the idea of leaving it in private hands, and

  attempting to produce beneficial social results through the pressure

  of taxation upon the land-owning class. That might break it up in

  an utterly disastrous way. The drift of the government proposals

  was all in the direction of sweating the landowner to get immediate

  values from his property, and such a course of action was bound to

  give us an irritated and vindictive land-owning class, the class

  upon which we had hitherto relied-not unjustifiably-for certain

  broad, patriotic services and an influence upon our collective

  judgments that no other class seemed prepared to exercise. Abolish

  landlordism if you will, I said, buy it out, but do not drive it to

  a defensive fight, and leave it still sufficiently strong and

  wealthy to become a malcontent element in your state. You have

  taxed and controlled the brewer and the publican until the outraged

  Liquor Interest has become a national danger. You now propose to do

  the same thing on a larger scale. You turn a class which has many

  fine and truly aristocratic traditions towards revolt, and there is

  nothing in these or any other of your proposals that shows any sense

  of the need for leadership to replace these traditional leaders you

  are ousting. This was the substance of my case, and I hammered at

  it not only in the House, but in the press…

  The Kinghampstead division remained for some time insensitive to my

  defection.

  Then it woke up suddenly, and began, in the columns of the

  KINGSHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN, an indignant, confused outcry. I was

  treated to an open letter, signed Junius Secundus," and I replied in

  provocative terms. There were two thinly attended public meetings

  at different ends of the constituency, and then I had a

  correspondence with my old friend Parvill, the photographer, which

  ended in my seeing a deputation.

  My impression is that it consisted of about eighteen or twenty

  people. They had had to come upstairs to me and they were

  manifestly full of indignation and a little short of breath. There

  was Parvill himself, J.P., dressed wholly in black-I think to mark

  his sense of the occasion-and curiously suggestive in his respect

  for my character and his concern for the honourableness of the

  KINGHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN editor, of Mark Antony at the funeral of

  Cesar. There was Mrs. Bulger, also in mourning; she had never

  abandoned the widow's streamers since the death of her husband ten

  years ago, and her loyalty to Liberalism of the severest type was

  part as it were of her weeds. There was a nephew of Sir Roderick

  Newton, a bright young Hebrew of the graver type, and a couple of

  dissenting ministers in high collars and hats that stopped halfway

  between the bowler of this world and the shovel-hat of heaven.

  There was also a young solicitor from Lurky done in the horsey

  style, and there was a very little nervous man with a high brow and

  a face contracting below as though the jawbones and teeth had been

  taken out and the features compressed. The rest of the deputation,

  which included two other public-spirited ladies and several

  ministers of religion, might have been raked out of any omnibus

  going Strandward during the May meetings. They thrust Parvill

  forward as spokesman, and manifested a strong disposition to say

  "Hear, hear!" to his more strenuous protests provided my eye wasn't

  upon them at the time.

  I regarded this appalling deputation as Parvill's apologetic but

  quite definite utterances drew to an end. I had a moment of vision.

  Behind them I saw the wonderful array of skeleton forces that stand

  for public opinion, that are as much public opinion as exists indeed

  at the present time. The whole process of politics which bulks so

  solidly in history seemed for that clairvoyant instant but a froth

  of petty motives above abysms of indifference…

  Some one had finished. I perceived I had to speak.

  "Very well," I said, "I won't keep you long in replying. I'll

  resign if there isn't a dissolution before next February, and if

  there is I shan't stand again. You don't want the bother and

  expense of a bye-election (approving murmurs) if it can be avoided.

  But I may tell you plainly now that I don't think it will be

  necessary for me to resign, and the sooner you find my successor the

  better for the party. The Lords are in a corner; they've got to

  fight now or never, and I think they will throw out the Budget.

  Then they will go on fighting. It is a fight that will last for

  years. They have a sort of social discipline, and you haven't. You

  Liberals will find yourselves with a country behind you, vaguely

  indignant perhaps, but totally unprepared with any ideas whatever in

  the matter, face to face with the problem of bringing the British

  constitution up-to-date. Anything may happen, provided only that it

  is sufficiently absurd. If the King backs the Lords-and I don't

  see why he shouldn't-you have no Republican movement whatever to

  fall back upon. You lost it during the Era of GoodTaste. The

  country, I say, is destitute of ideas, and you have no ideas to give

  it. I don't see what you will do… For my own part, I mean to

  spend a year or so between a window and my
writingdesk."

  I paused. "I think, gentlemen," began Parvill, "that we hear all

  this with very great regret…"

  4

  My estrangement from Margaret stands in my memory now as something

  that played itself out within the four walls of our house in Radnor

  Square, which was, indeed, confined to those limits. I went to and

  fro between my house and the House of Commons, and the dining-rooms

  and clubs and offices in which we were preparing our new

  developments, in a state of aggressive and energetic dissociation,

  in the nascent state, as a chemist would say. I was free now, and

  greedy for fresh combination. I had a tremendous sense of released

  energies. I had got back to the sort of thing I could do, and to

  the work that had been shaping itself for so long in my imagination.

  Our purpose now was plain, bold, and extraordinarily congenial. We

  meant no less than to organise a new movement in English thought and

  life, to resuscitate a Public Opinion and prepare the ground for a

  revised and renovated ruling culture.

  For a time I seemed quite wonderfully able to do whatever I wanted

  to do. Shoesmith responded to my first advances. We decided to

  create a weekly paper as our nucleus, and Crupp and I set to work

  forthwith to collect a group of writers and speakers, including

  Esmeer, Britten, Lord Gane, Neal, and one or two younger men, which

  should constitute a more or less definite editorial council about

  me, and meet at a weekly lunch on Tuesday to sustain our general co-

  operations. We marked our claim upon Toryism even in the colour of

  our wrapper, and spoke of ourselves collectively as the Blue

  Weeklies. But our lunches were open to all sorts of guests, and our

  deliberations were never of a character to control me effectively in

  my editorial decisions. My only influential councillor at first was

  old Britten, who became my sub-editor. It was curious how we two

  had picked up our ancient intimacy again and resumed the easy give

  and take of our speculative dreaming schoolboy days.

  For a time my life centred altogether upon this journalistic work.

  Britten was an experienced journalist, and I had most of the

  necessary instincts for the business. We meant to make the paper

  right and good down to the smallest detail, and we set ourselves at