THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Page 45

  me…

  At the very outset that secret, which was to touch no one but Isabel

  and myself, had reached out to stab another human being.

  7

  The whole world had changed for Isabel and me; and we tried to

  pretend that nothing had changed except a small matter between us.

  We believed quite honestly at that time that it was possible to keep

  this thing that had happened from any reaction at all, save perhaps

  through some magically enhanced vigour in our work, upon the world

  about us! Seen in retrospect, one can realise the absurdity of this

  belief; within a week I realised it; but that does not alter the

  fact that we did believe as much, and that people who are deeply in

  love and unable to marry will continue to believe so to the very end

  of time. They will continue to believe out of existence every

  consideration that separates them until they have come together.

  Then they will count the cost, as we two had to do.

  I am telling a story, and not propounding theories in this book; and

  chiefly Iam telling of the ideas and influences and emotions that

  have happened to me-me as a sort of sounding board for my world.

  The moralist is at liberty to go over my conduct with his measure

  and say, "At this point or at that you went wrong, and you ought to

  have done"-so-and-so. The point of interest to the statesman is

  that it didn't for a moment occur to us to do so-and-so when the

  time for doing it came. It amazes me now to think how little either

  of us troubled about the established rights or wrongs of the

  situation. We hadn't an atom of respect for them, innate or

  acquired. The guardians of public morals will say we were very bad

  people; I submit in defence that they are very bad guardians-

  provocative guardians… And when at last there came a claim

  against us that had an effective validity for us, we were in the

  full tide of passionate intimacy.

  I had a night of nearly sleepless perplexity after Margaret's

  return. She had suddenly presented herself to me like something

  dramatically recalled, fine, generous, infinitely capable of

  feeling. I was amazed how much I had forgotten her. In my contempt

  for vulgarised and conventionalised honour I had forgotten that for

  me there was such a reality as honour. And here it was, warm and

  near to me, living, breathing, unsuspecting. Margaret's pride was

  my honour, that I had had no right even to imperil.

  I do not now remember if I thought at that time of going to Isabel

  and putting this new aspect of the case before her. Perhaps I did.

  Perhaps I may have considered even then the possibility of ending

  what had so freshly and passionately begun. If I did, it vanished

  next day at the sight of her. Whatever regrets came in the

  darkness, the daylight brought an obstinate confidence in our

  resolution again. We would, we declared, "pull the thing off."

  Margaret must not know. Margaret should not know. If Margaret did

  not know, then no harm whatever would be done. We tried to sustain

  that…

  For a brief time we had been like two people in a magic cell,

  magically cut off from the world and full of a light of its own, and

  then we began to realise that we were not in the least cut off, that

  the world was all about us and pressing in upon us, limiting us,

  threatening us, resuming possession of us. I tried to ignore the

  injury to Margaret of her unreciprocated advances. I tried to

  maintain to myself that this hidden love made no difference to the

  now irreparable breach between husband and wife. But I never spoke

  of it to Isabel or let her see that aspect of our case. How could

  I? The time for that had gone…

  Then in new shapes and relations came trouble. Distressful elements

  crept in by reason of our unavoidable furtiveness; we ignored them,

  hid them from each other, and attempted to hide them from ourselves.

  Successful love is a thing of abounding pride, and we had to be

  secret. It was delightful at first to be secret, a whispering, warm

  conspiracy; then presently it became irksome and a little shameful.

  Her essential frankness of soul was all against the masks and

  falsehoods that many women would have enjoyed. Together in our

  secrecy we relaxed, then in the presence of other people again it

  was tiresome to have to watch for the careless, too easy phrase, to

  snatch back one's hand from the limitless betrayal of a light,

  familiar touch.

  Love becomes a poor thing, at best a poor beautiful thing, if it

  develops no continuing and habitual intimacy. We were always

  meeting, and most gloriously loving and beginning-and then we had

  to snatch at remorseless ticking watches, hurry to catch trains, and

  go back to this or that. That is all very well for the intrigues of

  idle people perhaps, but not for an intense personal relationship.

  It is like lighting a candle for the sake of lighting it, over and

  over again, and each time blowing it out. That, no doubt, must be

  very amusing to children playing with the matches, but not to people

  who love warm light, and want it in order to do fine and honourable

  things together. We had achieved-I give the ugly phrase that

  expresses the increasing discolouration in my mind-"illicit

  intercourse." To end at that, we now perceived, wasn't in our

  style. But where were we to end?…

  Perhaps we might at this stage have given it up. I think if we

  could have seen ahead and around us we might have done so. But the

  glow of our cell blinded us… I wonder what might have

  happened if at that time we had given it up… We propounded

  it, we met again in secret to discuss it, and our overpowering

  passion for one another reduced that meeting to absurdity…

  Presently the idea of children crept between us. It came in from

  all our conceptions of life and public service; it was, we found, in

  the quality of our minds that physical love without children is a

  little weak, timorous, more than a little shameful. With

  imaginative people there very speedily comes a time when that

  realisation is inevitable. We hadn't thought of that before-it

  isn't natural to think of that before. We hadn't known. There is

  no literature in English dealing with such things.

  There is a necessary sequence of phases in love. These came in

  their order, and with them, unanticipated tarnishings on the first

  bright perfection of our relations. For a time these developing

  phases were no more than a secret and private trouble between us,

  little shadows spreading by imperceptible degrees across that vivid

  and luminous cell.

  8

  The Handitch election flung me suddenly into prominence.

  It is still only two years since that struggle, and I will not

  trouble the reader with a detailed history of events that must be

  quite sufficiently present in his mind for my purpose already. Huge

  stacks of journalism have dealt with Handitch and its significance.

  For the reader very probably, as for most people outside a

  comparatively small circle, it meant my emerge
nce from obscurity.

  We obtruded no editor's name in the BLUE WEEKLY; I had never as yet

  been on the London hoardings. Before Handitch I was a journalist

  and writer of no great public standing; after Handitch, I was

  definitely a person, in the little group of persons who stood for

  the Young Imperialist movement. Handitch was, to a very large

  extent, my affair. I realised then, as a man comes to do, how much

  one can still grow after seven and twenty. In the second election I

  was a man taking hold of things; at Kinghamstead I had been simply a

  young candidate, a party unit, led about the constituency, told to

  do this and that, and finally washed in by the great Anti-

  Imperialist flood, like a starfish rolling up a beach.

  My feminist views had earnt the mistrust of the party, and I do not

  think I should have got the chance of Handitch or indeed any chance

  at all of Parliament for a long time, if it had not been that the

  seat with its long record of Liberal victories and its Liberal

  majority of 3642 at the last election, offered a hopeless contest.

  The Liberal dissensions and the belated but by no means contemptible

  Socialist candidate were providential interpositions. I think,

  however, the conduct of Gane, Crupp, and Tarvrille in coming down to

  fight for me, did count tremendously in my favour. "We aren't going

  to win, perhaps," said Crupp, "but we are going to talk." And until

  the very eve of victory, we treated Handitch not so much as a

  battlefield as a hoarding. And so it was the Endowment of

  Motherhood as a practical form of Eugenics got into English

  politics.

  Plutus, our agent, was scared out of his wits when the thing began.

  "They're ascribing all sorts of queer ideas to you about the

  Family," he said.

  "I think the Family exists for the good of the children," I said;

  "is that queer?"

  "Not when you explain it-but they won't let you explain it. And

  about marriage-?"

  "I'm all right about marriage-trust me."

  "Of course, if YOU had children," said Plutus, rather

  inconsiderately…

  They opened fire upon me in a little electioneering rag call the

  HANDITCH SENTINEL, with a string of garbled quotations and

  misrepresentations that gave me an admirable text for a speech. I

  spoke for an hour and ten minutes with a more and more crumpled copy

  of the SENTINEL in my hand, and I made the fullest and completest

  exposition of the idea of endowing motherhood that I think had ever

  been made up to that time in England. Its effect on the press was

  extraordinary. The Liberal papers gave me quite unprecedented space

  under the impression that I had only to be given rope to hang

  myself; the Conservatives cut me down or tried to justify me; the

  whole country was talking. I had had a pamphlet in type upon the

  subject, and I revised this carefully and put it on the book-stalls

  within three days. It sold enormously and brought me bushels of

  letters. We issued over three thousand in Handitch alone. At

  meeting after meeting I was heckled upon nothing else. Long before

  polling day Plutus was converted.

  "It's catching on like old age pensions," he said. "We've dished

  the Liberals! To think that such a project should come from our

  side!"

  But it was only with the declaration of the poll that my battle was

  won. No one expected more than a snatch victory, and I was in by

  over fifteen hundred. At one bound Cossington's papers passed from

  apologetics varied by repudiation to triumphant praise. "A

  renascent England, breeding men," said the leader in his chief daily

  on the morning after the polling, and claimed that the Conservatives

  had been ever the pioneers in sanely bold constructive projects.

  I came up to London with a weary but rejoicing Margaret by the night

  train.

  CHAPTER THE SECOND

  THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION

  1

  To any one who did not know of that glowing secret between Isabel

  and myself, I might well have appeared at that time the most

  successful and enviable of men. I had recovered rapidly from an

  uncongenial start in political life; I had become a considerable

  force through the BLUE WEEKLY, and was shaping an increasingly

  influential body of opinion; I had re-entered Parliament with quite

  dramatic distinction, and in spite of a certain faltering on the

  part of the orthodox Conservatives towards the bolder elements in

  our propaganda, I had loyal and unenvious associates who were making

  me a power in the party. People were coming to our group,

  understandings were developing. It was clear we should play a

  prominent part in the next general election, and that, given a

  Conservative victory, I should be assured of office. The world

  opened out to me brightly and invitingly. Great schemes took shape

  in my mind, always more concrete, always more practicable; the years

  ahead seemed falling into order, shining with the credible promise

  of immense achievement.

  And at the heart of it all, unseen and unsuspected, was the secret

  of my relations with Isabel-like a seed that germinates and

  thrusts, thrusts relentlessly.

  From the onset of the Handitch contest onward, my meetings with her

  had been more and more pervaded by the discussion of our situation.

  It had innumerable aspects. It was very present to us that we

  wanted to be together as much as possible-we were beginning to long

  very much for actual living together in the same house, so that one

  could come as it were carelessly-unawares-upon the other, busy

  perhaps about some trivial thing. We wanted to feel each other in

  the daily atmosphere. Preceding our imperatively sterile passion,

  you must remember, outside it, altogether greater than it so far as

  our individual lives were concerned, there had grown and still grew

  an enormous affection and intellectual sympathy between us. We

  brought all our impressions and all our ideas to each other, to see

  them in each other's light. It is hard to convey that quality of

  intellectual unison to any one who has not experienced it. I

  thought more and more in terms of conversation with Isabel; her

  possible comments upon things would flash into my mind, oh!-with

  the very sound of her voice.

  I remember, too, the odd effect of seeing her in the distance going

  about Handitch, like any stranger canvasser; the queer emotion of

  her approach along the street, the greeting as she passed. The

  morning of the polling she vanished from the constituency. I saw

  her for an instant in the passage behind our Committee rooms.

  "Going?" said I.

  She nodded.

  "Stay it out. I want you to see the fun. I remember-the other

  time."

  She didn't answer for a moment or so, and stood with face averted.

  "It's Margaret's show," she said abruptly. "If I see her smiling

  there like a queen by your side-! She did-last time. I

  remember." She caught at a sob and dashed her hand across her face

  impatiently. "Jealous fool, mean and petty, jealous fool!
…

  Good luck, old man, to you! You're going to win. But I don't want

  to see the end of it all the same…"

  "Good-bye!" said I, clasping her hand as some supporter appeared in

  the passage…

  I came back to London victorious, and a little flushed and coarse

  with victory; and so soon as I could break away I went to Isabel's

  flat and found her white and worn, with the stain of secret weeping

  about her eyes. I came into the room to her and shut the door.

  "You said I'd win," I said, and held out my arms.

  She hugged me closely for a moment.

  "My dear," I whispered, "it's nothing-without you-nothing!"

  We didn't speak for some seconds. Then she slipped from my hold.

  "Look!" she said, smiling like winter sunshine. "I've had in all

  the morning papers-the pile of them, and you-resounding."

  "It's more than I dared hope."

  "Or I."

  She stood for a moment still smiling bravely, and then she was

  sobbing in my arms. "The bigger you are-the more you show," she

  said-" the more we are parted. I know, I know-"

  I held her close to me, making no answer.

  Presently she became still. "Oh, well," she said, and wiped her

  eyes and sat down on the little sofa by the fire; and I sat down

  beside her.

  "I didn't know all there was in love," she said, staring at the

  coals, "when we went love-making."

  I put my arm behind her and took a handful of her dear soft hair in

  my hand and kissed it.

  "You've done a great thing this time," she said. "Handitch will

  make you."

  "It opens big chances," I said. "But why are you weeping, dear

  one?"

  "Envy," she said, "and love."

  "You're not lonely?"

  "I've plenty to do-and lots of people."

  "Well?"

  "I want you."

  "You've got me."

  She put her arm about me and kissed me. "I want you," she said,

  "just as if I had nothing of you. You don't understand-how a woman

  wants a man. I thought once if I just gave myself to you it would

  be enough. It was nothing-it was just a step across the threshold.

  My dear, every moment you are away I ache for you-ache! I want to

  be about when it isn't love-making or talk. I want to be doing