THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Read online

  things for you, and watching you when you're not thinking of me.

  All those safe, careless, intimate things. And something else-"

  She stopped. "Dear, I don't want to bother you. I just want you to

  know I love you…"

  She caught my head in her hands and kissed it, then stood up

  abruptly.

  I looked up at her, a little perplexed.

  "Dear heart," said I, "isn't this enough? You're my councillor, my

  colleague, my right hand, the secret soul of my life-"

  "And I want to darn your socks," she said, smiling back at me.

  "You're insatiable."

  She smiled "No," she said. "I'm not insatiable, Master. But I'm a

  woman in love. And I'm finding out what I want, and what is

  necessary to me-and what I can't have. That's all."

  "We get a lot."

  "We want a lot. You and I are greedy people for the things we like,

  Master. It's very evident we've got nearly all we can ever have of

  one another-and I'm not satisfied."

  "What more is there?

  "For you-very little. I wonder. For me-every thing. Yes-

  everything. You didn't mean it, Master; you didn't know any more

  than I did when I began, but love between a man and a woman is

  sometimes very one-sided. Fearfully one-sided! That's all…"

  "Don't YOU ever want children?" she said abruptly.

  "I suppose I do."

  "You don't!"

  "I haven't thought of them."

  "A man doesn't, perhaps. But I have… I want them-like

  hunger. YOUR children, and home with you. Really, continually you!

  That's the trouble… I can't have 'em, Master, and I can't

  have you."

  She was crying, and through her tears she laughed.

  "I'm going to make a scene," she said, "and get this over. I'm so

  discontented and miserable; I've got to tell you. It would come

  between us if I didn't. I'm in love with you, with everything-with

  all my brains. I'll pull through all right. I'll be good, Master,

  never you fear. But to-day I'm crying out with all my being. This

  election-You're going up; you're going on. In these papers-you're

  a great big fact. It's suddenly come home to me. At the back of my

  mind I've always had the idea I was going to have you somehow

  presently for myself-I mean to have you to go long tramps with, to

  keep house for, to get meals for, to watch for of an evening. It's

  a sort of habitual background to my thought of you. And it's

  nonsense-utter nonsense!" She stopped. She was crying and

  choking. "And the child, you know-the child!"

  I was troubled beyond measure, but Handitch and its intimations were

  clear and strong.

  "We can't have that," I said.

  "No," she said, "we can't have that."

  "We've got our own things to do."

  "YOUR things," she said.

  "Aren't they yours too?"

  "Because of you," she said.

  "Aren't they your very own things?"

  "Women don't have that sort of very own thing. Indeed, it's true!

  And think! You've been down there preaching the goodness of

  children, telling them the only good thing in a state is happy,

  hopeful children, working to free mothers and children-"

  "And we give our own children to do it?" I said.

  "Yes," she said. "And sometimes I think it's too much to give-too

  much altogether… Children get into a woman's brain-when she

  mustn't have them, especially when she must never hope for them.

  Think of the child we might have now!-the little creature with

  soft, tender skin, and little hands and little feet! At times it

  haunts me. It comes and says, Why wasn't I given life? I can hear

  it in the night… The world is full of such little ghosts,

  dear lover-little things that asked for life and were refused.

  They clamour to me. It's like a little fist beating at my heart.

  Love children, beautiful children. Little cold hands that tear at

  my heart! Oh, my heart and my lord!" She was holding my arm with

  both her hands and weeping against it, and now she drew herself to

  my shoulder and wept and sobbed in my embrace. "I shall never sit

  with your child on my knee and you beside me-never, and Iam a woman

  and your lover!…"

  2

  But the profound impossibility of our relation was now becoming more

  and more apparent to us. We found ourselves seeking justification,

  clinging passionately to a situation that was coldly, pitilessly,

  impossible and fated. We wanted quite intensely to live together

  and have a child, but also we wanted very many other things that

  were incompatible with these desires. It was extraordinarily

  difficult to weigh our political and intellectual ambitions against

  those intimate wishes. The weights kept altering according as one

  found oneself grasping this valued thing or that. It wasn't as if

  we could throw everything aside for our love, and have that as we

  wanted it. Love such as we bore one another isn't altogether, or

  even chiefly, a thing in itself-it is for the most part a value set

  upon things. Our love was interwoven with all our other interests;

  to go out of the world and live in isolation seemed to us like

  killing the best parts of each other; we loved the sight of each

  other engaged finely and characteristically, we knew each other best

  as activities. We had no delusions about material facts; we didn't

  want each other alive or dead, we wanted each other fully alive. We

  wanted to do big things together, and for us to take each other

  openly and desperately would leave us nothing in the world to do.

  We wanted children indeed passionately, but children with every

  helpful chance in the world, and children born in scandal would be

  handicapped at every turn. We wanted to share a home, and not a

  solitude.

  And when we were at this stage of realisation, began the intimations

  that we were found out, and that scandal was afoot against us…

  I heard of it first from Esmeer, who deliberately mentioned it, with

  that steady grey eye of his watching me, as an instance of the

  preposterous falsehoods people will circulate. It came to Isabel

  almost simultaneously through a married college friend, who made it

  her business to demand either confirmation or denial. It filled us

  both with consternation. In the surprise of the moment Isabel

  admitted her secret, and her friend went off "reserving her freedom

  of action."

  Discovery broke out in every direction. Friends with grave faces

  and an atmosphere of infinite tact invaded us both. Other friends

  ceased to invade either of us. It was manifest we had become-we

  knew not how-a private scandal, a subject for duologues, an

  amazement, a perplexity, a vivid interest. In a few brief weeks it

  seemed London passed from absolute unsuspiciousness to a chattering

  exaggeration of its knowledge of our relations.

  It was just the most inappropriate time for that disclosure. The

  long smouldering antagonism to my endowment of motherhood ideas had

  flared up into an active campaign in the EXPURGATOR, and it would be

  altogether disastrous to us if I should be convicted of any personal
/>
  irregularity. It was just because of the manifest and challenging

  respectability of my position that I had been able to carry the

  thing as far as I had done. Now suddenly my fortunes had sprung a

  leak, and scandal was pouring in… It chanced, too, that a

  wave of moral intolerance was sweeping through London, one of those

  waves in which the bitterness of the consciously just finds an ally

  in the panic of the undiscovered. A certain Father Blodgett had

  been preaching against social corruption with extraordinary force,

  and had roused the Church of England people to a kind of competition

  in denunciation. The old methods of the Anti-Socialist campaign had

  been renewed, and had offered far too wide a scope and too tempting

  an opportunity for private animosity, to be restricted to the

  private affairs of the Socialists. I had intimations of an

  extensive circulation of "private and confidential" letters…

  I think there can be nothing else in life quite like the unnerving

  realisation that rumour and scandal are afoot about one. Abruptly

  one's confidence in the solidity of the universe disappears. One

  walks silenced through a world that one feels to be full of

  inaudible accusations. One cannot challenge the assault, get it out

  into the open, separate truth and falsehood. It slinks from you,

  turns aside its face. Old acquaintances suddenly evaded me, made

  extraordinary excuses; men who had presumed on the verge of my world

  and pestered me with an intrusive enterprise, now took the bold step

  of flat repudiation. I became doubtful about the return of a nod,

  retracted all those tentacles of easy civility that I had hitherto

  spread to the world. I still grow warm with amazed indignation when

  I recall that Edward Crampton, meeting me full on the steps of the

  Climax Club, cut me dead. "By God!" I cried, and came near catching

  him by the throat and wringing out of him what of all good deeds and

  bad, could hearten him, a younger man than I and empty beyond

  comparison, to dare to play the judge to me. And then I had an open

  slight from Mrs. Millingham, whom I had counted on as one counts

  upon the sunrise. I had not expected things of that sort; they were

  disconcerting beyond measure; it was as if the world were giving way

  beneath my feet, as though something failed in the essential

  confidence of life, as though a hand of wet ice had touched my

  heart. Similar things were happening to Isabel. Yet we went on

  working, visiting, meeting, trying to ignore this gathering of

  implacable forces against us.

  For a time I was perplexed beyond measure to account for this

  campaign. Then I got a clue. The centre of diffusion was the

  Bailey household. The Baileys had never forgiven me my abandonment

  of the young Liberal group they had done so much to inspire and

  organise; their dinner-table had long been a scene of hostile

  depreciation of the BLUE WEEKLY and all its allies; week after week

  Altiora proclaimed that I was "doing nothing," and found other

  causes for our bye-election triumphs; I counted Chambers Street a

  dangerous place for me. Yet, nevertheless, I was astonished to find

  them using a private scandal against me. They did. I think

  Handitch had filled up the measure of their bitterness, for I had

  not only abandoned them, but I was succeeding beyond even their

  power of misrepresentation. Always I had been a wasp in their

  spider's web, difficult to claim as a tool, uncritical,

  antagonistic. I admired their work and devotion enormously, but I

  had never concealed my contempt for a certain childish vanity they

  displayed, and for the frequent puerility of their political

  intrigues. I suppose contempt galls more than injuries, and anyhow

  they had me now. They had me. Bailey, I found, was warning fathers

  of girls against me as a "reckless libertine," and Altiora, flushed,

  roguish, and dishevelled, was sitting on her fender curb after

  dinner, and pledging little parties of five or six women at a time

  with infinite gusto not to let the matter go further. Our cell was

  open to the world, and a bleak, distressful daylight streaming in.

  I had a gleam of a more intimate motive in Altiora from the reports

  that came to me. Isabel had been doing a series of five or six

  articles in the POLITICAL REVIEW in support of our campaign, the

  POLITICAL REVIEW which had hitherto been loyally Baileyite. Quite

  her best writing up to the present, at any rate, is in those papers,

  and no doubt Altiora had had not only to read her in those invaded

  columns, but listen to her praises in the mouths of the tactless

  influential. Altiora, like so many people who rely on gesture and

  vocal insistence in conversation, writes a poor and slovenly prose

  and handles an argument badly; Isabel has her University training

  behind her and wrote from the first with the stark power of a clear-

  headed man. "Now we know," said Altiora, with just a gleam of

  malice showing through her brightness, "now we know who helps with

  the writing!"

  She revealed astonishing knowledge.

  For a time I couldn't for the life of me discover her sources. I

  had, indeed, a desperate intention of challenging her, and then I

  bethought me of a youngster named Curmain, who had been my

  supplemental typist and secretary for a time, and whom I had sent on

  to her before the days of our breach. "Of course!" said I,

  "Curmain!" He was a tall, drooping, sidelong youth with sandy hair,

  a little forward head, and a long thin neck. He stole stamps, and,

  I suspected, rifled my private letter drawer, and I found him one

  day on a turn of the stairs looking guilty and ruffled with a pretty

  Irish housemaid of Margaret's manifestly in a state of hot

  indignation. I saw nothing, but I felt everything in the air

  between them. I hate this pestering of servants, but at the same

  time I didn't want Curmain wiped out of existence, so I had packed

  him off without unnecessary discussion to Altiora. He was quick and

  cheap anyhow, and I thought her general austerity ought to redeem

  him if anything could; the Chambers Street housemaid wasn't for any

  man's kissing and showed it, and the stamps and private letters were

  looked after with an efficiency altogether surpassing mine. And

  Altiora, I've no doubt left now whatever, pumped this young

  undesirable about me, and scenting a story, had him to dinner alone

  one evening to get to the bottom of the matter. She got quite to

  the bottom of it,-it must have been a queer duologue. She read

  Isabel's careless, intimate letters to me, so to speak, by this

  proxy, and she wasn't ashamed to use this information in the service

  of the bitterness that had sprung up in her since our political

  breach. It was essentially a personal bitterness; it helped no

  public purpose of theirs to get rid of me. My downfall in any

  public sense was sheer waste,-the loss of a man. She knew she was

  behaving badly, and so, when it came to remonstrance, she behaved

  worse. She'd got names and dates and places; the efficiency of her

 
; information was irresistible. And she set to work at it

  marvellously. Never before, in all her pursuit of efficient ideals,

  had Altiora achieved such levels of efficiency. I wrote a protest

  that was perhaps ill-advised and angry, I went to her and tried to

  stop her. She wouldn't listen, she wouldn't think, she denied and

  lied, she behaved like a naughty child of six years old which has

  made up its mind to be hurtful. It wasn't only, I think, that she

  couldn't bear our political and social influence; she also-I

  realised at that interview couldn't bear our loving. It seemed to

  her the sickliest thing,-a thing quite unendurable. While such

  things were, the virtue had gone out of her world.

  I've the vividest memory of that call of mine. She'd just come in

  and taken off her hat, and she was grey and dishevelled and tired,

  and in a business-like dress of black and crimson that didn't suit

  her and was muddy about the skirts; she'd a cold in her head and

  sniffed penetratingly, she avoided my eye as she talked and

  interrupted everything I had to say; she kept stabbing fiercely at

  the cushions of her sofa with a long hat-pin and pretending she was

  overwhelmed with grief at the DEBACLE she was deliberately

  organising.

  "Then part," she cried, "part. If you don't want a smashing up,-

  part! You two have got to be parted. You've got never to see each

  other ever, never to speak." There was a zest in her voice. "We're

  not circulating stories," she denied. "No! And Curmain never told

  us anything-Curmain is an EXCELLENT young man; oh! a quite

  excellent young man. You misjudged him altogether."…

  I was equally unsuccessful with Bailey. I caught the little wretch

  in the League Club, and he wriggled and lied. He wouldn't say where

  he had got his facts, he wouldn't admit he had told any one. When I

  gave him the names of two men who had come to me astonished and

  incredulous, he attempted absurdly to make me think they had told

  HIM. He did his horrible little best to suggest that honest old

  Quackett, who had just left England for the Cape, was the real

  scandalmonger. That struck me as mean, even for Bailey. I've still

  the odd vivid impression of his fluting voice, excusing the

  inexcusable, his big, shifty face evading me, his perspiration-

  beaded forehead, the shrugging shoulders, and the would-be