THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Page 48

  distinctive and memorable. We had seen so much of one another, had

  become so intimate, that we talked of parting even as we parted with

  a sense of incredible remoteness. We went together up over the

  cliffs, and to a place where they fall towards the sea, past the

  white, quaint-lanterned lighthouses of the South Foreland. There,

  in a kind of niche below the crest, we sat talking. It was a

  spacious day, serenely blue and warm, and on the wrinkled water

  remotely below a black tender and six hooded submarines came

  presently, and engaged in mysterious manoeuvers. Shrieking gulls

  and chattering jackdaws circled over us and below us, and dived and

  swooped; and a skerry of weedy, fallen chalk appeared, and gradually

  disappeared again, as the tide fell and rose.

  We talked and thought that afternoon on every aspect of our

  relations. It seems to me now we talked so wide and far that

  scarcely an issue in the life between man and woman can arise that

  we did not at least touch upon. Lying there at Isabel's feet, I

  have become for myself a symbol of all this world-wide problem

  between duty and conscious, passionate love the world has still to

  solve. Because it isn't solved; there's a wrong in it either way..

  .. The sky, the wide horizon, seemed to lift us out of ourselves

  until we were something representative and general. She was

  womanhood become articulate, talking to her lover.

  "I ought," I said, "never to have loved you."

  "It wasn't a thing planned," she said.

  "I ought never to have let our talk slip to that, never to have

  turned back from America."

  "I'm glad we did it," she said. "Don't think I repent."

  I looked at her.

  "I will never repent," she said. "Never!" as though she clung to

  her life in saying it.

  I remember we talked for a long time of divorce. It seemed to us

  then, and it seems to us still, that it ought to have been possible

  for Margaret to divorce me, and for me to marry without the

  scandalous and ugly publicity, the taint and ostracism that follow

  such a readjustment. We went on to the whole perplexing riddle of

  marriage. We criticised the current code, how muddled and

  conventionalised it had become, how modified by subterfuges and

  concealments and new necessities, and the increasing freedom of

  women. "It's all like Bromstead when the building came," I said;

  for I had often talked to her of that early impression of purpose

  dissolving again into chaotic forces. "There is no clear right in

  the world any more. The world is Byzantine. The justest man to-day

  must practise a tainted goodness."

  These questions need discussion-a magnificent frankness of

  discussion-if any standards are again to establish an effective

  hold upon educated people. Discretions, as I have said already,

  will never hold any one worth holding-longer than they held us.

  Against every "shalt not" there must be a "why not" plainly put,-

  the "why not" largest and plainest, the law deduced from its

  purpose. "You and I, Isabel," I said, "have always been a little

  disregardful of duty, partly at least because the idea of duty comes

  to us so ill-clad. Oh! I know there's an extravagant insubordinate

  strain in us, but that wasn't all. I wish humbugs would leave duty

  alone. I wish all duty wasn't covered with slime. That's where the

  real mischief comes in. Passion can always contrive to clothe

  itself in beauty, strips itself splendid. That carried us. But for

  all its mean associations there is this duty…

  "Don't we come rather late to it?"

  "Not so late that it won't be atrociously hard to do."

  "It's queer to think of now," said Isabel. "Who could believe we

  did all we have done honestly? Well, in a manner honestly. Who

  could believe we thought this might be hidden? Who could trace it

  all step by step from the time when we found that a certain boldness

  in our talk was pleasing? We talked of love… Master, there's

  not much for us to do in the way of Apologia that any one will

  credit. And yet if it were possible to tell the very heart of our

  story…

  "Does Margaret really want to go on with you?" she asked-"shield

  you-knowing of… THIS?"

  "I'm certain. I don't understand-just as I don't understand

  Shoesmith, but she does. These people walk on solid ground which is

  just thin air to us. They've got something we haven't got.

  Assurances? I wonder."…

  Then it was, or later, we talked of Shoesmith, and what her life

  might be with him.

  "He's good," she said; "he's kindly. He's everything but magic.

  He's the very image of the decent, sober, honourable life. You

  can't say a thing against him or I-except that something-something

  in his imagination, something in the tone of his voice-fails for

  me. Why don't I love him?-he's a better man than you! Why don't

  you? IS he a better man than you? He's usage, he's honour, he's

  the right thing, he's the breed and the tradition,-a gentleman.

  You're your erring, incalculable self. I suppose we women will

  trust this sort and love your sort to the very end of time…"

  We lay side by side and nibbled at grass stalks as we talked. It

  seemed enormously unreasonable to us that two people who had come to

  the pitch of easy and confident affection and happiness that held

  between us should be obliged to part and shun one another, or murder

  half the substance of their lives. We feltourselves crushed and

  beaten by an indiscriminating machine which destroys happiness in

  the service of jealousy. "The mass of people don't feel these

  things in quite the same manner as we feel them," she said. "Is it

  because they're different in grain, or educated out of some

  primitive instinct?"

  "It's because we've explored love a little, and they know no more

  than the gateway," I said. "Lust and then jealousy; their simple

  conception-and we have gone past all that and wandered hand in

  hand…"

  I remember that for a time we watched two of that larger sort of

  gull, whose wings are brownish-white, circle and hover against the

  blue. And then we lay and looked at a band of water mirror clear

  far out to sea, and wondered why the breeze that rippled all the

  rest should leave it so serene.

  "And in this State of ours," I resumed.

  "Eh!" said Isabel, rolling over into a sitting posture and looking

  out at the horizon. "Let's talk no more of things we can never see.

  Talk to me of the work you are doing and all we shall do-after we

  have parted. We've said too little of that. We've had our red

  life, and it's over. Thank Heaven!-though we stole it! Talk about

  your work, dear, and the things we'll go on doing-just as though we

  were still together. We'll still be together in a sense-through

  all these things we have in common."

  And so we talked of politics and our outlook. We were interested to

  the pitch of self-forgetfulness. We weighed persons and forces,

  discussed the probabilities of the next general election, the steady

  drift
of public opinion in the north and west away from Liberalism

  towards us. It was very manifest that in spite of Wardenham and the

  EXPURGATOR, we should come into the new Government strongly. The

  party had no one else, all the young men were formally or informally

  with us; Esmeer would have office, Lord Tarvrille, I… and very

  probably there would be something for Shoesmith. "And for my own

  part," I said, "I count on backing on the Liberal side. For the

  last two years we've been forcing competition in constructive

  legislation between the parties. The Liberals have not been long in

  following up our Endowment of Motherhood lead. They'll have to give

  votes and lip service anyhow. Half the readers of the BLUE WEEKLY,

  they say, are Liberals…

  "I remember talking about things of this sort with old Willersley,"

  I said, "ever so many years ago. It was some place near Locarno,

  and we looked down the lake that shone weltering-just as now we

  look over the sea. And then we dreamt in an indistinct featureless

  way of all that you and I are doing now."

  "I!" said Isabel, and laughed.

  "Well, of some such thing," I said, and remained for awhile silent,

  thinking of Locarno.

  I recalled once more the largeness, the release from small personal

  things that I had felt in my youth; statecraft became real and

  wonderful again with the memory, the gigantic handling of gigantic

  problems. I began to talk out my thoughts, sitting up beside her,

  as I could never talk of them to any one but Isabel; began to

  recover again the purpose that lay under all my political ambitions

  and adjustments and anticipations. I saw the State, splendid and

  wide as I had seen it in that first travel of mine, but now it was

  no mere distant prospect of spires and pinnacles, but populous with

  fine-trained, bold-thinking, bold-doing people. It was as if I had

  forgotten for a long time and now remembered with amazement.

  At first, I told her, I had been altogether at a loss how I could do

  anything to battle against the aimless muddle of our world; I had

  wanted a clue-until she had come into my life questioning,

  suggesting, unconsciously illuminating. "But I have done nothing,"

  she protested. I declared she had done everything in growing to

  education under my eyes, in reflecting again upon all the processes

  that had made myself, so that instead of abstractions and blue-books

  and bills and devices, I had realised the world of mankind as a

  crowd needing before all things fine women and men. We'd spoilt

  ourselves in learning that, but anyhow we had our lesson. Before

  her I was in a nineteenth-century darkness, dealing with the nation

  as if it were a crowd of selfish men, forgetful of women and

  children and that shy wild thing in the hearts of men, love, which

  must be drawn upon as it has never been drawn upon before, if the

  State is to live. I saw now how it is possible to bring the loose

  factors of a great realm together, to create a mind of literature

  and thought in it, and the expression of a purpose to make it self-

  conscious and fine. I had it all clear before me, so that at a

  score of points I could presently begin. The BLUE WEEKLY was a

  centre of force. Already we had given Imperialism a criticism, and

  leavened half the press from our columns. Our movement consolidated

  and spread. We should presently come into power. Everything moved

  towards our hands. We should be able to get at the schools, the

  services, the universities, the church; enormously increase the

  endowment of research, and organise what was sorely wanted, a

  criticism of research; contrive a closer contact between the press

  and creative intellectual life; foster literature, clarify,

  strengthen the public consciousness, develop social organisation and

  a sense of the State. Men were coming to us every day, brilliant

  young peers like Lord Dentonhill, writers like Carnot and Cresswell.

  It filled me with pride to win such men. "We stand for so much more

  than we seem to stand for," I said. I opened my heart to her, so

  freely that I hesitate to open my heart even to the reader, telling

  of projects and ambitions I cherished, of my consciousness of great

  powers and widening opportunities…

  Isabel watched me as I talked.

  She too, I think, had forgotten these things for a while. For it is

  curious and I think a very significant thing that since we had

  become lovers, we had talked very little of the broader things that

  had once so strongly gripped our imaginations.

  "It's good," I said, "to talk like this to you, to get back to youth

  and great ambitions with you. There have been times lately when

  politics has seemed the pettiest game played with mean tools for

  mean ends-and none the less so that the happiness of three hundred

  million people might be touched by our follies. I talk to no one

  else like this… And now I think of parting, I think but of

  how much more I might have talked to you."…

  Things drew to an end at last, but after we had spoken of a thousand

  things.

  "We've talked away our last half day," I said, staring over my

  shoulder at the blazing sunset sky behind us. "Dear, it's been the

  last day of our lives for us… It doesn't seem like the last

  day of our lives. Or any day."

  "I wonder how it will feel?" said Isabel.

  "It will be very strange at first-not to be able to tell you

  things."

  "I've a superstition that after-after we've parted-if ever I go

  into my room and talk, you'll hear. You'll be-somewhere."

  "I shall be in the world-yes."

  "I don't feel as though these days ahead were real. Here we are,

  here we remain."

  "Yes, I feel that. As though you and I were two immortals, who

  didn't live in time and space at all, who never met, who couldn't

  part, and here we lie on Olympus. And those two poor creatures who

  did meet, poor little Richard Remington and Isabel Rivers, who met

  and loved too much and had to part, they part and go their ways, and

  we lie here and watch them, you and I. She'll cry, poor dear."

  "She'll cry. She's crying now!"

  "Poor little beasts! I think he'll cry too. He winces. He could-

  for tuppence. I didn't know he had lachrymal glands at all until a

  little while ago. I suppose all love is hysterical-and a little

  foolish. Poor mites! Silly little pitiful creatures! How we have

  blundered! Think how we must look to God! Well, we'll pity them,

  and then we'll inspire him to stiffen up again-and do as we've

  determined he shall do. We'll see it through,-we who lie here on

  the cliff. They'll be mean at times, and horrid at times; we know

  them! Do you see her, a poor little fine lady in a great house,-

  she sometimes goes to her room and writes."

  "She writes for his BLUE WEEKLY still."

  "Yes. Sometimes-I hope. And he's there in the office with a bit

  of her copy in his hand."

  "Is it as good as if she still talked it over with him before she

  wrote it? Is it?"

  "Better, I think. Let's play it's be
tter-anyhow. It may be that

  talking over was rather mixed with love-making. After all, love-

  making is joy rather than magic. Don't let's pretend about that

  even… Let's go on watching him. (I don't see why her writing

  shouldn't be better. Indeed I don't.) See! There he goes down

  along the Embankment to Westminster just like a real man, for all

  that he's smaller than a grain of dust. What is running round

  inside that speck of a head of his? Look at him going past the

  Policemen, specks too-selected large ones from the country. I

  think he's going to dinner with the Speaker-some old thing like

  that. Is his face harder or commoner or stronger?-I can't quite

  see… And now he's up and speaking in the House. Hope he'll

  hold on to the thread. He'll have to plan his speeches to the very

  end of his days-and learn the headings."

  "Isn't she up in the women's gallery to hear him?"

  "No. Unless it's by accident."

  "She's there," she said.

  "Well, by accident it happens. Not too many accidents, Isabel.

  Never any more adventures for us, dear, now. No!… They play

  the game, you know. They've begun late, but now they've got to.

  You see it's not so very hard for them since you and I, my dear, are

  here always, always faithfully here on this warm cliff of love

  accomplished, watching and helping them under high heaven. It isn't

  so VERY hard. Rather good in some ways. Some people HAVE to be

  broken a little. Can you see Altiora down there, by any chance?"

  "She's too little to be seen," she said.

  "Can you see the sins they once committed?"

  "I can only see you here beside me, dear-for ever. For all my

  life, dear, till I die. Was that-the sin?"…

  I took her to the station, and after she had gone I was to drive to

  Dover, and cross to Calais by the night boat. I couldn't, I felt,

  return to London. We walked over the crest and down to the little

  station of Martin Mill side by side, talking at first in broken

  fragments, for the most part of unimportant things.

  "None of this," she said abruptly, "seems in the slightest degree

  real to me. I've got no sense of things ending."

  "We're parting," I said.

  "We're parting-as people part in a play. It's distressing. But I

  don't feel as though you and I were really never to see each other

  again for years. Do you?"

  I thought. "No," I said.