THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Read online

  "After we've parted I shall look to talk it over with you."

  "So shall I."

  "That's absurd."

  "Absurd."

  "I feel as if you'd always he there, just about where you are now.

  Invisible perhaps, but there. We've spent so much of our lives

  joggling elbows."…

  "Yes. Yes. I don't in the least realise it. I suppose I shall

  begin to when the train goes out of the station. Are we wanting in

  imagination, Isabel?"

  "I don't know. We've always assumed it was the other way about."

  "Even when the train goes out of the station-! I've seen you into

  so many trains."

  "I shall go on thinking of things to say to you-things to put in

  your letters. For years to come. How can I ever stop thinking in

  that way now? We've got into each other's brains."

  "It isn't real," I said; "nothing is real. The world's no more than

  a fantastic dream. Why are we parting, Isabel?"

  "I don't know. It seems now supremely silly. I suppose we have to.

  Can't we meet?-don't you think we shall meet even in dreams?"

  "We'll meet a thousand times in dreams," I said.

  "I wish we could dream at the same time," said Isabel… "Dream

  walks. I can't believe, dear, I shall never have a walk with you

  again."

  "If I'd stayed six months in America," I said, "we might have walked

  long walks and talked long talks for all our lives."

  "Not in a world of Baileys," said Isabel. "And anyhow-"

  She stopped short. I looked interrogation.

  "We've loved," she said.

  I took her ticket, saw to her luggage, and stood by the door of the

  compartment. "Good-bye," I said a little stiffly, conscious of the

  people upon the platform. She bent above me, white and dusky,

  looking at me very steadfastly.

  "Come here," she whispered. "Never mind the porters. What can they

  know? Just one time more-I must."

  She rested her hand against the door of the carriage and bent down

  upon me, and put her cold, moist lips to mine.

  CHAPTER THE THIRD

  THE BREAKING POINT

  1

  And then we broke down. We broke our faith with both Margaret and

  Shoesmith, flung career and duty out of our lives, and went away

  together.

  It is only now, almost a year after these events, that I can begin

  to see what happened to me. At the time it seemed to me I was a

  rational, responsible creature, but indeed I had not parted from her

  two days before I became a monomaniac to whom nothing could matter

  but Isabel. Every truth had to be squared to that obsession, every

  duty. It astounds me to think how I forgot Margaret, forgot my

  work, forgot everything but that we two were parted. I still

  believe that with better chances we might have escaped the

  consequences of the emotional storm that presently seized us both.

  But we had no foresight of that, and no preparation for it, and our

  circumstances betrayed us. It was partly Shoesmith's unwisdom in

  delaying his marriage until after the end of the session-partly my

  own amazing folly in returning within four days to Westminster. But

  we were all of us intent upon the defeat of scandal and the complete

  restoration of appearances. It seemed necessary that Shoesmith's

  marriage should not seem to be hurried, still more necessary that I

  should not vanish inexplicably. I had to be visible with Margaret

  in London just as much as possible; we went to restaurants, we

  visited the theatre; we could even contemplate the possibility of my

  presence at the wedding. For that, however, we had schemed a

  weekend visit to Wales, and a fictitious sprained ankle at the last

  moment which would justify my absence…

  I cannot convey to you the intolerable wretchedness and rebellion of

  my separation from Isabel. It seemed that in the past two years all

  my thoughts had spun commisures to Isabel's brain and I could think

  of nothing that did not lead me surely to the need of the one

  intimate I had found in the world. I came back to the House and the

  office and my home, I filled all my days with appointments and duty,

  and it did not save me in the least from a lonely emptiness such as

  I had never felt before in all my life. I had little sleep. In the

  daytime I did a hundred things, I even spoke in the House on two

  occasions, and by my own low standards spoke well, and it seemed to

  me that I was going about in my own brain like a hushed survivor in

  a house whose owner lies dead upstairs.

  I came to a crisis after that wild dinner of Tarvrille's. Something

  in that stripped my soul bare.

  It was an occasion made absurd and strange by the odd accident that

  the house caught fire upstairs while we were dining below. It was a

  men's dinner-" A dinner of all sorts," said Tarvrille, when he

  invited me; "everything from Evesham and Gane to Wilkins the author,

  and Heaven knows what will happen!" I remember that afterwards

  Tarvrille was accused of having planned the fire to make his dinner

  a marvel and a memory. It was indeed a wonderful occasion, and I

  suppose if I had not been altogether drenched in misery, I should

  have found the same wild amusement in it that glowed in all the

  others. There were one or two university dons, Lord George Fester,

  the racing man, Panmure, the artist, two or three big City men,

  Weston Massinghay and another prominent Liberal whose name I can't

  remember, the three men Tarvrille had promised and Esmeer, Lord

  Wrassleton, Waulsort, the member for Monckton, Neal and several

  others. We began a little coldly, with duologues, but the

  conversation was already becoming general-so far as such a long

  table permitted-when the fire asserted itself.

  It asserted itself first as a penetrating and emphatic smell of

  burning rubber,-it was caused by the fusing of an electric wire.

  The reek forced its way into the discussion of the Pekin massacres

  that had sprung up between Evesham, Waulsort, and the others at the

  end of the table. "Something burning," said the man next to me.

  "Something must be burning," said Panmure.

  Tarvrille hated undignified interruptions. He had a particularly

  imperturbable butler with a cadaverous sad face and an eye of rigid

  disapproval. He spoke to this individual over his shoulder. "Just

  see, will you," he said, and caught up the pause in the talk to his

  left.

  Wilkins was asking questions, and I, too, was curious. The story of

  the siege of the Legations in China in the year 1900 and all that

  followed upon that, is just one of those disturbing interludes in

  history that refuse to join on to that general scheme of

  protestation by which civilisation is maintained. It is a break in

  the general flow of experience as disconcerting to statecraft as the

  robbery of my knife and the scuffle that followed it had been to me

  when I was a boy at Penge. It is like a tear in a curtain revealing

  quite unexpected backgrounds. I had never given the business a

  thought for years; now this talk brought back a string of pictures

  to my mind; how the reliefs arr
ived and the plundering began, how

  section after section of the International Army was drawn into

  murder and pillage, how the infection spread upward until the wives

  of Ministers were busy looting, and the very sentinels stripped and

  crawled like snakes into the Palace they were set to guard. It did

  not stop at robbery, men were murdered, women, being plundered, were

  outraged, children were butchered, strong men had found themselves

  with arms in a lawless, defenceless city, and this had followed.

  Now it was all recalled.

  "Respectable ladies addicted to district visiting at home were as

  bad as any one," said Panmure. "Glazebrook told me of one-flushed

  like a woman at a bargain sale, he said-and when he pointed out to

  her that the silk she'd got was bloodstained, she just said, 'Oh,

  bother!' and threw it aside and went back…"

  We became aware that Tarvrille's butler had returned. We tried not

  to seem to listen.

  "Beg pardon, m'lord," he said. "The house IS on fire, m'lord."

  "Upstairs, m'lord."

  "Just overhead, m'lord."

  "The maids are throwing water, m'lord, and I've telephoned FIRE."

  "No, m'lord, no immediate danger."

  "It's all right," said Tarvrille to the table generally. Go on!

  It's not a general conflagration, and the fire brigade won't be five

  minutes. Don't see that it's our affair. The stuff's insured.

  They say old Lady Paskershortly was dreadful. Like a harpy. The

  Dowager Empress had shown her some little things of hers. Pet

  things-hidden away. Susan went straight for them-used to take an

  umbrella for the silks. Born shoplifter."

  It was evident he didn't want his dinner spoilt, and we played up

  loyally.

  "This is recorded history," said Wilkins,-" practically. It makes

  one wonder about unrecorded history. In India, for example."

  But nobody touched that.

  "Thompson," said Tarvrille to the imperturbable butler, and

  indicating the table generally, "champagne. Champagne. Keep it

  going."

  "M'lord," and Thompson marshalled his assistants.

  Some man I didn't know began to remember things about Mandalay.

  "It's queer," he said, "how people break out at times;" and told his

  story of an army doctor, brave, public-spirited, and, as it

  happened, deeply religious, who was caught one evening by the

  excitement of plundering-and stole and hid, twisted the wrist of a

  boy until it broke, and was afterwards overcome by wild remorse.

  I watched Evesham listening intently. "Strange," he said, "very

  strange. We are such stuff as thieves are made of. And in China,

  too, they murdered people-for the sake of murdering. Apart, so to

  speak, from mercenary considerations. I'm afraid there's no doubt

  of it in certain cases. No doubt at all. Young soldiers fresh from

  German high schools and English homes!"

  "Did OUR people?" asked some patriot.

  "Not so much. But I'm afraid there were cases… Some of the

  Indian troops were pretty bad."

  Gane picked up the tale with confirmations.

  It is all printed in the vividest way as a picture upon my memory,

  so that were I a painter I think I could give the deep rich browns

  and warm greys beyond the brightly lit table, the various

  distinguished faces, strongly illuminated, interested and keen,

  above the black and white of evening dress, the alert menservants

  with their heavier, clean-shaved faces indistinctly seen in the

  dimness behind. Then this was coloured emotionally for me by my

  aching sense of loss and sacrifice, and by the chance trend of our

  talk to the breaches and unrealities of the civilised scheme. We

  seemed a little transitory circle of light in a universe of darkness

  and violence; an effect to which the diminishing smell of burning

  rubber, the trampling of feet overhead, the swish of water, added

  enormously. Everybody-unless, perhaps, it was Evesham-drank

  rather carelessly because of the suppressed excitement of our

  situation, and talked the louder and more freely.

  "But what a flimsy thing our civilisation is!" said Evesham; "a mere

  thin net of habits and associations!"

  "I suppose those men came back," said Wilkins.

  "Lady Paskershortly did!" chuckled Evesham.

  "How do they fit it in with the rest of their lives?" Wilkins

  speculated. "I suppose there's Pekin-stained police officers,

  Pekin-stained J. P.'s-trying petty pilferers in the severest

  manner."…

  Then for a time things became preposterous. There was a sudden

  cascade of water by the fireplace, and then absurdly the ceiling

  began to rain upon us, first at this point and then that. "My new

  suit!" cried some one. "Perrrrrr-up pe-rr"-a new vertical line of

  blackened water would establish itself and form a spreading pool

  upon the gleaming cloth. The men nearest would arrange catchment

  areas of plates and flower bowls. "Draw up!" said Tarvrille, "draw

  up. That's the bad end of the table!" He turned to the

  imperturbable butler. "Take round bath towels," he said; and

  presently the men behind us were offering-with inflexible dignity-

  "Port wine, Sir. Bath towel, Sir!" Waulsort, with streaks of

  blackened water on his forehead, was suddenly reminded of a wet year

  when he had followed the French army manoeuvres. An animated

  dispute sprang up between him and Neal about the relative efficiency

  of the new French and German field guns. Wrassleton joined in and a

  little drunken shrivelled Oxford don of some sort with a black-

  splashed shirt front who presently silenced them all by the

  immensity and particularity of his knowledge of field artillery.

  Then the talk drifted to Sedan and the effect of dead horses upon

  drinking-water, which brought Wrassleton and Weston Massinghay into

  a dispute of great vigour and emphasis. "The trouble in South

  Africa," said Weston Massinghay, "wasn't that we didn't boil our

  water. It was that we didn't boil our men. The Boers drank the

  same stuff we did. THEY didn't get dysentery."

  That argument went on for some time. I was attacked across the

  table by a man named Burshort about my Endowment of Motherhood

  schemes, but in the gaps of that debate I could still hear Weston

  Massinghay at intervals repeat in a rather thickened voice: "THEY

  didn't get dysentery."

  I think Evesham went early. The rest of us clustered more and more

  closely towards the drier end of the room, the table was pushed

  along, and the area beneath the extinguished conflagration abandoned

  to a tinkling, splashing company of pots and pans and bowls and

  baths. Everybody was now disposed to be hilarious and noisy, to say

  startling and aggressive things; we must have sounded a queer

  clamour to a listener in the next room. The devil inspired them to

  begin baiting me. "Ours isn't the Tory party any more," said

  Burshort. "Remington has made it the Obstetric Party."

  "That's good!" said Weston Massinghay, with all his teeth gleaming;

  "I shall use that against you in the House!"

  "I shall denounce you for abusing private confid
ences if you do,"

  said Tarvrille.

  "Remington wants us to give up launching Dreadnoughts and launch

  babies instead," Burshort urged. "For the price of one Dreadnought-"

  The little shrivelled don who had been omniscient about guns joined

  in the baiting, and displayed himself a venomous creature.

  Something in his eyes told me he knew Isabel and hated me for it.

  "Love and fine thinking," he began, a little thickly, and knocking

  over a wine-glass with a too easy gesture. "Love and fine thinking.

  Two things don't go together. No philosophy worth a damn ever came

  out of excesses of love. Salt Lake City-Piggott-Ag-Agapemone

  again-no works to matter."

  Everybody laughed.

  "Got to rec'nise these facts," said my assailant. "Love and fine

  think'n pretty phrase-attractive. Suitable for p'litical

  dec'rations. Postcard, Christmas, gilt lets, in a wreath of white

  flow's. Not oth'wise valu'ble."

  I made some remark, I forget what, but he overbore me.

  Real things we want are Hate-Hate and COARSE think'n. I b'long to

  the school of Mrs. F's Aunt-"

  "What?" said some one, intent.

  "In 'Little Dorrit,'" explained Tarvrille; "go on!"

  "Hate a fool," said my assailant.

  Tarvrille glanced at me. I smiled to conceal the loss of my temper.

  "Hate," said the little man, emphasising his point with a clumsy

  fist. "Hate's the driving force. What's m'rality?-hate of rotten

  goings on. What's patriotism?-hate of int'loping foreigners.

  What's Radicalism?-hate of lords. What's Toryism?-hate of

  disturbance. It's all hate-hate from top to bottom. Hate of a

  mess. Remington owned it the other day, said he hated a mu'll.

  There you are! If you couldn't get hate into an election, damn it

  (hic) people wou'n't poll. Poll for love!-no' me!"

  He paused, but before any one could speak he had resumed.

  "Then this about fine thinking. Like going into a bear pit armed

  with a tagle-talgent-talgent galv'nometer. Like going to fight a

  mad dog with Shasepear and the Bible. Fine thinking-what we want

  is the thickes' thinking we can get. Thinking that stands up alone.

  Taf Reform means work for all, thassort of thing."

  The gentleman from Cambridge paused. "YOU a flag!" he said. "I'd

  as soon go to ba'ell und' wet tissue paper!"

  My best answer on the spur of the moment was: