Chapter 26

One countervailing influence to my drift to Toryism in those days was Margaret's quite religious faith in the Liberals. I realised that slowly and with a mild astonishment. It set me, indeed, even then questioning my own change of opinion. We came at last incidentally, as our way was, to an exchange of views. It was as nearly a quarrel as we had before I came over to the Conservative side. It was at Champneys, and I think during the same visit that witnessed my exploration of Lady Forthundred. It arose indirectly, I think, out of some comments of mine upon our fellow-guests, but it is one of those memories of which the scene and quality remain more vivid than the things said, a memory without any very definite beginning or end. It was afternoon, in the pause between tea and the dressing bell, and we were in Margaret's big silver-adorned, chintz-bright room, looking out on the trim Italian garden.... Yes, the beginning of it has escaped me altogether, but I remember it as an odd exceptional little wrangle.

At first we seem to have split upon the moral quality of the aristocracy, and I had an odd sense that in some way too feminine for me to understand our hostess had aggrieved her. She said, I know, that Champneys distressed her; made her “eager for work and reality again.”

“But aren't these people real?”

“They're so superficial, so extravagant!”

I said I was not shocked by their unreality. They seemed the least affected people I had ever met. “And are they really so extravagant?” I asked, and put it to her that her dresses cost quite as much as any other woman's in the house.

“It's not only their dresses,” Margaret parried. “It's the scale and spirit of things.”

I questioned that. “They're cynical,” said Margaret, staring before her out of the window.

I challenged her, and she quoted the Brabants, about whom there had been an ancient scandal. She'd heard of it from Altiora, and it was also Altiora who'd given her a horror of Lord Carnaby, who was also with us. “You know his reputation,” said Margaret. “That Normandy girl. Every one knows about it. I shiver when I look at him. He seems--oh! like something not of OUR civilisation. He WILL come and say little things to me.”

“Offensive things?”

“No, politenesses and things. Of course his manners are--quite right. That only makes it worse, I think. It shows he might have helped--all that happened. I do all I can to make him see I don't like him. But none of the others make the slightest objection to him.”

“Perhaps these people imagine something might be said for him.”

“That's just it,” said Margaret.

“Charity,” I suggested.

“I don't like that sort of toleration.”

I was oddly annoyed. “Like eating with publicans and sinners,” I said. “No!...”

But scandals, and the contempt for rigid standards their condonation displayed, weren't more than the sharp edge of the trouble. “It's their whole position, their selfish predominance, their class conspiracy against the mass of people,” said Margaret. “When I sit at dinner in that splendid room, with its glitter and white reflections and candlelight, and its flowers and its wonderful service and its candelabra of solid gold, I seem to feel the slums and the mines and the over-crowded cottages stuffed away under the table.”

I reminded Margaret that she was not altogether innocent of unearned increment.

“But aren't we doing our best to give it back?” she said.

I was moved to question her. “Do you really think,” I asked, “that the Tories and peers and rich people are to blame for social injustice as we have it to-day? Do you really see politics as a struggle of light on the Liberal side against darkness on the Tory?”

“They MUST know,” said Margaret.

I found myself questioning that. I see now that to Margaret it must have seemed the perversest carping against manifest things, but at the time I was concentrated simply upon the elucidation of her view and my own; I wanted to get at her conception in the sharpest, hardest lines that were possible. It was perfectly clear that she saw Toryism as the diabolical element in affairs. The thing showed in its hopeless untruth all the clearer for the fine, clean emotion with which she gave it out to me. My sleeping peer in the library at Stamford Court and Evesham talking luminously behind the Hartstein flowers embodied the devil, and my replete citizen sucking at his cigar in the National Liberal Club, Willie Crampton discussing the care and management of the stomach over a specially hygienic lemonade, and Dr. Tumpany in his aggressive frock-coat pegging out a sort of copyright in Socialism, were the centre and wings of the angelic side. It was nonsense. But how was I to put the truth to her?

“I don't see things at all as you do,” I said. “I don't see things in the same way.”

“Think of the poor,” said Margaret, going off at a tangent.

“Think of every one,” I said. “We Liberals have done more mischief through well-intentioned benevolence than all the selfishness in the world could have done. We built up the liquor interest.”

“WE!” cried Margaret. “How can you say that? It's against us.”

“Naturally. But we made it a monopoly in our clumsy efforts to prevent people drinking what they liked, because it interfered with industrial regularity--”

“Oh!” cried Margaret, stung; and I could see she thought I was talking mere wickedness.

“That's it,” I said.

“But would you have people drink whatever they pleased?”

“Certainly. What right have I to dictate to other men and women?”

“But think of the children!”

“Ah! there you have the folly of modern Liberalism, its half-cunning, half-silly way of getting at everything in a roundabout fashion. If neglecting children is an offence, and it IS an offence, then deal with it as such, but don't go badgering and restricting people who sell something that may possibly in some cases lead to a neglect of children. If drunkenness is an offence, punish it, but don't punish a man for selling honest drink that perhaps after all won't make any one drunk at all. Don't intensify the viciousness of the public-house by assuming the place isn't fit for women and children. That's either spite or folly. Make the public-house FIT for women and children. Make it a real public-house. If we Liberals go on as we are going, we shall presently want to stop the sale of ink and paper because those things tempt men to forgery. We do already threaten the privacy of the post because of betting tout's letters. The drift of all that kind of thing is narrow, unimaginative, mischievous, stupid....”

I stopped short and walked to the window and surveyed a pretty fountain, facsimile of one in Verona, amidst trim-cut borderings of yew. Beyond, and seen between the stems of ilex trees, was a great blaze of yellow flowers....

“But prevention,” I heard Margaret behind me, “is the essence of our work.”

I turned. “There's no prevention but education. There's no antiseptics in life but love and fine thinking. Make people fine, make fine people. Don't be afraid. These Tory leaders are better people individually than the average; why cast them for the villains of the piece? The real villain in the piece--in the whole human drama--is the muddle-headedness, and it matters very little if it's virtuous-minded or wicked. I want to get at muddle-headedness. If I could do that I could let all that you call wickedness in the world run about and do what it jolly well pleased. It would matter about as much as a slightly neglected dog--in an otherwise well-managed home.”

My thoughts had run away with me.

“I can't understand you,” said Margaret, in the profoundest distress. “I can't understand how it is you are coming to see things like this.”

10

The moods of a thinking man in politics are curiously evasive and difficult to describe. Neither the public nor the historian will permit the statesman moods. He has from the first to assume he has an Aim, a definite Aim, and to pretend to an absolute consistency with that. Those subtle questionings about the very fundamentals of life which plague us all so relentlessly nowadays are supposed to be silenced. He lifts his chin and pursues his Aim explicitly in the sight of all men. Those who have no real political experience can scarcely imagine the immense mental and moral strain there is between one's everyday acts and utterances on the one hand and the “thinking-out” process on the other. It is perplexingly difficult to keep in your mind, fixed and firm, a scheme essentially complex, to keep balancing a swaying possibility while at the same time under jealous, hostile, and stupid observation you tread your part in the platitudinous, quarrelsome, ill-presented march of affairs....

The most impossible of all autobiographies is an intellectual autobiography. I have thrown together in the crudest way the elements of the problem I struggled with, but I can give no record of the subtle details; I can tell nothing of the long vacillations between Protean values, the talks and re-talks, the meditations, the bleak lucidities of sleepless nights....

And yet these things I have struggled with must be thought out, and, to begin with, they must be thought out in this muddled, experimenting way. To go into a study to think about statecraft is to turn your back on the realities you are constantly needing to feel and test and sound if your thinking is to remain vital; to choose an aim and pursue it in despite of all subsequent questionings is to bury the talent of your mind. It is no use dealing with the intricate as though it were simple, to leap haphazard at the first course of action that presents itself; the whole world of politicians is far too like a man who snatches a poker to a failing watch. It is easy to say he wants to “get something done,” but the only sane thing to do for the moment is to put aside that poker and take thought and get a better implement....

One of the results of these fundamental preoccupations of mine was a curious irritability towards Margaret that I found difficult to conceal. It was one of the incidental cruelties of our position that this should happen. I was in such doubt myself, that I had no power to phrase things for her in a form she could use. Hitherto I had stage-managed our “serious” conversations. Now I was too much in earnest and too uncertain to go on doing this. I avoided talk with her. Her serene, sustained confidence in vague formulae and sentimental aspirations exasperated me; her want of sympathetic apprehension made my few efforts to indicate my changing attitudes distressing and futile. It wasn't that I was always thinking right, and that she was always saying wrong. It was that I was struggling to get hold of a difficult thing that was, at any rate, half true, I could not gauge how true, and that Margaret's habitual phrasing ignored these elusive elements of truth, and without premeditation fitted into the weaknesses of my new intimations, as though they had nothing but weaknesses. It was, for example, obvious that these big people, who were the backbone of Imperialism and Conservatism, were temperamentally lax, much more indolent, much more sensuous, than our deliberately virtuous Young Liberals. I didn't want to be reminded of that, just when I was in full effort to realise the finer elements in their composition. Margaret classed them and disposed of them. It was our incurable differences in habits and gestures of thought coming between us again.

The desert of misunderstanding widened. I was forced back upon myself and my own secret councils. For a time I went my way alone; an unmixed evil for both of us. Except for that Pentagram evening, a series of talks with Isabel Rivers, who was now becoming more and more important in my intellectual life, and the arguments I maintained with Crupp, I never really opened my mind at all during that period of indecisions, slow abandonments, and slow acquisitions.

CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ SECESSION

1

At last, out of a vast accumulation of impressions, decision distilled quite suddenly. I succumbed to Evesham and that dream of the right thing triumphant through expression. I determined I would go over to the Conservatives, and use my every gift and power on the side of such forces on that side as made for educational reorganisation, scientific research, literature, criticism, and intellectual development. That was in 1909. I judged the Tories were driving straight at a conflict with the country, and I thought them bound to incur an electoral defeat. I under-estimated their strength in the counties. There would follow, I calculated, a period of profound reconstruction in method and policy alike. I was entirely at one with Crupp in perceiving in this an immense opportunity for the things we desired. An aristocracy quickened by conflict and on the defensive, and full of the idea of justification by reconstruction, might prove altogether more apt for thought and high professions than Mrs. Redmondson's spoilt children. Behind the now inevitable struggle for a reform of the House of Lords, there would be great heart searchings and educational endeavour. On that we reckoned....

At last we talked it out to the practical pitch, and Crupp and Shoesmith, and I and Gane, made our definite agreement together....

I emerged from enormous silences upon Margaret one evening.

She was just back from the display of some new musicians at the Hartsteins. I remember she wore a dress of golden satin, very rich-looking and splendid. About her slender neck there was a rope of gold-set amber beads. Her hair caught up and echoed and returned these golden notes. I, too, was in evening dress, but where I had been escapes me,--some forgotten dinner, I suppose. I went into her room. I remember I didn't speak for some moments. I went across to the window and pulled the blind aside, and looked out upon the railed garden of the square, with its shrubs and shadowed turf gleaming pallidly and irregularly in the light of the big electric standard in the corner.

“Margaret,” I said, “I think I shall break with the party.”

She made no answer. I turned presently, a movement of enquiry.

“I was afraid you meant to do that,” she said.

“I'm out of touch,” I explained. “Altogether.”

“Oh! I know.”

“It places me in a difficult position,” I said.

Margaret stood at her dressing-table, looking steadfastly at herself in the glass, and with her fingers playing with a litter of stoppered bottles of tinted glass. “I was afraid it was coming to this,” she said.

“In a way,” I said, “we've been allies. I owe my seat to you. I couldn't have gone into Parliament....”

“I don't want considerations like that to affect us,” she interrupted.

There was a pause. She sat down in a chair by her dressing-table, lifted an ivory hand-glass, and put it down again.

“I wish,” she said, with something like a sob in her voice, “it were possible that you shouldn't do this.” She stopped abruptly, and I did not look at her, because I could feel the effort she was making to control herself.

“I thought,” she began again, “when you came into Parliament--”

There came another silence. “It's all gone so differently,” she said. “Everything has gone so differently.”

I had a sudden memory of her, shining triumphant after the Kinghampstead election, and for the first time I realised just how perplexing and disappointing my subsequent career must have been to her.

“I'm not doing this without consideration,” I said.

“I know,” she said, in a voice of despair, “I've seen it coming. But--I still don't understand it. I don't understand how you can go over.”

“My ideas have changed and developed,” I said.

I walked across to her bearskin hearthrug, and stood by the mantel.

“To think that you,” she said; “you who might have been leader--” She could not finish it. “All the forces of reaction,” she threw out.

“I don't think they are the forces of reaction,” I said. “I think I can find work to do--better work on that side.”

“Against us!” she said. “As if progress wasn't hard enough! As if it didn't call upon every able man!”

“I don't think Liberalism has a monopoly of progress.”

She did not answer that. She sat quite still looking in front of her. “WHY have you gone over?” she asked abruptly as though I had said nothing.

There came a silence that I was impelled to end. I began a stiff dissertation from the hearthrug. “I am going over, because I think I may join in an intellectual renascence on the Conservative side. I think that in the coming struggle there will be a partial and altogether confused and demoralising victory for democracy, that will stir the classes which now dominate the Conservative party into an energetic revival. They will set out to win back, and win back. Even if my estimate of contemporary 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 painful thought.

“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. I am 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 felt myself 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.