The New Machiavelli

She constituted herself the dragoman of our political travels. In hotels she was serenely resolute for the quietest and the best, she rejected all their proposals for meals and substituted a severely nourishing dietary of her own, and even in private houses she astonished me by her tranquil insistence upon special comforts and sustenance. I can see her face now as it would confront a hostess, a little intent, but sweetly resolute and assured.

Since our marriage she had read a number of political memoirs, and she had been particularly impressed by the career of Mrs. Gladstone. I don’t think it occurred to her to compare and contrast my quality with that of Mrs. Gladstone’s husband. I suspect her of a deliberate intention of achieving parallel results by parallel methods. I was to be Gladstonised. Gladstone it appeared used to lubricate his speeches with a mixture – if my memory serves me right – of egg beaten up in sherry, and Margaret was very anxious I should take a leaf from that celebrated book. She wanted, I know, to hold the glass in her hand while I was speaking.

But here I was firm. “No,” I said, very decisively, “simply I won’t stand that. It’s a matter of conscience. I shouldn’t feel – democratic. I’ll take my chance of the common water in the carafe on the chairman’s table.”

“I DO wish you wouldn’t,” she said, distressed.

It was absurd to feel irritated; it was so admirable of her, a little childish, infinitely womanly and devoted and fine – and I see now how pathetic. But I could not afford to succumb to her. I wanted to follow my own leading, to see things clearly, and this reassuring pose of a high destiny, of an almost terribly efficient pursuit of a fixed end when as a matter of fact I had a very doubtful end and an aim as yet by no means fixed, was all too seductive for dalliance…

4

And into all these things with the manner of a trifling and casual incident comes the figure of Isabel Rivers. My first impressions of her were of a rather ugly and ungainly, extraordinarily interesting schoolgirl with a beautiful quick flush under her warm brown skin, who said and did amusing and surprising things. When first I saw her she was riding a very old bicycle downhill with her feet on the fork of the frame – it seemed to me to the public danger, but afterwards I came to understand the quality of her nerve better – and on the third occasion she was for her own private satisfaction climbing a tree. On the intervening occasion we had what seems now to have been a long sustained conversation about the political situation and the books and papers I had written.

I wonder if it was.

What a delightful mixture of child and grave woman she was at that time, and how little I reckoned on the part she would play in my life! And since she has played that part, how impossible it is to tell now of those early days! Since I wrote that opening paragraph to this section my idle pen has been, as it were, playing by itself and sketching faces on the blotting pad – one impish wizened visage is oddly like little Bailey – and I have been thinking cheek on fist amidst a limitless wealth of memories. She sits below me on the low wall under the olive trees with our little child in her arms. She is now the central fact in my life. It still seems a little incredible that that should be so. She has destroyed me as a politician, brought me to this belated rebeginning of life. When I sit down and try to make her a girl again, I feel like the Arabian fisherman who tried to put the genius back into the pot from which it had spread gigantic across the skies…

I have a very clear vision of her rush downhill past our labouring ascendant car – my colours fluttered from handle-bar and shoulder-knot – and her waving hand and the sharp note of her voice. She cried out something, I don’t know what, some greeting.

“What a pretty girl!” said Margaret.

Parvill, the cheap photographer, that industrious organiser for whom by way of repayment I got those magic letters, that knighthood of the underlings, “J. P.” was in the car with us and explained her to us. “One of the best workers you have,” he said…

And then after a toilsome troubled morning we came, rather cross from the strain of sustained amiability, to Sir Graham Rivers’ house. It seemed all softness and quiet – I recall dead white panelling and oval mirrors horizontally set and a marble fireplace between white marble-blind Homer and marble-blind Virgil, very grave and fine – and how Isabel came in to lunch in a shapeless thing like a blue smock that made her bright quick-changing face seem yellow under her cloud of black hair. Her step-sister was there, Miss Gamer, to whom the house was to descend, a well-dressed lady of thirty, amiably disavowing responsibility for Isabel in every phrase and gesture. And there was a very pleasant doctor, an Oxford man, who seemed on excellent terms with every one. It was manifest that he was in the habit of sparring with the girl, but on this occasion she wasn’t sparring and refused to be teased into a display in spite of the taunts of either him or her father. She was, they discovered with rising eyebrows, shy. It seemed an opportunity too rare for them to miss. They proclaimed her enthusiasm for me in a way that brought a flush to her cheek and a look into her eye between appeal and defiance. They declared she had read my books, which I thought at the time was exaggeration, their dry political quality was so distinctly not what one was accustomed to regard as schoolgirl reading. Miss Gamer protested to protect her, “When once in a blue moon Isabel is well-behaved…!”

Except for these attacks I do not remember much of the conversation at table; it was, I know, discursive and concerned with the sort of topographical and social and electioneering fact natural to such a visit. Old Rivers struck me as a delightful person, modestly unconscious of his doubly-earned V. C. and the plucky defence of Kardin-Bergat that won his baronetcy. He was that excellent type, the soldier radical, and we began that day a friendship that was only ended by his death in the hunting-field three years later. He interested Margaret into a disregard of my plate and the fact that I had secured the illegal indulgence of Moselle. After lunch we went for coffee into another low room, this time brown panelled and looking through French windows on a red-walled garden, graceful even in its winter desolation. And there the conversation suddenly picked up and became good. It had fallen to a pause, and the doctor, with an air of definitely throwing off a mask and wrecking an established tranquillity, remarked: “Very probably you Liberals will come in, though I’m not sure you’ll come in so mightily as you think, but what you do when you do come in passes my comprehension.”

“There’s good work sometimes,” said Sir Graham, “in undoing.”

“You can’t govern a great empire by amending and repealing the Acts of your predecessors,” said the doctor.

There came that kind of pause that happens when a subject is broached too big and difficult for the gathering. Margaret’s blue eyes regarded the speaker with quiet disapproval for a moment, and then came to me in the not too confident hope that I would snub him out of existence with some prompt rhetorical stroke. A voice spoke out of the big armchair.

“We’ll do things,” said Isabel.

The doctor’s eye lit with the joy of the fisherman who strikes his fish at last. “What will you do?” he asked her.

“Every one knows we’re a mixed lot,” said Isabel.

“Poor old chaps like me!” interjected the general.

“But that’s not a programme,” said the doctor.

“But Mr. Remington has published a programme,” said Isabel.

The doctor cocked half an eye at me.

“In some review,” the girl went on. “After all, we’re not going to elect the whole Liberal party in the Kinghamstead Division. I’m a Remington-ite!”

“But the programme,” said the doctor, “the programme – ”

“In front of Mr. Remington!”

“Scandal always comes home at last,” said the doctor. “Let him hear the worst.”

“I’d like to hear,” I said. “Electioneering shatters convictions and enfeebles the mind.”

“Not mine,” said Isabel stoutly. “I mean – Well, anyhow I take it Mr. Remington stands for constructing a civilised state out of this muddle.”

“THIS muddle,” protested the doctor with an appeal of the eye to the beautiful long room and the ordered garden outside the bright clean windows.

“Well, THAT muddle, if you like! There’s a slum within a mile of us already. The dust and blacks get worse and worse, Sissie?”

“They do,” agreed Miss Gamer.

“Mr. Remington stands for construction, order, education, discipline.”

“And you?” said the doctor.

“I’m a good Remington-ite.”

“Discipline!” said the doctor.

“Oh!” said Isabel. “At times one has to be – Napoleonic. They want to libel me, Mr. Remington. A political worker can’t always be in time for meals, can she? At times one has to make – splendid cuts.”

Miss Gamer said something indistinctly.

“Order, education, discipline,” said Sir Graham. “Excellent things! But I’ve a sort of memory – in my young days – we talked about something called liberty.”

“Liberty under the law,” I said, with an unexpected approving murmur from Margaret, and took up the defence. “The old Liberal definition of liberty was a trifle uncritical. Privilege and legal restrictions are not the only enemies of liberty. An uneducated, underbred, and underfed propertyless man is a man who has lost the possibility of liberty. There’s no liberty worth a rap for him. A man who is swimming hopelessly for life wants nothing but the liberty to get out of the water; he’ll give every other liberty for it – until he gets out.”

Sir Graham took me up and we fell into a discussion of the changing qualities of Liberalism. It was a good give-and-take talk, extraordinarily refreshing after the nonsense and crowding secondary issues of the electioneering outside. We all contributed more or less except Miss Gamer; Margaret followed with knitted brows and occasional interjections. “People won’t SEE that,” for example, and “It all seems so plain to me.” The doctor showed himself clever but unsubstantial and inconsistent. Isabel sat back with her black mop of hair buried deep in the chair looking quickly from face to face. Her colour came and went with her vivid intellectual excitement; occasionally she would dart a word, usually a very apt word, like a lizard’s tongue into the discussion. I remember chiefly that a chance illustration betrayed that she had read Bishop Burnet…

After that it was not surprising that Isabel should ask for a lift in our car as far as the Lurky Committee Room, and that she should offer me quite sound advice EN ROUTE upon the intellectual temperament of the Lurky gasworkers.

On the third occasion that I saw Isabel she was, as I have said, climbing a tree – and a very creditable tree – for her own private satisfaction. It was a lapse from the high seriousness of politics, and I perceived she felt that I might regard it as such and attach too much importance to it. I had some difficulty in reassuring her. And it’s odd to note now – it has never occurred to me before – that from that day to this I do not think I have ever reminded Isabel of that encounter.

And after that memory she seems to be flickering about always in the election, an inextinguishable flame; now she flew by on her bicycle, now she dashed into committee rooms, now she appeared on doorsteps in animated conversation with dubious voters; I took every chance I could to talk to her – I had never met anything like her before in the world, and she interested me immensely – and before the polling day she and I had become, in the frankest simplicity, fast friends…

That, I think, sets out very fairly the facts of our early relationship. But it is hard to get it true, either in form or texture, because of the bright, translucent, coloured, and refracting memories that come between. One forgets not only the tint and quality of thoughts and impressions through that intervening haze, one forgets them altogether. I don’t remember now that I ever thought in those days of passionate love or the possibility of such love between us. I may have done so again and again. But I doubt it very strongly. I don’t think I ever thought of such aspects. I had no more sense of any danger between us, seeing the years and things that separated us, than I could have had if she had been an intelligent bright-eyed bird. Isabel came into my life as a new sort of thing; she didn’t join on at all to my previous experiences of womanhood. They were not, as I have laboured to explain, either very wide or very penetrating experiences, on the whole, “strangled dinginess” expresses them, but I do not believe they were narrower or shallower than those of many other men of my class. I thought of women as pretty things and beautiful things, pretty rather than beautiful, attractive and at times disconcertingly attractive, often bright and witty, but, because of the vast reservations that hid them from me, wanting, subtly and inevitably wanting, in understanding. My idealisation of Margaret had evaporated insensibly after our marriage. The shrine I had made for her in my private thoughts stood at last undisguisedly empty. But Isabel did not for a moment admit of either idealisation or interested contempt. She opened a new sphere of womanhood to me. With her steady amber-brown eyes, her unaffected interest in impersonal things, her upstanding waistless blue body, her energy, decision and courage, she seemed rather some new and infinitely finer form of boyhood than a feminine creature, as I had come to measure femininity. She was my perfect friend. Could I have foreseen, had my world been more wisely planned, to this day we might have been such friends.

She seemed at that time unconscious of sex, though she has told me since how full she was of protesting curiosities and restrained emotions. She spoke, as indeed she has always spoken, simply, clearly, and vividly; schoolgirl slang mingled with words that marked ample voracious reading, and she moved quickly with the free directness of some graceful young animal. She took many of the easy freedoms a man or a sister might have done with me. She would touch my arm, lay a hand on my shoulder as I sat, adjust the lapel of a breast-pocket as she talked to me. She says now she loved me always from the beginning. I doubt if there was a suspicion of that in her mind those days. I used to find her regarding me with the clearest, steadiest gaze in the world, exactly like the gaze of some nice healthy innocent animal in a forest, interested, inquiring, speculative, but singularly untroubled…

5

Polling day came after a last hoarse and dingy crescendo. The excitement was not of the sort that makes one forget one is tired out. The waiting for the end of the count has left a long blank mark on my memory, and then everyone was shaking my hand and repeating: “Nine hundred and seventy-six.”

My success had been a foregone conclusion since the afternoon, but we all behaved as though we had not been anticipating this result for hours, as though any other figures but nine hundred and seventy-six would have meant something entirely different. “Nine hundred and seventy-six!” said Margaret. “They didn’t expect three hundred.”

“Nine hundred and seventy-six,” said a little short man with a paper. “It means a big turnover. Two dozen short of a thousand, you know.”

A tremendous hullaboo began outside, and a lot of fresh people came into the room.

Isabel, flushed but not out of breath, Heaven knows where she had sprung from at that time of night! was running her hand down my sleeve almost caressingly, with the innocent bold affection of a girl. “Got you in!” she said. “It’s been no end of a lark.”

“And now,” said I, “I must go and be constructive.”

“Now you must go and be constructive,” she said.

“You’ve got to live here,” she added.

“By Jove! yes,” I said. “We’ll have to house hunt.”

“I shall read all your speeches.”

She hesitated.

“I wish I was you,” she said, and said it as though it was not exactly the thing she was meaning to say.

“They want you to speak,” said Margaret, with something unsaid in her face.

“You must come out with me,” I answered, putting my arm through hers, and felt someone urging me to the French windows that gave on the balcony.

“If you think – ” she said, yielding gladly

“Oh, RATHER!” said I.

The Mayor of Kinghamstead, a managing little man with no great belief in my oratorical powers, was sticking his face up to mine.

“It’s all over,” he said, “and you’ve won. Say all the nice things you can and say them plainly.”

I turned and handed Margaret out through the window and stood looking over the Market-place, which was more than half filled with swaying people. The crowd set up a roar of approval at the sight of us, tempered by a little booing. Down in one corner of the square a fight was going on for a flag, a fight that even the prospect of a speech could not instantly check. “Speech!” cried voices, “Speech!” and then a brief “boo-oo-oo” that was drowned in a cascade of shouts and cheers. The conflict round the flag culminated in the smashing of a pane of glass in the chemist’s window and instantly sank to peace.

“Gentlemen voters of the Kinghamstead Division,” I began.

“Votes for Women!” yelled a voice, amidst laughter – the first time I remember hearing that memorable war-cry.

“Three cheers for Mrs. Remington!”

“Mrs. Remington asks me to thank you,” I said, amidst further uproar and reiterated cries of “Speech!”

Then silence came with a startling swiftness.

Isabel was still in my mind, I suppose. “I shall go to Westminster,” I began. I sought for some compelling phrase and could not find one. “To do my share,” I went on, “in building up a great and splendid civilisation.”

I paused, and there was a weak gust of cheering, and then a renewal of booing.

“This election,” I said, “has been the end and the beginning of much. New ideas are abroad – ”

“Chinese labour,” yelled a voice, and across the square swept a wildfire of booting and bawling.

It is one of the few occasions when I quite lost my hold on a speech. I glanced sideways and saw the Mayor of Kinghamstead speaking behind his hand to Parvill. By a happy chance Parvill caught my eye.

“What do they want?” I asked.

“Eh?”

“What do they want?”

“Say something about general fairness – the other side,” prompted Parvill, flattered but a little surprised by my appeal. I pulled myself hastily into a more popular strain with a gross eulogy of my opponent’s good taste.

“Chinese labour!” cried the voice again.

“You’ve given that notice to quit,” I answered.

The Market-place roared delight, but whether that delight expressed hostility to Chinamen or hostility to their practical enslavement no student of the General Election of 1906 has ever been able to determine. Certainly one of the most effective posters on our side displayed a hideous yellow face, just that and nothing more. There was not even a legend to it. How it impressed the electorate we did not know, but that it impressed the electorate profoundly there can be no disputing.

6

Kinghamstead was one of the earliest constituencies fought, and we came back – it must have been Saturday – triumphant but very tired, to our house in Radnor Square. In the train we read the first intimations that the victory of our party was likely to be a sweeping one.

Then came a period when one was going about receiving and giving congratulations and watching the other men arrive, very like a boy who has returned to school with the first batch after the holidays. The London world reeked with the General Election; it had invaded the nurseries. All the children of one’s friends had got big maps of England cut up into squares to represent constituencies and were busy sticking gummed blue labels over the conquered red of Unionism that had hitherto submerged the country. And there were also orange labels, if I remember rightly, to represent the new Labour party, and green for the Irish. I engaged myself to speak at one or two London meetings, and lunched at the Reform, which was fairly tepid, and dined and spent one or two tumultuous evenings at the National Liberal Club, which was in active eruption. The National Liberal became feverishly congested towards midnight as the results of the counting came dropping in. A big green-baize screen had been fixed up at one end of the large smoking-room with the names of the constituencies that were voting that day, and directly the figures came to hand, up they went, amidst cheers that at last lost their energy through sheer repetition, whenever there was record of a Liberal gain. I don’t remember what happened when there was a Liberal loss; I don’t think that any were announced while I was there.

How packed and noisy the place was, and what a reek of tobacco and whisky fumes we made! Everybody was excited and talking, making waves of harsh confused sound that beat upon one’s ears, and every now and then hoarse voices would shout for someone to speak. Our little set was much in evidence. Both the Cramptons were in, Lewis, Bunting Harblow. We gave brief addresses attuned to this excitement and the late hour, amidst much enthusiasm.

“Now we can DO things!” I said amidst a rapture of applause. Men I did not know from Adam held up glasses and nodded to me in solemn fuddled approval as I came down past them into the crowd again.

Men were betting whether the Unionists would lose more or less than two hundred seats.

“I wonder just what we shall do with it all,” I heard one sceptic speculating…

After these orgies I would get home very tired and excited, and find it difficult to get to sleep. I would lie and speculate about what it was we WERE going to do. One hadn’t anticipated quite such a tremendous accession to power for one’s party. Liberalism was swirling in like a flood…

I found the next few weeks very unsatisfactory and distressing. I don’t clearly remember what it was I had expected; I suppose the fuss and strain of the General Election had built up a feeling that my return would in some way put power into my hands, and instead I found myself a mere undistinguished unit in a vast but rather vague majority. There were moments when I felt very distinctly that a majority could be too big a crowd altogether. I had all my work still before me, I had achieved nothing as yet but opportunity, and a very crowded opportunity it was at that. Everyone about me was chatting Parliament and appointments; one breathed distracting and irritating speculations as to what would be done and who would be asked to do it. I was chiefly impressed by what was unlikely to be done and by the absence of any general plan of legislation to hold us all together. I found the talk about Parliamentary procedure and etiquette particularly trying. We dined with the elder Cramptons one evening, and old Sir Edward was lengthily sage about what the House liked, what it didn’t like, what made a good impression and what a bad one. “A man shouldn’t speak more than twice in his first session, and not at first on too contentious a topic,” said Sir Edward. “No.”

“Very much depends on manner. The House hates a lecturer. There’s a sort of airy earnestness – ”

He waved his cigar to eke out his words.

“Little peculiarities of costume count for a great deal. I could name one man who spent three years living down a pair of spatterdashers. On the other hand – a thing like that – if it catches the eye of the PUNCH man, for example, may be your making.”

He went off into a lengthy speculation of why the House had come to like an originally unpopular Irishman named Biggar…

The opening of Parliament gave me some peculiar moods. I began to feel more and more like a branded sheep. We were sworn in in batches, dozens and scores of fresh men, trying not to look too fresh under the inspection of policemen and messengers, all of us carrying new silk hats and wearing magisterial coats. It is one of my vivid memories from this period, the sudden outbreak of silk hats in the smoking-room of the National Liberal Club. At first I thought there must have been a funeral. Familiar faces that one had grown to know under soft felt hats, under bowlers, under liberal-minded wide brims, and above artistic ties and tweed jackets, suddenly met one, staring with the stern gaze of self-consciousness, from under silk hats of incredible glossiness. There was a disposition to wear the hat much too forward, I thought, for a good Parliamentary style.