The New Machiavelli

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New ideas were abroad, it was Maytime and a spring of abundant
flowers--daffodils were particularly good that year--and Mrs. Seddon
celebrated her return by giving an afternoon reception at short
notice, with the clear intention of letting every one out into the
garden if the weather held.

The Seddons had a big old farmhouse modified to modern ideas of
comfort on the road out towards Misterton, with an orchard that had
been rather pleasantly subdued from use to ornament. It had rich
blossoming cherry and apple trees. Large patches of grass full of
nodding yellow trumpets had been left amidst the not too precisely
mown grass, which was as it were grass path with an occasional lapse
into lawn or glade. And Margaret, hatless, with the fair hair above
her thin, delicately pink face very simply done, came to meet our
rather too consciously dressed party,--we had come in the motor four
strong, with my aunt in grey silk. Margaret wore a soft flowing
flowered blue dress of diaphanous material, all unconnected with the
fashion and tied with pretty ribbons, like a slenderer, unbountiful
Primavera.

It was one of those May days that ape the light and heat of summer,
and I remember disconnectedly quite a number of brightly lit figures
and groups walking about, and a white gate between orchard and
garden and a large lawn with an oak tree and a red Georgian house
with a verandah and open French windows, through which the tea
drinking had come out upon the moss-edged flagstones even as Mrs.
Seddon had planned.

The party was almost entirely feminine except for a little curate
with a large head, a good voice and a radiant manner, who was
obviously attracted by Margaret, and two or three young husbands
still sufficiently addicted to their wives to accompany them. One
of them I recall as a quite romantic figure with abundant blond
curly hair on which was poised a grey felt hat encircled by a
refined black band. He wore, moreover, a loose rich shot silk tie
of red and purple, a long frock coat, grey trousers and brown shoes,
and presently he removed his hat and carried it in one hand. There
were two tennis-playing youths besides myself. There was also one
father with three daughters in anxious control, a father of the old
school scarcely half broken in, reluctant, rebellious and
consciously and conscientiously "reet Staffordshire." The daughters
were all alert to suppress the possible plungings, the undesirable
humorous impulses of this almost feral guest. They nipped his very
gestures in the bud. The rest of the people were mainly mothers
with daughters--daughters of all ages, and a scattering of aunts,
and there was a tendency to clotting, parties kept together and
regarded parties suspiciously. Mr. Seddon was in hiding, I think,
all the time, though not formally absent.

Matters centred upon the tea in the long room of the French windows,
where four trim maids went to and fro busily between the house and
the clumps of people seated or standing before it; and tennis and
croquet were intermittently visible and audible beyond a bank of
rockwork rich with the spikes and cups and bells of high spring.

Mrs. Seddon presided at the tea urn, and Margaret partly assisted
and partly talked to me and my cousin Sibyl--Gertrude had found a
disused and faded initial and was partnering him at tennis in a
state of gentle revival--while their mother exercised a divided
chaperonage from a seat near Mrs. Seddon. The little curate,
stirring a partially empty cup of tea, mingled with our party, and
preluded, I remember, every observation he made by a vigorous
resumption of stirring.

We talked of Cambridge, and Margaret kept us to it. The curate was
a Selwyn man and had taken a pass degree in theology, but Margaret
had come to Gaylord's lecturers in Trinity for a term before her
breakdown, and understood these differences. She had the eagerness
of an exile to hear the old familiar names of places and
personalities. We capped familiar anecdotes and were enthusiastic
about Kings' Chapel and the Backs, and the curate, addressing
himself more particularly to Sibyl, told a long confused story
illustrative of his disposition to reckless devilry (of a pure-
minded kindly sort) about upsetting two canoes quite needlessly on
the way to Grantchester.

I can still see Margaret as I saw her that afternoon, see her fresh
fair face, with the little obliquity of the upper lip, and her brow
always slightly knitted, and her manner as of one breathlessly shy
but determined. She had rather open blue eyes, and she spoke in an
even musical voice with the gentlest of stresses and the ghost of a
lisp. And it was true, she gathered, that Cambridge still existed.
"I went to Grantchester," she said, "last year, and had tea under
the apple-blossom. I didn't think then I should have to come down."
(It was that started the curate upon his anecdote.)

"I've seen a lot of pictures, and learnt a lot about them--at the
Pitti and the Brera,--the Brera is wonderful--wonderful places,--but
it isn't like real study," she was saying presently. . . . "We
bought bales of photographs," she said.

I thought the bales a little out of keeping.

But fair-haired and quite simply and yet graciously and fancifully
dressed, talking of art and beautiful things and a beautiful land,
and with so much manifest regret for learning denied, she seemed a
different kind of being altogether from my smart, hard, high-
coloured, black-haired and resolutely hatted cousin; she seemed
translucent beside Gertrude. Even the little twist and droop of her
slender body was a grace to me.

I liked her from the moment I saw her, and set myself to interest
and please her as well as I knew how.

We recalled a case of ragging that had rustled the shrubs of
Newnham, and then Chris Robinson's visit--he had given a talk to
Bennett Hall also--and our impression of him.

"He disappointed me, too," said Margaret.

I was moved to tell Margaret something of my own views in the matter
of social progress, and she listened--oh! with a kind of urged
attention, and her brow a little more knitted, very earnestly. The
little curate desisted from the appendices and refuse heaps and
general debris of his story, and made himself look very alert and
intelligent.

"We did a lot of that when I was up in the eighties," he said. "I'm
glad Imperialism hasn't swamped you fellows altogether."

Gertrude, looking bright and confident, came to join our talk from
the shrubbery; the initial, a little flushed and evidently in a
state of refreshed relationship, came with her, and a cheerful lady
in pink and more particularly distinguished by a pink bonnet joined
our little group. Gertrude had been sipping admiration and was not
disposed to play a passive part in the talk.

"Socialism!" she cried, catching the word. "It's well Pa isn't
here. He has Fits when people talk of socialism. Fits!"

The initial laughed in a general kind of way.

The curate said there was socialism AND socialism, and looked at
Margaret to gauge whether he had been too bold in this utterance.
But she was all, he perceived, for broad-mindness, and he stirred
himself (and incidentally his tea) to still more liberality of
expression. He said the state of the poor was appalling, simply
appalling; that there were times when he wanted to shatter the whole
system, "only," he said, turning to me appealingly, "What have we
got to put in its place?"

"The thing that exists is always the more evident alternative," I
said.

The little curate looked at it for a moment. "Precisely," he said
explosively, and turned stirring and with his head a little on one
side, to hear what Margaret was saying.

Margaret was saying, with a swift blush and an effect of daring,
that she had no doubt she was a socialist.

"And wearing a gold chain!" said Gertrude, "And drinking out of
eggshell! I like that!"

I came to Margaret's rescue. "It doesn't follow that because one's
a socialist one ought to dress in sackcloth and ashes."

The initial coloured deeply, and having secured my attention by
prodding me slightly with the wrist of the hand that held his
teacup, cleared his throat and suggested that "one ought to be
consistent."

I perceived we were embarked upon a discussion of the elements. We
began an interesting little wrangle one of those crude discussions
of general ideas that are dear to the heart of youth. I and
Margaret supported one another as socialists, Gertrude and Sybil and
the initial maintained an anti-socialist position, the curate
attempted a cross-bench position with an air of intending to come
down upon us presently with a casting vote. He reminded us of a
number of useful principles too often overlooked in argument, that
in a big question like this there was much to be said on both sides,
that if every one did his or her duty to every one about them there
would be no difficulty with social problems at all, that over and
above all enactments we needed moral changes in people themselves.
My cousin Gertrude was a difficult controversialist to manage, being
unconscious of inconsistency in statement and absolutely impervious
to reply. Her standpoint was essentially materialistic; she didn't
see why she shouldn't have a good time because other people didn't;
they would have a good time, she was sure, if she didn't. She said
that if we did give up everything we had to other people, they
wouldn't very likely know what to do with it. She asked if we were
so fond of work-people, why we didn't go and live among them, and
expressed the inflexible persuasion that if we HAD socialism,
everything would be just the same again in ten years' time. She
also threw upon us the imputation of ingratitude for a beautiful
world by saying that so far as she was concerned she didn't want to
upset everything. She was contented with things as they were, thank
you.

The discussion led in some way that I don't in the least recall now,
and possibly by abrupt transitions, to a croquet foursome in which
Margaret involved the curate without involving herself, and then
stood beside me on the edge of the lawn while the others played. We
watched silently for a moment.

"I HATE that sort of view," she said suddenly in a confidential
undertone, with her delicate pink flush returning.

"It's want of imagination," I said.

"To think we are just to enjoy ourselves," she went on; "just to go
on dressing and playing and having meals and spending money!" She
seemed to be referring not simply to my cousins, but to the whole
world of industry and property about us. "But what is one to do?"
she asked. "I do wish I had not had to come down. It's all so
pointless here. There seems to be nothing going forward, no ideas,
no dreams. No one here seems to feel quite what I feel, the sort of
need there is for MEANING in things. I hate things without
meaning."

"Don't you do--local work?"

"I suppose I shall. I suppose I must find something. Do you think--
if one were to attempt some sort of propaganda?"

"Could you--?" I began a little doubtfully.

"I suppose I couldn't," she answered, after a thoughtful moment. "I
suppose it would come to nothing. And yet I feel there is so much
to be done for the world, so much one ought to be doing. . . . I
want to do something for the world."

I can see her now as she stood there with her brows nearly frowning,
her blue eyes looking before her, her mouth almost petulant. "One
feels that there are so many things going on--out of one's reach,"
she said.

I went back in the motor-car with my mind full of her, the quality
of delicate discontent, the suggestion of exile. Even a kind of
weakness in her was sympathetic. She told tremendously against her
background. She was, I say, like a protesting blue flower upon a
cinder heap. It is curious, too, how she connects and mingles with
the furious quarrel I had with my uncle that very evening. That
came absurdly. Indirectly Margaret was responsible. My mind was
running on ideas she had revived and questions she had set
clamouring, and quite inadvertently in my attempt to find solutions
I talked so as to outrage his profoundest feelings. . . .

7

What a preposterous shindy that was!

I sat with him in the smoking-room, propounding what I considered to
be the most indisputable and non-contentious propositions
conceivable--until, to my infinite amazement, he exploded and called
me a "damned young puppy."

It was seismic.

"Tremendously interesting time," I said, "just in the beginning of
making a civilisation."

"Ah!" he said, with an averted face, and nodded, leaning forward
over his cigar.

I had not the remotest thought of annoying him.

"Monstrous muddle of things we have got," I said, "jumbled streets,
ugly population, ugly factories--"

"You'd do a sight better if you had to do with it," said my uncle,
regarding me askance.

"Not me. But a world that had a collective plan and knew where it
meant to be going would do a sight better, anyhow. We're all
swimming in a flood of ill-calculated chances--"

"You'll be making out I organised that business down there--by
chance--next," said my uncle, his voice thick with challenge.

I went on as though I was back in Trinity.

"There's a lot of chance in the making of all great businesses," I
said.

My uncle remarked that that showed how much I knew about businesses.
If chance made businesses, why was it that he always succeeded and
grew while those fools Ackroyd and Sons always took second place?
He showed a disposition to tell the glorious history of how once
Ackroyd's overshadowed him, and how now he could buy up Ackroyd's
three times over. But I wanted to get out what was in my mind.

"Oh!" I said, "as between man and man and business and business,
some of course get the pull by this quality or that--but it's forces
quite outside the individual case that make the big part of any
success under modern conditions. YOU never invented pottery, nor
any process in pottery that matters a rap in your works; it wasn't
YOUR foresight that joined all England up with railways and made it
possible to organise production on an altogether different scale.
You really at the utmost can't take credit for much more than being
the sort of man who happened to fit what happened to be the
requirements of the time, and who happened to be in a position to
take advantage of them--"

It was then my uncle cried out and called me a damned young puppy,
and became involved in some unexpected trouble of his own.

I woke up as it were from my analysis of the situation to discover
him bent over a splendid spittoon, cursing incoherently, retching a
little, and spitting out the end of his cigar which he had bitten
off in his last attempt at self-control, and withal fully prepared
as soon as he had cleared for action to give me just all that he
considered to be the contents of his mind upon the condition of
mine.

Well, why shouldn't I talk my mind to him? He'd never had an
outside view of himself for years, and I resolved to stand up to
him. We went at it hammer and tongs! It became clear that he
supposed me to be a Socialist, a zealous, embittered hater of all
ownership--and also an educated man of the vilest, most
pretentiously superior description. His principal grievance was
that I thought I knew everything; to that he recurred again and
again. . . .

We had been maintaining an armed truce with each other since my
resolve to go up to Cambridge, and now we had out all that had
accumulated between us. There had been stupendous accumulations. . . .

The particular things we said and did in that bawlmg encounter
matter nothing at all in this story. I can't now estimate how near
we came to fisticuffs. It ended with my saying, after a pungent
reminder of benefits conferred and remembered, that I didn't want to
stay another hour in his house. I went upstairs, in a state of
puerile fury, to pack and go off to the Railway Hotel, while he,
with ironical civility, telephoned for a cab.

"Good riddance!" shouted my uncle, seeing me off into the night.

On the face of it our row was preposterous, but the underlying
reality of our quarrel was the essential antagonism, it seemed to
me, in all human affairs, the antagonism between ideas and the
established method, that is to say, between ideas and the rule of
thumb. The world I hate is the rule-of-thumb world, the thing I and
my kind of people exist for primarily is to battle with that, to
annoy it, disarrange it, reconstruct it. We question everything,
disturb anything that cannot give a clear justification to our
questioning, because we believe inherently that our sense of
disorder implies the possibility of a better order. Of course we
are detestable. My uncle was of that other vaster mass who accept
everything for the thing it seems to be, hate enquiry and analysis
as a tramp hates washing, dread and resist change, oppose
experiment, despise science. The world is our battleground; and all
history, all literature that matters, all science, deals with this
conflict of the thing that is and the speculative "if" that will
destroy it.

But that is why I did not see Margaret Seddon again for five years.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

MARGARET IN LONDON

1

I was twenty-seven when I met Margaret again, and the intervening
five years had been years of vigorous activity for me, if not of
very remarkable growth. When I saw her again, I could count myself
a grown man. I think, indeed, I counted myself more completely
grown than I was. At any rate, by all ordinary standards, I had
"got on" very well, and my ideas, if they had not changed very
greatly, had become much more definite and my ambitions clearer and
bolder.

I had long since abandoned my fellowship and come to London. I had
published two books that had been talked about, written several
articles, and established a regular relationship with the WEEKLY
REVIEW and the EVENING GAZETTE. I was a member of the Eighty Club
and learning to adapt the style of the Cambridge Union to larger
uses. The London world had opened out to me very readily. I had
developed a pleasant variety of social connections. I had made the
acquaintance of Mr. Evesham, who had been attracted by my NEW RULER,
and who talked about it and me, and so did a very great deal to make
a way for me into the company of prominent and amusing people. I
dined out quite frequently. The glitter and interest of good London
dinner parties became a common experience. I liked the sort of
conversation one got at them extremely, the little glow of duologues
burning up into more general discussions, the closing-in of the men
after the going of the women, the sage, substantial masculine
gossiping, the later resumption of effective talk with some pleasant
woman, graciously at her best. I had a wide range of houses;
Cambridge had linked me to one or two correlated sets of artistic
and literary people, and my books and Mr. Evesham and opened to me
the big vague world of "society." I wasn't aggressive nor
particularly snobbish nor troublesome, sometimes I talked well, and
if I had nothing interesting to say I said as little as possible,
and I had a youthful gravity of manner that was liked by hostesses.
And the other side of my nature that first flared through the cover
of restraints at Locarno, that too had had opportunity to develop
along the line London renders practicable. I had had my experiences
and secrets and adventures among that fringe of ill-mated or erratic
or discredited women the London world possesses. The thing had long
ago ceased to be a matter of magic or mystery, and had become a
question of appetites and excitement, and among other things the
excitement of not being found out.

I write rather doubtfully of my growing during this period. Indeed
I find it hard to judge whether I can say that I grew at all in any
real sense of the word, between three and twenty and twenty-seven.
It seems to me now to have been rather a phase of realisation and
clarification. All the broad lines of my thought were laid down, I
am sure, by the date of my Locarno adventure, but in those five
years I discussed things over and over again with myself and others,
filled out with concrete fact forms I had at first apprehended
sketchily and conversationally, measured my powers against my ideals
and the forces in the world about me. It was evident that many men
no better than myself and with no greater advantages than mine had
raised themselves to influential and even decisive positions in the
worlds of politics and thought. I was gathering the confidence and
knowledge necessary to attack the world in the large manner; I found
I could write, and that people would let me write if I chose, as one
having authority and not as the scribes. Socially and politically
and intellectually I knew myself for an honest man, and that quite
without any deliberation on my part this showed and made things easy
for me. People trusted my good faith from the beginning--for all
that I came from nowhere and had no better position than any
adventurer.

But the growth process was arrested, I was nothing bigger at twenty-
seven than at twenty-two, however much saner and stronger, and any
one looking closely into my mind during that period might well have
imagined growth finished altogether. It is particularly evident to
me now that I came no nearer to any understanding of women during
that time. That Locarno affair was infinitely more to me than I had
supposed. It ended something--nipped something in the bud perhaps--
took me at a stride from a vague, fine, ignorant, closed world of
emotion to intrigue and a perfectly definite and limited sensuality.
It ended my youth, and for a time it prevented my manhood. I had
never yet even peeped at the sweetest, profoundest thing in the
world, the heart and meaning of a girl, or dreamt with any quality
of reality of a wife or any such thing as a friend among womanhood.
My vague anticipation of such things in life had vanished
altogether. I turned away from their possibility. It seemed to me
I knew what had to be known about womankind. I wanted to work hard,
to get on to a position in which I could develop and forward my
constructive projects. Women, I thought, had nothing to do with
that. It seemed clear I could not marry for some years; I was
attractive to certain types of women, I had vanity enough to give me
an agreeable confidence in love-making, and I went about seeking a
convenient mistress quite deliberately, some one who should serve my
purpose and say in the end, like that kindly first mistress of mine,
"I've done you no harm," and so release me. It seemed the only wise
way of disposing of urgencies that might otherwise entangle and
wreck the career I was intent upon.

I don't apologise for, or defend my mental and moral phases. So it
was I appraised life and prepared to take it, and so it is a
thousand ambitious men see it to-day. . . .

For the rest these five years were a period of definition. My
political conceptions were perfectly plain and honest. I had one
constant desire ruling my thoughts. I meant to leave England and
the empire better ordered than I found it, to organise and
discipline, to build up a constructive and controlling State out of
my world's confusions. We had, I saw, to suffuse education with
public intention, to develop a new better-living generation with a
collectivist habit of thought, to link now chaotic activities in
every human affair, and particularly to catch that escaped, world-
making, world-ruining, dangerous thing, industrial and financial
enterprise, and bring it back to the service of the general good. I
had then the precise image that still serves me as a symbol for all
I wish to bring about, the image of an engineer building a lock in a
swelling torrent--with water pressure as his only source of power.
My thoughts and acts were habitually turned to that enterprise; it
gave shape and direction to all my life. The problem that most
engaged my mind during those years was the practical and personal
problem of just where to apply myself to serve this almost innate
purpose. How was I, a child of this confusion, struggling upward
through the confusion, to take hold of things? Somewhere between
politics and literature my grip must needs be found, but where?
Always I seem to have been looking for that in those opening years,
and disregarding everything else to discover it.

2

The Baileys, under whose auspices I met Margaret again, were in the
sharpest contrast with the narrow industrialism of the Staffordshire
world. They were indeed at the other extreme of the scale, two
active self-centred people, excessively devoted to the public
service. It was natural I should gravitate to them, for they seemed
to stand for the maturer, more disciplined, better informed
expression of all I was then urgent to attempt to do. The bulk of
their friends were politicians or public officials, they described
themselves as publicists--a vague yet sufficiently significant term.
They lived and worked in a hard little house in Chambers Street,
Westminster, and made a centre for quite an astonishing amount of
political and social activity.

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