The New Machiavelli

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Before the reappearance of Margaret in my world at all an unwonted
disgust with the consequences and quality of my passions had arisen
in my mind. Among other things that moment with the Lettish girl
haunted me persistently. I would see myself again and again sitting
amidst those sluttish surroundings, collar and tie in hand, while
her heavy German words grouped themselves to a slowly apprehended
meaning. I would feel again with a fresh stab of remorse, that this
was not a flash of adventure, this was not seeing life in any
permissible sense, but a dip into tragedy, dishonour, hideous
degradation, and the pitiless cruelty of a world as yet uncontrolled
by any ordered will.

"Good God!" I put it to myself, "that I should finish the work those
Cossacks had begun! I who want order and justice before everything!
There's no way out of it, no decent excuse! If I didn't think, I
ought to have thought!" . . .

How did I get to it?" . . . I would ransack the phases of my
development from the first shy unveiling of a hidden wonder to the
last extremity as a man will go through muddled account books to
find some disorganising error. . . .

I was also involved at that time--I find it hard to place these
things in the exact order of their dates because they were so
disconnected with the regular progress of my work and life--in an
intrigue, a clumsy, sensuous, pretentious, artificially stimulated
intrigue, with a Mrs. Larrimer, a woman living separated from her
husband. I will not go into particulars of that episode, nor how we
quarrelled and chafed one another. She was at once unfaithful and
jealous and full of whims about our meetings; she was careless of
our secret, and vulgarised our relationship by intolerable
interpretations; except for some glowing moments of gratification,
except for the recurrent and essentially vicious desire that drew us
back to each other again, we both fretted at a vexatious and
unexpectedly binding intimacy. The interim was full of the quality
of work delayed, of time and energy wasted, of insecure precautions
against scandal and exposure. Disappointment is almost inherent in
illicit love. I had, and perhaps it was part of her recurrent
irritation also, a feeling as though one had followed something fine
and beautiful into a net--into bird lime! These furtive scuffles,
this sneaking into shabby houses of assignation, was what we had
made out of the suggestion of pagan beauty; this was the reality of
our vision of nymphs and satyrs dancing for the joy of life amidst
incessant sunshine. We had laid hands upon the wonder and glory of
bodily love and wasted them. . . .

It was the sense of waste, of finely beautiful possibilities getting
entangled and marred for ever that oppressed me. I had missed, I
had lost. I did not turn from these things after the fashion of the
Baileys, as one turns from something low and embarrassing. I felt
that these great organic forces were still to be wrought into a
harmony with my constructive passion. I felt too that I was not
doing it. I had not understood the forces in this struggle nor its
nature, and as I learnt I failed. I had been started wrong, I had
gone on wrong, in a world that was muddled and confused, full of
false counsel and erratic shames and twisted temptations. I learnt
to see it so by failures that were perhaps destroying any chance of
profit in my lessons. Moods of clear keen industry alternated with
moods of relapse and indulgence and moods of dubiety and remorse. I
was not going on as the Baileys thought I was going on. There were
times when the blindness of the Baileys irritated me intensely.
Beneath the ostensible success of those years, between twenty-three
and twenty-eight, this rottenness, known to scarcely any one but
myself, grew and spread. My sense of the probability of a collapse
intensified. I knew indeed now, even as Willersley had prophesied
five years before, that I was entangling myself in something that
might smother all my uses in the world. Down there among those
incommunicable difficulties, I was puzzled and blundering. I was
losing my hold upon things; the chaotic and adventurous element in
life was spreading upward and getting the better of me, over-
mastering me and all my will to rule and make. . . . And the
strength, the drugging urgency of the passion!

Margaret shone at times in my imagination like a radiant angel in a
world of mire and disorder, in a world of cravings, hot and dull red
like scars inflamed. . . .

I suppose it was because I had so great a need of such help as her
whiteness proffered, that I could ascribe impossible perfections to
her, a power of intellect, a moral power and patience to which she,
poor fellow mortal, had indeed no claim. If only a few of us WERE
angels and freed from the tangle of effort, how easy life might be!
I wanted her so badly, so very badly, to be what I needed. I wanted
a woman to save me. I forced myself to see her as I wished to see
her. Her tepidities became infinite delicacies, her mental
vagueness an atmospheric realism. The harsh precisions of the
Baileys and Altiora's blunt directness threw up her fineness into
relief and made a grace of every weakness.

Mixed up with the memory of times when I talked with Margaret as one
talks politely to those who are hopelessly inferior in mental
quality, explaining with a false lucidity, welcoming and encouraging
the feeblest response, when possible moulding and directing, are
times when I did indeed, as the old phrase goes, worship the ground
she trod on. I was equally honest and unconscious of inconsistency
at each extreme. But in neither phase could I find it easy to make
love to Margaret. For in the first I did not want to, though I
talked abundantly to her of marriage and so forth, and was a little
puzzled at myself for not going on to some personal application, and
in the second she seemed inaccessible, I felt I must make
confessions and put things before her that would be the grossest
outrage upon the noble purity I attributed to her.

9

I went to Margaret at last to ask her to marry me, wrought up to the
mood of one who stakes his life on a cast. Separated from her, and
with the resonance of an evening of angry recriminations with Mrs.
Larrimer echoing in my mind, I discovered myself to be quite
passionately in love with Margaret. Last shreds of doubt vanished.
It has always been a feature of our relationship that Margaret
absent means more to me than Margaret present; her memory distils
from its dross and purifies in me. All my criticisms and
qualifications of her vanished into some dark corner of my mind.
She was the lady of my salvation; I must win my way to her or
perish.

I went to her at last, for all that I knew she loved me, in
passionate self-abasement, white and a-tremble. She was staying
with the Rockleys at Woking, for Shena Rockley had been at Bennett
Hall with her and they had resumed a close intimacy; and I went down
to her on an impulse, unheralded. I was kept waiting for some
minutes, I remember, in a little room upon which a conservatory
opened, a conservatory full of pots of large mauve-edged, white
cyclamens in flower. And there was a big lacquer cabinet, a Chinese
thing, I suppose, of black and gold against the red-toned wall. To
this day the thought of Margaret is inseparably bound up with the
sight of a cyclamen's back-turned petals.

She came in, looking pale and drooping rather more than usual. I
suddenly realised that Altiora's hint of a disappointment leading to
positive illness was something more than a vindictive comment. She
closed the door and came across to me and took and dropped my hand
and stood still. "What is it you want with me?" she asked.

The speech I had been turning over and over in my mind on the way
vanished at the sight of her.

"I want to talk to you," I answered lamely.

For some seconds neither of us said a word.

"I want to tell you things about my life," I began.

She answered with a scarcely audible "yes."

"I almost asked you to marry me at Pangbourne," I plunged. "I
didn't. I didn't because--because you had too much to give me."

"Too much!" she echoed, "to give you!" She had lifted her eyes to
my face and the colour was coming into her cheeks.

"Don't misunderstand me," I said hastily. "I want to tell you
things, things you don't know. Don't answer me. I want to tell
you."

She stood before the fireplace with her ultimate answer shining
through the quiet of her face. "Go on," she said, very softly. It
was so pitilessly manifest she was resolved to idealise the
situation whatever I might say. I began walking up and down the
room between those cyclamens and the cabinet. There were little
gold fishermen on the cabinet fishing from little islands that each
had a pagoda and a tree, and there were also men in boats or
something, I couldn't determine what, and some obscure sub-office in
my mind concerned itself with that quite intently. Yet I seem to
have been striving with all my being to get words for the truth of
things. "You see," I emerged, "you make everything possible to me.
You can give me help and sympathy, support, understanding. You know
my political ambitions. You know all that I might do in the world.
I do so intensely want to do constructive things, big things
perhaps, in this wild jumble. . . . Only you don't know a bit what
I am. I want to tell you what I am. I'm complex. . . . I'm
streaked."

I glanced at her, and she was regarding me with an expression of
blissful disregard for any meaning I was seeking to convey.

"You see," I said, "I'm a bad man."

She sounded a note of valiant incredulity.

Everything seemed to be slipping away from me. I pushed on to the
ugly facts that remained over from the wreck of my interpretation.
"What has held me back," I said, "is the thought that you could not
possibly understand certain things in my life. Men are not pure as
women are. I have had love affairs. I mean I have had affairs.
Passion--desire. You see, I have had a mistress, I have been
entangled--"

She seemed about to speak, but I interrupted. "I'm not telling
you," I said, "what I meant to tell you. I want you to know clearly
that there is another side to my life, a dirty side. Deliberately I
say, dirty. It didn't seem so at first--"

I stopped blankly. "Dirty," I thought, was the most idiotic choice
of words to have made.

I had never in any tolerable sense of the word been dirty.

"I drifted into this--as men do," I said after a little pause and
stopped again.

She was looking at me with her wide blue eyes.

"Did you imagine," she began, "that I thought you--that I expected--"

"But how can you know?"

"I know. I do know."

"But--" I began.

"I know," she persisted, dropping her eyelids. "Of course I know,"
and nothing could have convinced me more completely that she did not
know.

"All men--" she generalised. "A woman does not understand these
temptations."

I was astonished beyond measure at her way of taking my confession.
. . .

"Of course," she said, hesitating a little over a transparent
difficulty, "it is all over and past."

"It's all over and past," I answered.

There was a little pause.

"I don't want to know," she said. "None of that seems to matter now
in the slightest degree."

She looked up and smiled as though we had exchanged some acceptable
commonplaces. "Poor dear!" she said, dismissing everything, and put
out her arms, and it seemed to me that I could hear the Lettish girl
in the background--doomed safety valve of purity in this intolerable
world--telling something in indistinguishable German--I know not
what nor why. . . .

I took Margaret in my arms and kissed her. Her eyes were wet with
tears. She clung to me and was near, I felt, to sobbing.

"I have loved you," she whispered presently, "Oh! ever since we met
in Misterton--six years and more ago."

CHAPTER THE THIRD

MARGARET IN VENICE

1

There comes into my mind a confused memory of conversations with
Margaret; we must have had dozens altogether, and they mix in now
for the most part inextricably not only with one another, but with
later talks and with things we discussed at Pangbourne. We had the
immensest anticipations of the years and opportunities that lay
before us. I was now very deeply in love with her indeed. I felt
not that I had cleaned up my life but that she had. We called each
other "confederate" I remember, and made during our brief engagement
a series of visits to the various legislative bodies in London, the
County Council, the House of Commons, where we dined with Villiers,
and the St. Pancras Vestry, where we heard Shaw speaking. I was
full of plans and so was she of the way in which we were to live and
work. We were to pay back in public service whatever excess of
wealth beyond his merits old Seddon's economic advantage had won for
him from the toiling people in the potteries. The end of the Boer
War was so recent that that blessed word "efficiency" echoed still
in people's minds and thoughts. Lord Roseberry in a memorable
oration had put it into the heads of the big outer public, but the
Baileys with a certain show of justice claimed to have set it going
in the channels that took it to him--if as a matter of fact it was
taken to him. But then it was their habit to make claims of that
sort. They certainly did their share to keep "efficient" going.
Altiora's highest praise was "thoroughly efficient." We were to be
a "thoroughly efficient" political couple of the "new type." She
explained us to herself and Oscar, she explained us to ourselves,
she explained us to the people who came to her dinners and
afternoons until the world was highly charged with explanation and
expectation, and the proposal that I should be the Liberal candidate
for the Kinghamstead Division seemed the most natural development in
the world.

I was full of the ideal of hard restrained living and relentless
activity, and throughout a beautiful November at Venice, where
chiefly we spent our honeymoon, we turned over and over again and
discussed in every aspect our conception of a life tremendously
focussed upon the ideal of social service.

Most clearly there stands out a picture of ourselves talking in a
gondola on our way to Torcella. Far away behind us the smoke of
Murano forms a black stain upon an immense shining prospect of
smooth water, water as unruffled and luminous as the sky above, a
mirror on which rows of posts and distant black high-stemmed, swan-
necked boats with their minutely clear swinging gondoliers, float
aerially. Remote and low before us rises the little tower of our
destination. Our men swing together and their oars swirl leisurely
through the water, hump back in the rowlocks, splash sharply and go
swishing back again. Margaret lies back on cushions, with her face
shaded by a holland parasol, and I sit up beside her.

"You see," I say, and in spite of Margaret's note of perfect
acquiescence I feel myself reasoning against an indefinable
antagonism, "it is so easy to fall into a slack way with life.
There may seem to be something priggish in a meticulous discipline,
but otherwise it is so easy to slip into indolent habits--and to be
distracted from one's purpose. The country, the world, wants men to
serve its constructive needs, to work out and carry out plans. For
a man who has to make a living the enemy is immediate necessity; for
people like ourselves it's--it's the constant small opportunity of
agreeable things."

"Frittering away," she says, "time and strength."

"That is what I feel. It's so pleasant to pretend one is simply
modest, it looks so foolish at times to take one's self too
seriously. We've GOT to take ourselves seriously."

She endorses my words with her eyes.

"I feel I can do great things with life."

"I KNOW you can."

"But that's only to be done by concentrating one's life upon one
main end. We have to plan our days, to make everything subserve our
scheme."

"I feel," she answers softly, "we ought to give--every hour."

Her face becomes dreamy. "I WANT to give every hour," she adds.

2

That holiday in Venice is set in my memory like a little artificial
lake in uneven confused country, as something very bright and
skylike, and discontinuous with all about it. The faded quality of
the very sunshine of that season, the mellow discoloured palaces and
places, the huge, time-ripened paintings of departed splendours, the
whispering, nearly noiseless passage of hearse-black gondolas, for
the horrible steam launch had not yet ruined Venice, the stilled
magnificences of the depopulated lagoons, the universal autumn, made
me feel altogether in recess from the teeming uproars of reality.
There was not a dozen people all told, no Americans and scarcely any
English, to dine in the big cavern of a dining-room, with its vistas
of separate tables, its distempered walls and its swathed
chandeliers. We went about seeing beautiful things, accepting
beauty on every hand, and taking it for granted that all was well
with ourselves and the world. It was ten days or a fortnight before
I became fretful and anxious for action; a long tranquillity for
such a temperament as mine.

Our pleasures were curiously impersonal, a succession of shared
aesthetic appreciation threads all that time. Our honeymoon was no
exultant coming together, no mutual shout of "YOU!" We were almost
shy with one another, and felt the relief of even a picture to help
us out. It was entirely in my conception of things that I should be
very watchful not to shock or distress Margaret or press the
sensuous note. Our love-making had much of the tepid smoothness of
the lagoons. We talked in delicate innuendo of what should be
glorious freedoms. Margaret had missed Verona and Venice in her
previous Italian journey--fear of the mosquito had driven her mother
across Italy to the westward route--and now she could fill up her
gaps and see the Titians and Paul Veroneses she already knew in
colourless photographs, the Carpaccios, (the St. George series
delighted her beyond measure,) the Basaitis and that great statue of
Bartolomeo Colleoni that Ruskin praised.

But since I am not a man to look at pictures and architectural
effects day after day, I did watch Margaret very closely and store a
thousand memories of her. I can see her now, her long body drooping
a little forward, her sweet face upraised to some discovered
familiar masterpiece and shining with a delicate enthusiasm. I can
hear again the soft cadences of her voice murmuring commonplace
comments, for she had no gift of expressing the shapeless
satisfaction these things gave her.

Margaret, I perceived, was a cultivated person, the first cultivated
person with whom I had ever come into close contact. She was
cultivated and moral, and I, I now realise, was never either of
these things. She was passive, and I am active. She did not simply
and naturally look for beauty but she had been incited to look for
it at school, and took perhaps a keener interest in books and
lectures and all the organisation of beautiful things than she did
in beauty itself; she found much of her delight in being guided to
it. Now a thing ceases to be beautiful to me when some finger points
me out its merits. Beauty is the salt of life, but I take my beauty
as a wild beast gets its salt, as a constituent of the meal. . . .

And besides, there was that between us that should have seemed more
beautiful than any picture. . . .

So we went about Venice tracking down pictures and spiral staircases
and such-like things, and my brains were busy all the time with such
things as a comparison of Venice and its nearest modern equivalent,
New York, with the elaboration of schemes of action when we returned
to London, with the development of a theory of Margaret.

Our marriage had done this much at least, that it had fused and
destroyed those two independent ways of thinking about her that had
gone on in my mind hitherto. Suddenly she had become very near to
me, and a very big thing, a sort of comprehensive generalisation
behind a thousand questions, like the sky or England. The judgments
and understandings that had worked when she was, so to speak, miles
away from my life, had now to be altogether revised. Trifling
things began to matter enormously, that she had a weak and easily
fatigued back, for example, or that when she knitted her brows and
stammered a little in talking, it didn't really mean that an
exquisite significance struggled for utterance.

We visited pictures in the mornings chiefly. In the afternoon,
unless we were making a day-long excursion in a gondola, Margaret
would rest for an hour while I prowled about in search of English
newspapers, and then we would go to tea in the Piazza San Marco and
watch the drift of people feeding the pigeons and going into the
little doors beneath the sunlit arches and domes of Saint Mark's.
Then perhaps we would stroll on the Piazzetta, or go out into the
sunset in a gondola. Margaret became very interested in the shops
that abound under the colonnades and decided at last to make an
extensive purchase of table glass. "These things," she said, are
quite beautiful, and far cheaper than anything but the most ordinary
looking English ware." I was interested in her idea, and a good
deal charmed by the delightful qualities of tinted shape, slender
handle and twisted stem. I suggested we should get not simply
tumblers and wineglasses but bedroom waterbottles, fruit- and sweet-
dishes, water-jugs, and in the end we made quite a business-like
afternoon of it.

I was beginning now to long quite definitely for events. Energy was
accumulating in me, and worrying me for an outlet. I found the
TIMES and the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the other papers I managed to get
hold of, more and more stimulating. I nearly wrote to the former
paper one day in answer to a letter by Lord Grimthorpe--I forget now
upon what point. I chafed secretly against this life of tranquil
appreciations more and more. I found my attitudes of restrained and
delicate affection for Margaret increasingly difficult to sustain.
I surprised myself and her by little gusts of irritability, gusts
like the catspaws before a gale. I was alarmed at these symptoms.

One night when Margaret had gone up to her room, I put on a light
overcoat, went out into the night and prowled for a long time
through the narrow streets, smoking and thinking. I returned and
went and sat on the edge of her bed to talk to her.

"Look here, Margaret," I said; "this is all very well, but I'm
restless."

"Restless! " she said with a faint surprise in her voice.

"Yes. I think I want exercise. I've got a sort of feeling--I've
never had it before--as though I was getting fat."

"My dear!" she cried.

"I want to do things;--ride horses, climb mountains, take the devil
out of myself."

She watched me thoughtfully.

"Couldn't we DO something?" she said.

Do what?

"I don't know. Couldn't we perhaps go away from here soon--and walk
in the mountains--on our way home."

I thought. "There seems to be no exercise at all in this place."

"Isn't there some walk?"

"I wonder," I answered. "We might walk to Chioggia perhaps, along
the Lido." And we tried that, but the long stretch of beach
fatigued Margaret's back, and gave her blisters, and we never got
beyond Malamocco. . . .

A day or so after we went out to those pleasant black-robed, bearded
Armenians in their monastery at Saint Lazzaro, and returned towards
sundown. We fell into silence. "PIU LENTO," said Margaret to the
gondolier, and released my accumulated resolution.

"Let us go back to London," I said abruptly.

Margaret looked at me with surprised blue eyes.

"This is beautiful beyond measure, you know," I said, sticking to my
point, "but I have work to do."

She was silent for some seconds. "I had forgotten," she said.

"So had I," I sympathised, and took her hand. "Suddenly I have
remembered."

She remained quite still. "There is so much to be done," I said,
almost apologetically.

She looked long away from me across the lagoon and at last sighed,
like one who has drunk deeply, and turned to me.

"I suppose one ought not to be so happy," she said. "Everything has
been so beautiful and so simple and splendid. And clean. It has
been just With You--the time of my life. It's a pity such things
must end. But the world is calling you, dear. . . . I ought not to
have forgotten it. I thought you were resting--and thinking. But
if you are rested.--Would you like us to start to-morrow?"

She looked at once so fragile and so devoted that on the spur of the
moment I relented, and we stayed in Venice four more days.

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