The New Machiavelli

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Margaret was troubled by no such doubts. She was clear I had to go
into Parliament on the side of Liberalism and the light, as against
the late Government and darkness. Essential to the memory of my
first contest, is the memory of her clear bright face, very resolute
and grave, helping me consciously, steadfastly, with all her
strength. Her quiet confidence, while I was so dissatisfied, worked
curiously towards the alienation of my sympathies. I felt she had
no business to be so sure of me. I had moments of vivid resentment
at being thus marched towards Parliament.

I seemed now always to be discovering alien forces of character in
her. Her way of taking life diverged from me more and more. She
sounded amazing, independent notes. She bought some particularly
costly furs for the campaign that roused enthusiasm whenever she
appeared. She also made me a birthday present in November of a
heavily fur-trimmed coat and this she would make me remove as I went
on to the platform, and hold over her arm until I was ready to
resume it. It was fearfully heavy for her and she liked it to be
heavy for her. That act of servitude was in essence a towering
self-assertion. I would glance sideways while some chairman
floundered through his introduction and see the clear blue eye with
which she regarded the audience, which existed so far as she was
concerned merely to return me to Parliament. It was a friendly eye,
provided they were not silly or troublesome. But it kindled a
little at the hint of a hostile question. After we had come so far
and taken so much trouble!

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 arm-chair.

"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."

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