The New Machiavelli

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"I want to know all about America," she repeated, with her eyes
scrutinising me. "Why did you come back?"

I repeated the substance of my letters rather lamely, and she sat
listening.

"But why did you turn back--without going to Denver?"

"I wanted to come back. I was restless."

"Restlessness," she said, and thought. "You were restless in
Venice. You said it was restlessness took you to America."

Again she studied me. She turned a little awkwardly to her tea
things, and poured needless water from the silver kettle into the
teapot. Then she sat still for some moments looking at the equipage
with expressionless eyes. I saw her hand upon the edge of the table
tremble slightly. I watched her closely. A vague uneasiness
possessed me. What might she not know or guess?

She spoke at last with an effort. "I wish you were in Parliament
again," she said. "Life doesn't give you events enough."

"If I was in Parliament again, I should be on the Conservative
side."

"I know," she said, and was still more thoughtful.

"Lately," she began, and paused. "Lately I've been reading--you."

I didn't help her out with what she had to say. I waited.

"I didn't understand what you were after. I had misjudged. I
didn't know. I think perhaps I was rather stupid." Her eyes were
suddenly shining with tears. "You didn't give me much chance to
understand."

She turned upon me suddenly with a voice full of tears.

"Husband," she said abruptly, holding her two hands out to me, "I
want to begin over again!"

I took her hands, perplexed beyond measure. "My dear!" I said.

"I want to begin over again."

I bowed my head to hide my face, and found her hand in mine and
kissed it.

"Ah!" she said, and slowly withdrew her hand. She leant forward
with her arm on the sofa-back, and looked very intently into my
face. I felt the most damnable scoundrel in the world as I returned
her gaze. The thought of Isabel's darkly shining eyes seemed like a
physical presence between us. . . .

"Tell me," I said presently, to break the intolerable tension, "tell
me plainly what you mean by this."

I sat a little away from her, and then took my teacup in hand, with
an odd effect of defending myself. "Have you been reading that old
book of mine?" I asked.

"That and the paper. I took a complete set from the beginning down
to Durham with me. I have read it over, thought it over. I didn't
understand--what you were teaching."

There was a little pause.

"It all seems so plain to me now," she said, "and so true."

I was profoundly disconcerted. I put down my teacup, stood up in
the middle of the hearthrug, and began talking. "I'm tremendously
glad, Margaret, that you've come to see I'm not altogether
perverse," I began. I launched out into a rather trite and windy
exposition of my views, and she sat close to me on the sofa, looking
up into my face, hanging on my words, a deliberate and invincible
convert.

"Yes," she said, "yes." . . .

I had never doubted my new conceptions before; now I doubted them
profoundly. But I went on talking. It's the grim irony in the
lives of all politicians, writers, public teachers, that once the
audience is at their feet, a new loyalty has gripped them. It isn't
their business to admit doubt and imperfections. They have to go on
talking. And I was now so accustomed to Isabel's vivid interruptions,
qualifications, restatements, and confirmations. . . .

Margaret and I dined together at home. She made me open out my
political projects to her. "I have been foolish," she said. "I
want to help."

And by some excuse I have forgotten she made me come to her room. I
think it was some book I had to take her, some American book I had
brought back with me, and mentioned in our talk. I walked in with
it, and put it down on the table and turned to go.

"Husband!" she cried, and held out her slender arms to me. I was
compelled to go to her and kiss her, and she twined them softly
about my neck and drew me to her and kissed me. I disentangled them
very gently, and took each wrist and kissed it, and the backs of her
hands.

"Good-night," I said. There came a little pause. "Good-night,
Margaret," I repeated, and walked very deliberately and with a kind
of sham preoccupation to the door.

I did not look at her, but I could feel her standing, watching me.
If I had looked up, she would, I knew, have held out her arms to
me. . . .

At the very outset that secret, which was to touch no one but Isabel
and myself, had reached out to stab another human being.

7

The whole world had changed for Isabel and me; and we tried to
pretend that nothing had changed except a small matter between us.
We believed quite honestly at that time that it was possible to keep
this thing that had happened from any reaction at all, save perhaps
through some magically enhanced vigour in our work, upon the world
about us! Seen in retrospect, one can realise the absurdity of this
belief; within a week I realised it; but that does not alter the
fact that we did believe as much, and that people who are deeply in
love and unable to marry will continue to believe so to the very end
of time. They will continue to believe out of existence every
consideration that separates them until they have come together.
Then they will count the cost, as we two had to do.

I am telling a story, and not propounding theories in this book; and
chiefly I am telling of the ideas and influences and emotions that
have happened to me--me as a sort of sounding board for my world.
The moralist is at liberty to go over my conduct with his measure
and say, "At this point or at that you went wrong, and you ought to
have done"--so-and-so. The point of interest to the statesman is
that it didn't for a moment occur to us to do so-and-so when the
time for doing it came. It amazes me now to think how little either
of us troubled about the established rights or wrongs of the
situation. We hadn't an atom of respect for them, innate or
acquired. The guardians of public morals will say we were very bad
people; I submit in defence that they are very bad guardians--
provocative guardians. . . . And when at last there came a claim
against us that had an effective validity for us, we were in the
full tide of passionate intimacy.

I had a night of nearly sleepless perplexity after Margaret's
return. She had suddenly presented herself to me like something
dramatically recalled, fine, generous, infinitely capable of
feeling. I was amazed how much I had forgotten her. In my contempt
for vulgarised and conventionalised honour I had forgotten that for
me there was such a reality as honour. And here it was, warm and
near to me, living, breathing, unsuspecting. Margaret's pride was
my honour, that I had had no right even to imperil.

I do not now remember if I thought at that time of going to Isabel
and putting this new aspect of the case before her. Perhaps I did.
Perhaps I may have considered even then the possibility of ending
what had so freshly and passionately begun. If I did, it vanished
next day at the sight of her. Whatever regrets came in the
darkness, the daylight brought an obstinate confidence in our
resolution again. We would, we declared, "pull the thing off."
Margaret must not know. Margaret should not know. If Margaret did
not know, then no harm whatever would be done. We tried to sustain
that. . . .

For a brief time we had been like two people in a magic cell,
magically cut off from the world and full of a light of its own, and
then we began to realise that we were not in the least cut off, that
the world was all about us and pressing in upon us, limiting us,
threatening us, resuming possession of us. I tried to ignore the
injury to Margaret of her unreciprocated advances. I tried to
maintain to myself that this hidden love made no difference to the
now irreparable breach between husband and wife. But I never spoke
of it to Isabel or let her see that aspect of our case. How could
I? The time for that had gone. . . .

Then in new shapes and relations came trouble. Distressful elements
crept in by reason of our unavoidable furtiveness; we ignored them,
hid them from each other, and attempted to hide them from ourselves.
Successful love is a thing of abounding pride, and we had to be
secret. It was delightful at first to be secret, a whispering, warm
conspiracy; then presently it became irksome and a little shameful.
Her essential frankness of soul was all against the masks and
falsehoods that many women would have enjoyed. Together in our
secrecy we relaxed, then in the presence of other people again it
was tiresome to have to watch for the careless, too easy phrase, to
snatch back one's hand from the limitless betrayal of a light,
familiar touch.

Love becomes a poor thing, at best a poor beautiful thing, if it
develops no continuing and habitual intimacy. We were always
meeting, and most gloriously loving and beginning--and then we had
to snatch at remorseless ticking watches, hurry to catch trains, and
go back to this or that. That is all very well for the intrigues of
idle people perhaps, but not for an intense personal relationship.
It is like lighting a candle for the sake of lighting it, over and
over again, and each time blowing it out. That, no doubt, must be
very amusing to children playing with the matches, but not to people
who love warm light, and want it in order to do fine and honourable
things together. We had achieved--I give the ugly phrase that
expresses the increasing discolouration in my mind--"illicit
intercourse." To end at that, we now perceived, wasn't in our
style. But where were we to end? . . .

Perhaps we might at this stage have given it up. I think if we
could have seen ahead and around us we might have done so. But the
glow of our cell blinded us. . . . I wonder what might have
happened if at that time we had given it up. . . . We propounded
it, we met again in secret to discuss it, and our overpowering
passion for one another reduced that meeting to absurdity. . . .

Presently the idea of children crept between us. It came in from
all our conceptions of life and public service; it was, we found, in
the quality of our minds that physical love without children is a
little weak, timorous, more than a little shameful. With
imaginative people there very speedily comes a time when that
realisation is inevitable. We hadn't thought of that before--it
isn't natural to think of that before. We hadn't known. There is
no literature in English dealing with such things.

There is a necessary sequence of phases in love. These came in
their order, and with them, unanticipated tarnishings on the first
bright perfection of our relations. For a time these developing
phases were no more than a secret and private trouble between us,
little shadows spreading by imperceptible degrees across that vivid
and luminous cell.

8

The Handitch election flung me suddenly into prominence.

It is still only two years since that struggle, and I will not
trouble the reader with a detailed history of events that must be
quite sufficiently present in his mind for my purpose already. Huge
stacks of journalism have dealt with Handitch and its significance.
For the reader very probably, as for most people outside a
comparatively small circle, it meant my emergence from obscurity.
We obtruded no editor's name in the BLUE WEEKLY; I had never as yet
been on the London hoardings. Before Handitch I was a journalist
and writer of no great public standing; after Handitch, I was
definitely a person, in the little group of persons who stood for
the Young Imperialist movement. Handitch was, to a very large
extent, my affair. I realised then, as a man comes to do, how much
one can still grow after seven and twenty. In the second election I
was a man taking hold of things; at Kinghamstead I had been simply a
young candidate, a party unit, led about the constituency, told to
do this and that, and finally washed in by the great Anti-
Imperialist flood, like a starfish rolling up a beach.

My feminist views had earnt the mistrust of the party, and I do not
think I should have got the chance of Handitch or indeed any chance
at all of Parliament for a long time, if it had not been that the
seat with its long record of Liberal victories and its Liberal
majority of 3642 at the last election, offered a hopeless contest.
The Liberal dissensions and the belated but by no means contemptible
Socialist candidate were providential interpositions. I think,
however, the conduct of Gane, Crupp, and Tarvrille in coming down to
fight for me, did count tremendously in my favour. "We aren't going
to win, perhaps," said Crupp, "but we are going to talk." And until
the very eve of victory, we treated Handitch not so much as a
battlefield as a hoarding. And so it was the Endowment of
Motherhood as a practical form of Eugenics got into English
politics.

Plutus, our agent, was scared out of his wits when the thing began.

"They're ascribing all sorts of queer ideas to you about the
Family," he said.

"I think the Family exists for the good of the children," I said;
"is that queer?"

"Not when you explain it--but they won't let you explain it. And
about marriage--?"

"I'm all right about marriage--trust me."

"Of course, if YOU had children," said Plutus, rather
inconsiderately. . . .

They opened fire upon me in a little electioneering rag call the
HANDITCH SENTINEL, with a string of garbled quotations and
misrepresentations that gave me an admirable text for a speech. I
spoke for an hour and ten minutes with a more and more crumpled copy
of the SENTINEL in my hand, and I made the fullest and completest
exposition of the idea of endowing motherhood that I think had ever
been made up to that time in England. Its effect on the press was
extraordinary. The Liberal papers gave me quite unprecedented space
under the impression that I had only to be given rope to hang
myself; the Conservatives cut me down or tried to justify me; the
whole country was talking. I had had a pamphlet in type upon the
subject, and I revised this carefully and put it on the book-stalls
within three days. It sold enormously and brought me bushels of
letters. We issued over three thousand in Handitch alone. At
meeting after meeting I was heckled upon nothing else. Long before
polling day Plutus was converted.

"It's catching on like old age pensions," he said. "We've dished
the Liberals! To think that such a project should come from our
side!"

But it was only with the declaration of the poll that my battle was
won. No one expected more than a snatch victory, and I was in by
over fifteen hundred. At one bound Cossington's papers passed from
apologetics varied by repudiation to triumphant praise. "A
renascent England, breeding men," said the leader in his chief daily
on the morning after the polling, and claimed that the Conservatives
had been ever the pioneers in sanely bold constructive projects.

I came up to London with a weary but rejoicing Margaret by the night
train.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION

1

To any one who did not know of that glowing secret between Isabel
and myself, I might well have appeared at that time the most
successful and enviable of men. I had recovered rapidly from an
uncongenial start in political life; I had become a considerable
force through the BLUE WEEKLY, and was shaping an increasingly
influential body of opinion; I had re-entered Parliament with quite
dramatic distinction, and in spite of a certain faltering on the
part of the orthodox Conservatives towards the bolder elements in
our propaganda, I had loyal and unenvious associates who were making
me a power in the party. People were coming to our group,
understandings were developing. It was clear we should play a
prominent part in the next general election, and that, given a
Conservative victory, I should be assured of office. The world
opened out to me brightly and invitingly. Great schemes took shape
in my mind, always more concrete, always more practicable; the years
ahead seemed falling into order, shining with the credible promise
of immense achievement.

And at the heart of it all, unseen and unsuspected, was the secret
of my relations with Isabel--like a seed that germinates and
thrusts, thrusts relentlessly.

From the onset of the Handitch contest onward, my meetings with her
had been more and more pervaded by the discussion of our situation.
It had innumerable aspects. It was very present to us that we
wanted to be together as much as possible--we were beginning to long
very much for actual living together in the same house, so that one
could come as it were carelessly--unawares--upon the other, busy
perhaps about some trivial thing. We wanted to feel each other in
the daily atmosphere. Preceding our imperatively sterile passion,
you must remember, outside it, altogether greater than it so far as
our individual lives were concerned, there had grown and still grew
an enormous affection and intellectual sympathy between us. We
brought all our impressions and all our ideas to each other, to see
them in each other's light. It is hard to convey that quality of
intellectual unison to any one who has not experienced it. I
thought more and more in terms of conversation with Isabel; her
possible comments upon things would flash into my mind, oh!--with
the very sound of her voice.

I remember, too, the odd effect of seeing her in the distance going
about Handitch, like any stranger canvasser; the queer emotion of
her approach along the street, the greeting as she passed. The
morning of the polling she vanished from the constituency. I saw
her for an instant in the passage behind our Committee rooms.

"Going?" said I.

She nodded.

"Stay it out. I want you to see the fun. I remember--the other
time."

She didn't answer for a moment or so, and stood with face averted.

"It's Margaret's show," she said abruptly. "If I see her smiling
there like a queen by your side--! She did--last time. I
remember." She caught at a sob and dashed her hand across her face
impatiently. "Jealous fool, mean and petty, jealous fool! . . .
Good luck, old man, to you! You're going to win. But I don't want
to see the end of it all the same. . . ."

"Good-bye!" said I, clasping her hand as some supporter appeared in
the passage. . . .

I came back to London victorious, and a little flushed and coarse
with victory; and so soon as I could break away I went to Isabel's
flat and found her white and worn, with the stain of secret weeping
about her eyes. I came into the room to her and shut the door.

"You said I'd win," I said, and held out my arms.

She hugged me closely for a moment.

"My dear," I whispered, "it's nothing--without you--nothing!"

We didn't speak for some seconds. Then she slipped from my hold.
"Look!" she said, smiling like winter sunshine. "I've had in all
the morning papers--the pile of them, and you--resounding."

"It's more than I dared hope."

"Or I."

She stood for a moment still smiling bravely, and then she was
sobbing in my arms. "The bigger you are--the more you show," she
said--" the more we are parted. I know, I know--"

I held her close to me, making no answer.

Presently she became still. "Oh, well," she said, and wiped her
eyes and sat down on the little sofa by the fire; and I sat down
beside her.

"I didn't know all there was in love," she said, staring at the
coals, "when we went love-making."

I put my arm behind her and took a handful of her dear soft hair in
my hand and kissed it.

"You've done a great thing this time," she said. "Handitch will
make you."

"It opens big chances," I said. "But why are you weeping, dear
one?"

"Envy," she said, "and love."

"You're not lonely?"

"I've plenty to do--and lots of people."

"Well?"

"I want you."

"You've got me."

She put her arm about me and kissed me. "I want you," she said,
"just as if I had nothing of you. You don't understand--how a woman
wants a man. I thought once if I just gave myself to you it would
be enough. It was nothing--it was just a step across the threshold.
My dear, every moment you are away I ache for you--ache! I want to
be about when it isn't love-making or talk. I want to be doing
things for you, and watching you when you're not thinking of me.
All those safe, careless, intimate things. And something else--"
She stopped. "Dear, I don't want to bother you. I just want you to
know I love you. . . ."

She caught my head in her hands and kissed it, then stood up
abruptly.

I looked up at her, a little perplexed.

"Dear heart," said I, "isn't this enough? You're my councillor, my
colleague, my right hand, the secret soul of my life--"

"And I want to darn your socks," she said, smiling back at me.

"You're insatiable."

She smiled "No," she said. "I'm not insatiable, Master. But I'm a
woman in love. And I'm finding out what I want, and what is
necessary to me--and what I can't have. That's all."

"We get a lot."

"We want a lot. You and I are greedy people for the things we like,
Master. It's very evident we've got nearly all we can ever have of
one another--and I'm not satisfied."

"What more is there?

"For you--very little. I wonder. For me--every thing. Yes--
everything. You didn't mean it, Master; you didn't know any more
than I did when I began, but love between a man and a woman is
sometimes very one-sided. Fearfully one-sided! That's all. . . ."

"Don't YOU ever want children?" she said abruptly.

"I suppose I do."

"You don't!"

"I haven't thought of them."

"A man doesn't, perhaps. But I have. . . . I want them--like
hunger. YOUR children, and home with you. Really, continually you!
That's the trouble. . . . I can't have 'em, Master, and I can't
have you."

She was crying, and through her tears she laughed.

"I'm going to make a scene," she said, "and get this over. I'm so
discontented and miserable; I've got to tell you. It would come
between us if I didn't. I'm in love with you, with everything--with
all my brains. I'll pull through all right. I'll be good, Master,
never you fear. But to-day I'm crying out with all my being. This
election--You're going up; you're going on. In these papers--you're
a great big fact. It's suddenly come home to me. At the back of my
mind I've always had the idea I was going to have you somehow
presently for myself--I mean to have you to go long tramps with, to
keep house for, to get meals for, to watch for of an evening. It's
a sort of habitual background to my thought of you. And it's
nonsense--utter nonsense!" She stopped. She was crying and
choking. "And the child, you know--the child!"

I was troubled beyond measure, but Handitch and its intimations were
clear and strong.

"We can't have that," I said.

"No," she said, "we can't have that."

"We've got our own things to do."

"YOUR things," she said.

"Aren't they yours too?"

"Because of you," she said.

"Aren't they your very own things?"

"Women don't have that sort of very own thing. Indeed, it's true!
And think! You've been down there preaching the goodness of
children, telling them the only good thing in a state is happy,
hopeful children, working to free mothers and children--"

"And we give our own children to do it?" I said.

"Yes," she said. "And sometimes I think it's too much to give--too
much altogether. . . . Children get into a woman's brain--when she
mustn't have them, especially when she must never hope for them.
Think of the child we might have now!--the little creature with
soft, tender skin, and little hands and little feet! At times it
haunts me. It comes and says, Why wasn't I given life? I can hear
it in the night. . . . The world is full of such little ghosts,
dear lover--little things that asked for life and were refused.
They clamour to me. It's like a little fist beating at my heart.
Love children, beautiful children. Little cold hands that tear at
my heart! Oh, my heart and my lord!" She was holding my arm with
both her hands and weeping against it, and now she drew herself to
my shoulder and wept and sobbed in my embrace. "I shall never sit
with your child on my knee and you beside me-never, and I am a woman
and your lover! . . ."

2

But the profound impossibility of our relation was now becoming more
and more apparent to us. We found ourselves seeking justification,
clinging passionately to a situation that was coldly, pitilessly,
impossible and fated. We wanted quite intensely to live together
and have a child, but also we wanted very many other things that
were incompatible with these desires. It was extraordinarily
difficult to weigh our political and intellectual ambitions against
those intimate wishes. The weights kept altering according as one
found oneself grasping this valued thing or that. It wasn't as if
we could throw everything aside for our love, and have that as we
wanted it. Love such as we bore one another isn't altogether, or
even chiefly, a thing in itself--it is for the most part a value set
upon things. Our love was interwoven with all our other interests;
to go out of the world and live in isolation seemed to us like
killing the best parts of each other; we loved the sight of each
other engaged finely and characteristically, we knew each other best
as activities. We had no delusions about material facts; we didn't
want each other alive or dead, we wanted each other fully alive. We
wanted to do big things together, and for us to take each other
openly and desperately would leave us nothing in the world to do.
We wanted children indeed passionately, but children with every
helpful chance in the world, and children born in scandal would be
handicapped at every turn. We wanted to share a home, and not a
solitude.

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