The New Machiavelli

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"Respectable ladies addicted to district visiting at home were as
bad as any one," said Panmure. "Glazebrook told me of one--flushed
like a woman at a bargain sale, he said--and when he pointed out to
her that the silk she'd got was bloodstained, she just said, 'Oh,
bother!' and threw it aside and went back. . . ."

We became aware that Tarvrille's butler had returned. We tried not
to seem to listen.

"Beg pardon, m'lord," he said. "The house IS on fire, m'lord."

"Upstairs, m'lord."

"Just overhead, m'lord."

"The maids are throwing water, m'lord, and I've telephoned FIRE."

"No, m'lord, no immediate danger."

"It's all right," said Tarvrille to the table generally. Go on!
It's not a general conflagration, and the fire brigade won't be five
minutes. Don't see that it's our affair. The stuff's insured.
They say old Lady Paskershortly was dreadful. Like a harpy. The
Dowager Empress had shown her some little things of hers. Pet
things--hidden away. Susan went straight for them--used to take an
umbrella for the silks. Born shoplifter."

It was evident he didn't want his dinner spoilt, and we played up
loyally.

"This is recorded history," said Wilkins,--" practically. It makes
one wonder about unrecorded history. In India, for example."

But nobody touched that.

"Thompson," said Tarvrille to the imperturbable butler, and
indicating the table generally, "champagne. Champagne. Keep it
going."

"M'lord," and Thompson marshalled his assistants.

Some man I didn't know began to remember things about Mandalay.
"It's queer," he said, "how people break out at times;" and told his
story of an army doctor, brave, public-spirited, and, as it
happened, deeply religious, who was caught one evening by the
excitement of plundering--and stole and hid, twisted the wrist of a
boy until it broke, and was afterwards overcome by wild remorse.

I watched Evesham listening intently. "Strange," he said, "very
strange. We are such stuff as thieves are made of. And in China,
too, they murdered people--for the sake of murdering. Apart, so to
speak, from mercenary considerations. I'm afraid there's no doubt
of it in certain cases. No doubt at all. Young soldiers fresh from
German high schools and English homes!"

"Did OUR people?" asked some patriot.

"Not so much. But I'm afraid there were cases. . . . Some of the
Indian troops were pretty bad."

Gane picked up the tale with confirmations.

It is all printed in the vividest way as a picture upon my memory,
so that were I a painter I think I could give the deep rich browns
and warm greys beyond the brightly lit table, the various
distinguished faces, strongly illuminated, interested and keen,
above the black and white of evening dress, the alert menservants
with their heavier, clean-shaved faces indistinctly seen in the
dimness behind. Then this was coloured emotionally for me by my
aching sense of loss and sacrifice, and by the chance trend of our
talk to the breaches and unrealities of the civilised scheme. We
seemed a little transitory circle of light in a universe of darkness
and violence; an effect to which the diminishing smell of burning
rubber, the trampling of feet overhead, the swish of water, added
enormously. Everybody--unless, perhaps, it was Evesham--drank
rather carelessly because of the suppressed excitement of our
situation, and talked the louder and more freely.

"But what a flimsy thing our civilisation is!" said Evesham; "a mere
thin net of habits and associations!"

"I suppose those men came back," said Wilkins.

"Lady Paskershortly did!" chuckled Evesham.

"How do they fit it in with the rest of their lives?" Wilkins
speculated. "I suppose there's Pekin-stained police officers,
Pekin-stained J. P.'s--trying petty pilferers in the severest
manner." . . .

Then for a time things became preposterous. There was a sudden
cascade of water by the fireplace, and then absurdly the ceiling
began to rain upon us, first at this point and then that. "My new
suit!" cried some one. "Perrrrrr-up pe-rr"--a new vertical line of
blackened water would establish itself and form a spreading pool
upon the gleaming cloth. The men nearest would arrange catchment
areas of plates and flower bowls. "Draw up!" said Tarvrille, "draw
up. That's the bad end of the table!" He turned to the
imperturbable butler. "Take round bath towels," he said; and
presently the men behind us were offering--with inflexible dignity--
"Port wine, Sir. Bath towel, Sir!" Waulsort, with streaks of
blackened water on his forehead, was suddenly reminded of a wet year
when he had followed the French army manoeuvres. An animated
dispute sprang up between him and Neal about the relative efficiency
of the new French and German field guns. Wrassleton joined in and a
little drunken shrivelled Oxford don of some sort with a black-
splashed shirt front who presently silenced them all by the
immensity and particularity of his knowledge of field artillery.
Then the talk drifted to Sedan and the effect of dead horses upon
drinking-water, which brought Wrassleton and Weston Massinghay into
a dispute of great vigour and emphasis. "The trouble in South
Africa," said Weston Massinghay, "wasn't that we didn't boil our
water. It was that we didn't boil our men. The Boers drank the
same stuff we did. THEY didn't get dysentery."

That argument went on for some time. I was attacked across the
table by a man named Burshort about my Endowment of Motherhood
schemes, but in the gaps of that debate I could still hear Weston
Massinghay at intervals repeat in a rather thickened voice: "THEY
didn't get dysentery."

I think Evesham went early. The rest of us clustered more and more
closely towards the drier end of the room, the table was pushed
along, and the area beneath the extinguished conflagration abandoned
to a tinkling, splashing company of pots and pans and bowls and
baths. Everybody was now disposed to be hilarious and noisy, to say
startling and aggressive things; we must have sounded a queer
clamour to a listener in the next room. The devil inspired them to
begin baiting me. "Ours isn't the Tory party any more," said
Burshort. "Remington has made it the Obstetric Party."

"That's good!" said Weston Massinghay, with all his teeth gleaming;
"I shall use that against you in the House!"

"I shall denounce you for abusing private confidences if you do,"
said Tarvrille.

"Remington wants us to give up launching Dreadnoughts and launch
babies instead," Burshort urged. "For the price of one Dreadnought--"

The little shrivelled don who had been omniscient about guns joined
in the baiting, and displayed himself a venomous creature.
Something in his eyes told me he knew Isabel and hated me for it.
"Love and fine thinking," he began, a little thickly, and knocking
over a wine-glass with a too easy gesture. "Love and fine thinking.
Two things don't go together. No philosophy worth a damn ever came
out of excesses of love. Salt Lake City--Piggott--Ag--Agapemone
again--no works to matter."

Everybody laughed.

"Got to rec'nise these facts," said my assailant. "Love and fine
think'n pretty phrase--attractive. Suitable for p'litical
dec'rations. Postcard, Christmas, gilt lets, in a wreath of white
flow's. Not oth'wise valu'ble."

I made some remark, I forget what, but he overbore me.

Real things we want are Hate--Hate and COARSE think'n. I b'long to
the school of Mrs. F's Aunt--"

"What?" said some one, intent.

"In 'Little Dorrit,'" explained Tarvrille; "go on!"

"Hate a fool," said my assailant.

Tarvrille glanced at me. I smiled to conceal the loss of my temper.

"Hate," said the little man, emphasising his point with a clumsy
fist. "Hate's the driving force. What's m'rality?--hate of rotten
goings on. What's patriotism?--hate of int'loping foreigners.
What's Radicalism?--hate of lords. What's Toryism?--hate of
disturbance. It's all hate--hate from top to bottom. Hate of a
mess. Remington owned it the other day, said he hated a mu'll.
There you are! If you couldn't get hate into an election, damn it
(hic) people wou'n't poll. Poll for love!--no' me!"

He paused, but before any one could speak he had resumed.

"Then this about fine thinking. Like going into a bear pit armed
with a tagle--talgent--talgent galv'nometer. Like going to fight a
mad dog with Shasepear and the Bible. Fine thinking--what we want
is the thickes' thinking we can get. Thinking that stands up alone.
Taf Reform means work for all, thassort of thing."

The gentleman from Cambridge paused. "YOU a flag!" he said. "I'd
as soon go to ba'ell und' wet tissue paper!"

My best answer on the spur of the moment was:

"The Japanese did." Which was absurd.

I went on to some other reply, I forget exactly what, and the talk
of the whole table drew round me. It was an extraordinary
revelation to me. Every one was unusually careless and outspoken,
and it was amazing how manifestly they echoed the feeling of this
old Tory spokesman. They were quite friendly to me, they regarded
me and the BLUE WEEKLY as valuable party assets for Toryism, but it
was clear they attached no more importance to what were my realities
than they did to the remarkable therapeutic claims of Mrs. Eddy.
They were flushed and amused, perhaps they went a little too far in
their resolves to draw me, but they left the impression on my mind
of men irrevocably set upon narrow and cynical views of political
life. For them the political struggle was a game, whose counters
were human hate and human credulity; their real aim was just every
one's aim, the preservation of the class and way of living to which
their lives were attuned. They did not know how tired I was, how
exhausted mentally and morally, nor how cruel their convergent
attack on me chanced to be. But my temper gave way, I became tart
and fierce, perhaps my replies were a trifle absurd, and Tarvrille,
with that quick eye and sympathy of his, came to the rescue. Then
for a time I sat silent and drank port wine while the others talked.
The disorder of the room, the still dripping ceiling, the noise, the
displaced ties and crumpled shirts of my companions, jarred on my
tormented nerves. . . .

It was long past midnight when we dispersed. I remember Tarvrille
coming with me into the hall, and then suggesting we should go
upstairs to see the damage. A manservant carried up two flickering
candles for us. One end of the room was gutted, curtains, hangings,
several chairs and tables were completely burnt, the panelling was
scorched and warped, three smashed windows made the candles flare
and gutter, and some scraps of broken china still lay on the puddled
floor.

As we surveyed this, Lady Tarvrille appeared, back from some party,
a slender, white-cloaked, satin-footed figure with amazed blue eyes
beneath her golden hair. I remember how stupidly we laughed at her
surprise.

2

I parted from Panmure at the corner of Aldington Street, and went my
way alone. But I did not go home, I turned westward and walked for
a long way, and then struck northward aimlessly. I was too
miserable to go to my house.

I wandered about that night like a man who has discovered his Gods
are dead. I can look back now detached yet sympathetic upon that
wild confusion of moods and impulses, and by it I think I can
understand, oh! half the wrongdoing and blundering in the world.

I do not feel now the logical force of the process that must have
convinced me then that I had made my sacrifice and spent my strength
in vain. At no time had I been under any illusion that the Tory
party had higher ideals than any other party, yet it came to me like
a thing newly discovered that the men I had to work with had for the
most part no such dreams, no sense of any collective purpose, no
atom of the faith I held. They were just as immediately intent upon
personal ends, just as limited by habits of thought, as the men in
any other group or party. Perhaps I had slipped unawares for a time
into the delusions of a party man--but I do not think so.

No, it was the mood of profound despondency that had followed upon
the abrupt cessation of my familiar intercourse with Isabel, that
gave this fact that had always been present in my mind its quality
of devastating revelation. It seemed as though I had never seen
before nor suspected the stupendous gap between the chaotic aims,
the routine, the conventional acquiescences, the vulgarisations of
the personal life, and that clearly conscious development and
service of a collective thought and purpose at which my efforts
aimed. I had thought them but a little way apart, and now I saw
they were separated by all the distance between earth and heaven. I
saw now in myself and every one around me, a concentration upon
interests close at hand, an inability to detach oneself from the
provocations, tendernesses, instinctive hates, dumb lusts and shy
timidities that touched one at every point; and, save for rare
exalted moments, a regardlessness of broader aims and remoter
possibilities that made the white passion of statecraft seem as
unearthly and irrelevant to human life as the story an astronomer
will tell, half proven but altogether incredible, of habitable
planets and answering intelligences, suns' distances uncounted
across the deep. It seemed to me I had aspired too high and thought
too far, had mocked my own littleness by presumption, had given the
uttermost dear reality of life for a theoriser's dream.

All through that wandering agony of mine that night a dozen threads
of thought interwove; now I was a soul speaking in protest to God
against a task too cold and high for it, and now I was an angry man,
scorned and pointed upon, who had let life cheat him of the ultimate
pride of his soul. Now I was the fool of ambition, who opened his
box of gold to find blank emptiness, and now I was a spinner of
flimsy thoughts, whose web tore to rags at a touch. I realised for
the first time how much I had come to depend upon the mind and faith
of Isabel, how she had confirmed me and sustained me, how little
strength I had to go on with our purposes now that she had vanished
from my life. She had been the incarnation of those great
abstractions, the saving reality, the voice that answered back.
There was no support that night in the things that had been. We
were alone together on the cliff for ever more!--that was very
pretty in its way, but it had no truth whatever that could help me
now, no ounce of sustaining value. I wanted Isabel that night, no
sentiment or memory of her, but Isabel alive,--to talk to me, to
touch me, to hold me together. I wanted unendurably the dusky
gentleness of her presence, the consolation of her voice.

We were alone together on the cliff! I startled a passing cabman
into interest by laughing aloud at that magnificent and
characteristic sentimentality. What a lie it was, and how
satisfying it had been! That was just where we shouldn't remain.
We of all people had no distinction from that humanity whose lot is
to forget. We should go out to other interests, new experiences,
new demands. That tall and intricate fabric of ambitious
understandings we had built up together in our intimacy would be the
first to go; and last perhaps to endure with us would be a few gross
memories of sights and sounds, and trivial incidental excitements. . . .

I had a curious feeling that night that I had lost touch with life
for a long time, and had now been reminded of its quality. That
infernal little don's parody of my ruling phrase, "Hate and coarse
thinking," stuck in my thoughts like a poisoned dart, a centre of
inflammation. Just as a man who is debilitated has no longer the
vitality to resist an infection, so my mind, slackened by the crisis
of my separation from Isabel, could find no resistance to his
emphatic suggestion. It seemed to me that what he had said was
overpoweringly true, not only of contemporary life, but of all
possible human life. Love is the rare thing, the treasured thing;
you lock it away jealously and watch, and well you may; hate and
aggression and force keep the streets and rule the world. And fine
thinking is, in the rough issues of life, weak thinking, is a
balancing indecisive process, discovers with disloyal impartiality a
justice and a defect on each disputing side. "Good honest men," as
Dayton calls them, rule the world, with a way of thinking out
decisions like shooting cartloads of bricks, and with a steadfast
pleasure in hostility. Dayton liked to call his antagonists
"blaggards and scoundrels"--it justified his opposition--the Lords
were "scoundrels," all people richer than be were "scoundrels," all
Socialists, all troublesome poor people; he liked to think of jails
and justice being done. His public spirit was saturated with the
sombre joys of conflict and the pleasant thought of condign
punishment for all recalcitrant souls. That was the way of it, I
perceived. That had survival value, as the biologists say. He was
fool enough in politics to be a consistent and happy politician. . . .

Hate and coarse thinking; how the infernal truth of the phrase beat
me down that night! I couldn't remember that I had known this all
along, and that it did not really matter in the slightest degree. I
had worked it all out long ago in other terms, when I had seen how
all parties stood for interests inevitably, and how the purpose in
life achieves itself, if it achieves itself at all, as a bye product
of the war of individuals and classes. Hadn't I always known that
science and philosophy elaborate themselves in spite of all the
passion and narrowness of men, in spite of the vanities and weakness
of their servants, in spite of all the heated disorder of
contemporary things? Wasn't it my own phrase to speak of "that
greater mind in men, in which we are but moments and transitorily
lit cells?" Hadn't I known that the spirit of man still speaks like
a thing that struggles out of mud and slime, and that the mere
effort to speak means choking and disaster? Hadn't I known that we
who think without fear and speak without discretion will not come to
our own for the next two thousand years?

It was the last was most forgotten of all that faith mislaid.
Before mankind, in my vision that night, stretched new centuries of
confusion, vast stupid wars, hastily conceived laws, foolish
temporary triumphs of order, lapses, set-backs, despairs,
catastrophes, new beginnings, a multitudinous wilderness of time, a
nigh plotless drama of wrong-headed energies. In order to assuage
my parting from Isabel we had set ourselves to imagine great rewards
for our separation, great personal rewards; we had promised
ourselves success visible and shining in our lives. To console
ourselves in our separation we had made out of the BLUE WEEKLY and
our young Tory movement preposterously enormous things-as though
those poor fertilising touches at the soil were indeed the
germinating seeds of the millennium, as though a million lives such
as ours had not to contribute before the beginning of the beginning.
That poor pretence had failed. That magnificent proposition
shrivelled to nothing in the black loneliness of that night.

I saw that there were to be no such compensations. So far as my
real services to mankind were concerned I had to live an
unrecognised and unrewarded life. If I made successes it would be
by the way. Our separation would alter nothing of that. My scandal
would cling to me now for all my life, a thing affecting
relationships, embarrassing and hampering my spirit. I should
follow the common lot of those who live by the imagination, and
follow it now in infinite loneliness of soul; the one good
comforter, the one effectual familiar, was lost to me for ever; I
should do good and evil together, no one caring to understand; I
should produce much weary work, much bad-spirited work, much
absolute evil; the good in me would be too often ill-expressed and
missed or misinterpreted. In the end I might leave one gleaming
flake or so amidst the slag heaps for a moment of postmortem
sympathy. I was afraid beyond measure of my derelict self. Because
I believed with all my soul in love and fine thinking that did not
mean that I should necessarily either love steadfastly or think
finely. I remember how I fell talking to God--I think I talked out
loud. "Why do I care for these things?" I cried, "when I can do so
little! Why am I apart from the jolly thoughtless fighting life of
men? These dreams fade to nothingness, and leave me bare!"

I scolded. "Why don't you speak to a man, show yourself? I thought
I had a gleam of you in Isabel,--and then you take her away. Do you
really think I can carry on this game alone, doing your work in
darkness and silence, living in muddled conflict, half living, half
dying?"

Grotesque analogies arose in my mind. I discovered a strange
parallelism between my now tattered phrase of "Love and fine
thinking" and the "Love and the Word" of Christian thought. Was it
possible the Christian propaganda had at the outset meant just that
system of attitudes I had been feeling my way towards from the very
beginning of my life? Had I spent a lifetime making my way back to
Christ? It mocks humanity to think how Christ has been overlaid. I
went along now, recalling long-neglected phrases and sentences; I
had a new vision of that great central figure preaching love with
hate and coarse thinking even in the disciples about Him, rising to
a tidal wave at last in that clamour for Barabbas, and the public
satisfaction in His fate. . . .

It's curious to think that hopeless love and a noisy disordered
dinner should lead a man to these speculations, but they did. "He
DID mean that!" I said, and suddenly thought of what a bludgeon
they'd made of His Christianity. Athwart that perplexing, patient
enigma sitting inaudibly among publicans and sinners, danced and
gibbered a long procession of the champions of orthodoxy. "He
wasn't human," I said, and remembered that last despairing cry, "My
God! My God! why hast Thou forsaken Me?"

"Oh, HE forsakes every one," I said, flying out as a tired mind
will, with an obvious repartee. . . .

I passed at a bound from such monstrous theology to a towering rage
against the Baileys. In an instant and with no sense of absurdity I
wanted--in the intervals of love and fine thinking--to fling about
that strenuously virtuous couple; I wanted to kick Keyhole of the
PEEPSHOW into the gutter and make a common massacre of all the
prosperous rascaldom that makes a trade and rule of virtue. I can
still feel that transition. In a moment I had reached that phase of
weakly decisive anger which is for people of my temperament the
concomitant of exhaustion.

"I will have her," I cried. "By Heaven! I WILL have her! Life
mocks me and cheats me. Nothing can be made good to me again. . . .
Why shouldn't I save what I can? I can't save myself without
her. . . ."

I remember myself--as a sort of anti-climax to that--rather
tediously asking my way home. I was somewhere in the neighbourhood
of Holland Park. . . .

It was then between one and two. I felt that I could go home now
without any risk of meeting Margaret. It had been the thought of
returning to Margaret that had sent me wandering that night. It is
one of the ugliest facts I recall about that time of crisis, the
intense aversion I felt for Margaret. No sense of her goodness, her
injury and nobility, and the enormous generosity of her forgiveness,
sufficed to mitigate that. I hope now that in this book I am able
to give something of her silvery splendour, but all through this
crisis I felt nothing of that. There was a triumphant kindliness
about her that I found intolerable. She meant to be so kind to me,
to offer unstinted consolation, to meet my needs, to supply just all
she imagined Isabel had given me.

When I left Tarvrille's, I felt I could anticipate exactly how she
would meet my homecoming. She would be perplexed by my crumpled
shirt front, on which I had spilt some drops of wine; she would
overlook that by an effort, explain it sentimentally, resolve it
should make no difference to her. She would want to know who had
been present, what we had talked about, show the alertest interest
in whatever it was--it didn't matter what. . . . No, I couldn't
face her.

So I did not reach my study until two o'clock.

There, I remember, stood the new and very beautiful old silver
candlesticks that she had set there two days since to please me--the
foolish kindliness of it! But in her search for expression,
Margaret heaped presents upon me. She had fitted these candlesticks
with electric lights, and I must, I suppose, have lit them to write
my note to Isabel. "Give me a word--the world aches without you,"
was all I scrawled, though I fully meant that she should come to me.
I knew, though I ought not to have known, that now she had left her
flat, she was with the Balfes--she was to have been married from the
Balfes--and I sent my letter there. And I went out into the silent
square and posted the note forthwith, because I knew quite clearly
that if I left it until morning I should never post it at all.

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