The New Machiavelli

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3

I had a curious revulsion of feeling that morning of our meeting.
(Of all places for such a clandestine encounter she had chosen the
bridge opposite Buckingham Palace.) Overnight I had been full of
self pity, and eager for the comfort of Isabel's presence. But the
ill-written scrawl in which she had replied had been full of the
suggestion of her own weakness and misery. And when I saw her, my
own selfish sorrows were altogether swept away by a wave of pitiful
tenderness. Something had happened to her that I did not
understand. She was manifestly ill. She came towards me wearily,
she who had always borne herself so bravely; her shoulders seemed
bent, and her eyes were tired, and her face white and drawn. All my
life has been a narrow self-centred life; no brothers, no sisters or
children or weak things had ever yet made any intimate appeal to me,
and suddenly--I verily believe for the first time in my life!--I
felt a great passion of protective ownership; I felt that here was
something that I could die to shelter, something that meant more
than joy or pride or splendid ambitions or splendid creation to me,
a new kind of hold upon me, a new power in the world. Some sealed
fountain was opened in my breast. I knew that I could love Isabel
broken, Isabel beaten, Isabel ugly and in pain, more than I could
love any sweet or delightful or glorious thing in life. I didn't
care any more for anything in the world but Isabel, and that I
should protect her. I trembled as I came near her, and could
scarcely speak to her for the emotion that filled me. . . .

"I had your letter," I said.

"I had yours."

"Where can we talk?"

I remember my lame sentences. "We'll have a boat. That's best
here."

I took her to the little boat-house, and there we hired a boat, and
I rowed in silence under the bridge and into the shade of a tree.
The square grey stone masses of the Foreign Office loomed through
the twigs, I remember, and a little space of grass separated us from
the pathway and the scrutiny of passers-by. And there we talked.

"I had to write to you," I said.

"I had to come."

"When are you to be married?"

"Thursday week."

"Well?" I said. "But--can we?"

She leant forward and scrutinised my face with eyes wide open.
"What do you mean?" she said at last in a whisper.

"Can we stand it? After all?"

I looked at her white face. "Can you?" I said.

She whispered. "Your career?"

Then suddenly her face was contorted,--she wept silently, exactly as
a child tormented beyond endurance might suddenly weep. . . .

"Oh! I don't care," I cried, "now. I don't care. Damn the whole
system of things! Damn all this patching of the irrevocable! I
want to take care of you, Isabel! and have you with me."

"I can't stand it," she blubbered.

"You needn't stand it. I thought it was best for you. . . . I
thought indeed it was best for you. I thought even you wanted it
like that."

"Couldn't I live alone--as I meant to do?"

"No," I said, "you couldn't. You're not strong enough. I've
thought of that; I've got to shelter you."

"And I want you," I went on. "I'm not strong enough--I can't stand
life without you."

She stopped weeping, she made a great effort to control herself, and
looked at me steadfastly for a moment. "I was going to kill
myself," she whispered. "I was going to kill myself quietly--
somehow. I meant to wait a bit and have an accident. I thought--
you didn't understand. You were a man, and couldn't understand. . . ."

"People can't do as we thought we could do," I said. "We've gone
too far together."

"Yes," she said, and I stared into her eyes.

"The horror of it," she whispered. "The horror of being handed
over. It's just only begun to dawn upon me, seeing him now as I do.
He tries to be kind to me. . . . I didn't know. I felt adventurous
before. . . . It makes me feel like all the women in the world who
have ever been owned and subdued. . . . It's not that he isn't the
best of men, it's because I'm a part of you. . . . I can't go
through with it. If I go through with it, I shall be left--robbed
of pride--outraged--a woman beaten. . . ."

"I know," I said, "I know."

"I want to live alone. . . . I don't care for anything now but just
escape. If you can help me. . . ."

"I must take you away. There's nothing for us but to go away
together."

"But your work," she said; "your career! Margaret! Our promises!"

"We've made a mess of things, Isabel--or things have made a mess of
us. I don't know which. Our flags are in the mud, anyhow. It's
too late to save those other things! They have to go. You can't
make terms with defeat. I thought it was Margaret needed me most.
But it's you. And I need you. I didn't think of that either. I
haven't a doubt left in the world now. We've got to leave
everything rather than leave each other. I'm sure of it. Now we
have gone so far. We've got to go right down to earth and begin
again. . . . Dear, I WANT disgrace with you. . . ."

So I whispered to her as she sat crumpled together on the faded
cushions of the boat, this white and weary young woman who had been
so valiant and careless a girl. "I don't care," I said. "I don't
care for anything, if I can save you out of the wreckage we have
made together."

4

The next day I went to the office of the BLUE WEEKLY in order to get
as much as possible of its affairs in working order before I left
London with Isabel. I just missed Shoesmith in the lower office.
Upstairs I found Britten amidst a pile of outside articles,
methodically reading the title of each and sometimes the first half-
dozen lines, and either dropping them in a growing heap on the floor
for a clerk to return, or putting them aside for consideration. I
interrupted him, squatted on the window-sill of the open window, and
sketched out my ideas for the session.

"You're far-sighted," he remarked at something of mine which reached
out ahead.

"I like to see things prepared," I answered.

"Yes," he said, and ripped open the envelope of a fresh aspirant.

I was silent while he read.

"You're going away with Isabel Rivers," he said abruptly.

"Well!" I said, amazed.

"I know," he said, and lost his breath. "Not my business. Only--"

It was queer to find Britten afraid to say a thing.

"It's not playing the game," he said.

"What do you know?"

"Everything that matters."

"Some games," I said, "are too hard to play."

There came a pause between us.

"I didn't know you were watching all this," I said.

"Yes," he answered, after a pause, "I've watched."

"Sorry--sorry you don't approve."

"It means smashing such an infernal lot of things, Remington."

I did not answer.

"You're going away then?"

"Yes."

"Soon?"

"Right away."

"There's vour wife."

"I know."

"Shoesmith--whom you're pledged to in a manner. You've just picked
him out and made him conspicuous. Every one will know. Oh! of
course--it's nothing to you. Honour--"

"I know."

"Common decency."

I nodded.

"All this movement of ours. That's what I care for most. . . .
It's come to be a big thing, Remington."

"That will go on."

"We have a use for you--no one else quite fills it. No one. . . .
I'm not sure it will go on."

"Do you think I haven't thought of all these things?"

He shrugged his shoulders, and rejected two papers unread.

"I knew," he remarked, "when you came back from America. You were
alight with it." Then he let his bitterness gleam for a moment.
"But I thought you would stick to your bargain."

"It's not so much choice as you think," I said.

"There's always a choice."

"No," I said.

He scrutinised my face.

"I can't live without her--I can't work. She's all mixed up with
this--and everything. And besides, there's things you can't
understand. There's feelings you've never felt. . . . You don't
understand how much we've been to one another."

Britten frowned and thought.

"Some things one's GOT to do," he threw out.

"Some things one can't do."

"These infernal institutions--"

"Some one must begin," I said.

He shook his head. "Not YOU," he said. "No!"

He stretched out his hands on the desk before him, and spoke again.

"Remington," he said, "I've thought of this business day and night
too. It matters to me. It matters immensely to me. In a way--it's
a thing one doesn't often say to a man--I've loved you. I'm the
sort of man who leads a narrow life. . . . But you've been
something fine and good for me, since that time, do you remember?
when we talked about Mecca together."

I nodded.

"Yes. And you'll always be something fine and good for me anyhow.
I know things about you,--qualities--no mere act can destroy them. .
. . Well, I can tell you, you're doing wrong. You're going on now
like a man who is hypnotised and can't turn round. You're piling
wrong on wrong. It was wrong for you two people ever to be lovers."

He paused.

"It gripped us hard," I said.

"Yes!--but in your position! And hers! It was vile!"

"You've not been tempted."

"How do you know? Anyhow--having done that, you ought to have stood
the consequences and thought of other people. You could have ended
it at the first pause for reflection. You didn't. You blundered
again. You kept on. You owed a certain secrecy to all of us! You
didn't keep it. You were careless. You made things worse. This
engagement and this publicity!--Damn it, Remington!"

"I know," I said, with smarting eyes. "Damn it ! with all my heart!
It came of trying to patch. . . . You CAN'T patch."

"And now, as I care for anything under heaven, Remington, you two
ought to stand these last consequences--and part. You ought to
part. Other people have to stand things! Other people have to
part. You ought to. You say--what do you say? It's loss of so
much life to lose each other. So is losing a hand or a leg. But
it's what you've incurred. Amputate. Take your punishment--After
all, you chose it."

"Oh, damn!" I said, standing up and going to the window.

"Damn by all means. I never knew a topic so full of justifiable
damns. But you two did choose it. You ought to stick to your
undertaking."

I turned upon him with a snarl in my voice. "My dear Britten!" I
cried. "Don't I KNOW I'm doing wrong? Aren't I in a net? Suppose
I don't go! Is there any right in that? Do you think we're going
to be much to ourselves or any one after this parting? I've been
thinking all last night of this business, trying it over and over
again from the beginning. How was it we went wrong? Since I came
back from America--I grant you THAT--but SINCE, there's never been a
step that wasn't forced, that hadn't as much right in it or more, as
wrong. You talk as though I was a thing of steel that could bend
this way or that and never change. You talk as though Isabel was a
cat one could give to any kind of owner. . . . We two are things
that change and grow and alter all the time. We're--so interwoven
that being parted now will leave us just misshapen cripples. . . .
You don't know the motives, you don't know the rush and feel of
things, you don't know how it was with us, and how it is with us.
You don't know the hunger for the mere sight of one another; you
don't know anything."

Britten looked at his finger-nails closely. His red face puckered
to a wry frown. "Haven't we all at times wanted the world put
back?" he grunted, and looked hard and close at one particular nail.

There was a long pause.

"I want her," I said, "and I'm going to have her. I'm too tired for
balancing the right or wrong of it any more. You can't separate
them. I saw her yesterday. . . . She's--ill. . . . I'd take her
now, if death were just outside the door waiting for us."

"Torture?"

I thought. "Yes."

"For her?"

"There isn't," I said.

"If there was?"

I made no answer.

"It's blind Want. And there's nothing ever been put into you to
stand against it. What are you going to do with the rest of your
lives?"

"No end of things."

"Nothing."

"I don't believe you are right," I said. "I believe we can save
something--"

Britten shook his head. "Some scraps of salvage won't excuse you,"
he said.

His indignation rose. "In the middle of life!" he said. "No man
has a right to take his hand from the plough!"

He leant forward on his desk and opened an argumentative palm. "You
know, Remington," he said, "and I know, that if this could be fended
off for six months--if you could be clapped in prison, or got out of
the way somehow,--until this marriage was all over and settled down
for a year, say--you know then you two could meet, curious, happy,
as friends. Saved! You KNOW it."

I turned and stared at him. "You're wrong, Britten," I said. "And
does it matter if we could?"

I found that in talking to him I could frame the apologetics I had
not been able to find for myself alone.

"I am certain of one thing, Britten. It is our duty not to hush up
this scandal."

He raised his eyebrows. I perceived now the element of absurdity in
me, but at the time I was as serious as a man who is burning.

"It's our duty," I went on, "to smash now openly in the sight of
every one. Yes! I've got that as clean and plain--as prison
whitewash. I am convinced that we have got to be public to the
uttermost now--I mean it--until every corner of our world knows this
story, knows it fully, adds it to the Parnell story and the Ashton
Dean story and the Carmel story and the Witterslea story, and all
the other stories that have picked man after man out of English
public life, the men with active imaginations, the men of strong
initiative. To think this tottering old-woman ridden Empire should
dare to waste a man on such a score! You say I ought to be
penitent--"

Britten shook his head and smiled very faintly.

"I'm boiling with indignation," I said. " I lay in bed last night
and went through it all. What in God's name was to be expected of
us but what has happened? I went through my life bit by bit last
night, I recalled all I've had to do with virtue and women, and all
I was told and how I was prepared. I was born into cowardice and
debasement. We all are. Our generation's grimy with hypocrisy. I
came to the most beautiful things in life--like peeping Tom of
Coventry. I was never given a light, never given a touch of natural
manhood by all this dingy, furtive, canting, humbugging English
world. Thank God! I'll soon be out of it! The shame of it! The
very savages in Australia initiate their children better than the
English do to-day. Neither of us was ever given a view of what they
call morality that didn't make it show as shabby subservience, as
the meanest discretion, an abject submission to unreasonable
prohibitions! meek surrender of mind and body to the dictation of
pedants and old women and fools. We weren't taught--we were mumbled
at! And when we found that the thing they called unclean, unclean,
was Pagan beauty--God! it was a glory to sin, Britten, it was a
pride and splendour like bathing in the sunlight after dust and
grime!"

"Yes," said Britten. "That's all very well--"

I interrupted him. "I know there's a case--I'm beginning to think
it a valid case against us; but we never met it! There's a steely
pride in self restraint, a nobility of chastity, but only for those
who see and think and act--untrammeled and unafraid. The other
thing, the current thing, why! it's worth as much as the chastity of
a monkey kept in a cage by itself!" I put my foot in a chair, and
urged my case upon him. "This is a dirty world, Britten, simply
because it is a muddled world, and the thing you call morality is
dirtier now than the thing you call immorality. Why don't the
moralists pick their stuff out of the slime if they care for it, and
wipe it?--damn them! I am burning now to say: 'Yes, we did this and
this,' to all the world. All the world! . . . I will!"

Britten rubbed the palm of his hand on the corner of his desk.
"That's all very well, Remington," he said. "You mean to go."

He stopped and began again. "If you didn't know you were in the
wrong you wouldn't be so damned rhetorical. You're in the wrong.
It's as plain to you as it is to me. You're leaving a big work,
you're leaving a wife who trusted you, to go and live with your
jolly mistress. . . . You won't see you're a statesman that
matters, that no single man, maybe, might come to such influence as
you in the next ten years. You're throwing yourself away and
accusing your country of rejecting you."

He swung round upon his swivel at me. "Remington," he said, "have
you forgotten the immense things our movement means?"

I thought. "Perhaps I am rhetorical," I said.

"But the things we might achieve! If you'd only stay now--even now!
Oh! you'd suffer a little socially, but what of that? You'd be able
to go on--perhaps all the better for hostility of the kind you'd
get. You know, Remington--you KNOW."

I thought and went back to his earlier point. "If I am rhetorical,
at any rate it's a living feeling behind it. Yes, I remember all
the implications of our aims--very splendid, very remote. But just
now it's rather like offering to give a freezing man the sunlit
Himalayas from end to end in return for his camp-fire. When you
talk of me and my jolly mistress, it isn't fair. That misrepresents
everything. I'm not going out of this--for delights. That's the
sort of thing men like Snuffles and Keyhole imagine--that excites
them! When I think of the things these creatures think! Ugh! But
YOU know better? You know that physical passion that burns like a
fire--ends clean. I'm going for love, Britten--if I sinned for
passion. I'm going, Britten, because when I saw her the other day
she HURT me. She hurt me damnably, Britten. . . . I've been a cold
man--I've led a rhetorical life--you hit me with that word!--I put
things in a windy way, I know, but what has got hold of me at last
is her pain. She's ill. Don't you understand? She's a sick thing--
a weak thing. She's no more a goddess than I'm a god. . . . I'm
not in love with her now; I'm RAW with love for her. I feel like a
man that's been flayed. I have been flayed. . . . You don't begin
to imagine the sort of helpless solicitude. . . . She's not going
to do things easily; she's ill. Her courage fails. . . . It's hard
to put things when one isn't rhetorical, but it's this, Britten--
there are distresses that matter more than all the delights or
achievements in the world. . . . I made her what she is--as I never
made Margaret. I've made her--I've broken her. . . . I'm going
with my own woman. The rest of my life and England, and so forth,
must square itself to that. . . ."

For a long time, as it seemed, we remained silent and motionless.
We'd said all we had to say. My eyes caught a printed slip upon the
desk before him, and I came back abruptly to the paper.

I picked up this galley proof. It was one of Winter's essays.
"This man goes on doing first-rate stuff," I said. "I hope you will
keep him going."

He did not answer for a moment or so. "I'll keep him going," he
said at last with a sigh.

5

I have a letter Margaret wrote me within a week of our flight. I
cannot resist transcribing some of it here, because it lights things
as no word of mine can do. It is a string of nearly inconsecutive
thoughts written in pencil in a fine, tall, sprawling hand. Its
very inconsecutiveness is essential. Many words are underlined. It
was in answer to one from me; but what I wrote has passed utterly
from my mind. . . .

"Certainly," she says, "I want to hear from you, but I do not want
to see you. There's a sort of abstract YOU that I want to go on
with. Something I've made out of you. . . . I want to know things
about you--but I don't want to see or feel or imagine. When some
day I have got rid of my intolerable sense of proprietorship, it may
be different. Then perhaps we may meet again. I think it is even
more the loss of our political work and dreams that I am feeling
than the loss of your presence. Aching loss. I thought so much of
the things we were DOING for the world--had given myself so
unreservedly. You've left me with nothing to DO. I am suddenly at
loose ends. . . .

"We women are trained to be so dependent on a man. I've got no life
of my own at all. It seems now to me that I wore my clothes even
for you and your schemes. . . .

"After I have told myself a hundred times why this has happened, I
ask again, 'Why did he give things up? Why did he give things
up?' . . .

"It is just as though you were wilfully dead. . . .

"Then I ask again and again whether this thing need have happened at
all, whether if I had had a warning, if I had understood better, I
might not have adapted myself to your restless mind and made this
catastrophe impossible. . . .

"Oh, my dear! why hadn't you the pluck to hurt me at the beginning,
and tell me what you thought of me and life? You didn't give me a
chance; not a chance. I suppose you couldn't. All these things you
and I stood away from. You let my first repugnances repel you. . . .

"It is strange to think after all these years that I should be
asking myself, do I love you? have I loved you? In a sense I think
I HATE you. I feel you have taken my life, dragged it in your wake
for a time, thrown it aside. I am resentful. Unfairly resentful,
for why should I exact that you should watch and understand my life,
when clearly I have understood so little of yours. But I am savage--
savage at the wrecking of all you were to do.

"Oh, why--why did you give things up?

"No human being is his own to do what he likes with. You were not
only pledged to my tiresome, ineffectual companionship, but to great
purposes. They ARE great purposes. . . .

"If only I could take up your work as you leave it, with the
strength you had--then indeed I feel I could let you go--you and
your young mistress. . . . All that matters so little to me. . . .

"Yet I think I must indeed love you yourself in my slower way. At
times I am mad with jealousy at the thought of all I hadn't the wit
to give you. . . . I've always hidden my tears from you--and what
was in my heart. It's my nature to hide--and you, you want things
brought to you to see. You are so curious as to be almost cruel.
You don't understand reserves. You have no mercy with restraints
and reservations. You arc not really a CIVILISED man at all. You
hate pretences--and not only pretences but decent coverings. . . .

"It's only after one has lost love and the chance of loving that
slow people like myself find what they might have done. Why wasn't
I bold and reckless and abandoned? It's as reasonable to ask that,
I suppose, as to ask why my hair is fair. . . .

"I go on with these perhapses over and over again here when I find
myself alone. . . .

"My dear, my dear, you can't think of the desolation of things--I
shall never go back to that house we furnished together, that was to
have been the laboratory (do you remember calling it a laboratory?)
in which you were to forge so much of the new order. . . .

"But, dear, if I can help you--even now--in any way--help both of
you, I mean. . . . It tears me when I think of you poor and
discredited. You will let me help you if I can--it will be the last
wrong not to let me do that. . . .

"You had better not get ill. If you do, and I hear of it--I shall
come after you with a troupe of doctor's and nurses. If I am a
failure as a wife, no one has ever said I was anything but a success
as a district visitor. . . ."

There are other sheets, but I cannot tell whether they were written
before or after the ones from which I have quoted. And most of them
have little things too intimate to set down. But this oddly
penetrating analysis of our differences must, I think, be given.

"There are all sorts of things I can't express about this and want
to. There's this difference that has always been between us, that
you like nakedness and wildness, and I, clothing and restraint. It
goes through everything. You are always TALKING of order and
system, and the splendid dream of the order that might replace the
muddled system you hate, but by a sort of instinct you seem to want
to break the law. I've watched you so closely. Now I want to obey
laws, to make sacrifices, to follow rules. I don't want to make,
but I do want to keep. You are at once makers and rebels, you and
Isabel too. You're bad people--criminal people, I feel, and yet
full of something the world must have. You're so much better than
me, and so much viler. It may be there is no making without
destruction, but it seems to me sometimes that it is nothing but an
instinct for lawlessness that drives you. You remind me--do you
remember?--of that time we went from Naples to Vesuvius, and walked
over the hot new lava there. Do you remember how tired I was? I
know it disappointed you that I was tired. One walked there in
spite of the heat because there was a crust; like custom, like law.
But directly a crust forms on things, you are restless to break down
to the fire again. You talk of beauty, both of you, as something
terrible, mysterious, imperative. YOUR beauty is something
altogether different from anything I know or feel. It has pain in
it. Yet you always speak as though it was something I ought to feel
and am dishonest not to feel. MY beauty is a quiet thing. You have
always laughed at my feeling for old-fashioned chintz and blue china
and Sheraton. But I like all these familiar USED things. My beauty
is STILL beauty, and yours, is excitement. I know nothing of the
fascination of the fire, or why one should go deliberately out of
all the decent fine things of life to run dangers and be singed and
tormented and destroyed. I don't understand. . . ."

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