The complete works, p.304
The Complete Works, page 304
The desert of misunderstanding widened. I was forced back upon myself and my own secret councils. For a time I went my way alone; an unmixed evil for both of us. Except for that Pentagram evening, a series of talks with Isabel Rivers, who was now becoming more and more important in my intellectual life, and the arguments I maintained with Crupp, I never really opened my mind at all during that period of indecisions, slow abandonments, and slow acquisitions.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
SECESSION
1
At last, out of a vast accumulation of impressions, decision distilled quite suddenly. I succumbed to Evesham and that dream of the right thing triumphant through expression. I determined I would go over to the Conservatives, and use my every gift and power on the side of such forces on that side as made for educational reorganisation, scientific research, literature, criticism, and intellectual development. That was in 1909. I judged the Tories were driving straight at a conflict with the country, and I thought them bound to incur an electoral defeat. I under-estimated their strength in the counties. There would follow, I calculated, a period of profound reconstruction in method and policy alike. I was entirely at one with Crupp in perceiving in this an immense opportunity for the things we desired. An aristocracy quickened by conflict and on the defensive, and full of the idea of justification by reconstruction, might prove altogether more apt for thought and high professions than Mrs. Redmondson's spoilt children. Behind the now inevitable struggle for a reform of the House of Lords, there would be great heart searchings and educational endeavour. On that we reckoned. . . .
At last we talked it out to the practical pitch, and Crupp and Shoesmith, and I and Gane, made our definite agreement together. . . .
I emerged from enormous silences upon Margaret one evening.
She was just back from the display of some new musicians at the Hartsteins. I remember she wore a dress of golden satin, very rich-looking and splendid. About her slender neck there was a rope of gold-set amber beads. Her hair caught up and echoed and returned these golden notes. I, too, was in evening dress, but where I had been escapes me,--some forgotten dinner, I suppose. I went into her room. I remember I didn't speak for some moments. I went across to the window and pulled the blind aside, and looked out upon the railed garden of the square, with its shrubs and shadowed turf gleaming pallidly and irregularly in the light of the big electric standard in the corner.
"Margaret," I said, "I think I shall break with the party."
She made no answer. I turned presently, a movement of enquiry.
"I was afraid you meant to do that," she said.
"I'm out of touch," I explained. "Altogether."
"Oh! I know."
"It places me in a difficult position," I said.
Margaret stood at her dressing-table, looking steadfastly at herself in the glass, and with her fingers playing with a litter of stoppered bottles of tinted glass. "I was afraid it was coming to this," she said.
"In a way," I said, "we've been allies. I owe my seat to you. I couldn't have gone into Parliament. . . ."
"I don't want considerations like that to affect us," she interrupted.
There was a pause. She sat down in a chair by her dressing-table, lifted an ivory hand-glass, and put it down again.
"I wish," she said, with something like a sob in her voice, "it were possible that you shouldn't do this." She stopped abruptly, and I did not look at her, because I could feel the effort she was making to control herself.
"I thought," she began again, "when you came into Parliament--"
There came another silence. "It's all gone so differently," she said. "Everything has gone so differently."
I had a sudden memory of her, shining triumphant after the Kinghampstead election, and for the first time I realised just how perplexing and disappointing my subsequent career must have been to her.
"I'm not doing this without consideration," I said.
"I know," she said, in a voice of despair, "I've seen it coming.
But--I still don't understand it. I don't understand how you can go over."
"My ideas have changed and developed," I said.
I walked across to her bearskin hearthrug, and stood by the mantel.
"To think that you," she said; "you who might have been leader--"
She could not finish it. "All the forces of reaction," she threw out.
"I don't think they are the forces of reaction," I said. "I think I can find work to do--better work on that side."
"Against us!" she said. "As if progress wasn't hard enough! As if it didn't call upon every able man!"
"I don't think Liberalism has a monopoly of progress."
She did not answer that. She sat quite still looking in front of her. "WHY have you gone over?" she asked abruptly as though I had said nothing.
There came a silence that I was impelled to end. I began a stiff dissertation from the hearthrug. "I am going over, because I think I may join in an intellectual renascence on the Conservative side.
I think that in the coming struggle there will be a partial and altogether confused and demoralising victory for democracy, that will stir the classes which now dominate the Conservative party into an energetic revival. They will set out to win back, and win back.
Even if my estimate of con-temporary forces is wrong and they win, they will still be forced to reconstruct their outlook. A war abroad will supply the chastening if home politics fail. The effort at renascence is bound to come by either alternative. I believe I can do more in relation to that effort than in any other connexion in the world of politics at the present time. That's my case, Margaret."
She certainly did not grasp what I said. "And so you will throw aside all the beginnings, all the beliefs and pledges--" Again her sentence remained incomplete. "I doubt if even, once you have gone over, they will welcome you."
"That hardly matters."
I made an effort to resume my speech.
"I came into Parliament, Margaret," I said, "a little prematurely.
Still--I suppose it was only by coming into Parliament that I could see things as I do now in terms of personality and imaginative range. . . ." I stopped. Her stiff, unhappy, unlistening silence broke up my disquisition.
"After all," I remarked, "most of this has been implicit in my writings."
She made no sign of admission.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"Keep my seat for a time and make the reasons of my breach clear.
Then either I must resign or--probably this new Budget will lead to a General Election. It's evidently meant to strain the Lords and provoke a quarrel."
"You might, I think, have stayed to fight for the Budget."
"I'm not," I said, "so keen against the Lords."
On that we halted.
"But what are you going to do?" she asked.
"I shall make my quarrel over some points in the Budget. I can't quite tell you yet where my chance will come. Then I shall either resign my seat--or if things drift to dissolution I shall stand again."
"It's political suicide."
"Not altogether."
"I can't imagine you out of Parliament again. It's just like--like undoing all we have done. What will you do?"
"Write. Make a new, more definite place for myself. You know, of course, there's already a sort of group about Crupp and Gane."
Margaret seemed lost for a time in painful thought.
"For me," she said at last, "our political work has been a religion--it has been more than a religion."
I heard in silence. I had no form of protest available against the implications of that.
"And then I find you turning against all we aimed to do--talking of going over, almost lightly--to those others." . . .
She was white-lipped as she spoke. In the most curious way she had captured the moral values of the situation. I found myself protesting ineffectually against her fixed conviction. "It's because I think my duty lies in this change that I make it," I said.
"I don't see how you can say that," she replied quietly.
There was another pause between us.
"Oh!" she said and clenched her hand upon the table. "That it should have come to this!"
She was extraordinarily dignified and extraordinarily absurd. She was hurt and thwarted beyond measure. She had no place in her ideas, I thought, for me. I could see how it appeared to her, but I could not make her see anything of the intricate process that had brought me to this divergence. The opposition of our intellectual temperaments was like a gag in my mouth. What was there for me to say? A flash of intuition told me that behind her white dignity was a passionate disappointment, a shattering of dreams that needed before everything else the relief of weeping.
"I've told you," I said awkwardly, "as soon as I could."
There was another long silence. "So that is how we stand," I said with an air of having things defined. I walked slowly to the door.
She had risen and stood now staring in front of her.
"Good-night," I said, making no movement towards our habitual kiss.
"Good-night," she answered in a tragic note. . . .
I closed the door softly. I remained for a moment or so on the big landing, hesitating between my bedroom and my study. As I did so I heard the soft rustle of her movement and the click of the key in her bedroom door. Then everything was still. . . .
She hid her tears from me. Something gripped my heart at the thought.
"Damnation!" I said wincing. "Why the devil can't people at least THINK in the same manner?"
2
And that insufficient colloquy was the beginning of a prolonged estrangement between us. It was characteristic of our relations that we never reopened the discussion. The thing had been in the air for some time; we had recognised it now; the widening breach between us was confessed. My own feelings were curiously divided.
It is remarkable that my very real affection for Margaret only became evident to me with this quarrel. The changes of the heart are very subtle changes. I am quite unaware how or when my early romantic love for her purity and beauty and high-principled devotion evaporated from my life; but I do know that quite early in my parliamentary days there had come a vague, unconfessed resentment at the tie that seemed to hold me in servitude to her standards of private living and public act. I felt I was caught, and none the less so because it had been my own act to rivet on my shackles. So long as I still held myself bound to her that resentment grew. Now, since I had broken my bonds and taken my line it withered again, and I could think of Margaret with a returning kindliness.
But I still felt embarrassment with her. I felt myself dependent upon her for house room and food and social support, as it were under false pretences. I would have liked to have separated our financial affairs altogether. But I knew that to raise the issue would have seemed a last brutal indelicacy. So I tried almost furtively to keep my personal expenditure within the scope of the private income I made by writing, and we went out together in her motor brougham, dined and made appearances, met politely at breakfast--parted at night with a kiss upon her cheek. The locking of her door upon me, which at that time I quite understood, which I understand now, became for a time in my mind, through some obscure process of the soul, an offence. I never crossed the landing to her room again.
In all this matter, and, indeed, in all my relations with Margaret, I perceive now I behaved badly and foolishly. My manifest blunder is that I, who was several years older than she, much subtler and in many ways wiser, never in any measure sought to guide and control her. After our marriage I treated her always as an equal, and let her go her way; held her responsible for all the weak and ineffective and unfortunate things she said and did to me. She wasn't clever enough to justify that. It wasn't fair to expect her to sympathise, anticipate, and understand. I ought to have taken care of her, roped her to me when it came to crossing the difficult places. If I had loved her more, and wiselier and more tenderly, if there had not been the consciousness of my financial dependence on her always stiffening my pride, I think she would have moved with me from the outset, and left the Liberals with me. But she did not get any inkling of the ends I sought in my change of sides. It must have seemed to her inexplicable perversity. She had, I knew--for surely I knew it then--an immense capacity for loyalty and devotion.
There she was with these treasures untouched, neglected and perplexed. A woman who loves wants to give. It is the duty and business of the man she has married for love to help her to help and give. But I was stupid. My eyes had never been opened. I was stiff with her and difficult to her, because even on my wedding morning there had been, deep down in my soul, voiceless though present, something weakly protesting, a faint perception of wrongdoing, the infinitesimally small, slow-multiplying germs of shame.
3
I made my breach with the party on the Budget.
In many ways I was disposed to regard the 1909 Budget as a fine piece of statecraft. Its production was certainly a very unexpected display of vigour on the Liberal side. But, on the whole, this movement towards collectivist organisation on the part of the Liberals rather strengthened than weakened my resolve to cross the floor of the house. It made it more necessary, I thought, to leaven the purely obstructive and reactionary elements that were at once manifest in the opposition. I assailed the land taxation proposals in one main speech, and a series of minor speeches in committee.
The line of attack I chose was that the land was a great public service that needed to be controlled on broad and far-sighted lines.
I had no objection to its nationalisation, but I did object most strenuously to the idea of leaving it in private hands, and attempting to produce beneficial social results through the pressure of taxation upon the land-owning class. That might break it up in an utterly disastrous way. The drift of the government proposals was all in the direction of sweating the landowner to get immediate values from his property, and such a course of action was bound to give us an irritated and vindictive land-owning class, the class upon which we had hitherto relied--not unjustifiably--for certain broad, patriotic services and an influence upon our collective judgments that no other class seemed prepared to exercise. Abolish landlordism if you will, I said, buy it out, but do not drive it to a defensive fight, and leave it still sufficiently strong and wealthy to become a malcontent element in your state. You have taxed and controlled the brewer and the publican until the outraged Liquor Interest has become a national danger. You now propose to do the same thing on a larger scale. You turn a class which has many fine and truly aristocratic traditions towards revolt, and there is nothing in these or any other of your proposals that shows any sense of the need for leadership to replace these traditional leaders you are ousting. This was the substance of my case, and I hammered at it not only in the House, but in the press. . . .
The Kinghampstead division remained for some time insensitive to my defection.
Then it woke up suddenly, and began, in the columns of the KINGSHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN, an indignant, confused outcry. I was
treated to an open letter, signed Junius Secundus," and I replied in provocative terms. There were two thinly attended public meetings at different ends of the constituency, and then I had a correspondence with my old friend Parvill, the photographer, which ended in my seeing a deputation.
My impression is that it consisted of about eighteen or twenty people. They had had to come upstairs to me and they were manifestly full of indignation and a little short of breath. There was Parvill himself, J.P., dressed wholly in black--I think to mark his sense of the occasion--and curiously suggestive in his respect for my character and his concern for the honourableness of the KINGHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN editor, of Mark Antony at the funeral of
Cesar. There was Mrs. Bulger, also in mourning; she had never abandoned the widow's streamers since the death of her husband ten years ago, and her loyalty to Liberalism of the severest type was part as it were of her weeds. There was a nephew of Sir Roderick Newton, a bright young Hebrew of the graver type, and a couple of dissenting ministers in high collars and hats that stopped halfway between the bowler of this world and the shovel-hat of heaven.
There was also a young solicitor from Lurky done in the horsey style, and there was a very little nervous man with a high brow and a face contracting below as though the jawbones and teeth had been taken out and the features compressed. The rest of the deputation, which included two other public-spirited ladies and several ministers of religion, might have been raked out of any omnibus going Strandward during the May meetings. They thrust Parvill forward as spokesman, and manifested a strong disposition to say
