Герберт Джордж Уэллс
The New Machiavelli
“Isn’t she up in the women’s gallery to hear him?”
“No. Unless it’s by accident.”
“She’s there,” she said.
“Well, by accident it happens. Not too many accidents, Isabel. Never any more adventures for us, dear, now. No!.. They play the game, you know. They’ve begun late, but now they’ve got to. You see it’s not so very hard for them since you and I, my dear, are here always, always faithfully here on this warm cliff of love accomplished, watching and helping them under high heaven. It isn’t so VERY hard. Rather good in some ways. Some people HAVE to be broken a little. Can you see Altiora down there, by any chance?”
“She’s too little to be seen,” she said.
“Can you see the sins they once committed?”
“I can only see you here beside me, dear – for ever. For all my life, dear, till I die. Was that – the sin?”…
I took her to the station, and after she had gone I was to drive to Dover, and cross to Calais by the night boat. I couldn’t, I felt, return to London. We walked over the crest and down to the little station of Martin Mill side by side, talking at first in broken fragments, for the most part of unimportant things.
“None of this,” she said abruptly, “seems in the slightest degree real to me. I’ve got no sense of things ending.”
“We’re parting,” I said.
“We’re parting – as people part in a play. It’s distressing. But I don’t feel as though you and I were really never to see each other again for years. Do you?”
I thought. “No,” I said.
“After we’ve parted I shall look to talk it over with you.”
“So shall I.”
“That’s absurd.”
“Absurd.”
“I feel as if you’d always be there, just about where you are now. Invisible perhaps, but there. We’ve spent so much of our lives joggling elbows.”…
“Yes. Yes. I don’t in the least realise it. I suppose I shall begin to when the train goes out of the station. Are we wanting in imagination, Isabel?”
“I don’t know. We’ve always assumed it was the other way about.”
“Even when the train goes out of the station – ! I’ve seen you into so many trains.”
“I shall go on thinking of things to say to you – things to put in your letters. For years to come. How can I ever stop thinking in that way now? We’ve got into each other’s brains.”
“It isn’t real,” I said; “nothing is real. The world’s no more than a fantastic dream. Why are we parting, Isabel?”
“I don’t know. It seems now supremely silly. I suppose we have to. Can’t we meet? – don’t you think we shall meet even in dreams?”
“We’ll meet a thousand times in dreams,” I said.
“I wish we could dream at the same time,” said Isabel… “Dream walks. I can’t believe, dear, I shall never have a walk with you again.”
“If I’d stayed six months in America,” I said, “we might have walked long walks and talked long talks for all our lives.”
“Not in a world of Baileys,” said Isabel. “And anyhow – ”
She stopped short. I looked interrogation.
“We’ve loved,” she said.
I took her ticket, saw to her luggage, and stood by the door of the compartment. “Good-bye,” I said a little stiffly, conscious of the people upon the platform. She bent above me, white and dusky, looking at me very steadfastly.
“Come here,” she whispered. “Never mind the porters. What can they know? Just one time more – I must.”
She rested her hand against the door of the carriage and bent down upon me, and put her cold, moist lips to mine.
CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ THE BREAKING POINT
1
And then we broke down. We broke our faith with both Margaret and Shoesmith, flung career and duty out of our lives, and went away together.
It is only now, almost a year after these events, that I can begin to see what happened to me. At the time it seemed to me I was a rational, responsible creature, but indeed I had not parted from her two days before I became a monomaniac to whom nothing could matter but Isabel. Every truth had to be squared to that obsession, every duty. It astounds me to think how I forgot Margaret, forgot my work, forgot everything but that we two were parted. I still believe that with better chances we might have escaped the consequences of the emotional storm that presently seized us both. But we had no foresight of that, and no preparation for it, and our circumstances betrayed us. It was partly Shoesmith’s unwisdom in delaying his marriage until after the end of the session – partly my own amazing folly in returning within four days to Westminster. But we were all of us intent upon the defeat of scandal and the complete restoration of appearances. It seemed necessary that Shoesmith’s marriage should not seem to be hurried, still more necessary that I should not vanish inexplicably. I had to be visible with Margaret in London just as much as possible; we went to restaurants, we visited the theatre; we could even contemplate the possibility of my presence at the wedding. For that, however, we had schemed a weekend visit to Wales, and a fictitious sprained ankle at the last moment which would justify my absence…
I cannot convey to you the intolerable wretchedness and rebellion of my separation from Isabel. It seemed that in the past two years all my thoughts had spun commisures to Isabel’s brain and I could think of nothing that did not lead me surely to the need of the one intimate I had found in the world. I came back to the House and the office and my home, I filled all my days with appointments and duty, and it did not save me in the least from a lonely emptiness such as I had never felt before in all my life. I had little sleep. In the daytime I did a hundred things, I even spoke in the House on two occasions, and by my own low standards spoke well, and it seemed to me that I was going about in my own brain like a hushed survivor in a house whose owner lies dead upstairs.
I came to a crisis after that wild dinner of Tarvrille’s. Something in that stripped my soul bare.
It was an occasion made absurd and strange by the odd accident that the house caught fire upstairs while we were dining below. It was a men’s dinner – “A dinner of all sorts,” said Tarvrille, when he invited me; “everything from Evesham and Gane to Wilkins the author, and Heaven knows what will happen!” I remember that afterwards Tarvrille was accused of having planned the fire to make his dinner a marvel and a memory. It was indeed a wonderful occasion, and I suppose if I had not been altogether drenched in misery, I should have found the same wild amusement in it that glowed in all the others. There were one or two university dons, Lord George Fester, the racing man, Panmure, the artist, two or three big City men, Weston Massinghay and another prominent Liberal whose name I can’t remember, the three men Tarvrille had promised and Esmeer, Lord Wrassleton, Waulsort, the member for Monckton, Neal and several others. We began a little coldly, with duologues, but the conversation was already becoming general – so far as such a long table permitted – when the fire asserted itself.
It asserted itself first as a penetrating and emphatic smell of burning rubber, – it was caused by the fusing of an electric wire. The reek forced its way into the discussion of the Pekin massacres that had sprung up between Evesham, Waulsort, and the others at the end of the table. “Something burning,” said the man next to me.
“Something must be burning,” said Panmure.
Tarvrille hated undignified interruptions. He had a particularly imperturbable butler with a cadaverous sad face and an eye of rigid disapproval. He spoke to this individual over his shoulder. “Just see, will you,” he said, and caught up the pause in the talk to his left.
Wilkins was asking questions, and I, too, was curious. The story of the siege of the Legations in China in the year 1900 and all that followed upon that, is just one of those disturbing interludes in history that refuse to join on to that general scheme of protestation by which civilisation is maintained. It is a break in the general flow of experience as disconcerting to statecraft as the robbery of my knife and the scuffle that followed it had been to me when I was a boy at Penge. It is like a tear in a curtain revealing quite unexpected backgrounds. I had never given the business a thought for years; now this talk brought back a string of pictures to my mind; how the reliefs arrived and the plundering began, how section after section of the International Army was drawn into murder and pillage, how the infection spread upward until the wives of Ministers were busy looting, and the very sentinels stripped and crawled like snakes into the Palace they were set to guard. It did not stop at robbery, men were murdered, women, being plundered, were outraged, children were butchered, strong men had found themselves with arms in a lawless, defenceless city, and this had followed. Now it was all recalled.
“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 he 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…
