THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

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 myselfalone.

"Iam 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. Iam 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! Iam 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 Iam 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 Iam 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.