THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

6

It was against this harsh and crude Staffordshire background that I

think I must have seen Margaret for the first time. I say I think

because it is quite possible that we had passed each other in the

streets of Cambridge, no doubt with that affectation of mutual

disregard which was once customary between undergraduates and

Newnham girls. But if that was so I had noted nothing of the

slender graciousness that shone out so pleasingly against the

bleaker midland surroundings.

She was a younger schoolfellow of my cousins', and the step-daughter

of Seddon, a prominent solicitor of Burslem. She was not only not

in my cousins' generation but not in their set, she was one of a

small hardworking group who kept immaculate note-books, and did as

much as is humanly possible of that insensate pile of written work

that the Girls' Public School movement has inflicted upon school-

girls. She really learnt French and German admirably and

thoroughly, she got as far in mathematics as an unflinching industry

can carry any one with no great natural aptitude, and she went up to

Bennett Hall, Newnham, after the usual conflict with her family, to

work for the History Tripos.

There in her third year she made herself thoroughly ill through

overwork, so ill that she had to give up Newnham altogether and go

abroad with her stepmother. She made herself ill, as so many girls

do in those university colleges, through the badness of her home and

school training. She thought study must needs be a hard straining

of the mind. She worried her work, she gave herself no leisure to

see it as a whole, she feltherself not making headway and she cut

her games and exercise in order to increase her hours of toil, and

worked into the night. She carried a knack of laborious

thoroughness into the blind alleys and inessentials of her subject.

It didn't need the badness of the food for which Bennett Hall is

celebrated and the remarkable dietary of nocturnal cocoa, cakes and

soft biscuits with which the girls have supplemented it, to ensure

her collapse. Her mother brought her home, fretting and distressed,

and then finding her hopelessly unhappy at home, took her and her

half-brother, a rather ailing youngster of ten who died three years

later, for a journey to Italy.

Italy did much to assuage Margaret's chagrin. I think all three of

them had a very good time there. At home Mr. Seddon, her step-

father, played the part of a well-meaning blight by reason of the

moods that arose from nervous dyspepsia. They went to Florence,

equipped with various introductions and much sound advice from

sympathetic Cambridge friends, and having acquired an ease in Italy

there, went on to Siena, Orvieto, and at last Rome. They returned,

if I remember rightly, by Pisa, Genoa, Milan and Paris. Six months

or more they had had abroad, and now Margaret was back in Burslem,

in health again and consciously a very civilised person.

New ideas were abroad, it was Maytime and a spring of abundant

flowers-daffodils were particularly good that year-and Mrs. Seddon

celebrated her return by giving an afternoon reception at short

notice, with the clear intention of letting every one out into the

garden if the weather held.

The Seddons had a big old farmhouse modified to modern ideas of

comfort on the road out towards Misterton, with an orchard that had

been rather pleasantly subdued from use to ornament. It had rich

blossoming cherry and apple trees. Large patches of grass full of

nodding yellow trumpets had been left amidst the not too precisely

mown grass, which was as it were grass path with an occasional lapse

into lawn or glade. And Margaret, hatless, with the fair hair above

her thin, delicately pink face very simply done, came to meet our

rather too consciously dressed party,-we had come in the motor four

strong, with my aunt in grey silk. Margaret wore a soft flowing

flowered blue dress of diaphanous material, all unconnected with the

fashion and tied with pretty ribbons, like a slenderer, unbountiful

Primavera.

It was one of those May days that ape the light and heat of summer,

and I remember disconnectedly quite a number of brightly lit figures

and groups walking about, and a white gate between orchard and

garden and a large lawn with an oak tree and a red Georgian house

with a verandah and open French windows, through which the tea

drinking had come out upon the moss-edged flagstones even as Mrs.

Seddon had planned.

The party was almost entirely feminine except for a little curate

with a large head, a good voice and a radiant manner, who was

obviously attracted by Margaret, and two or three young husbands

still sufficiently addicted to their wives to accompany them. One

of them I recall as a quite romantic figure with abundant blond

curly hair on which was poised a grey felt hat encircled by a

refined black band. He wore, moreover, a loose rich shot silk tie

of red and purple, a long frock coat, grey trousers and brown shoes,

and presently he removed his hat and carried it in one hand. There

were two tennis-playing youths besides myself. There was also one

father with three daughters in anxious control, a father of the old

school scarcely half broken in, reluctant, rebellious and

consciously and conscientiously "reet Staffordshire." The daughters

were all alert to suppress the possible plungings, the undesirable

humorous impulses of this almost feral guest. They nipped his very

gestures in the bud. The rest of the people were mainly mothers

with daughters-daughters of all ages, and a scattering of aunts,

and there was a tendency to clotting, parties kept together and

regarded parties suspiciously. Mr. Seddon was in hiding, I think,

all the time, though not formally absent.

Matters centred upon the tea in the long room of the French windows,

where four trim maids went to and fro busily between the house and

the clumps of people seated or standing before it; and tennis and

croquet were intermittently visible and audible beyond a bank of

rockwork rich with the spikes and cups and bells of high spring.

Mrs. Seddon presided at the tea urn, and Margaret partly assisted

and partly talked to me and my cousin Sibyl-Gertrude had found a

disused and faded initial and was partnering him at tennis in a

state of gentle revival-while their mother exercised a divided

chaperonage from a seat near Mrs. Seddon. The little curate,

stirring a partially empty cup of tea, mingled with our party, and

preluded, I remember, every observation he made by a vigorous

resumption of stirring.

We talked of Cambridge, and Margaret kept us to it. The curate was

a Selwyn man and had taken a pass degree in theology, but Margaret

had come to Gaylord's lecturers in Trinity for a term before her

breakdown, and understood these differences. She had the eagerness

of an exile to hear the old familiar names of places and

personalities. We capped familiar anecdotes and were enthusiastic

about Kings' Chapel and the Backs, and the curate, addressing

himself more particularly to Sibyl, told a long confused story

illustrative of his disposition to reckless devilry (of a pure-

minded kindly sort) about upsetting two canoes quite needlessly on

the way to Grantchester.

I can still see Margaret as I saw her that afternoon, see her fresh

fair face, with the little obliquity of the upper lip, and her brow

always slightly knitted, and her manner as of one breathlessly shy

but determined. She had rather open blue eyes, and she spoke in an

even musical voice with the gentlest of stresses and the ghost of a

lisp. And it was true, she gathered, that Cambridge still existed.

"I went to Grantchester," she said, "last year, and had tea under

the apple-blossom. I didn't think then I should have to come down."

(It was that started the curate upon his anecdote.)

"I've seen a lot of pictures, and learnt a lot about them-at the

Pitti and the Brera,-the Brera is wonderful-wonderful places,-but

it isn't like real study," she was saying presently… "We

bought bales of photographs," she said.

I thought the bales a little out of keeping.

But fair-haired and quite simply and yet graciously and fancifully

dressed, talking of art and beautiful things and a beautiful land,

and with so much manifest regret for learning denied, she seemed a

different kind of being altogether from my smart, hard, high-

coloured, black-haired and resolutely hatted cousin; she seemed

translucent beside Gertrude. Even the little twist and droop of her

slender body was a grace to me.

I liked her from the moment I saw her, and set myself to interest

and please her as well as I knew how.

We recalled a case of ragging that had rustled the shrubs of

Newnham, and then Chris Robinson's visit-he had given a talk to

Bennett Hall also-and our impression of him.

"He disappointed me, too," said Margaret.

I was moved to tell Margaret something of my own views in the matter

of social progress, and she listened-oh! with a kind of urged

attention, and her brow a little more knitted, very earnestly. The

little curate desisted from the appendices and refuse heaps and

general debris of his story, and made himself look very alert and

intelligent.

"We did a lot of that when I was up in the eighties," he said. "I'm

glad Imperialism hasn't swamped you fellows altogether."

Gertrude, looking bright and confident, came to join our talk from

the shrubbery; the initial, a little flushed and evidently in a

state of refreshed relationship, came with her, and a cheerful lady

in pink and more particularly distinguished by a pink bonnet joined

our little group. Gertrude had been sipping admiration and was not

disposed to play a passive part in the talk.

"Socialism!" she cried, catching the word. "It's well Pa isn't

here. He has Fits when people talk of socialism. Fits!"

The initial laughed in a general kind of way.

The curate said there was socialism AND socialism, and looked at

Margaret to gauge whether he had been too bold in this utterance.

But she was all, he perceived, for broad-mindness, and he stirred

himself (and incidentally his tea) to still more liberality of

expression. He said the state of the poor was appalling, simply

appalling; that there were times when he wanted to shatter the whole

system, "only," he said, turning to me appealingly, "What have we

got to put in its place?"

"The thing that exists is always the more evident alternative," I

said.

The little curate looked at it for a moment. "Precisely," he said

explosively, and turned stirring and with his head a little on one

side, to hear what Margaret was saying.

Margaret was saying, with a swift blush and an effect of daring,

that she had no doubt she was a socialist.

"And wearing a gold chain!" said Gertrude, "And drinking out of

eggshell! I like that!"

I came to Margaret's rescue. "It doesn't follow that because one's

a socialist one ought to dress in sackcloth and ashes."

The initial coloured deeply, and having secured my attention by

prodding me slightly with the wrist of the hand that held his

teacup, cleared his throat and suggested that "one ought to be

consistent."

I perceived we were embarked upon a discussion of the elements. We

began an interesting little wrangle one of those crude discussions

of general ideas that are dear to the heart of youth. I and

Margaret supported one another as socialists, Gertrude and Sybil and

the initial maintained an anti-socialist position, the curate

attempted a cross-bench position with an air of intending to come

down upon us presently with a casting vote. He reminded us of a

number of useful principles too often overlooked in argument, that

in a big question like this there was much to be said on both sides,

that if every one did his or her duty to every one about them there

would be no difficulty with social problems at all, that over and

above all enactments we needed moral changes in people themselves.

My cousin Gertrude was a difficult controversialist to manage, being

unconscious of inconsistency in statement and absolutely impervious

to reply. Her standpoint was essentially materialistic; she didn't

see why she shouldn't have a good time because other people didn't;

they would have a good time, she was sure, if she didn't. She said

that if we did give up everything we had to other people, they

wouldn't very likely know what to do with it. She asked if we were

so fond of work-people, why we didn't go and live among them, and

expressed the inflexible persuasion that if we HAD socialism,

everything would be just the same again in ten years' time. She

also threw upon us the imputation of ingratitude for a beautiful

world by saying that so far as she was concerned she didn't want to

upset everything. She was contented with things as they were, thank

you.

The discussion led in some way that I don't in the least recall now,

and possibly by abrupt transitions, to a croquet foursome in which

Margaret involved the curate without involving herself, and then

stood beside me on the edge of the lawn while the others played. We

watched silently for a moment.

"I HATE that sort of view," she said suddenly in a confidential

undertone, with her delicate pink flush returning.

"It's want of imagination," I said.

"To think we are just to enjoyourselves," she went on; "just to go

on dressing and playing and having meals and spending money!" She

seemed to be referring not simply to my cousins, but to the whole

world of industry and property about us. "But what is one to do?"

she asked. "I do wish I had not had to come down. It's all so

pointless here. There seems to be nothing going forward, no ideas,

no dreams. No one here seems to feel quite what I feel, the sort of

need there is for MEANING in things. I hate things without

meaning."

"Don't you do-local work?"

"I suppose I shall. I suppose I must find something. Do you think-

if one were to attempt some sort of propaganda?"

"Could you-?" I began a little doubtfully.

"I suppose I couldn't," she answered, after a thoughtful moment. "I

suppose it would come to nothing. And yet I feel there is so much

to be done for the world, so much one ought to be doing… I

want to do something for the world."

I can see her now as she stood there with her brows nearly frowning,

her blue eyes looking before her, her mouth almost petulant. "One

feels that there are so many things going on-out of one's reach,"

she said.

I went back in the motor-car with my mind full of her, the quality

of delicate discontent, the suggestion of exile. Even a kind of

weakness in her was sympathetic. She told tremendously against her

background. She was, I say, like a protesting blue flower upon a

cinder heap. It is curious, too, how she connects and mingles with

the furious quarrel I had with my uncle that very evening. That

came absurdly. Indirectly Margaret was responsible. My mind was

running on ideas she had revived and questions she had set

clamouring, and quite inadvertently in my attempt to find solutions

I talked so as to outrage his profoundest feelings…