THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

CHAPTER THE SECOND
MARGARET IN LONDON
1

I was twenty-seven when I met Margaret again, and the intervening

five years had been years of vigorous activity for me, if not of

very remarkable growth. When I saw her again, I could count myself

a grown man. I think, indeed, I counted myself more completely

grown than I was. At any rate, by all ordinary standards, I had

"got on" very well, and my ideas, if they had not changed very

greatly, had become much more definite and my ambitions clearer and

bolder.

I had long since abandoned my fellowship and come to London. I had

published two books that had been talked about, written several

articles, and established a regular relationship with the WEEKLY

REVIEW and the EVENING GAZETTE. I was a member of the Eighty Club

and learning to adapt the style of the Cambridge Union to larger

uses. The London world had opened out to me very readily. I had

developed a pleasant variety of social connections. I had made the

acquaintance of Mr. Evesham, who had been attracted by my NEW RULER,

and who talked about it and me, and so did a very great deal to make

a way for me into the company of prominent and amusing people. I

dined out quite frequently. The glitter and interest of good London

dinner parties became a common experience. I liked the sort of

conversation one got at them extremely, the little glow of duologues

burning up into more general discussions, the closing-in of the men

after the going of the women, the sage, substantial masculine

gossiping, the later resumption of effective talk with some pleasant

woman, graciously at her best. I had a wide range of houses;

Cambridge had linked me to one or two correlated sets of artistic

and literary people, and my books and Mr. Evesham and opened to me

the big vague world of "society." I wasn't aggressive nor

particularly snobbish nor troublesome, sometimes I talked well, and

if I had nothing interesting to say I said as little as possible,

and I had a youthful gravity of manner that was liked by hostesses.

And the other side of my nature that first flared through the cover

of restraints at Locarno, that too had had opportunity to develop

along the line London renders practicable. I had had my experiences

and secrets and adventures among that fringe of ill-mated or erratic

or discredited women the London world possesses. The thing had long

ago ceased to be a matter of magic or mystery, and had become a

question of appetites and excitement, and among other things the

excitement of not being found out.

I write rather doubtfully of my growing during this period. Indeed

I find it hard to judge whether I can say that I grew at all in any

real sense of the word, between three and twenty and twenty-seven.

It seems to me now to have been rather a phase of realisation and

clarification. All the broad lines of my thought were laid down, I

am sure, by the date of my Locarno adventure, but in those five

years I discussed things over and over again with myself and others,

filled out with concrete fact forms I had at first apprehended

sketchily and conversationally, measured my powers against my ideals

and the forces in the world about me. It was evident that many men

no better than myself and with no greater advantages than mine had

raised themselves to influential and even decisive positions in the

worlds of politics and thought. I was gathering the confidence and

knowledge necessary to attack the world in the large manner; I found

I could write, and that people would let me write if I chose, as one

having authority and not as the scribes. Socially and politically

and intellectually I knewmyself for an honest man, and that quite

without any deliberation on my part this showed and made things easy

for me. People trusted my goodfaith from the beginning-for all

that I came from nowhere and had no better position than any

adventurer.

But the growth process was arrested, I was nothing bigger at twenty-

seven than at twenty-two, however much saner and stronger, and any

one looking closely into my mind during that period might well have

imagined growth finished altogether. It is particularly evident to

me now that I came no nearer to any understanding of women during

that time. That Locarno affair was infinitely more to me than I had

supposed. It ended something-nipped something in the bud perhaps-

took me at a stride from a vague, fine, ignorant, closed world of

emotion to intrigue and a perfectly definite and limited sensuality.

It ended my youth, and for a time it prevented my manhood. I had

never yet even peeped at the sweetest, profoundest thing in the

world, the heart and meaning of a girl, or dreamt with any quality

of reality of a wife or any such thing as a friend among womanhood.

My vague anticipation of such things in life had vanished

altogether. I turned away from their possibility. It seemed to me

I knew what had to be known about womankind. I wanted to work hard,

to get on to a position in which I could develop and forward my

constructive projects. Women, I thought, had nothing to do with

that. It seemed clear I could not marry for some years; I was

attractive to certain types of women, I had vanity enough to give me

an agreeable confidence in love-making, and I went about seeking a

convenient mistress quite deliberately, some one who should serve my

purpose and say in the end, like that kindly first mistress of mine,

"I've done you no harm," and so release me. It seemed the only wise

way of disposing of urgencies that might otherwise entangle and

wreck the career I was intent upon.

I don't apologise for, or defend my mental and moral phases. So it

was I appraised life and prepared to take it, and so it is a

thousand ambitious men see it to-day…

For the rest these five years were a period of definition. My

political conceptions were perfectly plain and honest. I had one

constant desire ruling my thoughts. I meant to leave England and

the empire better ordered than I found it, to organise and

discipline, to build up a constructive and controlling State out of

my world's confusions. We had, I saw, to suffuse education with

public intention, to develop a new better-living generation with a

collectivist habit of thought, to link now chaotic activities in

every human affair, and particularly to catch that escaped, world-

making, world-ruining, dangerous thing, industrial and financial

enterprise, and bring it back to the service of the general good. I

had then the precise image that still serves me as a symbol for all

I wish to bring about, the image of an engineer building a lock in a

swelling torrent-with water pressure as his only source of power.

My thoughts and acts were habitually turned to that enterprise; it

gave shape and direction to all my life. The problem that most

engaged my mind during those years was the practical and personal

problem of just where to apply myself to serve this almost innate

purpose. How was I, a child of this confusion, struggling upward

through the confusion, to take hold of things? Somewhere between

politics and literature my grip must needs be found, but where?

Always I seem to have been looking for that in those opening years,

and disregarding everything else to discover it.