THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

6

"You've met before?" said Altiora, a day or so later.

I explained when.

"You find her interesting?"

I saw in a flash that Altiora meant to marry me to Margaret.

Her intention became much clearer as the year developed. Altiora

was systematic even in matters that evade system. I was to marry

Margaret, and freed from the need of making an income I was to come

into politics-as an exponent of Baileyism. She put it down with

the other excellent and advantageous things that should occupy her

summer holiday. It was her pride and glory to put things down and

plan them out in detail beforehand, and I'm not quite sure that she

did not even mark off the day upon which the engagement was to be

declared. If she did, I disappointed her. We didn't come to an

engagement, in spite of the broadest hints and the glaring

obviousness of everything, that summer.

Every summer the Baileys went out of London to some house they hired

or borrowed, leaving their secretaries toiling behind, and they went

on working hard in the mornings and evenings and taking exercise in

the open air in the afternoon. They cycled assiduously and went for

long walks at a trot, and raided and studied (and incidentally

explained themselves to) any social "types" that lived in the

neighbourhood. One invaded type, resentful under research,

described them with a dreadful aptness as Donna Quixote and Sancho

Panza-and himself as a harmless windmill, hurting no one and

signifying nothing. She did rather tilt at things. This particular

summer they were at a pleasant farmhouse in level country near

Pangbourne, belonging to the Hon. Wilfrid Winchester, and they asked

me to come down to rooms in the neighbourhood-Altiora took them for

a month for me in August-and board with them upon extremely

reasonable terms; and when I got there I found Margaret sitting in a

hammock at Altiora's feet. Lots of people, I gathered, were coming

and going in the neighbourhood, the Ponts were in a villa on the

river, and the Rickhams' houseboat was to moor for some days; but

these irruptions did not impede a great deal of duologue between

Margaret and myself.

Altiora was efficient rather than artistic in her match-making. She

sent us off for long walks together-Margaret was a fairly good

walker-she exhumed some defective croquet things and incited us to

croquet, not understanding that detestable game is the worst

stimulant for lovers in the world. And Margaret and I were always

getting left about, and finding ourselves for odd half-hours in the

kitchen-garden with nothing to do except talk, or we were told with

a wave of the hand to run away and amuse each other.

Altiora even tried a picnic in canoes, knowing from fiction rather

than imagination or experience the conclusive nature of such

excursions. But there she fumbled at the last moment, and elected

at the river's brink to share a canoe with me. Bailey showed so

much zeal and so little skill-his hat fell off and he became

miraculously nothing but paddle-clutching hands and a vast wrinkled

brow-that at last he had to be paddled ignominiously by Margaret,

while Altiora, after a phase of rigid discretion, as nearly as

possible drowned herself-and me no doubt into the bargain-with a

sudden lateral gesture of the arm to emphasise the high note with

which she dismissed the efficiency of the Charity Organisation

Society. We shipped about an inch of water and sat in it for the

rest of the time, an inconvenience she disregarded heroically. We

had difficulties in landing Oscar from his frail craft upon the ait

of our feasting,-he didn't balance sideways and was much alarmed,

and afterwards, as Margaret had a pain in her back, I took him in my

canoe, let him hide his shame with an ineffectual but not positively

harmful paddle, and towed the other by means of the joined painters.

Still it was the fault of the inadequate information supplied in the

books and not of Altiora that that was not the date of my betrothal.

I find it not a little difficult to state what kept me back from

proposing marriage to Margaret that summer, and what urged me

forward at last to marry her. It is so much easier to remember

one's resolutions than to remember the moods and suggestions that

produced them.

Marrying and getting married was, I think, a pretty simple affair to

Altiora; it was something that happened to the adolescent and

unmarried when you threw them together under the circumstances of

health, warmth and leisure. It happened with the kindly and

approving smiles of the more experienced elders who had organised

these proximities. The young people married, settled down, children

ensued, and father and mother turned their minds, now decently and

properly disillusioned, to other things. That to Altiora was the

normal sexual life, and she believed it to be the quality of the

great bulk of the life about her.

One of the great barriers to human understanding is the wide

temperamental difference one finds in the values of things relating

to sex. It is the issue upon which people most need training in

charity and imaginative sympathy. Here are no universal standards

at all, and indeed for no single man nor woman does there seem to be

any fixed standard, so much do the accidents of circumstances and

one's physical phases affect one's interpretations. There is

nothing in the whole range of sexual fact that may not seem

supremely beautiful or humanly jolly or magnificently wicked or

disgusting or trivial or utterly insignificant, according to the eye

that sees or the mood that colours. Here is something that may fill

the skies and every waking hour or be almost completely banished

from a life. It may be everything on Monday and less than nothing

on Saturday. And we make our laws and rules as though in these

matters all men and women were commensurable one with another, with

an equal steadfast passion and an equal constant duty…

I don't know what dreams Altiora may have had in her schoolroom

days, I always suspected her of suppressed and forgotten phases, but

certainly her general effect now was of an entirely passionless

worldliness in these matters. Indeed so far as I could get at her,

she regarded sexual passion as being hardly more legitimate in a

civilised person than-let us say-homicidal mania. She must have

forgotten-and Bailey too. I suspect she forgot before she married

him. I don't suppose either of them had the slightest intimation of

the dimensions sexual love can take in the thoughts of the great

majority of people with whom they come in contact. They loved in

their way-an intellectual way it was and a fond way-but it had no

relation to beauty and physical sensation-except that there seemed

a decree of exile against these things. They got their glow in high

moments of altruistic ambition-and in moments of vivid worldly

success. They sat at opposite ends of their dinner table with so

and so "captured," and so and so, flushed with a mutual approval.

They saw people in love forgetful and distraught about them, and

just put it down to forgetfulness and distraction. At any rate

Altiora manifestly viewed my situation and Margaret's with an

abnormal and entirely misleading simplicity. There was the girl,

rich, with an acceptable claim to be beautiful, shiningly virtuous,

quite capable of political interests, and there was I, talented,

ambitious and full of political and social passion, in need of just

the money, devotion and regularisation Margaret could provide. We

were both unmarried-white sheets of uninscribed paper. Was there

ever a simpler situation? What more could we possibly want?

She was even a little offended at the inconclusiveness that did not

settle things at Pangbourne. I seemed to her, I suspect, to reflect

upon her judgment and good intentions.