THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

2

It is curious to recall how Britten helped shatter that obvious,

lucidly explicable presentation of myself upon which I had embarked

with Margaret. He returned to revive a memory of adolescent dreams

and a habit of adolescent frankness; he reached through my shallow

frontage as no one else seemed capable of doing, and dragged that

back-self into relation with it.

I remember very distinctly a dinner and a subsequent walk with him

which presents itself now as altogether typical of the quality of

his influence.

I had come upon him one day while lunching with Somers and Sutton at

the Playwrights' Club, and had asked him to dinner on the spur of

the moment. He was oddly the same curly-headed, red-faced

ventriloquist, and oddly different, rather seedy as well as untidy,

and at first a little inclined to make comparisons with my sleek

successfulness. But that disposition presently evaporated, and his

talk was good and fresh and provocative. And something that had

long been straining at its checks in my mind flapped over, and he

and I found ourselves of one accord.

Altiora wasn't at this dinner. When she came matters were apt to

become confusedly strenuous. There was always a slight and

ineffectual struggle at the end on the part of Margaret to

anticipate Altiora's overpowering tendency to a rally and the

establishment of some entirely unjustifiable conclusion by a COUP-

DE-MAIN. When, however, Altiora was absent, the quieterinfluence

of the Cramptons prevailed; temperance and information for its own

sake prevailed excessively over dinner and the play of thought…

Good Lord! what bores the Cramptons were! I wonder I endured

them as I did. They had all of them the trick of lying in wait

conversationally; they had no sense of the self-exposures, the

gallant experiments in statement that are necessary for good

conversation. They would watch one talking with an expression

exactly like peeping through bushes. Then they would, as it were,

dash out, dissent succinctly, contradict some secondary fact, and

back to cover. They gave one twilight nerves. Their wives were

easier but still difficult at a stretch; they talked a good deal

about children and servants, but with an air caught from Altiora of

making observations upon sociological types. Lewis gossiped about

the House in an entirely finite manner. He never raised a

discussion; nobody ever raised a discussion. He would ask what we

thought of Evesham's question that afternoon, and Edward would say

it was good, and Mrs. Willie, who had been behind the grille, would

think it was very good, and then Willie, parting the branches, would

say rather conclusively that he didn't think it was very much good,

and I would deny hearing the question in order to evade a profitless

statement of views in that vacuum, and then we would cast about in

our minds for some other topic of equal interest…

On this occasion Altiora was absent, and to qualify our Young

Liberal bleakness we had Mrs. Millingham, with her white hair and

her fresh mind and complexion, and Esmeer. Willie Crampton was with

us, but not his wife, who was having her third baby on principle;

his brother Edward was present, and the Lewises, and of course the

Bunting Harblows. There was also some other lady. I remember her

as pale blue, but for the life of me I cannot remember her name.

Quite early there was a little breeze between Edward Crampton and

Esmeer, who had ventured an opinion about the partition of Poland.

Edward was at work then upon the seventh volume of his monumental

Life of Kosciusko, and a little impatient with views perhaps not

altogether false but betraying a lamentable ignorance of accessible

literature. At any rate, his correction of Esmeer was magisterial.

After that there was a distinct and not altogether delightful pause,

and then some one, it may have been the pale-blue lady, asked Mrs.

Lewis whether her aunt Lady Carmixter had returned from her rest-

and-sun-cure in Italy. That led to a rather anxiously sustained

talk about regimen, and Willie told us how he had profited by the

no-breakfast system. It had increased his power of work enormously.

He could get through ten hours a day now without inconvenience.

"What do you do?" said Esmeer abruptly.

"Oh! no end of work. There's all the estate and looking after

things."

"But publicly?"

"I asked three questions yesterday. And for one of them I had to

consult nine books!"

We were drifting, I could see, towards Doctor Haig's system of

dietary, and whether the exclusion or inclusion of fish and chicken

were most conducive to high efficiency, when Britten, who had

refused lemonade and claret and demanded Burgundy, broke out, and

was discovered to be demanding in his throat just what we Young

Liberals thought we were up to?

"I want," said Britten, repeating his challenge a little louder, "to

hear just exactly what you think you are doing in Parliament?"

Lewis laughed nervously, and thought we were "Seeking the Good of

the Community."

"HOW?"

"Beneficient Legislation," said Lewis.

"Beneficient in what direction?" insisted Britten. "I want to know

where you think you are going."

"Amelioration of Social Conditions," said Lewis.

"That's only a phrase!"

"You wouldn't have me sketch bills at dinner?"

"I'd like you to indicate directions," said Britten, and waited.

"Upward and On," said Lewis with conscious neatness, and turned to

ask Mrs. Bunting Harblow about her little boy's French.

For a time talk frothed over Britten's head, but the natural

mischief in Mrs. Millingham had been stirred, and she was presently

echoing his demand in lisping, quasi-confidential undertones. "What

ARE we Liberals doing?" Then Esmeer fell in with the

revolutionaries.

To begin with, I was a little shocked by this clamour for

fundamentals-and a little disconcerted. I had the experience that

I suppose comes to every one at times of discovering oneself

together with two different sets of people with whom one has

maintained two different sets of attitudes. It had always been, I

perceived, an instinctive suppression in our circle that we

shouldn't be more than vague about our political ideals. It had

almost become part of my morality to respect this convention. It

was understood we were all working hard, and keeping ourselves fit,

tremendously fit, under Altiora's inspiration, Pro Bono Publico.

Bunting Harblow had his under-secretaryship, and Lewis was on the

verge of the Cabinet, and these things we considered to be in the

nature of confirmations… It added to tbe discomfort of the

situation that these plunging enquiries were being made in the

presence of our wives.

The rebel section of our party forced the talk.

Edward Crampton was presently declaring-I forget in what relation:

"The country is with us."

My long-controlled hatred of the Cramptons' stereotyped phrases

about the Country and the House got the better of me. I showed my

cloven hoof to my friends for the first time.

"We don't respect the Country as we used to do," I said. "We

haven't the same belief we used to have in the will of the people.

It's no good, Crampton, trying to keep that up. We Liberals know as

a matter of fact-nowadays every one knows-that the monster that

brought us into power has, among other deficiencies, no head. We've

got to give it one-if possible with brains and a will. That lies

in the future. For the present if the country is with us, it means

merely that we happen to have hold of its tether."

Lewis was shocked. A "mandate" from the Country was sacred to his

system of pretences.

Britten wasn't subdued by his first rebuff; presently he was at us

again. There were several attempts to check his outbreak of

interrogation; I remember the Cramptons asked questions about the

welfare of various cousins of Lewis who were unknown to the rest of

us, and Margaret tried to engage Britten in a sympathetic discussion

of the Arts and Crafts exhibition. But Britten and Esmeer were

persistent, Mrs. Millingham was mischievous, and in the end our

rising hopes of Young Liberalism took to their thickets for good,

while we talked all over them of the prevalent vacuity of political

intentions. Margaret was perplexed by me. It is only now I

perceive just how perplexing I must have been. "Of course, she said

with that faint stress of apprehension in her eyes, one must have

aims." And, "it isn't always easy to put everything into phrases."

"Don't be long," said Mrs. Edward Crampton to her hsuband as the

wives trooped out. And afterwards when we went upstairs I had an

indefinable persuasion that the ladies had been criticising

Britten's share in our talk in an altogether unfavourable spirit.

Mrs. Edward evidently thought him aggressive and impertinent, and

Margaret with a quiet firmness that brooked no resistance, took him

at once into a corner and showed him Italian photographs by Coburn.

We dispersed early.

I walked with Britten along the Chelsea back streets towards

Battersea Bridge-he lodged on the south side.

"Mrs. Millingham's a dear," he began.

"She's a dear."

"I liked her demand for a hansom because a four-wheeler was too

safe."

"She was worked up," I said. "She's a woman of faultless character,

but her instincts, as Altiora would say, are anarchistic-when she

gives them a chance."

"So she takes it out in hansom cabs."

"Hansom cabs."

"She's wise," said Britten…

"I hope, Remington," he went on after a pause, "I didn't rag your

other guests too much. I've a sort of feeling at moments-

Remington, those chaps are so infernally not-not bloody. It's part

of a man's duty sometimes at least to eat red beef and get drunk.

How is he to understand government if he doesn't? It scares me to

think of your lot-by a sort of misapprehension-being in power. A

kind of neuralgia in the head, by way of government. I don't

understand where YOU come in. Those others-they've no lusts.

Their ideal is anaemia. You and I, we had at least a lust to take

hold of life and make something of it. They-they want to take hold

of life and make nothing of it. They want to cut out all the

stimulants. Just as though life was anything else but a reaction to

stimulation!"…

He began to talk of his own life. He had had ill-fortune through

most of it. He was poor and unsuccessful, and a girl he had been

very fond of had been attacked and killed by a horse in a field in a

very horrible manner. These things had wounded and tortured him,

but they hadn't broken him. They had, it seemed to me, made a kind

of crippled and ugly demigod of him. He was, I began to perceive,

so much better than I had any right to expect. At first I had been

rather struck by his unkempt look, and it made my reaction all the

stronger. There was about him something, a kind of raw and bleeding

faith in the deep things of life, that stirred me profoundly as he

showed it. My set of people had irritated him and disappointed him.

I discovered at his touch how they irritated him. He reproached me

boldly. He made me feel ashamed of my easy acquiescences as I

walked in my sleek tall neatness beside his rather old coat, his

rather battered hat, his sturdier shorter shape, and listened to his

denunciations of our self-satisfied New Liberalism and

Progressivism.

"It has the same relation to progress-the reality of progress-that

the things they paint on door panels in the suburbs have to art and

beauty. There's a sort of filiation… Your Altiora's just the

political equivalent of the ladies who sell traced cloth for

embroidery; she's a dealer in Refined Social Reform for the Parlour.

The real progress, Remington, is a graver thing and a painfuller

thing and a slower thing altogether. Look! THAT"-and he pointed

to where under a boarding in the light of a gas lamp a dingy

prostitute stood lurking-" was in Babylon and Nineveh. Your little

lot make believe there won't be anything of the sort after this

Parliament! They're going to vanish at a few top notes from Altiora

Bailey! Remington!-it's foolery. It's prigs at play. It's make-

believe, make-believe! Your people there haven't got hold of

things, aren't beginning to get hold of things, don't know anything

of life at all, shirk life, avoid life, get in little bright clean

rooms and talk big over your bumpers of lemonade while the Night

goes by outside-untouched. Those Crampton fools slink by all

this,"-he waved at the woman again-"pretend it doesn't exist, or

is going to be banished root and branch by an Act to keep children

in the wet outside public-houses. Do you think they really care,

Remington? I don't. It's make-believe. What they want to do, what

Lewis wants to do, what Mrs. Bunting Harblow wants her husband to

do, is to sit and feel very grave and necessary and respected on the

Government benches. They think of putting their feet out like

statesmen, and tilting shiny hats with becoming brims down over

their successful noses. Presentation portrait to a club at fifty.

That's their Reality. That's their scope. They don't, it's

manifest, WANT to think beyond that. The things there ARE,

Remington, they'll never face! the wonder and the depth of life,-

lust, and the night-sky,-pain."

"But the good intention," I pleaded, "the Good Will!"

"Sentimentality," said Britten. "No Good Will is anything but

dishonesty unless it frets and burns and hurts and destroys a man.

That lot of yours have nothing but a good will to think they have

good will. Do you think they lie awake of nights searching their

hearts as we do? Lewis? Crampton? Or those neat, admiring,

satisfied little wives? See how they shrank from the probe!"

"We all," I said, "shrink from the probe."

"God help us!" said Britten…

"We are but vermin at the best, Remington," he broke out," and the

greatest saint only a worm that has lifted its head for a moment

from the dust. We are damned, we are meant to be damned, coral

animalculae building upward, upward in a sea of damnation. But of

all the damned things that ever were damned, your damned shirking,

temperate, sham-efficient, self-satisfied, respectable, make-

believe, Fabian-spirited Young Liberal is tbe utterly damnedest."

He paused for a moment, and resumed in an entirely different note:

"Which is why I was so surprised, Remington, to find YOU in this

set!"

"You're just the old plunger you used to be, Britten," I said. "

You're going too far with all your might for the sake of the damns.

Like a donkey that drags its cart up a bank to get thistles.

There's depths in Liberalism-"

"We were talking about Liberals."

"Liberty!"

"Liberty! What do YOOR little lot know of liberty?"

"What does any little lot know of liberty?"

"It waits outside, too big for our understanding. Like the night

and the stars. And lust, Remington! lust and bitterness! Don't I

know them? with all the sweetness and hope of life bitten and

trampled, the dear eyes and the brain that loved and understood-and

my poor mumble of a life going on! I'm within sight of being a

drunkard, Remington! I'm a failure by most standards! Life has cut

me to the bone. But I'm not afraid of it any more. I've paid

something of the price, I've seen something of the meaning."

He flew off at a tangent. "I'd rather die in Delirium Tremens," he

cried, "than be a Crampton or a Lewis…"

"Make-believe. Make-believe." The phrase and Britten's squat

gestures haunted me as I walked homeward alone. I went to my room

and stood before my desk and surveyed papers and files and

Margaret's admirable equipment of me.

I perceived in the lurid light of Britten's suggestions that so it

was Mr. George Alexander would have mounted a statesman's private

room…