THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

2

But the profound impossibility of our relation was now becoming more

and more apparent to us. We found ourselves seeking justification,

clinging passionately to a situation that was coldly, pitilessly,

impossible and fated. We wanted quite intensely to live together

and have a child, but also we wanted very many other things that

were incompatible with these desires. It was extraordinarily

difficult to weigh our political and intellectual ambitions against

those intimate wishes. The weights kept altering according as one

found oneself grasping this valued thing or that. It wasn't as if

we could throw everything aside for our love, and have that as we

wanted it. Love such as we bore one another isn't altogether, or

even chiefly, a thing in itself-it is for the most part a value set

upon things. Our love was interwoven with all our other interests;

to go out of the world and live in isolation seemed to us like

killing the best parts of each other; we loved the sight of each

other engaged finely and characteristically, we knew each other best

as activities. We had no delusions about material facts; we didn't

want each other alive or dead, we wanted each other fully alive. We

wanted to do big things together, and for us to take each other

openly and desperately would leave us nothing in the world to do.

We wanted children indeed passionately, but children with every

helpful chance in the world, and children born in scandal would be

handicapped at every turn. We wanted to share a home, and not a

solitude.

And when we were at this stage of realisation, began the intimations

that we were found out, and that scandal was afoot against us…

I heard of it first from Esmeer, who deliberately mentioned it, with

that steady grey eye of his watching me, as an instance of the

preposterous falsehoods people will circulate. It came to Isabel

almost simultaneously through a married college friend, who made it

her business to demand either confirmation or denial. It filled us

both with consternation. In the surprise of the moment Isabel

admitted her secret, and her friend went off "reserving her freedom

of action."

Discovery broke out in every direction. Friends with grave faces

and an atmosphere of infinite tact invaded us both. Other friends

ceased to invade either of us. It was manifest we had become-we

knew not how-a private scandal, a subject for duologues, an

amazement, a perplexity, a vivid interest. In a few brief weeks it

seemed London passed from absolute unsuspiciousness to a chattering

exaggeration of its knowledge of our relations.

It was just the most inappropriate time for that disclosure. The

long smouldering antagonism to my endowment of motherhood ideas had

flared up into an active campaign in the EXPURGATOR, and it would be

altogether disastrous to us if I should be convicted of any personal

irregularity. It was just because of the manifest and challenging

respectability of my position that I had been able to carry the

thing as far as I had done. Now suddenly my fortunes had sprung a

leak, and scandal was pouring in… It chanced, too, that a

wave of moral intolerance was sweeping through London, one of those

waves in which the bitterness of the consciously just finds an ally

in the panic of the undiscovered. A certain Father Blodgett had

been preaching against social corruption with extraordinary force,

and had roused the Church of England people to a kind of competition

in denunciation. The old methods of the Anti-Socialist campaign had

been renewed, and had offered far too wide a scope and too tempting

an opportunity for private animosity, to be restricted to the

private affairs of the Socialists. I had intimations of an

extensive circulation of "private and confidential" letters…

I think there can be nothing else in life quite like the unnerving

realisation that rumour and scandal are afoot about one. Abruptly

one's confidence in the solidity of the universe disappears. One

walks silenced through a world that one feels to be full of

inaudible accusations. One cannot challenge the assault, get it out

into the open, separate truth and falsehood. It slinks from you,

turns aside its face. Old acquaintances suddenly evaded me, made

extraordinary excuses; men who had presumed on the verge of my world

and pestered me with an intrusive enterprise, now took the bold step

of flat repudiation. I became doubtful about the return of a nod,

retracted all those tentacles of easy civility that I had hitherto

spread to the world. I still grow warm with amazed indignation when

I recall that Edward Crampton, meeting me full on the steps of the

Climax Club, cut me dead. "By God!" I cried, and came near catching

him by the throat and wringing out of him what of all good deeds and

bad, could hearten him, a younger man than I and empty beyond

comparison, to dare to play the judge to me. And then I had an open

slight from Mrs. Millingham, whom I had counted on as one counts

upon the sunrise. I had not expected things of that sort; they were

disconcerting beyond measure; it was as if the world were giving way

beneath my feet, as though something failed in the essential

confidence of life, as though a hand of wet ice had touched my

heart. Similar things were happening to Isabel. Yet we went on

working, visiting, meeting, trying to ignore this gathering of

implacable forces against us.

For a time I was perplexed beyond measure to account for this

campaign. Then I got a clue. The centre of diffusion was the

Bailey household. The Baileys had never forgiven me my abandonment

of the young Liberal group they had done so much to inspire and

organise; their dinner-table had long been a scene of hostile

depreciation of the BLUE WEEKLY and all its allies; week after week

Altiora proclaimed that I was "doing nothing," and found other

causes for our bye-election triumphs; I counted Chambers Street a

dangerous place for me. Yet, nevertheless, I was astonished to find

them using a private scandal against me. They did. I think

Handitch had filled up the measure of their bitterness, for I had

not only abandoned them, but I was succeeding beyond even their

power of misrepresentation. Always I had been a wasp in their

spider's web, difficult to claim as a tool, uncritical,

antagonistic. I admired their work and devotion enormously, but I

had never concealed my contempt for a certain childish vanity they

displayed, and for the frequent puerility of their political

intrigues. I suppose contempt galls more than injuries, and anyhow

they had me now. They had me. Bailey, I found, was warning fathers

of girls against me as a "reckless libertine," and Altiora, flushed,

roguish, and dishevelled, was sitting on her fender curb after

dinner, and pledging little parties of five or six women at a time

with infinite gusto not to let the matter go further. Our cell was

open to the world, and a bleak, distressful daylight streaming in.

I had a gleam of a more intimate motive in Altiora from the reports

that came to me. Isabel had been doing a series of five or six

articles in the POLITICAL REVIEW in support of our campaign, the

POLITICAL REVIEW which had hitherto been loyally Baileyite. Quite

her best writing up to the present, at any rate, is in those papers,

and no doubt Altiora had had not only to read her in those invaded

columns, but listen to her praises in the mouths of the tactless

influential. Altiora, like so many people who rely on gesture and

vocal insistence in conversation, writes a poor and slovenly prose

and handles an argument badly; Isabel has her University training

behind her and wrote from the first with the stark power of a clear-

headed man. "Now we know," said Altiora, with just a gleam of

malice showing through her brightness, "now we know who helps with

the writing!"

She revealed astonishing knowledge.

For a time I couldn't for the life of me discover her sources. I

had, indeed, a desperate intention of challenging her, and then I

bethought me of a youngster named Curmain, who had been my

supplemental typist and secretary for a time, and whom I had sent on

to her before the days of our breach. "Of course!" said I,

"Curmain!" He was a tall, drooping, sidelong youth with sandy hair,

a little forward head, and a long thin neck. He stole stamps, and,

I suspected, rifled my private letter drawer, and I found him one

day on a turn of the stairs looking guilty and ruffled with a pretty

Irish housemaid of Margaret's manifestly in a state of hot

indignation. I saw nothing, but I felt everything in the air

between them. I hate this pestering of servants, but at the same

time I didn't want Curmain wiped out of existence, so I had packed

him off without unnecessary discussion to Altiora. He was quick and

cheap anyhow, and I thought her general austerity ought to redeem

him if anything could; the Chambers Street housemaid wasn't for any

man's kissing and showed it, and the stamps and private letters were

looked after with an efficiency altogether surpassing mine. And

Altiora, I've no doubt left now whatever, pumped this young

undesirable about me, and scenting a story, had him to dinner alone

one evening to get to the bottom of the matter. She got quite to

the bottom of it,-it must have been a queer duologue. She read

Isabel's careless, intimate letters to me, so to speak, by this

proxy, and she wasn't ashamed to use this information in the service

of the bitterness that had sprung up in her since our political

breach. It was essentially a personal bitterness; it helped no

public purpose of theirs to get rid of me. My downfall in any

public sense was sheer waste,-the loss of a man. She knew she was

behaving badly, and so, when it came to remonstrance, she behaved

worse. She'd got names and dates and places; the efficiency of her

information was irresistible. And she set to work at it

marvellously. Never before, in all her pursuit of efficient ideals,

had Altiora achieved such levels of efficiency. I wrote a protest

that was perhaps ill-advised and angry, I went to her and tried to

stop her. She wouldn't listen, she wouldn't think, she denied and

lied, she behaved like a naughty child of six years old which has

made up its mind to be hurtful. It wasn't only, I think, that she

couldn't bear our political and social influence; she also-I

realised at that interview couldn't bear our loving. It seemed to

her the sickliest thing,-a thing quite unendurable. While such

things were, the virtue had gone out of her world.

I've the vividest memory of that call of mine. She'd just come in

and taken off her hat, and she was grey and dishevelled and tired,

and in a business-like dress of black and crimson that didn't suit

her and was muddy about the skirts; she'd a cold in her head and

sniffed penetratingly, she avoided my eye as she talked and

interrupted everything I had to say; she kept stabbing fiercely at

the cushions of her sofa with a long hat-pin and pretending she was

overwhelmed with grief at the DEBACLE she was deliberately

organising.

"Then part," she cried, "part. If you don't want a smashing up,-

part! You two have got to be parted. You've got never to see each

other ever, never to speak." There was a zest in her voice. "We're

not circulating stories," she denied. "No! And Curmain never told

us anything-Curmain is an EXCELLENT young man; oh! a quite

excellent young man. You misjudged him altogether."…

I was equally unsuccessful with Bailey. I caught the little wretch

in the League Club, and he wriggled and lied. He wouldn't say where

he had got his facts, he wouldn't admit he had told any one. When I

gave him the names of two men who had come to me astonished and

incredulous, he attempted absurdly to make me think they had told

HIM. He did his horrible little best to suggest that honest old

Quackett, who had just left England for the Cape, was the real

scandalmonger. That struck me as mean, even for Bailey. I've still

the odd vivid impression of his fluting voice, excusing the

inexcusable, his big, shifty face evading me, his perspiration-

beaded forehead, the shrugging shoulders, and the would-be

exculpatory gestures-Houndsditch gestures-of his enormous ugly

hands.

"I can assure you, my dear fellow," he said; "I can assure you we've

done everything to shield you-everything."…