1
Margaret had already taken a little house in Radnor Square, Westminster,
before our marriage, a house that seemed particularly adaptable to our
needs as public-spirited efficients; it had been very pleasantly painted
and papered under Margaret's instructions, white paint and clean open
purples and green predominating, and now we set to work at once upon
the interesting business of arranging and--with our Venetian glass as a
beginning--furnishing it. We had been fairly fortunate with our wedding
presents, and for the most part it was open to us to choose just exactly
what we would have and just precisely where we would put it.
Margaret had a sense of form and colour altogether superior to mine, and
so quite apart from the fact that it was her money equipped us, I stood
aside from all these matters and obeyed her summons to a consultation
only to endorse her judgment very readily. Until everything was settled
I went every day to my old rooms in Vincent Square and worked at a
series of papers that were originally intended for the FORTNIGHTLY
REVIEW, the papers that afterwards became my fourth book, “New Aspects
of Liberalism.”
I still remember as delightful most of the circumstances of getting
into 79, Radnor Square. The thin flavour of indecision about Margaret
disappeared altogether in a shop; she had the precisest ideas of what
she wanted, and the devices of the salesman did not sway her. It was
very pleasant to find her taking things out of my hands with a certain
masterfulness, and showing the distinctest determination to make a
house in which I should be able to work in that great project of “doing
something for the world.”
“And I do want to make things pretty about us,” she said. “You don't
think it wrong to have things pretty?”
“I want them so.”
“Altiora has things hard.”
“Altiora,” I answered, “takes a pride in standing ugly and uncomfortable
things. But I don't see that they help her. Anyhow they won't help me.”
So Margaret went to the best shops and got everything very simple and
very good. She bought some pictures very well indeed; there was a little
Sussex landscape, full of wind and sunshine, by Nicholson, for my study,
that hit my taste far better than if I had gone out to get some such
expression for myself.
“We will buy a picture just now and then,” she said, “sometimes--when we
see one.”
I would come back through the January mire or fog from Vincent Square to
the door of 79, and reach it at last with a quite childish appreciation
of the fact that its solid Georgian proportions and its fine brass
furnishings belonged to MY home; I would use my latchkey and discover
Margaret in the warm-lit, spacious hall with a partially opened
packing-case, fatigued but happy, or go up to have tea with her out
of the right tea things, “come at last,” or be told to notice what was
fresh there. It wasn't simply that I had never had a house before, but
I had really never been, except in the most transitory way, in any house
that was nearly so delightful as mine promised to be. Everything was
fresh and bright, and softly and harmoniously toned. Downstairs we had
a green dining-room with gleaming silver, dark oak, and English
colour-prints; above was a large drawing-room that could be made still
larger by throwing open folding doors, and it was all carefully done in
greys and blues, for the most part with real Sheraton supplemented by
Sheraton so skilfully imitated by an expert Margaret had discovered as
to be indistinguishable except to a minute scrutiny. And for me, above
this and next to my bedroom, there was a roomy study, with specially
thick stair-carpet outside and thick carpets in the bedroom overhead and
a big old desk for me to sit at and work between fire and window, and
another desk specially made for me by that expert if I chose to
stand and write, and open bookshelves and bookcases and every sort of
convenient fitting. There were electric heaters beside the open fire,
and everything was put for me to make tea at any time--electric kettle,
infuser, biscuits and fresh butter, so that I could get up and work at
any hour of the day or night. I could do no work in this apartment for
a long time, I was so interested in the perfection of its arrangements.
And when I brought in my books and papers from Vincent Square, Margaret
seized upon all the really shabby volumes and had them re-bound in a
fine official-looking leather.
I can remember sitting down at that desk and looking round me and
feeling with a queer effect of surprise that after all even a place
in the Cabinet, though infinitely remote, was nevertheless in the same
large world with these fine and quietly expensive things.
On the same floor Margaret had a “den,” a very neat and pretty den with
good colour-prints of Botticellis and Carpaccios, and there was a third
apartment for sectarial purposes should the necessity for them arise,
with a severe-looking desk equipped with patent files. And Margaret
would come flitting into the room to me, or appear noiselessly
standing, a tall gracefully drooping form, in the wide open doorway. “Is
everything right, dear?” she would ask.
“Come in,” I would say, “I'm sorting out papers.”
She would come to the hearthrug.
“I mustn't disturb you,” she would remark.
“I'm not busy yet.”
“Things are getting into order. Then we must make out a time-table as
the Baileys do, and BEGIN!”
Altiora came in to see us once or twice, and a number of serious
young wives known to Altiora called and were shown over the house, and
discussed its arrangements with Margaret. They were all tremendously
keen on efficient arrangements.
“A little pretty,” said Altiora, with the faintest disapproval,
“still--”
It was clear she thought we should grow out of that. From the day of our
return we found other people's houses open to us and eager for us. We
went out of London for week-ends and dined out, and began discussing
our projects for reciprocating these hospitalities. As a single man
unattached, I had had a wide and miscellaneous social range, but now
I found myself falling into place in a set. For a time I acquiesced
in this. I went very little to my clubs, the Climax and the National
Liberal, and participated in no bachelor dinners at all. For a time,
too, I dropped out of the garrulous literary and journalistic circles I
had frequented. I put up for the Reform, not so much for the use of the
club as a sign of serious and substantial political standing. I didn't
go up to Cambridge, I remember, for nearly a year, so occupied was I
with my new adjustments.
The people we found ourselves among at this time were people, to put
it roughly, of the Parliamentary candidate class, or people already
actually placed in the political world. They ranged between very
considerable wealth and such a hard, bare independence as old Willersley
and the sister who kept house for him possessed. There were quite
a number of young couples like ourselves, a little younger and more
artless, or a little older and more established. Among the younger men
I had a sort of distinction because of my Cambridge reputation and my
writing, and because, unlike them, I was an adventurer and had won and
married my way into their circles instead of being naturally there. They
couldn't quite reckon upon what I should do; they felt I had reserves of
experience and incalculable traditions. Close to us were the Cramptons,
Willie Crampton, who has since been Postmaster-General, rich and
very important in Rockshire, and his younger brother Edward, who has
specialised in history and become one of those unimaginative men of
letters who are the glory of latter-day England. Then there was Lewis,
further towards Kensington, where his cousins the Solomons and the
Hartsteins lived, a brilliant representative of his race, able,
industrious and invariably uninspired, with a wife a little in revolt
against the racial tradition of feminine servitude and inclined to the
suffragette point of view, and Bunting Harblow, an old blue, and with an
erratic disposition well under the control of the able little cousin he
had married. I had known all these men, but now (with Altiora floating
angelically in benediction) they opened their hearts to me and took
me into their order. They were all like myself, prospective Liberal
candidates, with a feeling that the period of wandering in the
wilderness of opposition was drawing near its close. They were all
tremendously keen upon social and political service, and all greatly
under the sway of the ideal of a simple, strenuous life, a life finding
its satisfactions in political achievements and distinctions. The young
wives were as keen about it as the young husbands, Margaret most of
all, and I--whatever elements in me didn't march with the attitudes and
habits of this set were very much in the background during that time.
We would give little dinners and have evening gatherings at which
everything was very simple and very good, with a slight but perceptible
austerity, and there was more good fruit and flowers and less perhaps in
the way of savouries, patties and entrees than was customary. Sherry we
banished, and Marsala and liqueurs, and there was always good home-made
lemonade available. No men waited, but very expert parlourmaids. Our
meat was usually Welsh mutton--I don't know why, unless that mountains
have ever been the last refuge of the severer virtues. And we talked
politics and books and ideas and Bernard Shaw (who was a department by
himself and supposed in those days to be ethically sound at bottom),
and mingled with the intellectuals--I myself was, as it were, a promoted
intellectual.
The Cramptons had a tendency to read good things aloud on their less
frequented receptions, but I have never been able to participate
submissively in this hyper-digestion of written matter, and generally
managed to provoke a disruptive debate. We were all very earnest to make
the most of ourselves and to be and do, and I wonder still at times,
with an unassuaged perplexity, how it is that in that phase of utmost
earnestness I have always seemed to myself to be most remote from
reality.
2
I look back now across the detaching intervention of sixteen crowded
years, critically and I fancy almost impartially, to those beginnings
of my married life. I try to recall something near to their proper order
the developing phases of relationship. I am struck most of all by the
immense unpremeditated, generous-spirited insincerities upon which
Margaret and I were building.
It seems to me that here I have to tell perhaps the commonest experience
of all among married educated people, the deliberate, shy, complex
effort to fill the yawning gaps in temperament as they appear, the
sustained, failing attempt to bridge abysses, level barriers, evade
violent pressures. I have come these latter years of my life to believe
that it is possible for a man and woman to be absolutely real with one
another, to stand naked souled to each other, unashamed and unafraid,
because of the natural all-glorifying love between them. It is possible
to love and be loved untroubling, as a bird flies through the air. But
it is a rare and intricate chance that brings two people within sight of
that essential union, and for the majority marriage must adjust itself
on other terms. Most coupled people never really look at one another.
They look a little away to preconceived ideas. And each from the first
days of love-making HIDES from the other, is afraid of disappointing,
afraid of offending, afraid of discoveries in either sense. They build
not solidly upon the rock of truth, but upon arches and pillars and
queer provisional supports that are needed to make a common foundation,
and below in the imprisoned darknesses, below the fine fabric they
sustain together begins for each of them a cavernous hidden life. Down
there things may be prowling that scarce ever peep out to consciousness
except in the grey half-light of sleepless nights, passions that flash
out for an instant in an angry glance and are seen no more, starved
victims and beautiful dreams bricked up to die. For the most of us there
is no jail delivery of those inner depths, and the life above goes on to
its honourable end.
I have told how I loved Margaret and how I came to marry her. Perhaps
already unintentionally I have indicated the quality of the injustice
our marriage did us both. There was no kindred between us and no
understanding. We were drawn to one another by the unlikeness of our
quality, by the things we misunderstood in each other. I know a score of
couples who have married in that fashion.
Modern conditions and modern ideas, and in particular the intenser and
subtler perceptions of modern life, press more and more heavily upon a
marriage tie whose fashion comes from an earlier and less discriminating
time. When the wife was her husband's subordinate, meeting him simply
and uncritically for simple ends, when marriage was a purely domestic
relationship, leaving thought and the vivid things of life
almost entirely to the unencumbered man, mental and temperamental
incompatibilities mattered comparatively little. But now the wife,
and particularly the loving childless wife, unpremeditatedly makes a
relentless demand for a complete association, and the husband exacts
unthought of delicacies of understanding and co-operation. These are
stupendous demands. People not only think more fully and elaborately
about life than they ever did before, but marriage obliges us to make
that ever more accidented progress a three-legged race of carelessly
assorted couples....
Our very mental texture was different. I was rough-minded, to use the
phrase of William James, primary and intuitive and illogical; she was
tender-minded, logical, refined and secondary. She was loyal to
pledge and persons, sentimental and faithful; I am loyal to ideas
and instincts, emotional and scheming. My imagination moves in broad
gestures; her's was delicate with a real dread of extravagance. My
quality is sensuous and ruled by warm impulses; hers was discriminating
and essentially inhibitory. I like the facts of the case and to mention
everything; I like naked bodies and the jolly smells of things. She
abounded in reservations, in circumlocutions and evasions, in keenly
appreciated secondary points. Perhaps the reader knows that Tintoretto
in the National Gallery, the Origin of the Milky Way. It is an admirable
test of temperamental quality. In spite of my early training I have
come to regard that picture as altogether delightful; to Margaret it
has always been “needlessly offensive.” In that you have our fundamental
breach. She had a habit, by no means rare, of damning what she did not
like or find sympathetic in me on the score that it was not my “true
self,” and she did not so much accept the universe as select from it and
do her best to ignore the rest. And also I had far more initiative than
had she. This is no catalogue of rights and wrongs, or superiorities
and inferiorities; it is a catalogue of differences between two people
linked in a relationship that constantly becomes more intolerant of
differences.
This is how we stood to each other, and none of it was clear to either
of us at the outset. To begin with, I found myself reserving myself
from her, then slowly apprehending a jarring between our minds and
what seemed to me at first a queer little habit of misunderstanding in
her....
It did not hinder my being very fond of her....
Where our system of reservation became at once most usual and most
astounding was in our personal relations. It is not too much to say that
in that regard we never for a moment achieved sincerity with one another
during the first six years of our life together. It goes even deeper
than that, for in my effort to realise the ideal of my marriage I ceased
even to attempt to be sincere with myself. I would not admit my own
perceptions and interpretations. I tried to fit myself to her thinner
and finer determinations. There are people who will say with a note
of approval that I was learning to conquer myself. I record that much
without any note of approval....
For some years I never deceived Margaret about any concrete fact nor,
except for the silence about my earlier life that she had almost forced
upon me, did I hide any concrete fact that seemed to affect her, but
from the outset I was guilty of immense spiritual concealments, my very
marriage was based, I see now, on a spiritual subterfuge; I hid moods
from her, pretended feelings....
3
The interest and excitement of setting-up a house, of walking about
it from room to room and from floor to floor, or sitting at one's own
dinner table and watching one's wife control conversation with a pretty,
timid resolution, of taking a place among the secure and free people of
our world, passed almost insensibly into the interest and excitement
of my Parliamentary candidature for the Kinghamstead Division, that
shapeless chunk of agricultural midland between the Great Western and
the North Western railways. I was going to “take hold” at last, the
Kinghamstead Division was my appointed handle. I was to find my place in
the rather indistinctly sketched constructions that were implicit in the
minds of all our circle. The precise place I had to fill and the precise
functions I had to discharge were not as yet very clear, but all that,
we felt sure, would become plain as things developed.
A few brief months of vague activities of “nursing” gave place to
the excitements of the contest that followed the return of Mr.
Camphell-Bannerman to power in 1905. So far as the Kinghamstead Division
was concerned it was a depressed and tepid battle. I went about the
constituency making three speeches that were soon threadbare, and an
odd little collection of people worked for me; two solicitors, a cheap
photographer, a democratic parson, a number of dissenting ministers, the
Mayor of Kinghamstead, a Mrs. Bulger, the widow of an old Chartist who
had grown rich through electric traction patents, Sir Roderick Newton,
a Jew who had bought Calersham Castle, and old Sir Graham Rivers, that
sturdy old soldier, were among my chief supporters. We had headquarters
in each town and village, mostly there were empty shops we leased
temporarily, and there at least a sort of fuss and a coming and going
were maintained. The rest of the population stared in a state of
suspended judgment as we went about the business. The country was
supposed to be in a state of intellectual conflict and deliberate
decision, in history it will no doubt figure as a momentous conflict.
Yet except for an occasional flare of bill-sticking or a bill in a
window or a placard-plastered motor-car or an argumentative group
of people outside a public-house or a sluggish movement towards the
schoolroom or village hall, there was scarcely a sign that a great
empire was revising its destinies. Now and then one saw a canvasser on
a doorstep. For the most part people went about their business with an
entirely irresponsible confidence in the stability of the universe. At
times one felt a little absurd with one's flutter of colours and one's
air of saving the country.
My opponent was a quite undistinguished Major-General who relied upon
his advocacy of Protection, and was particularly anxious we should avoid
“personalities” and fight the constituency in a gentlemanly spirit. He
was always writing me notes, apologising for excesses on the part of his
supporters, or pointing out the undesirability of some course taken by
mine.
My speeches had been planned upon broad lines, but they lost touch with
these as the polling approached. To begin with I made a real attempt
to put what was in my mind before the people I was to supply with
a political voice. I spoke of the greatness of our empire and its
destinies, of the splendid projects and possibilities of life and order
that lay before the world, of all that a resolute and constructive
effort might do at the present time. “We are building a state,” I said,
“secure and splendid, we are in the dawn of the great age of mankind.”
Sometimes that would get a solitary “'Ear! 'ear!” Then having created,
as I imagined, a fine atmosphere, I turned upon the history of the last
Conservative administration and brought it into contrast with the wide
occasions of the age; discussed its failure to control the grasping
financiers in South Africa, its failure to release public education from
sectarian squabbles, its misconduct of the Boer War, its waste of the
world's resources....
It soon became manifest that my opening and my general spaciousness of
method bored my audiences a good deal. The richer and wider my phrases
the thinner sounded my voice in these non-resonating gatherings. Even
the platform supporters grew restive unconsciously, and stirred and
coughed. They did not recognise themselves as mankind. Building an
empire, preparing a fresh stage in the history of humanity, had no
appeal for them. They were mostly everyday, toiling people, full of
small personal solicitudes, and they came to my meetings, I think, very
largely as a relaxation. This stuff was not relaxing. They did not think
politics was a great constructive process, they thought it was a kind
of dog-fight. They wanted fun, they wanted spice, they wanted hits,
they wanted also a chance to say “'Ear', 'ear!” in an intelligent and
honourable manner and clap their hands and drum with their feet. The
great constructive process in history gives so little scope for clapping
and drumming and saying “'Ear, 'ear!” One might as well think of
hounding on the solar system.
So after one or two attempts to lift my audiences to the level of the
issues involved, I began to adapt myself to them. I cut down my review
of our imperial outlook and destinies more and more, and
developed a series of hits and anecdotes and--what shall I call
them?--“crudifications” of the issue. My helper's congratulated me on
the rapid improvement of my platform style. I ceased to speak of the
late Prime Minister with the respect I bore him, and began to fall in
with the popular caricature of him as an artful rabbit-witted person
intent only on keeping his leadership, in spite of the vigorous attempts
of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain to oust him therefrom. I ceased to qualify my
statement that Protection would make food dearer for the agricultural
labourer. I began to speak of Mr. Alfred Lyttelton as an influence at
once insane and diabolical, as a man inspired by a passionate desire
to substitute manacled but still criminal Chinese for honest British
labourers throughout the world. And when it came to the mention of our
own kindly leader, of Mr. John Burns or any one else of any prominence
at all on our side I fell more and more into the intonation of one who
mentions the high gods. And I had my reward in brighter meetings and
readier and readier applause.
One goes on from phase to phase in these things.
“After all,” I told myself, “if one wants to get to Westminster one must
follow the road that leads there,” but I found the road nevertheless
rather unexpectedly distasteful. “When one gets there,” I said, “then it
is one begins.”
But I would lie awake at nights with that sore throat and headache and
fatigue which come from speaking in ill-ventilated rooms, and wondering
how far it was possible to educate a whole people to great political
ideals. Why should political work always rot down to personalities and
personal appeals in this way? Life is, I suppose, to begin with and
end with a matter of personalities, from personalities all our broader
interests arise and to personalities they return. All our social and
political effort, all of it, is like trying to make a crowd of people
fall into formation. The broader lines appear, but then come a rush
and excitement and irrelevancy, and forthwith the incipient order has
vanished and the marshals must begin the work over again!
My memory of all that time is essentially confusion. There was a
frightful lot of tiresome locomotion in it; for the Kinghamstead
Division is extensive, abounding in ill-graded and badly metalled
cross-roads and vicious little hills, and singularly unpleasing to
the eye in a muddy winter. It is sufficiently near to London to
have undergone the same process of ill-regulated expansion that made
Bromstead the place it is. Several of its overgrown villages have
developed strings of factories and sidings along the railway lines, and
there is an abundance of petty villas. There seemed to be no place
at which one could take hold of more than this or that element of the
population. Now we met in a meeting-house, now in a Masonic Hall or
Drill Hall; I also did a certain amount of open-air speaking in the
dinner hour outside gas-works and groups of factories. Some special sort
of people was, as it were, secreted in response to each special appeal.
One said things carefully adjusted to the distinctive limitations of
each gathering. Jokes of an incredible silliness and shallowness drifted
about us. Our advisers made us declare that if we were elected we would
live in the district, and one hasty agent had bills printed, “If Mr.
Remington is elected he will live here.” The enemy obtained a number
of these bills and stuck them on outhouses, pigstyes, dog-kennels; you
cannot imagine how irksome the repetition of that jest became. The vast
drifting indifference in between my meetings impressed me more and more.
I realised the vagueness of my own plans as I had never done before
I brought them to the test of this experience. I was perplexed by the
riddle of just how far I was, in any sense of the word, taking hold at
all, how far I wasn't myself flowing into an accepted groove.
Margaret was troubled by no such doubts. She was clear I had to go into
Parliament on the side of Liberalism and the light, as against the late
Government and darkness. Essential to the memory of my first contest, is
the memory of her clear bright face, very resolute and grave, helping me
consciously, steadfastly, with all her strength. Her quiet confidence,
while I was so dissatisfied, worked curiously towards the alienation
of my sympathies. I felt she had no business to be so sure of me. I had
moments of vivid resentment at being thus marched towards Parliament.
I seemed now always to be discovering alien forces of character in
her. Her way of taking life diverged from me more and more. She sounded
amazing, independent notes. She bought some particularly costly furs for
the campaign that roused enthusiasm whenever she appeared. She also made
me a birthday present in November of a heavily fur-trimmed coat and this
she would make me remove as I went on to the platform, and hold over her
arm until I was ready to resume it. It was fearfully heavy for her and
she liked it to be heavy for her. That act of servitude was in essence
a towering self-assertion. I would glance sideways while some chairman
floundered through his introduction and see the clear blue eye with
which she regarded the audience, which existed so far as she was
concerned merely to return me to Parliament. It was a friendly eye,
provided they were not silly or troublesome. But it kindled a little at
the hint of a hostile question. After we had come so far and taken so
much trouble!
She constituted herself the dragoman of our political travels. In hotels
she was serenely resolute for the quietest and the best, she rejected
all their proposals for meals and substituted a severely nourishing
dietary of her own, and even in private houses she astonished me by her
tranquil insistence upon special comforts and sustenance. I can see her
face now as it would confront a hostess, a little intent, but sweetly
resolute and assured.
Since our marriage she had read a number of political memoirs, and she
had been particularly impressed by the career of Mrs. Gladstone. I don't
think it occurred to her to compare and contrast my quality with that
of Mrs. Gladstone's husband. I suspect her of a deliberate intention
of achieving parallel results by parallel methods. I was to be
Gladstonised. Gladstone it appeared used to lubricate his speeches with
a mixture--if my memory serves me right--of egg beaten up in sherry,
and Margaret was very anxious I should take a leaf from that celebrated
book. She wanted, I know, to hold the glass in her hand while I was
speaking.
But here I was firm. “No,” I said, very decisively, “simply I won't
stand that. It's a matter of conscience. I shouldn't feel--democratic.
I'll take my chance of the common water in the carafe on the chairman's
table.”
“I DO wish you wouldn't,” she said, distressed.
It was absurd to feel irritated; it was so admirable of her, a little
childish, infinitely womanly and devoted and fine--and I see now how
pathetic. But I could not afford to succumb to her. I wanted to follow
my own leading, to see things clearly, and this reassuring pose of a
high destiny, of an almost terribly efficient pursuit of a fixed end
when as a matter of fact I had a very doubtful end and an aim as yet by
no means fixed, was all too seductive for dalliance....
4
And into all these things with the manner of a trifling and casual
incident comes the figure of Isabel Rivers. My first impressions of
her were of a rather ugly and ungainly, extraordinarily interesting
schoolgirl with a beautiful quick flush under her warm brown skin, who
said and did amusing and surprising things. When first I saw her she
was riding a very old bicycle downhill with her feet on the fork of the
frame--it seemed to me to the public danger, but afterwards I came to
understand the quality of her nerve better--and on the third occasion
she was for her own private satisfaction climbing a tree. On the
intervening occasion we had what seems now to have been a long sustained
conversation about the political situation and the books and papers I
had written.