What a delightful mixture of child and grave woman she was at that time,
and how little I reckoned on the part she would play in my life! And
since she has played that part, how impossible it is to tell now of
those early days! Since I wrote that opening paragraph to this section
my idle pen has been, as it were, playing by itself and sketching faces
on the blotting pad--one impish wizened visage is oddly like little
Bailey--and I have been thinking cheek on fist amidst a limitless wealth
of memories. She sits below me on the low wall under the olive trees
with our little child in her arms. She is now the central fact in my
life. It still seems a little incredible that that should be so. She has
destroyed me as a politician, brought me to this belated rebeginning of
life. When I sit down and try to make her a girl again, I feel like the
Arabian fisherman who tried to put the genius back into the pot from
which it had spread gigantic across the skies....
I have a very clear vision of her rush downhill past our
labouring ascendant car--my colours fluttered from handle-bar and
shoulder-knot--and her waving hand and the sharp note of her voice. She
cried out something, I don't know what, some greeting.
“What a pretty girl!” said Margaret.
Parvill, the cheap photographer, that industrious organiser for whom
by way of repayment I got those magic letters, that knighthood of the
underlings, “J. P.” was in the car with us and explained her to us. “One
of the best workers you have,” he said....
And then after a toilsome troubled morning we came, rather cross from
the strain of sustained amiability, to Sir Graham Rivers' house. It
seemed all softness and quiet--I recall dead white panelling and
oval mirrors horizontally set and a marble fireplace between white
marble-blind Homer and marble-blind Virgil, very grave and fine--and how
Isabel came in to lunch in a shapeless thing like a blue smock that
made her bright quick-changing face seem yellow under her cloud of black
hair. Her step-sister was there, Miss Gamer, to whom the house was
to descend, a well-dressed lady of thirty, amiably disavowing
responsibility for Isabel in every phrase and gesture. And there was a
very pleasant doctor, an Oxford man, who seemed on excellent terms with
every one. It was manifest that he was in the habit of sparring with the
girl, but on this occasion she wasn't sparring and refused to be teased
into a display in spite of the taunts of either him or her father. She
was, they discovered with rising eyebrows, shy. It seemed an opportunity
too rare for them to miss. They proclaimed her enthusiasm for me in a
way that brought a flush to her cheek and a look into her eye between
appeal and defiance. They declared she had read my books, which I
thought at the time was exaggeration, their dry political quality was so
distinctly not what one was accustomed to regard as schoolgirl reading.
Miss Gamer protested to protect her, “When once in a blue moon Isabel is
well-behaved....!”
Except for these attacks I do not remember much of the conversation
at table; it was, I know, discursive and concerned with the sort of
topographical and social and electioneering fact natural to such a
visit. Old Rivers struck me as a delightful person, modestly unconscious
of his doubly-earned V. C. and the plucky defence of Kardin-Bergat that
won his baronetcy. He was that excellent type, the soldier radical, and
we began that day a friendship that was only ended by his death in the
hunting-field three years later. He interested Margaret into a disregard
of my plate and the fact that I had secured the illegal indulgence of
Moselle. After lunch we went for coffee into another low room, this
time brown panelled and looking through French windows on a red-walled
garden, graceful even in its winter desolation. And there the
conversation suddenly picked up and became good. It had fallen to a
pause, and the doctor, with an air of definitely throwing off a mask
and wrecking an established tranquillity, remarked: “Very probably you
Liberals will come in, though I'm not sure you'll come in so mightily as
you think, but what you do when you do come in passes my comprehension.”
“There's good work sometimes,” said Sir Graham, “in undoing.”
“You can't govern a great empire by amending and repealing the Acts of
your predecessors,” said the doctor.
There came that kind of pause that happens when a subject is broached
too big and difficult for the gathering. Margaret's blue eyes regarded
the speaker with quiet disapproval for a moment, and then came to me in
the not too confident hope that I would snub him out of existence with
some prompt rhetorical stroke. A voice spoke out of the big armchair.
“We'll do things,” said Isabel.
The doctor's eye lit with the joy of the fisherman who strikes his fish
at last. “What will you do?” he asked her.
“Every one knows we're a mixed lot,” said Isabel.
“Poor old chaps like me!” interjected the general.
“But that's not a programme,” said the doctor.
“But Mr. Remington has published a programme,” said Isabel.
The doctor cocked half an eye at me.
“In some review,” the girl went on. “After all, we're not going to
elect the whole Liberal party in the Kinghamstead Division. I'm a
Remington-ite!”
“But the programme,” said the doctor, “the programme--”
“In front of Mr. Remington!”
“Scandal always comes home at last,” said the doctor. “Let him hear the
worst.”
“I'd like to hear,” I said. “Electioneering shatters convictions and
enfeebles the mind.”
“Not mine,” said Isabel stoutly. “I mean--Well, anyhow I take it Mr.
Remington stands for constructing a civilised state out of this muddle.”
“THIS muddle,” protested the doctor with an appeal of the eye to the
beautiful long room and the ordered garden outside the bright clean
windows.
“Well, THAT muddle, if you like! There's a slum within a mile of us
already. The dust and blacks get worse and worse, Sissie?”
“They do,” agreed Miss Gamer.
“Mr. Remington stands for construction, order, education, discipline.”
“And you?” said the doctor.
“I'm a good Remington-ite.”
“Discipline!” said the doctor.
“Oh!” said Isabel. “At times one has to be--Napoleonic. They want to
libel me, Mr. Remington. A political worker can't always be in time for
meals, can she? At times one has to make--splendid cuts.”
Miss Gamer said something indistinctly.
“Order, education, discipline,” said Sir Graham. “Excellent things!
But I've a sort of memory--in my young days--we talked about something
called liberty.”
“Liberty under the law,” I said, with an unexpected approving murmur
from Margaret, and took up the defence. “The old Liberal definition of
liberty was a trifle uncritical. Privilege and legal restrictions are
not the only enemies of liberty. An uneducated, underbred, and underfed
propertyless man is a man who has lost the possibility of liberty.
There's no liberty worth a rap for him. A man who is swimming hopelessly
for life wants nothing but the liberty to get out of the water; he'll
give every other liberty for it--until he gets out.”
Sir Graham took me up and we fell into a discussion of the
changing qualities of Liberalism. It was a good give-and-take talk,
extraordinarily refreshing after the nonsense and crowding secondary
issues of the electioneering outside. We all contributed more or less
except Miss Gamer; Margaret followed with knitted brows and occasional
interjections. “People won't SEE that,” for example, and “It all seems
so plain to me.” The doctor showed himself clever but unsubstantial and
inconsistent. Isabel sat back with her black mop of hair buried deep in
the chair looking quickly from face to face. Her colour came and went
with her vivid intellectual excitement; occasionally she would dart
a word, usually a very apt word, like a lizard's tongue into the
discussion. I remember chiefly that a chance illustration betrayed that
she had read Bishop Burnet....
After that it was not surprising that Isabel should ask for a lift in
our car as far as the Lurky Committee Room, and that she should offer
me quite sound advice EN ROUTE upon the intellectual temperament of the
Lurky gasworkers.
On the third occasion that I saw Isabel she was, as I have said,
climbing a tree--and a very creditable tree--for her own private
satisfaction. It was a lapse from the high seriousness of politics, and
I perceived she felt that I might regard it as such and attach too much
importance to it. I had some difficulty in reassuring her. And it's odd
to note now--it has never occurred to me before--that from that day to
this I do not think I have ever reminded Isabel of that encounter.
And after that memory she seems to be flickering about always in the
election, an inextinguishable flame; now she flew by on her bicycle,
now she dashed into committee rooms, now she appeared on doorsteps in
animated conversation with dubious voters; I took every chance I could
to talk to her--I had never met anything like her before in the world,
and she interested me immensely--and before the polling day she and I
had become, in the frankest simplicity, fast friends....
That, I think, sets out very fairly the facts of our early relationship.
But it is hard to get it true, either in form or texture, because of
the bright, translucent, coloured, and refracting memories that come
between. One forgets not only the tint and quality of thoughts and
impressions through that intervening haze, one forgets them altogether.
I don't remember now that I ever thought in those days of passionate
love or the possibility of such love between us. I may have done so
again and again. But I doubt it very strongly. I don't think I ever
thought of such aspects. I had no more sense of any danger between us,
seeing the years and things that separated us, than I could have had if
she had been an intelligent bright-eyed bird. Isabel came into my
life as a new sort of thing; she didn't join on at all to my previous
experiences of womanhood. They were not, as I have laboured to explain,
either very wide or very penetrating experiences, on the whole,
“strangled dinginess” expresses them, but I do not believe they were
narrower or shallower than those of many other men of my class. I
thought of women as pretty things and beautiful things, pretty rather
than beautiful, attractive and at times disconcertingly attractive,
often bright and witty, but, because of the vast reservations that hid
them from me, wanting, subtly and inevitably wanting, in understanding.
My idealisation of Margaret had evaporated insensibly after our
marriage. The shrine I had made for her in my private thoughts stood
at last undisguisedly empty. But Isabel did not for a moment admit of
either idealisation or interested contempt. She opened a new sphere
of womanhood to me. With her steady amber-brown eyes, her unaffected
interest in impersonal things, her upstanding waistless blue body, her
energy, decision and courage, she seemed rather some new and infinitely
finer form of boyhood than a feminine creature, as I had come to measure
femininity. She was my perfect friend. Could I have foreseen, had my
world been more wisely planned, to this day we might have been such
friends.
She seemed at that time unconscious of sex, though she has told me since
how full she was of protesting curiosities and restrained emotions. She
spoke, as indeed she has always spoken, simply, clearly, and vividly;
schoolgirl slang mingled with words that marked ample voracious reading,
and she moved quickly with the free directness of some graceful young
animal. She took many of the easy freedoms a man or a sister might have
done with me. She would touch my arm, lay a hand on my shoulder as I
sat, adjust the lapel of a breast-pocket as she talked to me. She says
now she loved me always from the beginning. I doubt if there was a
suspicion of that in her mind those days. I used to find her regarding
me with the clearest, steadiest gaze in the world, exactly like the gaze
of some nice healthy innocent animal in a forest, interested, inquiring,
speculative, but singularly untroubled....
5
Polling day came after a last hoarse and dingy crescendo. The excitement
was not of the sort that makes one forget one is tired out. The waiting
for the end of the count has left a long blank mark on my memory, and
then everyone was shaking my hand and repeating: “Nine hundred and
seventy-six.”
My success had been a foregone conclusion since the afternoon, but
we all behaved as though we had not been anticipating this result for
hours, as though any other figures but nine hundred and seventy-six
would have meant something entirely different. “Nine hundred and
seventy-six!” said Margaret. “They didn't expect three hundred.”
“Nine hundred and seventy-six,” said a little short man with a paper.
“It means a big turnover. Two dozen short of a thousand, you know.”
A tremendous hullaboo began outside, and a lot of fresh people came into
the room.
Isabel, flushed but not out of breath, Heaven knows where she had sprung
from at that time of night! was running her hand down my sleeve almost
caressingly, with the innocent bold affection of a girl. “Got you in!”
she said. “It's been no end of a lark.”
“And now,” said I, “I must go and be constructive.”
“Now you must go and be constructive,” she said.
“You've got to live here,” she added.
“By Jove! yes,” I said. “We'll have to house hunt.”
“I shall read all your speeches.”
She hesitated.
“I wish I was you,” she said, and said it as though it was not exactly
the thing she was meaning to say.
“They want you to speak,” said Margaret, with something unsaid in her
face.
“You must come out with me,” I answered, putting my arm through hers,
and felt someone urging me to the French windows that gave on the
balcony.
“If you think--” she said, yielding gladly
“Oh, RATHER!” said I.
The Mayor of Kinghamstead, a managing little man with no great belief in
my oratorical powers, was sticking his face up to mine.
“It's all over,” he said, “and you've won. Say all the nice things you
can and say them plainly.”
I turned and handed Margaret out through the window and stood looking
over the Market-place, which was more than half filled with swaying
people. The crowd set up a roar of approval at the sight of us, tempered
by a little booing. Down in one corner of the square a fight was going
on for a flag, a fight that even the prospect of a speech could not
instantly check. “Speech!” cried voices, “Speech!” and then a brief
“boo-oo-oo” that was drowned in a cascade of shouts and cheers. The
conflict round the flag culminated in the smashing of a pane of glass in
the chemist's window and instantly sank to peace.
“Gentlemen voters of the Kinghamstead Division,” I began.
“Votes for Women!” yelled a voice, amidst laughter--the first time I
remember hearing that memorable war-cry.
“Three cheers for Mrs. Remington!”
“Mrs. Remington asks me to thank you,” I said, amidst further uproar and
reiterated cries of “Speech!”
Then silence came with a startling swiftness.
Isabel was still in my mind, I suppose. “I shall go to Westminster,” I
began. I sought for some compelling phrase and could not find one.
“To do my share,” I went on, “in building up a great and splendid
civilisation.”
I paused, and there was a weak gust of cheering, and then a renewal of
booing.
“This election,” I said, “has been the end and the beginning of much.
New ideas are abroad--”
“Chinese labour,” yelled a voice, and across the square swept a wildfire
of booting and bawling.
It is one of the few occasions when I quite lost my hold on a speech. I
glanced sideways and saw the Mayor of Kinghamstead speaking behind his
hand to Parvill. By a happy chance Parvill caught my eye.
“What do they want?” I asked.
“Eh?”
“What do they want?”
“Say something about general fairness--the other side,” prompted
Parvill, flattered but a little surprised by my appeal. I pulled myself
hastily into a more popular strain with a gross eulogy of my opponent's
good taste.
“Chinese labour!” cried the voice again.
“You've given that notice to quit,” I answered.
The Market-place roared delight, but whether that delight expressed
hostility to Chinamen or hostility to their practical enslavement no
student of the General Election of 1906 has ever been able to determine.
Certainly one of the most effective posters on our side displayed a
hideous yellow face, just that and nothing more. There was not even a
legend to it. How it impressed the electorate we did not know, but that
it impressed the electorate profoundly there can be no disputing.
6
Kinghamstead was one of the earliest constituencies fought, and we came
back--it must have been Saturday--triumphant but very tired, to our
house in Radnor Square. In the train we read the first intimations that
the victory of our party was likely to be a sweeping one.
Then came a period when one was going about receiving and giving
congratulations and watching the other men arrive, very like a boy who
has returned to school with the first batch after the holidays. The
London world reeked with the General Election; it had invaded the
nurseries. All the children of one's friends had got big maps of England
cut up into squares to represent constituencies and were busy sticking
gummed blue labels over the conquered red of Unionism that had hitherto
submerged the country. And there were also orange labels, if I remember
rightly, to represent the new Labour party, and green for the Irish. I
engaged myself to speak at one or two London meetings, and lunched
at the Reform, which was fairly tepid, and dined and spent one or two
tumultuous evenings at the National Liberal Club, which was in active
eruption. The National Liberal became feverishly congested towards
midnight as the results of the counting came dropping in. A big
green-baize screen had been fixed up at one end of the large
smoking-room with the names of the constituencies that were voting that
day, and directly the figures came to hand, up they went, amidst cheers
that at last lost their energy through sheer repetition, whenever there
was record of a Liberal gain. I don't remember what happened when there
was a Liberal loss; I don't think that any were announced while I was
there.
How packed and noisy the place was, and what a reek of tobacco and
whisky fumes we made! Everybody was excited and talking, making waves of
harsh confused sound that beat upon one's ears, and every now and then
hoarse voices would shout for someone to speak. Our little set was much
in evidence. Both the Cramptons were in, Lewis, Bunting Harblow. We gave
brief addresses attuned to this excitement and the late hour, amidst
much enthusiasm.
“Now we can DO things!” I said amidst a rapture of applause. Men I did
not know from Adam held up glasses and nodded to me in solemn fuddled
approval as I came down past them into the crowd again.
Men were betting whether the Unionists would lose more or less than two
hundred seats.
“I wonder just what we shall do with it all,” I heard one sceptic
speculating....
After these orgies I would get home very tired and excited, and find it
difficult to get to sleep. I would lie and speculate about what it was
we WERE going to do. One hadn't anticipated quite such a tremendous
accession to power for one's party. Liberalism was swirling in like a
flood....
I found the next few weeks very unsatisfactory and distressing. I don't
clearly remember what it was I had expected; I suppose the fuss and
strain of the General Election had built up a feeling that my return
would in some way put power into my hands, and instead I found myself
a mere undistinguished unit in a vast but rather vague majority. There
were moments when I felt very distinctly that a majority could be
too big a crowd altogether. I had all my work still before me, I had
achieved nothing as yet but opportunity, and a very crowded opportunity
it was at that. Everyone about me was chatting Parliament and
appointments; one breathed distracting and irritating speculations as
to what would be done and who would be asked to do it. I was chiefly
impressed by what was unlikely to be done and by the absence of any
general plan of legislation to hold us all together. I found the talk
about Parliamentary procedure and etiquette particularly trying. We
dined with the elder Cramptons one evening, and old Sir Edward was
lengthily sage about what the House liked, what it didn't like, what
made a good impression and what a bad one. “A man shouldn't speak more
than twice in his first session, and not at first on too contentious a
topic,” said Sir Edward. “No.”
“Very much depends on manner. The House hates a lecturer. There's a sort
of airy earnestness--”
He waved his cigar to eke out his words.
“Little peculiarities of costume count for a great deal. I could name
one man who spent three years living down a pair of spatterdashers. On
the other hand--a thing like that--if it catches the eye of the PUNCH
man, for example, may be your making.”
He went off into a lengthy speculation of why the House had come to like
an originally unpopular Irishman named Biggar....
The opening of Parliament gave me some peculiar moods. I began to feel
more and more like a branded sheep. We were sworn in in batches,
dozens and scores of fresh men, trying not to look too fresh under the
inspection of policemen and messengers, all of us carrying new silk hats
and wearing magisterial coats. It is one of my vivid memories from this
period, the sudden outbreak of silk hats in the smoking-room of the
National Liberal Club. At first I thought there must have been a
funeral. Familiar faces that one had grown to know under soft felt hats,
under bowlers, under liberal-minded wide brims, and above artistic ties
and tweed jackets, suddenly met one, staring with the stern gaze of
self-consciousness, from under silk hats of incredible glossiness. There
was a disposition to wear the hat much too forward, I thought, for a
good Parliamentary style.
There was much play with the hats all through; a tremendous competition
to get in first and put hats on coveted seats. A memory hangs about me
of the House in the early afternoon, an inhumane desolation inhabited
almost entirely by silk hats. The current use of cards to secure seats
came later. There were yards and yards of empty green benches with hats
and hats and hats distributed along them, resolute-looking top hats, lax
top hats with a kind of shadowy grin under them, sensible top bats brim
upward, and one scandalous incontinent that had rolled from the front
Opposition bench right to the middle of the floor. A headless hat is
surely the most soulless thing in the world, far worse even than a
skull....
At last, in a leisurely muddled manner we got to the Address; and
I found myself packed in a dense elbowing crowd to the right of the
Speaker's chair; while the attenuated Opposition, nearly leaderless
after the massacre, tilted its brim to its nose and sprawled at its ease
amidst its empty benches.
There was a tremendous hullaboo about something, and I craned to see
over the shoulder of the man in front. “Order, order, order!”
“What's it about?” I asked.
The man in front of me was clearly no better informed, and then I
gathered from a slightly contemptuous Scotchman beside me that it was
Chris Robinson had walked between the honourable member in possession
of the house and the Speaker. I caught a glimpse of him blushingly
whispering about his misadventure to a colleague. He was just that
same little figure I had once assisted to entertain at Cambridge, but
grey-haired now, and still it seemed with the same knitted muffler
he had discarded for a reckless half-hour while he talked to us in
Hatherleigh's rooms.
It dawned upon me that I wasn't particularly wanted in the House, and
that I should get all I needed of the opening speeches next day from the
TIMES.
I made my way out and was presently walking rather aimlessly through the
outer lobby.
I caught myself regarding the shadow that spread itself out before me,
multiplied itself in blue tints of various intensity, shuffled itself
like a pack of cards under the many lights, the square shoulders, the
silk hat, already worn with a parliamentary tilt backward; I found I was
surveying this statesmanlike outline with a weak approval. “A MEMBER!”
I felt the little cluster of people that were scattered about the lobby
must be saying.
“Good God!” I said in hot reaction, “what am I doing here?”
It was one of those moments infinitely trivial in themselves, that yet
are cardinal in a man's life. It came to me with extreme vividness that
it wasn't so much that I had got hold of something as that something
had got hold of me. I distinctly recall the rebound of my mind. Whatever
happened in this Parliament, I at least would attempt something. “By
God!” I said, “I won't be overwhelmed. I am here to do something, and do
something I will!”
But I felt that for the moment I could not remain in the House.
I went out by myself with my thoughts into the night. It was a chilling
night, and rare spots of rain were falling. I glanced over my shoulder
at the lit windows of the Lords. I walked, I remember, westward, and
presently came to the Grosvenar Embankment and followed it, watching the
glittering black rush of the river and the dark, dimly lit barges round
which the water swirled. Across the river was the hunched sky-line of
Doulton's potteries, and a kiln flared redly. Dimly luminous trams were
gliding amidst a dotted line of lamps, and two little trains crawled
into Waterloo station. Mysterious black figures came by me and were
suddenly changed to the commonplace at the touch of the nearer lamps. It
was a big confused world, I felt, for a man to lay his hands upon.
I remember I crossed Vauxhall Bridge and stood for a time watching the
huge black shapes in the darkness under the gas-works. A shoal of coal
barges lay indistinctly on the darkly shining mud and water below, and
a colossal crane was perpetually hauling up coal into mysterious
blacknesses above, and dropping the empty clutch back to the barges.
Just one or two minute black featureless figures of men toiled amidst
these monster shapes. They did not seem to be controlling them but only
moving about among them. These gas-works have a big chimney that belches
a lurid flame into the night, a livid shivering bluish flame, shot with
strange crimson streaks....
On the other side of Lambeth Bridge broad stairs go down to the lapping
water of the river; the lower steps are luminous under the lamps and
one treads unwarned into thick soft Thames mud. They seem to be purely
architectural steps, they lead nowhere, they have an air of absolute
indifference to mortal ends.
Those shapes and large inhuman places--for all of mankind that one
sees at night about Lambeth is minute and pitiful beside the industrial
monsters that snort and toil there--mix up inextricably with my memories
of my first days as a legislator. Black figures drift by me, heavy vans
clatter, a newspaper rough tears by on a motor bicycle, and presently,
on the Albert Embankment, every seat has its one or two outcasts huddled
together and slumbering.
“These things come, these things go,” a whispering voice urged upon me,
“as once those vast unmeaning Saurians whose bones encumber museums came
and went rejoicing noisily in fruitless lives.”...
Fruitless lives!--was that the truth of it all?...
Later I stood within sight of the Houses of Parliament in front of the
colonnades of St Thomas's Hospital. I leant on the parapet close by a
lamp-stand of twisted dolphins--and I prayed!
I remember the swirl of the tide upon the water, and how a string of
barges presently came swinging and bumping round as high-water turned
to ebb. That sudden change of position and my brief perplexity at it,
sticks like a paper pin through the substance of my thoughts. It was
then I was moved to prayer. I prayed that night that life might not
be in vain, that in particular I might not live in vain. I prayed for
strength and faith, that the monstrous blundering forces in life might
not overwhelm me, might not beat me back to futility and a meaningless
acquiescence in existent things. I knew myself for the weakling I was,
I knew that nevertheless it was set for me to make such order as I could
out of these disorders, and my task cowed me, gave me at the thought of
it a sense of yielding feebleness.
“Break me, O God,” I prayed at last, “disgrace me, torment me, destroy
me as you will, but save me from self-complacency and little interests
and little successes and the life that passes like the shadow of a
dream.”