So far as any average could be struck and so far as any backbone could
be located, it seemed to me that this silent, shy, replete, sub-angry,
middle-class sentimentalist was in his endless species and varieties and
dialects the backbone of our party. So far as I could be considered as
representing anything in the House, I pretended to sit for the elements
of HIM....
7
For a time I turned towards the Socialists. They at least had an air of
coherent intentions. At that time Socialism had come into politics again
after a period of depression and obscurity, with a tremendous ECLAT.
There was visibly a following of Socialist members to Chris Robinson;
mysteriously uncommunicative gentlemen in soft felt hats and short
coats and square-toed boots who replied to casual advances a little
surprisingly in rich North Country dialects. Members became aware of a
“seagreen incorruptible,” as Colonel Marlow put it to me, speaking on
the Address, a slender twisted figure supporting itself on a stick and
speaking with a fire that was altogether revolutionary. This was Philip
Snowden, the member for Blackburn. They had come in nearly forty
strong altogether, and with an air of presently meaning to come in much
stronger. They were only one aspect of what seemed at that time a big
national movement. Socialist societies, we gathered, were springing up
all over the country, and every one was inquiring about Socialism and
discussing Socialism. It had taken the Universities with particular
force, and any youngster with the slightest intellectual pretension was
either actively for or brilliantly against. For a time our Young Liberal
group was ostentatiously sympathetic....
When I think of the Socialists there comes a vivid memory of certain
evening gatherings at our house....
These gatherings had been organised by Margaret as the outcome of
a discussion at the Baileys'. Altiora had been very emphatic and
uncharitable upon the futility of the Socialist movement. It seemed that
even the leaders fought shy of dinner-parties.
“They never meet each other,” said Altiora, “much less people on the
other side. How can they begin to understand politics until they do
that?”
“Most of them have totally unpresentable wives,” said Altiora,
“totally!” and quoted instances, “and they WILL bring them. Or they
won't come! Some of the poor creatures have scarcely learnt their table
manners. They just make holes in the talk....”
I thought there was a great deal of truth beneath Altiora's outburst.
The presentation of the Socialist case seemed very greatly crippled
by the want of a common intimacy in its leaders; the want of intimacy
didn't at first appear to be more than an accident, and our talk led to
Margaret's attempt to get acquaintance and easy intercourse afoot among
them and between them and the Young Liberals of our group. She gave a
series of weekly dinners, planned, I think, a little too accurately upon
Altiora's model, and after each we had as catholic a reception as we
could contrive.
Our receptions were indeed, I should think, about as catholic as
receptions could be. Margaret found herself with a weekly houseful of
insoluble problems in intercourse. One did one's best, but one got a
nightmare feeling as the evening wore on.
It was one of the few unanimities of these parties that every one should
be a little odd in appearance, funny about the hair or the tie or the
shoes or more generally, and that bursts of violent aggression should
alternate with an attitude entirely defensive. A number of our guests
had an air of waiting for a clue that never came, and stood and sat
about silently, mildly amused but not a bit surprised that we did not
discover their distinctive Open-Sesames. There was a sprinkling of
manifest seers and prophetesses in shapeless garments, far too many, I
thought, for really easy social intercourse, and any conversation at any
moment was liable to become oracular. One was in a state of tension
from first to last; the most innocent remark seemed capable of exploding
resentment, and replies came out at the most unexpected angles. We Young
Liberals went about puzzled but polite to the gathering we had evoked.
The Young Liberals' tradition is on the whole wonderfully discreet,
superfluous steam is let out far away from home in the Balkans or
Africa, and the neat, stiff figures of the Cramptons, Bunting Harblow,
and Lewis, either in extremely well-cut morning coats indicative of the
House, or in what is sometimes written of as “faultless evening dress,”
stood about on those evenings, they and their very quietly and simply
and expensively dressed little wives, like a datum line amidst lakes and
mountains.
I didn't at first see the connection between systematic social
reorganisation and arbitrary novelties in dietary and costume, just as
I didn't realise why the most comprehensive constructive projects should
appear to be supported solely by odd and exceptional personalities.
On one of these evenings a little group of rather jolly-looking pretty
young people seated themselves for no particular reason in a large
circle on the floor of my study, and engaged, so far as I could judge,
in the game of Hunt the Meaning, the intellectual equivalent of Hunt the
Slipper. It must have been that same evening I came upon an unbleached
young gentleman before the oval mirror on the landing engaged in
removing the remains of an anchovy sandwich from his protruded
tongue--visible ends of cress having misled him into the belief that he
was dealing with doctrinally permissible food. It was not unusual to be
given hand-bills and printed matter by our guests, but there I had
the advantage over Lewis, who was too tactful to refuse the stuff, too
neatly dressed to pocket it, and had no writing-desk available upon
which he could relieve himself in a manner flattering to the giver. So
that his hands got fuller and fuller. A relentless, compact little woman
in what Margaret declared to be an extremely expensive black dress
has also printed herself on my memory; she had set her heart upon my
contributing to a weekly periodical in the lentil interest with which
she was associated, and I spent much time and care in evading her.
Mingling with the more hygienic types were a number of Anti-Puritan
Socialists, bulging with bias against temperance, and breaking out
against austere methods of living all over their faces. Their manner
was packed with heartiness. They were apt to choke the approaches to
the little buffet Margaret had set up downstairs, and there engage in
discussions of Determinism--it always seemed to be Determinism--which
became heartier and noisier, but never acrimonious even in the small
hours. It seemed impossible to settle about this Determinism of
theirs--ever. And there were worldly Socialists also. I particularly
recall a large, active, buoyant, lady-killing individual with an
eyeglass borne upon a broad black ribbon, who swam about us one evening.
He might have been a slightly frayed actor, in his large frock-coat,
his white waistcoat, and the sort of black and white check trousers that
twinkle. He had a high-pitched voice with aristocratic intonations, and
he seemed to be in a perpetual state of interrogation. “What are we
all he-a for?” he would ask only too audibly. “What are we doing he-a?
What's the connection?”
What WAS the connection?
We made a special effort with our last assembly in June, 1907. We tried
to get something like a representative collection of the parliamentary
leaders of Socialism, the various exponents of Socialist thought and a
number of Young Liberal thinkers into one room. Dorvil came, and Horatio
Bulch; Featherstonehaugh appeared for ten minutes and talked charmingly
to Margaret and then vanished again; there was Wilkins the novelist and
Toomer and Dr. Tumpany. Chris Robinson stood about for a time in a new
comforter, and Magdeberg and Will Pipes and five or six Labour members.
And on our side we had our particular little group, Bunting Harblow,
Crampton, Lewis, all looking as broad-minded and open to conviction as
they possibly could, and even occasionally talking out from their bushes
almost boldly. But the gathering as a whole refused either to mingle or
dispute, and as an experiment in intercourse the evening was a failure.
Unexpected dissociations appeared between Socialists one had supposed
friendly. I could not have imagined it was possible for half so many
people to turn their backs on everybody else in such small rooms as
ours. But the unsaid things those backs expressed broke out, I remarked,
with refreshed virulence in the various organs of the various sections
of the party next week.
I talked, I remember, with Dr. Tumpany, a large young man in a still
larger professional frock-coat, and with a great shock of very fair
hair, who was candidate for some North Country constituency. We
discussed the political outlook, and, like so many Socialists at that
time, he was full of vague threatenings against the Liberal party. I
was struck by a thing in him that I had already observed less vividly in
many others of these Socialist leaders, and which gave me at last a clue
to the whole business. He behaved exactly like a man in possession of
valuable patent rights, who wants to be dealt with. He had an air of
having a corner in ideas. Then it flashed into my head that the whole
Socialist movement was an attempted corner in ideas....
8
Late that night I found myself alone with Margaret amid the debris of
the gathering.
I sat before the fire, hands in pockets, and Margaret, looking white and
weary, came and leant upon the mantel.
“Oh, Lord!” said Margaret.