1
And then we broke down. We broke our faith with both Margaret and
Shoesmith, flung career and duty out of our lives, and went away
together.
It is only now, almost a year after these events, that I can begin to
see what happened to me. At the time it seemed to me I was a rational,
responsible creature, but indeed I had not parted from her two days
before I became a monomaniac to whom nothing could matter but Isabel.
Every truth had to be squared to that obsession, every duty. It astounds
me to think how I forgot Margaret, forgot my work, forgot everything
but that we two were parted. I still believe that with better chances
we might have escaped the consequences of the emotional storm that
presently seized us both. But we had no foresight of that, and no
preparation for it, and our circumstances betrayed us. It was partly
Shoesmith's unwisdom in delaying his marriage until after the end of the
session--partly my own amazing folly in returning within four days to
Westminster. But we were all of us intent upon the defeat of scandal
and the complete restoration of appearances. It seemed necessary that
Shoesmith's marriage should not seem to be hurried, still more necessary
that I should not vanish inexplicably. I had to be visible with Margaret
in London just as much as possible; we went to restaurants, we visited
the theatre; we could even contemplate the possibility of my presence at
the wedding. For that, however, we had schemed a weekend visit to Wales,
and a fictitious sprained ankle at the last moment which would justify
my absence....
I cannot convey to you the intolerable wretchedness and rebellion of
my separation from Isabel. It seemed that in the past two years all
my thoughts had spun commisures to Isabel's brain and I could think of
nothing that did not lead me surely to the need of the one intimate I
had found in the world. I came back to the House and the office and my
home, I filled all my days with appointments and duty, and it did not
save me in the least from a lonely emptiness such as I had never felt
before in all my life. I had little sleep. In the daytime I did a
hundred things, I even spoke in the House on two occasions, and by my
own low standards spoke well, and it seemed to me that I was going about
in my own brain like a hushed survivor in a house whose owner lies dead
upstairs.
I came to a crisis after that wild dinner of Tarvrille's. Something in
that stripped my soul bare.
It was an occasion made absurd and strange by the odd accident that the
house caught fire upstairs while we were dining below. It was a men's
dinner--“A dinner of all sorts,” said Tarvrille, when he invited me;
“everything from Evesham and Gane to Wilkins the author, and Heaven
knows what will happen!” I remember that afterwards Tarvrille was
accused of having planned the fire to make his dinner a marvel and a
memory. It was indeed a wonderful occasion, and I suppose if I had not
been altogether drenched in misery, I should have found the same wild
amusement in it that glowed in all the others. There were one or two
university dons, Lord George Fester, the racing man, Panmure, the
artist, two or three big City men, Weston Massinghay and another
prominent Liberal whose name I can't remember, the three men Tarvrille
had promised and Esmeer, Lord Wrassleton, Waulsort, the member for
Monckton, Neal and several others. We began a little coldly, with
duologues, but the conversation was already becoming general--so far as
such a long table permitted--when the fire asserted itself.
It asserted itself first as a penetrating and emphatic smell of burning
rubber,--it was caused by the fusing of an electric wire. The reek
forced its way into the discussion of the Pekin massacres that had
sprung up between Evesham, Waulsort, and the others at the end of the
table. “Something burning,” said the man next to me.
“Something must be burning,” said Panmure.
Tarvrille hated undignified interruptions. He had a particularly
imperturbable butler with a cadaverous sad face and an eye of rigid
disapproval. He spoke to this individual over his shoulder. “Just see,
will you,” he said, and caught up the pause in the talk to his left.
Wilkins was asking questions, and I, too, was curious. The story of the
siege of the Legations in China in the year 1900 and all that followed
upon that, is just one of those disturbing interludes in history that
refuse to join on to that general scheme of protestation by which
civilisation is maintained. It is a break in the general flow of
experience as disconcerting to statecraft as the robbery of my knife and
the scuffle that followed it had been to me when I was a boy at Penge.
It is like a tear in a curtain revealing quite unexpected backgrounds. I
had never given the business a thought for years; now this talk brought
back a string of pictures to my mind; how the reliefs arrived and the
plundering began, how section after section of the International Army
was drawn into murder and pillage, how the infection spread upward
until the wives of Ministers were busy looting, and the very sentinels
stripped and crawled like snakes into the Palace they were set to guard.
It did not stop at robbery, men were murdered, women, being plundered,
were outraged, children were butchered, strong men had found themselves
with arms in a lawless, defenceless city, and this had followed. Now it
was all recalled.
“Respectable ladies addicted to district visiting at home were as bad as
any one,” said Panmure. “Glazebrook told me of one--flushed like a woman
at a bargain sale, he said--and when he pointed out to her that the silk
she'd got was bloodstained, she just said, 'Oh, bother!' and threw it
aside and went back....”
We became aware that Tarvrille's butler had returned. We tried not to
seem to listen.
“Beg pardon, m'lord,” he said. “The house IS on fire, m'lord.”
“Upstairs, m'lord.”
“Just overhead, m'lord.”
“The maids are throwing water, m'lord, and I've telephoned FIRE.”
“No, m'lord, no immediate danger.”
“It's all right,” said Tarvrille to the table generally. “Go on! It's
not a general conflagration, and the fire brigade won't be five minutes.
Don't see that it's our affair. The stuff's insured. They say old Lady
Paskershortly was dreadful. Like a harpy. The Dowager Empress had shown
her some little things of hers. Pet things--hidden away. Susan went
straight for them--used to take an umbrella for the silks. Born
shoplifter.”
It was evident he didn't want his dinner spoilt, and we played up
loyally.
“This is recorded history,” said Wilkins,--“practically. It makes one
wonder about unrecorded history. In India, for example.”
But nobody touched that.
“Thompson,” said Tarvrille to the imperturbable butler, and indicating
the table generally, “champagne. Champagne. Keep it going.”
“M'lord,” and Thompson marshalled his assistants.
Some man I didn't know began to remember things about Mandalay. “It's
queer,” he said, “how people break out at times;” and told his story
of an army doctor, brave, public-spirited, and, as it happened,
deeply religious, who was caught one evening by the excitement of
plundering--and stole and hid, twisted the wrist of a boy until it
broke, and was afterwards overcome by wild remorse.
I watched Evesham listening intently. “Strange,” he said, “very strange.
We are such stuff as thieves are made of. And in China, too, they
murdered people--for the sake of murdering. Apart, so to speak, from
mercenary considerations. I'm afraid there's no doubt of it in certain
cases. No doubt at all. Young soldiers fresh from German high schools
and English homes!”
“Did OUR people?” asked some patriot.
“Not so much. But I'm afraid there were cases.... Some of the Indian
troops were pretty bad.”
Gane picked up the tale with confirmations.
It is all printed in the vividest way as a picture upon my memory, so
that were I a painter I think I could give the deep rich browns and warm
greys beyond the brightly lit table, the various distinguished faces,
strongly illuminated, interested and keen, above the black and white of
evening dress, the alert menservants with their heavier, clean-shaved
faces indistinctly seen in the dimness behind. Then this was coloured
emotionally for me by my aching sense of loss and sacrifice, and by
the chance trend of our talk to the breaches and unrealities of the
civilised scheme. We seemed a little transitory circle of light in a
universe of darkness and violence; an effect to which the diminishing
smell of burning rubber, the trampling of feet overhead, the swish
of water, added enormously. Everybody--unless, perhaps, it was
Evesham--drank rather carelessly because of the suppressed excitement of
our situation, and talked the louder and more freely.
“But what a flimsy thing our civilisation is!” said Evesham; “a mere
thin net of habits and associations!”
“I suppose those men came back,” said Wilkins.
“Lady Paskershortly did!” chuckled Evesham.
“How do they fit it in with the rest of their lives?” Wilkins
speculated. “I suppose there's Pekin-stained police officers,
Pekin-stained J. P.'s--trying petty pilferers in the severest
manner.”...
Then for a time things became preposterous. There was a sudden cascade
of water by the fireplace, and then absurdly the ceiling began to rain
upon us, first at this point and then that. “My new suit!” cried some
one. “Perrrrrr-up pe-rr”--a new vertical line of blackened water would
establish itself and form a spreading pool upon the gleaming cloth. The
men nearest would arrange catchment areas of plates and flower bowls.
“Draw up!” said Tarvrille, “draw up. That's the bad end of the table!”
He turned to the imperturbable butler. “Take round bath towels,” he
said; and presently the men behind us were offering--with inflexible
dignity--“Port wine, Sir. Bath towel, Sir!” Waulsort, with streaks of
blackened water on his forehead, was suddenly reminded of a wet year
when he had followed the French army manoeuvres. An animated dispute
sprang up between him and Neal about the relative efficiency of the new
French and German field guns. Wrassleton joined in and a little drunken
shrivelled Oxford don of some sort with a black-splashed shirt front who
presently silenced them all by the immensity and particularity of his
knowledge of field artillery. Then the talk drifted to Sedan and the
effect of dead horses upon drinking-water, which brought Wrassleton
and Weston Massinghay into a dispute of great vigour and emphasis. “The
trouble in South Africa,” said Weston Massinghay, “wasn't that we didn't
boil our water. It was that we didn't boil our men. The Boers drank the
same stuff we did. THEY didn't get dysentery.”
That argument went on for some time. I was attacked across the table by
a man named Burshort about my Endowment of Motherhood schemes, but
in the gaps of that debate I could still hear Weston Massinghay
at intervals repeat in a rather thickened voice: “THEY didn't get
dysentery.”
I think Evesham went early. The rest of us clustered more and more
closely towards the drier end of the room, the table was pushed along,
and the area beneath the extinguished conflagration abandoned to a
tinkling, splashing company of pots and pans and bowls and baths.
Everybody was now disposed to be hilarious and noisy, to say startling
and aggressive things; we must have sounded a queer clamour to a
listener in the next room. The devil inspired them to begin baiting me.
“Ours isn't the Tory party any more,” said Burshort. “Remington has made
it the Obstetric Party.”
“That's good!” said Weston Massinghay, with all his teeth gleaming; “I
shall use that against you in the House!”
“I shall denounce you for abusing private confidences if you do,” said
Tarvrille.
“Remington wants us to give up launching Dreadnoughts and launch babies
instead,” Burshort urged. “For the price of one Dreadnought--”
The little shrivelled don who had been omniscient about guns joined in
the baiting, and displayed himself a venomous creature. Something in
his eyes told me he knew Isabel and hated me for it. “Love and fine
thinking,” he began, a little thickly, and knocking over a wine-glass
with a too easy gesture. “Love and fine thinking. Two things don't go
together. No philosophy worth a damn ever came out of excesses of love.
Salt Lake City--Piggott--Ag--Agapemone again--no works to matter.”
Everybody laughed.
“Got to rec'nise these facts,” said my assailant. “Love and fine think'n
pretty phrase--attractive. Suitable for p'litical dec'rations. Postcard,
Christmas, gilt lets, in a wreath of white flow's. Not oth'wise
valu'ble.”