Real things we want are Hate--Hate and COARSE think'n. I b'long to the
school of Mrs. F's Aunt--”
“What?” said some one, intent.
“In 'Little Dorrit,'” explained Tarvrille; “go on!”
“Hate a fool,” said my assailant.
Tarvrille glanced at me. I smiled to conceal the loss of my temper.
“Hate,” said the little man, emphasising his point with a clumsy fist.
“Hate's the driving force. What's m'rality?--hate of rotten goings
on. What's patriotism?--hate of int'loping foreigners. What's
Radicalism?--hate of lords. What's Toryism?--hate of disturbance. It's
all hate--hate from top to bottom. Hate of a mess. Remington owned it
the other day, said he hated a mu'll. There you are! If you couldn't
get hate into an election, damn it (hic) people wou'n't poll. Poll for
love!--no' me!”
He paused, but before any one could speak he had resumed.
“Then this about fine thinking. Like going into a bear pit armed with a
tagle--talgent--talgent galv'nometer. Like going to fight a mad dog with
Shasepear and the Bible. Fine thinking--what we want is the thickes'
thinking we can get. Thinking that stands up alone. Taf Reform means
work for all, thassort of thing.”
The gentleman from Cambridge paused. “YOU a flag!” he said. “I'd as soon
go to ba'ell und' wet tissue paper!”
My best answer on the spur of the moment was:
“The Japanese did.” Which was absurd.
I went on to some other reply, I forget exactly what, and the talk of
the whole table drew round me. It was an extraordinary revelation to me.
Every one was unusually careless and outspoken, and it was amazing how
manifestly they echoed the feeling of this old Tory spokesman. They were
quite friendly to me, they regarded me and the BLUE WEEKLY as valuable
party assets for Toryism, but it was clear they attached no more
importance to what were my realities than they did to the remarkable
therapeutic claims of Mrs. Eddy. They were flushed and amused, perhaps
they went a little too far in their resolves to draw me, but they left
the impression on my mind of men irrevocably set upon narrow and cynical
views of political life. For them the political struggle was a game,
whose counters were human hate and human credulity; their real aim was
just every one's aim, the preservation of the class and way of living to
which their lives were attuned. They did not know how tired I was, how
exhausted mentally and morally, nor how cruel their convergent attack
on me chanced to be. But my temper gave way, I became tart and fierce,
perhaps my replies were a trifle absurd, and Tarvrille, with that quick
eye and sympathy of his, came to the rescue. Then for a time I sat
silent and drank port wine while the others talked. The disorder of
the room, the still dripping ceiling, the noise, the displaced ties and
crumpled shirts of my companions, jarred on my tormented nerves....
It was long past midnight when we dispersed. I remember Tarvrille coming
with me into the hall, and then suggesting we should go upstairs to see
the damage. A manservant carried up two flickering candles for us.
One end of the room was gutted, curtains, hangings, several chairs and
tables were completely burnt, the panelling was scorched and warped,
three smashed windows made the candles flare and gutter, and some scraps
of broken china still lay on the puddled floor.
As we surveyed this, Lady Tarvrille appeared, back from some party,
a slender, white-cloaked, satin-footed figure with amazed blue eyes
beneath her golden hair. I remember how stupidly we laughed at her
surprise.
2
I parted from Panmure at the corner of Aldington Street, and went my way
alone. But I did not go home, I turned westward and walked for a long
way, and then struck northward aimlessly. I was too miserable to go to
my house.
I wandered about that night like a man who has discovered his Gods
are dead. I can look back now detached yet sympathetic upon that wild
confusion of moods and impulses, and by it I think I can understand, oh!
half the wrongdoing and blundering in the world.
I do not feel now the logical force of the process that must have
convinced me then that I had made my sacrifice and spent my strength in
vain. At no time had I been under any illusion that the Tory party had
higher ideals than any other party, yet it came to me like a thing newly
discovered that the men I had to work with had for the most part no such
dreams, no sense of any collective purpose, no atom of the faith I held.
They were just as immediately intent upon personal ends, just as limited
by habits of thought, as the men in any other group or party. Perhaps I
had slipped unawares for a time into the delusions of a party man--but I
do not think so.
No, it was the mood of profound despondency that had followed upon the
abrupt cessation of my familiar intercourse with Isabel, that gave this
fact that had always been present in my mind its quality of devastating
revelation. It seemed as though I had never seen before nor suspected
the stupendous gap between the chaotic aims, the routine, the
conventional acquiescences, the vulgarisations of the personal life, and
that clearly conscious development and service of a collective thought
and purpose at which my efforts aimed. I had thought them but a little
way apart, and now I saw they were separated by all the distance
between earth and heaven. I saw now in myself and every one around me,
a concentration upon interests close at hand, an inability to detach
oneself from the provocations, tendernesses, instinctive hates, dumb
lusts and shy timidities that touched one at every point; and, save
for rare exalted moments, a regardlessness of broader aims and remoter
possibilities that made the white passion of statecraft seem as
unearthly and irrelevant to human life as the story an astronomer will
tell, half proven but altogether incredible, of habitable planets and
answering intelligences, suns' distances uncounted across the deep. It
seemed to me I had aspired too high and thought too far, had mocked my
own littleness by presumption, had given the uttermost dear reality of
life for a theoriser's dream.
All through that wandering agony of mine that night a dozen threads of
thought interwove; now I was a soul speaking in protest to God against
a task too cold and high for it, and now I was an angry man, scorned and
pointed upon, who had let life cheat him of the ultimate pride of his
soul. Now I was the fool of ambition, who opened his box of gold to find
blank emptiness, and now I was a spinner of flimsy thoughts, whose web
tore to rags at a touch. I realised for the first time how much I had
come to depend upon the mind and faith of Isabel, how she had confirmed
me and sustained me, how little strength I had to go on with our
purposes now that she had vanished from my life. She had been the
incarnation of those great abstractions, the saving reality, the voice
that answered back. There was no support that night in the things that
had been. We were alone together on the cliff for ever more!--that was
very pretty in its way, but it had no truth whatever that could help
me now, no ounce of sustaining value. I wanted Isabel that night, no
sentiment or memory of her, but Isabel alive,--to talk to me, to touch
me, to hold me together. I wanted unendurably the dusky gentleness of
her presence, the consolation of her voice.
We were alone together on the cliff! I startled a passing cabman into
interest by laughing aloud at that magnificent and characteristic
sentimentality. What a lie it was, and how satisfying it had been! That
was just where we shouldn't remain. We of all people had no distinction
from that humanity whose lot is to forget. We should go out to other
interests, new experiences, new demands. That tall and intricate fabric
of ambitious understandings we had built up together in our intimacy
would be the first to go; and last perhaps to endure with us would be
a few gross memories of sights and sounds, and trivial incidental
excitements....
I had a curious feeling that night that I had lost touch with life for
a long time, and had now been reminded of its quality. That infernal
little don's parody of my ruling phrase, “Hate and coarse thinking,”
stuck in my thoughts like a poisoned dart, a centre of inflammation.
Just as a man who is debilitated has no longer the vitality to resist
an infection, so my mind, slackened by the crisis of my separation from
Isabel, could find no resistance to his emphatic suggestion. It seemed
to me that what he had said was overpoweringly true, not only of
contemporary life, but of all possible human life. Love is the rare
thing, the treasured thing; you lock it away jealously and watch, and
well you may; hate and aggression and force keep the streets and rule
the world. And fine thinking is, in the rough issues of life, weak
thinking, is a balancing indecisive process, discovers with disloyal
impartiality a justice and a defect on each disputing side. “Good honest
men,” as Dayton calls them, rule the world, with a way of thinking
out decisions like shooting cartloads of bricks, and with a steadfast
pleasure in hostility. Dayton liked to call his antagonists “blaggards
and scoundrels”--it justified his opposition--the Lords were
“scoundrels,” all people richer than he were “scoundrels,” all
Socialists, all troublesome poor people; he liked to think of jails and
justice being done. His public spirit was saturated with the sombre
joys of conflict and the pleasant thought of condign punishment for
all recalcitrant souls. That was the way of it, I perceived. That had
survival value, as the biologists say. He was fool enough in politics to
be a consistent and happy politician....
Hate and coarse thinking; how the infernal truth of the phrase beat me
down that night! I couldn't remember that I had known this all along,
and that it did not really matter in the slightest degree. I had worked
it all out long ago in other terms, when I had seen how all parties
stood for interests inevitably, and how the purpose in life achieves
itself, if it achieves itself at all, as a bye product of the war
of individuals and classes. Hadn't I always known that science and
philosophy elaborate themselves in spite of all the passion and
narrowness of men, in spite of the vanities and weakness of their
servants, in spite of all the heated disorder of contemporary things?
Wasn't it my own phrase to speak of “that greater mind in men, in which
we are but moments and transitorily lit cells?” Hadn't I known that the
spirit of man still speaks like a thing that struggles out of mud and
slime, and that the mere effort to speak means choking and disaster?
Hadn't I known that we who think without fear and speak without
discretion will not come to our own for the next two thousand years?
It was the last was most forgotten of all that faith mislaid. Before
mankind, in my vision that night, stretched new centuries of confusion,
vast stupid wars, hastily conceived laws, foolish temporary triumphs
of order, lapses, set-backs, despairs, catastrophes, new beginnings, a
multitudinous wilderness of time, a nigh plotless drama of wrong-headed
energies. In order to assuage my parting from Isabel we had set
ourselves to imagine great rewards for our separation, great personal
rewards; we had promised ourselves success visible and shining in our
lives. To console ourselves in our separation we had made out of
the BLUE WEEKLY and our young Tory movement preposterously enormous
things-as though those poor fertilising touches at the soil were indeed
the germinating seeds of the millennium, as though a million lives such
as ours had not to contribute before the beginning of the beginning.
That poor pretence had failed. That magnificent proposition shrivelled
to nothing in the black loneliness of that night.
I saw that there were to be no such compensations. So far as my real
services to mankind were concerned I had to live an unrecognised
and unrewarded life. If I made successes it would be by the way. Our
separation would alter nothing of that. My scandal would cling to me
now for all my life, a thing affecting relationships, embarrassing and
hampering my spirit. I should follow the common lot of those who live by
the imagination, and follow it now in infinite loneliness of soul; the
one good comforter, the one effectual familiar, was lost to me for
ever; I should do good and evil together, no one caring to understand;
I should produce much weary work, much bad-spirited work, much absolute
evil; the good in me would be too often ill-expressed and missed or
misinterpreted. In the end I might leave one gleaming flake or so amidst
the slag heaps for a moment of postmortem sympathy. I was afraid beyond
measure of my derelict self. Because I believed with all my soul in love
and fine thinking that did not mean that I should necessarily either
love steadfastly or think finely. I remember how I fell talking to
God--I think I talked out loud. “Why do I care for these things?”
I cried, “when I can do so little! Why am I apart from the jolly
thoughtless fighting life of men? These dreams fade to nothingness, and
leave me bare!”
I scolded. “Why don't you speak to a man, show yourself? I thought I
had a gleam of you in Isabel,--and then you take her away. Do you really
think I can carry on this game alone, doing your work in darkness and
silence, living in muddled conflict, half living, half dying?”
Grotesque analogies arose in my mind. I discovered a strange parallelism
between my now tattered phrase of “Love and fine thinking” and the
“Love and the Word” of Christian thought. Was it possible the Christian
propaganda had at the outset meant just that system of attitudes I had
been feeling my way towards from the very beginning of my life? Had
I spent a lifetime making my way back to Christ? It mocks humanity
to think how Christ has been overlaid. I went along now, recalling
long-neglected phrases and sentences; I had a new vision of that great
central figure preaching love with hate and coarse thinking even in the
disciples about Him, rising to a tidal wave at last in that clamour for
Barabbas, and the public satisfaction in His fate....
It's curious to think that hopeless love and a noisy disordered dinner
should lead a man to these speculations, but they did. “He DID mean
that!” I said, and suddenly thought of what a bludgeon they'd made
of His Christianity. Athwart that perplexing, patient enigma sitting
inaudibly among publicans and sinners, danced and gibbered a long
procession of the champions of orthodoxy. “He wasn't human,” I said,
and remembered that last despairing cry, “My God! My God! why hast Thou
forsaken Me?”
“Oh, HE forsakes every one,” I said, flying out as a tired mind will,
with an obvious repartee....
I passed at a bound from such monstrous theology to a towering rage
against the Baileys. In an instant and with no sense of absurdity I
wanted--in the intervals of love and fine thinking--to fling about that
strenuously virtuous couple; I wanted to kick Keyhole of the PEEPSHOW
into the gutter and make a common massacre of all the prosperous
rascaldom that makes a trade and rule of virtue. I can still feel that
transition. In a moment I had reached that phase of weakly decisive
anger which is for people of my temperament the concomitant of
exhaustion.
“I will have her,” I cried. “By Heaven! I WILL have her! Life mocks me
and cheats me. Nothing can be made good to me again.... Why shouldn't I
save what I can? I can't save myself without her....”
I remember myself--as a sort of anti-climax to that--rather tediously
asking my way home. I was somewhere in the neighbourhood of Holland
Park....
It was then between one and two. I felt that I could go home now without
any risk of meeting Margaret. It had been the thought of returning to
Margaret that had sent me wandering that night. It is one of the ugliest
facts I recall about that time of crisis, the intense aversion I felt
for Margaret. No sense of her goodness, her injury and nobility, and
the enormous generosity of her forgiveness, sufficed to mitigate that.
I hope now that in this book I am able to give something of her silvery
splendour, but all through this crisis I felt nothing of that. There was
a triumphant kindliness about her that I found intolerable. She meant to
be so kind to me, to offer unstinted consolation, to meet my needs, to
supply just all she imagined Isabel had given me.
When I left Tarvrille's, I felt I could anticipate exactly how she would
meet my homecoming. She would be perplexed by my crumpled shirt front,
on which I had spilt some drops of wine; she would overlook that by an
effort, explain it sentimentally, resolve it should make no difference
to her. She would want to know who had been present, what we had talked
about, show the alertest interest in whatever it was--it didn't matter
what.... No, I couldn't face her.
So I did not reach my study until two o'clock.
There, I remember, stood the new and very beautiful old silver
candlesticks that she had set there two days since to please me--the
foolish kindliness of it! But in her search for expression, Margaret
heaped presents upon me. She had fitted these candlesticks with electric
lights, and I must, I suppose, have lit them to write my note to Isabel.
“Give me a word--the world aches without you,” was all I scrawled,
though I fully meant that she should come to me. I knew, though I ought
not to have known, that now she had left her flat, she was with the
Balfes--she was to have been married from the Balfes--and I sent my
letter there. And I went out into the silent square and posted the note
forthwith, because I knew quite clearly that if I left it until morning
I should never post it at all.
3
I had a curious revulsion of feeling that morning of our meeting. (Of
all places for such a clandestine encounter she had chosen the bridge
opposite Buckingham Palace.) Overnight I had been full of self pity, and
eager for the comfort of Isabel's presence. But the ill-written scrawl
in which she had replied had been full of the suggestion of her own
weakness and misery. And when I saw her, my own selfish sorrows were
altogether swept away by a wave of pitiful tenderness. Something had
happened to her that I did not understand. She was manifestly ill. She
came towards me wearily, she who had always borne herself so bravely;
her shoulders seemed bent, and her eyes were tired, and her face white
and drawn. All my life has been a narrow self-centred life; no brothers,
no sisters or children or weak things had ever yet made any intimate
appeal to me, and suddenly--I verily believe for the first time in my
life!--I felt a great passion of protective ownership; I felt that here
was something that I could die to shelter, something that meant more
than joy or pride or splendid ambitions or splendid creation to me, a
new kind of hold upon me, a new power in the world. Some sealed fountain
was opened in my breast. I knew that I could love Isabel broken, Isabel
beaten, Isabel ugly and in pain, more than I could love any sweet
or delightful or glorious thing in life. I didn't care any more for
anything in the world but Isabel, and that I should protect her. I
trembled as I came near her, and could scarcely speak to her for the
emotion that filled me....
“I had your letter,” I said.
“I had yours.”
“Where can we talk?”