"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. Wra.s.sleton 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 Wra.s.sleton and Weston Ma.s.singhay into a dispute of great vigour and emphasis. "The trouble in South Africa," said Weston Ma.s.singhay, "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 Ma.s.singhay at intervals repeat in a rather thickened voice: "THEY didn"t get dysentery."
I think Evesham went early. The rest of us cl.u.s.tered 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 Ma.s.singhay, 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-gla.s.s with a too easy gesture. "Love and fine thinking. Two things don"t go together. No philosophy worth a d.a.m.n 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 a.s.sailant. "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."
I made some remark, I forget what, but he overbore me.
Real things we want are Hate--Hate and COa.r.s.e 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 a.s.sailant.
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, d.a.m.n 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, tha.s.sort 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 j.a.panese 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 a.s.sets 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 cla.s.s 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 G.o.ds 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 l.u.s.ts 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 pa.s.sion 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sing 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 coa.r.s.e 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 coa.r.s.e 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 cla.s.ses. Hadn"t I always known that science and philosophy elaborate themselves in spite of all the pa.s.sion 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 mult.i.tudinous wilderness of time, a nigh plotless drama of wrong-headed energies. In order to a.s.suage 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, embarra.s.sing 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 G.o.d--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 a.n.a.logies 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 att.i.tudes 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 coa.r.s.e 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 G.o.d! My G.o.d! why hast Thou forsaken Me?"
"Oh, HE forsakes every one," I said, flying out as a tired mind will, with an obvious repartee....