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Book 3: The Heart of PoliticsThe Riddle for the Statesman2
It is curious to recall how Britten helped shatter that obvious, lucidly explicable presentation of myself upon which I had embarked with Margaret. He returned to revive a memory of adolescent dreams and a habit of adolescent frankness; he reached through my shallow frontage as no one else seemed capable of doing, and dragged that back-self into relation with it.
I remember very distinctly a dinner and a subsequent walk with him which presents itself now as altogether typical of the quality of his influence.
I had come upon him one day while lunching with Somers and Sutton at the Playwrights` Club, and had asked him to dinner on the spur of the moment. He was oddly the same curly-headed, red-faced ventriloquist, and oddly different, rather seedy as well as untidy, and at first a little inclined to make comparisons with my sleek successfulness. But that disposition presently evaporated, and his talk was good and fresh and provocative. And something that had long been straining at its checks in my mind flapped over, and he and I found ourselves of one accord.
Altiora wasn`t at this dinner. When she came matters were apt to become confusedly strenuous. There was always a slight and ineffectual struggle at the end on the part of Margaret to anticipate Altiora`s overpowering tendency to a rally and the establishment of some entirely unjustifiable conclusion by a COUP- DE-MAIN. When, however, Altiora was absent, the quieter influence of the Cramptons prevailed; temperance and information for its own sake prevailed excessively over dinner and the play of thought. . . . Good Lord! what bores the Cramptons were! I wonder I endured them as I did. They had all of them the trick of lying in wait conversationally; they had no sense of the self-exposures, the gallant experiments in statement that are necessary for good conversation. They would watch one talking with an expression exactly like peeping through bushes. Then they would, as it were, dash out, dissent succinctly, contradict some secondary fact, and back to cover. They gave one twilight nerves. Their wives were easier but still difficult at a stretch; they talked a good deal about children and servants, but with an air caught from Altiora of making observations upon sociological types. Lewis gossiped about the House in an entirely finite manner. He never raised a discussion; nobody ever raised a discussion. He would ask what we thought of Evesham`s question that afternoon, and Edward would say it was good, and Mrs. Willie, who had been behind the grille, would think it was very good, and then Willie, parting the branches, would say rather conclusively that he didn`t think it was very much good, and I would deny hearing the question in order to evade a profitless statement of views in that vacuum, and then we would cast about in our minds for some other topic of equal interest. . . .
On this occasion Altiora was absent, and to qualify our Young Liberal bleakness we had Mrs. Millingham, with her white hair and her fresh mind and complexion, and Esmeer. Willie Crampton was with us, but not his wife, who was having her third baby on principle; his brother Edward was present, and the Lewises, and of course the Bunting Harblows. There was also some other lady. I remember her as pale blue, but for the life of me I cannot remember her name.
Quite early there was a little breeze between Edward Crampton and Esmeer, who had ventured an opinion about the partition of Poland. Edward was at work then upon the seventh volume of his monumental Life of Kosciusko, and a little impatient with views perhaps not altogether false but betraying a lamentable ignorance of accessible literature. At any rate, his correction of Esmeer was magisterial. After that there was a distinct and not altogether delightful pause, and then some one, it may have been the pale-blue lady, asked Mrs. Lewis whether her aunt Lady Carmixter had returned from her rest- and-sun-cure in Italy. That led to a rather anxiously sustained talk about regimen, and Willie told us how he had profited by the no-breakfast system. It had increased his power of work enormously. He could get through ten hours a day now without inconvenience.
"What do you do?" said Esmeer abruptly.
"Oh! no end of work. There`s all the estate and looking after things."
"But publicly?"
"I asked three questions yesterday. And for one of them I had to consult nine books!"
We were drifting, I could see, towards Doctor Haig`s system of dietary, and whether the exclusion or inclusion of fish and chicken were most conducive to high efficiency, when Britten, who had refused lemonade and claret and demanded Burgundy, broke out, and was discovered to be demanding in his throat just what we Young Liberals thought we were up to?
"I want," said Britten, repeating his challenge a little louder, "to hear just exactly what you think you are doing in Parliament?"
Lewis laughed nervously, and thought we were "Seeking the Good of the Community."
"HOW?"
"Beneficient Legislation," said Lewis.
"Beneficient in what direction?" insisted Britten. "I want to know where you think you are going."
"Amelioration of Social Conditions," said Lewis.
"That`s only a phrase!"
"You wouldn`t have me sketch bills at dinner?"
"I`d like you to indicate directions," said Britten, and waited.
"Upward and On," said Lewis with conscious neatness, and turned to ask Mrs. Bunting Harblow about her little boy`s French.
For a time talk frothed over Britten`s head, but the natural mischief in Mrs. Millingham had been stirred, and she was presently echoing his demand in lisping, quasi-confidential undertones. "What ARE we Liberals doing?" Then Esmeer fell in with the revolutionaries.
To begin with, I was a little shocked by this clamour for fundamentals--and a little disconcerted. I had the experience that I suppose comes to every one at times of discovering oneself together with two different sets of people with whom one has maintained two different sets of attitudes. It had always been, I perceived, an instinctive suppression in our circle that we shouldn`t be more than vague about our political ideals. It had almost become part of my morality to respect this convention. It was understood we were all working hard, and keeping ourselves fit, tremendously fit, under Altiora`s inspiration, Pro Bono Publico. Bunting Harblow had his under-secretaryship, and Lewis was on the verge of the Cabinet, and these things we considered to be in the nature of confirmations. . . . It added to the discomfort of the situation that these plunging enquiries were being made in the presence of our wives.
The rebel section of our party forced the talk.
Edward Crampton was presently declaring--I forget in what relation: "The country is with us."
My long-controlled hatred of the Cramptons` stereotyped phrases about the Country and the House got the better of me. I showed my cloven hoof to my friends for the first time.
"We don`t respect the Country as we used to do," I said. "We haven`t the same belief we used to have in the will of the people. It`s no good, Crampton, trying to keep that up. We Liberals know as a matter of fact--nowadays every one knows--that the monster that brought us into power has, among other deficiencies, no head. We`ve got to give it one--if possible with brains and a will. That lies in the future. For the present if the country is with us, it means merely that we happen to have hold of its tether."
Lewis was shocked. A "mandate" from the Country was sacred to his system of pretences.
Britten wasn`t subdued by his first rebuff; presently he was at us again. There were several attempts to check his outbreak of interrogation; I remember the Cramptons asked questions about the welfare of various cousins of Lewis who were unknown to the rest of us, and Margaret tried to engage Britten in a sympathetic discussion of the Arts and Crafts exhibition. But Britten and Esmeer were persistent, Mrs. Millingham was mischievous, and in the end our rising hopes of Young Liberalism took to their thickets for good, while we talked all over them of the prevalent vacuity of political intentions. Margaret was perplexed by me. It is only now I perceive just how perplexing I must have been. "Of course, she said with that faint stress of apprehension in her eyes, one must have aims." And, "it isn`t always easy to put everything into phrases." "Don`t be long," said Mrs. Edward Crampton to her husband as the wives trooped out. And afterwards when we went upstairs I had an indefinable persuasion that the ladies had been criticising Britten`s share in our talk in an altogether unfavourable spirit. Mrs. Edward evidently thought him aggressive and impertinent, and Margaret with a quiet firmness that brooked no resistance, took him at once into a corner and showed him Italian photographs by Coburn. We dispersed early.
I walked with Britten along the Chelsea back streets towards Battersea Bridge--he lodged on the south side.
"Mrs. Millingham`s a dear," he began.
"She`s a dear."
"I liked her demand for a hansom because a four-wheeler was too safe."
"She was worked up," I said. "She`s a woman of faultless character, but her instincts, as Altiora would say, are anarchistic--when she gives them a chance."
"So she takes it out in hansom cabs."
"Hansom cabs."
"She`s wise," said Britten. . . .
"I hope, Remington," he went on after a pause, "I didn`t rag your other guests too much. I`ve a sort of feeling at moments-- Remington, those chaps are so infernally not--not bloody. It`s part of a man`s duty sometimes at least to eat red beef and get drunk. How is he to understand government if he doesn`t? It scares me to think of your lot--by a sort of misapprehension--being in power. A kind of neuralgia in the head, by way of government. I don`t understand where YOU come in. Those others--they`ve no lusts. Their ideal is anaemia. You and I, we had at least a lust to take hold of life and make something of it. They--they want to take hold of life and make nothing of it. They want to cut out all the stimulants. Just as though life was anything else but a reaction to stimulation!" . . .
He began to talk of his own life. He had had ill-fortune through most of it. He was poor and unsuccessful, and a girl he had been very fond of had been attacked and killed by a horse in a field in a very horrible manner. These things had wounded and tortured him, but they hadn`t broken him. They had, it seemed to me, made a kind of crippled and ugly demigod of him. He was, I began to perceive, so much better than I had any right to expect. At first I had been rather struck by his unkempt look, and it made my reaction all the stronger. There was about him something, a kind of raw and bleeding faith in the deep things of life, that stirred me profoundly as he showed it. My set of people had irritated him and disappointed him. I discovered at his touch how they irritated him. He reproached me boldly. He made me feel ashamed of my easy acquiescences as I walked in my sleek tall neatness beside his rather old coat, his rather battered hat, his sturdier shorter shape, and listened to his denunciations of our self-satisfied New Liberalism and Progressivism.
"It has the same relation to progress--the reality of progress--that the things they paint on door panels in the suburbs have to art and beauty. There`s a sort of filiation. . . . Your Altiora`s just the political equivalent of the ladies who sell traced cloth for embroidery; she`s a dealer in Refined Social Reform for the Parlour. The real progress, Remington, is a graver thing and a painfuller thing and a slower thing altogether. Look! THAT"--and he pointed to where under a boarding in the light of a gas lamp a dingy prostitute stood lurking--"was in Babylon and Nineveh. Your little lot make believe there won`t be anything of the sort after this Parliament! They`re going to vanish at a few top notes from Altiora Bailey! Remington!--it`s foolery. It`s prigs at play. It`s make- believe, make-believe! Your people there haven`t got hold of things, aren`t beginning to get hold of things, don`t know anything of life at all, shirk life, avoid life, get in little bright clean rooms and talk big over your bumpers of lemonade while the Night goes by outside--untouched. Those Crampton fools slink by all this,"--he waved at the woman again--"pretend it doesn`t exist, or is going to be banished root and branch by an Act to keep children in the wet outside public-houses. Do you think they really care, Remington? I don`t. It`s make-believe. What they want to do, what Lewis wants to do, what Mrs. Bunting Harblow wants her husband to do, is to sit and feel very grave and necessary and respected on the Government benches. They think of putting their feet out like statesmen, and tilting shiny hats with becoming brims down over their successful noses. Presentation portrait to a club at fifty. That`s their Reality. That`s their scope. They don`t, it`s manifest, WANT to think beyond that. The things there ARE, Remington, they`ll never face! the wonder and the depth of life,-- lust, and the night-sky,--pain."
"But the good intention," I pleaded, "the Good Will!"
"Sentimentality," said Britten. "No Good Will is anything but dishonesty unless it frets and burns and hurts and destroys a man. That lot of yours have nothing but a good will to think they have good will. Do you think they lie awake of nights searching their hearts as we do? Lewis? Crampton? Or those neat, admiring, satisfied little wives? See how they shrank from the probe!"
"We all," I said, "shrink from the probe."
"God help us!" said Britten. . . .
"We are but vermin at the best, Remington," he broke out,"and the greatest saint only a worm that has lifted its head for a moment from the dust. We are damned, we are meant to be damned, coral animalculae building upward, upward in a sea of damnation. But of all the damned things that ever were damned, your damned shirking, temperate, sham-efficient, self-satisfied, respectable, make- believe, Fabian-spirited Young Liberal is the utterly damnedest." He paused for a moment, and resumed in an entirely different note: "Which is why I was so surprised, Remington, to find YOU in this set!"
"You`re just the old plunger you used to be, Britten," I said. "You`re going too far with all your might for the sake of the damns. Like a donkey that drags its cart up a bank to get thistles. There`s depths in Liberalism--"
"We were talking about Liberals."
"Liberty!"
"Liberty! What do YOOR little lot know of liberty?"
"What does any little lot know of liberty?"
"It waits outside, too big for our understanding. Like the night and the stars. And lust, Remington! lust and bitterness! Don`t I know them? with all the sweetness and hope of life bitten and trampled, the dear eyes and the brain that loved and understood--and my poor mumble of a life going on! I`m within sight of being a drunkard, Remington! I`m a failure by most standards! Life has cut me to the bone. But I`m not afraid of it any more. I`ve paid something of the price, I`ve seen something of the meaning."
He flew off at a tangent. "I`d rather die in Delirium Tremens," he cried, "than be a Crampton or a Lewis. . . ."
"Make-believe. Make-believe." The phrase and Britten`s squat gestures haunted me as I walked homeward alone. I went to my room and stood before my desk and surveyed papers and files and Margaret`s admirable equipment of me.
I perceived in the lurid light of Britten`s suggestions that so it was Mr. George Alexander would have mounted a statesman`s private room. . . .
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