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Book 3: The Heart of PoliticsSecession1
At last, out of a vast accumulation of impressions, decision distilled quite suddenly. I succumbed to Evesham and that dream of the right thing triumphant through expression. I determined I would go over to the Conservatives, and use my every gift and power on the side of such forces on that side as made for educational reorganisation, scientific research, literature, criticism, and intellectual development. That was in 1909. I judged the Tories were driving straight at a conflict with the country, and I thought them bound to incur an electoral defeat. I under-estimated their strength in the counties. There would follow, I calculated, a period of profound reconstruction in method and policy alike. I was entirely at one with Crupp in perceiving in this an immense opportunity for the things we desired. An aristocracy quickened by conflict and on the defensive, and full of the idea of justification by reconstruction, might prove altogether more apt for thought and high professions than Mrs. Redmondson`s spoilt children. Behind the now inevitable struggle for a reform of the House of Lords, there would be great heart searchings and educational endeavour. On that we reckoned. . . .
At last we talked it out to the practical pitch, and Crupp and Shoesmith, and I and Gane, made our definite agreement together. . . .
I emerged from enormous silences upon Margaret one evening.
She was just back from the display of some new musicians at the Hartsteins. I remember she wore a dress of golden satin, very rich- looking and splendid. About her slender neck there was a rope of gold-set amber beads. Her hair caught up and echoed and returned these golden notes. I, too, was in evening dress, but where I had been escapes me,--some forgotten dinner, I suppose. I went into her room. I remember I didn`t speak for some moments. I went across to the window and pulled the blind aside, and looked out upon the railed garden of the square, with its shrubs and shadowed turf gleaming pallidly and irregularly in the light of the big electric standard in the corner.
"Margaret," I said, "I think I shall break with the party."
She made no answer. I turned presently, a movement of enquiry.
"I was afraid you meant to do that," she said.
"I`m out of touch," I explained. "Altogether."
"Oh! I know."
"It places me in a difficult position," I said.
Margaret stood at her dressing-table, looking steadfastly at herself in the glass, and with her fingers playing with a litter of stoppered bottles of tinted glass. "I was afraid it was coming to this," she said.
"In a way," I said, "we`ve been allies. I owe my seat to you. I couldn`t have gone into Parliament. . . ."
"I don`t want considerations like that to affect us," she interrupted.
There was a pause. She sat down in a chair by her dressing-table, lifted an ivory hand-glass, and put it down again.
"I wish," she said, with something like a sob in her voice, "it were possible that you shouldn`t do this." She stopped abruptly, and I did not look at her, because I could feel the effort she was making to control herself.
"I thought," she began again, "when you came into Parliament--"
There came another silence. "It`s all gone so differently," she said. "Everything has gone so differently."
I had a sudden memory of her, shining triumphant after the Kinghampstead election, and for the first time I realised just how perplexing and disappointing my subsequent career must have been to her.
"I`m not doing this without consideration," I said.
"I know," she said, in a voice of despair, "I`ve seen it coming. But--I still don`t understand it. I don`t understand how you can go over."
"My ideas have changed and developed," I said.
I walked across to her bearskin hearthrug, and stood by the mantel.
"To think that you," she said; "you who might have been leader--" She could not finish it. "All the forces of reaction," she threw out.
"I don`t think they are the forces of reaction," I said. "I think I can find work to do--better work on that side."
"Against us!" she said. "As if progress wasn`t hard enough! As if it didn`t call upon every able man!"
"I don`t think Liberalism has a monopoly of progress."
She did not answer that. She sat quite still looking in front of her. "WHY have you gone over?" she asked abruptly as though I had said nothing.
There came a silence that I was impelled to end. I began a stiff dissertation from the hearthrug. "I am going over, because I think I may join in an intellectual renascence on the Conservative side. I think that in the coming struggle there will be a partial and altogether confused and demoralising victory for democracy, that will stir the classes which now dominate the Conservative party into an energetic revival. They will set out to win back, and win back. Even if my estimate of contemporary forces is wrong and they win, they will still be forced to reconstruct their outlook. A war abroad will supply the chastening if home politics fail. The effort at renascence is bound to come by either alternative. I believe I can do more in relation to that effort than in any other connexion in the world of politics at the present time. That`s my case, Margaret."
She certainly did not grasp what I said. "And so you will throw aside all the beginnings, all the beliefs and pledges--" Again her sentence remained incomplete. "I doubt if even, once you have gone over, they will welcome you."
"That hardly matters."
I made an effort to resume my speech.
"I came into Parliament, Margaret," I said, "a little prematurely. Still--I suppose it was only by coming into Parliament that I could see things as I do now in terms of personality and imaginative range. . . ." I stopped. Her stiff, unhappy, unlistening silence broke up my disquisition.
"After all," I remarked, "most of this has been implicit in my writings."
She made no sign of admission.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"Keep my seat for a time and make the reasons of my breach clear. Then either I must resign or--probably this new Budget will lead to a General Election. It`s evidently meant to strain the Lords and provoke a quarrel."
"You might, I think, have stayed to fight for the Budget."
"I`m not," I said, "so keen against the Lords."
On that we halted.
"But what are you going to do?" she asked.
"I shall make my quarrel over some points in the Budget. I can`t quite tell you yet where my chance will come. Then I shall either resign my seat--or if things drift to dissolution I shall stand again."
"It`s political suicide."
"Not altogether."
"I can`t imagine you out of Parliament again. It`s just like--like undoing all we have done. What will you do?"
"Write. Make a new, more definite place for myself. You know, of course, there`s already a sort of group about Crupp and Gane."
Margaret seemed lost for a time in painful thought.
"For me," she said at last, "our political work has been a religion-- it has been more than a religion."
I heard in silence. I had no form of protest available against the implications of that.
"And then I find you turning against all we aimed to do--talking of going over, almost lightly--to those others." . . .
She was white-lipped as she spoke. In the most curious way she had captured the moral values of the situation. I found myself protesting ineffectually against her fixed conviction. "It`s because I think my duty lies in this change that I make it," I said.
"I don`t see how you can say that," she replied quietly.
There was another pause between us.
"Oh!" she said and clenched her hand upon the table. "That it should have come to this!"
She was extraordinarily dignified and extraordinarily absurd. She was hurt and thwarted beyond measure. She had no place in her ideas, I thought, for me. I could see how it appeared to her, but I could not make her see anything of the intricate process that had brought me to this divergence. The opposition of our intellectual temperaments was like a gag in my mouth. What was there for me to say? A flash of intuition told me that behind her white dignity was a passionate disappointment, a shattering of dreams that needed before everything else the relief of weeping.
"I`ve told you," I said awkwardly, "as soon as I could."
There was another long silence. "So that is how we stand," I said with an air of having things defined. I walked slowly to the door.
She had risen and stood now staring in front of her.
"Good-night," I said, making no movement towards our habitual kiss.
"Good-night," she answered in a tragic note. . . .
I closed the door softly. I remained for a moment or so on the big landing, hesitating between my bedroom and my study. As I did so I heard the soft rustle of her movement and the click of the key in her bedroom door. Then everything was still. . . .
She hid her tears from me. Something gripped my heart at the thought.
"Damnation!" I said wincing. "Why the devil can`t people at least THINK in the same manner?"
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