of the subtle details; I can tell nothing of the long vacillations
between Protean values, the talks and re-talks, the meditations, the
bleak lucidities of sleepless nights…
And yet these things I have struggled with must be thought out, and,
to begin with, they must be thought out in this muddled,
experimenting way. To go into a study to think about statecraft is
to turn your back on the realities you are constantly needing to
feel and test and sound if your thinking is to remain vital; to
choose an aim and pursue it in despite of all subsequent
questionings is to bury the talent of your mind. It is no use
dealing with the intricate as though it were simple, to leap
haphazard at the first course of action that presents itself; the
whole world of politicians is far too like a man who snatches a
poker to a failing watch. It is easy to say he wants to "get
something done," but the only sane thing to do for the moment is to
put aside that poker and take thought and get a better implement…
One of the results of these fundamental preoccupations of mine was a
curious irritability towards Margaret that I found difficult to
conceal. It was one of the incidental cruelties of our position
that this should happen. I was in such doubtmyself, that I had no
power to phrase things for her in a form she could use. Hitherto I
had stage-managed our "serious" conversations. Now I was too much
in earnest and too uncertain to go on doing this. I avoided talk
with her. Her serene, sustained confidence in vague formulae and
sentimental aspirations exasperated me; her want of sympathetic
apprehension made my few efforts to indicate my changing attitudes
distressing and futile. It wasn't that I was always thinking right,
and that she was always saying wrong. It was that I was struggling
to get hold of a difficult thing that was, at any rate, half true, I
could not gauge how true, and that Margaret's habitual phrasing
ignored these elusive elements of truth, and without premeditation
fitted into the weaknesses of my new intimations, as though they had
nothing but weaknesses. It was, for example, obvious that these big
people, who were the backbone of Imperialism and Conservatism, were
temperamentally lax, much more indolent, much more sensuous, than
our deliberately virtuous Young Liberals. I didn't want to be
reminded of that, just when I was in full effort to realise the
finer elements in their composition. Margaret classed them and
disposed of them. It was our incurable differences in habits and
gestures of thought coming between us again.
The desert of misunderstanding widened. I was forced back upon
myself and my own secret councils. For a time I went my way alone;
an unmixed evil for both of us. Except for that Pentagram evening,
a series of talks with Isabel Rivers, who was now becoming more and
more important in my intellectual life, and the arguments I
maintained with Crupp, I never really opened my mind at all during
that period of indecisions, slow abandonments, and slow
acquisitions.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
SECESSION
1
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.