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.
"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. "Iam 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