romantic love for her purity and beauty and high-principled devotion
evaporated from my life; but I do know that quite early in my
parliamentary days there had come a vague, unconfessed resentment at
the tie that seemed to hold me in servitude to her standards of
private living and public act. I felt I was caught, and none the
less so because it had been my own act to rivet on my shackles. So
long as I still held myself bound to her that resentment grew. Now,
since I had broken my bonds and taken my line it withered again, and
I could think of Margaret with a returning kindliness.
But I still felt embarrassment with her. I feltmyself dependent
upon her for house room and food and social support, as it were
under false pretences. I would have liked to have separated our
financial affairs altogether. But I knew that to raise the issue
would have seemed a last brutal indelicacy. So I tried almost
furtively to keep my personal expenditure within the scope of the
private income I made by writing, and we went out together in her
motor brougham, dined and made appearances, met politely at
breakfast-parted at night with a kiss upon her cheek. The locking
of her door upon me, which at that time I quite understood, which I
understand now, became for a time in my mind, through some obscure
process of the soul, an offence. I never crossed the landing to her
room again.
In all this matter, and, indeed, in all my relations with Margaret,
I perceive now I behaved badly and foolishly. My manifest blunder
is that I, who was several years older than she, much subtler and in
many ways wiser, never in any measure sought to guide and control
her. After our marriage I treated her always as an equal, and let
her go her way; held her responsible for all the weak and
ineffective and unfortunate things she said and did to me. She
wasn't clever enough to justify that. It wasn't fair to expect her
to sympathise, anticipate, and understand. I ought to have taken
care of her, roped her to me when it came to crossing the difficult
places. If I had loved her more, and wiselier and more tenderly, if
there had not been the consciousness of my financial dependence on
her always stiffening my pride, I think she would have moved with me
from the outset, and left the Liberals with me. But she did not get
any inkling of the ends I sought in my change of sides. It must
have seemed to her inexplicable perversity. She had, I knew-for
surely I knew it then-an immense capacity for loyalty and devotion.
There she was with these treasures untouched, neglected and
perplexed. A woman who loves wants to give. It is the duty and
business of the man she has married for love to help her to help and
give. But I was stupid. My eyes had never been opened. I was
stiff with her and difficult to her, because even on my wedding
morning there had been, deep down in my soul, voiceless though
present, something weakly protesting, a faint perception of wrong-
doing, the infinitesimally small, slow-multiplying germs of shame.
3
I made my breach with the party on the Budget.
In many ways I was disposed to regard the 1909 Budget as a fine
piece of statecraft. Its production was certainly a very unexpected
display of vigour on the Liberal side. But, on the whole, this
movement towards collectivist organisation on the part of the
Liberals rather strengthened than weakened my resolve to cross the
floor of the house. It made it more necessary, I thought, to leaven
the purely obstructive and reactionary elements that were at once
manifest in the opposition. I assailed the land taxation proposals
in one main speech, and a series of minor speeches in committee.
The line of attack I chose was that the land was a great public
service that needed to be controlled on broad and far-sighted lines.
I had no objection to its nationalisation, but I did object most
strenuously to the idea of leaving it in private hands, and
attempting to produce beneficial social results through the pressure
of taxation upon the land-owning class. That might break it up in
an utterly disastrous way. The drift of the government proposals
was all in the direction of sweating the landowner to get immediate
values from his property, and such a course of action was bound to
give us an irritated and vindictive land-owning class, the class
upon which we had hitherto relied-not unjustifiably-for certain
broad, patriotic services and an influence upon our collective
judgments that no other class seemed prepared to exercise. Abolish
landlordism if you will, I said, buy it out, but do not drive it to
a defensive fight, and leave it still sufficiently strong and
wealthy to become a malcontent element in your state. You have
taxed and controlled the brewer and the publican until the outraged
Liquor Interest has become a national danger. You now propose to do
the same thing on a larger scale. You turn a class which has many
fine and truly aristocratic traditions towards revolt, and there is
nothing in these or any other of your proposals that shows any sense