THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

by H. G. Wells

  eyes regarded the speaker with quiet disapproval for a moment, and

  then came to me in the not too confident hope that I would snub him

  out of existence with some prompt rhetorical stroke. A voice spoke

  out of the big arm-chair.

  "We'll do things," said Isabel.

  The doctor's eye lit with the joy of the fisherman who strikes his

  fish at last. "What will you do?" he asked her.

  "Every one knows we're a mixed lot," said Isabel.

  "Poor old chaps like me!" interjected the general.

  "But that's not a programme," said the doctor.

  "But Mr. Remington has published a programme," said Isabel.

  The doctor cocked half an eye at me.

  "In some review," the girl went on. "After all, we're not going to

  elect the whole Liberal party in the Kinghamstead Division. I'm a

  Remington-ite!"

  "But the programme," said the doctor, "the programme-"

  "In front of Mr. Remington!"

  "Scandal always comes home at last," said the doctor. "Let him hear

  the worst."

  "I'd like to hear," I said. "Electioneering shatters convictions

  and enfeebles the mind."

  "Not mine," said Isabel stoutly. "I mean-Well, anyhow I take it

  Mr. Remington stands for constructing a civilised state out of this

  muddle."

  "THIS muddle," protested the doctor with an appeal of the eye to the

  beautiful long room and the ordered garden outside the bright clean

  windows.

  "Well, THAT muddle, if you like! There's a slum within a mile of us

  already. The dust and blacks get worse and worse, Sissie?"

  "They do," agreed Miss Gamer.

  "Mr. Remington stands for construction, order, education, discipline."

  "And you?" said the doctor.

  "I'm a good Remington-ite."

  "Discipline!" said the doctor.

  "Oh!" said Isabel. "At times one has to be-Napoleonic. They want

  to libel me, Mr. Remington. A political worker can't always be in

  time for meals, can she? At times one has to make-splendid cuts."

  Miss Gamer said something indistinctly.

  "Order, education, discipline," said Sir Graham. "Excellent things!

  But I've a sort of memory-in my young days-we talked about

  something called liberty."

  "Liberty under the law," I said, with an unexpected approving murmur

  from Margaret, and took up the defence. "The old Liberal definition

  of liberty was a trifle uncritical. Privilege and legal

  restrictions are not the only enemies of liberty. An uneducated,

  underbred, and underfed propertyless man is a man who has lost the

  possibility of liberty. There's no liberty worth a rap for him. A

  man who is swimming hopelessly for life wants nothing but the

  liberty to get out of the water; he'll give every other liberty for

  it-until he gets out."

  Sir Graham took me up and we fell into a discussion of the changing

  qualities of Liberalism. It was a good give-and-take talk,

  extraordinarily refreshing after the nonsense and crowding secondary

  issues of the electioneering outside. We all contributed more or

  less except Miss Gamer; Margaret followed with knitted brows and

  occasional interjections. "People won't SEE that," for example, and

  "It all seems so plain to me." The doctor showed himself clever but

  unsubstantial and inconsistent. Isabel sat back with her black mop

  of hair buried deep in the chair looking quickly from face to face.

  Her colour came and went with her vivid intellectual excitement;

  occasionally she would dart a word, usually a very apt word, like a

  lizard's tongue into the discussion. I remember chiefly that a

  chance illustration betrayed that she had read Bishop Burnet…

  After that it was not surprising that Isabel should ask for a lift

  in our car as far as the Lurky Committee Room, and that she should

  offer me quite sound advice EN ROUTE upon the intellectual

  temperament of the Lurky gasworkers.

  On the third occasion that I saw Isabel she was, as I have said,

  climbing a tree-and a very creditable tree-for her own private

  satisfaction. It was a lapse from the high seriousness of politics,

  and I perceived she felt that I might regard it as such and attach

  too much importance to it. I had some difficulty in reassuring her.

  And it's odd to note now-it has never occurred to me before-that

  from that day to this I do not think I have ever reminded Isabel of

  that encounter.

  And after that memory she seems to be flickering about always in the

  election, an inextinguishable flame; now she flew by on her bicycle,

  now she dashed into committee rooms, now she appeared on doorsteps

  in animated conversation with dubious voters; I took every chance I

  could to talk to her-I had never met anything like her before in

  the world, and she interested me immensely-and before the polling

  day she and I had become, in the frankest simplicity, fast

  friends…

  That, I think, sets out very fairly the facts of our early

  relationship. But it is hard to get it true, either in form or

  texture, because of the bright, translucent, coloured, and

  refracting memories that come between. One forgets not only the

  tint and quality of thoughts and impressions through that

  intervening haze, one forgets them altogether. I don't remember now

  that I ever thought in those days of passionate love or the

  possibility of such love between us. I may have done so again and

  again. But I doubt it very strongly. I don't think I ever thought

  of such aspects. I had no more sense of any danger between us,

  seeing the years and things that separated us, than I could have had

  if she had been an intelligent bright-eyed bird. Isabel came into

  my life as a new sort of thing; she didn't join on at all to my

  previous experiences of womanhood. They were not, as I have

  laboured to explain, either very wide or very penetrating

  experiences, on the whole, "strangled dinginess" expresses them, but

  I do not believe they were narrower or shallower than those of many

  other men of my class. I thought of women as pretty things and

  beautiful things, pretty rather than beautiful, attractive and at

  times disconcertingly attractive, often bright and witty, but,

  because of the vast reservations that hid them from me, wanting,

  subtly and inevitably wanting, in understanding. My idealisation of

  Margaret had evaporated insensibly after our marriage. The shrine I

  had made for her in my private thoughts stood at last undisguisedly

  empty. But Isabel did not for a moment admit of either idealisation

  or interested contempt. She opened a new sphere of womanhood to me.

  With her steady amber-brown eyes, her unaffected interest in

  impersonal things, her upstanding waistless blue body, her energy,

  decision and courage, she seemed rather some new and infinitely

  finer form of boyhood than a feminine creature, as I had come to

  measure femininity. She was my perfect friend. Could I have

  foreseen, had my world been more wisely planned, to this day we

  might have been such friends.

  She seemed at that time unconscious of sex, though she has told me

  s
ince how full she was of protesting curiosities and restrained

  emotions. She spoke, as indeed she has always spoken, simply,

  clearly, and vividly; schoolgirl slang mingled with words that

  marked ample voracious reading, and she moved quickly with the free

  directness of some graceful young animal. She took many of the easy

  freedoms a man or a sister might have done with me. She would touch

  my arm, lay a hand on my shoulder as I sat, adjust the lapel of a

  breast-pocket as she talked to me. She says now she loved me always

  from the beginning. I doubt if there was a suspicion of that in her

  mind those days. I used to find her regarding me with the clearest,

  steadiest gaze in the world, exactly like the gaze of some nice

  healthy innocent animal in a forest, interested, inquiring,

  speculative, but singularly untroubled…

  5

  Polling day came after a last hoarse and dingy crescendo. The

  excitement was not of the sort that makes one forget one is tired

  out. The waiting for the end of the count has left a long blank

  mark on my memory, and then everyone was shaking my hand and

  repeating: "Nine hundred and seventy-six."

  My success had been a foregone conclusion since the afternoon, but

  we all behaved as though we had not been anticipating this result

  for hours, as though any other figures but nine hundred and seventy-

  six would have meant something entirely different. "Nine hundred

  and seventy-six!" said Margaret. "They didn't expect three

  hundred."

  "Nine hundred and seventy-six," said a little short man with a

  paper. "It means a big turnover. Two dozen short of a thousand,

  you know."

  A tremendous hullaboo began outside, and a lot of fresh people came

  into the room.

  Isabel, flushed but not out of breath, Heaven knows where she had

  sprung from at that time of night! was running her hand down my

  sleeve almost caressingly, with the innocent bold affection of a

  girl. "Got you in!" she said. "It's been no end of a lark."

  "And now," said I, "I must go and be constructive."

  "Now you must go and be constructive," she said.

  "You've got to live here," she added.

  "By Jove! yes," I said. "We'll have to house hunt."

  "I shall read all your speeches."

  She hesitated.

  "I wish I was you," she said, and said it as though it was not

  exactly the thing she was meaning to say.

  "They want you to speak," said Margaret, with something unsaid in

  her face.

  "You must come out with me," I answered, putting my arm through

  hers, and felt someone urging me to the French windows that gave on

  the balcony.

  "If you think-" she said, yielding gladly

  "Oh, RATHER!" said I.

  The Mayor of Kinghamstead, a managing little man with no great

  belief in my oratorical powers, was sticking his face up to mine.

  "It's all over," he said, " and you've won. Say all the nice things

  you can and say them plainly."

  I turned and handed Margaret out through the window and stood

  looking over the Market-place, which was more than half filled with

  swaying people. The crowd set up a roar of approval at the sight of

  us, tempered by a little booing. Down in one corner of the square a

  fight was going on for a flag, a fight that even the prospect of a

  speech could not instantly check. "Speech!" cried voices, "Speech!"

  and then a brief "boo-oo-oo" that was drowned in a cascade of shouts

  and cheers. The conflict round the flag culminated in the smashing

  of a pane of glass in the chemist's window and instantly sank to

  peace.

  "Gentlemen voters of the Kinghamstead Division," I began.

  "Votes for Women!" yelled a voice, amidst laughter-the first time I

  remember hearing that memorable war-cry.

  "Three cheers for Mrs. Remington!"

  "Mrs. Remington asks me to thank you," I said, amidst further uproar

  and reiterated cries of "Speech!"

  Then silence came with a startling swiftness.

  Isabel was still in my mind, I suppose. "I shall go to

  Westminster," I began. I sought for some compelling phrase and

  could not find one. "To do my share," I went on, "in building up a

  great and splendid civilisation."

  I paused, and there was a weak gust of cheering, and then a renewal

  of booing.

  "This election," I said, " has been the end and the beginning of

  much. New ideas are abroad-"

  "Chinese labour," yelled a voice, and across the square swept a

  wildfire of booting and bawling.

  It is one of the few occasions when I quite lost my hold on a

  speech. I glanced sideways and saw the Mayor of Kinghamstead

  speaking behind his hand to Parvill. By a happy chance Parvill

  caught my eye.

  "What do they want?" I asked.

  "Eh?"

  "What do they want?"

  "Say something about general fairness-the other side," prompted

  Parvill, flattered but a little surprised by my appeal. I pulled

  myself hastily into a more popular strain with a gross eulogy of my

  opponent's goodtaste.

  "Chinese labour!" cried the voice again.

  "You've given that notice to quit," I answered.

  The Market-place roared delight, but whether that delight expressed

  hostility to Chinamen or hostility to their practical enslavement no

  student of the General Election of 1906 has ever been able to

  determine. Certainly one of the most effective posters on our side

  displayed a hideous yellow face, just that and nothing more. There

  was not even a legend to it. How it impressed the electorate we did

  not know, but that it impressed the electorate profoundly there can

  be no disputing.

  6

  Kinghamstead was one of the earliest constituencies fought, and we

  came back-it must have been Saturday-triumphant but very tired, to

  our house in Radnor Square. In the train we read the first

  intimations that the victory of our party was likely to be a

  sweeping one.

  Then came a period when one was going about receiving and giving

  congratulations and watching the other men arrive, very like a boy

  who has returned to school with the first batch after the holidays.

  The London world reeked with the General Election; it had invaded

  the nurseries. All the children of one's friends had got big maps

  of England cut up into squares to represent constituencies and were

  busy sticking gummed blue labels over the conquered red of Unionism

  that had hitherto submerged the country. And there were also orange

  labels, if I remember rightly, to represent the new Labour party,

  and green for the Irish. I engaged myself to speak at one or two

  London meetings, and lunched at the Reform, which was fairly tepid,

  and dined and spent one or two tumultuous evenings at the National

  Liberal Club, which was in active eruption. The National Liberal

  became feverishly congested towards midnight as the results of the

  counting came dropping in. A big green-baize screen had been fixed

  up at one end of the large smoking-room with the names of the

  constituencies that were voting t
hat day, and directly the figures

  came to hand, up they went, amidst cheers that at last lost their

  energy through sheer repetition, whenever there was record of a

  Liberal gain. I don't remember what happened when there was a

  Liberal loss; I don't think that any were announced while I was

  there.

  How packed and noisy the place was, and what a reek of tobacco and

  whisky fumes we made! Everybody was excited and talking, making

  waves of harsh confused sound that beat upon one's ears, and every

  now and then hoarse voices would shout for someone to speak. Our

  little set was much in evidence. Both the Cramptons were in, Lewis,

  Bunting Harblow. We gave brief addresses attuned to this excitement

  and the late hour, amidst much enthusiasm.

  Now we can DO things!" I said amidst a rapture of applause. Men I

  did not know from Adam held up glasses and nodded to me in solemn

  fuddled approval as I came down past them into the crowd again.

  Men were betting whether the Unionists would lose more or less than

  two hundred seats.

  "I wonder just what we shall do with it all," I heard one sceptic

  speculating…

  After these orgies I would get home very tired and excited, and find

  it difficult to get to sleep. I would lie and speculate about what

  it was we WERE going to do. One hadn't anticipated quite such a

  tremendous accession to power for one's party. Liberalism was

  swirling in like a flood…

  I found the next few weeks very unsatisfactory and distressing. I

  don't clearly remember what it was I had expected; I suppose the

  fuss and strain of the General Election had built up a feeling that

  my return would in some way put power into my hands, and instead I

  found myself a mere undistinguished unit in a vast but rather vague

  majority. There were moments when I felt very distinctly that a

  majority could be too big a crowd altogether. I had all my work

  still before me, I had achieved nothing as yet but opportunity, and

  a very crowded opportunity it was at that. Everyone about me was

  chatting Parliament and appointments; one breathed distracting and

  irritating speculations as to what would be done and who would be

  asked to do it. I was chiefly impressed by what was unlikely to be

  done and by the absence of any general plan of legislation to hold