by H. G. Wells
conversationally; they had no sense of the self-exposures, the
gallant experiments in statement that are necessary for good
conversation. They would watch one talking with an expression
exactly like peeping through bushes. Then they would, as it were,
dash out, dissent succinctly, contradict some secondary fact, and
back to cover. They gave one twilight nerves. Their wives were
easier but still difficult at a stretch; they talked a good deal
about children and servants, but with an air caught from Altiora of
making observations upon sociological types. Lewis gossiped about
the House in an entirely finite manner. He never raised a
discussion; nobody ever raised a discussion. He would ask what we
thought of Evesham's question that afternoon, and Edward would say
it was good, and Mrs. Willie, who had been behind the grille, would
think it was very good, and then Willie, parting the branches, would
say rather conclusively that he didn't think it was very much good,
and I would deny hearing the question in order to evade a profitless
statement of views in that vacuum, and then we would cast about in
our minds for some other topic of equal interest…
On this occasion Altiora was absent, and to qualify our Young
Liberal bleakness we had Mrs. Millingham, with her white hair and
her fresh mind and complexion, and Esmeer. Willie Crampton was with
us, but not his wife, who was having her third baby on principle;
his brother Edward was present, and the Lewises, and of course the
Bunting Harblows. There was also some other lady. I remember her
as pale blue, but for the life of me I cannot remember her name.
Quite early there was a little breeze between Edward Crampton and
Esmeer, who had ventured an opinion about the partition of Poland.
Edward was at work then upon the seventh volume of his monumental
Life of Kosciusko, and a little impatient with views perhaps not
altogether false but betraying a lamentable ignorance of accessible
literature. At any rate, his correction of Esmeer was magisterial.
After that there was a distinct and not altogether delightful pause,
and then some one, it may have been the pale-blue lady, asked Mrs.
Lewis whether her aunt Lady Carmixter had returned from her rest-
and-sun-cure in Italy. That led to a rather anxiously sustained
talk about regimen, and Willie told us how he had profited by the
no-breakfast system. It had increased his power of work enormously.
He could get through ten hours a day now without inconvenience.
"What do you do?" said Esmeer abruptly.
"Oh! no end of work. There's all the estate and looking after
things."
"But publicly?"
"I asked three questions yesterday. And for one of them I had to
consult nine books!"
We were drifting, I could see, towards Doctor Haig's system of
dietary, and whether the exclusion or inclusion of fish and chicken
were most conducive to high efficiency, when Britten, who had
refused lemonade and claret and demanded Burgundy, broke out, and
was discovered to be demanding in his throat just what we Young
Liberals thought we were up to?
"I want," said Britten, repeating his challenge a little louder, "to
hear just exactly what you think you are doing in Parliament?"
Lewis laughed nervously, and thought we were "Seeking the Good of
the Community."
"HOW?"
"Beneficient Legislation," said Lewis.
"Beneficient in what direction?" insisted Britten. "I want to know
where you think you are going."
"Amelioration of Social Conditions," said Lewis.
"That's only a phrase!"
"You wouldn't have me sketch bills at dinner?"
"I'd like you to indicate directions," said Britten, and waited.
"Upward and On," said Lewis with conscious neatness, and turned to
ask Mrs. Bunting Harblow about her little boy's French.
For a time talk frothed over Britten's head, but the natural
mischief in Mrs. Millingham had been stirred, and she was presently
echoing his demand in lisping, quasi-confidential undertones. "What
ARE we Liberals doing?" Then Esmeer fell in with the
revolutionaries.
To begin with, I was a little shocked by this clamour for
fundamentals-and a little disconcerted. I had the experience that
I suppose comes to every one at times of discovering oneself
together with two different sets of people with whom one has
maintained two different sets of attitudes. It had always been, I
perceived, an instinctive suppression in our circle that we
shouldn't be more than vague about our political ideals. It had
almost become part of my morality to respect this convention. It
was understood we were all working hard, and keeping ourselves fit,
tremendously fit, under Altiora's inspiration, Pro Bono Publico.
Bunting Harblow had his under-secretaryship, and Lewis was on the
verge of the Cabinet, and these things we considered to be in the
nature of confirmations… It added to tbe discomfort of the
situation that these plunging enquiries were being made in the
presence of our wives.
The rebel section of our party forced the talk.
Edward Crampton was presently declaring-I forget in what relation:
"The country is with us."
My long-controlled hatred of the Cramptons' stereotyped phrases
about the Country and the House got the better of me. I showed my
cloven hoof to my friends for the first time.
"We don't respect the Country as we used to do," I said. "We
haven't the same belief we used to have in the will of the people.
It's no good, Crampton, trying to keep that up. We Liberals know as
a matter of fact-nowadays every one knows-that the monster that
brought us into power has, among other deficiencies, no head. We've
got to give it one-if possible with brains and a will. That lies
in the future. For the present if the country is with us, it means
merely that we happen to have hold of its tether."
Lewis was shocked. A "mandate" from the Country was sacred to his
system of pretences.
Britten wasn't subdued by his first rebuff; presently he was at us
again. There were several attempts to check his outbreak of
interrogation; I remember the Cramptons asked questions about the
welfare of various cousins of Lewis who were unknown to the rest of
us, and Margaret tried to engage Britten in a sympathetic discussion
of the Arts and Crafts exhibition. But Britten and Esmeer were
persistent, Mrs. Millingham was mischievous, and in the end our
rising hopes of Young Liberalism took to their thickets for good,
while we talked all over them of the prevalent vacuity of political
intentions. Margaret was perplexed by me. It is only now I
perceive just how perplexing I must have been. "Of course, she said
with that faint stress of apprehension in her eyes, one must have
aims." And, "it isn't always easy to put everything into phrases."
"Don't be long," said Mrs. Edward Crampton to her hsuband as the
wives trooped out. And afterwards when we went upstairs I had an
; indefinable persuasion that the ladies had been criticising
Britten's share in our talk in an altogether unfavourable spirit.
Mrs. Edward evidently thought him aggressive and impertinent, and
Margaret with a quiet firmness that brooked no resistance, took him
at once into a corner and showed him Italian photographs by Coburn.
We dispersed early.
I walked with Britten along the Chelsea back streets towards
Battersea Bridge-he lodged on the south side.
"Mrs. Millingham's a dear," he began.
"She's a dear."
"I liked her demand for a hansom because a four-wheeler was too
safe."
"She was worked up," I said. "She's a woman of faultless character,
but her instincts, as Altiora would say, are anarchistic-when she
gives them a chance."
"So she takes it out in hansom cabs."
"Hansom cabs."
"She's wise," said Britten…
"I hope, Remington," he went on after a pause, "I didn't rag your
other guests too much. I've a sort of feeling at moments-
Remington, those chaps are so infernally not-not bloody. It's part
of a man's duty sometimes at least to eat red beef and get drunk.
How is he to understand government if he doesn't? It scares me to
think of your lot-by a sort of misapprehension-being in power. A
kind of neuralgia in the head, by way of government. I don't
understand where YOU come in. Those others-they've no lusts.
Their ideal is anaemia. You and I, we had at least a lust to take
hold of life and make something of it. They-they want to take hold
of life and make nothing of it. They want to cut out all the
stimulants. Just as though life was anything else but a reaction to
stimulation!"…
He began to talk of his own life. He had had ill-fortune through
most of it. He was poor and unsuccessful, and a girl he had been
very fond of had been attacked and killed by a horse in a field in a
very horrible manner. These things had wounded and tortured him,
but they hadn't broken him. They had, it seemed to me, made a kind
of crippled and ugly demigod of him. He was, I began to perceive,
so much better than I had any right to expect. At first I had been
rather struck by his unkempt look, and it made my reaction all the
stronger. There was about him something, a kind of raw and bleeding
faith in the deep things of life, that stirred me profoundly as he
showed it. My set of people had irritated him and disappointed him.
I discovered at his touch how they irritated him. He reproached me
boldly. He made me feel ashamed of my easy acquiescences as I
walked in my sleek tall neatness beside his rather old coat, his
rather battered hat, his sturdier shorter shape, and listened to his
denunciations of our self-satisfied New Liberalism and
Progressivism.
"It has the same relation to progress-the reality of progress-that
the things they paint on door panels in the suburbs have to art and
beauty. There's a sort of filiation… Your Altiora's just the
political equivalent of the ladies who sell traced cloth for
embroidery; she's a dealer in Refined Social Reform for the Parlour.
The real progress, Remington, is a graver thing and a painfuller
thing and a slower thing altogether. Look! THAT"-and he pointed
to where under a boarding in the light of a gas lamp a dingy
prostitute stood lurking-" was in Babylon and Nineveh. Your little
lot make believe there won't be anything of the sort after this
Parliament! They're going to vanish at a few top notes from Altiora
Bailey! Remington!-it's foolery. It's prigs at play. It's make-
believe, make-believe! Your people there haven't got hold of
things, aren't beginning to get hold of things, don't know anything
of life at all, shirk life, avoid life, get in little bright clean
rooms and talk big over your bumpers of lemonade while the Night
goes by outside-untouched. Those Crampton fools slink by all
this,"-he waved at the woman again-"pretend it doesn't exist, or
is going to be banished root and branch by an Act to keep children
in the wet outside public-houses. Do you think they really care,
Remington? I don't. It's make-believe. What they want to do, what
Lewis wants to do, what Mrs. Bunting Harblow wants her husband to
do, is to sit and feel very grave and necessary and respected on the
Government benches. They think of putting their feet out like
statesmen, and tilting shiny hats with becoming brims down over
their successful noses. Presentation portrait to a club at fifty.
That's their Reality. That's their scope. They don't, it's
manifest, WANT to think beyond that. The things there ARE,
Remington, they'll never face! the wonder and the depth of life,-
lust, and the night-sky,-pain."
"But the good intention," I pleaded, "the Good Will!"
"Sentimentality," said Britten. "No Good Will is anything but
dishonesty unless it frets and burns and hurts and destroys a man.
That lot of yours have nothing but a good will to think they have
good will. Do you think they lie awake of nights searching their
hearts as we do? Lewis? Crampton? Or those neat, admiring,
satisfied little wives? See how they shrank from the probe!"
"We all," I said, "shrink from the probe."
"God help us!" said Britten…
"We are but vermin at the best, Remington," he broke out," and the
greatest saint only a worm that has lifted its head for a moment
from the dust. We are damned, we are meant to be damned, coral
animalculae building upward, upward in a sea of damnation. But of
all the damned things that ever were damned, your damned shirking,
temperate, sham-efficient, self-satisfied, respectable, make-
believe, Fabian-spirited Young Liberal is tbe utterly damnedest."
He paused for a moment, and resumed in an entirely different note:
"Which is why I was so surprised, Remington, to find YOU in this
set!"
"You're just the old plunger you used to be, Britten," I said. "
You're going too far with all your might for the sake of the damns.
Like a donkey that drags its cart up a bank to get thistles.
There's depths in Liberalism-"
"We were talking about Liberals."
"Liberty!"
"Liberty! What do YOOR little lot know of liberty?"
"What does any little lot know of liberty?"
"It waits outside, too big for our understanding. Like the night
and the stars. And lust, Remington! lust and bitterness! Don't I
know them? with all the sweetness and hope of life bitten and
trampled, the dear eyes and the brain that loved and understood-and
my poor mumble of a life going on! I'm within sight of being a
drunkard, Remington! I'm a failure by most standards! Life has cut
me to the bone. But I'm not afraid of it any more. I've paid
something of the price, I've seen something of the meaning."
He flew off at a tangent. "I'd rather die in Delirium Tremens," he
cried, "than be a Crampton or a Lewis…"
"Make-believe. Make-believe." The phrase and Britten's squat
gestures haunted me as I walked homeward alone. I went to my
room
and stood before my desk and surveyed papers and files and
Margaret's admirable equipment of me.
I perceived in the lurid light of Britten's suggestions that so it
was Mr. George Alexander would have mounted a statesman's private
room…
3
I was never at any stage a loyal party man. I doubt if party will
ever again be the force it was during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Men are becoming increasingly constructive and
selective, less patient under tradition and the bondage of initial
circumstances. As education becomes more universal and liberating,
men will sort themselves more and more by their intellectual
temperaments and less and less by their accidental associations.
The past will rule them less; the future more. It is not simply
party but school and college and county and country that lose their
glamour. One does not hear nearly as much as our forefathers did of
the "old Harrovian," "old Arvonian," "old Etonian" claim to this or
that unfair advantage or unearnt sympathy. Even the Scotch and the
Devonians weaken a little in their clannishness. A widening sense
of fair play destroys such things. They follow freemasonry down-
freemasonry of which one is chiefly reminded nowadays in England by
propitiatory symbols outside shady public-houses…
There is, of course, a type of man which clings very obstinately to
party ties. These are the men with strong reproductive imaginations
and no imaginative initiative, such men as Cladingbowl, for example,
or Dayton. They are the scholars-at-large in life. For them the
fact that the party system has been essential in the history of
England for two hundred years gives it an overwhelming glamour.
They have read histories and memoirs, they see the great grey pile
of Westminster not so much for what it is as for what it was, rich
with dramatic memories, populous with glorious ghosts, phrasing
itself inevitably in anecdotes and quotations. It seems almost
scandalous that new things should continue to happen, swamping with
strange qualities the savour of these old associations.
That Mr. Ramsay Macdonald should walk through Westminster Hall,
thrust himself, it may be, through the very piece of space that once
held Charles the Martyr pleading for his life, seems horrible