by H. G. Wells
Even if my estimate of con-temporary forces is wrong and they win,
they will still be forced to reconstruct their outlook. A war
abroad will supply the chastening if home politics fail. The effort
at renascence is bound to come by either alternative. I believe I
can do more in relation to that effort than in any other connexion
in the world of politics at the present time. That's my case,
Margaret."
She certainly did not grasp what I said. "And so you will throw
aside all the beginnings, all the beliefs and pledges-" Again her
sentence remained incomplete. "I doubt if even, once you have gone
over, they will welcome you."
"That hardly matters."
I made an effort to resume my speech.
"I came into Parliament, Margaret," I said, "a little prematurely.
Still-I suppose it was only by coming into Parliament that I could
see things as I do now in terms of personality and imaginative
range…" I stopped. Her stiff, unhappy, unlistening silence
broke up my disquisition.
"After all," I remarked, "most of this has been implicit in my
writings."
She made no sign of admission.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"Keep my seat for a time and make the reasons of my breach clear.
Then either I must resign or-probably this new Budget will lead to
a General Election. It's evidently meant to strain the Lords and
provoke a quarrel."
"You might, I think, have stayed to fight for the Budget."
"I'm not," I said, "so keen against the Lords."
On that we halted.
"But what are you going to do?" she asked.
"I shall make my quarrel over some points in the Budget. I can't
quite tell you yet where my chance will come. Then I shall either
resign my seat-or if things drift to dissolution I shall stand
again."
"It's political suicide."
"Not altogether."
"I can't imagine you out of Parliament again. It's just like-like
undoing all we have done. What will you do?"
"Write. Make a new, more definite place for myself. You know, of
course, there's already a sort of group about Crupp and Gane."
Margaret seemed lost for a time in painfulthought.
"For me," she said at last, "our political work has been a religion-
it has been more than a religion."
I heard in silence. I had no form of protest available against the
implications of that.
"And then I find you turning against all we aimed to do-talking of
going over, almost lightly-to those others."…
She was white-lipped as she spoke. In the most curious way she had
captured the moral values of the situation. I found myself
protesting ineffectually against her fixed conviction. "It's
because I think my duty lies in this change that I make it," I said.
"I don't see how you can say that," she replied quietly.
There was another pause between us.
"Oh!" she said and clenched her hand upon the table. "That it
should have come to this!"
She was extraordinarily dignified and extraordinarily absurd. She
was hurt and thwarted beyond measure. She had no place in her
ideas, I thought, for me. I could see how it appeared to her, but I
could not make her see anything of the intricate process that had
brought me to this divergence. The opposition of our intellectual
temperaments was like a gag in my mouth. What was there for me to
say? A flash of intuition told me that behind her white dignity was
a passionate disappointment, a shattering of dreams that needed
before everything else the relief of weeping.
"I've told you," I said awkwardly, "as soon as I could."
There was another long silence. "So that is how we stand," I said
with an air of having things defined. I walked slowly to the door.
She had risen and stood now staring in front of her.
"Good-night," I said, making no movement towards our habitual kiss.
"Good-night," she answered in a tragic note…
I closed the door softly. I remained for a moment or so on the big
landing, hesitating between my bedroom and my study. As I did so I
heard the soft rustle of her movement and the click of the key in
her bedroom door. Then everything was still…
She hid her tears from me. Something gripped my heart at the
thought.
"Damnation!" I said wincing. "Why the devil can't people at least
THINK in the same manner?"
2
And that insufficient colloquy was the beginning of a prolonged
estrangement between us. It was characteristic of our relations
that we never reopened the discussion. The thing had been in the
air for some time; we had recognised it now; the widening breach
between us was confessed. My own feelings were curiously divided.
It is remarkable that my very real affection for Margaret only
became evident to me with this quarrel. The changes of the heart
are very subtle changes. Iam quite unaware how or when my early
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 te
nderly, 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
of the need for leadership to replace these traditional leaders you
are ousting. This was the substance of my case, and I hammered at
it not only in the House, but in the press…
The Kinghampstead division remained for some time insensitive to my
defection.
Then it woke up suddenly, and began, in the columns of the
KINGSHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN, an indignant, confused outcry. I was
treated to an open letter, signed Junius Secundus," and I replied in
provocative terms. There were two thinly attended public meetings
at different ends of the constituency, and then I had a
correspondence with my old friend Parvill, the photographer, which
ended in my seeing a deputation.
My impression is that it consisted of about eighteen or twenty
people. They had had to come upstairs to me and they were
manifestly full of indignation and a little short of breath. There
was Parvill himself, J.P., dressed wholly in black-I think to mark
his sense of the occasion-and curiously suggestive in his respect
for my character and his concern for the honourableness of the
KINGHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN editor, of Mark Antony at the funeral of
Cesar. There was Mrs. Bulger, also in mourning; she had never
abandoned the widow's streamers since the death of her husband ten
years ago, and her loyalty to Liberalism of the severest type was
part as it were of her weeds. There was a nephew of Sir Roderick
Newton, a bright young Hebrew of the graver type, and a couple of
dissenting ministers in high collars and hats that stopped halfway
between the bowler of this world and the shovel-hat of heaven.
There was also a young solicitor from Lurky done in the horsey
style, and there was a very little nervous man with a high brow and
a face contracting below as though the jawbones and teeth had been
taken out and the features compressed. The rest of the deputation,
which included two other public-spirited ladies and several
ministers of religion, might have been raked out of any omnibus
going Strandward during the May meetings. They thrust Parvill
forward as spokesman, and manifested a strong disposition to say
"Hear, hear!" to his more strenuous protests provided my eye wasn't
upon them at the time.
I regarded this appalling deputation as Parvill's apologetic but
quite definite utterances drew to an end. I had a moment of vision.
Behind them I saw the wonderful array of skeleton forces that stand
for public opinion, that are as much public opinion as exists indeed
at the present time. The whole process of politics which bulks so
solidly in history seemed for that clairvoyant instant but a froth
of petty motives above abysms of indifference…
Some one had finished. I perceived I had to speak.
"Very well," I said, "I won't keep you long in replying. I'll
resign if there isn't a dissolution before next February, and if
there is I shan't stand again. You don't want the bother and
expense of a bye-election (approving murmurs) if it can be avoided.
But I may tell you plainly now that I don't think it will be
necessary for me to resign, and the sooner you find my successor the
better for the party. The Lords are in a corner; they've got to
fight now or never, and I think they will throw out the Budget.
Then they will go on fighting. It is a fight that will last for
years. They have a sort of social discipline, and you haven't. You
Liberals will find yourselves with a country behind you, vaguely
indignant perhaps, but totally unprepared with any ideas whatever in
the matter, face to face with the problem of bringing the British
constitution up-to-date. Anything may happen, provided only that it
is sufficiently absurd. If the King backs the Lords-and I don't
see why he shouldn't-you have no Republican movement whatever to
fall back upon. You lost it during the Era of GoodTaste. The
country, I say, is destitute of ideas, and you have no ideas to give
it. I don't see what you will do… For my own part, I mean to
spend a year or so between a window and my
writingdesk."
I paused. "I think, gentlemen," began Parvill, "that we hear all
this with very great regret…"
4
My estrangement from Margaret stands in my memory now as something
that played itself out within the four walls of our house in Radnor
Square, which was, indeed, confined to those limits. I went to and
fro between my house and the House of Commons, and the dining-rooms
and clubs and offices in which we were preparing our new
developments, in a state of aggressive and energetic dissociation,
in the nascent state, as a chemist would say. I was free now, and
greedy for fresh combination. I had a tremendous sense of released
energies. I had got back to the sort of thing I could do, and to
the work that had been shaping itself for so long in my imagination.
Our purpose now was plain, bold, and extraordinarily congenial. We
meant no less than to organise a new movement in English thought and
life, to resuscitate a Public Opinion and prepare the ground for a
revised and renovated ruling culture.
For a time I seemed quite wonderfully able to do whatever I wanted
to do. Shoesmith responded to my first advances. We decided to
create a weekly paper as our nucleus, and Crupp and I set to work
forthwith to collect a group of writers and speakers, including
Esmeer, Britten, Lord Gane, Neal, and one or two younger men, which
should constitute a more or less definite editorial council about
me, and meet at a weekly lunch on Tuesday to sustain our general co-
operations. We marked our claim upon Toryism even in the colour of
our wrapper, and spoke of ourselves collectively as the Blue
Weeklies. But our lunches were open to all sorts of guests, and our
deliberations were never of a character to control me effectively in
my editorial decisions. My only influential councillor at first was
old Britten, who became my sub-editor. It was curious how we two
had picked up our ancient intimacy again and resumed the easy give
and take of our speculative dreaming schoolboy days.
For a time my life centred altogether upon this journalistic work.
Britten was an experienced journalist, and I had most of the
necessary instincts for the business. We meant to make the paper
right and good down to the smallest detail, and we set ourselves at