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, Iperceived, 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 Iperceive 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.Akind 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 Iwalked 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.
