temporarily, and there at least a sort of fuss and a coming and
going were maintained. The rest of the population stared in a state
of suspended judgment as we went about the business. The country
was supposed to be in a state of intellectual conflict and
deliberate decision, in history it will no doubt figure as a
momentous conflict. Yet except for an occasional flare of bill-
sticking or a bill in a window or a placard-plastered motor-car or
an argumentative group of people outside a public-house or a
sluggish movement towards the schoolroom or village hall, there was
scarcely a sign that a great empire was revising its destinies. Now
and then one saw a canvasser on a doorstep. For the most part
people went about their business with an entirely irresponsible
confidence in the stability of the universe. At times one felt a
little absurd with one's flutter of colours and one's air of saving
the country.
My opponent was a quite undistinguished Major-General who relied
upon his advocacy of Protection, and was particularly anxious we
should avoid "personalities" and fight the constituency in a
gentlemanly spirit. He was always writing me notes, apologising for
excesses on the part of his supporters, or pointing out the
undesirability of some course taken by mine.
My speeches had been planned upon broad lines, but they lost touch
with these as the polling approached. To begin with I made a real
attempt to put what was in my mind before the people I was to supply
with a political voice. I spoke of the greatness of our empire and
its destinies, of the splendid projects and possibilities of life
and order that lay before the world, of all that a resolute and
constructive effort might do at the present time. "We are building
a state," I said, "secure and splendid, we are in the dawn of the
great age of mankind." Sometimes that would get a solitary "'Ear!
'ear!" Then having created, as I imagined, a fine atmosphere, I
turned upon the history of the last Conservative administration and
brought it into contrast with the wide occasions of the age;
discussed its failure to control the grasping financiers in South
Africa, its failure to release public education from sectarian
squabbles, its misconduct of the Boer War, its waste of the world's
resources…
It soon became manifest that my opening and my general spaciousness
of method bored my audiences a good deal. The richer and wider my
phrases the thinner sounded my voice in these non-resonating
gatherings. Even the platform supporters grewrestive
unconsciously, and stirred and coughed. They did not recognise
themselves as mankind. Building an empire, preparing a fresh stage
in the history of humanity, had no appeal for them. They were
mostly everyday, toiling people, full of small personal solicitudes,
and they came to my meetings, I think, very largely as a relaxation.
This stuff was not relaxing. They did not think politics was a
great constructive process, they thought it was a kind of dog-fight.
They wanted fun, they wanted spice, they wanted hits, they wanted
also a chance to say "'Ear', 'ear!" in an intelligent and honourable
manner and clap their hands and drum with their feet. The great
constructive process in history gives so little scope for clapping
and drumming and saying "'Ear, 'ear!" One might as well think of
hounding on the solar system.
So after one or two attempts to lift my audiences to the level of
the issues involved, I began to adapt myself to them. I cut down my
review of our imperial outlook and destinies more and more, and
developed a series of hits and anecdotes and-what shall I call
them?-"crudifications" of the issue. My helper's congratulated me
on the rapid improvement of my platform style. I ceased to speak of
the late Prime Minister with the respect I bore him, and began to
fall in with the popular caricature of him as an artful rabbit-
witted person intent only on keeping his leadership, in spite of the
vigorous attempts of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain to oust him therefrom.
I ceased to qualify my statement that Protection would make food
Alfred Lyttelton as an influence at once insane and diabolical, as a
man inspired by a passionate desire to substitute manacled but still
criminal Chinese for honest British labourers throughout the world.
And when it came to the mention of our own kindly leader, of Mr.
John Burns or any one else of any prominence at all on our side I
fell more and more into the intonation of one who mentions the high
gods. And I had my reward in brighter meetings and readier and
readier applause.
One goes on from phase to phase in these things.
"After all," I told myself, "if one wants to get to Westminster one
must follow the road that leads there," but I found the road
nevertheless rather unexpectedly distasteful. "When one gets
there," I said, "then it is one begins."
But I would lie awake at nights with that sore throat and headache
and fatigue which come from speaking in ill-ventilated rooms, and
wondering how far it was possible to educate a whole people to great
political ideals. Why should political work always rot down to
personalities and personal appeals in this way? Life is, I suppose,
to begin with and end with a matter of personalities, from
personalities all our broader interests arise and to personalities
they return. All our social and political effort, all of it, is
like trying to make a crowd of people fall into formation. The
broader lines appear, but then come a rush and excitement and
irrelevancy, and forthwith the incipient order has vanished and the
marshals must begin the work over again!
My memory of all that time is essentially confusion. There was a
frightful lot of tiresome locomotion in it; for the Kinghamstead
Division is extensive, abounding in ill-graded and badly metalled
cross-roads and vicious little hills, and singularly unpleasing to
the eye in a muddy winter. It is sufficiently near to London to
have undergone the same process of ill-regulated expansion that made
Bromstead the place it is. Several of its overgrown villages have
developed strings of factories and sidings along the railway lines,
and there is an abundance of petty villas. There seemed to be no
place at which one could take hold of more than this or that element
of the population. Now we met in a meeting-house, now in a Masonic
Hall or Drill Hall; I also did a certain amount of open-air speaking
in the dinner hour outside gas-works and groups of factories. Some
special sort of people was, as it were, secreted in response to each
special appeal. One said things carefully adjusted to the
distinctive limitations of each gathering. Jokes of an incredible
silliness and shallowness drifted about us. Our advisers made us
declare that if we were elected we would live in the district, and
one hasty agent had bills printed, "If Mr. Remington
is elected he
will live here." The enemy obtained a number of these bills and
stuck them on outhouses, pigstyes, dog-kennels; you cannot imagine
how irksome the repetition of that jest became. The vast drifting
indifference in between my meetings impressed me more and more. I
realised the vagueness of my own plans as I had never done before I
brought them to the test of this experience. I was perplexed by the
riddle of just how far I was, in any sense of the word, taking hold
at all, how far I wasn't myself flowing into an accepted groove.
Margaret was troubled by no such doubts. She was clear I had to go
into Parliament on the side of Liberalism and the light, as against
the late Government and darkness. Essential to the memory of my
first contest, is the memory of her clear bright face, very resolute
and grave, helping me consciously, steadfastly, with all her
strength. Her quiet confidence, while I was so dissatisfied, worked
curiously towards the alienation of my sympathies. I felt she had
no business to be so sure of me. I had moments of vivid resentment
at being thus marched towards Parliament.
I seemed now always to be discovering alien forces of character in
her. Her way of taking life diverged from me more and more. She
sounded amazing, independent notes. She bought some particularly
costly furs for the campaign that roused enthusiasm whenever she
appeared. She also made me a birthday present in November of a
heavily fur-trimmed coat and this she would make me remove as I went
on to the platform, and hold over her arm until I was ready to
resume it. It was fearfully heavy for her and she liked it to be
heavy for her. That act of servitude was in essence a towering
self-assertion. I would glance sideways while some chairman
floundered through his introduction and see the clear blue eye with
which she regarded the audience, which existed so far as she was
concerned merely to return me to Parliament. It was a friendly eye,
provided they were not silly or troublesome. But it kindled a
little at the hint of a hostile question. After we had come so far
and taken so much trouble!
She constituted herself the dragoman of our political travels. In
hotels she was serenely resolute for the quietest and the best, she
rejected all their proposals for meals and substituted a severely
nourishing dietary of her own, and even in private houses she
astonished me by her tranquil insistence upon special comforts and
sustenance. I can see her face now as it would confront a hostess,
a little intent, but sweetly resolute and assured.
Since our marriage she had read a number of political memoirs, and
she had been particularly impressed by the career of Mrs. Gladstone.
I don't think it occurred to her to compare and contrast my quality
with that of Mrs. Gladstone's husband. I suspect her of a
deliberate intention of achieving parallel results by parallel
methods. I was to be Gladstonised. Gladstone it appeared used to
lubricate his speeches with a mixture-if my memory serves me right-
of egg beaten up in sherry, and Margaret was very anxious I should
take a leaf from that celebrated book. She wanted, I know, to hold
the glass in her hand while I was speaking.
But here I was firm. "No," I said, very decisively, "simply I won't
stand that. It's a matter of conscience. I shouldn't feel-
democratic. I'll take my chance of the common water in the carafe
on the chairman's table."
"I DO wish you wouldn't," she said, distressed.
It was absurd to feel irritated; it was so admirable of her, a
little childish, infinitely womanly and devoted and fine-and I see
now how pathetic. But I could not afford to succumb to her. I
wanted to follow my own leading, to see things clearly, and this
reassuring pose of a high destiny, of an almost terribly efficient
pursuit of a fixed end when as a matter of fact I had a very
doubtful end and an aim as yet by no means fixed, was all too
seductive for dalliance…
4
And into all these things with the manner of a trifling and casual
incident comes the figure of Isabel Rivers. My first impressions of
her were of a rather ugly and ungainly, extraordinarily interesting
schoolgirl with a beautiful quick flush under her warm brown skin,
who said and did amusing and surprising things. When first I saw
her she was riding a very old bicycle downhill with her feet on the
fork of the frame-it seemed to me to the public danger, but
afterwards I came to understand the quality of her nerve better-and
on the third occasion she was for her own private satisfaction
climbing a tree. On the intervening occasion we had what seems now
to have been a long sustained conversation about the political
situation and the books and papers I had written.
I wonder if it was.
What a delightful mixture of child and grave woman she was at that
time, and how little I reckoned on the part she would play in my
life! And since she has played that part, how impossible it is to
tell now of those early days! Since I wrote that opening paragraph
to this section my idle pen has been, as it were, playing by itself
and sketching faces on the blotting pad-one impish wizened visage
is oddly like little Bailey-and I have been thinking cheek on fist
amidst a limitless wealth of memories. She sits below me on the low
wall under the olive trees with our little child in her arms. She
is now the central fact in my life. It still seems a little
incredible that that should be so. She has destroyed me as a
politician, brought me to this belated rebeginning of life. When I
sit down and try to make her a girl again, I feel like the Arabian
fisherman who tried to put the genius back into the pot from which
it had spread gigantic across the skies…
I have a very clear vision of her rush downhill past our labouring
ascendant car-my colours fluttered from handle-bar and shoulder-
knot-and her waving hand and the sharp note of her voice. She
cried out something, I don't know what, some greeting.
"What a pretty girl!" said Margaret.
Parvill, the cheap photographer, that industrious organiser for whom
by way of repayment I got those magic letters, that knighthood of
the underlings, "J. P." was in the car with us and explained her to
us. "One of the best workers you have," he said…
And then after a toilsome troubled morning we came, rather cross
from the strain of sustained amiability, to Sir Graham Rivers'
house. It seemed all softness and quiet-I recall dead white
panelling and oval mirrors horizontally set and a marble fireplace
between white marble-blind Homer and marble-blind Virgil, very grave
and fine-and how Isabel came in to lunch in a shapeless thing like
a blue smock that made her bright quick-changing face seem yellow
under her cloud of black hair. Her step-sister was there, Miss
Gamer, to whom the house was to descend, a well-dressed lady of
thirty, amiably disavowing responsibility for Isabel in every p
hrase
and gesture. And there was a very pleasant doctor, an Oxford man,
who seemed on excellent terms with every one. It was manifest that
he was in the habit of sparring with the girl, but on this occasion
she wasn't sparring and refused to be teased into a display in spite
of the taunts of either him or her father. She was, they discovered
with rising eyebrows, shy. It seemed an opportunity too rare for
them to miss. They proclaimed her enthusiasm for me in a way that
brought a flush to her cheek and a look into her eye between appeal
and defiance. They declared she had read my books, which I thought
at the time was exaggeration, their dry political quality was so
distinctly not what one was accustomed to regard as schoolgirl
reading. Miss Gamer protested to protect her, "When once in a blue
moon Isabel is well-behaved…!"
Except for these attacks I do not remember much of the conversation
at table; it was, I know, discursive and concerned with the sort of
topographical and social and electioneering fact natural to such a
visit. Old Rivers struck me as a delightful person, modestly
unconscious of his doubly-earned V. C. and the plucky defence of
Kardin-Bergat that won his baronetcy. He was that excellent type,
the soldier radical, and we began that day a friendship that was
only ended by his death in the hunting-field three years later. He
interested Margaret into a disregard of my plate and the fact that I
had secured the illegal indulgence of Moselle. After lunch we went
for coffee into another low room, this time brown panelled and
looking through French windows on a red-walled garden, graceful even
in its winter desolation. And there the conversation suddenly
picked up and became good. It had fallen to a pause, and the
doctor, with an air of definitely throwing off a mask and wrecking
an established tranquillity, remarked: "Very probably you Liberals
will come in, though I'm not sure you'll come in so mightily as you
think, but what you do when you do come in passes my comprehension."
"There's good work sometimes," said Sir Graham, "in undoing."
"You can't govern a great empire by amending and repealing the Acts
of your predecessors," said the doctor.
There came that kind of pause that happens when a subject is
broached too big and difficult for the gathering. Margaret's blue