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,
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