"After we've parted I shall look to talk it over with you."
"So shall I."
"That's absurd."
"Absurd."
"I feel as if you'd always he there, just about where you are now.
Invisible perhaps, but there. We've spent so much of our lives
joggling elbows."…
"Yes. Yes. I don't in the least realise it. I suppose I shall
begin to when the train goes out of the station. Are we wanting in
imagination, Isabel?"
"I don't know. We've always assumed it was the other way about."
"Even when the train goes out of the station-! I've seen you into
so many trains."
"I shall go on thinking of things to say to you-things to put in
your letters. For years to come. How can I ever stop thinking in
that way now? We've got into each other's brains."
"It isn't real," I said; "nothing is real. The world's no more than
a fantastic dream. Why are we parting, Isabel?"
"I don't know. It seems now supremely silly. I suppose we have to.
Can't we meet?-don't you think we shall meet even in dreams?"
"We'll meet a thousand times in dreams," I said.
"I wish we could dream at the same time," said Isabel… "Dream
walks. I can't believe, dear, I shall never have a walk with you
again."
"If I'd stayed six months in America," I said, "we might have walked
long walks and talked long talks for all our lives."
"Not in a world of Baileys," said Isabel. "And anyhow-"
She stopped short. I looked interrogation.
"We've loved," she said.
I took her ticket, saw to her luggage, and stood by the door of the
compartment. "Good-bye," I said a little stiffly, conscious of the
people upon the platform. She bent above me, white and dusky,
looking at me very steadfastly.
"Come here," she whispered. "Never mind the porters. What can they
know? Just one time more-I must."
She rested her hand against the door of the carriage and bent down
upon me, and put her cold, moist lips to mine.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE BREAKING POINT
1
And then we broke down. We broke our faith with both Margaret and
Shoesmith, flung career and duty out of our lives, and went away
together.
It is only now, almost a year after these events, that I can begin
to see what happened to me. At the time it seemed to me I was a
rational, responsible creature, but indeed I had not parted from her
two days before I became a monomaniac to whom nothing could matter
but Isabel. Every truth had to be squared to that obsession, every
duty. It astounds me to think how I forgot Margaret, forgot my
work, forgot everything but that we two were parted. I still
believe that with better chances we might have escaped the
consequences of the emotional storm that presently seized us both.
But we had no foresight of that, and no preparation for it, and our
circumstances betrayed us. It was partly Shoesmith's unwisdom in
delaying his marriage until after the end of the session-partly my
own amazing folly in returning within four days to Westminster. But
we were all of us intent upon the defeat of scandal and the complete
restoration of appearances. It seemed necessary that Shoesmith's
marriage should not seem to be hurried, still more necessary that I
should not vanish inexplicably. I had to be visible with Margaret
in London just as much as possible; we went to restaurants, we
visited the theatre; we could even contemplate the possibility of my
presence at the wedding. For that, however, we had schemed a
weekend visit to Wales, and a fictitious sprained ankle at the last
moment which would justify my absence…
I cannot convey to you the intolerable wretchedness and rebellion of
my separation from Isabel. It seemed that in the past two years all
my thoughts had spun commisures to Isabel's brain and I could think
of nothing that did not lead me surely to the need of the one
office and my home, I filled all my days with appointments and duty,
and it did not save me in the least from a lonely emptiness such as
I had never felt before in all my life. I had little sleep. In the
daytime I did a hundred things, I even spoke in the House on two
occasions, and by my own low standards spoke well, and it seemed to
me that I was going about in my own brain like a hushed survivor in
a house whose owner lies dead upstairs.
I came to a crisis after that wild dinner of Tarvrille's. Something
in that stripped my soul bare.
It was an occasion made absurd and strange by the odd accident that
the house caught fire upstairs while we were dining below. It was a
men's dinner-" A dinner of all sorts," said Tarvrille, when he
invited me; "everything from Evesham and Gane to Wilkins the author,
and Heaven knows what will happen!" I remember that afterwards
Tarvrille was accused of having planned the fire to make his dinner
a marvel and a memory. It was indeed a wonderful occasion, and I
suppose if I had not been altogether drenched in misery, I should
have found the same wild amusement in it that glowed in all the
others. There were one or two university dons, Lord George Fester,
the racing man, Panmure, the artist, two or three big City men,
Weston Massinghay and another prominent Liberal whose name I can't
remember, the three men Tarvrille had promised and Esmeer, Lord
Wrassleton, Waulsort, the member for Monckton, Neal and several
others. We began a little coldly, with duologues, but the
conversation was already becoming general-so far as such a long
table permitted-when the fire asserted itself.
It asserted itself first as a penetrating and emphatic smell of
burning rubber,-it was caused by the fusing of an electric wire.
The reek forced its way into the discussion of the Pekin massacres
that had sprung up between Evesham, Waulsort, and the others at the
end of the table. "Something burning," said the man next to me.
"Something must be burning," said Panmure.
Tarvrille hated undignified interruptions. He had a particularly
imperturbable butler with a cadaverous sad face and an eye of rigid
disapproval. He spoke to this individual over his shoulder. "Just
see, will you," he said, and caught up the pause in the talk to his
left.
Wilkins was asking questions, and I, too, was curious. The story of
the siege of the Legations in China in the year 1900 and all that
followed upon that, is just one of those disturbing interludes in
history that refuse to join on to that general scheme of
protestation by which civilisation is maintained. It is a break in
the general flow of experience as disconcerting to statecraft as the
robbery of my knife and the scuffle that followed it had been to me
when I was a boy at Penge. It is like a tear in a curtain revealing
quite unexpected backgrounds. I had never given the business a
thought for years; now this talk brought back a string of pictures
to my mind; how the reliefs arr
ived and the plundering began, how
section after section of the International Army was drawn into
murder and pillage, how the infection spread upward until the wives
of Ministers were busy looting, and the very sentinels stripped and
crawled like snakes into the Palace they were set to guard. It did
not stop at robbery, men were murdered, women, being plundered, were
outraged, children were butchered, strong men had found themselves
with arms in a lawless, defenceless city, and this had followed.
Now it was all recalled.
"Respectable ladies addicted to district visiting at home were as
bad as any one," said Panmure. "Glazebrook told me of one-flushed
like a woman at a bargain sale, he said-and when he pointed out to
her that the silk she'd got was bloodstained, she just said, 'Oh,
bother!' and threw it aside and went back…"
We became aware that Tarvrille's butler had returned. We tried not
to seem to listen.
"Beg pardon, m'lord," he said. "The house IS on fire, m'lord."
"Upstairs, m'lord."
"Just overhead, m'lord."
"The maids are throwing water, m'lord, and I've telephoned FIRE."
"No, m'lord, no immediate danger."
"It's all right," said Tarvrille to the table generally. Go on!
It's not a general conflagration, and the fire brigade won't be five
minutes. Don't see that it's our affair. The stuff's insured.
They say old Lady Paskershortly was dreadful. Like a harpy. The
Dowager Empress had shown her some little things of hers. Pet
things-hidden away. Susan went straight for them-used to take an
umbrella for the silks. Born shoplifter."
It was evident he didn't want his dinner spoilt, and we played up
loyally.
"This is recorded history," said Wilkins,-" practically. It makes
one wonder about unrecorded history. In India, for example."
But nobody touched that.
"Thompson," said Tarvrille to the imperturbable butler, and
indicating the table generally, "champagne. Champagne. Keep it
going."
"M'lord," and Thompson marshalled his assistants.
Some man I didn't know began to remember things about Mandalay.
"It's queer," he said, "how people break out at times;" and told his
story of an army doctor, brave, public-spirited, and, as it
happened, deeply religious, who was caught one evening by the
excitement of plundering-and stole and hid, twisted the wrist of a
boy until it broke, and was afterwards overcome by wild remorse.
I watched Evesham listening intently. "Strange," he said, "very
strange. We are such stuff as thieves are made of. And in China,
too, they murdered people-for the sake of murdering. Apart, so to
speak, from mercenary considerations. I'm afraid there's no doubt
of it in certain cases. No doubt at all. Young soldiers fresh from
German high schools and English homes!"
"Did OUR people?" asked some patriot.
"Not so much. But I'm afraid there were cases… Some of the
Indian troops were pretty bad."
Gane picked up the tale with confirmations.
It is all printed in the vividest way as a picture upon my memory,
so that were I a painter I think I could give the deep rich browns
and warm greys beyond the brightly lit table, the various
distinguished faces, strongly illuminated, interested and keen,
above the black and white of evening dress, the alert menservants
with their heavier, clean-shaved faces indistinctly seen in the
dimness behind. Then this was coloured emotionally for me by my
aching sense of loss and sacrifice, and by the chance trend of our
talk to the breaches and unrealities of the civilised scheme. We
seemed a little transitory circle of light in a universe of darkness
and violence; an effect to which the diminishing smell of burning
rubber, the trampling of feet overhead, the swish of water, added
enormously. Everybody-unless, perhaps, it was Evesham-drank
rather carelessly because of the suppressed excitement of our
situation, and talked the louder and more freely.
"But what a flimsy thing our civilisation is!" said Evesham; "a mere
thin net of habits and associations!"
"I suppose those men came back," said Wilkins.
"Lady Paskershortly did!" chuckled Evesham.
"How do they fit it in with the rest of their lives?" Wilkins
speculated. "I suppose there's Pekin-stained police officers,
Pekin-stained J. P.'s-trying petty pilferers in the severest
manner."…
Then for a time things became preposterous. There was a sudden
cascade of water by the fireplace, and then absurdly the ceiling
began to rain upon us, first at this point and then that. "My new
suit!" cried some one. "Perrrrrr-up pe-rr"-a new vertical line of
blackened water would establish itself and form a spreading pool
upon the gleaming cloth. The men nearest would arrange catchment
areas of plates and flower bowls. "Draw up!" said Tarvrille, "draw
up. That's the bad end of the table!" He turned to the
imperturbable butler. "Take round bath towels," he said; and
presently the men behind us were offering-with inflexible dignity-
"Port wine, Sir. Bath towel, Sir!" Waulsort, with streaks of
blackened water on his forehead, was suddenly reminded of a wet year
when he had followed the French army manoeuvres. An animated
dispute sprang up between him and Neal about the relative efficiency
of the new French and German field guns. Wrassleton joined in and a
little drunken shrivelled Oxford don of some sort with a black-
splashed shirt front who presently silenced them all by the
immensity and particularity of his knowledge of field artillery.
Then the talk drifted to Sedan and the effect of dead horses upon
drinking-water, which brought Wrassleton and Weston Massinghay into
a dispute of great vigour and emphasis. "The trouble in South
Africa," said Weston Massinghay, "wasn't that we didn't boil our
water. It was that we didn't boil our men. The Boers drank the
same stuff we did. THEY didn't get dysentery."
That argument went on for some time. I was attacked across the
table by a man named Burshort about my Endowment of Motherhood
schemes, but in the gaps of that debate I could still hear Weston
Massinghay at intervals repeat in a rather thickened voice: "THEY
didn't get dysentery."
I think Evesham went early. The rest of us clustered more and more
closely towards the drier end of the room, the table was pushed
along, and the area beneath the extinguished conflagration abandoned
to a tinkling, splashing company of pots and pans and bowls and
baths. Everybody was now disposed to be hilarious and noisy, to say
startling and aggressive things; we must have sounded a queer
clamour to a listener in the next room. The devil inspired them to
begin baiting me. "Ours isn't the Tory party any more," said
Burshort. "Remington has made it the Obstetric Party."
"That's good!" said Weston Massinghay, with all his teeth gleaming;
"I shall use that against you in the House!"
"I shall denounce you for abusing private confid
ences if you do,"
said Tarvrille.
"Remington wants us to give up launching Dreadnoughts and launch
babies instead," Burshort urged. "For the price of one Dreadnought-"
The little shrivelled don who had been omniscient about guns joined
in the baiting, and displayed himself a venomous creature.
Something in his eyes told me he knew Isabel and hated me for it.
"Love and fine thinking," he began, a little thickly, and knocking
over a wine-glass with a too easy gesture. "Love and fine thinking.
Two things don't go together. No philosophy worth a damn ever came
out of excesses of love. Salt Lake City-Piggott-Ag-Agapemone
again-no works to matter."
Everybody laughed.
"Got to rec'nise these facts," said my assailant. "Love and fine
think'n pretty phrase-attractive. Suitable for p'litical
dec'rations. Postcard, Christmas, gilt lets, in a wreath of white
flow's. Not oth'wise valu'ble."
I made some remark, I forget what, but he overbore me.
Real things we want are Hate-Hate and COARSE think'n. I b'long to
the school of Mrs. F's Aunt-"
"What?" said some one, intent.
"In 'Little Dorrit,'" explained Tarvrille; "go on!"
"Hate a fool," said my assailant.
Tarvrille glanced at me. I smiled to conceal the loss of my temper.
"Hate," said the little man, emphasising his point with a clumsy
fist. "Hate's the driving force. What's m'rality?-hate of rotten
goings on. What's patriotism?-hate of int'loping foreigners.
What's Radicalism?-hate of lords. What's Toryism?-hate of
disturbance. It's all hate-hate from top to bottom. Hate of a
mess. Remington owned it the other day, said he hated a mu'll.
There you are! If you couldn't get hate into an election, damn it
(hic) people wou'n't poll. Poll for love!-no' me!"
He paused, but before any one could speak he had resumed.
"Then this about fine thinking. Like going into a bear pit armed
with a tagle-talgent-talgent galv'nometer. Like going to fight a
mad dog with Shasepear and the Bible. Fine thinking-what we want
is the thickes' thinking we can get. Thinking that stands up alone.
Taf Reform means work for all, thassort of thing."
The gentleman from Cambridge paused. "YOU a flag!" he said. "I'd
as soon go to ba'ell und' wet tissue paper!"
My best answer on the spur of the moment was: