H. Wells: THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

"Oh, damn!" I said, standing up and going to the window.

"Damn by all means. I never knewa topic so full of justifiable

damns. But you two did choose it. You ought to stick to your

undertaking."

I turned upon him with a snarl in my voice. "My dear Britten!" I

cried. "Don't I KNOW I'mdoing wrong? Aren't I in a net? Suppose

I don't go! Is there any right in that? Do you thinkwe're going

to be much to ourselvesor any one after this parting? I've been

thinkingall last night of this business, trying it over and over

again from the beginning. How was it we went wrong? Since I came

back from America-I grant you THAT-but SINCE, there's never been a

step that wasn't forced, that hadn't as much right in it or more, as

wrong. You talk as though I was a thing of steel that could bend

this way or that and never change. You talk as though Isabel was a

cat one could give to any kind of owner… We two are things

that change and growand alter all the time. We're-so interwoven

that beingparted now will leave us just misshapen cripples…

You don't knowthe motives, you don't knowthe rush and feelof

things, you don't knowhow it was with us, and how it is with us.

You don't knowthe hunger for the mere sightof one another; you

don't knowanything."

Britten looked at his finger-nails closely. His red face puckered

to a wry frown. "Haven't we all at times wanted the world put

back?" he grunted, and looked hard and close at one particular nail.

There was a long pause.

"I want her," I said, "and I'mgoing to have her. I'mtoo tired for

balancing the right or wrong of it any more. You can't separate

them. I sawher yesterday… She's-ill… I'd take her

now, if death were just outside the door waiting for us."

"Torture?"

I thought. "Yes."

"For her?"

"There isn't," I said.

"If there was?"

I made no answer.

"It's blind Want. And there's nothing ever been put into you to

stand against it. What are you going to do with the restof your

lives?"

"No end of things."

"Nothing."

"I don't believe you are right," I said. "I believe we can save

something-"

Britten shook his head. "Some scraps of salvage won't excuse you,"

he said.

His indignation rose. "In the middle of life!" he said. "No man

has a right to take his hand from the plough!"

He leant forward on his desk and opened an argumentative palm. "You

know, Remington," he said, "and I know, that if this could be fended

off for six months-if you could be clapped in prison, or got out of

the way somehow,-until this marriage was all over and settled down

for a year, say-you knowthen you two could meet, curious, happy,

as friends. Saved! You KNOW it."

I turned and stared at him. "You're wrong, Britten," I said. "And

does it matter if we could?"

I found that in talking to him I could frame the apologetics I had

not been able to find for myself alone.

" I amcertain of one thing, Britten. It is our duty not to hush up

this scandal."

He raised his eyebrows. I perceivednow the element of absurdity in

me, but at the time I was as serious as a man who is burning.

"It's our duty," I went on, "to smash now openly in the sightof

every one. Yes! I've got that as clean and plain-as prison

whitewash. I amconvinced that we have got to be public to the

uttermost now-I mean it-until every corner of our world knowsthis

story, knowsit fully, adds it to the Parnell story and the Ashton

Dean story and the Carmel story and the Witterslea story, and all

the other stories that have picked man after man out of English

public life, the men with active imaginations, the men of strong

initiative. To thinkthis tottering old-woman ridden Empire should

dare to waste a man on such a score! You say I ought to be

penitent-"

Britten shook his head and smiled very faintly.

" I'mboiling with indignation," I said. " I lay in bed last night

and went through it all. What in God's name was to be expected of

us but what has happened? I went through my life bit by bit last

night, I recalled all I've had to do with virtueand women, and all

I was told and how I was prepared. I was born into cowardice and

debasement. We all are. Our generation's grimy with hypocrisy. I

came to the most beautiful things in life-like peeping Tom of

Coventry. I was never given a light, never given a touchof natural

manhood by all this dingy, furtive, canting, humbugging English

world. Thank God! I'll soon be out of it! The shame of it! The

very savages in Australia initiate their children better than the

English do to-day. Neither of us was ever given a view of what they

call morality that didn't make it show as shabby subservience, as

the meanest discretion, an abject submission to unreasonable

prohibitions! meek surrender of mindand body to the dictation of

pedants and old women and fools. We weren't taught-we were mumbled

at! And when we found that the thing they called unclean, unclean,

was Pagan beauty-God! it was a glory to sin, Britten, it was a

pride and splendour like bathing in the sunlight after dust and

grime!"

"Yes," said Britten. "That's all very well-"

I interrupted him. "I knowthere's a case-I'm beginning to think

it a valid case against us; but we never met it! There's a steely

pride in selfrestraint, a nobilityof chastity, but only for those

who seeand thinkand act-untrammeled and unafraid. The other

thing, the current thing, why! it's worth as much as the chastity of

a monkey kept in a cage by itself!" I put my foot in a chair, and

urged my case upon him. "This is a dirty world, Britten, simply

because it is a muddled world, and the thing you call morality is

dirtier now than the thing you call immorality. Why don't the

moralists pick their stuff out of the slime if they care for it, and

wipe it?-damn them! I amburning now to say: 'Yes, we did this and

this,' to all the world. All the world!… I will!"

Britten rubbed the palm of his hand on the corner of his desk.

"That's all very well, Remington," he said. "You mean to go."

He stopped and began again. "If you didn't knowyou were in the

wrong you wouldn't be so damned rhetorical. You're in the wrong.

It's as plain to you as it is to me. You're leaving a big work,

you're leaving a wife who trusted you, to go and live with your

jolly mistress… You won't seeyou're a statesman that

matters, that no single man, maybe, might come to such influenceas

you in the next ten years. You're throwing yourselfaway and

accusing your country of rejecting you."

He swung round upon his swivel at me. "Remington," he said, "have

you forgotten the immense things our movement means?"

I thought. "Perhaps I amrhetorical," I said.

"But the things we might achieve! If you'd only stay now-even now!

Oh! you'd suffer a little socially, but what of that? You'd be able

to go on-perhaps all the better for hostility of the kind you'd

get. You know, Remington-you KNOW."

I thoughtand went back to his earlier point. "If I amrhetorical,

at any rate it's a living feelingbehind it. Yes, I rememberall

the implications of our aims-very splendid, very remote. But just

now it's rather like offering to give a freezing man the sunlit

Himalayas from end to end in return for his camp-fire. When you

talk of me and my jolly mistress, it isn't fair. That misrepresents

everything. I'mnot going out of this-for delights. That's the