The real progress, Remington, is a graver thing and a painfuller thing and a slower thing altogether.Look! THAT"--and he pointed to where under a boarding in the light of a gas lamp a dingy prostitute stood lurking--" was in Babylon and Nineveh.Your little lot make believe there won't be anything of the sort after this Parliament! They're going to vanish at a few top notes from Altiora Bailey! Remington!--it's foolery.It's prigs at play.It's make-believe, make-believe! Your people there haven't got hold of things, aren't beginning to get hold of things, don't know anything of life at all, shirk life, avoid life, get in little bright clean rooms and talk big over your bumpers of lemonade while the Night goes by outside--untouched.Those Crampton fools slink by all this,"--he waved at the woman again--"pretend it doesn't exist, or is going to be banished root and branch by an Act to keep children in the wet outside public-houses.Do you think they really care, Remington? I don't.It's make-believe.What they want to do, what Lewis wants to do, what Mrs.Bunting Harblow wants her husband to do, is to sit and feel very grave and necessary and respected on the Government benches.They think of putting their feet out like statesmen, and tilting shiny hats with becoming brims down over their successful noses.Presentation portrait to a club at fifty.
That's their Reality.That's their scope.They don't, it's manifest, WANT to think beyond that.The things there ARE, Remington, they'll never face! the wonder and the depth of life,--lust, and the night-sky,--pain."
"But the good intention," I pleaded, "the Good Will!""Sentimentality," said Britten."No Good Will is anything but dishonesty unless it frets and burns and hurts and destroys a man.
That lot of yours have nothing but a good will to think they have good will.Do you think they lie awake of nights searching their hearts as we do? Lewis? Crampton? Or those neat, admiring, satisfied little wives? See how they shrank from the probe!""We all," I said, "shrink from the probe.""God help us!" said Britten....
"We are but vermin at the best, Remington," he broke out," and the greatest saint only a worm that has lifted its head for a moment from the dust.We are damned, we are meant to be damned, coral animalculae building upward, upward in a sea of damnation.But of all the damned things that ever were damned, your damned shirking, temperate, sham-efficient, self-satisfied, respectable, make-believe, Fabian-spirited Young Liberal is tbe utterly damnedest."He paused for a moment, and resumed in an entirely different note:
"Which is why I was so surprised, Remington, to find YOU in this set!""You're just the old plunger you used to be, Britten," I said."You're going too far with all your might for the sake of the damns.
Like a donkey that drags its cart up a bank to get thistles.
There's depths in Liberalism--"
"We were talking about Liberals."
"Liberty!"
"Liberty! What do YOOR little lot know of liberty?""What does any little lot know of liberty?""It waits outside, too big for our understanding.Like the night and the stars.And lust, Remington! lust and bitterness! Don't Iknow them? with all the sweetness and hope of life bitten and trampled, the dear eyes and the brain that loved and understood--and my poor mumble of a life going on! I'm within sight of being a drunkard, Remington! I'm a failure by most standards! Life has cut me to the bone.But I'm not afraid of it any more.I've paid something of the price, I've seen something of the meaning."He flew off at a tangent."I'd rather die in Delirium Tremens," he cried, "than be a Crampton or a Lewis....""Make-believe.Make-believe." The phrase and Britten's squat gestures haunted me as I walked homeward alone.I went to my room and stood before my desk and surveyed papers and files and Margaret's admirable equipment of me.
I perceived in the lurid light of Britten's suggestions that so it was Mr.George Alexander would have mounted a statesman's private room....
3
I was never at any stage a loyal party man.I doubt if party will ever again be the force it was during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Men are becoming increasingly constructive and selective, less patient under tradition and the bondage of initial circumstances.As education becomes more universal and liberating, men will sort themselves more and more by their intellectual temperaments and less and less by their accidental associations.
The past will rule them less; the future more.It is not simply party but school and college and county and country that lose their glamour.One does not hear nearly as much as our forefathers did of the "old Harrovian," "old Arvonian," "old Etonian" claim to this or that unfair advantage or unearnt sympathy.Even the Scotch and the Devonians weaken a little in their clannishness.A widening sense of fair play destroys such things.They follow freemasonry down--freemasonry of which one is chiefly reminded nowadays in England by propitiatory symbols outside shady public-houses....
There is, of course, a type of man which clings very obstinately to party ties.These are the men with strong reproductive imaginations and no imaginative initiative, such men as Cladingbowl, for example, or Dayton.They are the scholars-at-large in life.For them the fact that the party system has been essential in the history of England for two hundred years gives it an overwhelming glamour.
They have read histories and memoirs, they see the great grey pile of Westminster not so much for what it is as for what it was, rich with dramatic memories, populous with glorious ghosts, phrasing itself inevitably in anecdotes and quotations.It seems almost scandalous that new things should continue to happen, swamping with strange qualities the savour of these old associations.
