THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

full of plans and so was she of the way in which we were to live and

work. We were to pay back in public service whatever excess of

wealth beyond his merits old Seddon's economic advantage had won for

him from the toiling people in the potteries. The end of the Boer

War was so recent that that blessed word "efficiency" echoed still

in people's minds and thoughts. Lord Roseberry in a memorable

oration had put it into the heads of the big outer public, but the

Baileys with a certain show of justice claimed to have set it going

in the cha

taken to him. But then it was their habit to make claims of that

sort. They certainly did their share to keep "efficient" going.

Altiora's highest praise was "thoroughly efficient." We were to be

a "thoroughly efficient" political couple of the "new type." She

explained us to herself and Oscar, she explained us to ourselves,

she explained us to the people who came to her di

afternoons until the world was highly charged with explanation and

expectation, and the proposal that I should be the Liberal candidate

for the Kinghamstead Division seemed the most natural development in

the world.

I was full of the ideal of hard restrained living and relentless

activity, and throughout a beautiful November at Venice, where

chiefly we spent our honeymoon, we turned over and over again and

discussed in every aspect our conception of a life tremendously

focussed upon the ideal of social service.

Most clearly there stands out a picture of ourselves talking in a

gondola on our way to Torcella. Far away behind us the smoke of

Murano forms a black stain upon an immense shining prospect of

smooth water, water as unruffled and luminous as the sky above, a

mirror on which rows of posts and distant black high-stemmed, swan-

necked boats with their minutely clear swinging gondoliers, float

aerially. Remote and low before us rises the little tower of our

destination. Our men swing together and their oars swirl leisurely

through the water, hump back in the rowlocks, splash sharply and go

swishing back again. Margaret lies back on cushions, with her face

shaded by a holland parasol, and I sit up beside her.

"You see," I say, and in spite of Margaret's note of perfect

acquiescence I feelmyself reasoning against an indefinable

antagonism, "it is so easy to fall into a slack way with life.

There may seem to be something priggish in a meticulous discipline,

but otherwise it is so easy to slip into indolent habits-and to be

distracted from one's purpose. The country, the world, wants men to

serve its constructive needs, to work out and carry out plans. For

a man who has to make a living the enemy is immediate necessity; for

people like ourselves it's-it's the constant small opportunity of

agreeable things."

"Frittering away," she says, "time and strength."

"That is what I feel. It's so pleasant to pretend one is simply

modest, it looks so foolish at times to take one's self too

seriously. We've GOT to take ourselves seriously."

She endorses my words with her eyes.

"I feel I can do great things with life."

"I KNOW you can."

"But that's only to be done by concentrating one's life upon one

main end. We have to plan our days, to make everything subserve our

scheme."

"I feel," she answers softly, "we ought to give-every hour."

Her face becomes dreamy. "I WANT to give every hour," she adds.

2

That holiday in Venice is set in my memory like a little artificial

lake in uneven confused country, as something very bright and

skylike, and discontinuous with all about it. The faded quality of

the very sunshine of that season, the mellow discoloured palaces and

places, the huge, time-ripened paintings of departed splendours, the

whispering, nearly noiseless passage of hearse-black gondolas, for

the horrible steam launch had not yet ruined Venice, the stilled

magnificences of the depopulated lagoons, the universal autumn, made

me feel altogether in recess from the teeming uproars of reality.

There was not a dozen people all told, no Americans and scarcely any

English, to dine in the big cavern of a dining-room, with its vistas

of separate tables, its distempered walls and its swathed

chandeliers. We went about seeing beautiful things, accepting

beauty on every hand, and taking it for granted that all was well

with ourselves and the world. It was ten days or a fortnight before

I became fretful and anxious for action; a long tranquillity for

such a temperament as mine.

Our pleasures were curiously impersonal, a succession of shared

aesthetic appreciation threads all that time. Our honeymoon was no

exultant coming together, no mutual shout of "YOU!" We were almost

shy with one another, and felt the relief of even a picture to help

us out. It was entirely in my conception of things that I should be

very watchful not to shock or distress Margaret or press the

sensuous note. Our love-making had much of the tepid smoothness of

the lagoons. We talked in delicate i

glorious freedoms. Margaret had missed Verona and Venice in her