4

And into all these things with the manner of a trifling and casual

incident comes the figure of Isabel Rivers. My first impressions of

her were of a rather ugly and ungainly, extraordinarily interesting

schoolgirl with a beautiful quick flush under her warm brown skin,

who said and did amusing and surprising things. When first I saw

her she was riding a very old bicycle downhill with her feet on the

fork of the frame-it seemed to me to the public danger, but

afterwards I came to understand the quality of her nerve better-and

on the third occasion she was for her own private satisfaction

climbing a tree. On the intervening occasion we had what seems now

to have been a long sustained conversation about the political

situation and the books and papers I had written.

I wonder if it was.

What a delightful mixture of child and grave woman she was at that

time, and how little I reckoned on the part she would play in my

life! And since she has played that part, how impossible it is to

tell now of those early days! Since I wrote that opening paragraph

to this section my idle pen has been, as it were, playing by itself

and sketching faces on the blotting pad-one impish wizened visage

is oddly like little Bailey-and I have been thinking cheek on fist

amidst a limitless wealth of memories. She sits below me on the low

wall under the olive trees with our little child in her arms. She

is now the central fact in my life. It still seems a little

incredible that that should be so. She has destroyed me as a

politician, brought me to this belated rebeginning of life. When I

sit down and try to make her a girl again, I feel like the Arabian

fisherman who tried to put the genius back into the pot from which

it had spread gigantic across the skies…

I have a very clear vision of her rush downhill past our labouring

ascendant car-my colours fluttered from handle-bar and shoulder-

knot-and her waving hand and the sharp note of her voice. She

cried out something, I don't know what, some greeting.

"What a pretty girl!" said Margaret.

Parvill, the cheap photographer, that industrious organiser for whom

by way of repayment I got those magic letters, that knighthood of

the underlings, "J. P." was in the car with us and explained her to

us. "One of the best workers you have," he said…

And then after a toilsome troubled morning we came, rather cross

from the strain of sustained amiability, to Sir Graham Rivers'

house. It seemed all softness and quiet-I recall dead white

panelling and oval mirrors horizontally set and a marble fireplace

between white marble-blind Homer and marble-blind Virgil, very grave

and fine-and how Isabel came in to lunch in a shapeless thing like

a blue smock that made her bright quick-changing face seem yellow

under her cloud of black hair. Her step-sister was there, Miss

Gamer, to whom the house was to descend, a well-dressed lady of

thirty, amiably disavowing responsibility for Isabel in every phrase

and gesture. And there was a very pleasant doctor, an Oxford man,

who seemed on excellent terms with every one. It was manifest that

he was in the habit of sparring with the girl, but on this occasion

she wasn't sparring and refused to be teased into a display in spite

of the taunts of either him or her father. She was, they discovered

with rising eyebrows, shy. It seemed an opportunity too rare for

them to miss. They proclaimed her enthusiasm for me in a way that

brought a flush to her cheek and a look into her eye between appeal

and defiance. They declared she had read my books, which I thought

at the time was exaggeration, their dry political quality was so

distinctly not what one was accustomed to regard as schoolgirl

reading. Miss Gamer protested to protect her, "When once in a blue

moon Isabel is well-behaved…!"

Except for these attacks I do not remember much of the conversation

at table; it was, I know, discursive and concerned with the sort of

topographical and social and electioneering fact natural to such a

visit. Old Rivers struck me as a delightful person, modestly

unconscious of his doubly-earned V. C. and the plucky defence of

Kardin-Bergat that won his baronetcy. He was that excellent type,

the soldier radical, and we began that day a friendship that was

only ended by his death in the hunting-field three years later. He

interested Margaret into a disregard of my plate and the fact that I

had secured the illegal indulgence of Moselle. After lunch we went

for coffee into another low room, this time brown panelled and

looking through French windows on a red-walled garden, graceful even

in its winter desolation. And there the conversation suddenly

picked up and became good. It had fallen to a pause, and the

doctor, with an air of definitely throwing off a mask and wrecking

an established tranquillity, remarked: "Very probably you Liberals

will come in, though I'm not sure you'll come in so mightily as you

think, but what you do when you do come in passes my comprehension."

"There's good work sometimes," said Sir Graham, "in undoing."

"You can't govern a great empire by amending and repealing the Acts

of your predecessors," said the doctor.

There came that kind of pause that happens when a subject is

broached too big and difficult for the gathering. Margaret's blue

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.