on. We passed
Cardcaster Place. Perhaps old Wardingham, that pillar of the old
Conservatives, was there, fretting over his unsuccessful struggle with
our young Toryism. Little he recked of this new turn of the wheel and
how it would confirm his contempt of all our novelties. Perhaps some
faint intimation drew him to the window to see behind the stems of the
young fir trees that bordered his domain, the little string of lighted
carriage windows gliding southward....

Suddenly I began to realise just what it was we were doing.

And now, indeed, I knew what London had been to me, London where I
had been born and educated, the slovenly mother of my mind and all my
ambitions, London and the empire! It seemed to me we must be going
out to a world that was utterly empty. All our significance fell from
us--and before us was no meaning any more. We were leaving London; my
hand, which had gripped so hungrily upon its complex life, had been
forced from it, my fingers left their hold. That was over. I should
never have a voice in public affairs again. The inexorable unwritten
law which forbids overt scandal sentenced me. We were going out to a
new life, a life that appeared in that moment to be a mere shrivelled
remnant of me, a mere residuum of sheltering and feeding and seeing
amidst alien scenery and the sound of unfamiliar tongues. We were going
to live cheaply in a foreign place, so cut off that I meet now the
merest stray tourist, the commonest tweed-clad stranger with a mixture
of shyness and hunger.... And suddenly all the schemes I was leaving
appeared fine and adventurous and hopeful as they had never done before.
How great was this purpose I had relinquished, this bold and subtle
remaking of the English will! I had doubted so many things, and now
suddenly I doubted my unimportance, doubted my right to this suicidal
abandonment. Was I not a trusted messenger, greatly trusted and
favoured, who had turned aside by the way? Had I not, after all, stood
for far more than I had thought; was I not filching from that dear great
city of my birth and life, some vitally necessary thing, a key, a link,
a reconciling clue in her political development, that now she might seek
vaguely for in vain? What is one life against the State? Ought I not
to have sacrificed Isabel and all my passion and sorrow for Isabel, and
held to my thing--stuck to my thing?

I heard as though he had spoken it in the carriage Britten's "It WAS
a good game."