Yours, dear Mrs. Ward,
most truly,
HENRY JAMES.”
Meanwhile, in spite of the drawback of her continued ill-health, she derived throughout these years an ever-increasing pleasure from the friendships with which she was surrounded. Both in the London house, which they had acquired early in 1891 (25 Grosvenor Place), and at Stocks, she loved to gather many friends about her, though the effort of entertaining them was often a sore tax upon her slender strength. Her Sunday parties at Stocks brought together men and women from many different worlds—political, literary and philanthropic—with whom the talk ranged over all the questions and persons of the day from breakfast till lunch, from lunch till tea, and from tea till dinner; but after dinner, in sheer exhaustion, the party would usually take refuge in what were known, derisively, as “intellectual games.” Mrs. Ward herself was not particularly good at these diversions, but she loved to watch the efforts of others, and they did give a rest, after all, from the endless talk! On one such occasion the game selected was the variety known as “riddle game,” in which a name and a thing are written down at random by different players, and the next tries to give a reason why the person should be like the thing. Lord Acton, who had that day devoured ten books of Biblical criticism that Mrs. Ward had placed in his room, and would infinitely have preferred to go on talking about them, found himself confronted by the question: “Why is Lord Rothschild like a poker?” For a long time he sat contemplating the paper, then scribbled down in desperation: “Because he is upright,” and retired impenetrably behind an eleventh book. But Mr. Asquith made up for all deficiencies by his ingenuity in this form of nonsense. “Why is Irving like a wheelbarrow?” demanded one of the little papers that came round to him, and while the rest of us floundered in heavy jokes Mr. Asquith found the exact answer: “Because he serves to fill up the pit and carry away the boxes.”
Politics were of absorbing interest to Mrs. Ward, and though her own views remained decidedly Unionist on the Irish question, in home affairs they were sufficiently mixed to make free discussion not only possible, but delightful to her. She still retained her old friendship for Mr. Morley, and probably the majority of her Parliamentary friends at this time were of the Liberal persuasion. 1895 was the year of the “cordite division” and the fall of Lord Rosebery’s Government, involving many of these friends in the catastrophe. Mr. Morley was defeated at Newcastle and went to recover his serenity in the Highlands, whither Mrs. Ward sent him a copy of Bessie Costrell, provoking the following letter from her old friend and master:
August 6, 1895.
My dear Mrs. Ward,—
It was most pleasant to me to receive the little volume, in its pretty dress, and with the friendly dedication. It will take its place among my personal treasures, and I am truly grateful to you for thinking of me.
The story is full of interest to me, and in the vein of a true realism, humanising instead of brutalising. The “severity” of the poor dead woman’s look, and the whole of that page, redeems with a note of just pity all the sordid elements.... We are quartered in one of the most glorious of highland glens, five and twenty miles from a railway, and nearly as many hours from London. Now and then my thoughts wander to Westminster, passing round by way of Newcastle, but I quickly cast Satan behind me—and try to cultivate a steady-eyed equanimity, which shall not be a stupid insensibility to either one’s personal catastrophe or to the detriment which the commonwealth has just suffered. If life were not so short—I sometimes think it is far too long—I should see some compensations in the deluge that has come upon the Liberal party. It will do them good to be sent to adjust their compasses. The steering had been very blind in these latter days. Perhaps some will tell you that my own bit of steering was the very blindest of all. I know that you are disposed to agree with such folk, and I know that Irish character (for which English government, by the way, is wholly responsible), is difficult stuff to work with. But the policy was right, and I beg you not to think—as I once told the H. of C.—that the Irish sphinx is going to gather up her rags, and depart from your gates in meekness.
During these months another Liberal friend, Mr. Sydney Buxton, was taking infinite pains to pilot Mrs. Ward through the intricacies of the Parliamentary situation required for the book she was now writing, Sir George Tressady—drawing her a coloured plan of the House and the division-lobbies for the scene of Tressady’s “ratting,” and generally supervising the details of Marcella Maxwell’s Factory Bill. “I am sure it is owing to you,” wrote Mrs. Ward to him afterwards, “that the political framework has not at any rate stood in the way of the book’s success, as I feared at one time it might.” She herself had regularly put herself to school to learn every detail of the system of sweated homework prevalent in the East End of London at that time; wading through piles of Blue-books, visiting the actual scenes under the care of a Factory Inspector, or of Lord Rothschild’s Jewish secretary; learning much from her Fabian friends, Mrs. Sidney Webb and Mr. Graham Wallas.
“As to Maxwell’s Bill itself,” she wrote to Mr. Buxton, “after my talk with you and Mr. Gerald Balfour, I took the final idea of it from some evidence of Sidney Webb’s before the Royal Commission. There he says that he can perfectly well imagine, and would like to see tried, a special Factory Act for East London, and I find the same thing foreshadowed in various other things on Factory Law I have been reading. And some weeks ago I talked over the idea with Mr. Haldane, who thought it quite conceivable, and added that ‘London would bear quietly what would make Nottingham or Leeds revolt.’ If such a Bill is possible or plausible, that I think is all a novelist wants. For of course one cannot describe the real, and yet one wants something which is not merely fanciful, but might be, under certain circumstances. The whole situation lies as it were some ten years ahead, and I have made use of a remark of Gerald Balfour’s to me on the Terrace, when we had been talking over the new Factory Bill. ‘There is not much difference between Parties,’ he said, agreeing with you—‘but I should not wonder if, within the next few years, we saw some reaction in these matters,’ by which I suppose he meant if the Home Office power were over-driven, or the Acts administered too vexatiously.
“Do you see that they have lately been repealing some Factory legislation concerning women’s labour in France? We are not France, but we might conceivably, don’t you think, have a period of discontent?”