CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ ADOLESCENCE

1

I find it very difficult to trace how form was added to form

and interpretation followed interpretation in my ever-spreading,

ever-deepening, ever-multiplying and enriching vision of this world into

which I had been born. Every day added its impressions, its hints, its

subtle explications to the growing understanding. Day after day the

living interlacing threads of a mind weave together. Every morning now

for three weeks and more (for to-day is Thursday and I started on a

Tuesday) I have been trying to convey some idea of the factors and

early influences by which my particular scrap of subjective tapestry

was shaped, to show the child playing on the nursery floor, the son

perplexed by his mother, gazing aghast at his dead father, exploring

interminable suburbs, touched by first intimations of the sexual

mystery, coming in with a sort of confused avidity towards the centres

of the life of London. It is only by such an effort to write it down

that one realises how marvellously crowded, how marvellously analytical

and synthetic those ears must be. One begins with the little child

to whom the sky is a roof of blue, the world a screen of opaque and

disconnected facts, the home a thing eternal, and “being good” just

simple obedience to unquestioned authority; and one comes at last to

the vast world of one's adult perception, pierced deep by flaring

searchlights of partial understanding, here masked by mists, here

refracted and distorted through half translucent veils, here showing

broad prospects and limitless vistas and here impenetrably dark.

I recall phases of deep speculation, doubts and even prayers by night,

and strange occasions when by a sort of hypnotic contemplation of

nothingness I sought to pierce the web of appearances about me. It is

hard to measure these things in receding perspective, and now I cannot

trace, so closely has mood succeeded and overlaid and obliterated mood,

the phases by which an utter horror of death was replaced by the growing

realisation of its necessity and dignity. Difficulty of the imagination

with infinite space, infinite time, entangled my mind; and moral

distress for the pain and suffering of bygone ages that made all thought

of reformation in the future seem but the grimmest irony upon now

irreparable wrongs. Many an intricate perplexity of these broadening

years did not so much get settled as cease to matter. Life crowded me

away from it.

I have confessed myself a temerarious theologian, and in that

passage from boyhood to manhood I ranged widely in my search for some

permanently satisfying Truth. That, too, ceased after a time to be

urgently interesting. I came at last into a phase that endures to this

day, of absolute tranquillity, of absolute confidence in whatever that

Incomprehensible Comprehensive which must needs be the substratum of all

things, may be. Feeling OF IT, feeling BY IT, I cannot feel afraid of

it. I think I had got quite clearly and finally to that adjustment long

before my Cambridge days were done. I am sure that the evil in life is

transitory and finite like an accident or distress in the nursery; that

God is my Father and that I may trust Him, even though life hurts so

that one must needs cry out at it, even though it shows no consequence

but failure, no promise but pain....

But while I was fearless of theology I must confess it was comparatively

late before I faced and dared to probe the secrecies of sex. I was

afraid of sex. I had an instinctive perception that it would be a large

and difficult thing in my life, but my early training was all in

the direction of regarding it as an irrelevant thing, as something

disconnected from all the broad significances of life, as hostile

and disgraceful in its quality. The world was never so emasculated in

thought, I suppose, as it was in the Victorian time....

I was afraid to think either of sex or (what I have always found

inseparable from a kind of sexual emotion) beauty. Even as a boy I knew

the thing as a haunting and alluring mystery that I tried to keep away

from. Its dim presence obsessed me none the less for all the extravagant

decency, the stimulating silences of my upbringing....

The plaster Venuses and Apollos that used to adorn the vast aisle and

huge grey terraces of the Crystal Palace were the first intimations of

the beauty of the body that ever came into my life. As I write of it I

feel again the shameful attraction of those gracious forms. I used to

look at them not simply, but curiously and askance. Once at least in

my later days at Penge, I spent a shilling in admission chiefly for the

sake of them....

The strangest thing of all my odd and solitary upbringing seems to me

now that swathing up of all the splendours of the flesh, that strange

combination of fanatical terrorism and shyness that fenced me about with

prohibitions. It caused me to grow up, I will not say blankly ignorant,

but with an ignorance blurred and dishonoured by shame, by enigmatical

warnings, by cultivated aversions, an ignorance in which a fascinated

curiosity and desire struggled like a thing in a net. I knew so little

and I felt so much. There was indeed no Aphrodite at all in my youthful

Pantheon, but instead there was a mysterious and minatory gap. I have

told how at last a new Venus was born in my imagination out of gas lamps

and the twilight, a Venus with a cockney accent and dark eyes shining

out of the dusk, a Venus who was a warm, passion-stirring atmosphere

rather than incarnate in a body. And I have told, too, how I bought a

picture.

All this was a thing apart from the rest of my life, a locked avoided

chamber....

It was not until my last year at Trinity that I really broke down the

barriers of this unwholesome silence and brought my secret broodings to

the light of day. Then a little set of us plunged suddenly into what

we called at first sociological discussion. I can still recall even the

physical feeling of those first tentative talks. I remember them mostly

as occurring in the rooms of Ted Hatherleigh, who kept at the corner by

the Trinity great gate, but we also used to talk a good deal at a man's

in King's, a man named, if I remember rightly, Redmayne. The atmosphere

of Hatherleigh's rooms was a haze of tobacco smoke against a background

brown and deep. He professed himself a socialist with anarchistic

leanings--he had suffered the martyrdom of ducking for it--and a huge

French May-day poster displaying a splendid proletarian in red and black

on a barricade against a flaring orange sky, dominated his decorations.

Hatherleigh affected a fine untidiness, and all the place, even

the floor, was littered with books, for the most part open and face

downward; deeper darknesses were supplied by a discarded gown and

our caps, all conscientiously battered, Hatherleigh's flopped like an

elephant's ear and inserted quill pens supported the corners of mine;

the highlights of the picture came chiefly as reflections from his

chequered blue mugs full of audit ale. We sat on oak chairs, except the

four or five who crowded on a capacious settle, we drank a lot of beer

and were often fuddled, and occasionally quite drunk, and we all smoked

reckless-looking pipes,--there was a transient fashion among us for corn

cobs for which Mark Twain, I think, was responsible. Our little excesses

with liquor were due far more to conscience than appetite, indicated

chiefly a resolve to break away from restraints that we suspected were

keeping us off the instructive knife-edges of life. Hatherleigh was a

good Englishman of the premature type with a red face, a lot of hair, a

deep voice and an explosive plunging manner, and it was he who said one

evening--Heaven knows how we got to it--“Look here, you know, it's all

Rot, this Shutting Up about Women. We OUGHT to talk about them. What are

we going to do about them? It's got to come. We're all festering inside

about it. Let's out with it. There's too much Decency altogether about

this Infernal University!”

We rose to his challenge a little awkwardly and our first talk

was clumsy, there were flushed faces and red ears, and I remember

Hatherleigh broke out into a monologue on decency. “Modesty and

Decency,” said Hatherleigh, “are Oriental vices. The Jews brought them

to Europe. They're Semitic, just like our monasticism here and the

seclusion of women and mutilating the dead on a battlefield. And all

that sort of thing.”

Hatherleigh's mind progressed by huge leaps, leaps that were usually

wildly inaccurate, and for a time we engaged hotly upon the topic of

those alleged mutilations and the Semitic responsibility for decency.

Hatherleigh tried hard to saddle the Semitic race with the less elegant

war customs of the Soudan and the northwest frontier of India, and

quoted Doughty, at that time a little-known author, and Cunninghame

Graham to show that the Arab was worse than a county-town spinster in

his regard for respectability. But his case was too preposterous, and

Esmeer, with his shrill penetrating voice and his way of pointing with

all four long fingers flat together, carried the point against him. He

quoted Cato and Roman law and the monasteries of Thibet.

“Well, anyway,” said Hatherleigh, escaping from our hands like an

intellectual frog, “Semitic or not, I've got no use for decency.”

We argued points and Hatherleigh professed an unusually balanced and

tolerating attitude. “I don't mind a certain refinement and dignity,” he

admitted generously. “What I object to is this spreading out of decency

until it darkens the whole sky, until it makes a man's father afraid to

speak of the most important things, until it makes a man afraid to look

a frank book in the face or think--even think! until it leads to our

coming to--to the business at last with nothing but a few prohibitions,

a few hints, a lot of dirty jokes and, and “--he waved a hand and seemed

to seek and catch his image in the air--“oh, a confounded buttered slide

of sentiment, to guide us. I tell you I'm going to think about it and

talk about it until I see a little more daylight than I do at present.

I'm twenty-two. Things might happen to me anywhen. You men can go out

into the world if you like, to sin like fools and marry like fools,

not knowing what you are doing and ashamed to ask. You'll take

the consequences, too, I expect, pretty meekly, sniggering a bit,

sentimentalising a bit, like--like Cambridge humorists.... I mean to

know what I'm doing.”

He paused to drink, and I think I cut in with ideas of my own. But one

is apt to forget one's own share in a talk, I find, more than one does

the clear-cut objectivity of other people's, and I do not know how far

I contributed to this discussion that followed. I am, however, pretty

certain that it was then that ideal that we were pleased to call

aristocracy and which soon became the common property of our set was

developed. It was Esmeer, I know, who laid down and maintained the

proposition that so far as minds went there were really only two sorts

of man in the world, the aristocrat and the man who subdues his mind to

other people's.

“'I couldn't THINK of it, Sir,'” said Esmeer in his elucidatory tones;

“that's what a servant says. His mind even is broken in to run between

fences, and he admits it. WE'VE got to be able to think of anything.

And 'such things aren't for the Likes of Us!' That's another servant's

saying. Well, everything IS for the Likes of Us. If we see fit, that

is.”

A small fresh-coloured man in grey objected.

“Well,” exploded Hatherleigh, “if that isn't so what the deuce are we

up here for? Instead of working in mines? If some things aren't to be

thought about ever! We've got the privilege of all these extra years for

getting things straight in our heads, and then we won't use 'em. Good

God! what do you think a university's for?”...

Esmeer's idea came with an effect of real emancipation to several of

us. We were not going to be afraid of ideas any longer, we were going

to throw down every barrier of prohibition and take them in and see what

came of it. We became for a time even intemperately experimental, and

one of us, at the bare suggestion of an eminent psychic investigator,

took hashish and very nearly died of it within a fortnight of our great

elucidation.

The chief matter of our interchanges was of course the discussion

of sex. Once the theme had been opened it became a sore place in

our intercourse; none of us seemed able to keep away from it. Our

imaginations got astir with it. We made up for lost time and went

round it and through it and over it exhaustively. I recall prolonged

discussion of polygamy on the way to Royston, muddy November tramps to

Madingley, when amidst much profanity from Hatherleigh at the serious

treatment of so obsolete a matter, we weighed the reasons, if any, for

the institution of marriage. The fine dim night-time spaces of the Great

Court are bound up with the inconclusive finales of mighty hot-eared

wrangles; the narrows of Trinity Street and Petty Cury and Market Hill

have their particular associations for me with that spate of confession

and free speech, that almost painful goal delivery of long pent and

crappled and sometimes crippled ideas.

And we went on a reading party that Easter to a place called Pulborough

in Sussex, where there is a fishing inn and a river that goes under a

bridge. It was a late Easter and a blazing one, and we boated and bathed

and talked of being Hellenic and the beauty of the body until at moments

it seemed to us that we were destined to restore the Golden Age, by the

simple abolition of tailors and outfitters.

Those undergraduate talks! how rich and glorious they seemed, how

splendidly new the ideas that grew and multiplied in our seething minds!

We made long afternoon and evening raids over the Downs towards Arundel,

and would come tramping back through the still keen moonlight singing

and shouting. We formed romantic friendships with one another, and

grieved more or less convincingly that there were no splendid women fit

to be our companions in the world. But Hatherleigh, it seemed, had once

known a girl whose hair was gloriously red. “My God!” said Hatherleigh

to convey the quality of her; just simply and with projectile violence:

“My God!”

Benton had heard of a woman who lived with a man refusing to be married

to him--we thought that splendid beyond measure,--I cannot now imagine

why. She was “like a tender goddess,” Benton said. A sort of shame

came upon us in the dark in spite of our liberal intentions when Benton

committed himself to that. And after such talk we would fall upon great

pauses of emotional dreaming, and if by chance we passed a girl in a

governess cart, or some farmer's daughter walking to the station, we

became alertly silent or obstreperously indifferent to her. For might

she not be just that one exception to the banal decency, the sickly

pointless conventionality, the sham modesty of the times in which we

lived?

We felt we stood for a new movement, not realising how perennially this

same emancipation returns to those ancient courts beside the Cam.

We were the anti-decency party, we discovered a catch phrase that we

flourished about in the Union and made our watchword, namely, “stark

fact.” We hung nude pictures in our rooms much as if they had been

flags, to the earnest concern of our bedders, and I disinterred my

long-kept engraving and had it framed in fumed oak, and found for it a

completer and less restrained companion, a companion I never cared for

in the slightest degree....

This efflorescence did not prevent, I think indeed it rather helped, our

more formal university work, for most of us took firsts, and three of

us got Fellowships in one year or another. There was Benton who had a

Research Fellowship and went to Tubingen, there was Esmeer and myself

who both became Residential Fellows. I had taken the Mental and

Moral Science Tripos (as it was then), and three years later I got a

lectureship in political science. In those days it was disguised in the

cloak of Political Economy.

2

It was our affectation to be a little detached from the main stream of

undergraduate life. We worked pretty hard, but by virtue of our

beer, our socialism and suchlike heterodoxy, held ourselves to be

differentiated from the swatting reading man. None of us, except Baxter,

who was a rowing blue, a rather abnormal blue with an appetite for

ideas, took games seriously enough to train, and on the other hand

we intimated contempt for the rather mediocre, deliberately humorous,

consciously gentlemanly and consciously wild undergraduate men who

made up the mass of Cambridge life. After the manner of youth we were

altogether too hard on our contemporaries. We battered our caps and

tore our gowns lest they should seem new, and we despised these others

extremely for doing exactly the same things; we had an idea of ourselves

and resented beyond measure a similar weakness in these our brothers.

There was a type, or at least there seemed to us to be a type--I'm a

little doubtful at times now whether after all we didn't create it--for

which Hatherleigh invented the nickname the “Pinky Dinkys,” intending

thereby both contempt and abhorrence in almost equal measure. The Pinky

Dinky summarised all that we particularly did not want to be, and also,

I now perceive, much of what we were and all that we secretly dreaded

becoming.

But it is hard to convey the Pinky Dinky idea, for all that it meant so

much to us. We spent one evening at least during that reading party upon

the Pinky Dinky; we sat about our one fire after a walk in the

rain--it was our only wet day--smoked our excessively virile pipes, and

elaborated the natural history of the Pinky Dinky. We improvised a

sort of Pinky Dinky litany, and Hatherleigh supplied deep notes for the

responses.

“The Pinky Dinky extracts a good deal of amusement from life,” said some

one.

“Damned prig!” said Hatherleigh.

“The Pinky Dinky arises in the Union and treats the question with a

light gay touch. He makes the weird ones mad. But sometimes he cannot go

on because of the amusement he extracts.”

“I want to shy books at the giggling swine,” said Hatherleigh.

“The Pinky Dinky says suddenly while he is making the tea, 'We're all

being frightfully funny. It's time for you to say something now.'”

“The Pinky Dinky shakes his head and says: 'I'm afraid I shall never be

a responsible being.' And he really IS frivolous.”

“Frivolous but not vulgar,” said Esmeer.

“Pinky Dinkys are chaps who've had their buds nipped,” said Hatherleigh.

“They're Plebs and they know it. They haven't the Guts to get hold of

things. And so they worry up all those silly little jokes of theirs to

carry it off.”...

We tried bad ones for a time, viciously flavoured.

Pinky Dinkys are due to over-production of the type that ought to keep

outfitters' shops. Pinky Dinkys would like to keep outfitters' shops

with whimsy 'scriptions on the boxes and make your bill out funny, and

not be snobs to customers, no!--not even if they had titles.”

“Every Pinky Dinky's people are rather good people, and better than most

Pinky Dinky's people. But he does not put on side.”

“Pinky Dinkys become playful at the sight of women.”

“'Croquet's my game,' said the Pinky Dinky, and felt a man

condescended.”

“But what the devil do they think they're up to, anyhow?” roared old

Hatherleigh suddenly, dropping plump into bottomless despair.

We felt we had still failed to get at the core of the mystery of the

Pinky Dinky.

We tried over things about his religion. “The Pinky Dinky goes to King's

Chapel, and sits and feels in the dusk. Solemn things! Oh HUSH! He

wouldn't tell you--”

“He COULDN'T tell you.”

“Religion is so sacred to him he never talks about it, never reads about

it, never thinks about it. Just feels!”

“But in his heart of hearts, oh! ever so deep, the Pinky Dinky has a

doubt--”

Some one protested.

“Not a vulgar doubt,” Esmeer went on, “but a kind of hesitation whether

the Ancient of Days is really exactly what one would call good form....

There's a lot of horrid coarseness got into the world somehow. SOMEBODY

put it there.... And anyhow there's no particular reason why a man

should be seen about with Him. He's jolly Awful of course and all

that--”

“The Pinky Dinky for all his fun and levity has a clean mind.”

“A thoroughly clean mind. Not like Esmeer's--the Pig!”

“If once he began to think about sex, how could he be comfortable at

croquet?”

“It's their Damned Modesty,” said Hatherleigh suddenly, “that's what's

the matter with the Pinky Dinky. It's Mental Cowardice dressed up as a

virtue and taking the poor dears in. Cambridge is soaked with it; it's

some confounded local bacillus. Like the thing that gives a flavour to

Havana cigars. He comes up here to be made into a man and a ruler of

the people, and he thinks it shows a nice disposition not to take on the

job! How the Devil is a great Empire to be run with men like him?”

“All his little jokes and things,” said Esmeer regarding his feet on

the fender, “it's just a nervous sniggering--because he's afraid....

Oxford's no better.”

“What's he afraid of?” said I.

“God knows!” exploded Hatherleigh and stared at the fire.

“LIFE!” said Esmeer. “And so in a way are we,” he added, and made a

thoughtful silence for a time.

“I say,” began Carter, who was doing the Natural Science Tripos, “what

is the adult form of the Pinky Dinky?”

But there we were checked by our ignorance of the world.

“What is the adult form of any of us?” asked Benton, voicing the thought

that had arrested our flow.

3

I do not remember that we ever lifted our criticism to the dons and the

organisation of the University. I think we took them for granted. When I

look back at my youth I am always astonished by the multitude of things

that we took for granted. It seemed to us that Cambridge was in the

order of things, for all the world like having eyebrows or a vermiform

appendix. Now with the larger scepticism of middle age I can entertain

very fundamental doubts about these old universities. Indeed I had a

scheme--

I do not see what harm I can do now by laying bare the purpose of the

political combinations I was trying to effect.

My educational scheme was indeed the starting-point of all the big

project of conscious public reconstruction at which I aimed. I wanted

to build up a new educational machine altogether for the governing class

out of a consolidated system of special public service schools. I

meant to get to work upon this whatever office I was given in the new

government. I could have begun my plan from the Admiralty or the

War Office quite as easily as from the Education Office. I am firmly

convinced it is hopeless to think of reforming the old public schools

and universities to meet the needs of a modern state, they send their

roots too deep and far, the cost would exceed any good that could

possibly be effected, and so I have sought a way round this invincible

obstacle. I do think it would be quite practicable to side-track, as the

Americans say, the whole system by creating hardworking, hard-living,

modern and scientific boys' schools, first for the Royal Navy and then

for the public service generally, and as they grew, opening them to

the public without any absolute obligation to subsequent service.

Simultaneously with this it would not be impossible to develop a new

college system with strong faculties in modern philosophy, modern

history, European literature and criticism, physical and biological

science, education and sociology.

We could in fact create a new liberal education in this way, and cut the

umbilicus of the classical languages for good and all. I should have set

this going, and trusted it to correct or kill the old public schools and

the Oxford and Cambridge tradition altogether. I had men in my mind to

begin the work, and I should have found others. I should have aimed at

making a hard-trained, capable, intellectually active, proud type of

man. Everything else would have been made subservient to that. I should

have kept my grip on the men through their vacation, and somehow or

other I would have contrived a young woman to match them. I think I

could have seen to it effectually enough that they didn't get at croquet

and tennis with the vicarage daughters and discover sex in the Peeping

Tom fashion I did, and that they realised quite early in life that

it isn't really virile to reek of tobacco. I should have had military

manoeuvres, training ships, aeroplane work, mountaineering and so forth,

in the place of the solemn trivialities of games, and I should have fed

and housed my men clean and very hard--where there wasn't any audit ale,

no credit tradesmen, and plenty of high pressure douches....

I have revisited Cambridge and Oxford time after time since I came

down, and so far as the Empire goes, I want to get clear of those two

places....

Always I renew my old feelings, a physical oppression, a sense of

lowness and dampness almost exactly like the feeling of an underground

room where paper moulders and leaves the wall, a feeling of ineradicable

contagion in the Gothic buildings, in the narrow ditch-like rivers, in

those roads and roads of stuffy little villas. Those little villas

have destroyed all the good of the old monastic system and none of its

evil....

Some of the most charming people in the world live in them, but their

collective effect is below the quality of any individual among them.

Cambridge is a world of subdued tones, of excessively subtle humours, of

prim conduct and free thinking; it fears the Parent, but it has no fear

of God; it offers amidst surroundings that vary between disguises and

antiquarian charm the inflammation of literature's purple draught;

one hears there a peculiar thin scandal like no other scandal in the

world--a covetous scandal--so that I am always reminded of Ibsen in

Cambridge. In Cambridge and the plays of Ibsen alone does it seem

appropriate for the heroine before the great crisis of life to “enter,

take off her overshoes, and put her wet umbrella upon the writing

desk.”...

We have to make a new Academic mind for modern needs, and the last thing

to make it out of, I am convinced, is the old Academic mind. One

might as soon try to fake the old VICTORY at Portsmouth into a line of

battleship again. Besides which the old Academic mind, like those old

bathless, damp Gothic colleges, is much too delightful in its peculiar

and distinctive way to damage by futile patching.

My heart warms to a sense of affectionate absurdity as I recall dear old

Codger, surely the most “unleaderly” of men. No more than from the old

Schoolmen, his kindred, could one get from him a School for Princes.

Yet apart from his teaching he was as curious and adorable as a good

Netsuke. Until quite recently he was a power in Cambridge, he could

make and bar and destroy, and in a way he has become the quintessence of

Cambridge in my thoughts.

I see him on his way to the morning's lecture, with his plump childish

face, his round innocent eyes, his absurdly non-prehensile fat hand

carrying his cap, his grey trousers braced up much too high, his feet a

trifle inturned, and going across the great court with a queer tripping

pace that seemed cultivated even to my naive undergraduate eye. Or I

see him lecturing. He lectured walking up and down between the desks,

talking in a fluting rapid voice, and with the utmost lucidity. If he

could not walk up and down he could not lecture. His mind and voice had

precisely the fluid quality of some clear subtle liquid; one felt it

could flow round anything and overcome nothing. And its nimble eddies

were wonderful! Or again I recall him drinking port with little muscular

movements in his neck and cheek and chin and his brows knit--very

judicial, very concentrated, preparing to say the apt just thing; it was

the last thing he would have told a lie about.

When I think of Codger I am reminded of an inscription I saw on some

occasion in Regent's Park above two eyes scarcely more limpidly innocent

than his--“Born in the Menagerie.” Never once since Codger began to

display the early promise of scholarship at the age of eight or more,

had he been outside the bars. His utmost travel had been to lecture here

and lecture there. His student phase had culminated in papers of quite

exceptional brilliance, and he had gone on to lecture with a cheerful

combination of wit and mannerism that had made him a success from the

beginning. He has lectured ever since. He lectures still. Year by year

he has become plumper, more rubicund and more and more of an item for

the intelligent visitor to see. Even in my time he was pointed out to

people as part of our innumerable enrichments, and obviously he knew it.

He has become now almost the leading Character in a little donnish world

of much too intensely appreciated Characters.

He boasted he took no exercise, and also of his knowledge of port wine.

Of other wines he confessed quite frankly he had no “special knowledge.”

Beyond these things he had little pride except that he claimed to have

read every novel by a woman writer that had ever entered the Union

Library. This, however, he held to be remarkable rather than ennobling,

and such boasts as he made of it were tinged with playfulness. Certainly

he had a scholar's knowledge of the works of Miss Marie Corelli, Miss

Braddon, Miss Elizabeth Glyn and Madame Sarah Grand that would have

astonished and flattered those ladies enormously, and he loved nothing

so much in his hours of relaxation as to propound and answer difficult

questions upon their books. Tusher of King's was his ineffectual rival

in this field, their bouts were memorable and rarely other than glorious

for Codger; but then Tusher spread himself too much, he also undertook

to rehearse whole pages out of Bradshaw, and tell you with all the

changes how to get from any station to any station in Great Britain by

the nearest and cheapest routes....

Codger lodged with a little deaf innocent old lady, Mrs. Araminta

Mergle, who was understood to be herself a very redoubtable Character in

the Gyp-Bedder class; about her he related quietly absurd anecdotes.

He displayed a marvellous invention in ascribing to her plausible

expressions of opinion entirely identical in import with those of the

Oxford and Harvard Pragmatists, against whom he waged a fierce obscure

war....

It was Codger's function to teach me philosophy, philosophy! the

intimate wisdom of things. He dealt in a variety of Hegelian stuff like

nothing else in the world, but marvellously consistent with itself. It

was a wonderful web he spun out of that queer big active childish brain

that had never lusted nor hated nor grieved nor feared nor passionately

loved,--a web of iridescent threads. He had luminous final theories

about Love and Death and Immortality, odd matters they seemed for him to

think about! and all his woven thoughts lay across my perception of the

realities of things, as flimsy and irrelevant and clever and beautiful,

oh!--as a dew-wet spider's web slung in the morning sunshine across the

black mouth of a gun....

4

All through those years of development I perceive now there must have

been growing in me, slowly, irregularly, assimilating to itself all

the phrases and forms of patriotism, diverting my religious impulses,

utilising my esthetic tendencies, my dominating idea, the statesman's

idea, that idea of social service which is the protagonist of my story,

that real though complex passion for Making, making widely and greatly,

cities, national order, civilisation, whose interplay with all those

other factors in life I have set out to present. It was growing in

me--as one's bones grow, no man intending it.

I have tried to show how, quite early in my life, the fact of

disorderliness, the conception of social life as being a multitudinous

confusion out of hand, came to me. One always of course simplifies these

things in the telling, but I do not think I ever saw the world at large

in any other terms. I never at any stage entertained the idea

which sustained my mother, and which sustains so many people in the

world,--the idea that the universe, whatever superficial discords it

may present, is as a matter of fact “all right,” is being steered to

definite ends by a serene and unquestionable God. My mother thought that

Order prevailed, and that disorder was just incidental and foredoomed

rebellion; I feel and have always felt that order rebels against and

struggles against disorder, that order has an up-hill job, in gardens,

experiments, suburbs, everything alike; from the very beginnings of my

experience I discovered hostility to order, a constant escaping from

control.

The current of living and contemporary ideas in which my mind was

presently swimming made all in the same direction; in place of my

mother's attentive, meticulous but occasionally extremely irascible

Providence, the talk was all of the Struggle for Existence and the

survival not of the Best--that was nonsense, but of the fittest to

survive.

The attempts to rehabilitate Faith in the form of the Individualist's

LAISSEZ FAIRE never won upon me. I disliked Herbert Spencer all my life

until I read his autobiography, and then I laughed a little and loved

him. I remember as early as the City Merchants' days how Britten and I

scoffed at that pompous question-begging word “Evolution,” having, so to

speak, found it out. Evolution, some illuminating talker had remarked at

the Britten lunch table, had led not only to man, but to the liver-fluke

and skunk, obviously it might lead anywhere; order came into things only

through the struggling mind of man. That lit things wonderfully for

us. When I went up to Cambridge I was perfectly clear that life was

a various and splendid disorder of forces that the spirit of man sets

itself to tame. I have never since fallen away from that persuasion.

I do not think I was exceptionally precocious in reaching these

conclusions and a sort of religious finality for myself by eighteen or

nineteen. I know men and women vary very much in these matters, just as

children do in learning to talk. Some will chatter at eighteen months

and some will hardly speak until three, and the thing has very little

to do with their subsequent mental quality. So it is with young people;

some will begin their religious, their social, their sexual interests at

fourteen, some not until far on in the twenties. Britten and I belonged

to one of the precocious types, and Cossington very probably to another.

It wasn't that there was anything priggish about any of us; we should

have been prigs to have concealed our spontaneous interests and ape the

theoretical boy.

The world of man centred for my imagination in London, it still centres

there; the real and present world, that is to say, as distinguished from

the wonder-lands of atomic and microscopic science and the stars and

future time. I had travelled scarcely at all, I had never crossed the

Channel, but I had read copiously and I had formed a very good working

idea of this round globe with its mountains and wildernesses and forests

and all the sorts and conditions of human life that were scattered over

its surface. It was all alive, I felt, and changing every day; how it

was changing, and the changes men might bring about, fascinated my mind

beyond measure.

I used to find a charm in old maps that showed The World as Known to the

Ancients, and I wish I could now without any suspicion of self-deception

write down compactly the world as it was known to me at nineteen. So

far as extension went it was, I fancy, very like the world I know now at

forty-two; I had practically all the mountains and seas, boundaries and

races, products and possibilities that I have now. But its intension was

very different. All the interval has been increasing and deepening my

social knowledge, replacing crude and second-hand impressions by felt

and realised distinctions.

In 1895--that was my last year with Britten, for I went up to Cambridge

in September--my vision of the world had much the same relation to the

vision I have to-day that an ill-drawn daub of a mask has to the direct

vision of a human face. Britten and I looked at our world and saw--what

did we see? Forms and colours side by side that we had no suspicion were

interdependent. We had no conception of the roots of things nor of the

reaction of things. It did not seem to us, for example, that business

had anything to do with government, or that money and means affected the

heroic issues of war. There were no wagons in our war game, and where

there were guns, there it was assumed the ammunition was gathered

together. Finance again was a sealed book to us; we did not so much

connect it with the broad aspects of human affairs as regard it as a

sort of intrusive nuisance to be earnestly ignored by all right-minded

men. We had no conception of the quality of politics, nor how

“interests” came into such affairs; we believed men were swayed by

purely intellectual convictions and were either right or wrong, honest

or dishonest (in which case they deserved to be shot), good or bad. We

knew nothing of mental inertia, and could imagine the opinion of a whole

nation changed by one lucid and convincing exposition. We were capable

of the most incongruous transfers from the scroll of history to our own

times, we could suppose Brixton ravaged and Hampstead burnt in civil

wars for the succession to the throne, or Cheapside a lane of death and

the front of the Mansion House set about with guillotines in the course

of an accurately transposed French Revolution. We rebuilt London by Act

of Parliament, and once in a mood of hygienic enterprise we transferred

its population EN MASSE to the North Downs by an order of the Local

Government Board. We thought nothing of throwing religious organisations

out of employment or superseding all the newspapers by freely

distributed bulletins. We could contemplate the possibility of laws

abolishing whole classes; we were equal to such a dream as the peaceful

and orderly proclamation of Communism from the steps of St. Paul's

Cathedral, after the passing of a simply worded bill,--a close and not

unnaturally an exciting division carrying the third reading. I remember

quite distinctly evolving that vision. We were then fully fifteen and we

were perfectly serious about it. We were not fools; it was simply that

as yet we had gathered no experience at all of the limits and powers of

legislation and conscious collective intention....

I think this statement does my boyhood justice, and yet I have my

doubts. It is so hard now to say what one understood and what one did

not understand. It isn't only that every day changed one's general

outlook, but also that a boy fluctuates between phases of quite adult

understanding and phases of tawdrily magnificent puerility. Sometimes

I myself was in those tumbrils that went along Cheapside to the Mansion

House, a Sydney Cartonesque figure, a white defeated Mirabean; sometimes

it was I who sat judging and condemning and ruling (sleeping in

my clothes and feeding very simply) the soul and autocrat of the

Provisional Government, which occupied, of all inconvenient places! the

General Post Office at St. Martin's-le-Grand!...

I cannot trace the development of my ideas at Cambridge, but I believe

the mere physical fact of going two hours' journey away from London gave

that place for the first time an effect of unity in my imagination. I

got outside London. It became tangible instead of being a frame almost

as universal as sea and sky.

At Cambridge my ideas ceased to live in a duologue; in exchange for

Britten, with whom, however, I corresponded lengthily, stylishly and

self-consciously for some years, I had now a set of congenial friends. I

got talk with some of the younger dons, I learnt to speak in the Union,

and in my little set we were all pretty busily sharpening each other's

wits and correcting each other's interpretations. Cambridge made

politics personal and actual. At City Merchants' we had had no sense

of effective contact; we boasted, it is true, an under secretary and a

colonial governor among our old boys, but they were never real to

us; such distinguished sons as returned to visit the old school were

allusive and pleasant in the best Pinky Dinky style, and pretended to

be in earnest about nothing but our football and cricket, to mourn the

abolition of “water,” and find a shuddering personal interest in the

ancient swishing block. At Cambridge I felt for the first time that I

touched the thing that was going on. Real living statesmen came down to

debate in the Union, the older dons had been their college intimates,

their sons and nephews expounded them to us and made them real to us.

They invited us to entertain ideas; I found myself for the first time

in my life expected to read and think and discuss, my secret vice had

become a virtue.

That combination-room world is at last larger and more populous and

various than the world of schoolmasters. The Shoesmiths and Naylors who

had been the aristocracy of City Merchants' fell into their place in my

mind; they became an undistinguished mass on the more athletic side of

Pinky Dinkyism, and their hostility to ideas and to the expression

of ideas ceased to limit and trouble me. The brighter men of each

generation stay up; these others go down to propagate their tradition,

as the fathers of families, as mediocre professional men, as assistant

masters in schools. Cambridge which perfects them is by the nature

of things least oppressed by them,--except when it comes to a vote in

Convocation.

We were still in those days under the shadow of the great Victorians. I

never saw Gladstone (as I never set eyes on the old Queen), but he

had resigned office only a year before I went up to Trinity, and the

Combination Rooms were full of personal gossip about him and Disraeli

and the other big figures of the gladiatorial stage of Parlimentary

history, talk that leaked copiously into such sets as mine. The ceiling

of our guest chamber at Trinity was glorious with the arms of Sir

William Harcourt, whose Death Duties had seemed at first like a

socialist dawn. Mr. Evesham we asked to come to the Union every year,

Masters, Chamberlain and the old Duke of Devonshire; they did not come

indeed, but their polite refusals brought us all, as it were, within

personal touch of them. One heard of cabinet councils and meetings at

country houses. Some of us, pursuing such interests, went so far as to

read political memoirs and the novels of Disraeli and Mrs. Humphry Ward.

From gossip, example and the illustrated newspapers one learnt something

of the way in which parties were split, coalitions formed, how permanent

officials worked and controlled their ministers, how measures were

brought forward and projects modified.

And while I was getting the great leading figures on the political

stage, who had been presented to me in my schooldays not so much as men

as the pantomimic monsters of political caricature, while I was getting

them reduced in my imagination to the stature of humanity, and their

motives to the quality of impulses like my own, I was also acquiring in

my Tripos work a constantly developing and enriching conception of

the world of men as a complex of economic, intellectual and moral

processes....

5

Socialism is an intellectual Proteus, but to the men of my generation it

came as the revolt of the workers. Rodbertus we never heard of and

the Fabian Society we did not understand; Marx and Morris, the Chicago

Anarchists, JUSTICE and Social Democratic Federation (as it was then)

presented socialism to our minds. Hatherleigh was the leading exponent

of the new doctrines in Trinity, and the figure upon his wall of a

huge-muscled, black-haired toiler swaggering sledgehammer in hand across

a revolutionary barricade, seemed the quintessence of what he had to

expound. Landlord and capitalist had robbed and enslaved the workers,

and were driving them quite automatically to inevitable insurrection.

They would arise and the capitalist system would flee and vanish like

the mists before the morning, like the dews before the sunrise, giving

place in the most simple and obvious manner to an era of Right and

Justice and Virtue and Well Being, and in short a Perfectly Splendid

Time.

I had already discussed this sort of socialism under the guidance of

Britten, before I went up to Cambridge. It was all mixed up with ideas

about freedom and natural virtue and a great scorn for kings, titles,

wealth and officials, and it was symbolised by the red ties we wore. Our

simple verdict on existing arrangements was that they were “all wrong.”

The rich were robbers and knew it, kings and princes were usurpers and

knew it, religious teachers were impostors in league with power,

the economic system was an elaborate plot on the part of the few to

expropriate the many. We went about feeling scornful of all the current

forms of life, forms that esteemed themselves solid, that were, we knew,

no more than shapes painted on a curtain that was presently to be torn

aside....

It was Hatherleigh's poster and his capacity for overstating things, I

think, that first qualified my simple revolutionary enthusiasm. Perhaps

also I had met with Fabian publications, but if I did I forget the

circumstances. And no doubt my innate constructiveness with its

practical corollary of an analytical treatment of the material supplied,

was bound to push me on beyond this melodramatic interpretation of human

affairs.

I compared that Working Man of the poster with any sort of working man

I knew. I perceived that the latter was not going to change, and indeed

could not under any stimulus whatever be expected to change, into the

former. It crept into my mind as slowly and surely as the dawn creeps

into a room that the former was not, as I had at first rather glibly

assumed, an “ideal,” but a complete misrepresentation of the quality and

possibilities of things.

I do not know now whether it was during my school-days or at Cambridge

that I first began not merely to see the world as a great contrast of

rich and poor, but to feel the massive effect of that multitudinous

majority of people who toil continually, who are for ever anxious about

ways and means, who are restricted, ill clothed, ill fed and ill

housed, who have limited outlooks and continually suffer misadventures,

hardships and distresses through the want of money. My lot had fallen

upon the fringe of the possessing minority; if I did not know the want

of necessities I knew shabbiness, and the world that let me go on to a

university education intimated very plainly that there was not a thing

beyond the primary needs that my stimulated imagination might demand

that it would not be an effort for me to secure. A certain aggressive

radicalism against the ruling and propertied classes followed almost

naturally from my circumstances. It did not at first connect itself at

all with the perception of a planless disorder in human affairs that had

been forced upon me by the atmosphere of my upbringing, nor did it link

me in sympathy with any of the profounder realities of poverty. It was

a personal independent thing. The dingier people one saw in the back

streets and lower quarters of Bromstead and Penge, the drift of dirty

children, ragged old women, street loafers, grimy workers that made

the social background of London, the stories one heard of privation and

sweating, only joined up very slowly with the general propositions I was

making about life. We could become splendidly eloquent about the social

revolution and the triumph of the Proletariat after the Class war, and

it was only by a sort of inspiration that it came to me that my bedder,

a garrulous old thing with a dusty black bonnet over one eye and an

ostentatiously clean apron outside the dark mysteries that clothed her,

or the cheeky little ruffians who yelled papers about the streets, were

really material to such questions.

Directly any of us young socialists of Trinity found ourselves in

immediate contact with servants or cadgers or gyps or bedders or

plumbers or navvies or cabmen or railway porters we became unconsciously

and unthinkingly aristocrats. Our voices altered, our gestures altered.

We behaved just as all the other men, rich or poor, swatters or

sportsmen or Pinky Dinkys, behaved, and exactly as we were expected

to behave. On the whole it is a population of poor quality round about

Cambridge, rather stunted and spiritless and very difficult to idealise.

That theoretical Working Man of ours!--if we felt the clash at all we

explained it, I suppose, by assuming that he came from another part of

the country; Esmeer, I remember, who lived somewhere in the Fens, was

very eloquent about the Cornish fishermen, and Hatherleigh, who was

a Hampshire man, assured us we ought to know the Scottish miner.

My private fancy was for the Lancashire operative because of his

co-operative societies, and because what Lancashire thinks to-day

England thinks to-morrow.... And also I had never been in Lancashire.

By little increments of realisation it was that the profounder verities

of the problem of socialism came to me. It helped me very much that I

had to go down to the Potteries several times to discuss my future with

my uncle and guardian; I walked about and saw Bursley Wakes and much of

the human aspects of organised industrialism at close quarters for the

first time. The picture of a splendid Working Man cheated out of his

innate glorious possibilities, and presently to arise and dash this

scoundrelly and scandalous system of private ownership to fragments,

began to give place to a limitless spectacle of inefficiency, to a

conception of millions of people not organised as they should be, not

educated as they should be, not simply prevented from but incapable

of nearly every sort of beauty, mostly kindly and well meaning, mostly

incompetent, mostly obstinate, and easily humbugged and easily diverted.

Even the tragic and inspiring idea of Marx, that the poor were nearing

a limit of painful experience, and awakening to a sense of intolerable

wrongs, began to develop into the more appalling conception that the

poor were simply in a witless uncomfortable inconclusive way--“muddling

along”; that they wanted nothing very definitely nor very urgently, that

mean fears enslaved them and mean satisfactions decoyed them, that they

took the very gift of life itself with a spiritless lassitude, hoarding

it, being rather anxious not to lose it than to use it in any way

whatever.

The complete development of that realisation was the work of many

years. I had only the first intimations at Cambridge. But I did have

intimations. Most acutely do I remember the doubts that followed the

visit of Chris Robinson. Chris Robinson was heralded by such heroic

anticipations, and he was so entirely what we had not anticipated.

Hatherleigh got him to come, arranged a sort of meeting for him at

Redmayne's rooms in King's, and was very proud and proprietorial. It

failed to stir Cambridge at all profoundly. Beyond a futile attempt

to screw up Hatherleigh made by some inexpert duffers who used nails

instead of screws and gimlets, there was no attempt to rag. Next day

Chris Robinson went and spoke at Bennett Hall in Newnham College, and

left Cambridge in the evening amidst the cheers of twenty men or so.

Socialism was at such a low ebb politically in those days that it didn't

even rouse men to opposition.

And there sat Chris under that flamboyant and heroic Worker of the

poster, a little wrinkled grey-bearded apologetic man in ready-made

clothes, with watchful innocent brown eyes and a persistent and

invincible air of being out of his element. He sat with his stout boots

tucked up under his chair, and clung to a teacup and saucer and

looked away from us into the fire, and we all sat about on tables and

chair-arms and windowsills and boxes and anywhere except upon chairs

after the manner of young men. The only other chair whose seat was

occupied was the one containing his knitted woollen comforter and his

picturesque old beach-photographer's hat. We were all shy and didn't

know how to take hold of him now we had got him, and, which was

disconcertingly unanticipated, he was manifestly having the same

difficulty with us. We had expected to be gripped.

“I'll not be knowing what to say to these Chaps,” he repeated with a

north-country quality in his speech.

We made reassuring noises.

The Ambassador of the Workers stirred his tea earnestly through an

uncomfortable pause.

“I'd best tell 'em something of how things are in Lancashire, what

with the new machines and all that,” he speculated at last with red

reflections in his thoughtful eyes.

We had an inexcusable dread that perhaps he would make a mess of the

meeting.

But when he was no longer in the unaccustomed meshes of refined

conversation, but speaking with an audience before him, he became a

different man. He declared he would explain to us just exactly what

socialism was, and went on at once to an impassioned contrast of social

conditions. “You young men,” he said “come from homes of luxury; every

need you feel is supplied--”

We sat and stood and sprawled about him, occupying every inch of

Redmayne's floor space except the hearthrug-platform, and we listened

to him and thought him over. He was the voice of wrongs that made us

indignant and eager. We forgot for a time that he had been shy and

seemed not a little incompetent, his provincial accent became a beauty

of his earnest speech, we were carried away by his indignations. We

looked with shining eyes at one another and at the various dons who had

dropped in and were striving to maintain a front of judicious severity.

We felt more and more that social injustice must cease, and cease

forthwith. We felt we could not sleep upon it. At the end we clapped and

murmured our applause and wanted badly to cheer.

Then like a lancet stuck into a bladder came the heckling. Denson, that

indolent, liberal-minded sceptic, did most of the questioning. He lay

contorted in a chair, with his ugly head very low, his legs crossed and

his left boot very high, and he pointed his remarks with a long thin

hand and occasionally adjusted the unstable glasses that hid his watery

eyes. “I don't want to carp,” he began. “The present system, I admit,

stands condemned. Every present system always HAS stood condemned in the

minds of intelligent men. But where it seems to me you get thin, is just

where everybody has been thin, and that's when you come to the remedy.”

“Socialism,” said Chris Robinson, as if it answered everything, and

Hatherleigh said “Hear! Hear!” very resolutely.

“I suppose I OUGHT to take that as an answer,” said Denson, getting

his shoulder-blades well down to the seat of his chair; “but I don't.

I don't, you know. It's rather a shame to cross-examine you after this

fine address of yours”--Chris Robinson on the hearthrug made acquiescent

and inviting noises--“but the real question remains how exactly are you

going to end all these wrongs? There are the administrative questions.

If you abolish the private owner, I admit you abolish a very complex

and clumsy way of getting businesses run, land controlled and things

in general administered, but you don't get rid of the need of

administration, you know.”

“Democracy,” said Chris Robinson.

“Organised somehow,” said Denson. “And it's just the How perplexes me.

I can quite easily imagine a socialist state administered in a sort of

scrambling tumult that would be worse than anything we have got now.

“Nothing could be worse than things are now,” said Chris Robinson. “I

have seen little children--”

“I submit life on an ill-provisioned raft, for example, could easily be

worse--or life in a beleagured town.”

Murmurs.

They wrangled for some time, and it had the effect upon me of coming out

from the glow of a good matinee performance into the cold daylight of

late afternoon. Chris Robinson did not shine in conflict with Denson; he

was an orator and not a dialectician, and he missed Denson's points and

displayed a disposition to plunge into untimely pathos and indignation.

And Denson hit me curiously hard with one of his shafts. “Suppose,” he

said, “you found yourself prime minister--”

I looked at Chris Robinson, bright-eyed and his hair a little ruffled

and his whole being rhetorical, and measured him against the huge

machine of government muddled and mysterious. Oh! but I was perplexed!

And then we took him back to Hatherleigh's rooms and drank beer and

smoked about him while he nursed his knee with hairy wristed hands that

protruded from his flannel shirt, and drank lemonade under the cartoon

of that emancipated Worker, and we had a great discursive talk with him.

“Eh! you should see our big meetings up north?” he said.

Denson had ruffled him and worried him a good deal, and ever and again

he came back to that discussion. “It's all very easy for your learned

men to sit and pick holes,” he said, “while the children suffer and die.

They don't pick holes up north. They mean business.”

He talked, and that was the most interesting part of it all, of his

going to work in a factory when he was twelve--“when you Chaps were all

with your mammies “--and how he had educated himself of nights until he

would fall asleep at his reading.

“It's made many of us keen for all our lives,” he remarked, “all that

clemming for education. Why! I longed all through one winter to read a

bit of Darwin. I must know about this Darwin if I die for it, I said.

And I could no' get the book.”

Hatherleigh made an enthusiastic noise and drank beer at him with round

eyes over the mug.

“Well, anyhow I wasted no time on Greek and Latin,” said Chris Robinson.

“And one learns to go straight at a thing without splitting straws. One

gets hold of the Elementals.”

(Well, did they? That was the gist of my perplexity.)

“One doesn't quibble,” he said, returning to his rankling memory of

Denson, “while men decay and starve.”

“But suppose,” I said, suddenly dropping into opposition, “the

alternative is to risk a worse disaster--or do something patently

futile.”

“I don't follow that,” said Chris Robinson. “We don't propose anything

futile, so far as I can see.”

6

The prevailing force in my undergraduate days was not Socialism

but Kiplingism. Our set was quite exceptional in its socialistic

professions. And we were all, you must understand, very distinctly

Imperialists also, and professed a vivid sense of the “White Man's

Burden.”

It is a little difficult now to get back to the feelings of that

period; Kipling has since been so mercilessly and exhaustively mocked,

criticised and torn to shreds;--never was a man so violently exalted and

then, himself assisting, so relentlessly called down. But in the middle

nineties this spectacled and moustached little figure with its heavy

chin and its general effect of vehement gesticulation, its wild shouts

of boyish enthusiasm for effective force, its lyric delight in the

sounds and colours, in the very odours of empire, its wonderful

discovery of machinery and cotton waste and the under officer and the

engineer, and “shop” as a poetic dialect, became almost a national

symbol. He got hold of us wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling and

haunting quotations, he stirred Britten and myself to futile imitations,

he coloured the very idiom of our conversation. He rose to his climax

with his “Recessional,” while I was still an undergraduate.

What did he give me exactly?

He helped to broaden my geographical sense immensely, and he provided

phrases for just that desire for discipline and devotion and organised

effort the Socialism of our time failed to express, that the current

socialist movement still fails, I think, to express. The sort of thing

that follows, for example, tore something out of my inmost nature and

gave it a shape, and I took it back from him shaped and let much of

the rest of him, the tumult and the bullying, the hysteria and the

impatience, the incoherence and inconsistency, go uncriticised for the

sake of it:--

“Keep ye the Law--be swift in all obedience--Clear the land of evil,

drive the road and bridge the ford, Make ye sure to each his own That he

reap where he hath sown; By the peace among Our peoples let men know we

serve the Lord!”

And then again, and for all our later criticism, this sticks in my mind,

sticks there now as quintessential wisdom:

“The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood an' stone;

'E don't obey no orders unless they is 'is own;

'E keeps 'is side-arms awful: 'e leaves 'em all about

An' then comes up the regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out.

All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,

All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less,

All along of abby-nay, kul, an' hazar-ho,

Mind you keep your rifle an' yourself jus' so!”

It is after all a secondary matter that Kipling, not having been born

and brought up in Bromstead and Penge, and the war in South Africa

being yet in the womb of time, could quite honestly entertain the now

remarkable delusion that England had her side-arms at that time kept

anything but “awful.” He learnt better, and we all learnt with him in

the dark years of exasperating and humiliating struggle that followed,

and I do not see that we fellow learners are justified in turning

resentfully upon him for a common ignorance and assumption....

South Africa seems always painted on the back cloth of my Cambridge

memories. How immense those disasters seemed at the time, disasters

our facile English world has long since contrived in any edifying or

profitable sense to forget! How we thrilled to the shouting newspaper

sellers as the first false flush of victory gave place to the

realisation of defeat. Far away there our army showed itself human,

mortal and human in the sight of all the world, the pleasant officers we

had imagined would change to wonderful heroes at the first crackling of

rifles, remained the pleasant, rather incompetent men they had always

been, failing to imagine, failing to plan and co-operate, failing to

grip. And the common soldiers, too, they were just what our streets and

country-side had made them, no sudden magic came out of the war bugles

for them. Neither splendid nor disgraceful were they,--just ill-trained

and fairly plucky and wonderfully good-tempered men--paying for it. And

how it lowered our vitality all that first winter to hear of Nicholson's

Nek, and then presently close upon one another, to realise the

bloody waste of Magersfontein, the shattering retreat from Stormberg,

Colenso--Colenso, that blundering battle, with White, as it seemed, in

Ladysmith near the point of surrender! and so through the long unfolding

catalogue of bleak disillusionments, of aching, unconcealed anxiety lest

worse should follow. To advance upon your enemy singing about his lack

of cleanliness and method went out of fashion altogether! The dirty

retrogressive Boer vanished from our scheme of illusion.

All through my middle Cambridge period, the guns boomed and the rifles

crackled away there on the veldt, and the horsemen rode and the tale of

accidents and blundering went on. Men, mules, horses, stores and money

poured into South Africa, and the convalescent wounded streamed home. I

see it in my memory as if I had looked at it through a window instead of

through the pages of the illustrated papers; I recall as if I had been

there the wide open spaces, the ragged hillsides, the open order attacks

of helmeted men in khaki, the scarce visible smoke of the guns, the

wrecked trains in great lonely places, the burnt isolated farms, and

at last the blockhouses and the fences of barbed wire uncoiling and

spreading for endless miles across the desert, netting the elusive enemy

until at last, though he broke the meshes again and again, we had him in

the toils. If one's attention strayed in the lecture-room it wandered to

those battle-fields.

And that imagined panorama of war unfolds to an accompaniment of yelling

newsboys in the narrow old Cambridge streets, of the flicker of papers

hastily bought and torn open in the twilight, of the doubtful reception

of doubtful victories, and the insensate rejoicings at last that seemed

to some of us more shameful than defeats....

7

A book that stands out among these memories, that stimulated me

immensely so that I forced it upon my companions, half in the spirit of

propaganda and half to test it by their comments, was Meredith's ONE OF

OUR CONQUERORS. It is one of the books that have made me. In that I got

a supplement and corrective of Kipling. It was the first detached and

adverse criticism of the Englishman I had ever encountered. It must have

been published already nine or ten years when I read it. The country

had paid no heed to it, had gone on to the expensive lessons of the War

because of the dull aversion our people feel for all such intimations,

and so I could read it as a book justified. The war endorsed its every

word for me, underlined each warning indication of the gigantic dangers

that gathered against our system across the narrow seas. It discovered

Europe to me, as watching and critical.

But while I could respond to all its criticisms of my country's

intellectual indolence, of my country's want of training and discipline

and moral courage, I remember that the idea that on the continent there

were other peoples going ahead of us, mentally alert while we fumbled,

disciplined while we slouched, aggressive and preparing to bring our

Imperial pride to a reckoning, was extremely novel and distasteful to

me. It set me worrying of nights. It put all my projects for social and

political reconstruction upon a new uncomfortable footing. It made them

no longer merely desirable but urgent. Instead of pride and the love

of making one might own to a baser motive. Under Kipling's sway I had a

little forgotten the continent of Europe, treated it as a mere envious

echo to our own world-wide display. I began now to have a disturbing

sense as it were of busy searchlights over the horizon....

One consequence of the patriotic chagrin Meredith produced in me was an

attempt to belittle his merit. “It isn't a good novel, anyhow,” I said.

The charge I brought against it was, I remember, a lack of unity. It

professed to be a study of the English situation in the early nineties,

but it was all deflected, I said, and all the interest was confused by

the story of Victor Radnor's fight with society to vindicate the woman

he had loved and never married. Now in the retrospect and with a mind

full of bitter enlightenment, I can do Meredith justice, and admit the

conflict was not only essential but cardinal in his picture, that the

terrible inflexibility of the rich aunts and the still more terrible

claim of Mrs. Burman Radnor, the “infernal punctilio,” and Dudley

Sowerby's limitations, were the central substance of that inalertness

the book set itself to assail. So many things have been brought together

in my mind that were once remotely separated. A people that will not

valiantly face and understand and admit love and passion can understand

nothing whatever. But in those days what is now just obvious truth to me

was altogether outside my range of comprehension....

8

As I seek to recapitulate the interlacing growth of my apprehension of

the world, as I flounder among the half-remembered developments that

found me a crude schoolboy and left me a man, there comes out, as if

it stood for all the rest, my first holiday abroad. That did not happen

until I was twenty-two. I was a fellow of Trinity, and the Peace of

Vereeniging had just been signed.

I went with a man named Willersley, a man some years senior to myself,

who had just missed a fellowship and the higher division of the Civil

Service, and who had become an enthusiastic member of the London School

Board, upon which the cumulative vote and the support of the “advanced”

people had placed him. He had, like myself, a small independent income

that relieved him of any necessity to earn a living, and he had a

kindred craving for social theorising and some form of social service.

He had sought my acquaintance after reading a paper of mine (begotten

by the visit of Chris Robinson) on the limits of pure democracy. It had

marched with some thoughts of his own.

We went by train to Spiez on the Lake of Thun, then up the Gemmi,

and thence with one or two halts and digressions and a little modest

climbing we crossed over by the Antrona pass (on which we were

benighted) into Italy, and by way of Domo D'ossola and the Santa Maria

Maggiore valley to Cannobio, and thence up the lake to Locarno (where,

as I shall tell, we stayed some eventful days) and so up the Val Maggia

and over to Airolo and home.

As I write of that long tramp of ours, something of its freshness and

enlargement returns to me. I feel again the faint pleasant excitement of

the boat train, the trampling procession of people with hand baggage and

laden porters along the platform of the Folkestone pier, the scarcely

perceptible swaying of the moored boat beneath our feet. Then, very

obvious and simple, the little emotion of standing out from the homeland

and seeing the long white Kentish cliffs recede. One walked about the

boat doing one's best not to feel absurdly adventurous, and presently a

movement of people directed one's attention to a white lighthouse on a

cliff to the east of us, coming up suddenly; and then one turned to scan

the little different French coast villages, and then, sliding by in a

pale sunshine came a long wooden pier with oddly dressed children upon

it, and the clustering town of Boulogne.

One took it all with the outward calm that became a young man of nearly

three and twenty, but one was alive to one's finger-tips with pleasing

little stimulations. The custom house examination excited one, the

strangeness of a babble in a foreign tongue; one found the French of

City Merchants' and Cambridge a shy and viscous flow, and then one was

standing in the train as it went slowly through the rail-laid street to

Boulogne Ville, and one looked out at the world in French, porters in

blouses, workmen in enormous purple trousers, police officers in peaked

caps instead of helmets and romantically cloaked, big carts, all on

two wheels instead of four, green shuttered casements instead of

sash windows, and great numbers of neatly dressed women in economical

mourning.

“Oh! there's a priest!” one said, and was betrayed into suchlike artless

cries.

It was a real other world, with different government and different

methods, and in the night one was roused from uneasy slumbers and

sat blinking and surly, wrapped up in one's couverture and with one's

oreiller all awry, to encounter a new social phenomenon, the German

official, so different in manner from the British; and when one woke

again after that one had come to Bale, and out one tumbled to get coffee

in Switzerland....

I have been over that route dozens of times since, but it still revives

a certain lingering youthfulness, a certain sense of cheerful release in

me.

I remember that I and Willersley became very sociological as we ran on

to Spiez, and made all sorts of generalisations from the steeply sloping

fields on the hillsides, and from the people we saw on platforms and

from little differences in the way things were done.

The clean prosperity of Bale and Switzerland, the big clean stations,

filled me with patriotic misgivings, as I thought of the vast dirtiness

of London, the mean dirtiness of Cambridgeshire. It came to me that

perhaps my scheme of international values was all wrong, that quite

stupendous possibilities and challenges for us and our empire might be

developing here--and I recalled Meredith's Skepsey in France with a new

understanding.

Willersley had dressed himself in a world-worn Norfolk suit of greenish

grey tweeds that ended unfamiliarly at his rather impending, spectacled,

intellectual visage. I didn't, I remember, like the contrast of him with

the drilled Swiss and Germans about us. Convict coloured stockings

and vast hobnail boots finished him below, and all his luggage was a

borrowed rucksac that he had tied askew. He did not want to shave in

the train, but I made him at one of the Swiss stations--I dislike

these Oxford slovenlinesses--and then confound him! he cut himself and

bled....

Next morning we were breathing a thin exhilarating air that seemed to

have washed our very veins to an incredible cleanliness, and

eating hard-boiled eggs in a vast clear space of rime-edged rocks,

snow-mottled, above a blue-gashed glacier. All about us the monstrous

rock surfaces rose towards the shining peaks above, and there were

winding moraines from which the ice had receded, and then dark

clustering fir trees far below.

I had an extraordinary feeling of having come out of things, of being

outside.

“But this is the round world!” I said, with a sense of never having

perceived it before; “this is the round world!”

9

That holiday was full of big comprehensive effects; the first view of

the Rhone valley and the distant Valaisian Alps, for example, which we

saw from the shoulder of the mountain above the Gemmi, and the early

summer dawn breaking over Italy as we moved from our night's crouching

and munched bread and chocolate and stretched our stiff limbs among the

tumbled and precipitous rocks that hung over Lake Cingolo, and surveyed

the winding tiring rocky track going down and down to Antronapiano.

And our thoughts were as comprehensive as our impressions. Willersley's

mind abounded in historical matter; he had an inaccurate abundant habit

of topographical reference; he made me see and trace and see again the

Roman Empire sweep up these winding valleys, and the coming of the first

great Peace among the warring tribes of men....

In the retrospect each of us seems to have been talking about our

outlook almost continually. Each of us, you see, was full of the same

question, very near and altogether predominant to us, the question:

“What am I going to do with my life?” He saw it almost as importantly as

I, but from a different angle, because his choice was largely made and

mine still hung in the balance.

“I feel we might do so many things,” I said, “and everything that calls

one, calls one away from something else.”

Willersley agreed without any modest disavowals.

“We have got to think out,” he said, “just what we are and what we are

up to. We've got to do that now. And then--it's one of those questions

it is inadvisable to reopen subsequently.”

He beamed at me through his glasses. The sententious use of long words

was a playful habit with him, that and a slight deliberate humour,

habits occasional Extension Lecturing was doing very much to intensify.

“You've made your decision?”

He nodded with a peculiar forward movement of his head.

“How would you put it?”

“Social Service--education. Whatever else matters or doesn't matter, it

seems to me there is one thing we MUST have and increase, and that

is the number of people who can think a little--and have”--he beamed

again--“an adequate sense of causation.”

“You're sure it's worth while.”

“For me--certainly. I don't discuss that any more.”

“I don't limit myself too narrowly,” he added. “After all, the work is

all one. We who know, we who feel, are building the great modern state,

joining wall to wall and way to way, the new great England rising out

of the decaying old... we are the real statesmen--I like that use of

'statesmen.'...”

“Yes,” I said with many doubts. “Yes, of course....”

Willersley is middle-aged now, with silver in his hair and a deepening

benevolence in his always amiable face, and he has very fairly kept his

word. He has lived for social service and to do vast masses of

useful, undistinguished, fertilising work. Think of the days of

arid administrative plodding and of contention still more arid and

unrewarded, that he must have spent! His little affectations of gesture

and manner, imitative affectations for the most part, have increased,

and the humorous beam and the humorous intonations have become a thing

he puts on every morning like an old coat. His devotion is mingled with

a considerable whimsicality, and they say he is easily flattered by

subordinates and easily offended into opposition by colleagues; he has

made mistakes at times and followed wrong courses, still there he is,

a flat contradiction to all the ordinary doctrine of motives, a man who

has foregone any chances of wealth and profit, foregone any easier paths

to distinction, foregone marriage and parentage, in order to serve the

community. He does it without any fee or reward except his personal

self-satisfaction in doing this work, and he does it without any hope

of future joys and punishments, for he is an implacable Rationalist. No

doubt he idealises himself a little, and dreams of recognition. No

doubt he gets his pleasure from a sense of power, from the spending

and husbanding of large sums of public money, and from the inevitable

proprietorship he must feel in the fair, fine, well-ordered schools he

has done so much to develop. “But for me,” he can say, “there would have

been a Job about those diagrams, and that subject or this would have

been less ably taught.”...

The fact remains that for him the rewards have been adequate, if not to

content at any rate to keep him working. Of course he covets the

notice of the world he has served, as a lover covets the notice of his

mistress. Of course he thinks somewhere, somewhen, he will get credit.

Only last year I heard some men talking of him, and they were noting,

with little mean smiles, how he had shown himself self-conscious while

there was talk of some honorary degree-giving or other; it would, I have

no doubt, please him greatly if his work were to flower into a crimson

gown in some Academic parterre. Why shouldn't it? But that is incidental

vanity at the worst; he goes on anyhow. Most men don't.

But we had our walk twenty years and more ago now. He was oldish even

then as a young man, just as he is oldish still in middle age. Long

may his industrious elderliness flourish for the good of the world! He

lectured a little in conversation then; he lectures more now and listens

less, toilsomely disentangling what you already understand, giving you

in detail the data you know; these are things like callosities that come

from a man's work.

Our long three weeks' talk comes back to me as a memory of ideas and

determinations slowly growing, all mixed up with a smell of wood smoke

and pine woods and huge precipices and remote gleams of snow-fields and

the sound of cascading torrents rushing through deep gorges far below.

It is mixed, too, with gossips with waitresses and fellow travellers,

with my first essays in colloquial German and Italian, with disputes

about the way to take, and other things that I will tell of in another

section. But the white passion of human service was our dominant theme.

Not simply perhaps nor altogether unselfishly, but quite honestly, and

with at least a frequent self-forgetfulness, did we want to do fine and

noble things, to help in their developing, to lessen misery, to broaden

and exalt life. It is very hard--perhaps it is impossible--to present

in a page or two the substance and quality of nearly a month's

conversation, conversation that is casual and discursive in form, that

ranges carelessly from triviality to immensity, and yet is constantly

resuming a constructive process, as workmen on a wall loiter and jest

and go and come back, and all the while build.

We got it more and more definite that the core of our purpose beneath

all its varied aspects must needs be order and discipline. “Muddle,”

said I, “is the enemy.” That remains my belief to this day. Clearness

and order, light and foresight, these things I know for Good. It was

muddle had just given us all the still freshly painful disasters and

humiliations of the war, muddle that gives us the visibly sprawling

disorder of our cities and industrial country-side, muddle that gives us

the waste of life, the limitations, wretchedness and unemployment of the

poor. Muddle! I remember myself quoting Kipling--

“All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,

All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less.”

“We build the state,” we said over and over again. “That is what we are

for--servants of the new reorganisation!”

We planned half in earnest and half Utopianising, a League of Social

Service.

We talked of the splendid world of men that might grow out of such

unpaid and ill-paid work as we were setting our faces to do. We spoke

of the intricate difficulties, the monstrous passive resistances, the

hostilities to such a development as we conceived our work subserved,

and we spoke with that underlying confidence in the invincibility of the

causes we adopted that is natural to young and scarcely tried men.

We talked much of the detailed life of politics so far as it was known

to us, and there Willersley was more experienced and far better informed

than I; we discussed possible combinations and possible developments,

and the chances of some great constructive movement coming from

the heart-searchings the Boer war had occasioned. We would sink to

gossip--even at the Suetonius level. Willersley would decline towards

illuminating anecdotes that I capped more or less loosely from my

private reading. We were particularly wise, I remember, upon the

management of newspapers, because about that we knew nothing whatever.

We perceived that great things were to be done through newspapers. We

talked of swaying opinion and moving great classes to massive action.

Men are egotistical even in devotion. All our splendid projects were

thickset with the first personal pronoun. We both could write, and all

that we said in general terms was reflected in the particular in our

minds; it was ourselves we saw, and no others, writing and speaking

that moving word. We had already produced manuscript and passed the

initiations of proof reading; I had been a frequent speaker in the

Union, and Willersley was an active man on the School Board. Our feet

were already on the lower rungs that led up and up. He was six and

twenty, and I twenty-two. We intimated our individual careers in terms

of bold expectation. I had prophetic glimpses of walls and hoardings

clamorous with “Vote for Remington,” and Willersley no doubt saw himself

chairman of this committee and that, saying a few slightly ironical

words after the declaration of the poll, and then sitting friendly

beside me on the government benches. There was nothing impossible in

such dreams. Why not the Board of Education for him? My preference at

that time wavered between the Local Government Board--I had great ideas

about town-planning, about revisions of municipal areas and re-organised

internal transit--and the War Office. I swayed strongly towards the

latter as the journey progressed. My educational bias came later.

The swelling ambitions that have tramped over Alpine passes! How many

of them, like mine, have come almost within sight of realisation before

they failed?

There were times when we posed like young gods (of unassuming exterior),

and times when we were full of the absurdest little solicitudes about

our prospects. There were times when one surveyed the whole world of

men as if it was a little thing at one's feet, and by way of contrast

I remember once lying in bed--it must have been during this holiday,

though I cannot for the life of me fix where--and speculating whether

perhaps some day I might not be a K. C. B., Sir Richard Remington, K. C.

B., M. P.

But the big style prevailed....

We could not tell from minute to minute whether we were planning for

a world of solid reality, or telling ourselves fairy tales about this

prospect of life. So much seemed possible, and everything we could think

of so improbable. There were lapses when it seemed to me I could never

be anything but just the entirely unimportant and undistinguished young

man I was for ever and ever. I couldn't even think of myself as five and

thirty.

Once I remember Willersley going over a list of failures, and why

they had failed--but young men in the twenties do not know much about

failures.

10

Willersley and I professed ourselves Socialists, but by this time I knew

my Rodbertus as well as my Marx, and there was much in our socialism

that would have shocked Chris Robinson as much as anything in life could

have shocked him. Socialism as a simple democratic cry we had done with

for ever. We were socialists because Individualism for us meant muddle,

meant a crowd of separated, undisciplined little people all obstinately

and ignorantly doing things jarringly, each one in his own way.

“Each,” I said quoting words of my father's that rose apt in my memory,

“snarling from his own little bit of property, like a dog tied to a

cart's tail.”

“Essentially,” said Willersley, “essentially we're for conscription, in

peace and war alike. The man who owns property is a public official and

has to behave as such. That's the gist of socialism as I understand it.”

“Or be dismissed from his post,” I said, “and replaced by some better

sort of official. A man's none the less an official because he's

irresponsible. What he does with his property affects people just the

same. Private! No one is really private but an outlaw....”

Order and devotion were the very essence of our socialism, and a

splendid collective vigour and happiness its end. We projected an ideal

state, an organised state as confident and powerful as modern science,

as balanced and beautiful as a body, as beneficent as sunshine, the

organised state that should end muddle for ever; it ruled all our ideals

and gave form to all our ambitions.

Every man was to be definitely related to that, to have his predominant

duty to that. Such was the England renewed we had in mind, and how to

serve that end, to subdue undisciplined worker and undisciplined wealth

to it, and make the Scientific Commonweal, King, was the continuing

substance of our intercourse.

11

Every day the wine of the mountains was stronger in our blood, and the

flush of our youth deeper. We would go in the morning sunlight along

some narrow Alpine mule-path shouting large suggestions for national

reorganisation, and weighing considerations as lightly as though the

world was wax in our hands. “Great England,” we said in effect, over

and over again, “and we will be among the makers! England renewed! The

country has been warned; it has learnt its lesson. The disasters and

anxieties of the war have sunk in. England has become serious.... Oh!

there are big things before us to do; big enduring things!”

One evening we walked up to the loggia of a little pilgrimage church,

I forget its name, that stands out on a conical hill at the head of a

winding stair above the town of Locarno. Down below the houses clustered

amidst a confusion of heat-bitten greenery. I had been sitting silently

on the parapet, looking across to the purple mountain masses where

Switzerland passes into Italy, and the drift of our talk seemed suddenly

to gather to a head.

I broke into speech, giving form to the thoughts that had been

accumulating. My words have long since passed out of my memory, the

phrases of familiar expression have altered for me, but the substance

remains as clear as ever. I said how we were in our measure emperors

and kings, men undriven, free to do as we pleased with life; we classed

among the happy ones, our bread and common necessities were given us for

nothing, we had abilities,--it wasn't modesty but cowardice to behave

as if we hadn't--and Fortune watched us to see what we might do with

opportunity and the world.

“There are so many things to do, you see,” began Willersley, in his

judicial lecturer's voice.

“So many things we may do,” I interrupted, “with all these years before

us.... We're exceptional men. It's our place, our duty, to do things.”

“Here anyhow,” I said, answering the faint amusement of his face; “I've

got no modesty. Everything conspires to set me up. Why should I run

about like all those grubby little beasts down there, seeking nothing

but mean little vanities and indulgencies--and then take credit for

modesty? I KNOW I am capable. I KNOW I have imagination. Modesty! I know

if I don't attempt the very biggest things in life I am a damned shirk.

The very biggest! Somebody has to attempt them. I feel like a loaded gun

that is only a little perplexed because it has to find out just where to

aim itself....”

The lake and the frontier villages, a white puff of steam on the distant

railway to Luino, the busy boats and steamers trailing triangular wakes

of foam, the long vista eastward towards battlemented Bellinzona, the

vast mountain distances, now tinged with sunset light, behind this

nearer landscape, and the southward waters with remote coast towns

shining dimly, waters that merged at last in a luminous golden haze,

made a broad panoramic spectacle. It was as if one surveyed the

world,--and it was like the games I used to set out upon my nursery

floor. I was exalted by it; I felt larger than men. So kings should

feel.

That sense of largeness came to me then, and it has come to me since,

again and again, a splendid intimation or a splendid vanity. Once, I

remember, when I looked at Genoa from the mountain crest behind the

town and saw that multitudinous place in all its beauty of width and

abundance and clustering human effort, and once as I was steaming past

the brown low hills of Staten Island towards the towering vigour and

clamorous vitality of New York City, that mood rose to its quintessence.

And once it came to me, as I shall tell, on Dover cliffs. And a hundred

times when I have thought of England as our country might be, with no

wretched poor, no wretched rich, a nation armed and ordered, trained and

purposeful amidst its vales and rivers, that emotion of collective ends

and collective purposes has returned to me. I felt as great as humanity.

For a brief moment I was humanity, looking at the world I had made and

had still to make....

12

And mingled with these dreams of power and patriotic service there was

another series of a different quality and a different colour, like the

antagonistic colour of a shot silk. The white life and the red life,

contrasted and interchanged, passing swiftly at a turn from one to

another, and refusing ever to mingle peacefully one with the other. I

was asking myself openly and distinctly: what are you going to do

for the world? What are you going to do with yourself? and with an

increasing strength and persistence Nature in spite of my averted

attention was asking me in penetrating undertones: what are you going

to do about this other fundamental matter, the beauty of girls and women

and your desire for them?

I have told of my sisterless youth and the narrow circumstances of my

upbringing. It made all women-kind mysterious to me. If it had not been

for my Staffordshire cousins I do not think I should have known any

girls at all until I was twenty. Of Staffordshire I will tell a little

later. But I can remember still how through all those ripening years,

the thought of women's beauty, their magic presence in the world beside

me and the unknown, untried reactions of their intercourse, grew upon me

and grew, as a strange presence grows in a room when one is occupied by

other things. I busied myself and pretended to be wholly occupied, and

there the woman stood, full half of life neglected, and it seemed to my

averted mind sometimes that she was there clad and dignified and divine,

and sometimes Aphrodite shining and commanding, and sometimes that Venus

who stoops and allures.

This travel abroad seemed to have released a multitude of things in my

mind; the clear air, the beauty of the sunshine, the very blue of

the glaciers made me feel my body and quickened all those disregarded

dreams. I saw the sheathed beauty of women's forms all about me, in the

cheerful waitresses at the inns, in the pedestrians one encountered

in the tracks, in the chance fellow travellers at the hotel tables.

“Confound it!” said I, and talked all the more zealously of that greater

England that was calling us.

I remember that we passed two Germans, an old man and a tall fair girl,

father and daughter, who were walking down from Saas. She came swinging

and shining towards us, easy and strong. I worshipped her as she

approached.

“Gut Tag!” said Willersley, removing his hat.

“Morgen!” said the old man, saluting.