1
I was twenty-seven when I met Margaret again, and the intervening
five years had been years of vigorous activity for me, if not of very
remarkable growth. When I saw her again, I could count myself a grown
man. I think, indeed, I counted myself more completely grown than I was.
At any rate, by all ordinary standards, I had “got on” very well, and
my ideas, if they had not changed very greatly, had become much more
definite and my ambitions clearer and bolder.
I had long since abandoned my fellowship and come to London. I had
published two books that had been talked about, written several
articles, and established a regular relationship with the WEEKLY REVIEW
and the EVENING GAZETTE. I was a member of the Eighty Club and learning
to adapt the style of the Cambridge Union to larger uses. The London
world had opened out to me very readily. I had developed a pleasant
variety of social connections. I had made the acquaintance of Mr.
Evesham, who had been attracted by my NEW RULER, and who talked about
it and me, and so did a very great deal to make a way for me into the
company of prominent and amusing people. I dined out quite frequently.
The glitter and interest of good London dinner parties became a common
experience. I liked the sort of conversation one got at them extremely,
the little glow of duologues burning up into more general discussions,
the closing-in of the men after the going of the women, the sage,
substantial masculine gossiping, the later resumption of effective talk
with some pleasant woman, graciously at her best. I had a wide range
of houses; Cambridge had linked me to one or two correlated sets of
artistic and literary people, and my books and Mr. Evesham and opened
to me the big vague world of “society.” I wasn't aggressive nor
particularly snobbish nor troublesome, sometimes I talked well, and if I
had nothing interesting to say I said as little as possible, and I had
a youthful gravity of manner that was liked by hostesses. And the other
side of my nature that first flared through the cover of restraints at
Locarno, that too had had opportunity to develop along the line London
renders practicable. I had had my experiences and secrets and adventures
among that fringe of ill-mated or erratic or discredited women the
London world possesses. The thing had long ago ceased to be a matter of
magic or mystery, and had become a question of appetites and excitement,
and among other things the excitement of not being found out.
I write rather doubtfully of my growing during this period. Indeed I
find it hard to judge whether I can say that I grew at all in any real
sense of the word, between three and twenty and twenty-seven. It seems
to me now to have been rather a phase of realisation and clarification.
All the broad lines of my thought were laid down, I am sure, by the date
of my Locarno adventure, but in those five years I discussed things over
and over again with myself and others, filled out with concrete fact
forms I had at first apprehended sketchily and conversationally,
measured my powers against my ideals and the forces in the world about
me. It was evident that many men no better than myself and with no
greater advantages than mine had raised themselves to influential and
even decisive positions in the worlds of politics and thought. I was
gathering the confidence and knowledge necessary to attack the world in
the large manner; I found I could write, and that people would let
me write if I chose, as one having authority and not as the scribes.
Socially and politically and intellectually I knew myself for an honest
man, and that quite without any deliberation on my part this showed
and made things easy for me. People trusted my good faith from the
beginning--for all that I came from nowhere and had no better position
than any adventurer.
But the growth process was arrested, I was nothing bigger at
twenty-seven than at twenty-two, however much saner and stronger, and
any one looking closely into my mind during that period might well have
imagined growth finished altogether. It is particularly evident to me
now that I came no nearer to any understanding of women during that
time. That Locarno affair was infinitely more to me than I had supposed.
It ended something--nipped something in the bud perhaps--took me at a
stride from a vague, fine, ignorant, closed world of emotion to intrigue
and a perfectly definite and limited sensuality. It ended my youth, and
for a time it prevented my manhood. I had never yet even peeped at the
sweetest, profoundest thing in the world, the heart and meaning of a
girl, or dreamt with any quality of reality of a wife or any such thing
as a friend among womanhood. My vague anticipation of such things in
life had vanished altogether. I turned away from their possibility. It
seemed to me I knew what had to be known about womankind. I wanted to
work hard, to get on to a position in which I could develop and forward
my constructive projects. Women, I thought, had nothing to do with that.
It seemed clear I could not marry for some years; I was attractive to
certain types of women, I had vanity enough to give me an agreeable
confidence in love-making, and I went about seeking a convenient
mistress quite deliberately, some one who should serve my purpose and
say in the end, like that kindly first mistress of mine, “I've done you
no harm,” and so release me. It seemed the only wise way of disposing
of urgencies that might otherwise entangle and wreck the career I was
intent upon.
I don't apologise for, or defend my mental and moral phases. So it was
I appraised life and prepared to take it, and so it is a thousand
ambitious men see it to-day....
For the rest these five years were a period of definition. My political
conceptions were perfectly plain and honest. I had one constant desire
ruling my thoughts. I meant to leave England and the empire better
ordered than I found it, to organise and discipline, to build up a
constructive and controlling State out of my world's confusions. We
had, I saw, to suffuse education with public intention, to develop a new
better-living generation with a collectivist habit of thought, to link
now chaotic activities in every human affair, and particularly to catch
that escaped, world-making, world-ruining, dangerous thing, industrial
and financial enterprise, and bring it back to the service of the
general good. I had then the precise image that still serves me as a
symbol for all I wish to bring about, the image of an engineer building
a lock in a swelling torrent--with water pressure as his only source of
power. My thoughts and acts were habitually turned to that enterprise;
it gave shape and direction to all my life. The problem that most
engaged my mind during those years was the practical and personal
problem of just where to apply myself to serve this almost innate
purpose. How was I, a child of this confusion, struggling upward through
the confusion, to take hold of things? Somewhere between politics and
literature my grip must needs be found, but where? Always I seem to
have been looking for that in those opening years, and disregarding
everything else to discover it.
2
The Baileys, under whose auspices I met Margaret again, were in the
sharpest contrast with the narrow industrialism of the Staffordshire
world. They were indeed at the other extreme of the scale, two active
self-centred people, excessively devoted to the public service. It was
natural I should gravitate to them, for they seemed to stand for the
maturer, more disciplined, better informed expression of all I was then
urgent to attempt to do. The bulk of their friends were politicians or
public officials, they described themselves as publicists--a vague yet
sufficiently significant term. They lived and worked in a hard little
house in Chambers Street, Westminster, and made a centre for quite an
astonishing amount of political and social activity.
Willersley took me there one evening. The place was almost pretentiously
matter-of-fact and unassuming. The narrow passage-hall, papered with
some ancient yellowish paper, grained to imitate wood, was choked with
hats and cloaks and an occasional feminine wrap. Motioned rather than
announced by a tall Scotch servant woman, the only domestic I ever
remember seeing there, we made our way up a narrow staircase past the
open door of a small study packed with blue-books, to discover Altiora
Bailey receiving before the fireplace in her drawing-room. She was a
tall commanding figure, splendid but a little untidy in black silk and
red beads, with dark eyes that had no depths, with a clear hard voice
that had an almost visible prominence, aquiline features and straight
black hair that was apt to get astray, that was now astray like the
head feathers of an eagle in a gale. She stood with her hands behind her
back, and talked in a high tenor of a projected Town Planning Bill with
Blupp, who was practically in those days the secretary of the local
Government Board. A very short broad man with thick ears and fat white
hands writhing intertwined behind him, stood with his back to us, eager
to bark interruptions into Altiora's discourse. A slender girl in pale
blue, manifestly a young political wife, stood with one foot on the
fender listening with an expression of entirely puzzled propitiation.
A tall sandy-bearded bishop with the expression of a man in a trance
completed this central group.
The room was one of those long apartments once divided by folding doors,
and reaching from back to front, that are common upon the first floors
of London houses. Its walls were hung with two or three indifferent
water colours, there was scarcely any furniture but a sofa or so and a
chair, and the floor, severely carpeted with matting, was crowded with
a curious medley of people, men predominating. Several were in evening
dress, but most had the morning garb of the politician; the women were
either severely rational or radiantly magnificent. Willersley pointed
out to me the wife of the Secretary of State for War, and I recognised
the Duchess of Clynes, who at that time cultivated intellectuality. I
looked round, identifying a face here or there, and stepping back trod
on some one's toe, and turned to find it belonged to the Right Hon. G.
B. Mottisham, dear to the PUNCH caricaturists. He received my apology
with that intentional charm that is one of his most delightful traits,
and resumed his discussion. Beside him was Esmeer of Trinity, whom I had
not seen since my Cambridge days....
Willersley found an ex-member of the School Board for whom he had
affinities, and left me to exchange experiences and comments upon the
company with Esmeer. Esmeer was still a don; but he was nibbling, he
said, at certain negotiations with the TIMES that might bring him
down to London. He wanted to come to London. “We peep at things from
Cambridge,” he said.
“This sort of thing,” I said, “makes London necessary. It's the oddest
gathering.”
“Every one comes here,” said Esmeer. “Mostly we hate them like
poison--jealousy--and little irritations--Altiora can be a horror at
times--but we HAVE to come.”
“Things are being done?”
“Oh!--no doubt of it. It's one of the parts of the British
machinery--that doesn't show.... But nobody else could do it.
“Two people,” said Esmeer, “who've planned to be a power--in an original
way. And by Jove! they've done it!”
I did not for some time pick out Oscar Bailey, and then Esmeer
showed him to me in elaborately confidential talk in a corner with a
distinguished-looking stranger wearing a ribbon. Oscar had none of the
fine appearance of his wife; he was a short sturdy figure with a rounded
protruding abdomen and a curious broad, flattened, clean-shaven face
that seemed nearly all forehead. He was of Anglo-Hungarian extraction,
and I have always fancied something Mongolian in his type. He peered
up with reddish swollen-looking eyes over gilt-edged glasses that were
divided horizontally into portions of different refractive power, and he
talking in an ingratiating undertone, with busy thin lips, an eager lisp
and nervous movements of the hand.
People say that thirty years before at Oxford he was almost exactly the
same eager, clever little man he was when I first met him. He had come
up to Balliol bristling with extraordinary degrees and prizes captured
in provincial and Irish and Scotch universities--and had made a name for
himself as the most formidable dealer in exact fact the rhetoricians
of the Union had ever had to encounter. From Oxford he had gone on to a
position in the Higher Division of the Civil Service, I think in the
War Office, and had speedily made a place for himself as a political
journalist. He was a particularly neat controversialist, and very full
of political and sociological ideas. He had a quite astounding memory
for facts and a mastery of detailed analysis, and the time afforded
scope for these gifts. The later eighties were full of politico-social
discussion, and he became a prominent name upon the contents list of the
NINETEENTH CENTURY, the FORTNIGHTLY and CONTEMPORARY chiefly as a half
sympathetic but frequently very damaging critic of the socialism of that
period. He won the immense respect of every one specially interested in
social and political questions, he soon achieved the limited distinction
that is awarded such capacity, and at that I think he would have
remained for the rest of his life if he had not encountered Altiora.
But Altiora Macvitie was an altogether exceptional woman, an
extraordinary mixture of qualities, the one woman in the world who could
make something more out of Bailey than that. She had much of the
vigour and handsomeness of a slender impudent young man, and an
unscrupulousness altogether feminine. She was one of those women who
are waiting in--what is the word?--muliebrity. She had courage and
initiative and a philosophical way of handling questions, and she could
be bored by regular work like a man. She was entirely unfitted for her
sex's sphere. She was neither uncertain, coy nor hard to please, and
altogether too stimulating and aggressive for any gentleman's hours of
ease. Her cookery would have been about as sketchy as her handwriting,
which was generally quite illegible, and she would have made, I feel
sure, a shocking bad nurse. Yet you mustn't imagine she was an inelegant
or unbeautiful woman, and she is inconceivable to me in high collars or
any sort of masculine garment. But her soul was bony, and at the base
of her was a vanity gaunt and greedy! When she wasn't in a state of
personal untidiness that was partly a protest against the waste of hours
exacted by the toilet and partly a natural disinclination, she had a
gypsy splendour of black and red and silver all her own. And somewhen in
the early nineties she met and married Bailey.
I know very little about her early years. She was the only daughter of
Sir Deighton Macvitie, who applied the iodoform process to cotton,
and only his subsequent unfortunate attempts to become a Cotton King
prevented her being a very rich woman. As it was she had a tolerable
independence. She came into prominence as one of the more able of the
little shoal of young women who were led into politico-philanthropic
activities by the influence of the earlier novels of Mrs. Humphry
Ward--the Marcella crop. She went “slumming” with distinguished vigour,
which was quite usual in those days--and returned from her experiences
as an amateur flower girl with clear and original views about the
problem--which is and always had been unusual. She had not married, I
suppose because her standards were high, and men are cowards and with an
instinctive appetite for muliebrity. She had kept house for her father
by speaking occasionally to the housekeeper, butler and cook her mother
had left her, and gathering the most interesting dinner parties she
could, and had married off four orphan nieces in a harsh and successful
manner. After her father's smash and death she came out as a writer
upon social questions and a scathing critic of the Charity Organisation
Society, and she was three and thirty and a little at loose ends when
she met Oscar Bailey, so to speak, in the CONTEMPORARY REVIEW. The
lurking woman in her nature was fascinated by the ease and precision
with which the little man rolled over all sorts of important and
authoritative people, she was the first to discover a sort of
imaginative bigness in his still growing mind, the forehead perhaps
carried him off physically, and she took occasion to meet and subjugate
him, and, so soon as he had sufficiently recovered from his abject
humility and a certain panic at her attentions, marry him.
This had opened a new phase in the lives of Bailey and herself. The two
supplemented each other to an extraordinary extent. Their subsequent
career was, I think, almost entirely her invention. She was aggressive,
imaginative, and had a great capacity for ideas, while he was almost
destitute of initiative, and could do nothing with ideas except remember
and discuss them. She was, if not exact, at least indolent, with a
strong disposition to save energy by sketching--even her handwriting
showed that--while he was inexhaustibly industrious with a relentless
invariable calligraphy that grew larger and clearer as the years passed
by. She had a considerable power of charming; she could be just as nice
to people--and incidentally just as nasty--as she wanted to be. He was
always just the same, a little confidential and SOTTO VOCE, artlessly
rude and egoistic in an undignified way. She had considerable social
experience, good social connections, and considerable social ambition,
while he had none of these things. She saw in a flash her opportunity
to redeem his defects, use his powers, and do large, novel, rather
startling things. She ran him. Her marriage, which shocked her friends
and relations beyond measure--for a time they would only speak of Bailey
as “that gnome”--was a stroke of genius, and forthwith they proceeded
to make themselves the most formidable and distinguished couple
conceivable. P. B. P., she boasted, was engraved inside their wedding
rings, Pro Bono Publico, and she meant it to be no idle threat. She had
discovered very early that the last thing influential people will do is
to work. Everything in their lives tends to make them dependent upon a
supply of confidently administered detail. Their business is with the
window and not the stock behind, and in the end they are dependent upon
the stock behind for what goes into the window. She linked with that the
fact that Bailey had a mind as orderly as a museum, and an invincible
power over detail. She saw that if two people took the necessary pains
to know the facts of government and administration with precision, to
gather together knowledge that was dispersed and confused, to be able to
say precisely what had to be done and what avoided in this eventuality
or that, they would necessarily become a centre of reference for all
sorts of legislative proposals and political expedients, and she went
unhesitatingly upon that.
Bailey, under her vigorous direction, threw up his post in the
Civil Service and abandoned sporadic controversies, and they devoted
themselves to the elaboration and realisation of this centre of public
information she had conceived as their role. They set out to study
the methods and organisation and realities of government in the most
elaborate manner. They did the work as no one had ever hitherto dreamt
of doing it. They planned the research on a thoroughly satisfying scale,
and arranged their lives almost entirely for it. They took that house
in Chambers Street and furnished it with severe economy, they discovered
that Scotch domestic who is destined to be the guardian and tyrant of
their declining years, and they set to work. Their first book, “The
Permanent Official,” fills three plump volumes, and took them and their
two secretaries upwards of four years to do. It is an amazingly good
book, an enduring achievement. In a hundred directions the history and
the administrative treatment of the public service was clarified for all
time....
They worked regularly every morning from nine to twelve, they lunched
lightly but severely, in the afternoon they “took exercise” or Bailey
attended meetings of the London School Board, on which he served, he
said, for the purposes of study--he also became a railway director
for the same end. In the late afternoon Altiora was at home to various
callers, and in the evening came dinner or a reception or both.
Her dinners and gatherings were a very important feature in their
scheme. She got together all sorts of interesting people in or about
the public service, she mixed the obscurely efficient with the
ill-instructed famous and the rudderless rich, got together in one room
more of the factors in our strange jumble of a public life than had ever
met easily before. She fed them with a shameless austerity that kept the
conversation brilliant, on a soup, a plain fish, and mutton or boiled
fowl and milk pudding, with nothing to drink but whisky and soda, and
hot and cold water, and milk and lemonade. Everybody was soon very glad
indeed to come to that. She boasted how little her housekeeping cost
her, and sought constantly for fresh economies that would enable her,
she said, to sustain an additional private secretary. Secretaries were
the Baileys' one extravagance, they loved to think of searches going
on in the British Museum, and letters being cleared up and precis made
overhead, while they sat in the little study and worked together, Bailey
with a clockwork industry, and Altiora in splendid flashes between
intervals of cigarettes and meditation. “All efficient public careers,”
said Altiora, “consist in the proper direction of secretaries.”
“If everything goes well I shall have another secretary next year,”
Altiora told me. “I wish I could refuse people dinner napkins. Imagine
what it means in washing! I dare most things.... But as it is, they
stand a lot of hardship here.”
“There's something of the miser in both these people,” said Esmeer, and
the thing was perfectly true. For, after all, the miser is nothing more
than a man who either through want of imagination or want of suggestion
misapplies to a base use a natural power of concentration upon one end.
The concentration itself is neither good nor evil, but a power that
can be used in either way. And the Baileys gathered and reinvested
usuriously not money, but knowledge of the utmost value in human
affairs. They produced an effect of having found themselves--completely.
One envied them at times extraordinarily. I was attracted, I was
dazzled--and at the same time there was something about Bailey's big
wrinkled forehead, his lisping broad mouth, the gestures of his hands
and an uncivil preoccupation I could not endure....
3
Their effect upon me was from the outset very considerable.
Both of them found occasion on that first visit of mine to talk to
me about my published writings and particularly about my then just
published book THE NEW RULER, which had interested them very much. It
fell in indeed so closely with their own way of thinking that I doubt if
they ever understood how independently I had arrived at my conclusions.
It was their weakness to claim excessively. That irritation, however,
came later. We discovered each other immensely; for a time it produced a
tremendous sense of kindred and co-operation.
Altiora, I remember, maintained that there existed a great army of such
constructive-minded people as ourselves--as yet undiscovered by one
another.
“It's like boring a tunnel through a mountain,” said Oscar, “and
presently hearing the tapping of the workers from the other end.”
“If you didn't know of them beforehand,” I said, “it might be a rather
badly joined tunnel.”
“Exactly,” said Altiora with a high note, “and that's why we all want to
find out each other....”
They didn't talk like that on our first encounter, but they urged me to
lunch with them next day, and then it was we went into things. A woman
Factory Inspector and the Educational Minister for New Banksland and his
wife were also there, but I don't remember they made any contribution
to the conversation. The Baileys saw to that. They kept on at me in an
urgent litigious way.
“We have read your book,” each began--as though it had been a joint
function. “And we consider--”
“Yes,” I protested, “I think--”
That was a secondary matter.
“They did not consider,” said Altiora, raising her voice and going right
over me, “that I had allowed sufficiently for the inevitable development
of an official administrative class in the modern state.”
“Nor of its importance,” echoed Oscar.
That, they explained in a sort of chorus, was the cardinal idea of their
lives, what they were up to, what they stood for. “We want to suggest to
you,” they said--and I found this was a stock opening of theirs--“that
from the mere necessities of convenience elected bodies MUST avail
themselves more and more of the services of expert officials. We have
that very much in mind. The more complicated and technical affairs
become, the less confidence will the elected official have in himself.
We want to suggest that these expert officials must necessarily develop
into a new class and a very powerful class in the community. We want to
organise that. It may be THE power of the future. They will necessarily
have to have very much of a common training. We consider ourselves as
amateur unpaid precursors of such a class.”...
The vision they displayed for my consideration as the aim of
public-spirited endeavour, seemed like a harder, narrower, more
specialised version of the idea of a trained and disciplined state that
Willersley and I had worked out in the Alps. They wanted things more
organised, more correlated with government and a collective purpose,
just as we did, but they saw it not in terms of a growing collective
understanding, but in terms of functionaries, legislative change, and
methods of administration....
It wasn't clear at first how we differed. The Baileys were very anxious
to win me to co-operation, and I was quite prepared at first to identify
their distinctive expressions with phrases of my own, and so we came
very readily into an alliance that was to last some years, and break at
last very painfully. Altiora manifestly liked me, I was soon discussing
with her the perplexity I found in placing myself efficiently in the
world, the problem of how to take hold of things that occupied my
thoughts, and she was sketching out careers for my consideration, very
much as an architect on his first visit sketches houses, considers
requirements, and puts before you this example and that of the more or
less similar thing already done....
4
It is easy to see how much in common there was between the Baileys and
me, and how natural it was that I should become a constant visitor at
their house and an ally of theirs in many enterprises. It is not nearly
so easy to define the profound antagonism of spirit that also held
between us. There was a difference in texture, a difference in quality.
How can I express it? The shapes of our thoughts were the same, but the
substance quite different. It was as if they had made in china or cast
iron what I had made in transparent living matter. (The comparison is
manifestly from my point of view.) Certain things never seemed to show
through their ideas that were visible, refracted perhaps and distorted,
but visible always through mine.
I thought for a time the essential difference lay in our relation to
beauty. With me beauty is quite primary in life; I like truth, order
and goodness, wholly because they are beautiful or lead straight to
beautiful consequences. The Baileys either hadn't got that or they
didn't see it. They seemed at times to prefer things harsh and ugly.
That puzzled me extremely. The esthetic quality of many of their
proposals, the “manners” of their work, so to speak, were at times as
dreadful as--well, War Office barrack architecture. A caricature by
its exaggerated statements will sometimes serve to point a truth by
antagonising falsity and falsity. I remember talking to a prominent
museum official in need of more public funds for the work he had in
hand. I mentioned the possibility of enlisting Bailey's influence.
“Oh, we don't want Philistines like that infernal Bottle-Imp running
us,” he said hastily, and would hear of no concerted action for the end
he had in view. “I'd rather not have the extension.
“You see,” he went on to explain, “Bailey's wanting in the essentials.”
“What essentials?” said I.
“Oh! he'd be like a nasty oily efficient little machine for some merely
subordinate necessity among all my delicate stuff. He'd do all we wanted
no doubt in the way of money and powers--and he'd do it wrong and mess
the place for ever. Hands all black, you know. He's just a means. Just a
very aggressive and unmanageable means. This isn't a plumber's job....”