“I don't LIKE him,” said the official conclusively, and it seemed to me
at the time he was just blind prejudice speaking....
I came nearer the truth of the matter as I came to realise that
our philosophies differed profoundly. That isn't a very curable
difference,--once people have grown up. Theirs was a philosophy devoid
of FINESSE. Temperamentally the Baileys were specialised, concentrated,
accurate, while I am urged either by some Inner force or some entirely
assimilated influence in my training, always to round off and shadow
my outlines. I hate them hard. I would sacrifice detail to modelling
always, and the Baileys, it seemed to me, loved a world as flat and
metallic as Sidney Cooper's cows. If they had the universe in hand I
know they would take down all the trees and put up stamped tin green
shades and sunlight accumulators. Altiora thought trees hopelessly
irregular and sea cliffs a great mistake.... I got things clearer as
time went on. Though it was an Hegelian mess of which I had partaken at
Codger's table by way of a philosophical training, my sympathies have
always been Pragmatist. I belong almost by nature to that school of
Pragmatism that, following the medieval Nominalists, bases itself upon
a denial of the reality of classes, and of the validity of general
laws. The Baileys classified everything. They were, in the scholastic
sense--which so oddly contradicts the modern use of the word “Realists.”
They believed classes were REAL and independent of their individuals.
This is the common habit of all so-called educated people who have no
metaphysical aptitude and no metaphysical training. It leads them to a
progressive misunderstanding of the world. It was a favourite trick
of Altiora's to speak of everybody as a “type”; she saw men as samples
moving; her dining-room became a chamber of representatives. It gave
a tremendously scientific air to many of their generalisations, using
“scientific” in its nineteenth-century uncritical Herbert Spencer sense,
an air that only began to disappear when you thought them over again in
terms of actuality and the people one knew....
At the Baileys' one always seemed to be getting one's hands on the very
strings that guided the world. You heard legislation projected to affect
this “type” and that; statistics marched by you with sin and shame and
injustice and misery reduced to quite manageable percentages, you found
men who were to frame or amend bills in grave and intimate exchange
with Bailey's omniscience, you heard Altiora canvassing approaching
resignations and possible appointments that might make or mar a
revolution in administrative methods, and doing it with a vigorous
directness that manifestly swayed the decision; and you felt you were
in a sort of signal box with levers all about you, and the world outside
there, albeit a little dark and mysterious beyond the window, running
on its lines in ready obedience to these unhesitating lights, true and
steady to trim termini.
And then with all this administrative fizzle, this pseudo-scientific
administrative chatter, dying away in your head, out you went into the
limitless grimy chaos of London streets and squares, roads and avenues
lined with teeming houses, each larger than the Chambers Street house
and at least equally alive, you saw the chaotic clamour of hoardings,
the jumble of traffic, the coming and going of mysterious myriads,
you heard the rumble of traffic like the noise of a torrent; a vague
incessant murmur of cries and voices, wanton crimes and accidents bawled
at you from the placards; imperative unaccountable fashions swaggered
triumphant in dazzling windows of the shops; and you found yourself
swaying back to the opposite conviction that the huge formless spirit
of the world it was that held the strings and danced the puppets on the
Bailey stage....
Under the lamps you were jostled by people like my Staffordshire uncle
out for a spree, you saw shy youths conversing with prostitutes, you
passed young lovers pairing with an entire disregard of the social
suitability of the “types” they might blend or create, you saw men
leaning drunken against lamp-posts whom you knew for the “type” that
will charge with fixed bayonets into the face of death, and you found
yourself unable to imagine little Bailey achieving either drunkenness or
the careless defiance of annihilation. You realised that quite a lot of
types were underrepresented in Chambers Street, that feral and obscure
and altogether monstrous forces must be at work, as yet altogether
unassimilated by those neat administrative reorganisations.
5
Altiora, I remember, preluded Margaret's reappearance by announcing her
as a “new type.”
I was accustomed to go early to the Baileys' dinners in those days, for
a preliminary gossip with Altiora in front of her drawing-room fire. One
got her alone, and that early arrival was a little sign of appreciation
she valued. She had every woman's need of followers and servants.
“I'm going to send you down to-night,” she said, “with a very
interesting type indeed--one of the new generation of serious gals.
Middle-class origin--and quite well off. Rich in fact. Her step-father
was a solicitor and something of an ENTREPRENEUR towards the end, I
fancy--in the Black Country. There was a little brother died, and she's
lost her mother quite recently. Quite on her own, so to speak. She's
never been out into society very much, and doesn't seem really very
anxious to go.... Not exactly an intellectual person, you know, but
quiet, and great force of character. Came up to London on her own and
came to us--someone had told her we were the sort of people to advise
her--to ask what to do. I'm sure she'll interest you.”
“What CAN people of that sort do?” I asked. “Is she capable of
investigation?”
Altiora compressed her lips and shook her head. She always did shake her
head when you asked that of anyone.
“Of course what she ought to do,” said Altiora, with her silk dress
pulled back from her knee before the fire, and with a lift of her voice
towards a chuckle at her daring way of putting things, “is to marry a
member of Parliament and see he does his work.... Perhaps she will.
It's a very exceptional gal who can do anything by herself--quite
exceptional. The more serious they are--without being exceptional--the
more we want them to marry.”
Her exposition was truncated by the entry of the type in question.
“Well!” cried Altiora turning, and with a high note of welcome, “HERE
you are!”
Margaret had gained in dignity and prettiness by the lapse of five
years, and she was now very beautifully and richly and simply dressed.
Her fair hair had been done in some way that made it seem softer and
more abundant than it was in my memory, and a gleam of purple velvet-set
diamonds showed amidst its mist of little golden and brown lines.
Her dress was of white and violet, the last trace of mourning for her
mother, and confessed the gracious droop of her tall and slender body.
She did not suggest Staffordshire at all, and I was puzzled for a moment
to think where I had met her. Her sweetly shaped mouth with the
slight obliquity of the lip and the little kink in her brow were
extraordinarily familiar to me. But she had either been prepared
by Altiora or she remembered my name. “We met,” she said, “while my
step-father was alive--at Misterton. You came to see us”; and instantly
I recalled the sunshine between the apple blossom and a slender pale
blue girlish shape among the daffodils, like something that had sprung
from a bulb itself. I recalled at once that I had found her very
interesting, though I did not clearly remember how it was she had
interested me.
Other guests arrived--it was one of Altiora's boldly blended mixtures of
people with ideas and people with influence or money who might perhaps
be expected to resonate to them. Bailey came down late with an air of
hurry, and was introduced to Margaret and said absolutely nothing to
her--there being no information either to receive or impart and nothing
to do--but stood snatching his left cheek until I rescued him and her,
and left him free to congratulate the new Lady Snape on her husband's K.
C. B.
I took Margaret down. We achieved no feats of mutual expression, except
that it was abundantly clear we were both very pleased and interested
to meet again, and that we had both kept memories of each other. We made
that Misterton tea-party and the subsequent marriages of my cousins
and the world of Burslem generally, matter for quite an agreeable
conversation until at last Altiora, following her invariable custom,
called me by name imperatively out of our duologue. “Mr. Remington,” she
said, “we want your opinion--” in her entirely characteristic effort to
get all the threads of conversation into her own hands for the climax
that always wound up her dinners. How the other women used to hate those
concluding raids of hers! I forget most of the other people at that
dinner, nor can I recall what the crowning rally was about. It didn't in
any way join on to my impression of Margaret.
In the drawing-room of the matting floor I rejoined her, with Altiora's
manifest connivance, and in the interval I had been thinking of our
former meeting.
“Do you find London,” I asked, “give you more opportunity for doing
things and learning things than Burslem?”
She showed at once she appreciated my allusion to her former
confidences. “I was very discontented then,” she said and paused. “I've
really only been in London for a few months. It's so different. In
Burslem, life seems all business and getting--without any reason. One
went on and it didn't seem to mean anything. At least anything that
mattered.... London seems to be so full of meanings--all mixed up
together.”
She knitted her brows over her words and smiled appealingly at the end
as if for consideration for her inadequate expression, appealingly and
almost humorously.
I looked understandingly at her. “We have all,” I agreed, “to come to
London.”
“One sees so much distress,” she added, as if she felt she had
completely omitted something, and needed a codicil.
“What are you doing in London?”
“I'm thinking of studying. Some social question. I thought perhaps I
might go and study social conditions as Mrs. Bailey did, go perhaps as
a work-girl or see the reality of living in, but Mrs. Bailey thought
perhaps it wasn't quite my work.”
“Are you studying?”
“I'm going to a good many lectures, and perhaps I shall take up a
regular course at the Westminster School of Politics and Sociology. But
Mrs. Bailey doesn't seem to believe very much in that either.”
Her faintly whimsical smile returned. “I seem rather indefinite,” she
apologised, “but one does not want to get entangled in things one can't
do. One--one has so many advantages, one's life seems to be such a trust
and such a responsibility--”
She stopped.
“A man gets driven into work,” I said.
“It must be splendid to be Mrs. Bailey,” she replied with a glance of
envious admiration across the room.
“SHE has no doubts, anyhow,” I remarked.
“She HAD,” said Margaret with the pride of one who has received great
confidences.
6
“You've met before?” said Altiora, a day or so later.