The New Machiavelli
H. G. Wells [Herbert George Wells]

THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

by H. G. Wells



CONTENTS


BOOK THE FIRST

THE MAKING OF A MAN

I.   CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
II.  BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER
III. SCHOLASTIC
IV.  ADOLESCENCE


BOOK THE SECOND

MARGARET

I.   MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE
II.  MARGARET IN LONDON
III. MARGARET IN VENICE
IV.  THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER


BOOK THE THIRD

THE HEART OF POLITICS

I.   THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN
II.  SEEKING ASSOCIATES
III. SECESSION
IV.  THE BESETTING OF SEX


BOOK THE FOURTH

ISABEL

I.   LOVE AND SUCCESS
II.  THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION
III. THE BREAKING POINT



BOOK THE FIRST

THE MAKING OF A MAN



CHAPTER THE FIRST

CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN


1

Since I came to this place I have been very restless, wasting my 
energies in the futile beginning of ill-conceived books.  One does 
not settle down very readily at two and forty to a new way of 
living, and I have found myself with the teeming interests of the 
life I have abandoned still buzzing like a swarm of homeless bees in 
my head.  My mind has been full of confused protests and 
justifications.  In any case I should have found difficulties enough 
in expressing the complex thing I have to tell, but it has added 
greatly to my trouble that I have a great analogue, that a certain 
Niccolo Machiavelli chanced to fall out of politics at very much the 
age I have reached, and wrote a book to engage the restlessness of 
his mind, very much as I have wanted to do.  He wrote about the 
relation of the great constructive spirit in politics to individual 
character and weaknesses, and so far his achievement lies like a 
deep rut in the road of my intention.  It has taken me far astray.  
It is a matter of many weeks now--diversified indeed by some long 
drives into the mountains behind us and a memorable sail to Genoa 
across the blue and purple waters that drowned Shelley--since I 
began a laboured and futile imitation of "The Prince."  I sat up 
late last night with the jumbled accumulation; and at last made a 
little fire of olive twigs and burnt it all, sheet by sheet--to 
begin again clear this morning.

But incidentally I have re-read most of Machiavelli, not excepting 
those scandalous letters of his to Vettori, and it seems to me, now 
that I have released myself altogether from his literary precedent, 
that he still has his use for me.  In spite of his vast prestige I 
claim kindred with him and set his name upon my title-page, in 
partial intimation of the matter of my story.  He takes me with 
sympathy not only by reason of the dream he pursued and the humanity 
of his politics, but by the mixture of his nature.  His vices come 
in, essential to my issue.  He is dead and gone, all his immediate 
correlations to party and faction have faded to insignificance, 
leaving only on the one hand his broad method and conceptions, and 
upon the other his intimate living personality, exposed down to its 
salacious corners as the soul of no contemporary can ever be 
exposed.  Of those double strands it is I have to write, of the 
subtle protesting perplexing play of instinctive passion and desire 
against too abstract a dream of statesmanship.  But things that 
seemed to lie very far apart in Machiavelli's time have come near to 
one another; it is no simple story of white passions struggling 
against the red that I have to tell.

The state-making dream is a very old dream indeed in the world's 
history.  It plays too small a part in novels.  Plato and Confucius 
are but the highest of a great host of minds that have had a kindred 
aspiration, have dreamt of a world of men better ordered, happier, 
finer, securer.  They imagined cities grown more powerful and 
peoples made rich and multitudinous by their efforts, they thought 
in terms of harbours and shining navies, great roads engineered 
marvellously, jungles cleared and deserts conquered, the ending of 
muddle and diseases and dirt and misery; the ending of confusions 
that waste human possibilities; they thought of these things with 
passion and desire as other men think of the soft lines and tender 
beauty of women.  Thousands of men there are to-day almost mastered 
by this white passion of statecraft, and in nearly every one who 
reads and thinks you could find, I suspect, some sort of answering 
response.  But in every one it presents itself extraordinarily 
entangled and mixed up with other, more intimate things.

It was so with Machiavelli.  I picture him at San Casciano as he 
lived in retirement upon his property after the fall of the 
Republic, perhaps with a twinge of the torture that punished his 
conspiracy still lurking in his limbs.  Such twinges could not stop 
his dreaming.  Then it was "The Prince" was written.  All day he 
went about his personal affairs, saw homely neighbours, dealt with 
his family, gave vent to everyday passions.  He would sit in the 
shop of Donato del Corno gossiping curiously among vicious company, 
or pace the lonely woods of his estate, book in hand, full of bitter 
meditations.  In the evening he returned home and went to his study.  
At the entrance, he says, he pulled off his peasant clothes covered 
with the dust and dirt of that immediate life, washed himself, put 
on his "noble court dress," closed the door on the world of toiling 
and getting, private loving, private hating and personal regrets, 
sat down with a sigh of contentment to those wider dreams.

I like to think of him so, with brown books before him lit by the 
light of candles in silver candlesticks, or heading some new chapter 
of "The Prince," with a grey quill in his clean fine hand.

So writing, he becomes a symbol for me, and the less none because of 
his animal humour, his queer indecent side, and because of such 
lapses into utter meanness as that which made him sound the note of 
the begging-letter writer even in his "Dedication," reminding His 
Magnificence very urgently, as if it were the gist of his matter, of 
the continued malignity of fortune in his affairs.  These flaws 
complete him.  They are my reason for preferring him as a symbol to 
Plato, of whose indelicate side we know nothing, and whose 
correspondence with Dionysius of Syracuse has perished; or to 
Confucius who travelled China in search of a Prince he might 
instruct, with lapses and indignities now lost in the mists of ages. 
They have achieved the apotheosis of individual forgetfulness, and 
Plato has the added glory of that acquired beauty, that bust of the 
Indian Bacchus which is now indissolubly mingled with his tradition.  
They have passed into the world of the ideal, and every humbug takes 
his freedoms with their names.  But Machiavelli, more recent and 
less popular, is still all human and earthly, a fallen brother--and 
at the same time that nobly dressed and nobly dreaming writer at the 
desk.

That vision of the strengthened and perfected state is protagonist 
in my story.  But as I re-read "The Prince" and thought out the 
manner of my now abandoned project, I came to perceive how that stir 
and whirl of human thought one calls by way of embodiment the French 
Revolution, has altered absolutely the approach to such a question.  
Machiavelli, like Plato and Pythagoras and Confucius two hundred odd 
decades before him, saw only one method by which a thinking man, 
himself not powerful, might do the work of state building, and that 
was by seizing the imagination of a Prince.  Directly these men 
turned their thoughts towards realisation, their attitudes became--
what shall I call it?--secretarial.  Machiavelli, it is true, had 
some little doubts about the particular Prince he wanted, whether it 
was Caesar Borgia of Giuliano or Lorenzo, but a Prince it had to be.  
Before I saw clearly the differences of our own time I searched my 
mind for the modern equivalent of a Prince.  At various times I 
redrafted a parallel dedication to the Prince of Wales, to the 
Emperor William, to Mr. Evesham, to a certain newspaper proprietor 
who was once my schoolfellow at City Merchants', to Mr. J. D. 
Rockefeller--all of them men in their several ways and circumstances 
and possibilities, princely.  Yet in every case my pen bent of its 
own accord towards irony because--because, although at first I did 
not realise it, I myself am just as free to be a prince.  The appeal 
was unfair.  The old sort of Prince, the old little principality has 
vanished from the world.  The commonweal is one man's absolute 
estate and responsibility no more.  In Machiavelli's time it was 
indeed to an extreme degree one man's affair.  But the days of the 
Prince who planned and directed and was the source and centre of all 
power are ended.  We are in a condition of affairs infinitely more 
complex, in which every prince and statesman is something of a 
servant and every intelligent human being something of a Prince.  No 
magnificent pensive Lorenzos remain any more in this world for 
secretarial hopes.

In a sense it is wonderful how power has vanished, in a sense 
wonderful how it has increased.  I sit here, an unarmed discredited 
man, at a small writing-table in a little defenceless dwelling among 
the vines, and no human being can stop my pen except by the 
deliberate self-immolation of murdering me, nor destroy its fruits 
except by theft and crime.  No King, no council, can seize and 
torture me; no Church, no nation silence me.  Such powers of 
ruthless and complete suppression have vanished.  But that is not 
because power has diminished, but because it has increased and 
become multitudinous, because it has dispersed itself and 
specialised.  It is no longer a negative power we have, but 
positive; we cannot prevent, but we can do.  This age, far beyond 
all previous ages, is full of powerful men, men who might, if they 
had the will for it, achieve stupendous things.

The things that might be done to-day!  The things indeed that are 
being done!  It is the latter that give one so vast a sense of the 
former.  When I think of the progress of physical and mechanical 
science, of medicine and sanitation during the last century, when I 
measure the increase in general education and average efficiency, 
the power now available for human service, the merely physical 
increment, and compare it with anything that has ever been at man's 
disposal before, and when I think of what a little straggling, 
incidental, undisciplined and uncoordinated minority of inventors, 
experimenters, educators, writers and organisers has achieved this 
development of human possibilities, achieved it in spite of the 
disregard and aimlessness of the huge majority, and the passionate 
resistance of the active dull, my imagination grows giddy with 
dazzling intimations of the human splendours the justly organised 
state may yet attain.  I glimpse for a bewildering instant the 
heights that may be scaled, the splendid enterprises made possible.

But the appeal goes out now in other forms, in a book that catches 
at thousands of readers for the eye of a Prince diffused.  It is the 
old appeal indeed for the unification of human effort, the ending of 
confusions, but instead of the Machiavellian deference to a 
flattered lord, a man cries out of his heart to the unseen 
fellowship about him.  The last written dedication of all those I 
burnt last night, was to no single man, but to the socially 
constructive passion--in any man. . . .

There is, moreover, a second great difference in kind between my 
world and Machiavelli's.  We are discovering women.  It is as if 
they had come across a vast interval since his time, into the very 
chamber of the statesman.


2

In Machiavelli's outlook the interest of womanhood was in a region 
of life almost infinitely remote from his statecraft.  They were the 
vehicle of children, but only Imperial Rome and the new world of to-
day have ever had an inkling of the significance that might give 
them in the state.  They did their work, he thought, as the ploughed 
earth bears its crops.  Apart from their function of fertility they 
gave a humorous twist to life, stimulated worthy men to toil, and 
wasted the hours of Princes.  He left the thought of women outside 
with his other dusty things when he went into his study to write, 
dismissed them from his mind.  But our modern world is burthened 
with its sense of the immense, now half articulate, significance of 
women.  They stand now, as it were, close beside the silver 
candlesticks, speaking as Machiavelli writes, until he stays his pen 
and turns to discuss his writing with them.

It is this gradual discovery of sex as a thing collectively 
portentous that I have to mingle with my statecraft if my picture is 
to be true which has turned me at length from a treatise to the 
telling of my own story.  In my life I have paralleled very closely 
the slow realisations that are going on in the world about me.  I 
began life ignoring women, they came to me at first perplexing and 
dishonouring; only very slowly and very late in my life and after 
misadventure, did I gauge the power and beauty of the love of man 
and woman and learnt how it must needs frame a justifiable vision of 
the ordered world.  Love has brought me to disaster, because my 
career had been planned regardless of its possibility and value.  
But Machiavelli, it seems to me, when he went into his study, left 
not only the earth of life outside but its unsuspected soul.


3

Like Machiavelli at San Casciano, if I may take this analogy one 
step further, I too am an exile.  Office and leading are closed to 
me.  The political career that promised so much for me is shattered 
and ended for ever.

I look out from this vine-wreathed veranda under the branches of a 
stone pine; I see wide and far across a purple valley whose sides 
are terraced and set with houses of pine and ivory, the Gulf of 
Liguria gleaming sapphire blue, and cloud-like baseless mountains 
hanging in the sky, and I think of lank and coaly steamships heaving 
on the grey rollers of the English Channel and darkling streets wet 
with rain, I recall as if I were back there the busy exit from 
Charing Cross, the cross and the money-changers' offices, the 
splendid grime of giant London and the crowds going perpetually to 
and fro, the lights by night and the urgency and eventfulness of 
that great rain-swept heart of the modern world.

It is difficult to think we have left that--for many years if not 
for ever.  In thought I walk once more in Palace Yard and hear the 
clink and clatter of hansoms and the quick quiet whirr of motors; I 
go in vivid recent memories through the stir in the lobbies, I sit 
again at eventful dinners in those old dining-rooms like cellars 
below the House--dinners that ended with shrill division bells, I 
think of huge clubs swarming and excited by the bulletins of that 
electoral battle that was for me the opening opportunity.  I see the 
stencilled names and numbers go up on the green baize, constituency 
after constituency, amidst murmurs or loud shouting. . . .

It is over for me now and vanished.  That opportunity will come no 
more.  Very probably you have heard already some crude inaccurate 
version of our story and why I did not take office, and have formed 
your partial judgement on me.  And so it is I sit now at my stone 
table, half out of life already, in a warm, large, shadowy leisure, 
splashed with sunlight and hung with vine tendrils, with paper 
before me to distil such wisdom as I can, as Machiavelli in his 
exile sought to do, from the things I have learnt and felt during 
the career that has ended now in my divorce.

I climbed high and fast from small beginnings.  I had the mind of my 
party.  I do not know where I might not have ended, but for this red 
blaze that came out of my unguarded nature and closed my career for 
ever.



CHAPTER THE SECOND

BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER


1

I dreamt first of states and cities and political things when I was 
a little boy in knickerbockers.

When I think of how such things began in my mind, there comes back 
to me the memory of an enormous bleak room with its ceiling going up 
to heaven and its floor covered irregularly with patched and 
defective oilcloth and a dingy mat or so and a "surround" as they 
call it, of dark stained wood.  Here and there against the wall are 
trunks and boxes.  There are cupboards on either side of the 
fireplace and bookshelves with books above them, and on the wall and 
rather tattered is a large yellow-varnished geological map of the 
South of England.  Over the mantel is a huge lump of white coral 
rock and several big fossil bones, and above that hangs the portrait 
of a brainy gentleman, sliced in half and displaying an interior of 
intricate detail and much vigour of coloring.  It is the floor I 
think of chiefly; over the oilcloth of which, assumed to be land, 
spread towns and villages and forts of wooden bricks; there are 
steep square hills (geologically, volumes of Orr's CYCLOPAEDIA OF 
THE SCIENCES) and the cracks and spaces of the floor and the bare 
brown surround were the water channels and open sea of that 
continent of mine.

I still remember with infinite gratitude the great-uncle to whom I 
owe my bricks.  He must have been one of those rare adults who have 
not forgotten the chagrins and dreams of childhood.  He was a 
prosperous west of England builder; including my father he had three 
nephews, and for each of them he caused a box of bricks to be made 
by an out-of-work carpenter, not the insufficient supply of the 
toyshop, you understand, but a really adequate quantity of bricks 
made out of oak and shaped and smoothed, bricks about five inches by 
two and a half by one, and half-bricks and quarter-bricks to 
correspond.  There were hundreds of them, many hundreds.  I could 
build six towers as high as myself with them, and there seemed quite 
enough for every engineering project I could undertake.  I could 
build whole towns with streets and houses and churches and citadels; 
I could bridge every gap in the oilcloth and make causeways over 
crumpled spaces (which I feigned to be morasses), and on a keel of 
whole bricks it was possible to construct ships to push over the 
high seas to the remotest port in the room.  And a disciplined 
population, that rose at last by sedulous begging on birthdays and 
all convenient occasions to well over two hundred, of lead sailors 
and soldiers, horse, foot and artillery, inhabited this world.

Justice has never been done to bricks and soldiers by those who 
write about toys.  The praises of the toy theatre have been a common 
theme for essayists, the planning of the scenes, the painting and 
cutting out of the caste, penny plain twopence coloured, the stink 
and glory of the performance and the final conflagration.  I had 
such a theatre once, but I never loved it nor hoped for much from 
it; my bricks and soldiers were my perpetual drama.  I recall an 
incessant variety of interests.  There was the mystery and charm of 
the complicated buildings one could make, with long passages and 
steps and windows through which one peeped into their intricacies, 
and by means of slips of card one could make slanting ways in them, 
and send marbles rolling from top to base and thence out into the 
hold of a waiting ship.  Then there were the fortresses and gun 
emplacements and covered ways in which one's soldiers went.  And 
there was commerce; the shops and markets and store-rooms full of 
nasturtium seed, thrift seed, lupin beans and suchlike provender 
from the garden; such stuff one stored in match-boxes and pill-
boxes, or packed in sacks of old glove fingers tied up with thread 
and sent off by waggons along the great military road to the 
beleaguered fortress on the Indian frontier beyond the worn places 
that were dismal swamps.  And there were battles on the way.

That great road is still clear in my memory.  I was given, I forget 
by what benefactor, certain particularly fierce red Indians of lead--
I have never seen such soldiers since--and for these my father 
helped me to make tepees of brown paper, and I settled them in a 
hitherto desolate country under the frowning nail-studded cliffs of 
an ancient trunk.  Then I conquered them and garrisoned their land.  
(Alas! they died, no doubt through contact with civilisation--one my 
mother trod on--and their land became a wilderness again and was 
ravaged for a time by a clockwork crocodile of vast proportions.)  
And out towards the coal-scuttle was a region near the impassable 
thickets of the ragged hearthrug where lived certain china Zulus 
brandishing spears, and a mountain country of rudely piled bricks 
concealing the most devious and enchanting caves and several mines 
of gold and silver paper.  Among these rocks a number of survivors 
from a Noah's Ark made a various, dangerous, albeit frequently 
invalid and crippled fauna, and I was wont to increase the 
uncultivated wildness of this region further by trees of privet-
twigs from the garden hedge and box from the garden borders.  By 
these territories went my Imperial Road carrying produce to and fro, 
bridging gaps in the oilcloth, tunnelling through Encyclopaedic 
hills--one tunnel was three volumes long--defended as occasion 
required by camps of paper tents or brick blockhouses, and ending at 
last in a magnificently engineered ascent to a fortress on the 
cliffs commanding the Indian reservation.

My games upon the floor must have spread over several years and 
developed from small beginnings, incorporating now this suggestion 
and now that.  They stretch, I suppose, from seven to eleven or 
twelve.  I played them intermittently, and they bulk now in the 
retrospect far more significantly than they did at the time.  I 
played them in bursts, and then forgot them for long periods; 
through the spring and summer I was mostly out of doors, and school 
and classes caught me early.  And in the retrospect I see them all 
not only magnified and transfigured, but fore-shortened and confused 
together.  A clockwork railway, I seem to remember, came and went; 
one or two clockwork boats, toy sailing ships that, being keeled, 
would do nothing but lie on their beam ends on the floor; a 
detestable lot of cavalrymen, undersized and gilt all over, given me 
by a maiden aunt, and very much what one might expect from an aunt, 
that I used as Nero used his Christians to ornament my public 
buildings; and I finally melted some into fratricidal bullets, and 
therewith blew the rest to flat splashes of lead by means of a brass 
cannon in the garden.

I find this empire of the floor much more vivid and detailed in my 
memory now than many of the owners of the skirts and legs and boots 
that went gingerly across its territories.  Occasionally, alas! they 
stooped to scrub, abolishing in one universal destruction the slow 
growth of whole days of civilised development.  I still remember the 
hatred and disgust of these catastrophes.  Like Noah I was given 
warnings.  Did I disregard them, coarse red hands would descend, 
plucking garrisons from fortresses and sailors from ships, jumbling 
them up in their wrong boxes, clumsily so that their rifles and 
swords were broken, sweeping the splendid curves of the Imperial 
Road into heaps of ruins, casting the jungle growth of Zululand into 
the fire.

Well, Master Dick," the voice of this cosmic calamity would say, 
"you ought to have put them away last night.  No! I can't wait until 
you've sailed them all away in ships.  I got my work to do, and do 
it I will."

And in no time all my continents and lands were swirling water and 
swiping strokes of house-flannel.

That was the worst of my giant visitants, but my mother too, dear 
lady, was something of a terror to this microcosm.  She wore spring-
sided boots, a kind of boot now vanished, I believe, from the world, 
with dull bodies and shiny toes, and a silk dress with flounces that 
were very destructive to the more hazardous viaducts of the Imperial 
Road.  She was always, I seem to remember, fetching me; fetching me 
for a meal, fetching me for a walk or, detestable absurdity! 
fetching me for a wash and brush up, and she never seemed to 
understand anything whatever of the political Systems across which 
she came to me.  Also she forbade all toys on Sundays except the 
bricks for church-building and the soldiers for church parade, or a 
Scriptural use of the remains of the Noah's Ark mixed up with a 
wooden Swiss dairy farm.  But she really did not know whether a 
thing was a church or not unless it positively bristled with cannon, 
and many a Sunday afternoon have I played Chicago (with the fear of 
God in my heart) under an infidel pretence that it was a new sort of 
ark rather elaborately done.

Chicago, I must explain, was based upon my father's description of 
the pig slaughterings in that city and certain pictures I had seen.  
You made your beasts--which were all the ark lot really, 
provisionally conceived as pigs--go up elaborate approaches to a 
central pen, from which they went down a cardboard slide four at a 
time, and dropped most satisfyingly down a brick shaft, and pitter-
litter over some steep steps to where a head slaughterman (ne Noah) 
strung a cotton loop round their legs and sent them by pin hooks 
along a wire to a second slaughterman with a chipped foot (formerly 
Mrs. Noah) who, if I remember rightly, converted them into Army 
sausage by means of a portion of the inside of an old alarum clock.

My mother did not understand my games, but my father did.  He wore 
bright-coloured socks and carpet slippers when he was indoors--my 
mother disliked boots in the house--and he would sit down on my 
little chair and survey the microcosm on the floor with admirable 
understanding and sympathy.

It was he gave me most of my toys and, I more than suspect, most of 
my ideas.  "Here's some corrugated iron," he would say, "suitable 
for roofs and fencing," and hand me a lump of that stiff crinkled 
paper that is used for packing medicine bottles.  Or, "Dick, do you 
see the tiger loose near the Imperial Road?--won't do for your 
cattle ranch."  And I would find a bright new lead tiger like a 
special creation at large in the world, and demanding a hunting 
expedition and much elaborate effort to get him safely housed in the 
city menagerie beside the captured dragon crocodile, tamed now, and 
his key lost and the heart and spring gone out of him.

And to the various irregular reading of my father I owe the 
inestimable blessing of never having a boy's book in my boyhood 
except those of Jules Verne.  But my father used to get books for 
himself and me from the Bromstead Institute, Fenimore Cooper and 
Mayne Reid and illustrated histories; one of the Russo-Turkish war 
and one of Napier's expedition to Abyssinia I read from end to end; 
Stanley and Livingstone, lives of Wellington, Napoleon and 
Garibaldi, and back volumes of PUNCH, from which I derived 
conceptions of foreign and domestic politics it has taken years of 
adult reflection to correct.  And at home permanently we had Wood's 
NATURAL HISTORY, a brand-new illustrated Green's HISTORY OF THE 
ENGLISH PEOPLE, Irving's COMPANIONS OF COLUMBUS, a great number of 
unbound parts of some geographical work, a VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD I 
think it was called, with pictures of foreign places, and Clarke's 
NEW TESTAMENT with a map of Palestine, and a variety of other 
informing books bought at sales.  There was a Sowerby's BOTANY also, 
with thousands of carefully tinted pictures of British plants, and 
one or two other important works in the sitting-room.  I was allowed 
to turn these over and even lie on the floor with them on Sundays 
and other occasions of exceptional cleanliness.

And in the attic I found one day a very old forgotten map after the 
fashion of a bird's-eye view, representing the Crimea, that 
fascinated me and kept me for hours navigating its waters with a 
pin.


2

My father was a lank-limbed man in easy shabby tweed clothes and 
with his hands in his trouser pockets.  He was a science teacher, 
taking a number of classes at the Bromstead Institute in Kent under 
the old Science and Art Department, and "visiting" various schools; 
and our resources were eked out by my mother's income of nearly a 
hundred pounds a year, and by his inheritance of a terrace of three 
palatial but structurally unsound stucco houses near Bromstead 
Station.

They were big clumsy residences in the earliest Victorian style, 
interminably high and with deep damp  basements  and  downstairs  
coal-cellars  and kitchens  that suggested  an architect  
vindictively devoted to the discomfort of the servant class.  If so, 
he had overreached himself and defeated his end, for no servant 
would stay in them unless for exceptional wages or exceptional 
tolerance of inefficiency or exceptional freedom in repartee.  Every 
storey in the house was from twelve to fifteen feet high (which 
would have been cool and pleasant in a hot climate), and the stairs 
went steeply up, to end at last in attics too inaccessible for 
occupation.  The ceilings had vast plaster cornices of classical 
design, fragments of which would sometimes fall unexpectedly, and 
the wall-papers were bold and gigantic in pattern and much 
variegated by damp and ill-mended rents.

As my father was quite unable to let more than one of these houses 
at a time, and that for the most part to eccentric and undesirable 
tenants, he thought it politic to live in one of the two others, and 
devote the rent he received from the let one, when it was let, to 
the incessant necessary repairing of all three.  He also did some of 
the repairing himself and, smoking a bull-dog pipe the while, which 
my mother would not allow him to do in the house, he cultivated 
vegetables in a sketchy, unpunctual and not always successful manner 
in the unoccupied gardens.  The three houses faced north, and the 
back of the one we occupied was covered by a grape-vine that 
yielded, I remember, small green grapes for pies in the spring, and 
imperfectly ripe black grapes in favourable autumns for the purposes 
of dessert. The grape-vine played an important part in my life, for 
my father broke his neck while he was pruning it, when I was 
thirteen.

My father was what is called a man of ideas, but they were not 
always good ideas.  My grandfather had been a private schoolmaster 
and one of the founders of the College of Preceptors, and my father 
had assisted him in his school until increasing competition and 
diminishing attendance had made it evident that the days of small 
private schools kept by unqualified persons were numbered.  
Thereupon my father had roused himself and had qualified as a 
science teacher under the Science and Art Department, which in these 
days had charge of the scientific and artistic education of the mass 
of the English population, and had thrown himself into science 
teaching and the earning of government grants therefor with great if 
transitory zeal and success.

I do not remember anything of my father's earlier and more energetic 
time.  I was the child of my parents' middle years; they married 
when my father was thirty-five and my mother past forty, and I saw 
only the last decadent phase of his educational career.

The Science and Art Department has vanished altogether from the 
world, and people are forgetting it now with the utmost readiness 
and generosity.  Part of its substance and staff and spirit survive, 
more or less completely digested into the Board of Education.

The world does move on, even in its government.  It is wonderful how 
many of the clumsy and limited governing bodies of my youth and 
early manhood have given place now to more scientific and efficient 
machinery.  When I was a boy, Bromstead, which is now a borough, was 
ruled by a strange body called a Local Board--it was the Age of 
Boards--and I still remember indistinctly my father rejoicing at the 
breakfast-table over the liberation of London from the corrupt and 
devastating control of a Metropolitan Board of Works.  Then there 
were also School Boards; I was already practically in politics 
before the London School Board was absorbed by the spreading 
tentacles of the London County Council.

It gives a measure of the newness of our modern ideas of the State 
to remember that the very beginnings of public education lie within 
my father's lifetime, and that many most intelligent and patriotic 
people were shocked beyond measure at the State doing anything of 
the sort.  When he was born, totally illiterate people who could 
neither read a book nor write more than perhaps a clumsy signature, 
were to be found everywhere in England; and great masses of the 
population were getting no instruction at all.  Only a few schools 
flourished upon the patronage of exceptional parents; all over the 
country the old endowed grammar schools were to be found sinking and 
dwindling; many of them had closed altogether.  In the new great 
centres of population multitudes of children were sweated in the 
factories, darkly ignorant and wretched and the under-equipped and 
under-staffed National and British schools, supported by voluntary 
contributions and sectarian rivalries, made an ineffectual fight 
against this festering darkness.  It was a condition of affairs 
clamouring for remedies, but there was an immense amount of 
indifference and prejudice to be overcome before any remedies were 
possible.  Perhaps some day some industrious and lucid historian 
will disentangle all the muddle of impulses and antagonisms, the 
commercialism, utilitarianism, obstinate conservatism, humanitarian 
enthusiasm, out of which our present educational organisation arose.  
I have long since come to believe it necessary that all new social 
institutions should be born in confusion, and that at first they 
should present chiefly crude and ridiculous aspects.  The distrust 
of government in the Victorian days was far too great, and the 
general intelligence far too low, to permit the State to go about 
the new business it was taking up in a businesslike way, to train 
teachers, build and equip schools, endow pedagogic research, and 
provide properly written school-books.  These things it was felt 
MUST be provided by individual and local effort, and since it was 
manifest that it was individual and local effort that were in 
default, it was reluctantly agreed to stimulate them by money 
payments.  The State set up a machinery of examination both in 
Science and Art and for the elementary schools; and payments, known 
technically as grants, were made in accordance with the examination 
results attained, to such schools as Providence might see fit to 
send into the world.  In this way it was felt the Demand would be 
established that would, according to the beliefs of that time, 
inevitably ensure the Supply.  An industry of "Grant earning" was 
created, and this would give education as a necessary by-product.

In the end this belief was found to need qualification, but Grant-
earning was still in full activity when I was a small boy.  So far 
as the Science and Art Department and my father are concerned, the 
task of examination was entrusted to eminent scientific men, for the 
most part quite unaccustomed to teaching.  You see, if they also 
were teaching similar classes to those they examined, it was feared 
that injustice might be done.  Year after year these eminent persons 
set questions and employed subordinates to read and mark the 
increasing thousands of answers that ensued, and having no doubt the 
national ideal of fairness well developed in their minds, they were 
careful each year to re-read the preceding papers before composing 
the current one, in order to see what it was usual to ask.  As a 
result of this, in the course of a few years the recurrence and 
permutation of questions became almost calculable, and since the 
practical object of the teaching was to teach people not science, 
but how to write answers to these questions, the industry of Grant-
earning assumed a form easily distinguished from any kind of genuine 
education whatever.

Other remarkable compromises had also to be made with the spirit of 
the age.  The unfortunate conflict between Religion and Science 
prevalent at this time was mitigated, if I remember rightly, by 
making graduates in arts and priests in the established church 
Science Teachers EX OFFICIO, and leaving local and private 
enterprise to provide schools, diagrams, books, material, according 
to the conceptions of efficiency prevalent in the district.  Private 
enterprise made a particularly good thing of the books.  A number of 
competing firms of publishers sprang into existence specialising in 
Science and Art Department work; they set themselves to produce 
text-books that should supply exactly the quantity and quality of 
knowledge necessary for every stage of each of five and twenty 
subjects into which desirable science was divided, and copies and 
models and instructions that should give precisely the method and 
gestures esteemed as proficiency in art.  Every section of each book 
was written in the idiom found to be most satisfactory to the 
examiners, and test questions extracted from papers set in former 
years were appended to every chapter.  By means of these last the 
teacher was able to train his class to the very highest level of 
grant-earning efficiency, and very naturally he cast all other 
methods of exposition aside.  First he posed his pupils with 
questions and then dictated model replies.

That was my father's method of instruction.  I attended his classes 
as an elementary grant-earner from the age of ten until his death, 
and it is so I remember him, sitting on the edge of a table, 
smothering a yawn occasionally and giving out the infallible 
formulae to the industriously scribbling class sitting in rows of 
desks before him.  Occasionally be would slide to his feet and go to 
a blackboard on an easel and draw on that very slowly and 
deliberately in coloured chalks a diagram for the class to copy in 
coloured pencils, and sometimes he would display a specimen or 
arrange an experiment for them to see.  The room in the Institute in 
which he taught was equipped with a certain amount of apparatus 
prescribed as necessary for subject this and subject that by the 
Science and Art Department, and this my father would supplement with 
maps and diagrams and drawings of his own.

But he never really did experiments, except that in the class in 
systematic botany he sometimes made us tease common flowers to 
pieces.  He did not do experiments if he could possibly help it, 
because in the first place they used up time and gas for the Bunsen 
burner and good material in a ruinous fashion, and in the second 
they were, in his rather careless and sketchy hands, apt to endanger 
the apparatus of the Institute and even the lives of his students.  
Then thirdly, real experiments involved washing up.  And moreover 
they always turned out wrong, and sometimes misled the too observant 
learner very seriously and opened demoralising controversies.  Quite 
early in life I acquired an almost ineradicable sense of the 
unscientific perversity of Nature and the impassable gulf that is 
fixed between systematic science and elusive fact.  I knew, for 
example, that in science, whether it be subject XII., Organic 
Chemistry, or subject XVII., Animal Physiology, when you blow into a 
glass of lime water it instantly becomes cloudy, and if you continue 
to blow it clears again, whereas in truth you may blow into the 
stuff from the lime-water bottle until you are crimson in the face 
and painful under the ears, and it never becomes cloudy at all.  And 
I knew, too, that in science if you put potassium chlorate into a 
retort and heat it over a Bunsen burner, oxygen is disengaged and 
may be collected over water, whereas in real life if you do anything 
of the sort the vessel cracks with a loud report, the potassium 
chlorate descends sizzling upon the flame, the experimenter says 
"Oh! Damn!" with astonishing heartiness and distinctness, and a lady 
student in the back seats gets up and leaves the room.

Science is the organised conquest of Nature, and I can quite 
understand that ancient libertine refusing to cooperate in her own 
undoing.  And I can quite understand, too, my father's preference 
for what he called an illustrative experiment, which was simply an 
arrangement of the apparatus in front of the class with nothing 
whatever by way of material, and the Bunsen burner clean and cool, 
and then a slow luminous description of just what you did put in it 
when you were so ill-advised as to carry the affair beyond 
illustration, and just exactly what ought anyhow to happen when you 
did.  He had considerable powers of vivid expression, so that in 
this way he could make us see all he described.  The class, freed 
from any unpleasant nervous tension, could draw this still life 
without flinching, and if any part was too difficult to draw, then 
my father would produce a simplified version on the blackboard to be 
copied instead.  And he would also write on the blackboard any 
exceptionally difficult but grant-earning words, such as 
"empyreumatic" or "botryoidal."

Some words in constant use he rarely explained.  I remember once 
sticking up my hand and asking him in the full flow of description, 
"Please, sir, what is flocculent?"

"The precipitate is."

"Yes, sir, but what does it mean?"

"Oh! flocculent! " said my father, "flocculent!  Why--" he extended 
his hand and arm and twiddled his fingers for a second in the air.  
"Like that," he said.

I thought the explanation sufficient, but he paused for a moment 
after giving it.  "As in a flock bed, you know," he added and 
resumed his discourse.


3

My father, I am afraid, carried a natural incompetence in practical 
affairs to an exceptionally high level.  He combined practical 
incompetence, practical enterprise and a thoroughly sanguine 
temperament, in a manner that I have never seen paralleled in any 
human being.  He was always trying to do new things in the briskest 
manner, under the suggestion of books or papers or his own 
spontaneous imagination, and as he had never been trained to do 
anything whatever in his life properly, his futilities were 
extensive and thorough.  At one time he nearly gave up his classes 
for intensive culture, so enamoured was he of its possibilities; the 
peculiar pungency of the manure he got, in pursuit of a chemical 
theory of his own, has scarred my olfactory memories for a lifetime.  
The intensive culture phase is very clear in my memory; it came near 
the end of his career and when I was between eleven and twelve.  I 
was mobilised to gather caterpillars on several occasions, and 
assisted in nocturnal raids upon the slugs by lantern-light that 
wrecked my preparation work for school next day.  My father dug up 
both lawns, and trenched and manured in spasms of immense vigour 
alternating with periods of paralysing distaste for the garden.  And 
for weeks he talked about eight hundred pounds an acre at every 
meal.

A garden, even when it is not exasperated by intensive methods, is a 
thing as exacting as a baby, its moods have to he watched; it does 
not wait upon the cultivator's convenience, but has times of its 
own.  Intensive culture greatly increases this disposition to 
trouble mankind; it makes a garden touchy and hysterical, a drugged 
and demoralised and over-irritated garden.  My father got at cross 
purposes with our two patches at an early stage.  Everything grew 
wrong from the first to last, and if my father's manures intensified 
nothing else, they certainly intensified the Primordial Curse.  The 
peas were eaten in the night before they were three inches high, the 
beans bore nothing but blight, the only apparent result of a 
spraying of the potatoes was to develop a PENCHANT in the cat for 
being ill indoors, the cucumber frames were damaged by the 
catapulting of boys going down the lane at the back, and all your 
cucumbers were mysteriously embittered.  That lane with its 
occasional passers-by did much to wreck the intensive scheme, 
because my father always stopped work and went indoors if any one 
watched him.  His special manure was apt to arouse a troublesome 
spirit of inquiry in hardy natures.

In digging his rows and shaping his patches he neglected the guiding 
string and trusted to his eye altogether too much, and the 
consequent obliquity and the various wind-breaks and scare-crows he 
erected, and particularly an irrigation contrivance he began and 
never finished by which everything was to be watered at once by 
means of pieces of gutter from the roof and outhouses of Number 2, 
and a large and particularly obstinate clump of elder-bushes in the 
abolished hedge that he had failed to destroy entirely either by axe 
or by fire, combined to give the gardens under intensive culture a 
singularly desolate and disorderly appearance.  He took steps 
towards the diversion of our house drain under the influence of the 
Sewage Utilisation Society; but happily he stopped in time.  He 
hardly completed any of the operations he began; something else 
became more urgent or simply he tired; a considerable area of the 
Number 2 territory was never even dug up.

In the end the affair irritated him beyond endurance.  Never was a 
man less horticulturally-minded.  The clamour of these vegetables he 
had launched into the world for his service and assistance, wore out 
his patience.  He would walk into the garden the happiest of men 
after a day or so of disregard, talking to me of history perhaps or 
social organisation, or summarising some book he had read.  He 
talked to me of anything that interested him, regardless of my 
limitations.  Then he would begin to note the growth of the weeds.  
"This won't do," he would say and pull up a handful.

More weeding would follow and the talk would become fragmentary.  
His hands would become earthy, his nails black, weeds would snap off 
in his careless grip, leaving the roots behind.  The world would 
darken.  He would look at his fingers with disgusted astonishment.  
"CURSE these weeds!" he would say from his heart.  His discourse was 
at an end.

I have memories, too, of his sudden unexpected charges into the 
tranquillity of the house, his hands and clothes intensively 
enriched.  He would come in like a whirlwind.  "This damned stuff 
all over me and the Agricultural Chemistry Class at six!  Bah!  
AAAAAAH!"

My mother would never learn not to attempt to break him of swearing 
on such occasions.  She would remain standing a little stiffly in 
the scullery refusing to assist him to the adjectival towel he 
sought.

"If you say such things--"

He would dance with rage and hurl the soap about.  "The towel!" he 
would cry, flicking suds from big fingers in every direction; "the 
towel! I'll let the blithering class slide if you don't give me the 
towel!  I'll give up everything, I tell you--everything!" . . .

At last with the failure of the lettuces came the breaking point.  I 
was in the little arbour learning Latin irregular verbs when it 
happened.  I can see him still, his peculiar tenor voice still 
echoes in my brain, shouting his opinion of intensive culture for 
all the world to hear, and slashing away at that abominable mockery 
of a crop with a hoe.  We had tied them up with bast only a week or 
so before, and now half were rotten and half had shot up into tall 
slender growths.  He had the hoe in both hands and slogged.  Great 
wipes he made, and at each stroke he said, "Take that!"

The air was thick with flying fragments of abortive salad.  It was a 
fantastic massacre.  It was the French Revolution of that cold 
tyranny, the vindictive overthrow of the pampered vegetable 
aristocrats.  After he had assuaged his passion upon them, he turned 
for other prey; he kicked holes in two of our noblest marrows, 
flicked off the heads of half a row of artichokes, and shied the hoe 
with a splendid smash into the cucumber frame.  Something of the awe 
of that moment returns to me as I write of it.

Well, my boy," he said, approaching with an expression of beneficent 
happiness, "I've done with gardening.  Let's go for a walk like 
reasonable beings.  I've had enough of this"--his face was convulsed 
for an instant with bitter resentment--"  Pandering to cabbages."


4

That afternoon's walk sticks in my memory for many reasons.  One is 
that we went further than I had ever been before; far beyond Keston 
and nearly to Seven-oaks, coming back by train from Dunton Green, 
and the other is that my father as he went along talked about 
himself, not so much to me as to himself, and about life and what he 
had done with it.  He monologued so that at times he produced an 
effect of weird world-forgetfulness.  I listened puzzled, and at 
that time not upderstanding many things that afterwards became plain 
to me.  It is only in recent years that I have discovered the pathos 
of that monologue; how friendless my father was and uncompanioned in 
his thoughts and feelings, and what a hunger he may have felt for 
the sympathy of the undeveloped youngster who trotted by his side.

"I'm no gardener," he said, "I'm no anything.  Why the devil did I 
start gardening?

"I suppose man was created to mind a garden. . .  But the Fall let 
us out of that!  What was I created for?  God! what was I created 
for? . . .

"Slaves to matter!  Minding inanimate things!  It doesn't suit me, 
you know.  I've got no hands and no patience.  I've mucked about 
with life.  Mucked about with life."  He suddenly addressed himself 
to me, and for an instant I started like an eavesdropper discovered.  
"Whatever you do, boy, whatever you do, make a Plan.  Make a good 
Plan and stick to it.  Find out what life is about--I never have--
and set yourself to do whatever you ought to do.  I admit it's a 
puzzle. . . .

"Those damned houses have been the curse of my life.  Stucco white 
elephants!  Beastly cracked stucco with stains of green--black and 
green.  Conferva and soot. . . .  Property, they are! . . .  Beware 
of Things, Dick, beware of Things!  Before you know where you are 
you are waiting on them and minding them.  They'll eat your life up.  
Eat up your hours and your blood and energy!  When those houses came 
to me, I ought to have sold them--or fled the country.  I ought to 
have cleared out.  Sarcophagi--eaters of men!  Oh! the hours and 
days of work, the nights of anxiety those vile houses have cost me!  
The painting!  It worked up my arms; it got all over me.  I stank of 
it.  It made me ill.  It isn't living--it's minding. . . .

"Property's the curse of life.  Property!  Ugh!  Look at this 
country all cut up into silly little parallelograms, look at all 
those villas we passed just now and those potato patches and that 
tarred shanty and the hedge!  Somebody's minding every bit of it 
like a dog tied to a cart's tail.  Patching it and bothering about 
it.  Bothering!  Yapping at every passer-by.  Look at that notice-
board!  One rotten worried little beast wants to keep us other 
rotten little beasts off HIS patch,--God knows why!  Look at the 
weeds in it.  Look at the mended fence! . . .  There's no property 
worth having, Dick, but money.  That's only good to spend.  All 
these things.  Human souls buried under a cartload of blithering 
rubbish. . . .

"I'm not a fool, Dick.  I have qualities, imagination, a sort of go.  
I ought to have made a better thing of life.

"I'm sure I could have done things.  Only the old people pulled my 
leg.  They started me wrong.  They never started me at all.  I only 
began to find out what life was like when I was nearly forty.

"If I'd gone to a university; if I'd had any sort of sound training, 
if I hadn't slipped into the haphazard places that came easiest. . . .

"Nobody warned me.  Nobody.  It isn't a world we live in, Dick; it's 
a cascade of accidents; it's a chaos exasperated by policemen!  YOU 
be warned in time, Dick.  You stick to a plan.  Don't wait for any 
one to show you the way.  Nobody will.  There isn't a way till you 
make one.  Get education, get a good education.  Fight your way to 
the top.  It's your only chance.  I've watched you.  You'll do no 
good at digging and property minding.  There isn't a neighbour in 
Bromstead won't be able to skin you at suchlike games.  You and I 
are the brainy unstable kind, topside or nothing.  And if ever those 
blithering houses come to you--don't have 'em.  Give them away!  
Dynamite 'em--and off!  LIVE, Dick!  I'll get rid of them for you if 
I can, Dick, but remember what I say." . . .

So it was my father discoursed, if not in those particular words, 
yet exactly in that manner, as he slouched along the southward road, 
with resentful eyes becoming less resentful as he talked, and 
flinging out clumsy illustrative motions at the outskirts of 
Bromstead as we passed along them.  That afternoon he hated 
Bromstead, from its foot-tiring pebbles up.  He had no illusions 
about Bromstead or himself.  I have the clearest impression of him 
in his garden-stained tweeds with a deer-stalker hat on the back of 
his head and presently a pipe sometimes between his teeth and 
sometimes in his gesticulating hand, as he became diverted by his 
talk from his original exasperation. . . .

This particular afternoon is no doubt mixed up in my memory with 
many other afternoons; all sorts of things my father said and did at 
different times have got themselves referred to it; it filled me at 
the time with a great unprecedented sense of fellowship and it has 
become the symbol now for all our intercourse together.  If I didn't 
understand the things he said, I did the mood he was in.  He gave me 
two very broad ideas in that talk and the talks I have mingled with 
it; he gave them to me very clearly and they have remained 
fundamental in my mind; one a sense of the extraordinary confusion 
and waste and planlessness of the human life that went on all about 
us; and the other of a great ideal of order and economy which he 
called variously Science and Civilisation, and which, though I do 
not remember that he ever used that word, I suppose many people 
nowadays would identify with Socialism,--as the Fabians expound it.

He was not very definite about this Science, you must understand, 
but he seemed always to be waving his hand towards it,--just as his 
contemporary Tennyson seems always to be doing--he belonged to his 
age and mostly his talk was destructive of the limited beliefs of 
his time, he led me to infer rather than actually told me that this 
Science was coming, a spirit of light and order, to the rescue of a 
world groaning and travailing in muddle for the want of it. . . .


5

When I think of Bromstead nowadays I find it inseparably bound up 
with the disorders of my father's gardening, and the odd patchings 
and paintings that disfigured his houses.  It was all of a piece 
with that.

Let me try and give something of the quality of Bromstead and 
something of its history.  It is the quality and history of a 
thousand places round and about London, and round and about the 
other great centres of population in the world.  Indeed it is in a 
measure the quality of the whole of this modern world from which we 
who have the statesman's passion struggle to evolve, and dream still 
of evolving order.

First, then, you must think of Bromstead a hundred and fifty years 
ago, as a narrow irregular little street of thatched houses strung 
out on the London and Dover Road, a little mellow sample unit of a 
social order that had a kind of completeness, at its level, of its 
own.  At that time its population numbered a little under two 
thousand people, mostly engaged in agricultural work or in trades 
serving agriculture.  There was a blacksmith, a saddler, a chemist, 
a doctor, a barber, a linen-draper (who brewed his own beer); a 
veterinary surgeon, a hardware shop, and two capacious inns.  Round 
and about it were a number of pleasant gentlemen's seats, whose 
owners went frequently to London town in their coaches along the 
very tolerable high-road.  The church was big enough to hold the 
whole population, were people minded to go to church, and indeed a 
large proportion did go, and all who married were married in it, and 
everybody, to begin with, was christened at its font and buried at 
last in its yew-shaded graveyard.  Everybody knew everybody in the 
place.  It was, in fact, a definite place and a real human community 
in those days.  There was a pleasant old market-house in the middle 
of the town with a weekly market, and an annual fair at which much 
cheerful merry making and homely intoxication occurred; there was a 
pack of hounds which hunted within five miles of London Bridge, and 
the local gentry would occasionally enliven the place with valiant 
cricket matches for a hundred guineas a side, to the vast excitement 
of the entire population.  It was very much the same sort of place 
that it had been for three or four centuries.  A Bromstead Rip van 
Winkle from 1550 returning in 1750 would have found most of the old 
houses still as he had known them, the same trades a little improved 
and differentiated one from the other, the same roads rather more 
carefully tended, the Inns not very much altered, the ancient 
familiar market-house.  The occasional wheeled traffic would have 
struck him as the most remarkable difference, next perhaps to the 
swaggering painted stone monuments instead of brasses and the 
protestant severity of the communion-table in the parish church,--
both from the material point of view very little things.  A Rip van 
Winkle from 1350, again, would have noticed scarcely greater 
changes; fewer clergy, more people, and particularly more people of 
the middling sort; the glass in the windows of many of the houses, 
the stylish chimneys springing up everywhere would have impressed 
him, and suchlike details.  The place would have had the same 
boundaries, the same broad essential features, would have been still 
itself in the way that a man is still himself after he has "filled 
out" a little and grown a longer beard and changed his clothes.

But after 1750 something got hold of the world, something that was 
destined to alter the scale of every human affair.

That something was machinery and a vague energetic disposition to 
improve material things.  In another part of England ingenious 
people were beginning to use coal in smelting iron, and were 
producing metal in abundance and metal castings in sizes that had 
hitherto been unattainable.  Without warning or preparation, 
increment involving countless possibilities of further increment was 
coming to the strength of horses and men.   "Power," all 
unsuspected, was flowing like a drug into the veins of the social 
body.

Nobody seems to have perceived this coming of power, and nobody had 
calculated its probable consequences.  Suddenly, almost 
inadvertently, people found themselves doing things that would have 
amazed their ancestors.  They began to construct wheeled vehicles 
much more easily and cheaply than they had ever done before, to make 
up roads and move things about that had formerly been esteemed too 
heavy for locomotion, to join woodwork with iron nails instead of 
wooden pegs, to achieve all sorts of mechanical possibilities, to 
trade more freely and manufacture on a larger scale, to send goods 
abroad in a wholesale and systematic way, to bring back commodities 
from overseas, not simply spices and fine commodities, but goods in 
bulk.  The new influence spread to agriculture, iron appliances 
replaced wooden, breeding of stock became systematic, paper-making 
and printing increased and cheapened.  Roofs of slate and tile 
appeared amidst and presently prevailed over the original Bromstead 
thatch, the huge space of Common to the south was extensively 
enclosed, and what had been an ill-defined horse-track to Dover, 
only passable by adventurous coaches in dry weather, became the 
Dover Road, and was presently the route first of one and then of 
several daily coaches.  The High Street was discovered to be too 
tortuous for these awakening energies, and a new road cut off its 
worst contortions.  Residential villas appeared occupied by retired 
tradesmen and widows, who esteemed the place healthy, and by others 
of a strange new unoccupied class of people who had money invested 
in joint-stock enterprises.  First one and then several boys' 
boarding-schools came, drawing their pupils from London,--my 
grandfather's was one of these.  London, twelve miles to the north-
west, was making itself felt more and more.

But this was only the beginning of the growth period, the first 
trickle of the coming flood of mechanical power.  Away in the north 
they were casting iron in bigger and bigger forms, working their way 
to the production of steel on a large scale, applying power in 
factories.  Bromstead had almost doubted in size again long before 
the railway came; there was hardly any thatch left in the High 
Street, but instead were houses with handsome brass-knockered front 
doors and several windows, and shops with shop-fronts all of square 
glass panes, and the place was lighted publicly now by oil lamps--
previously only one flickering lamp outside each of the coaching 
inns had broken the nocturnal darkness.  And there was talk, it long 
remained talk,--of gas.  The gasworks came in 1834, and about that 
date my father's three houses must have been built convenient for 
the London Road.  They mark nearly the beginning of the real 
suburban quality; they were let at first to City people still 
engaged in business.

And then hard on the gasworks had come the railway and cheap coal; 
there was a wild outbreak of brickfields upon the claylands to the 
east, and the Great Growth had begun in earnest.  The agricultural 
placidities that had formerly come to the very borders of the High 
Street were broken up north, west and south, by new roads.  This 
enterprising person and then that began to "run up" houses, 
irrespective of every other enterprising person who was doing the 
same thing.  A Local Board came into existence, and with much 
hesitation and penny-wise economy inaugurated drainage works.  Rates 
became a common topic, a fact of accumulating importance.  Several 
chapels of zinc and iron appeared, and also a white new church in 
commercial Gothic upon the common, and another of red brick in the 
residential district out beyond the brickfields towards Chessington.

The population doubled again and doubled again, and became 
particularly teeming in the prolific "working-class" district about 
the deep-rutted, muddy, coal-blackened roads between the gasworks, 
Blodgett's laundries, and the railway goods-yard.  Weekly 
properties, that is to say small houses built by small property 
owners and let by the week, sprang up also in the Cage Fields, and 
presently extended right up the London Road.  A single national 
school in an inconvenient situation set itself inadequately to 
collect subscriptions and teach the swarming, sniffing, grimy 
offspring of this dingy new population to read.  The villages of 
Beckington, which used to be three miles to the west, and Blamely 
four miles to the east of Bromstead, were experiencing similar 
distensions and proliferations, and grew out to meet us.  All effect 
of locality or community had gone from these places long before I 
was born; hardly any one knew any one; there was no general meeting 
place any more, the old fairs were just common nuisances haunted by 
gypsies, van showmen, Cheap Jacks and London roughs, the churches 
were incapable of a quarter of the population.  One or two local 
papers of shameless veniality reported the proceedings of the local 
Bench and the local Board, compelled tradesmen who were interested 
in these affairs to advertise, used the epithet "Bromstedian" as one 
expressing peculiar virtues, and so maintained in the general mind a 
weak tradition of some local quality that embraced us all.  Then the 
parish graveyard filled up and became a scandal, and an ambitious 
area with an air of appetite was walled in by a Bromstead Cemetery 
Company, and planted with suitably high-minded and sorrowful 
varieties of conifer.  A stonemason took one of the earlier villas 
with a front garden at the end of the High Street, and displayed a 
supply of urns on pillars and headstones and crosses in stone, 
marble, and granite, that would have sufficed to commemorate in 
elaborate detail the entire population of Bromstead as one found it 
in 1750.

The cemetery was made when I was a little boy of five or six; I was 
in the full tide of building and growth from the first; the second 
railway with its station at Bromstead North and the drainage 
followed when I was ten or eleven, and all my childish memories are 
of digging and wheeling, of woods invaded by building, roads gashed 
open and littered with iron pipes amidst a fearful smell of gas, of 
men peeped at and seen toiling away deep down in excavations, of 
hedges broken down and replaced by planks, of wheelbarrows and 
builders' sheds, of rivulets overtaken and swallowed up by drain-
pipes.  Big trees, and especially elms, cleared of undergrowth and 
left standing amid such things, acquired a peculiar tattered 
dinginess rather in the quality of needy widow women who have seen 
happier days.

The Ravensbrook of my earlier memories was a beautiful stream.  It 
came into my world out of a mysterious Beyond, out of a garden, 
splashing brightly down a weir which had once been the weir of a 
mill.  (Above the weir and inaccessible there were bulrushes growing 
in splendid clumps, and beyond that, pampas grass, yellow and 
crimson spikes of hollyhock, and blue suggestions of wonderland.)  
From the pool at the foot of this initial cascade it flowed in a 
leisurely fashion beside a footpath,--there were two pretty thatchcd 
cottages on the left, and here were ducks, and there were willows on 
the right,--and so came to where great trees grew on high banks on 
either hand and bowed closer, and at last met overhead.  This part 
was difficult to reach because of an old fence, but a little boy 
might glimpse that long cavern of greenery by wading.  Either I have 
actually seen kingfishers there, or my father has described them so 
accurately to me that he inserted them into my memory.  I remember 
them there anyhow.  Most of that overhung part I never penetrated at 
all, but followed the field path with my mother and met the stream 
again, where beyond there were flat meadows, Roper's meadows.  The 
Ravensbrook went meandering across the middle of these, now between 
steep banks, and now with wide shallows at the bends where the 
cattle waded and drank.  Yellow and purple loose-strife and ordinary 
rushes grew in clumps along the bank, and now and then a willow.  On 
rare occasions of rapture one might see a rat cleaning his whiskers 
at the water's edge.  The deep places were rich with tangled weeds, 
and in them fishes lurked--to me they were big fishes--water-boatmen 
and water-beetles traversed the calm surface of these still deeps; 
in one pool were yellow lilies and water-soldiers, and in the shoaly 
places hovering fleets of small fry basked in the sunshine--to 
vanish in a flash at one's shadow.  In one place, too, were Rapids, 
where the stream woke with a start from a dreamless brooding into 
foaming panic and babbled and hastened.  Well do I remember that 
half-mile of rivulet; all other rivers and cascades have their 
reference to it for me.  And after I was eleven, and before we left 
Bromstead, all the delight and beauty of it was destroyed.

The volume of its water decreased abruptly--I suppose the new 
drainage works that linked us up with Beckington, and made me first 
acquainted with the geological quality of the London clay, had to do 
with that--until only a weak uncleansing trickle remained.  That at 
first did not strike me as a misfortune.  An adventurous small boy 
might walk dryshod in places hitherto inaccessible.  But hard upon 
that came the pegs, the planks and carts and devastation.  Roper's 
meadows, being no longer in fear of floods, were now to be slashed 
out into parallelograms of untidy road, and built upon with rows of 
working-class cottages.  The roads came,--horribly; the houses 
followed.  They seemed to rise in the night.  People moved into them 
as soon as the roofs were on, mostly workmen and their young wives, 
and already in a year some of these raw houses stood empty again 
from defaulting tenants, with windows broken and wood-work warping 
and rotting.  The Ravensbrook became a dump for old iron, rusty 
cans, abandoned boots and the like, and was a river only when 
unusual rains filled it for a day or so with an inky flood of 
surface water. . . .

That indeed was my most striking perception in the growth of 
Bromstead.  The Ravensbrook had been important to my imaginative 
life; that way had always been my first choice in all my walks with 
my mother, and its rapid swamping by the new urban growth made it 
indicative of all the other things that had happened just before my 
time, or were still, at a less dramatic pace, happening.  I realised 
that building was the enemy.  I began to understand why in every 
direction out of Bromstead one walked past scaffold-poles into 
litter, why fragments of broken brick and cinder mingled in every 
path, and the significance of the universal notice-boards, either 
white and new or a year old and torn and battered, promising sites, 
proffering houses to be sold or let, abusing and intimidating 
passers-by for fancied trespass, and protecting rights of way.

It is difficult to disentangle now what I understood at this time 
and what I have since come to understand, but it seems to me that 
even in those childish days I was acutely aware of an invading and 
growing disorder.  The serene rhythms of the old established 
agriculture, I see now, were everywhere being replaced by 
cultivation under notice and snatch crops; hedges ceased to be 
repaired, and were replaced by cheap iron railings or chunks of 
corrugated iron; more and more hoardings sprang up, and contributed 
more and more to the nomad tribes of filthy paper scraps that flew 
before the wind and overspread the country.  The outskirts of 
Bromstead were a maze of exploitation roads that led nowhere, that 
ended in tarred fences studded with nails (I don't remember barbed 
wire in those days; I think the Zeitgeist did not produce that until 
later), and in trespass boards that used vehement language.  Broken 
glass, tin cans, and ashes and paper abounded.  Cheap glass, cheap 
tin, abundant fuel, and a free untaxed Press had rushed upon a world 
quite unprepared to dispose of these blessings when the fulness of 
enjoyment was past.

I suppose one might have persuaded oneself that all this was but the 
replacement of an ancient tranquillity, or at least an ancient 
balance, by a new order.  Only to my eyes, quickened by my father's 
intimations, it was manifestly no order at all.  It was a multitude 
of incoordinated fresh starts, each more sweeping and destructive 
than the last, and none of them ever really worked out to a ripe and 
satisfactory completion.  Each left a legacy of products, houses, 
humanity, or what not, in its wake.  It was a sort of progress that 
had bolted; it was change out of hand, and going at an unprecedented 
pace nowhere in particular.

No, the Victorian epoch was not the dawn of a new era; it was a 
hasty, trial experiment, a gigantic experiment of the most slovenly 
and wasteful kind.  I suppose it was necessary; I suppose all things 
are necessary.  I suppose that before men will discipline themselves 
to learn and plan, they must first see in a hundred convincing forms 
the folly and muddle that come from headlong, aimless and haphazard 
methods.  The nineteenth century was an age of demonstrations, some 
of them very impressive demonstrations, of the powers that have come 
to mankind, but of permanent achievement, what will our descendants 
cherish?  It is hard to estimate what grains of precious metal may 
not be found in a mud torrent of human production on so large a 
scale, but will any one, a hundred years from now, consent to live 
in the houses the Victorians built, travel by their roads or 
railways, value the furnishings they made to live among or esteem, 
except for curious or historical reasons, their prevalent art and 
the clipped and limited literature that satisfied their souls?

That age which bore me was indeed a world full of restricted and 
undisciplined people, overtaken by power, by possessions and great 
new freedoms, and unable to make any civilised use of them whatever; 
stricken now by this idea and now by that, tempted first by one 
possession and then another to ill-considered attempts; it was my 
father's exploitahon of his villa gardens on the wholesale level.  
The whole of Bromstead as I remember it, and as I saw it last--it is 
a year ago now--is a dull useless boiling-up of human activities, an 
immense clustering of futilities.  It is as unfinished as ever; the 
builders' roads still run out and end in mid-field in their old 
fashion; the various enterprises jumble in the same hopeless 
contradiction, if anything intensified.  Pretentious villas jostle 
slums, and public-house and tin tabernacle glower at one another 
across the cat-haunted lot that intervenes.  Roper's meadows are now 
quite frankly a slum; back doors and sculleries gape towards the 
railway, their yards are hung with tattered washing unashamed; and 
there seem to be more boards by the railway every time I pass, 
advertising pills and pickles, tonics and condiments, and suchlike 
solicitudes of a people with no natural health nor appetite left in 
them. . . .

Well, we have to do better.  Failure is not failure nor waste wasted 
if it sweeps away illusion and lights the road to a plan.


6

Chaotic indiscipline, ill-adjusted effort, spasmodic aims, these 
give the quality of all my Bromstead memories.  The crowning one of 
them all rises to desolating tragedy.  I remember now the wan spring 
sunshine of that Sunday morning, the stiff feeling of best clothes 
and aggressive cleanliness and formality, when I and my mother 
returned from church to find my father dead.  He had been pruning 
the grape vine.  He had never had a ladder long enough to reach the 
sill of the third-floor windows--at house-painting times he had 
borrowed one from the plumber who mixed his paint--and he had in his 
own happy-go-lucky way contrived a combination of the garden fruit 
ladder with a battered kitchen table that served all sorts of odd 
purposes in an outhouse.  He had stayed up this arrangement by means 
of the garden roller, and the roller had at the critical moment--
rolled.  He was lying close by the garden door with his head queerly 
bent back against a broken and twisted rainwater pipe, an expression 
of pacific contentment on his face, a bamboo curtain rod with a 
tableknife tied to end of it, still gripped in his hand.  We had 
been rapping for some time at the front door unable to make him 
hear, and then we came round by the door in the side trellis into 
the garden and so discovered him.

"Arthur!"  I remember my mother crying with the strangest break in 
her voice, "What are you doing there?  Arthur!  And--SUNDAY!"

I was coming behind her, musing remotely, when the quality of her 
voice roused me.  She stood as if she could not go near him.  He had 
always puzzled her so, he and his ways, and this seemed only another 
enigma.  Then the truth dawned on her, she shrieked as if afraid of 
him, ran a dozen steps back towards the trellis door and stopped and 
clasped her ineffectual gloved hands, leaving me staring blankly, 
too astonished for feeling, at the carelessly flung limbs.

The same idea came to me also.  I ran to her.  "Mother!" I cried, 
pale to the depths of my spirit, "IS HE DEAD?"

I had been thinking two minutes before of the cold fruit pie that 
glorified our Sunday dinner-table, and how I might perhaps get into 
the tree at the end of the garden to read in the afternoon.  Now an 
immense fact had come down like a curtain and blotted out all my 
childish world.  My father was lying dead before my eyes. . . .   I 
perceived that my mother was helpless and that things must he done.

"Mother!" I said, "we must get Doctor Beaseley,--and carry him 
indoors."



CHAPTER THE THIRD

SCHOLASTIC


1

My formal education began in a small preparatory school in 
Bromstead.  I went there as a day boy.  The charge for my 
instruction was mainly set off by the periodic visits of my father 
with a large bag of battered fossils to lecture to us upon geology.  
I was one of those fortunate youngsters who take readily to school 
work, I had a good memory, versatile interests and a considerable 
appetite for commendation, and when I was barely twelve I got a 
scholarship at the City Merchants School and was entrusted with a 
scholar's railway season ticket to Victoria.  After my father's 
death a large and very animated and solidly built uncle in tweeds 
from Staffordshire, Uncle Minter, my mother's sister's husband, with 
a remarkable accent and remarkable vowel sounds, who had plunged 
into the Bromstead home once or twice for the night but who was 
otherwise unknown to me, came on the scene, sold off the three gaunt 
houses with the utmost gusto, invested the proceeds and my father's 
life insurance money, and got us into a small villa at Penge within 
sight of that immense facade of glass and iron, the Crystal Palace.  
Then he retired in a mood of good-natured contempt to his native 
habitat again.  We stayed at Penge until my mother's death.

School became a large part of the world to me, absorbing my time and 
interest, and I never acquired that detailed and intimate knowledge 
of Penge and the hilly villadom round about, that I have of the town 
and outskirts of Bromstead.

It was a district of very much the same character, but it was more 
completely urbanised and nearer to the centre of things; there were 
the same unfinished roads, the same occasional disconcerted hedges 
and trees, the same butcher's horse grazing under a builder's 
notice-board, the same incidental lapses into slum.  The Crystal 
Palace grounds cut off a large part of my walking radius to the west 
with impassable fences and forbiddingly expensive turnstiles, but it 
added to the ordinary spectacle of meteorology a great variety of 
gratuitous fireworks which banged and flared away of a night after 
supper and drew me abroad to see them better.  Such walks as I took, 
to Croydon, Wembledon, West Wickham and Greenwich, impressed upon me 
the interminable extent of London's residential suburbs; mile after 
mile one went, between houses, villas, rows of cottages, streets of 
shops, under railway arches, over railway bridges.  I have forgotten 
the detailed local characteristics--if there were any--of much of 
that region altogether.  I was only there two years, and half my 
perambulations occurred at dusk or after dark.  But with Penge I 
associate my first realisations of the wonder and beauty of twilight 
and night, the effect of dark walls reflecting lamplight, and the 
mystery of blue haze-veiled hillsides of houses, the glare of shops 
by night, the glowing steam and streaming sparks of railway trains 
and railway signals lit up in the darkness.  My first rambles in the 
evening occurred at Penge--I was becoming a big and independent-
spirited boy--and I began my experience of smoking during these 
twilight prowls with the threepenny packets of American cigarettes 
then just appearing in the world.

My life centred upon the City Merchants School.  Usually I caught 
the eight-eighteen for Victoria, I had a midday meal and tea; four 
nights a week I stayed for preparation, and often I was not back 
home again until within an hour of my bedtime.  I spent my half 
holidays at school in order to play cricket and football.  This, and 
a pretty voracious appetite for miscellaneous reading which was 
fostered by the Penge Middleton Library, did not leave me much 
leisure for local topography.  On Sundays also I sang in the choir 
at St. Martin's Church, and my mother did not like me to walk out 
alone on the Sabbath afternoon, she herself slumbered, so that I 
wrote or read at home.  I must confess I was at home as little as I 
could contrive.

Home, after my father's death, had become a very quiet and 
uneventful place indeed.  My mother had either an unimaginative 
temperament or her mind was greatly occupied with private religious 
solicitudes, and I remember her talking to me but little, and that 
usually upon topics I was anxious to evade.  I had developed my own 
view about low-Church theology long before my father's death, and my 
meditation upon that event had finished my secret estrangement from 
my mother's faith.  My reason would not permit even a remote chance 
of his being in hell, he was so manifestly not evil, and this 
religion would not permit him a remote chance of being out yet.  
When I was a little boy my mother had taught me to read and write 
and pray and had done many things for me, indeed she persisted in 
washing me and even in making my clothes until I rebelled against 
these things as indignities.  But our minds parted very soon.  She 
never began to understand the mental processes of my play, she never 
interested herself in my school life and work, she could not 
understand things I said; and she came, I think, quite insensibly to 
regard me with something of the same hopeless perplexity she had 
felt towards my father.

Him she must have wedded under considerable delusions.  I do not 
think he deceived her, indeed, nor do I suspect him of mercenariness 
in their union; but no doubt he played up to her requirements in the 
half ingenuous way that was and still is the quality of most wooing, 
and presented himself as a very brisk and orthodox young man.  I 
wonder why nearly all lovemaking has to be fraudulent.  Afterwards 
he must have disappointed her cruelly by letting one aspect after 
another of his careless, sceptical, experimental temperament appear.  
Her mind was fixed and definite, she embodied all that confidence in 
church and decorum and the assurances of the pulpit which was 
characteristic of the large mass of the English people--for after 
all, the rather low-Church section WAS the largest single mass--in 
early Victorian times.  She had dreams, I suspect, of going to 
church with him side by side; she in a little poke bonnet and a 
large flounced crinoline, all mauve and magenta and starched under a 
little lace-trimmed parasol, and he in a tall silk hat and peg-top 
trousers and a roll-collar coat, and looking rather like the Prince 
Consort,--white angels almost visibly raining benedictions on their 
amiable progress.  Perhaps she dreamt gently of much-belaced babies 
and an interestingly pious (but not too dissenting or fanatical) 
little girl or boy or so, also angel-haunted.  And I think, too, she 
must have seen herself ruling a seemly "home of taste," with a 
vivarium in the conservatory that opened out of the drawing-room, or 
again, making preserves in the kitchen.  My father's science-
teaching, his diagrams of disembowelled humanity, his pictures of 
prehistoric beasts that contradicted the Flood, his disposition 
towards soft shirts and loose tweed suits, his inability to use a 
clothes brush, his spasmodic reading fits and his bulldog pipes, 
must have jarred cruelly with her rather unintelligent 
anticipations.  His wild moments of violent temper when he would 
swear and smash things, absurd almost lovable storms that passed 
like summer thunder, must have been starkly dreadful to her.  She 
was constitutionally inadaptable, and certainly made no attempt to 
understand or tolerate these outbreaks.  She tried them by her 
standards, and by her standards they were wrong.  Her standards hid 
him from her.  The blazing things he said rankled in her mind 
unforgettably.

As I remember them together they chafed constantly.  Her attitude to 
nearly all his moods and all his enterprises was a sceptical 
disapproval.  She treated him as something that belonged to me and 
not to her.  "YOUR father," she used to call him, as though I had 
got him for her.

She had married late and she had, I think, become mentally self-
subsisting before her marriage.  Even in those Herne Hill days I 
used to wonder what was going on in her mind, and I find that old 
speculative curiosity return as I write this.  She took a 
considerable interest in the housework that our generally 
servantless condition put upon her--she used to have a charwoman in 
two or three times a week--but she did not do it with any great 
skill.  She covered most of our furniture with flouncey ill-fitting 
covers, and she cooked plainly and without very much judgment.  The 
Penge house, as it contained nearly all our Bromstead things, was 
crowded with furniture, and is chiefly associated in my mind with 
the smell of turpentine, a condiment she used very freely upon the 
veneered mahogany pieces.  My mother had an equal dread of "blacks" 
by day and the "night air," so that our brightly clean windows were 
rarely open.

She took a morning paper, and she would open it and glance at the 
headlines, but she did not read it until the afternoon and then, I 
think, she was interested only in the more violent crimes, and in 
railway and mine disasters and in the minutest domesticities of the 
Royal Family.  Most of the books at home were my father's, and I do 
not think she opened any of them.  She had one or two volumes that 
dated from her own youth, and she tried in vain to interest me in 
them; there was Miss Strickland's QUEENS OF ENGLAND, a book I 
remember with particular animosity, and QUEECHY and the WIDE WIDE 
WORLD.  She made these books of hers into a class apart by sewing 
outer covers upon them of calico and figured muslin.  To me in these 
habiliments they seemed not so much books as confederated old 
ladies.

My mother was also very punctual with her religious duties, and 
rejoiced to watch me in the choir.

On winter evenings she occupied an armchair on the other side of the 
table at which I sat, head on hand reading, and she would be darning 
stockings or socks or the like.  We achieved an effect of rather 
stuffy comfortableness that was soporific, and in a passive way I 
think she found these among her happy times.  On such occasions she 
was wont to put her work down on her knees and fall into a sort of 
thoughtless musing that would last for long intervals and rouse my 
curiosity.  For like most young people I could not imagine mental 
states without definite forms.

She carried on a correspondence with a number of cousins and 
friends, writing letters in a slanting Italian hand and dealing 
mainly with births, marriages and deaths, business starts (in the 
vaguest terms) and the distresses of bankruptcy.

And yet, you know, she did have a curious intimate life of her own 
that I suspected nothing of at the time, that only now becomes 
credible to me.  She kept a diary that is still in my possession, a 
diary of fragmentary entries in a miscellaneous collection of pocket 
books.  She put down the texts of the sermons she heard, and queer 
stiff little comments on casual visitors,--" Miss G. and much noisy 
shrieking talk about games and such frivolities and CROQUAY.  A. 
delighted and VERY ATTENTIVE."  Such little human entries abound.  
She had an odd way of never writing a name, only an initial; my 
father is always "A.," and I am always "D."  It is manifest she 
followed the domestic events in the life of the Princess of Wales, 
who is now Queen Mother, with peculiar interest and sympathy.  "Pray 
G. all may be well," she writes in one such crisis.

But there are things about myself that I still find too poignant to 
tell easily, certain painful and clumsy circumstances of my birth in 
very great detail, the distresses of my infantile ailments.  Then 
later I find such things as this: "Heard D.  s----."  The "s" is 
evidently "swear "--"  G. bless and keep my boy from evil."  And 
again, with the thin handwriting shaken by distress: "D. would not 
go to church, and hardened his heart and said wicked infidel things, 
much disrespect of the clergy.  The anthem is tiresome!!!  That men 
should set up to be wiser than their maker!!!"  Then trebly 
underlined: "I FEAR HIS FATHER'S TEACHING."  Dreadful little tangle 
of misapprehensions and false judgments!  More comforting for me to 
read, "D. very kind and good.  He grows more thoughtful every day."  
I suspect myself of forgotten hypocrisies.

At just one point my mother's papers seem to dip deeper.  I think 
the death of my father must have stirred her for the first time for 
many years to think for herself.  Even she could not go on living in 
any peace at all, believing that he had indeed been flung headlong 
into hell.  Of this gnawing solicitude she never spoke to me, never, 
and for her diary also she could find no phrases.  But on a loose 
half-sheet of notepaper between its pages I find this passage that 
follows, written very carefully.  I do not know whose lines they are 
nor how she came upon them.  They run:--

     "And if there be no meeting past the grave;
      If all is darkness, silence, yet 'tis rest.
      Be not afraid ye waiting hearts that weep,
      For God still giveth His beloved sleep,
      And if an endless sleep He wills, so best."

That scrap of verse amazed me when I read it.  I could even wonder 
if my mother really grasped the import of what she had copied out.  
It affected me as if a stone-deaf person had suddenly turned and 
joined in a whispered conversation.  It set me thinking how far a 
mind in its general effect quite hopelessly limited, might range.  
After that I went through all her diaries, trying to find something 
more than a conventional term of tenderness for my father.  But I 
found nothing.  And yet somehow there grew upon me the realisation 
that there had been love. . . .  Her love for me, on the other hand, 
was abundantly expressed.

I knew nothing of that secret life of feeling at the time; such 
expression as it found was all beyond my schoolboy range.  I did not 
know when I pleased her and I did not know when I distressed her.  
Chiefly I was aware of my mother as rather dull company, as a mind 
thorny with irrational conclusions and incapable of explication, as 
one believing quite wilfully and irritatingly in impossible things.  
So I suppose it had to be; life was coming to me in new forms and 
with new requirements.  It was essential to our situation that we 
should fail to understand.  After this space of years I have come to 
realisations and attitudes that dissolve my estrangement from her, I 
can pierce these barriers, I can see her and feel her as a loving 
and feeling and desiring and muddle-headed person.  There are times 
when I would have her alive again, if only that I might be kind to 
her for a little while and give her some return for the narrow 
intense affection, the tender desires, she evidently lavished so 
abundantly on me.  But then again I ask how I could make that 
return?  And I realise the futility of such dreaming.  Her demand 
was rigid, and to meet it I should need to act and lie.

So she whose blood fed me, whose body made me, lies in my memory as 
I saw her last, fixed, still, infinitely intimate, infinitely 
remote. . . .

My own case with my mother, however, does not awaken the same regret 
I feel when I think of how she misjudged and irked my father, and 
turned his weaknesses into thorns for her own tormenting.  I wish I 
could look back without that little twinge to two people who were 
both in their different quality so good.  But goodness that is 
narrow is a pedestrian and ineffectual goodness.  Her attitude to my 
father seems to me one of the essentially tragic things that have 
come to me personally, one of those things that nothing can 
transfigure, that REMAIN sorrowful, that I cannot soothe with any 
explanation, for as I remember him he was indeed the most lovable of 
weak spasmodic men.  But my mother had been trained in a hard and 
narrow system that made evil out of many things not in the least 
evil, and inculcated neither kindliness nor charity.  All their 
estrangement followed from that.

These cramping cults do indeed take an enormous toll of human love 
and happiness, and not only that but what we Machiavellians must 
needs consider, they make frightful breaches in human solidarity.  I 
suppose I am a deeply religious man, as men of my quality go, but I 
hate more and more, as I grow older, the shadow of intolerance cast 
by religious organisations.  All my life has been darkened by 
irrational intolerance, by arbitrary irrational prohibitions and 
exclusions.  Mahometanism with its fierce proselytism, has, I 
suppose, the blackest record of uncharitableness, but most of the 
Christian sects are tainted, tainted to a degree beyond any of the 
anterior paganisms, with this same hateful quality.  It is their 
exclusive claim that sends them wrong, the vain ambition that 
inspires them all to teach a uniform one-sided God and be the one 
and only gateway to salvation.  Deprecation of all outside the 
household of faith, an organised undervaluation of heretical 
goodness and lovableness, follows, necessarily.  Every petty 
difference is exaggerated to the quality of a saving grace or a 
damning defect.  Elaborate precautions are taken to shield the 
believer's mind against broad or amiable suggestions; the faithful 
are deterred by dark allusions, by sinister warnings, from books, 
from theatres, from worldly conversation, from all the kindly 
instruments that mingle human sympathy.  For only by isolating its 
flock can the organisation survive.

Every month there came to my mother a little magazine called, if I 
remember rightly, the HOME CHURCHMAN, with the combined authority of 
print and clerical commendation.  It was the most evil thing that 
ever came into the house, a very devil, a thin little pamphlet with 
one woodcut illustration on the front page of each number; now the 
uninviting visage of some exponent of the real and only doctrine and 
attitudes, now some coral strand in act of welcoming the 
missionaries of God's mysterious preferences, now a new church in 
the Victorian Gothic.  The vile rag it was!  A score of vices that 
shun the policeman have nothing of its subtle wickedness.  It was an 
outrage upon the natural kindliness of men.  The contents were all 
admirably adjusted to keep a spirit in prison.  Their force of 
sustained suggestion was tremendous.  There would be dreadful 
intimations of the swift retribution that fell upon individuals for 
Sabbath-breaking, and upon nations for weakening towards Ritualism, 
or treating Roman Catholics as tolerable human beings; there would 
be great rejoicings over the conversion of alleged Jews, and 
terrible descriptions of the death-beds of prominent infidels with 
boldly invented last words,--the most unscrupulous lying; there 
would be the appallingly edifying careers of "early piety" 
lusciously described, or stories of condemned criminals who traced 
their final ruin unerringly to early laxities of the kind that leads 
people to give up subscribing to the HOME CHURCHMAN.

Every month that evil spirit brought about a slump in our mutual 
love.  My mother used to read the thing and become depressed and 
anxious for my spiritual welfare, used to be stirred to 
unintelligent pestering. . . .


2

A few years ago I met the editor of this same HOME CHURCHMAN.  It 
was at one of the weekly dinners of that Fleet Street dining club, 
the Blackfriars.

I heard the paper's name with a queer little shock and surveyed the 
man with interest.  No doubt he was only a successor of the purveyor 
of discords who darkened my boyhood.  It was amazing to find an 
influence so terrible embodied in a creature so palpably petty.  He 
was seated some way down a table at right angles to the one at which 
I sat, a man of mean appearance with a greyish complexion, thin, 
with a square nose, a heavy wiry moustache and a big Adam's apple 
sticking out between the wings of his collar.  He ate with 
considerable appetite and unconcealed relish, and as his jaw was 
underhung, he chummed and made the moustache wave like reeds in the 
swell of a steamer.  It gave him a conscientious look.  After dinner 
he a little forced himself upon me.  At that time, though the shadow 
of my scandal was already upon me, I still seemed to be shaping for 
great successes, and he was glad to be in conversation with me and 
anxious to intimate political sympathy and support.  I tried to make 
him talk of the HOME CHURCHMAN and the kindred publications he ran, 
but he was manifestly ashamed of his job so far as I was concerned.

"One wants," he said, pitching himself as he supposed in my key, "to 
put constructive ideas into our readers, but they are narrow, you 
know, very narrow.  Very."  He made his moustache and lips express 
judicious regret.  "One has to consider them carefully, one has to 
respect their attitudes.  One dare not go too far with them.  One 
has to feel one's way."

He chummed and the moustache bristled.

A hireling, beyond question, catering for a demand.  I gathered 
there was a home in Tufnell Park, and three boys to be fed and 
clothed and educated. . . .

I had the curiosity to buy a copy of his magazine afterwards, and it 
seemed much the same sort of thing that had worried my mother in my 
boyhood.  There was the usual Christian hero, this time with mutton-
chop whiskers and a long bare upper lip.  The Jesuits, it seemed, 
were still hard at it, and Heaven frightfully upset about the Sunday 
opening of museums and the falling birth-rate, and as touchy and 
vindictive as ever.  There were two vigorous paragraphs upon the 
utter damnableness of the Rev. R. J. Campbell, a contagious 
damnableness I gathered, one wasn't safe within a mile of Holborn 
Viaduct, and a foul-mouthed attack on poor little Wilkins the 
novelist--who was being baited by the moralists at that time for 
making one of his big women characters, not being in holy wedlock, 
desire a baby and say so. . . .

The broadening of human thought is a slow and complex process.  We 
do go on, we do get on.  But when one thinks that people are living 
and dying now, quarrelling and sulking, misled and misunderstanding, 
vaguely fearful, condemning and thwarting one another in the close 
darknesses of these narrow cults--Oh, God! one wants a gale out of 
Heaven, one wants a great wind from the sea!


3

While I lived at Penge two little things happened to me, trivial in 
themselves and yet in their quality profoundly significant.  They 
had this in common, that they pierced the texture of the life I was 
quietly taking for granted and let me see through it into realities--
realities I had indeed known about before but never realised.  Each 
of these experiences left me with a sense of shock, with all the 
values in my life perplexingly altered, attempting readjustment.  
One of these disturbing and illuminating events was that I was 
robbed of a new pocket-knife and the other that I fell in love.  It 
was altogether surprising to me to be robbed.  You see, as an only 
child I had always been fairly well looked after and protected, and 
the result was an amazing confidence in the practical goodness of 
the people one met in the world.  I knew there were robbers in the 
world, just as I knew there were tigers; that I was ever likely to 
meet robber or tiger face to face seemed equally impossible.

The knife as I remember it was a particularly jolly one with all 
sorts of instruments in it, tweezers and a thing for getting a stone 
out of the hoof of a horse, and a corkscrew; it had cost me a 
carefuly accumulated half-crown, and amounted indeed to a new 
experience in knives.  I had had it for two or three days, and then 
one afternoon I dropped it through a hole in my pocket on a footpath 
crossing a field between Penge and Anerley.  I heard it fall in the 
way one does without at the time appreciating what had happened, 
then, later, before I got home, when my hand wandered into my pocket 
to embrace the still dear new possession I found it gone, and 
instantly that memory of something hitting the ground sprang up into 
consciousness.  I went back and commenced a search.  Almost 
immediately I was accosted by the leader of a little gang of four or 
five extremely dirty and ragged boys of assorted sizes and slouching 
carriage who were coming from the Anerley direction.

"Lost anythink, Matey?" said he.

I explained.

"'E's dropped 'is knife," said my interlocutor, and joined in the 
search.

"What sort of 'andle was it, Matey?" said a small white-faced 
sniffing boy in a big bowler hat.

I supplied the information.  His sharp little face scrutinised the 
ground about us.

"GOT it," he said, and pounced.

"Give it 'ere," said the big boy hoarsely, and secured it.

I walked towards him serenely confident that he would hand it over 
to me, and that all was for the best in the best of all possible 
worlds.

"No bloomin' fear!" he said, regarding me obliquely.  "Oo said it 
was your knife?"

Remarkable doubts assailed me.  "Of course it's my knife," I said.  
The other boys gathered round me.

"This ain't your knife," said the big boy, and spat casually.

"I dropped it just now."

"Findin's keepin's, I believe," said the big boy.

"Nonsense," I said.  "Give me my knife."

"'Ow many blades it got?"

"Three."

"And what sort of 'andle?"

"Bone."

"Got a corkscrew like?"

"Yes."

"Ah!  This ain't your knife no'ow.  See?"

He made no offer to show it to me.  My breath went.

"Look here!" I said.  "I saw that kid pick it up.  It IS my knife."

"Rot!" said the big boy, and slowly, deliberately put my knife into 
his trouser pocket.

I braced my soul for battle.  All civilisation was behind me, but I 
doubt if it kept the colour in my face.  I buttoned my jacket and 
clenched my fists and advanced on my antagonist--he had, I suppose, 
the advantage of two years of age and three inches of height.  "Hand 
over that knife," I said.

Then one of the smallest of the band assailed me with extraordinary 
vigour and swiftness from behind, had an arm round my neck and a 
knee in my back before I had the slightest intimation of attack, and 
so got me down.  "I got 'im, Bill," squeaked this amazing little 
ruffian.  My nose was flattened by a dirty hand, and as I struck out 
and hit something like sacking, some one kicked my elbow.  Two or 
three seemed to be at me at the same time.  Then I rolled over and 
sat up to discover them all making off, a ragged flight, footballing 
my cap, my City Merchants' cap, amongst them.  I leapt to my feet in 
a passion of indignation and pursued them.

But I did not overtake them.  We are beings of mixed composition, 
and I doubt if mine was a single-minded pursuit.  I knew that honour 
required me to pursue, and I had a vivid impression of having just 
been down in the dust with a very wiry and active and dirty little 
antagonist of disagreeable odour and incredible and incalculable 
unscrupulousness, kneeling on me and gripping my arm and neck.  I 
wanted of course to be even with him, but also I doubted if catching 
him would necessarily involve that.  They kicked my cap into the 
ditch at the end of the field, and made off compactly along a cinder 
lane while I turned aside to recover my dishonoured headdress.  As I 
knocked the dust out of that and out of my jacket, and brushed my 
knees and readjusted my very crumpled collar, I tried to focus this 
startling occurrence in my mind.

I had vague ideas of going to a policeman or of complaining at a 
police station, but some boyish instinct against informing prevented 
that.  No doubt I entertained ideas of vindictive pursuit and 
murderous reprisals.  And I was acutely enraged whenever I thought 
of my knife.  The thing indeed rankled in my mind for weeks and 
weeks, and altered all the flavour of my world for me.  It was the 
first time I glimpsed the simple brute violence that lurks and peeps 
beneath our civilisation.  A certain kindly complacency of attitude 
towards the palpably lower classes was qualified for ever


4

But the other experience was still more cardinal.  It was the first 
clear intimation of a new motif in life, the sex motif, that was to 
rise and increase and accumulate power and enrichment and interweave 
with and at last dominate all my life.

It was when I was nearly fifteen this happened.  It is inseparably 
connected in my mind with the dusk of warm September evenings.  I 
never met the girl I loved by daylight, and I have forgotten her 
name.  It was some insignificant name.

Yet the peculiar quality of the adventure keeps it shining darkly 
like some deep coloured gem in the common setting of my memories.  
It came as something new and strange, something that did not join on 
to anything else in my life or connect with any of my thoughts or 
beliefs or habits; it was a wonder, a mystery, a discovery about 
myself, a discovery about the whole world.  Only in after years did 
sexual feeling lose that isolation and spread itself out to 
illuminate and pervade and at last possess the whole broad vision of 
life.

It was in that phase of an urban youth's development, the phase of 
the cheap cigarette, that this thing happened.  One evening I came 
by chance on a number of young people promenading by the light of a 
row of shops towards Beckington, and, with all the glory of a 
glowing cigarette between my lips, I joined their strolling number.  
These twilight parades of young people, youngsters chiefly of the 
lower middle-class, are one of the odd social developments of the 
great suburban growths--unkindly critics, blind to the inner 
meanings of things, call them, I believe, Monkeys' Parades--the shop 
apprentices, the young work girls, the boy clerks and so forth, 
stirred by mysterious intimations, spend their first-earned money 
upon collars and ties, chiffon hats, smart lace collars, walking-
sticks, sunshades or cigarettes, and come valiantly into the vague 
transfiguring mingling of gaslight and evening, to walk up and down, 
to eye meaningly, even to accost and make friends.  It is a queer 
instinctive revolt from the narrow limited friendless homes in which 
so many find themselves, a going out towards something, romance if 
you will, beauty, that has suddenly become a need--a need that 
hitherto has lain dormant and unsuspected.  They promenade.

Vulgar!--it is as vulgar as the spirit that calls the moth abroad in 
the evening and lights the body of the glow-worm in the night.  I 
made my way through the throng, a little contemptuously as became a 
public schoolboy, my hands in my pockets--none of your cheap canes 
for me!--and very careful of the lie of my cigarette upon my lips.  
And two girls passed me, one a little taller than the other, with 
dim warm-tinted faces under clouds of dark hair and with dark eyes 
like pools reflecting stars.

I half turned, and the shorter one glanced back at me over her 
shoulder--I could draw you now the pose of her cheek and neck and 
shoulder--and instantly I was as passionately in love with the girl 
as I have ever been before or since, as any man ever was with any 
woman.  I turned about and followed them, I flung away my cigarette 
ostentatiously and lifted my school cap and spoke to them.

The girl answered shyly with her dark eyes on my face.  What I said 
and what she said I cannot remember, but I have little doubt it was 
something absolutely vapid.  It really did not matter; the thing was 
we had met.  I felt as I think a new-hatched moth must feel when 
suddenly its urgent headlong searching brings it in tremulous 
amazement upon its mate.

We met, covered from each other, with all the nets of civilisation 
keeping us apart.  We walked side by side.

It led to scarcely more than that.  I think we met four or five 
times altogether, and always with her nearly silent elder sister on 
the other side of her.  We walked on the last two occasions arm in 
arm, furtively caressing each other's hands, we went away from the 
glare of the shops into the quiet roads of villadom, and there we 
whispered instead of talking and looked closely into one another's 
warm and shaded face.  "Dear," I whispered very daringly, and she 
answered, "Dear!"  We had a vague sense that we wanted more of that 
quality of intimacy and more.  We wanted each other as one wants 
beautiful music again or to breathe again the scent of flowers.

And that is all there was between us.  The events are nothing, the 
thing that matters is the way in which this experience stabbed 
through the common stuff of life and left it pierced, with a light, 
with a huge new interest shining through the rent.

When I think of it I can recall even now the warm mystery of her 
face, her lips a little apart, lips that I never kissed, her soft 
shadowed throat, and I feel again the sensuous stir of her 
proximity. . . .

Those two girls never told me their surname nor let me approach 
their house.  They made me leave them at the corner of a road of 
small houses near Penge Station.  And quite abruptly, without any 
intimation, they vanished and came to the meeting place no more, 
they vanished as a moth goes out of a window into the night, and 
left me possessed of an intolerable want. . . .

The affair pervaded my existence for many weeks.  I could not do my 
work and I could not rest at home.  Night after night I promenaded 
up and down that Monkeys' Parade full of an unappeasable desire, 
with a thwarted sense of something just begun that ought to have 
gone on.  I went backwards and forwards on the way to the vanishing 
place, and at last explored the forbidden road that had swallowed 
them up.  But I never saw her again, except that later she came to 
me, my symbol of womanhood, in dreams.  How my blood was stirred!  I 
lay awake of nights whispering in the darkness for her.  I prayed 
for her.

Indeed that girl, who probably forgot the last vestiges of me when 
her first real kiss came to her, ruled and haunted me, gave a Queen 
to my imagination and a texture to all my desires until I became a 
man.

I generalised her at last.  I suddenly discovered that poetry was 
about her and that she was the key to all that had hitherto seemed 
nonsense about love.  I took to reading novels, and if the heroine 
could not possibly be like her, dusky and warm and starlike, I put 
the book aside. . . .

I hesitate and add here one other confession.  I want to tell this 
thing because it seems to me we are altogether too restrained and 
secretive about such matters.  The cardinal thing in life sneaks in 
to us darkly and shamefully like a thief in the night.

One day during my Cambridge days--it must have been in my first year 
before I knew Hatherleigh--I saw in a print-shop window near the 
Strand an engraving of a girl that reminded me sharply of Penge and 
its dusky encounter.  It was just a half length of a bare-
shouldered, bare-breasted Oriental with arms akimbo, smiling 
faintly.  I looked at it, went my way, then turned back and bought 
it.  I felt I must have it.  The odd thing is that I was more than a 
little shamefaced about it.  I did not have it framed and hung in my 
room open to the criticism of my friends, but I kept it in the 
drawer of my writing-table.  And I kept that drawer locked for a 
year.  It speedily merged with and became identified with the dark 
girl of Penge.  That engraving became in a way my mistress.  Often 
when I had sported my oak and was supposed to be reading, I was 
sitting with it before me.

Obeying some instinct I kept the thing very secret indeed.  For a 
time nobody suspected what was locked in my drawer nor what was 
locked in me.  I seemed as sexless as my world required.


5

These things stabbed through my life, intimations of things above 
and below and before me.  They had an air of being no more than 
incidents, interruptions.

The broad substance of my existence at this time was the City 
Merchants School.  Home was a place where I slept and read, and the 
mooning explorations of the south-eastern postal district which 
occupied the restless evenings and spare days of my vacations mere 
interstices, giving glimpses of enigmatical lights and distant 
spaces between the woven threads of a school-boy's career.  School 
life began for me every morning at Herne Hill, for there I was 
joined by three or four other boys and the rest of the way we went 
together.  Most of the streets and roads we traversed in our 
morning's walk from Victoria are still intact, the storms of 
rebuilding that have submerged so much of my boyhood's London have 
passed and left them, and I have revived the impression of them 
again and again in recent years as I have clattered dinnerward in a 
hansom or hummed along in a motor cab to some engagement.  The main 
gate still looks out with the same expression of ancient well-
proportioned kindliness upon St. Margaret's Close.  There are 
imposing new science laboratories in Chambers Street indeed, but the 
old playing fields are unaltered except for the big electric trams 
that go droning and spitting blue flashes along the western 
boundary.  I know Ratten, the new Head, very well, but I have not 
been inside the school to see if it has changed at all since I went 
up to Cambridge.

I took all they put before us very readily as a boy, for I had a 
mind of vigorous appetite, but since I have grown mentally to man's 
estate and developed a more and more comprehensive view of our 
national process and our national needs, I am more and more struck 
by the oddity of the educational methods pursued, their aimless 
disconnectedness from the constructive forces in the community.  I 
suppose if we are to view the public school as anything more than an 
institution that has just chanced to happen, we must treat it as 
having a definite function towards the general scheme of the nation, 
as being in a sense designed to take the crude young male of the 
more or less responsible class, to correct his harsh egotisms, 
broaden his outlook, give him a grasp of the contemporary 
developments he will presently be called upon to influence and 
control, and send him on to the university to be made a leading and 
ruling social man.  It is easy enough to carp at schoolmasters and 
set up for an Educational Reformer, I know, but still it is 
impossible not to feel how infinitely more effectually--given 
certain impossibilities perhaps--the job might be done.

My memory of school has indeed no hint whatever of that quality of 
elucidation it seems reasonable to demand from it.  Here all about 
me was London, a vast inexplicable being, a vortex of gigantic 
forces, that filled and overwhelmed me with impressions, that 
stirred my imagination to a perpetual vague enquiry; and my school 
not only offered no key to it, but had practically no comment to 
make upon it at all.  We were within three miles of Westminster and 
Charing Cross, the government offices of a fifth of mankind were all 
within an hour's stroll, great economic changes were going on under 
our eyes, now the hoardings flamed with election placards, now the 
Salvation Army and now the unemployed came trailing in procession 
through the winter-grey streets, now the newspaper placards outside 
news-shops told of battles in strange places, now of amazing 
discoveries, now of sinister crimes, abject squalor and poverty, 
imperial splendour and luxury, Buckingham Palace, Rotten Row, 
Mayfair, the slums of Pimlico, garbage-littered streets of bawling 
costermongers, the inky silver of the barge-laden Thames--such was 
the background of our days.  We went across St. Margaret's Close and 
through the school gate into a quiet puerile world apart from all 
these things.  We joined in the earnest acquirement of all that was 
necessary for Greek epigrams and Latin verse, and for the rest 
played games.  We dipped down into something clear and elegantly 
proportioned and time-worn and for all its high resolve of stalwart 
virility a little feeble, like our blackened and decayed portals by 
Inigo Jones.

Within, we were taught as the chief subjects of instruction, Latin 
and Greek.  We were taught very badly because the men who taught us 
did not habitually use either of these languages, nobody uses them 
any more now except perhaps for the Latin of a few Levantine 
monasteries.  At the utmost our men read them.  We were taught these 
languages because long ago Latin had been the language of 
civilisation; the one way of escape from the narrow and localised 
life had lain in those days through Latin, and afterwards Greek had 
come in as the vehicle of a flood of new and amazing ideas.  Once 
these two languages had been the sole means of initiation to the 
detached criticism and partial comprehension of the world.  I can 
imagine the fierce zeal of our first Heads, Gardener and Roper, 
teaching Greek like passionate missionaries, as a progressive 
Chinaman might teach English to the boys of Pekin, clumsily, 
impatiently, with rod and harsh urgency, but sincerely, 
patriotically, because they felt that behind it lay revelations, the 
irresistible stimulus to a new phase of history.  That was long ago.  
A new great world, a vaster Imperialism had arisen about the school, 
had assimilated all these amazing and incredible ideas, had gone on 
to new and yet more amazing developments of its own.  But the City 
Merchants School still made the substance of its teaching Latin and 
Greek, still, with no thought of rotating crops, sowed in a dream 
amidst the harvesting.

There is no fierceness left in the teaching now.  Just after I went 
up to Trinity, Gates, our Head, wrote a review article in defence of 
our curriculum.  In this, among other indiscretions, he asserted 
that it was impossible to write good English without an illuminating 
knowledge of the classic tongues, and he split an infinitive and 
failed to button up a sentence in saying so.  His main argument 
conceded every objection a reasonable person could make to the City 
Merchants' curriculum.  He admitted that translation had now placed 
all the wisdom of the past at a common man's disposal, that scarcely 
a field of endeavour remained in which modern work had not long 
since passed beyond the ancient achievement.  He disclaimed any 
utility.  But there was, he said, a peculiar magic in these 
grammatical exercises no other subjects of instruction possessed.  
Nothing else provided the same strengthening and orderly discipline 
for the mind.

He said that, knowing the Senior Classics he did, himself a Senior 
Classic!

Yet in a dim confused way I think be was making out a case.  In 
schools as we knew them, and with the sort of assistant available, 
the sort of assistant who has been trained entirely on the old 
lines, he could see no other teaching so effectual in developing 
attention, restraint, sustained constructive effort and various yet 
systematic adjustment.  And that was as far as his imagination could 
go.

It is infinitely easier to begin organised human affairs than end 
them; the curriculum and the social organisation of the English 
public school are the crowning instances of that.  They go on 
because they have begun.  Schools are not only immortal institutions 
but reproductive ones.  Our founder, Jabez Arvon, knew nothing, I am 
sure, of Gates' pedagogic values and would, I feel certain, have 
dealt with them disrespectfully.  But public schools and university 
colleges sprang into existence correlated, the scholars went on to 
the universities and came back to teach the schools, to teach as 
they themselves had been taught, before they had ever made any real 
use of the teaching; the crowd of boys herded together, a crowd 
perpetually renewed and unbrokenly the same, adjusted itself by 
means of spontaneously developed institutions.  In a century, by its 
very success, this revolutionary innovation of Renascence public 
schools had become an immense tradition woven closely into the 
fabric of the national life.  Intelligent and powerful people ceased 
to talk Latin or read Greek, they had got what was wanted, but that 
only left the schoolmaster the freer to elaborate his point.  Since 
most men of any importance or influence in the country had been 
through the mill, it was naturally a little difficult to persuade 
them that it was not quite the best and most ennobling mill the wit 
of man could devise.  And, moreover, they did not want their 
children made strange to them.  There was all the machinery and all 
the men needed to teach the old subjects, and none to teach whatever 
new the critic might propose.  Such science instruction as my father 
gave seemed indeed the uninviting alternative to the classical 
grind.  It was certainly an altogether inferior instrument at that 
time.

So it was I occupied my mind with the exact study of dead languages 
for seven long years.  It was the strangest of detachments.  We 
would sit under the desk of such a master as Topham like creatures 
who had fallen into an enchanted pit, and he would do his 
considerable best to work us up to enthusiasm for, let us say, a 
Greek play.  If we flagged he would lash himself to revive us.  He 
would walk about the class-room mouthing great lines in a rich roar, 
and asking us with a flushed face and shining eyes if it was not 
"GLORIOUS."  The very sight of Greek letters brings back to me the 
dingy, faded, ink-splashed quality of our class-room, the banging of 
books, Topham's disordered hair, the sheen of his alpaca gown, his 
deep unmusical intonations and the wide striding of his creaking 
boots.  Glorious!  And being plastic human beings we would consent 
that it was glorious, and some of us even achieved an answering 
reverberation and a sympathetic flush.  I at times responded freely.   
We all accepted from him unquestioningly that these melodies, these 
strange sounds, exceeded any possibility of beauty that lay in the 
Gothic intricacy, the splash and glitter, the jar and recovery, the 
stabbing lights, the heights and broad distances of our English 
tongue.  That indeed was the chief sin of him.  It was not that he 
was for Greek and Latin, but that he was fiercely against every 
beauty that was neither classic nor deferred to classical canons.

And what exactly did we make of it, we seniors who understood it 
best?  We visualised dimly through that dust and the grammatical 
difficulties, the spectacle of the chorus chanting grotesquely, 
helping out protagonist and antagonist, masked and buskined, with 
the telling of incomprehensible parricides, of inexplicable incest, 
of gods faded beyond symbolism, of that Relentless Law we did not 
believe in for a moment, that no modern western European can believe 
in.  We thought of the characters in the unconvincing wigs and 
costumes of our school performance.  No Gilbert Murray had come as 
yet to touch these things to life again.  It was like the ghost of 
an antiquarian's toy theatre, a ghost that crumbled and condensed 
into a gritty dust of construing as one looked at it.

Marks, shindies, prayers and punishments, all flavoured with the 
leathery stuffiness of time-worn Big Hall. . . .

And then out one would come through our grey old gate into the 
evening light and the spectacle of London hurrying like a cataract, 
London in black and brown and blue and gleaming silver, roaring like 
the very loom of Time.  We came out into the new world no teacher 
has yet had the power and courage to grasp and expound.  Life and 
death sang all about one, joys and fears on such a scale, in such an 
intricacy as never Greek nor Roman knew.  The interminable 
procession of horse omnibuses went lumbering past, bearing countless 
people we knew not whence, we knew not whither.  Hansoms clattered, 
foot passengers jostled one, a thousand appeals of shop and boarding 
caught the eye.  The multi-coloured lights of window and street 
mingled with the warm glow of the declining day under the softly 
flushing London skies; the ever-changing placards, the shouting 
news-vendors, told of a kaleidoscopic drama all about the globe.  
One did not realise what had happened to us, but the voice of Topham 
was suddenly drowned and lost, he and his minute, remote 
gesticulations. . . .

That submerged and isolated curriculum did not even join on to 
living interests where it might have done so.   We were left 
absolutely to the hints of the newspapers, to casual political 
speeches, to the cartoons of the comic papers or a chance reading of 
some Socialist pamphlet for any general ideas whatever about the 
huge swirling world process in which we found ourselves.  I always 
look back with particular exasperation to the cessation of our 
modern history at the year 1815.  There it pulled up abruptly, as 
though it had come upon something indelicate. . . .

But, after all, what would Topham or Flack have made of the huge 
adjustments of the nineteenth century?  Flack was the chief 
cricketer on the staff; he belonged to that great cult which 
pretends that the place of this or that county in the struggle for 
the championship is a matter of supreme importance to boys.  He 
obliged us to affect a passionate interest in the progress of county 
matches, to work up unnatural enthusiasms.  What a fuss there would 
be when some well-trained boy, panting as if from Marathon, appeared 
with an evening paper!  "I say, you chaps, Middlesex all out for a 
hundred and five!"

Under Flack's pressure I became, I confess, a cricket humbug of the 
first class.  I applied myself industriously year by year to 
mastering scores and averages; I pretended that Lords or the Oval 
were the places nearest Paradise for me.  (I never went to either.)  
Through a slight mistake about the county boundary I adopted Surrey 
for my loyalty, though as a matter of fact we were by some five 
hundred yards or so in Kent.  It did quite as well for my purposes.  
I bowled rather straight and fast, and spent endless hours acquiring 
the skill to bowl Flack out.  He was a bat in the Corinthian style, 
rich and voluminous, and succumbed very easily to a low shooter or 
an unexpected Yorker, hut usually he was caught early by long leg.  
The difficulty was to bowl him before he got caught.  He loved to 
lift a ball to leg.  After one had clean bowled him at the practice 
nets one deliberately gave him a ball to leg just to make him feel 
nice again.

Flack went about a world of marvels dreaming of leg hits.  He has 
been observed, going across the Park on his way to his highly 
respectable club in Piccadilly, to break from profound musings into 
a strange brief dance that ended with an imaginary swipe with his 
umbrella, a roofer, over the trees towards Buckingham Palace.  The 
hit accomplished, Flack resumed his way.

Inadequately instructed foreigners would pass him in terror, 
needlessly alert.


6

These schoolmasters move through my memory as always a little 
distant and more than a little incomprehensible.  Except when they 
wore flannels, I saw them almost always in old college caps and 
gowns, a uniform which greatly increased their detachment from the 
world of actual men.  Gates, the head, was a lean loose-limbed man, 
rather stupid I discovered when I reached the Sixth and came into 
contact with him, but honest, simple and very eager to be liberal-
minded.  He was bald, with an almost conical baldness, with a 
grizzled pointed beard, small featured and, under the stresses of a 
Zeitgeist that demanded liberality, with an expression of puzzled 
but resolute resistance to his own unalterable opinions.  He made a 
tall dignified figure in his gown.  In my junior days he spoke to me 
only three or four times, and then he annoyed me by giving me a 
wrong surname; it was a sore point because I was an outsider and not 
one of the old school families, the Shoesmiths, the Naylors, the 
Marklows, the Tophams, the Pevises and suchlike, who came generation 
after generation.  I recall him most vividly against the background 
of faded brown book-backs in the old library in which we less 
destructive seniors were trusted to work, with the light from the 
stained-glass window falling in coloured patches on his face.  It 
gave him the appearance of having no colour of his own.  He had a 
habit of scratching the beard on his cheek as he talked, and he used 
to come and consult us about things and invariably do as we said.  
That, in his phraseology, was "maintaining the traditions of the 
school."

He had indeed an effect not of a man directing a school, but of a 
man captured and directed by a school.  Dead and gone Elizabethans 
had begotten a monster that could carry him about in its mouth.

Yet being a man, as I say, with his hair a little stirred by a 
Zeitgeist that made for change, Gates did at times display a 
disposition towards developments.  City Merchants had no modern 
side, and utilitarian spirits were carping in the PALL MALL GAZETTE 
and elsewhere at the omissions from our curriculum, and particularly 
at our want of German.   Moreover, four classes still worked 
together with much clashing and uproar in the old Big Hall that had 
once held in a common tumult the entire school.  Gates used to come 
and talk to us older fellows about these things.

"I don't wish to innovate unduly," he used to say.  But we ought to 
get in some German, you know,--for those who like it.  The army men 
will be wanting it some of these days."

He referred to the organisation of regular evening preparation for 
the lower boys in Big Hall as a "revolutionary change," but he 
achieved it, and he declared he began the replacement of the hacked 
wooden tables, at which the boys had worked since Tudor days, by 
sloping desks with safety inkpots and scientifically adjustable 
seats, "with grave misgivings."  And though he never birched a boy 
in his life, and was, I am convinced, morally incapable of such a 
scuffle, he retained the block and birch in the school through all 
his term of office, and spoke at the Headmasters' Conference in 
temperate approval of corporal chastisement, comparing it, dear 
soul! to the power of the sword. . . .

I wish I could, in some measure and without tediousness, convey the 
effect of his discourses to General Assembly in Big Hall.  But that 
is like trying to draw the obverse and reverse of a sixpence worn to 
complete illegibility.  His tall fine figure stood high on the days, 
his thoughtful tenor filled the air as he steered his hazardous way 
through sentences that dragged inconclusive tails and dropped 
redundant prepositions.  And he pleaded ever so urgently, ever so 
finely, that what we all knew for Sin was sinful, and on the whole 
best avoided altogether, and so went on with deepening notes and 
even with short arresting gestures of the right arm and hand, to 
stir and exhort us towards goodness, towards that modern, 
unsectarian goodness, goodness in general and nothing in particular, 
which the Zeitgeist seemed to indicate in those transitional years.


7

The school never quite got hold of me.  Partly I think that was 
because I was a day-boy and so freer than most of the boys, partly 
because of a temperamental disposition to see things in my own way 
and have my private dreams, partly because I was a little 
antagonised by the family traditions that ran through the school.  I 
was made to feel at first that I was a rank outsider, and I never 
quite forgot it.  I suffered very little bullying, and I never had a 
fight--in all my time there were only three fights--but I followed 
my own curiosities.  I was already a very keen theologian and 
politician before I was fifteen.  I was also intensely interested in 
modern warfare.  I read the morning papers in the Reading Room 
during the midday recess, never missed the illustrated weeklies, and 
often when I could afford it I bought a PALL MALL GAZETTE on my way 
home.

I do not think that I was very exceptional in that; most intelligent 
boys, I believe, want naturally to be men, and are keenly interested 
in men's affairs.  There is not the universal passion for a 
magnified puerility among them it is customary to assume.  I was 
indeed a voracious reader of everything but boys' books--which I 
detested--and fiction.  I read histories, travel, popular science 
and controversy with particular zest, and I loved maps.  School work 
and school games were quite subordinate affairs for me.  I worked 
well and made a passable figure at games, and I do not think I was 
abnormally insensitive to the fine quality of our school, to the 
charm of its mediaeval nucleus, its Gothic cloisters, its scraps of 
Palladian and its dignified Georgian extensions; the contrast of the 
old quiet, that in spite of our presence pervaded it everywhere, 
with the rushing and impending London all about it, was indeed a 
continual pleasure to me.  But these things were certainly not the 
living and central interests of my life.

I had to conceal my wider outlook to a certain extent--from the 
masters even more than from the boys.  Indeed I only let myself go 
freely with one boy, Britten, my especial chum, the son of the 
Agent-General for East Australia.  We two discovered in a chance 
conversation A PROPOS of a map in the library that we were both of 
us curious why there were Malays in Madagascar, and how the Mecca 
pilgrims came from the East Indies before steamships were available.  
Neither of us had suspected that there was any one at all in the 
school who knew or cared a rap about the Indian Ocean, except as 
water on the way to India.  But Britten had come up through the Suez 
Canal, and his ship had spoken a pilgrim ship on the way.  It gave 
him a startling quality of living knowledge.  From these pilgrims we 
got to a comparative treatment of religions, and from that, by a 
sudden plunge, to entirely sceptical and disrespectful confessions 
concerning Gates' last outbreak of simple piety in School Assembly.  
We became congenial intimates from that hour.

The discovery of Britten happened to me when we were both in the 
Lower Fifth.  Previously there had been a watertight compartment 
between the books I read and the thoughts they begot on the one hand 
and human intercourse on the other.  Now I really began my higher 
education, and aired and examined and developed in conversation the 
doubts, the ideas, the interpretations that had been forming in my 
mind.  As we were both day-boys with a good deal of control over our 
time we organised walks and expeditions together, and my habit of 
solitary and rather vague prowling gave way to much more definite 
joint enterprises.  I went several times to his house, he was the 
youngest of several brothers, one of whom was a medical student and 
let us assist at the dissection of a cat, and once or twice in 
vacation time he came to Penge, and we went with parcels of 
provisions to do a thorough day in the grounds and galleries of the 
Crystal Palace, ending with the fireworks at close quarters.  We 
went in a river steamboat down to Greenwich, and fired by that made 
an excursion to Margate and back; we explored London docks and 
Bethnal Green Museum, Petticoat Lane and all sorts of out-of-the-way 
places together.

We confessed shyly to one another a common secret vice, "Phantom 
warfare."  When we walked alone, especially in the country, we had 
both developed the same practice of fighting an imaginary battle 
about us as we walked.  As we went along we were generals, and our 
attacks pushed along on either side, crouching and gathering behind 
hedges, cresting ridges, occupying copses, rushing open spaces, 
fighting from house to house.  The hillsides about Penge were 
honeycombed in my imagination with the pits and trenches I had 
created to cheek a victorious invader coming out of Surrey.  For him 
West Kensington was chiefly important as the scene of a desperate 
and successful last stand of insurrectionary troops (who had seized 
the Navy, the Bank and other advantages) against a royalist army--
reinforced by Germans--advancing for reasons best known to 
themselves by way of Harrow and Ealing.  It is a secret and solitary 
game, as we found when we tried to play it together.  We made a 
success of that only once.  All the way down to Margate we schemed 
defences and assailed and fought them as we came back against the 
sunset.  Afterwards we recapitulated all that conflict by means of a 
large scale map of the Thames and little paper ironclads in plan cut 
out of paper.

A subsequent revival of these imaginings was brought about by 
Britten's luck in getting, through a friend of his father's, 
admission for us both to the spectacle of volunteer officers 
fighting the war game in Caxton Hall.  We developed a war game of 
our own at Britten's home with nearly a couple of hundred lead 
soldiers, some excellent spring cannons that shot hard and true at 
six yards, hills of books and a constantly elaborated set of rules.  
For some months that occupied an immense proportion of our leisure.  
Some of our battles lasted several days.  We kept the game a 
profound secret from the other fellows.  They would not have 
understood.

And we also began, it was certainly before we were sixteen, to 
write, for the sake of writing.  We liked writing.  We had 
discovered Lamb and the best of the middle articles in such weeklies 
as the SATURDAY GAZETTE, and we imitated them.  Our minds were full 
of dim uncertain things we wanted to drag out into the light of 
expression.  Britten had got hold of IN MEMORIAM, and I had 
disinterred Pope's ESSAY ON MAN and RABBI BEN EZRA, and these things 
had set our theological and cosmic solicitudes talking.  I was 
somewhere between sixteen and eighteen, I know, when he and I walked 
along the Thames Embankment confessing shamefully to one another 
that we had never read Lucretius.  We thought every one who mattered 
had read Lucretius.

When I was nearly sixteen my mother was taken ill very suddenly, and 
died of some perplexing complaint that involved a post-mortem 
examination; it was, I think, the trouble that has since those days 
been recognised as appendicitis.  This led to a considerable change 
in my circumstances; the house at Penge was given up, and my 
Staffordshire uncle arranged for me to lodge during school terms 
with a needy solicitor and his wife in Vicars Street, S. W., about a 
mile and a half from the school.  So it was I came right into 
London; I had almost two years of London before I went to Cambridge.

Tehose were our great days together.  Afterwards we were torn apart; 
Britten went to Oxford, and our circumstances never afterwards threw 
us continuously together until the days of the BLUE WEEKLY.

As boys, we walked together, read and discussed the same books, 
pursued the same enquiries.  We got a reputation as inseparables and 
the nickname of the Rose and the Lily, for Britten was short and 
thick-set with dark close curling hair and a ruddy Irish type of 
face; I was lean and fair-haired and some inches taller than he.  
Our talk ranged widely and yet had certain very definite 
limitations.  We were amazingly free with politics and religion, we 
went to that little meeting-house of William Morris's at Hammersmith 
and worked out the principles of Socialism pretty thoroughly, and we 
got up the Darwinian theory with the help of Britten's medical-
student brother and the galleries of the Natural History Museum in 
Cromwell Road.  Those wonderful cases on the ground floor 
illustrating mimicry, dimorphism and so forth, were new in our 
times, and we went through them with earnest industry and tried over 
our Darwinism in the light of that.  Such topics we did 
exhaustively.  But on the other hand I do not remember any 
discussion whatever of human sex or sexual relationships.  There, in 
spite of intense secret curiosities, our lips were sealed by a 
peculiar shyness.  And I do not believe we ever had occasion either 
of us to use the word "love."  It was not only that we were 
instinctively shy of the subject, but that we were mightily ashamed 
of the extent of our ignorance and uncertainty in these matters.  We 
evaded them elaborately with an assumption of exhaustive knowledge.

We certainly had no shyness about theology.  We marked the 
emancipation of our spirits from the frightful teachings that had 
oppressed our boyhood, by much indulgence in blasphemous wit.  We 
had a secret literature of irreverent rhymes, and a secret art of 
theological caricature.  Britten's father had delighted his family 
by reading aloud from Dr. Richard Garnett's TWILIGHT OF THE GODS, 
and Britten conveyed the precious volume to me.  That and the BAB 
BALLADS were the inspiration of some of our earliest lucubrations.

For an imaginative boy the first experience of writing is like a 
tiger's first taste of blood, and our literary flowerings led very 
directly to the revival of the school magazine, which had been 
comatose for some years.  But there we came upon a disappointment.


8

In that revival we associated certain other of the Sixth Form boys, 
and notably one for whom our enterprise was to lay the foundations 
of a career that has ended in the House of Lords, Arthur Cossington, 
now Lord Paddockhurst.  Cossington was at that time a rather heavy, 
rather good-looking boy who was chiefly eminent in cricket, an 
outsider even as we were and preoccupied no doubt, had we been 
sufficiently detached to observe him, with private imaginings very 
much of the same quality and spirit as our own.  He was, we were 
inclined to think, rather a sentimentalist, rather a poseur, he 
affected a concise emphatic styl, played chess very well, betrayed 
a belief in will-power, and earned Britten's secret hostility, 
Britten being a sloven, by the invariable neatness of his collars 
and ties.  He came into our magazine with a vigour that we found 
extremely surprising and unwelcome.

Britten and I had wanted to write.  We had indeed figured our 
project modestly as a manuscript magazine of satirical, liberal and 
brilliant literature by which in some rather inexplicable way the 
vague tumult of ideas that teemed within us was to find form and 
expression; Cossington, it was manifest from the outset, wanted 
neither to write nor writing, but a magazine.  I remember the 
inaugural meeting in Shoesmith major's study--we had had great 
trouble in getting it together--and how effectually Cossington 
bolted with the proposal.

"I think we fellows ought to run a magazine," said Cossington.  "The 
school used to have one.  A school like this ought to have a 
magazine."

"The last one died in '84," said Shoesmith from the hearthrug.  
"Called the OBSERVER.  Rot rather."

"Bad title," said Cossington.

"There was a TATLER before that," said Britten, sitting on the 
writing table at the window that was closed to deaden the cries of 
the Lower School at play, and clashing his boots together.

"We want something suggestive of City Merchants."

"CITY MERCHANDIZE," said Britten.

"Too fanciful.  What of ARVONIAN?  Richard Arvon was our founder, 
and it seems almost a duty--"

"They call them all -usians or -onians," said Britten.

"I like CITY MERCHANDIZE," I said.  "We could probably find a 
quotation to suggest--oh! mixed good things."

Cossington regarded me abstractedly.

Don't want to put the accent on the City, do we?" said Shoesmith, 
who had a feeling for county families, and Naylor supported him by a 
murmur of approval.

"We ought to call it the ARVONIAN," decided Cossington, "and we 
might very well have underneath, 'With which is incorporated the 
OBSERVER.'  That picks up the old traditions, makes an appeal to old 
boys and all that, and it gives us something to print under the 
title."

I still held out for CITY MERCHANDIZE, which had taken my fancy.  
"Some of the chaps' people won't like it," said Naylor, "certain not 
to.  And it sounds Rum."

"Sounds Weird," said a boy who had not hitherto spoken.

"We aren't going to do anything Queer," said Shoesmith, pointedly 
not looking at Britten.

The question of the title had manifestly gone against us.  "Oh! HAVE 
it ARVONIAN," I said.

"And next, what size shall we have?" said Cossington.

"Something like MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE--or LONGMANS'; LONGMANS' is 
better because it has a whole page, not columns.  It makes no end of 
difference to one's effects."

"What effects?" asked Shoesmith abruptly.

"Oh! a pause or a white line or anything.  You've got to write 
closer for a double column.  It's nuggetty.  You can't get a swing 
on your prose."  I had discussed this thoroughly with Britten.

"If the fellows are going to write--" began Britten.

"We ought to keep off fine writing," said Shoesmith.  "It's cheek.  
I vote we don't have any."

"We sha'n't get any," said Cossington, and then as an olive branch 
to me, "unless Remington does a bit.  Or Britten.  But it's no good 
making too much space for it."

"We ought to be very careful about the writing," said Shoesmith.   
"We don't want to give ourselves away."

"I vote we ask old Topham to see us through," said Naylor.

Britten groaned aloud and every one regarded him.  "Greek epigrams 
on the fellows' names," he said.  " Small beer in ancient bottles.  
Let's get a stuffed broody hen to SIT on the magazine."

"We might do worse than a Greek epigram," said Cossington.  "One in 
each number.  It--it impresses parents and keeps up our classieal 
tradition.  And the masters CAN help.  We don't want to antagonise 
them.  Of course--we've got to dcpartmentalise.  Writing is only one 
section of the thing.  The ARVONIAN has to stand for the school.  
There's questions of space and questions of expense.  We can't turn 
out a great chunk of printed prose like--like wet cold toast and 
call it a magazine."

Britten writhed, appreciating the image.

"There's to be a section of sports.  YOU must do that."

"I'm not going to do any fine writing," said Shoesmith.

"What you've got to do is just to list all the chaps and put a note 
to their play:--'Naylor minor must pass more.  Football isn't the 
place for extreme individualism.'  'Ammersham shapes well as half-
back.'  Things like that."

"I could do that all right," said Shoesmith, brightening and 
manifestly hecoming pregnant with judgments.

"One great thing about a magazine of this sort," said Cossington, 
"is to mention just as many names as you can in each number.  It 
keeps the interest alive.  Chaps will turn it over looking for their 
own little bit.  Then it all lights up for them."

"Do you want any reports of matches?" Shoesmith broke from his 
meditation.

"Rather.  With comments."

"Naylor surpassed himself and negotiated the lemon safely home," 
said Shoesmith.

"Shut it," said Naylor modestly.

"Exactly," said Cossington.  "That gives us three features," 
touching them off on his fingers, "Epigram, Literary Section, 
Sports.  Then we want a section to shove anything into, a joke, a 
notice of anything that's going on.  So on.  Our Note Book."

"Oh, Hell!" said Britten, and clashed his boots, to the silent 
disapproval of every one.

"Then we want an editorial."

"A WHAT?" cried Britten, with a note of real terror in his voice.

"Well, don't we?  Unless we have our Note Book to begin on the front 
page.  It gives a scrappy effect to do that.  We want something 
manly and straightforward and a bit thoughtful, about Patriotism, 
say, or ESPRIT DE CORPS, or After-Life."

I looked at Britten.  Hitherto we had not considered Cossington 
mattered very much in the world.

He went over us as a motor-car goes over a dog.  There was a sort of 
energy about him, a new sort of energy to us; we had never realised 
that anything of the sort existed in the world.  We were hopelessly 
at a disadvantage.  Almost instantly we had developed a clear and 
detailed vision of a magazine made up of everything that was most 
acceptable in the magazines that flourished in the adult world about 
us, and had determined to make it a success.  He had by a kind of 
instinct, as it were, synthetically plagiarised every successful 
magazine and breathed into this dusty mixture the breath of life.  
He was elected at his own suggestion managing director, with the 
earnest support of Shoesmith and Naylor, and conducted the magazine 
so successfully and brilliantly that he even got a whole back page 
of advertisements from the big sports shop in Holborn, and made the 
printers pay at the same rate for a notice of certain books of their 
own which they said they had inserted by inadvertency to fill up 
space.  The only literary contribution in the first number was a 
column by Topham in faultless stereotyped English in depreciation of 
some fancied evil called Utilitarian Studies and ending with that 
noble old quotation:--


"To the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome."


And Flack crowded us out of number two with a bright little paper on 
the "Humours of Cricket," and the Head himself was profusely 
thoughtful all over the editorial under the heading of "The School 
Chapel; and How it Seems to an Old Boy."

Britten and I found it difficult to express to each other with any 
grace or precision what we felt about that magazine.



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 he 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 entertamed 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 Existenc 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 ease 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 admimstrative 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 couldno' 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 
alternatve 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 re-organisation, 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 largness 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.

I stared stockishly at the girl, who passed with an indifferent 
face.

That sticks in my mind as a picture remains in a room, it has kept 
there bright and fresh as a thing seen yesterday, for twenty 
years. . . .

I flirted hesitatingly once or twice with comely serving girls, and 
was a little ashamed lest Willersley should detect the keen interest 
I took in them, and then as we came over the pass from Santa Maria 
Maggiore to Cannobio, my secret preoccupation took me by surprise 
and flooded me and broke down my pretences.

The women in that valley are very beautiful--women vary from valley 
to valley in the Alps and are plain and squat here and divinities 
five miles away--and as we came down we passed a group of five or 
six of them resting by the wayside.  Their burthens were beside 
them, and one like Ceres held a reaping hook in her brown hand.  She 
watched us approaching and smiled faintly, her eyes at mine.

There was some greeting, and two of them laughed together.

We passed.

"Glorious girls they were," said Willersley, and suddenly an immense 
sense of boredom enveloped me.  I saw myself striding on down that 
winding road, talking of politics and parties and bills of 
parliament and all sorts of dessicated things.  That road seemed to 
me to wind on for ever down to dust and infinite dreariness.  I knew 
it for a way of death.  Reality was behind us.

Willersley set himself to draw a sociological moral.  "I'm not so 
sure," he said in a voice of intense discriminations, "after all, 
that agricultural work isn't good for women."

"Damn agricultural work!" I said, and broke out into a vigorous 
cursing of all I held dear.  "Fettered things we are!" I cried.  "I 
wonder why I stand it!"

"Stand what?"

"Why don't I go back and make love to those girls and let the world 
and you and everything go hang?  Deep breasts and rounded limbs--and 
we poor emasculated devils go tramping by with the blood of youth in 
us! . . ."

"I'm not quite sure, Remington," said Willersley, looking at me with 
a deliberately quaint expression over his glasses, "that picturesque 
scenery is altogether good for your morals."

That fever was still in my blood when we came to Locarno.



13


Along the hot and dusty lower road between the Orrido of Traffiume 
and Cannobio Willersley had developed his first blister.  And partly 
because of that and partly because there was a bag at the station 
that gave us the refreshment of clean linen and partly because of 
the lazy lower air into which we had come, we decided upon three or 
four days' sojourn in the Empress Hotel.

We dined that night at a table-d'hote, and I found myself next to an 
Englishwoman who began a conversation that was resumed presently in 
the hotel lounge.  She was a woman of perhaps thirty-three or 
thirty-four, slenderly built, with a warm reddish skin and very 
abundant fair golden hair, the wife of a petulant-looking heavy-
faced man of perhaps fifty-three, who smoked a cigar and dozed over 
his coffee and presently went to bed.  "He always goes to bed like 
that," she confided startlingly.  "He sleeps after all his meals.  I 
never knew such a man to sleep."

Then she returned to our talk, whatever it was.

We had begun at the dinner table with itineraries and the usual 
topographical talk, and she had envied our pedestrian travel.  "My 
husband doesn't walk," she said.  "His heart is weak and he cannot 
manage the hills."

There was something friendly and adventurous in her manner; she 
conveyed she liked me, and when presently Willersley drifted off to 
write letters our talk sank at once to easy confidential undertones.  
I felt enterprising, and indeed it is easy to be daring with people 
one has never seen before and may never see again.  I said I loved 
beautiful scenery and all beautiful things, and the pointing note in 
my voice made her laugh.  She told me I had bold eyes, and so far as 
I can remember I said she made them bold.  "Blue they are," she 
remarked, smiling archly.  "I like blue eyes."  Then I think we 
compared ages, and she said she was the Woman of Thirty, "George 
Moore's Woman of Thirty."

I had not read George Moore at the time, but I pretended to 
understand.

That, I think, was our limit that evening.  She went to bed, smiling 
good-night quite prettily down the big staircase, and I and 
Willersley went out to smoke in the garden.  My head was full of 
her, and I found it necessary to talk about her.  So I made her a 
problem in sociology.  "Who the deuce are these people?" I said, and 
how do they get a living?  They seem to have plenty of money.  He 
strikes me as being--Willersley, what is a drysalter?  I think he's 
a retired drysalter."

Willersley theorised while I thought of the woman and that 
provocative quality of dash she had displayed.  The next day at 
lunch she and I met like old friends.  A huge mass of private 
thinking during the interval had been added to our effect upon one 
another.  We talked for a time of insignificant things.

"What do you do," she asked rather quickly, "after lunch?  Take a 
siesta?"

"Sometimes," I said, and hung for a moment eye to eye.

We hadn't a doubt of each other, but my heart was beating like a 
steamer propeller when it lifts out of the water.

"Do you get a view from your room?" she asked after a pause.

"It's on the third floor, Number seventeen, near the staircase.  My 
friend's next door."

She began to talk of books.  She was interested in Christian 
Science, she said, and spoke of a book.  I forget altogether what 
that book was called, though I remember to this day with the utmost 
exactness the purplish magenta of its cover.  She said she would 
lend it to me and hesitated.

Wlllersley wanted to go for an expedition across the lake that 
afternoon, but I refused.  He made some other proposals that I 
rejected abruptly.  " I shall write in my room," I said.

"Why not write down here?"

"I shall write in my room," I snarled like a thwarted animal, and he 
looked at me curiously.  "Very well," he said; "then I'll make some 
notes and think about that order of ours out under the magnolias."

I hovered about the lounge for a time buying postcards and 
feverishly restless, watching the movements of the other people.  
Finally I went up to my room and sat down by the windows, staring 
out.  There came a little tap at the unlocked door and in an 
instant, like the go of a taut bowstring, I was up and had it open.

"Here is that book," she said, and we hesitated.

"COME IN!" I whispered, trembling from head to foot.

"You're just a boy," she said in a low tone.

I did not feel a bit like a lover, I felt like a burglar with the 
safe-door nearly opened.  "Come in," I said almost impatiently, for 
anyone might be in the passage, and I gripped her wrist and drew her 
towards me.

"What do you mean?" she answered with a faint smile on her lips, and 
awkward and yielding.

I shut the door behind her, still holding her with one hand, then 
turned upon her--she was laughing nervously--and without a word drew 
her to me and kissed her.  And I remember that as I kissed her she 
made a little noise almost like the purring miaow with which a cat 
will greet one and her face, close to mine, became solemn and 
tender.

She was suddenly a different being from the discontented wife who 
had tapped a moment since on my door, a woman transfigured. . . .

That evening I came down to dinner a monster of pride, for behold! I 
was a man.  I felt myself the most wonderful and unprecedented of 
adventurers.  It was hard to believe that any one in the world 
before had done as much.  My mistress and I met smiling, we carried 
things off admirably, and it seemed to me that Willersley was the 
dullest old dog in the world.  I wanted to give him advice.  I 
wanted to give him derisive pokes.  After dinner and coffee in the 
lounge I was too excited and hilarious to go to bed, I made him come 
with me down to the cafe under the arches by the pier, and there 
drank beer and talked extravagant nonsense about everything under 
the sun, in order not to talk about the happenings of the afternoon.  
All the time something shouted within me: "I am a man!  I am a 
man!" . . .

"What shall we do to-morrow?" said he.

"I'm for loafing," I said.  "Let's row in the morning and spend to-
morrow afternoon just as we did to-day."

"They say the church behind the town is worth seeing."

"We'll go up about sunset; that's the best time for it.  We can 
start about five."

We heard music, and went further along the arcade to discover a 
place where girls in operatic Swiss peasant costume were singing and 
dancing on a creaking, protesting little stage.  I eyed their 
generous display of pink neck and arm with the seasoned eye of a man 
who has lived in the world.  Life was perfectly simple and easy, I 
felt, if one took it the right way.

Next day Willersley wanted to go on, but I delayed.  Altogether I 
kept him back four days.  Then abruptly my mood changed, and we 
decided to start early the following morning.  I remember, though a 
little indistinctly, the feeling of my last talk with that woman 
whose surname, odd as it may seem, either I never learnt or I have 
forgotten.  (Her christian name was Milly.)  She was tired and 
rather low-spirited, and disposed to be sentimental, and for the 
first time in our intercourse I found myself liking her for the sake 
of her own personality.  There was something kindly and generous 
appearing behind the veil of naive and uncontrolled sensuality she 
had worn.  There was a curious quality of motherliness in her 
attitude to me that something in my nature answered and approved.  
She didn't pretend to keep it up that she had yielded to my 
initiative.  "I've done you no harm," she said a little doubtfully, 
an odd note for a man's victim!  And, "we've had a good time.  You 
have liked me, haven't you?"

She interested me in her lonely dissatisfied life; she was childless 
and had no hope of children, and her husband was the only son of a 
rich meat salesman, very mean, a mighty smoker--"he reeks of it," 
she said, "always"--and interested in nothing but golf, billiards 
(which he played very badly), pigeon shooting, convivial Free 
Masonry and Stock Exchange punting.  Mostly they drifted about the 
Riviera.  Her mother had contrived her marriage when she was 
eighteen.  They were the first samples I ever encountered of the 
great multitude of functionless property owners which encumbers 
modern civilisation--but at the time I didn't think much of that 
aspect of them. . . .

I tell all this business as it happened without comment, because I 
have no comment to make.  It was all strange to me, strange rather 
than wonderful, and, it may be, some dream of beauty died for ever 
in those furtive meetings; it happened to me, and I could scarcely 
have been more irresponsible in the matter or controlled events less 
if I had been suddenly pushed over a cliff into water.  I swam, of 
course--finding myself in it.  Things tested me, and I reacted, as I 
have told.  The bloom of my innocence, if ever there had been such a 
thing, was gone.  And here is the remarkable thing about it; at the 
time and for some days I was over-weeningly proud; I have never been 
so proud before or since; I felt I had been promoted to virility; I 
was unable to conceal my exultation from Willersley.  It was a mood 
of shining shameless ungracious self-approval.  As he and I went 
along in the cool morning sunshine by the rice fields in the throat 
of the Val Maggia a silence fell between us.

"You know?" I said abruptly,--"about that woman?"

Willersley did not answer for a moment.  He looked at me over the 
corner of his spectacles.

"Things went pretty far?" he asked.

"Oh! all the way!" and I had a twinge of fatuous pride in my 
unpremeditated achievement.

"She came to your room?"

I nodded.

"I heard her.  I heard her whispering. . . .  The whispering and 
rustling and so on.  I was in my room yesterday. . . .  Any one 
might have heard you."

I went on with my head in the air.

"You might have been caught, and that would have meant endless 
trouble.  You might have incurred all sorts of consequences.  What 
did you know about her? . . .  We have wasted four days in that hot 
close place.  When we found that League of Social Service we were 
talking about," he said with a determined eye upon me, "chastity 
will be first among the virtues prescribed."

"I shall form a rival league," I said a little damped.  "I'm hanged 
if I give up a single desire in me until I know why."

He lifted his chin and stared before him through his glasses at 
nothing.  "There are some things," he said, "that a man who means to 
work--to do great public services--MUST turn his back upon.  I'm not 
discussing the rights or wrongs of this sort of thing.  It happens 
to be the conditions we work under.  It will probably always be so.  
If you want to experiment in that way, if you want even to discuss 
it,--out you go from political life.  You must know that's so. . . .  
You're a strange man, Remington, with a kind of kink in you.  You've 
a sort of force.  You might happen to do immense things. . . .  
Only--"

He stopped.  He had said all that he had forced himself to say.

"I mean to take myself as I am," I said.  "I'm going to get 
experience for humanity out of all my talents--and bury nothing."

Willersley twisted his face to its humorous expression.  "I doubt if 
sexual proclivities," he said drily, come within the scope of the 
parable."

I let that go for a little while.  Then I broke out.  "Sex!" said I, 
"is a fundamental thing in life.  We went through all this at 
Trinity.  I'm going to look at it, experience it, think about it--
and get it square with the rest of life.  Career and Politics must 
take their chances of that.  It's part of the general English 
slackness that they won't look this in the face.  Gods! what a 
muffled time we're coming out of!  Sex means breeding, and breeding 
is a necessary function in a nation.  The Romans broke up upon that.  
The Americans fade out amidst their successes.  Eugenics--"

"THAT wasn't Eugenics," said Willersley.

"It was a woman," I said after a little interval, feeling oddly that 
I had failed altogether to answer him, and yet had a strong dumb 
case against him.



BOOK THE SECOND

MARGARET



CHAPTER THE FIRST

MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE


1

I must go back a little way with my story.  In the previous book I 
have described the kind of education that happens to a man of my 
class nowadays, and it has been convenient to leap a phase in my 
experience that I must now set out at length.  I want to tell in 
this second hook how I came to marry, and to do that I must give 
something of the atmosphere in which I first met my wife and some 
intimations of the forces that went to her making.  I met her in 
Staffordshire while I was staying with that uncle of whom I have 
already spoken, the uncle who sold my father's houses and settled my 
mother in Penge.  Margaret was twenty then and I was twenty-two.

It was just before the walking tour in Switzerland that opened up so 
much of the world to me.  I saw her once, for an afternoon, and 
circumstances so threw her up in relief that I formed a very vivid 
memory of her.  She was in the sharpest contrast with the industrial 
world about her; she impressed me as a dainty blue flower might do, 
come upon suddenly on a clinker heap.  She remained in my mind at 
once a perplexing interrogation and a symbol. . . .

But first I must tell of my Staffordshire cousins and the world that 
served as a foil for her.



2


I first went to stay with my cousins when I was an awkward youth of 
sixteen, wearing deep mourning for my mother.  My uncle wanted to 
talk things over with me, he said, and if he could, to persuade me 
to go into business instead of going up to Cambridge.

I remember that visit on account of all sorts of novel things, but 
chiefly, I think, because it was the first time I encountered 
anything that deserves to be spoken of as wealth.  For the first 
time in my life I had to do with people who seemed to have endless 
supplies of money, unlimited good clothes, numerous servants; whose 
daily life was made up of things that I had hitherto considered to 
be treats or exceptional extravagances.  My cousins of eighteen and 
nineteen took cabs, for instance, with the utmost freedom, and 
travelled first-class in the local trains that run up and down the 
district of the Five Towns with an entire unconsciousness of the 
magnificence, as it seemed to me, of such a proceeding.

The family occupied a large villa in Newcastle, with big lawns 
before it and behind, a shrubbery with quite a lot of shrubs, a 
coach house and stable, and subordinate dwelling-places for the 
gardener and the coachman.  Every bedroom contained a gas heater and 
a canopied brass bedstead, and had a little bathroom attached 
equipped with the porcelain baths and fittings my uncle 
manufactured, bright and sanitary and stamped with his name, and the 
house was furnished throughout with chairs and tables in bright 
shining wood, soft and prevalently red Turkish carpets, cosy 
corners, curtained archways, gold-framed landscapes, overmantels, a 
dining-room sideboard like a palace with a large Tantalus, and 
electric light fittings of a gay and expensive quality.  There was a 
fine billiard-room on the ground floor with three comfortable sofas 
and a rotating bookcase containing an excellent collection of the 
English and American humorists from THREE MEN IN A BOAT to the 
penultimate Mark Twain.  There was also a conservatory opening out 
of the dining-room, to which the gardener brought potted flowers in 
their season. . . .

My aunt was a little woman with a scared look and a cap that would 
get over one eye, not very like my mother, and nearly eight years 
her junior; she was very much concerned with keeping everything 
nice, and unmercifully bullied by my two cousins, who took after 
their father and followed the imaginations of their own hearts.  
They were tall, dark, warmly flushed girls handsome rather than 
pretty.  Gertrude, the eldest and tallest, had eyes that were almost 
black; Sibyl was of a stouter build, and her eyes, of which she was 
shamelessly proud, were dark blue.  Sibyl's hair waved, and 
Gertrude's was severely straight.  They treated me on my first visit 
with all the contempt of the adolescent girl for a boy a little 
younger and infinitely less expert in the business of life than 
herself.  They were very busy with the writings of notes and certain 
mysterious goings and comings of their own, and left me very much to 
my own devices.  Their speech in my presence was full of 
unfathomable allusions.  They were the sort of girls who will talk 
over and through an uninitiated stranger with the pleasantest sense 
of superiority.

I met them at breakfast and at lunch and at the half-past six 
o'clock high tea that formed the third chief meal of the day.  I 
heard them rattling off the compositions of Chaminade and Moskowski, 
with great decision and effect, and hovered on the edge of tennis 
foursomes where it was manifest to the dullest intelligence that my 
presence was unnecessary.  Then I went off to find some readable 
book in the place, but apart from miscellaneous popular novels, some 
veterinary works, a number of comic books, old bound volumes of THE 
ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS and a large, popular illustrated History of 
England, there was very little to be found.  My anut talked to me in 
a casual feeble way, chiefly about my motber's last illness.  The 
two bad seen very little of each other for many years; she made no 
secret of it that the ineligible qualities of my father were the 
cause of the estrangement.  The only other society in the house 
during the day was an old and rather decayed Skye terrier in 
constant conflict with what were no doubt imaginary fleas.  I took 
myself off for a series of walks, and acquired a considerable 
knowledge of the scenery and topography of the Potteries.

It puzzled my aunt that I did not go westward, where it was country-
side and often quite pretty, with hedgerows and fields and copses 
and flowers.  But always I went eastward, where in a long valley 
industrialism smokes and sprawls.  That was the stuff to which I 
turned by nature, to the human effort, and the accumulation and jar 
of men's activities.  And in such a country as that valley social 
and economic relations were simple and manifest.  Instead of the 
limitless confusion of London's population, in which no man can 
trace any but the most slender correlation between rich and poor, in 
which everyone seems disconnected and adrift from everyone, you can 
see here the works, the potbank or the ironworks or what not, and 
here close at hand the congested, meanly-housed workers, and at a 
little distance a small middle-class quarter, and again remoter, the 
big house of the employer.  It was like a very simplified diagram--
after the untraceable confusion of London.

I prowled alone, curious and interested, through shabby back streets 
of mean little homes; I followed canals, sometimes canals of 
mysteriously heated waters with ghostly wisps of steam rising 
against blackened walls or a distant prospect of dustbin-fed 
vegetable gardens, I saw the women pouring out from the potbanks, 
heard the hooters summoning the toilers to work, lost my way upon 
slag heaps as big as the hills of the south country, dodged trains 
at manifestly dangerous level crossings, and surveyed across dark 
intervening spaces, the flaming uproar, the gnome-like activities of 
iron foundries.  I heard talk of strikes and rumours of strikes, and 
learnt from the columns of some obscure labour paper I bought one 
day, of the horrors of the lead poisoning that was in those days one 
of the normal risks of certain sorts of pottery workers.  Then back 
I came, by the ugly groaning and clanging steam tram of that period, 
to my uncle's house and lavish abundance of money and more or less 
furtive flirtations and the tinkle of Moskowski and Chaminade.  It 
was, I say, diagrammatic.  One saw the expropriator and the 
expropriated--as if Marx had arranged the picture.  It was as 
jumbled and far more dingy and disastrous than any of the confusions 
of building and development that had surrounded my youth at 
Bromstead and Penge, but it had a novel quality of being explicable.  
I found great virtue in the word "exploitation."

There stuck in my mind as if it was symbolical of the whole thing 
the twisted figure of a man, whose face had been horribly scalded--I 
can't describe how, except that one eye was just expressionless 
white--and he ground at an organ bearing a card which told in weak 
and bitterly satirical phrasing that he had been scalded by the hot 
water from the tuyeres of the blast furnace of Lord Pandram's works.  
He had been scalded and quite inadequately compensated and 
dismissed.  And Lord Pandram was worth half a million.

That upturned sightless white eye of his took possession of my 
imagination.  I don't think that even then I was swayed by any crude 
melodramatic conception of injustice.  I was quite prepared to 
believe the card wasn't a punctiliously accurate statement of fact, 
and that a case could be made out for Lord Pandram.  Still there in 
the muddy gutter, painfully and dreadfully, was the man, and he was 
smashed and scalded and wretched, and he ground his dismal 
hurdygurdy with a weary arm, calling upon Heaven and the passer-by 
for help, for help and some sort of righting--one could not imagine 
quite what.  There he was as a fact, as a by-product of the system 
that heaped my cousins with trinkets and provided the comic novels 
and the abundant cigars and spacious billiard-room of my uncle's 
house.  I couldn't disconnect him and them.

My uncle on his part did nothing to conceal the state of war that 
existed between himself and his workers, and the mingled contempt 
and animosity he felt from them.



3


Prosperity had overtaken my uncle.  So quite naturally he believed 
that every man who was not as prosperous as he was had only himself 
to blame.  He was rich and he had left school and gone into his 
father's business at fifteen, and that seemed to him the proper age 
at which everyone's education should terminate.  He was very anxious 
to dissuade me from going up to Cambridge, and we argued 
intermittently through all my visit.

I had remembered him as a big and buoyant man, striding 
destructively about the nursery floor of my childhood, and saluting 
my existence by slaps, loud laughter, and questions about half 
herrings and half eggs subtly framed to puzzle and confuse my mind.  
I didn't see him for some years until my father's death, and then he 
seemed rather smaller, though still a fair size, yellow instead of 
red and much less radiantly aggressive.  This altered effect was due 
not so much to my own changed perspectives, I fancy, as to the facts 
that he was suffering for continuous cigar smoking, and being taken 
in hand by his adolescent daughters who had just returned from 
school.

During my first visit there was a perpetual series of--the only word 
is rows, between them and him.  Up to the age of fifteen or 
thereabouts, he had maintamed his ascendancy over them by simple 
old-fashioned physical chastisement.  Then after an interlude of a 
year it had dawned upon them that power had mysteriously departed 
from him.  He had tried stopping their pocket money, but they found 
their mother financially amenable; besides which it was fundamental 
to my uncle's attitude that he should give them money freely.  Not 
to do so would seem like admitting a difficulty in making it.  So 
that after he had stopped their allowances for the fourth time Sybil 
and Gertrude were prepared to face beggary without a qualm.  It had 
been his pride to give them the largest allowance of any girls at 
the school, not even excepting the granddaughter of Fladden the 
Borax King, and his soul recoiled from this discipline as it had 
never recoiled from the ruder method of the earlier phase.  Both 
girls had developed to a high pitch in their mutual recriminations a 
gift for damaging retort, and he found it an altogether deadlier 
thing than the power of the raised voice that had always cowed my 
aunt.  Whenever he became heated with them, they frowned as if 
involuntarily, drew in their breath sharply, said: "Daddy, you 
really must not say --" and corrected his pronunciation.  Then, at a 
great advantage, they resumed the discussion. . . .

My uncle's views about Cambridge, however, were perfectly clear and 
definite.  It was waste of time and money.  It was all damned 
foolery.  Did they make a man a better business man?  Not a bit of 
it.  He gave instances.  It spoilt a man for business by giving him 
"false ideas."  Some men said that at college a man formed useful 
friendships.  What use were friendships to a business man?  He might 
get to know lords, but, as my uncle pointed out, a lord's 
requirements in his line of faience were little greater than a 
common  man's.  If college introduced him to hotel proprietors there 
might be something in it.  Perhaps it helped a man into Parliament, 
Parliament still being a confused retrogressive corner in the world 
where lawyers and suchlike sheltered themselves from the onslaughts 
of common-sense behind a fog of Latin and Greek and twaddle and 
tosh; but I wasn't the sort to go into Parliament, unless I meant to 
be a lawyer.  Did I mean to be a lawyer?  It cost no end of money, 
and was full of uncertainties, and there were no judges nor great 
solicitors among my relations.  "Young chaps think they get on by 
themselves," said my uncle.  It isn't so.  Not unless they take 
their coats off.  I took mine off before I was your age by nigh a 
year."

We were at cross purposes from the outset, because I did not think 
men lived to make money; and I was obtuse to the hints he was 
throwing out at the possibilities of his own potbank, not willfully 
obtuse, but just failing to penetrate his meaning.  Whatever City 
Merchants had or had not done for me, Flack, Topham and old Gates 
had certainly barred my mistaking the profitable production and sale 
of lavatory basins and bathroom fittings for the highest good.  It 
was only upon reflection that it dawned upon me that the splendid 
chance for a young fellow with my uncle, "me, having no son of my 
own," was anything but an illustration for comparison with my own 
chosen career.

I still remember very distinctly my uncle's talk,--he loved to speak 
"reet Staffordshire"--his rather flabby face with the mottled 
complexion that told of crude ill-regulated appetites, his clumsy 
gestures--he kept emphasising his points by prodding at me with his 
finger--the ill-worn, costly, grey tweed clothes, the watch chain of 
plain solid gold, and soft felt hat thrust back from his head.  He 
tackled me first in the garden after lunch, and then tried to raise 
me to enthusiasm by taking me to his potbank and showing me its 
organisation, from the dusty grinding mills in which whitened men 
worked and coughed, through the highly ventilated glazing room in 
which strangely masked girls looked ashamed of themselves,--"They'll 
risk death, the fools, to show their faces to a man," said my uncle, 
quite audibly--to the firing kilns and the glazing kilns, and so 
round the whole place to the railway siding and the gratifying 
spectacle of three trucks laden with executed orders.

Then we went up a creaking outside staircase to his little office, 
and he showed off before me for a while, with one or two 
subordinates and the telephone.

"None of your Gas," he said, "all this.  It's Real every bit of it.  
Hard cash and hard glaze."

"Yes," I said, with memories of a carelessly read pamphlet in my 
mind, and without any satirical intention, "I suppose you MUST use 
lead in your glazes?"

Whereupon I found I had tapped the ruling grievance of my uncle's 
life.  He hated leadless glazes more than he hated anything, except 
the benevolent people who had organised the agitation for their use.  
"Leadless glazes ain't only fit for buns," he said.  "Let me tell 
you, my boy--"

He began in a voice of bland persuasiveness that presently warmed to 
anger, to explain the whole matter.  I hadn't the rights of the 
matter at all.  Firstly, there was practically no such thing as lead 
poisoning.  Secondly, not everyone was liable to lead poisoning, and 
it would be quite easy to pick out the susceptible types--as soon as 
they had it--and put them to other work.  Thirdly, the evil effects 
of lead poisoning were much exaggerated.  Fourthly, and this was in 
a particularly confidential undertone, many of the people liked to 
get lead poisoning, especially the women, because it caused 
abortion.  I might not believe it, but he knew it for a fact.  
Fifthly, the work-people simply would not learn the gravity of the 
danger, and would eat with unwashed hands, and incur all sorts of 
risks, so that as my uncle put it: "the fools deserve what they 
get."  Sixthly, he and several associated firms had organised a 
simple and generous insurance scheme against lead-poisoning risks.  
Seventhly, he never wearied in rational (as distinguished from 
excessive, futile and expensive) precautions against the disease.  
Eighthly, in the ill-equipped shops of his minor competitors lead 
poisoning was a frequent and virulent evil, and people had 
generalised from these exceptional cases.  The small shops, he 
hazarded, looking out of the cracked and dirty window at distant 
chimneys, might be advantageously closed. . . .

"But what's the good of talking?" said my uncle, getting off the 
table on which he had been sitting.  "Seems to me there'll come a 
time when a master will get fined if he don't run round the works 
blowing his girls noses for them.  That's about what it'll come to."

He walked to the black mantelpiece and stood on the threadbare rug, 
and urged me not to be misled by the stories of prejudiced and 
interested enemies of our national industries.

"They'll get a strike one of these days, of employers, and then 
we'll see a bit," he said.  "They'll drive Capital abroad and then 
they'll whistle to get it back again." . . .

He led the way down the shaky wooden steps and cheered up to tell me 
of his way of checking his coal consumption.  He exchanged a 
ferocious greeting with one or two workpeople, and so we came out of 
the factory gates into the ugly narrow streets, paved with a 
peculiarly hard diapered brick of an unpleasing inky-blue colour, 
and bordered with the mean and squalid homes of his workers.  Doors 
stood open and showed grimy interiors, and dirty ill-clad children 
played in the kennel.

We passed a sickly-looking girl with a sallow face, who dragged her 
limbs and peered at us dimly with painful eyes.  She stood back, as 
partly blinded people will do, to allow us to pass, although there 
was plenty of room for us.

I glanced back at her.

"THAT'S ploombism " said my uncle casually.

"What?" said I.

"Ploombism.  And the other day I saw a fool of a girl, and what 
d'you think?  She'd got a basin that hadn't been fired, a cracked 
piece of biscuit it was, up on the shelf over her head, just all 
over glaze, killing glaze, man, and she was putting up her hand if 
you please, and eating her dinner out of it.  Got her dinner in it!

"Eating her dinner out of it," he repeated in loud and bitter tones, 
and punched me hard in the ribs.

"And then they comes to THAT--and grumbles.  And the fools up in 
Westminster want you to put in fans here and fans there--the Longton 
fools have. . . .  And then eating their dinners out of it all the 
time!" . . .

At high tea that night--my uncle was still holding out against 
evening dinner--Sibyl and Gertrude made what was evidently a 
concerted demand for a motorcar.

"You've got your mother's brougham," he said, that's good enough for 
you."  But he seemed shaken by the fact that some Burslem rival was 
launching out with the new invention.  "He spoils his girls," he 
remarked.  "He's a fool," and became thoughtful.

Afterwards he asked me to come to him into his study; it was a room 
with a writing-desk and full of pieces of earthenware and suchlike 
litter, and we had our great row about Cambridge.

"Have you thought things over, Dick?" he said.

"I think I'll go to Trinity, Uncle," I said firmly.  "I want to go 
to Trinity.  It is a great college."

He was manifestly chagrined.  "You're a fool," he said.

I made no answer.

"You're a damned fool," he said.  "But I suppose you've got to do 
it.  You could have come here--That don't matter, though, now. . .  
You'll have your time and spend your money, and be a poor half-
starved clergyman, mucking about with the women all the day and 
afraid to have one of your own ever, or you'll be a schoolmaster or 
some such fool for the rest of your life.  Or some newspaper chap.   
That's what you'll get from Cambridge.  I'm half a mind not to let 
you.  Eh?  More than half a mind. . . ."

"You've got to do the thing you can," he said, after a pause, "and 
likely it's what you're fitted for."



4


I paid several short visits to Staffordshire during my Cambridge 
days, and always these relations of mine produced the same effect of 
hardness.   My uncle's thoughts had neither atmosphere nor mystery.   
He lived in a different universe from the dreams of scientific 
construction that filled my mind.  He could as easily have 
understood Chinese poetry.  His motives were made up of intense 
rivalries with other men of his class and kind, a few vindictive 
hates springing from real and fancied slights, a habit of 
acquisition that had become a second nature, a keen love both of 
efficiency and display in his own affairs.  He seemed to me to have 
no sense of the state, no sense and much less any love of beauty, no 
charity and no sort of religious feeling whatever.  He had strong 
bodily appetites, he ate and drank freely, smoked a great deal, and 
occasionally was carried off by his passions for a "bit of a spree" 
to Birmingham or Liverpool or Manchester.  The indulgences of these 
occasions were usually followed by a period of reaction, when he was 
urgent for the suppression of nudity in the local Art Gallery and a 
harsh and forcible elevation of the superficial morals of the 
valley.  And he spoke of the ladies who ministered to the delights 
of his jolly-dog period, when he spoke of them at all, by the 
unprintable feminine equivalent.  My aunt he treated with a kindly 
contempt and considerable financial generosity, but his daughters 
tore his heart; he was so proud of them, so glad to find them money 
to spend, so resolved to own them, so instinctively jealous of every 
man who came near them.

My uncle has been the clue to a great number of men for me.  He was 
an illuminating extreme.  I have learnt what not to expect from them 
through him, and to comprehend resentments and dangerous sudden 
antagonisms I should have found incomprehensible in their more 
complex forms, if I had not first seen them in him in their feral 
state.

With his soft felt hat at the back of his head, his rather heavy, 
rather mottled face, his rationally thick boots and slouching tweed-
clad form, a little round-shouldered and very obstinate looking, he 
strolls through all my speculations sucking his teeth audibly, and 
occasionally throwing out a shrewd aphorism, the intractable 
unavoidable ore of the new civilisation.

Essentially he was simple.  Generally speaking, he hated and 
despised in equal measure whatever seemed to suggest that he 
personally was not the most perfect human being conceivable.  He 
hated all education after fifteen because he had had no education 
after fifteen, he hated all people who did not have high tea until 
he himself under duress gave up high tea, he hated every game except 
football, which he had played and could judge, he hated all people 
who spoke foreign languages because he knew no language but 
Staffordshire, he hated all foreigners because he was English, and 
all foreign ways because they were not his ways.  Also he hated 
particularly, and in this order, Londoner's, Yorkshiremen, Scotch, 
Welch and Irish, because they were not "reet Staffordshire," and he 
hated all other Staffordshire men as insufficiently "reet."  He 
wanted to have all his own women inviolate, and to fancy he had a 
call upon every other woman in the world.  He wanted to have the 
best cigars and the best brandy in the world to consume or give away 
magnificently, and every one else to have inferior ones.  (His 
billiard table was an extra large size, specially made and very 
inconvenient.)  And he hated Trade Unions because they interfered 
with his autocratic direction of his works, and his workpeople 
because they were not obedient and untiring mechanisms to do his 
bidding.  He was, in fact, a very naive, vigorous human being.  He 
was about as much civilised, about as much tamed to the ideas of 
collective action and mutual consideration as a Central African 
negro.

There are hordes of such men as he throughout all the modern 
industrial world.  You will find the same type with the slightest 
modifications in the Pas de Calais or Rhenish Prussia or New Jersey 
or North Italy.  No doubt you would find it in New Japan.  These men 
have raised themselves up from the general mass of untrained, 
uncultured, poorish people in a hard industrious selfish struggle.  
To drive others they have had first to drive themselves.  They have 
never yet had occasion nor leisure to think of the state or social 
life as a whole, and as for dreams or beauty, it was a condition of 
survival that they should ignore such cravings.  All the distinctive 
qualities of my uncle can be thought of as dictated by his 
conditions; his success and harshness, the extravagances that 
expressed his pride in making money, the uncongenial luxury that 
sprang from rivalry, and his self-reliance, his contempt for broad 
views, his contempt for everything that he could not understand.

His daughters were the inevitable children of his life.  Queer girls 
they were!  Curiously "spirited" as people phrase it, and curiously 
limited.  During my Cambridge days I went down to Staffordshire 
several times.  My uncle, though he still resented my refusal to go 
into his business, was also in his odd way proud of me.  I was his 
nephew and poor relation, and yet there I was, a young gentleman 
learning all sorts of unremunerative things in the grandest manner, 
"Latin and mook," while the sons of his neighhours, not nephews 
merely, but sons, stayed unpolished in their native town.  Every 
time I went down I found extensive changes and altered relations, 
and before I had settled down to them off I went again.  I don't 
think I was one person to them; I was a series of visitors.  There 
is a gulf of ages between a gaunt schoolboy of sixteen in unbecoming 
mourning and two vividly self-conscious girls of eighteen and 
nineteen, but a Cambridge "man" of two and twenty with a first and 
good tennis and a growing social experience, is a fair contemporary 
for two girls of twenty-three and twenty-four.

A motor-car appeared, I think in my second visit, a bottle-green 
affair that opened behind, had dark purple cushions, and was 
controlled mysteriously by a man in shiny black costume and a flat 
cap.  The high tea had been shifted to seven and rechristened 
dinner, but my uncle would not dress nor consent to have wine; and 
after one painful experiment, I gathered, and a scene, he put his 
foot down and prohibited any but high-necked dresses.

"Daddy's perfectly impossible," Sybil told me.

The foot had descended vehemently!  "My own daughters!" he had said, 
"dressed up like --"--and had arrested himself and fumbled and 
decided to say--"actresses, and showin' their fat arms for every 
fool to stare at!"  Nor would he have any people invited to dinner.  
He didn't, he had explained, want strangers poking about in his 
house when he came home tired.  So such calling as occurred went on 
during his absence in the afternoon.

One of the peculiarities of the life of these ascendant families of 
the industrial class to which wealth has come, is its tremendous 
insulations.  There were no customs of intercourse in the Five 
Towns.   All the isolated prosperities of the district sprang from 
economising, hard driven homes, in which there was neither time nor 
means for hospitality.  Social intercourse centred very largely upon 
the church or chapel, and the chapels were better at bringing people 
together than the Establishment to which my cousins belonged.  Their 
chief outlet to the wider world lay therefore through the 
acquaintances they had formed at school, and through two much less 
prosperous families of relations who lived at Longton and Hanley.  A 
number of gossiping friendships with old school mates were "kept 
up," and my cousins would "spend the afternoon" or even spend the 
day with these; such occasions led to other encounters and 
interlaced with the furtive correspondences and snatched meetings 
that formed the emotional thread of their lives.  When the billiard 
table had been new, my uncle had taken to asking in a few approved 
friends for an occasional game, but mostly the billiard-room was for 
glory and the girls.  Both of them played very well.  They never, so 
far as I know, dined out, and when at last after bitter domestic 
conflicts they began to go to dances, they went with the quavering 
connivance of my aunt, and changed into ball frocks at friends' 
houses on the way.  There was a tennis club that formed a convenient 
afternoon rendezvous, and I recall that in the period of my earlier 
visits the young bloods of the district found much satisfaction in 
taking girls for drives in dog-carts and suchlike high-wheeled 
vehicles, a disposition that died in tangled tandems at the 
apparition of motor-car's.

My aunt and uncle had conceived no plans in life for their daughters 
at all.  In the undifferentiated industrial community from which 
they had sprung, girls got married somehow, and it did not occur to 
them that the concentration of property that had made them wealthy, 
had cut their children off from the general social sea in which 
their own awkward meeting had occurred, without necessarily opening 
any other world in exchange.  My uncle was too much occupied with 
the works and his business affairs and his private vices to 
philosophise about his girls; he wanted them just to keep girls, 
preferably about sixteen, and to be a sort of animated flowers and 
make home bright and be given things.  He was irritated that they 
would not remain at this, and still more irritated that they failed 
to suppress altogether their natural interest in young men.  The 
tandems would be steered by weird and devious routes to evade the 
bare chance of his bloodshot eye.  My aunt seemed to have no ideas 
whatever about what was likely to happen to her children.  She had 
indeed no ideas about anything; she took her husband and the days as 
they came.

I can see now the pathetic difficulty of my cousins' position in 
life; the absence of any guidance or instruction or provision for 
their development.  They supplemented the silences of home by the 
conversation of schoolfellows and the suggestions of popular 
fiction.  They had to make what they could out of life with such 
hints as these.  The church was far too modest to offer them any 
advice.  It was obtruded upon my mind upon my first visit that they 
were both carrying on correspondences and having little furtive 
passings and seeings and meetings with the mysterious owners of 
certain initials, S. and L. K., and, if I remember rightly, "the R. 
N." brothers and cousins, I suppose, of their friends.  The same 
thing was going on, with a certain intensification, at my next 
visit, excepting only that the initials were different.  But when I 
came again their methods were maturer or I was no longer a 
negligible quantity, and the notes and the initials were no longer 
flaunted quite so openly in my face.

My cousins had worked it out from the indications of their universe 
that the end of life is to have a "good time."  They used the 
phrase.  That and the drives in dog-carts were only the first of 
endless points of resemblance between them and the commoner sort of 
American girl.  When some years ago I paid my first and only visit 
to America I seemed to recover my cousins' atmosphere as soon as I 
entered the train at Euston.  There were three girls in my 
compartment supplied with huge decorated cases of sweets, and being 
seen off by a company of friends, noisily arch and eager about the 
"steamer letters" they would get at Liverpool; they were the very 
soul-sisters of my cousins.  The chief elements of a good time, as 
my cousins judged it, as these countless thousands of rich young 
women judge it, are a petty eventfulness, laughter, and to feel that 
you are looking well and attracting attention.  Shopping is one of 
its leading joys.  You buy things, clothes and trinkets for yourself 
and presents for your friends.  Presents always seemed to be flying 
about in that circle; flowers and boxes of sweets were common 
currency.  My cousins were always getting and giving, my uncle 
caressed them with parcels and cheques.  They kissed him and he 
exuded sovereigns as a stroked APHIS exudes honey.  It was like the 
new language of the Academy of Lagado to me, and I never learnt how 
to express myself in it, for nature and training make me feel 
encumbered to receive presents and embarrassed in giving them.  But 
then, like my father, I hate and distrust possessions.

Of the quality of their private imagination I never learnt anything; 
I suppose it followed the lines of the fiction they read and was 
romantic and sentimental.  So far as marriage went, the married 
state seemed at once very attractive and dreadfully serious to them, 
composed in equal measure of becoming important and becoming old.  I 
don't know what they thought about children.  I doubt if they 
thought about them at all.  It was very secret if they did.

As for the poor and dingy people all about them, my cousins were 
always ready to take part in a Charitable Bazaar.  They were unaware 
of any economic correlation of their own prosperity and that 
circumambient poverty, and they knew of Trade Unions simply as 
disagreeable external things that upset my uncle's temper.  They 
knew of nothing wrong in social life at all except that there were 
"Agitators."  It surprised them a little, I think, that Agitators 
were not more drastically put down.  But they had a sort of 
instinctive dread of social discussion as of something that might 
breach the happiness of their ignorance. . . .



5


My cousins did more than illustrate Marx for me; they also undertook 
a stage of my emotional education.  Their method in that as in 
everything else was extremely simple, but it took my inexperience by 
surprise.

It must have been on my third visit that Sybil took me in hand.  
Hitherto I seemed to have seen her only in profile, but now she 
became almost completely full face, manifestly regarded me with 
those violet eyes of hers.  She passed me things I needed at 
breakfast--it was the first morning of my visit--before I asked for 
them.

When young men are looked at by pretty cousins, they become 
intensely aware of those cousins.   It seemed to me that I had 
always admired Sybil's eyes very greatly, and that there was 
something in her temperament congenial to mine.  It was odd I had 
not noted it on my previous visits.

We walked round the garden somewhen that morning, and talked about 
Cambridge.  She asked quite a lot of questions about my work and my 
ambitions.  She said she had always felt sure I was clever.

The conversation languished a little, and we picked some flowers for 
the house.  Then she asked if I could run.  I conceded her various 
starts and we raced up and down the middle garden path.   Then, a 
little breathless, we went into the new twenty-five guinea summer-
house at the end of the herbaceous border.

We sat side by side, pleasantly hidden from the house, and she 
became anxious about her hair, which was slightly and prettily 
disarranged, and asked me to help her with the adjustment of a 
hairpin.  I had never in my life been so near the soft curly hair 
and the dainty eyebrow and eyelid and warm soft cheek of a girl, and 
I was stirred--

It stirs me now to recall it.

I became a battleground of impulses and inhibitions.

"Thank you," said my cousin, and moved a little away from me.

She began to talk about friendship, and lost her thread and forgot 
the little electric stress between us in a rather meandering 
analysis of her principal girl friends.

But afterwards she resumed her purpose.

I went to bed that night with one propostion overshadowing 
everything else in my mind, namely, that kissing my cousin Sybil was 
a difficult, but not impossible, achievement.  I do not recall any 
shadow of a doubt whether on the whole it was worth doing.  The 
thing had come into my existence, disturbing and interrupting its 
flow exactly as a fever does.  Sybil had infected me with herself.

The next day matters came to a crisis in the little upstairs 
sitting-room which had been assigned me as a study during my visit.  
I was working up there, or rather trying to work in spite of the 
outrageous capering of some very primitive elements in my brain, 
book.

I turned round and then got up at the sight of her.  I quite forget 
what our conversation was about, but I know she led me to believe I 
might kiss her.  Then when I attempted to do so she averted her 
face.

"How COULD you?" she said; "I didn't mean that!"

That remained the state of our relations for two days.  I developed 
a growing irritation with and resentment against cousin Sybil, 
combined with an intense desire to get that kiss for which I 
hungered and thirsted.  Cousin Sybil went about in the happy 
persuasion that I was madly in love with her, and her game, so far 
as she was concerned, was played and won.  It wasn't until I had 
fretted for two days that I realised that I was being used for the 
commonest form of excitement possible to a commonplace girl; that 
dozens perhaps of young men had played the part of Tantalus at 
cousin Sybil's lips.  I walked about my room at nights, damning her 
and calling her by terms which on the whole she rather deserved, 
while Sybil went to sleep pitying "poor old Dick!"

"Damn it!" I said, "I WILL be equal with you."

But I never did equalise the disadvantage, and perhaps it's as well, 
for I fancy that sort of revenge cuts both people too much for a 
rational man to seek it. . . .   

"Why are men so silly?" said cousin Sybil next morning, wriggling 
back with down-bent head to release herself from what should have 
been a compelling embrace.

"Confound it!" I said with a flash of clear vision.  "You STARTED 
this game."

"Oh!"

She stood back against a hedge of roses, a little flushed and 
excited and interested, and ready for the delightful defensive if I 
should renew my attack.

"Beastly hot for scuffling," I said, white with anger.  "I don't 
know whether I'm so keen on kissing you, Sybil, after all.  I just 
thought you wanted me to."

I could have whipped her, and my voice stung more than my words.

Our eyes met; a real hatred in hers leaping up to meet mine.

"Let's play tennis," I said, after a moment's pause.

"No," she answered shortly, "I'm going indoors."

"Very well."

And that ended the affair with Sybil.

I was still in the full glare of this disillusionment when Gertrude 
awoke from some preoccupation to an interest in my existence.  She 
developed a disposition to touch my hand by accident, and let her 
fingers rest in contact with it for a moment,--she had pleasant soft 
hands;--she began to drift into summer houses with me, to let her 
arm rest trustfully against mine, to ask questions about Cambridge.  
They were much the same questions that Sybil had asked.  But I 
controlled myself and maintained a profile of intelligent and 
entirely civil indifference to her blandishments.

What Gertrude made of it came out one evening in some talk--I forget 
about what--with Sybil.

"Oh, Dick!" said Gertrude a little impatiently, "Dick's Pi."

And I never disillusioned her by any subsequent levity from this 
theory of my innate and virginal piety.



6


It was against this harsh and crude Staffordshire background that I 
think I must have seen Margaret for the first time.  I say I think 
because it is quite possible that we had passed each other in the 
streets of Cambridge, no doubt with that affectation of mutual 
disregard which was once customary between undergraduates and 
Newnham girls.  But if that was so I had noted nothing of the 
slender graciousness that shone out so pleasingly against the 
bleaker midland surroundings.

She was a younger schoolfellow of my cousins', and the step-daughter 
of Seddon, a prominent solicitor of Burslem.  She was not only not 
in my cousins' generation but not in their set, she was one of a 
small hardworking group who kept immaculate note-books, and did as 
much as is humanly possible of that insensate pile of written work 
that the Girls' Public School movement has inflicted upon school-
girls.  She really learnt French and German admirably and 
thoroughly, she got as far in mathematics as an unflinching industry 
can carry any one with no great natural aptitude, and she went up to 
Bennett Hall, Newnham, after the usual conflict with her family, to 
work for the History Tripos.

There in her third year she made herself thoroughly ill through 
overwork, so ill that she had to give up Newnham altogether and go 
abroad with her stepmother.  She made herself ill, as so many girls 
do in those university colleges, through the badness of her home and 
school training.  She thought study must needs be a hard straining 
of the mind.  She worried her work, she gave herself no leisure to 
see it as a whole, she felt herself not making headway and she cut 
her games and exercise in order to increase her hours of toil, and 
worked into the night.  She carried a knack of laborious 
thoroughness into the blind alleys and inessentials of her subject.  
It didn't need the badness of the food for which Bennett Hall is 
celebrated and the remarkable dietary of nocturnal cocoa, cakes and 
soft biscuits with which the girls have supplemented it, to ensure 
her collapse.  Her mother brought her home, fretting and distressed, 
and then finding her hopelessly unhappy at home, took her and her 
half-brother, a rather ailing youngster of ten who died three years 
later, for a journey to Italy.

Italy did much to assuage Margaret's chagrin.  I think all three of 
them had a very good time there.  At home Mr. Seddon, her step-
father, played the part of a well-meaning blight by reason of the 
moods that arose from nervous dyspepsia.  They went to Florence, 
equipped with various introductions and much sound advice from 
sympathetic Cambridge friends, and having acquired an ease in Italy 
there, went on to Siena, Orvieto, and at last Rome.  They returned, 
if I remember rightly, by Pisa, Genoa, Milan and Paris.  Six months 
or more they had had abroad, and now Margaret was back in Burslem, 
in health again and consciously a very civilised person.

New ideas were abroad, it was Maytime and a spring of abundant 
flowers--daffodils were particularly good that year--and Mrs. Seddon 
celebrated her return by giving an afternoon reception at short 
notice, with the clear intention of letting every one out into the 
garden if the weather held.

The Seddons had a big old farmhouse modified to modern ideas of 
comfort on the road out towards Misterton, with an orchard that had 
been rather pleasantly subdued from use to ornament.  It had rich 
blossoming cherry and apple trees.  Large patches of grass full of 
nodding yellow trumpets had been left amidst the not too precisely 
mown grass, which was as it were grass path with an occasional lapse 
into lawn or glade.  And Margaret, hatless, with the fair hair above 
her thin, delicately pink face very simply done, came to meet our 
rather too consciously dressed party,--we had come in the motor four 
strong, with my aunt in grey silk.  Margaret wore a soft flowing 
flowered blue dress of diaphanous material, all unconnected with the 
fashion and tied with pretty ribbons, like a slenderer, unbountiful 
Primavera.

It was one of those May days that ape the light and heat of summer, 
and I remember disconnectedly quite a number of brightly lit figures 
and groups walking about, and a white gate between orchard and 
garden and a large lawn with an oak tree and a red Georgian house 
with a verandah and open French windows, through which the tea 
drinking had come out upon the moss-edged flagstones even as Mrs. 
Seddon had planned.

The party was almost entirely feminine except for a little curate 
with a large head, a good voice and a radiant manner, who was 
obviously attracted by Margaret, and two or three young husbands 
still sufficiently addicted to their wives to accompany them.  One 
of them I recall as a quite romantic figure with abundant blond 
curly hair on which was poised a grey felt hat encircled by a 
refined black band.  He wore, moreover, a loose rich shot silk tie 
of red and purple, a long frock coat, grey trousers and brown shoes, 
and presently he removed his hat and carried it in one hand.  There 
were two tennis-playing youths besides myself.  There was also one 
father with three daughters in anxious control, a father of the old 
school scarcely half broken in, reluctant, rebellious and 
consciously and conscientiously "reet Staffordshire."  The daughters 
were all alert to suppress the possible plungings, the undesirable 
humorous impulses of this almost feral guest.  They nipped his very 
gestures in the bud.  The rest of the people were mainly mothers 
with daughters--daughters of all ages, and a scattering of aunts, 
and there was a tendency to clotting, parties kept together and 
regarded parties suspiciously.  Mr. Seddon was in hiding, I think, 
all the time, though not formally absent.

Matters centred upon the tea in the long room of the French windows, 
where four trim maids went to and fro busily between the house and 
the clumps of people seated or standing before it; and tennis and 
croquet were intermittently visible and audible beyond a bank of 
rockwork rich with the spikes and cups and bells of high spring.

Mrs.  Seddon presided at the tea urn, and Margaret partly assisted 
and partly talked to me and my cousin Sibyl--Gertrude had found a 
disused and faded initial and was partnering him at tennis in a 
state of gentle revival--while their mother exercised a divided 
chaperonage from a seat near Mrs. Seddon.  The little curate, 
stirring a partially empty cup of tea, mingled with our party, and 
preluded, I remember, every observation he made by a vigorous 
resumption of stirring.

We talked of Cambridge, and Margaret kept us to it.  The curate was 
a Selwyn man and had taken a pass degree in theology, but Margaret 
had come to Gaylord's lecturers in Trinity for a term before her 
breakdown, and understood these differences.  She had the eagerness 
of an exile to hear the old familiar names of places and 
personalities.  We capped familiar anecdotes and were enthusiastic 
about Kings' Chapel and the Backs, and the curate, addressing 
himself more particularly to Sibyl, told a long confused story 
illustrative of his disposition to reckless devilry (of a pure-
minded kindly sort) about upsetting two canoes quite needlessly on 
the way to Grantchester.

I can still see Margaret as I saw her that afternoon, see her fresh 
fair face, with the little obliquity of the upper lip, and her brow 
always slightly knitted, and her manner as of one breathlessly shy 
but determined.  She had rather open blue eyes, and she spoke in an 
even musical voice with the gentlest of stresses and the ghost of a 
lisp.  And it was true, she gathered, that Cambridge still existed.  
"I went to Grantchester," she said, "last year, and had tea under 
the apple-blossom.  I didn't think then I should have to come down."  
(It was that started the curate upon his anecdote.)

"I've seen a lot of pictures, and learnt a lot about them--at the 
Pitti and the Brera,--the Brera is wonderful--wonderful places,--but 
it isn't like real study," she was saying presently. . . .  "We 
bought bales of photographs," she said.

I thought the bales a little out of keeping.

But fair-haired and quite simply and yet graciously and fancifully 
dressed, talking of art and beautiful things and a beautiful land, 
and with so much manifest regret for learning denied, she seemed a 
different kind of being altogether from my smart, hard, high-
coloured, black-haired and resolutely hatted cousin; she seemed 
translucent beside Gertrude.  Even the little twist and droop of her 
slender body was a grace to me.

I liked her from the moment I saw her, and set myself to interest 
and please her as well as I knew how.

We recalled a case of ragging that had rustled the shrubs of 
Newnham, and then Chris Robinson's visit--he had given a talk to 
Bennett Hall also--and our impression of him.

"He disappointed me, too," said Margaret.

I was moved to tell Margaret something of my own views in the matter 
of social progress, and she listened--oh! with a kind of urged 
attention, and her brow a little more knitted, very earnestly.  The 
little curate desisted from the appendices and refuse heaps and 
general debris of his story, and made himself look very alert and 
intelligent.

"We did a lot of that when I was up in the eighties," he said.  "I'm 
glad Imperialism hasn't swamped you fellows altogether."

Gertrude, looking bright and confident, came to join our talk from 
the shrubbery; the initial, a little flushed and evidently in a 
state of refreshed relationship, came with her, and a cheerful lady 
in pink and more particularly distinguished by a pink bonnet joined 
our little group.  Gertrude had been sipping admiration and was not 
disposed to play a passive part in the talk.

"Socialism!" she cried, catching the word.  "It's well Pa isn't 
here.  He has Fits when people talk of socialism.  Fits!"

The initial laughed in a general kind of way.

The curate said there was socialism AND socialism, and looked at 
Margaret to gauge whether he had been too bold in this utterance.  
But she was all, he perceived, for broad-mindness, and he stirred 
himself (and incidentally his tea) to still more liberality of 
expression.  He said the state of the poor was appalling, simply 
appalling; that there were times when he wanted to shatter the whole 
system, "only," he said, turning to me appealingly, "What have we 
got to put in its place?"

"The thing that exists is always the more evident alternative," I 
said.

The little curate looked at it for a moment.  "Precisely," he said 
explosively, and turned stirring and with his head a little on one 
side, to hear what Margaret was saying.

Margaret was saying, with a swift blush and an effect of daring, 
that she had no doubt she was a socialist.

"And wearing a gold chain!" said Gertrude, "And drinking out of 
eggshell!  I like that!"

I came to Margaret's rescue.  "It doesn't follow that because one's 
a socialist one ought to dress in sackcloth and ashes."

The initial coloured deeply, and having secured my attention by 
prodding me slightly with the wrist of the hand that held his 
teacup, cleared his throat and suggested that "one ought to be 
consistent."

I perceived we were embarked upon a discussion of the elements.  We 
began an interesting little wrangle one of those crude discussions 
of general ideas that are dear to the heart of youth.  I and 
Margaret supported one another as socialists, Gertrude and Sybil and 
the initial maintained an anti-socialist position, the curate 
attempted a cross-bench position with an air of intending to come 
down upon us presently with a casting vote.  He reminded us of a 
number of useful principles too often overlooked in argument, that 
in a big question like this there was much to be said on both sides, 
that if every one did his or her duty to every one about them there 
would be no difficulty with social problems at all, that over and 
above all enactments we needed moral changes in people themselves.  
My cousin Gertrude was a difficult controversialist to manage, being 
unconscious of inconsistency in statement and absolutely impervious 
to reply.  Her standpoint was essentially materialistic; she didn't 
see why she shouldn't have a good time because other people didn't; 
they would have a good time, she was sure, if she didn't.  She said 
that if we did give up everything we had to other people, they 
wouldn't very likely know what to do with it.  She asked if we were 
so fond of work-people, why we didn't go and live among them, and 
expressed the inflexible persuasion that if we HAD socialism, 
everything would be just the same again in ten years' time.  She 
also threw upon us the imputation of ingratitude for a beautiful 
world by saying that so far as she was concerned she didn't want to 
upset everything.  She was contented with things as they were, thank 
you.

The discussion led in some way that I don't in the least recall now, 
and possibly by abrupt transitions, to a croquet foursome in which 
Margaret involved the curate without involving herself, and then 
stood beside me on the edge of the lawn while the others played.  We 
watched silently for a moment.

"I HATE that sort of view," she said suddenly in a confidential 
undertone, with her delicate pink flush returning.

"It's want of imagination," I said.

"To think we are just to enjoy ourselves," she went on; "just to go 
on dressing and playing and having meals and spending money!"  She 
seemed to be referring not simply to my cousins, but to the whole 
world of industry and property about us.  "But what is one to do?" 
she asked.  "I do wish I had not had to come down.  It's all so 
pointless here.  There seems to be nothing going forward, no ideas, 
no dreams.  No one here seems to feel quite what I feel, the sort of 
need there is for MEANING in things.  I hate things without 
meaning."

"Don't you do--local work?"

"I suppose I shall.  I suppose I must find something.  Do you think--
if one were to attempt some sort of propaganda?"

"Could you--?" I began a little doubtfully.

"I suppose I couldn't," she answered, after a thoughtful moment.  "I 
suppose it would come to nothing.  And yet I feel there is so much 
to be done for the world, so much one ought to be doing. . . .  I 
want to do something for the world."

I can see her now as she stood there with her brows nearly frowning, 
her blue eyes looking before her, her mouth almost petulant.  "One 
feels that there are so many things going on--out of one's reach," 
she said.

I went back in the motor-car with my mind full of her, the quality 
of delicate discontent, the suggestion of exile.  Even a kind of 
weakness in her was sympathetic.  She told tremendously against her 
background.  She was, I say, like a protesting blue flower upon a 
cinder heap.  It is curious, too, how she connects and mingles with 
the furious quarrel I had with my uncle that very evening.  That 
came absurdly.  Indirectly Margaret was responsible.  My mind was 
running on ideas she had revived and questions she had set 
clamouring, and quite inadvertently in my attempt to find solutions 
I talked so as to outrage his profoundest feelings. . . .



7


What a preposterous shindy that was!

I sat with him in the smoking-room, propounding what I considered to 
be the most indisputable and non-contentious propositions 
conceivable--until, to my infinite amazement, he exploded and called 
me a "damned young puppy."

It was seismic.

"Tremendously interesting time," I said, "just in the beginning of 
making a civilisation."

"Ah!" he said, with an averted face, and nodded, leaning forward 
over his cigar.

I had not the remotest thought of annoying him.

"Monstrous muddle of things we have got," I said, "jumbled streets, 
ugly population, ugly factories--"

"You'd do a sight better if you had to do with it," said my uncle, 
regarding me askance.

"Not me.  But a world that had a collective plan and knew where it 
meant to be going would do a sight better, anyhow.  We're all 
swimming in a flood of ill-calculated chances--"

"You'll be making out I organised that business down there--by 
chance--next," said my uncle, his voice thick with challenge.

I went on as though I was back in Trinity.

"There's a lot of chance in the making of all great businesses," I 
said.

My uncle remarked that that showed how much I knew about businesses.   
If chance made businesses, why was it that he always succeeded and 
grew while those fools Ackroyd and Sons always took second place?  
He showed a disposition to tell the glorious history of how once 
Ackroyd's overshadowed him, and how now he could buy up Ackroyd's 
three times over.  But I wanted to get out what was in my mind.

"Oh!" I said, "as between man and man and business and business, 
some of course get the pull by this quality or that--but it's forces 
quite outside the individual case that make the big part of any 
success under modern conditions.  YOU never invented pottery, nor 
any process in pottery that matters a rap in your works; it wasn't 
YOUR foresight that joined all England up with railways and made it 
possible to organise production on an altogether different scale.  
You really at the utmost can't take credit for much more than being 
the sort of man who happened to fit what happened to be the 
requirements of the time, and who happened to be in a position to 
take advantage of them--"

It was then my uncle cried out and called me a damned young puppy, 
and became involved in some unexpected trouble of his own.

I woke up as it were from my analysis of the situation to discover 
him bent over a splendid spittoon, cursing incoherently, retching a 
little, and spitting out the end of his cigar which he had bitten 
off in his last attempt at self-control, and withal fully prepared 
as soon as he had cleared for action to give me just all that he 
considered to be the contents of his mind upon the condition of 
mine.

Well, why shouldn't I talk my mind to him?  He'd never had an 
outside view of himself for years, and I resolved to stand up to 
him.  We went at it hammer and tongs!  It became clear that he 
supposed me to be a Socialist, a zealous, embittered hater of all 
ownership--and also an educated man of the vilest, most 
pretentiously superior description.   His principal grievance was 
that I thought I knew everything; to that he recurred again and 
again. . . .

We had been maintaining an armed truce with each other since my 
resolve to go up to Cambridge, and now we had out all that had 
accumulated between us.  There had been stupendous accumulations. . . .

The particular things we said and did in that bawlmg encounter 
matter nothing at all in this story.  I can't now estimate how near 
we came to fisticuffs.  It ended with my saying, after a pungent 
reminder of benefits conferred and remembered, that I didn't want to 
stay another hour in his house.  I went upstairs, in a state of 
puerile fury, to pack and go off to the Railway Hotel, while he, 
with ironical civility, telephoned for a cab.

"Good riddance!" shouted my uncle, seeing me off into the night.

On the face of it our row was preposterous, but the underlying 
reality of our quarrel was the essential antagonism, it seemed to 
me, in all human affairs, the antagonism between ideas and the 
established method, that is to say, between ideas and the rule of 
thumb.  The world I hate is the rule-of-thumb world, the thing I and 
my kind of people exist for primarily is to battle with that, to 
annoy it, disarrange it, reconstruct it.  We question everything, 
disturb anything that cannot give a clear justification to our 
questioning, because we believe inherently that our sense of 
disorder implies the possibility of a better order.  Of course we 
are detestable.  My uncle was of that other vaster mass who accept 
everything for the thing it seems to be, hate enquiry and analysis 
as a tramp hates washing, dread and resist change, oppose 
experiment, despise science.  The world is our battleground; and all 
history, all literature that matters, all science, deals with this 
conflict of the thing that is and the speculative "if" that will 
destroy it.

But that is why I did not see Margaret Seddon again for five years.



CHAPTER THE SECOND

MARGARET IN LONDON



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 capturned 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 caligraphy 
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 
cooperation.

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. . . ."

I stuck to my argument.

"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 
"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.

I explained when.

"You find her interesting?"

I saw in a flash that Altiora meant to marry me to Margaret.

Her intention became much clearer as the year developed.  Altiora 
was systematic even in matters that evade system.  I was to marry 
Margaret, and freed from the need of making an income I was to come 
into politics--as an exponent of Baileyism.  She put it down with 
the other excellent and advantageous things that should occupy her 
summer holiday.  It was her pride and glory to put things down and 
plan them out in detail beforehand, and I'm not quite sure that she 
did not even mark off the day upon which the engagement was to be 
declared.  If she did, I disappointed her.  We didn't come to an 
engagement, in spite of the broadest hints and the glaring 
obviousness of everything, that summer.

Every summer the Baileys went out of London to some house they hired 
or borrowed, leaving their secretaries toiling behind, and they went 
on working hard in the mornings and evenings and taking exercise in 
the open air in the afternoon.  They cycled assiduously and went for 
long walks at a trot, and raided and studied (and incidentally 
explained themselves to) any social "types" that lived in the 
neighbourhood.  One invaded type, resentful under research, 
described them with a dreadful aptness as Donna Quixote and Sancho 
Panza--and himself as a harmless windmill, hurting no one and 
signifying nothing.  She did rather tilt at things.  This particular 
summer they were at a pleasant farmhouse in level country near 
Pangbourne, belonging to the Hon. Wilfrid Winchester, and they asked 
me to come down to rooms in the neighbourhood--Altiora took them for 
a month for me in August--and board with them upon extremely 
reasonable terms; and when I got there I found Margaret sitting in a 
hammock at Altiora's feet.  Lots of people, I gathered, were coming 
and going in the neighbourhood, the Ponts were in a villa on the 
river, and the Rickhams' houseboat was to moor for some days; but 
these irruptions did not impede a great deal of duologue between 
Margaret and myself.

Altiora was efficient rather than artistic in her match-making.  She 
sent us off for long walks together--Margaret was a fairly good 
walker--she exhumed some defective croquet things and incited us to 
croquet, not understanding that detestable game is the worst 
stimulant for lovers in the world.  And Margaret and I were always 
getting left about, and finding ourselves for odd half-hours in the 
kitchen-garden with nothing to do except talk, or we were told with 
a wave of the hand to run away and amuse each other.

Altiora even tried a picnic in canoes, knowing from fiction rather 
than imagination or experience the conclusive nature of such 
excursions.  But there she fumbled at the last moment, and elected 
at the river's brink to share a canoe with me.  Bailey showed so 
much zeal and so little skill--his hat fell off and he became 
miraculously nothing but paddle-clutching hands and a vast wrinkled 
brow--that at last he had to be paddled ignominiously by Margaret, 
while Altiora, after a phase of rigid discretion, as nearly as 
possible drowned herself--and me no doubt into the bargain--with a 
sudden lateral gesture of the arm to emphasise the high note with 
which she dismissed the efficiency of the Charity Organisation 
Society.  We shipped about an inch of water and sat in it for the 
rest of the time, an inconvenience she disregarded heroically.  We 
had difficulties in landing Oscar from his frail craft upon the ait 
of our feasting,--he didn't balance sideways and was much alarmed, 
and afterwards, as Margaret had a pain in her back, I took him in my 
canoe, let him hide his shame with an ineffectual but not positively 
harmful paddle, and towed the other by means of the joined painters.  
Still it was the fault of the inadequate information supplied in the 
books and not of Altiora that that was not the date of my betrothal.

I find it not a little difficult to state what kept me back from 
proposing marriage to Margaret that summer, and what urged me 
forward at last to marry her.  It is so much easier to remember 
one's resolutions than to remember the moods and suggestions that 
produced them.

Marrying and getting married was, I think, a pretty simple affair to 
Altiora; it was something that happened to the adolescent and 
unmarried when you threw them together under the circumstances of 
health, warmth and leisure.  It happened with the kindly and 
approving smiles of the more experienced elders who had organised 
these proximities.  The young people married, settled down, children 
ensued, and father and mother turned their minds, now decently and 
properly disillusioned, to other things.  That to Altiora was the 
normal sexual life, and she believed it to be the quality of the 
great bulk of the life about her.

One of the great barriers to human understanding is the wide 
temperamental difference one finds in the values of things relating 
to sex.  It is the issue upon which people most need training in 
charity and imaginative sympathy.  Here are no universal standards 
at all, and indeed for no single man nor woman does there seem to be 
any fixed standard, so much do the accidents of circumstances and 
one's physical phases affect one's interpretations.  There is 
nothing in the whole range of sexual fact that may not seem 
supremely beautiful or humanly jolly or magnificently wicked or 
disgusting or trivial or utterly insignificant, according to the eye 
that sees or the mood that colours.  Here is something that may fill 
the skies and every waking hour or be almost completely banished 
from a life.  It may be everything on Monday and less than nothing 
on Saturday.  And we make our laws and rules as though in these 
matters all men and women were commensurable one with another, with 
an equal steadfast passion and an equal constant duty. . . .

I don't know what dreams Altiora may have had in her schoolroom 
days, I always suspected her of suppressed and forgotten phases, but 
certainly her general effect now was of an entirely passionless 
worldliness in these matters.  Indeed so far as I could get at her, 
she regarded sexual passion as being hardly more legitimate in a 
civilised person than--let us say--homicidal mania.  She must have 
forgotten--and Bailey too.  I suspect she forgot before she married 
him.  I don't suppose either of them had the slightest intimation of 
the dimensions sexual love can take in the thoughts of the great 
majority of people with whom they come in contact.  They loved in 
their way--an intellectual way it was and a fond way--but it had no 
relation to beauty and physical sensation--except that there seemed 
a decree of exile against these things.  They got their glow in high 
moments of altruistic ambition--and in moments of vivid worldly 
success.  They sat at opposite ends of their dinner table with so 
and so "captured," and so and so, flushed with a mutual approval.  
They saw people in love forgetful and distraught about them, and 
just put it down to forgetfulness and distraction.  At any rate 
Altiora manifestly viewed my situation and Margaret's with an 
abnormal and entirely misleading simplicity.  There was the girl, 
rich, with an acceptable claim to be beautiful, shiningly virtuous, 
quite capable of political interests, and there was I, talented, 
ambitious and full of political and social passion, in need of just 
the money, devotion and regularisation Margaret could provide.  We 
were both unmarried--white sheets of uninscribed paper.  Was there 
ever a simpler situation?  What more could we possibly want?

She was even a little offended at the inconclusiveness that did not 
settle things at Pangbourne.  I seemed to her, I suspect, to reflect 
upon her judgment and good intentions.



7


I didn't see things with Altiora's simplicity.

I admired Margaret very much, I was fully aware of all that she and 
I might give each other; indeed so far as Altiora went we were quite 
in agreement.  But what seemed solid ground to Altiora and the 
ultimate footing of her emasculated world, was to me just the 
superficial covering of a gulf--oh! abysses of vague and dim, and 
yet stupendously significant things.

I couldn't dismiss the interests and the passion of sex as Altiora 
did.  Work, I agreed, was important; career and success; but deep 
unanalysable instincts told me this preoccupation was a thing quite 
as important; dangerous, interfering, destructive indeed, but none 
the less a dominating interest in life.  I have told how flittingly 
and uninvited it came like a moth from the outer twilight into my 
life, how it grew in me with my manhood, how it found its way to 
speech and grew daring, and led me at last to experience.  After 
that adventure at Locarno sex and the interests and desires of sex 
never left me for long at peace.  I went on with my work and my 
career, and all the time it was like--like someone talking ever and 
again in a room while one tries to write.

There were times when I could have wished the world a world all of 
men, so greatly did this unassimilated series of motives and 
curiosities hamper me; and times when I could have wished the world 
all of women.  I seemed always to be seeking something in women, in 
girls, and I was never clear what it was I was seeking.  But never--
even at my coarsest--was I moved by physical desire alone.  Was I 
seeking help and fellowship?  Was I seeking some intimacy with 
beauty?  It was a thing too formless to state, that I seemed always 
desiring to attain and never attaining.  Waves of gross sensuousness 
arose out of this preoccupation, carried me to a crisis of 
gratification or disappointment that was clearly not the needed 
thing; they passed and left my mind free again for a time to get on 
with the permanent pursuits of my life.  And then presently this 
solicitude would have me again, an irrelevance as it seemed, and yet 
a constantly recurring demand.

I don't want particularly to dwell upon things that are disagreeable 
for others to read, but I cannot leave them out of my story and get 
the right proportions of the forces I am balancing.  I was no 
abnormal man, and that world of order we desire to make must be 
built of such stuff as I was and am and can beget.  You cannot have 
a world of Baileys; it would end in one orderly generation.  
Humanity is begotten in Desire, lives by Desire.


     "Love which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb;
      Love which is lust, is the Call from the Gloom."


I echo Henley.

I suppose the life of celibacy which the active, well-fed, well-
exercised and imaginatively stirred young man of the educated 
classes is supposed to lead from the age of nineteen or twenty, when 
Nature certainly meant him to marry, to thirty or more, when 
civilisation permits him to do so, is the most impossible thing in 
the world.  We deal here with facts that are kept secret and 
obscure, but I doubt for my own part if more than one man out of 
five in our class satisfies that ideal demand.  The rest are even as 
I was, and Hatherleigh and Esmeer and all the men I knew.  I draw no 
lessons and offer no panacea; I have to tell the quality of life, 
and this is how it is.  This is how it will remain until men and 
women have the courage to face the facts of life.

I was no systematic libertine, you must understand; things happened 
to me and desire drove me.  Any young man would have served for that 
Locarno adventure, and after that what had been a mystic and 
wonderful thing passed rapidly into a gross, manifestly misdirected 
and complicating one.  I can count a meagre tale of five illicit 
loves in the days of my youth, to include that first experience, and 
of them all only two were sustained relationships.  Besides these 
five "affairs," on one or two occasions I dipped so low as the inky 
dismal sensuality of the streets, and made one of those pairs of 
correlated figures, the woman in her squalid finery sailing 
homeward, the man modestly aloof and behind, that every night in the 
London year flit by the score of thousands across the sight of the 
observant. . . .

How ugly it is to recall; ugly and shameful now without 
qualification!  Yet at the time there was surely something not 
altogether ugly in it--something that has vanished, some fine thing 
mortally ailing.

One such occasion I recall as if it were a vision deep down in a 
pit, as if it had happened in another state of existence to someone 
else.  And yet it is the sort of thing that has happened, once or 
twice at least, to half the men in London who have been in a 
position to make it possible.  Let me try and give you its peculiar 
effect.  Man or woman, you ought to know of it.

Figure to yourself a dingy room, somewhere in that network of 
streets that lies about Tottenham Court Road, a dingy bedroom lit by 
a solitary candle and carpeted with scraps and patches, with 
curtains of cretonne closing the window, and a tawdry ornament of 
paper in the grate.  I sit on a bed beside a weary-eyed, fair-
haired, sturdy young woman, half undressed, who is telling me in 
broken German something that my knowledge of German is at first 
inadequate to understand. . . .

I thought she was boasting about her family, and then slowly the 
meaning came to me.  She was a Lett from near Libau in Courland, and 
she was telling me--just as one tells something too strange for 
comment or emotion--how her father had been shot and her sister 
outraged and murdered before her eyes.

It was as if one had dipped into something primordial and stupendous 
beneath the smooth and trivial surfaces of life.  There was I, you 
know, the promising young don from Cambridge, who wrote quite 
brilliantly about politics and might presently get into Parliament, 
with my collar and tie in my hand, and a certain sense of shameful 
adventure fading out of my mind.

"Ach Gott!" she sighed by way of comment, and mused deeply for a 
moment before she turned her face to me, as to something forgotten 
and remembered, and assumed the half-hearted meretricious smile.

"Bin ich eine hubsche?" she asked like one who repeats a lesson.

I was moved to crave her pardon and come away.

"Bin ich eine hubsche?" she asked a little anxiously, laying a 
detaining hand upon me, and evidently not understanding a word of 
what I was striving to say.



8


I find it extraordinarily difficult to recall the phases by which I 
passed from my first admiration of Margaret's earnestness and 
unconscious daintiness to an intimate acquaintance.  The earlier 
encounters stand out clear and hard, but then the impressions become 
crowded and mingle not only with each other but with all the 
subsequent developments of relationship, the enormous evolutions of 
interpretation and comprehension between husband and wife.  Dipping 
into my memories is like dipping into a ragbag, one brings out this 
memory or that, with no intimation of how they came in time or what 
led to them and joined them together.  And they are all mixed up 
with subsequent associations, with sympathies and discords, habits 
of intercourse, surprises and disappointments and discovered 
misunderstandings.  I know only that always my feelings for Margaret 
were complicatel feelings, woven of many and various strands.

It is one of the curious neglected aspects of life how at the same 
time and in relation to the same reality we can have in our minds 
streams of thought at quite different levels.  We can be at the same 
time idealising a person and seeing and criticising that person 
quite coldly and clearly, and we slip unconsciously from level to 
level and produce all sorts of inconsistent acts.  In a sense I had 
no illusions about Margaret; in a sense my conception of Margaret 
was entirely poetic illusion.  I don't think I was ever blind to 
certain defects of hers, and quite as certainly they didn't seem to 
matter in the slightest degree.  Her mind had a curious want of 
vigour, "flatness" is the only word; she never seemed to escape from 
her phrase; her way of thinking, her way of doing was indecisive; 
she remained in her attitude, it did not flow out to easy, 
confirmatory action.

I saw this quite clearly, and when we walked and talked together I 
seemed always trying for animation in her and never finding it.  I 
would state my ideas.  "I know," she would say, "I know."

I talked about myself and she listened wonderfully, but she made no 
answering revelations.  I talked politics, and she remarked with her 
blue eyes wide and earnest: "Every WORD you say seems so just."

I admired her appearance tremendously but--I can only express it by 
saying I didn't want to touch her.  Her fair hair was always 
delectably done.  It flowed beautifully over her pretty small ears, 
and she would tie its fair coilings with fillets of black or blue 
velvet that carried pretty buckles of silver and paste.  The light, 
the faint down on her brow and cheek was delightful.  And it was 
clear to me that I made her happy.

My sense of her deficiencies didn't stand in the way of my falling 
at last very deeply in love with her.  Her very shortcomings seemed 
to offer me something. . . .

She stood in my mind for goodness--and for things from which it 
seemed to me my hold was slipping.

She seemed to promise a way of escape from the deepening opposition 
in me between physical passions and the constructive career, the 
career of wide aims and human service, upon which I had embarked.  
All the time that I was seeing her as a beautiful, fragile, rather 
ineffective girl, I was also seeing her just as consciously as a 
shining slender figure, a radiant reconciliation, coming into my 
darkling disorders of lust and impulse.  I could understand clearly 
that she was incapable of the most necessary subtleties of political 
thought, and yet I could contemplate praying to her and putting all 
the intricate troubles of my life at her feet.

Before the reappearance of Margaret in my world at all an unwonted 
disgust with the consequences and quality of my passions had arisen 
in my mind.  Among other things that moment with the Lettish girl 
haunted me persistently.  I would see myself again and again sitting 
amidst those sluttish surroundings, collar and tie in hand, while 
her heavy German words grouped themselves to a slowly apprehended 
meaning.  I would feel again with a fresh stab of remorse, that this 
was not a flash of adventure, this was not seeing life in any 
permissible sense, but a dip into tragedy, dishonour, hideous 
degradation, and the pitiless cruelty of a world as yet uncontrolled 
by any ordered will.

"Good God!" I put it to myself, "that I should finish the work those 
Cossacks had begun!  I who want order and justice before everything!  
There's no way out of it, no decent excuse!  If I didn't think, I 
ought to have thought!" . . .

How did I get to it?" . . .  I would ransack the phases of my 
development from the first shy unveiling of a hidden wonder to the 
last extremity as a man will go through muddled account books to 
find some disorganising error. . . .

I was also involved at that time--I find it hard to place these 
things in the exact order of their dates because they were so 
disconnected with the regular progress of my work and life--in an 
intrigue, a clumsy, sensuous, pretentious, artificially stimulated 
intrigue, with a Mrs. Larrimer, a woman living separated from her 
husband.  I will not go into particulars of that episode, nor how we 
quarrelled and chafed one another.  She was at once unfaithful and 
jealous and full of whims about our meetings; she was careless of 
our secret, and vulgarised our relationship by intolerable 
interpretations; except for some glowing moments of gratification, 
except for the recurrent and essentially vicious desire that drew us 
back to each other again, we both fretted at a vexatious and 
unexpectedly binding intimacy.  The interim was full of the quality 
of work delayed, of time and energy wasted, of insecure precautions 
against scandal and exposure.  Disappointment is almost inherent in 
illicit love.  I had, and perhaps it was part of her recurrent 
irritation also, a feeling as though one had followed something fine 
and beautiful into a net--into bird lime!  These furtive scuffles, 
this sneaking into shabby houses of assignation, was what we had 
made out of the suggestion of pagan beauty; this was the reality of 
our vision of nymphs and satyrs dancing for the joy of life amidst 
incessant sunshine.  We had laid hands upon the wonder and glory of 
bodily love and wasted them. . . .

It was the sense of waste, of finely beautiful possibilities getting 
entangled and marred for ever that oppressed me.  I had missed, I 
had lost.  I did not turn from these things after the fashion of the 
Baileys, as one turns from something low and embarrassing.  I felt 
that these great organic forces were still to be wrought into a 
harmony with my constructive passion.  I felt too that I was not 
doing it.  I had not understood the forces in this struggle nor its 
nature, and as I learnt I failed.  I had been started wrong, I had 
gone on wrong, in a world that was muddled and confused, full of 
false counsel and erratic shames and twisted temptations.  I learnt 
to see it so by failures that were perhaps destroying any chance of 
profit in my lessons.  Moods of clear keen industry alternated with 
moods of relapse and indulgence and moods of dubiety and remorse.  I 
was not going on as the Baileys thought I was going on.  There were 
times when the blindness of the Baileys irritated me intensely. 
Beneath the ostensible success of those years, between twenty-three 
and twenty-eight, this rottenness, known to scarcely any one but 
myself, grew and spread.  My sense of the probability of a collapse 
intensified.  I knew indeed now, even as Willersley had prophesied 
five years before, that I was entangling myself in something that 
might smother all my uses in the world.  Down there among those 
incommunicable difficulties, I was puzzled and blundering.  I was 
losing my hold upon things; the chaotic and adventurous element in 
life was spreading upward and getting the better of me, over-
mastering me and all my will to rule and make. . . .  And the 
strength, the drugging urgency of the passion!

Margaret shone at times in my imagination like a radiant angel in a 
world of mire and disorder, in a world of cravings, hot and dull red 
like scars inflamed. . . .

I suppose it was because I had so great a need of such help as her 
whiteness proffered, that I could ascribe impossible perfections to 
her, a power of intellect, a moral power and patience to which she, 
poor fellow mortal, had indeed no claim.  If only a few of us WERE 
angels and freed from the tangle of effort, how easy life might be!  
I wanted her so badly, so very badly, to be what I needed.  I wanted 
a woman to save me.  I forced myself to see her as I wished to see 
her.  Her tepidities became infinite delicacies, her mental 
vagueness an atmospheric realism.  The harsh precisions of the 
Baileys and Altiora's blunt directness threw up her fineness into 
relief and made a grace of every weakness.

Mixed up with the memory of times when I talked with Margaret as one 
talks politely to those who are hopelessly inferior in mental 
quality, explaining with a false lucidity, welcoming and encouraging 
the feeblest response, when possible moulding and directing, are 
times when I did indeed, as the old phrase goes, worship the ground 
she trod on.  I was equally honest and unconscious of inconsistency 
at each extreme.  But in neither phase could I find it easy to make 
love to Margaret.  For in the first I did not want to, though I 
talked abundantly to her of marriage and so forth, and was a little 
puzzled at myself for not going on to some personal application, and 
in the second she seemed inaccessible, I felt I must make 
confessions and put things before her that would be the grossest 
outrage upon the noble purity I attributed to her.



9


I went to Margaret at last to ask her to marry me, wrought up to the 
mood of one who stakes his life on a cast.  Separated from her, and 
with the resonance of an evening of angry recriminations with Mrs. 
Larrimer echoing in my mind, I discovered myself to be quite 
passionately in love with Margaret.  Last shreds of doubt vanished.  
It has always been a feature of our relationship that Margaret 
absent means more to me than Margaret present; her memory distils 
from its dross and purifies in me.  All my criticisms and 
qualifications of her vanished into some dark corner of my mind.  
She was the lady of my salvation; I must win my way to her or 
perish.

I went to her at last, for all that I knew she loved me, in 
passionate self-abasement, white and a-tremble.  She was staying 
with the Rockleys at Woking, for Shena Rockley had been at Bennett 
Hall with her and they had resumed a close intimacy; and I went down 
to her on an impulse, unheralded.  I was kept waiting for some 
minutes, I remember, in a little room upon which a conservatory 
opened, a conservatory full of pots of large mauve-edged, white 
cyclamens in flower.  And there was a big lacquer cabinet, a Chinese 
thing, I suppose, of black and gold against the red-toned wall.  To 
this day the thought of Margaret is inseparably bound up with the 
sight of a cyclamen's back-turned petals.

She came in, looking pale and drooping rather more than usual.  I 
suddenly realised that Altiora's hint of a disappointment leading to 
positive illness was something more than a vindictive comment.  She 
closed the door and came across to me and took and dropped my hand 
and stood still.  "What is it you want with me?" she asked.

The speech I had been turning over and over in my mind on the way 
vanished at the sight of her.

"I want to talk to you," I answered lamely.

For some seconds neither of us said a word.

"I want to tell you things about my life," I began.

She answered with a scarcely audible "yes."

"I almost asked you to marry me at Pangbourne," I plunged.  "I 
didn't.  I didn't because--because you had too much to give me."

"Too much!" she echoed, "to give you!"  She had lifted her eyes to 
my face and the colour was coming into her cheeks.

"Don't misunderstand me," I said hastily.  "I want to tell you 
things, things you don't know.  Don't answer me.  I want to tell 
you."

She stood before the fireplace with her ultimate answer shining 
through the quiet of her face.  "Go on," she said, very softly.  It 
was so pitilessly manifest she was resolved to idealise the 
situation whatever I might say.  I began walking up and down the 
room between those cyclamens and the cabinet.  There were little 
gold fishermen on the cabinet fishing from little islands that each 
had a pagoda and a tree, and there were also men in boats or 
something, I couldn't determine what, and some obscure sub-office in 
my mind concerned itself with that quite intently.  Yet I seem to 
have been striving with all my being to get words for the truth of 
things.  "You see," I emerged, "you make everything possible to me.  
You can give me help and sympathy, support, understanding.  You know 
my political ambitions.  You know all that I might do in the world.  
I do so intensely want to do constructive things, big things 
perhaps, in this wild jumble. . . .  Only you don't know a bit what 
I am.  I want to tell you what I am.  I'm complex. . . .  I'm 
streaked."

I glanced at her, and she was regarding me with an expression of 
blissful disregard for any meaning I was seeking to convey.

"You see," I said, "I'm a bad man."

She sounded a note of valiant incredulity.

Everything seemed to be slipping away from me.  I pushed on to the 
ugly facts that remained over from the wreck of my interpretation.  
"What has held me back," I said, "is the thought that you could not 
possibly understand certain things in my life.  Men are not pure as 
women are.  I have had love affairs.  I mean I have had affairs.  
Passion--desire.  You see, I have had a mistress, I have been 
entangled--"

She seemed about to speak, but I interrupted.  "I'm not telling 
you," I said, "what I meant to tell you.  I want you to know clearly 
that there is another side to my life, a dirty side.  Deliberately I 
say, dirty.  It didn't seem so at first--"

I stopped blankly.  "Dirty," I thought, was the most idiotic choice 
of words to have made.

I had never in any tolerable sense of the word been dirty.

"I drifted into this--as men do," I said after a little pause and 
stopped again.

She was looking at me with her wide blue eyes.

"Did you imagine," she began, "that I thought you--that I expected--"

"But how can you know?"

"I know.  I do know."

"But--" I began.

"I know," she persisted, dropping her eyelids.  "Of course I know," 
and nothing could have convinced me more completely that she did not 
know.

"All men--" she generalised.  "A woman does not understand these 
temptations."

I was astonished beyond measure at her way of taking my confession. 
. . .

"Of course," she said, hesitating a little over a transparent 
difficulty, "it is all over and past."

"It's all over and past," I answered.

There was a little pause.

"I don't want to know," she said.  "None of that seems to matter now 
in the slightest degree."

She looked up and smiled as though we had exchanged some acceptable 
commonplaces.  "Poor dear!" she said, dismissing everything, and put 
out her arms, and it seemed to me that I could hear the Lettish girl 
in the background--doomed safety valve of purity in this intolerable 
world--telling something in indistinguishable German--I know not 
what nor why. . . .

I took Margaret in my arms and kissed her.  Her eyes were wet with 
tears.  She clung to me and was near, I felt, to sobbing.

"I have loved you," she whispered presently, "Oh! ever since we met 
in Misterton--six years and more ago."



CHAPTER THE THIRD

MARGARET IN VENICE



1


There comes into my mind a confused memory of conversations with 
Margaret; we must have had dozens altogether, and they mix in now 
for the most part inextricably not only with one another, but with 
later talks and with things we discussed at Pangbourne.  We had the 
immensest anticipations of the years and opportunities that lay 
before us.  I was now very deeply in love with her indeed.  I felt 
not that I had cleaned up my life but that she had.  We called each 
other "confederate" I remember, and made during our brief engagement 
a series of visits to the various legislative bodies in London, the 
County Council, the House of Commons, where we dined with Villiers, 
and the St. Pancras Vestry, where we heard Shaw speaking.  I was 
full of plans and so was she of the way in which we were to live and 
work.  We were to pay back in public service whatever excess of 
wealth beyond his merits old Seddon's economic advantage had won for 
him from the toiling people in the potteries.  The end of the Boer 
War was so recent that that blessed word "efficiency" echoed still 
in people's minds and thoughts.  Lord Roseberry in a memorable 
oration had put it into the heads of the big outer public, but the 
Baileys with a certain show of justice claimed to have set it going 
in the channels that took it to him--if as a matter of fact it was 
taken to him.  But then it was their habit to make claims of that 
sort.  They certainly did their share to keep "efficient" going.  
Altiora's highest praise was "thoroughly efficient."  We were to be 
a "thoroughly efficient" political couple of the "new type."  She 
explained us to herself and Oscar, she explained us to ourselves, 
she explained us to the people who came to her dinners and 
afternoons until the world was highly charged with explanation and 
expectation, and the proposal that I should be the Liberal candidate 
for the Kinghamstead Division seemed the most natural development in 
the world.

I was full of the ideal of hard restrained living and relentless 
activity, and throughout a beautiful November at Venice, where 
chiefly we spent our honeymoon, we turned over and over again and 
discussed in every aspect our conception of a life tremendously 
focussed upon the ideal of social service.

Most clearly there stands out a picture of ourselves talking in a 
gondola on our way to Torcella.  Far away behind us the smoke of 
Murano forms a black stain upon an immense shining prospect of 
smooth water, water as unruffled and luminous as the sky above, a 
mirror on which rows of posts and distant black high-stemmed, swan-
necked boats with their minutely clear swinging gondoliers, float 
aerially.  Remote and low before us rises the little tower of our 
destination.  Our men swing together and their oars swirl leisurely 
through the water, hump back in the rowlocks, splash sharply and go 
swishing back again.  Margaret lies back on cushions, with her face 
shaded by a holland parasol, and I sit up beside her.

"You see," I say, and in spite of Margaret's note of perfect 
acquiescence I feel myself reasoning against an indefinable 
antagonism, "it is so easy to fall into a slack way with life.  
There may seem to be something priggish in a meticulous discipline, 
but otherwise it is so easy to slip into indolent habits--and to be 
distracted from one's purpose.  The country, the world, wants men to 
serve its constructive needs, to work out and carry out plans.  For 
a man who has to make a living the enemy is immediate necessity; for 
people like ourselves it's--it's the constant small opportunity of 
agreeable things."

"Frittering away," she says, "time and strength."

"That is what I feel.  It's so pleasant to pretend one is simply 
modest, it looks so foolish at times to take one's self too 
seriously.  We've GOT to take ourselves seriously."

She endorses my words with her eyes.

"I feel I can do great things with life."

"I KNOW you can."

"But that's only to be done by concentrating one's life upon one 
main end.  We have to plan our days, to make everything subserve our 
scheme."

"I feel," she answers softly, "we ought to give--every hour."

Her face becomes dreamy.  "I WANT to give every hour," she adds.



2


That holiday in Venice is set in my memory like a little artificial 
lake in uneven confused country, as something very bright and 
skylike, and discontinuous with all about it.  The faded quality of 
the very sunshine of that season, the mellow discoloured palaces and 
places, the huge, time-ripened paintings of departed splendours, the 
whispering, nearly noiseless passage of hearse-black gondolas, for 
the horrible steam launch had not yet ruined Venice, the stilled 
magnificences of the depopulated lagoons, the universal autumn, made 
me feel altogether in recess from the teeming uproars of reality.  
There was not a dozen people all told, no Americans and scarcely any 
English, to dine in the big cavern of a dining-room, with its vistas 
of separate tables, its distempered walls and its swathed 
chandeliers.  We went about seeing beautiful things, accepting 
beauty on every hand, and taking it for granted that all was well 
with ourselves and the world.  It was ten days or a fortnight before 
I became fretful and anxious for action; a long tranquillity for 
such a temperament as mine.

Our pleasures were curiously impersonal, a succession of shared 
aesthetic appreciation threads all that time.  Our honeymoon was no 
exultant coming together, no mutual shout of "YOU!"  We were almost 
shy with one another, and felt the relief of even a picture to help 
us out.  It was entirely in my conception of things that I should be 
very watchful not to shock or distress Margaret or press the 
sensuous note.  Our love-making had much of the tepid smoothness of 
the lagoons.  We talked in delicate innuendo of what should be 
glorious freedoms.  Margaret had missed Verona and Venice in her 
previous Italian journey--fear of the mosquito had driven her mother 
across Italy to the westward route--and now she could fill up her 
gaps and see the Titians and Paul Veroneses she already knew in 
colourless photographs, the Carpaccios, (the St. George series 
delighted her beyond measure,) the Basaitis and that great statue of 
Bartolomeo Colleoni that Ruskin praised.

But since I am not a man to look at pictures and architectural 
effects day after day, I did watch Margaret very closely and store a 
thousand memories of her.  I can see her now, her long body drooping 
a little forward, her sweet face upraised to some discovered 
familiar masterpiece and shining with a delicate enthusiasm.  I can 
hear again the soft cadences of her voice murmuring commonplace 
comments, for she had no gift of expressing the shapeless 
satisfaction these things gave her.

Margaret, I perceived, was a cultivated person, the first cultivated 
person with whom I had ever come into close contact.  She was 
cultivated and moral, and I, I now realise, was never either of 
these things.  She was passive, and I am active.  She did not simply 
and naturally look for beauty but she had been incited to look for 
it at school, and took perhaps a keener interest in books and 
lectures and all the organisation of beautiful things than she did 
in beauty itself; she found much of her delight in being guided to 
it.  Now a thing ceases to be beautiful to me when some finger points 
me out its merits.  Beauty is the salt of life, but I take my beauty 
as a wild beast gets its salt, as a constituent of the meal. . . .

And besides, there was that between us that should have seemed more 
beautiful than any picture. . . .

So we went about Venice tracking down pictures and spiral staircases 
and such-like things, and my brains were busy all the time with such 
things as a comparison of Venice and its nearest modern equivalent, 
New York, with the elaboration of schemes of action when we returned 
to London, with the development of a theory of Margaret.

Our marriage had done this much at least, that it had fused and 
destroyed those two independent ways of thinking about her that had 
gone on in my mind hitherto.  Suddenly she had become very near to 
me, and a very big thing, a sort of comprehensive generalisation 
behind a thousand questions, like the sky or England.  The judgments 
and understandings that had worked when she was, so to speak, miles 
away from my life, had now to be altogether revised.  Trifling 
things began to matter enormously, that she had a weak and easily 
fatigued back, for example, or that when she knitted her brows and 
stammered a little in talking, it didn't really mean that an 
exquisite significance struggled for utterance.

We visited pictures in the mornings chiefly.  In the afternoon, 
unless we were making a day-long excursion in a gondola, Margaret 
would rest for an hour while I prowled about in search of English 
newspapers, and then we would go to tea in the Piazza San Marco and 
watch the drift of people feeding the pigeons and going into the 
little doors beneath the sunlit arches and domes of Saint Mark's.  
Then perhaps we would stroll on the Piazzetta, or go out into the 
sunset in a gondola.  Margaret became very interested in the shops 
that abound under the colonnades and decided at last to make an 
extensive purchase of table glass.  "These things," she said, are 
quite beautiful, and far cheaper than anything but the most ordinary 
looking English ware."  I was interested in her idea, and a good 
deal charmed by the delightful qualities of tinted shape, slender 
handle and twisted stem.  I suggested we should get not simply 
tumblers and wineglasses but bedroom waterbottles, fruit- and sweet-
dishes, water-jugs, and in the end we made quite a business-like 
afternoon of it.

I was beginning now to long quite definitely for events.  Energy was 
accumulating in me, and worrying me for an outlet.  I found the 
TIMES and the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the other papers I managed to get 
hold of, more and more stimulating.  I nearly wrote to the former 
paper one day in answer to a letter by Lord Grimthorpe--I forget now 
upon what point.  I chafed secretly against this life of tranquil 
appreciations more and more.  I found my attitudes of restrained and 
delicate affection for Margaret increasingly difficult to sustain.  
I surprised myself and her by little gusts of irritability, gusts 
like the catspaws before a gale.  I was alarmed at these symptoms.

One night when Margaret had gone up to her room, I put on a light 
overcoat, went out into the night and prowled for a long time 
through the narrow streets, smoking and thinking.  I returned and 
went and sat on the edge of her bed to talk to her.

"Look here, Margaret," I said; "this is all very well, but I'm 
restless."

"Restless! " she said with a faint surprise in her voice.

"Yes.  I think I want exercise.  I've got a sort of feeling--I've 
never had it before--as though I was getting fat."

"My dear!" she cried.

"I want to do things;--ride horses, climb mountains, take the devil 
out of myself."

She watched me thoughtfully.

"Couldn't we DO something?" she said.

Do what?

"I don't know.  Couldn't we perhaps go away from here soon--and walk 
in the mountains--on our way home."

I thought.  "There seems to be no exercise at all in this place."

"Isn't there some walk?"

"I wonder," I answered.  "We might walk to Chioggia perhaps, along 
the Lido."  And we tried that, but the long stretch of beach 
fatigued Margaret's back, and gave her blisters, and we never got 
beyond Malamocco. . . .

A day or so after we went out to those pleasant black-robed, bearded 
Armenians in their monastery at Saint Lazzaro, and returned towards 
sundown.  We fell into silence.  "PIU LENTO," said Margaret to the 
gondolier, and released my accumulated resolution.

"Let us go back to London," I said abruptly.

Margaret looked at me with surprised blue eyes.

"This is beautiful beyond measure, you know," I said, sticking to my 
point, "but I have work to do."

She was silent for some seconds.  "I had forgotten," she said.

"So had I," I sympathised, and took her hand.  "Suddenly I have 
remembered."

She remained quite still.  "There is so much to be done," I said, 
almost apologetically.

She looked long away from me across the lagoon and at last sighed, 
like one who has drunk deeply, and turned to me.

"I suppose one ought not to be so happy," she said.  "Everything has 
been so beautiful and so simple and splendid.  And clean.  It has 
been just With You--the time of my life.  It's a pity such things 
must end.  But the world is calling you, dear. . . .  I ought not to 
have forgotten it.  I thought you were resting--and thinking.  But 
if you are rested.--Would you like us to start to-morrow?"

She looked at once so fragile and so devoted that on the spur of the 
moment I relented, and we stayed in Venice four more days.



CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER



1


Margaret had already taken a little house in Radnor Square, 
Westminster, before our marriage, a house that seemed particularly 
adaptable to our needs as public-spirited efficients; it had been 
very pleasantly painted and papered under Margaret's instructions, 
white paint and clean open purples and green predominating, and now 
we set to work at once upon the interesting business of arranging 
and--with our Venetian glass as a beginning--furnishing it.  We had 
been fairly fortunate with our wedding presents, and for the most 
part it was open to us to choose just exactly what we would have and 
just precisely where we would put it.

Margaret had a sense of form and colour altogether superior to mine, 
and so quite apart from the fact that it was her money equipped us, 
I stood aside from all these matters and obeyed her summons to a 
consultation only to endorse her judgment very readily.  Until 
everything was settled I went every day to my old rooms in Vincent 
Square and worked at a series of papers that were originally 
intended for the FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW, the papers that afterwards 
became my fourth book, "New Aspects of Liberalism."

I still remember as delightful most of the circumstances of getting 
into 79, Radnor Square.  The thin flavour of indecision about 
Margaret disappeared altogether in a shop; she had the precisest 
ideas of what she wanted, and the devices of the salesman did not 
sway her.  It was very pleasant to find her taking things out of my 
hands with a certain masterfulness, and showing the distinctest 
determination to make a house in which I should be able to work in 
that great project of "doing something for the world."

"And I do want to make things pretty about us," she said.  "You 
don't think it wrong to have things pretty?"

"I want them so."

"Altiora has things hard."

"Altiora," I answered, "takes a pride in standing ugly and 
uncomfortable things.  But I don't see that they help her.  Anyhow 
they won't help me."

So Margaret went to the best shops and got everything very simple 
and very good.  She bought some pictures very well indeed; there was 
a little Sussex landscape, full of wind and sunshine, by Nicholson, 
for my study, that hit my taste far better than if I had gone out to 
get some such expression for myself.

"We will buy a picture just now and then," she said, "sometimes--
when we see one."

I would come back through the January mire or fog from Vincent 
Square to the door of 79, and reach it at last with a quite childish 
appreciation of the fact that its solid Georgian proportions and its 
fine brass furnishings belonged to MY home; I would use my latchkey 
and discover Margaret in the warm-lit, spacious hall with a 
partially opened packing-case, fatigued but happy, or go up to have 
tea with her out of the right tea things, "come at last," or be told 
to notice what was fresh there.  It wasn't simply that I had never 
had a house before, but I had really never been, except in the most 
transitory way, in any house that was nearly so delightful as mine 
promised to be.  Everything was fresh and bright, and softly and 
harmoniously toned.  Downstairs we had a green dining-room with 
gleaming silver, dark oak, and English colour-prints; above was a 
large drawing-room that could be made still larger by throwing open 
folding doors, and it was all carefully done in greys and blues, for 
the most part with real Sheraton supplemented by Sheraton so 
skilfully imitated by an expert Margaret had discovered as to be 
indistinguishable except to a minute scrutiny.  And for me, above 
this and next to my bedroom, there was a roomy study, with specially 
thick stair-carpet outside and thick carpets in the bedroom overhead 
and a big old desk for me to sit at and work between fire and 
window, and another desk specially made for me by that expert if I 
chose to stand and write, and open bookshelves and bookcases and 
every sort of convenient fitting.  There were electric heaters 
beside the open fire, and everything was put for me to make tea at 
any time--electric kettle, infuser, biscuits and fresh butter, so 
that I could get up and work at any hour of the day or night.  I 
could do no work in this apartment for a long time, I was so 
interested in the perfection of its arrangements.  And when I 
brought in my books and papers from Vincent Square, Margaret seized 
upon all the really shabby volumes and had them re-bound in a fine 
official-looking leather.

I can remember sitting down at that desk and looking round me and 
feeling with a queer effect of surprise that after all even a place 
in the Cabinet, though infinitely remote, was nevertheless in the 
same large world with these fine and quietly expensive things.

On the same floor Margaret had a "den," a very neat and pretty den 
with good colour-prints of Botticellis and Carpaccios, and there was 
a third apartment for sectarial purposes should the necessity for 
them arise, with a severe-looking desk equipped with patent files.  
And Margaret would come flitting into the room to me, or appear 
noiselessly standing, a tall gracefully drooping form, in the wide 
open doorway.  "Is everything right, dear?" she would ask.

"Come in," I would say, "I'm sorting out papers."

She would come to the hearthrug.

"I mustn't disturb you," she would remark.

"I'm not busy yet."

"Things are getting into order.  Then we must make out a time-table 
as the Baileys do, and BEGIN!"

Altiora came in to see us once or twice, and a number of serious 
young wives known to Altiora called and were shown over the house, 
and discussed its arrangements with Margaret.  They were all 
tremendously keen on efficient arrangements.

"A little pretty," said Altiora, with the faintest disapproval, 
"still--"

It was clear she thought we should grow out of that.  From the day 
of our return we found other people's houses open to us and eager 
for us.  We went out of London for week-ends and dined out, and 
began discussing our projects for reciprocating these hospitalities.  
As a single man unattached, I had had a wide and miscellaneous 
social range, but now I found myself falling into place in a set.  
For a time I acquiesced in this.  I went very little to my clubs, 
the Climax and the National Liberal, and participated in no bachelor 
dinners at all.  For a time, too, I dropped out of the garrulous 
literary and journalistic circles I had frequented.  I put up for 
the Reform, not so much for the use of the club as a sign of serious 
and substantial political standing.  I didn't go up to Cambridge, I 
remember, for nearly a year, so occupied was I with my new 
adjustments.

The people we found ourselves among at this time were people, to put 
it roughly, of the Parliamentary candidate class, or people already 
actually placed in the political world.  They ranged between very 
considerable wealth and such a hard, bare independence as old 
Willersley and the sister who kept house for him possessed.  There 
were quite a number of young couples like ourselves, a little 
younger and more artless, or a little older and more established.  
Among the younger men I had a sort of distinction because of my 
Cambridge reputation and my writing, and because, unlike them, I was 
an adventurer and had won and married my way into their circles 
instead of being naturally there.  They couldn't quite reckon upon 
what I should do; they felt I had reserves of experience and 
incalculable traditions.  Close to us were the Cramptons, Willie 
Crampton, who has since been Postmaster-General, rich and very 
important in Rockshire, and his younger brother Edward, who has 
specialised in history and become one of those unimaginative men of 
letters who are the glory of latter-day England.  Then there was 
Lewis, further towards Kensington, where his cousins the Solomons 
and the Hartsteins lived, a brilliant representative of his race, 
able, industrious and invariably uninspired, with a wife a little in 
revolt against the racial tradition of feminine servitude and 
inclined to the suffragette point of view, and Bunting Harblow, an 
old blue, and with an erratic disposition well under the control of 
the able little cousin he had married.  I had known all these men, 
but now (with Altiora floating angelically in benediction) they 
opened their hearts to me and took me into their order.  They were 
all like myself, prospective Liberal candidates, with a feeling that 
the period of wandering in the wilderness of opposition was drawing 
near its close.  They were all tremendously keen upon social and 
political service, and all greatly under the sway of the ideal of a 
simple, strenuous life, a life finding its satisfactions in 
political achievements and distinctions.  The young wives were as 
keen about it as the young husbands, Margaret most of all, and I--
whatever elements in me didn't march with the attitudes and habits 
of this set were very much in the background during that time.

We would give little dinners and have evening gatherings at which 
everything was very simple and very good, with a slight but 
perceptible austerity, and there was more good fruit and flowers and 
less perhaps in the way of savouries, patties and entrees than was 
customary.  Sherry we banished, and Marsala and liqueurs, and there 
was always good home-made lemonade available.  No men waited, but 
very expert parlourmaids.  Our meat was usually Welsh mutton--I 
don't know why, unless that mountains have ever been the last refuge 
of the severer virtues.  And we talked politics and books and ideas 
and Bernard Shaw (who was a department by himself and supposed in 
those days to be ethically sound at bottom), and mingled with the 
intellectuals--I myself was, as it were, a promoted intellectual.

The Cramptons had a tendency to read good things aloud on their less 
frequented receptions, but I have never been able to participate 
submissively in this hyper-digestion of written matter, and 
generally managed to provoke a disruptive debate.  We were all very 
earnest to make the most of ourselves and to be and do, and I wonder 
still at times, with an unassuaged perplexity, how it is that in 
that phase of utmost earnestness I have always seemed to myself to 
be most remote from reality.



2


I look back now across the detaching intervention of sixteen crowded 
years, critically and I fancy almost impartially, to those 
beginnings of my married life.  I try to recall something near to 
their proper order the developing phases of relationship.  I am 
struck most of all by the immense unpremeditated, generous-spirited 
insincerities upon which Margaret and I were building.

It seems to me that here I have to tell perhaps the commonest 
experience of all among married educated people, the deliberate, 
shy, complex effort to fill the yawning gaps in temperament as they 
appear, the sustained, failing attempt to bridge abysses, level 
barriers, evade violent pressures.  I have come these latter years 
of my life to believe that it is possible for a man and woman to be 
absolutely real with one another, to stand naked souled to each 
other, unashamed and unafraid, because of the natural all-glorifying 
love between them.  It is possible to love and be loved untroubling, 
as a bird flies through the air.  But it is a rare and intricate 
chance that brings two people within sight of that essential union, 
and for the majority marriage must adjust itself on other terms.  
Most coupled people never really look at one another.  They look a 
little away to preconceived ideas.  And each from the first days of 
love-making HIDES from the other, is afraid of disappointing, afraid 
of offending, afraid of discoveries in either sense.  They build not 
solidly upon the rock of truth, but upon arches and pillars and 
queer provisional supports that are needed to make a common 
foundation, and below in the imprisoned darknesses, below the fine 
fabric they sustain together begins for each of them a cavernous 
hidden life.  Down there things may be prowling that scarce ever 
peep out to consciousness except in the grey half-light of sleepless 
nights, passions that flash out for an instant in an angry glance 
and are seen no more, starved victims and beautiful dreams bricked 
up to die.  For the most of us there is no jail delivery of those 
inner depths, and the life above goes on to its honourable end.

I have told how I loved Margaret and how I came to marry her.  
Perhaps already unintentionally I have indicated the quality of the 
injustice our marriage did us both.  There was no kindred between us 
and no understanding.  We were drawn to one another by the 
unlikeness of our quality, by the things we misunderstood in each 
other.  I know a score of couples who have married in that fashion.

Modern conditions and modern ideas, and in particular the intenser 
and subtler perceptions of modern life, press more and more heavily 
upon a marriage tie whose fashion comes from an earlier and less 
discriminating time.  When the wife was her husband's subordinate, 
meeting him simply and uncritically for simple ends, when marriage 
was a purely domestic relationship, leaving thought and the vivid 
things of life almost entirely to the unencumbered man, mental and 
temperamental incompatibilities mattered comparatively little.  But 
now the wife, and particularly the loving childless wife, 
unpremeditatedly makes a relentless demand for a complete 
association, and the husband exacts unthought of delicacies of 
understanding and co-operation.  These are stupendous demands.  
People not only think more fully and elaborately about life than 
they ever did before, but marriage obliges us to make that ever more 
accidented progress a three-legged race of carelessly assorted 
couples. . . .

Our very mental texture was different.  I was rough-minded, to use 
the phrase of William James, primary and intuitive and illogical; 
she was tender-minded, logical, refined and secondary.  She was 
loyal to pledge and persons, sentimental and faithful; I am loyal to 
ideas and instincts, emotional and scheming.  My imagination moves 
in broad gestures; her's was delicate with a real dread of 
extravagance.  My quality is sensuous and ruled by warm impulses; 
hers was discriminating and essentially inhibitory.  I like the 
facts of the case and to mention everything; I like naked bodies and 
the jolly smells of things.  She abounded in reservations, in 
circumlocutions and evasions, in keenly appreciated secondary 
points.  Perhaps the reader knows that Tintoretto in the National 
Gallery, the Origin of the Milky Way.  It is an admirable test of 
tempera-mental quality.  In spite of my early training I have come 
to regard that picture as altogether delightful; to Margaret it has 
always been "needlessly offensive."  In that you have our 
fundamental breach.  She had a habit, by no means rare, of damning 
what she did not like or find sympathetic in me on the score that it 
was not my "true self," and she did not so much accept the universe 
as select from it and do her best to ignore the rest.  And also I 
had far more initiative than had she.  This is no catalogue of 
rights and wrongs, or superiorities and inferiorities; it is a 
catalogue of differences between two people linked in a relationship 
that constantly becomes more intolerant of differences.

This is how we stood to each other, and none of it was clear to 
either of us at the outset.  To begin with, I found myself reserving 
myself from her, then slowly apprehending a jarring between our 
minds and what seemed to me at first a queer little habit of 
misunderstanding in her. . . .

It did not hinder my being very fond of her. . . .

Where our system of reservation became at once most usual and most 
astounding was in our personal relations.  It is not too much to say 
that in that regard we never for a moment achieved sincerity with 
one another during the first six years of our life together.  It 
goes even deeper than that, for in my effort to realise the ideal of 
my marriage I ceased even to attempt to be sincere with myself.  I 
would not admit my own perceptions and interpretations.  I tried to 
fit myself to her thinner and finer determinations.  There are 
people who will say with a note of approval that I was learning to 
conquer myself.  I record that much without any note of approval. . . .

For some years I never deceived Margaret about any concrete fact 
nor, except for the silence about my earlier life that she had 
almost forced upon me, did I hide any concrete fact that seemed to 
affect her, but from the outset I was guilty of immense spiritual 
concealments, my very marriage was based, I see now, on a spiritual 
subterfuge; I hid moods from her, pretended feelings. . . .



3


The interest and excitement of setting-up a house, of walking about 
it from room to room and from floor to floor, or sitting at one's 
own dinner table and watching one's wife control conversation with a 
pretty, timid resolution, of taking a place among the secure and 
free people of our world, passed almost insensibly into the interest 
and excitement of my Parliamentary candidature for the Kinghamstead 
Division, that shapeless chunk of agricultural midland between the 
Great Western and the North Western railways.  I was going to "take 
hold" at last, the Kinghamstead Division was my appointed handle.  I 
was to find my place in the rather indistinctly sketched 
constructions that were implicit in the minds of all our circle.  
The precise place I had to fill and the precise functions I had to 
discharge were not as yet very clear, but all that, we felt sure, 
would become plain as things developed.

A few brief months of vague activities of "nursing" gave place to 
the excitements of the contest that followed the return of Mr. 
Camphell-Bannerman to power in 1905.  So far as the Kinghamstead 
Division was concerned it was a depressed and tepid battle.  I went 
about the constituency making three speeches that were soon 
threadbare, and an odd little collection of people worked for me; 
two solicitors, a cheap photographer, a democratic parson, a number 
of dissenting ministers, the Mayor of Kinghamstead, a Mrs. Bulger, 
the widow of an old Chartist who had grown rich through electric 
traction patents, Sir Roderick Newton, a Jew who had bought 
Calersham Castle, and old Sir Graham Rivers, that sturdy old 
soldier, were among my chief supporters.  We had headquarters in 
each town and village, mostly there were empty shops we leased 
temporarily, and there at least a sort of fuss and a coming and 
going were maintained.  The rest of the population stared in a state 
of suspended judgment as we went about the business.  The country 
was supposed to be in a state of intellectual conflict and 
deliberate decision, in history it will no doubt figure as a 
momentous conflict.  Yet except for an occasional flare of bill-
sticking or a bill in a window or a placard-plastered motor-car or 
an argumentative group of people outside a public-house or a 
sluggish movement towards the schoolroom or village hall, there was 
scarcely a sign that a great empire was revising its destinies.  Now 
and then one saw a canvasser on a doorstep.  For the most part 
people went about their business with an entirely irresponsible 
confidence in the stability of the universe.  At times one felt a 
little absurd with one's flutter of colours and one's air of saving 
the country.

My opponent was a quite undistinguished Major-General who relied 
upon his advocacy of Protection, and was particularly anxious we 
should avoid "personalities" and fight the constituency in a 
gentlemanly spirit.  He was always writing me notes, apologising for 
excesses on the part of his supporters, or pointing out the 
undesirability of some course taken by mine.

My speeches had been planned upon broad lines, but they lost touch 
with these as the polling approached.  To begin with I made a real 
attempt to put what was in my mind before the people I was to supply 
with a political voice.  I spoke of the greatness of our empire and 
its destinies, of the splendid projects and possibilities of life 
and order that lay before the world, of all that a resolute and 
constructive effort might do at the present time.  "We are building 
a state," I said, "secure and splendid, we are in the dawn of the 
great age of mankind."  Sometimes that would get a solitary "'Ear! 
'ear!"  Then having created, as I imagined, a fine atmosphere, I 
turned upon the history of the last Conservative administration and 
brought it into contrast with the wide occasions of the age; 
discussed its failure to control the grasping financiers in South 
Africa, its failure to release public education from sectarian 
squabbles, its misconduct of the Boer War, its waste of the world's 
resources. . . .

It soon became manifest that my opening and my general spaciousness 
of method bored my audiences a good deal.  The richer and wider my 
phrases the thinner sounded my voice in these non-resonating 
gatherings.  Even the platform supporters grew restive 
unconsciously, and stirred and coughed.  They did not recognise 
themselves as mankind.  Building an empire, preparing a fresh stage 
in the history of humanity, had no appeal for them.  They were 
mostly everyday, toiling people, full of small personal solicitudes, 
and they came to my meetings, I think, very largely as a relaxation.  
This stuff was not relaxing.  They did not think politics was a 
great constructive process, they thought it was a kind of dog-fight.  
They wanted fun, they wanted spice, they wanted hits, they wanted 
also a chance to say "'Ear', 'ear!" in an intelligent and honourable 
manner and clap their hands and drum with their feet.  The great 
constructive process in history gives so little scope for clapping 
and drumming and saying "'Ear, 'ear!"  One might as well think of 
hounding on the solar system.

So after one or two attempts to lift my audiences to the level of 
the issues involved, I began to adapt myself to them.  I cut down my 
review of our imperial outlook and destinies more and more, and 
developed a series of hits and anecdotes and--what shall I call 
them?--"crudifications" of the issue.  My helper's congratulated me 
on the rapid improvement of my platform style.  I ceased to speak of 
the late Prime Minister with the respect I bore him, and began to 
fall in with the popular caricature of him as an artful rabbit-
witted person intent only on keeping his leadership, in spite of the 
vigorous attempts of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain to oust him therefrom.  
I ceased to qualify my statement that Protection would make food 
dearer for the agricultural labourer.  I began to speak of Mr. 
Alfred Lyttelton as an influence at once insane and diabolical, as a 
man inspired by a passionate desire to substitute manacled but still 
criminal Chinese for honest British labourers throughout the world.  
And when it came to the mention of our own kindly leader, of Mr. 
John Burns or any one else of any prominence at all on our side I 
fell more and more into the intonation of one who mentions the high 
gods.  And I had my reward in brighter meetings and readier and 
readier applause.

One goes on from phase to phase in these things.

"After all," I told myself, "if one wants to get to Westminster one 
must follow the road that leads there," but I found the road 
nevertheless rather unexpectedly distasteful.  "When one gets 
there," I said, "then it is one begins."

But I would lie awake at nights with that sore throat and headache 
and fatigue which come from speaking in ill-ventilated rooms, and 
wondering how far it was possible to educate a whole people to great 
political ideals.  Why should political work always rot down to 
personalities and personal appeals in this way?  Life is, I suppose, 
to begin with and end with a matter of personalities, from 
personalities all our broader interests arise and to personalities 
they return.  All our social and political effort, all of it, is 
like trying to make a crowd of people fall into formation.  The 
broader lines appear, but then come a rush and excitement and 
irrelevancy, and forthwith the incipient order has vanished and the 
marshals must begin the work over again!

My memory of all that time is essentially confusion.  There was a 
frightful lot of tiresome locomotion in it; for the Kinghamstead 
Division is extensive, abounding in ill-graded and badly metalled 
cross-roads and vicious little hills, and singularly unpleasing to 
the eye in a muddy winter.  It is sufficiently near to London to 
have undergone the same process of ill-regulated expansion that made 
Bromstead the place it is.  Several of its overgrown villages have 
developed strings of factories and sidings along the railway lines, 
and there is an abundance of petty villas.  There seemed to be no 
place at which one could take hold of more than this or that element 
of the population.  Now we met in a meeting-house, now in a Masonic 
Hall or Drill Hall; I also did a certain amount of open-air speaking 
in the dinner hour outside gas-works and groups of factories.  Some 
special sort of people was, as it were, secreted in response to each 
special appeal.  One said things carefully adjusted to the 
distinctive limitations of each gathering.  Jokes of an incredible 
silliness and shallowness drifted about us.  Our advisers made us 
declare that if we were elected we would live in the district, and 
one hasty agent had bills printed, "If Mr. Remington is elected he 
will live here."  The enemy obtained a number of these bills and 
stuck them on outhouses, pigstyes, dog-kennels; you cannot imagine 
how irksome the repetition of that jest became.  The vast drifting 
indifference in between my meetings impressed me more and more.  I 
realised the vagueness of my own plans as I had never done before I 
brought them to the test of this experience.  I was perplexed by the 
riddle of just how far I was, in any sense of the word, taking hold 
at all, how far I wasn't myself flowing into an accepted groove.

Margaret was troubled by no such doubts.  She was clear I had to go 
into Parliament on the side of Liberalism and the light, as against 
the late Government and darkness.  Essential to the memory of my 
first contest, is the memory of her clear bright face, very resolute 
and grave, helping me consciously, steadfastly, with all her 
strength.  Her quiet confidence, while I was so dissatisfied, worked 
curiously towards the alienation of my sympathies.  I felt she had 
no business to be so sure of me.  I had moments of vivid resentment 
at being thus marched towards Parliament.

I seemed now always to be discovering alien forces of character in 
her.  Her way of taking life diverged from me more and more.  She 
sounded amazing, independent notes.  She bought some particularly 
costly furs for the campaign that roused enthusiasm whenever she 
appeared.  She also made me a birthday present in November of a 
heavily fur-trimmed coat and this she would make me remove as I went 
on to the platform, and hold over her arm until I was ready to 
resume it.  It was fearfully heavy for her and she liked it to be 
heavy for her.  That act of servitude was in essence a towering 
self-assertion.  I would glance sideways while some chairman 
floundered through his introduction and see the clear blue eye with 
which she regarded the audience, which existed so far as she was 
concerned merely to return me to Parliament.  It was a friendly eye, 
provided they were not silly or troublesome.  But it kindled a 
little at the hint of a hostile question.  After we had come so far 
and taken so much trouble!

She constituted herself the dragoman of our political travels.  In 
hotels she was serenely resolute for the quietest and the best, she 
rejected all their proposals for meals and substituted a severely 
nourishing dietary of her own, and even in private houses she 
astonished me by her tranquil insistence upon special comforts and 
sustenance.  I can see her face now as it would confront a hostess, 
a little intent, but sweetly resolute and assured.

Since our marriage she had read a number of political memoirs, and 
she had been particularly impressed by the career of Mrs. Gladstone.  
I don't think it occurred to her to compare and contrast my quality 
with that of Mrs. Gladstone's husband.  I suspect her of a 
deliberate intention of achieving parallel results by parallel 
methods.  I was to be Gladstonised.  Gladstone it appeared used to 
lubricate his speeches with a mixture--if my memory serves me right--
of egg beaten up in sherry, and Margaret was very anxious I should 
take a leaf from that celebrated book.  She wanted, I know, to hold 
the glass in her hand while I was speaking.

But here I was firm.  "No," I said, very decisively, "simply I won't 
stand that.  It's a matter of conscience.  I shouldn't feel--
democratic.  I'll take my chance of the common water in the carafe 
on the chairman's table."

"I DO wish you wouldn't," she said, distressed.

It was absurd to feel irritated; it was so admirable of her, a 
little childish, infinitely womanly and devoted and fine--and I see 
now how pathetic.  But I could not afford to succumb to her.  I 
wanted to follow my own leading, to see things clearly, and this 
reassuring pose of a high destiny, of an almost terribly efficient 
pursuit of a fixed end when as a matter of fact I had a very 
doubtful end and an aim as yet by no means fixed, was all too 
seductive for dalliance. . . .



4


And into all these things with the manner of a trifling and casual 
incident comes the figure of Isabel Rivers.  My first impressions of 
her were of a rather ugly and ungainly, extraordinarily interesting 
schoolgirl with a beautiful quick flush under her warm brown skin, 
who said and did amusing and surprising things.  When first I saw 
her she was riding a very old bicycle downhill with her feet on the 
fork of the frame--it seemed to me to the public danger, but 
afterwards I came to understand the quality of her nerve better--and 
on the third occasion she was for her own private satisfaction 
climbing a tree.  On the intervening occasion we had what seems now 
to have been a long sustained conversation about the political 
situation and the books and papers I had written.

I wonder if it was.

What a delightful mixture of child and grave woman she was at that 
time, and how little I reckoned on the part she would play in my 
life!  And since she has played that part, how impossible it is to 
tell now of those early days!  Since I wrote that opening paragraph 
to this section my idle pen has been, as it were, playing by itself 
and sketching faces on the blotting pad--one impish wizened visage 
is oddly like little Bailey--and I have been thinking cheek on fist 
amidst a limitless wealth of memories.  She sits below me on the low 
wall under the olive trees with our little child in her arms.  She 
is now the central fact in my life.  It still seems a little 
incredible that that should be so.  She has destroyed me as a 
politician, brought me to this belated rebeginning of life.  When I 
sit down and try to make her a girl again, I feel like the Arabian 
fisherman who tried to put the genius back into the pot from which 
it had spread gigantic across the skies. . . .

I have a very clear vision of her rush downhill past our labouring 
ascendant car--my colours fluttered from handle-bar and shoulder-
knot--and her waving hand and the sharp note of her voice.  She 
cried out something, I don't know what, some greeting.

"What a pretty girl!" said Margaret.

Parvill, the cheap photographer, that industrious organiser for whom 
by way of repayment I got those magic letters, that knighthood of 
the underlings, "J. P." was in the car with us and explained her to 
us.  "One of the best workers you have," he said. . . .

And then after a toilsome troubled morning we came, rather cross 
from the strain of sustained amiability, to Sir Graham Rivers' 
house.  It seemed all softness and quiet--I recall dead white 
panelling and oval mirrors horizontally set and a marble fireplace 
between white marble-blind Homer and marble-blind Virgil, very grave 
and fine--and how Isabel came in to lunch in a shapeless thing like 
a blue smock that made her bright quick-changing face seem yellow 
under her cloud of black hair.  Her step-sister was there, Miss 
Gamer, to whom the house was to descend, a well-dressed lady of 
thirty, amiably disavowing responsibility for Isabel in every phrase 
and gesture.  And there was a very pleasant doctor, an Oxford man, 
who seemed on excellent terms with every one.  It was manifest that 
he was in the habit of sparring with the girl, but on this occasion 
she wasn't sparring and refused to be teased into a display in spite 
of the taunts of either him or her father.  She was, they discovered 
with rising eyebrows, shy.  It seemed an opportunity too rare for 
them to miss.  They proclaimed her enthusiasm for me in a way that 
brought a flush to her cheek and a look into her eye between appeal 
and defiance.  They declared she had read my books, which I thought 
at the time was exaggeration, their dry political quality was so 
distinctly not what one was accustomed to regard as schoolgirl 
reading.  Miss Gamer protested to protect her, "When once in a blue 
moon Isabel is well-behaved. . . .!"

Except for these attacks I do not remember much of the conversation 
at table; it was, I know, discursive and concerned with the sort of 
topographical and social and electioneering fact natural to such a 
visit.  Old Rivers struck me as a delightful person, modestly 
unconscious of his doubly-earned V. C. and the plucky defence of 
Kardin-Bergat that won his baronetcy.  He was that excellent type, 
the soldier radical, and we began that day a friendship that was 
only ended by his death in the hunting-field three years later.  He 
interested Margaret into a disregard of my plate and the fact that I 
had secured the illegal indulgence of Moselle.  After lunch we went 
for coffee into another low room, this time brown panelled and 
looking through French windows on a red-walled garden, graceful even 
in its winter desolation.  And there the conversation suddenly 
picked up and became good.  It had fallen to a pause, and the 
doctor, with an air of definitely throwing off a mask and wrecking 
an established tranquillity, remarked: "Very probably you Liberals 
will come in, though I'm not sure you'll come in so mightily as you 
think, but what you do when you do come in passes my comprehension."

"There's good work sometimes," said Sir Graham, "in undoing."

"You can't govern a great empire by amending and repealing the Acts 
of your predecessors," said the doctor.

There came that kind of pause that happens when a subject is 
broached too big and difficult for the gathering.  Margaret's blue 
eyes regarded the speaker with quiet disapproval for a moment, and 
then came to me in the not too confident hope that I would snub him 
out of existence with some prompt rhetorical stroke.  A voice spoke 
out of the big arm-chair.

"We'll do things," said Isabel.

The doctor's eye lit with the joy of the fisherman who strikes his 
fish at last.  "What will you do?" he asked her.

"Every one knows we're a mixed lot," said Isabel.

"Poor old chaps like me!" interjected the general.

"But that's not a programme," said the doctor.

"But Mr. Remington has published a programme," said Isabel.

The doctor cocked half an eye at me.

"In some review," the girl went on.  "After all, we're not going to 
elect the whole Liberal party in the Kinghamstead Division.  I'm a 
Remington-ite!"

"But the programme," said the doctor, "the programme--"

"In front of Mr. Remington!"

"Scandal always comes home at last," said the doctor.  "Let him hear 
the worst."

"I'd like to hear," I said.  "Electioneering shatters convictions 
and enfeebles the mind."

"Not mine," said Isabel stoutly.  "I mean--Well, anyhow I take it 
Mr. Remington stands for constructing a civilised state out of this 
muddle."

"THIS muddle," protested the doctor with an appeal of the eye to the 
beautiful long room and the ordered garden outside the bright clean 
windows.

"Well, THAT muddle, if you like!  There's a slum within a mile of us 
already.  The dust and blacks get worse and worse, Sissie?"

"They do," agreed Miss Gamer.

"Mr. Remington stands for construction, order, education, discipline."

"And you?" said the doctor.

"I'm a good Remington-ite."

"Discipline!" said the doctor.

"Oh!" said Isabel.  "At times one has to be--Napoleonic.  They want 
to libel me, Mr. Remington.  A political worker can't always be in 
time for meals, can she?  At times one has to make--splendid cuts."

Miss Gamer said something indistinctly.

"Order, education, discipline," said Sir Graham.  "Excellent things!  
But I've a sort of memory--in my young days--we talked about 
something called liberty."

"Liberty under the law," I said, with an unexpected approving murmur 
from Margaret, and took up the defence.  "The old Liberal definition 
of liberty was a trifle uncritical.  Privilege and legal 
restrictions are not the only enemies of liberty.  An uneducated, 
underbred, and underfed propertyless man is a man who has lost the 
possibility of liberty.  There's no liberty worth a rap for him.  A 
man who is swimming hopelessly for life wants nothing but the 
liberty to get out of the water; he'll give every other liberty for 
it--until he gets out."

Sir Graham took me up and we fell into a discussion of the changing 
qualities of Liberalism.  It was a good give-and-take talk, 
extraordinarily refreshing after the nonsense and crowding secondary 
issues of the electioneering outside.  We all contributed more or 
less except Miss Gamer; Margaret followed with knitted brows and 
occasional interjections.  "People won't SEE that," for example, and 
"It all seems so plain to me."  The doctor showed himself clever but 
unsubstantial and inconsistent.  Isabel sat back with her black mop 
of hair buried deep in the chair looking quickly from face to face.  
Her colour came and went with her vivid intellectual excitement; 
occasionally she would dart a word, usually a very apt word, like a 
lizard's tongue into the discussion.  I remember chiefly that a 
chance illustration betrayed that she had read Bishop Burnet. . . .

After that it was not surprising that Isabel should ask for a lift 
in our car as far as the Lurky Committee Room, and that she should 
offer me quite sound advice EN ROUTE upon the intellectual 
temperament of the Lurky gasworkers.

On the third occasion that I saw Isabel she was, as I have said, 
climbing a tree--and a very creditable tree--for her own private 
satisfaction.  It was a lapse from the high seriousness of politics, 
and I perceived she felt that I might regard it as such and attach 
too much importance to it.  I had some difficulty in reassuring her.  
And it's odd to note now--it has never occurred to me before--that 
from that day to this I do not think I have ever reminded Isabel of 
that encounter.

And after that memory she seems to be flickering about always in the 
election, an inextinguishable flame; now she flew by on her bicycle, 
now she dashed into committee rooms, now she appeared on doorsteps 
in animated conversation with dubious voters; I took every chance I 
could to talk to her--I had never met anything like her before in 
the world, and she interested me immensely--and before the polling 
day she and I had become, in the frankest simplicity, fast 
friends. . . .

That, I think, sets out very fairly the facts of our early 
relationship.  But it is hard to get it true, either in form or 
texture, because of the bright, translucent, coloured, and 
refracting memories that come between.  One forgets not only the 
tint and quality of thoughts and impressions through that 
intervening haze, one forgets them altogether.  I don't remember now 
that I ever thought in those days of passionate love or the 
possibility of such love between us.  I may have done so again and 
again.  But I doubt it very strongly.  I don't think I ever thought 
of such aspects.  I had no more sense of any danger between us, 
seeing the years and things that separated us, than I could have had 
if she had been an intelligent bright-eyed bird.  Isabel came into 
my life as a new sort of thing; she didn't join on at all to my 
previous experiences of womanhood.  They were not, as I have 
laboured to explain, either very wide or very penetrating 
experiences, on the whole, "strangled dinginess" expresses them, but 
I do not believe they were narrower or shallower than those of many 
other men of my class.  I thought of women as pretty things and 
beautiful things, pretty rather than beautiful, attractive and at 
times disconcertingly attractive, often bright and witty, but, 
because of the vast reservations that hid them from me, wanting, 
subtly and inevitably wanting, in understanding.  My idealisation of 
Margaret had evaporated insensibly after our marriage.  The shrine I 
had made for her in my private thoughts stood at last undisguisedly 
empty.  But Isabel did not for a moment admit of either idealisation 
or interested contempt.  She opened a new sphere of womanhood to me.  
With her steady amber-brown eyes, her unaffected interest in 
impersonal things, her upstanding waistless blue body, her energy, 
decision and courage, she seemed rather some new and infinitely 
finer form of boyhood than a feminine creature, as I had come to 
measure femininity.  She was my perfect friend.  Could I have 
foreseen, had my world been more wisely planned, to this day we 
might have been such friends.

She seemed at that time unconscious of sex, though she has told me 
since how full she was of protesting curiosities and restrained 
emotions.  She spoke, as indeed she has always spoken, simply, 
clearly, and vividly; schoolgirl slang mingled with words that 
marked ample voracious reading, and she moved quickly with the free 
directness of some graceful young animal.  She took many of the easy 
freedoms a man or a sister might have done with me.  She would touch 
my arm, lay a hand on my shoulder as I sat, adjust the lapel of a 
breast-pocket as she talked to me.  She says now she loved me always 
from the beginning.  I doubt if there was a suspicion of that in her 
mind those days.  I used to find her regarding me with the clearest, 
steadiest gaze in the world, exactly like the gaze of some nice 
healthy innocent animal in a forest, interested, inquiring, 
speculative, but singularly untroubled. . . .



5


Polling day came after a last hoarse and dingy crescendo.  The 
excitement was not of the sort that makes one forget one is tired 
out.  The waiting for the end of the count has left a long blank 
mark on my memory, and then everyone was shaking my hand and 
repeating: "Nine hundred and seventy-six."

My success had been a foregone conclusion since the afternoon, but 
we all behaved as though we had not been anticipating this result 
for hours, as though any other figures but nine hundred and seventy-
six would have meant something entirely different.  "Nine hundred 
and seventy-six!" said Margaret.  "They didn't expect three 
hundred."

"Nine hundred and seventy-six," said a little short man with a 
paper.  "It means a big turnover.  Two dozen short of a thousand, 
you know."

A tremendous hullaboo began outside, and a lot of fresh people came 
into the room.

Isabel, flushed but not out of breath, Heaven knows where she had 
sprung from at that time of night! was running her hand down my 
sleeve almost caressingly, with the innocent bold affection of a 
girl.  "Got you in!" she said.  "It's been no end of a lark."

"And now," said I, "I must go and be constructive."

"Now you must go and be constructive," she said.

"You've got to live here," she added.

"By Jove! yes," I said.  "We'll have to house hunt."

"I shall read all your speeches."

She hesitated.

"I wish I was you," she said, and said it as though it was not 
exactly the thing she was meaning to say.

"They want you to speak," said Margaret, with something unsaid in 
her face.

"You must come out with me," I answered, putting my arm through 
hers, and felt someone urging me to the French windows that gave on 
the balcony.

"If you think--" she said, yielding gladly

"Oh, RATHER!" said I.

The Mayor of Kinghamstead, a managing little man with no great 
belief in my oratorical powers, was sticking his face up to mine.

"It's all over," he said, " and you've won.  Say all the nice things 
you can and say them plainly."

I turned and handed Margaret out through the window and stood 
looking over the Market-place, which was more than half filled with 
swaying people.  The crowd set up a roar of approval at the sight of 
us, tempered by a little booing.  Down in one corner of the square a 
fight was going on for a flag, a fight that even the prospect of a 
speech could not instantly check.  "Speech!" cried voices, "Speech!" 
and then a brief "boo-oo-oo" that was drowned in a cascade of shouts 
and cheers.  The conflict round the flag culminated in the smashing 
of a pane of glass in the chemist's window and instantly sank to 
peace.

"Gentlemen voters of the Kinghamstead Division," I began.

"Votes for Women!" yelled a voice, amidst laughter--the first time I 
remember hearing that memorable war-cry.

"Three cheers for Mrs. Remington!"

"Mrs. Remington asks me to thank you," I said, amidst further uproar 
and reiterated cries of "Speech!"

Then silence came with a startling swiftness.

Isabel was still in my mind, I suppose.  "I shall go to 
Westminster," I began.  I sought for some compelling phrase and 
could not find one.  "To do my share," I went on, "in building up a 
great and splendid civilisation."

I paused, and there was a weak gust of cheering, and then a renewal 
of booing.

"This election," I said, " has been the end and the beginning of 
much.  New ideas are abroad--"

"Chinese labour," yelled a voice, and across the square swept a 
wildfire of booting and bawling.

It is one of the few occasions when I quite lost my hold on a 
speech.  I glanced sideways and saw the Mayor of Kinghamstead 
speaking behind his hand to Parvill.  By a happy chance Parvill 
caught my eye.

"What do they want?" I asked.

"Eh?"

"What do they want?"

"Say something about general fairness--the other side," prompted 
Parvill, flattered but a little surprised by my appeal.  I pulled 
myself hastily into a more popular strain with a gross eulogy of my 
opponent's good taste.

"Chinese labour!" cried the voice again.

"You've given that notice to quit," I answered.

The Market-place roared delight, but whether that delight expressed 
hostility to Chinamen or hostility to their practical enslavement no 
student of the General Election of 1906 has ever been able to 
determine.  Certainly one of the most effective posters on our side 
displayed a hideous yellow face, just that and nothing more.  There 
was not even a legend to it.  How it impressed the electorate we did 
not know, but that it impressed the electorate profoundly there can 
be no disputing.



6


Kinghamstead was one of the earliest constituencies fought, and we 
came back--it must have been Saturday--triumphant but very tired, to 
our house in Radnor Square.  In the train we read the first 
intimations that the victory of our party was likely to be a 
sweeping one.

Then came a period when one was going about receiving and giving 
congratulations and watching the other men arrive, very like a boy 
who has returned to school with the first batch after the holidays.  
The London world reeked with the General Election; it had invaded 
the nurseries.  All the children of one's friends had got big maps 
of England cut up into squares to represent constituencies and were 
busy sticking gummed blue labels over the conquered red of Unionism 
that had hitherto submerged the country.  And there were also orange 
labels, if I remember rightly, to represent the new Labour party, 
and green for the Irish.  I engaged myself to speak at one or two 
London meetings, and lunched at the Reform, which was fairly tepid, 
and dined and spent one or two tumultuous evenings at the National 
Liberal Club, which was in active eruption.  The National Liberal 
became feverishly congested towards midnight as the results of the 
counting came dropping in.  A big green-baize screen had been fixed 
up at one end of the large smoking-room with the names of the 
constituencies that were voting that day, and directly the figures 
came to hand, up they went, amidst cheers that at last lost their 
energy through sheer repetition, whenever there was record of a 
Liberal gain.  I don't remember what happened when there was a 
Liberal loss; I don't think that any were announced while I was 
there.

How packed and noisy the place was, and what a reek of tobacco and 
whisky fumes we made!  Everybody was excited and talking, making 
waves of harsh confused sound that beat upon one's ears, and every 
now and then hoarse voices would shout for someone to speak.  Our 
little set was much in evidence.  Both the Cramptons were in, Lewis, 
Bunting Harblow.  We gave brief addresses attuned to this excitement 
and the late hour, amidst much enthusiasm.

Now we can DO things!" I said amidst a rapture of applause.  Men I 
did not know from Adam held up glasses and nodded to me in solemn 
fuddled approval as I came down past them into the crowd again.

Men were betting whether the Unionists would lose more or less than 
two hundred seats.

"I wonder just what we shall do with it all," I heard one sceptic 
speculating. . . .

After these orgies I would get home very tired and excited, and find 
it difficult to get to sleep.  I would lie and speculate about what 
it was we WERE going to do.  One hadn't anticipated quite such a 
tremendous accession to power for one's party.  Liberalism was 
swirling in like a flood. . . .

I found the next few weeks very unsatisfactory and distressing.  I 
don't clearly remember what it was I had expected; I suppose the 
fuss and strain of the General Election had built up a feeling that 
my return would in some way put power into my hands, and instead I 
found myself a mere undistinguished unit in a vast but rather vague 
majority.  There were moments when I felt very distinctly that a 
majority could be too big a crowd altogether.  I had all my work 
still before me, I had achieved nothing as yet but opportunity, and 
a very crowded opportunity it was at that.  Everyone about me was 
chatting Parliament and appointments; one breathed distracting and 
irritating speculations as to what would be done and who would be 
asked to do it.  I was chiefly impressed by what was unlikely to be 
done and by the absence of any general plan of legislation to hold 
us all together.  I found the talk about Parliamentary procedure and 
etiquette particularly trying.  We dined with the elder Cramptons 
one evening, and old Sir Edward was lengthily sage about what the 
House liked, what it didn't like, what made a good impression and 
what a bad one.  "A man shouldn't speak more than twice in his first 
session, and not at first on too contentious a topic," said Sir 
Edward.  "No."

"Very much depends on manner.  The House hates a lecturer.  There's 
a sort of airy earnestness--"

He waved his cigar to eke out his words.

"Little peculiarities of costume count for a great deal.  I could 
name one man who spent three years living down a pair of 
spatterdashers.  On the other hand--a thing like that--if it catches 
the eye of the PUNCH man, for example, may be your making."

He went off into a lengthy speculation of why the House had come to 
like an originally unpopular Irishman named Biggar. . . .

The opening of Parliament gave me some peculiar moods.  I began to 
feel more and more like a branded sheep.  We were sworn in in 
batches, dozens and scores of fresh men, trying not to look too 
fresh under the inspection of policemen and messengers, all of us 
carrying new silk hats and wearing magisterial coats.  It is one of 
my vivid memories from this period, the sudden outbreak of silk hats 
in the smoking-room of the National Liberal Club.  At first I 
thought there must have been a funeral.  Familiar faces that one had 
grown to know under soft felt hats, under bowlers, under liberal-
minded wide brims, and above artistic ties and tweed jackets, 
suddenly met one, staring with the stern gaze of self-consciousness, 
from under silk hats of incredible glossiness.  There was a 
disposition to wear the hat much too forward, I thought, for a good 
Parliamentary style.

There was much play with the hats all through; a tremendous 
competition to get in first and put hats on coveted seats.  A memory 
hangs about me of the House in the early afternoon, an inhumane 
desolation inhabited almost entirely by silk hats.  The current use 
of cards to secure seats came later.  There were yards and yards of 
empty green benches with hats and hats and hats distributed along 
them, resolute-looking top hats, lax top hats with a kind of shadowy 
grin under them, sensible top bats brim upward, and one scandalous 
incontinent that had rolled from the front Opposition bench right to 
the middle of the floor.  A headless hat is surely the most soulless 
thing in the world, far worse even than a skull. . . .

At last, in a leisurely muddled manner we got to the Address; and I 
found myself packed in a dense elbowing crowd to the right of the 
Speaker's chair; while the attenuated Opposition, nearly leaderless 
after the massacre, tilted its brim to its nose and sprawled at its 
ease amidst its empty benches.

There was a tremendous hullaboo about something, and I craned to see 
over the shoulder of the man in front.  ''Order, order, order!"

"What's it about?" I asked.

The man in front of me was clearly no better informed, and then I 
gathered from a slightly contemptuous Scotchman beside me that it 
was Chris Robinson had walked between the bonourable member in 
possession of the house and the Speaker.  I caught a glimpse of him 
blushingly whispering about his misadventure to a colleague.  He was 
just that same little figure I had once assisted to entertain at 
Cambridge, but grey-haired now, and still it seemed with the same 
knitted muffler he had discarded for a reckless half-hour while he 
talked to us in Hatherleigh's rooms.

It dawned upon me that I wasn't particularly wanted in the House, 
and that I should get all I needed of the opening speeches next day 
from the TIMES.

I made my way out and was presently walking rather aimlessly through 
the outer lobby.

I caught myself regarding the shadow that spread itself out before 
me, multiplied itself in blue tints of various intensity, shuffled 
itself like a pack of cards under the many lights, the square 
shoulders, the silk hat, already worn with a parliamentary tilt 
backward; I found I was surveying this statesmanlike outline with a 
weak approval.  "A MEMBER!" I felt the little cluster of people that 
were scattered about the lobby must be saying.

"Good God!" I said in hot reaction, "what am I doing here?"

It was one of those moments infinitely trivial in themselves, that 
yet are cardinal in a man's life.  It came to me with extreme 
vividness that it wasn't so much that I had got hold of something as 
that something had got hold of me.  I distinctly recall the rebound 
of my mind.  Whatever happened in this Parliament, I at least would 
attempt something.  "By God!" I said, "I won't be overwhelmed.  I am 
here to do something, and do something I will!"

But I felt that for the moment I could not remain in the House.

I went out by myself with my thoughts into the night.  It was a 
chilling night, and rare spots of rain were falling.  I glanced over 
my shoulder at the lit windows of the Lords.  I walked, I remember, 
westward, and presently came to the Grosvenar Embankment and 
followed it, watching the glittering black rush of the river and the 
dark, dimly lit barges round which the water swirled.  Across the 
river was the hunched sky-line of Doulton's potteries, and a kiln 
flared redly.  Dimly luminous trams were gliding amidst a dotted 
line of lamps, and two little trains crawled into Waterloo station.  
Mysterious black figures came by me and were suddenly changed to the 
commonplace at the touch of the nearer lamps.  It was a big confused 
world, I felt, for a man to lay his hands upon.

I remember I crossed Vauxhall Bridge and stood for a time watching 
the huge black shapes in the darkness under the gas-works.  A shoal 
of coal barges lay indistinctly on the darkly shining mud and water 
below, and a colossal crane was perpetually hauling up coal into 
mysterious blacknesses above, and dropping the empty clutch back to 
the barges.  Just one or two minute black featureless figures of men 
toiled amidst these monster shapes.  They did not seem to be 
controlling them but only moving about among them.  These gas-works 
have a big chimney that belches a lurid flame into the night, a 
livid shivering bluish flame, shot with strange crimson streaks. . . .

On the other side of Lambeth Bridge broad stairs go down to the 
lapping water of the river; the lower steps are luminous under the 
lamps and one treads unwarned into thick soft Thames mud.  They seem 
to be purely architectural steps, they lead nowhere, they have an 
air of absolute indifference to mortal ends.

Those shapes and large inhuman places--for all of mankind that one 
sees at night about Lambeth is minute and pitiful beside the 
industrial monsters that snort and toil there--mix up inextricably 
with my memories of my first days as a legislator.  Black figures 
drift by me, heavy vans clatter, a newspaper rough tears by on a 
motor bicycle, and presently, on the Albert Embankment, every seat 
has its one or two outcasts huddled together and slumbering.

"These things come, these things go," a whispering voice urged upon 
me, "as once those vast unmeaning Saurians whose bones encumber 
museums came and went rejoicing noisily in fruitless lives." . . .

Fruitless lives!--was that the truth of it all? . . .

Later I stood within sight of the Houses of Parliament in front of 
the colonnades of St Thomas's Hospital.  I leant on the parapet 
close by a lamp-stand of twisted dolphins--and I prayed!

I remember the swirl of the tide upon the water, and how a string of 
barges presently came swinging and bumping round as high-water 
turned to ebb.  That sudden change of position and my brief 
perplexity at it, sticks like a paper pin through the substance of 
my thoughts.  It was then I was moved to prayer.  I prayed that 
night that life might not be in vain, that in particular I might not 
live in vain.  I prayed for strength and faith, that the monstrous 
blundering forces in life might not overwhelm me, might not beat me 
back to futility and a meaningless acquiescence in existent things.  
I knew myself for the weakling I was, I knew that nevertheless it 
was set for me to make such order as I could out of these disorders, 
and my task cowed me, gave me at the thought of it a sense of 
yielding feebleness.

"Break me, O God," I prayed at last, "disgrace me, torment me, 
destroy me as you will, but save me from self-complacency and little 
interests and little successes and the life that passes like the 
shadow of a dream."



BOOK THE THIRD

THE HEART OF POLITICS



CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN



1


I have been planning and replanning, writing and rewriting, this 
next portion of my book for many days.  I perceive I must leave it 
raw edged and ill joined.  I have learnt something of the 
impossibility of History.  For all I have had to tell is the story 
of one man's convictions and aims and how they reacted upon his 
life; and I find it too subtle and involved and intricate for the 
doing.  I find it taxes all my powers to convey even the main forms 
and forces in that development.  It is like looking through moving 
media of changing hue and variable refraction at something vitally 
unstable.  Broad theories and generalisations are mingled with 
personal influences, with prevalent prejudices; and not only 
coloured but altered by phases of hopefulness and moods of 
depression.  The web is made up of the most diverse elements, beyond 
treatment multitudinous. . . .  For a week or so I desisted 
altogether, and walked over the mountains and returned to sit 
through the warm soft mornings among the shaded rocks above this 
little perched-up house of ours, discussing my difficulties with 
Isabel and I think on the whole complicating them further in the 
effort to simplify them to manageable and stateable elements.

Let me, nevertheless, attempt a rough preliminary analysis of this 
confused process.  A main strand is quite easily traceable.  This 
main strand is the story of my obvious life, my life as it must have 
looked to most of my acquaintances.  It presents you with a young 
couple, bright, hopeful, and energetic, starting out under Altiora's 
auspices to make a career.  You figure us well dressed and active, 
running about in motor-cars, visiting in great people's houses, 
dining amidst brilliant companies, going to the theatre, meeting in 
the lobby.  Margaret wore hundreds of beautiful dresses.  We must 
have had an air of succeeding meritoriously during that time.

We did very continually and faithfully serve our joint career.  I 
thought about it a great deal, and did and refrained from doing ten 
thousand things for the sake of it.  I kept up a solicitude for it, 
as it were by inertia, long after things had happened and changes 
occurred in me that rendered its completion impossible.  Under 
certain very artless pretences, we wanted steadfastly to make a 
handsome position in the world, achieve respect, SUCCEED.  Enormous 
unseen changes had been in progress for years in my mind and the 
realities of my life, before our general circle could have had any 
inkling of their existence, or suspected the appearances of our 
life.  Then suddenly our proceedings began to be deflected, our 
outward unanimity visibly strained and marred by the insurgence of 
these so long-hidden developments.

That career had its own hidden side, of course; but when I write of 
these unseen factors I do not mean that but something altogether 
broader.  I do not mean the everyday pettinesses which gave the 
cynical observer scope and told of a narrower, baser aspect of the 
fair but limited ambitions of my ostensible self.  This "sub-
careerist" element noted little things that affected the career, 
made me suspicious of the rivalry of so-and-so, propitiatory to so-
and-so, whom, as a matter of fact, I didn't respect or feel in the 
least sympathetic towards; guarded with that man, who for all his 
charm and interest wasn't helpful, and a little touchy at the 
appearance of neglect from that.  No, I mean something greater and 
not something smaller when I write of a hidden life.

In the ostensible self who glowed under the approbation of Altiora 
Bailey, and was envied and discussed, praised and depreciated, in 
the House and in smoking-room gossip, you really have as much of a 
man as usually figures in a novel or an obituary notice.  But I am 
tremendously impressed now in the retrospect by the realisation of 
how little that frontage represented me, and just how little such 
frontages do represent the complexities of the intelligent 
contemporary.  Behind it, yet struggling to disorganise and alter 
it, altogether, was a far more essential reality, a self less 
personal, less individualised, and broader in its references.  Its 
aims were never simply to get on; it had an altogether different 
system of demands and satisfactions.  It was critical, curious, more 
than a little unfeeling--and relentlessly illuminating.

It is just the existence and development of this more generalised 
self-behind-the-frontage that is making modern life so much more 
subtle and intricate to render, and so much more hopeful in its 
relations to the perplexities of the universe.  I see this mental 
and spiritual hinterland vary enormously in the people about me, 
from a type which seems to keep, as people say, all its goods in the 
window, to others who, like myself, come to regard the ostensible 
existence more and more as a mere experimental feeder and agent for 
that greater personality behind.  And this back-self has its history 
of phases, its crises and happy accidents and irrevocable 
conclusions, more or less distinct from the adventures and 
achievements of the ostensible self.  It meets persons and phrases, 
it assimilates the spirit of a book, it is startled into new 
realisations by some accident that seems altogether irrelevant to 
the general tenor of one's life.  Its increasing independence of the 
ostensible career makes it the organ of corrective criticism; it 
accumulates disturbing energy.  Then it breaks our overt promises 
and repudiates our pledges, coming down at last like an overbearing 
mentor upon the small engagements of the pupil.

In the life of the individual it takes the role that the growth of 
philosophy, science, and creative literature may play in the 
development of mankind.



2


It is curious to recall how Britten helped shatter that obvious, 
lucidly explicable presentation of myself upon which I had embarked 
with Margaret.  He returned to revive a memory of adolescent dreams 
and a habit of adolescent frankness; he reached through my shallow 
frontage as no one else seemed capable of doing, and dragged that 
back-self into relation with it.

I remember very distinctly a dinner and a subsequent walk with him 
which presents itself now as altogether typical of the quality of 
his influence.

I had come upon him one day while lunching with Somers and Sutton at 
the Playwrights' Club, and had asked him to dinner on the spur of 
the moment.  He was oddly the same curly-headed, red-faced 
ventriloquist, and oddly different, rather seedy as well as untidy, 
and at first a little inclined to make comparisons with my sleek 
successfulness.  But that disposition presently evaporated, and his 
talk was good and fresh and provocative.  And something that had 
long been straining at its checks in my mind flapped over, and he 
and I found ourselves of one accord.

Altiora wasn't at this dinner.  When she came matters were apt to 
become confusedly strenuous.  There was always a slight and 
ineffectual struggle at the end on the part of Margaret to 
anticipate Altiora's overpowering tendency to a rally and the 
establishment of some entirely unjustifiable conclusion by a COUP-
DE-MAIN.  When, however, Altiora was absent, the quieter influence 
of the Cramptons prevailed; temperance and information for its own 
sake prevailed excessively over dinner and the play of thought. . . .  
Good Lord! what bores the Cramptons were!  I wonder I endured 
them as I did.  They had all of them the trick of lying in wait 
conversationally; they had no sense of the self-exposures, the 
gallant experiments in statement that are necessary for good 
conversation.  They would watch one talking with an expression 
exactly like peeping through bushes.  Then they would, as it were, 
dash out, dissent succinctly, contradict some secondary fact, and 
back to cover.  They gave one twilight nerves.  Their wives were 
easier but still difficult at a stretch; they talked a good deal 
about children and servants, but with an air caught from Altiora of 
making observations upon sociological types.  Lewis gossiped about 
the House in an entirely finite manner.  He never raised a 
discussion; nobody ever raised a discussion.  He would ask what we 
thought of Evesham's question that afternoon, and Edward would say 
it was good, and Mrs. Willie, who had been behind the grille, would 
think it was very good, and then Willie, parting the branches, would 
say rather conclusively that he didn't think it was very much good, 
and I would deny hearing the question in order to evade a profitless 
statement of views in that vacuum, and then we would cast about in 
our minds for some other topic of equal interest. . . .

On this occasion Altiora was absent, and to qualify our Young 
Liberal bleakness we had Mrs. Millingham, with her white hair and 
her fresh mind and complexion, and Esmeer.  Willie Crampton was with 
us, but not his wife, who was having her third baby on principle; 
his brother Edward was present, and the Lewises, and of course the 
Bunting Harblows.  There was also some other lady.  I remember her 
as pale blue, but for the life of me I cannot remember her name.

Quite early there was a little breeze between Edward Crampton and 
Esmeer, who had ventured an opinion about the partition of Poland.  
Edward was at work then upon the seventh volume of his monumental 
Life of Kosciusko, and a little impatient with views perhaps not 
altogether false but betraying a lamentable ignorance of accessible 
literature.  At any rate, his correction of Esmeer was magisterial.  
After that there was a distinct and not altogether delightful pause, 
and then some one, it may have been the pale-blue lady, asked Mrs. 
Lewis whether her aunt Lady Carmixter had returned from her rest-
and-sun-cure in Italy.  That led to a rather anxiously sustained 
talk about regimen, and Willie told us how he had profited by the 
no-breakfast system.  It had increased his power of work enormously.  
He could get through ten hours a day now without inconvenience.

"What do you do?" said Esmeer abruptly.

"Oh! no end of work.  There's all the estate and looking after 
things."

"But publicly?"

"I asked three questions yesterday.  And for one of them I had to 
consult nine books!"

We were drifting, I could see, towards Doctor Haig's system of 
dietary, and whether the exclusion or inclusion of fish and chicken 
were most conducive to high efficiency, when Britten, who had 
refused lemonade and claret and demanded Burgundy, broke out, and 
was discovered to be demanding in his throat just what we Young 
Liberals thought we were up to?

"I want," said Britten, repeating his challenge a little louder, "to 
hear just exactly what you think you are doing in Parliament?"

Lewis laughed nervously, and thought we were "Seeking the Good of 
the Community."

"HOW?"

"Beneficient Legislation," said Lewis.

"Beneficient in what direction?" insisted Britten.  "I want to know 
where you think you are going."

"Amelioration of Social Conditions," said Lewis.

"That's only a phrase!"

"You wouldn't have me sketch bills at dinner?"

"I'd like you to indicate directions," said Britten, and waited.

"Upward and On," said Lewis with conscious neatness, and turned to 
ask Mrs. Bunting Harblow about her little boy's French.

For a time talk frothed over Britten's head, but the natural 
mischief in Mrs. Millingham had been stirred, and she was presently 
echoing his demand in lisping, quasi-confidential undertones.  "What 
ARE we Liberals doing?"  Then Esmeer fell in with the 
revolutionaries.

To begin with, I was a little shocked by this clamour for 
fundamentals--and a little disconcerted.  I had the experience that 
I suppose comes to every one at times of discovering oneself 
together with two different sets of people with whom one has 
maintained two different sets of attitudes.  It had always been, I 
perceived, an instinctive suppression in our circle that we 
shouldn't be more than vague about our political ideals.  It had 
almost become part of my morality to respect this convention.  It 
was understood we were all working hard, and keeping ourselves fit, 
tremendously fit, under Altiora's inspiration, Pro Bono Publico.  
Bunting Harblow had his under-secretaryship, and Lewis was on the 
verge of the Cabinet, and these things we considered to be in the 
nature of confirmations. . . .  It added to tbe discomfort of the 
situation that these plunging enquiries were being made in the 
presence of our wives.

The rebel section of our party forced the talk.

Edward Crampton was presently declaring--I forget in what relation: 
"The country is with us."

My long-controlled hatred of the Cramptons' stereotyped phrases 
about the Country and the House got the better of me.  I showed my 
cloven hoof to my friends for the first time.

"We don't respect the Country as we used to do," I said.  "We 
haven't the same belief we used to have in the will of the people.  
It's no good, Crampton, trying to keep that up.  We Liberals know as 
a matter of fact--nowadays every one knows--that the monster that 
brought us into power has, among other deficiencies, no head.  We've 
got to give it one--if possible with brains and a will.  That lies 
in the future.  For the present if the country is with us, it means 
merely that we happen to have hold of its tether."

Lewis was shocked.  A "mandate" from the Country was sacred to his 
system of pretences.

Britten wasn't subdued by his first rebuff; presently he was at us 
again.  There were several attempts to check his outbreak of 
interrogation; I remember the Cramptons asked questions about the 
welfare of various cousins of Lewis who were unknown to the rest of 
us, and Margaret tried to engage Britten in a sympathetic discussion 
of the Arts and Crafts exhibition.  But Britten and Esmeer were 
persistent, Mrs. Millingham was mischievous, and in the end our 
rising hopes of Young Liberalism took to their thickets for good, 
while we talked all over them of the prevalent vacuity of political 
intentions.  Margaret was perplexed by me.  It is only now I 
perceive just how perplexing I must have been.  "Of course, she said 
with that faint stress of apprehension in her eyes, one must have 
aims."  And, "it isn't always easy to put everything into phrases."  
"Don't be long," said Mrs. Edward Crampton to her hsuband as the 
wives trooped out.  And afterwards when we went upstairs I had an 
indefinable persuasion that the ladies had been criticising 
Britten's share in our talk in an altogether unfavourable spirit.  
Mrs. Edward evidently thought him aggressive and impertinent, and 
Margaret with a quiet firmness that brooked no resistance, took him 
at once into a corner and showed him Italian photographs by Coburn.  
We dispersed early.

I walked with Britten along the Chelsea back streets towards 
Battersea Bridge--he lodged on the south side.

"Mrs. Millingham's a dear," he began.

"She's a dear."

"I liked her demand for a hansom because a four-wheeler was too 
safe."

"She was worked up," I said.  "She's a woman of faultless character, 
but her instincts, as Altiora would say, are anarchistic--when she 
gives them a chance."

"So she takes it out in hansom cabs."

"Hansom cabs."

"She's wise," said Britten. . . .

"I hope, Remington," he went on after a pause, "I didn't rag your 
other guests too much.  I've a sort of feeling at moments--
Remington, those chaps are so infernally not--not bloody.  It's part 
of a man's duty sometimes at least to eat red beef and get drunk.  
How is he to understand government if he doesn't?  It scares me to 
think of your lot--by a sort of misapprehension--being in power.  A 
kind of neuralgia in the head, by way of government.  I don't 
understand where YOU come in.  Those others--they've no lusts.  
Their ideal is anaemia.  You and I, we had at least a lust to take 
hold of life and make something of it.  They--they want to take hold 
of life and make nothing of it.  They want to cut out all the 
stimulants.  Just as though life was anything else but a reaction to 
stimulation!" . . .

He began to talk of his own life.  He had had ill-fortune through 
most of it.  He was poor and unsuccessful, and a girl he had been 
very fond of had been attacked and killed by a horse in a field in a 
very horrible manner.  These things had wounded and tortured him, 
but they hadn't broken him.  They had, it seemed to me, made a kind 
of crippled and ugly demigod of him.  He was, I began to perceive, 
so much better than I had any right to expect.  At first I had been 
rather struck by his unkempt look, and it made my reaction all the 
stronger.  There was about him something, a kind of raw and bleeding 
faith in the deep things of life, that stirred me profoundly as he 
showed it.  My set of people had irritated him and disappointed him.  
I discovered at his touch how they irritated him.  He reproached me 
boldly.  He made me feel ashamed of my easy acquiescences as I 
walked in my sleek tall neatness beside his rather old coat, his 
rather battered hat, his sturdier shorter shape, and listened to his 
denunciations of our self-satisfied New Liberalism and 
Progressivism.

"It has the same relation to progress--the reality of progress--that 
the things they paint on door panels in the suburbs have to art and 
beauty.  There's a sort of filiation. . . .  Your Altiora's just the 
political equivalent of the ladies who sell traced cloth for 
embroidery; she's a dealer in Refined Social Reform for the Parlour.  
The real progress, Remington, is a graver thing and a painfuller 
thing and a slower thing altogether.  Look!  THAT"--and he pointed 
to where under a boarding in the light of a gas lamp a dingy 
prostitute stood lurking--" was in Babylon and Nineveh.  Your little 
lot make believe there won't be anything of the sort after this 
Parliament!  They're going to vanish at a few top notes from Altiora 
Bailey!  Remington!--it's foolery.  It's prigs at play.  It's make-
believe, make-believe!  Your people there haven't got hold of 
things, aren't beginning to get hold of things, don't know anything 
of life at all, shirk life, avoid life, get in little bright clean 
rooms and talk big over your bumpers of lemonade while the Night 
goes by outside--untouched.  Those Crampton fools slink by all 
this,"--he waved at the woman again--"pretend it doesn't exist, or 
is going to be banished root and branch by an Act to keep children 
in the wet outside public-houses.  Do you think they really care, 
Remington?  I don't.  It's make-believe.  What they want to do, what 
Lewis wants to do, what Mrs. Bunting Harblow wants her husband to 
do, is to sit and feel very grave and necessary and respected on the 
Government benches.  They think of putting their feet out like 
statesmen, and tilting shiny hats with becoming brims down over 
their successful noses.  Presentation portrait to a club at fifty.  
That's their Reality.  That's their scope.  They don't, it's 
manifest, WANT to think beyond that.  The things there ARE, 
Remington, they'll never face! the wonder and the depth of life,--
lust, and the night-sky,--pain."

"But the good intention," I pleaded, "the Good Will!"

"Sentimentality," said Britten.  "No Good Will is anything but 
dishonesty unless it frets and burns and hurts and destroys a man.  
That lot of yours have nothing but a good will to think they have 
good will.  Do you think they lie awake of nights searching their 
hearts as we do?  Lewis?  Crampton?  Or those neat, admiring, 
satisfied little wives?  See how they shrank from the probe!"

"We all," I said, "shrink from the probe."

"God help us!" said Britten. . . .

"We are but vermin at the best, Remington," he broke out," and the 
greatest saint only a worm that has lifted its head for a moment 
from the dust.  We are damned, we are meant to be damned, coral 
animalculae building upward, upward in a sea of damnation.  But of 
all the damned things that ever were damned, your damned shirking, 
temperate, sham-efficient, self-satisfied, respectable, make-
believe, Fabian-spirited Young Liberal is tbe utterly damnedest."  
He paused for a moment, and resumed in an entirely different note: 
"Which is why I was so surprised, Remington, to find YOU in this 
set!"

"You're just the old plunger you used to be, Britten," I said.  " 
You're going too far with all your might for the sake of the damns.  
Like a donkey that drags its cart up a bank to get thistles.  
There's depths in Liberalism--"

"We were talking about Liberals."

"Liberty!"

"Liberty!  What do YOOR little lot know of liberty?"

"What does any little lot know of liberty?"

"It waits outside, too big for our understanding.  Like the night 
and the stars.  And lust, Remington! lust and bitterness!  Don't I 
know them? with all the sweetness and hope of life bitten and 
trampled, the dear eyes and the brain that loved and understood--and 
my poor mumble of a life going on!  I'm within sight of being a 
drunkard, Remington!  I'm a failure by most standards!  Life has cut 
me to the bone.  But I'm not afraid of it any more.  I've paid 
something of the price, I've seen something of the meaning."

He flew off at a tangent.  "I'd rather die in Delirium Tremens," he 
cried, "than be a Crampton or a Lewis. . . ."

"Make-believe.  Make-believe."  The phrase and Britten's squat 
gestures haunted me as I walked homeward alone.  I went to my room 
and stood before my desk and surveyed papers and files and 
Margaret's admirable equipment of me.

I perceived in the lurid light of Britten's suggestions that so it 
was Mr. George Alexander would have mounted a statesman's private 
room. . . .



3


I was never at any stage a loyal party man.  I doubt if party will 
ever again be the force it was during the eighteenth and nineteenth 
centuries.  Men are becoming increasingly constructive and 
selective, less patient under tradition and the bondage of initial 
circumstances.  As education becomes more universal and liberating, 
men will sort themselves more and more by their intellectual 
temperaments and less and less by their accidental associations.  
The past will rule them less; the future more.  It is not simply 
party but school and college and county and country that lose their 
glamour.  One does not hear nearly as much as our forefathers did of 
the "old Harrovian," "old Arvonian," "old Etonian" claim to this or 
that unfair advantage or unearnt sympathy.  Even the Scotch and the 
Devonians weaken a little in their clannishness.  A widening sense 
of fair play destroys such things.  They follow freemasonry down--
freemasonry of which one is chiefly reminded nowadays in England by 
propitiatory symbols outside shady public-houses. . . .

There is, of course, a type of man which clings very obstinately to 
party ties.  These are the men with strong reproductive imaginations 
and no imaginative initiative, such men as Cladingbowl, for example, 
or Dayton.  They are the scholars-at-large in life.  For them the 
fact that the party system has been essential in the history of 
England for two hundred years gives it an overwhelming glamour.  
They have read histories and memoirs, they see the great grey pile 
of Westminster not so much for what it is as for what it was, rich 
with dramatic memories, populous with glorious ghosts, phrasing 
itself inevitably in anecdotes and quotations.  It seems almost 
scandalous that new things should continue to happen, swamping with 
strange qualities the savour of these old associations.

That Mr. Ramsay Macdonald should walk through Westminster Hall, 
thrust himself, it may be, through the very piece of space that once 
held Charles the Martyr pleading for his life, seems horrible 
profanation to Dayton, a last posthumous outrage; and he would, I 
think, like to have the front benches left empty now for ever, or at 
most adorned with laureated ivory tablets: "Here Dizzy sat," and "On 
this Spot William Ewart Gladstone made his First Budget Speech."  
Failing this, he demands, if only as signs of modesty and respect on 
the part of the survivors, meticulous imitation.  "Mr. G.," he 
murmurs, "would not have done that," and laments a vanished subtlety 
even while Mr. Evesham is speaking.  He is always gloomily disposed 
to lapse into wonderings about what things are coming to, wonderings 
that have no grain of curiosity.  His conception of perfect conduct 
is industrious persistence along the worn-down, well-marked grooves 
of the great recorded days.  So infinitely more important to him is 
the documented, respected thing than the elusive present.

Cladingbowl and Dayton do not shine in the House, though Cladingbowl 
is a sound man on a committee, and Dayton keeps the OLD COUNTRY 
GAZETTE, the most gentlemanly paper in London.  They prevail, 
however, in their clubs at lunch time.  There, with the pleasant 
consciousness of a morning's work free from either zeal or shirking, 
they mingle with permanent officials, prominent lawyers, even a few 
of the soberer type of business men, and relax their minds in the 
discussion of the morning paper, of the architecture of the West 
End, and of the latest public appointments, of golf, of holiday 
resorts, of the last judicial witticisms and forensic "crushers."  
The New Year and Birthday honours lists are always very sagely and 
exhaustively considered, and anecdotes are popular and keenly 
judged.  They do not talk of the things that are really active in 
their minds, but in the formal and habitual manner they suppose to 
be proper to intelligent but still honourable men.  Socialism, 
individual money matters, and religion are forbidden topics, and sex 
and women only in so far as they appear in the law courts.  It is to 
me the strangest of conventions, this assumption of unreal loyalties 
and traditional respects, this repudiation and concealment of 
passionate interests.  It is like wearing gloves in summer fields, 
or bathing in a gown, or falling in love with the heroine of a 
novel, or writing under a pseudonym, or becoming a masked Tuareg. . . .

It is not, I think, that men of my species are insensitive to the 
great past that is embodied in Westminster and its traditions; we 
are not so much wanting in the historical sense as alive to the 
greatness of our present opportunities and the still vaster future 
that is possible to us.  London is the most interesting, beautiful, 
and wonderful city in the world to me, delicate in her incidental 
and multitudinous littleness, and stupendous in her pregnant 
totality; I cannot bring myself to use her as a museum or an old 
bookshop.  When I think of Whitehall that little affair on the 
scaffold outside the Banqueting Hall seems trivial and remote in 
comparison with the possibilities that offer themselves to my 
imagination within the great grey Government buildings close at 
hand.

It gives me a qualm of nostalgia even to name those places now.  I 
think of St. Stephen's tower streaming upwards into the misty London 
night and the great wet quadrangle of New Palace Yard, from which 
the hansom cabs of my first experiences were ousted more and more by 
taxicabs as the second Parliament of King Edward the Seventh aged; I 
think of the Admiralty and War office with their tall Marconi masts 
sending out invisible threads of direction to the armies in the 
camps, to great fleets about the world.  The crowded, darkly shining 
river goes flooding through my memory once again, on to those narrow 
seas that part us from our rival nations; I see quadrangles and 
corridors of spacious grey-toned offices in which undistinguished 
little men and little files of papers link us to islands in the 
tropics, to frozen wildernesses gashed for gold, to vast temple-
studded plains, to forest worlds and mountain worlds, to ports and 
fortresses and lighthouses and watch-towers and grazing lands and 
corn lands all about the globe.  Once more I traverse Victoria 
Street, grimy and dark, where the Agents of the Empire jostle one 
another, pass the big embassies in the West End with their flags and 
scutcheons, follow the broad avenue that leads to Buckingham Palace, 
witness the coming and going of troops and officials and guests 
along it from every land on earth. . . .  Interwoven in the texture 
of it all, mocking, perplexing, stimulating beyond measure, is the 
gleaming consciousness, the challenging knowledge: "You and your 
kind might still, if you could but grasp it here, mould all the 
destiny of Man!"



4


My first three years in Parliament were years of active discontent.  
The little group of younger Liberals to which I belonged was very 
ignorant of the traditions and qualities of our older leaders, and 
quite out of touch with the mass of the party.  For a time 
Parliament was enormously taken up with moribund issues and old 
quarrels.  The early Educational legislation was sectarian and 
unenterprising, and the Licensing Bill went little further than the 
attempted rectification of a Conservative mistake.  I was altogether 
for the nationalisation of the public-houses, and of this end the 
Bill gave no intimations.  It was just beer-baiting.  I was 
recalcitrant almost from the beginning, and spoke against the 
Government so early as the second reading of the first Education 
Bill, the one the Lords rejected in 1906.  I went a little beyond my 
intention in the heat of speaking,--it is a way with inexperienced 
man.  I called the Bill timid, narrow, a mere sop to the jealousies 
of sects and little-minded people.  I contrasted its aim and methods 
with the manifest needs of the time.

I am not a particularly good speaker; after the manner of a writer I 
worry to find my meaning too much; but this was one of my successes.  
I spoke after dinner and to a fairly full House, for people were 
already a little curious about me because of my writings.  Several 
of the Conservative leaders were present and stayed, and Mr. 
Evesham, I remember, came ostentatiously to hear me, with that 
engaging friendliness of his, and gave me at the first chance an 
approving "Hear, Hear!"  I can still recall quite distinctly my two 
futile attempts to catch the Speaker's eye before I was able to 
begin, the nervous quiver of my rather too prepared opening, the 
effect of hearing my own voice and my subconscious wonder as to what 
I could possibly be talking about, the realisation that I was 
getting on fairly well, the immense satisfaction afterwards of 
having on the whole brought it off, and the absurd gratitude I felt 
for that encouraging cheer.

Addressing the House of Commons is like no other public speaking in 
the world.  Its semi-colloquial methods give it an air of being 
easy, but its shifting audience, the comings and goings and 
hesitations of members behind the chair--not mere audience units, 
but men who matter--the desolating emptiness that spreads itself 
round the man who fails to interest, the little compact, disciplined 
crowd in the strangers' gallery, the light, elusive, flickering 
movements high up behind the grill, the wigged, attentive, weary 
Speaker, the table and the mace and the chapel-like Gothic 
background with its sombre shadows, conspire together, produce a 
confused, uncertain feeling in me, as though I was walking upon a 
pavement full of trap-doors and patches of uncovered morass.  A 
misplaced, well-meant "Hear, Hear!" is apt to be extraordinarily 
disconcerting, and under no other circumstances have I had to speak 
with quite the same sideways twist that the arrangement of the House 
imposes.  One does not recognise one's own voice threading out into 
the stirring brown.  Unless I was excited or speaking to the mind of 
some particular person in the house, I was apt to lose my feeling of 
an auditor.  I had no sense of whither my sentences were going, such 
as one has with a public meeting well under one's eye.  And to lose 
one's sense of an auditor is for a man of my temperament to lose 
one's sense of the immediate, and to become prolix and vague with 
qualifications.



5


My discontents with the Liberal party and my mental exploration of 
the quality of party generally is curiously mixed up with certain 
impressions of things and people in the National Liberal Club.  The 
National Liberal Club is Liberalism made visible in the flesh--and 
Doultonware.  It is an extraordinary big club done in a bold, 
wholesale, shiny, marbled style, richly furnished with numerous 
paintings, steel engravings, busts, and full-length statues of the 
late Mr. Gladstone; and its spacious dining-rooms, its long, hazy, 
crowded smoking-room with innumerable little tables and groups of 
men in armchairs, its magazine room and library upstairs, have just 
that undistinguished and unconcentrated diversity which is for me 
the Liberal note.  The pensive member sits and hears perplexing 
dialects and even fragments of foreign speech, and among the 
clustering masses of less insistent whites his roving eye catches 
profiles and complexions that send his mind afield to Calcutta or 
Rangoon or the West Indies or Sierra Leone or the Cape. . . .

I was not infrequently that pensive member.  I used to go to the 
Club to doubt about Liberalism.

About two o'clock in the day the great smoking-room is crowded with 
countless little groups.  They sit about small round tables, or in 
circles of chairs, and the haze of tobacco seems to prolong the 
great narrow place, with its pillars and bays, to infinity.  Some of 
the groups are big, as many as a dozen men talk in loud tones; some 
are duologues, and there is always a sprinkling of lonely, 
dissociated men.  At first one gets an impression of men going from 
group to group and as it were linking them, but as one watches 
closely one finds that these men just visit three or four groups at 
the outside, and know nothing of the others.  One begins to perceive 
more and more distinctly that one is dealing with a sort of human 
mosaic; that each patch in that great place is of a different 
quality and colour from the next and never to be mixed with it.  
Most clubs have a common link, a lowest common denominator in the 
Club Bore, who spares no one, but even the National Liberal bores 
are specialised and sectional.  As one looks round one sees here a 
clump of men from the North Country or the Potteries, here an island 
of South London politicians, here a couple of young Jews ascendant 
from Whitechapel, here a circle of journalists and writers, here a 
group of Irish politicians, here two East Indians, here a priest or 
so, here a clump of old-fashioned Protestants, here a little knot of 
eminent Rationalists indulging in a blasphemous story SOTTO VOCE.  
Next them are a group of anglicised Germans and highly specialised 
chess-players, and then two of the oddest-looking persons--bulging 
with documents and intent upon extraordinary business transactions 
over long cigars. . . .

I would listen to a stormy sea of babblement, and try to extract 
some constructive intimations.  Every now and then I got a whiff of 
politics.  It was clear they were against the Lords--against 
plutocrats--against Cossington's newspapers--against the brewers. . . .  
It was tremendously clear what they were against.  The trouble 
was to find out what on earth they were for! . . .

As I sat and thought, the streaked and mottled pillars and wall, the 
various views, aspects, and portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, the 
partitions of polished mahogany, the yellow-vested waiters, would 
dissolve and vanish, and I would have a vision of this sample of 
miscellaneous men of limited, diverse interests and a universal 
littleness of imagination enlarged, unlimited, no longer a sample 
but a community, spreading, stretching out to infinity--all in 
little groups and duologues and circles, all with their special and 
narrow concerns, all with their backs to most of the others.

What but a common antagonism would ever keep these multitudes 
together?  I understood why modern electioneering is more than half 
of it denunciation.  Let us condemn, if possible, let us obstruct 
and deprive, but not let us do.  There is no real appeal to the 
commonplace mind in "Let us do."  That calls for the creative 
imagination, and few have been accustomed to respond to that call.  
The other merely needs jealousy and bate, of which there are great 
and easily accessible reservoirs in every human heart. . . .

I remember that vision of endless, narrow, jealous individuality 
very vividly.  A seething limitlessness it became at last, like a 
waste place covered by crawling locusts that men sweep up by the 
sackload and drown by the million in ditches. . . .

Grotesquely against it came the lean features, the sidelong shy 
movements of Edward Crampton, seated in a circle of talkers close at 
hand.  I had a whiff of his strained, unmusical voice, and behold! 
he was saying something about the "Will of the People. . . ." 

The immense and wonderful disconnectednesses of human life!  I 
forgot the smoke and jabber of the club altogether; I became a 
lonely spirit flung aloft by some queer accident, a stone upon a 
ledge in some high and rocky wilderness, and below as far as the eye 
could reach stretched the swarming infinitesimals of humanity, like 
grass upon the field, like pebbles upon unbounded beaches.  Was 
there ever to be in human life more than that endless struggling 
individualism?  Was there indeed some giantry, some immense valiant 
synthesis, still to come--or present it might be and still unseen by 
me, or was this the beginning and withal the last phase of 
mankind? . . .

I glimpsed for a while the stupendous impudence of our ambitions, 
the tremendous enterprise to which the modern statesman is 
implicitly addressed.  I was as it were one of a little swarm of 
would-be reef builders looking back at the teeming slime upon the 
ocean floor.  All the history of mankind, all the history of life, 
has been and will be the story of something struggling out of the 
indiscriminated abyss, struggling to exist and prevail over and 
comprehend individual lives--an effort of insidious attraction, an 
idea of invincible appeal.  That something greater than ourselves, 
which does not so much exist as seek existence, palpitating between 
being and not-being, how marvellous it is!  It has worn the form and 
visage of ten thousand different gods, sought a shape for itself in 
stone and ivory and music and wonderful words, spoken more and more 
clearly of a mystery of love, a mystery of unity, dabbling meanwhile 
in blood and cruelty beyond the common impulses of men.  It is 
something that comes and goes, like a light that shines and is 
withdrawn, withdrawn so completely that one doubts if it has ever 
been. . . .



6


I would mark with a curious interest the stray country member of the 
club up in town for a night or so.  My mind would be busy with 
speculations about him, about his home, his family, his reading, his 
horizons, his innumerable fellows who didn't belong and never came 
up.  I would fill in the outline of him with memories of my uncle 
and his Staffordshire neighbours.  He was perhaps Alderman This or 
Councillor That down there, a great man in his ward, J. P. within 
seven miles of the boundary of the borough, and a God in his home.  
Here he was nobody, and very shy, and either a little too arrogant 
or a little too meek towards our very democratic mannered but still 
livened waiters.  Was he perhaps the backbone of England?  He over-
ate himself lest he should appear mean, went through our Special 
Dinner conscientiously, drank, unless he was teetotal, of unfamiliar 
wines, and did his best, in spite of the rules, to tip.  Afterwards, 
in a state of flushed repletion, he would have old brandy, black 
coffee, and a banded cigar, or in the name of temperance omit the 
brandy and have rather more coffee, in the smoking-room.  I would 
sit and watch that stiff dignity of self-indulgence, and wonder, 
wonder. . . .

An infernal clairvoyance would come to me.  I would have visions of 
him in relation to his wife, checking always, sometimes bullying, 
sometimes being ostentatiously "kind"; I would see him glance 
furtively at his domestic servants upon his staircase, or stiffen 
his upper lip against the reluctant, protesting business employee.  
We imaginative people are base enough, heaven knows, but it is only 
in rare moods of bitter penetration that we pierce down to the baser 
lusts, the viler shames, the everlasting lying and muddle-headed 
self-justification of the dull.

I would turn my eyes down the crowded room and see others of him and 
others.  What did he think he was up to?  Did he for a moment 
realise that his presence under that ceramic glory of a ceiling with 
me meant, if it had any rational meaning at all, that we were 
jointly doing something with the nation and the empire and 
mankind? . . .  How on earth could any one get hold of him, make 
any noble use of him?  He didn't read beyond his newspaper.  He 
never thought, but only followed imaginings in his heart.  He never 
discussed.  At the first hint of discussion his temper gave way.  
He was, I knew, a deep, thinly-covered tank of resentments and 
quite irrational moral rages.  Yet withal I would have to resist 
an impulse to go over to him and nudge him and say to him, "Look 
here!  What indeed do you think we are doing with the nation and 
the empire and mankind?  You know--MANKIND!"

I wonder what reply I should have got.

So far as any average could be struck and so far as any backbone 
could be located, it seemed to me that this silent, shy, replete, 
sub-angry, middle-class sentimentalist was in his endless species 
and varieties and dialects the backbone of our party.  So far as I 
could be considered as representing anything in the House, I 
pretended to sit for the elements of HIM. . . .



7


For a time I turned towards the Socialists.  They at least had an 
air of coherent intentions.  At that time Socialism had come into 
politics again after a period of depression and obscurity, with a 
tremendous ECLAT.  There was visibly a following of Socialist 
members to Chris Robinson; mysteriously uncommunicative gentlemen in 
soft felt hats and short coats and square-toed boots who replied to 
casual advances a little surprisingly in rich North Country 
dialects.  Members became aware of a "seagreen incorruptible," as 
Colonel Marlow put it to me, speaking on the Address, a slender 
twisted figure supporting itself on a stick and speaking with a fire 
that was altogether revolutionary.  This was Philip Snowden, the 
member for Blackburn.  They had come in nearly forty strong 
altogether, and with an air of presently meaning to come in much 
stronger.  They were only one aspect of what seemed at that time a 
big national movement.  Socialist societies, we gathered, were 
springing up all over the country, and every one was inquiring about 
Socialism and discussing Socialism.  It had taken the Universities 
with particular force, and any youngster with the slightest 
intellectual pretension was either actively for or brilliantly 
against.  For a time our Young Liberal group was ostentatiously 
sympathetic. . . .

When I think of the Socialists there comes a vivid memory of certain 
evening gatherings at our house. . . .

These gatherings had been organised by Margaret as the outcome of a 
discussion at the Baileys'.  Altiora had been very emphatic and 
uncharitable upon the futility of the Socialist movement.  It seemed 
that even the leaders fought shy of dinner-parties.

"They never meet each other," said Altiora, "much less people on the 
other side.  How can they begin to understand politics until they do 
that?"

"Most of them have totally unpresentable wives," said Altiora, 
"totally!" and quoted insta