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
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 doubtsawhimself 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 impossi
ble 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 Iam capable. I KNOW I have
imagination. Modesty! I know if I don't attempt the very biggest
things in life Iam 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, a
nd 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