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 Iam 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 formlessspirit 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
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 capab
le of
investigation?"
Altiora compressed her lips and shook her head. She always did
shake her head when you asked that of anyone.
"Of course what she ought to do," said Altiora, with her silk dress
pulled back from her knee before the fire, and with a lift of her
voice towards a chuckle at her daring way of putting things, "is to
marry a member of Parliament and see he does his work…
Perhaps she will. It's a very exceptional gal who can do anything
by herself-quite exceptional. The more serious they are-without
being exceptional-the more we want them to marry."
Her exposition was truncated by the entry of the type in question.
"Well!" cried Altiora turning, and with a high note of welcome,
"HERE you are!"
Margaret had gained in dignity and prettiness by the lapse of five
years, and she was now very beautifully and richly and simply
dressed. Her fair hair had been done in some way that made it seem
softer and more abundant than it was in my memory, and a gleam of
purple velvet-set diamonds showed amidst its mist of little golden
and brown lines. Her dress was of white and violet, the last trace
of mourning for her mother, and confessed the gracious droop of her
tall and slender body. She did not suggest Staffordshire at all,
and I was puzzled for a moment to think where I had met her. Her
sweetly shaped mouth with the slight obliquity of the lip and the
little kink in her brow were extraordinarily familiar to me. But
she had either been prepared by Altiora or she remembered my name.
"We met," she said, "while my step-father was alive-at Misterton.
You came to see us"; and instantly I recalled the sunshine between
the apple blossom and a slender pale blue girlish shape among the
daffodils, like something that had sprung from a bulb itself. I
recalled at once that I had found her very interesting, though I did
not clearly remember how it was she had interested me.
Other guests arrived-it was one of Altiora's boldly blended
mixtures of people with ideas and people with influence or money who
might perhaps be expected to resonate to them. Bailey came down
late with an air of hurry, and was introduced to Margaret and said
absolutely nothing to her-there being no information either to