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 noblydreaming 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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   My father, Iam 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."

   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…

   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 fearfulsmell 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.

   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."

   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 goodmemory, 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 seenherself 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 Iam 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 Iam 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…

   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!

   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

   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.

   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, Iam 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, Iam
   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.

   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, Iam 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.

   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
   continualpleasure 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.

   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.

   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 growingunderstanding. 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 "beinggood" 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 satisfyingTruth. That, too, ceased after a time
   to be urgently interesting. I came at last into a phase that
   endures to this day, of absolutetranquillity, 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. Iam 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. Iam,
   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 painfulgoal 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 emotionaldreaming, 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.

   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 responsiblebeing.' 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
   goodform… 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.

   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 Iam 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. Iam 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 Iam
   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, Iam 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 Iam 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 relatedquietly
   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…

   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…

   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 painfulexperience, 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."

   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…

   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…

   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!"

   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 limitmyself 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 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 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.

   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.

   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, 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…

   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 sawmyself 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.

   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 feltmyself 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: "Iam a man! Iam 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 Iam," 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.

   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.

   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.

   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."

   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…

   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,
   when she came up to me, under a transparent pretext of looking for a
   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 realhatred 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.

   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 feltherself 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 enjoyourselves," 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…

   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.

   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 knewmyself for an honest man, and that quite
   without any deliberation on my part this showed and made things easy
   for me. People trusted my goodfaith 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.

   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 rememberseeing 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 growingmind,
   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…

   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…

   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
   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.

   Altiora, I remember, preluded Margaret's reappearance by announcing
   her as a "new type."
   I was accustomed to go early to the Baileys' dinners in those days,
   for a preliminary gossip with Altiora in front of her drawing-room
   fire. One got her alone, and that early arrival was a little sign
   of appreciation she valued. She had every woman's need of followers
   and servants.
   "I'm going to send you down to-night," she said, "with a very
   interesting type indeed-one of the new generation of serious gals.
   Middle-class origin-and quite well off. Rich in fact. Her step-
   father was a solicitor and something of an ENTREPRENEUR towards the
   end, I fancy-in the Black Country. There was a little brother
   died, and she's lost her mother quite recently. Quite on her own,
   so to speak. She's never been out into society very much, and
   doesn't seem really very anxious to go… Not exactly an
   intellectual person, you know, but quiet, and great force of
   character. Came up to London on her own and came to us-someone had
   told her we were the sort of people to advise her-to ask what to
   do. I'm sure she'll interest you."
   "What CAN people of that sort do?" I asked. "Is she capable of
   investigation?"
   Altiora compressed her lips and shook her head. She always did
   shake her head when you asked that of anyone.
   "Of course what she ought to do," said Altiora, with her silk dress
   pulled back from her knee before the fire, and with a lift of her
   voice towards a chuckle at her daring way of putting things, "is to
   marry a member of Parliament and see he does his work…
   Perhaps she will. It's a very exceptional gal who can do anything
   by herself-quite exceptional. The more serious they are-without
   being exceptional-the more we want them to marry."
   Her exposition was truncated by the entry of the type in question.
   "Well!" cried Altiora turning, and with a high note of welcome,
   "HERE you are!"
   Margaret had gained in dignity and prettiness by the lapse of five
   years, and she was now very beautifully and richly and simply
   dressed. Her fair hair had been done in some way that made it seem
   softer and more abundant than it was in my memory, and a gleam of
   purple velvet-set diamonds showed amidst its mist of little golden
   and brown lines. Her dress was of white and violet, the last trace
   of mourning for her mother, and confessed the gracious droop of her
   tall and slender body. She did not suggest Staffordshire at all,
   and I was puzzled for a moment to think where I had met her. Her
   sweetly shaped mouth with the slight obliquity of the lip and the
   little kink in her brow were extraordinarily familiar to me. But
   she had either been prepared by Altiora or she remembered my name.
   "We met," she said, "while my step-father was alive-at Misterton.
   You came to see us"; and instantly I recalled the sunshine between
   the apple blossom and a slender pale blue girlish shape among the
   daffodils, like something that had sprung from a bulb itself. I
   recalled at once that I had found her very interesting, though I did
   not clearly remember how it was she had interested me.
   Other guests arrived-it was one of Altiora's boldly blended
   mixtures of people with ideas and people with influence or money who
   might perhaps be expected to resonate to them. Bailey came down
   late with an air of hurry, and was introduced to Margaret and said
   absolutely nothing to her-there being no information either to
   receive or impart and nothing to do-but stood snatching his left
   cheek until I rescued him and her, and left him free to congratulate
   the new Lady Snape on her husband's K. C. B.
   I took Margaret down. We achieved no feats of mutual expression,
   except that it was abundantly clear we were both very pleased and
   interested to meet again, and that we had both kept memories of each
   other. We made that Misterton tea-party and the subsequent
   marriages of my cousins and the world of Burslem generally, matter
   for quite an agreeable conversation until at last Altiora, following
   her invariable custom, called me by name imperatively out of our
   duologue. "Mr. Remington," she said, "we want your opinion-" in
   her entirely characteristic effort to get all the threads of
   conversation into her own hands for the climax that always wound up
   her dinners. How the other women used to hate those concluding
   raids of hers! I forget most of the other people at that dinner,
   nor can I recall what the crowning rally was about. It didn't in
   any way join on to my impression of Margaret.
   In the drawing-room of the matting floor I rejoined her, with
   Altiora's manifest connivance, and in the interval I had been
   thinking of our former meeting.
   "Do you find London," I asked, "give you more opportunity for doing
   things and learning things than Burslem?"
   She showed at once she appreciated my allusion to her former
   confidences. "I was very discontented then," she said and paused.
   "I've really only been in London for a few months. It's so
   different. In Burslem, life seems all business and getting-without
   any reason. One went on and it didn't seem to mean anything. At
   least anything that mattered… London seems to be so full of
   meanings-all mixed up together."
   She knitted her brows over her words and smiled appealingly at the
   end as if for consideration for her inadequate expression,
   appealingly and almost humorously.
   I looked understandingly at her. "We have all," I agreed, "to come
   to London."
   "One sees so much distress," she added, as if she felt she had
   completely omitted something, and needed a codicil.
   "What are you doing in London?"
   "I'mthinking 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.