THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Read online

  that. It seemed clear I could not marry for some years; I was

  attractive to certain types of women, I had vanity enough to give me

  an agreeable confidence in love-making, and I went about seeking a

  convenient mistress quite deliberately, some one who should serve my

  purpose and say in the end, like that kindly first mistress of mine,

  "I've done you no harm," and so release me. It seemed the only wise

  way of disposing of urgencies that might otherwise entangle and

  wreck the career I was intent upon.

  I don't apologise for, or defend my mental and moral phases. So it

  was I appraised life and prepared to take it, and so it is a

  thousand ambitious men see it to-day…

  For the rest these five years were a period of definition. My

  political conceptions were perfectly plain and honest. I had one

  constant desire ruling my thoughts. I meant to leave England and

  the empire better ordered than I found it, to organise and

  discipline, to build up a constructive and controlling State out of

  my world's confusions. We had, I saw, to suffuse education with

  public intention, to develop a new better-living generation with a

  collectivist habit of thought, to link now chaotic activities in

  every human affair, and particularly to catch that escaped, world-

  making, world-ruining, dangerous thing, industrial and financial

  enterprise, and bring it back to the service of the general good. I

  had then the precise image that still serves me as a symbol for all

  I wish to bring about, the image of an engineer building a lock in a

  swelling torrent-with water pressure as his only source of power.

  My thoughts and acts were habitually turned to that enterprise; it

  gave shape and direction to all my life. The problem that most

  engaged my mind during those years was the practical and personal

  problem of just where to apply myself to serve this almost innate

  purpose. How was I, a child of this confusion, struggling upward

  through the confusion, to take hold of things? Somewhere between

  politics and literature my grip must needs be found, but where?

  Always I seem to have been looking for that in those opening years,

  and disregarding everything else to discover it.

  2

  The Baileys, under whose auspices I met Margaret again, were in the

  sharpest contrast with the narrow industrialism of the Staffordshire

  world. They were indeed at the other extreme of the scale, two

  active self-centred people, excessively devoted to the public

  service. It was natural I should gravitate to them, for they seemed

  to stand for the maturer, more disciplined, better informed

  expression of all I was then urgent to attempt to do. The bulk of

  their friends were politicians or public officials, they described

  themselves as publicists-a vague yet sufficiently significant term.

  They lived and worked in a hard little house in Chambers Street,

  Westminster, and made a centre for quite an astonishing amount of

  political and social activity.

  Willersley took me there one evening. The place was almost

  pretentiously matter-of-fact and unassuming. The narrow passage-

  hall, papered with some ancient yellowish paper, grained to imitate

  wood, was choked with hats and cloaks and an occasional feminine

  wrap. Motioned rather than announced by a tall Scotch servant

  woman, the only domestic I ever 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

&
nbsp; 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