THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Page 22

  whisky and soda, and hot and cold water, and milk and lemonade.

  Everybody was soon very glad indeed to come to that. She boasted

  how little her housekeeping cost her, and sought constantly for

  fresh economies that would enable her, she said, to sustain an

  additional private secretary. Secretaries were the Baileys' one

  extravagance, they loved to think of searches going on in the

  British Museum, and letters being cleared up and precis made

  overhead, while they sat in the little study and worked together,

  Bailey with a clockwork industry, and Altiora in splendid flashes

  between intervals of cigarettes and meditation. "All efficient

  public careers," said Altiora, "consist in the proper direction of

  secretaries."

  "If everything goes well I shall have another secretary next year,"

  Altiora told me. "I wish I could refuse people dinner napkins.

  Imagine what it means in washing! I dare most things… But as

  it is, they stand a lot of hardship here."

  "There's something of the miser in both these people," said Esmeer,

  and the thing was perfectly true. For, after all, the miser is

  nothing more than a man who either through want of imagination or

  want of suggestion misapplies to a base use a natural power of

  concentration upon one end. The concentration itself is neither

  good nor evil, but a power that can be used in either way. And the

  Baileys gathered and reinvested usuriously not money, but knowledge

  of the utmost value in human affairs. They produced an effect of

  having found themselves-completely. One envied them at times

  extraordinarily. I was attracted, I was dazzled-and at the same

  time there was something about Bailey's big wrinkled forehead, his

  lisping broad mouth, the gestures of his hands and an uncivil

  preoccupation I could not endure…

  3

  Their effect upon me was from the outset very considerable.

  Both of them found occasion on that first visit of mine to talk to

  me about my published writings and particularly about my then just

  published book THE NEW RULER, which had interested them very much.

  It fell in indeed so closely with their own way of thinking that I

  doubt if they ever understood how independently I had arrived at my

  conclusions. It was their weakness to claim excessively. That

  irritation, however, came later. We discovered each other

  immensely; for a time it produced a tremendous sense of kindred and

  cooperation.

  Altiora, I remember, maintained that there existed a great army of

  such constructive-minded people as ourselves-as yet undiscovered by

  one another.

  "It's like boring a tunnel through a mountain," said Oscar, "and

  presently hearing the tapping of the workers from the other end."

  "If you didn't know of them beforehand," I said, "it might be a

  rather badly joined tunnel."

  "Exactly," said Altiora with a high note, "and that's why we all

  want to find out each other…"

  They didn't talk like that on our first encounter, but they urged me

  to lunch with them next day, and then it was we went into things. A

  woman Factory Inspector and the Educational Minister for New

  Banksland and his wife were also there, but I don't remember they

  made any contribution to the conversation. The Baileys saw to that.

  They kept on at me in an urgent litigious way.

  "We have read your book," each began-as though it had been a joint

  function. "And we consider-"

  "Yes," I protested, "I think-"

  That was a secondary matter.

  "They did not consider," said Altiora, raising her voice and going

  right over me, that I had allowed sufficiently for the inevitable

  development of an official administrative class in the modern

  state."

  "Nor of its importance," echoed Oscar.

  That, they explained in a sort of chorus, was the cardinal idea of

  their lives, what they were up to, what they stood for. "We want to

  suggest to you," they said-and I found this was a stock opening of

  theirs-"that from the mere necessities of convenience elected

  bodies MUST avail themselves more and more of the services of expert

  officials. We have that very much in mind. The more complicated

  and technical affairs become, the less confidence will the elected

  official have in himself. We want to suggest that these expert

  officials must necessarily develop into a new class and a very

  powerful class in the community. We want to organise that. It may

  be THE power of the future. They will necessarily have to have very

  much of a common training. We consider ourselves as amateur unpaid

  precursors of such a class."…

  The vision they displayed for my consideration as the aim of public-

  spirited endeavour, seemed like a harder, narrower, more specialised

  version of the idea of a trained and disciplined state that

  Willersley and I had worked out in the Alps. They wanted things

  more organised, more correlated with government and a collective

  purpose, just as we did, but they saw it not in terms of a growing

  collective understanding, but in terms of functionaries, legislative

  change, and methods of administration…

  It wasn't clear at first how we differed. The Baileys were very

  anxious to win me to co-operation, and I was quite prepared at first

  to identify their distinctive expressions with phrases of my own,

  and so we came very readily into an alliance that was to last some

  years, and break at last very painfully. Altiora manifestly liked

  me, I was soon discussing with her the perplexity I found in placing

  myself efficiently in the world, the problem of how to take hold of

  things that occupied my thoughts, and she was sketching out careers

  for my consideration, very much as an architect on his first visit

  sketches houses, considers requirements, and puts before you this

  example and that of the more or less similar thing already done…

  4

  It is easy to see how much in common there was between the Baileys

  and me, and how natural it was that I should become a constant

  visitor at their house and an ally of theirs in many enterprises.

  It is not nearly so easy to define the profound antagonism of spirit

  that also held between us. There was a difference in texture, a

  difference in quality. How can I express it? The shapes of our

  thoughts were the same, but the substance quite different. It was

  as if they had made in china or cast iron what I had made in

  transparent living matter. (The comparison is manifestly from my

  point of view.) Certain things never seemed to show through their

  ideas that were visible, refracted perhaps and distorted, but

  visible always through mine.

  I thought for a time the essential difference lay in our relation to

  beauty. With me beauty is quite primary in life; I like truth,

  order and goodness, wholly because they are beautiful or lead

  straight to beautiful consequences. The Baileys either hadn't got

  that or they didn't see it. They seemed at times to prefer things

  harsh and ugly. That puzzled me extremely. The esthetic quality of


  many of their proposals, the "manners" of their work, so to speak,

  were at times as dreadful as-well, War Office barrack architecture.

  A caricature by its exaggerated statements will sometimes serve to

  point a truth by antagonising falsity and falsity. I remember

  talking to a prominent museum official in need of more public funds

  for the work he had in hand. I mentioned the possibility of

  enlisting Bailey's influence.

  "Oh, we don't want Philistines like that infernal Bottle-Imp running

  us," he said hastily, and would hear of no concerted action for the

  end he had in view. "I'd rather not have the extension.

  "You see," he went on to explain, "Bailey's wanting in the

  essentials."

  "What essentials?" said I.

  "Oh! he'd be like a nasty oily efficient little machine for some

  merely subordinate necessity among all my delicate stuff. He'd do

  all we wanted no doubt in the way of money and powers-and he'd do

  it wrong and mess the place for ever. Hands all black, you know.

  He's just a means. Just a very aggressive and unmanageable means.

  This isn't a plumber's job…"

  I stuck to my argument.

  "I don't LIKE him," said the official conclusively, and it seemed to

  me at the time he was just blind prejudice speaking…

  I came nearer the truth of the matter as I came to realise that our

  philosophies differed profoundly. That isn't a very curable

  difference,-once people have grown up. Theirs was a philosophy

  devoid of FINESSE. Temperamentally the Baileys were specialised,

  concentrated, accurate, while Iam urged either by some Inner force

  or some entirely assimilated influence in my training, always to

  round off and shadow my outlines. I hate them hard. I would

  sacrifice detail to modelling always, and the Baileys, it seemed to

  me, loved a world as flat and metallic as Sidney Cooper's cows. If

  they had the universe in hand I know they would take down all the

  trees and put up stamped tin green shades and sunlight accumulators.

  Altiora thought trees hopelessly irregular and sea cliffs a great

  mistake… I got things clearer as time went on. Though it

  was an Hegelian mess of which I had partaken at Codger's table by

  way of a philosophical training, my sympathies have always been

  Pragmatist. I belong almost by nature to that school of Pragmatism

  that, following the medieval Nominalists, bases itself upon a denial

  of the reality of classes, and of the validity of general laws. The

  Baileys classified everything. They were, in the scholastic sense-

  which so oddly contradicts the modern use of the word-"Realists."

  They believed classes were REAL and independent of their

  individuals. This is the common habit of all so-called educated

  people who have no metaphysical aptitude and no metaphysical

  training. It leads them to a progressive misunderstanding of the

  world. It was a favourite trick of Altiora's to speak of everybody

  as a "type"; she saw men as samples moving; her dining-room became a

  chamber of representatives. It gave a tremendously scientific air

  to many of their generalisations, using "scientific" in its

  nineteenth-century uncritical Herbert Spencer sense, an air that

  only began to disappear when you thought them over again in terms of

  actuality and the people one knew…

  At the Baileys' one always seemed to be getting one's hands on the

  very strings that guided the world. You heard legislation projected

  to affect this "type" and that; statistics marched by you with sin

  and shame and injustice and misery reduced to quite manageable

  percentages, you found men who were to frame or amend bills in grave

  and intimate exchange with Bailey's omniscience, you heard Altiora

  canvassing approaching resignations and possible appointments that

  might make or mar a revolution in administrative methods, and doing

  it with a vigorous directness that manifestly swayed the decision;

  and you felt you were in a sort of signal box with levers all about

  you, and the world outside there, albeit a little dark and

  mysterious beyond the window, running on its lines in ready

  obedience to these unhesitating lights, true and steady to trim

  termini.

  And then with all this administrative fizzle, this pseudo-scientific

  administrative chatter, dying away in your head, out you went into

  the limitless grimy chaos of London streets and squares, roads and

  avenues lined with teeming houses, each larger than the Chambers

  Street house and at least equally alive, you saw the chaotic clamour

  of hoardings, the jumble of traffic, the coming and going of

  mysterious myriads, you heard the rumble of traffic like the noise

  of a torrent; a vague incessant murmur of cries and voices, wanton

  crimes and accidents bawled at you from the placards; imperative

  unaccountable fashions swaggered triumphant in dazzling windows of

  the shops; and you found yourself swaying back to the opposite

  conviction that the huge formlessspirit of the world it was that

  held the strings and danced the puppets on the Bailey stage…

  Under the lamps you were jostled by people like my Staffordshire

  uncle out for a spree, you saw shy youths conversing with

  prostitutes, you passed young lovers pairing with an entire

  disregard of the social suitability of the "types" they might blend

  or create, you saw men leaning drunken against lamp-posts whom you

  knew for the "type" that will charge with fixed bayonets into the

  face of death, and you found yourself unable to imagine little

  Bailey achieving either drunkenness or the careless defiance of

  annihilation. You realised that quite a lot of types were

  underrepresented in Chambers Street, that feral and obscure and

  altogether monstrous forces must be at work, as yet altogether

  unassimilated by those neat administrative reorganisations.

  5

  Altiora, I remember, preluded Margaret's reappearance by announcing

  her as a "new type."

  I was accustomed to go early to the Baileys' dinners in those days,

  for a preliminary gossip with Altiora in front of her drawing-room

  fire. One got her alone, and that early arrival was a little sign

  of appreciation she valued. She had every woman's need of followers

  and servants.

  "I'm going to send you down to-night," she said, "with a very

  interesting type indeed-one of the new generation of serious gals.

  Middle-class origin-and quite well off. Rich in fact. Her step-

  father was a solicitor and something of an ENTREPRENEUR towards the

  end, I fancy-in the Black Country. There was a little brother

  died, and she's lost her mother quite recently. Quite on her own,

  so to speak. She's never been out into society very much, and

  doesn't seem really very anxious to go… Not exactly an

  intellectual person, you know, but quiet, and great force of

  character. Came up to London on her own and came to us-someone had

  told her we were the sort of people to advise her-to ask what to

  do. I'm sure she'll interest you."

  "What CAN people of that sort do?" I asked. "Is she capab
le of

  investigation?"

  Altiora compressed her lips and shook her head. She always did

  shake her head when you asked that of anyone.

  "Of course what she ought to do," said Altiora, with her silk dress

  pulled back from her knee before the fire, and with a lift of her

  voice towards a chuckle at her daring way of putting things, "is to

  marry a member of Parliament and see he does his work…

  Perhaps she will. It's a very exceptional gal who can do anything

  by herself-quite exceptional. The more serious they are-without

  being exceptional-the more we want them to marry."

  Her exposition was truncated by the entry of the type in question.

  "Well!" cried Altiora turning, and with a high note of welcome,

  "HERE you are!"

  Margaret had gained in dignity and prettiness by the lapse of five

  years, and she was now very beautifully and richly and simply

  dressed. Her fair hair had been done in some way that made it seem

  softer and more abundant than it was in my memory, and a gleam of

  purple velvet-set diamonds showed amidst its mist of little golden

  and brown lines. Her dress was of white and violet, the last trace

  of mourning for her mother, and confessed the gracious droop of her

  tall and slender body. She did not suggest Staffordshire at all,

  and I was puzzled for a moment to think where I had met her. Her

  sweetly shaped mouth with the slight obliquity of the lip and the

  little kink in her brow were extraordinarily familiar to me. But

  she had either been prepared by Altiora or she remembered my name.

  "We met," she said, "while my step-father was alive-at Misterton.

  You came to see us"; and instantly I recalled the sunshine between

  the apple blossom and a slender pale blue girlish shape among the

  daffodils, like something that had sprung from a bulb itself. I

  recalled at once that I had found her very interesting, though I did

  not clearly remember how it was she had interested me.

  Other guests arrived-it was one of Altiora's boldly blended

  mixtures of people with ideas and people with influence or money who

  might perhaps be expected to resonate to them. Bailey came down

  late with an air of hurry, and was introduced to Margaret and said

  absolutely nothing to her-there being no information either to