THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

8

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!"