THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

9

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.