THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

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

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…