THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

seven than at twenty-two, however much saner and stronger, and any

one looking closely into my mind during that period might well have

imagined growth finished altogether. It is particularly evident to

me now that I came no nearer to any understanding of women during

that time. That Locarno affair was infinitely more to me than I had

supposed. It ended something-nipped something in the bud perhaps-

took me at a stride from a vague, fine, ignorant, closed world of

emotion to intrigue and a perfectly definite and limited sensuality.

It ended my youth, and for a time it prevented my manhood. I had

never yet even peeped at the sweetest, profoundest thing in the

world, the heart and meaning of a girl, or dreamt with any quality

of reality of a wife or any such thing as a friend among womanhood.

My vague anticipation of such things in life had vanished

altogether. I turned away from their possibility. It seemed to me

I knew what had to be known about womankind. I wanted to work hard,

to get on to a position in which I could develop and forward my

constructive projects. Women, I thought, had nothing to do with

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 i

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 a

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 Pla

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