I find it hard to judge whether I can say that I grew at all in any
real sense of the word, between three and twenty and twenty-seven.
It seems to me now to have been rather a phase of realisation and
clarification. All the broad lines of my thought were laid down, I
am sure, by the date of my Locarno adventure, but in those five
years I discussed things over and over again with myself and others,
filled out with concrete fact forms I had at first apprehended
sketchily and conversationally, measured my powers against my ideals
and the forces in the world about me. It was evident that many men
no better than myself and with no greater advantages than mine had
raised themselves to influential and even decisive positions in the
worlds of politics and thought. I was gathering the confidence and
knowledge necessary to attack the world in the large manner; I found
I could write, and that people would let me write if I chose, as one
having authority and not as the scribes. Socially and politically
and intellectually I knewmyself for an honest man, and that quite
without any deliberation on my part this showed and made things easy
for me. People trusted my goodfaith from the beginning-for all
that I came from nowhere and had no better position than any
adventurer.
But the growth process was arrested, I was nothing bigger at twenty-
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 innate
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 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,