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