aunts and the still more terrible claim of Mrs. Burman Radnor, the
"infernal punctilio," and Dudley Sowerby's limitations, were the
central substance of that inalertness the book set itself to assail.
So many things have been brought together in my mind that were once
remotely separated. A people that will not valiantly face and
understand and admit love and passion can understand nothing
whatever. But in those days what is now just obvious truth to me
was altogether outside my range of comprehension…
8
As I seek to recapitulate the interlacing growth of my apprehension
of the world, as I flounder among the half-remembered developments
that found me a crude schoolboy and left me a man, there comes out,
as if it stood for all the rest, my first holiday abroad. That did
not happen until I was twenty-two. I was a fellow of Trinity, and
the Peace of Vereeniging had just been signed.
I went with a man named Willersley, a man some years senior to
myself, who had just missed a fellowship and the higher division of
the Civil Service, and who had become an enthusiastic member of the
London School Board, upon which the cumulative vote and the support
of the "advanced" people had placed him. He had, like myself, a
small independent income that relieved him of any necessity to earn
a living, and he had a kindred craving for social theorising and
some form of social service. He had sought my acquaintance after
reading a paper of mine (begotten by the visit of Chris Robinson) on
the limits of pure democracy. It had marched with some thoughts of
his own.
We went by train to Spiez on the Lake of Thun, then up the Gemmi,
and thence with one or two halts and digressions and a little modest
climbing we crossed over by the Antrona pass (on which we were
benighted) into Italy, and by way of Domo D'ossola and the Santa
Maria Maggiore valley to Cannobio, and thence up the lake to Locarno
(where, as I shall tell, we stayed some eventful days) and so up the
Val Maggia and over to Airolo and home.
As I write of that long tramp of ours, something of its freshness
and enlargement returns to me. I feel again the faint pleasant
excitement of the boat train, the trampling procession of people
with hand baggage and laden porters along the platform of the
Folkestone pier, the scarcely perceptible swaying of the moored boat
beneath our feet. Then, very obvious and simple, the little emotion
of standing out from the homeland and seeing the long white Kentish
cliffs recede. One walked about the boat doing one's best not to
feel absurdly adventurous, and presently a movement of people
directed one's attention to a white lighthouse on a cliff to the
east of us, coming up suddenly; and then one turned to scan the
little different French coast villages, and then, sliding by in a
pale sunshine came a long wooden pier with oddly dressed children
upon it, and the clustering town of Boulogne.
One took it all with the outward calm that became a young man of
nearly three and twenty, but one was alive to one's finger-tips with
pleasing little stimulations. The custom house examination excited
one, the strangeness of a babble in a foreign tongue; one found the
French of City Merchants' and Cambridge a shy and viscous flow, and
then one was standing in the train as it went slowly through the
rail-laid street to Boulogne Ville, and one looked out at the world
in French, porters in blouses, workmen in enormous purple trousers,
police officers in peaked caps instead of helmets and romantically
cloaked, big carts, all on two wheels instead of four, green
shuttered casements instead of sash windows, and great numbers of
neatly dressed women in economical mourning.
"Oh! there's a priest!" one said, and was betrayed into suchlike
artless cries.
It was a real other world, with different government and different
methods, and in the night one was roused from uneasy slumbers and
sat blinking and surly, wrapped up in one's couverture and with
one's oreiller all awry, to encounter a new social phenomenon, the
German official, so different in manner from the British; and when
one woke again after that one had come to Bale, and out one tumbled
to get coffee in Switzerland…
I have been over that route dozens of times since, but it still
revives a certain lingering youthfulness, a certain sense of
cheerful release in me.
I remember that I and Willersley became very sociological as we ran
on to Spiez, and made all sorts of generalisations from the steeply
sloping fields on the hillsides, and from the people we saw on
platforms and from little differences in the way things were done.
The clean prosperity of Bale and Switzerland, the big clean
stations, filled me with patriotic misgivings, as I thought of the
vast dirtiness of London, the mean dirtiness of Cambridgeshire. It
came to me that perhaps my scheme of international values was all
wrong, that quite stupendous possibilities and challenges for us and
our empire might be developing here-and I recalled Meredith's
Skepsey in France with a new understanding.
Willersley had dressed himself in a world-worn Norfolk suit of
greenish grey tweeds that ended unfamiliarly at his rather
impending, spectacled, intellectual visage. I didn't, I