like the contrast of him with the drilled Swiss and Germans about
us. Convict coloured stockings and vast hobnail boots finished him
below, and all his luggage was a borrowed rucksac that he had tied
askew. He did not want to shave in the train, but I made him at one
of the Swiss stations-I dislike these Oxford slovenlinesses-and
then confound him! he cut himself and bled…
Next morning we were breathing a thin exhilarating air that seemed
to have washed our very veins to an incredible cleanliness, and
eating hard-boiled eggs in a vast clear space of rime-edged rocks,
snow-mottled, above a blue-gashed glacier. All about us the
monstrous rock surfaces rose towards the shining peaks above, and
there were winding moraines from which the ice had receded, and then
dark clustering fir trees far below.
I had an extraordinary feeling of having come out of things, of
being outside.
"But this is the round world!" I said, with a sense of never having
perceived it before; "this is the round world!"
9
That holiday was full of big comprehensive effects; the first view
of the Rhone valley and the distant Valaisian Alps, for example,
which we saw from the shoulder of the mountain above the Gemmi, and
the early summer dawn breaking over Italy as we moved from our
night's crouching and munched bread and chocolate and stretched our
stiff limbs among the tumbled and precipitous rocks that hung over
Lake Cingolo, and surveyed the winding tiring rocky track going down
and down to Antronapiano.
And our thoughts were as comprehensive as our impressions.
Willersley's mind abounded in historical matter; he had an
inaccurate abundant habit of topographical reference; he made me see
and trace and see again the Roman Empire sweep up these winding
valleys, and the coming of the first great Peace among the warring
tribes of men…
In the retrospect each of us seems to have been talking about our
outlook almost continually. Each of us, you see, was full of the
same question, very near and altogether predominant to us, the
question: "What am I going to do with my life?" He saw it almost as
importantly as I, but from a different angle, because his choice was
largely made and mine still hung in the balance.
"I feel we might do so many things," I said, "and everything that
calls one, calls one away from something else."
Willersley agreed without any modest disavowals.
"We have got to think out," he said, "just what we are and what we
are up to. We've got to do that now. And then-it's one of those
questions it is inadvisable to reopen subsequently."
He beamed at me through his glasses. The sententious use of long
words was a playful habit with him, that and a slight deliberate
humour, habits occasional Extension Lecturing was doing very much to
intensify.
"You've made your decision?"
He nodded with a peculiar forward movement of his head.
"How would you put it?"
"Social Service-education. Whatever else matters or doesn't
matter, it seems to me there is one thing we MUST have and increase,
and that is the number of people who can think a little-and have "-
he beamed again-" an adequate sense of causation."
"You're sure it's worth while."
"For me-certainly. I don't discuss that any more."
"I don't limitmyself too narrowly," he added. "After all, the work
is all one. We who know, we who feel, are building the great modern
state, joining wall to wall and way to way, the new great England
rising out of the decaying old… we are the real statesmen-I
like that use of 'statesmen.'…"
"Yes," I said with many doubts. "Yes, of course…"
Willersley is middle-aged now, with silver in his hair and a
deepening benevolence in his always amiable face, and he has very
fairly kept his word. He has lived for social service and to do
vast masses of useful, undistinguished, fertilising work. Think of
the days of arid administrative plodding and of contention still
more arid and unrewarded, that he must have spent! His little
affectations of gesture and manner, imitative affectations for the
most part, have increased, and the humorous beam and the humorous
intonations have become a thing he puts on every morning like an old
coat. His devotion is mingled with a considerable whimsicality, and
they say he is easily flattered by subordinates and easily offended
into opposition by colleagues; he has made mistakes at times and
followed wrong courses, still there he is, a flat contradiction to
all the ordinary doctrine of motives, a man who has foregone any
chances of wealth and profit, foregone any easier paths to
distinction, foregone marriage and parentage, in order to serve the
community. He does it without any fee or reward except his personal
self-satisfaction in doing this work, and he does it without any
hope of future joys and punishments, for he is an implacable
Rationalist. No doubt he idealises himself a little, and dreams of
recognition. No doubt he gets his