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,
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