novel, rather startling things. She ran him. Her marriage, which
shocked her friends and relations beyond measure-for a time they
would only speak of Bailey as "that gnome"-was a stroke of genius,
and forthwith they proceeded to make themselves the most formidable
and distinguished couple conceivable. P. B. P., she boasted, was
engraved inside their wedding rings, Pro Bono Publico, and she meant
it to be no idle threat. She had discovered very early that the
last thing influential people will do is to work. Everything in
their lives tends to make them dependent upon a supply of
confidently administered detail. Their business is with the window
and not the stock behind, and in the end they are dependent upon the
stock behind for what goes into the window. She linked with that
the fact that Bailey had a mind as orderly as a museum, and an
invincible power over detail. She saw that if two people took the
necessary pains to know the facts of government and administration
with precision, to gather together knowledge that was dispersed and
confused, to be able to say precisely what had to be done and what
avoided in this eventuality or that, they would necessarily become a
centre of reference for all sorts of legislative proposals and
political expedients, and she went unhesitatingly upon that.
Bailey, under her vigorous direction, threw up his post in the Civil
Service and abandoned sporadic controversies, and they devoted
themselves to the elaboration and realisation of this centre of
public information she had conceived as their role. They set out to
study the methods and organisation and realities of government in
the most elaborate manner. They did the work as no one had ever
hitherto dreamt of doing it. They planned the research on a
thoroughly satisfying scale, and arranged their lives almost
entirely for it. They took that house in Chambers Street and
furnished it with severe economy, they discovered that Scotch
domestic who is destined to be the guardian and tyrant of their
declining years, and they set to work. Their first book, "The
Permanent Official," fills three plump volumes, and took them and
their two secretaries upwards of four years to do. It is an
amazingly good book, an enduring achievement. In a hundred
directions the history and the administrative treatment of the
public service was clarified for all time…
They worked regularly every morning from nine to twelve, they
lunched lightly but severely, in the afternoon they "took exercise"
or Bailey attended meetings of the London School Board, on which he
served, he said, for the purposes of study-he also became a railway
director for the same end. In the late afternoon Altiora was at
home to various callers, and in the evening came dinner or a
reception or both.
Her dinners and gatherings were a very important feature in their
scheme. She got together all sorts of interesting people in or
about the public service, she mixed the obscurely efficient with the
ill-instructed famous and the rudderless rich, got together in one
room more of the factors in our strange jumble of a public life than
had ever met easily before. She fed them with a shameless austerity
that kept the conversation brilliant, on a soup, a plain fish, and
mutton or boiled fowl and milk pudding, with nothing to drink but
whisky and soda, and hot and cold water, and milk and lemonade.
Everybody was soon very glad indeed to come to that. She boasted
how little her housekeeping cost her, and sought constantly for
fresh economies that would enable her, she said, to sustain an
additional private secretary. Secretaries were the Baileys' one
extravagance, they loved to think of searches going on in the
British Museum, and letters being cleared up and precis made
overhead, while they sat in the little study and worked together,
Bailey with a clockwork industry, and Altiora in splendid flashes
between intervals of cigarettes and meditation. "All efficient
public careers," said Altiora, "consist in the proper direction of
secretaries."
"If everything goes well I shall have another secretary next year,"
Altiora told me. "I wish I could refuse people dinner napkins.
Imagine what it means in washing! I dare most things… But as
it is, they stand a lot of hardship here."
"There's something of the miser in both these people," said Esmeer,
and the thing was perfectly true. For, after all, the miser is
nothing more than a man who either through want of imagination or
want of suggestion misapplies to a base use a natural power of
concentration upon one end. The concentration itself is neither
good nor evil, but a power that can be used in either way. And the
Baileys gathered and reinvested usuriously not money, but knowledge
of the utmost value in human affairs. They produced an effect of
having found themselves-completely. One envied them at times
extraordinarily. I was attracted, I was dazzled-and at the same
time there was something about Bailey's big wrinkled forehead, his
lisping broad mouth, the gestures of his hands and an uncivil
preoccupation I could not endure…
3
Their effect upon me was from the outset very considerable.
Both of them found occasion on that first visit of mine to talk to
me about my published writings and particularly about my then just
published book THE NEW RULER, which had interested them very much.