by H. G. Wells
that. It seemed clear I could not marry for some years; I was
attractive to certain types of women, I had vanity enough to give me
an agreeable confidence in love-making, and I went about seeking a
convenient mistress quite deliberately, some one who should serve my
purpose and say in the end, like that kindly first mistress of mine,
"I've done you no harm," and so release me. It seemed the only wise
way of disposing of urgencies that might otherwise entangle and
wreck the career I was intent upon.
I don't apologise for, or defend my mental and moral phases. So it
was I appraised life and prepared to take it, and so it is a
thousand ambitious men see it to-day…
For the rest these five years were a period of definition. My
political conceptions were perfectly plain and honest. I had one
constant desire ruling my thoughts. I meant to leave England and
the empire better ordered than I found it, to organise and
discipline, to build up a constructive and controlling State out of
my world's confusions. We had, I saw, to suffuse education with
public intention, to develop a new better-living generation with a
collectivist habit of thought, to link now chaotic activities in
every human affair, and particularly to catch that escaped, world-
making, world-ruining, dangerous thing, industrial and financial
enterprise, and bring it back to the service of the general good. I
had then the precise image that still serves me as a symbol for all
I wish to bring about, the image of an engineer building a lock in a
swelling torrent-with water pressure as his only source of power.
My thoughts and acts were habitually turned to that enterprise; it
gave shape and direction to all my life. The problem that most
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 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
days-and returned from her experiences as an amateur flower girl
with clear and original views about the problem-which is and always
had been unusual. She had not married, I suppose because her
standards were high, and men are cowards and with an instinctive
appetite for muliebrity. She had kept house for her father by
speaking occasionally to the housekeeper, butler and cook her mother
had left her, and gathering the most interesting dinner parties she
could, and had married off four orphan nieces in a harsh and
successful manner. After her father's smash and death she came out
as a writer upon social questions and a scathing critic of the
Charity Organisation Society, and she was three and thirty and a
little at loose ends when she met Oscar Bailey, so to speak, in the
CONTEMPORARY REVIEW. The lurking woman in her nature was fascinated
by the ease and precision with which the little man rolled over all
sorts of important and authoritative people, she was the first to
discover a sort of imaginative bigness in his still growingmind,
the forehead perhaps carried him off physically, and she took
occasion to meet and subjugate him, and, so soon as he had
sufficiently recovered from his abject humility and a certain panic
at her attentions, marry him.
This had opened a new phase in the lives of Bailey and herself. The
two supplemented each other to an extraordinary extent. Their
subsequent career was, I think, almost entirely her invention. She
was aggressive, imaginative, and had a great capacity for ideas,
while he was almost destitute of initiative, and could do nothing
with ideas except remember and discuss them. She was, if not exact,
at least indolent, with a strong disposition to save energy by
sketching-even her handwriting showed that-while he was
inexhaustibly industrious with a relentless invariable caligraphy
that grew larger and clearer as the years passed by. She had a
considerable power of charming; she could be just as nice to people-
and incidentally just as nasty-as she wanted to be. He was always
just the same, a little confidential and SOTTO VOCE, artlessly rude
and egoistic in an undignified way. She had considerable social
experience, good social connections, and considerable social
ambition, while he had none of these things. She saw in a flash her
opportunity to redeem his defects, use his powers, and do large,
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
&
nbsp; 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
