Our long three weeks" talk comes back to me as a memory of ideas and determinations slowly growing, all mixed up with a smell of wood smoke and pine woods and huge precipices and remote gleams of snow-fields and the sound of cascading torrents rushing through deep gorges far below.
It is mixed, too, with gossips with waitresses and fellow travellers, with my first essays in colloquial German and Italian, with disputes about the way to take, and other things that I will tell of in another section. But the white pa.s.sion of human service was our dominant theme.
Not simply perhaps nor altogether unselfishly, but quite honestly, and with at least a frequent self-forgetfulness, did we want to do fine and n.o.ble things, to help in their developing, to lessen misery, to broaden and exalt life. It is very hard--perhaps it is impossible--to present in a page or two the substance and quality of nearly a month"s conversation, conversation that is casual and discursive in form, that ranges carelessly from triviality to immensity, and yet is constantly resuming a constructive process, as workmen on a wall loiter and jest and go and come back, and all the while build.
We got it more and more definite that the core of our purpose beneath all its varied aspects must needs be order and discipline. "Muddle,"
said I, "is the enemy." That remains my belief to this day. Clearness and order, light and foresight, these things I know for Good. It was muddle had just given us all the still freshly painful disasters and humiliations of the war, muddle that gives us the visibly sprawling disorder of our cities and industrial country-side, muddle that gives us the waste of life, the limitations, wretchedness and unemployment of the poor. Muddle! I remember myself quoting Kipling--
"All along o" dirtiness, all along o" mess, All along o" doin" things rather-more-or-less."
"We build the state," we said over and over again. "That is what we are for--servants of the new reorganisation!"
We planned half in earnest and half Utopianising, a League of Social Service.
We talked of the splendid world of men that might grow out of such unpaid and ill-paid work as we were setting our faces to do. We spoke of the intricate difficulties, the monstrous pa.s.sive resistances, the hostilities to such a development as we conceived our work subserved, and we spoke with that underlying confidence in the invincibility of the causes we adopted that is natural to young and scarcely tried men.
We talked much of the detailed life of politics so far as it was known to us, and there Willersley was more experienced and far better informed than I; we discussed possible combinations and possible developments, and the chances of some great constructive movement coming from the heart-searchings the Boer war had occasioned. We would sink to gossip--even at the Suetonius level. Willersley would decline towards illuminating anecdotes that I capped more or less loosely from my private reading. We were particularly wise, I remember, upon the management of newspapers, because about that we knew nothing whatever.
We perceived that great things were to be done through newspapers. We talked of swaying opinion and moving great cla.s.ses to ma.s.sive action.
Men are egotistical even in devotion. All our splendid projects were thickset with the first personal p.r.o.noun. We both could write, and all that we said in general terms was reflected in the particular in our minds; it was ourselves we saw, and no others, writing and speaking that moving word. We had already produced ma.n.u.script and pa.s.sed the initiations of proof reading; I had been a frequent speaker in the Union, and Willersley was an active man on the School Board. Our feet were already on the lower rungs that led up and up. He was six and twenty, and I twenty-two. We intimated our individual careers in terms of bold expectation. I had prophetic glimpses of walls and h.o.a.rdings clamorous with "Vote for Remington," and Willersley no doubt saw himself chairman of this committee and that, saying a few slightly ironical words after the declaration of the poll, and then sitting friendly beside me on the government benches. There was nothing impossible in such dreams. Why not the Board of Education for him? My preference at that time wavered between the Local Government Board--I had great ideas about town-planning, about revisions of munic.i.p.al areas and re-organised internal transit--and the War Office. I swayed strongly towards the latter as the journey progressed. My educational bias came later.
The swelling ambitions that have tramped over Alpine pa.s.ses! How many of them, like mine, have come almost within sight of realisation before they failed?
There were times when we posed like young G.o.ds (of una.s.suming exterior), and times when we were full of the absurdest little solicitudes about our prospects. There were times when one surveyed the whole world of men as if it was a little thing at one"s feet, and by way of contrast I remember once lying in bed--it must have been during this holiday, though I cannot for the life of me fix where--and speculating whether perhaps some day I might not be a K. C. B., Sir Richard Remington, K. C.
B., M. P.
But the big style prevailed....
We could not tell from minute to minute whether we were planning for a world of solid reality, or telling ourselves fairy tales about this prospect of life. So much seemed possible, and everything we could think of so improbable. There were lapses when it seemed to me I could never be anything but just the entirely unimportant and undistinguished young man I was for ever and ever. I couldn"t even think of myself as five and thirty.
Once I remember Willersley going over a list of failures, and why they had failed--but young men in the twenties do not know much about failures.
10
Willersley and I professed ourselves Socialists, but by this time I knew my Rodbertus as well as my Marx, and there was much in our socialism that would have shocked Chris Robinson as much as anything in life could have shocked him. Socialism as a simple democratic cry we had done with for ever. We were socialists because Individualism for us meant muddle, meant a crowd of separated, undisciplined little people all obstinately and ignorantly doing things jarringly, each one in his own way.
"Each," I said quoting words of my father"s that rose apt in my memory, "snarling from his own little bit of property, like a dog tied to a cart"s tail."
"Essentially," said Willersley, "essentially we"re for conscription, in peace and war alike. The man who owns property is a public official and has to behave as such. That"s the gist of socialism as I understand it."
"Or be dismissed from his post," I said, "and replaced by some better sort of official. A man"s none the less an official because he"s irresponsible. What he does with his property affects people just the same. Private! No one is really private but an outlaw...."
Order and devotion were the very essence of our socialism, and a splendid collective vigour and happiness its end. We projected an ideal state, an organised state as confident and powerful as modern science, as balanced and beautiful as a body, as beneficent as sunshine, the organised state that should end muddle for ever; it ruled all our ideals and gave form to all our ambitions.
Every man was to be definitely related to that, to have his predominant duty to that. Such was the England renewed we had in mind, and how to serve that end, to subdue undisciplined worker and undisciplined wealth to it, and make the Scientific Commonweal, King, was the continuing substance of our intercourse.
11
Every day the wine of the mountains was stronger in our blood, and the flush of our youth deeper. We would go in the morning sunlight along some narrow Alpine mule-path shouting large suggestions for national reorganisation, and weighing considerations as lightly as though the world was wax in our hands. "Great England," we said in effect, over and over again, "and we will be among the makers! England renewed! The country has been warned; it has learnt its lesson. The disasters and anxieties of the war have sunk in. England has become serious.... Oh!
there are big things before us to do; big enduring things!"
One evening we walked up to the loggia of a little pilgrimage church, I forget its name, that stands out on a conical hill at the head of a winding stair above the town of Locarno. Down below the houses cl.u.s.tered amidst a confusion of heat-bitten greenery. I had been sitting silently on the parapet, looking across to the purple mountain ma.s.ses where Switzerland pa.s.ses into Italy, and the drift of our talk seemed suddenly to gather to a head.
I broke into speech, giving form to the thoughts that had been acc.u.mulating. My words have long since pa.s.sed out of my memory, the phrases of familiar expression have altered for me, but the substance remains as clear as ever. I said how we were in our measure emperors and kings, men undriven, free to do as we pleased with life; we cla.s.sed among the happy ones, our bread and common necessities were given us for nothing, we had abilities,--it wasn"t modesty but cowardice to behave as if we hadn"t--and Fortune watched us to see what we might do with opportunity and the world.
"There are so many things to do, you see," began Willersley, in his judicial lecturer"s voice.
"So many things we may do," I interrupted, "with all these years before us.... We"re exceptional men. It"s our place, our duty, to do things."
"Here anyhow," I said, answering the faint amus.e.m.e.nt of his face; "I"ve got no modesty. Everything conspires to set me up. Why should I run about like all those grubby little beasts down there, seeking nothing but mean little vanities and indulgencies--and then take credit for modesty? I KNOW I am capable. I KNOW I have imagination. Modesty! I know if I don"t attempt the very biggest things in life I am a d.a.m.ned shirk.
The very biggest! Somebody has to attempt them. I feel like a loaded gun that is only a little perplexed because it has to find out just where to aim itself...."
The lake and the frontier villages, a white puff of steam on the distant railway to Luino, the busy boats and steamers trailing triangular wakes of foam, the long vista eastward towards battlemented Bellinzona, the vast mountain distances, now tinged with sunset light, behind this nearer landscape, and the southward waters with remote coast towns shining dimly, waters that merged at last in a luminous golden haze, made a broad panoramic spectacle. It was as if one surveyed the world,--and it was like the games I used to set out upon my nursery floor. I was exalted by it; I felt larger than men. So kings should feel.
That sense of largeness came to me then, and it has come to me since, again and again, a splendid intimation or a splendid vanity. Once, I remember, when I looked at Genoa from the mountain crest behind the town and saw that mult.i.tudinous place in all its beauty of width and abundance and cl.u.s.tering human effort, and once as I was steaming past the brown low hills of Staten Island towards the towering vigour and clamorous vitality of New York City, that mood rose to its quintessence.
And once it came to me, as I shall tell, on Dover cliffs. And a hundred times when I have thought of England as our country might be, with no wretched poor, no wretched rich, a nation armed and ordered, trained and purposeful amidst its vales and rivers, that emotion of collective ends and collective purposes has returned to me. I felt as great as humanity.
For a brief moment I was humanity, looking at the world I had made and had still to make....
12
And mingled with these dreams of power and patriotic service there was another series of a different quality and a different colour, like the antagonistic colour of a shot silk. The white life and the red life, contrasted and interchanged, pa.s.sing swiftly at a turn from one to another, and refusing ever to mingle peacefully one with the other. I was asking myself openly and distinctly: what are you going to do for the world? What are you going to do with yourself? and with an increasing strength and persistence Nature in spite of my averted attention was asking me in penetrating undertones: what are you going to do about this other fundamental matter, the beauty of girls and women and your desire for them?
I have told of my sisterless youth and the narrow circ.u.mstances of my upbringing. It made all women-kind mysterious to me. If it had not been for my Staffordshire cousins I do not think I should have known any girls at all until I was twenty. Of Staffordshire I will tell a little later. But I can remember still how through all those ripening years, the thought of women"s beauty, their magic presence in the world beside me and the unknown, untried reactions of their intercourse, grew upon me and grew, as a strange presence grows in a room when one is occupied by other things. I busied myself and pretended to be wholly occupied, and there the woman stood, full half of life neglected, and it seemed to my averted mind sometimes that she was there clad and dignified and divine, and sometimes Aphrodite shining and commanding, and sometimes that Venus who stoops and allures.
This travel abroad seemed to have released a mult.i.tude of things in my mind; the clear air, the beauty of the sunshine, the very blue of the glaciers made me feel my body and quickened all those disregarded dreams. I saw the sheathed beauty of women"s forms all about me, in the cheerful waitresses at the inns, in the pedestrians one encountered in the tracks, in the chance fellow travellers at the hotel tables.
"Confound it!" said I, and talked all the more zealously of that greater England that was calling us.
I remember that we pa.s.sed two Germans, an old man and a tall fair girl, father and daughter, who were walking down from Saas. She came swinging and shining towards us, easy and strong. I worshipped her as she approached.
"Gut Tag!" said Willersley, removing his hat.
"Morgen!" said the old man, saluting.
I stared stockishly at the girl, who pa.s.sed with an indifferent face.
That sticks in my mind as a picture remains in a room, it has kept there bright and fresh as a thing seen yesterday, for twenty years....
I flirted hesitatingly once or twice with comely serving girls, and was a little ashamed lest Willersley should detect the keen interest I took in them, and then as we came over the pa.s.s from Santa Maria Maggiore to Cann.o.bio, my secret preoccupation took me by surprise and flooded me and broke down my pretences.
The women in that valley are very beautiful--women vary from valley to valley in the Alps and are plain and squat here and divinities five miles away--and as we came down we pa.s.sed a group of five or six of them resting by the wayside. Their burthens were beside them, and one like Ceres held a reaping hook in her brown hand. She watched us approaching and smiled faintly, her eyes at mine.