"I've really only been in London for a few months.It's so different.In Burslem, life seems all business and getting--without any reason.One went on and it didn't seem to mean anything.At least anything that mattered....London seems to be so full of meanings--all mixed up together."She knitted her brows over her words and smiled appealingly at the end as if for consideration for her inadequate expression, appealingly and almost humorously.
I looked understandingly at her."We have all," I agreed, "to come to London.""One sees so much distress," she added, as if she felt she had completely omitted something, and needed a codicil.
"What are you doing in London?"
"I'm thinking of studying.Some social question.I thought perhaps I might go and study social conditions as Mrs.Bailey did, go perhaps as a work-girl or see the reality of living in, but Mrs.
Bailey thought perhaps it wasn't quite my work.""Are you studying?"
"I'm going to a good many lectures, and perhaps I shall take up a regular course at the Westminster School of Politics and Sociology.
But Mrs.Bailey doesn't seem to believe very much in that either."Her faintly whimsical smile returned."I seem rather indefinite,"she apologised, "but one does not want to get entangled in things one can't do.One--one has so many advantages, one's life seems to be such a trust and such a responsibility--"She stopped.
"A man gets driven into work," I said.
"It must be splendid to be Mrs.Bailey," she replied with a glance of envious admiration across the room.
"SHE has no doubts, anyhow," I remarked.
"She HAD," said Margaret with the pride of one who has received great confidences.
6
"You've met before?" said Altiora, a day or so later.
I explained when.
"You find her interesting?"
I saw in a flash that Altiora meant to marry me to Margaret.
Her intention became much clearer as the year developed.Altiora was systematic even in matters that evade system.I was to marry Margaret, and freed from the need of making an income I was to come into politics--as an exponent of Baileyism.She put it down with the other excellent and advantageous things that should occupy her summer holiday.It was her pride and glory to put things down and plan them out in detail beforehand, and I'm not quite sure that she did not even mark off the day upon which the engagement was to be declared.If she did, I disappointed her.We didn't come to an engagement, in spite of the broadest hints and the glaring obviousness of everything, that summer.
Every summer the Baileys went out of London to some house they hired or borrowed, leaving their secretaries toiling behind, and they went on working hard in the mornings and evenings and taking exercise in the open air in the afternoon.They cycled assiduously and went for long walks at a trot, and raided and studied (and incidentally explained themselves to) any social "types" that lived in the neighbourhood.One invaded type, resentful under research, described them with a dreadful aptness as Donna Quixote and Sancho Panza--and himself as a harmless windmill, hurting no one and signifying nothing.She did rather tilt at things.This particular summer they were at a pleasant farmhouse in level country near Pangbourne, belonging to the Hon.Wilfrid Winchester, and they asked me to come down to rooms in the neighbourhood--Altiora took them for a month for me in August--and board with them upon extremely reasonable terms; and when I got there I found Margaret sitting in a hammock at Altiora's feet.Lots of people, I gathered, were coming and going in the neighbourhood, the Ponts were in a villa on the river, and the Rickhams' houseboat was to moor for some days; but these irruptions did not impede a great deal of duologue between Margaret and myself.
Altiora was efficient rather than artistic in her match-making.She sent us off for long walks together--Margaret was a fairly good walker--she exhumed some defective croquet things and incited us to croquet, not understanding that detestable game is the worst stimulant for lovers in the world.And Margaret and I were always getting left about, and finding ourselves for odd half-hours in the kitchen-garden with nothing to do except talk, or we were told with a wave of the hand to run away and amuse each other.
Altiora even tried a picnic in canoes, knowing from fiction rather than imagination or experience the conclusive nature of such excursions.But there she fumbled at the last moment, and elected at the river's brink to share a canoe with me.Bailey showed so much zeal and so little skill--his hat fell off and he became miraculously nothing but paddle-clutching hands and a vast wrinkled brow--that at last he had to be paddled ignominiously by Margaret, while Altiora, after a phase of rigid discretion, as nearly as possible drowned herself--and me no doubt into the bargain--with a sudden lateral gesture of the arm to emphasise the high note with which she dismissed the efficiency of the Charity Organisation Society.We shipped about an inch of water and sat in it for the rest of the time, an inconvenience she disregarded heroically.We had difficulties in landing Oscar from his frail craft upon the ait of our feasting,--he didn't balance sideways and was much alarmed, and afterwards, as Margaret had a pain in her back, I took him in my canoe, let him hide his shame with an ineffectual but not positively harmful paddle, and towed the other by means of the joined painters.
Still it was the fault of the inadequate information supplied in the books and not of Altiora that that was not the date of my betrothal.
I find it not a little difficult to state what kept me back from proposing marriage to Margaret that summer, and what urged me forward at last to marry her.It is so much easier to remember one's resolutions than to remember the moods and suggestions that produced them.
