第61章 THE SECOND(4)

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 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.