第42章 CHAPTER THE SECOND(11)

How is one with no experience of affairs to get an experience of affairs when the door of affairs is closed to one by one's own convictions? Outside of affairs how can one escape being flimsy?

How can one escape becoming merely an intellectual like those wordy Fabians, those writers, poseurs, and sham publicists whose wrangles he had attended? And, moreover, there is danger in the leisure of your intellectual.One cannot be always reading and thinking and discussing and inquiring....WOULD IT NOT BE BETTER AFTER ALL TOMAKE A CONCESSION, SWALLOW HOME RULE OR TARIFF REFORM, AND SO ATLEAST GET HIS HANDS ON THINGS?

And then in a little while the party conflict would swallow him up?

Still it would engage him, it would hold him.If, perhaps, he did not let it swallow him up.If he worked with an eye open for opportunities of self-assertion....

The party game had not altogether swallowed "Mr.Arthur."...

But every one is not a Balfour....

He reflected profoundly.On his left knee his left hand rested with two fingers held up.By some rapid mental alchemy these fingers had now become Home Rule and Tariff Reform.His right hand which had hitherto taken no part in the controversy, had raised its index finger by imperceptible degrees.It had been raised almost subconsciously.And by still obscurer processes this finger had become Mrs.Skelmersdale.He recognized her sudden reappearance above the threshold of consciousness with mild surprise.He had almost forgotten her share in these problems.He had supposed her dismissed to an entirely subordinate position....

Then he perceived that the workmen in the chalk pit far below had knocked off and were engaged upon their midday meal.He understood why his mind was no longer moving forward with any alacrity.

Food?

The question where he should eat arose abruptly and dismissed all other problems from his mind.He unfolded a map.Here must be the chalk pit, here was Dorking.That village was Brockham Green.

Should he go down to Dorking or this way over Box Hill to the little inn at Burford Bridge.He would try the latter.

The April sunset found our young man talking to himself for greater emphasis, and wandering along a turfy cart-track through a wilderness mysteriously planted with great bushes of rhododendra on the Downs above Shere.He had eaten a belated lunch at Burford Bridge, he had got some tea at a little inn near a church with a splendid yew tree, and for the rest of the time he had wandered and thought.He had travelled perhaps a dozen or fifteen miles, and a good way from his first meditations above the Dorking chalk pit.

He had recovered long ago from that remarkable conception of an active if dishonest political career as a means of escaping Mrs.

Skelmersdale and all that Mrs.Skelmersdale symbolized.That would be just louting from one bad thing to another.He had to settle Mrs.Skelmersdale clean and right, and he had to do as exquisitely right in politics as he could devise.If the public life of the country had got itself into a stupid antagonism of two undesirable things, the only course for a sane man of honour was to stand out from the parties and try and get them back to sound issues again.

There must be endless people of a mind with himself in this matter.

And even if there were not, if he was the only man in the world, he still had to follow his lights and do the right.And his business was to find out the right....

He came back from these imaginative excursions into contemporary politics with one idea confirmed in his mind, an idea that had been indeed already in his mind during his Cambridge days.This was the idea of working out for himself, thoroughly and completely, a political scheme, a theory of his work and duty in the world, a plan of the world's future that should give a rule for his life.The Research Magnificent was emerging.It was an alarmingly vast proposal, but he could see no alternative but submission, a plebeian's submission to the currents of life about him.

Little pictures began to flit before his imagination of the way in which he might build up this tremendous inquiry.He would begin by hunting up people, everybody who seemed to have ideas and promise ideas he would get at.He would travel far--and exhaustively.He would, so soon as the ideas seemed to indicate it, hunt out facts.

He would learn how the world was governed.He would learn how it did its thinking.He would live sparingly.("Not TOO sparingly,''

something interpolated.) He would work ten or twelve hours a day.

Such a course of investigation must pass almost of its own accord into action and realization.He need not trouble now how it would bring him into politics.Inevitably somewhere it would bring him into politics.And he would travel.Almost at once he would travel.It is the manifest duty of every young aristocrat to travel.Here he was, ruling India.At any rate, passively, through the mere fact of being English, he was ruling India.And he knew nothing of India.He knew nothing indeed of Asia.So soon as he returned to London his preparations for this travel must begin, he must plot out the men to whom he would go, and so contrive that also he would go round the world.Perhaps he would get Lionel Maxim to go with him.Or if Maxim could not come, then possibly Prothero.

Some one surely could be found, some one thinking and talking of statecraft and the larger idea of life.All the world is not swallowed up in every day....

His mind shifted very suddenly from these large proposals to an entirely different theme.These mental landslips are not unusual when men are thinking hard and wandering.He found himself holding a trial upon himself for Presumptuousness, for setting himself up against the wisdom of the ages, and the decisions of all the established men in the world, for being in short a Presumptuous Sort of Ass.He was judge and jury and prosecutor, but rather inexplicably the defence was conducted in an irregular and undignified way by some inferior stratum of his being.