An attempt to designate him as belonging to a type or class he mistrusted as some kind of Socialism. And yet he ate with himself in restaurants and private houses, travelled with himself in trains, read the speeches of himself in Parliament, and the accounts of how he had been surrounded by persons of Dutch origin, or on some frontier punished a tribe whose manners were not quite his own. He played golf with himself, and shot with his very images. Nor was he confined to his own class; but frequently drove himself home in cabs, watched himself drilling in the barrack squares, or, walking up and down in blue, protected his own house at night from burglars. If he required to send a message from his Club, he sent himself; he sold himself his waistcoats, and even laid the pavements of the streets that he trod daily in his pilgrimage. From his neighbourhood Imagination stretched its wings and flitted further on. Patron of precedent, pattern of order, upholder of the law, where he dwelt an orderly disorder reigned. He was for ever doing things, and out of everything he did there sprang up two more things that wanted to be done, and these things he would do—in time! Believing no real harm of others or himself, he kept young and green! Oh! very green and young!
And in old age, past doing things, seated in the Club smoking-room, he will recount behind his comely grey moustache that day’s shooting and that day’s run; the marriage of that fine girl; the death of that dear old chap; the details of that first-rate joke, or that bad dinner; and dwelling with love on these isolated facts, his old blue eyes will twinkle. Presently, when it is late and he is left alone, he will put his old tired feet up on the sofa, remove the cigar from his old lips, and, holding it a foot from off his eyes, look closely at the ash; finding this fact a little yellow, he will frown.
POWER
XII
Power
When he rose every morning, the first thing he would do was to fall on his knees beside his bed. His figure in its white garment—for he wore a nightshirt—was rather long and lean, and looked its longest thus bent from the loins. His thick fair hair, little disturbed by sleep, together with a glimpse of sanguine neck and cheek, was all that could be seen above that figure, for his face was buried in the counterpane. Here he would commune with the deity he had constructed for himself out of his secret aspirations and desires, out of his most private consciousness. In the long and subtle processes of contemplation this deity had come to be a big white-clothed figure, whose face and head were shrouded from his gaze in frosty dimness, but whose hands—great hands, a little red—were always clearly visible, reposing motionless on knees parted beneath the white and flowing garment. The figure appeared in his imagination seated as it were on air ten or fifteen feet above the floor of a white, wide, marble corridor, and its great hands seemed to be pressing down and stilling all that came before them. So oddly concrete was this image that sometimes he addressed no prayers to it, but knelt, simply feeling that it was sitting there above him; and when at last he raised his head, a strange aspiring look had come into his strained eyes, and face suffused with blood. When he did pray, he himself hardly knew for what he prayed, unless it were to be made like his deity, that sat so quiet, above the marble corridor.
For, after all, this deity of his, like the deity of every other man, was but his temperament exaggerated beyond life-size and put in perfect order—it was but the concretion of his constant feeling that nothing could be trusted to behave, freed from the still, cold hands of Power. He had never trusted himself to act save under the authority of this peculiar deity, much less, then, could he feel that others could be trusted. This lack of trust—which was only, perhaps, a natural desire for putting everything and everybody in their proper places—had made him from a child eligible for almost any post of trust. And Nature, recognising this, had used him a hundred thousand times, weeding him out from among his more irregular and trustful fellows, and piling him in layers, one on another, till she had built out of him in every division of the State, temples of Power. Two qualifications alone had she exacted; that he should not be trustful, and that he should be content to lie beneath the layer above him, until he should come in time to be that upper layer himself. She had marked him down as quite a tiny boy, walking with his governess, chopping the heads off thistles with his stick, and ordering his brothers’ games precisely, so that they should all know what they were playing at. She had seen him take his dog, and, squatting on the floor, hold it close to the biscuit that it did not want to eat; and she had marked the expression in his grey eyes, fixed on that little white fox-terrier, trying so hard to back out through her collar. She saw at once that he did not trust the little creature to know whether it required to eat the biscuit; it was her proper time for eating it, and even though by holding her nose close he could not make her eat it, he could put her in the corner for not eating it. And having in due course seen him do so, Nature had felt ever since that he would keep himself apart, year by year and step by step, till he was safely serving in the cold, still corridors of Power. She watched him, then, with interest, throughout his school and university career, considering what division of the State she had best build with him, though whether he should work at feeding soldiers, at supervising education, or organizing the incarceration of his fellows, did not seem to her to matter much. In all these things order was essential, and the love of placing the hand kindly but firmly on the public head, desirable; further, these were all things that must be done, and with her unerring instinct for economy, Nature saw that he should do them.
He had accordingly entered the State’s service at a proper age, and had remained there, rising.
Well aware that his was an occupation tending to the constriction of the mind, he had early made a practice of keeping it elastic by reading, argument, and a habit of presenting every case in every light, before pronouncing judgment; indeed, he would often take another person’s point of view, and, having improved on it, show that it was not really what the person thought it. Only when he was contradicted did a somewhat ugly look come into his eyes, and a peculiar smile contract his straight lips between his little fair moustache and his little, carefully kept, fair beard. At such moments he would raise his hands—red, and shapely, though rather large—as though about to press them on the head or shoulders of the presumptuous person. For, certain as he was that he always took all points of view before deciding any matter, he knew he must be right. But he was careful not to domineer in any way, recognising that to domineer was peculiarly unbecoming in a bureaucrat.
Keeping his mind elastic, he was always ready to welcome any sort of progress; the word indeed was often on his lips, and he regarded the thing itself as essential to the well-being of any modern State; it was only when some particular kind of progress happened to be mentioned that he felt any doubt. Then, caressing his beard slowly, and, if possible, taking up a pen, he would point out the difficulties. These were, it seemed, more numerous than the lay mind had imagined.