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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.
As he and I went along in the cool morning sunshine by the rice fields in the throat of the Val Maggia a silence fell between us. "You know?" I said abruptly, "about that woman?" Willersley did not answer for a moment. He looked at me over the corner of his spectacles. "Things went pretty far?" he asked. "Oh! all the way!" and I had a twinge of fatuous pride in my unpremeditated achievement.
There was something friendly and adventurous in her manner; she conveyed she liked me, and when presently Willersley drifted off to write letters our talk sank at once to easy confidential undertones. I felt enterprising, and indeed it is easy to be daring with people one has never seen before and may never see again.
I remember that we passed 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 passed with an indifferent face.
The vision they displayed for my consideration as the aim of public-spirited endeavour, seemed like a harder, narrower, more specialised version of the idea of a trained and disciplined state that Willersley and I had worked out in the Alps.
I knew it for a way of death. Reality was behind us. Willersley set himself to draw a sociological moral. "I'm not so sure," he said in a voice of intense discriminations, "after all, that agricultural work isn't good for women." "Damn agricultural work!" I said, and broke out into a vigorous cursing of all I held dear. "Fettered things we are!" I cried. "I wonder why I stand it!" "Stand what?"
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 pointed out to me the wife of the Secretary of State for War, and I recognised the Duchess of Clynes, who at that time cultivated intellectuality. I looked round, identifying a face here or there, and stepping back trod on some one's toe, and turned to find it belonged to the Right Hon. G. B. Mottisham, dear to the PUNCH caricaturists.
That fever was still in my blood when we came to Locarno. Along the hot and dusty lower road between the Orrido of Traffiume and Cannobio Willersley had developed his first blister.
He received my apology with that intentional charm that is one of his most delightful traits, and resumed his discussion. Beside him was Esmeer of Trinity, whom I had not seen since my Cambridge days.... Willersley found an ex-member of the School Board for whom he had affinities, and left me to exchange experiences and comments upon the company with Esmeer.
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