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Next day Willersley wanted to go on, but I delayed. Altogether I kept him back four days. Then abruptly my mood changed, and we decided to start early the following morning. I remember, though a little indistinctly, the feeling of my last talk with that woman whose surname, odd as it may seem, either I never learnt or I have forgotten.
I had prophetic glimpses of walls and hoardings clamorous with "Vote for Remington," and Willersley no doubt saw himself chairman of this committee and that, saying a few slightly ironical words after the declaration of the poll, and then sitting friendly beside me on the government benches. There was nothing impossible in such dreams. Why not the Board of Education for him?
I had not read George Moore at the time, but I pretended to understand. That, I think, was our limit that evening. She went to bed, smiling good-night quite prettily down the big staircase, and I and Willersley went out to smoke in the garden. My head was full of her, and I found it necessary to talk about her. So I made her a problem in sociology. "Who the deuce are these people?"
All our Imperialists were obsessed by the thought of international conflict, and their influence revived for a time those uneasinesses that had been aroused in me for the first time by my continental journey with Willersley and by Meredith's "One of Our Conquerors."
At the same time, there are a number of delightful expeditions to be made in the neighbourhood, on foot or horseback, and on donkeys, hills to be ascended and caves to be explored. By permission of Sir Richard Arkwright of Willersley Castle, close to Matlock and several other river preserves, good fishing may be obtained.
I went with a man named Willersley, a man some years senior to myself, who had just missed a fellowship and the higher division of the Civil Service, and who had become an enthusiastic member of the London School Board, upon which the cumulative vote and the support of the "advanced" people had placed him.
"There are so many things to do, you see," began Willersley, in his judicial lecturer's voice. "So many things we may do," I interrupted, "with all these years before us.... We're exceptional men. It's our place, our duty, to do things." "Here anyhow," I said, answering the faint amusement of his face; "I've got no modesty. Everything conspires to set me up.
"Why don't I go back and make love to those girls and let the world and you and everything go hang? Deep breasts and rounded limbs and we poor emasculated devils go tramping by with the blood of youth in us!..." "I'm not quite sure, Remington," said Willersley, looking at me with a deliberately quaint expression over his glasses, "that picturesque scenery is altogether good for your morals."
Beneath the ostensible success of those years, between twenty-three and twenty-eight, this rottenness, known to scarcely any one but myself, grew and spread. My sense of the probability of a collapse intensified. I knew indeed now, even as Willersley had prophesied five years before, that I was entangling myself in something that might smother all my uses in the world.
Willersley had dressed himself in a world-worn Norfolk suit of greenish grey tweeds that ended unfamiliarly at his rather impending, spectacled, intellectual visage. I didn't, I remember, like the contrast of him with the drilled Swiss and Germans about us. Convict coloured stockings and vast hobnail boots finished him below, and all his luggage was a borrowed rucksac that he had tied askew.
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