"I feel we might do so many things," I said, "and everything that

calls one, calls one away from something else."

Willersley agreed without any modest disavowals.

"We have got to think out," he said, "just what we are and what we

are up to. We've got to do that now. And then-it's one of those

questions it is inadvisable to reopen subsequently."

He beamed at me through his glasses. The sententious use of long

words was a playful habit with him, that and a slight deliberate

humour, habits occasional Extension Lecturing was doing very much to

intensify.

"You've made your decision?"

He nodded with a peculiar forward movement of his head.

"How would you put it?"

"Social Service-education. Whatever else matters or doesn't

matter, it seems to me there is one thing we MUST have and increase,

and that is the number of people who can think a little-and have "-

he beamed again-" an adequate sense of causation."

"You're sure it's worth while."

"For me-certainly. I don't discuss that any more."

"I don't limitmyself too narrowly," he added. "After all, the work

is all one. We who know, we who feel, are building the great modern

state, joining wall to wall and way to way, the new great England

rising out of the decaying old… we are the real statesmen-I

like that use of 'statesmen.'…"

"Yes," I said with many doubts. "Yes, of course…"

Willersley is middle-aged now, with silver in his hair and a

deepening benevolence in his always amiable face, and he has very

fairly kept his word. He has lived for social service and to do

vast masses of useful, undistinguished, fertilising work. Think of

the days of arid administrative plodding and of contention still

more arid and unrewarded, that he must have spent! His little

affectations of gesture and manner, imitative affectations for the

most part, have increased, and the humorous beam and the humorous

intonations have become a thing he puts on every morning like an old

coat. His devotion is mingled with a considerable whimsicality, and

they say he is easily flattered by subordinates and easily offended

into opposition by colleagues; he has made mistakes at times and

followed wrong courses, still there he is, a flat contradiction to

all the ordinary doctrine of motives, a man who has foregone any

chances of wealth and profit, foregone any easier paths to

distinction, foregone marriage and parentage, in order to serve the

community. He does it without any fee or reward except his personal

self-satisfaction in doing this work, and he does it without any

hope of future joys and punishments, for he is an implacable

Rationalist. No doubt he idealises himself a little, and dreams of

recognition. No doubt he gets his pleasure from a sense of power,

from the spending and husbanding of large sums of public money, and

from the inevitable proprietorship he must feel in the fair, fine,

well-ordered schools he has done so much to develop. "But for me,"

he can say, "there would have been a Job about those diagrams, and

that subject or this would have been less ably taught."…

The fact remains that for him the rewards have been adequate, if not

to content at any rate to keep him working. Of course he covets the

notice of the world he has served, as a lover covets the notice of

his mistress. Of course he thinks somewhere, somewhen, he will get

credit. Only last year I heard some men talking of him, and they

were noting, with little mean smiles, how he had shown himself self-

conscious while there was talk of some honorary degree-giving or

other; it would, I have no doubt, please him greatly if his work

were to flower into a crimson gown in some Academic parterre. Why

shouldn't it? But that is incidental vanity at the worst; he goes

on anyhow. Most men don't.

But we had our walk twenty years and more ago now. He was oldish

even then as a young man, just as he is oldish still in middle age.

Long may his industrious elderliness flourish for the good of the

world! He lectured a little in conversation then; he lectures more

now and listens less, toilsomely disentangling what you already

understand, giving you in detail the data you know; these are things

like callosities that come from a man's work.

Our long three weeks' talk comes back to me as a memory of ideas and

determinations slowly growing, all mixed up with a smell of wood

smoke and pine woods and huge precipices and remote gleams of snow-

fields and the sound of cascading torrents rushing through deep

gorges far below. It is mixed, too, with gossips with waitresses

and fellow travellers, with my first essays in colloquial German and

Italian, with disputes about the way to take, and other things that

I will tell of in another section. But the white passion of human

service was our dominant theme. Not simply perhaps nor altogether

unselfishly, but quite honestly, and with at least a frequent self-

forgetfulness, did we want to do fine and noble things, to help in