THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

methods. The nineteenth century was an age of demonstrations, some

of them very impressive demonstrations, of the powers that have come

to mankind, but of permanent achievement, what will our descendants

cherish? It is hard to estimate what grains of precious metal may

not be found in a mud torrent of human production on so large a

scale, but will any one, a hundred years from now, consent to live

in the houses the Victorians built, travel by their roads or

railways, value the furnishings they made to live among or esteem,

except for curious or historical reasons, their prevalent art and

the clipped and limited literature that satisfied their souls?

That age which bore me was indeed a world full of restricted and

undisciplined people, overtaken by power, by possessions and great

new freedoms, and unable to make any civilised use of them whatever;

stricken now by this idea and now by that, tempted first by one

possession and then another to ill-considered attempts; it was my

father's exploitahon of his villa gardens on the wholesale level.

The whole of Bromstead as I remember it, and as I saw it last-it is

a year ago now-is a dull useless boiling-up of human activities, an

immense clustering of futilities. It is as unfinished as ever; the

builders' roads still run out and end in mid-field in their old

fashion; the various enterprises jumble in the same hopeless

contradiction, if anything intensified. Pretentious villas jostle

slums, and public-house and tin tabernacle glower at one another

across the cat-haunted lot that intervenes. Roper's meadows are now

quite frankly a slum; back doors and sculleries gape towards the

railway, their yards are hung with tattered washing unashamed; and

there seem to be more boards by the railway every time I pass,

advertising pills and pickles, tonics and condiments, and suchlike

solicitudes of a people with no natural health nor appetite left in

them…

Well, we have to do better. Failure is not failure nor waste wasted

if it sweeps away illusion and lights the road to a plan.

6

Chaotic indiscipline, ill-adjusted effort, spasmodic aims, these

give the quality of all my Bromstead memories. The crowning one of

them all rises to desolating tragedy. I remember now the wan spring

sunshine of that Sunday morning, the stiff feeling of best clothes

and aggressive cleanliness and formality, when I and my mother

returned from church to find my father dead. He had been pruning

the grape vine. He had never had a ladder long enough to reach the

sill of the third-floor windows-at house-painting times he had

borrowed one from the plumber who mixed his paint-and he had in his

own happy-go-lucky way contrived a combination of the garden fruit

ladder with a battered kitchen table that served all sorts of odd

purposes in an outhouse. He had stayed up this arrangement by means

of the garden roller, and the roller had at the critical moment-

rolled. He was lying close by the garden door with his head queerly

bent back against a broken and twisted rainwater pipe, an expression

of pacific contentment on his face, a bamboo curtain rod with a

tableknife tied to end of it, still gripped in his hand. We had

been rapping for some time at the front door unable to make him

hear, and then we came round by the door in the side trellis into

the garden and so discovered him.

"Arthur!" I remember my mother crying with the strangest break in

her voice, "What are you doing there? Arthur! And-SUNDAY!"

I was coming behind her, musing remotely, when the quality of her

voice roused me. She stood as if she could not go near him. He had

always puzzled her so, he and his ways, and this seemed only another

enigma. Then the truth dawned on her, she shrieked as if afraid of

him, ran a dozen steps back towards the trellis door and stopped and

clasped her ineffectual gloved hands, leaving me staring blankly,

too astonished for feeling, at the carelessly flung limbs.

The same idea came to me also. I ran to her. "Mother!" I cried,

pale to the depths of my spirit, "IS HE DEAD?"

I had been thinking two minutes before of the cold fruit pie that

glorified our Sunday di

the tree at the end of the garden to read in the afternoon. Now an

immense fact had come down like a curtain and blotted out all my

childish world. My father was lying dead before my eyes… I

perceived that my mother was helpless and that things must he done.

"Mother!" I said, "we must get Doctor Beaseley,-and carry him

indoors."

CHAPTER THE THIRD

SCHOLASTIC

1

My formal education began in a small preparatory school in

Bromstead. I went there as a day boy. The charge for my

instruction was mainly set off by the periodic visits of my father

with a large bag of battered fossils to lecture to us upon geology.

I was one of those fortunate youngsters who take readily to school

work, I had a goodmemory, versatile interests and a considerable

appetite for commendation, and when I was barely twelve I got a

scholarship at the City Merchants School and was entrusted with a

scholar's railway season ticket to Victoria. After my father's

death a large and very animated and solidly built uncle in tweeds

from Staffordshire, Uncle Minter, my mother's sister's husband, with

a remarkable accent and remarkable vowel sounds, who had plunged

into the Bromstead home once or twice for the night but who was

otherwise unknown to me, came on the scene, sold off the three gaunt

houses with the utmost gusto, invested the proceeds and my father's

life insurance money, and got us into a small villa at Penge within

sight of that immense facade of glass and iron, the Crystal Palace.

Then he retired in a mood of good-natured contempt to his native