THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

habitat again. We stayed at Penge until my mother's death.

School became a large part of the world to me, absorbing my time and

interest, and I never acquired that detailed and intimate knowledge

of Penge and the hilly villadom round about, that I have of the town

and outskirts of Bromstead.

It was a district of very much the same character, but it was more

completely urbanised and nearer to the centre of things; there were

the same unfinished roads, the same occasional disconcerted hedges

and trees, the same butcher's horse grazing under a builder's

notice-board, the same incidental lapses into slum. The Crystal

Palace grounds cut off a large part of my walking radius to the west

with impassable fences and forbiddingly expensive turnstiles, but it

added to the ordinary spectacle of meteorology a great variety of

gratuitous fireworks which banged and flared away of a night after

supper and drew me abroad to see them better. Such walks as I took,

to Croydon, Wembledon, West Wickham and Greenwich, impressed upon me

the interminable extent of London's residential suburbs; mile after

mile one went, between houses, villas, rows of cottages, streets of

shops, under railway arches, over railway bridges. I have forgotten

the detailed local characteristics-if there were any-of much of

that region altogether. I was only there two years, and half my

perambulations occurred at dusk or after dark. But with Penge I

associate my first realisations of the wonder and beauty of twilight

and night, the effect of dark walls reflecting lamplight, and the

mystery of blue haze-veiled hillsides of houses, the glare of shops

by night, the glowing steam and streaming sparks of railway trains

and railway signals lit up in the darkness. My first rambles in the

evening occurred at Penge-I was becoming a big and independent-

spirited boy-and I began my experience of smoking during these

twilight prowls with the threepe

then just appearing in the world.

My life centred upon the City Merchants School. Usually I caught

the eight-eighteen for Victoria, I had a midday meal and tea; four

nights a week I stayed for preparation, and often I was not back

home again until within an hour of my bedtime. I spent my half

holidays at school in order to play cricket and football. This, and

a pretty voracious appetite for miscellaneous reading which was

fostered by the Penge Middleton Library, did not leave me much

leisure for local topography. On Sundays also I sang in the choir

at St. Martin 's Church, and my mother did not like me to walk out

alone on the Sabbath afternoon, she herself slumbered, so that I

wrote or read at home. I must confess I was at home as little as I

could contrive.

Home, after my father's death, had become a very quiet and

uneventful place indeed. My mother had either an unimaginative

temperament or her mind was greatly occupied with private religious

solicitudes, and I remember her talking to me but little, and that

usually upon topics I was anxious to evade. I had developed my own

view about low-Church theology long before my father's death, and my

meditation upon that event had finished my secret estrangement from

my mother's faith. My reason would not permit even a remote chance

of his being in hell, he was so manifestly not evil, and this

religion would not permit him a remote chance of being out yet.

When I was a little boy my mother had taught me to read and write

and pray and had done many things for me, indeed she persisted in

washing me and even in making my clothes until I rebelled against

these things as indignities. But our minds parted very soon. She

never began to understand the mental processes of my play, she never

interested herself in my school life and work, she could not

understand things I said; and she came, I think, quite insensibly to

regard me with something of the same hopeless perplexity she had

felt towards my father.

Him she must have wedded under considerable delusions. I do not

think he deceived her, indeed, nor do I suspect him of mercenariness

in their union; but no doubt he played up to her requirements in the

half ingenuous way that was and still is the quality of most wooing,

and presented himself as a very brisk and orthodox young man. I

wonder why nearly all lovemaking has to be fraudulent. Afterwards

he must have disappointed her cruelly by letting one aspect after

another of his careless, sceptical, experimental temperament appear.

Her mind was fixed and definite, she embodied all that confidence in

church and decorum and the assurances of the pulpit which was

characteristic of the large mass of the English people-for after

all, the rather low-Church section WAS the largest single mass-in

early Victorian times. She had dreams, I suspect, of going to

church with him side by side; she in a little poke bo

large flounced crinoline, all mauve and magenta and starched under a

little lace-trimmed parasol, and he in a tall silk hat and peg-top

trousers and a roll-collar coat, and looking rather like the Prince

Consort,-white angels almost visibly raining benedictions on their

amiable progress. Perhaps she dreamt gently of much-belaced babies

and an interestingly pious (but not too dissenting or fanatical)