THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

evidently "swear "-" G. bless and keep my boy from evil." And

again, with the thin handwriting shaken by distress: "D. would not

go to church, and hardened his heart and said wicked infidel things,

much disrespect of the clergy. The anthem is tiresome!!! That men

should set up to be wiser than their maker!!!" Then trebly

underlined: "I FEAR HIS FATHER'S TEACHING." Dreadful little tangle

of misapprehensions and false judgments! More comforting for me to

read, "D. very kind and good. He grows more thoughtful every day."

I suspect myself of forgotten hypocrisies.

At just one point my mother's papers seem to dip deeper. I think

the death of my father must have stirred her for the first time for

many years to think for herself. Even she could not go on living in

any peace at all, believing that he had indeed been flung headlong

into hell. Of this gnawing solicitude she never spoke to me, never,

and for her diary also she could find no phrases. But on a loose

half-sheet of notepaper between its pages I find this passage that

follows, written very carefully. I do not know whose lines they are

nor how she came upon them. They run:-

"And if there be no meeting past the grave;

If all is darkness, silence, yet 'tis rest.

Be not afraid ye waiting hearts that weep,

For God still giveth His beloved sleep,

And if an endless sleep He wills, so best."

That scrap of verse amazed me when I read it. I could even wonder

if my mother really grasped the import of what she had copied out.

It affected me as if a stone-deaf person had suddenly turned and

joined in a whispered conversation. It set me thinking how far a

mind in its general effect quite hopelessly limited, might range.

After that I went through all her diaries, trying to find something

more than a conventional term of tenderness for my father. But I

found nothing. And yet somehow there grew upon me the realisation

that there had been love… Her love for me, on the other hand,

was abundantly expressed.

I knew nothing of that secret life of feeling at the time; such

expression as it found was all beyond my schoolboy range. I did not

know when I pleased her and I did not know when I distressed her.

Chiefly I was aware of my mother as rather dull company, as a mind

thorny with irrational conclusions and incapable of explication, as

one believing quite wilfully and irritatingly in impossible things.

So I suppose it had to be; life was coming to me in new forms and

with new requirements. It was essential to our situation that we

should fail to understand. After this space of years I have come to

realisations and attitudes that dissolve my estrangement from her, I

can pierce these barriers, I can see her and feel her as a loving

and feeling and desiring and muddle-headed person. There are times

when I would have her alive again, if only that I might be kind to

her for a little while and give her some return for the narrow

intense affection, the tender desires, she evidently lavished so

abundantly on me. But then again I ask how I could make that

return? And I realise the futility of such dreaming. Her demand

was rigid, and to meet it I should need to act and lie.

So she whose blood fed me, whose body made me, lies in my memory as

I saw her last, fixed, still, infinitely intimate, infinitely

remote…

My own case with my mother, however, does not awaken the same regret

I feel when I think of how she misjudged and irked my father, and

turned his weaknesses into thorns for her own tormenting. I wish I

could look back without that little twinge to two people who were

both in their different quality so good. But goodness that is

narrow is a pedestrian and ineffectual goodness. Her attitude to my

father seems to me one of the essentially tragic things that have

come to me personally, one of those things that nothing can

transfigure, that REMAIN sorrowful, that I ca

explanation, for as I remember him he was indeed the most lovable of

weak spasmodic men. But my mother had been trained in a hard and

narrow system that made evil out of many things not in the least

evil, and inculcated neither kindliness nor charity. All their

estrangement followed from that.