THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

dismissed. And Lord Pandram was worth half a million.

That upturned sightless white eye of his took possession of my

imagination. I don't think that even then I was swayed by any crude

melodramatic conception of injustice. I was quite prepared to

believe the card wasn't a punctiliously accurate statement of fact,

and that a case could be made out for Lord Pandram. Still there in

the muddy gutter, painfully and dreadfully, was the man, and he was

smashed and scalded and wretched, and he ground his dismal

hurdygurdy with a weary arm, calling upon Heaven and the passer-by

for help, for help and some sort of righting-one could not imagine

quite what. There he was as a fact, as a by-product of the system

that heaped my cousins with trinkets and provided the comic novels

and the abundant cigars and spacious billiard-room of my uncle's

house. I couldn't disco

My uncle on his part did nothing to conceal the state of war that

existed between himself and his workers, and the mingled contempt

and animosity he felt from them.

3

Prosperity had overtaken my uncle. So quite naturally he believed

that every man who was not as prosperous as he was had only himself

to blame. He was rich and he had left school and gone into his

father's business at fifteen, and that seemed to him the proper age

at which everyone's education should terminate. He was very anxious

to dissuade me from going up to Cambridge, and we argued

intermittently through all my visit.

I had remembered him as a big and buoyant man, striding

destructively about the nursery floor of my childhood, and saluting

my existence by slaps, loud laughter, and questions about half

herrings and half eggs subtly framed to puzzle and confuse my mind.

I didn't see him for some years until my father's death, and then he

seemed rather smaller, though still a fair size, yellow instead of

red and much less radiantly aggressive. This altered effect was due

not so much to my own changed perspectives, I fancy, as to the facts

that he was suffering for continuous cigar smoking, and being taken

in hand by his adolescent daughters who had just returned from

school.

During my first visit there was a perpetual series of-the only word

is rows, between them and him. Up to the age of fifteen or

thereabouts, he had maintamed his ascendancy over them by simple

old-fashioned physical chastisement. Then after an interlude of a

year it had dawned upon them that power had mysteriously departed

from him. He had tried stopping their pocket money, but they found

their mother financially amenable; besides which it was fundamental

to my uncle's attitude that he should give them money freely. Not

to do so would seem like admitting a difficulty in making it. So

that after he had stopped their allowances for the fourth time Sybil

and Gertrude were prepared to face beggary without a qualm. It had

been his pride to give them the largest allowance of any girls at

the school, not even excepting the granddaughter of Fladden the

Borax King, and his soul recoiled from this discipline as it had

never recoiled from the ruder method of the earlier phase. Both

girls had developed to a high pitch in their mutual recriminations a

gift for damaging retort, and he found it an altogether deadlier

thing than the power of the raised voice that had always cowed my

aunt. Whenever he became heated with them, they frowned as if

involuntarily, drew in their breath sharply, said: "Daddy, you

really must not say -" and corrected his pronunciation. Then, at a

great advantage, they resumed the discussion…

My uncle's views about Cambridge, however, were perfectly clear and

definite. It was waste of time and money. It was all damned

foolery. Did they make a man a better business man? Not a bit of

it. He gave instances. It spoilt a man for business by giving him

"false ideas." Some men said that at college a man formed useful

friendships. What use were friendships to a business man? He might

get to know lords, but, as my uncle pointed out, a lord's

requirements in his line of faience were little greater than a

common man's. If college introduced him to hotel proprietors there

might be something in it. Perhaps it helped a man into Parliament,

Parliament still being a confused retrogressive corner in the world

where lawyers and suchlike sheltered themselves from the onslaughts

of common-sense behind a fog of Latin and Greek and twaddle and

tosh; but I wasn't the sort to go into Parliament, unless I meant to

be a lawyer. Did I mean to be a lawyer? It cost no end of money,

and was full of uncertainties, and there were no judges nor great

solicitors among my relations. "Young chaps think they get on by

themselves," said my uncle. It isn't so. Not unless they take

their coats off. I took mine off before I was your age by nigh a

year."

We were at cross purposes from the outset, because I did not think

men lived to make money; and I was obtuse to the hints he was

throwing out at the possibilities of his own potbank, not willfully