THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

2

I first went to stay with my cousins when I was an awkward youth of

sixteen, wearing deep mourning for my mother. My uncle wanted to

talk things over with me, he said, and if he could, to persuade me

to go into business instead of going up to Cambridge.

I remember that visit on account of all sorts of novel things, but

chiefly, I think, because it was the first time I encountered

anything that deserves to be spoken of as wealth. For the first

time in my life I had to do with people who seemed to have endless

supplies of money, unlimited good clothes, numerous servants; whose

daily life was made up of things that I had hitherto considered to

be treats or exceptional extravagances. My cousins of eighteen and

nineteen took cabs, for instance, with the utmost freedom, and

travelled first-class in the local trains that run up and down the

district of the Five Towns with an entire unconsciousness of the

magnificence, as it seemed to me, of such a proceeding.

The family occupied a large villa in Newcastle, with big lawns

before it and behind, a shrubbery with quite a lot of shrubs, a

coach house and stable, and subordinate dwelling-places for the

gardener and the coachman. Every bedroom contained a gas heater and

a canopied brass bedstead, and had a little bathroom attached

equipped with the porcelain baths and fittings my uncle

manufactured, bright and sanitary and stamped with his name, and the

house was furnished throughout with chairs and tables in bright

shining wood, soft and prevalently red Turkish carpets, cosy

corners, curtained archways, gold-framed landscapes, overmantels, a

dining-room sideboard like a palace with a large Tantalus, and

electric light fittings of a gay and expensive quality. There was a

fine billiard-room on the ground floor with three comfortable sofas

and a rotating bookcase containing an excellent collection of the

English and American humorists from THREE MEN IN A BOAT to the

penultimate Mark Twain. There was also a conservatory opening out

of the dining-room, to which the gardener brought potted flowers in

their season…

My aunt was a little woman with a scared look and a cap that would

get over one eye, not very like my mother, and nearly eight years

her junior; she was very much concerned with keeping everything

nice, and unmercifully bullied by my two cousins, who took after

their father and followed the imaginations of their own hearts.

They were tall, dark, warmly flushed girls handsome rather than

pretty. Gertrude, the eldest and tallest, had eyes that were almost

black; Sibyl was of a stouter build, and her eyes, of which she was

shamelessly proud, were dark blue. Sibyl's hair waved, and

Gertrude's was severely straight. They treated me on my first visit

with all the contempt of the adolescent girl for a boy a little

younger and infinitely less expert in the business of life than

herself. They were very busy with the writings of notes and certain

mysterious goings and comings of their own, and left me very much to

my own devices. Their speech in my presence was full of

unfathomable allusions. They were the sort of girls who will talk

over and through an uninitiated stranger with the pleasantest sense

of superiority.

I met them at breakfast and at lunch and at the half-past six

o'clock high tea that formed the third chief meal of the day. I

heard them rattling off the compositions of Chaminade and Moskowski,

with great decision and effect, and hovered on the edge of tennis

foursomes where it was manifest to the dullest intelligence that my

presence was unnecessary. Then I went off to find some readable

book in the place, but apart from miscellaneous popular novels, some

veterinary works, a number of comic books, old bound volumes of THE

ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS and a large, popular illustrated History of

England, there was very little to be found. My anut talked to me in

a casual feeble way, chiefly about my motber's last illness. The

two bad seen very little of each other for many years; she made no

secret of it that the ineligible qualities of my father were the

cause of the estrangement. The only other society in the house

during the day was an old and rather decayed Skye terrier in

constant conflict with what were no doubt imaginary fleas. I took

myself off for a series of walks, and acquired a considerable

knowledge of the scenery and topography of the Potteries.

It puzzled my aunt that I did not go westward, where it was country-

side and often quite pretty, with hedgerows and fields and copses

and flowers. But always I went eastward, where in a long valley

industrialism smokes and sprawls. That was the stuff to which I

turned by nature, to the human effort, and the accumulation and jar

of men's activities. And in such a country as that valley social

and economic relations were simple and manifest. Instead of the

limitless confusion of London's population, in which no man can

trace any but the most slender correlation between rich and poor, in

which everyone seems disconnected and adrift from everyone, you can

see here the works, the potbank or the ironworks or what not, and

here close at hand the congested, meanly-housed workers, and at a

little distance a small middle-class quarter, and again remoter, the

big house of the employer. It was like a very simplified diagram-

after the untraceable confusion of London.

I prowled alone, curious and interested, through shabby back streets

of mean little homes; I followed canals, sometimes canals of

mysteriously heated waters with ghostly wisps of steam rising

against blackened walls or a distant prospect of dustbin-fed

vegetable gardens, I saw the women pouring out from the potbanks,

heard the hooters summoning the toilers to work, lost my way upon

slag heaps as big as the hills of the south country, dodged trains

at manifestly dangerous level crossings, and surveyed across dark

intervening spaces, the flaming uproar, the gnome-like activities of

iron foundries. I heard talk of strikes and rumours of strikes, and

learnt from the columns of some obscure labour paper I bought one

day, of the horrors of the lead poisoning that was in those days one

of the normal risks of certain sorts of pottery workers. Then back

I came, by the ugly groaning and clanging steam tram of that period,

to my uncle's house and lavish abundance of money and more or less

furtive flirtations and the tinkle of Moskowski and Chaminade. It

was, I say, diagrammatic. One saw the expropriator and the

expropriated-as if Marx had arranged the picture. It was as

jumbled and far more dingy and disastrous than any of the confusions

of building and development that had surrounded my youth at

Bromstead and Penge, but it had a novel quality of being explicable.

I found great virtue in the word "exploitation."

There stuck in my mind as if it was symbolical of the whole thing

the twisted figure of a man, whose face had been horribly scalded-I

can't describe how, except that one eye was just expressionless

white-and he ground at an organ bearing a card which told in weak

and bitterly satirical phrasing that he had been scalded by the hot

water from the tuyeres of the blast furnace of Lord Pandram's works.

He had been scalded and quite inadequately compensated and

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 disconnect him and them.

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.