THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

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

obtuse, but just failing to penetrate his meaning. Whatever City

Merchants had or had not done for me, Flack, Topham and old Gates

had certainly barred my mistaking the profitable production and sale

of lavatory basins and bathroom fittings for the highest good. It

was only upon reflection that it dawned upon me that the splendid

chance for a young fellow with my uncle, "me, having no son of my

own," was anything but an illustration for comparison with my own

chosen career.

I still remember very distinctly my uncle's talk,-he loved to speak

"reet Staffordshire"-his rather flabby face with the mottled

complexion that told of crude ill-regulated appetites, his clumsy

gestures-he kept emphasising his points by prodding at me with his

finger-the ill-worn, costly, grey tweed clothes, the watch chain of

plain solid gold, and soft felt hat thrust back from his head. He

tackled me first in the garden after lunch, and then tried to raise

me to enthusiasm by taking me to his potbank and showing me its

organisation, from the dusty grinding mills in which whitened men

worked and coughed, through the highly ventilated glazing room in

which strangely masked girls looked ashamed of themselves,-"They'll

risk death, the fools, to show their faces to a man," said my uncle,

quite audibly-to the firing kilns and the glazing kilns, and so

round the whole place to the railway siding and the gratifying

spectacle of three trucks laden with executed orders.

Then we went up a creaking outside staircase to his little office,

and he showed off before me for a while, with one or two

subordinates and the telephone.

"None of your Gas," he said, "all this. It's Real every bit of it.

Hard cash and hard glaze."

"Yes," I said, with memories of a carelessly read pamphlet in my

mind, and without any satirical intention, "I suppose you MUST use

lead in your glazes?"

Whereupon I found I had tapped the ruling grievance of my uncle's

life. He hated leadless glazes more than he hated anything, except

the benevolent people who had organised the agitation for their use.

"Leadless glazes ain't only fit for buns," he said. "Let me tell

you, my boy-"

He began in a voice of bland persuasiveness that presently warmed to

anger, to explain the whole matter. I hadn't the rights of the

matter at all. Firstly, there was practically no such thing as lead

poisoning. Secondly, not everyone was liable to lead poisoning, and

it would be quite easy to pick out the susceptible types-as soon as

they had it-and put them to other work. Thirdly, the evil effects

of lead poisoning were much exaggerated. Fourthly, and this was in

a particularly confidential undertone, many of the people liked to

get lead poisoning, especially the women, because it caused

abortion. I might not believe it, but he knew it for a fact.

Fifthly, the work-people simply would not learn the gravity of the

danger, and would eat with unwashed hands, and incur all sorts of

risks, so that as my uncle put it: "the fools deserve what they

get." Sixthly, he and several associated firms had organised a

simple and generous insurance scheme against lead-poisoning risks.

Seventhly, he never wearied in rational (as distinguished from

excessive, futile and expensive) precautions against the disease.

Eighthly, in the ill-equipped shops of his minor competitors lead

poisoning was a frequent and virulent evil, and people had

generalised from these exceptional cases. The small shops, he

hazarded, looking out of the cracked and dirty window at distant

chimneys, might be advantageously closed…

"But what's the good of talking?" said my uncle, getting off the

table on which he had been sitting. "Seems to me there'll come a

time when a master will get fined if he don't run round the works

blowing his girls noses for them. That's about what it'll come to."

He walked to the black mantelpiece and stood on the threadbare rug,

and urged me not to be misled by the stories of prejudiced and

interested enemies of our national industries.

"They'll get a strike one of these days, of employers, and then

we'll see a bit," he said. "They'll drive Capital abroad and then

they'll whistle to get it back again."…

He led the way down the shaky wooden steps and cheered up to tell me

of his way of checking his coal consumption. He exchanged a

ferocious greeting with one or two workpeople, and so we came out of

the factory gates into the ugly narrow streets, paved with a

peculiarly hard diapered brick of an unpleasing inky-blue colour,

and bordered with the mean and squalid homes of his workers. Doors

stood open and showed grimy interiors, and dirty ill-clad children

played in the kennel.

We passed a sickly-looking girl with a sallow face, who dragged her

limbs and peered at us dimly with painful eyes. She stood back, as

partly blinded people will do, to allow us to pass, although there

was plenty of room for us.

I glanced back at her.

"THAT'S ploombism " said my uncle casually.

"What?" said I.

"Ploombism. And the other day I saw a fool of a girl, and what

d'you think? She'd got a basin that hadn't been fired, a cracked

piece of biscuit it was, up on the shelf over her head, just all

over glaze, killing glaze, man, and she was putting up her hand if

you please, and eating her dinner out of it. Got her dinner in it!

"Eating her dinner out of it," he repeated in loud and bitter tones,

and punched me hard in the ribs.

"And then they comes to THAT-and grumbles. And the fools up in

Westminster want you to put in fans here and fans there-the Longton

fools have… And then eating their dinners out of it all the

time!"…

At high tea that night-my uncle was still holding out against

evening dinner-Sibyl and Gertrude made what was evidently a

concerted demand for a motorcar.

"You've got your mother's brougham," he said, that's good enough for

you." But he seemed shaken by the fact that some Burslem rival was

launching out with the new invention. "He spoils his girls," he

remarked. "He's a fool," and became thoughtful.

Afterwards he asked me to come to him into his study; it was a room

with a writing-desk and full of pieces of earthenware and suchlike

litter, and we had our great row about Cambridge.

"Have you thought things over, Dick?" he said.

"I think I'll go to Trinity, Uncle," I said firmly. "I want to go

to Trinity. It is a great college."

He was manifestly chagrined. "You're a fool," he said.

I made no answer.

"You're a damned fool," he said. "But I suppose you've got to do

it. You could have come here-That don't matter, though, now…

You'll have your time and spend your money, and be a poor half-

starved clergyman, mucking about with the women all the day and

afraid to have one of your own ever, or you'll be a schoolmaster or

some such fool for the rest of your life. Or some newspaper chap.

That's what you'll get from Cambridge. I'm half a mind not to let

you. Eh? More than half a mind…"

"You've got to do the thing you can," he said, after a pause, "and

likely it's what you're fitted for."