THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

7

What a preposterous shindy that was!

I sat with him in the smoking-room, propounding what I considered to

be the most indisputable and non-contentious propositions

conceivable-until, to my infinite amazement, he exploded and called

me a "damned young puppy."

It was seismic.

"Tremendously interesting time," I said, "just in the beginning of

making a civilisation."

"Ah!" he said, with an averted face, and nodded, leaning forward

over his cigar.

I had not the remotest thought of annoying him.

"Monstrous muddle of things we have got," I said, "jumbled streets,

ugly population, ugly factories-"

"You'd do a sight better if you had to do with it," said my uncle,

regarding me askance.

"Not me. But a world that had a collective plan and knew where it

meant to be going would do a sight better, anyhow. We're all

swimming in a flood of ill-calculated chances-"

"You'll be making out I organised that business down there-by

chance-next," said my uncle, his voice thick with challenge.

I went on as though I was back in Trinity.

"There's a lot of chance in the making of all great businesses," I

said.

My uncle remarked that that showed how much I knew about businesses.

If chance made businesses, why was it that he always succeeded and

grew while those fools Ackroyd and Sons always took second place?

He showed a disposition to tell the glorious history of how once

Ackroyd's overshadowed him, and how now he could buy up Ackroyd's

three times over. But I wanted to get out what was in my mind.

"Oh!" I said, "as between man and man and business and business,

some of course get the pull by this quality or that-but it's forces

quite outside the individual case that make the big part of any

success under modern conditions. YOU never invented pottery, nor

any process in pottery that matters a rap in your works; it wasn't

YOUR foresight that joined all England up with railways and made it

possible to organise production on an altogether different scale.

You really at the utmost can't take credit for much more than being

the sort of man who happened to fit what happened to be the

requirements of the time, and who happened to be in a position to

take advantage of them-"

It was then my uncle cried out and called me a damned young puppy,

and became involved in some unexpected trouble of his own.

I woke up as it were from my analysis of the situation to discover

him bent over a splendid spittoon, cursing incoherently, retching a

little, and spitting out the end of his cigar which he had bitten

off in his last attempt at self-control, and withal fully prepared

as soon as he had cleared for action to give me just all that he

considered to be the contents of his mind upon the condition of

mine.

Well, why shouldn't I talk my mind to him? He'd never had an

outside view of himself for years, and I resolved to stand up to

him. We went at it hammer and tongs! It became clear that he

supposed me to be a Socialist, a zealous, embittered hater of all

ownership-and also an educated man of the vilest, most

pretentiously superior description. His principal grievance was

that I thought I knew everything; to that he recurred again and

again…

We had been maintaining an armed truce with each other since my

resolve to go up to Cambridge, and now we had out all that had

accumulated between us. There had been stupendous accumulations…

The particular things we said and did in that bawlmg encounter

matter nothing at all in this story. I can't now estimate how near

we came to fisticuffs. It ended with my saying, after a pungent

reminder of benefits conferred and remembered, that I didn't want to

stay another hour in his house. I went upstairs, in a state of

puerile fury, to pack and go off to the Railway Hotel, while he,

with ironical civility, telephoned for a cab.

"Good riddance!" shouted my uncle, seeing me off into the night.

On the face of it our row was preposterous, but the underlying

reality of our quarrel was the essential antagonism, it seemed to

me, in all human affairs, the antagonism between ideas and the

established method, that is to say, between ideas and the rule of

thumb. The world I hate is the rule-of-thumb world, the thing I and

my kind of people exist for primarily is to battle with that, to

annoy it, disarrange it, reconstruct it. We question everything,

disturb anything that cannot give a clear justification to our

questioning, because we believe inherently that our sense of

disorder implies the possibility of a better order. Of course we

are detestable. My uncle was of that other vaster mass who accept

everything for the thing it seems to be, hate enquiry and analysis

as a tramp hates washing, dread and resist change, oppose

experiment, despise science. The world is our battleground; and all

history, all literature that matters, all science, deals with this

conflict of the thing that is and the speculative "if" that will

destroy it.

But that is why I did not see Margaret Seddon again for five years.