THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

CHAPTER THE SECOND
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER
1

I dreamt first of states and cities and political things when I was

a little boy in knickerbockers.

When I think of how such things began in my mind, there comes back

to me the memory of an enormous bleak room with its ceiling going up

to heaven and its floor covered irregularly with patched and

defective oilcloth and a dingy mat or so and a "surround" as they

call it, of dark stained wood. Here and there against the wall are

trunks and boxes. There are cupboards on either side of the

fireplace and bookshelves with books above them, and on the wall and

rather tattered is a large yellow-varnished geological map of the

South of England. Over the mantel is a huge lump of white coral

rock and several big fossil bones, and above that hangs the portrait

of a brainy gentleman, sliced in half and displaying an interior of

intricate detail and much vigour of coloring. It is the floor I

think of chiefly; over the oilcloth of which, assumed to be land,

spread towns and villages and forts of wooden bricks; there are

steep square hills (geologically, volumes of Orr's CYCLOPAEDIA OF

THE SCIENCES) and the cracks and spaces of the floor and the bare

brown surround were the water channels and open sea of that

continent of mine.

I still remember with infinite gratitude the great-uncle to whom I

owe my bricks. He must have been one of those rare adults who have

not forgotten the chagrins and dreams of childhood. He was a

prosperous west of England builder; including my father he had three

nephews, and for each of them he caused a box of bricks to be made

by an out-of-work carpenter, not the insufficient supply of the

toyshop, you understand, but a really adequate quantity of bricks

made out of oak and shaped and smoothed, bricks about five inches by

two and a half by one, and half-bricks and quarter-bricks to

correspond. There were hundreds of them, many hundreds. I could

build six towers as high as myself with them, and there seemed quite

enough for every engineering project I could undertake. I could

build whole towns with streets and houses and churches and citadels;

I could bridge every gap in the oilcloth and make causeways over

crumpled spaces (which I feigned to be morasses), and on a keel of

whole bricks it was possible to construct ships to push over the

high seas to the remotest port in the room. And a disciplined

population, that rose at last by sedulous begging on birthdays and

all convenient occasions to well over two hundred, of lead sailors

and soldiers, horse, foot and artillery, inhabited this world.

Justice has never been done to bricks and soldiers by those who

write about toys. The praises of the toy theatre have been a common

theme for essayists, the planning of the scenes, the painting and

cutting out of the caste, penny plain twopence coloured, the stink

and glory of the performance and the final conflagration. I had

such a theatre once, but I never loved it nor hoped for much from

it; my bricks and soldiers were my perpetual drama. I recall an

incessant variety of interests. There was the mystery and charm of

the complicated buildings one could make, with long passages and

steps and windows through which one peeped into their intricacies,

and by means of slips of card one could make slanting ways in them,

and send marbles rolling from top to base and thence out into the

hold of a waiting ship. Then there were the fortresses and gun

emplacements and covered ways in which one's soldiers went. And

there was commerce; the shops and markets and store-rooms full of

nasturtium seed, thrift seed, lupin beans and suchlike provender

from the garden; such stuff one stored in match-boxes and pill-

boxes, or packed in sacks of old glove fingers tied up with thread

and sent off by waggons along the great military road to the

beleaguered fortress on the Indian frontier beyond the worn places

that were dismal swamps. And there were battles on the way.

That great road is still clear in my memory. I was given, I forget

by what benefactor, certain particularly fierce red Indians of lead-

I have never seen such soldiers since-and for these my father

helped me to make tepees of brown paper, and I settled them in a

hitherto desolate country under the frowning nail-studded cliffs of

an ancient trunk. Then I conquered them and garrisoned their land.

(Alas! they died, no doubt through contact with civilisation-one my

mother trod on-and their land became a wilderness again and was

ravaged for a time by a clockwork crocodile of vast proportions.)

And out towards the coal-scuttle was a region near the impassable

thickets of the ragged hearthrug where lived certain china Zulus

brandishing spears, and a mountain country of rudely piled bricks

concealing the most devious and enchanting caves and several mines

of gold and silver paper. Among these rocks a number of survivors

from a Noah's Ark made a various, dangerous, albeit frequently

invalid and crippled fauna, and I was wont to increase the

uncultivated wildness of this region further by trees of privet-

twigs from the garden hedge and box from the garden borders. By

these territories went my Imperial Road carrying produce to and fro,

bridging gaps in the oilcloth, tunnelling through Encyclopaedic

hills-one tunnel was three volumes long-defended as occasion

required by camps of paper tents or brick blockhouses, and ending at

last in a magnificently engineered ascent to a fortress on the

cliffs commanding the Indian reservation.

My games upon the floor must have spread over several years and

developed from small beginnings, incorporating now this suggestion

and now that. They stretch, I suppose, from seven to eleven or

twelve. I played them intermittently, and they bulk now in the

retrospect far more significantly than they did at the time. I

played them in bursts, and then forgot them for long periods;

through the spring and summer I was mostly out of doors, and school

and classes caught me early. And in the retrospect I see them all

not only magnified and transfigured, but fore-shortened and confused

together. A clockwork railway, I seem to remember, came and went;

one or two clockwork boats, toy sailing ships that, being keeled,

would do nothing but lie on their beam ends on the floor; a

detestable lot of cavalrymen, undersized and gilt all over, given me

by a maiden aunt, and very much what one might expect from an aunt,

that I used as Nero used his Christians to ornament my public

buildings; and I finally melted some into fratricidal bullets, and

therewith blew the rest to flat splashes of lead by means of a brass

cannon in the garden.

I find this empire of the floor much more vivid and detailed in my

memory now than many of the owners of the skirts and legs and boots

that went gingerly across its territories. Occasionally, alas! they

stooped to scrub, abolishing in one universal destruction the slow

growth of whole days of civilised development. I still remember the

hatred and disgust of these catastrophes. Like Noah I was given

warnings. Did I disregard them, coarse red hands would descend,

plucking garrisons from fortresses and sailors from ships, jumbling

them up in their wrong boxes, clumsily so that their rifles and

swords were broken, sweeping the splendid curves of the Imperial

Road into heaps of ruins, casting the jungle growth of Zululand into

the fire.

Well, Master Dick," the voice of this cosmic calamity would say,

"you ought to have put them away last night. No! I can't wait until

you've sailed them all away in ships. I got my work to do, and do

it I will."

And in no time all my continents and lands were swirling water and

swiping strokes of house-flannel.

That was the worst of my giant visitants, but my mother too, dear

lady, was something of a terror to this microcosm. She wore spring-

sided boots, a kind of boot now vanished, I believe, from the world,

with dull bodies and shiny toes, and a silk dress with flounces that

were very destructive to the more hazardous viaducts of the Imperial

Road. She was always, I seem to remember, fetching me; fetching me

for a meal, fetching me for a walk or, detestable absurdity!

fetching me for a wash and brush up, and she never seemed to

understand anything whatever of the political Systems across which

she came to me. Also she forbade all toys on Sundays except the

bricks for church-building and the soldiers for church parade, or a

Scriptural use of the remains of the Noah's Ark mixed up with a

wooden Swiss dairy farm. But she really did not know whether a

thing was a church or not unless it positively bristled with cannon,

and many a Sunday afternoon have I played Chicago (with the fear of

God in my heart) under an infidel pretence that it was a new sort of

ark rather elaborately done.

Chicago, I must explain, was based upon my father's description of

the pig slaughterings in that city and certain pictures I had seen.

You made your beasts-which were all the ark lot really,

provisionally conceived as pigs-go up elaborate approaches to a

central pen, from which they went down a cardboard slide four at a

time, and dropped most satisfyingly down a brick shaft, and pitter-

litter over some steep steps to where a head slaughterman (ne Noah)

strung a cotton loop round their legs and sent them by pin hooks

along a wire to a second slaughterman with a chipped foot (formerly

Mrs. Noah) who, if I remember rightly, converted them into Army

sausage by means of a portion of the inside of an old alarum clock.

My mother did not understand my games, but my father did. He wore

bright-coloured socks and carpet slippers when he was indoors-my

mother disliked boots in the house-and he would sit down on my

little chair and survey the microcosm on the floor with admirable

understanding and sympathy.

It was he gave me most of my toys and, I more than suspect, most of

my ideas. "Here's some corrugated iron," he would say, "suitable

for roofs and fencing," and hand me a lump of that stiff crinkled

paper that is used for packing medicine bottles. Or, "Dick, do you

see the tiger loose near the Imperial Road?-won't do for your

cattle ranch." And I would find a bright new lead tiger like a

special creation at large in the world, and demanding a hunting

expedition and much elaborate effort to get him safely housed in the

city menagerie beside the captured dragon crocodile, tamed now, and

his key lost and the heart and spring gone out of him.

And to the various irregular reading of my father I owe the

inestimable blessing of never having a boy's book in my boyhood

except those of Jules Verne. But my father used to get books for

himself and me from the Bromstead Institute, Fenimore Cooper and

Mayne Reid and illustrated histories; one of the Russo-Turkish war

and one of Napier's expedition to Abyssinia I read from end to end;

Stanley and Livingstone, lives of Wellington, Napoleon and

Garibaldi, and back volumes of PUNCH, from which I derived

conceptions of foreign and domestic politics it has taken years of

adult reflection to correct. And at home permanently we had Wood's

NATURAL HISTORY, a brand-new illustrated Green's HISTORY OF THE

ENGLISH PEOPLE, Irving's COMPANIONS OF COLUMBUS, a great number of

unbound parts of some geographical work, a VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD I

think it was called, with pictures of foreign places, and Clarke's

NEW TESTAMENT with a map of Palestine, and a variety of other

informing books bought at sales. There was a Sowerby's BOTANY also,

with thousands of carefully tinted pictures of British plants, and

one or two other important works in the sitting-room. I was allowed

to turn these over and even lie on the floor with them on Sundays

and other occasions of exceptional cleanliness.

And in the attic I found one day a very old forgotten map after the

fashion of a bird's-eye view, representing the Crimea, that

fascinated me and kept me for hours navigating its waters with a

pin.