THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

3

My father, Iam afraid, carried a natural incompetence in practical

affairs to an exceptionally high level. He combined practical

incompetence, practical enterprise and a thoroughly sanguine

temperament, in a manner that I have never seen paralleled in any

human being. He was always trying to do new things in the briskest

manner, under the suggestion of books or papers or his own

spontaneous imagination, and as he had never been trained to do

anything whatever in his life properly, his futilities were

extensive and thorough. At one time he nearly gave up his classes

for intensive culture, so enamoured was he of its possibilities; the

peculiar pungency of the manure he got, in pursuit of a chemical

theory of his own, has scarred my olfactory memories for a lifetime.

The intensive culture phase is very clear in my memory; it came near

the end of his career and when I was between eleven and twelve. I

was mobilised to gather caterpillars on several occasions, and

assisted in nocturnal raids upon the slugs by lantern-light that

wrecked my preparation work for school next day. My father dug up

both lawns, and trenched and manured in spasms of immense vigour

alternating with periods of paralysing distaste for the garden. And

for weeks he talked about eight hundred pounds an acre at every

meal.

A garden, even when it is not exasperated by intensive methods, is a

thing as exacting as a baby, its moods have to he watched; it does

not wait upon the cultivator's convenience, but has times of its

own. Intensive culture greatly increases this disposition to

trouble mankind; it makes a garden touchy and hysterical, a drugged

and demoralised and over-irritated garden. My father got at cross

purposes with our two patches at an early stage. Everything grew

wrong from the first to last, and if my father's manures intensified

nothing else, they certainly intensified the Primordial Curse. The

peas were eaten in the night before they were three inches high, the

beans bore nothing but blight, the only apparent result of a

spraying of the potatoes was to develop a PENCHANT in the cat for

being ill indoors, the cucumber frames were damaged by the

catapulting of boys going down the lane at the back, and all your

cucumbers were mysteriously embittered. That lane with its

occasional passers-by did much to wreck the intensive scheme,

because my father always stopped work and went indoors if any one

watched him. His special manure was apt to arouse a troublesome

spirit of inquiry in hardy natures.

In digging his rows and shaping his patches he neglected the guiding

string and trusted to his eye altogether too much, and the

consequent obliquity and the various wind-breaks and scare-crows he

erected, and particularly an irrigation contrivance he began and

never finished by which everything was to be watered at once by

means of pieces of gutter from the roof and outhouses of Number 2,

and a large and particularly obstinate clump of elder-bushes in the

abolished hedge that he had failed to destroy entirely either by axe

or by fire, combined to give the gardens under intensive culture a

singularly desolate and disorderly appearance. He took steps

towards the diversion of our house drain under the influence of the

Sewage Utilisation Society; but happily he stopped in time. He

hardly completed any of the operations he began; something else

became more urgent or simply he tired; a considerable area of the

Number 2 territory was never even dug up.

In the end the affair irritated him beyond endurance. Never was a

man less horticulturally-minded. The clamour of these vegetables he

had launched into the world for his service and assistance, wore out

his patience. He would walk into the garden the happiest of men

after a day or so of disregard, talking to me of history perhaps or

social organisation, or summarising some book he had read. He

talked to me of anything that interested him, regardless of my

limitations. Then he would begin to note the growth of the weeds.

"This won't do," he would say and pull up a handful.

More weeding would follow and the talk would become fragmentary.

His hands would become earthy, his nails black, weeds would snap off

in his careless grip, leaving the roots behind. The world would

darken. He would look at his fingers with disgusted astonishment.

"CURSE these weeds!" he would say from his heart. His discourse was

at an end.

I have memories, too, of his sudden unexpected charges into the

tranquillity of the house, his hands and clothes intensively

enriched. He would come in like a whirlwind. "This damned stuff

all over me and the Agricultural Chemistry Class at six! Bah!

AAAAAAH!"

My mother would never learn not to attempt to break him of swearing

on such occasions. She would remain standing a little stiffly in

the scullery refusing to assist him to the adjectival towel he

sought.

"If you say such things-"

He would dance with rage and hurl the soap about. "The towel!" he

would cry, flicking suds from big fingers in every direction; "the

towel! I'll let the blithering class slide if you don't give me the

towel! I'll give up everything, I tell you-everything!"…

At last with the failure of the lettuces came the breaking point. I

was in the little arbour learning Latin irregular verbs when it

happened. I can see him still, his peculiar tenor voice still

echoes in my brain, shouting his opinion of intensive culture for

all the world to hear, and slashing away at that abominable mockery

of a crop with a hoe. We had tied them up with bast only a week or

so before, and now half were rotten and half had shot up into tall

slender growths. He had the hoe in both hands and slogged. Great

wipes he made, and at each stroke he said, "Take that!"

The air was thick with flying fragments of abortive salad. It was a

fantastic massacre. It was the French Revolution of that cold

tyranny, the vindictive overthrow of the pampered vegetable

aristocrats. After he had assuaged his passion upon them, he turned

for other prey; he kicked holes in two of our noblest marrows,

flicked off the heads of half a row of artichokes, and shied the hoe

with a splendid smash into the cucumber frame. Something of the awe

of that moment returns to me as I write of it.

Well, my boy," he said, approaching with an expression of beneficent

happiness, "I've done with gardening. Let's go for a walk like

reasonable beings. I've had enough of this"-his face was convulsed

for an instant with bitter resentment-" Pandering to cabbages."