THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

4

That afternoon's walk sticks in my memory for many reasons. One is

that we went further than I had ever been before; far beyond Keston

and nearly to Seven-oaks, coming back by train from Dunton Green,

and the other is that my father as he went along talked about

himself, not so much to me as to himself, and about life and what he

had done with it. He monologued so that at times he produced an

effect of weird world-forgetfulness. I listened puzzled, and at

that time not upderstanding many things that afterwards became plain

to me. It is only in recent years that I have discovered the pathos

of that monologue; how friendless my father was and uncompanioned in

his thoughts and feelings, and what a hunger he may have felt for

the sympathy of the undeveloped youngster who trotted by his side.

"I'm no gardener," he said, "I'm no anything. Why the devil did I

start gardening?

"I suppose man was created to mind a garden… But the Fall let

us out of that! What was I created for? God! what was I created

for?…

"Slaves to matter! Minding inanimate things! It doesn't suit me,

you know. I've got no hands and no patience. I've mucked about

with life. Mucked about with life." He suddenly addressed himself

to me, and for an instant I started like an eavesdropper discovered.

"Whatever you do, boy, whatever you do, make a Plan. Make a good

Plan and stick to it. Find out what life is about-I never have-

and set yourself to do whatever you ought to do. I admit it's a

puzzle…

"Those damned houses have been the curse of my life. Stucco white

elephants! Beastly cracked stucco with stains of green-black and

green. Conferva and soot… Property, they are!… Beware

of Things, Dick, beware of Things! Before you know where you are

you are waiting on them and minding them. They'll eat your life up.

Eat up your hours and your blood and energy! When those houses came

to me, I ought to have sold them-or fled the country. I ought to

have cleared out. Sarcophagi-eaters of men! Oh! the hours and

days of work, the nights of anxiety those vile houses have cost me!

The painting! It worked up my arms; it got all over me. I stank of

it. It made me ill. It isn't living-it's minding…

"Property's the curse of life. Property! Ugh! Look at this

country all cut up into silly little parallelograms, look at all

those villas we passed just now and those potato patches and that

tarred shanty and the hedge! Somebody's minding every bit of it

like a dog tied to a cart's tail. Patching it and bothering about

it. Bothering! Yapping at every passer-by. Look at that notice-

board! One rotten worried little beast wants to keep us other

rotten little beasts off HIS patch,-God knows why! Look at the

weeds in it. Look at the mended fence!… There's no property

worth having, Dick, but money. That's only good to spend. All

these things. Human souls buried under a cartload of blithering

rubbish…

"I'm not a fool, Dick. I have qualities, imagination, a sort of go.

I ought to have made a better thing of life.

"I'm sure I could have done things. Only the old people pulled my

leg. They started me wrong. They never started me at all. I only

began to find out what life was like when I was nearly forty.

"If I'd gone to a university; if I'd had any sort of sound training,

if I hadn't slipped into the haphazard places that came easiest…

"Nobody warned me. Nobody. It isn't a world we live in, Dick; it's

a cascade of accidents; it's a chaos exasperated by policemen! YOU

be warned in time, Dick. You stick to a plan. Don't wait for any

one to show you the way. Nobody will. There isn't a way till you

make one. Get education, get a good education. Fight your way to

the top. It's your only chance. I've watched you. You'll do no

good at digging and property minding. There isn't a neighbour in

Bromstead won't be able to skin you at suchlike games. You and I

are the brainy unstable kind, topside or nothing. And if ever those

blithering houses come to you-don't have 'em. Give them away!

Dynamite 'em-and off! LIVE, Dick! I'll get rid of them for you if

I can, Dick, but remember what I say."…

So it was my father discoursed, if not in those particular words,

yet exactly in that manner, as he slouched along the southward road,

with resentful eyes becoming less resentful as he talked, and

flinging out clumsy illustrative motions at the outskirts of

Bromstead as we passed along them. That afternoon he hated

Bromstead, from its foot-tiring pebbles up. He had no illusions

about Bromstead or himself. I have the clearest impression of him

in his garden-stained tweeds with a deer-stalker hat on the back of

his head and presently a pipe sometimes between his teeth and

sometimes in his gesticulating hand, as he became diverted by his

talk from his original exasperation…

This particular afternoon is no doubt mixed up in my memory with

many other afternoons; all sorts of things my father said and did at

different times have got themselves referred to it; it filled me at

the time with a great unprecedented sense of fellowship and it has

become the symbol now for all our intercourse together. If I didn't

understand the things he said, I did the mood he was in. He gave me

two very broad ideas in that talk and the talks I have mingled with

it; he gave them to me very clearly and they have remained

fundamental in my mind; one a sense of the extraordinary confusion

and waste and planlessness of the human life that went on all about

us; and the other of a great ideal of order and economy which he

called variously Science and Civilisation, and which, though I do

not remember that he ever used that word, I suppose many people

nowadays would identify with Socialism,-as the Fabians expound it.

He was not very definite about this Science, you must understand,

but he seemed always to be waving his hand towards it,-just as his

contemporary Tennyson seems always to be doing-he belonged to his

age and mostly his talk was destructive of the limited beliefs of

his time, he led me to infer rather than actually told me that this

Science was coming, a spirit of light and order, to the rescue of a

world groaning and travailing in muddle for the want of it…