THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Read online

  much of the world to me. I saw her once, for an afternoon, and

  circumstances so threw her up in relief that I formed a very vivid

  memory of her. She was in the sharpest contrast with the industrial

  world about her; she impressed me as a dainty blue flower might do,

  come upon suddenly on a clinker heap. She remained in my mind at

  once a perplexing interrogation and a symbol…

  But first I must tell of my Staffordshire cousins and the world that

  served as a foil for her.

  2

  I first went to stay with my cousins when I was an awkward youth of

  sixteen, wearing deep mourning for my mother. My uncle wanted to

  talk things over with me, he said, and if he could, to persuade me

  to go into business instead of going up to Cambridge.

  I remember that visit on account of all sorts of novel things, but

  chiefly, I think, because it was the first time I encountered

  anything that deserves to be spoken of as wealth. For the first

  time in my life I had to do with people who seemed to have endless

  supplies of money, unlimited good clothes, numerous servants; whose

  daily life was made up of things that I had hitherto considered to

  be treats or exceptional extravagances. My cousins of eighteen and

  nineteen took cabs, for instance, with the utmost freedom, and

  travelled first-class in the local trains that run up and down the

  district of the Five Towns with an entire unconsciousness of the

  magnificence, as it seemed to me, of such a proceeding.

  The family occupied a large villa in Newcastle, with big lawns

  before it and behind, a shrubbery with quite a lot of shrubs, a

  coach house and stable, and subordinate dwelling-places for the

  gardener and the coachman. Every bedroom contained a gas heater and

  a canopied brass bedstead, and had a little bathroom attached

  equipped with the porcelain baths and fittings my uncle

  manufactured, bright and sanitary and stamped with his name, and the

  house was furnished throughout with chairs and tables in bright

  shining wood, soft and prevalently red Turkish carpets, cosy

  corners, curtained archways, gold-framed landscapes, overmantels, a

  dining-room sideboard like a palace with a large Tantalus, and

  electric light fittings of a gay and expensive quality. There was a

  fine billiard-room on the ground floor with three comfortable sofas

  and a rotating bookcase containing an excellent collection of the

  English and American humorists from THREE MEN IN A BOAT to the

  penultimate Mark Twain. There was also a conservatory opening out

  of the dining-room, to which the gardener brought potted flowers in

  their season…

  My aunt was a little woman with a scared look and a cap that would

  get over one eye, not very like my mother, and nearly eight years

  her junior; she was very much concerned with keeping everything

  nice, and unmercifully bullied by my two cousins, who took after

  their father and followed the imaginations of their own hearts.

  They were tall, dark, warmly flushed girls handsome rather than

  pretty. Gertrude, the eldest and tallest, had eyes that were almost

  black; Sibyl was of a stouter build, and her eyes, of which she was

  shamelessly proud, were dark blue. Sibyl's hair waved, and

  Gertrude's was severely straight. They treated me on my first visit

  with all the contempt of the adolescent girl for a boy a little

  younger and infinitely less expert in the business of life than

  herself. They were very busy with the writings of notes and certain

  mysterious goings and comings of their own, and left me very much to

  my own devices. Their speech in my presence was full of

  unfathomable allusions. They were the sort of girls who will talk

  over and through an uninitiated stranger with the pleasantest sense

  of superiority.

  I met them at breakfast and at lunch and at the half-past six

  o'clock high tea that formed the third chief meal of the day. I

  heard them rattling off the compositions of Chaminade and Moskowski,

  with great decision and effect, and hovered on the edge of tennis

  foursomes where it was manifest to the dullest intelligence that my

  presence was unnecessary. Then I went off to find some readable

  book in the place, but apart from miscellaneous popular novels, some

  veterinary works, a number of comic books, old bound volumes of THE

  ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS and a large, popular illustrated History of

  England, there was very little to be found. My anut talked to me in

  a casual feeble way, chiefly about my motber's last illness. The

  two bad seen very little of each other for many years; she made no

  secret of it that the ineligible qualities of my father were the

  cause of the estrangement. The only other society in the house

  during the day was an old and rather decayed Skye terrier in

  constant conflict with what were no doubt imaginary fleas. I took

  myself off for a series of walks, and acquired a considerable

  knowledge of the scenery and topography of the Potteries.

  It puzzled my aunt that I did not go westward, where it was country-

  side and often quite pretty, with hedgerows and fields and copses

  and flowers. But always I went eastward, where in a long valley

  industrialism smokes and sprawls. That was the stuff to which I

  turned by nature, to the human effort, and the accumulation and jar

  of men's activities. And in such a country as that valley social

  and economic relations were simple and manifest. Instead of the

  limitless confusion of London's population, in which no man can

  trace any but the most slender correlation between rich and poor, in

  which everyone seems disconnected and adrift from everyone, you can

  see here the works, the potbank or the ironworks or what not, and

  here close at hand the congested, meanly-housed workers, and at a

  little distance a small middle-class quarter, and again remoter, the

  big house of the employer. It was like a very simplified diagram-

  after the untraceable confusion of London.

  I prowled alone, curious and interested, through shabby back streets

  of mean little homes; I followed canals, sometimes canals of

  mysteriously heated waters with ghostly wisps of steam rising

  against blackened walls or a distant prospect of dustbin-fed

  vegetable gardens, I saw the women pouring out from the potbanks,

  heard the hooters summoning the toilers to work, lost my way upon

  slag heaps as big as the hills of the south country, dodged trains

  at manifestly dangerous level crossings, and surveyed across dark

  intervening spaces, the flaming uproar, the gnome-like activities of

  iron foundries. I heard talk of strikes and rumours of strikes, and

  learnt from the columns of some obscure labour paper I bought one

  day, of the horrors of the lead poisoning that was in those days one

  of the normal risks of certain sorts of pottery workers. Then back

  I came, by the ugly groaning and clanging steam tram of that period,

  to my uncle's house and lavish abundance of money and more or less

  furtive flirtations and the tinkle of Moskowski and Chaminade. It

  was, I say, diagrammat
ic. One saw the expropriator and the

  expropriated-as if Marx had arranged the picture. It was as

  jumbled and far more dingy and disastrous than any of the confusions

  of building and development that had surrounded my youth at

  Bromstead and Penge, but it had a novel quality of being explicable.

  I found great virtue in the word "exploitation."

  There stuck in my mind as if it was symbolical of the whole thing

  the twisted figure of a man, whose face had been horribly scalded-I

  can't describe how, except that one eye was just expressionless

  white-and he ground at an organ bearing a card which told in weak

  and bitterly satirical phrasing that he had been scalded by the hot

  water from the tuyeres of the blast furnace of Lord Pandram's works.

  He had been scalded and quite inadequately compensated and

  dismissed. And Lord Pandram was worth half a million.

  That upturned sightless white eye of his took possession of my

  imagination. I don't think that even then I was swayed by any crude

  melodramatic conception of injustice. I was quite prepared to

  believe the card wasn't a punctiliously accurate statement of fact,

  and that a case could be made out for Lord Pandram. Still there in

  the muddy gutter, painfully and dreadfully, was the man, and he was

  smashed and scalded and wretched, and he ground his dismal

  hurdygurdy with a weary arm, calling upon Heaven and the passer-by

  for help, for help and some sort of righting-one could not imagine

  quite what. There he was as a fact, as a by-product of the system

  that heaped my cousins with trinkets and provided the comic novels

  and the abundant cigars and spacious billiard-room of my uncle's

  house. I couldn't disconnect him and them.

  My uncle on his part did nothing to conceal the state of war that

  existed between himself and his workers, and the mingled contempt

  and animosity he felt from them.

  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

  wo
rked 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