THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Page 18

  poisoning was a frequent and virulent evil, and people had

  generalised from these exceptional cases. The small shops, he

  hazarded, looking out of the cracked and dirty window at distant

  chimneys, might be advantageously closed…

  "But what's the good of talking?" said my uncle, getting off the

  table on which he had been sitting. "Seems to me there'll come a

  time when a master will get fined if he don't run round the works

  blowing his girls noses for them. That's about what it'll come to."

  He walked to the black mantelpiece and stood on the threadbare rug,

  and urged me not to be misled by the stories of prejudiced and

  interested enemies of our national industries.

  "They'll get a strike one of these days, of employers, and then

  we'll see a bit," he said. "They'll drive Capital abroad and then

  they'll whistle to get it back again."…

  He led the way down the shaky wooden steps and cheered up to tell me

  of his way of checking his coal consumption. He exchanged a

  ferocious greeting with one or two workpeople, and so we came out of

  the factory gates into the ugly narrow streets, paved with a

  peculiarly hard diapered brick of an unpleasing inky-blue colour,

  and bordered with the mean and squalid homes of his workers. Doors

  stood open and showed grimy interiors, and dirty ill-clad children

  played in the kennel.

  We passed a sickly-looking girl with a sallow face, who dragged her

  limbs and peered at us dimly with painful eyes. She stood back, as

  partly blinded people will do, to allow us to pass, although there

  was plenty of room for us.

  I glanced back at her.

  "THAT'S ploombism " said my uncle casually.

  "What?" said I.

  "Ploombism. And the other day I saw a fool of a girl, and what

  d'you think? She'd got a basin that hadn't been fired, a cracked

  piece of biscuit it was, up on the shelf over her head, just all

  over glaze, killing glaze, man, and she was putting up her hand if

  you please, and eating her dinner out of it. Got her dinner in it!

  "Eating her dinner out of it," he repeated in loud and bitter tones,

  and punched me hard in the ribs.

  "And then they comes to THAT-and grumbles. And the fools up in

  Westminster want you to put in fans here and fans there-the Longton

  fools have… And then eating their dinners out of it all the

  time!"…

  At high tea that night-my uncle was still holding out against

  evening dinner-Sibyl and Gertrude made what was evidently a

  concerted demand for a motorcar.

  "You've got your mother's brougham," he said, that's good enough for

  you." But he seemed shaken by the fact that some Burslem rival was

  launching out with the new invention. "He spoils his girls," he

  remarked. "He's a fool," and became thoughtful.

  Afterwards he asked me to come to him into his study; it was a room

  with a writing-desk and full of pieces of earthenware and suchlike

  litter, and we had our great row about Cambridge.

  "Have you thought things over, Dick?" he said.

  "I think I'll go to Trinity, Uncle," I said firmly. "I want to go

  to Trinity. It is a great college."

  He was manifestly chagrined. "You're a fool," he said.

  I made no answer.

  "You're a damned fool," he said. "But I suppose you've got to do

  it. You could have come here-That don't matter, though, now…

  You'll have your time and spend your money, and be a poor half-

  starved clergyman, mucking about with the women all the day and

  afraid to have one of your own ever, or you'll be a schoolmaster or

  some such fool for the rest of your life. Or some newspaper chap.

  That's what you'll get from Cambridge. I'm half a mind not to let

  you. Eh? More than half a mind…"

  "You've got to do the thing you can," he said, after a pause, "and

  likely it's what you're fitted for."

  4

  I paid several short visits to Staffordshire during my Cambridge

  days, and always these relations of mine produced the same effect of

  hardness. My uncle's thoughts had neither atmosphere nor mystery.

  He lived in a different universe from the dreams of scientific

  construction that filled my mind. He could as easily have

  understood Chinese poetry. His motives were made up of intense

  rivalries with other men of his class and kind, a few vindictive

  hates springing from real and fancied slights, a habit of

  acquisition that had become a second nature, a keen love both of

  efficiency and display in his own affairs. He seemed to me to have

  no sense of the state, no sense and much less any love of beauty, no

  charity and no sort of religious feeling whatever. He had strong

  bodily appetites, he ate and drank freely, smoked a great deal, and

  occasionally was carried off by his passions for a "bit of a spree"

  to Birmingham or Liverpool or Manchester. The indulgences of these

  occasions were usually followed by a period of reaction, when he was

  urgent for the suppression of nudity in the local Art Gallery and a

  harsh and forcible elevation of the superficial morals of the

  valley. And he spoke of the ladies who ministered to the delights

  of his jolly-dog period, when he spoke of them at all, by the

  unprintable feminine equivalent. My aunt he treated with a kindly

  contempt and considerable financial generosity, but his daughters

  tore his heart; he was so proud of them, so glad to find them money

  to spend, so resolved to own them, so instinctively jealous of every

  man who came near them.

  My uncle has been the clue to a great number of men for me. He was

  an illuminating extreme. I have learnt what not to expect from them

  through him, and to comprehend resentments and dangerous sudden

  antagonisms I should have found incomprehensible in their more

  complex forms, if I had not first seen them in him in their feral

  state.

  With his soft felt hat at the back of his head, his rather heavy,

  rather mottled face, his rationally thick boots and slouching tweed-

  clad form, a little round-shouldered and very obstinate looking, he

  strolls through all my speculations sucking his teeth audibly, and

  occasionally throwing out a shrewd aphorism, the intractable

  unavoidable ore of the new civilisation.

  Essentially he was simple. Generally speaking, he hated and

  despised in equal measure whatever seemed to suggest that he

  personally was not the most perfect human being conceivable. He

  hated all education after fifteen because he had had no education

  after fifteen, he hated all people who did not have high tea until

  he himself under duress gave up high tea, he hated every game except

  football, which he had played and could judge, he hated all people

  who spoke foreign languages because he knew no language but

  Staffordshire, he hated all foreigners because he was English, and

  all foreign ways because they were not his ways. Also he hated

  particularly, and in this order, Londoner's, Yorkshiremen, Scotch,

  Welch and Irish, because they were not "reet Staffordshire," and he

  hated all other Staffordshire men as
insufficiently "reet." He

  wanted to have all his own women inviolate, and to fancy he had a

  call upon every other woman in the world. He wanted to have the

  best cigars and the best brandy in the world to consume or give away

  magnificently, and every one else to have inferior ones. (His

  billiard table was an extra large size, specially made and very

  inconvenient.) And he hated Trade Unions because they interfered

  with his autocratic direction of his works, and his workpeople

  because they were not obedient and untiring mechanisms to do his

  bidding. He was, in fact, a very naive, vigorous human being. He

  was about as much civilised, about as much tamed to the ideas of

  collective action and mutual consideration as a Central African

  negro.

  There are hordes of such men as he throughout all the modern

  industrial world. You will find the same type with the slightest

  modifications in the Pas de Calais or Rhenish Prussia or New Jersey

  or North Italy. No doubt you would find it in New Japan. These men

  have raised themselves up from the general mass of untrained,

  uncultured, poorish people in a hard industrious selfish struggle.

  To drive others they have had first to drive themselves. They have

  never yet had occasion nor leisure to think of the state or social

  life as a whole, and as for dreams or beauty, it was a condition of

  survival that they should ignore such cravings. All the distinctive

  qualities of my uncle can be thought of as dictated by his

  conditions; his success and harshness, the extravagances that

  expressed his pride in making money, the uncongenial luxury that

  sprang from rivalry, and his self-reliance, his contempt for broad

  views, his contempt for everything that he could not understand.

  His daughters were the inevitable children of his life. Queer girls

  they were! Curiously "spirited" as people phrase it, and curiously

  limited. During my Cambridge days I went down to Staffordshire

  several times. My uncle, though he still resented my refusal to go

  into his business, was also in his odd way proud of me. I was his

  nephew and poor relation, and yet there I was, a young gentleman

  learning all sorts of unremunerative things in the grandest manner,

  "Latin and mook," while the sons of his neighhours, not nephews

  merely, but sons, stayed unpolished in their native town. Every

  time I went down I found extensive changes and altered relations,

  and before I had settled down to them off I went again. I don't

  think I was one person to them; I was a series of visitors. There

  is a gulf of ages between a gaunt schoolboy of sixteen in unbecoming

  mourning and two vividly self-conscious girls of eighteen and

  nineteen, but a Cambridge "man" of two and twenty with a first and

  good tennis and a growing social experience, is a fair contemporary

  for two girls of twenty-three and twenty-four.

  A motor-car appeared, I think in my second visit, a bottle-green

  affair that opened behind, had dark purple cushions, and was

  controlled mysteriously by a man in shiny black costume and a flat

  cap. The high tea had been shifted to seven and rechristened

  dinner, but my uncle would not dress nor consent to have wine; and

  after one painful experiment, I gathered, and a scene, he put his

  foot down and prohibited any but high-necked dresses.

  "Daddy's perfectly impossible," Sybil told me.

  The foot had descended vehemently! "My own daughters!" he had said,

  "dressed up like -"-and had arrested himself and fumbled and

  decided to say-"actresses, and showin' their fat arms for every

  fool to stare at!" Nor would he have any people invited to dinner.

  He didn't, he had explained, want strangers poking about in his

  house when he came home tired. So such calling as occurred went on

  during his absence in the afternoon.

  One of the peculiarities of the life of these ascendant families of

  the industrial class to which wealth has come, is its tremendous

  insulations. There were no customs of intercourse in the Five

  Towns. All the isolated prosperities of the district sprang from

  economising, hard driven homes, in which there was neither time nor

  means for hospitality. Social intercourse centred very largely upon

  the church or chapel, and the chapels were better at bringing people

  together than the Establishment to which my cousins belonged. Their

  chief outlet to the wider world lay therefore through the

  acquaintances they had formed at school, and through two much less

  prosperous families of relations who lived at Longton and Hanley. A

  number of gossiping friendships with old school mates were "kept

  up," and my cousins would "spend the afternoon" or even spend the

  day with these; such occasions led to other encounters and

  interlaced with the furtive correspondences and snatched meetings

  that formed the emotional thread of their lives. When the billiard

  table had been new, my uncle had taken to asking in a few approved

  friends for an occasional game, but mostly the billiard-room was for

  glory and the girls. Both of them played very well. They never, so

  far as I know, dined out, and when at last after bitter domestic

  conflicts they began to go to dances, they went with the quavering

  connivance of my aunt, and changed into ball frocks at friends'

  houses on the way. There was a tennis club that formed a convenient

  afternoon rendezvous, and I recall that in the period of my earlier

  visits the young bloods of the district found much satisfaction in

  taking girls for drives in dog-carts and suchlike high-wheeled

  vehicles, a disposition that died in tangled tandems at the

  apparition of motor-car's.

  My aunt and uncle had conceived no plans in life for their daughters

  at all. In the undifferentiated industrial community from which

  they had sprung, girls got married somehow, and it did not occur to

  them that the concentration of property that had made them wealthy,

  had cut their children off from the general social sea in which

  their own awkward meeting had occurred, without necessarily opening

  any other world in exchange. My uncle was too much occupied with

  the works and his business affairs and his private vices to

  philosophise about his girls; he wanted them just to keep girls,

  preferably about sixteen, and to be a sort of animated flowers and

  make home bright and be given things. He was irritated that they

  would not remain at this, and still more irritated that they failed

  to suppress altogether their natural interest in young men. The

  tandems would be steered by weird and devious routes to evade the

  bare chance of his bloodshot eye. My aunt seemed to have no ideas

  whatever about what was likely to happen to her children. She had

  indeed no ideas about anything; she took her husband and the days as

  they came.

  I can see now the pathetic difficulty of my cousins' position in

  life; the absence of any guidance or instruction or provision for

  their development. They supplemented the silences of home by the

  conversation of schoolfellows and the suggestions of popula
r

  fiction. They had to make what they could out of life with such

  hints as these. The church was far too modest to offer them any

  advice. It was obtruded upon my mind upon my first visit that they

  were both carrying on correspondences and having little furtive

  passings and seeings and meetings with the mysterious owners of

  certain initials, S. and L. K., and, if I remember rightly, "the R.

  N." brothers and cousins, I suppose, of their friends. The same

  thing was going on, with a certain intensification, at my next

  visit, excepting only that the initials were different. But when I

  came again their methods were maturer or I was no longer a

  negligible quantity, and the notes and the initials were no longer

  flaunted quite so openly in my face.

  My cousins had worked it out from the indications of their universe

  that the end of life is to have a "good time." They used the

  phrase. That and the drives in dog-carts were only the first of

  endless points of resemblance between them and the commoner sort of

  American girl. When some years ago I paid my first and only visit

  to America I seemed to recover my cousins' atmosphere as soon as I

  entered the train at Euston. There were three girls in my

  compartment supplied with huge decorated cases of sweets, and being

  seen off by a company of friends, noisily arch and eager about the

  "steamer letters" they would get at Liverpool; they were the very

  soul-sisters of my cousins. The chief elements of a good time, as

  my cousins judged it, as these countless thousands of rich young

  women judge it, are a petty eventfulness, laughter, and to feel that

  you are looking well and attracting attention. Shopping is one of

  its leading joys. You buy things, clothes and trinkets for yourself

  and presents for your friends. Presents always seemed to be flying

  about in that circle; flowers and boxes of sweets were common

  currency. My cousins were always getting and giving, my uncle

  caressed them with parcels and cheques. They kissed him and he

  exuded sovereigns as a stroked APHIS exudes honey. It was like the

  new language of the Academy of Lagado to me, and I never learnt how

  to express myself in it, for nature and training make me feel

  encumbered to receive presents and embarrassed in giving them. But

  then, like my father, I hate and distrust possessions.