THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Read online

  It is over for me now and vanished. That opportunity will come no

  more. Very probably you have heard already some crude inaccurate

  version of our story and why I did not take office, and have formed

  your partial judgement on me. And so it is I sit now at my stone

  table, half out of life already, in a warm, large, shadowy leisure,

  splashed with sunlight and hung with vine tendrils, with paper

  before me to distil such wisdom as I can, as Machiavelli in his

  exile sought to do, from the things I have learnt and felt during

  the career that has ended now in my divorce.

  I climbed high and fast from small beginnings. I had the mind of my

  party. I do not know where I might not have ended, but for this red

  blaze that came out of my unguarded nature and closed my career for

  ever.

  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.

  2

  My father was a lank-limbed man in easy shabby tweed clothes and

  with his hands in his trouser pockets. He was a science teacher,

  taking a number of classes at the Bromstead Institute in Kent under

  the old Science and Art Department, and "visiting" various schools;

  and our resources were eked out by my mother's income of nearly a

  hundred pounds a year, and by his inheritance of a terrace of three

  palatial but structurally unsound stucco houses near Bromstead

  Station.

  They were big clumsy residences in the earliest Victorian style,

  interminably high and with deep damp basements and downstairs

  coal-cellars and kitchens that suggested an architect

  vindictively devoted to the discomfort of the servant class. If so,

  he had overreached himself and defeated his end, for no servant

  would stay in them unless for exceptional wages or exceptional

  tolerance of inefficiency or exceptional freedom in repartee. Every

  storey in the house was from twelve to fifteen feet high (which

  would have been cool and pleasant in a hot climate), and the stairs

  went ste
eply up, to end at last in attics too inaccessible for

  occupation. The ceilings had vast plaster cornices of classical

  design, fragments of which would sometimes fall unexpectedly, and

  the wall-papers were bold and gigantic in pattern and much

  variegated by damp and ill-mended rents.

  As my father was quite unable to let more than one of these houses

  at a time, and that for the most part to eccentric and undesirable

  tenants, he thought it politic to live in one of the two others, and

  devote the rent he received from the let one, when it was let, to

  the incessant necessary repairing of all three. He also did some of

  the repairing himself and, smoking a bull-dog pipe the while, which

  my mother would not allow him to do in the house, he cultivated

  vegetables in a sketchy, unpunctual and not always successful manner

  in the unoccupied gardens. The three houses faced north, and the

  back of the one we occupied was covered by a grape-vine that

  yielded, I remember, small green grapes for pies in the spring, and

  imperfectly ripe black grapes in favourable autumns for the purposes

  of dessert. The grape-vine played an important part in my life, for

  my father broke his neck while he was pruning it, when I was

  thirteen.

  My father was what is called a man of ideas, but they were not

  always good ideas. My grandfather had been a private schoolmaster

  and one of the founders of the College of Preceptors, and my father

  had assisted him in his school until increasing competition and

  diminishing attendance had made it evident that the days of small

  private schools kept by unqualified persons were numbered.

  Thereupon my father had roused himself and had qualified as a

  science teacher under the Science and Art Department, which in these

  days had charge of the scientific and artistic education of the mass

  of the English population, and had thrown himself into science

  teaching and the earning of government grants therefor with great if

  transitory zeal and success.

  I do not remember anything of my father's earlier and more energetic

  time. I was the child of my parents' middle years; they married

  when my father was thirty-five and my mother past forty, and I saw