The New Machiavelli

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"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 popular
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.

Of the quality of their private imagination I never learnt anything;
I suppose it followed the lines of the fiction they read and was
romantic and sentimental. So far as marriage went, the married
state seemed at once very attractive and dreadfully serious to them,
composed in equal measure of becoming important and becoming old. I
don't know what they thought about children. I doubt if they
thought about them at all. It was very secret if they did.

As for the poor and dingy people all about them, my cousins were
always ready to take part in a Charitable Bazaar. They were unaware
of any economic correlation of their own prosperity and that
circumambient poverty, and they knew of Trade Unions simply as
disagreeable external things that upset my uncle's temper. They
knew of nothing wrong in social life at all except that there were
"Agitators." It surprised them a little, I think, that Agitators
were not more drastically put down. But they had a sort of
instinctive dread of social discussion as of something that might
breach the happiness of their ignorance. . . .

5

My cousins did more than illustrate Marx for me; they also undertook
a stage of my emotional education. Their method in that as in
everything else was extremely simple, but it took my inexperience by
surprise.

It must have been on my third visit that Sybil took me in hand.
Hitherto I seemed to have seen her only in profile, but now she
became almost completely full face, manifestly regarded me with
those violet eyes of hers. She passed me things I needed at
breakfast--it was the first morning of my visit--before I asked for
them.

When young men are looked at by pretty cousins, they become
intensely aware of those cousins. It seemed to me that I had
always admired Sybil's eyes very greatly, and that there was
something in her temperament congenial to mine. It was odd I had
not noted it on my previous visits.

We walked round the garden somewhen that morning, and talked about
Cambridge. She asked quite a lot of questions about my work and my
ambitions. She said she had always felt sure I was clever.

The conversation languished a little, and we picked some flowers for
the house. Then she asked if I could run. I conceded her various
starts and we raced up and down the middle garden path. Then, a
little breathless, we went into the new twenty-five guinea summer-
house at the end of the herbaceous border.

We sat side by side, pleasantly hidden from the house, and she
became anxious about her hair, which was slightly and prettily
disarranged, and asked me to help her with the adjustment of a
hairpin. I had never in my life been so near the soft curly hair
and the dainty eyebrow and eyelid and warm soft cheek of a girl, and
I was stirred--

It stirs me now to recall it.

I became a battleground of impulses and inhibitions.

"Thank you," said my cousin, and moved a little away from me.

She began to talk about friendship, and lost her thread and forgot
the little electric stress between us in a rather meandering
analysis of her principal girl friends.

But afterwards she resumed her purpose.

I went to bed that night with one propostion overshadowing
everything else in my mind, namely, that kissing my cousin Sybil was
a difficult, but not impossible, achievement. I do not recall any
shadow of a doubt whether on the whole it was worth doing. The
thing had come into my existence, disturbing and interrupting its
flow exactly as a fever does. Sybil had infected me with herself.

The next day matters came to a crisis in the little upstairs
sitting-room which had been assigned me as a study during my visit.
I was working up there, or rather trying to work in spite of the
outrageous capering of some very primitive elements in my brain,
when she came up to me, under a transparent pretext of looking for a
book.

I turned round and then got up at the sight of her. I quite forget
what our conversation was about, but I know she led me to believe I
might kiss her. Then when I attempted to do so she averted her
face.

"How COULD you?" she said; "I didn't mean that!"

That remained the state of our relations for two days. I developed
a growing irritation with and resentment against cousin Sybil,
combined with an intense desire to get that kiss for which I
hungered and thirsted. Cousin Sybil went about in the happy
persuasion that I was madly in love with her, and her game, so far
as she was concerned, was played and won. It wasn't until I had
fretted for two days that I realised that I was being used for the
commonest form of excitement possible to a commonplace girl; that
dozens perhaps of young men had played the part of Tantalus at
cousin Sybil's lips. I walked about my room at nights, damning her
and calling her by terms which on the whole she rather deserved,
while Sybil went to sleep pitying "poor old Dick!"

"Damn it!" I said, "I WILL be equal with you."

But I never did equalise the disadvantage, and perhaps it's as well,
for I fancy that sort of revenge cuts both people too much for a
rational man to seek it. . . .

"Why are men so silly?" said cousin Sybil next morning, wriggling
back with down-bent head to release herself from what should have
been a compelling embrace.

"Confound it!" I said with a flash of clear vision. "You STARTED
this game."

"Oh!"

She stood back against a hedge of roses, a little flushed and
excited and interested, and ready for the delightful defensive if I
should renew my attack.

"Beastly hot for scuffling," I said, white with anger. "I don't
know whether I'm so keen on kissing you, Sybil, after all. I just
thought you wanted me to."

I could have whipped her, and my voice stung more than my words.

Our eyes met; a real hatred in hers leaping up to meet mine.

"Let's play tennis," I said, after a moment's pause.

"No," she answered shortly, "I'm going indoors."

"Very well."

And that ended the affair with Sybil.

I was still in the full glare of this disillusionment when Gertrude
awoke from some preoccupation to an interest in my existence. She
developed a disposition to touch my hand by accident, and let her
fingers rest in contact with it for a moment,--she had pleasant soft
hands;--she began to drift into summer houses with me, to let her
arm rest trustfully against mine, to ask questions about Cambridge.
They were much the same questions that Sybil had asked. But I
controlled myself and maintained a profile of intelligent and
entirely civil indifference to her blandishments.

What Gertrude made of it came out one evening in some talk--I forget
about what--with Sybil.

"Oh, Dick!" said Gertrude a little impatiently, "Dick's Pi."

And I never disillusioned her by any subsequent levity from this
theory of my innate and virginal piety.

6

It was against this harsh and crude Staffordshire background that I
think I must have seen Margaret for the first time. I say I think
because it is quite possible that we had passed each other in the
streets of Cambridge, no doubt with that affectation of mutual
disregard which was once customary between undergraduates and
Newnham girls. But if that was so I had noted nothing of the
slender graciousness that shone out so pleasingly against the
bleaker midland surroundings.

She was a younger schoolfellow of my cousins', and the step-daughter
of Seddon, a prominent solicitor of Burslem. She was not only not
in my cousins' generation but not in their set, she was one of a
small hardworking group who kept immaculate note-books, and did as
much as is humanly possible of that insensate pile of written work
that the Girls' Public School movement has inflicted upon school-
girls. She really learnt French and German admirably and
thoroughly, she got as far in mathematics as an unflinching industry
can carry any one with no great natural aptitude, and she went up to
Bennett Hall, Newnham, after the usual conflict with her family, to
work for the History Tripos.

There in her third year she made herself thoroughly ill through
overwork, so ill that she had to give up Newnham altogether and go
abroad with her stepmother. She made herself ill, as so many girls
do in those university colleges, through the badness of her home and
school training. She thought study must needs be a hard straining
of the mind. She worried her work, she gave herself no leisure to
see it as a whole, she felt herself not making headway and she cut
her games and exercise in order to increase her hours of toil, and
worked into the night. She carried a knack of laborious
thoroughness into the blind alleys and inessentials of her subject.
It didn't need the badness of the food for which Bennett Hall is
celebrated and the remarkable dietary of nocturnal cocoa, cakes and
soft biscuits with which the girls have supplemented it, to ensure
her collapse. Her mother brought her home, fretting and distressed,
and then finding her hopelessly unhappy at home, took her and her
half-brother, a rather ailing youngster of ten who died three years
later, for a journey to Italy.

Italy did much to assuage Margaret's chagrin. I think all three of
them had a very good time there. At home Mr. Seddon, her step-
father, played the part of a well-meaning blight by reason of the
moods that arose from nervous dyspepsia. They went to Florence,
equipped with various introductions and much sound advice from
sympathetic Cambridge friends, and having acquired an ease in Italy
there, went on to Siena, Orvieto, and at last Rome. They returned,
if I remember rightly, by Pisa, Genoa, Milan and Paris. Six months
or more they had had abroad, and now Margaret was back in Burslem,
in health again and consciously a very civilised person.

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