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The New Machiavelli Chapter 5 Part 1 · The H. G. Wells Library

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Speaker 1: Chapter five of The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells.
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Speaker 1: This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by
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Speaker 1: Antoniogus Margaret in Staffordshire, Section one one. I must go
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Speaker 1: back a little way with my story. In the previous book.
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Speaker 1: I have described the kind of education that happens to
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Speaker 1: a man of my class nowadays, and it has been
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Speaker 1: convenient to leap a phase in my experience that I
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Speaker 1: must now set out at length. I want to tell
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Speaker 1: in this second book how I came to marry, and
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Speaker 1: to do that I must give something of the atmosphere
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Speaker 1: in which I first met my wife, and some intimations
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Speaker 1: of the forces that went to her making. I met
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Speaker 1: her in Staffordshire while I was staying with that uncle
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Speaker 1: of whom I have already spoken, the uncle who sold
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Speaker 1: my father's houses and settled my mother in Penge. Margaret
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Speaker 1: was twenty then and I was twenty two. It was
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Speaker 1: just before the walking tour in Switzerland that opened up
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Speaker 1: so much of the world to me. I saw her
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Speaker 1: once for an afternoon, and circumstances so threw her up
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Speaker 1: in relief that I formed a very vivid memory of her.
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Speaker 1: She was in the sharpest contrast with the industrial world
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Speaker 1: about her. She impressed me as a dainty blue flower
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Speaker 1: might do, come upon suddenly on a clinker heap. She
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Speaker 1: remained in my mind at once a perplexing interrogation and
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Speaker 1: a symbol. But first I must tell of my Staffordshire
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Speaker 1: cousins and the world that served as a foil for her. Two.
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Speaker 1: I first went to stay with my cousins when I
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Speaker 1: was an awkward youth of sixteen, wearing deep mourning for
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Speaker 1: my mother. My uncle wanted to talk things over with me,
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Speaker 1: he said, and if he could to persuade me to
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Speaker 1: go into business instead of going up to Cambderidge. I
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Speaker 1: remember that visit on account of all sorts of novel things,
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Speaker 1: but chiefly, I think because it was the first time
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Speaker 1: I encountered anything that deserves to be spoken of as wealth.
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Speaker 1: For the first time in my life, I had to
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Speaker 1: do with people who seemed to have endless supplies of money,
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Speaker 1: unlimited good clothes, numerous servants, whose daily life was made
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Speaker 1: up of things that I had hitherto considered to be
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Speaker 1: treats or exceptional extravagances. My cousins of eighteen and nineteen
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Speaker 1: took cabs for instance, with the utmost freedom, and traveled
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Speaker 1: first class in the local trains that run up and
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Speaker 1: down the district of the five towns, with an entire
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Speaker 1: unconsciousness of the magnificence, as it seemed to me of
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Speaker 1: such a proceeding. The family occupied a large villa in Newcastle,
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Speaker 1: with big lawns before it and behind a shrubbery with
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Speaker 1: quite a lot of shrubs, a coach house and stable
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Speaker 1: and subordinate dwelling places for the gardener and the coachman.
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Speaker 1: Every bedroom contained a gas heater and a cannopid brass bedstead,
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Speaker 1: and had a little bathroom attached, equip with the porcelain
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Speaker 1: baths and fittings. My uncle manufactured bright and sanitary and
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Speaker 1: stamped with his name, and the house was furnished throughout
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Speaker 1: with chairs and tables in bright shining wood, soft and
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Speaker 1: prevalently red Turkish carpets, cozy corners, curtained archways, gold frame
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Speaker 1: landscapes over mantels, a dining room sideboard like a palace,
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Speaker 1: with a large tantalus, and electric like fittings of a
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Speaker 1: gay and expensive quality. There was a fine billiard room
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Speaker 1: on the ground floor with three comfortable sofas and a
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Speaker 1: rotating bookcase containing an excellent collection of the English and
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Speaker 1: American humorists, from Three Men in a Boat to the
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Speaker 1: penultimate Mark Twain. There was also a conservatory opening out
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Speaker 1: of the dining room, to which the gardener brought potted
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Speaker 1: flowers in their season. My aunt was a little woman
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Speaker 1: with a scared look and a cat that would get
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Speaker 1: over one eye. Not very like my mother, A nearly
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Speaker 1: eight years her junior. She was very much concerned with
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Speaker 1: keeping everything nice, and unmercifully bullied by my two cousins,
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Speaker 1: who took after their father and followed the imaginations of
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Speaker 1: their own hearts. They were tall, dark, warmly flushed girls,
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Speaker 1: handsome rather than pretty. Gertrude, the eldest and tallest, had
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Speaker 1: eyes that were almost black. Sybil was of a stouter build,
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Speaker 1: and her eyes, of which she was shamelessly proud, were
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Speaker 1: dark blue. Sybil's hair waved, and Gertrude's was severely straight.
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Speaker 1: They treated me on my first visit with all the
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Speaker 1: contempt of the adolescent girl for a boy a little
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Speaker 1: younger and infinitely le expert in the business of life
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Speaker 1: than herself. They were very busy with the writings of
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Speaker 1: notes and certain mysterious goings and comings of their own,
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Speaker 1: and left me very much to my own devices. Their
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Speaker 1: speech in my presence was full of unfathomable illusions. They
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Speaker 1: were the sort of girls who will talk over and
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Speaker 1: through an uninitiated stranger with the pleasantest sense of superiority.
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Speaker 1: I met them at breakfast and at lunch, and at
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Speaker 1: the half past six o'clock high tea that formed the
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Speaker 1: third chief meal of the day. I heard them rattling
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Speaker 1: off the compositions of Shaminad and Muskovsky with great decision
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Speaker 1: and effect, and hovered on the edge of Tennis Foorsom's,
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Speaker 1: where it was manifest to the dullest intelligence that my
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Speaker 1: presence was unnecessary. Then I went off to find some
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Speaker 1: readable book in the place. But apart from miscellaneous popular novels,
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Speaker 1: some veterinary works, a number of comic books, old bound
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Speaker 1: volumes of the illustrated London News, and a large popular
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Speaker 1: illustrated history of England, there was very little to be found.
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Speaker 1: My aunt talked to me in a casual, feeble way,
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Speaker 1: chiefly about my mother's last illness. The two had seen
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Speaker 1: very little of each other for many years. She made
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Speaker 1: no secret of it that the ineligible qualities of my
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Speaker 1: father were the cause of the estrangement. The only other
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Speaker 1: society in the house during the day was an old
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Speaker 1: and rather decayed sky terrier in constant conflict with what
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Speaker 1: were no doubt imaginary fleas. I took myself off for
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Speaker 1: a series of walks and acquired a considerable knowledge of
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Speaker 1: the scenery and topography of the potteries. It puzzled my
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Speaker 1: aunt that I did not go westward, where it was
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Speaker 1: countryside and often quite pretty, with hedge rows and fields
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Speaker 1: and copses and flowers. But always I went eastward, where
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Speaker 1: in a long valley industrialism smokes and sprawls. That was
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Speaker 1: the stuff to which I turned, by nature, to the
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Speaker 1: human effort and the accumulation and jar of men's activities.
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Speaker 1: And in such a country as that valley, social and
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Speaker 1: economic relations were simple and manifest, instead of the limitless
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Speaker 1: confusion of London's population, in which no man can trace
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Speaker 1: any but the most slender correlation between rich and poor,
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Speaker 1: in which everyone seems disconnected and adrift from everyone. You
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Speaker 1: can see here the works, the pot bank, or the
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Speaker 1: iron works or what not, And here close at hand,
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Speaker 1: the congested, meanly housed workers and at a little distance
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Speaker 1: a small middle class quarter, and again remoter the big
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Speaker 1: house of the employer. It was like a very simplified diagram.
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Speaker 1: After the untraceable confusion of London, I prowled alone, curious
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Speaker 1: and interested, through shabby back streets of mean, little he
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Speaker 1: I followed canals, sometimes canals of mysteriously heated waters, with
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Speaker 1: ghostly wisps of steam rising against blackened walls, or a
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Speaker 1: distant prospect of dust beIN fed vegetable gardens. I saw
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Speaker 1: the women pouring out from the pot banks, heard the
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Speaker 1: hooters summoning the toilers to work. Lost my way upon
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Speaker 1: slag heaps as big as the hills of the South Country,
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Speaker 1: dodged trains at manifestly dangerous level crossings, and surveyed across dark,
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Speaker 1: intervening spaces, the flaming uproar, the gnome like activities of
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Speaker 1: iron foundries. I heard talk of strikes and rumors of strikes,
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Speaker 1: and learnt from the columns of some obscure labour paper
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Speaker 1: I bought one day of the horrors of the lead
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Speaker 1: poisoning that was, in those days one of the normal
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Speaker 1: risks of certain sorts of pottery workers. Then back I
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Speaker 1: came by the ugly groaning and clanging steam train of
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Speaker 1: that period to my uncle house, and lavish abundance of money,
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Speaker 1: and more or less furtive flirtations, and the tinkle of
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Speaker 1: Moskovsky and Shaminad. It was, I say, diagrammatic. One saw
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Speaker 1: the expropriator and the expropriated, as if marks had arranged
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Speaker 1: the picture. It was as jumbled and far more dingy
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Speaker 1: disastrous than any of the confusions of building and development
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Speaker 1: that had surrounded my youth at Bromstad and Penge. But
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Speaker 1: it had a novel quality of being explicable. I found
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Speaker 1: great virtue in the word exploitation. There stuck in my mind,
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Speaker 1: as if it were symbolical of the whole thing. The
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Speaker 1: twisted figure of a man whose face had been horribly scolded.
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Speaker 1: I can't describe how, except that one eye was just
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Speaker 1: expressionless white, and he ground at an organ, bearing a
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Speaker 1: card which told, in weak and bitterly satirical phrasing, that
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Speaker 1: he had been scolded by the hot water the two
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Speaker 1: year of the blast furnace of Lord Pandram's works. He
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Speaker 1: had been schoolded and quite inadequately compensated and dismissed, and
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Speaker 1: Lord Pandram was worth half a million. That upturned, sightless,
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Speaker 1: white eye of his took possession of my imagination. I
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Speaker 1: don't think that even then I was swayed by any crude,
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Speaker 1: melodramatic conception of injustice. I was quite prepared to believe
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Speaker 1: the card wasn't a punctiliously accurate statement of fact, and
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Speaker 1: that a case could be made out for Lord Pandram.
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Speaker 1: Still there in the muddy gutta painfully and dreadfully was
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Speaker 1: the man. And he was smashed and scalded and wretched,
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Speaker 1: and he ground his dismal hurdy gurdy with a weary arm,
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Speaker 1: calling upon heaven and the passer by for help, for
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Speaker 1: help in some sort of writing. One could not imagine
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Speaker 1: quite what there he was as a fact, as a
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Speaker 1: by product of the system that heap my cousins with
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Speaker 1: trinkets and provided the comic novels and the abundant cigars
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Speaker 1: and spacious billiard room of my uncle's house. I couldn't
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Speaker 1: disconnect him and them. My uncle, on his part, did
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Speaker 1: nothing to conceal the state of war that existed between
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Speaker 1: himself and his workers, and the mingled contempt and animosity
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Speaker 1: he felt from them. Three prosperity had overtaken my uncle,
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Speaker 1: so quite naturally, he believed that every man who was
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Speaker 1: not as prosperous as he was had only himself to blame.
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Speaker 1: He was rich, and he had left school and gone
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Speaker 1: into his father's business at fifteen, and that seemed to
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Speaker 1: him the proper age at which every one's education should terminate.
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Speaker 1: He was very anxious to dissuade me from going up
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Speaker 1: to Cambridge, and we argued intermittently through all my visit.
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Speaker 1: I had remembered him as a big and buoyant man,
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Speaker 1: striding destructively about the nursery floor of my childhood and
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Speaker 1: saluting my existence by slaps, loud laughter, and questions about
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Speaker 1: half herrings and half eggs, subtly framed to puzzle and
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Speaker 1: confuse my mind. I didn't see him for some years
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Speaker 1: until my father's death, and then he seemed rather smaller,
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Speaker 1: though still a fair size, yellow instead of red, and
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Speaker 1: much less ragiantly aggressive. This altered effect was due not
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Speaker 1: so much to my own changed perspectives, I fancy, as
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Speaker 1: to the fact that he was suffering for continuous cigar
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Speaker 1: smoking and being taken in hand by his adolescent daughters
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Speaker 1: who had just returned from school. During my first visit,
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Speaker 1: there was a perpetual series of the only word is
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Speaker 1: roused between them and him. Up to the age of
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Speaker 1: fifteen or thereabouts, he had maintained his ascendancy over them
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Speaker 1: by a simple old fashioned physical chastisement. Then after an
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Speaker 1: interlude of a year, it adawned upon them that power
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Speaker 1: and mysterious departed from him. He had tried stopping their
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Speaker 1: pocket money, but they found their mother financially amenable. Besides which,
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Speaker 1: it was fundamental to my uncle's attitude that he should
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Speaker 1: give them money freely. Not to do so would seem
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Speaker 1: like admitting a difficulty in making it, so that after
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Speaker 1: he had stopped their allowances for the fourth time, Sybil
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Speaker 1: and Gertrude were prepared to face beggary without a qualm.
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Speaker 1: It had been his pride to give them the largest
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Speaker 1: allowance of any girls at the school, not even accepting
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Speaker 1: the granddaughter of Flatten. The borax king, and his soul
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Speaker 1: recoiled from this discipline, as it had never recoiled from
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Speaker 1: the ruder method of the earlier phase. Both girls had
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Speaker 1: developed to a high pitch in their mutual recriminations, a
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Speaker 1: gift for damaging retort, and he found it an altogether
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Speaker 1: deadlier thing than the power of the raised voice that
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Speaker 1: had always cowed my aunt whenever he became heated with them.
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Speaker 1: They frowned as if involuntarily, drew in their breath, sharply said, Daddy,
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Speaker 1: you really must not say, and corrected his pronunciation. Then,
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Speaker 1: at a great advantage, they resumed the discussion. My uncle's
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Speaker 1: views about Cambridge, however, were perfectly clear and definite. It
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Speaker 1: was waste of time and money. It was all damned foolery.
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Speaker 1: Did they make a man a better business man? Not
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Speaker 1: a bit of it. He gave instances. It spoilt a
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Speaker 1: man for business by giving him false ideas. Some men
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Speaker 1: said that at college a man formed useful friendships. What
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Speaker 1: use were friendships to a business man? He might get
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Speaker 1: to know lords, But as my uncle pointed out, the
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Speaker 1: lord's requirements in his line of feiance were a little
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Speaker 1: greater than a common man's. If college introduced him to
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Speaker 1: hotel proprietors, there might be something in it. Perhaps it
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Speaker 1: helped a man into parliament. Parliament still being a confused,
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Speaker 1: retrogressive corner in the world world, where lawyers and such
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Speaker 1: likes sheltered themselves from the onslaughts of common sense, behind
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Speaker 1: a fog of Latin and Greek and twaddle and tosh.
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Speaker 1: But I wasn't the sort to go into parliament unless
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Speaker 1: I meant to be a lawyer. Did I mean to
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Speaker 1: be a lawyer? It cost no end of money and
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Speaker 1: was full of uncertainties, and there were no judges nor
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Speaker 1: great solicitors among my relations. Young chaps think they got
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Speaker 1: on by themselves, said my uncle. It isn't so, not
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Speaker 1: unless they take the coats off. I took mine off
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Speaker 1: before I was your age. By nigh a year. We
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Speaker 1: were at cross purposes from the outset, because I did
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Speaker 1: not think men lived to make money, and I was
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Speaker 1: obtuse to the hints he was throwing out at the
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Speaker 1: possibilities of his own pot bank, not wilfully obtuse, but
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Speaker 1: just failing to penetrate his meaning. Whatever city merchants had
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Speaker 1: or had not done for me flak top of an
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Speaker 1: old gates had certainly barred my mistaking the profitable production
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Speaker 1: and sale of lavatory basins and bathroom fittings for the
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Speaker 1: highest good. It was only upon reflection that it dawned
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Speaker 1: upon me that the splendid chance for a young fellow
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Speaker 1: with my uncle. Me having no son of my own,
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Speaker 1: was anything but an illustration for comparison with my own
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Speaker 1: chosen career. I still remember very distinctly my uncle's talk.
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Speaker 1: He loved to speak ar eat Stuffordshire, his rather flabby face,
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Speaker 1: with the mottled complexion that told of crude, ill regulated appetites,
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Speaker 1: his clumsy gestures. He kept emphasizing his points by plodding
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Speaker 1: at me with his finger, the ill worn, costly gray
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Speaker 1: tweed clothes, the watch chain of plain solid gold, and
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Speaker 1: soft felt hat thrust back from his head. He tackled
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Speaker 1: me first in the garden after lunch, and then tried
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Speaker 1: to raise me to enthusiasm by taking me to his
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Speaker 1: pop bank and showing me its organization. From the dusty
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Speaker 1: grinding mills in which white and men worked and coughed,
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Speaker 1: through the highly ventilated glazing room in which strangely masked
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Speaker 1: girls looked ashamed of themselves. They'll rist death the fools
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Speaker 1: to show their faces to a man, said my uncle,
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Speaker 1: quite audibly, to the firing kilns and the glazing kilns,
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Speaker 1: and so round the whole place, to the railway siding,
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Speaker 1: and the gratifying spectacle of three trucks laden with executed orders.
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Speaker 1: Then we went up a creaking outside staircase to his
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Speaker 1: little office, and he showed off before me for a
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Speaker 1: while with one or two subordinates and the telephone. None
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Speaker 1: of your gas, he said, all this, it's real, every
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Speaker 1: bit of it, hard cash and hard glaze. Yes, I said,
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Speaker 1: with memories of a carelessly read pamphlet in my mind,
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Speaker 1: and without any satirical intention, I suppose you must use
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Speaker 1: lead in your glazes. Whereupon I found I had tapped
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Speaker 1: the ruling grievance of my uncle's life. He hated leadless
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Speaker 1: glazes more than he hated anything, except the benevolent people
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Speaker 1: who had organized the agitation for their use. Leadless glazes
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Speaker 1: ain't only fit for buns, he said. Let me tell you,
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Speaker 1: my boy. He began, in a voice of bland persuasiveness
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Speaker 1: that presently warmed to anger, to explain the whole matter.
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Speaker 1: I hadn't the rights of the matter at all. Firstly,
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Speaker 1: there was practically no such thing as lead poisoning. Secondly,
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Speaker 1: not everyone was liable to lead poisoning, and it would
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Speaker 1: be quite easy to pick out the susceptible types as
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Speaker 1: soon as they had it, And put them to other work. Thirdly,
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Speaker 1: the evil effects of lead poisoning were much exaggerated. Fourthly,
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Speaker 1: and this was in a particularly confidential undertone, many of
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Speaker 1: the people liked to get lead poisoning, especially the women,
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Speaker 1: because it caused abortion. I might not believe it, but
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Speaker 1: he knew it for a fact. Fifthly, the workpeople simply
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Speaker 1: would not learn the gravity of the danger and would
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Speaker 1: eat with unwashed hands and incur all sorts of risks,
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Speaker 1: so that, as my uncle put it, the fools deserve
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Speaker 1: what they get. Sixthly, he and several associated firms had
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Speaker 1: organized a simple and generous insurance scheme against lead poisoning risks. Seventhly,
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Speaker 1: he never wearied in rational as distinguished from excessive, futile
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Speaker 1: and expensive precautions against the disease. Eighthly, in the ill
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Speaker 1: equipped shops of his minor competitors, lead poisoning was a
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Speaker 1: frequent and virile and evil, and people had generalized from
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Speaker 1: these exceptional cases. The small shops he hazarded, looking out
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Speaker 1: of the cracked and dirty window at distant chimneys, might
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Speaker 1: be advantageously closed. But what's the good of talking, said
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Speaker 1: my uncle, getting off the table on which he had
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Speaker 1: been sitting. Seems to me there'll come a time when
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Speaker 1: a master will get fined if you don't run round
19:55
Speaker 1: the works blowing his girl's noses for them. That's about
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Speaker 1: where it'll come to. He walked to the black mantelpiece
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Speaker 1: and stood on the threadbare rug and urged me not
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Speaker 1: to be misled by the stories of prejudiced and interested
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Speaker 1: enemies of our national industries. They'll get a strike one
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Speaker 1: of these days of employers, and then we'll see a bit,
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Speaker 1: he said. They'll drive capital abroad, and then they'll whistle
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Speaker 1: to get it back again. He led the way down
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Speaker 1: the shaky wooden steps and cheered up to tell me
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Speaker 1: of his way of checking his coal consumption. He exchanged
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Speaker 1: a ferocious greeting with one or two work people, and
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Speaker 1: so we came out of the factory gates into the ugly,
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Speaker 1: narrow streets, paved with a peculiarly hard diaper brick of
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Speaker 1: an unpleasing inky blue color, and bordered with the mean
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Speaker 1: and squalid homes of his workers. Doors stood open and
20:49
Speaker 1: showed grim interiors and dirty, ill clad children playing in
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Speaker 1: the kennel. We passed a sickly looking girl with a
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Speaker 1: sallow face, who dragged her limbs and at us dimly
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Speaker 1: with painful eyes. She stood back, as partly blinded people
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Speaker 1: will do to allow us to pass, although there was
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Speaker 1: plenty of room for us. I glanced back at her.
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Speaker 1: That's pluminism, said my uncle casually. What said I plumism?
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Speaker 1: And the other day I saw a fall of a girl,
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Speaker 1: and what yo think? She got a basin that had
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Speaker 1: been fired, a cracked piece of biscuit. It was up
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Speaker 1: on the shelf over her head, just all over glaze,
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Speaker 1: killing glaze man. And she was putting up a hand,
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Speaker 1: if you please, and eating her dinner out of it.
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Speaker 1: Got her dinner in it, eating her dinner out of it,
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Speaker 1: he repeated in loud and bitter tones, and punched me
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Speaker 1: hard in the ribs. And then they comes to that
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Speaker 1: and grumbles, and the falls up in Westminster want you
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Speaker 1: to put in fans here and fans there, the Longton
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Speaker 1: fools have, and then eating their dinners out of it
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Speaker 1: all the time. At high tea that night, my uncle
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Speaker 1: was still holding out against evening dinner. Sybil and Gertrude
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Speaker 1: made what was evidently a concerted demand for a motor car.
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Speaker 1: You've got your mother's broom. He said, that's good enough
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Speaker 1: for you, But he seemed shaken by the fact that
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Speaker 1: some Bursum rival was launching out with the new invention.
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Speaker 1: He spoils his girls. He remarked, he's a fool, and
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Speaker 1: became thoughtful. Afterwards, he asked me to come to him
22:22
Speaker 1: into his study. It was a room with a writing
22:25
Speaker 1: desk and full of pieces of earthenware and such like litter.
22:29
Speaker 1: And we had our great row about Cambridge. How you
22:32
Speaker 1: thought things, olver, Dick, He said, I think I'll go
22:36
Speaker 1: to Trinity. Uncle, I said firmly, I want to go
22:38
Speaker 1: to Trinity. It is a great college. He was manifestly chagrined.
22:43
Speaker 1: You're a fool, he said. I made no answer. You're
22:47
Speaker 1: a damned fool, he said, But I suppose you've got
22:50
Speaker 1: to do it. You could have come here. I don't
22:53
Speaker 1: matter though.
22:54
Speaker 2: Now you'll have your time and spend your money and
22:56
Speaker 2: be a poor half stir clergyman, mucking about with the
22:59
Speaker 2: women all the day and afraid I wordy your own ever,
23:02
Speaker 2: or you'll be a schoolmaster or some such fool for
23:05
Speaker 2: the rest of your life, or some newspaper chap. That's
23:08
Speaker 2: what you'll get from Cambridge, have half a mind not
23:11
Speaker 2: to let you more than half a mind.
23:15
Speaker 1: You got to know the thing you can, he said,
23:17
Speaker 1: after a pause, And likely it's what you're fetted for. Four.
23:23
Speaker 1: I paid several short visits to Staffordshire during my Cambridge days,
23:27
Speaker 1: and always these relations of mine produced the same effect
23:30
Speaker 1: of hardness. My uncle, thoughts, had neither atmosphere nor mystery.
23:35
Speaker 1: He lived in a different universe from the dreams of
23:38
Speaker 1: scientific construction that filled my mind. He could as easily
23:43
Speaker 1: have understood Chinese poetry. His motives were made up of
23:47
Speaker 1: intense rivalries with other men of his class and kind,
23:51
Speaker 1: a few vindictive hates springing from real and fancied slights,
23:55
Speaker 1: a habit of acquisition that had become a second nature,
23:59
Speaker 1: the keen love both of efficiency and display in his
24:02
Speaker 1: own affairs. He seemed to me to have no sense
24:05
Speaker 1: of the state, no sense, and much less any love
24:09
Speaker 1: of beauty, no charity, and no sort of religious feeling.
24:13
Speaker 1: Whatever he had strong bodily appetites, he yet and drank freely,
24:18
Speaker 1: smoked a great deal, and occasionally was carried off by
24:21
Speaker 1: his passions for a bit of a spree to Birmingham
24:24
Speaker 1: or Liverpool or Manchester. The indulgences of these occasions were
24:29
Speaker 1: usually followed by a period of reaction, when he was
24:32
Speaker 1: urgent for the suppression of nudity and the local art gallery,
24:36
Speaker 1: and a harsh and forcible elevation of the superficial morals
24:40
Speaker 1: of the valley. And he spoke of the ladies who
24:43
Speaker 1: ministered to the delights of his jolly dog period when
24:46
Speaker 1: he spoke of them at all, by the unprintable feminine
24:49
Speaker 1: equivalent my aunt, he treated with a kindly contempt and
24:54
Speaker 1: considerable financial generosity. But his daughters tore his heart. He
24:59
Speaker 1: was so out of them, so glad to find the
25:01
Speaker 1: money to spend, so resolved to own them, so instinctively
25:06
Speaker 1: jealous of every man who came near them. My uncle
25:09
Speaker 1: has been the clue to a great number of men.
25:12
Speaker 1: For me, he was an illuminating extreme. I have learnt
25:16
Speaker 1: what not to expect from them through him, and to
25:19
Speaker 1: comprehend resentments and dangerous sudden antagonisms I should have found
25:24
Speaker 1: incomprehensible in their more complex forms, if I had not
25:28
Speaker 1: first seen them in him, in their feral state, with
25:31
Speaker 1: his soft felt hat at the back of his head,
25:34
Speaker 1: his rather heavy, rather mottled face, his rationally thick boots
25:39
Speaker 1: and slouching tweed clad form. A little round shouldered and
25:43
Speaker 1: very obstinate looking. He strolled through all my speculations, sucking
25:48
Speaker 1: his teeth audibly and occasionally throwing out a shrewd aphorism,
25:52
Speaker 1: the intractable, unavoidable awe of the new civilization. Essentially, he
25:58
Speaker 1: was simple, generally speaking. He hated and despised in equal
26:02
Speaker 1: measure whatever seemed to suggest that he personally was not
26:06
Speaker 1: the most perfect human being conceivable. He hated all education
26:10
Speaker 1: after fifteen, because he had had no education after fifteen.
26:15
Speaker 1: He hated all people who did not have high tea
26:18
Speaker 1: until he himself, under duress, gave up high tea. He
26:22
Speaker 1: hated every game except football, which he had played and
26:25
Speaker 1: could judge. He hated all people who spoke foreign languages,
26:29
Speaker 1: because he knew no language but Staffordshire. He hated all
26:33
Speaker 1: foreigners because he was English, and all foreign ways because
26:37
Speaker 1: they were not his ways. Also, he hated particularly, and
26:41
Speaker 1: in this order, Londoners, Yorkshiremen, Scotch, Welsh and Irish because
26:46
Speaker 1: they were not Staffordshire. And he hated all other Staffordshire
26:50
Speaker 1: men as insufficiently rate. He wanted to have all his
26:54
Speaker 1: own women inviolate and a fancy. He had a call
26:57
Speaker 1: upon every other woman in the world. He wanted to
27:01
Speaker 1: have the best cigars and the best brand in the
27:03
Speaker 1: world to consume or give away magnificently, and every one
27:07
Speaker 1: else to have inferior ones. His billiard table was an
27:11
Speaker 1: extra large size, specially made and very inconvenient. And he
27:16
Speaker 1: hated trade unions because they interfered with his autocratic direction
27:21
Speaker 1: of his works and his work people because they were
27:24
Speaker 1: not obedient and untiring mechanisms to do his bidding. He was,
27:29
Speaker 1: in fact a very naive, vigorous human being. He was
27:34
Speaker 1: about as much civilized, about as much tam to the
27:37
Speaker 1: ideas of collective action and mutual consideration as a Central
27:42
Speaker 1: African negro. There are hordes of such men as he
27:46
Speaker 1: throughout all the modern industrial world. You will find the
27:49
Speaker 1: same type with the slightest modifications in the Pa de Calais,
27:54
Speaker 1: or Rainish Prussia, or New Jersey or North Italy. No
27:58
Speaker 1: doubt you would find it in New Japan. These men
28:01
Speaker 1: have raised themselves up from the general mass of untrained, uncultured,
28:05
Speaker 1: poorish people in a hard industrious, selfish struggle to drive others.
28:11
Speaker 1: They have had first to drive themselves. They have never
28:14
Speaker 1: yet had occasion nor leisure to think of the state
28:17
Speaker 1: or social life as a whole. And as for dreams
28:20
Speaker 1: or beauty, it was a condition of survival that they
28:23
Speaker 1: should ignore such cravings. All the distinctive qualities of my
28:27
Speaker 1: uncle can be thought of as dictated by his conditions,
28:31
Speaker 1: his success and harshness, the extravagances that expressed his pride
28:35
Speaker 1: in making money, the uncongenial luxury that sprang from rivalry
28:40
Speaker 1: and his self reliance, His contempt for broad views, his
28:44
Speaker 1: contempt for everything that he could not understand. His daughters
28:49
Speaker 1: were the inevitable children of his life, queer girls. They
28:52
Speaker 1: were curiously spirits of people phrase it, and curiously limited.
28:58
Speaker 1: During my Cambridge days I went down to Staffordshire several times.
29:03
Speaker 1: My uncle, though he still resented my refusal to go
29:06
Speaker 1: into his business, was also, in his odd way proud
29:09
Speaker 1: of me. I was his nephew and poor relation. And
29:13
Speaker 1: yet there I was a young gentleman learning all sorts
29:16
Speaker 1: of unremunerative things in the grandest manner Latin and mook.
29:21
Speaker 1: While the sons of his neighbors, not nephews, merely, but
29:24
Speaker 1: sons stayed unpolished in their native town. Every time I
29:30
Speaker 1: went down, I found extensive changes and altered relations. And
29:34
Speaker 1: before I had settled down to them, off I went again.
29:38
Speaker 1: I don't think I was one person to them, I
29:40
Speaker 1: was a series of visitors. There is a gulf of
29:43
Speaker 1: ages between a gaunt schoolboy of sixteen in unbecoming mourning
29:48
Speaker 1: and two vividly self conscious girls of eighteen and nineteen.
29:52
Speaker 1: But a Cambridge man of two and twenty with a
29:55
Speaker 1: first and good tennis and a growing social experience is
29:59
Speaker 1: a fair contemporary for two girls of twenty three and
30:01
Speaker 1: twenty four. A motor car appeared, I think in my
30:05
Speaker 1: second visit, a bottled green affair that opened behind, had
30:10
Speaker 1: dark purple cushions and was controlled mysteriously by a man
30:14
Speaker 1: in shiny black costume and a flat cap. The high
30:17
Speaker 1: tea had been shifted to seven and re christened dinner.
30:21
Speaker 1: But my uncle would not dress nor consent to have wine.
30:25
Speaker 1: And after one painful experiment I gathered and a scene.
30:28
Speaker 1: He put his foot down and prohibited any but high
30:31
Speaker 1: necked dresses. Dad is perfectly impossible, Sybil told me the
30:37
Speaker 1: foot had descended vehemently. My own daughters, he had said,
30:41
Speaker 1: dressed up like, and had arrested himself and fumbled and
30:45
Speaker 1: decided to say attresses and showing their fat arms very
30:49
Speaker 1: full to stare at. Nor would he have any people
30:52
Speaker 1: invited to dinner. He didn't, he had explained once, strangers
30:56
Speaker 1: poking about in his house when he came home tired.
31:00
Speaker 1: So such calling as occurred went on during his absence
31:03
Speaker 1: in the afternoon. One of the peculiarities of the life
31:08
Speaker 1: of these ascendant families of the industrial class to which
31:12
Speaker 1: wealth has come is its tremendous insulations. There were no
31:16
Speaker 1: customs of intercourse in the five towns. All the isolated
31:20
Speaker 1: prosperities of the district sprang from economizing, hard driven homes
31:26
Speaker 1: in which there was neither time nor means for hospitality.
31:30
Speaker 1: Social intercourse centered very largely upon the church or chapel,
31:34
Speaker 1: and the chapels were better of bringing people together than
31:37
Speaker 1: the establishment to which my cousins belonged. Their chief outlet
31:42
Speaker 1: to the wider world lay therefore through the acquaintances they
31:46
Speaker 1: had formed at school, and through too much less prosperous
31:50
Speaker 1: families of relations who lived at Longton and Hanley, a
31:54
Speaker 1: number of gossiping friendships with old schoolmates were kept up,
31:58
Speaker 1: and my cousins would spend the hot afternoon or even
32:01
Speaker 1: spend the day with these. Such occasions led to other
32:05
Speaker 1: encounters and interlaced with the furtive correspondences and snatch meetings
32:10
Speaker 1: that formed the emotional thread of their lives. When the
32:13
Speaker 1: billiard table had been new, my uncle had been taken
32:16
Speaker 1: to asking in a few approved friends for an occasional game,
32:20
Speaker 1: but mostly the billiard room was for glory in the girls.
32:24
Speaker 1: Both of them played very well. They never, so far
32:27
Speaker 1: as I know, dined out, and when at last, after
32:30
Speaker 1: bitter domestic conflicts there began to go to dances, they
32:34
Speaker 1: went with the quavering connivance of my aunts and changed
32:37
Speaker 1: into bull flocks at friends houses. On the way there
32:41
Speaker 1: was a tennis club that formed a convenient afternoon rendezvous,
32:45
Speaker 1: and I recall that in the period of my earlier visits,
32:48
Speaker 1: the young bloods of the district found much satisfaction in
32:52
Speaker 1: taking girls for drives in dog carts and such like
32:55
Speaker 1: high wheeled vehicles, a disposition that died in Tangled Town
33:00
Speaker 1: at the apparition of motor cars. My aunt and uncle
33:05
Speaker 1: had conceived no plans in life for their daughters at all.
33:09
Speaker 1: In the undifferentiated industrial community from which they had sprung,
33:13
Speaker 1: girls got married somehow, and it did not occur to
33:16
Speaker 1: them that the concentration of property that had made them
33:19
Speaker 1: wealthy had cut their children off from the general social
33:23
Speaker 1: sea in which their own awkward meeting had occurred, without
33:26
Speaker 1: necessarily opening any other world in exchange. My uncle was
33:31
Speaker 1: too much occupied with the works and his business affairs
33:34
Speaker 1: and his private vices to philosophize about his girls. He
33:39
Speaker 1: wanted them just to keep girls, preferably about sixteen, and
33:43
Speaker 1: to be a sort of animated flowers, and make home
33:45
Speaker 1: bright and be given things. He was irritated that they
33:49
Speaker 1: would not remain at this, and still more irritated that
33:52
Speaker 1: they failed to suppress altogether their natural interest in young men.
33:57
Speaker 1: The tandems were be steered by weird and devious roots
34:01
Speaker 1: to evade the bare chance of his bloodshot eye. My
34:04
Speaker 1: aunt seemed to have no ideas whatever about what was
34:07
Speaker 1: likely to happen to her children. She had indeed no
34:10
Speaker 1: ideas about anything. She took her husband and the days
34:14
Speaker 1: as they came. I can see now the pathetic difficulty
34:18
Speaker 1: of my cousin's position in life. The absence of any
34:21
Speaker 1: guidance or instruction or provision for their development. They supplemented
34:26
Speaker 1: the silences of home by the conversation of school fellows
34:30
Speaker 1: and the suggestions of popular fiction. They had to make
34:34
Speaker 1: what they could out of life with such hints as these.
34:38
Speaker 1: The Church was far too modest to offer them any advice.
34:41
Speaker 1: It was obtruded upon my mind upon my first visit
34:45
Speaker 1: that they were both carrying on correspondences and having little
34:48
Speaker 1: furtive passings and seeings and meetings with the mysterious owners
34:52
Speaker 1: of certain initials s and l K, and if I
34:57
Speaker 1: remember rightly the r N brothers and cousin, I suppose
35:00
Speaker 1: of their friends. The same thing was going on with
35:04
Speaker 1: a certain intensification at my next visit, excepting only that
35:08
Speaker 1: the initials were different. But when I came again, their
35:11
Speaker 1: methods were MATURER or I was no longer a negligible quantity,
35:16
Speaker 1: and the notes and the initials were no longer flaunted
35:18
Speaker 1: quite so openly in my face. My cousins had worked
35:22
Speaker 1: it out from the indications of their universe that the
35:25
Speaker 1: end of life is to have a good time. They
35:28
Speaker 1: used the phrase that and the drives in dogcarts were
35:33
Speaker 1: only the first of endless points of resemblance between them
35:36
Speaker 1: and the common A sort of American girl. When some
35:40
Speaker 1: years ago I paid my first and only visit to America,
35:43
Speaker 1: I seemed to recover my cousin's atmosphere. As soon as
35:46
Speaker 1: I entered the train at Euston. There were three girls
35:50
Speaker 1: in my compartment, supplied with huge decorated cases of suits,
35:54
Speaker 1: and being seen off by a company of friends, noisily
35:58
Speaker 1: arch and eager about the steel letters they were get
36:01
Speaker 1: at Liverpool. They were the very sole sisters of my cousins,
36:05
Speaker 1: the chief elements of a good time. As my cousins
36:08
Speaker 1: judged it, as these countless thousands of rich young women
36:11
Speaker 1: judge it, are a petty eventfulness, laughter, and to feel
36:15
Speaker 1: that you're looking well and attracting attention. Shopping is one
36:20
Speaker 1: of its leading joys. You buy things, clothes and trinkets
36:23
Speaker 1: for yourself and presents for your friends. Presents always seem
36:27
Speaker 1: to be flying about in that circle. Flowers and boxes
36:30
Speaker 1: of sweets were common currency. My cousins were always getting
36:35
Speaker 1: and giving. My uncle caressed them with parcels and checks.
36:39
Speaker 1: They kissed him in exuded sovereigns as a stroked Afis exudes, honey.
36:44
Speaker 1: It was like the new language of the Academy of
36:46
Speaker 1: Legardo to me, and I never learned how to express
36:49
Speaker 1: myself in it, for nature and training make me feel
36:53
Speaker 1: encumbered to receive presents and embarrassed in giving them. But then,
36:57
Speaker 1: like my father, I hate and distrust Zis of the
37:02
Speaker 1: quality of their private imagination. I never learned anything. I
37:06
Speaker 1: suppose it followed the lines of the fiction they read,
37:09
Speaker 1: and was romantic and sentimental. So far as marriage went,
37:13
Speaker 1: the marriage states seemed at once very attractive and dreadfully serious.
37:17
Speaker 1: To them, composed an equal measure of becoming important and
37:21
Speaker 1: becoming old. I don't know what they thought about children.
37:25
Speaker 1: I doubt if they thought about them at all. It
37:28
Speaker 1: was very secret if they did. As for the poor
37:31
Speaker 1: and dingy people all about them, my cousins were always
37:34
Speaker 1: ready to take part in a charitable bazaar. They were
37:38
Speaker 1: unaware of any economic correlation of their own prosperity and
37:42
Speaker 1: that circumambient poverty. And they knew of trade union simply
37:46
Speaker 1: as disagreeable external things that upset my uncle's temper. They
37:51
Speaker 1: knew of nothing wrong in social life at all except
37:54
Speaker 1: that there were agitators. It surprised them a little. I
37:58
Speaker 1: think that agitators were not more drastically put down, but
38:03
Speaker 1: they had a sort of instinctive dread of social discussion
38:06
Speaker 1: as of something that might breach the happiness of their ignorance.
38:11
Speaker 1: End of Chapter five, Section one