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The New Machiavelli Chapter 2 Part 2 · The H. G. Wells Library

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Speaker 1: Chapter two, Section two of the New Machiavelli by H. G. Worlds.
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Speaker 1: This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by
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Speaker 1: Antoniogus four. That afternoon's walk sticks in my memory for
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Speaker 1: many reasons. One is that we went further than I
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Speaker 1: had ever been before, far beyond Keston and nearly to
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Speaker 1: seven Oaks, coming back by train from Dunton Green. And
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Speaker 1: the other is that my father, as he went along,
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Speaker 1: talked about himself, not so much to me as to himself,
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Speaker 1: and about life and what he had done with it.
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Speaker 1: He monologued so that at times he produced an effect
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Speaker 1: of weird world forgetfulness. I listened, puzzled and at that
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Speaker 1: time not understanding many things that afterwards became plain to me.
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Speaker 1: It is only in recent years that I have discovered
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Speaker 1: the pathos of that monolith. How friendless my father was
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Speaker 1: and uncompanioned in his thoughts and feelings, and what a
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Speaker 1: hunger he may have felt for the sympathy of the
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Speaker 1: undeveloped youngster who trotted by his side. I'm no gardener,
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Speaker 1: he said, I'm no anything. Why the devil did I
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Speaker 1: start gardening? I suppose man was created to mind a garden.
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Speaker 1: But the fool let us out of that. What was
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Speaker 1: I created for God? What was I created for slaves
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Speaker 1: to matter? Minding inanimate things? It doesn't suit me. You know,
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Speaker 1: I've got no hands and no patience. I've mucked about
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Speaker 1: with life, mucked about with life. He suddenly addressed himself
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Speaker 1: to me, and for an instant I started, like an
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Speaker 1: eavesdropper discovered. Whatever you do, boy, whatever you do, make
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Speaker 1: a plan, make a good plan, and stick to find
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Speaker 1: out what life is about. I never have, and set
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Speaker 1: yourself to do whatever you ought to do. I admit
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Speaker 1: it's a puzzle. Those damned houses have been the curse
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Speaker 1: of my life. Stucco, white elephants, beastly cracked stucco, with
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Speaker 1: stains of green, blacken, green, confervor, and soot property. They
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Speaker 1: are beware of things, Dick, Beware of things. Before you
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Speaker 1: know where you are, and you're waiting on them and
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Speaker 1: minding them. They'll eat your life up, eat up your
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Speaker 1: hours and your blood and energy. When those houses came
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Speaker 1: to me, I ought to have sold them or fled
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Speaker 1: the country. I ought to have cleared out sarcophagi, eaters
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Speaker 1: of men. Oh, the hours and days of work, the
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Speaker 1: nights of anxiety. Those vile houses have cost me the painting.
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Speaker 1: It worked up my arms, it got all over me.
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Speaker 1: I stank of it. It made me ill. It isn't living,
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Speaker 1: it's minding. Property is the curse of life. Property. Augh.
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Speaker 1: Look at this country, all cut up into silly little parallelograms.
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Speaker 1: Look at all those villas we passed just now, and
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Speaker 1: those potato patches, and that tarred shanty and the hedge.
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Speaker 1: Somebody's minding every bit of it like a dog tied
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Speaker 1: to a cart's tail, patching it and bothering about it, bothering,
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Speaker 1: yapping at every passer by. Look at that notice board.
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Speaker 1: One rotten, worried little beast wants to keep us other
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Speaker 1: rotten little beasts off his patch. God knows why. Look
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Speaker 1: at the weeds in it. Look at the mended fence.
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Speaker 1: There's no property worth having, Dick, but money that's only
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Speaker 1: good to spend. All these things, human souls buried under
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Speaker 1: a cartload of blithering rubbish. I'm not a fool, Dick.
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Speaker 1: I have qualities, imagination, a sort of go I ought
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Speaker 1: to have made a better thing of life. I'm sure
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Speaker 1: I could have done things. Only the old people pulled
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Speaker 1: my leg They started me wrong. They never started me
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Speaker 1: at all. I only began to find out what life
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Speaker 1: was like when I was nearly forty. If I'd gone
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Speaker 1: to a university, if I'd had any sort of sound training,
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Speaker 1: if I hadn't slipped into the haphazard places that came easiest.
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Speaker 1: Nobody warned me, nobody. It isn't a world we live in, Dick.
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Speaker 1: It's a cascade of accidents. It's a chaos exasperated by policemen.
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Speaker 1: You be warned in time, Dick. You stick to a plan.
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Speaker 1: Don't wait for anyone to show you the way. Nobody will.
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Speaker 1: There isn't a way till you make one. Get education,
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Speaker 1: Get a good education, fight your way to the top.
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Speaker 1: It's your only child. As I've watched you, you'll do
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Speaker 1: no good at digging and property minding. There isn't a
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Speaker 1: neighbor in Bromsteed won't be able to skin you at
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Speaker 1: such like games. You and I are the brainy, unstable
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Speaker 1: kind top side or nothing. And if ever those blering
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Speaker 1: houses come to you, don't have them. Give them away,
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Speaker 1: dynamitem and off live, Dick. I'll get rid of them
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Speaker 1: for you if I can, Dick. But remember what I
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Speaker 1: say so. It was my father discoursed, if not in
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Speaker 1: those particular words, yet exactly in that manner, as he
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Speaker 1: slouched along the southward road, with resentful eyes, becoming less
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Speaker 1: resentful as he talked, and flinging out clumsy, illustrative motions
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Speaker 1: at the outskirts of Bromsteed as we passed along them.
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Speaker 1: That afternoon. He hated Bromstead from its foot towering pebbles up.
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Speaker 1: He had no illusions about Bromsteed or himself. I have
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Speaker 1: the clearest impression of him in his garden stained tweeds,
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Speaker 1: with a dear stalker hat on the back of his head,
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Speaker 1: and presently a pipe, sometimes between his teeth, and sometimes
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Speaker 1: in his gesticulating hand, as he became diverted by his
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Speaker 1: talk from his original exasperation. This particular afternoon is no
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Speaker 1: doubt mixed up in my memory with many other afternoons.
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Speaker 1: All sorts of things my father said and did at
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Speaker 1: different times have got themselves referred to it. It filled
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Speaker 1: me at the time with a great, unprecedented sense of fellowship,
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Speaker 1: and it has become the symbol now for all our
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Speaker 1: intercourse together. If I didn't understand the things he said,
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Speaker 1: I did the mood he was in. He gave me
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Speaker 1: two very broad ideas in that talk and the talks
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Speaker 1: I have mingled with it. He gave them to me
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Speaker 1: very clearly, and they have remained fundamental in my mind.
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Speaker 1: One a sense of the extraordinary confusion and waste and
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Speaker 1: planlessness of the human life that went on all about us,
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Speaker 1: and the other of a great ideal of order and economy,
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Speaker 1: which he called variously science and civilization, and which, though
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Speaker 1: I do not remember that he ever used that word,
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Speaker 1: I suppose many people nowadays would identify with socialism as
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Speaker 1: the Fabians expound it. He was not very definite about
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Speaker 1: this science, you must understand, but he seemed always to
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Speaker 1: be waving his hand towards it, just as his contemporary
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Speaker 1: Tennyson seems always to be doing. He belonged to his age,
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Speaker 1: and mostly his talk was destructive of the limited beliefs
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Speaker 1: of his time. He led me to infer, rather than
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Speaker 1: actually told me, that this science was coming a spirit
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Speaker 1: of light and order to the rescue of a world
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Speaker 1: groaning and prevailing in muddle for the want of it. Five.
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Speaker 1: When I think of Bromstead nowadays, I find it inseparably
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Speaker 1: bound up with the disorders of my father's gardening, and
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Speaker 1: the odd patchings and paintings that disfigured his houses. It
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Speaker 1: was all of a peace with that. Let me try
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Speaker 1: and give something of the quality of Bromsteed, and something
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Speaker 1: of its history. It is the quality and history of
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Speaker 1: a thousand places round and about London, and round and
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Speaker 1: about the other great centers of population in the world. Indeed,
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Speaker 1: it is in a measure the quality of the whole
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Speaker 1: of this modern world from which we, who have the
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Speaker 1: statesman's passion, struggle to evolve and dream still of evolving order. First,
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Speaker 1: then you must think of Bromsteed one hundred and fifty
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Speaker 1: years ago as a narrow, irregular, little street of thatched
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Speaker 1: houses strung out on the London and Dover Road, a little,
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Speaker 1: mellow sample unit of a social order that had a
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Speaker 1: kind of completeness at its level of its own. At
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Speaker 1: that time, its population numbered a little under two thousand people,
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Speaker 1: mostly engaged in agricultural work or in trade serving agriculture.
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Speaker 1: There was a blacksmith, a saddler, a chemist, a doctor,
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Speaker 1: a barber, a linen draper who brewed his own beer,
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Speaker 1: a veterinary surgeon, a hardware shop, and two capacious inns.
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Speaker 1: Round and about it were a number of pleasant gentlemen's seats,
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Speaker 1: whose owners went frequently to London Town in their coaches
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Speaker 1: along the very tolerable high road. The church was big
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Speaker 1: enough to hold the whole population were people minded to
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Speaker 1: go to church, and indeed a large proportion did go,
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Speaker 1: And all who married were married in it. And everybody,
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Speaker 1: to begin with was christened at its font and buried
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Speaker 1: at last in its yew shaded graveyard. Everybody knew everybody
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Speaker 1: in the pl It was, in fact a definite place
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Speaker 1: and a real human community. In those days there was
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Speaker 1: a pleasant old market house in the middle of the town,
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Speaker 1: with a weekly market and an annual fair at which
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Speaker 1: much cheerful merrymaking and homely intoxication occurred. There was a
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Speaker 1: pack of hounds which hunted within five miles of London Bridge,
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Speaker 1: and the local gentry would occasionally enliven the place with
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Speaker 1: valiant cricket matches for one hundred guineas. Aside to the
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Speaker 1: vast excitement of the entire population, it was very much
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Speaker 1: the same sort of place that it had been for three
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Speaker 1: or four centuries. A bronzed rip van Winkle from fifteen fifty.
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Speaker 1: Returning in seventeen fifty, would have found most of the
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Speaker 1: old houses still as he had known them, the same
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Speaker 1: trades a little improved and differentiated one from the other,
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Speaker 1: the same roads rather more carefully tended, the inns not
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Speaker 1: very much altered, the ancient familiar market house. The occasional
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Speaker 1: wheeled traffic would have struck him as the most remarkable difference,
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Speaker 1: next perhaps to the swaggering painted stone monuments instead of brasses,
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Speaker 1: and the Protestant severity of the communion table in the
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Speaker 1: parish church. Both from the material point of view, very
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Speaker 1: little things. A rip van Winkle from thirteen fifty again
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Speaker 1: would have noticed scarcely greater changes. Fewer clergy, more people,
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Speaker 1: and particularly more people of the middling sort. The glass
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Speaker 1: in the windows of many of the houses, the stylish
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Speaker 1: chimneys springing up everywhere, would have impressed him, and such
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Speaker 1: like details. The place would have had the same boundaries,
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Speaker 1: the same broad essential features would have been still itself,
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Speaker 1: in the way that a man is still himself after
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Speaker 1: he has filled out a little and grown a longer
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Speaker 1: beard and changed his clothes. But after seventeen fifty something
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Speaker 1: got hold of the world, something that was destined to
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Speaker 1: all to the scale of every human affair. That something
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Speaker 1: was machinery and a vague energetic disposition to improve material things.
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Speaker 1: In another part of England, ingenious people were beginning to
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Speaker 1: use coal in smelting iron, and were producing metal in
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Speaker 1: abundance and metal castings in sizes that had hitherto been
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Speaker 1: unattainable without warning or preparation. Increment, involving countless possibilities of
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Speaker 1: further increment, was coming to the strength of horses and men. Power,
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Speaker 1: all unsuspected was flowing like a drug into the veins
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Speaker 1: of the social body. Nobody seemed to have perceived this
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Speaker 1: coming of power, and nobody had calculated its probable consequences. Suddenly,
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Speaker 1: almost inadvertently, people found themselves doing things that would have
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Speaker 1: amazed their ancestors. They began to construct wheeled vehicles much
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Speaker 1: more easily and deeply than they had ever done before.
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Speaker 1: To make up roads and move things about that had
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Speaker 1: formerly been esteemed too heavy for locomotion, to join woodwork
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Speaker 1: with iron nails instead of wooden pegs, to achieve all
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Speaker 1: sorts of mechanical possibilities, to trade more freely and manufacture
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Speaker 1: on a larger scale, to send goods abroad in a
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Speaker 1: wholesale and systematic way to bring back commodities from overseas,
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Speaker 1: not simply spices and fine commodities, but goods in bulk.
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Speaker 1: The new influence spread to agriculture. Iron appliances replaced wooden
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Speaker 1: breeding of stock became systematic. Paper making and printing increased,
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Speaker 1: and cheapened roofs of slate and tile appeared amidst and
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Speaker 1: presently prevailed over the original bronzed in thatch. The huge
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Speaker 1: space of Common to the south was extensively enclosed, and
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Speaker 1: what had been an ill defined horse track to Dover,
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Speaker 1: only passable by adventurous coaches in dry weather, became the
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Speaker 1: Dover Road, and was presently the route, first of one
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Speaker 1: and then of several daily coaches. The high Street was
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Speaker 1: discovered to be too tortuous for these awakening energies, and
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Speaker 1: a new road cut off its worst contortions. Residential villas appeared,
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Speaker 1: occupied by retired tradesmen and widows who esteemed the place healthy,
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Speaker 1: and by others of a strange new unoccupied class of
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Speaker 1: people who had money invested in joint stock enterprises. First
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Speaker 1: one and then several boys boarding schools came, drawing their
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Speaker 1: pupils from London. My grandfathers was one of these. London,
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Speaker 1: twelve miles to the northwest, was making itself felt more
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Speaker 1: and more. But this was only the beginning of the
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Speaker 1: growth period, the first trickle of the coming flood of
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Speaker 1: mechanical power. Away in the north. They were casting iron
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Speaker 1: in bigger and bigger forms, working their way to the
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Speaker 1: production of steel and a large scale applying power in factories.
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Speaker 1: Bromstead had almost doubled in size again. Long before the
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Speaker 1: railway came. There was hardly any thatch left in the
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Speaker 1: high Street, but instead were houses with handsome brass knock
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Speaker 1: at front doors and several windows, and shops with shop
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Speaker 1: fronts all of square glass panes. And the place was
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Speaker 1: lighted publicly, now by oil lamps. Previously only one flickering
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Speaker 1: lamp outside each of the coaching inns had broken the
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Speaker 1: nocturnal darkness, and there was talk it long remained talk
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Speaker 1: of gas. The gas works came in eighteen thirty four,
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Speaker 1: and about that date my father's three houses must have
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Speaker 1: been built. Convenient for the London Road. They marked nearly
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Speaker 1: the beginning of the real suburban quality. They were let
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Speaker 1: at first a city. People still engaged in business, and
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Speaker 1: then hard on the gas works had come the railway
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Speaker 1: and cheap coal. There was a wild outbreak of brickfields
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Speaker 1: upon the clay lands to the east, and the great
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Speaker 1: growth had begun in earnest The agricultural placidities that had
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Speaker 1: formerly come to the very borders of the high Street
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Speaker 1: were broken up northwest and south by new roads. This
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Speaker 1: enterprising person and then that began to run up houses,
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Speaker 1: irrespective of every other enterprising person who was doing the
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Speaker 1: same thing. A local board came into existence, and with
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Speaker 1: much hesitation and pennywise economy inaugurated. Drainage works rates became
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Speaker 1: a common topic, a fact of accumulating importance. Several chapels
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Speaker 1: of zinc and iron appeared, and also a white new
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Speaker 1: church in commercial Gothic upon the Common, and another of
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Speaker 1: red brick in the residential district. Out beyond the brickfields
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Speaker 1: towards Chessington. The population doubled again, and doubled again, and
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Speaker 1: became particularly teeming in the prolific working class district about
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Speaker 1: the deep rutted, muddy, coal blackened roads between the gas works, blodgets,
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Speaker 1: laundries and the railway, goods yard. Weekly properties that is
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Speaker 1: to say, small houses built by small property owners and
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Speaker 1: let by the weak, sprang up also in the cage fields,
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Speaker 1: and presently extended right up the London Road. A single
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Speaker 1: national school, in an inconvenient situation, set itself inadequately to
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Speaker 1: collect subscriptions and teach the swarming, sniffing, grimy offspring of
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Speaker 1: this dingy new population to read. The villages of Beckington,
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Speaker 1: which used to be three miles to the west and
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Speaker 1: blamely four miles to the east of Bromstead, were experiencing
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Speaker 1: similar distensions and proliferations, and grew out to meet us.
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Speaker 1: All effects of locality to your community had gone from
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Speaker 1: these places long before I was born. Hardly anyone knew anyone.
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Speaker 1: There was no general meeting place anymore. The old fairs
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Speaker 1: were just common nuisances, haunted by gypsies, van showmen, cheap
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Speaker 1: jacks and London roffs. The churches were incapable of a
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Speaker 1: quarter of the population. One or two local papers of
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Speaker 1: shameless veniality reported the proceedings of the local bench, and
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Speaker 1: the local board compelled tradesmen who were interested in these
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Speaker 1: affairs to advertise. Used the epithet Bromstadion as one expressing
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Speaker 1: peculiar virtues, and so maintained in the general mind a
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Speaker 1: weak tradition of some local quality that embraced us all.
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Speaker 1: Then the parish graveyard filled up and became a scandal,
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Speaker 1: and an ambitious area with an air of appetite, was
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Speaker 1: walled in by a Bromsteed cemetery company and planted with
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Speaker 1: suitably high minded and sorrowful varieties of conifer. A stonemason
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Speaker 1: took one of the earlier villas with the front garden
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Speaker 1: at the end of the high street, and displayed a
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Speaker 1: supply of urns on pillars, and headstones and crosses in stone,
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Speaker 1: marble and granite that would have sufficed to commemorate in
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Speaker 1: elaborate detail the entire population of Bromsteed, as one founded
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Speaker 1: in seventeen fifty. The cemetery was made when I was
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Speaker 1: a little boy of five or six. I was in
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Speaker 1: the full tide of building and growth from the first
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Speaker 1: the second railway with its station at Bromstead North, and
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Speaker 1: the drainage followed when I was ten or eleven, and
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Speaker 1: all my childish memories are of digging and wheeling of
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Speaker 1: woods invaded by building roads, gashed open and littered with
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Speaker 1: iron pipes amidst a fearful smell of gas, of men
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Speaker 1: peeped at and seen toiling away deep down in excavations,
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Speaker 1: of hedges broken down and replaced by planks of wheelbarrows
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Speaker 1: and builders, Sheds of rivulets overtaken and swallowed up by
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Speaker 1: drain pipes. Big trees, and especially elms, cleared of undergrowth
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Speaker 1: and left standing amid such things acquired a peculiar tattered dinginess,
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Speaker 1: rather in the quality of needy widow women who have
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Speaker 1: seen happier days. The Raven's book of my Earlier Memories
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Speaker 1: was a beautiful stream. It came into my world out
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Speaker 1: of a mysterious beyond, out of a garden, splashing brightly
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Speaker 1: down a weir which had once been the weir of
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Speaker 1: a mill. Above the weir and inaccessible, there were bulrushes
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Speaker 1: growing in splendid clumps, and beyond that pampas grass, yellow
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Speaker 1: and crimson, spikes of hollyhock and blue suggestions of wonderland.
20:52
Speaker 1: From the pool. At the foot of this initial cascade,
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Speaker 1: it flowed in a leisurely fashion, beside a footpath. There
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Speaker 1: were two pretty thatched cottages on the left, and here
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Speaker 1: were ducks, and there were willows on the right, and
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Speaker 1: so came to where great trees grew on high banks
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Speaker 1: on either hand, and bowed closer, and at last met overhead.
21:14
Speaker 1: This part was difficult to reach because of an old fence,
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Speaker 1: but a little boy might glimpse that long cavern of
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Speaker 1: greenery by wading. Either I have actually seen kingfishers there,
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Speaker 1: or my father has described them so accurately to me
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Speaker 1: that he inserted them into my memory. I remember them
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Speaker 1: there anyhow, most of that overhung part I never penetrated
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Speaker 1: at aol, but followed the field path with my mother
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Speaker 1: and met the stream again, where beyond there were flat
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Speaker 1: meadows roper's meadows. The ravens went meandering across the middle
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Speaker 1: of these, now between steep banks, and now with wide
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Speaker 1: shadows at the bends, where the cattle waded and drank,
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Speaker 1: yellow and purple. Loose strife and ordinary rushes grew in
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Speaker 1: clumps along the bank, and now and then a willow.
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Speaker 1: On rare occasions of rapture, one might see a rat
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Speaker 1: cleaning his whiskers at the water's edge. The deep places
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Speaker 1: were rich with tangled weeds, and in them fishes lurked.
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Speaker 1: To me. They were big fishes, water boatmen, and water
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Speaker 1: beetles traversed the calm surface of these still deeps. In
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Speaker 1: one pool were yellow lilies and water soldiers, and in
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Speaker 1: the shoally places hovering fleets of small fry basks in
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Speaker 1: the sunshine, to vanish in a flash at one shadow.
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Speaker 1: In one place, too were rapids where the stream woke
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Speaker 1: with a start from a dreamless brooding into foaming panic,
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Speaker 1: and babbled and hastened. Well, do I remember that half
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Speaker 1: mile of Rivulette? All other rivers and cascades have their
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Speaker 1: reference to it for me? And after I was eleven,
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Speaker 1: and before we left Broms did all the delight and
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Speaker 1: beauty of it was destroyed? The volume of its water
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Speaker 1: decreased abruptly. I suppose the new drainage works that linked
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Speaker 1: us up with Beckington had made me first acquainted with
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Speaker 1: the geological quality of the London clay. Had to do
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Speaker 1: with that until only a week uncleansing trickle remained. That
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Speaker 1: at first did not strike me as a misfortune. An
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Speaker 1: adventurous small boy might walk dry shod in places hitherto inaccessible,
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Speaker 1: but hard upon that came the pegs, the planks, and cuts,
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Speaker 1: and devastation. Roper's meadows, being no longer in fear of floods,
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Speaker 1: were now to be slashed out into parallelograms of untidy
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Speaker 1: road and built upon with rows of working class cottages.
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Speaker 1: The roads came horribly the houses followed. They seemed to
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Speaker 1: rise in the night. People moved into them as soon
23:56
Speaker 1: as the rules were on, mostly workmen and their young wives,
24:00
Speaker 1: and already in a year some of these raw houses
24:03
Speaker 1: stood empty again from defaulting tenants, with windows broken on
24:08
Speaker 1: wood work warping and rotting. The Ravens Brook became a
24:12
Speaker 1: dump for old iron, rusty cairns, abandoned boots and the like,
24:17
Speaker 1: and was a river only when unusual rains filled it
24:20
Speaker 1: for a day or so with an inky flood of
24:22
Speaker 1: surface water. That indeed was my most striking perception in
24:27
Speaker 1: the growth of Bromstead. The Ravens Brook had been important
24:31
Speaker 1: to my imaginative life. That way had always been my
24:35
Speaker 1: first choice in all my walks with my mother, and
24:38
Speaker 1: its rapid swamping by the new urban growth made it
24:41
Speaker 1: indicative of all the other things that had happened just
24:44
Speaker 1: before my time, or were still at a less dramatic
24:48
Speaker 1: pace happening. I realized that building was the enemy. I
24:53
Speaker 1: began to understand why in every direction out of Bromstead
24:57
Speaker 1: one walked past scaffold poles into litter, why fragments of
25:01
Speaker 1: broken brick and cinder mingled in every path, than the
25:04
Speaker 1: significance of the universal notice boards, either white and new
25:09
Speaker 1: or a year old and torn and battered, promising sights
25:13
Speaker 1: proffering houses to be sold or let, abusing and intimidating
25:17
Speaker 1: passers by for fancied trespass, and protecting rights of whey.
25:23
Speaker 1: It is difficult to disentangle now what I understood at
25:26
Speaker 1: this time and what I have since come to understand.
25:30
Speaker 1: But it seems to me that even in those childish days,
25:33
Speaker 1: I was acutely aware of an invading and growing disorder.
25:37
Speaker 1: The serene rhythms of the old established agriculture I see
25:41
Speaker 1: now were everywhere being replaced by cultivation under notice and
25:45
Speaker 1: snatched crops. Hedges ceased to be repaired and were replaced
25:50
Speaker 1: by cheap iron railings or chunks of corrugated iron. More
25:54
Speaker 1: and more hoardings sprang up and contributed more and more
25:58
Speaker 1: to the no bad tribes of filthy paper scraps that
26:02
Speaker 1: flew before the wind and overspread the country. The outskirts
26:07
Speaker 1: of Bromsteed were a maze of exploitation, roads that led
26:10
Speaker 1: nowhere that ended in tarred fences studded with nails. I
26:15
Speaker 1: don't remember barred wire in those days. I think the
26:18
Speaker 1: zeitgeist did not produce that until later. An intrespass board
26:22
Speaker 1: that used vehement language, broken glass, tin, cans and ashes
26:27
Speaker 1: and paper abounded, cheap glass, cheap tin, abundant fuel, and
26:33
Speaker 1: a free, untaxed press had rushed upon a world quite
26:36
Speaker 1: unprepared to dispose of these blessings. When the fullness of
26:40
Speaker 1: enjoyment was passed, I suppose one might have persuaded oneself
26:45
Speaker 1: that all this was but the replacement of an ancient tranquility,
26:48
Speaker 1: or at least an ancient balance, by a new order.
26:52
Speaker 1: Only to my eyes, quickened by my father's intimations, it
26:56
Speaker 1: was manifestly no order at all. It was a multitude
27:00
Speaker 1: of incoordinated fresh starts, each more sweeping and destructive than
27:05
Speaker 1: the last, and none of them ever really worked out
27:09
Speaker 1: to a ripe and satisfactory completion. Each left a legacy
27:13
Speaker 1: of products, houses, humanity, or what not in its wake.
27:17
Speaker 1: It was a sort of progress that had bolted it
27:20
Speaker 1: was changed out of hand and going at an unprecedented
27:24
Speaker 1: pace nowhere in particular. No, the Victorian epoch was not
27:29
Speaker 1: the dawn of a new era. It was a hasty
27:32
Speaker 1: trial experiment, a gigantic experiment of the most slovenly and
27:36
Speaker 1: wasteful kind. I suppose it was necessary. I suppose all
27:41
Speaker 1: things are necessary. I suppose that before men will discipline
27:45
Speaker 1: themselves to learn and plan, they must first see, in
27:48
Speaker 1: a hundred convincing forms, the folly and muddle that come
27:52
Speaker 1: from headlong, aimless and haphazard methods. The nineteenth century was
27:58
Speaker 1: an age of demonstrations, some of them very impressive, demonstrations
28:03
Speaker 1: of the power that have come to mankind. But of
28:06
Speaker 1: permanent achievement. What will our descendants cherish? It is hard
28:11
Speaker 1: to estimate what grains of precious metal may not be
28:14
Speaker 1: found in a mud torrent of human production on so
28:18
Speaker 1: large a scale. But will any one a hundred years
28:21
Speaker 1: from now consent to live in the houses of Victorians
28:24
Speaker 1: built travel by their roads or railways, value the furnishings
28:29
Speaker 1: they made to live among, or esteem except for curious
28:32
Speaker 1: or historical reasons. Their prevalent art and the clipped and
28:36
Speaker 1: limited literature that satisfied their souls. That age which bore
28:42
Speaker 1: me was indeed a world full of restricted and undisciplined people,
28:47
Speaker 1: overtaken by power, by possessions and great new freedoms, and
28:51
Speaker 1: unable to make any civilized use of them whatever. Stricken
28:56
Speaker 1: now by this idea and now by that tempted first
28:59
Speaker 1: by one possession and then another to ill considered attempts.
29:04
Speaker 1: It was my father's exploitation of his villa gardens on
29:07
Speaker 1: the wholesale level. The whole of Bromsteed, as I remember it,
29:12
Speaker 1: and as I saw it last it is a year
29:14
Speaker 1: ago now is a dull, useless boiling up of human activities,
29:19
Speaker 1: an immense clustering of futilities. It is as unfinished as ever.
29:24
Speaker 1: The builder's roads still run out and end in midfield
29:28
Speaker 1: in their old fashion. The various enterprises jumble in the
29:32
Speaker 1: same hopeless contradiction, if anything, intensified, pretentious villas jostle. Slums
29:39
Speaker 1: and public house and tin tabernacle glower at one another
29:43
Speaker 1: across the cat haunted lot that intervenes. Roper's meadows are
29:48
Speaker 1: now quite frankly as slum back doors and sculleries gaped
29:53
Speaker 1: towards the railway their yards are hung with tattered washing, unashamed,
29:58
Speaker 1: and there seem to more boards by the railway every
30:01
Speaker 1: time I pass advertising pills and pickles, tonics and condiments
30:06
Speaker 1: and suchlike, solicitudes of a people with no natural health
30:11
Speaker 1: nor appetite left in them. Well, we have to do better.
30:15
Speaker 1: Failure is not failure nor waste wasted if it sweeps
30:19
Speaker 1: away illusion and lights the road to a plan. Six
30:27
Speaker 1: chaotic in discipline, ill adjusted effort, spasmodic aims. These give
30:33
Speaker 1: the quality of all my bronzeded memories, the crowning one
30:37
Speaker 1: of them all rises to desolating tragedy. I remember now
30:42
Speaker 1: the one spring sunshine of that Sunday morning, the stiff
30:46
Speaker 1: feeling of best clothes and aggressive cleanliness and formality. When
30:51
Speaker 1: I and my mother returned from church to find my
30:53
Speaker 1: father dead. He had been pruning the grapevine. He had
30:58
Speaker 1: never had a ladder long enough to reach the sill
31:00
Speaker 1: of the third floor windows. At house painting time, he
31:03
Speaker 1: had borrowed one from the plumber who mixed his paint,
31:07
Speaker 1: and he had, in his own happy go lucky way,
31:10
Speaker 1: contrived a combination of the garden fruit ladder with a
31:14
Speaker 1: battered kitchen table that served all sorts of odd purposes
31:18
Speaker 1: in an outhouse. He had stayed up this arrangement by
31:22
Speaker 1: means of the garden roller, and the roller had, at
31:24
Speaker 1: the critical moment rolled. He was lying close by the
31:28
Speaker 1: garden door, with his head queerly bent back against a
31:32
Speaker 1: broken and twisted rain water pipe, an expression of pacific
31:36
Speaker 1: contentment on his face. A bamboo curtain rod with a
31:40
Speaker 1: table knife tied to the end of it still gripped
31:43
Speaker 1: in his hand. We had been wrapping for some time
31:47
Speaker 1: at the front door, unable to make him hear, And
31:50
Speaker 1: then we came round by the door in the side
31:53
Speaker 1: trellis into the garden, and so discovered him. Arthur, I
31:58
Speaker 1: remember my mother crying, with the strangest break in her voice,
32:02
Speaker 1: what are you doing there, Arthur? And Sunday I was
32:06
Speaker 1: coming behind her, musing remotely, when the quality of her
32:11
Speaker 1: voice roused me. She stood as if she could not
32:14
Speaker 1: go near him. He had always puzzled her, so he
32:17
Speaker 1: and his ways, and this seemed only another enigma. Then
32:22
Speaker 1: the truth dawned on her. She shrieked as if afraid
32:25
Speaker 1: of him, ran a dozen steps back towards the trellis door,
32:30
Speaker 1: and stopped and clasped her in effectual gloved hands, leaving
32:34
Speaker 1: me staring blankly, too astonished for feeling at the carelessly
32:39
Speaker 1: flung limbs. The same idea came to me also. I
32:44
Speaker 1: ran to her mother, I cried, pale to the depths
32:48
Speaker 1: of my spirit, is he dead? I had been thinking
32:52
Speaker 1: two minutes before of the cold fruit pie that glorified
32:56
Speaker 1: our Sunday dinner table, and how I might perhaps get
32:59
Speaker 1: into the tree at the end of the garden to
33:02
Speaker 1: read in the afternoon. Now an immense fact had come
33:06
Speaker 1: down like a curtain and blotted out all my childish world.
33:11
Speaker 1: My father was lying dead before my eyes. I perceived
33:15
Speaker 1: that my mother was helpless, and that things must be done. Mother,
33:20
Speaker 1: I said, we must get doctor Beasley and carry him indoors.
33:25
Speaker 1: End of Chapter two.