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The New Machiavelli Chapter 3 Part 1 · The H. G. Wells Library

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Speaker 1: Chapter three, Section one 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 scholastic One. My formal education began in a small
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Speaker 1: preparatory school in Bromstead. I went there as a day boy.
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Speaker 1: The charge for my instruction was mainly set off by
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Speaker 1: the periodic visits of my father with a large bag
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Speaker 1: of battered fossils to lecture to us upon geology. I
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Speaker 1: was one of those fortunate youngsters who take readily to
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Speaker 1: school work. I had a good memory, versatile interests, and
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Speaker 1: a considerable appetite for commendation. And when I was barely twelve,
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Speaker 1: I got a scholarship at the City Merchant's School and
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Speaker 1: was entrusted with a scholar's railway season ticket to Victoria.
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Speaker 1: After my father's death, a large and a very animated
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Speaker 1: and solidly built uncle in tweeds from Staffordshire. Uncle Minta,
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Speaker 1: my mother's sister's husband with a remarkable accent and remarkable
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Speaker 1: vowel sounds, who had plunged into the Bronseded home once
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Speaker 1: or twice for the night, but who was otherwise unknown
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Speaker 1: to me, came on the scene, sold off the three
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Speaker 1: gaunt houses with the utmost. Gusto invested the proceeds and
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Speaker 1: my father's life insurance money, and got us into a
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Speaker 1: small villa at Penge, within sight of that immense facade
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Speaker 1: of glass and iron, the Crystal Palace. Then he retired
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Speaker 1: in a mood of good natured contempt to his native habitat. Again.
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Speaker 1: We stayed at Penge until my mother's death. School became
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Speaker 1: a large part of the world to me, absorbing my
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Speaker 1: time and interest, and I never acquired that detailed and
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Speaker 1: intimate knowledge of Penge and the hilly village dim round
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Speaker 1: about that I have of the town and outskirts of Bromsteed.
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Speaker 1: It was a district of very much the same character,
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Speaker 1: but it was more completely urbanized and nearer to the
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Speaker 1: center of things. There were the same unfinished roads, the
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Speaker 1: same occasional disconcerted hedges and trees, the same butcher's horse
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Speaker 1: grazing under a builder's noticeboard, the same incidental lapses into slum.
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Speaker 1: The Crystal Palace grounds cut off a large part of
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Speaker 1: my walking radius to the west, with impassable fences and
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Speaker 1: forbiddingly expensive turnstiles, But it added to the ordinary spectacle
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Speaker 1: of meteorology, a great variety of gratuitous fireworks which banged
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Speaker 1: and flared away of a night after supper, and drew
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Speaker 1: me abroad to see them better. Such walks as I
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Speaker 1: took to Croydon, Wimbledon, west Wickham and Grinage, impressed upon
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Speaker 1: me the interminable extent of London's residential suburbs. Mile after
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Speaker 1: mile one went between houses, villas, rows of cottages, streeps
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Speaker 1: of shops, under railway arches, over railway bridges. I have
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Speaker 1: forgotten the detailed local characteristics, if there were any of
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Speaker 1: much of that region altogether. I was only there two
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Speaker 1: years and half. My perambulations occurred at dusk or after dark.
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Speaker 1: But with Penge I associate my first realizations of the
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Speaker 1: wondering beauty of twilight and night, the effect of dark
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Speaker 1: walls reflecting lamplight, and the mystery of blue haze veiled
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Speaker 1: hillsides of houses, the glare of shops by night, the
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Speaker 1: glowing steam and streaming sparks of railway trains and railway
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Speaker 1: signals lit up in the darkness. My first rambles in
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Speaker 1: the evening occurred at Penge. I was becoming a big
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Speaker 1: and independent, spirited boy, and I began my experience of
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Speaker 1: smoking during these twilight prows, with the thropenny packets of
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Speaker 1: American cigarette then just appearing in the world. My life
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Speaker 1: centered upon the City Merchant's School. Usually I caught the
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Speaker 1: eight eighteenth for Victoria. I had a midday meal and tea.
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Speaker 1: Four nights a week. I stayed for preparation, and often
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Speaker 1: I was not back home again until within an hour
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Speaker 1: of my bedtime. I spent my half holidays at school
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Speaker 1: in order to play cricket and football. This and a
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Speaker 1: pretty voracious appetite for miscellaneous reading, which was fostered by
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Speaker 1: the Penge Middleton Library, did not leave me much leisure
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Speaker 1: for local topography on Sundays. Also, I sang in the
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Speaker 1: choir at Saint Martin's Church, and my mother did not
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Speaker 1: like me to walk out alone on the Sabbath afternoon.
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Speaker 1: She herself slumbered, so that I wrote or read at home.
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Speaker 1: I must confess I was at home as little as
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Speaker 1: I could contrive. Home after my father's death had become
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Speaker 1: a requiet an uneventful place. Indeed, my mother had either
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Speaker 1: an unimaginative temperament or her mind was greatly occupied with
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Speaker 1: private religious solicitudes. And I remember her talking to me
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Speaker 1: but little, and that usually upon topics I was anxious
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Speaker 1: to evade. I had developed my own view about low
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Speaker 1: Church theology long before my father's death, and my meditation
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Speaker 1: upon that event had finished my secret estrangement from my
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Speaker 1: mother's faith. My reason would not permit even a remote
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Speaker 1: chance of his being in hell. He was so manifestly
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Speaker 1: not evil, and this religion would not permit him a
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Speaker 1: remote chance of being out. Yet, when I was a
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Speaker 1: little boy, my mother had taught me to read and
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Speaker 1: write and pray, and had done many things for me. Indeed,
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Speaker 1: she persisted in washing me and even in making my clothes,
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Speaker 1: until I rebelled against these things as indignities. But our
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Speaker 1: minds parted very soon. She never began to understand the
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Speaker 1: mental processes of my play. She never interested herself in
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Speaker 1: my school life and work. She could not understand things
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Speaker 1: I said. And she came, I think, quite insensibly to
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Speaker 1: regard me with something of the same hopeless perplexity she
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Speaker 1: had felt towards my father. Him she must have wedded
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Speaker 1: under considerable delusions. I do not think he deceived her, indeed,
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Speaker 1: nor do I suspect him of mercenaries in their union.
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Speaker 1: But no doubt he played up to her requirements in
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Speaker 1: the half ingenuous way that was and still is the
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Speaker 1: quality of most wooing, and presented himself as a very
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Speaker 1: brisk and orthodox young man. I wonder why nearly all
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Speaker 1: love making has to be fraudulent. Afterwards, he must have
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Speaker 1: disappointed her cruelly by letting one aspect after another of
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Speaker 1: his careless, skeptical, experimental temperament appear. Her mind was fixed
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Speaker 1: and definite, embodied all the confidence in church and decorum,
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Speaker 1: and the assurances of the pulpit, which was characteristic of
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Speaker 1: the large mass of the English people. For after all,
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Speaker 1: the rather low church section was the largest single mass
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Speaker 1: in early Victorian times. She had dreams, I suspect, of
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Speaker 1: going to church with him side by side. She in
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Speaker 1: a little poke bonnet and a large flounced crinoline, all
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Speaker 1: move and magenta, and starched under a little lace trimmed parasol,
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Speaker 1: and he in a tall silk hat and peg top
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Speaker 1: trousers and a roll collar coat on, looking rather like
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Speaker 1: the Prince consort white angels, almost visibly raining benedictions on
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Speaker 1: their amiable progress. Perhaps she dreamt gently of much belaced
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Speaker 1: babies and an interestingly pious but not too dissenting or
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Speaker 1: fanatical little girl or boy or so also angel haunted,
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Speaker 1: and I think too she must have seen herself ruling
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Speaker 1: a seemly home of taste with a vivarium in the
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Speaker 1: conservatory that opened out of the drawing room, or again
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Speaker 1: making preserves in the kitchen. My father's science teaching, his
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Speaker 1: diagrams of disembold humanity, his pictures of prehistoric beasts that
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Speaker 1: contradicted the flood, his disposition towards soft shirts and loose
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Speaker 1: tweed suits, his inability to use a clothes brush, his
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Speaker 1: spasmodic reading fits, and his bulldog pipes must have jarred
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Speaker 1: cruelly with her rather unintelligent antsipations. His wild moments of
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Speaker 1: violent temper when he would swear and smash things, absurd
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Speaker 1: almost lovable storms that passed like summer thunder, must have
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Speaker 1: been starkly dreadful to her. She was constitutionally inadaptable and
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Speaker 1: certainly made no attempt to understand or tolerate these outbreaks.
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Speaker 1: She tried them by her standards, and by her standards
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Speaker 1: they were wrong. Her standards hid him from her. The
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Speaker 1: blazing things he said rankled in her mind, unforgettably as
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Speaker 1: I remember them together, they chafed constantly. Her attitude to
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Speaker 1: nearly all his moods and all his enterprises was a
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Speaker 1: skeptical disapproval. She treated him as something that belonged to
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Speaker 1: me and not to her. Your father, she used to
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Speaker 1: call him as though I had got him for her.
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Speaker 1: She had married late, and she had, I think, become
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Speaker 1: mentally self subsisting before her marriage. Even in those herne
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Speaker 1: hill days, I used to wonder what was going on
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Speaker 1: in her mind, and I find that old speculative curiosity
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Speaker 1: return as I write this. She took a considerable interest
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Speaker 1: in the housework that our generally servantless condition put upon her.
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Speaker 1: She used to have a childwoman in two or three
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Speaker 1: times a week, but she did not do it with
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Speaker 1: any great skill. She covered most of our furniture with flouncy,
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Speaker 1: ill fitting covers, and she cooked plainly and without very
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Speaker 1: much judgment. The Penge house, as it contained nearly all
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Speaker 1: our Bromsted things, was crowded with furniture, and is chiefly
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Speaker 1: associated in my mind with the smell of turpentine, a
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Speaker 1: condiment she used very freely upon the veneered mahogany pieces.
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Speaker 1: My mother had an equal dread of blacks by day
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Speaker 1: and the night air, so that our brightly clean windows
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Speaker 1: were rarely open. She took a morning paper and she
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Speaker 1: would open it and glance at the headlines, but she
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Speaker 1: did not read it until the afternoon. And then I
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Speaker 1: think she was interested only in the more violent crimes,
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Speaker 1: and in railway are mine disasters, and in the minutest
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Speaker 1: domesticities of the royal family. Most of the books at
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Speaker 1: home were my father's, and I do not think she
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Speaker 1: opened any of them. She had one or two volumes
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Speaker 1: that dated from her own, and she tried in vain
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Speaker 1: to interest me in them. There was Miss Strickland's Queens
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Speaker 1: of England, a book I remember with particular animosity, and
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Speaker 1: Queechee in the wide wide world. She made these books
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Speaker 1: of hers into a class apart by sewing out a
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Speaker 1: covers upon them of calico and figured muslin. To me,
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Speaker 1: in these habiliments, they seemed not so much books as
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Speaker 1: confederated old ladies. My mother was also very punctual with
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Speaker 1: her religious duties, and rejoiced to watch me in the
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Speaker 1: choir on winter evenings. She occupied an armchair on the
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Speaker 1: other side of the table at which I sat head
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Speaker 1: on hand reading and she would be darning stockings or
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Speaker 1: socks or the like. We achieved an effect of rather
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Speaker 1: stuffy comfortableness that was soporific and in a passive way.
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Speaker 1: I think she found these among her happy times. On
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Speaker 1: such occasions she was wont to put her work down
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Speaker 1: on her knees and fall into a sort of thoughtless
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Speaker 1: musing that would last for long intervals and rouse my curiosity,
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Speaker 1: for like most young people, I could not imagine mental
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Speaker 1: states without definite forms. She carried on a correspondence with
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Speaker 1: a number of cousins and friends, writing letters in a
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Speaker 1: slanting Italian hand, and dealing mainly with births, marriages and deaths,
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Speaker 1: business starts in the vaguest terms, and the distresses of bankruptcy.
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Speaker 1: And yet you know she did have a curious, intimate
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Speaker 1: life of her own that I suspected nothing of at
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Speaker 1: the time, that only now becomes credible to me. She
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Speaker 1: kept a diary that is still in my possession, a
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Speaker 1: diary of fragmentary entries in a miscellaneous collection of pocket books.
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Speaker 1: She put down the texts of the sermons she heard,
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Speaker 1: and queer, stiff little comments on casual visitors Miss g
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Speaker 1: and much noisy, shrieking talk about games and such frivolities
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Speaker 1: and croquet a delighted and very attentive. Such little human
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Speaker 1: entries abound. She had an odd way of never writing
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Speaker 1: a name, only an initial. My father is always A,
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Speaker 1: and I am always D. It is manifest. She followed
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Speaker 1: the domestic events in the life of the Princess of Wales,
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Speaker 1: who is now Queen Mother, with peculiar interest and sympathy.
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Speaker 1: Pray g Or may be well, she writes in one
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Speaker 1: such crisis, But there are things about myself that I
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Speaker 1: still find too poignant to tell easily, certain painful and
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Speaker 1: clumsy circumstances of my birth, in very great detail, the
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Speaker 1: distresses of my infantile ailments. Then later I find such
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Speaker 1: things as this heard D s the s is evidently
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Speaker 1: swear g bless and keep my boy from evil. And again,
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Speaker 1: with the thin hand and writing shaken by distress, D
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Speaker 1: would not go to church, and hardened his heart and
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Speaker 1: said wicked, infidel things, much disrespect of the clergy. The
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Speaker 1: anthem was tiresome, that men should set up to be
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Speaker 1: wiser than their maker. Then trebly underlined I fear his
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Speaker 1: father's teaching dreadful little tangle of misapprehensions and false judgments,
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Speaker 1: more comforting for me to read d very kind and good.
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Speaker 1: He grows more thoughtful every day. I suspect myself of
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Speaker 1: forgotten hypocrisies. At just one point, my mother's papers seemed
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Speaker 1: to dip deeper. I think the death of my father
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Speaker 1: must have stirred her for the first time for many
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Speaker 1: years to think for herself. Even she could not go
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Speaker 1: on living in any peace at all, believing that he
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Speaker 1: had indeed been flung headlong into hell. Of this gnawing solicitude.
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Speaker 1: She never spoke to me never, and for her dari
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Speaker 1: also she could find no phrases. But on a loose
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Speaker 1: half sheet of notepaper between its pages, I find this
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Speaker 1: passage that follows, written very carefully. I do not know
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Speaker 1: whose lines they are, nor how she came upon them.
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Speaker 1: They run. And if there be no meeting past the grave,
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Speaker 1: if all is darkness, silence, yet tis rest. Be not
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Speaker 1: afraid you waiting hearts that weep, For God still giveth
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Speaker 1: his beloved sleep. And if an endless sleep he wills
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Speaker 1: so best. That scrap of verse amaze me when I
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Speaker 1: read it, I could even wonder if my mother really
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Speaker 1: grasped the import of what she had copied out. It
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Speaker 1: affected me as if a stone deaf person had suddenly
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Speaker 1: turned and joined in a whispered conversation. It set me
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Speaker 1: thinking how far a mind, in its general effect, quite
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Speaker 1: hopelessly limited, might range. After so that I went through
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Speaker 1: all her daries trying to find something more than a
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Speaker 1: conventional term of tenderness for my father. But I found nothing.
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Speaker 1: And yet somehow there grew upon me the realization that
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Speaker 1: there had been love. Her love for me, on the
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Speaker 1: other hand, was abundantly expressed. I knew nothing of that
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Speaker 1: secret life of feeling at the time. Such expression, as
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Speaker 1: it found, was all beyond my schoolboy range. I did
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Speaker 1: not know when I pleased her, and I did not
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Speaker 1: know when I distressed her. Chiefly, I was aware of
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Speaker 1: my mother as rather dull company, as a mind thorny
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Speaker 1: with irrational conclusions and incapable of explication, as one believing
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Speaker 1: quite wilfully and irritatingly in impossible things. So I suppose
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Speaker 1: it had to be life was coming to me in
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Speaker 1: new forms and with new requirements. It was essential to
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Speaker 1: our situation that we should fail to understand After this
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Speaker 1: space of years, I have come to realizations and attitudes
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Speaker 1: that dissolve my estrangement from her. I can pierce these barriers.
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Speaker 1: I can see her and feel her as a loving
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Speaker 1: and feeling and desiring and muddle headed person. There are
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Speaker 1: times when I would have her alive again, if only
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Speaker 1: that I might be kind to her for a little
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Speaker 1: while and give her some return for the narrow, intense affection,
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Speaker 1: the tender desires she evidently lavished so abundantly on me.
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Speaker 1: But then again I ask how I could make that return,
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Speaker 1: and I realize the futility of such dreaming. Her demand
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Speaker 1: was rigid, and to meet it I should need to
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Speaker 1: act and lie. So she whose blood fed me, whose
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Speaker 1: body made me, lies in my memory as I saw
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Speaker 1: her last fixed, still infinitely intimate, infinitely remote. My own
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Speaker 1: case with my mother, however, does not await the same
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Speaker 1: regret I feel when I think of how she misjudged
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Speaker 1: and irk my father and turned his weaknesses into thorns
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Speaker 1: for her own tormenting. I wish I could look back
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Speaker 1: without that little twinge to two people who were both
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Speaker 1: in their different quality so good, but goodness that is
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Speaker 1: narrow is a pedestrian and ineffectual goodness. Her attitude to
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Speaker 1: my father seems to me one of the essentially tragic
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Speaker 1: things that have come to me personally, one of those
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Speaker 1: things that nothing can tranced, figure that remain sorrowful, that
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Speaker 1: I cannot soothe with any explanation. For as I remember him,
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Speaker 1: he was indeed the most lovable of weak spasmodic men.
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Speaker 1: But my mother had been trained in a hard and
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Speaker 1: narrow system that made evil out of many things not
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Speaker 1: in the least evil, and inculcated neither kindliness nor charity.
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Speaker 1: All their estrangement followed from that. These cramping culor to
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Speaker 1: indeed take an enormost toll of human love and happiness.
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Speaker 1: And not only that, but what we Machiavelians must needs consider,
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Speaker 1: they make frightful breaches in human solidarity. I suppose I
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Speaker 1: am a deeply religious man, as men of my quality go,
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Speaker 1: but I hate more and more as I grow older
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Speaker 1: the shadow of intolerance cast by religious organizations. All my
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Speaker 1: life has been darkened by irrational intolerance, by arbitrary, irrational
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Speaker 1: prohibitions and exclusions. Mahometanism, with its fierce proselytism, as I supposed,
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Speaker 1: the blackest record of uncharitableness. But most of the Christian
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Speaker 1: sects are tainted, tainted to a degree beyond any of
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Speaker 1: the anterior paganisms with this same hateful quality. It is
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Speaker 1: their exclusive claim that sends them wrong, the vain ambition
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Speaker 1: that inspires them all to teach a uniform, one sided
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Speaker 1: God and be the one and only gateway to salvation
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Speaker 1: deprecation of all outside the household of faith. An organized
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Speaker 1: under valuation of heretical goodness and lovableness follows. Necessarily, every
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Speaker 1: petty difference is exaggerated to the quality of a saving
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Speaker 1: grace or a damning defect. Elaborate precautions are taken to
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Speaker 1: shield the believer's mind against broad or amiable suggestions. The
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Speaker 1: faithful are deterred by dark illusions, by sinister warnings from books,
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Speaker 1: from theaters, from worldly conversation, from all the kindly instruments
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Speaker 1: that mingle human sympathy. For only by isolating its flock
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Speaker 1: can the organization survive. Every month there came to my
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Speaker 1: mother a little magazine called, if I remember rightly, the
20:51
Speaker 1: Home Churchman, with the combined authority of print and clerical commendation.
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Speaker 1: It was the most evil thing that ever came into
20:59
Speaker 1: the house a very devil. A thin little pamphlet with
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Speaker 1: one would cut illustration on the front page of each number.
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Speaker 1: Now the uninviting visage of some exponent of the real
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Speaker 1: and only doctrine and attitudes. Now some coral strand in
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Speaker 1: act of welcoming the missionaries of God's mysterious preferences. Now
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Speaker 1: a new church. In the Victorian Gothic, the vile rag
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Speaker 1: it was a score of vices that shun the policemen
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Speaker 1: have nothing of its subtle wickedness. It was an outrage
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Speaker 1: upon the natural kindliness of men. The contents were all
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Speaker 1: admirably adjusted to keep a spirit in prison. Their force
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Speaker 1: of sustained suggestion was tremendous. There would be dreadful intimations
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Speaker 1: of the swift retribution that fell upon individuals for Sabbath breaking,
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Speaker 1: and upon nations for weakening towards ritualism or treating Roman
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Speaker 1: Catholics as tolerable human beings. There would be great rejoicings
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Speaker 1: over the conversion of alleged Jews, and terrible descriptions of
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Speaker 1: the death beds of prominent infidels with boldly invented last
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Speaker 1: words the most unscrupulous lying. There would be the appallingly
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Speaker 1: edifying careers of early piety lusciously described, or stories of
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Speaker 1: condemned criminals who trace their final ruin unerringly to early laxities,
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Speaker 1: of the kind that leads people to give up subscribing
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Speaker 1: to the Home Churchmen. Every month an evil spirit brought
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Speaker 1: about a slump in our mutual love. My mother used
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Speaker 1: to read the thing and become depressed and anxious for
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Speaker 1: my spiritual welfare, used to be stirred to unintelligent pestering. Two.
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Speaker 1: A few years ago I met the editor of this
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Speaker 1: same Home Churchman. It was at one of the weekly
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Speaker 1: dinners of that Fleet Street dining club, the Blackfriars. I
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Speaker 1: heard the paper's name with a queer little shock, and
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Speaker 1: surveyed the man with interest. No doubt he was only
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Speaker 1: a successor of the perver of discords who darkened my boyhood.
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Speaker 1: It was amazing to find an influence so terrible embodied
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Speaker 1: in a creature so palpably petty. He was seated some
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Speaker 1: way down a table at right angles to the one
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Speaker 1: at which I sat, a man of mean appearance, with
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Speaker 1: a grayish complexion, thin with a square nose, a heavy
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Speaker 1: wiry mustache, and a big Adam's apple sticking out between
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Speaker 1: the wings of his collar. Yet with considerable appetite and
23:36
Speaker 1: unconcealed relish, and as his jaw was underhung, he chummed
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Speaker 1: and made the mustache wave like reeds in the swell
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Speaker 1: of a steamer. It gave him a conscientious look. After dinner,
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Speaker 1: he a little forced himself upon me. At that time,
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Speaker 1: though the shadow of my scandal was already upon me,
23:57
Speaker 1: I still seemed to be shaping for great successes, and
24:01
Speaker 1: he was glad to be in conversation with me, and
24:04
Speaker 1: anxious to intimate political sympathy and support. I tried to
24:09
Speaker 1: make him talk of the home churchmen and the kindred
24:12
Speaker 1: publications he ran, but he was manifestly ashamed of his job.
24:16
Speaker 1: So far as I was concerned. One wants, he said,
24:21
Speaker 1: pitching himself as he supposed in my key, to put
24:25
Speaker 1: constructive ideas into our readers. But they are narrow, you know,
24:30
Speaker 1: very narrow. Very He made his mustache and lips express
24:35
Speaker 1: judicious regret. One has to consider them carefully. One has
24:40
Speaker 1: to respect their attitudes. One dare not go too far
24:44
Speaker 1: with them. One has to feel one's way. He chummed,
24:48
Speaker 1: and the mustache bristled a hireling beyond question, catering for
24:53
Speaker 1: a demand. I gathered there was a home in Toughnel Park,
24:57
Speaker 1: and three boys to be fed and clothed educated. I
25:02
Speaker 1: had the curiosity to buy a copy of his magazine afterwards,
25:06
Speaker 1: and it seemed much the same sort of thing that
25:08
Speaker 1: had worried my mother in my boyhood. There was the
25:12
Speaker 1: usual Christian hero, this time with mutton chop, whiskers and
25:15
Speaker 1: a long, bare upper lip. The Jesuits, it seemed, were
25:19
Speaker 1: still hard at it, and heaven frightfully upset about the
25:23
Speaker 1: Sunday opening of museums and the falling birth rate, and
25:27
Speaker 1: as touchy and vindictive as ever. There were two vigorous
25:31
Speaker 1: paragraphs upon the utter damnableness of the Reverend R. J. Campbell,
25:36
Speaker 1: a contagious damnableness, I gathered one wasn't safe within a
25:40
Speaker 1: mile of Hobn Viaduct. And a foul mouthed attack on
25:43
Speaker 1: poor little Wilkins, the novelist, who was being baited by
25:47
Speaker 1: the moralists at that time for making one of his
25:50
Speaker 1: big women characters not being in holy wedlock, desire a
25:54
Speaker 1: baby and say so. The broadening of human thought is
25:58
Speaker 1: a slow and complex process. We do go on, we
26:02
Speaker 1: do get on. But when one thinks that people are
26:05
Speaker 1: living and dying now, quarreling and sulking, misled and misunderstanding,
26:11
Speaker 1: vaguely fearful, condemning and thwarting one another in the close
26:15
Speaker 1: darknesses of these narrow cults, Oh God, one wants a
26:19
Speaker 1: gale out of heaven. One wants a great wind from
26:22
Speaker 1: the sea. Three while I lived in Penge, two little
26:28
Speaker 1: things happened to me, trivial in themselves and yet in
26:32
Speaker 1: their quality profoundly significant. They had this in common that
26:37
Speaker 1: they pierced the texture of the life I was quietly
26:40
Speaker 1: taking for granted, and let me see through it into realities,
26:44
Speaker 1: realities I had indeed known about before, but never realized.
26:50
Speaker 1: Each of these experiences left me with a sense of shock,
26:53
Speaker 1: with all the values in my life perplexingly altered, attempting readjustment.
27:00
Speaker 1: Please disturbing and illuminating events was that I was robbed
27:04
Speaker 1: of a new pocket knife, and the other that I
27:07
Speaker 1: fell in love. It was altogether surprising to me to
27:11
Speaker 1: be robbed. You see, as an only child, I had
27:13
Speaker 1: always been fairly well looked after and protected, and the
27:17
Speaker 1: result was an amazing confidence in the practical goodness of
27:21
Speaker 1: the people one met in the world. I knew there
27:24
Speaker 1: were robbers in the world, just as I knew there
27:27
Speaker 1: were tigers. That I was ever likely to meet robber
27:30
Speaker 1: or tiger face to face seemed equally impossible. The knife,
27:36
Speaker 1: as I remember it, was a particularly jolly one, with
27:39
Speaker 1: all sorts of instruments in it, tweezers and a thing
27:42
Speaker 1: for getting a stone out of the hoof of a horse,
27:45
Speaker 1: and a corkscrew. It had cost me a carefully accumulated
27:49
Speaker 1: half crown and amounted indeed to a new experience in knives.
27:55
Speaker 1: I had had it for two or three days, and
27:57
Speaker 1: then one afternoon I dropped it through a hole in
28:00
Speaker 1: my pocket on a footpath crossing a field between Penge
28:04
Speaker 1: and Annali. I heard it fall in the way one
28:07
Speaker 1: does without at the time appreciating what had happened. Then later,
28:12
Speaker 1: before I got home, when my hand wandered into my
28:15
Speaker 1: pocket to embrace the still dear new possession, I found
28:19
Speaker 1: it gone, and instantly that memory of something hitting the
28:23
Speaker 1: ground sprang up into consciousness. I went back and commenced
28:28
Speaker 1: a search. Almost immediately I was accosted by the leader
28:32
Speaker 1: of a little gang of four or five extremely dirty
28:35
Speaker 1: and ragged boys of assorted sizes and slouching carriage, who
28:40
Speaker 1: were coming from the annale direction. Loft anything, matey, said he,
28:45
Speaker 1: I explained. He's dropped his knife, said my interlocuta, and
28:50
Speaker 1: joined in the search. What sort of handle was it, matey,
28:54
Speaker 1: said a small, white faced, sniffing boy in a big
28:57
Speaker 1: bowler hat. I supplied the his sharp little face scrutinized
29:03
Speaker 1: the ground about us. Got it, he said, and pounced.
29:07
Speaker 1: Give it here, said the big boy, hoarsely, and secured it.
29:12
Speaker 1: I walked towards him, serenely, confident that he would hand
29:15
Speaker 1: it over to me, and that all was for the best,
29:17
Speaker 1: in the best of all possible worlds. No blooming fear,
29:22
Speaker 1: he said, regarding me obliquely. Oh, said it was your knife. Remarkable,
29:27
Speaker 1: doubts assailed me. Of course, it's my knife, I said.
29:31
Speaker 1: The other boys gathered round me. This ain't your knife,
29:35
Speaker 1: said the big boy, and spat casually. I dropped it
29:38
Speaker 1: just now. Finding's keepings, I believe, said the big boy. Nonsense,
29:44
Speaker 1: I said, give me my knife. How many blades it got? Three?
29:49
Speaker 1: And what sort of handle? Bone? Got? A corkscrew light? Yes, ah,
29:54
Speaker 1: this ain't your knife, nohow See he made no offer
29:58
Speaker 1: to show it to me. My breath went. Look here,
30:02
Speaker 1: I said, I saw that kid pick it up. It
30:05
Speaker 1: is my knife, rot said the big boy, and slowly
30:09
Speaker 1: deliberately put my knife into his trouser pocket. I braced
30:14
Speaker 1: my soul for battle. All civilization was behind me, but
30:19
Speaker 1: I doubt if it kept the color in my face.
30:22
Speaker 1: I buttoned my jacket and clenched my fists and advanced
30:26
Speaker 1: on my antagonist. He had, I supposed, the advantage of
30:29
Speaker 1: two years of age and three inches of height. Hand
30:33
Speaker 1: over that knife, I said. Then one of the smallest
30:37
Speaker 1: of the band assailed me with extraordinary vigor and swiftness
30:40
Speaker 1: from behind, had an arm round my neck and a
30:43
Speaker 1: knee in my back before I had the slightest intimation
30:47
Speaker 1: of attack, and so got me down. I got him
30:50
Speaker 1: built squeaked this amazing little ruffian. My nose was flattened
30:55
Speaker 1: by a dirty hand, and as I struck out and
30:58
Speaker 1: hit something like the sacking, some one kicked my elbow.
31:02
Speaker 1: Two or three seemed to be at me at the
31:04
Speaker 1: same time. Then I rolled over and sat up to
31:07
Speaker 1: discover them, all making off a ragged flight footballing my cap,
31:12
Speaker 1: my city merchant's cap amongst them. I leaped to my
31:16
Speaker 1: feet in a passion of indignation and pursued them, But
31:19
Speaker 1: I did not overtake them. We are beings of mixed composition,
31:23
Speaker 1: and I doubt if mine was a single minded pursuit.
31:27
Speaker 1: I knew that honor required me to pursue. And I
31:30
Speaker 1: had a vivid impression of having just been down in
31:33
Speaker 1: the dust with a very wiry and active and dirty
31:36
Speaker 1: little antagonist of disagreeable odor and incredible and incalculable unscrupulousness
31:42
Speaker 1: kneeling on me and gripping my arm and neck. I wanted,
31:46
Speaker 1: of course, to be even with him, but also I
31:49
Speaker 1: doubted if catching him would necessarily involve that. They kicked
31:53
Speaker 1: my cap into the ditch at the end of the
31:56
Speaker 1: field and made off compactly along a cinder lane, while
31:59
Speaker 1: I turned aside to recover my dishonored head dress. As
32:03
Speaker 1: I knocked the dust out of that and out of
32:05
Speaker 1: my jacket, and brushed my knees and readjusted my very
32:09
Speaker 1: crumpled collar, I tried to focus this startling occurrence in
32:13
Speaker 1: my mind. I had vague ideas of going to a
32:17
Speaker 1: policeman or of complaining at a police station, but some
32:21
Speaker 1: boyish instinct against informing prevented that. No doubt I entertained
32:27
Speaker 1: ideas of vindictive pursuit and murderous reprisals, and I was
32:31
Speaker 1: acutely enraged whenever I thought of my knife. The thing
32:35
Speaker 1: indeed rankled in my mind for weeks and weeks, and
32:39
Speaker 1: altered all the flavor of my world. For me, it
32:42
Speaker 1: was the first time I glimped the simple brute violence
32:46
Speaker 1: that lurks and peeps beneath our civilization. A certain kindly
32:50
Speaker 1: complacency of attitude towards the palpably lower classes was qualified
32:56
Speaker 1: for ever four. But the other experience was still more cardinal.
33:04
Speaker 1: It was the first clear intimation of a new motif
33:07
Speaker 1: in life, the sex motif that was to rise and
33:10
Speaker 1: increase and accumulate power in enrichment and interweave with and
33:15
Speaker 1: at last dominate all my life. It was when I
33:19
Speaker 1: was nearly fifteen this happened. It is inseparably connected in
33:23
Speaker 1: my mind with the dusk of warm September evenings. I
33:28
Speaker 1: never met the girl I loved by daylight, and I
33:31
Speaker 1: have forgotten her name. It was some insignificant name. Yet
33:36
Speaker 1: the peculiar quality of the adventure keeps it shining darkly,
33:40
Speaker 1: like some deep colored gem in the common setting of
33:43
Speaker 1: my memories. It came as something new and strange, something
33:47
Speaker 1: that did not join on to anything else in my
33:50
Speaker 1: life or connect with any of my thoughts or beliefs
33:53
Speaker 1: or habits. It was a wonder, a mystery, a discovery
33:58
Speaker 1: about myself, a discovery about the whole world. Only in
34:02
Speaker 1: after years did sexual feeling lose that isolation and spread
34:07
Speaker 1: itself out to illuminate and pervade, and at last possess
34:11
Speaker 1: the whole broad vision of life. It was in that
34:15
Speaker 1: phase of an urban youth's development, the phase of the
34:19
Speaker 1: cheap cigarette, that this thing happened. One evening I came
34:24
Speaker 1: by chance on a number of young people promenading by
34:27
Speaker 1: the light of a row of shops towards Beckington, and
34:31
Speaker 1: with all the glory of a glowing cigarette between my lips,
34:34
Speaker 1: I joined their strolling number. These twilight parades of young people, youngsters,
34:41
Speaker 1: chiefly of the lower middle class, are one of the
34:43
Speaker 1: odd social developments of the great suburban growths. Unkindly critics
34:49
Speaker 1: blind to the inner meanings of things call them. I
34:52
Speaker 1: believe Monkey's parades, the shop apprentices, the young work girls,
34:57
Speaker 1: the boy clerks, and so forth, stirred by mysterious intimations,
35:02
Speaker 1: spend their first earned money upon collars and ties, chief
35:06
Speaker 1: on hats, smart lace collars, walking sticks, sunshades or cigarettes,
35:12
Speaker 1: and come valiantly into the vague, transfiguring mingling of gas
35:15
Speaker 1: light and evening, to walk up and down to eye meaningly,
35:19
Speaker 1: even to a cost, and make friends. It is a queer,
35:23
Speaker 1: instinctive revolt from the narrow, limited, friendless homes in which
35:28
Speaker 1: so many find themselves. Are going out towards something romance,
35:33
Speaker 1: if you will, beauty that has suddenly become a need,
35:36
Speaker 1: a need that hitherto has lain dormant and unsuspected. They
35:41
Speaker 1: promenade vulgar. It is as vulgar as the spirit that
35:45
Speaker 1: calls the moth abroad in the evening and lights the
35:48
Speaker 1: body of the glow worm in the night. I made
35:52
Speaker 1: my way through the throng a little contemptuously as became
35:55
Speaker 1: a public schoolboy, my hands in my pockets, none of
35:59
Speaker 1: your cheek canes for me, and very careful of the
36:02
Speaker 1: lie of my cigarette upon my lips. And two girls
36:06
Speaker 1: pass me, one a little taller than the other with dim,
36:09
Speaker 1: warm tinted faces, under clouds of dark hair, and with
36:14
Speaker 1: dark eyes like pools reflecting stars. I half turned, and
36:19
Speaker 1: the shorter one glanced back at me over her shoulder.
36:23
Speaker 1: I could draw you now the pose of her cheek
36:25
Speaker 1: and neck and shoulder, and instantly I was as passionately
36:28
Speaker 1: in love with the girl as I have ever been
36:31
Speaker 1: before or since, as any man ever was with any woman.
36:35
Speaker 1: I turned about and followed them. I flung away my
36:38
Speaker 1: cigarette ostentatiously and lifted my school cap and spoke to them.
36:44
Speaker 1: The girl answered, shyly, with her dark eyes on my face.
36:48
Speaker 1: What I said and what she said I cannot remember,
36:51
Speaker 1: but I have little doubt it was something absolutely vapid.
36:55
Speaker 1: It really did not matter. The thing was we had met,
36:59
Speaker 1: I felt, I think a new hatched moth must feel
37:02
Speaker 1: when suddenly its urgent headlong searching brings it in tremulous
37:06
Speaker 1: amazement upon its mate. We met, covered from each other,
37:10
Speaker 1: with all the nets of civilization keeping us apart. We
37:15
Speaker 1: walked side by side. It led to scarcely more than that.
37:20
Speaker 1: I think we met four or five times altogether, and
37:23
Speaker 1: always with her nearly silent elder sister on the other
37:26
Speaker 1: side of her. We walked on the last two occasions
37:30
Speaker 1: arm in arm, furtively caressing each other's hands. We went
37:34
Speaker 1: away from the glare of the shops into the quiet
37:37
Speaker 1: roads of Villadum, and there we whispered instead of talking,
37:41
Speaker 1: and looked closely into one another's warm and shaded face. Dear,
37:46
Speaker 1: I whispered, very daringly, and she answered dear. We had
37:51
Speaker 1: a vague sense that we wanted more of that quality
37:54
Speaker 1: of intimacy, and more. We wanted each other as one
37:58
Speaker 1: wants beautiful music again, or to breathe again the scent
38:02
Speaker 1: of flowers. And that is all there was between us.
38:06
Speaker 1: The events are nothing. The thing that matters is the
38:09
Speaker 1: way in which this experience stabbed through the common stuff
38:13
Speaker 1: of life and left it pierced with a light, with
38:16
Speaker 1: a huge new interest shining through the rent. When I
38:20
Speaker 1: think of it, I can recall even now the warm
38:23
Speaker 1: mystery of her face, her lips a little apart, lips
38:27
Speaker 1: that I never kissed, her soft shadowed throat, and I
38:31
Speaker 1: feel again the sensuous stir of her proximity. Those two
38:36
Speaker 1: girls never told me their surname, nor let me approach
38:39
Speaker 1: their house. They made me leave them at the corner
38:42
Speaker 1: of a road of small houses near Penne Station, and
38:46
Speaker 1: quite abruptly, without any intimation, they vanished and came to
38:51
Speaker 1: the meeting place no more. They vanished as a moth
38:54
Speaker 1: goes out of a window into the night, and left
38:57
Speaker 1: me possessed of an intolerable want. The affair pervaded my
39:02
Speaker 1: existence for many weeks. I could not do my work,
39:06
Speaker 1: and I could not rest at home. Night after night
39:09
Speaker 1: I promenaded up and down that monkey's parade, full of
39:13
Speaker 1: an unappeasable desire, with a thwarted sense of something just
39:17
Speaker 1: begun that ought to have gone on. I went backwards
39:21
Speaker 1: and forwards on the way to the vanishing place, and
39:24
Speaker 1: at last explored the forbidden road that had swallowed them up.
39:28
Speaker 1: But I never saw her again, except that later she
39:32
Speaker 1: came to me, my symbol of womanhood in dreams. How
39:37
Speaker 1: my blood was stirred. I lay awake of nights, whispering
39:41
Speaker 1: in the darkness for her. I prayed for her. Indeed,
39:45
Speaker 1: that girl who probably forgot the last vestiges of me
39:49
Speaker 1: when her first real kiss came to her, ruled and
39:52
Speaker 1: haunted me. Gave a queen to my imagination and a
39:56
Speaker 1: texture to all my desires. Until I became a man,
40:00
Speaker 1: I generalized her. At last, I suddenly discovered that Pertree
40:05
Speaker 1: was about her, and that she was the key to
40:07
Speaker 1: all that had hitherto seemed nonsense about love. I took
40:12
Speaker 1: to reading novels, and if the heroine could not possibly
40:15
Speaker 1: be like her, dusky and warm and starlike, I put
40:19
Speaker 1: the book aside. I hesitate and add here one other confession.
40:24
Speaker 1: I want to tell this thing because it seems to
40:27
Speaker 1: me we are altogether too restrained and secretive about such matters.
40:32
Speaker 1: The cardinal thing in life sneaks into us darkly and shamefully,
40:37
Speaker 1: like a thief in the night. One day, during my
40:41
Speaker 1: Cambridge days, it must have been in my first year,
40:44
Speaker 1: before I knew Hathily, I saw in a print shop
40:47
Speaker 1: window near the strand an engraving of a girl that
40:50
Speaker 1: reminded me sharply of Penge and its dusky encounter. It
40:55
Speaker 1: was just a half length of a bare shouldered, bare
40:58
Speaker 1: breasted Oriental with arms akimbo, smiling faintly. I looked at it,
41:04
Speaker 1: went my way, then turned back and bought it. I
41:07
Speaker 1: felt I must have it. The odd thing is that
41:10
Speaker 1: I was more than a little shame faced about it.
41:13
Speaker 1: I did not have it framed and hung in my room,
41:16
Speaker 1: open to the criticism of my friends. But I kept
41:20
Speaker 1: it in the drawer of my writing table, and I
41:23
Speaker 1: kept that drawer locked for a year. It speedily merged
41:27
Speaker 1: with and became identified with the dark girl of Penge.
41:32
Speaker 1: That engraving became, in a way my mistress. Often when
41:36
Speaker 1: I had sported my oak and was supposed to be reading,
41:40
Speaker 1: I was sitting with it before me. Obeying some instinct,
41:44
Speaker 1: I kept the thing very secret. Indeed, for a time,
41:48
Speaker 1: nobody suspected what was locked in my drawer, nor what
41:51
Speaker 1: was locked in me. I seemed as sexless as my
41:54
Speaker 1: world required. End of Chapter three, Section one