It is over for me now and vanished. That opportunity will come no
more. Very probably you have heard already some crude inaccurate
version of our story and why I did not take office, and have formed
your partial judgement on me. And so it is I sit now at my stone
table, half out of life already, in a warm, large, shadowy leisure,
splashed with sunlight and hung with vine tendrils, with paper
before me to distil such wisdom as I can, as Machiavelli in his
exile sought to do, from the things I have learnt and felt during
the career that has ended now in my divorce.
I climbed high and fast from small beginnings. I had the mind of my
party. I do not know where I might not have ended, but for this red
blaze that came out of my unguarded nature and closed my career for
ever.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER
1
I dreamt first of states and cities and political things when I was
a little boy in knickerbockers.
When I think of how such things began in my mind, there comes back
to me the memory of an enormous bleak room with its ceiling going up
to heaven and its floor covered irregularly with patched and
defective oilcloth and a dingy mat or so and a "surround" as they
call it, of dark stained wood. Here and there against the wall are
trunks and boxes. There are cupboards on either side of the
fireplace and bookshelves with books above them, and on the wall and
rather tattered is a large yellow-varnished geological map of the
South of England. Over the mantel is a huge lump of white coral
rock and several big fossil bones, and above that hangs the portrait
of a brainy gentleman, sliced in half and displaying an interior of
intricate detail and much vigour of coloring. It is the floor I
think of chiefly; over the oilcloth of which, assumed to be land,
spread towns and villages and forts of wooden bricks; there are
steep square hills (geologically, volumes of Orr's CYCLOPAEDIA OF
THE SCIENCES) and the cracks and spaces of the floor and the bare
brown surround were the water channels and open sea of that
continent of mine.
I still remember with infinite gratitude the great-uncle to whom I
owe my bricks. He must have been one of those rare adults who have
not forgotten the chagrins and dreams of childhood. He was a
prosperous west of England builder; including my father he had three
nephews, and for each of them he caused a box of bricks to be made
by an out-of-work carpenter, not the insufficient supply of the
toyshop, you understand, but a really adequate quantity of bricks
made out of oak and shaped and smoothed, bricks about five inches by
two and a half by one, and half-bricks and quarter-bricks to
correspond. There were hundreds of them, many hundreds. I could
build six towers as high as myself with them, and there seemed quite
enough for every engineering project I could undertake. I could
build whole towns with streets and houses and churches and citadels;
I could bridge every gap in the oilcloth and make causeways over
crumpled spaces (which I feigned to be morasses), and on a keel of
whole bricks it was possible to construct ships to push over the
high seas to the remotest port in the room. And a disciplined
population, that rose at last by sedulous begging on birthdays and
all convenient occasions to well over two hundred, of lead sailors
and soldiers, horse, foot and artillery, inhabited this world.
Justice has never been done to bricks and soldiers by those who
write about toys. The praises of the toy theatre have been a common
theme for essayists, the planning of the scenes, the painting and
cutting out of the caste, penny plain twopence coloured, the stink
and glory of the performance and the final conflagration. I had
such a theatre once, but I never loved it nor hoped for much from
it; my bricks and soldiers were my perpetual drama. I recall an
incessant variety of interests. There was the mystery and charm of
the complicated buildings one could make, with long passages and
steps and windows through which one peeped into their intricacies,
and by means of slips of card one could make slanting ways in them,
and send marbles rolling from top to base and thence out into the
hold of a waiting ship. Then there were the fortresses and gun
emplacements and covered ways in which one's soldiers went. And
there was commerce; the shops and markets and store-rooms full of
nasturtium seed, thrift seed, lupin beans and suchlike provender
from the garden; such stuff one stored in match-boxes and pill-
boxes, or packed in sacks of old glove fingers tied up with thread
and sent off by waggons along the great military road to the
beleaguered fortress on the Indian frontier beyond the worn places
that were dismal swamps. And there were battles on the way.
That great road is still clear in my memory. I was given, I forget
by what benefactor, certain particularly fierce red Indians of lead-
I have never seen such soldiers since-and for these my father
helped me to make tepees of brown paper, and I settled them in a
hitherto desolate country under the frowning nail-studded cliffs of
an ancient trunk. Then I conquered them and garrisoned their land.
(Alas! they died, no doubt through contact with civilisation-one my
mother trod on-and their land became a wilderness again and was
ravaged for a time by a clockwork crocodile of vast proportions.)
And out towards the coal-scuttle was a region near the impassable
thickets of the ragged hearthrug where lived certain china Zulus
brandishing spears, and a mountain country of rudely piled bricks
concealing the most devious and enchanting caves and several mines
of gold and silver paper. Among these rocks a number of survivors
from a Noah's Ark made a various, dangerous, albeit frequently
invalid and crippled fauna, and I was wont to increase the
uncultivated wildness of this region further by trees of privet-
twigs from the garden hedge and box from the garden borders. By
these territories went my Imperial Road carrying produce to and fro,
bridging gaps in the oilcloth, tunnelling through Encyclopaedic
hills-one tunnel was three volumes long-defended as occasion
required by camps of paper tents or brick blockhouses, and ending at
last in a magnificently engineered ascent to a fortress on the
cliffs commanding the Indian reservation.
My games upon the floor must have spread over several years and
developed from small beginnings, incorporating now this suggestion
and now that. They stretch, I suppose, from seven to eleven or
twelve. I played them intermittently, and they bulk now in the
retrospect far more significantly than they did at the time. I
played them in bursts, and then forgot them for long periods;
through the spring and summer I was mostly out of doors, and school
and classes caught me early. And in the retrospect I see them all
not only magnified and transfigured, but fore-shortened and confused
together. A clockwork
railway, I seem to remember, came and went;
one or two clockwork boats, toy sailing ships that, being keeled,
would do nothing but lie on their beam ends on the floor; a
detestable lot of cavalrymen, undersized and gilt all over, given me
by a maiden aunt, and very much what one might expect from an aunt,
that I used as Nero used his Christians to ornament my public
buildings; and I finally melted some into fratricidal bullets, and
therewith blew the rest to flat splashes of lead by means of a brass
cannon in the garden.
I find this empire of the floor much more vivid and detailed in my
memory now than many of the owners of the skirts and legs and boots
that went gingerly across its territories. Occasionally, alas! they
stooped to scrub, abolishing in one universal destruction the slow
growth of whole days of civilised development. I still remember the
hatred and disgust of these catastrophes. Like Noah I was given
warnings. Did I disregard them, coarse red hands would descend,
plucking garrisons from fortresses and sailors from ships, jumbling
them up in their wrong boxes, clumsily so that their rifles and
swords were broken, sweeping the splendid curves of the Imperial
Road into heaps of ruins, casting the jungle growth of Zululand into
the fire.
Well, Master Dick," the voice of this cosmic calamity would say,
"you ought to have put them away last night. No! I can't wait until
you've sailed them all away in ships. I got my work to do, and do
it I will."
And in no time all my continents and lands were swirling water and
swiping strokes of house-flannel.
That was the worst of my giant visitants, but my mother too, dear
lady, was something of a terror to this microcosm. She wore spring-
sided boots, a kind of boot now vanished, I believe, from the world,
with dull bodies and shiny toes, and a silk dress with flounces that
were very destructive to the more hazardous viaducts of the Imperial
Road. She was always, I seem to remember, fetching me; fetching me
for a meal, fetching me for a walk or, detestable absurdity!
fetching me for a wash and brush up, and she never seemed to
understand anything whatever of the political Systems across which
she came to me. Also she forbade all toys on Sundays except the
bricks for church-building and the soldiers for church parade, or a
Scriptural use of the remains of the Noah's Ark mixed up with a
wooden Swiss dairy farm. But she really did not know whether a
thing was a church or not unless it positively bristled with cannon,
and many a Sunday afternoon have I played Chicago (with the fear of
God in my heart) under an infidel pretence that it was a new sort of
ark rather elaborately done.
Chicago, I must explain, was based upon my father's description of
the pig slaughterings in that city and certain pictures I had seen.
You made your beasts-which were all the ark lot really,
provisionally conceived as pigs-go up elaborate approaches to a
central pen, from which they went down a cardboard slide four at a
time, and dropped most satisfyingly down a brick shaft, and pitter-
litter over some steep steps to where a head slaughterman (ne Noah)
strung a cotton loop round their legs and sent them by pin hooks
along a wire to a second slaughterman with a chipped foot (formerly
Mrs. Noah) who, if I remember rightly, converted them into Army
sausage by means of a portion of the inside of an old alarum clock.
My mother did not understand my games, but my father did. He wore
bright-coloured socks and carpet slippers when he was indoors-my
mother disliked boots in the house-and he would sit down on my
little chair and survey the microcosm on the floor with admirable
understanding and sympathy.
It was he gave me most of my toys and, I more than suspect, most of
my ideas. "Here's some corrugated iron," he would say, "suitable
for roofs and fencing," and hand me a lump of that stiff crinkled
paper that is used for packing medicine bottles. Or, "Dick, do you
see the tiger loose near the Imperial Road?-won't do for your
cattle ranch." And I would find a bright new lead tiger like a
special creation at large in the world, and demanding a hunting
expedition and much elaborate effort to get him safely housed in the
city menagerie beside the captured dragon crocodile, tamed now, and
his key lost and the heart and spring gone out of him.
And to the various irregular reading of my father I owe the
inestimable blessing of never having a boy's book in my boyhood
except those of Jules Verne. But my father used to get books for
himself and me from the Bromstead Institute, Fenimore Cooper and
Mayne Reid and illustrated histories; one of the Russo-Turkish war
and one of Napier's expedition to Abyssinia I read from end to end;
Stanley and Livingstone, lives of Wellington, Napoleon and
Garibaldi, and back volumes of PUNCH, from which I derived
conceptions of foreign and domestic politics it has taken years of
adult reflection to correct. And at home permanently we had Wood's
NATURAL HISTORY, a brand-new illustrated Green's HISTORY OF THE
ENGLISH PEOPLE, Irving's COMPANIONS OF COLUMBUS, a great number of
unbound parts of some geographical work, a VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD I
think it was called, with pictures of foreign places, and Clarke's
NEW TESTAMENT with a map of Palestine, and a variety of other
informing books bought at sales. There was a Sowerby's BOTANY also,
with thousands of carefully tinted pictures of British plants, and
one or two other important works in the sitting-room. I was allowed
to turn these over and even lie on the floor with them on Sundays
and other occasions of exceptional cleanliness.
And in the attic I found one day a very old forgotten map after the
fashion of a bird's-eye view, representing the Crimea, that
fascinated me and kept me for hours navigating its waters with a
pin.
2
My father was a lank-limbed man in easy shabby tweed clothes and
with his hands in his trouser pockets. He was a science teacher,
taking a number of classes at the Bromstead Institute in Kent under
the old Science and Art Department, and "visiting" various schools;
and our resources were eked out by my mother's income of nearly a
hundred pounds a year, and by his inheritance of a terrace of three
palatial but structurally unsound stucco houses near Bromstead
Station.
They were big clumsy residences in the earliest Victorian style,
interminably high and with deep damp basements and downstairs
coal-cellars and kitchens that suggested an architect
vindictively devoted to the discomfort of the servant class. If so,
he had overreached himself and defeated his end, for no servant
would stay in them unless for exceptional wages or exceptional
tolerance of inefficiency or exceptional freedom in repartee. Every
storey in the house was from twelve to fifteen feet high (which
would have been cool and pleasant in a hot climate), and the stairs
went ste
eply up, to end at last in attics too inaccessible for
occupation. The ceilings had vast plaster cornices of classical
design, fragments of which would sometimes fall unexpectedly, and
the wall-papers were bold and gigantic in pattern and much
variegated by damp and ill-mended rents.
As my father was quite unable to let more than one of these houses
at a time, and that for the most part to eccentric and undesirable
tenants, he thought it politic to live in one of the two others, and
devote the rent he received from the let one, when it was let, to
the incessant necessary repairing of all three. He also did some of
the repairing himself and, smoking a bull-dog pipe the while, which
my mother would not allow him to do in the house, he cultivated
vegetables in a sketchy, unpunctual and not always successful manner
in the unoccupied gardens. The three houses faced north, and the
back of the one we occupied was covered by a grape-vine that
yielded, I remember, small green grapes for pies in the spring, and
imperfectly ripe black grapes in favourable autumns for the purposes
of dessert. The grape-vine played an important part in my life, for
my father broke his neck while he was pruning it, when I was
thirteen.
My father was what is called a man of ideas, but they were not
always good ideas. My grandfather had been a private schoolmaster
and one of the founders of the College of Preceptors, and my father
had assisted him in his school until increasing competition and
diminishing attendance had made it evident that the days of small
private schools kept by unqualified persons were numbered.
Thereupon my father had roused himself and had qualified as a
science teacher under the Science and Art Department, which in these
days had charge of the scientific and artistic education of the mass
of the English population, and had thrown himself into science
teaching and the earning of government grants therefor with great if
transitory zeal and success.
I do not remember anything of my father's earlier and more energetic
time. I was the child of my parents' middle years; they married
when my father was thirty-five and my mother past forty, and I saw