H. Wells - THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

and in them fishes lurked-to me they were big fishes-water-boatmen

and water-beetles traversed the calm surface of these still deeps;

in one pool were yellow lilies and water-soldiers, and in the shoaly

places hovering fleets of small fry basked in the sunshine-to

vanish in a flash at one's shadow. In one place, too, were Rapids,

where the stream wokewith a start from a dreamless brooding into

foaming panic and babbled and hastened. Well do I rememberthat

half-mile of rivulet; all other rivers and cascades have their

reference to it for me. And after I was eleven, and before we left

Bromstead, all the delight and beauty of it was destroyed.

The volume of its water decreased abruptly-I suppose the new

drainage works that linked us up with Beckington, and made me first

acquainted with the geological quality of the London clay, had to do

with that-until only a weak uncleansing trickle remained. That at

first did not strike me as a misfortune. An adventurous small boy

might walk dryshod in places hitherto inaccessible. But hard upon

that came the pegs, the planks and carts and devastation. Roper's

meadows, beingno longer in fearof floods, were now to be slashed

out into parallelograms of untidy road, and built upon with rows of

working-class cottages. The roads came,-horribly; the houses

followed. They seemed to rise in the night. People moved into them

as soon as the roofs were on, mostly workmen and their young wives,

and already in a year some of these raw houses stood empty again

from defaulting tenants, with windows broken and wood-work warping

and rotting. The Ravensbrook became a dump for old iron, rusty

cans, abandoned boots and the like, and was a river only when

unusual rains filled it for a day or so with an inky flood of

surface water…

That indeed was my most striking perceptionin the growthof

Bromstead. The Ravensbrook had been important to my imaginative

life; that way had always been my first choice in all my walks with

my mother, and its rapid swamping by the new urban growthmade it

indicative of all the other things that had happened just before my

time, or were still, at a less dramatic pace, happening. I realised

that building was the enemy. I began to understandwhy in every

direction out of Bromstead one walked past scaffold-poles into

litter, why fragments of broken brick and cinder mingled in every

path, and the significance of the universal notice-boards, either

white and new or a year old and torn and battered, promising sites,

proffering houses to be sold or let, abusing and intimidating

passers-by for fancied trespass, and protecting rights of way.

It is difficult to disentangle now what I understoodat this time

and what I have since come to understand, but it seems to me that

even in those childish days I was acutely aware of an invading and

growingdisorder. The serene rhythms of the old established

agriculture, I seenow, were everywhere beingreplaced by

cultivation under notice and snatch crops; hedges ceasedto be

repaired, and were replaced by cheap iron railings or chunks of

corrugated iron; more and more hoardings sprang up, and contributed

more and more to the nomad tribes of filthy paper scraps that flew

before the wind and overspread the country. The outskirts of

Bromstead were a maze of exploitation roads that led nowhere, that

ended in tarred fences studded with nails (I don't rememberbarbed

wire in those days; I thinkthe Zeitgeist did not produce that until

later), and in trespass boards that used vehement language. Broken

glass, tin cans, and ashes and paper abounded. Cheap glass, cheap

tin, abundant fuel, and a free untaxed Press had rushed upon a world

quite unprepared to disposeof these blessings when the fulness of

enjoymentwas past.

I suppose one might have persuaded oneself that all this was but the

replacement of an ancient tranquillity, or at least an ancient

balance, by a new order. Only to my eyes, quickened by my father's

intimations, it was manifestly no order at all. It was a multitude

of incoordinated fresh starts, each more sweeping and destructive

than the last, and none of them ever reallyworked out to a ripe and

satisfactorycompletion. Each left a legacy of products, houses,

humanity, or what not, in its wake. It was a sort of progress that

had bolted; it was change out of hand, and going at an unprecedented

pace nowhere in particular.

No, the Victorian epoch was not the dawn of a new era; it was a

hasty, trial experiment, a gigantic experiment of the most slovenly

and wasteful kind. I suppose it was necessary; I suppose all things

are necessary. I suppose that before men will discipline themselves

to learn and plan, they must first seein a hundred convincing forms

the folly and muddle that come from headlong, aimless and haphazard

methods. The nineteenth century was an age of demonstrations, some

of them very impressive demonstrations, of the powers that have come

to mankind, but of permanent achievement, what will our descendants

cherish? It is hard to estimate what grains of precious metal may

not be found in a mud torrent of human production on so large a

scale, but will any one, a hundred years from now, consent to live

in the houses the Victorians built, travel by their roads or

railways, value the furnishings they made to live among or esteem,

except for curious or historical reasons, their prevalent art and

the clipped and limitedliterature that satisfiedtheir souls?

That age which bore me was indeed a world full of restricted and

undisciplined people, overtaken by power, by possessions and great

new freedoms, and unable to make any civilised use of them whatever;

stricken now by this idea and now by that, tempted first by one

possession and then another to ill-considered attempts; it was my

father's exploitahon of his villa gardens on the wholesale level.

The whole of Bromstead as I rememberit, and as I sawit last-it is

a year ago now-is a dull useless boiling-up of human activities, an

immense clustering of futilities. It is as unfinished as ever; the

builders' roads still run out and end in mid-field in their old

fashion; the various enterprises jumble in the same hopeless

contradiction, if anything intensified. Pretentious villas jostle

slums, and public-house and tin tabernacle glower at one another

across the cat-haunted lot that intervenes. Roper's meadows are now

quite frankly a slum; back doors and sculleries gape towards the

railway, their yards are hung with tattered washing unashamed; and

there seem to be more boards by the railway every time I pass,

advertising pills and pickles, tonics and condiments, and suchlike

solicitudes of a people with no natural health nor appetite left in

them…

Well, we have to do better. Failure is not failure nor waste wasted

if it sweeps away illusion and lights the road to a plan.

Chaotic indiscipline, ill-adjusted effort, spasmodic aims, these

give the quality of all my Bromstead memories. The crowning one of

them all rises to desolating tragedy. I remembernow the wan spring

sunshine of that Sunday morning, the stiff feelingof best clothes

and aggressive cleanliness and formality, when I and my mother

returned from church to find my father dead. He had been pruning

the grape vine. He had never had a ladder long enough to reach the

sill of the third-floor windows-at house-painting times he had