H. Wells - THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

borrowed one from the plumber who mixed his paint-and he had in his

own happy-go-lucky way contrived a combination of the garden fruit

ladder with a battered kitchen table that served all sorts of odd

purposes in an outhouse. He had stayed up this arrangement by means

of the garden roller, and the roller had at the critical moment-

rolled. He was lying close by the garden door with his head queerly

bent back against a broken and twisted rainwater pipe, an expression

of pacific contentment on his face, a bamboo curtain rod with a

tableknife tied to end of it, still gripped in his hand. We had

been rapping for some time at the front door unable to make him

hear, and then we came round by the door in the side trellis into

the garden and so discovered him.

"Arthur!" I remembermy mother crying with the strangest break in

her voice, "What are you doing there? Arthur! And-SUNDAY!"

I was coming behind her, musing remotely, when the quality of her

voice roused me. She stood as if she could not go near him. He had

always puzzled her so, he and his ways, and this seemed only another

enigma. Then the truthdawned on her, she shrieked as if afraid of

him, ran a dozen steps back towards the trellis door and stopped and

clasped her ineffectual gloved hands, leaving me staring blankly,

too astonished for feeling, at the carelessly flung limbs.

The same idea came to me also. I ran to her. "Mother!" I cried,

pale to the depths of my spirit, "IS HE DEAD?"

I had been thinkingtwo minutes before of the cold fruit pie that

glorified our Sunday dinner-table, and how I might perhaps get into

the tree at the end of the garden to read in the afternoon. Now an

immense fact had come down like a curtain and blotted out all my

childish world. My father was lying dead before my eyes… I

perceivedthat my mother was helpless and that things must he done.

"Mother!" I said, "we must get Doctor Beaseley,-and carry him

indoors."

My formal education began in a small preparatory school in

Bromstead. I went there as a day boy. The charge for my

instruction was mainly set off by the periodic visits of my father

with a large bag of battered fossils to lecture to us upon geology.

I was one of those fortunate youngsters who take readily to school

work, I had a good memory, versatile interests and a considerable

appetite for commendation, and when I was barely twelve I got a

scholarship at the City Merchants School and was entrusted with a

scholar's railway season ticket to Victoria. After my father's

death a large and very animated and solidly built uncle in tweeds

from Staffordshire, Uncle Minter, my mother's sister's husband, with

a remarkable accent and remarkable vowel sounds, who had plunged

into the Bromstead home once or twice for the night but who was

otherwise unknown to me, came on the scene, sold off the three gaunt

houses with the utmost gusto, invested the proceeds and my father's

life insurance money, and got us into a small villa at Penge within

sightof that immense facade of glass and iron, the Crystal Palace.

Then he retired in a mood of good-naturedcontempt to his native

habitat again. We stayed at Penge until my mother's death.

School became a large part of the world to me, absorbing my time and

interest, and I never acquired that detailed and intimate knowledge

of Penge and the hilly villadom round about, that I have of the town

and outskirts of Bromstead.

It was a district of very much the same character, but it was more

completely urbanised and nearer to the centre of things; there were

the same unfinished roads, the same occasional disconcerted hedges

and trees, the same butcher's horse grazing under a builder's

notice-board, the same incidental lapses into slum. The Crystal

Palace grounds cut off a large part of my walking radius to the west

with impassable fences and forbiddingly expensive turnstiles, but it

added to the ordinary spectacle of meteorology a great variety of

gratuitous fireworks which banged and flared away of a night after

supper and drew me abroad to seethem better. Such walks as I took,

to Croydon, Wembledon, West Wickham and Greenwich, impressed upon me

the interminable extent of London's residential suburbs; mile after

mile one went, between houses, villas, rows of cottages, streets of

shops, under railway arches, over railway bridges. I have forgotten

the detailed local characteristics-if there were any-of much of

that region altogether. I was only there two years, and half my

perambulations occurred at dusk or after dark. But with Penge I

associate my first realisations of the wonder and beauty of twilight

and night, the effectof dark walls reflecting lamplight, and the

mystery of blue haze-veiled hillsides of houses, the glare of shops

by night, the glowing steam and streaming sparks of railway trains

and railway signals lit up in the darkness. My first rambles in the

evening occurred at Penge-I was becoming a big and independent-

spiritedboy-and I began my experienceof smoking during these

twilight prowls with the threepenny packets of American cigarettes

then just appearing in the world.

My life centred upon the City Merchants School. Usually I caught

the eight-eighteen for Victoria, I had a midday meal and tea; four

nights a week I stayed for preparation, and often I was not back

home again until within an hour of my bedtime. I spent my half

holidays at school in order to play cricket and football. This, and

a pretty voracious appetite for miscellaneous reading which was

fostered by the Penge Middleton Library, did not leave me much

leisure for local topography. On Sundays also I sang in the choir

at St. Martin 's Church, and my mother did not like me to walk out

aloneon the Sabbath afternoon, she herselfslumbered, so that I

wrote or read at home. I must confess I was at home as little as I

could contrive.

Home, after my father's death, had become a very quietand

uneventful place indeed. My mother had either an unimaginative

temperament or her mindwas greatly occupied with private religious

solicitudes, and I rememberher talking to me but little, and that

usually upon topics I was anxious to evade. I had developed my own

view about low-Church theology long before my father's death, and my

meditationupon that event had finished my secret estrangement from

my mother's faith. My reason would not permit even a remote chance

of his beingin hell, he was so manifestly not evil, and this

religion would not permit him a remote chance of beingout yet.

When I was a little boy my mother had taught me to read and write

and pray and had done many things for me, indeed she persisted in

washing me and even in making my clothes until I rebelled against

these things as indignities. But our mindsparted very soon. She

never began to understandthe mental processes of my play, she never

interested herselfin my school life and work, she could not

understandthings I said; and she came, I think, quite insensibly to

regard me with something of the same hopeless perplexity she had

felttowards my father.

Him she must have wedded under considerable delusions. I do not

thinkhe deceivedher, indeed, nor do I suspect him of mercenariness

in their union; but no doubthe played up to her requirements in the

half ingenuous way that was and still is the quality of most wooing,