H. Wells - THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

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 restto 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

memorynow 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

growthof whole days of civilised development. I still rememberthe

hatredand 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 growthof 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

understandanything 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 reallydid not knowwhether a

thing was a church or not unless it positively bristled with cannon,

and many a Sunday afternoon have I played Chicago (with the fearof

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 satisfyinglydown 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 rememberrightly, converted them into Army

sausage by means of a portion of the inside of an old alarum clock.

My mother did not understandmy 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

understandingand 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

seethe 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

himselfand 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

thinkit 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.

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 himselfand 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 pleasantin a hot climate), and the stairs

went steeply 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 thoughtit 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 himselfand, smoking a bull-dog pipe the while, which