"I'm no gardener," he said, "I'm no anything.Why the devil did Istart gardening?
"I suppose man was created to mind a garden...But the Fall let us out of that! What was I created for? God! what was I created for?...
"Slaves to matter! Minding inanimate things! It doesn't suit me, you know.I've got no hands and no patience.I've mucked about with life.Mucked about with life." He suddenly addressed himself to me, and for an instant I started like an eavesdropper discovered.
"Whatever you do, boy, whatever you do, make a Plan.Make a good Plan and stick to it.Find out what life is about--I never have--and set yourself to do whatever you ought to do.I admit it's a puzzle....
"Those damned houses have been the curse of my life.Stucco white elephants! Beastly cracked stucco with stains of green--black and green.Conferva and soot....Property, they are!...Beware of Things, Dick, beware of Things! Before you know where you are you are waiting on them and minding them.They'll eat your life up.
Eat up your hours and your blood and energy! When those houses came to me, I ought to have sold them--or fled the country.I ought to have cleared out.Sarcophagi--eaters of men! Oh! the hours and days of work, the nights of anxiety those vile houses have cost me!
The painting! It worked up my arms; it got all over me.I stank of it.It made me ill.It isn't living--it's minding....
"Property's the curse of life.Property! Ugh! Look at this country all cut up into silly little parallelograms, look at all those villas we passed just now and those potato patches and that tarred shanty and the hedge! Somebody's minding every bit of it like a dog tied to a cart's tail.Patching it and bothering about it.Bothering! Yapping at every passer-by.Look at that notice-board! One rotten worried little beast wants to keep us other rotten little beasts off HIS patch,--God knows why! Look at the weeds in it.Look at the mended fence!...There's no property worth having, Dick, but money.That's only good to spend.All these things.Human souls buried under a cartload of blithering rubbish....
"I'm not a fool, Dick.I have qualities, imagination, a sort of go.
I ought to have made a better thing of life.
"I'm sure I could have done things.Only the old people pulled my leg.They started me wrong.They never started me at all.I only began to find out what life was like when I was nearly forty.
"If I'd gone to a university; if I'd had any sort of sound training, if I hadn't slipped into the haphazard places that came easiest....
"Nobody warned me.Nobody.It isn't a world we live in, Dick; it's a cascade of accidents; it's a chaos exasperated by policemen! YOUbe warned in time, Dick.You stick to a plan.Don't wait for any one to show you the way.Nobody will.There isn't a way till you make one.Get education, get a good education.Fight your way to the top.It's your only chance.I've watched you.You'll do no good at digging and property minding.There isn't a neighbour in Bromstead won't be able to skin you at suchlike games.You and Iare the brainy unstable kind, topside or nothing.And if ever those blithering houses come to you--don't have 'em.Give them away!
Dynamite 'em--and off! LIVE, Dick! I'll get rid of them for you if I can, Dick, but remember what I say."...
So it was my father discoursed, if not in those particular words, yet exactly in that manner, as he slouched along the southward road, with resentful eyes becoming less resentful as he talked, and flinging out clumsy illustrative motions at the outskirts of Bromstead as we passed along them.That afternoon he hated Bromstead, from its foot-tiring pebbles up.He had no illusions about Bromstead or himself.I have the clearest impression of him in his garden-stained tweeds with a deer-stalker hat on the back of his head and presently a pipe sometimes between his teeth and sometimes in his gesticulating hand, as he became diverted by his talk from his original exasperation....
This particular afternoon is no doubt mixed up in my memory with many other afternoons; all sorts of things my father said and did at different times have got themselves referred to it; it filled me at the time with a great unprecedented sense of fellowship and it has become the symbol now for all our intercourse together.If I didn't understand the things he said, I did the mood he was in.He gave me two very broad ideas in that talk and the talks I have mingled with it; he gave them to me very clearly and they have remained fundamental in my mind; one a sense of the extraordinary confusion and waste and planlessness of the human life that went on all about us; and the other of a great ideal of order and economy which he called variously Science and Civilisation, and which, though I do not remember that he ever used that word, I suppose many people nowadays would identify with Socialism,--as the Fabians expound it.
He was not very definite about this Science, you must understand, but he seemed always to be waving his hand towards it,--just as his contemporary Tennyson seems always to be doing--he belonged to his age and mostly his talk was destructive of the limited beliefs of his time, he led me to infer rather than actually told me that this Science was coming, a spirit of light and order, to the rescue of a world groaning and travailing in muddle for the want of it....
5
When I think of Bromstead nowadays I find it inseparably bound up with the disorders of my father's gardening, and the odd patchings and paintings that disfigured his houses.It was all of a piece with that.
Let me try and give something of the quality of Bromstead and something of its history.It is the quality and history of a thousand places round and about London, and round and about the other great centres of population in the world.Indeed it is in a measure the quality of the whole of this modern world from which we who have the statesman's passion struggle to evolve, and dream still of evolving order.
