Tono-Bungay Read online

  Produced by John Bean; Diane Bean and David Widger

  TONO-BUNGAY

  by H.G Wells

  BOOK THE FIRST

  THE DAYS BEFORE TONO-BUNGAY WAS INVENTED

  CHAPTER THE FIRST

  OF BLADESOVER HOUSE, AND MY MOTHER; AND THE CONSTITUTION OF SOCIETY

  I

  Most people in this world seem to live "in character"; they have abeginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous one withanother and true to the rules of their type. You can speak of them asbeing of this sort of people or that. They are, as theatrical peoplesay, no more (and no less) than "character actors." They have a class,they have a place, they know what is becoming in them and what is due tothem, and their proper size of tombstone tells at last how properly theyhave played the part. But there is also another kind of life that is notso much living as a miscellaneous tasting of life. One gets hit by someunusual transverse force, one is jerked out of one's stratum and livescrosswise for the rest of the time, and, as it were, in a successionof samples. That has been my lot, and that is what has set me at lastwriting something in the nature of a novel. I have got an unusual seriesof impressions that I want very urgently to tell. I have seen life atvery different levels, and at all these levels I have seen it with asort of intimacy and in good faith. I have been a native in many socialcountries. I have been the unwelcome guest of a working baker, mycousin, who has since died in the Chatham infirmary; I have eatenillegal snacks--the unjustifiable gifts of footmen--in pantries,and been despised for my want of style (and subsequently married anddivorced) by the daughter of a gasworks clerk; and--to go to my otherextreme--I was once--oh, glittering days!--an item in the house-partyof a countess. She was, I admit, a countess with a financial aspect, butstill, you know, a countess. I've seen these people at various angles.At the dinner-table I've met not simply the titled but the great. Onone occasion--it is my brightest memory--I upset my champagne over thetrousers of the greatest statesman in the empire--Heaven forbid I shouldbe so invidious as to name him!--in the warmth of our mutual admiration.

  And once (though it is the most incidental thing in my life) I murdereda man....

  Yes, I've seen a curious variety of people and ways of livingaltogether. Odd people they all are great and small, very much alike atbottom and curiously different on their surfaces. I wish I had rangedjust a little further both up and down, seeing I have ranged so far.Royalty must be worth knowing and very great fun. But my contacts withprinces have been limited to quite public occasions, nor at the otherend of the scale have I had what I should call an inside acquaintancewith that dusty but attractive class of people who go about on thehigh-roads drunk but enfamille (so redeeming the minor lapse), in thesummertime, with a perambulator, lavender to sell, sun-brown children,a smell, and ambiguous bundles that fire the imagination. Navvies,farm-labourers, sailormen and stokers, all such as sit in 1834beer-houses, are beyond me also, and I suppose must remain so now forever. My intercourse with the ducal rank too has been negligible; Ionce went shooting with a duke, and in an outburst of what was no doubtsnobbishness, did my best to get him in the legs. But that failed.

  I'm sorry I haven't done the whole lot though....

  You will ask by what merit I achieved this remarkable social range,this extensive cross-section of the British social organism. It was theAccident of Birth. It always is in England.

  Indeed, if I may make the remark so cosmic, everything is. But that isby the way. I was my uncle's nephew, and my uncle was no less a personthan Edward Ponderevo, whose comet-like transit of the financialheavens happened--it is now ten years ago! Do you remember the daysof Ponderevo, the great days, I mean, of Ponderevo? Perhaps you hada trifle in some world-shaking enterprise! Then you know him onlytoo well. Astraddle on Tono-Bungay, he flashed athwart the emptyheavens--like a comet--rather, like a stupendous rocket!--and overawedinvestors spoke of his star. At his zenith he burst into a cloud ofthe most magnificent promotions. What a time that was! The Napoleon ofdomestic conveniences!

  I was his nephew, his peculiar and intimate nephew. I was hanging onto his coat-tails all the way through. I made pills with him in thechemist's shop at Wimblehurst before he began. I was, you might say, thestick of his rocket; and after our tremendous soar, after he had playedwith millions, a golden rain in the sky, after my bird's-eye view of themodern world, I fell again, a little scarred and blistered perhaps, twoand twenty years older, with my youth gone, my manhood eaten in upon,but greatly edified, into this Thames-side yard, into these white heatsand hammerings, amidst the fine realites of steel--to think it all overin my leisure and jot down the notes and inconsecutive observationsthat make this book. It was more, you know, than a figurative soar. Thezenith of that career was surely our flight across the channel in theLord Roberts B....

  I warn you this book is going to be something of an agglomeration. Iwant to trace my social trajectory (and my uncle's) as the main line ofmy story, but as this is my first novel and almost certainly my last,I want to get in, too, all sorts of things that struck me, things thatamused me and impressions I got--even although they don't ministerdirectly to my narrative at all. I want to set out my own queer loveexperiences too, such as they are, for they troubled and distressedand swayed me hugely, and they still seem to me to contain all sorts ofirrational and debatable elements that I shall be the clearer-headedfor getting on paper. And possibly I may even flow into descriptions ofpeople who are really no more than people seen in transit, justbecause it amuses me to recall what they said and did to us, andmore particularly how they behaved in the brief but splendid glare ofTono-Bungay and its still more glaring offspring. It lit some of themup, I can assure you! Indeed, I want to get in all sorts of things. Myideas of a novel all through are comprehensive rather than austere....

  Tono-Bungay still figures on the hoardings, it stands in rows in everychemist's storeroom, it still assuages the coughs of age and brightensthe elderly eye and loosens the elderly tongue; but its social glory,its financial illumination, have faded from the world for ever. And I,sole scorched survivor from the blaze, sit writing of it here in an airthat is never still for the clang and thunder of machines, on a tablelittered with working drawings, and amid fragments of models and notesabout velocities and air and water pressures and trajectories--of analtogether different sort from that of Tono-Bungay.

  II

  I write that much and look at it, and wonder whether, after all, this isany fair statement of what I am attempting in this book. I've given, Isee, an impression that I want to make simply a hotch-potch of anecdotesand experiences with my uncle swimming in the middle as the largest lumpof victual. I'll own that here, with the pen already started, I realisewhat a fermenting mass of things learnt and emotions experienced andtheories formed I've got to deal with, and how, in a sense, hopeless mybook must be from the very outset. I suppose what I'm really trying torender is nothing more nor less than Life--as one man has found it. Iwant to tell--MYSELF, and my impressions of the thing as a whole, to saythings I have come to feel intensely of the laws, traditions, usages,and ideas we call society, and how we poor individuals get driven andlured and stranded among these windy, perplexing shoals and channels.I've got, I suppose, to a time of life when things begin to take onshapes that have an air of reality, and become no longer material fordreaming, but interesting in themselves. I've reached the criticising,novel-writing age, and here I am writing mine--my one novel--withouthaving any of the discipline to refrain and omit that I suppose theregular novel-writer acquires.

  I've read an average share of novels and made some starts before thisbeginning, and I've found the restraints and rules of the art (as I madethem out) impossible for me. I like to write, I am keenly interested inwriting, but it is not my technique. I'm an engineer with
a patent ortwo and a set of ideas; most of whatever artist there is in me has beengiven to turbine machines and boat building and the problem of flying,and do what I will I fail to see how I can be other than a lax,undisciplined story-teller. I must sprawl and flounder, comment andtheorise, if I am to get the thing out I have in mind. And it isn'ta constructed tale I have to tell, but unmanageable realities. Mylove-story--and if only I can keep up the spirit of truth-telling allthrough as strongly as I have now, you shall have it all--falls intono sort of neat scheme of telling. It involves three separate femininepersons. It's all mixed up with the other things....

  But I've said enough, I hope, to excuse myself for the method or wantof method in what follows, and I think I had better tell without furtherdelay of my boyhood and my early impressions in the shadow of BladesoverHouse.

  III

  There came a time when I realised that Bladesover House was not all itseemed, but when I was a little boy I took the place with the entirestfaith as a complete authentic microcosm. I believed that the Bladesoversystem was a little working-model--and not so very little either--of thewhole world.

  Let me try and give you the effect of it.

  Bladesover lies up on the Kentish Downs, eight miles perhaps fromAshborough; and its old pavilion, a little wooden parody of the templeof Vesta at Tibur, upon the hill crest behind the house, commands intheory at least a view of either sea, of the Channel southward and theThames to the northeast. The park is the second largest in Kent, finelywooded with well-placed beeches, many elms and some sweet chestnuts,abounding in little valleys and hollows of bracken, with springs and astream and three fine ponds and multitudes of fallow deer. The house wasbuilt in the eighteenth century, it is of pale red brick in the style ofa French chateau, and save for one pass among the crests which opens toblue distances, to minute, remote, oast-set farm-houses and copsesand wheat fields and the occasional gleam of water, its hundredand seventeen windows look on nothing but its own wide and handsometerritories. A semi-circular screen of great beeches masks the churchand village, which cluster picturesquely about the high road along theskirts of the great park. Northward, at the remotest corner of thatenclosure, is a second dependent village, Ropedean, less fortunate inits greater distance and also on account of a rector. This divinewas indeed rich, but he was vindictively economical because of someshrinkage of his tithes; and by reason of his use of the word Eucharistfor the Lord's Supper he had become altogether estranged from the greatladies of Bladesover. So that Ropedean was in the shadows through allthat youthful time.

  Now the unavoidable suggestion of that wide park and that fair largehouse, dominating church, village and the country side, was that theyrepresented the thing that mattered supremely in the world, and that allother things had significance only in relation to them. They representedthe Gentry, the Quality, by and through and for whom the rest of theworld, the farming folk and the labouring folk, the trades-peopleof Ashborough, and the upper servants and the lower servants and theservants of the estate, breathed and lived and were permitted. And theQuality did it so quietly and thoroughly, the great house mingled sosolidly and effectually earth and sky, the contrast of its spacioushall and saloon and galleries, its airy housekeeper's room and warrenof offices with the meagre dignities of the vicar, and the pinched andstuffy rooms of even the post-office people and the grocer, so enforcedthese suggestions, that it was only when I was a boy of thirteen orfourteen and some queer inherited strain of scepticism had set medoubting whether Mr. Bartlett, the vicar, did really know with certaintyall about God, that as a further and deeper step in doubting I began toquestion the final rightness of the gentlefolks, their primary necessityin the scheme of things. But once that scepticism had awakened it tookme fast and far. By fourteen I had achieved terrible blasphemies andsacrilege; I had resolved to marry a viscount's daughter, and I hadblacked the left eye--I think it was the left--of her half-brother, inopen and declared rebellion.

  But of that in its place.

  The great house, the church, the village, and the labourers and theservants in their stations and degrees, seemed to me, I say, to be aclosed and complete social system. About us were other villages andgreat estates, and from house to house, interlacing, correlated, theGentry, the fine Olympians, came and went. The country towns seemed merecollections of ships, marketing places for the tenantry, centres forsuch education as they needed, as entirely dependent on the gentry asthe village and scarcely less directly so. I thought this was the orderof the whole world. I thought London was only a greater country townwhere the gentle-folk kept town-houses and did their greater shoppingunder the magnificent shadow of the greatest of all fine gentlewomen,the Queen. It seemed to be in the divine order. That all this fineappearance was already sapped, that there were forces at work that mightpresently carry all this elaborate social system in which my motherinstructed me so carefully that I might understand my "place," to Limbo,had scarcely dawned upon me even by the time that Tono-Bungay was fairlylaunched upon the world.

  There are many people in England to-day upon whom it has not yet dawned.There are times when I doubt whether any but a very inconsiderableminority of English people realise how extensively this ostensible orderhas even now passed away. The great houses stand in the parks still,the cottages cluster respectfully on their borders, touching their eaveswith their creepers, the English countryside--you can range through Kentfrom Bladesover northward and see persists obstinately in looking whatit was. It is like an early day in a fine October. The hand of changerests on it all, unfelt, unseen; resting for awhile, as it were halfreluctantly, before it grips and ends the thing for ever. One frost andthe whole face of things will be bare, links snap, patience end, ourfine foliage of pretences lie glowing in the mire.

  For that we have still to wait a little while. The new order may havegone far towards shaping itself, but just as in that sort of lanternshow that used to be known in the village as the "Dissolving Views," thescene that is going remains upon the mind, traceable and evident, andthe newer picture is yet enigmatical long after the lines that are toreplace those former ones have grown bright and strong, so that the newEngland of our children's children is still a riddle to me. The ideasof democracy, of equality, and above all of promiscuous fraternity havecertainly never really entered into the English mind. But what IS cominginto it? All this book, I hope, will bear a little on that. Our peoplenever formulates; it keeps words for jests and ironies. In the meanwhilethe old shapes, the old attitudes remain, subtly changed and changingstill, sheltering strange tenants. Bladesover House is now let furnishedto Sir Reuben Lichtenstein, and has been since old Lady Drew died; itwas my odd experience to visit there, in the house of which my motherhad been housekeeper, when my uncle was at the climax of Tono-Bungay.It was curious to notice then the little differences that had come tothings with this substitution. To borrow an image from mymineralogical days, these Jews were not so much a new British gentry as"pseudomorphous" after the gentry. They are a very clever people, theJews, but not clever enough to suppress their cleverness. I wished Icould have gone downstairs to savour the tone of the pantry. It wouldhave been very different I know. Hawksnest, over beyond, I noted, hadits pseudomorph too; a newspaper proprietor of the type that hustlesalong with stolen ideas from one loud sink-or-swim enterprise toanother, had bought the place outright; Redgrave was in the hands ofbrewers.

  But the people in the villages, so far as I could detect, saw nodifference in their world. Two little girls bobbed and an old labourertouched his hat convulsively as I walked through the village. He stillthought he knew his place--and mine. I did not know him, but I wouldhave liked dearly to have asked him if he remembered my mother, ifeither my uncle or old Lichtenstein had been man enough to stand beinggiven away like that.

  In that English countryside of my boyhood every human being had a"place." It belonged to you from your birth like the colour of youreyes, it was inextricably your destiny. Above you were your betters,below you were your inferiors, and there were even
an unstablequestionable few, cases so disputable that you might for the roughpurposes of every day at least, regard them as your equals. Headand centre of our system was Lady Drew, her "leddyship," shrivelled,garrulous, with a wonderful memory for genealogies and very, veryold, and beside her and nearly as old, Miss Somerville, her cousin andcompanion. These two old souls lived like dried-up kernels in the greatshell of Bladesover House, the shell that had once been gaily full offops, of fine ladies in powder and patches and courtly gentlemen withswords; and when there was no company they spent whole days in thecorner parlour just over the housekeeper's room, between reading andslumber and caressing their two pet dogs. When I was a boy I used alwaysto think of these two poor old creatures as superior beings living, likeGod, somewhere through the ceiling. Occasionally they bumped about a bitand one even heard them overhead, which gave them a greater effect ofreality without mitigating their vertical predominance. Sometimes too Isaw them. Of course if I came upon them in the park or in the shrubbery(where I was a trespasser) I hid or fled in pious horror, but I wasupon due occasion taken into the Presence by request. I rememberher "leddyship" then as a thing of black silks and a golden chain,a quavering injunction to me to be a good boy, a very shrunkenloose-skinned face and neck, and a ropy hand that trembled a halfcrowninto mine. Miss Somerville hovered behind, a paler thing of brokenlavender and white and black, with screwed up, sandy-lashed eyes.Her hair was yellow and her colour bright, and when we sat in thehousekeeper's room of a winter's night warming our toes and sippingelder wine, her maid would tell us the simple secrets of that belatedflush.... After my fight with young Garvell I was of course banished,and I never saw those poor old painted goddesses again.

  Then there came and went on these floors over our respectful heads, theCompany; people I rarely saw, but whose tricks and manners were imitatedand discussed by their maids and valets in the housekeeper's room andthe steward's room--so that I had them through a medium at second hand.I gathered that none of the company were really Lady Drew's equals, theywere greater and lesser after the manner of all things in our world.Once I remember there was a Prince, with a real live gentleman inattendance, and that was a little above our customary levels and excitedus all, and perhaps raised our expectations unduly. Afterwards, Rabbits,the butler, came into my mother's room downstairs, red with indignationand with tears in his eyes. "Look at that!" gasped Rabbits. My motherwas speechless with horror. That was a sovereign, a mere sovereign, suchas you might get from any commoner!

  After Company, I remember, came anxious days, for the poor old womenupstairs were left tired and cross and vindictive, and in a state ofphysical and emotional indigestion after their social efforts....

  On the lowest fringe of these real Olympians hung the vicarage people,and next to them came those ambiguous beings who are neither quality norsubjects. The vicarage people certainly hold a place by themselves inthe typical English scheme; nothing is more remarkable than the progressthe Church has made--socially--in the last two hundred years. In theearly eighteenth century the vicar was rather under than over thehouse-steward, and was deemed a fitting match for the housekeeper or anynot too morally discredited discard. The eighteenth century literatureis full of his complaints that he might not remain at table to share thepie. He rose above these indignities because of the abundance of youngersons. When I meet the large assumptions of the contemporary cleric, Iam apt to think of these things. It is curious to note that to-day thatdown-trodden, organ-playing creature, the Church of England villageSchoolmaster, holds much the same position as the seventeenth centuryparson. The doctor in Bladesover ranked below the vicar but above the"vet," artists and summer visitors squeezed in above or below this pointaccording to their appearance and expenditure, and then in a carefullyarranged scale came the tenantry, the butler and housekeeper, thevillage shopkeeper, the head keeper, the cook, the publican, the secondkeeper, the blacksmith (whose status was complicated by his daughterkeeping the post-office--and a fine hash she used to make of telegramstoo!) the village shopkeeper's eldest son, the first footman, youngersons of the village shopkeeper, his first assistant, and so forth.

  All these conceptions and applications of a universal precedence andmuch else I drank in at Bladesover, as I listened to the talk of valets,ladies'-maids, Rabbits the butler and my mother in the much-cupboarded,white-painted, chintz-brightened housekeeper's room where the upperservants assembled, or of footmen and Rabbits and estate men of allsorts among the green baize and Windsor chairs of the pantry--whereRabbits, being above the law, sold beer without a license or anycompunction--or of housemaids and still-room maids in the bleak,matting-carpeted still-room or of the cook and her kitchen maids andcasual friends among the bright copper and hot glow of the kitchens.

  Of course their own ranks and places came by implication to thesepeople, and it was with the ranks and places of the Olympians that thetalk mainly concerned itself. There was an old peerage and a Crockfordtogether with the books of recipes, the Whitaker's Almanack, the OldMoore's Almanack, and the eighteenth century dictionary, on the littledresser that broke the cupboards on one side of my mother's room; therewas another peerage, with the covers off, in the pantry; there was anew peerage in the billiard-room, and I seem to remember another in theanomalous apartment that held the upper servants' bagatelle board and inwhich, after the Hall dinner, they partook of the luxury of sweets. Andif you had asked any of those upper servants how such and such a Princeof Battenberg was related to, let us say, Mr. Cunninghame Graham orthe Duke of Argyle, you would have been told upon the nail. As a boy, Iheard a great deal of that sort of thing, and if to this day I amstill a little vague about courtesy titles and the exact application ofhonorifics, it is, I can assure you, because I hardened my heart, andnot from any lack of adequate opportunity of mastering these succulentparticulars.

  Dominating all these memories is the figure of my mother--my mother whodid not love me because I grew liker my father every day--and who knewwith inflexible decision her place and the place of every one in theworld--except the place that concealed my father--and in some detailsmine. Subtle points were put to her. I can see and hear her sayingnow, "No, Miss Fison, peers of England go in before peers of the UnitedKingdom, and he is merely a peer of the United Kingdom." She had muchexercise in placing people's servants about her tea-table, where theetiquette was very strict. I wonder sometimes if the etiquette ofhousekeepers' rooms is as strict to-day, and what my mother would havemade of a chauffeur....

  On the whole I am glad that I saw so much as I did of Bladesover--iffor no other reason than because seeing it when I did, quite naively,believing in it thoroughly, and then coming to analyse it, has enabledme to understand much that would be absolutely incomprehensible in thestructure of English society. Bladesover is, I am convinced, the clue toalmost all that is distinctively British and perplexing to the foreigninquirer in England and the English-speaking peoples. Grasp firmly thatEngland was all Bladesover two hundred years ago; that it has hadReform Acts indeed, and such--like changes of formula, but no essentialrevolution since then; that all that is modern and different has come inas a thing intruded or as a gloss upon this predominant formula, eitherimpertinently or apologetically; and you will perceive at once thereasonableness, the necessity, of that snobbishness which is thedistinctive quality of English thought. Everybody who is not actually inthe shadow of a Bladesover is as it were perpetually seeking afterlost orientations. We have never broken with our tradition, never evensymbolically hewed it to pieces, as the French did in quivering factin the Terror. But all the organizing ideas have slackened, the oldhabitual bonds have relaxed or altogether come undone. And Americatoo, is, as it were, a detached, outlying part of that estate whichhas expanded in queer ways. George Washington, Esquire, was of thegentlefolk, and he came near being a King. It was Plutarch, you know,and nothing intrinsically American that prevented George Washingtonbeing a King....

  IV

  I hated teatime in the housekeeper's room more than anything else atBl
adesover. And more particularly I hated it when Mrs. Mackridge andMrs. Booch and Mrs. Latude-Fernay were staying in the house. They were,all three of them, pensioned-off servants.

  Old friends of Lady Drew's had rewarded them posthumously for aprolonged devotion to their minor comforts, and Mrs. Booch was alsotrustee for a favourite Skye terrier. Every year Lady Drew gave them aninvitation--a reward and encouragement of virtue with especial referenceto my mother and Miss Fison, the maid. They sat about in black andshiny and flouncey clothing adorned with gimp and beads, eatinggreat quantities of cake, drinking much tea in a stately manner andreverberating remarks.

  I remember these women as immense. No doubt they were of negotiablesize, but I was only a very little chap and they have assumed nightmareproportions in my mind. They loomed, they bulged, they impended.Mrs. Mackridge was large and dark; there was a marvel about her head,inasmuch as she was bald. She wore a dignified cap, and in front of thatupon her brow, hair was PAINTED. I have never seen the like since. Shehad been maid to the widow of Sir Roderick Blenderhasset Impey, somesort of governor or such-like portent in the East Indies, and from herremains--in Mrs. Mackridge--I judge Lady Impey was a very stupendous andcrushing creature indeed. Lady Impey had been of the Juno type, haughty,unapproachable, given to irony and a caustic wit. Mrs. Mackridge had nowit, but she had acquired the caustic voice and gestures along with theold satins and trimmings of the great lady. When she told you it was afine morning, she seemed also to be telling you you were a fool and alow fool to boot; when she was spoken to, she had a way of acknowledgingyour poor tinkle of utterance with a voluminous, scornful "Haw!" thatmade you want to burn her alive. She also had a way of saying "Indade!"with a droop of the eyelids.

  Mrs. Booch was a smaller woman, brown haired, with queer little curls oneither side of her face, large blue eyes and a small set of stereotypedremarks that constituted her entire mental range. Mrs. Latude-Fernay hasleft, oddly enough, no memory at all except her name and the effect ofa green-grey silk dress, all set with gold and blue buttons. I fancy shewas a large blonde. Then there was Miss Fison, the maid who served bothLady Drew and Miss Somerville, and at the end of the table opposite mymother, sat Rabbits the butler. Rabbits, for a butler, was an unassumingman, and at tea he was not as you know butlers, but in a morningcoat and a black tie with blue spots. Still, he was large, with sidewhiskers, even if his clean-shaven mouth was weak and little. I satamong these people on a high, hard, early Gregorian chair, trying toexist, like a feeble seedling amidst great rocks, and my mother satwith an eye upon me, resolute to suppress the slightest manifestationof vitality. It was hard on me, but perhaps it was also hard uponthese rather over-fed, ageing, pretending people, that my youthfulrestlessness and rebellious unbelieving eyes should be thrust in amongtheir dignities.

  Tea lasted for nearly three-quarters of an hour, and I sat it outperforce; and day after day the talk was exactly the same.

  "Sugar, Mrs. Mackridge?" my mother used to ask.

  "Sugar, Mrs. Latude-Fernay?"

  The word sugar would stir the mind of Mrs. Mackridge. "They say," shewould begin, issuing her proclamation--at least half her sentences began"they say"--"sugar is fatt-an-ing, nowadays. Many of the best people donot take it at all."

  "Not with their tea, ma'am," said Rabbits intelligently.

  "Not with anything," said Mrs. Mackridge, with an air of crushingrepartee, and drank.

  "What won't they say next?" said Miss Fison.

  "They do say such things!" said Mrs. Booch.

  "They say," said Mrs. Mackridge, inflexibly, "the doctors are notrecomm-an-ding it now."

  My Mother: "No, ma'am?"

  Mrs. Mackridge: "No, ma'am."

  Then, to the table at large: "Poor Sir Roderick, before he died,consumed great quan-ta-ties of sugar. I have sometimes fancied it mayhave hastened his end."

  This ended the first skirmish. A certain gloom of manner and a pause wasconsidered due to the sacred memory of Sir Roderick.

  "George," said my mother, "don't kick the chair!"

  Then, perhaps, Mrs. Booch would produce a favourite piece from herrepertoire. "The evenings are drawing out nicely," she would say, orif the season was decadent, "How the evenings draw in!" It was aninvaluable remark to her; I do not know how she would have got alongwithout it.

  My mother, who sat with her back to the window, would always considerit due to Mrs. Booch to turn about and regard the evening in the act ofelongation or contraction, whichever phase it might be.

  A brisk discussion of how long we were to the longest or shortest daywould ensue, and die away at last exhausted.

  Mrs. Mackridge, perhaps, would reopen. She had many intelligent habits;among others she read the paper--The Morning Post. The other ladieswould at times tackle that sheet, but only to read the births,marriages, and deaths on the front page. It was, of course, the oldMorning Post that cost threepence, not the brisk coruscating young thingof to-day. "They say," she would open, "that Lord Tweedums is to go toCanada."

  "Ah!" said Mr. Rabbits; "dew they?"

  "Isn't he," said my mother, "the Earl of Slumgold's cousin?" She knewhe was; it was an entirely irrelevant and unnecessary remark, but still,something to say.

  "The same, ma'am," said Mrs. Mackridge. "They say he was extremelaypopular in New South Wales. They looked up to him greatlay. I knew him,ma'am, as a young man. A very nice pleasant young fella."

  Interlude of respect.

  "'Is predecessor," said Rabbits, who had acquired from some clericalmodel a precise emphatic articulation without acquiring at the same timethe aspirates that would have graced it, "got into trouble at Sydney."

  "Haw!" said Mrs. Mackridge, scornfully, "so am tawled."

  "'E came to Templemorton after 'e came back, and I remember them talking'im over after 'e'd gone again."

  "Haw?" said Mrs. Mackridge, interrogatively.

  "'Is fuss was quotin' poetry, ma'am. 'E said--what was it 'e said--'Theylef' their country for their country's good,'--which in some way wastook to remind them of their being originally convic's, though nowreformed. Every one I 'eard speak, agreed it was takless of 'im."

  "Sir Roderick used to say," said Mrs. Mackridge, "that the FirstThing,"--here Mrs. Mackridge paused and looked dreadfully at me--"andthe Second Thing"--here she fixed me again--"and the Third Thing"--now Iwas released--"needed in a colonial governor is Tact." She became awareof my doubts again, and added predominantly, "It has always struck methat that was a Singularly True Remark."

  I resolved that if ever I found this polypus of Tact growing up in mysoul, I would tear it out by the roots, throw it forth and stamp on it.

  "They're queer people--colonials," said Rabbits, "very queer. When I wasat Templemorton I see something of 'em. Queer fellows, some of 'em. Veryrespectful of course, free with their money in a spasammy sort of way,but--Some of 'em, I must confess, make me nervous. They have an eyeon you. They watch you--as you wait. They let themselves appear to belookin' at you..."

  My mother said nothing in that discussion. The word colonies alwaysupset her. She was afraid, I think, that if she turned her mind in thatdirection my errant father might suddenly and shockingly bediscovered, no doubt conspicuously bigamic and altogether offensive andrevolutionary. She did not want to rediscover my father at all.

  It is curious that when I was a little listening boy I had such an ideaof our colonies that I jeered in my heart at Mrs. Mackridge's colonialascendancy. These brave emancipated sunburnt English of the open, Ithought, suffer these aristocratic invaders as a quaint anachronism, butas for being gratified--!

  I don't jeer now. I'm not so sure.

  V

  It is a little difficult to explain why I did not come to do what wasthe natural thing for any one in my circumstances to do, and take myworld for granted. A certain innate scepticism, I think, explains it anda certain inaptitude for sympathetic assimilation. My father, I believe,was a sceptic; my mother was certainly a hard woman.

  I was an only child, and
to this day I do not know whether my fatheris living or dead. He fled my mother's virtues before my distinctermemories began. He left no traces in his flight, and she, in herindignation, destroyed every vestige that she could of him. Never aphotograph nor a scrap of his handwriting have I seen; and it was, Iknow, only the accepted code of virtue and discretion that prevented herdestroying her marriage certificate and me, and so making a clean sweepof her matrimonial humiliation. I suppose I must inherit something ofthe moral stupidity that would enable her to make a holocaust of everylittle personal thing she had of him. There must have been presents madeby him as a lover, for example--books with kindly inscriptions, lettersperhaps, a flattened flower, a ring, or such-like gage. She kept herwedding-ring, of course, but all the others she destroyed. She nevertold me his christian name or indeed spoke a word to me of him; thoughat times I came near daring to ask her: add what I have of him--it isn'tmuch--I got from his brother, my hero, my uncle Ponderevo. She wore herring; her marriage certificate she kept in a sealed envelope in the verybottom of her largest trunk, and me she sustained at a privateschool among the Kentish hills. You must not think I was always atBladesover--even in my holidays. If at the time these came round, LadyDrew was vexed by recent Company, or for any other reason wished to takeit out of my mother, then she used to ignore the customary reminder mymother gave her, and I "stayed on" at the school.

  But such occasions were rare, and I suppose that between ten andfourteen I averaged fifty days a year at Bladesover.

  Don't imagine I deny that was a fine thing for me. Bladesover, inabsorbing the whole countryside, had not altogether missed greatness.The Bladesover system has at least done one good thing for England, ithas abolished the peasant habit of mind. If many of us still live andbreathe pantry and housekeeper's room, we are quit of the dream ofliving by economising parasitically on hens and pigs.... About that parkthere were some elements of a liberal education; there was a great spaceof greensward not given over to manure and food grubbing; there wasmystery, there was matter for the imagination. It was still a park ofdeer. I saw something of the life of these dappled creatures, heard thebelling of stags, came upon young fawns among the bracken, found bones,skulls, and antlers in lonely places. There were corners that gavea gleam of meaning to the word forest, glimpses of unstudied naturalsplendour. There was a slope of bluebells in the broken sunlight underthe newly green beeches in the west wood that is now precious sapphirein my memory; it was the first time that I knowingly met Beauty.

  And in the house there were books. The rubbish old Lady Drew read Inever saw; stuff of the Maria Monk type, I have since gathered, hada fascination for her; but back in the past there had been a Drew ofintellectual enterprise, Sir Cuthbert, the son of Sir Matthew who builtthe house; and thrust away, neglected and despised, in an old roomupstairs, were books and treasures of his that my mother let me routamong during a spell of wintry wet. Sitting under a dormer window on ashelf above great stores of tea and spices, I became familiar with muchof Hogarth in a big portfolio, with Raphael, there was a great book ofengravings from the stanzas of Raphael in the Vatican--and with mostof the capitals of Europe as they had looked about 1780, by meansof several pig iron-moulded books of views. There was also a broadeighteenth century atlas with huge wandering maps that instructed memightily. It had splendid adornments about each map title; Hollandshowed a fisherman and his boat; Russia a Cossack; Japan, remarkablepeople attired in pagodas--I say it deliberately, "pagodas." There wereTerrae Incognitae in every continent then, Poland, Sarmatia, lands sincelost; and many a voyage I made with a blunted pin about that large,incorrect and dignified world. The books in that little old closet hadbeen banished, I suppose, from the saloon during the Victorian revivalof good taste and emasculated orthodoxy, but my mother had no suspicionof their character. So I read and understood the good sound rhetoric ofTom Paine's "Rights of Man," and his "Common Sense," excellent books,once praised by bishops and since sedulously lied about. Gulliver wasthere unexpurgated, strong meat for a boy perhaps but not too strong Ihold--I have never regretted that I escaped niceness in these affairs.The satire of Traldragdubh made my blood boil as it was meant to do,but I hated Swift for the Houyhnhnms and never quite liked a horseafterwards. Then I remember also a translation of Voltaire's "Candide,"and "Rasselas;" and, vast book though it was, I really believe I read,in a muzzy sort of way of course, from end to end, and even with somereference now and then to the Atlas, Gibbon--in twelve volumes.

  These readings whetted my taste for more, and surreptitiously I raidedthe bookcases in the big saloon. I got through quite a number ofbooks before my sacrilegious temerity was discovered by Ann, the oldhead-housemaid. I remember that among others I tried a translation ofPlato's "Republic" then, and found extraordinarily little interest init; I was much too young for that; but "Vathek"--"Vathek" was gloriousstuff. That kicking affair! When everybody HAD to kick!

  The thought of "Vathek" always brings back with it my boyish memory ofthe big saloon at Bladesover.

  It was a huge long room with many windows opening upon the park, andeach window--there were a dozen or more reaching from the floor up--hadits elaborate silk or satin curtains, heavily fringed, a canopy (is it?)above, its completely white shutters folding into the deep thickness ofthe wall. At either end of that great still place was an immense marblechimney-piece; the end by the bookcase showed the wolf and Romulus andRemus, with Homer and Virgil for supporters; the design of the other endI have forgotten. Frederick, Prince of Wales, swaggered flatly over theone, twice life-size, but mellowed by the surface gleam of oil; andover the other was an equally colossal group of departed Drews as sylvandeities, scantily clad, against a storm-rent sky. Down the centre of theelaborate ceiling were three chandeliers, each bearing some hundreds ofdangling glass lustres, and over the interminable carpet--it impressedme as about as big as Sarmatia in the store-room Atlas--were islands andarchipelagoes of chintz-covered chairs and couches, tables, great Sevresvases on pedestals, a bronze man and horse. Somewhere in this wildernessone came, I remember, upon--a big harp beside a lyre-shaped music stand,and a grand piano....

  The book-borrowing raid was one of extraordinary dash and danger.

  One came down the main service stairs--that was legal, and illegalitybegan in a little landing when, very cautiously, one went through a redbaize door. A little passage led to the hall, and here one reconnoiteredfor Ann, the old head-housemaid--the younger housemaids were friendlyand did not count. Ann located, came a dash across the open space atthe foot of that great staircase that has never been properly descendedsince powder went out of fashion, and so to the saloon door. A beastof an oscillating Chinaman in china, as large as life, grimaced andquivered to one's lightest steps. That door was the perilous place; itwas double with the thickness of the wall between, so that one could notlisten beforehand for the whisk of the feather-brush on the other side.Oddly rat-like, is it not, this darting into enormous places in pursuitof the abandoned crumbs of thought?

  And I found Langhorne's "Plutarch" too, I remember, on those shelves. Itseems queer to me now to think that I acquired pride and self-respect,the idea of a state and the germ of public spirit, in such a furtivefashion; queer, too, that it should rest with an old Greek, dead theseeighteen hundred years to teach that.

  VI

  The school I went to was the sort of school the Bladesover systempermitted. The public schools that add comic into existence in the briefglow of the Renascence had been taken possession of by the ruling class;the lower classes were not supposed to stand in need of schools, and ourmiddle stratum got the schools it deserved, private schools, schools anyunqualified pretender was free to establish. Mine was kept by a man whohad had the energy to get himself a College of Preceptors diploma, andconsidering how cheap his charges were, I will readily admit the placemight have been worse. The building was a dingy yellow-brick residenceoutside the village, with the schoolroom as an outbuilding of lath andplaster.

  I do not remember that my school-days were u
nhappy--indeed I recall agood lot of fine mixed fun in them--but I cannot without grave riskof misinterpretation declare that we were at all nice and refined. Wefought much, not sound formal fighting, but "scrapping" of a sincere andmurderous kind, into which one might bring one's boots--it made us toughat any rate--and several of us were the sons of London publicans, whodistinguished "scraps" where one meant to hurt from ordered pugilism,practising both arts, and having, moreover, precocious linguistic gifts.Our cricket-field was bald about the wickets, and we played withoutstyle and disputed with the umpire; and the teaching was chiefly inthe hands of a lout of nineteen, who wore ready-made clothes andtaught despicably. The head-master and proprietor taught us arithmetic,algebra, and Euclid, and to the older boys even trigonometry, himself;he had a strong mathematical bias, and I think now that by the standardof a British public school he did rather well by us.

  We had one inestimable privilege at that school, and that was spiritualneglect. We dealt with one another with the forcible simplicity ofnatural boys, we "cheeked," and "punched" and "clouted"; we thoughtourselves Red Indians and cowboys and such-like honourable things,and not young English gentlemen; we never felt the strain of "OnwardChristian soldiers," nor were swayed by any premature piety in the coldoak pew of our Sunday devotions. All that was good. We spent our rarepennies in the uncensored reading matter of the village dame's shop, onthe Boys of England, and honest penny dreadfuls--ripping stuff, stuffthat anticipated Haggard and Stevenson, badly printed and queerlyillustrated, and very very good for us. On our half-holidays we wereallowed the unusual freedom of rambling in twos and threes wide and farabout the land, talking experimentally, dreaming wildly. There was muchin those walks! To this day the landscape of the Kentish world, with itslow broad distances, its hop gardens and golden stretches of wheat, itsoasts and square church towers, its background of downland and hangers,has for me a faint sense of adventure added to the pleasure of itsbeauty. We smoked on occasion, but nobody put us up to the proper"boyish" things to do; we never "robbed an orchard" for example, thoughthere were orchards all about us, we thought stealing was sinful, westole incidental apples and turnips and strawberries from the fieldsindeed, but in a criminal inglorious fashion, and afterwards we wereashamed. We had our days of adventure, but they were natural accidents,our own adventures. There was one hot day when several of us, walkingout towards Maidstone, were incited by the devil to despise ginger beer,and we fuddled ourselves dreadfully with ale; and a time when our youngminds were infected to the pitch of buying pistols, by the legend ofthe Wild West. Young Roots from Highbury came back with a revolver andcartridges, and we went off six strong to live a free wild life oneholiday afternoon. We fired our first shot deep in the old flint mine atChiselstead, and nearly burst our ear drums; then we fired in a primrosestudded wood by Pickthorn Green, and I gave a false alarm of "keeper,"and we fled in disorder for a mile. After which Roots suddenly shot ata pheasant in the high road by Chiselstead, and then young Barker toldlies about the severity of the game laws and made Roots sore afraid, andwe hid the pistol in a dry ditch outside the school field. A day or soafter we got in again, and ignoring a certain fouling and rusting of thebarrel, tried for a rabbit at three hundred yards. Young Roots blewa molehill at twenty paces into a dust cloud, burnt his fingers, andscorched his face; and the weapon having once displayed this strangedisposition to flame back upon the shooter, was not subsequently fired.

  One main source of excitement for us was "cheeking" people in vans andcarts upon the Goudhurst road; and getting myself into a monstrous whitemess in the chalk pits beyond the village, and catching yellow jaundiceas a sequel to bathing stark naked with three other Adamites, old Ewartleading that function, in the rivulet across Hickson's meadows, areamong my memorabilia. Those free imaginative afternoons! how much theywere for us! how much they did for us! All streams came from the thenundiscovered "sources of the Nile" in those days, all thickets wereIndian jungles, and our best game, I say it with pride, I invented. Igot it out of the Bladesover saloon. We found a wood where "Trespassing"was forbidden, and did the "Retreat of the Ten Thousand" through it fromend to end, cutting our way bravely through a host of nettle beds thatbarred our path, and not forgetting to weep and kneel when at last weemerged within sight of the High Road Sea. So we have burst at times,weeping and rejoicing, upon startled wayfarers. Usually I took the partof that distinguished general Xenophen--and please note the quantity ofthe o. I have all my classical names like that,--Socrates rhymes withBates for me, and except when the bleak eye of some scholar warns me ofhis standards of judgment, I use those dear old mispronunciations still.The little splash into Latin made during my days as a chemist washed offnothing of the habit. Well,--if I met those great gentlemen of the pastwith their accents carelessly adjusted I did at least meet them alive,as an equal, and in a living tongue. Altogether my school might easilyhave been worse for me, and among other good things it gave me a friendwho has lasted my life out.

  This was Ewart, who is now a monumental artist at Woking, after manyvicissitudes. Dear chap, how he did stick out of his clothes to be sure!He was a longlimbed lout, ridiculously tall beside my more youth fullcompactness, and, except that there was no black moustache under hisnose blob, he had the same round knobby face as he has to-day, the samebright and active hazel brown eyes, the stare, the meditative moment,the insinuating reply. Surely no boy ever played the fool as Bob Ewartused to play it, no boy had a readier knack of mantling the world withwonder. Commonness vanished before Ewart, at his expository touch allthings became memorable and rare. From him I first heard tell of love,but only after its barbs were already sticking in my heart. He was, Iknow now the bastard of that great improvident artist, Rickmann Ewart;he brought the light of a lax world that at least had not turned itsback upon beauty, into the growing fermentation of my mind.

  I won his heart by a version of Vathek, and after that we wereinseparable yarning friends. We merged our intellectual stock socompletely that I wonder sometimes how much I did not become Ewart, howmuch Ewart is not vicariously and derivatively me.

  VII

  And then when I had newly passed my fourteenth birthday, came my tragicdisgrace.

  It was in my midsummer holidays that the thing happened, and it wasthrough the Honourable Beatrice Normandy. She had "come into my life,"as they say, before I was twelve.

  She descended unexpectedly into a peaceful interlude that followed theannual going of those Three Great Women. She came into the old nurseryupstairs, and every day she had tea with us in the housekeeper's room.She was eight, and she came with a nurse called Nannie; and to beginwith, I did not like her at all.

  Nobody liked this irruption into the downstairs rooms; the two "gavetrouble,"--a dire offence; Nannie's sense of duty to her charge led torequests and demands that took my mother's breath away. Eggs at unusualtimes, the reboiling of milk, the rejection of an excellent milkpudding--not negotiated respectfully but dictated as of right. Nanniewas a dark, longfeatured, taciturn woman in a grey dress; she had afurtive inflexibility of manner that finally dismayed and crushed andovercame. She conveyed she was "under orders"--like a Greek tragedy. Shewas that strange product of the old time, a devoted, trusted servant;she had, as it were, banked all her pride and will with the greater,more powerful people who employed her, in return for a life-longsecurity of servitude--the bargain was nonetheless binding for beingimplicit. Finally they were to pension her, and she would die the hatedtreasure of a boarding-house. She had built up in herself an enormoushabit of reference to these upstairs people, she had curbed down alldiscordant murmurings of her soul, her very instincts were perverted orsurrendered. She was sexless, her personal pride was all transferred,she mothered another woman's child with a hard, joyless devotion thatwas at least entirely compatible with a stoical separation. She treatedus all as things that counted for nothing save to fetch and carry forher charge. But the Honourable Beatrice could condescend.

  The queer chances of later years come between me and a distinc
tlyseparated memory of that childish face. When I think of Beatrice, Ithink of her as I came to know her at a later time, when at last I cameto know her so well that indeed now I could draw her, and show a hundredlittle delicate things you would miss in looking at her. But even then Iremember how I noted the infinite delicacy of her childish skin and thefine eyebrow, finer than the finest feather that ever one felt on thebreast of a bird. She was one of those elfin, rather precocious littlegirls, quick coloured, with dark hair, naturally curling dusky hairthat was sometimes astray over her eyes, and eyes that were sometimesimpishly dark, and sometimes a clear brown yellow. And from the veryoutset, after a most cursory attention to Rabbits, she decided that theonly really interesting thing at the tea-table was myself.

  The elders talked in their formal dull way--telling Nannie the triteold things about the park and the village that they told every one, andBeatrice watched me across the table with a pitiless little curiositythat made me uncomfortable.

  "Nannie," she said, pointing, and Nannie left a question of my mother'sdisregarded to attend to her; "is he a servant boy?"

  "S-s-sh," said Nannie. "He's Master Ponderevo."

  "Is he a servant boy?" repeated Beatrice.

  "He's a schoolboy," said my mother.

  "Then may I talk to him, Nannie?"

  Nannie surveyed me with brutal inhumanity. "You mustn't talk too much,"she said to her charge, and cut cake into fingers for her.

  "No," she added decisively, as Beatrice made to speak.

  Beatrice became malignant. Her eyes explored me with unjustifiablehostility. "He's got dirty hands," she said, stabbing at the forbiddenfruit. "And there's a fray to his collar."

  Then she gave herself up to cake with an appearance of entireforgetfulness of me that filled me with hate and a passionate desire tocompel her to admire me.... And the next day before tea, I did for thefirst time in my life, freely, without command or any compulsion, washmy hands.

  So our acquaintance began, and presently was deepened by a whim of hers.She had a cold and was kept indoors, and confronted Nannie suddenly withthe alternative of being hopelessly naughty, which in her case involveda generous amount of screaming unsuitable for the ears of an elderly,shaky, rich aunt, or having me up to the nursery to play with her allthe afternoon. Nannie came downstairs and borrowed me in a carewornmanner; and I was handed over to the little creature as if I was somelarge variety of kitten. I had never had anything to do with a littlegirl before, I thought she was more beautiful and wonderful and brightthan anything else could possibly be in life, and she found me thegentlest of slaves--though at the same time, as I made evident, fairlystrong. And Nannie was amazed to find the afternoon slip cheerfully andrapidly away. She praised my manners to Lady Drew and to my mother,who said she was glad to hear well of me, and after that I played withBeatrice several times. The toys she had remain in my memory still asgreat splendid things, gigantic to all my previous experience of toys,and we even went to the great doll's house on the nursery landing toplay discreetly with that, the great doll's house that the Prince Regenthad given Sir Harry Drew's first-born (who died at five), that was a notineffectual model of Bladesover itself, and contained eighty-five dollsand had cost hundreds of pounds. I played under imperious direction withthat toy of glory.

  I went back to school when that holiday was over, dreaming of beautifulthings, and got Ewart to talk to me of love; and I made a great storyout of the doll's house, a story that, taken over into Ewart's hands,speedily grew to an island doll's city all our own.

  One of the dolls, I privately decided, was like Beatrice.

  One other holiday there was when I saw something of her--oddly enough mymemory of that second holiday in which she played a part is vague--andthen came a gap of a year, and then my disgrace.

  VIII

  Now I sit down to write my story and tell over again things in theirorder, I find for the first time how inconsecutive and irrational athing the memory can be. One recalls acts and cannot recall motives;one recalls quite vividly moments that stand out inexplicably--thingsadrift, joining on to nothing, leading nowhere. I think I must have seenBeatrice and her half-brother quite a number of times in my last holidayat Bladesover, but I really cannot recall more than a little of thequality of the circumstances. That great crisis of my boyhood stands outvery vividly as an effect, as a sort of cardinal thing for me, but whenI look for details, particularly details that led up to the crisis--Icannot find them in any developing order at all. This halfbrother,Archie Garvell, was a new factor in the affair. I remember him clearlyas a fair-haired, supercilious looking, weedily-lank boy, much tallerthan I, but I should imagine very little heavier, and that we hatedeach other by a sort of instinct from the beginning; and yet I cannotremember my first meeting with him at all.

  Looking back into these past things--it is like rummaging in a neglectedattic that has experienced the attentions of some whimsical robber--Icannot even account for the presence of these children at Bladesover.They were, I know, among the innumerable cousins of Lady Drew, andaccording to the theories of downstairs candidates for the ultimatepossession of Bladesover. If they were, their candidature wasunsuccessful. But that great place, with all its faded splendour, itsfine furniture, its large traditions, was entirely at the old lady'sdisposition; and I am inclined to think it is true that she used thisfact to torment and dominate a number of eligible people. Lord Ospreywas among the number of these, and she showed these hospitalities to hismotherless child and step-child, partly, no doubt, because he was poor,but quite as much, I nowadays imagine, in the dim hope of finding someaffectionate or imaginative outcome of contact with them. Nannie haddropped out of the world this second time, and Beatrice was in thecharge of an extremely amiable and ineffectual poor army-class youngwoman whose name I never knew. They were, I think, two remarkablyillmanaged and enterprising children. I seem to remember too, that itwas understood that I was not a fit companion for them, and that ourmeetings had to be as unostentatious as possible. It was Beatrice whoinsisted upon our meeting.

  I am certain I knew quite a lot about love at fourteen and that I wasquite as much in love with Beatrice then as any impassioned adult couldbe, and that Beatrice was, in her way, in love with me. It is part ofthe decent and useful pretences of our world that children of the age atwhich we were, think nothing, feel nothing, know nothing of love. Itis wonderful what people the English are for keeping up pretences. Butindeed I cannot avoid telling that Beatrice and I talked of love andkissed and embraced one another.

  I recall something of one talk under the overhanging bushes of theshrubbery--I on the park side of the stone wall, and the lady of myworship a little inelegantly astride thereon. Inelegantly do I say? youshould have seen the sweet imp as I remember her. Just her poise on thewall comes suddenly clear before me, and behind her the light variousbranches of the bushes of the shrubbery that my feet might not profane,and far away and high behind her, dim and stately, the cornice of thegreat facade of Bladesover rose against the dappled sky. Our talk musthave been serious and business-like, for we were discussing my socialposition.

  "I don't love Archie," she had said, apropos of nothing; and then in awhisper, leaning forward with the hair about her face, "I love YOU!"

  But she had been a little pressing to have it clear that I was not andcould not be a servant.

  "You'll never be a servant--ever!"

  I swore that very readily, and it is a vow I have kept by nature.

  "What will you be?" said she.

  I ran my mind hastily over the professions.

  "Will you be a soldier?" she asked.

  "And be bawled at by duffers? No fear!" said I. "Leave that to theplough-boys."

  "But an officer?"

  "I don't know," I said, evading a shameful difficulty.

  "I'd rather go into the navy."

  "Wouldn't you like to fight?"

  "I'd like to fight," I said. "But a common soldier it's no honour tohave to be told to fight and to be looked down
upon while you do it, andhow could I be an officer?"

  "Couldn't you be?" she said, and looked at me doubtfully; and the spacesof the social system opened between us.

  Then, as became a male of spirit, I took upon myself to brag and liemy way through this trouble. I said I was a poor man, and poor men wentinto the navy; that I "knew" mathematics, which no army officer did; andI claimed Nelson for an exemplar, and spoke very highly of my outlookupon blue water. "He loved Lady Hamilton," I said, "although she was alady--and I will love you."

  We were somewhere near that when the egregious governess became audible,calling "Beeee-atrice! Beeee-e-atrice!"

  "Snifty beast!" said my lady, and tried to get on with the conversation;but that governess made things impossible.

  "Come here!" said my lady suddenly, holding out a grubby hand; and Iwent very close to her, and she put her little head down upon the walluntil her black fog of hair tickled my cheek.

  "You are my humble, faithful lover," she demanded in a whisper, her warmflushed face near touching mine, and her eyes very dark and lustrous.

  "I am your humble, faithful lover," I whispered back.

  And she put her arm about my head and put out her lips and we kissed,and boy though I was, I was all atremble. So we two kissed for the firsttime.

  "Beeee-e-e-a-trice!" fearfully close.

  My lady had vanished, with one wild kick of her black-stocking leg. Amoment after, I heard her sustaining the reproaches of her governess,and explaining her failure to answer with an admirable lucidity anddisingenuousness.

  I felt it was unnecessary for me to be seen just then, and I vanishedguiltily round the corner into the West Wood, and so to love-dreamsand single-handed play, wandering along one of those meandering brackenvalleys that varied Bladesover park. And that day and for many days thatkiss upon my lips was a seal, and by night the seed of dreams.

  Then I remember an expedition we made--she, I, and herhalf-brother--into those West Woods--they two were supposed to beplaying in the shrubbery--and how we were Indians there, and made awigwam out of a pile of beech logs, and how we stalked deer, crept nearand watched rabbits feeding in a glade, and almost got a squirrel. Itwas play seasoned with plentiful disputing between me and young Garvell,for each firmly insisted upon the leading roles, and only my widerreading--I had read ten stories to his one--gave me the ascendencyover him. Also I scored over him by knowing how to find the eagle in abracken stem. And somehow--I don't remember what led to it at all--I andBeatrice, two hot and ruffled creatures, crept in among the tall brackenand hid from him. The great fronds rose above us, five feet or more, andas I had learnt how to wriggle through that undergrowth with the minimumof betrayal by tossing greenery above, I led the way. The ground underbracken is beautifully clear and faintly scented in warm weather; thestems come up black and then green; if you crawl flat, it is a tropicalforest in miniature. I led the way and Beatrice crawled behind, and thenas the green of the further glade opened before us, stopped. She crawledup to me, her hot little face came close to mine; once more she lookedand breathed close to me, and suddenly she flung her arm about my neckand dragged me to earth beside her, and kissed me and kissed meagain. We kissed, we embraced and kissed again, all without a word; wedesisted, we stared and hesitated--then in a suddenly damped mood and alittle perplexed at ourselves, crawled out, to be presently run down andcaught in the tamest way by Archie.

  That comes back very clearly to me, and other vague memories--I knowold Hall and his gun, out shooting at jackdaws, came into our commonexperiences, but I don't remember how; and then at last, abruptly, ourfight in the Warren stands out. The Warren, like most places in Englandthat have that name, was not particularly a warren, it was a long slopeof thorns and beeches through which a path ran, and made an alternativeroute to the downhill carriage road between Bladesover and Ropedean. Idon't know how we three got there, but I have an uncertain fancy it wasconnected with a visit paid by the governess to the Ropedean vicaragepeople. But suddenly Archie and I, in discussing a game, fell into adispute for Beatrice. I had made him the fairest offer: I was to be aSpanish nobleman, she was to be my wife, and he was to be a tribe ofIndians trying to carry her off. It seems to me a fairly attractiveoffer to a boy to be a whole tribe of Indians with a chance of such abooty. But Archie suddenly took offence.

  "No," he said; "we can't have that!"

  "Can't have what?"

  "You can't be a gentleman, because you aren't. And you can't playBeatrice is your wife. It's--it's impertinent."

  "But" I said, and looked at her.

  Some earlier grudge in the day's affairs must have been in Archie'smind. "We let you play with us," said Archie; "but we can't have thingslike that."

  "What rot!" said Beatrice. "He can if he likes."

  But he carried his point. I let him carry it, and only began to growangry three or four minutes later. Then we were still discussing playand disputing about another game. Nothing seemed right for all of us.

  "We don't want you to play with us at all," said Archie.

  "Yes, we do," said Beatrice.

  "He drops his aitches like anything."

  "No, 'e doesn't," said I, in the heat of the moment.

  "There you go!" he cried. "E, he says. E! E! E!"

  He pointed a finger at me. He had struck to the heart of my shame. Imade the only possible reply by a rush at him. "Hello!" he cried, at myblackavised attack. He dropped back into an attitude that had some stylein it, parried my blow, got back at my cheek, and laughed with surpriseand relief at his own success. Whereupon I became a thing of murderousrage. He could box as well or better than I--he had yet to realise Iknew anything of that at all--but I had fought once or twice to a finishwith bare fists. I was used to inflicting and enduring savage hurting,and I doubt if he had ever fought. I hadn't fought ten seconds beforeI felt this softness in him, realised all that quality of modernupper-class England that never goes to the quick, that hedges aboutrules and those petty points of honour that are the ultimate comminutionof honour, that claims credit for things demonstrably half done. Heseemed to think that first hit of his and one or two others were goingto matter, that I ought to give in when presently my lip bled anddripped blood upon my clothes. So before we had been at it a minutehe had ceased to be aggressive except in momentary spurts, and I wasknocking him about almost as I wanted to do; and demanding breathlesslyand fiercely, after our school manner, whether he had had enough, notknowing that by his high code and his soft training it was equallyimpossible for him to either buck-up and beat me, or give in.

  I have a very distinct impression of Beatrice dancing about us duringthe affair in a state of unladylike appreciation, but I was toopreoccupied to hear much of what she was saying. But she certainlybacked us both, and I am inclined to think now--it may be thedisillusionment of my ripened years--whichever she thought was winning.

  Then young Garvell, giving way before my slogging, stumbled and fellover a big flint, and I, still following the tradition of my class andschool, promptly flung myself on him to finish him. We were busywith each other on the ground when we became aware of a dreadfulinterruption.

  "Shut up, you FOOL!" said Archie.

  "Oh, Lady Drew!" I heard Beatrice cry. "They're fighting! They'refighting something awful!"

  I looked over my shoulder. Archie's wish to get up became irresistible,and my resolve to go on with him vanished altogether.

  I became aware of the two old ladies, presences of black and purple silkand fur and shining dark things; they had walked up through the Warren,while the horses took the hill easily, and so had come upon us. Beatricehad gone to them at once with an air of taking refuge, and stood besideand a little behind them. We both rose dejectedly. The two old ladieswere evidently quite dreadfully shocked, and peering at us with theirpoor old eyes; and never had I seen such a tremblement in Lady Drew'slorgnettes.

  "You've never been fighting?" said Lady Drew.

  "You have been fighting."

  "It wasn't proper
fighting," snapped Archie, with accusing eyes on me.

  "It's Mrs. Ponderevo's George!" said Miss Somerville, so adding aconviction for ingratitude to my evident sacrilege.

  "How could he DARE?" cried Lady Drew, becoming very awful.

  "He broke the rules" said Archie, sobbing for breath. "I slipped,and--he hit me while I was down. He knelt on me."

  "How could you DARE?" said Lady Drew.

  I produced an experienced handkerchief rolled up into a tight ball, andwiped the blood from my chin, but I offered no explanation of my daring.Among other things that prevented that, I was too short of breath.

  "He didn't fight fair," sobbed Archie.

  Beatrice, from behind the old ladies, regarded me intently and withouthostility. I am inclined to think the modification of my face throughthe damage to my lip interested her. It became dimly apparent to myconfused intelligence that I must not say these two had been playingwith me. That would not be after the rules of their game. I resolvedin this difficult situation upon a sulky silence, and to take whateverconsequences might follow.

  IX

  The powers of justice in Bladesover made an extraordinary mess of mycase.

  I have regretfully to admit that the Honourable Beatrice Normandy did,at the age of ten, betray me, abandon me, and lie most abominably aboutme. She was, as a matter of fact, panic-stricken about me, consciencestricken too; she bolted from the very thought of my being her affiancedlover and so forth, from the faintest memory of kissing; she wasindeed altogether disgraceful and human in her betrayal. She and herhalf-brother lied in perfect concord, and I was presented as a wantonassailant of my social betters. They were waiting about in the Warren,when I came up and spoke to them, etc.

  On the whole, I now perceive Lady Drew's decisions were, in the light ofthe evidence, reasonable and merciful.

  They were conveyed to me by my mother, who was, I really believe, evenmore shocked by the grossness of my social insubordination than LadyDrew. She dilated on her ladyship's kindnesses to me, on the effronteryand wickedness of my procedure, and so came at last to the terms of mypenance. "You must go up to young Mr. Garvell, and beg his pardon."

  "I won't beg his pardon," I said, speaking for the first time.

  My mother paused, incredulous.

  I folded my arms on her table-cloth, and delivered my wicked littleultimatum. "I won't beg his pardon nohow," I said. "See?"

  "Then you will have to go off to your uncle Frapp at Chatham."

  "I don't care where I have to go or what I have to do, I won't beg hispardon," I said.

  And I didn't.

  After that I was one against the world. Perhaps in my mother's heartthere lurked some pity for me, but she did not show it. She took theside of the young gentleman; she tried hard, she tried very hard, tomake me say I was sorry I had struck him. Sorry!

  I couldn't explain.

  So I went into exile in the dog-cart to Redwood station, with Jukes thecoachman, coldly silent, driving me, and all my personal belongings in asmall American cloth portmanteau behind.

  I felt I had much to embitter me; the game had and the beginnings offairness by any standards I knew.... But the thing that embittered memost was that the Honourable Beatrice Normandy should have repudiatedand fled from me as though I was some sort of leper, and not even havetaken a chance or so, to give me a good-bye. She might have done thatanyhow! Supposing I had told on her! But the son of a servant counts asa servant. She had forgotten and now remembered.

  I solaced myself with some extraordinary dream of coming back toBladesover, stern, powerful, after the fashion of Coriolanus. I do notrecall the details, but I have no doubt I displayed great magnanimity...

  Well, anyhow I never said I was sorry for pounding young Garvell, and Iam not sorry to this day.

  CHAPTER THE SECOND

  OF MY LAUNCH INTO THE WORLD AND THE LAST I SAW OF BLADESOVER

  I

  When I was thus banished from Bladesover House, as it was then thoughtfor good and all, I was sent by my mother in a vindictive spirit,first to her cousin Nicodemus Frapp, and then, as a fully indenturedapprentice, to my uncle Ponderevo.

  I ran away from the care of my cousin Nicodemus back to BladesoverHouse.

  My cousin Nicodemus Frapp was a baker in a back street--a slumrather--just off that miserable narrow mean high road that threads thoseexquisite beads, Rochester and Chatham. He was, I must admit, a shockto me, much dominated by a young, plump, prolific, malingering wife;a bent, slow-moving, unwilling dark man with flour in his hair andeyelashes, in the lines of his face and the seams of his coat. I'venever had a chance to correct my early impression of him, and he stillremains an almost dreadful memory, a sort of caricature of incompetentsimplicity. As I remember him, indeed, he presented the serviletradition perfected. He had no pride in his person; fine clothes anddressing up wasn't "for the likes of" him, so that he got his wife, whowas no artist at it, to cut his black hair at irregular intervals, andlet his nails become disagreeable to the fastidious eye; he had no pridein his business nor any initiative; his only virtues were not doingcertain things and hard work. "Your uncle," said my mother--all grown-upcousins were uncles by courtesy among the Victorian middle-class--"isn'tmuch to look at or talk to, but he's a Good Hard-Working Man." Therewas a sort of base honourableness about toil, however needless, in thatsystem of inversion. Another point of honour was to rise at or beforedawn, and then laboriously muddle about.

  It was very distinctly impressed on my mind that the Good Hard-WorkingMan would have thought it "fal-lallish" to own a pocket handkerchief.Poor old Frapp--dirty and crushed by, product of, Bladesover'smagnificence! He made no fight against the world at all, he wasfloundering in small debts that were not so small but that finally theyoverwhelmed him, whenever there was occasion for any exertion hiswife fell back upon pains and her "condition," and God sent them manychildren, most of whom died, and so, by their coming and going, gave adouble exercise in the virtues of submission.

  Resignation to God's will was the common device of these people inthe face of every duty and every emergency. There were no books in thehouse; I doubt if either of them had retained the capacity for readingconsecutively for more than a minute or so, and it was with amazementthat day after day, over and above stale bread, one beheld food andagain more food amidst the litter that held permanent session on theliving-room table.

  One might have doubted if either of them felt discomfort in thisdusty darkness of existence, if it was not that they did visibly seekconsolation. They sought this and found it of a Sunday, not in strongdrink and raving, but in imaginary draughts of blood. They met withtwenty or thirty other darkened and unclean people, all dressed in dingycolours that would not show the dirt, in a little brick-built chapelequipped with a spavined roarer of a harmonium, and there solaced theirminds on the thought that all that was fair and free in life, all thatstruggled, all that planned and made, all pride and beauty and honour,all fine and enjoyable things, were irrevocably damned to everlastingtorments. They were the self-appointed confidants of God's mockery ofhis own creation. So at any rate they stick in my mind. Vaguer, and yethardly less agreeable than this cosmic jest, this coming "Yah, clever!"and general serving out and "showing up" of the lucky, the bold, and thecheerful, was their own predestination to Glory.

  "There is a Fountain, filled with Blood Drawn from Emmanuel's Veins,"

  so they sang. I hear the drone and wheeze of that hymn now. I hated themwith the bitter uncharitable condemnation of boyhood, and a twinge ofthat hate comes back to me. As I write the words, the sounds and thenthe scene return, these obscure, undignified people, a fat woman withasthma, an old Welsh milk-seller with a tumour on his bald head, who wasthe intellectual leader of the sect, a huge-voiced haberdasher witha big black beard, a white-faced, extraordinarily pregnant woman, hiswife, a spectacled rate collector with a bent back.... I hear the talkabout souls, the strange battered old phrases that were coined ages agoin the seaports of the sun-dry Levant, of balm
of Gilead and manna inthe desert, of gourds that give shade and water in a thirsty land; Irecall again the way in which at the conclusion of the service the talkremained pious in form but became medical in substance, and how thewomen got together for obstetric whisperings. I, as a boy, did notmatter, and might overhear.

  If Bladesover is my key for the explanation of England, I think myinvincible persuasion that I understand Russia was engendered by thecircle of Uncle Frapp.

  I slept in a dingy sheeted bed with the two elder survivors of Frappfecundity, and spent my week days in helping in the laborious disorderof the shop and bakehouse, in incidental deliveries of bread and soforth, and in parrying the probings of my uncle into my relationswith the Blood, and his confidential explanations that ten shillingsa week--which was what my mother paid him--was not enough to cover myaccommodation. He was very anxious to keep that, but also he wantedmore. There were neither books nor any seat nor corner in that housewhere reading was possible, no newspaper ever brought the clash ofworldly things into its heavenward seclusion; horror of it all grew inme daily, and whenever I could I escaped into the streets and trampedabout Chatham. The news shops appealed to me particularly. One sawthere smudgy illustrated sheets, the Police News in particular, inwhich vilely drawn pictures brought home to the dullest intelligence aninterminable succession of squalid crimes, women murdered and put intoboxes, buried under floors, old men bludgeoned at midnight by robbers,people thrust suddenly out of trains, happy lovers shot, vitrioled andso forth by rivals. I got my first glimpse of the life of pleasure infoully drawn pictures of "police raids" on this and that. Interspersedwith these sheets were others in which Sloper, the urban John Bull, hadhis fling with gin bottle and obese umbrella, or the kindly empty facesof the Royal Family appeared and reappeared, visiting this, openingthat, getting married, getting offspring, lying in state, doingeverything but anything, a wonderful, good-meaning, impenetrable raceapart.

  I have never revisited Chatham; the impression it has left on my mind isone of squalid compression, unlit by any gleam of a maturer charity.All its effects arranged themselves as antithetical to the Bladesovereffects. They confirmed and intensified all that Bladesover suggested.Bladesover declared itself to be the land, to be essentially England; Ihave already told how its airy spaciousness, its wide dignity, seemed tothrust village, church, and vicarage into corners, into a secondary andconditional significance. Here one gathered the corollary of that. Sincethe whole wide country of Kent was made up of contiguous Bladesoversand for the gentlefolk, the surplus of population, all who were notgood tenants nor good labourers, Church of England, submissive andrespectful, were necessarily thrust together, jostled out of sight, tofester as they might in this place that had the colours and even thesmells of a well-packed dustbin. They should be grateful even for that;that, one felt, was the theory of it all.

  And I loafed about this wilderness of crowded dinginess, with young,receptive, wide-open eyes, and through the blessing (or curse) of somefairy godmother of mine, asking and asking again: "But after all, WHY--"

  I wandered up through Rochester once, and had a glimpse of the Stourvalley above the town, all horrible with cement works and foully smokingchimneys and rows of workmen's cottages, minute, ugly, uncomfortable,and grimy. So I had my first intimation of how industrialism must livein a landlord's land. I spent some hours, too, in the streets that giveupon the river, drawn by the spell of the sea. But I saw barges andships stripped of magic and mostly devoted to cement, ice, timber, andcoal. The sailors looked to me gross and slovenly men, and the shippingstruck me as clumsy, ugly, old, and dirty. I discovered that most sailsdon't fit the ships that hoist them, and that there may be as pitifuland squalid a display of poverty with a vessel as with a man. When Isaw colliers unloading, watched the workers in the hold filling up sillylittle sacks and the succession of blackened, half-naked men that ran toand fro with these along a plank over a thirty-foot drop into filth andmud, I was first seized with admiration of their courage and toughnessand then, "But after all, WHY--?" and the stupid ugliness of all thiswaste of muscle and endurance came home to me. Among other things itobviously wasted and deteriorated the coal.... And I had imagined greatthings of the sea!

  Well, anyhow, for a time that vocation was stilled.

  But such impressions came into my leisure, and of that I had no excess.Most of my time was spent doing things for Uncle Frapp, and my eveningsand nights perforce in the company of the two eldest of my cousins.He was errand boy at an oil shop and fervently pious, and of him I sawnothing until the evening except at meals; the other was enjoying themidsummer holidays without any great elation; a singularly thin andabject, stunted creature he was, whose chief liveliness was to pretendto be a monkey, and who I am now convinced had some secret disease thatdrained his vitality away. If I met him now I should think him a pitifullittle creature and be extremely sorry for him. Then I felt only awondering aversion. He sniffed horribly, he was tired out by a coupleof miles of loafing, he never started any conversation, and he seemed toprefer his own company to mine. His mother, poor woman, said he was the"thoughtful one."

  Serious trouble came suddenly out of a conversation we held in bed onenight. Some particularly pious phrase of my elder cousin's irritated meextremely, and I avowed outright my entire disbelief in the whole schemeof revealed religion. I had never said a word about my doubts to any onebefore, except to Ewart who had first evolved them. I had never settledmy doubts until at this moment when I spoke. But it came to me then thatthe whole scheme of salvation of the Frappes was not simply doubtful,but impossible. I fired this discovery out into the darkness with thegreatest promptitude.

  My abrupt denials certainly scared my cousin amazingly.

  At first they could not understand what I was saying, and when theydid I fully believe they expected an instant answer in thunderbolts andflames. They gave me more room in the bed forthwith, and then the eldersat up and expressed his sense of my awfulness. I was already a littlefrightened at my temerity, but when he asked me categorically to unsaywhat I had said, what could I do but confirm my repudiation?

  "There's no hell," I said, "and no eternal punishment. No God would besuch a fool as that."

  My elder cousin cried aloud in horror, and the younger lay scared, butlistening. "Then you mean," said my elder cousin, when at last he couldbring himself to argue, "you might do just as you liked?"

  "If you were cad enough," said I.

  Our little voices went on interminably, and at one stage my cousin gotout of bed and made his brother do likewise, and knelt in the nightdimness and prayed at me. That I found trying, but I held out valiantly."Forgive him," said my cousin, "he knows not what he sayeth."

  "You can pray if you like," I said, "but if you're going to cheek me inyour prayers I draw the line."

  The last I remember of that great discussion was my cousin deploring thefact that he "should ever sleep in the same bed with an Infidel!"

  The next day he astonished me by telling the whole business to hisfather. This was quite outside all my codes. Uncle Nicodemus sprang itupon me at the midday meal.

  "You been sayin' queer things, George," he said abruptly. "You bettermind what you're saying."

  "What did he say, father?" said Mrs. Frapp.

  "Things I couldn't' repeat," said he.

  "What things?" I asked hotly.

  "Ask 'IM," said my uncle, pointing with his knife to his informant,and making me realise the nature of my offence. My aunt looked at thewitness. "Not--?" she framed a question.

  "Wuss," said my uncle. "Blarsphemy."

  My aunt couldn't touch another mouthful. I was already a little troubledin my conscience by my daring, and now I began to feel the blackenormity of the course upon which I had embarked.

  "I was only talking sense," I said.

  I had a still more dreadful moment when presently I met my cousin in thebrick alley behind the yard, that led back to his grocer's shop.

  "You sneak!" I said, and smacked his face ha
rd forthwith. "Now then,"said I.

  He started back, astonished and alarmed. His eyes met mine, and I saw asudden gleam of resolution. He turned his other cheek to me.

  "'It 'it," he said."'It 'it. I'LL forgive you."

  I felt I had never encountered a more detestable way of evading alicking. I shoved him against the wall and left him there, forgiving me,and went back into the house.

  "You better not speak to your cousins, George," said my aunt, "tillyou're in a better state of mind."

  I became an outcast forthwith. At supper that night a gloomy silence wasbroken by my cousin saying,

  "'E 'it me for telling you, and I turned the other cheek, muvver."

  "'E's got the evil one be'ind 'im now, a ridin' on 'is back," said myaunt, to the grave discomfort of the eldest girl, who sat beside me.

  After supper my uncle, in a few ill-chosen words, prayed me to repentbefore I slept.

  "Suppose you was took in your sleep, George," he said; "where'd yoube then? You jest think of that me boy." By this time I was thoroughlymiserable and frightened, and this suggestion unnerved me dreadfully butI kept up an impenitent front. "To wake in 'ell," said Uncle Nicodemus,in gentle tones. "You don't want to wake in 'ell, George, burnin' andscreamin' for ever, do you? You wouldn't like that?"

  He tried very hard to get me to "jest 'ave a look at the bake'ouse fire"before I retired. "It might move you," he said.

  I was awake longest that night. My cousins slept, the sleep of faithon either side of me. I decided I would whisper my prayers, and stoppedmidway because I was ashamed, and perhaps also because I had an idea onedidn't square God like that.

  "No," I said, with a sudden confidence, "damn me if you're cowardenough.... But you're not. No! You couldn't be!"

  I woke my cousins up with emphatic digs, and told them as much,triumphantly, and went very peacefully to sleep with my act of faithaccomplished.

  I slept not only through that night, but for all my nights since then.So far as any fear of Divine injustice goes, I sleep soundly, andshall, I know, to the end of things. That declaration was an epoch in myspiritual life.

  II

  But I didn't expect to have the whole meeting on Sunday turned on to me.

  It was. It all comes back to me, that convergence of attention, even thefaint leathery smell of its atmosphere returns, and the coarse feel ofmy aunt's black dress beside me in contact with my hand. I see againthe old Welsh milkman "wrestling" with me, they all wrestled with me, byprayer or exhortation. And I was holding out stoutly, though convincednow by the contagion of their universal conviction that by doing so Iwas certainly and hopelessly damned. I felt that they were right, thatGod was probably like them, and that on the whole it didn't matter.And to simplify the business thoroughly I had declared I didn't believeanything at all. They confuted me by texts from Scripture which I nowperceive was an illegitimate method of reply. When I got home, stillimpenitent and eternally lost and secretly very lonely and miserable andalarmed, Uncle Nicodemus docked my Sunday pudding.

  One person only spoke to me like a human being on that day of wrath, andthat was the younger Frapp. He came up to me in the afternoon while Iwas confined upstairs with a Bible and my own thoughts.

  "'Ello," he said, and fretted about.

  "D'you mean to say there isn't--no one," he said, funking the word.

  "No one?"

  "No one watching yer--always."

  "Why should there be?" I asked.

  "You can't 'elp thoughts," said my cousin, "anyhow. You mean--" Hestopped hovering. "I s'pose I oughtn't to be talking to you."

  He hesitated and flitted away with a guilty back glance over hisshoulder....

  The following week made life quite intolerable for me; these peopleforced me at last into an Atheism that terrified me. When I learntthat next Sunday the wrestling was to be resumed, my courage failed mealtogether.

  I happened upon a map of Kent in a stationer's window on Saturday, andthat set me thinking of one form of release. I studied it intently forhalf an hour perhaps, on Saturday night, got a route list of villageswell fixed in my memory, and got up and started for Bladesover aboutfive on Sunday morning while my two bed mates were still fast asleep.

  III

  I remember something, but not so much of it as I should like to recall,of my long tramp to Bladesover House. The distance from Chatham isalmost exactly seventeen miles, and it took me until nearly one. It wasvery interesting and I do not think I was very fatigued, though I gotrather pinched by one boot.

  The morning must have been very clear, because I remember that nearItchinstow Hall I looked back and saw the estuary of the Thames, thatriver that has since played so large a part in my life. But at the timeI did not know it was the Thames, I thought this great expanse of mudflats and water was the sea, which I had never yet seen nearly. Andout upon it stood ships, sailing ships and a steamer or so, going up toLondon or down out into the great seas of the world. I stood for a longtime watching these and thinking whether after all I should not havedone better to have run away to sea.

  The nearer I drew to Bladesover, the more doubtful I grew of the dualityof my reception, and the more I regretted that alternative. I suppose itwas the dirty clumsiness of the shipping I had seen nearly, that put meout of mind of that. I took a short cut through the Warren across thecorner of the main park to intercept the people from the church. Iwanted to avoid meeting any one before I met my mother, and so I went toa place where the path passed between banks, and without exactly hiding,stood up among the bushes. This place among other advantages eliminatedany chance of seeing Lady Drew, who would drive round by the carriageroad.

  Standing up to waylay in this fashion I had a queer feeling ofbrigandage, as though I was some intrusive sort of bandit among theseorderly things. It is the first time I remember having that outlawfeeling distinctly, a feeling that has played a large part in mysubsequent life. I felt there existed no place for me that I had todrive myself in.

  Presently, down the hill, the servants appeared, straggling by twos andthrees, first some of the garden people and the butler's wife with them,then the two laundry maids, odd inseparable old creatures, then thefirst footman talking to the butler's little girl, and at last, walkinggrave and breathless beside old Ann and Miss Fison, the black figure ofmy mother.

  My boyish mind suggested the adoption of a playful form of appearance."Coo-ee, mother" said I, coming out against the sky, "Coo-ee!"

  My mother looked up, went very white, and put her hand to her bosom.

  I suppose there was a fearful fuss about me. And of course I was quiteunable to explain my reappearance. But I held out stoutly, "I won'tgo back to Chatham; I'll drown myself first." The next day my mothercarried me off to Wimblehurst, took me fiercely and aggressively to anuncle I had never heard of before, near though the place was to us. Shegave me no word as to what was to happen, and I was too subdued byher manifest wrath and humiliation at my last misdemeanour to demandinformation. I don't for one moment think Lady Drew was "nice" about me.The finality of my banishment was endorsed and underlined and stampedhome. I wished very much now that I had run away to sea, in spite of thecoal dust and squalour Rochester had revealed to me. Perhaps over seasone came to different lands.

  IV

  I do not remember much of my journey to Wimblehurst with my motherexcept the image of her as sitting bolt upright, as rather disdainingthe third-class carriage in which we traveled, and how she looked awayfrom me out of the window when she spoke of my uncle. "I have not seenyour uncle," she said, "since he was a boy...." She added grudgingly,"Then he was supposed to be clever."

  She took little interest in such qualities as cleverness.

  "He married about three years ago, and set up for himself inWimblehurst.... So I suppose she had some money."

  She mused on scenes she had long dismissed from her mind. "Teddy," shesaid at last in the tone of one who has been feeling in the darkand finds. "He was called Teddy... about your age.... Now he must betwe
nty-six or seven."

  I thought of my uncle as Teddy directly I saw him; there was somethingin his personal appearance that in the light of that memory phraseditself at once as Teddiness--a certain Teddidity. To describe it inand other terms is more difficult. It is nimbleness without grace, andalertness without intelligence. He whisked out of his shop upon thepavement, a short figure in grey and wearing grey carpet slippers; onehad a sense of a young fattish face behind gilt glasses, wiry hair thatstuck up and forward over the forehead, an irregular nose that had itsaquiline moments, and that the body betrayed an equatorial laxity, anincipient "bow window" as the image goes. He jerked out of the shop,came to a stand on the pavement outside, regarded something in thewindow with infinite appreciation, stroked his chin, and, as abruptly,shot sideways into the door again, charging through it as it were behindan extended hand.

  "That must be him," said my mother, catching at her breath.

  We came past the window whose contents I was presently to know by heart,a very ordinary chemist's window except that there was a frictionalelectrical machine, an air pump and two or three tripods and retortsreplacing the customary blue, yellow, and red bottles above. There wasa plaster of Paris horse to indicate veterinary medicines among thesebreakables, and below were scent packets and diffusers and sponges andsoda-water syphons and such-like things. Only in the middle there was arubricated card, very neatly painted by hand, with these words--

  Buy Ponderevo's Cough Linctus NOW. NOW! WHY? Twopence Cheaper than in Winter. You Store apples! why not the Medicine You are Bound to Need?

  in which appeal I was to recognise presently my uncle's distinctivenote.

  My uncle's face appeared above a card of infant's comforters in theglass pane of the door. I perceived his eyes were brown, and that hisglasses creased his nose. It was manifest he did not know us from Adam.A stare of scrutiny allowed an expression of commercial deference toappear in front of it, and my uncle flung open the door.

  "You don't know me?" panted my mother.

  My uncle would not own he did not, but his curiosity was manifest. Mymother sat down on one of the little chairs before the soap and patentmedicine-piled counter, and her lips opened and closed.

  "A glass of water, madam," said my uncle, waved his hand in a sort ofcurve and shot away.

  My mother drank the water and spoke. "That boy," she said, "takes afterhis father. He grows more like him every day.... And so I have broughthim to you."

  "His father, madam?"

  "George."

  For a moment the chemist was still at a loss. He stood behind thecounter with the glass my mother had returned to him in his hand. Thencomprehension grew.

  "By Gosh!" he said. "Lord!" he cried. His glasses fell off. Hedisappeared replacing them, behind a pile of boxed-up bottles of bloodmixture. "Eleven thousand virgins!" I heard him cry. The glass wasbanged down. "O-ri-ental Gums!"

  He shot away out of the shop through some masked door. One heard hisvoice. "Susan! Susan!"

  Then he reappeared with an extended hand. "Well, how are you?" he said."I was never so surprised in my life. Fancy!... You!"

  He shook my mother's impassive hand and then mine very warmly holdinghis glasses on with his left forefinger.

  "Come right in!" he cried--"come right in! Better late than never!" andled the way into the parlour behind the shop.

  After Bladesover that apartment struck me as stuffy and petty, but itwas very comfortable in comparison with the Frapp living-room. It hada faint, disintegrating smell of meals about it, and my most immediateimpression was of the remarkable fact that something was hung aboutor wrapped round or draped over everything. There was bright-patternedmuslin round the gas-bracket in the middle of the room, round the mirrorover the mantel, stuff with ball-fringe along the mantel and casing inthe fireplace,--I first saw ball-fringe here--and even the lamp on thelittle bureau wore a shade like a large muslin hat. The table-cloth hadball-fringe and so had the window curtains, and the carpet was a bed ofroses. There were little cupboards on either side of the fireplace, andin the recesses, ill-made shelves packed with books, and enriched withpinked American cloth. There was a dictionary lying face downward onthe table, and the open bureau was littered with foolscap paper andthe evidences of recently abandoned toil. My eye caught "The PonderevoPatent Flat, a Machine you can Live in," written in large firm letters.My uncle opened a little door like a cupboard door in the corner of thisroom, and revealed the narrowest twist of staircase I had ever seteyes upon. "Susan!" he bawled again. "Wantje. Some one to see you.Surprisin'."

  There came an inaudible reply, and a sudden loud bump over our headsas of some article of domestic utility pettishly flung aside, thenthe cautious steps of someone descending the twist, and then my auntappeared in the doorway with her hand upon the jamb.

  "It's Aunt Ponderevo," cried my uncle. "George's wife--and she's broughtover her son!" His eye roamed about the room. He darted to the bureauwith a sudden impulse, and turned the sheet about the patent flatface down. Then he waved his glasses at us, "You know, Susan, my elderbrother George. I told you about 'im lots of times."

  He fretted across to the hearthrug and took up a position there,replaced his glasses and coughed.

  My aunt Susan seemed to be taking it in. She was then rather a prettyslender woman of twenty-three or four, I suppose, and I remember beingstruck by the blueness of her eyes and the clear freshness of hercomplexion. She had little features, a button nose, a pretty chin and along graceful neck that stuck out of her pale blue cotton morningdress. There was a look of half-assumed perplexity on her face, a littlequizzical wrinkle of the brow that suggested a faintly amused attemptto follow my uncle's mental operations, a vain attempt and a certainhopelessness that had in succession become habitual. She seemed to besaying, "Oh Lord! What's he giving me THIS time?" And as came to knowher better I detected, as a complication of her effort of apprehension,a subsidiary riddle to "What's he giving me?" and that was--to borrow aphrase from my schoolboy language "Is it keeps?" She looked at my motherand me, and back to her husband again.

  "You know," he said. "George."

  "Well," she said to my mother, descending the last three steps of thestaircase and holding out her hand! "you're welcome. Though it's asurprise.... I can't ask you to HAVE anything, I'm afraid, for thereisn't anything in the house." She smiled, and looked at her husbandbanteringly. "Unless he makes up something with his old chemicals, whichhe's quite equal to doing."

  My mother shook hands stiffly, and told me to kiss my aunt....

  "Well, let's all sit down," said my uncle, suddenly whistling throughhis clenched teeth, and briskly rubbing his hands together. He put up achair for my mother, raised the blind of the little window, lowered itagain, and returned to his hearthrug. "I'm sure," he said, as one whodecides, "I'm very glad to see you."

  V

  As they talked I gave my attention pretty exclusively to my uncle.

  I noted him in great detail. I remember now his partially unbuttonedwaistcoat, as though something had occurred to distract him as he didit up, and a little cut upon his chin. I liked a certain humour inhis eyes. I watched, too, with the fascination that things have for anobservant boy, the play of his lips--they were a little oblique, andthere was something "slipshod," if one may strain a word so far, abouthis mouth, so that he lisped and sibilated ever and again and the comingand going of a curious expression, triumphant in quality it was, uponhis face as he talked. He fingered his glasses, which did not seem tofit his nose, fretted with things in his waistcoat pockets or put hishands behind him, looked over our heads, and ever and again rose to histoes and dropped back on his heels. He had a way of drawing air in attimes through his teeth that gave a whispering zest to his speech It's asound I can only represent as a soft Zzzz.

  He did most of the talking. My mother repeated what she had already saidin the shop, "I have brought George over to you," and then desistedfor a time from the real business in hand. "You find this acomfortable
house?" she asked; and this being affirmed: "It looks--veryconvenient.... Not too big to be a trouble--no. You like Wimblehurst, Isuppose?"

  My uncle retorted with some inquiries about the great people ofBladesover, and my mother answered in the character of a personal friendof Lady Drew's. The talk hung for a time, and then my uncle embarkedupon a dissertation upon Wimblehurst.

  "This place," he began, "isn't of course quite the place I ought to bein."

  My mother nodded as though she had expected that.

  "It gives me no Scope," he went on. "It's dead-and-alive. Nothinghappens."

  "He's always wanting something to happen," said my aunt Susan. "Some dayhe'll get a shower of things and they'll be too much for him."

  "Not they," said my uncle, buoyantly.

  "Do you find business--slack?" asked my mother.

  "Oh! one rubs along. But there's no Development--no growth. They justcome along here and buy pills when they want 'em--and a horseball orsuch. They've got to be ill before there's a prescription. That sortthey are. You can't get 'em to launch out, you can't get 'em to take upanything new. For instance, I've been trying lately--induce them to buytheir medicines in advance, and in larger quantities. But they won'tlook for it! Then I tried to float a little notion of mine, sort of aninsurance scheme for colds; you pay so much a week, and when you've gota cold you get a bottle of Cough Linctus so long as you can produce asubstantial sniff. See? But Lord! they've no capacity for ideas, theydon't catch on; no Jump about the place, no Life. Live!--they trickle,and what one has to do here is to trickle too--Zzzz."

  "Ah!" said my mother.

  "It doesn't suit me," said my uncle. "I'm the cascading sort."

  "George was that," said my mother after a pondering moment.

  My aunt Susan took up the parable with an affectionate glance at herhusband.

  "He's always trying to make his old business jump," she said. "Alwaysputting fresh cards in the window, or getting up to something. You'dhardly believe. It makes ME jump sometimes."

  "But it does no good," said my uncle.

  "It does no good," said his wife. "It's not his miloo..."

  Presently they came upon a wide pause.

  From the beginning of their conversation there had been the promise ofthis pause, and I pricked my ears. I knew perfectly what was boundto come; they were going to talk of my father. I was enormouslystrengthened in my persuasion when I found my mother's eyes restingthoughtfully upon me in the silence, and than my uncle looked at me andthen my aunt. I struggled unavailingly to produce an expression of meekstupidity.

  "I think," said my uncle, "that George will find it more amusing to havea turn in the market-place than to sit here talking with us. There's apair of stocks there, George--very interesting. Old-fashioned stocks."

  "I don't mind sitting here," I said.

  My uncle rose and in the most friendly way led me through the shop. Hestood on his doorstep and jerked amiable directions to me.

  "Ain't it sleepy, George, eh? There's the butcher's dog over there,asleep in the road-half an hour from midday! If the last Trump soundedI don't believe it would wake. Nobody would wake! The chaps up there inthe churchyard--they'd just turn over and say: 'Naar--you don't catchus, you don't! See?'.... Well, you'll find the stocks just round thatcorner."

  He watched me out of sight.

  So I never heard what they said about my father after all.

  VI

  When I returned, my uncle had in some remarkable way become larger andcentral. "Tha'chu, George?" he cried, when the shop-door bell sounded."Come right through"; and I found him, as it were, in the chairman'splace before the draped grate.

  The three of them regarded me.

  "We have been talking of making you a chemist, George," said my uncle.

  My mother looked at me. "I had hoped," she said, "that Lady Drew wouldhave done something for him--" She stopped.

  "In what way?" said my uncle.

  "She might have spoken to some one, got him into something perhaps...."She had the servant's invincible persuasion that all good things aredone by patronage.

  "He is not the sort of boy for whom things are done," she added,dismissing these dreams. "He doesn't accommodate himself. When he thinksLady Drew wishes a thing, he seems not to wish it. Towards Mr. Redgrave,too, he has been--disrespectful--he is like his father."

  "Who's Mr. Redgrave?"

  "The Vicar."

  "A bit independent?" said my uncle, briskly.

  "Disobedient," said my mother. "He has no idea of his place. He seems tothink he can get on by slighting people and flouting them. He'll learnperhaps before it is too late."

  My uncle stroked his cut chin and me. "Have you learnt any Latin?" heasked abruptly.

  I said I had not.

  "He'll have to learn a little Latin," he explained to my mother,"to qualify. H'm. He could go down to the chap at the grammar schoolhere--it's just been routed into existence again by the CharityCommissioners and have lessons."

  "What, me learn Latin!" I cried, with emotion.

  "A little," he said.

  "I've always wanted" I said and; "LATIN!"

  I had long been obsessed by the idea that having no Latin was adisadvantage in the world, and Archie Garvell had driven the point ofthis pretty earnestly home. The literature I had read at Bladesover hadall tended that way. Latin had had a quality of emancipation for me thatI find it difficult to convey. And suddenly, when I had supposed alllearning was at an end for me, I heard this!

  "It's no good to you, of course," said my uncle, "except to pass examswith, but there you are!"

  "You'll have to learn Latin because you have to learn Latin," said mymother, "not because you want to. And afterwards you will have to learnall sorts of other things...."

  The idea that I was to go on learning, that to read and master thecontents of books was still to be justifiable as a duty, overwhelmed allother facts. I had had it rather clear in my mind for some weeks thatall that kind of opportunity might close to me for ever. I began to takea lively interest in this new project.

  "Then shall I live here?" I asked, "with you, and study... as well aswork in the shop?"

  "That's the way of it," said my uncle.

  I parted from my mother that day in a dream, so sudden and importantwas this new aspect of things to me. I was to learn Latin! Now that thehumiliation of my failure at Bladesover was past for her, now that shehad a little got over her first intense repugnance at this resort to myuncle and contrived something that seemed like a possible provision formy future, the tenderness natural to a parting far more significant thanany of our previous partings crept into her manner.

  She sat in the train to return, I remember, and I stood at the open doorof her compartment, and neither of us knew how soon we should cease forever to be a trouble to one another.

  "You must be a good boy, George," she said. "You must learn.... And youmustn't set yourself up against those who are above you and better thanyou.... Or envy them."

  "No, mother," I said.

  I promised carelessly. Her eyes were fixed upon me. I was wonderingwhether I could by any means begin Latin that night.

  Something touched her heart then, some thought, some memory; perhapssome premonition.... The solitary porter began slamming carriage doors.

  "George" she said hastily, almost shamefully, "kiss me!"

  I stepped up into her compartment as she bent downward.

  She caught me in her arms quite eagerly, she pressed me to her--astrange thing for her to do. I perceived her eyes were extraordinarilybright, and then this brightness burst along the lower lids and rolleddown her cheeks.

  For the first and last time in my life I saw my mother's tears. Then shehad gone, leaving me discomforted and perplexed, forgetting for a timeeven that I was to learn Latin, thinking of my mother as of somethingnew and strange.

  The thing recurred though I sought to dismiss it, it stuck itselfinto my memory against the day of fuller understanding. Poor,
proud,habitual, sternly narrow soul! poor difficult and misunderstanding son!it was the first time that ever it dawned upon me that my mother alsomight perhaps feel.

  VII

  My mother died suddenly and, it was thought by Lady Drew,inconsiderately, the following spring. Her ladyship instantly fled toFolkestone with Miss Somerville and Fison, until the funeral should beover and my mother's successor installed.

  My uncle took me over to the funeral. I remember there was a sort ofprolonged crisis in the days preceding this because, directly he heardof my loss, he had sent a pair of check trousers to the Judkins peoplein London to be dyed black, and they did not come back in time. Hebecame very excited on the third day, and sent a number of increasinglyfiery telegrams without any result whatever, and succumbed next morningwith a very ill grace to my aunt Susan's insistence upon the resourcesof his dress-suit. In my memory those black legs of his, in aparticularly thin and shiny black cloth--for evidently his dress-suitdated from adolescent and slenderer days--straddle like the Colossusof Rhodes over my approach to my mother's funeral. Moreover, I wasinconvenienced and distracted by a silk hat he had bought me, my firstsilk hat, much ennobled, as his was also, by a deep mourning band.

  I remember, but rather indistinctly, my mother's white paneledhousekeeper's room and the touch of oddness about it that she was notthere, and the various familiar faces made strange by black, and I seemto recall the exaggerated self-consciousness that arose out of theirfocussed attention. No doubt the sense of the new silk hat came and wentand came again in my emotional chaos. Then something comes out clear andsorrowful, rises out clear and sheer from among all these rather baseand inconsequent things, and once again I walk before all the othermourners close behind her coffin as it is carried along the churchyardpath to her grave, with the old vicar's slow voice saying regretfullyand unconvincingly above me, triumphant solemn things.

  "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believethin me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth andbelieveth in me shall never die."

  Never die! The day was a high and glorious morning in spring, and allthe trees were budding and bursting into green. Everywhere there wereblossoms and flowers; the pear trees and cherry trees in the sexton'sgarden were sunlit snow, there were nodding daffodils and early tulipsin the graveyard beds, great multitudes of daisies, and everywherethe birds seemed singing. And in the middle was the brown coffin end,tilting on men's shoulders and half occluded by the vicar's Oxford hood.

  And so we came to my mother's waiting grave.

  For a time I was very observant, watching the coffin lowered, hearingthe words of the ritual. It seemed a very curious business altogether.

  Suddenly as the service drew to its end, I felt something had stillto be said which had not been said, realised that she had withdrawnin silence, neither forgiving me nor hearing from me--those now lostassurances. Suddenly I knew I had not understood. Suddenly I saw hertenderly; remembered not so much tender or kindly things of her as hercrossed wishes and the ways in which I had thwarted her. SurprisinglyI realised that behind all her hardness and severity she had loved me,that I was the only thing she had ever loved and that until this momentI had never loved her. And now she was there and deaf and blind to me,pitifully defeated in her designs for me, covered from me so that shecould not know....

  I dug my nails into the palms of my hands, I set my teeth, but tearsblinded me, sobs would have choked me had speech been required of me.The old vicar read on, there came a mumbled response--and so on to theend. I wept as it were internally, and only when we had come out of thechurchyard could I think and speak calmly again.

  Stamped across this memory are the little black figures of my uncle andRabbits, telling Avebury, the sexton and undertaker, that "it had allpassed off very well--very well indeed."

  VIII

  That is the last I shall tell of Bladesover. The dropscene falls onthat, and it comes no more as an actual presence into this novel. Idid indeed go back there once again, but under circumstances quiteimmaterial to my story. But in a sense Bladesover has never left me;it is, as I said at the outset, one of those dominant explanatoryimpressions that make the framework of my mind. Bladesover illuminatesEngland; it has become all that is spacious, dignified pretentious, andtruly conservative in English life. It is my social datum. That is why Ihave drawn it here on so large a scale.

  When I came back at last to the real Bladesover on an inconsequentvisit, everything was far smaller than I could have supposed possible.It was as though everything had shivered and shrivelled a little at theLichtenstein touch. The harp was still in the saloon, but there was adifferent grand piano with a painted lid and a metrostyle pianola, andan extraordinary quantity of artistic litter and bric-a-brac scatteredabout. There was the trail of the Bond Street showroom over it all. Thefurniture was still under chintz, but it wasn't the same sort of chintzalthough it pretended to be, and the lustre-dangling chandeliers hadpassed away. Lady Lichtenstein's books replaced the brown volumes Ihad browsed among--they were mostly presentation copies of contemporarynovels and the National Review and the Empire Review, and the NineteenthCentury and after jostled current books on the tables--English new booksin gaudy catchpenny "artistic" covers, French and Italian novels inyellow, German art handbooks of almost incredible ugliness. Therewere abundant evidences that her ladyship was playing with theKeltic renascence, and a great number of ugly cats made of china--she"collected" china and stoneware cats--stood about everywhere--in allcolours, in all kinds of deliberately comic, highly glazed distortion.

  It is nonsense to pretend that finance makes any better aristocrats thanrent. Nothing can make an aristocrat but pride, knowledge, training, andthe sword. These people were no improvement on the Drews, none whatever.There was no effect of a beneficial replacement of passive unintelligentpeople by active intelligent ones. One felt that a smaller but moreenterprising and intensely undignified variety of stupidity had replacedthe large dullness of the old gentry, and that was all. Bladesover, Ithought, had undergone just the same change between the seventies andthe new century that had overtaken the dear old Times, and heaven knowshow much more of the decorous British fabric. These Lichtensteins andtheir like seem to have no promise in them at all of any fresh vitalityfor the kingdom. I do not believe in their intelligence or theirpower--they have nothing new about them at all, nothing creative norrejuvenescent, no more than a disorderly instinct of acquisition; andthe prevalence of them and their kind is but a phase in the broad slowdecay of the great social organism of England. They could not have madeBladesover they cannot replace it; they just happen to break out overit--saprophytically.

  Well--that was my last impression of Bladesover.

  CHAPTER THE THIRD

  THE WIMBLEHURST APPRENTICESHIP

  I

  So far as I can remember now, except for that one emotional phase by thegraveside, I passed through all these experiences rather callously. Ihad already, with the facility of youth, changed my world, ceased tothink at all of the old school routine and put Bladesover aside fordigestion at a latter stage. I took up my new world in Wimblehurst withthe chemist's shop as its hub, set to work at Latin and materia medica,and concentrated upon the present with all my heart. Wimblehurst is anexceptionally quiet and grey Sussex town rare among south of Englandtowns in being largely built of stone. I found something very agreeableand picturesque in its clean cobbled streets, its odd turnings andabrupt corners; and in the pleasant park that crowds up one side of thetown. The whole place is under the Eastry dominion and it was theEastry influence and dignity that kept its railway station a mile andthree-quarters away. Eastry House is so close that it dominates thewhole; one goes across the marketplace (with its old lock-up andstocks), past the great pre-reformation church, a fine grey shell, likesome empty skull from which the life has fled, and there at once are thehuge wrought-iron gates, and one peeps through them to see the facade ofthis place, very white and large and fine, down a long avenue of ye
ws.Eastry was far greater than Bladesover and an altogether completerexample of the eighteenth century system. It ruled not two villages, buta borough, that had sent its sons and cousins to parliament almost as amatter of right so long as its franchise endured. Every one was in thesystem, every one--except my uncle. He stood out and complained.

  My uncle was the first real breach I found in the great front ofBladesover the world had presented me, for Chatham was not so much abreach as a confirmation. But my uncle had no respect for Bladesover andEastry--none whatever. He did not believe in them. He was blind even towhat they were. He propounded strange phrases about them, he exfoliatedand wagged about novel and incredible ideas.

  "This place," said my uncle, surveying it from his open doorway in thedignified stillness of a summer afternoon, "wants Waking Up!"

  I was sorting up patent medicines in the corner.

  "I'd like to let a dozen young Americans loose into it," said my uncle."Then we'd see."

  I made a tick against Mother Shipton's Sleeping Syrup. We had clearedour forward stock.

  "Things must be happening SOMEWHERE, George," he broke out in aquerulously rising note as he came back into the little shop. He fiddledwith the piled dummy boxes of fancy soap and scent and so forth thatadorned the end of the counter, then turned about petulantly, stuck hishands deeply into his pockets and withdrew one to scratch his head. "Imust do SOMETHING," he said. "I can't stand it.

  "I must invent something. And shove it.... I could.

  "Or a play. There's a deal of money in a play, George. What would youthink of me writing a play eh?... There's all sorts of things to bedone.

  "Or the stog-igschange."

  He fell into that meditative whistling of his.

  "Sac-ramental wine!" he swore, "this isn't the world--it's Cold MuttonFat! That's what Wimblehurst is! Cold Mutton Fat!--dead and stiff! AndI'm buried in it up to the arm pits. Nothing ever happens, nobodywants things to happen 'scept me! Up in London, George, things happen.America! I wish to Heaven, George, I'd been born American--where thingshum.

  "What can one do here? How can one grow? While we're sleepin' here withour Capital oozing away into Lord Eastry's pockets for rent-men areup there...." He indicated London as remotely over the top of thedispensing counter, and then as a scene of great activity by a whirl ofthe hand and a wink and a meaning smile at me.

  "What sort of things do they do?" I asked.

  "Rush about," he said. "Do things! Somethin' glorious. There's covergambling. Ever heard of that, George?" He drew the air in through histeeth. "You put down a hundred say, and buy ten thousand pounds worth.See? That's a cover of one per cent. Things go up one, you sell, realisecent per cent; down, whiff, it's gone! Try again! Cent per cent, George,every day. Men are made or done for in an hour. And the shoutin'!Zzzz.... Well, that's one way, George. Then another way--there'sCorners!"

  "They're rather big things, aren't they?" I ventured.

  "Oh, if you go in for wheat or steel--yes. But suppose you tackled alittle thing, George. Just some little thing that only needed a fewthousands. Drugs for example. Shoved all you had into it--staked yourliver on it, so to speak. Take a drug--take ipecac, for example. Takea lot of ipecac. Take all there is! See? There you are! There aren'tunlimited supplies of ipecacuanha--can't be!--and it's a thing peoplemust have. Then quinine again! You watch your chance, wait for atropical war breaking out, let's say, and collar all the quinine. WhereARE they? Must have quinine, you know. Eh? Zzzz.

  "Lord! there's no end of things--no end of little things.Dill-water--all the suffering babes yowling for it. Eucalyptusagain--cascara--witch hazel--menthol--all the toothache things. Thenthere's antiseptics, and curare, cocaine...."

  "Rather a nuisance to the doctors," I reflected.

  "They got to look out for themselves. By Jove, yes. They'll do you ifthey can, and you do them. Like brigands. That makes it romantic. That'sthe Romance of Commerce, George. You're in the mountains there! Thinkof having all the quinine in the world, and some millionaire's pamperedwife gone ill with malaria, eh? That's a squeeze, George, eh? Eh?Millionaire on his motor car outside, offering you any price you liked.That 'ud wake up Wimblehurst.... Lord! You haven't an Idea down here.Not an idea. Zzzz."

  He passed into a rapt dream, from which escaped such fragments as:"Fifty per cent. advance sir; security--to-morrow. Zzzz."

  The idea of cornering a drug struck upon my mind then as a sort ofirresponsible monkey trick that no one would ever be permitted to do inreality. It was the sort of nonsense one would talk to make Ewart laughand set him going on to still odder possibilities. I thought it was partof my uncle's way of talking. But I've learnt differently since. Thewhole trend of modern money-making is to foresee something that willpresently be needed and put it out of reach, and then to haggle yourselfwealthy. You buy up land upon which people will presently want to buildhouses, you secure rights that will bar vitally important developments,and so on, and so on. Of course the naive intelligence of a boy does notgrasp the subtler developments of human inadequacy. He begins life witha disposition to believe in the wisdom of grown-up people, he does notrealise how casual and disingenuous has been the development of law andcustom, and he thinks that somewhere in the state there is a poweras irresistible as a head master's to check mischievous and foolishenterprises of every sort. I will confess that when my uncle talked ofcornering quinine, I had a clear impression that any one who contrivedto do that would pretty certainly go to jail. Now I know that any onewho could really bring it off would be much more likely to go to theHouse of Lords!

  My uncle ranged over the gilt labels of his bottles and drawers for awhile, dreaming of corners in this and that. But at last he reverted toWimblehurst again.

  "You got to be in London when these things are in hand. Down here--!

  "Jee-rusalem!" he cried. "Why did I plant myself here? Everything'sdone. The game's over. Here's Lord Eastry, and he's got everything,except what his lawyers get, and before you get any more change this wayyou'll have to dynamite him--and them. HE doesn't want anything moreto happen. Why should he? Any chance 'ud be a loss to him. He wantseverything to burble along and burble along and go on as it's goingfor the next ten thousand years, Eastry after Eastry, one parson downanother come, one grocer dead, get another! Any one with any ideasbetter go away. They HAVE gone away! Look at all these blessed peoplein this place! Look at 'em! All fast asleep, doing their business outof habit--in a sort of dream, Stuffed men would do just as well--just.They've all shook down into their places. THEY don't want anything tohappen either. They're all broken in. There you are! Only what are theyall alive for?...

  "Why can't they get a clockwork chemist?"

  He concluded as he often concluded these talks. "I must inventsomething,--that's about what I must do. Zzzz. Some convenience.Something people want.... Strike out.... You can't think, George, ofanything everybody wants and hasn't got? I mean something you could turnout retail under a shilling, say? Well, YOU think, whenever you haven'tgot anything better to do. See?"

  II

  So I remember my uncle in that first phase, young, but already a littlefat, restless, fretful, garrulous, putting in my fermenting head allsorts of discrepant ideas. Certainly he was educational....

  For me the years at Wimblehurst were years of pretty active growth.Most of my leisure and much of my time in the shop I spent in study.I speedily mastered the modicum of Latin necessary for my qualifyingexaminations, and--a little assisted by the Government Science and ArtDepartment classes that were held in the Grammar School--went on with mymathematics. There were classes in physics, in chemistry, in mathematicsand machine drawing, and I took up these subjects with considerableavidity. Exercise I got chiefly in the form of walks. There was somecricket in the summer and football in the winter sustained by youngmen's clubs that levied a parasitic blackmail of the big people and thesitting member, but I was never very keen at these games. I didn't findany very close companions among the youths of Wimblehurst. They struckme, after
my cockney schoolmates, as loutish and slow, servile andfurtive, spiteful and mean. WE used to swagger, but these countrymendragged their feet and hated an equal who didn't; we talked loud, butyou only got the real thoughts of Wimblehurst in a knowing undertonebehind its hand. And even then they weren't much in the way of thoughts.

  No, I didn't like those young countrymen, and I'm no believer in theEnglish countryside under the Bladesover system as a breeding ground forhonourable men. One hears a frightful lot of nonsense about the RuralExodus and the degeneration wrought by town life upon our population. Tomy mind, the English townsman, even in the slums, is infinitely betterspiritually, more courageous, more imaginative and cleaner, than hisagricultural cousin. I've seen them both when they didn't thinkthey were being observed, and I know. There was something about myWimblehurst companions that disgusted me. It's hard to define. Heavenknows that at that cockney boarding-school at Goudhurst we were coarseenough; the Wimblehurst youngsters had neither words nor courage for thesort of thing we used to do--for our bad language, for example; but,on the other hand, they displayed a sort of sluggish, real lewdness,lewdness is the word--a baseness of attitude. Whatever we exiled urbansdid at Goudhurst was touched with something, however coarse, of romanticimagination. We had read the Boys of England, and told each otherstories. In the English countryside there are no books at all, no songs,no drama, no valiant sin even; all these things have never come or theywere taken away and hidden generations ago, and the imagination abortsand bestialises. That, I think, is where the real difference against theEnglish rural man lies. It is because I know this that I do not sharein the common repinings because our countryside is being depopulated,because our population is passing through the furnace of the towns. Theystarve, they suffer, no doubt, but they come out of it hardened, theycome out of it with souls.

  Of an evening the Wimblehurst blade, shiny-faced from a wash and withsome loud finery, a coloured waistcoat or a vivid tie, would betakehimself to the Eastry Arms billiard-room, or to the bar parlour ofsome minor pub where nap could be played. One soon sickened of his slowknowingness, the cunning observation of his deadened eyes, his idea ofa "good story," always, always told in undertones, poor dirty worm! hisshrewd, elaborate maneuvers for some petty advantage, a drink to thegood or such-like deal. There rises before my eyes as I write, youngHopley Dodd, the son of the Wimblehurst auctioneer, the pride ofWimblehurst, its finest flower, with his fur waistcoat and his bulldogpipe, his riding breeches--he had no horse--and his gaiters, as he usedto sit, leaning forward and watching the billiard-table from under thebrim of his artfully tilted hat. A half-dozen phrases constituted hisconversation: "hard lines!" he used to say, and "Good baazness," in abass bleat. Moreover, he had a long slow whistle that was esteemed thevery cream of humorous comment. Night after night he was there.

  Also you knew he would not understand that _I_ could play billiards, andregarded every stroke I made as a fluke. For a beginner I didn't play sobadly, I thought. I'm not so sure now; that was my opinion at the time.But young Dodd's scepticism and the "good baazness" finally cured meof my disposition to frequent the Eastry Arms, and so these noises hadtheir value in my world.

  I made no friends among the young men of the place at all, and though Iwas entering upon adolescence I have no love-affair to tell of here.Not that I was not waking up to that aspect of life in my middle teens Idid, indeed, in various slightly informal ways scrape acquaintance withcasual Wimblehurst girls; with a little dressmaker's apprentice I gotupon shyly speaking terms, and a pupil teacher in the National Schoolwent further and was "talked about" in connection with me but I was notby any means touched by any reality of passion for either of these youngpeople; love--love as yet came to me only in my dreams. I only kissedthese girls once or twice. They rather disconcerted than developed thosedreams. They were so clearly not "it." I shall have much to say of lovein this story, but I may break it to the reader now that it is my roleto be a rather ineffectual lover. Desire I knew well enough--indeed, toowell; but love I have been shy of. In all my early enterprises in thewar of the sexes, I was torn between the urgency of the body and ahabit of romantic fantasy that wanted every phase of the adventure tobe generous and beautiful. And I had a curiously haunting memory ofBeatrice, of her kisses in the bracken and her kiss upon the wall, thatsomehow pitched the standard too high for Wimblehurst's opportunities. Iwill not deny I did in a boyish way attempt a shy, rude adventure or soin love-making at Wimblehurst; but through these various influences,I didn't bring things off to any extent at all. I left behind me nodevastating memories, no splendid reputation. I came away at last,still inexperienced and a little thwarted, with only a natural growth ofinterest and desire in sexual things.

  If I fell in love with any one in Wimblehurst it was with my aunt. Shetreated me with a kindliness that was only half maternal--she petted mybooks, she knew about my certificates, she made fun of me in a way thatstirred my heart to her. Quite unconsciously I grew fond of her....

  My adolescent years at Wimblehurst were on the whole laborious,uneventful years that began in short jackets and left me in many waysnearly a man, years so uneventful that the Calculus of Variations isassociated with one winter, and an examination in Physics for Scienceand Art department Honours marks an epoch. Many divergent impulsesstirred within me, but the master impulse was a grave young dispositionto work and learn and thereby in some not very clearly defined way getout of the Wimblehurst world into which I had fallen. I wrote withsome frequency to Ewart, self-conscious, but, as I remember them, notintelligent letters, dated in Latin and with lapses into Latin quotationthat roused Ewart to parody. There was something about me in those daysmore than a little priggish. But it was, to do myself justice, somethingmore than the petty pride of learning. I had a very grave sense ofdiscipline and preparation that I am not ashamed at all to remember. Iwas serious. More serious than I am at the present time. More serious,indeed, than any adult seems to be. I was capable then of efforts--ofnobilities.... They are beyond me now. I don't see why, at forty, Ishouldn't confess I respect my own youth. I had dropped being a boyquite abruptly. I thought I was presently to go out into a larger andquite important world and do significant things there. I thought Iwas destined to do something definite to a world that had a definitepurpose. I did not understand then, as I do now, that life was toconsist largely in the world's doing things to me. Young people neverdo seem to understand that aspect of things. And, as I say, among myeducational influences my uncle, all unsuspected, played a leading part,and perhaps among other things gave my discontent with Wimblehurst, mydesire to get away from that clean and picturesque emptiness, a form andexpression that helped to emphasise it. In a way that definition made mepatient. "Presently I shall get to London," I said, echoing him.

  I remember him now as talking, always talking, in those days. He talkedto me of theology, he talked of politics, of the wonders of scienceand the marvels of art, of the passions and the affections, ofthe immortality of the soul and the peculiar actions of drugs; butpredominantly and constantly he talked of getting on, of enterprises,of inventions and great fortunes, of Rothschilds, silver kings,Vanderbilts, Goulds, flotations, realisations and the marvelous waysof Chance with men--in all localities, that is to say, that are notabsolutely sunken to the level of Cold Mutton Fat.

  When I think of those early talks, I figure him always in one of threepositions. Either we were in the dispensing lair behind a high barrier,he pounding up things in a mortar perhaps, and I rolling pill-stuff intolong rolls and cutting it up with a sort of broad, fluted knife, orhe stood looking out of the shop door against the case of sponges andspray-diffusers, while I surveyed him from behind the counter, or heleant against the little drawers behind the counter, and I hovereddusting in front. The thought of those early days brings back to mynostrils the faint smell of scent that was always in the air, marblednow with streaks of this drug and now of that, and to my eyes the rowsof jejune glass bottles with gold labels, mirror-reflected, that stoodbehind him. My au
nt, I remember, used sometimes to come into the shopin a state of aggressive sprightliness, a sort of connubial raggingexpedition, and get much fun over the abbreviated Latinity of those giltinscriptions. "Ol Amjig, George," she would read derisively, "and hepretends it's almond oil! Snap!--and that's mustard. Did you ever,George?

  "Look at him, George, looking dignified. I'd like to put an old labelon to him round the middle like his bottles are, with Ol Pondo on it.That's Latin for Impostor, George MUST be. He'd look lovely with astopper."

  "YOU want a stopper," said my uncle, projecting his face....

  My aunt, dear soul, was in those days quite thin and slender, with adelicate rosebud completion and a disposition to connubial badinage, toa sort of gentle skylarking. There was a silvery ghost of lisping in herspeech. She was a great humourist, and as the constraint of my presenceat meals wore off, I became more and more aware of a filmy but extensivenet of nonsense she had woven about her domestic relations until it hadbecome the reality of her life. She affected a derisive attitude to theworld at large and applied the epithet "old" to more things than I haveever heard linked to it before or since. "Here's the old news-paper,"she used to say--to my uncle. "Now don't go and get it in the butter,you silly old Sardine!"

  "What's the day of the week, Susan?" my uncle would ask.

  "Old Monday, Sossidge," she would say, and add, "I got all my OldWashing to do. Don't I KNOW it!"...

  She had evidently been the wit and joy of a large circle ofschoolfellows, and this style had become a second nature with her. Itmade her very delightful to me in that quiet place. Her customary walkeven had a sort of hello! in it. Her chief preoccupation in life was, Ibelieve, to make my uncle laugh, and when by some new nickname, some newquaintness or absurdity, she achieved that end, she was, behind a maskof sober amazement, the happiest woman on earth. My uncle's laugh whenit did come, I must admit was, as Baedeker says, "rewarding." It beganwith gusty blowings and snortings, and opened into a clear "Ha ha!"but in fullest development it included, in those youthful days, fallingabout anyhow and doubling up tightly, and whackings of the stomach, andtears and cries of anguish. I never in my life heard my uncle laugh tohis maximum except at her; he was commonly too much in earnest for that,and he didn't laugh much at all, to my knowledge, after those earlyyears. Also she threw things at him to an enormous extent in her resolveto keep things lively in spite of Wimblehurst; sponges out of stock shethrew, cushions, balls of paper, clean washing, bread; and once up theyard when they thought that I and the errand boy and the diminutivemaid of all work were safely out of the way, she smashed a boxful ofeight-ounce bottles I had left to drain, assaulting my uncle with a newsoft broom. Sometimes she would shy things at me--but not often. Thereseemed always laughter round and about her--all three of us would sharehysterics at times--and on one occasion the two of them came home fromchurch shockingly ashamed of themselves, because of a storm of mirthduring the sermon. The vicar, it seems, had tried to blow his nosewith a black glove as well as the customary pocket-handkerchief. Andafterwards she had picked up her own glove by the finger, and lookinginnocently but intently sideways, had suddenly by this simple expedientexploded my uncle altogether. We had it all over again at dinner.

  "But it shows you," cried my uncle, suddenly becoming grave, "whatWimblehurst is, to have us all laughing at a little thing like that! Weweren't the only ones that giggled. Not by any means! And, Lord! it wasfunny!"

  Socially, my uncle and aunt were almost completely isolated. In placeslike Wimblehurst the tradesmen's lives always are isolated socially,all of them, unless they have a sister or a bosom friend among theother wives, but the husbands met in various bar-parlours or in thebilliard-room of the Eastry Arms. But my uncle, for the most part, spenthis evenings at home. When first he arrived in Wimblehurst I thinkhe had spread his effect of abounding ideas and enterprise rathertoo aggressively; and Wimblehurst, after a temporary subjugation, hadrebelled and done its best to make a butt of him. His appearance in apublic-house led to a pause in any conversation that was going on.

  "Come to tell us about everything, Mr. Pond'revo?" some one would saypolitely.

  "You wait," my uncle used to answer, disconcerted, and sulk for the restof his visit.

  Or some one with an immense air of innocence would remark to the worldgenerally, "They're talkin' of rebuildin' Wimblehurst all over again,I'm told. Anybody heard anything of it? Going to make it a reg'larsmartgoin', enterprisin' place--kind of Crystal Pallas."

  "Earthquake and a pestilence before you get that," my uncle wouldmutter, to the infinite delight of every one, and add somethinginaudible about "Cold Mutton Fat."...

  III

  We were torn apart by a financial accident to my uncle of which I didnot at first grasp the full bearings. He had developed what I regardedas an innocent intellectual recreation which he called stock-marketmeteorology. I think he got the idea from one use of curves in thegraphic presentation of associated variations that he saw me plotting.He secured some of my squared paper and, having cast about for a time,decided to trace the rise and fall of certain lines and railways."There's something in this, George," he said, and I little dreamt thatamong other things that were in it, was the whole of his spare money andmost of what my mother had left to him in trust for me.

  "It's as plain as can be," he said. "See, here's one system of waves andhere's another! These are prices for Union Pacifics--extending over amonth. Now next week, mark my words, they'll be down one whole point.We're getting near the steep part of the curve again. See? It'sabsolutely scientific. It's verifiable. Well, and apply it! You buy inthe hollow and sell on the crest, and there you are!"

  I was so convinced of the triviality of this amusement that to find atlast that he had taken it in the most disastrous earnest overwhelmed me.

  He took me for a long walk to break it to me, over the hills towardsYare and across the great gorse commons by Hazelbrow.

  "There are ups and downs in life, George," he said--halfway across thatgreat open space, and paused against the sky.... "I left out one factorin the Union Pacific analysis."

  "DID you?" I said, struck by the sudden chance in his voice. "But youdon't mean?"

  I stopped and turned on him in the narrow sandy rut of pathway and hestopped likewise.

  "I do, George. I DO mean. It's bust me! I'm a bankrupt here and now."

  "Then--?"

  "The shop's bust too. I shall have to get out of that."

  "And me?"

  "Oh, you!--YOU'RE all right. You can transfer your apprenticeship,and--er--well, I'm not the sort of man to be careless with trust funds,you can be sure. I kept that aspect in mind. There's some of it leftGeorge--trust me!--quite a decent little sum."

  "But you and aunt?"

  "It isn't QUITE the way we meant to leave Wimblehurst, George; but weshall have to go. Sale; all the things shoved about and ticketed--lota hundred and one. Ugh!... It's been a larky little house in some ways.The first we had. Furnishing--a spree in its way.... Very happy..." Hisface winced at some memory. "Let's go on, George," he said shortly, nearchoking, I could see.

  I turned my back on him, and did not look round again for a littlewhile.

  "That's how it is, you see, George." I heard him after a time.

  When we were back in the high road again he came alongside, and for atime we walked in silence.

  "Don't say anything home yet," he said presently. "Fortunes of War. Igot to pick the proper time with Susan--else she'll get depressed. Notthat she isn't a first-rate brick whatever comes along."

  "All right," I said, "I'll be careful"; and it seemed to me for the timealtogether too selfish to bother him with any further inquiries abouthis responsibility as my trustee. He gave a little sigh of relief atmy note of assent, and was presently talking quite cheerfully of hisplans.... But he had, I remember, one lapse into moodiness that came andwent suddenly. "Those others!" he said, as though the thought had stunghim for the first time.

  "What others?" I asked.


  "Damn them!" said he.

  "But what others?"

  "All those damned stick-in-the-mud-and-die-slowly tradespeople: Ruck,the butcher, Marbel, the grocer. Snape! Gord! George, HOW they'll grin!"

  I thought him over in the next few weeks, and I remember now in greatdetail the last talk we had together before he handed over the shopand me to his successor. For he had the good luck to sell his business,"lock, stock, and barrel"--in which expression I found myself and myindentures included. The horrors of a sale by auction of the furnitureeven were avoided.

  I remember that either coming or going on that occasion, Ruck, thebutcher, stood in his doorway and regarded us with a grin that showedhis long teeth.

  "You half-witted hog!" said my uncle. "You grinning hyaena"; and then,"Pleasant day, Mr. Ruck."

  "Goin' to make your fortun' in London, then?" said Mr. Ruck, with slowenjoyment.

  That last excursion took us along the causeway to Beeching, and so upthe downs and round almost as far as Steadhurst, home. My moods, as wewent, made a mingled web. By this time I had really grasped the factthat my uncle had, in plain English, robbed me; the little accumulationsof my mother, six hundred pounds and more, that would have educated meand started me in business, had been eaten into and was mostly goneinto the unexpected hollow that ought to have been a crest of the UnionPacific curve, and of the remainder he still gave no account. I was tooyoung and inexperienced to insist on this or know how to get it, but thethought of it all made streaks of decidedly black anger in that schemeof interwoven feelings. And you know, I was also acutely sorry forhim--almost as sorry as I was for my aunt Susan. Even then I had quitefound him out. I knew him to be weaker than myself; his incurable,irresponsible childishness was as clear to me then as it was on hisdeathbed, his redeeming and excusing imaginative silliness. Through someodd mental twist perhaps I was disposed to exonerate him even atthe cost of blaming my poor old mother who had left things in hisuntrustworthy hands.

  I should have forgiven him altogether, I believe, if he had been in anymanner apologetic to me; but he wasn't that. He kept reassuring me ina way I found irritating. Mostly, however, his solicitude was for AuntSusan and himself.

  "It's these Crises, George," he said, "try Character. Your aunt's comeout well, my boy."

  He made meditative noises for a space.

  "Had her cry of course,"--the thing had been only too painfully evidentto me in her eyes and swollen face--"who wouldn't? But now--buoyantagain!... She's a Corker.

  "We'll be sorry to leave the little house of course. It's a bit likeAdam and Eve, you know. Lord! what a chap old Milton was!

  "'The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.'

  "It sounds, George.... Providence their guide!... Well--thank goodnessthere's no imeedgit prospect of either Cain or Abel!"

  "After all, it won't be so bad up there. Not the scenery, perhaps, orthe air we get here, but--LIFE! We've got very comfortable little rooms,very comfortable considering, and I shall rise. We're not done yet,we're not beaten; don't think that, George. I shall pay twenty shillingsin the pound before I've done--you mark my words, George,--twenty--fiveto you.... I got this situation within twenty-four hours--othersoffered. It's an important firm--one of the best in London. I looked tothat. I might have got four or five shillings a week more--elsewhere.Quarters I could name. But I said to them plainly, wages to go on with,but opportunity's my game--development. We understood each other."

  He threw out his chest, and the little round eyes behind his glassesrested valiantly on imaginary employers.

  We would go on in silence for a space while he revised and restated thatencounter. Then he would break out abruptly with some banal phrase.

  "The Battle of Life, George, my boy," he would cry, or "Ups and Downs!"

  He ignored or waived the poor little attempts I made to ascertain my ownposition. "That's all right," he would say; or, "Leave all that to me.I'LL look after them." And he would drift away towards the philosophyand moral of the situation. What was I to do?

  "Never put all your resources into one chance, George; that's the lessonI draw from this. Have forces in reserve. It was a hundred to one,George, that I was right--a hundred to one. I worked it out afterwards.And here we are spiked on the off-chance. If I'd have only kept back alittle, I'd have had it on U.P. next day, like a shot, and come out onthe rise. There you are!"

  His thoughts took a graver turn.

  "It's where you'll bump up against Chance like this, George, that youfeel the need of religion. Your hard-and-fast scientific men--yourSpencers and Huxleys--they don't understand that. I do. I've thoughtof it a lot lately--in bed and about. I was thinking of it this morningwhile I shaved. It's not irreverent for me to say it, I hope--but Godcomes in on the off-chance, George. See? Don't you be too cocksure ofanything, good or bad. That's what I make out of it. I could have sworn.Well, do you think I--particular as I am--would have touched those UnionPacifics with trust money at all, if I hadn't thought it a thoroughlygood thing--good without spot or blemish?... And it was bad!

  "It's a lesson to me. You start in to get a hundred percent. and youcome out with that. It means, in a way, a reproof for Pride. I'vethought of that, George--in the Night Watches. I was thinking thismorning when I was shaving, that that's where the good of it all comesin. At the bottom I'm a mystic in these affairs. You calculate you'regoing to do this or that, but at bottom who knows at all WHAT he'sdoing? When you most think you're doing things, they're being done rightover your head. YOU'RE being done--in a sense. Take a hundred-to onechance, or one to a hundred--what does it matter? You're being Led."

  It's odd that I heard this at the time with unutterable contempt, andnow that I recall it--well, I ask myself, what have I got better?

  "I wish," said I, becoming for a moment outrageous, "YOU were being Ledto give me some account of my money, uncle."

  "Not without a bit of paper to figure on, George, I can't. But you trustme about that never fear. You trust me."

  And in the end I had to.

  I think the bankruptcy hit my aunt pretty hard. There was, so far as Ican remember now, a complete cessation of all those cheerful outbreaksof elasticity, no more skylarking in the shop nor scampering about thehouse. But there was no fuss that I saw, and only little signs in hercomplexion of the fits of weeping that must have taken her. She didn'tcry at the end, though to me her face with its strain of self-possessionwas more pathetic than any weeping. "Well" she said to me as she camethrough the shop to the cab, "Here's old orf, George! Orf to Mome numbertwo! Good-bye!" And she took me in her arms and kissed me and pressed meto her. Then she dived straight for the cab before I could answer her.

  My uncle followed, and he seemed to me a trifle too valiant andconfident in his bearing for reality. He was unusually white in theface. He spoke to his successor at the counter. "Here we go!" he said."One down, the other up. You'll find it a quiet little business so longas you run it on quiet lines--a nice quiet little business. There'snothing more? No? Well, if you want to know anything write to me. I'llalways explain fully. Anything--business, place or people. You'll findPil Antibil. a little overstocked by-the-by, I found it soothed my mindthe day before yesterday making 'em, and I made 'em all day. Thousands!And where's George? Ah! there you are! I'll write to you, George, FULLY,about all that affair. Fully!"

  It became clear to me as if for the first time, that I was reallyparting from my aunt Susan. I went out on to the pavement and saw herhead craned forward, her wide-open blue eyes and her little face intenton the shop that had combined for her all the charms of a big doll'shouse and a little home of her very own. "Good-bye!" she said to it andto me. Our eyes met for a moment--perplexed. My uncle bustled out andgave a few totally unnecessary directions to the cabman and got inbeside her. "All right?" asked the driver. "Right," said I; and he wokeup the horse with a flick of his whip. My aunt's eyes surveyed me again."Stick to your old science and things, George, and write and
tell mewhen they make you a Professor," she said cheerfully.

  She stared at me for a second longer with eyes growing wider andbrighter and a smile that had become fixed, glanced again at the brightlittle shop still saying "Ponderevo" with all the emphasis of itsfascia, and then flopped back hastily out of sight of me into therecesses of the cab. Then it had gone from before me and I beheld Mr.Snape, the hairdresser, inside his store regarding its departure with aquiet satisfaction and exchanging smiles and significant headshakes withMr. Marbel.

  IV

  I was left, I say, as part of the lock, stock, and barrel, atWimblehurst with my new master, a Mr. Mantell; who plays no part in theprogress of this story except in so far as he effaced my uncle's traces.So soon as the freshness of this new personality faded, I began to findWimblehurst not only a dull but a lonely place, and to miss my auntSusan immensely. The advertisements of the summer terms for CoughLinctus were removed; the bottles of coloured water--red, green, andyellow--restored to their places; the horse announcing veterinarymedicine, which my uncle, sizzling all the while, had coloured incareful portraiture of a Goodwood favourite, rewhitened; and I turnedmyself even more resolutely than before to Latin (until the passingof my preliminary examination enabled me to drop that), and then tomathematics and science.

  There were classes in Electricity and Magnetism at the Grammar School. Itook a little "elementary" prize in that in my first year and a medalin my third; and in Chemistry and Human Physiology and Sound, Lightand Heat, I did well. There was also a lighter, more discursivesubject called Physiography, in which one ranged among the sciencesand encountered Geology as a process of evolution from Eozoon to EastryHouse, and Astronomy as a record of celestial movements of the mostaustere and invariable integrity. I learnt out of badly-written,condensed little text-books, and with the minimum of experiment, butstill I learnt. Only thirty years ago it was, and I remember I learnt ofthe electric light as an expensive, impracticable toy, the telephone asa curiosity, electric traction as a practical absurdity. There was noargon, no radium, no phagocytes--at least to my knowledge, and aluminiumwas a dear, infrequent metal. The fastest ships in the world went thenat nineteen knots, and no one but a lunatic here and there ever thoughtit possible that men might fly.

  Many things have happened since then, but the last glance I had ofWimblehurst two years ago remarked no change whatever in its pleasanttranquillity. They had not even built any fresh houses--at least notactually in the town, though about the station there had been somebuilding. But it was a good place to do work in, for all its quiescence.I was soon beyond the small requirements of the Pharmaceutical Society'sexamination, and as they do not permit candidates to sit for that untilone and twenty, I was presently filling up my time and preventing mystudies becoming too desultory by making an attack upon the LondonUniversity degree of Bachelor of Science, which impressed me then asa very splendid but almost impossible achievement. The degreein mathematics and chemistry appealed to me as particularlycongenial--albeit giddily inaccessible. I set to work. I had presentlyto arrange a holiday and go to London to matriculate, and so it was Icame upon my aunt and uncle again. In many ways that visit marked anepoch. It was my first impression of London at all. I was then nineteen,and by a conspiracy of chances my nearest approach to that humanwilderness had been my brief visit to Chatham. Chatham too had been mylargest town. So that I got London at last with an exceptional freshnessof effect, as the sudden revelation of a whole unsuspected other side tolife.

  I came to it on a dull and smoky day by the South Eastern Railway, andour train was half an hour late, stopping and going on and stoppingagain. I marked beyond Chiselhurst the growing multitude of villas,and so came stage by stage through multiplying houses and diminishinginterspaces of market garden and dingy grass to regions of interlacingrailway lines, big factories, gasometers and wide reeking swamps ofdingy little homes, more of them and more and more. The number of theseand their dinginess and poverty increased, and here rose a great publichouse and here a Board School and there a gaunt factory; and away to theeast there loomed for a time a queer, incongruous forest of masts andspars. The congestion of houses intensified and piled up presently intotenements; I marveled more and more at this boundless world of dingypeople; whiffs of industrial smell, of leather, of brewing, drifted intothe carriage; the sky darkened, I rumbled thunderously over bridges,van-crowded streets, peered down on and crossed the Thames with anabrupt eclat of sound. I got an effect of tall warehouses, of greywater, barge crowded, of broad banks of indescribable mud, and thenI was in Cannon Street Station--a monstrous dirty cavern with trainspacked across its vast floor and more porters standing along theplatform than I had ever been in my life before. I alighted with myportmanteau and struggled along, realising for the first time just howsmall and weak I could still upon occasion feel. In this world, I felt,an Honours medal in Electricity and magnetism counted for nothing atall.

  Afterwards I drove in a cab down a canon of rushing street between highwarehouses, and peeped up astonished at the blackened greys of SaintPaul's. The traffic of Cheapside--it was mostly in horse omnibuses inthose days--seemed stupendous, its roar was stupendous; I wondered wherethe money came from to employ so many cabs, what industry could supportthe endless jostling stream of silk-hatted, frock-coated, hurrying men.Down a turning I found the Temperance Hotel Mr. Mantell had recommendedto me. The porter in a green uniform who took over my portmanteau,seemed, I thought, to despise me a good deal.

  V

  Matriculation kept me for four full days and then came an afternoonto spare, and I sought out Tottenham Court Road through a perplexingnetwork of various and crowded streets. But this London was vast! it wasendless! it seemed the whole world had changed into packed frontages andhoardings and street spaces. I got there at last and made inquiries,and I found my uncle behind the counter of the pharmacy he managed, anestablishment that did not impress me as doing a particularly high-classtrade. "Lord!" he said at the sight of me, "I was wanting something tohappen!"

  He greeted me warmly. I had grown taller, and he, I thought, had grownshorter and smaller and rounder but otherwise he was unchanged. Hestruck me as being rather shabby, and the silk hat he produced and puton, when, after mysterious negotiations in the back premises he achievedhis freedom to accompany me, was past its first youth; but he was asbuoyant and confident as ever.

  "Come to ask me about all THAT," he cried. "I've never written yet."

  "Oh, among other things," said I, with a sudden regrettable politeness,and waived the topic of his trusteeship to ask after my aunt Susan.

  "We'll have her out of it," he said suddenly; "we'll go somewhere. Wedon't get you in London every day."

  "It's my first visit," I said, "I've never seen London before"; andthat made him ask me what I thought of it, and the rest of the talk wasLondon, London, to the exclusion of all smaller topics. He took me upthe Hampstead Road almost to the Cobden statue, plunged into some backstreets to the left, and came at last to a blistered front door thatresponded to his latch-key, one of a long series of blistered frontdoors with fanlights and apartment cards above. We found ourselves ina drab-coloured passage that was not only narrow and dirty butdesolatingly empty, and then he opened a door and revealed my auntsitting at the window with a little sewing-machine on a bamboooccasional table before her, and "work"--a plum-coloured walking dressI judged at its most analytical stage--scattered over the rest of theapartment.

  At the first glance I judged my aunt was plumper than she had been, buther complexion was just as fresh and her China blue eye as bright as inthe old days.

  "London," she said, didn't "get blacks" on her.

  She still "cheeked" my uncle, I was pleased to find. "What are you oldPoking in for at THIS time--Gubbitt?" she said when he appeared, andshe still looked with a practised eye for the facetious side of things.When she saw me behind him, she gave a little cry and stood up radiant.Then she became grave.

  I was surprised at my own emotion in seeing her. She held me
at arm'slength for a moment, a hand on each shoulder, and looked at me with asort of glad scrutiny. She seemed to hesitate, and then pecked littlekiss off my cheek.

  "You're a man, George," she said, as she released me, and continued tolook at me for a while.

  Their menage was one of a very common type in London. They occupied whatis called the dining-room floor of a small house, and they had the useof a little inconvenient kitchen in the basement that had once beenscullery. The two rooms, bedroom behind and living room in front, wereseparated by folding-doors that were never now thrown back, and indeed,in the presence of a visitor, not used at all. There was of course nobathroom or anything of that sort available, and there was no watersupply except to the kitchen below. My aunt did all the domestic work,though she could have afforded to pay for help if the build of the placehad not rendered that inconvenient to the pitch of impossibility. Therewas no sort of help available except that of indoor servants, for whomshe had no accommodation. The furniture was their own; it was partlysecondhand, but on the whole it seemed cheerful to my eye, and my aunt'sbias for cheap, gay-figured muslin had found ample score. In many waysI should think it must have been an extremely inconvenient and crampedsort of home, but at the time I took it, as I was taking everything, asbeing there and in the nature of things. I did not see the oddness ofsolvent decent people living in a habitation so clearly neither designednor adapted for their needs, so wasteful of labour and so devoid ofbeauty as this was, and it is only now as I describe this that I findmyself thinking of the essential absurdity of an intelligent communityliving in such makeshift homes. It strikes me now as the next thing towearing second-hand clothes.

  You see it was a natural growth, part of that system to whichBladesover, I hold, is the key. There are wide regions of London, milesof streets of houses, that appear to have been originally designed forprosperous-middle-class homes of the early Victorian type. There musthave been a perfect fury of such building in the thirties, forties, andfifties. Street after street must have been rushed into being, CampdenTown way, Pentonville way, Brompton way, West Kensington way in theVictoria region and all over the minor suburbs of the south side.

  I am doubtful if many of these houses had any long use as the residencesof single families if from the very first almost their tenants did notmakeshift and take lodgers and sublet. They were built with basements,in which their servants worked and lived--servants of a more submissiveand troglodytic generation who did not mind stairs. The dining-room(with folding doors) was a little above the ground level, and in thatthe wholesome boiled and roast with damp boiled potatoes and then pieto follow, was consumed and the numerous family read and worked in theevening, and above was the drawing-room (also with folding doors), wherethe infrequent callers were received. That was the vision at which thoseindustrious builders aimed. Even while these houses were being run up,the threads upon the loom of fate were shaping to abolish altogetherthe type of household that would have fitted them. Means of transit weredeveloping to carry the moderately prosperous middle-class families outof London, education and factory employment were whittling away atthe supply of rough, hardworking, obedient girls who would standthe subterranean drudgery of these places, new classes of hard-upmiddle-class people such as my uncle, employees of various types, werecoming into existence, for whom no homes were provided. None of theseclasses have ideas of what they ought to be, or fit in any legitimateway into the Bladesover theory that dominates our minds. It was nobody'sconcern to see them housed under civilised conditions, and the beautifullaws of supply and demand had free play. They had to squeeze in. Thelandlords came out financially intact from their blundering enterprise.More and more these houses fell into the hands of married artisans, orstruggling widows or old servants with savings, who became responsiblefor the quarterly rent and tried to sweat a living by sub-lettingfurnished or unfurnished apartments.

  I remember now that a poor grey-haired old woman who had an air ofhaving been roused from a nap in the dust bin, came out into the areaand looked up at us as we three went out from the front door to "seeLondon" under my uncle's direction. She was the sub-letting occupier;she squeezed out a precarious living by taking the house whole andsub-letting it in detail and she made her food and got the shelter of anattic above and a basement below by the transaction. And if she didn'tchance to "let" steadily, out she went to pauperdom and some other poor,sordid old adventurer tried in her place....

  It is a foolish community that can house whole classes, useful andhelpful, honest and loyal classes, in such squalidly unsuitabledwellings. It is by no means the social economy it seems, to use up oldwomen, savings and inexperience in order to meet the landlord's demands.But any one who doubts this thing is going on right up to to-day needonly spend an afternoon in hunting for lodgings in any of the regions ofLondon I have named.

  But where has my story got to? My uncle, I say, decided I must be shownLondon, and out we three went as soon as my aunt had got her hat on, tocatch all that was left of the day.

  VI

  It pleased my uncle extremely to find I had never seen London before. Hetook possession of the metropolis forthwith. "London, George," he said,"takes a lot of understanding. It's a great place. Immense. The richesttown in the world, the biggest port, the greatest manufacturing town,the Imperial city--the centre of civilisation, the heart of the world!See those sandwich men down there! That third one's hat! Fair treat! Youdon't see poverty like that in Wimblehurst George! And many of them highOxford honour men too. Brought down by drink! It's a wonderful place,George--a whirlpool, a maelstrom! whirls you up and whirls you down."

  I have a very confused memory of that afternoon's inspection ofLondon. My uncle took us to and fro showing us over his London, talkingerratically, following a route of his own. Sometimes we were walking,sometimes we were on the tops of great staggering horse omnibuses ina heaving jumble of traffic, and at one point we had tea in an AeratedBread Shop. But I remember very distinctly how we passed down Park Laneunder an overcast sky, and how my uncle pointed out the house of thischild of good fortune and that with succulent appreciation.

  I remember, too, that as he talked I would find my aunt watching my faceas if to check the soundness of his talk by my expression.

  "Been in love yet, George?" she asked suddenly, over a bun in thetea-shop.

  "Too busy, aunt," I told her.

  She bit her bun extensively, and gesticulated with the remnant toindicate that she had more to say.

  "How are YOU going to make your fortune?" she said so soon as she couldspeak again. "You haven't told us that."

  "'Lectricity," said my uncle, taking breath after a deep draught of tea.

  "If I make it at all," I said. "For my part I think shall be satisfiedwith something less than a fortune."

  "We're going to make ours--suddenly," she said.

  "So HE old says." She jerked her head at my uncle.

  "He won't tell me when--so I can't get anything ready. But it'scoming. Going to ride in our carriage and have a garden. Garden--like abishop's."

  She finished her bun and twiddled crumbs from her fingers. "I shall beglad of the garden," she said. "It's going to be a real big one withrosaries and things. Fountains in it. Pampas grass. Hothouses."

  "You'll get it all right," said my uncle, who had reddened a little.

  "Grey horses in the carriage, George," she said. "It's nice to thinkabout when one's dull. And dinners in restaurants often and often. Andtheatres--in the stalls. And money and money and money."

  "You may joke," said my uncle, and hummed for a moment.

  "Just as though an old Porpoise like him would ever make money,"she said, turning her eyes upon his profile with a sudden lapse toaffection. "He'll just porpoise about."

  "I'll do something," said my uncle, "you bet! Zzzz!" and rapped with ashilling on the marble table.

  "When you do you'll have to buy me a new pair of gloves," she said,"anyhow. That finger's past mending. Look! you Cabbage--you." And sheheld the split u
nder his nose, and pulled a face of comical fierceness.

  My uncle smiled at these sallies at the time, but afterwards, when Iwent back with him to the Pharmacy--the low-class business grew briskerin the evening and they kept open late--he reverted to it in a lowexpository tone. "Your aunt's a bit impatient, George. She gets at me.It's only natural.... A woman doesn't understand how long it takesto build up a position. No.... In certain directions now--Iam--quietly--building up a position. Now here.... I get this room. Ihave my three assistants. Zzzz. It's a position that, judged by thecriterion of imeedjit income, isn't perhaps so good as I deserve,but strategically--yes. It's what I want. I make my plans. I rally myattack."

  "What plans," I said, "are you making?"

  "Well, George, there's one thing you can rely upon, I'm doing nothing ina hurry. I turn over this one and that, and I don't talk--indiscreetly.There's--No! I don't think I can tell you that. And yet, why NOT?"

  He got up and closed the door into the shop. "I've told no one," heremarked, as he sat down again. "I owe you something."

  His face flushed slightly, he leant forward over the little tabletowards me.

  "Listen!" he said.

  I listened.

  "Tono-Bungay," said my uncle very slowly and distinctly.

  I thought he was asking me to hear some remote, strange noise. "I don'thear anything," I said reluctantly to his expectant face. He smiledundefeated. "Try again," he said, and repeated, "Tono-Bungay."

  "Oh, THAT!" I said.

  "Eh?" said he.

  "But what is it?"

  "Ah!" said my uncle, rejoicing and expanding. "What IS it? That'swhat you got to ask? What won't it be?" He dug me violently in what hesupposed to be my ribs. "George," he cried--"George, watch this place!There's more to follow."

  And that was all I could get from him.

  That, I believe, was the very first time that the words Tono-Bungay everheard on earth--unless my uncle indulged in monologues in his chamber--ahighly probable thing. Its utterance certainly did not seem to me at thetime to mark any sort of epoch, and had I been told this word was theOpen Sesame to whatever pride and pleasure the grimy front of London hidfrom us that evening, I should have laughed aloud.

  "Coming now to business," I said after a pause, and with a chill senseof effort; and I opened the question of his trust.

  My uncle sighed, and leant back in his chair. "I wish I could make allthis business as clear to you as it is to me," he said. "However--Go on!Say what you have to say."

  VII

  After I left my uncle that evening I gave way to a feeling of profounddepression. My uncle and aunt seemed to me to be leading--I have alreadyused the word too often, but I must use it again--DINGY lives. Theyseemed to be adrift in a limitless crowd of dingy people, wearing shabbyclothes, living uncomfortably in shabby second-hand houses, going to andfro on pavements that had always a thin veneer of greasy, slippery mud,under grey skies that showed no gleam of hope of anything for them butdinginess until they died. It seemed absolutely clear to me that mymother's little savings had been swallowed up and that my own prospectwas all too certainly to drop into and be swallowed up myself sooneror later by this dingy London ocean. The London that was to be anadventurous escape from the slumber of Wimblehurst, had vanished from mydreams. I saw my uncle pointing to the houses in Park Lane and showinga frayed shirt-cuff as he did so. I heard my aunt: "I'm to ride in mycarriage then. So he old says."

  My feelings towards my uncle were extraordinarily mixed. I was intenselysorry not only for my aunt Susan but for him--for it seemed indisputablethat as they were living then so they must go on--and at the same time Iwas angry with the garrulous vanity and illness that had elipped allmy chance of independent study, and imprisoned her in those greyapartments. When I got back to Wimblehurst I allowed myself to writehim a boyishly sarcastic and sincerely bitter letter. He never replied.Then, believing it to be the only way of escape for me, I set myself farmore grimly and resolutely to my studies than I had ever done before.After a time I wrote to him in more moderate terms, and he answeredme evasively. And then I tried to dismiss him from my mind and went onworking.

  Yes, that first raid upon London under the moist and chilly depressionof January had an immense effect upon me. It was for me an epoch-makingdisappointment. I had thought of London as a large, free, welcoming,adventurous place, and I saw it slovenly and harsh and irresponsive.

  I did not realise at all what human things might be found behindthose grey frontages, what weakness that whole forbidding facade mightpresently confess. It is the constant error of youth to over-estimatethe Will in things. I did not see that the dirt, the discouragement, thediscomfort of London could be due simply to the fact that London wasa witless old giantess of a town, too slack and stupid to keep herselfclean and maintain a brave face to the word. No! I suffered from thesort of illusion that burnt witches in the seventeenth century. Iendued her grubby disorder with a sinister and magnificent quality ofintention.

  And my uncle's gestures and promises filled me with doubt and a sort offear for him. He seemed to me a lost little creature, too silly to besilent, in a vast implacable condemnation. I was full of pity and a sortof tenderness for my aunt Susan, who was doomed to follow his erraticfortunes mocked by his grandiloquent promises.

  I was to learn better. But I worked with the terror of the grimunderside of London in my soul during all my last year at Wimblehurst.