Most people in this world seem to live “in character”; they have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous one with another and true to the rules of their type. You can speak of them as being of this sort of people or that. They are, as theatrical1 people say, 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 to them, and their proper size of tombstone tells at last how properly they have played the part. But there is also another kind of life that is not so much living as a miscellaneous tasting of life. One gets hit by some unusual transverse force, one is jerked out of one’s stratum2 and lives crosswise for the rest of the time, and, as it were, in a succession of samples. That has been my lot, and that is what has set me at last writing something in the nature of a novel. I have got an unusual series of impressions that I want very urgently to tell. I have seen life at very different levels, and at all these levels I have seen it with a sort of intimacy4 and in good faith. I have been a native in many social countries. I have been the unwelcome guest of a working baker5, my cousin, who has since died in the Chatham infirmary; I have eaten illegal snacks—the unjustifiable gifts of footmen—in pantries, and been despised for my want of style (and subsequently married and divorced) by the daughter of a gasworks clerk; and—to go to my other extreme—I was once—oh, glittering days!—an item in the house-party of a countess. She was, I admit, a countess with a financial aspect, but still, 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. On one occasion—it is my brightest memory—I upset my champagne6 over the trousers of the greatest statesman in the empire—Heaven forbid I should be so invidious as to name him!—in the warmth of our mutual7 admiration8.
And once (though it is the most incidental thing in my life) I murdered a man....
Yes, I’ve seen a curious variety of people and ways of living altogether. Odd people they all are great and small, very much alike at bottom and curiously9 different on their surfaces. I wish I had ranged just a little further both up and down, seeing I have ranged so far. Royalty10 must be worth knowing and very great fun. But my contacts with princes have been limited to quite public occasions, nor at the other end of the scale have I had what I should call an inside acquaintance with that dusty but attractive class of people who go about on the high-roads drunk but en famille (so redeeming13 the minor14 lapse), in the summertime, 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 1834 beer-houses, are beyond me also, and I suppose must remain so now for ever. My intercourse15 with the ducal rank too has been negligible; I once went shooting with a duke, and in an outburst of what was no doubt snobbishness16, 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 remarkable17 social range, this extensive cross-section of the British social organism. It was the Accident of Birth. It always is in England. Indeed, if I may make the remark so cosmic, everything is. But that is by the way. I was my uncle’s nephew, and my uncle was no less a person than Edward Ponderevo, whose comet-like transit18 of the financial heavens happened—it is now ten years ago! Do you remember the days of Ponderevo, the great days, I mean, of Ponderevo? Perhaps you had a trifle in some world-shaking enterprise! Then you know him only too well. Astraddle on Tono-Bungay, he flashed athwart the empty heavens—like a comet—rather, like a stupendous rocket!—and overawed investors19 spoke20 of his star. At his zenith he burst into a cloud of the most magnificent promotions21. What a time that was! The Napoleon of domestic conveniences!
I was his nephew, his peculiar22 and intimate nephew. I was hanging on to his coat-tails all the way through. I made pills with him in the chemist’s shop at Wimblehurst before he began. I was, you might say, the stick of his rocket; and after our tremendous soar, after he had played with millions, a golden rain in the sky, after my bird’s-eye view of the modern world, I fell again, a little scarred and blistered24 perhaps, two and twenty years older, with my youth gone, my manhood eaten in upon, but greatly edified25, into this Thames-side yard, into these white heats and hammerings, amidst the fine realites of steel—to think it all over in my leisure and jot26 down the notes and inconsecutive observations that make this book. It was more, you know, than a figurative soar. The zenith of that career was surely our flight across the channel in the Lord Roberts B....
I warn you this book is going to be something of an agglomeration27. I want to trace my social trajectory28 (and my uncle’s) as the main line of my 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 that amused me and impressions I got—even although they don’t minister directly to my narrative30 at all. I want to set out my own queer love experiences too, such as they are, for they troubled and distressed31 and swayed me hugely, and they still seem to me to contain all sorts of irrational32 and debatable elements that I shall be the clearer-headed for getting on paper. And possibly I may even flow into descriptions of people who are really no more than people seen in transit, just because it amuses me to recall what they said and did to us, and more particularly how they behaved in the brief but splendid glare of Tono-Bungay and its still more glaring offspring. It lit some of them up, I can assure you! Indeed, I want to get in all sorts of things. My ideas of a novel all through are comprehensive rather than austere33....
Tono-Bungay still figures on the hoardings, it stands in rows in every chemist’s storeroom, it still assuages34 the coughs of age and brightens the elderly eye and loosens the elderly tongue; but its social glory, its financial illumination, have faded from the world for ever. And I, sole scorched35 survivor36 from the blaze, sit writing of it here in an air that is never still for the clang and thunder of machines, on a table littered with working drawings, and amid fragments of models and notes about velocities37 and air and water pressures and trajectories—of an altogether different sort from that of Tono-Bungay.
II
I write that much and look at it, and wonder whether, after all, this is any fair statement of what I am attempting in this book. I’ve given, I see, an impression that I want to make simply a hotch-potch of anecdotes38 and experiences with my uncle swimming in the middle as the largest lump of victual. I’ll own that here, with the pen already started, I realise what a fermenting39 mass of things learnt and emotions experienced and theories formed I’ve got to deal with, and how, in a sense, hopeless my book must be from the very outset. I suppose what I’m really trying to render is nothing more nor less than Life—as one man has found it. I want to tell—myself, and my impressions of the thing as a whole, to say things I have come to feel intensely of the laws, traditions, usages, and ideas we call society, and how we poor individuals get driven and lured40 and stranded41 among these windy, perplexing shoals and channels. I’ve got, I suppose, to a time of life when things begin to take on shapes that have an air of reality, and become no longer material for dreaming, but interesting in themselves. I’ve reached the criticising, novel-writing age, and here I am writing mine—my one novel—without having any of the discipline to refrain and omit that I suppose the regular novel-writer acquires.
I’ve read an average share of novels and made some starts before this beginning, and I’ve found the restraints and rules of the art (as I made them out) impossible for me. I like to write, I am keenly interested in writing, but it is not my technique. I’m an engineer with a patent or two and a set of ideas; most of whatever artist there is in me has been given 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 sprawl42 and flounder, comment and theorise, if I am to get the thing out I have in mind. And it isn’t a constructed tale I have to tell, but unmanageable realities. My love-story—and if only I can keep up the spirit of truth-telling all through as strongly as I have now, you shall have it all—falls into no sort of neat scheme of telling. It involves three separate feminine persons. It’s all mixed up with the other things....
But I’ve said enough, I hope, to excuse myself for the method or want of method in what follows, and I think I had better tell without further delay of my boyhood and my early impressions in the shadow of Bladesover House.
III
There came a time when I realised that Bladesover House was not all it seemed, but when I was a little boy I took the place with the entirest faith as a complete authentic43 microcosm. I believed that the Bladesover system was a little working-model—and not so very little either—of the whole world.
Let me try and give you the effect of it.
Bladesover lies up on the Kentish Downs, eight miles perhaps from Ashborough; and its old pavilion, a little wooden parody44 of the temple of Vesta at Tibur, upon the hill crest45 behind the house, commands in theory at least a view of either sea, of the Channel southward and the Thames to the northeast. The park is the second largest in Kent, finely wooded with well-placed beeches47, many elms and some sweet chestnuts48, abounding49 in little valleys and hollows of bracken, with springs and a stream and three fine ponds and multitudes of fallow deer. The house was built in the eighteenth century, it is of pale red brick in the style of a French chateau50, and save for one pass among the crests51 which opens to blue distances, to minute, remote, oast-set farm-houses and copses and wheat fields and the occasional gleam of water, its hundred and seventeen windows look on nothing but its own wide and handsome territories. A semi-circular screen of great beeches masks the church and village, which cluster picturesquely52 about the high road along the skirts of the great park. Northward53, at the remotest corner of that enclosure, is a second dependent village, Ropedean, less fortunate in its greater distance and also on account of a rector. This divine was indeed rich, but he was vindictively54 economical because of some shrinkage of his tithes56; and by reason of his use of the word Eucharist for the Lord’s Supper he had become altogether estranged57 from the great ladies of Bladesover. So that Ropedean was in the shadows through all that youthful time.
Now the unavoidable suggestion of that wide park and that fair large house, dominating church, village and the country side, was that they represented the thing that mattered supremely58 in the world, and that all other things had significance only in relation to them. They represented the Gentry59, the Quality, by and through and for whom the rest of the world, the farming folk and the labouring folk, the trades-people of Ashborough, and the upper servants and the lower servants and the servants of the estate, breathed and lived and were permitted. And the Quality did it so quietly and thoroughly60, the great house mingled61 so solidly and effectually earth and sky, the contrast of its spacious62 hall and saloon and galleries, its airy housekeeper63’s room and warren of offices with the meagre dignities of the vicar, and the pinched and stuffy64 rooms of even the post-office people and the grocer, so enforced these suggestions, that it was only when I was a boy of thirteen or fourteen and some queer inherited strain of scepticism had set me doubting whether Mr. Bartlett, the vicar, did really know with certainty all about God, that as a further and deeper step in doubting I began to question the final rightness of the gentlefolks, their primary necessity in the scheme of things. But once that scepticism had awakened65 it took me fast and far. By fourteen I had achieved terrible blasphemies66 and sacrilege; I had resolved to marry a viscount’s daughter, and I had blacked the left eye—I think it was the left—of her half-brother, in open and declared rebellion.
But of that in its place.
The great house, the church, the village, and the labourers and the servants in their stations and degrees, seemed to me, I say, to be a closed and complete social system. About us were other villages and great estates, and from house to house, interlacing, correlated, the Gentry, the fine Olympians, came and went. The country towns seemed mere67 collections of ships, marketing68 places for the tenantry, centres for such education as they needed, as entirely69 dependent on the gentry as the village and scarcely less directly so. I thought this was the order of the whole world. I thought London was only a greater country town where the gentle-folk kept town-houses and did their greater shopping under the magnificent shadow of the greatest of all fine gentlewomen, the Queen. It seemed to be in the divine order. That all this fine appearance was already sapped, that there were forces at work that might presently carry all this elaborate social system in which my mother instructed me so carefully that I might understand my “place,” to Limbo70, had scarcely dawned upon me even by the time that Tono-Bungay was fairly launched 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 inconsiderable minority of English people realise how extensively this ostensible71 order has even now passed away. The great houses stand in the parks still, the cottages cluster respectfully on their borders, touching72 their eaves with their creepers, the English countryside—you can range through Kent from Bladesover northward and see persists obstinately73 in looking what it was. It is like an early day in a fine October. The hand of change rests on it all, unfelt, unseen; resting for awhile, as it were half reluctantly, before it grips and ends the thing for ever. One frost and the whole face of things will be bare, links snap, patience end, our fine foliage74 of pretences75 lie glowing in the mire76.
For that we have still to wait a little while. The new order may have gone far towards shaping itself, but just as in that sort of lantern show that used to be known in the village as the “Dissolving Views,” the scene that is going remains77 upon the mind, traceable and evident, and the newer picture is yet enigmatical long after the lines that are to replace those former ones have grown bright and strong, so that the new England of our children’s children is still a riddle78 to me. The ideas of democracy, of equality, and above all of promiscuous79 fraternity have certainly never really entered into the English mind. But what is coming into it? All this book, I hope, will bear a little on that. Our people never formulates80; it keeps words for jests and ironies81. In the meanwhile the old shapes, the old attitudes remain, subtly changed and changing still, sheltering strange tenants82. Bladesover House is now let furnished to Sir Reuben Lichtenstein, and has been since old Lady Drew died; it was my odd experience to visit there, in the house of which my mother had been housekeeper, when my uncle was at the climax83 of Tono-Bungay. It was curious to notice then the little differences that had come to things with this substitution. To borrow an image from my mineralogical days, these Jews were not so much a new British gentry as “pseudomorphous” after the gentry. They are a very clever people, the Jews, but not clever enough to suppress their cleverness. I wished I could have gone downstairs to savour the tone of the pantry. It would have been very different I know. Hawksnest, over beyond, I noted84, had its pseudomorph too; a newspaper proprietor85 of the type that hustles86 along with stolen ideas from one loud sink-or-swim enterprise to another, had bought the place outright87; Redgrave was in the hands of brewers.
But the people in the villages, so far as I could detect, saw no difference in their world. Two little girls bobbed and an old labourer touched his hat convulsively as I walked through the village. He still thought he knew his place—and mine. I did not know him, but I would have liked dearly to have asked him if he remembered my mother, if either my uncle or old Lichtenstein had been man enough to stand being given 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 your eyes, it was inextricably your destiny. Above you were your betters, below you were your inferiors, and there were even an unstable88 questionable89 few, cases so disputable that you might for the rough purposes of every day at least, regard them as your equals. Head and centre of our system was Lady Drew, her “leddyship,” shrivelled, garrulous90, with a wonderful memory for genealogies91 and very, very old, and beside her and nearly as old, Miss Somerville, her cousin and companion. These two old souls lived like dried-up kernels92 in the great shell of Bladesover House, the shell that had once been gaily93 full of fops, of fine ladies in powder and patches and courtly gentlemen with swords; and when there was no company they spent whole days in the corner parlour just over the housekeeper’s room, between reading and slumber94 and caressing95 their two pet dogs. When I was a boy I used always to think of these two poor old creatures as superior beings living, like God, somewhere through the ceiling. Occasionally they bumped about a bit and one even heard them overhead, which gave them a greater effect of reality without mitigating96 their vertical97 predominance. Sometimes too I saw 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 pious98 horror, but I was upon due occasion taken into the Presence by request. I remember her “leddyship” then as a thing of black silks and a golden chain, a quavering injunction to me to be a good boy, a very shrunken loose-skinned face and neck, and a ropy hand that trembled a halfcrown into mine. Miss Somerville hovered99 behind, a paler thing of broken lavender and white and black, with screwed up, sandy-lashed eyes. Her hair was yellow and her colour bright, and when we sat in the housekeeper’s room of a winter’s night warming our toes and sipping100 elder wine, her maid would tell us the simple secrets of that belated flush.... After my fight with young Garvell I was of course banished101, and I never saw those poor old painted goddesses again.
Then there came and went on these floors over our respectful heads, the Company; people I rarely saw, but whose tricks and manners were imitated and discussed by their maids and valets in the housekeeper’s room and the 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, they were greater and lesser102 after the manner of all things in our world. Once I remember there was a Prince, with a real live gentleman in attendance, and that was a little above our customary levels and excited us all, and perhaps raised our expectations unduly103. Afterwards, Rabbits, the butler, came into my mother’s room downstairs, red with indignation and with tears in his eyes. “Look at that!” gasped104 Rabbits. My mother was speechless with horror. That was a sovereign, a mere sovereign, such as you might get from any commoner!
After Company, I remember, came anxious days, for the poor old women upstairs were left tired and cross and vindictive55, and in a state of physical 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 nor subjects. The vicarage people certainly hold a place by themselves in the typical English scheme; nothing is more remarkable than the progress the Church has made—socially—in the last two hundred years. In the early eighteenth century the vicar was rather under than over the house-steward, and was deemed a fitting match for the housekeeper or any not too morally discredited105 discard. The eighteenth century literature is full of his complaints that he might not remain at table to share the pie. He rose above these indignities106 because of the abundance of younger sons. When I meet the large assumptions of the contemporary cleric, I am apt to think of these things. It is curious to note that to-day that down-trodden, organ-playing creature, the Church of England village Schoolmaster, holds much the same position as the seventeenth century parson. The doctor in Bladesover ranked below the vicar but above the “vet,” artists and summer visitors squeezed in above or below this point according to their appearance and expenditure107, and then in a carefully arranged scale came the tenantry, the butler and housekeeper, the village shopkeeper, the head keeper, the cook, the publican, the second keeper, the blacksmith (whose status was complicated by his daughter keeping the post-office—and a fine hash she used to make of telegrams too!) the village shopkeeper’s eldest108 son, the first footman, younger sons of the village shopkeeper, his first assistant, and so forth109.
All these conceptions and applications of a universal precedence and much 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 upper servants assembled, or of footmen and Rabbits and estate men of all sorts among the green baize and Windsor chairs of the pantry—where Rabbits, being above the law, sold beer without a license110 or any compunction—or of housemaids and still-room maids in the bleak111, matting-carpeted still-room or of the cook and her kitchen maids and casual friends among the bright copper112 and hot glow of the kitchens.
Of course their own ranks and places came by implication to these people, and it was with the ranks and places of the Olympians that the talk mainly concerned itself. There was an old peerage and a Crockford together with the books of recipes, the Whitaker’s Almanack, the Old Moore’s Almanack, and the eighteenth century dictionary, on the little dresser that broke the cupboards on one side of my mother’s room; there was another peerage, with the covers off, in the pantry; there was a new peerage in the billiard-room, and I seem to remember another in the anomalous113 apartment that held the upper servants’ bagatelle114 board and in which, after the Hall dinner, they partook of the luxury of sweets. And if you had asked any of those upper servants how such and such a Prince of Battenberg was related to, let us say, Mr. Cunninghame Graham or the Duke of Argyle, you would have been told upon the nail. As a boy, I heard a great deal of that sort of thing, and if to this day I am still a little vague about courtesy titles and the exact application of honorifics, it is, I can assure you, because I hardened my heart, and not from any lack of adequate opportunity of mastering these succulent particulars.
Dominating all these memories is the figure of my mother—my mother who did not love me because I grew liker my father every day—and who knew with inflexible115 decision her place and the place of every one in the world—except the place that concealed116 my father—and in some details mine. Subtle points were put to her. I can see and hear her saying now, “No, Miss Fison, peers of England go in before peers of the United Kingdom, and he is merely a peer of the United Kingdom.” She had much exercise in placing people’s servants about her tea-table, where the etiquette117 was very strict. I wonder sometimes if the etiquette of housekeepers’ rooms is as strict to-day, and what my mother would have made of a chauffeur118....
On the whole I am glad that I saw so much as I did of Bladesover—if for no other reason than because seeing it when I did, quite naively119, believing in it thoroughly, and then coming to analyse it, has enabled me to understand much that would be absolutely incomprehensible in the structure of English society. Bladesover is, I am convinced, the clue to almost all that is distinctively121 British and perplexing to the foreign inquirer in England and the English-speaking peoples. Grasp firmly that England was all Bladesover two hundred years ago; that it has had Reform Acts indeed, and such—like changes of formula, but no essential revolution since then; that all that is modern and different has come in as a thing intruded122 or as a gloss123 upon this predominant formula, either impertinently or apologetically; and you will perceive at once the reasonableness, the necessity, of that snobbishness which is the distinctive120 quality of English thought. Everybody who is not actually in the shadow of a Bladesover is as it were perpetually seeking after lost orientations124. We have never broken with our tradition, never even symbolically125 hewed126 it to pieces, as the French did in quivering fact in the Terror. But all the organizing ideas have slackened, the old habitual127 bonds have relaxed or altogether come undone128. And America too, is, as it were, a detached, outlying part of that estate which has expanded in queer ways. George Washington, Esquire, was of the gentlefolk, and he came near being a King. It was Plutarch, you know, and nothing intrinsically American that prevented George Washington being a King....
IV
I hated teatime in the housekeeper’s room more than anything else at Bladesover. And more particularly I hated it when Mrs. Mackridge and Mrs. 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 posthumously129 for a prolonged devotion to their minor comforts, and Mrs. Booch was also trustee for a favourite Skye terrier. Every year Lady Drew gave them an invitation—a reward and encouragement of virtue130 with especial reference to my mother and Miss Fison, the maid. They sat about in black and shiny and flouncey clothing adorned131 with gimp and beads132, eating great quantities of cake, drinking much tea in a stately manner and reverberating133 remarks.
I remember these women as immense. No doubt they were of negotiable size, but I was only a very little chap and they have assumed nightmare proportions in my mind. They loomed134, they bulged135, they impended136. Mrs. Mackridge was large and dark; there was a marvel137 about her head, inasmuch as she was bald. She wore a dignified138 cap, and in front of that upon her brow, hair was painted. I have never seen the like since. She had been maid to the widow of Sir Roderick Blenderhasset Impey, some sort of governor or such-like portent139 in the East Indies, and from her remains—in Mrs. Mackridge—I judge Lady Impey was a very stupendous and crushing creature indeed. Lady Impey had been of the Juno type, haughty140, unapproachable, given to irony141 and a caustic142 wit. Mrs. Mackridge had no wit, but she had acquired the caustic voice and gestures along with the old satins and trimmings of the great lady. When she told you it was a fine morning, she seemed also to be telling you you were a fool and a low fool to boot; when she was spoken to, she had a way of acknowledging your poor tinkle143 of utterance144 with a voluminous, scornful “Haw!” that made you want to burn her alive. She also had a way of saying “Indade!” with a droop145 of the eyelids146.
Mrs. Booch was a smaller woman, brown haired, with queer little curls on either side of her face, large blue eyes and a small set of stereotyped147 remarks that constituted her entire mental range. Mrs. Latude-Fernay has left, oddly enough, no memory at all except her name and the effect of a green-grey silk dress, all set with gold and blue buttons. I fancy she was a large blonde. Then there was Miss Fison, the maid who served both Lady Drew and Miss Somerville, and at the end of the table opposite my mother, sat Rabbits the butler. Rabbits, for a butler, was an unassuming man, and at tea he was not as you know butlers, but in a morning coat and a black tie with blue spots. Still, he was large, with side whiskers, even if his clean-shaven mouth was weak and little. I sat among these people on a high, hard, early Gregorian chair, trying to exist, like a feeble seedling148 amidst great rocks, and my mother sat with an eye upon me, resolute149 to suppress the slightest manifestation150 of vitality151. It was hard on me, but perhaps it was also hard upon these rather over-fed, ageing, pretending people, that my youthful restlessness and rebellious152 unbelieving eyes should be thrust in among their dignities.
Tea lasted for nearly three-quarters of an hour, and I sat it out perforce; 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,” she would begin, issuing her proclamation—at least half her sentences began “they say”—“sugar is fatt-an-ing, nowadays. Many of the best people do not take it at all.”
“Not with their tea, ma’am,” said Rabbits intelligently.
“Not with anything,” said Mrs. Mackridge, with an air of crushing repartee153, and drank.
“What won’t they say next?” said Miss Fison.
“They do say such things!” said Mrs. Booch.
“They say,” said Mrs. Mackridge, inflexibly154, “the doctors are not recomm-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 may have hastened his end.”
This ended the first skirmish. A certain gloom of manner and a pause was considered 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 her repertoire155. “The evenings are drawing out nicely,” she would say, or if the season was decadent156, “How the evenings draw in!” It was an invaluable157 remark to her; I do not know how she would have got along without it.
My mother, who sat with her back to the window, would always consider it due to Mrs. Booch to turn about and regard the evening in the act of elongation or contraction158, whichever phase it might be.
A brisk discussion of how long we were to the longest or shortest day would ensue, and die away at last exhausted159.
Mrs. Mackridge, perhaps, would reopen. She had many intelligent habits; among others she read the paper—The Morning Post. The other ladies would at times tackle that sheet, but only to read the births, marriages, and deaths on the front page. It was, of course, the old Morning Post that cost threepence, not the brisk coruscating160 young thing of to-day. “They say,” she would open, “that Lord Tweedums is to go to Canada.”
“Ah!” said Mr. Rabbits; “dew they?”
“Isn’t he,” said my mother, “the Earl of Slumgold’s cousin?” She knew he was; it was an entirely irrelevant161 and unnecessary remark, but still, something to say.
“The same, ma’am,” said Mrs. Mackridge. “They say he was extremelay popular 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 clerical model a precise emphatic162 articulation163 without acquiring at the same time the 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—‘They lef’ their country for their country’s good,’—which in some way was took to remind them of their being originally convic’s, though now reformed. Every one I ’eard speak, agreed it was takless of ’im.”
“Sir Roderick used to say,” said Mrs. Mackridge, “that the First Thing,”—here Mrs. Mackridge paused and looked dreadfully at me—“and the Second Thing”—here she fixed164 me again—“and the Third Thing”—now I was released—“needed in a colonial governor is Tact11.” She became aware of my doubts again, and added predominantly, “It has always struck me that that was a Singularly True Remark.”
I resolved that if ever I found this polypus of Tact growing up in my soul, 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 was at Templemorton I see something of ’em. Queer fellows, some of ’em. Very respectful 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 eye on you. They watch you—as you wait. They let themselves appear to be lookin’ at you...”
My mother said nothing in that discussion. The word colonies always upset her. She was afraid, I think, that if she turned her mind in that direction my errant father might suddenly and shockingly be discovered, no doubt conspicuously165 bigamic and altogether offensive and revolutionary. 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 idea of our colonies that I jeered167 in my heart at Mrs. Mackridge’s colonial ascendancy168. These brave emancipated169 sunburnt English of the open, I thought, suffer these aristocratic invaders170 as a quaint12 anachronism, but as for being gratified—!
I don’t jeer166 now. I’m not so sure.
V
It is a little difficult to explain why I did not come to do what was the natural thing for any one in my circumstances to do, and take my world for granted. A certain innate171 scepticism, I think, explains it and a 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 father is living or dead. He fled my mother’s virtues172 before my distincter memories began. He left no traces in his flight, and she, in her indignation, destroyed every vestige173 that she could of him. Never a photograph nor a scrap174 of his handwriting have I seen; and it was, I know, only the accepted code of virtue and discretion175 that prevented her destroying her marriage certificate and me, and so making a clean sweep of her matrimonial humiliation176. I suppose I must inherit something of the moral stupidity that would enable her to make a holocaust177 of every little personal thing she had of him. There must have been presents made by him as a lover, for example—books with kindly178 inscriptions179, letters perhaps, a flattened180 flower, a ring, or such-like gage181. She kept her wedding-ring, of course, but all the others she destroyed. She never told me his christian182 name or indeed spoke a word to me of him; though at times I came near daring to ask her: add what I have of him—it isn’t much—I got from his brother, my hero, my uncle Ponderevo. She wore her ring; her marriage certificate she kept in a sealed envelope in the very bottom of her largest trunk, and me she sustained at a private school among the Kentish hills. You must not think I was always at Bladesover—even in my holidays. If at the time these came round, Lady Drew was vexed183 by recent Company, or for any other reason wished to take it out of my mother, then she used to ignore the customary reminder184 my mother gave her, and I “stayed on” at the school.
But such occasions were rare, and I suppose that between ten and fourteen I averaged fifty days a year at Bladesover.
Don’t imagine I deny that was a fine thing for me. Bladesover, in absorbing the whole countryside, had not altogether missed greatness. The Bladesover system has at least done one good thing for England, it has abolished the peasant habit of mind. If many of us still live and breathe pantry and housekeeper’s room, we are quit of the dream of living by economising parasitically185 on hens and pigs.... About that park there were some elements of a liberal education; there was a great space of greensward not given over to manure186 and food grubbing; there was mystery, there was matter for the imagination. It was still a park of deer. I saw something of the life of these dappled creatures, heard the belling of stags, came upon young fawns187 among the bracken, found bones, skulls188, and antlers in lonely places. There were corners that gave a gleam of meaning to the word forest, glimpses of unstudied natural splendour. There was a slope of bluebells189 in the broken sunlight under the newly green beeches in the west wood that is now precious sapphire190 in 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 I never saw; stuff of the Maria Monk191 type, I have since gathered, had a fascination192 for her; but back in the past there had been a Drew of intellectual enterprise, Sir Cuthbert, the son of Sir Matthew who built the house; and thrust away, neglected and despised, in an old room upstairs, were books and treasures of his that my mother let me rout193 among during a spell of wintry wet. Sitting under a dormer window on a shelf above great stores of tea and spices, I became familiar with much of Hogarth in a big portfolio194, with Raphael, there was a great book of engravings from the stanzas195 of Raphael in the Vatican—and with most of the capitals of Europe as they had looked about 1780, by means of several pig iron-moulded books of views. There was also a broad eighteenth century atlas196 with huge wandering maps that instructed me mightily197. It had splendid adornments about each map title; Holland showed a fisherman and his boat; Russia a Cossack; Japan, remarkable people attired198 in pagodas—I say it deliberately199, “pagodas.” There were Terrae Incognitae in every continent then, Poland, Sarmatia, lands since lost; and many a voyage I made with a blunted pin about that large, incorrect and dignified world. The books in that little old closet had been banished, I suppose, from the saloon during the Victorian revival200 of good taste and emasculated orthodoxy, but my mother had no suspicion of their character. So I read and understood the good sound rhetoric201 of Tom Paine’s “Rights of Man,” and his “Common Sense,” excellent books, once praised by bishops202 and since sedulously203 lied about. Gulliver was there unexpurgated, strong meat for a boy perhaps but not too strong I hold—I have never regretted that I escaped niceness in these affairs. The satire204 of Traldragdubh made my blood boil as it was meant to do, but I hated Swift for the Houyhnhnms and never quite liked a horse afterwards. 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 some reference now and then to the Atlas, Gibbon—in twelve volumes.
These readings whetted205 my taste for more, and surreptitiously I raided the bookcases in the big saloon. I got through quite a number of books before my sacrilegious temerity206 was discovered by Ann, the old head-housemaid. I remember that among others I tried a translation of Plato’s “Republic” then, and found extraordinarily207 little interest in it; I was much too young for that; but “Vathek”—“Vathek” was glorious stuff. That kicking affair! When everybody had to kick!
The thought of “Vathek” always brings back with it my boyish memory of the big saloon at Bladesover.
It was a huge long room with many windows opening upon the park, and each window—there were a dozen or more reaching from the floor up—had its elaborate silk or satin curtains, heavily fringed, a canopy208 (is it?) above, its completely white shutters209 folding into the deep thickness of the wall. At either end of that great still place was an immense marble chimney-piece; the end by the bookcase showed the wolf and Romulus and Remus, with Homer and Virgil for supporters; the design of the other end I have forgotten. Frederick, Prince of Wales, swaggered flatly over the one, twice life-size, but mellowed210 by the surface gleam of oil; and over the other was an equally colossal211 group of departed Drews as sylvan212 deities213, scantily214 clad, against a storm-rent sky. Down the centre of the elaborate ceiling were three chandeliers, each bearing some hundreds of dangling215 glass lustres, and over the interminable carpet—it impressed me as about as big as Sarmatia in the store-room Atlas—were islands and archipelagoes of chintz-covered chairs and couches, tables, great Sevres vases on pedestals, a bronze man and horse. Somewhere in this wilderness216 one came, I remember, upon—a big harp217 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 illegality began in a little landing when, very cautiously, one went through a red baize door. A little passage led to the hall, and here one reconnoitered for Ann, the old head-housemaid—the younger housemaids were friendly and did not count. Ann located, came a dash across the open space at the foot of that great staircase that has never been properly descended218 since powder went out of fashion, and so to the saloon door. A beast of an oscillating Chinaman in china, as large as life, grimaced219 and quivered to one’s lightest steps. That door was the perilous220 place; it was double with the thickness of the wall between, so that one could not listen beforehand for the whisk of the feather-brush on the other side. Oddly rat-like, is it not, this darting221 into enormous places in pursuit of the abandoned crumbs222 of thought?
And I found Langhorne’s “Plutarch” too, I remember, on those shelves. It seems 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 furtive223 fashion; queer, too, that it should rest with an old Greek, dead these eighteen hundred years to teach that.
VI
The school I went to was the sort of school the Bladesover system permitted. The public schools that add comic into existence in the brief glow 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 our middle stratum got the schools it deserved, private schools, schools any unqualified pretender was free to establish. Mine was kept by a man who had had the energy to get himself a College of Preceptors diploma, and considering how cheap his charges were, I will readily admit the place might have been worse. The building was a dingy224 yellow-brick residence outside the village, with the schoolroom as an outbuilding of lath and plaster.
I do not remember that my school-days were unhappy—indeed I recall a good lot of fine mixed fun in them—but I cannot without grave risk of misinterpretation declare that we were at all nice and refined. We fought much, not sound formal fighting, but “scrapping” of a sincere and murderous kind, into which one might bring one’s boots—it made us tough at any rate—and several of us were the sons of London publicans, who distinguished225 “scraps” where one meant to hurt from ordered pugilism, practising both arts, and having, moreover, precocious226 linguistic227 gifts. Our cricket-field was bald about the wickets, and we played without style and disputed with the umpire; and the teaching was chiefly in the hands of a lout228 of nineteen, who wore ready-made clothes and taught despicably. The head-master and proprietor taught us arithmetic, algebra229, and Euclid, and to the older boys even trigonometry, himself; he had a strong mathematical bias230, and I think now that by the standard of a British public school he did rather well by us.
We had one inestimable privilege at that school, and that was spiritual neglect. We dealt with one another with the forcible simplicity231 of natural boys, we “cheeked,” and “punched” and “clouted”; we thought ourselves Red Indians and cowboys and such-like honourable233 things, and not young English gentlemen; we never felt the strain of “Onward Christian soldiers,” nor were swayed by any premature234 piety235 in the cold oak pew of our Sunday devotions. All that was good. We spent our rare pennies in the uncensored reading matter of the village dame’s shop, on the Boys of England, and honest penny dreadfuls—ripping stuff, stuff that anticipated Haggard and Stevenson, badly printed and queerly illustrated236, and very very good for us. On our half-holidays we were allowed the unusual freedom of rambling237 in twos and threes wide and far about the land, talking experimentally, dreaming wildly. There was much in those walks! To this day the landscape of the Kentish world, with its low broad distances, its hop23 gardens and golden stretches of wheat, its oasts and square church towers, its background of downland and hangers238, has for me a faint sense of adventure added to the pleasure of its beauty. We smoked on occasion, but nobody put us up to the proper “boyish” things to do; we never “robbed an orchard” for example, though there were orchards239 all about us, we thought stealing was sinful, we stole incidental apples and turnips240 and strawberries from the fields indeed, but in a criminal inglorious fashion, and afterwards we were ashamed. We had our days of adventure, but they were natural accidents, our own adventures. There was one hot day when several of us, walking out towards Maidstone, were incited241 by the devil to despise ginger242 beer, and we fuddled ourselves dreadfully with ale; and a time when our young minds were infected to the pitch of buying pistols, by the legend of the Wild West. Young Roots from Highbury came back with a revolver and cartridges243, and we went off six strong to live a free wild life one holiday afternoon. We fired our first shot deep in the old flint mine at Chiselstead, and nearly burst our ear drums; then we fired in a primrose244 studded wood by Pickthorn Green, and I gave a false alarm of “keeper,” and we fled in disorder245 for a mile. After which Roots suddenly shot at a pheasant in the high road by Chiselstead, and then young Barker told lies about the severity of the game laws and made Roots sore afraid, and we hid the pistol in a dry ditch outside the school field. A day or so after we got in again, and ignoring a certain fouling246 and rusting247 of the barrel, tried for a rabbit at three hundred yards. Young Roots blew a molehill at twenty paces into a dust cloud, burnt his fingers, and scorched his face; and the weapon having once displayed this strange disposition248 to flame back upon the shooter, was not subsequently fired.
One main source of excitement for us was “cheeking” people in vans and carts upon the Goudhurst road; and getting myself into a monstrous249 white mess in the chalk pits beyond the village, and catching250 yellow jaundice as a sequel to bathing stark251 naked with three other Adamites, old Ewart leading that function, in the rivulet252 across Hickson’s meadows, are among my memorabilia. Those free imaginative afternoons! how much they were for us! how much they did for us! All streams came from the then undiscovered “sources of the Nile” in those days, all thickets253 were Indian jungles, and our best game, I say it with pride, I invented. I got it out of the Bladesover saloon. We found a wood where “Trespassing” was forbidden, and did the “Retreat of the Ten Thousand” through it from end to end, cutting our way bravely through a host of nettle254 beds that barred our path, and not forgetting to weep and kneel when at last we emerged within sight of the High Road Sea. So we have burst at times, weeping and rejoicing, upon startled wayfarers256. Usually I took the part of that distinguished general Xenōphen—and please note the quantity of the ō. I have all my classical names like that,—Socrates rhymes with Bates for me, and except when the bleak eye of some scholar warns me of his standards of judgment257, I use those dear old mispronunciations still. The little splash into Latin made during my days as a chemist washed off nothing of the habit. Well,—if I met those great gentlemen of the past with their accents carelessly adjusted I did at least meet them alive, as an equal, and in a living tongue. Altogether my school might easily have been worse for me, and among other good things it gave me a friend who has lasted my life out.
This was Ewart, who is now a monumental artist at Woking, after many vicissitudes258. Dear chap, how he did stick out of his clothes to be sure! He was a longlimbed lout, ridiculously tall beside my more youth full compactness, and, except that there was no black moustache under his nose blob, he had the same round knobby face as he has to-day, the same bright and active hazel brown eyes, the stare, the meditative259 moment, the insinuating260 reply. Surely no boy ever played the fool as Bob Ewart used to play it, no boy had a readier knack261 of mantling262 the world with wonder. Commonness vanished before Ewart, at his expository touch all things became memorable263 and rare. From him I first heard tell of love, but only after its barbs264 were already sticking in my heart. He was, I know now the bastard265 of that great improvident266 artist, Rickmann Ewart; he brought the light of a lax world that at least had not turned its back upon beauty, into the growing fermentation of my mind.
I won his heart by a version of Vathek, and after that we were inseparable yarning267 friends. We merged255 our intellectual stock so completely that I wonder sometimes how much I did not become Ewart, how much Ewart is not vicariously and derivatively268 me.
VII
And then when I had newly passed my fourteenth birthday, came my tragic269 disgrace.
It was in my midsummer holidays that the thing happened, and it was through 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 the annual going of those Three Great Women. She came into the old nursery upstairs, 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 begin with, I did not like her at all.
Nobody liked this irruption into the downstairs rooms; the two “gave trouble,”—a dire29 offence; Nannie’s sense of duty to her charge led to requests and demands that took my mother’s breath away. Eggs at unusual times, the reboiling of milk, the rejection270 of an excellent milk pudding—not negotiated respectfully but dictated271 as of right. Nannie was a dark, longfeatured, taciturn woman in a grey dress; she had a furtive inflexibility272 of manner that finally dismayed and crushed and overcame. She conveyed she was “under orders”—like a Greek tragedy. She was that strange product of the old time, a devoted273, 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-long security of servitude—the bargain was nonetheless binding274 for being implicit232. Finally they were to pension her, and she would die the hated treasure of a boarding-house. She had built up in herself an enormous habit of reference to these upstairs people, she had curbed275 down all discordant276 murmurings of her soul, her very instincts were perverted277 or surrendered. She was sexless, her personal pride was all transferred, she mothered another woman’s child with a hard, joyless devotion that was at least entirely compatible with a stoical separation. She treated us all as things that counted for nothing save to fetch and carry for her charge. But the Honourable Beatrice could condescend278.
The queer chances of later years come between me and a distinctly separated memory of that childish face. When I think of Beatrice, I think of her as I came to know her at a later time, when at last I came to know her so well that indeed now I could draw her, and show a hundred little delicate things you would miss in looking at her. But even then I remember how I noted the infinite delicacy279 of her childish skin and the fine eyebrow280, finer than the finest feather that ever one felt on the breast of a bird. She was one of those elfin, rather precocious little girls, quick coloured, with dark hair, naturally curling dusky hair that was sometimes astray over her eyes, and eyes that were sometimes impishly dark, and sometimes a clear brown yellow. And from the very outset, after a most cursory281 attention to Rabbits, she decided282 that the only really interesting thing at the tea-table was myself.
The elders talked in their formal dull way—telling Nannie the trite283 old things about the park and the village that they told every one, and Beatrice watched me across the table with a pitiless little curiosity that made me uncomfortable.
“Nannie,” she said, pointing, and Nannie left a question of my mother’s disregarded 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 brutal284 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 malignant285. Her eyes explored me with unjustifiable hostility286. “He’s got dirty hands,” she said, stabbing at the forbidden fruit. “And there’s a fray287 to his collar.”
Then she gave herself up to cake with an appearance of entire forgetfulness of me that filled me with hate and a passionate288 desire to compel her to admire me.... And the next day before tea, I did for the first time in my life, freely, without command or any compulsion, wash my hands.
So our acquaintance began, and presently was deepened by a whim289 of hers. She had a cold and was kept indoors, and confronted Nannie suddenly with the alternative of being hopelessly naughty, which in her case involved a 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 all the afternoon. Nannie came downstairs and borrowed me in a careworn290 manner; and I was handed over to the little creature as if I was some large variety of kitten. I had never had anything to do with a little girl before, I thought she was more beautiful and wonderful and bright than anything else could possibly be in life, and she found me the gentlest of slaves—though at the same time, as I made evident, fairly strong. And Nannie was amazed to find the afternoon slip cheerfully and rapidly 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 with Beatrice several times. The toys she had remain in my memory still as great splendid things, gigantic to all my previous experience of toys, and we even went to the great doll’s house on the nursery landing to play discreetly291 with that, the great doll’s house that the Prince Regent had given Sir Harry292 Drew’s first-born (who died at five), that was a not ineffectual model of Bladesover itself, and contained eighty-five dolls and had cost hundreds of pounds. I played under imperious direction with that toy of glory.
I went back to school when that holiday was over, dreaming of beautiful things, and got Ewart to talk to me of love; and I made a great story out 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 privately293 decided, was like Beatrice.
One other holiday there was when I saw something of her—oddly enough my memory of that second holiday in which she played a part is vague—and then 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 their order, I find for the first time how inconsecutive and irrational a thing the memory can be. One recalls acts and cannot recall motives294; one recalls quite vividly295 moments that stand out inexplicably—things adrift, joining on to nothing, leading nowhere. I think I must have seen Beatrice and her half-brother quite a number of times in my last holiday at Bladesover, but I really cannot recall more than a little of the quality of the circumstances. That great crisis of my boyhood stands out very vividly as an effect, as a sort of cardinal296 thing for me, but when I look for details, particularly details that led up to the crisis—I cannot find them in any developing order at all. This halfbrother, Archie Garvell, was a new factor in the affair. I remember him clearly as a fair-haired, supercilious297 looking, weedily-lank boy, much taller than I, but I should imagine very little heavier, and that we hated each other by a sort of instinct from the beginning; and yet I cannot remember my first meeting with him at all.
Looking back into these past things—it is like rummaging298 in a neglected attic299 that has experienced the attentions of some whimsical robber—I cannot even account for the presence of these children at Bladesover. They were, I know, among the innumerable cousins of Lady Drew, and according to the theories of downstairs candidates for the ultimate possession of Bladesover. If they were, their candidature was unsuccessful. But that great place, with all its faded splendour, its fine furniture, its large traditions, was entirely at the old lady’s disposition; and I am inclined to think it is true that she used this fact to torment300 and dominate a number of eligible301 people. Lord Osprey was among the number of these, and she showed these hospitalities to his motherless child and step-child, partly, no doubt, because he was poor, but quite as much, I nowadays imagine, in the dim hope of finding some affectionate or imaginative outcome of contact with them. Nannie had dropped out of the world this second time, and Beatrice was in the charge of an extremely amiable302 and ineffectual poor army-class young woman whose name I never knew. They were, I think, two remarkably303 illmanaged and enterprising children. I seem to remember too, that it was understood that I was not a fit companion for them, and that our meetings had to be as unostentatious as possible. It was Beatrice who insisted upon our meeting.
I am certain I knew quite a lot about love at fourteen and that I was quite as much in love with Beatrice then as any impassioned adult could be, and that Beatrice was, in her way, in love with me. It is part of the decent and useful pretences of our world that children of the age at which we were, think nothing, feel nothing, know nothing of love. It is wonderful what people the English are for keeping up pretences. But indeed I cannot avoid telling that Beatrice and I talked of love and kissed and embraced one another.
I recall something of one talk under the overhanging bushes of the shrubbery—I on the park side of the stone wall, and the lady of my worship a little inelegantly astride thereon. Inelegantly do I say? you should have seen the sweet imp3 as I remember her. Just her poise304 on the wall comes suddenly clear before me, and behind her the light various branches of the bushes of the shrubbery that my feet might not profane305, and far away and high behind her, dim and stately, the cornice of the great façade of Bladesover rose against the dappled sky. Our talk must have been serious and business-like, for we were discussing my social position.
“I don’t love Archie,” she had said, apropos306 of nothing; and then in a whisper, 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 and could not be a servant.
“You’ll never be a servant—ever!”
I swore that very readily, and it is a vow307 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 bawled308 at by duffers? No fear!” said I. “Leave that to the plough-boys.”
“But an officer?”
“I don’t know,” I said, evading309 a shameful310 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 to have to be told to fight and to be looked down upon while you do it, and how could I be an officer?”
“Couldn’t you be?” she said, and looked at me doubtfully; and the spaces of the social system opened between us.
Then, as became a male of spirit, I took upon myself to brag311 and lie my way through this trouble. I said I was a poor man, and poor men went into the navy; that I “knew” mathematics, which no army officer did; and I claimed Nelson for an exemplar, and spoke very highly of my outlook upon blue water. “He loved Lady Hamilton,” I said, “although she was a lady—and I will love you.”
We were somewhere near that when the egregious312 governess became audible, calling “Beeee-âtrice! Beeee-e-âtrice!”
“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 I went very close to her, and she put her little head down upon the wall until her black fog of hair tickled313 my cheek.
“You are my humble314, faithful lover,” she demanded in a whisper, her warm flushed face near touching mine, and her eyes very dark and lustrous315.
“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 first time.
“Beeee-e-e-â-trice!” fearfully close.
My lady had vanished, with one wild kick of her black-stocking leg. A moment after, I heard her sustaining the reproaches of her governess, and explaining her failure to answer with an admirable lucidity316 and disingenuousness317.
I felt it was unnecessary for me to be seen just then, and I vanished guiltily round the corner into the West Wood, and so to love-dreams and single-handed play, wandering along one of those meandering318 bracken valleys that varied319 Bladesover park. And that day and for many days that kiss upon my lips was a seal, and by night the seed of dreams.
Then I remember an expedition we made—she, I, and her half-brother—into those West Woods—they two were supposed to be playing in the shrubbery—and how we were Indians there, and made a wigwam out of a pile of beech46 logs, and how we stalked deer, crept near and watched rabbits feeding in a glade320, and almost got a squirrel. It was play seasoned with plentiful321 disputing between me and young Garvell, for each firmly insisted upon the leading rôles, and only my wider reading—I had read ten stories to his one—gave me the ascendency over him. Also I scored over him by knowing how to find the eagle in a bracken stem. And somehow—I don’t remember what led to it at all—I and Beatrice, two hot and ruffled322 creatures, crept in among the tall bracken and hid from him. The great fronds323 rose above us, five feet or more, and as I had learnt how to wriggle324 through that undergrowth with the minimum of betrayal by tossing greenery above, I led the way. The ground under bracken is beautifully clear and faintly scented325 in warm weather; the stems come up black and then green; if you crawl flat, it is a tropical forest in miniature. I led the way and Beatrice crawled behind, and then as the green of the further glade opened before us, stopped. She crawled up to me, her hot little face came close to mine; once more she looked and breathed close to me, and suddenly she flung her arm about my neck and dragged me to earth beside her, and kissed me and kissed me again. We kissed, we embraced and kissed again, all without a word; we desisted, we stared and hesitated—then in a suddenly damped mood and a little perplexed326 at ourselves, crawled out, to be presently run down and caught in the tamest way by Archie.
That comes back very clearly to me, and other vague memories—I know old Hall and his gun, out shooting at jackdaws, came into our common experiences, but I don’t remember how; and then at last, abruptly327, our fight in the Warren stands out. The Warren, like most places in England that have that name, was not particularly a warren, it was a long slope of thorns and beeches through which a path ran, and made an alternative route to the downhill carriage road between Bladesover and Ropedean. I don’t know how we three got there, but I have an uncertain fancy it was connected with a visit paid by the governess to the Ropedean vicarage people. But suddenly Archie and I, in discussing a game, fell into a dispute for Beatrice. I had made him the fairest offer: I was to be a Spanish nobleman, she was to be my wife, and he was to be a tribe of Indians trying to carry her off. It seems to me a fairly attractive offer to a boy to be a whole tribe of Indians with a chance of such a booty. 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 play Beatrice is your wife. It’s—it’s impertinent.”
“But” I said, and looked at her.
Some earlier grudge328 in the day’s affairs must have been in Archie’s mind. “We let you play with us,” said Archie; “but we can’t have things like that.”
“What rot!” said Beatrice. “He can if he likes.”
But he carried his point. I let him carry it, and only began to grow angry three or four minutes later. Then we were still discussing play and 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 pointed329 a finger at me. He had struck to the heart of my shame. I made the only possible reply by a rush at him. “Hello!” he cried, at my blackavised attack. He dropped back into an attitude that had some style in it, parried my blow, got back at my cheek, and laughed with surprise and relief at his own success. Whereupon I became a thing of murderous rage. He could box as well or better than I—he had yet to realise I knew anything of that at all—but I had fought once or twice to a finish with bare fists. I was used to inflicting330 and enduring savage331 hurting, and I doubt if he had ever fought. I hadn’t fought ten seconds before I felt this softness in him, realised all that quality of modern upper-class England that never goes to the quick, that hedges about rules and those petty points of honour that are the ultimate comminution of honour, that claims credit for things demonstrably half done. He seemed to think that first hit of his and one or two others were going to matter, that I ought to give in when presently my lip bled and dripped blood upon my clothes. So before we had been at it a minute he had ceased to be aggressive except in momentary332 spurts333, and I was knocking him about almost as I wanted to do; and demanding breathlessly and fiercely, after our school manner, whether he had had enough, not knowing that by his high code and his soft training it was equally impossible for him to either buck-up and beat me, or give in.
I have a very distinct impression of Beatrice dancing about us during the affair in a state of unladylike appreciation334, but I was too preoccupied335 to hear much of what she was saying. But she certainly backed us both, and I am inclined to think now—it may be the disillusionment of my ripened336 years—whichever she thought was winning.
Then young Garvell, giving way before my slogging, stumbled and fell over a big flint, and I, still following the tradition of my class and school, promptly337 flung myself on him to finish him. We were busy with each other on the ground when we became aware of a dreadful interruption.
“Shut up, you fool!” said Archie.
“Oh, Lady Drew!” I heard Beatrice cry. “They’re fighting! They’re fighting something awful!”
I looked over my shoulder. Archie’s wish to get up became irresistible338, and my resolve to go on with him vanished altogether.
I became aware of the two old ladies, presences of black and purple silk and 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. Beatrice had gone to them at once with an air of taking refuge, and stood beside and a little behind them. We both rose dejectedly. The two old ladies were evidently quite dreadfully shocked, and peering at us with their poor old eyes; and never had I seen such a tremblement in Lady Drew’s lorgnettes.
“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 a conviction for ingratitude339 to my evident sacrilege.
“How could he dare?” cried Lady Drew, becoming very awful.
“He broke the rules” said Archie, sobbing340 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, and wiped 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,” sobbed341 Archie.
Beatrice, from behind the old ladies, regarded me intently and without hostility. I am inclined to think the modification342 of my face through the damage to my lip interested her. It became dimly apparent to my confused intelligence that I must not say these two had been playing with me. That would not be after the rules of their game. I resolved in this difficult situation upon a sulky silence, and to take whatever consequences might follow.
IX
The powers of justice in Bladesover made an extraordinary mess of my case.
I have regretfully to admit that the Honourable Beatrice Normandy did, at the age of ten, betray me, abandon me, and lie most abominably343 about me. She was, as a matter of fact, panic-stricken about me, conscience stricken too; she bolted from the very thought of my being her affianced lover and so forth, from the faintest memory of kissing; she was indeed altogether disgraceful and human in her betrayal. She and her half-brother lied in perfect concord344, and I was presented as a wanton assailant 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 of the evidence, reasonable and merciful.
They were conveyed to me by my mother, who was, I really believe, even more shocked by the grossness of my social insubordination than Lady Drew. She dilated345 on her ladyship’s kindnesses to me, on the effrontery346 and wickedness of my procedure, and so came at last to the terms of my penance347. “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 little ultimatum348. “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 his pardon,” I said.
And I didn’t.
After that I was one against the world. Perhaps in my mother’s heart there lurked349 some pity for me, but she did not show it. She took the side of the young gentleman; she tried hard, she tried very hard, to make 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 the coachman, coldly silent, driving me, and all my personal belongings350 in a small American cloth portmanteau behind.
I felt I had much to embitter351 me; the game had and the beginnings of fairness by any standards I knew.... But the thing that embittered352 me most was that the Honourable Beatrice Normandy should have repudiated353 and fled from me as though I was some sort of leper, and not even have taken a chance or so, to give me a good-bye. She might have done that anyhow! Supposing I had told on her! But the son of a servant counts as a servant. She had forgotten and now remembered.
I solaced354 myself with some extraordinary dream of coming back to Bladesover, stern, powerful, after the fashion of Coriolanus. I do not recall the details, but I have no doubt I displayed great magnanimity...
Well, anyhow I never said I was sorry for pounding young Garvell, and I am not sorry to this day.
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