Tono Bungay
by H.G. Wells
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

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
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
theatrical 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 stratum 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 intimacy and in
good faith. I have been a native in many social countries. I
have been the unwelcome guest of a working baker, 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 champagne 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 mutual
admiration.

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 curiously different on their surfaces. I
wish I had ranged just 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 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 enfamille (so redeeming the minor 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 intercourse with the ducal rank too has been
negligible; I once went shooting with a duke, and in an outburst
of what was no doubt snobbishness, 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 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 transit 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 investors
spoke of his star. At his zenith he burst into a cloud of the
most magnificent promotions. What a time that was! The Napoleon
of domestic conveniences!

I was his nephew, his peculiar 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 blistered perhaps, two and twenty years
older, with my youth gone, my manhood eaten in upon, but greatly
edified, 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 jot 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
agglomeration. I want to trace my social trajectory (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 narrative at all. I want to set out my own queer love
experiences too, such as they are, for they troubled and
distressed and swayed me hugely, and they still seem to me to
contain all sorts of irrational 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
austere....

Tono-Bungay still figures on the hoardings, it stands in rows in
every chemist's storeroom, it still assuages 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 scorched survivor 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 velocities
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 anecdotes 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 fermenting
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 lured and stranded 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 sprawl 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 authentic 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 parody of the
temple of Vesta at Tibur, upon the hill crest 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 beeches,
many elms and some sweet chestnuts, abounding 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 chateau, and save for one pass among the crests 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 picturesquely
about the high road along the skirts of the great park.
Northward,  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 vindictively economical because of some
shrinkage of his tithes; and by reason of his use of the word
Eucharist for the Lord's Supper he had become altogether
estranged 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 supremely in the
world, and that all other things had significance only in
relation to them. They represented the Gentry, 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 thoroughly, the great house mingled so
solidly and effectually earth and sky, the contrast of its
spacious hall and saloon and galleries, its airy housekeeper's
room and warren of offices with the meagre dignities of the
vicar, and the pinched and stuffy 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
awakened it took me fast and far. By fourteen I had achieved
terrible blasphemies 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 mere collections of ships, marketing places
for the tenantry, centres for such education as they needed, as
entirely 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 Limbo, 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 ostensible order has even now passed away. The great houses
stand in the parks still, the cottages cluster respectfully on
their borders, touching their eaves with their creepers, the
English countryside--you can range through Kent from Bladesover
northward and see persists obstinately 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 foliage of pretences lie glowing in the
mire.

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 remains 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 riddle to me. The ideas of
democracy, of equality, and above all of promiscuous 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 formulates; it keeps words for
jests and ironies. In the meanwhile the old shapes, the old
attitudes remain, subtly changed and changing still, sheltering
strange tenants. 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 climax 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 noted, had its
pseudomorph too; a newspaper proprietor of the type that hustles
along with stolen ideas from one loud sink-or-swim enterprise to
another, had bought the place outright; 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 unstable questionable 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, garrulous, with a wonderful memory for
genealogies 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 kernels in the great shell of Bladesover
House, the shell that had once been gaily 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
slumber and caressing 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
mitigating their vertical 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 pious
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
hovered 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 sipping elder wine, her
maid would tell us the simple secrets of that belated flush....
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, 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
lesser 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 unduly.
Afterwards, Rabbits, the butler, came into my mother's room
downstairs, red with indignation and with tears in his eyes.
"Look at that!" gasped 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 vindictive, 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 discredited 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
indignities 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 expenditure, 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 eldest son, the
first footman, younger sons of the village shopkeeper, his first
assistant, and so forth.

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 license or any compunction--or of housemaids
and still-room maids in the bleak, matting-carpeted still-room or
of the cook and her kitchen maids and casual friends among the
bright copper 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 anomalous apartment  that held the upper servants' bagatelle
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 inflexible decision her place and the
place of every one in the world--except the place that concealed
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
etiquette  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 chauffeur....

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 naively, 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
distinctively 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 intruded or as a gloss upon
this predominant formula, either impertinently or apologetically;
and you will perceive at once the reasonableness, the necessity,
of that snobbishness which is the distinctive quality of English
thought. Everybody who is not actually in the shadow of a
Bladesover is as it were perpetually seeking after lost
orientations. We have never broken with our tradition, never
even symbolically hewed it to pieces, as the French did in
quivering fact in the Terror. But all the organizing ideas have
slackened, the old habitual bonds have relaxed or altogether
come undone. 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 posthumously 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 virtue
with especial reference to my mother and Miss Fison, the maid.
They sat about in black and shiny and flouncey clothing adorned
with gimp and beads, eating great quantities of cake, drinking
much tea in a stately manner and reverberating 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 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 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 portent 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, haughty, unapproachable, given to irony and a
caustic 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 tinkle of utterance with a voluminous,
scornful "Haw!" that made 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 on either side of her face, large blue eyes and a small set
of stereotyped 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 seedling amidst
great rocks, and my mother sat with an eye upon me, resolute to
suppress the slightest manifestation of vitality. It was hard on
me, but perhaps it was also hard upon these rather over-fed,
ageing, pretending people, that my youthful restlessness and
rebellious 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
repartee, 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 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 repertoire. "The evenings are drawing out nicely," she would
say, or if the season was decadent, "How the evenings draw in!"
It was an invaluable 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 contraction, 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 exhausted.

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
coruscating 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 irrelevant  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 emphatic articulation 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 fixed me again--"and the
Third Thing"--now I was released--"needed in a colonial governor
is Tact."  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 conspicuously 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 jeered in my heart at Mrs.
Mackridge's colonial ascendancy. These brave emancipated
sunburnt English of the open, I thought, suffer these
aristocratic invaders as a quaint anachronism, but as 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
was the natural thing for any one in my circumstances to do, and
take my world for granted. A certain innate 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 virtues before my
distincter memories began. He left no traces in his flight, and
she, in her indignation,  destroyed every vestige that she could
of him. Never a photograph nor a scrap of his handwriting have I
seen; and it was, I know, only the accepted code of virtue and
discretion that prevented her destroying  her marriage
certificate and me, and so making a clean sweep of her
matrimonial humiliation. I suppose I must inherit something of
the moral stupidity that would enable her to make a holocaust of
every little personal thing she had of him. There must have been
presents made by him as a lover, for example--books with kindly
inscriptions, letters perhaps, a flattened  flower, a ring, or
such-like gage. She kept her wedding-ring, of course, but all
the others she destroyed. She never told me his christian 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 vexed by recent Company, or for any
other reason wished to take it out of my mother, then she used to
ignore the customary reminder 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
parasitically 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 manure 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 fawns
among the bracken, found bones, skulls, 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 bluebells in the broken sunlight under the newly green
beeches in the west wood that is now precious sapphire 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 Monk type, I have since
gathered, had a fascination 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 rout 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 portfolio, with Raphael, there was a great book of
engravings from the stanzas 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 atlas with huge wandering maps that
instructed me mightily. It had splendid adornments about each
map title; Holland showed a fisherman and his boat;  Russia a
Cossack; Japan, remarkable people attired in pagodas--I say it
deliberately, "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 revival
of good taste and emasculated orthodoxy, but my mother had no
suspicion of their character. So I read and understood the good
sound rhetoric of Tom Paine's "Rights of Man," and his "Common
Sense," excellent books, once praised by bishops and since
sedulously 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 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 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 whetted 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 temerity was discovered by
Ann, the old head-housemaid. I remember that among others I
tried a translation of Plato's "Republic" then, and found
extraordinarily 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 canopy (is it?) above, its completely white shutters
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 mellowed by the surface gleam
of oil; and over the other was an equally colossal group of
departed Drews as sylvan deities, scantily clad, against a
storm-rent sky. Down the centre of the elaborate ceiling were
three chandeliers, each bearing some hundreds of dangling 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 wilderness one 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
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 descended since powder
went out of fashion, and so to the saloon door. A beast of an
oscillating Chinaman in china, as large as life, grimaced and
quivered to one's lightest steps. That door was the perilous
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
darting into enormous places in pursuit of the abandoned crumbs
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 furtive 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 dingy 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 distinguished "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 without
style and disputed with the umpire; and the teaching was chiefly
in the hands of a lout of nineteen, who wore ready-made clothes
and taught 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 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
simplicity of natural boys, we "cheeked," and "punched" and
"clouted"; we thought ourselves Red Indians and cowboys and
such-like honourable things, and not young English gentlemen; we
never felt the strain of "Onward Christian soldiers," nor were
swayed by any premature piety 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
illustrated, and very very good for us. On our half-holidays we
were allowed the unusual freedom of rambling 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
hop gardens and golden stretches of wheat, its oasts and square
church towers, its background of downland and hangers, 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 orchards all about us, we thought stealing was
sinful, we stole incidental apples and turnips 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
incited by the devil to despise ginger 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 cartridges, 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 primrose studded 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 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
fouling and rusting 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 disposition 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
monstrous white mess in the chalk pits beyond the village, and
catching yellow jaundice as a sequel to bathing stark naked with
three other Adamites, old Ewart leading that function, in the
rivulet 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 thickets
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 nettle 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 wayfarers. Usually I took the part
of that distinguished general Xenophen--and please note the
quantity of the o. 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 judgment,
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 vicissitudes. 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 meditative moment,  the insinuating
reply. Surely no boy ever played the fool as Bob Ewart used to
play it, no boy had a readier knack of mantling the world with
wonder. Commonness  vanished before Ewart, at his expository
touch all things 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, I know now the bastard of that
great improvident 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 yarning friends. We merged our intellectual stock so
completely that I wonder sometimes  how much I did not become
Ewart, how much Ewart is not vicariously and derivatively me.

VII

And then when I had newly passed my fourteenth birthday, came my
tragic 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 dire 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
rejection of an excellent milk pudding--not negotiated
respectfully but dictated as of right. Nannie was a dark,
longfeatured, taciturn woman in a grey dress; she had a furtive
inflexibility 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
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-long security of
servitude--the bargain was nonetheless binding for being
implicit. 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 curbed down all discordant murmurings  of her soul, her
very instincts were perverted 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 condescend.

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 delicacy of her childish skin and the fine eyebrow,
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 cursory attention to Rabbits,
she decided that the only really interesting thing at the
tea-table was myself.

The elders talked in their formal dull way--telling Nannie the
trite 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 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
unjustifiable hostility. "He's got dirty hands," she said,
stabbing at the forbidden fruit. "And there's a fray 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 passionate
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 whim
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 careworn 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 discreetly with that, the great doll's house that the
Prince Regent had given Sir Harry 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 privately 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 motives; one recalls quite vividly 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 cardinal 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, supercilious 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 rummaging  in a
neglected attic 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 torment and dominate a number of eligible 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 amiable and ineffectual poor army-class young woman
whose name I never knew. They were, I think, two remarkably
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 imp as I remember her.
Just her poise 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 profane, and far away and high
behind her, dim and stately, the cornice of the great facade 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, apropos 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 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
the plough-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 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 brag 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 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 I went very close to her, and she put her little head down
upon the wall until her black fog of hair tickled my cheek.

"You are my humble, faithful lover," she demanded in a whisper,
her warm flushed 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 first time.

"Beeee-e-e-a-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 lucidity and disingenuousness.

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
meandering bracken valleys that varied 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 beech logs, and how we stalked deer,
crept near and watched rabbits feeding in a glade, and almost got
a squirrel. It was play seasoned with plentiful disputing
between me and young Garvell, for each firmly insisted upon the
leading roles, 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 ruffled creatures, crept in among the tall bracken
and hid from him. The great fronds rose above us, five feet or
more, and as I had learnt how to wriggle 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
scented 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 perplexed 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, abruptly, 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 grudge 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 pointed 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  inflicting and enduring
savage 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 momentary spurts, 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 appreciation, but I
was too preoccupied 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 ripened 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, promptly 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
irresistible, 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 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, 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," sobbed Archie.

Beatrice, from behind the old ladies, regarded me intently and
without hostility. I am inclined to think the modification 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
abominably 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 concord, 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 dilated on her ladyship's kindnesses to me,
on the effrontery and wickedness of my procedure, and so came at
last to the terms of my penance. "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 ultimatum. "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 lurked 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 belongings in a small American cloth portmanteau behind.

I felt I had much to embitter me; the game had and the beginnings
of fairness by any standards I knew.... But the thing that
embittered me most was that the Honourable Beatrice Normandy
should have repudiated  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 solaced 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.

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
thought for good and all, I was sent by my mother in a vindictive
spirit, first to her cousin Nicodemus Frapp, and then, as a
fully indentured apprentice, to my uncle Ponderevo.

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

My cousin Nicodemus Frapp was a baker in a back street--a slum
rather--just off that miserable narrow mean high road that
threads those exquisite beads, Rochester and Chatham. He was, I
must admit, a shock to me, much dominated by a young, plump,
prolific, malingering wife; a bent, slow-moving, unwilling dark
man with flour in his hair and eyelashes, in the lines of his
face and the seams of his coat. I've never had a chance to
correct my early impression of him, and he still remains an
almost dreadful memory, a sort of caricature of incompetent
simplicity. As I remember him, indeed, he presented the servile
tradition perfected. He had no pride in his person; fine clothes
and dressing up wasn't "for the likes of" him, so that he got his
wife, who was no artist at it, to cut his black hair at irregular
intervals, and let his nails become disagreeable to the
fastidious eye; he had no pride in his business nor any
initiative; his only virtues were not doing certain things and
hard work. "Your uncle," said my mother--all grown-up cousins
were uncles by courtesy among the Victorian middle-class-- "isn't
much to look at or talk to, but he's a Good Hard-Working Man."
There was a sort of base honourableness about toil, however
needless, in that system of inversion. Another point of honour
was to rise at or before dawn, and then laboriously muddle about.

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

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

One might have doubted if either of them felt discomfort in this
dusty darkness of existence, if it was not that they did visibly
seek consolation. They sought this and found it of a Sunday, not
in strong drink and raving, but in imaginary draughts of blood.
They met with twenty or thirty other darkened and unclean people,
all dressed in dingy colours that would not show the dirt, in a
little brick-built chapel equipped with a spavined roarer of a
harmonium, and there solaced their minds on the thought that all
that was fair and free in life, all that struggled, all that
planned and made, all pride and beauty and honour, all fine and
enjoyable things, were irrevocably damned to everlasting
torments. They were the self-appointed confidants of God's
mockery of his own creation. So at any rate they stick in my
mind. Vaguer, and yet hardly less agreeable than this cosmic
jest, this coming "Yah, clever!" and general serving out and
"showing up" of the lucky, the bold, and the cheerful, 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 them with the bitter uncharitable condemnation of boyhood,
and a twinge of that hate comes back to me. As I write the
words, the sounds and then the scene return, these obscure,
undignified people, a fat woman with asthma, an old Welsh
milk-seller with a tumour on his bald head, who was the
intellectual leader of the sect, a huge-voiced haberdasher with a
big black beard, a white-faced, extraordinarily pregnant woman,
his wife, a spectacled rate collector with a bent back.... I
hear the talk about souls, the strange battered old phrases that
were coined ages ago in the seaports of the sun-dry Levant, of
balm of Gilead and manna in the desert, of gourds that give shade
and water in a thirsty land; I recall again the way in which at
the conclusion of the service the talk remained pious in form but
became medical in substance, and how the women got together for
obstetric whisperings. I, as a boy, did not matter, and might
overhear.

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

I slept in a dingy sheeted bed with the two elder survivors of
Frapp fecundity, and spent my week days in helping in the
laborious disorder of the shop and bakehouse, in incidental
deliveries of bread and so forth, and in parrying the probings of
my uncle into my relations with the Blood, and his confidential
explanations that ten shillings a week--which was what my mother
paid him--was not enough to cover my accommodation. He was very
anxious to keep that, but also he wanted more. There were
neither books nor any seat nor corner in that house where reading
was possible, no newspaper ever brought the clash of worldly
things into its heavenward seclusion; horror of it all grew in me
daily, and whenever I could I escaped into the streets and
tramped about Chatham. The news shops appealed to me
particularly. One saw there smudgy illustrated sheets, the
Police News in particular, in which vilely drawn pictures brought
home to the dullest intelligence an interminable succession of
squalid crimes, women murdered and put into boxes, buried under
floors, old men bludgeoned at midnight by robbers, people thrust
suddenly out of trains, happy lovers shot, vitrioled and so forth
by rivals. I got my first glimpse of the life of pleasure in
foully drawn pictures of "police raids" on this and that.
Interspersed with these sheets were others in which Sloper, the
urban John Bull, had his fling with gin bottle and obese
umbrella, or the kindly empty faces of the Royal Family appeared
and reappeared, visiting this, opening that, getting married,
getting offspring, lying in state, doing everything but anything,
a wonderful, good-meaning, impenetrable race apart.

I have never revisited Chatham; the impression it has left on my
mind is one of squalid compression, unlit by any gleam of a
maturer charity. All its effects arranged themselves as
antithetical to the Bladesover effects. They confirmed and
intensified all that Bladesover  suggested. Bladesover declared
itself to be the land, to be essentially England; I have already
told how its airy spaciousness, its wide dignity, seemed to
thrust village, church, and vicarage into corners, into a
secondary  and conditional significance. Here one gathered the
corollary of that. Since the whole wide country of Kent was
made up of contiguous Bladesovers and for the gentlefolk, the
surplus of population, all who were not good tenants nor good
labourers, Church of England, submissive and respectful, were
necessarily thrust together, jostled out of sight, to fester as
they might in this place that had the colours and even the smells
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 some fairy godmother of mine, asking and asking again:
"But after all, WHY--"

I wandered up through Rochester once, and had a glimpse of the
Stour valley above the town, all horrible with cement works and
foully smoking chimneys and rows of workmen's cottages, minute,
ugly, uncomfortable, and grimy. So I had my first intimation of
how industrialism must live in a landlord's land. I spent some
hours, too, in the streets that give upon the river, drawn by the
spell of the sea. But I saw barges and ships stripped of magic
and mostly devoted to cement, ice, timber, and coal. The sailors
looked to me gross and slovenly men, and the shipping struck me
as clumsy, ugly, old, and dirty. I discovered that most sails
don't fit the ships that hoist them, and that there may be as
pitiful and squalid a display of poverty with a vessel as with a
man. When I saw colliers unloading, watched the workers in the
hold filling up silly little sacks and the succession of
blackened, half-naked men that ran to and fro with these along a
plank over a thirty-foot drop into filth and mud, I was first
seized with admiration  of their courage and toughness and then,
"But after all, WHY--?" and the stupid ugliness of all this waste
of muscle and endurance came home to me. Among other things it
obviously wasted and deteriorated the coal.... And I had
imagined great things 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 evenings and 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 saw nothing until the evening
except at meals; the other was enjoying the midsummer holidays
without any great elation; a singularly  thin and abject, stunted
creature he was, whose chief liveliness was to pretend to be a
monkey, and who I am now convinced had some secret disease that
drained his vitality away. If I met him now I should think him a
pitiful little creature and be extremely sorry for him. Then I
felt only a wondering aversion. He sniffed horribly, he was
tired out by a couple of miles of loafing, he never started any
conversation, and he seemed to prefer 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 one night. Some particularly pious phrase of my elder
cousin's irritated me extremely, and I avowed outright my entire
disbelief in the whole scheme of revealed religion. I had never
said a word about my doubts to any one before, except to Ewart
who had first evolved them. I had never settled my doubts until
at this moment when I spoke. But it came to me then that the
whole scheme of salvation of the Frappes was not simply doubtful,
but impossible. I fired this discovery out into the darkness
with the greatest promptitude.

My abrupt denials certainly scared my cousin amazingly.

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

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

My elder cousin cried aloud in horror, and the younger lay
scared, but listening. "Then you mean," said my elder cousin,
when at last he could bring 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 got out of bed and made his brother do likewise, and knelt
in the night dimness 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 in your prayers I draw the line."

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

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

"You been sayin' queer things, George," he said abruptly. "You
better mind 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 the witness. "Not--?" she framed a question.

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

My aunt couldn't touch another mouthful. I was already a little
troubled in my conscience by my daring, and now I began to feel
the black enormity 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 the brick alley behind the yard, that led back to his grocer's
shop.

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

He started back, astonished and alarmed. His eyes met mine, and
I saw a sudden 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 a
licking. 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,
"till you're in a better state of mind."

I became an outcast forthwith. At supper that night a gloomy
silence was broken 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 my aunt, 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
repent before I slept.

"Suppose you was took in your sleep, George," he said; "where'd
you be then? You jest think of that me boy."  By this time I was
thoroughly miserable and frightened, and this suggestion unnerved
me dreadfully but I 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' and screamin' 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
faith on either side of me. I decided I would whisper my
prayers, and stopped midway because I was ashamed, and perhaps
also because I had an idea one didn't square God like that.

"No," I said, with a sudden confidence, "damn me if you're coward
enough.... 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
faith accomplished.

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, and shall, I know, to the end of things. That
declaration was an epoch in my