JOAN AND PETER
[Illustration]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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JOAN AND PETER
_THE STORY OF AN EDUCATION_
BY
H. G. WELLS
Author of “Mr. Britling Sees It Through,” etc.
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1921
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1918
BY H. G. WELLS
Set up and electrotyped. Published, September, 1918
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I PETER’S PARENTAGE 1
II STUBLANDS IN COUNCIL 13
III ARTHUR OR OSWALD? 31
IV FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE UNIVERSE 59
V THE CHRISTENING 78
VI THE FOURTH GUARDIAN 102
VII THE SCHOOL OF ST. GEORGE AND THE VENERABLE BEDE 112
VIII THE HIGH CROSS PREPARATORY SCHOOL 142
IX OSWALD TAKES CONTROL 204
X A SEARCHING OF SCHOOLMASTERS 255
XI ADOLESCENCE 282
XII THE WORLD ON THE EVE OF WAR 377
XIII JOAN AND PETER GRADUATE 443
XIV OSWALD’S VALEDICTION 544
JOAN AND PETER
THE STORY OF AN EDUCATION
CHAPTER THE FIRST
PETER’S PARENTAGE
§ 1
Early one summer morning in England, in the year 1893 in the reign—which
seemed in those days to have been going on for ever and to be likely to
go on for evermore—of Queen Victoria, there was born a little boy named
Peter. Peter was a novel name then; he was before the great crop of
Peters who derived their name from Peter Pan. He was born with some
difficulty. His father, who had not been to bed all night, for the
trouble of the birth had begun overnight at about nine o’clock, was
walking about in the garden in a dewy dawn, thinking the world very
dreadful and beautiful, when he first heard Peter cry. Peter, he
thought, made a noise like a little frightened hen that something big
had caught.... Peter’s mother had been moaning but now she moaned no
more, and Peter’s father stood outside and whispered “Oh, God! Oh! Damn
them and _damn_ them! why don’t they _tell_ me?”
Then the nurse put her head out of the window; it was a casement window
with white roses about it; said “Everything’s all right. I’ll tell you
when to come in,” and vanished again.
Peter’s father turned about very sharply so that she should not see he
was fool enough to weep, and went along the flagged path to the end of
the garden, where was the little summerhouse that looked over the Weald.
But he could not see the Weald because his tears blinded him. All night
Peter’s father had been thinking what an imperfect husband he had always
been and how he had never really told his wife how much he loved her,
and how indeed until now he had never understood how very much he loved
her, and he had been making good resolutions for the future in great
abundance, in enormous abundance, the most remarkable good resolutions,
and one waking nightmare after another had been chasing across his mind
nightmares of a dreadful dark-grey world in which there would be no
Dolly, no Dolly at all anywhere, even if you went out into the garden
and whistled your utmost, and he would be a widower with only one little
lonely child to console him. He could not imagine any other woman for
him but Dolly.
The last trailing vestige of those twilight distresses vanished when
presently he saw Dolly looking tired indeed but pink and healthy, with
her hair almost roguishly astray, and the room full of warm daylight
from the dawn-flushed sky, full of fresh south-west air from the Sussex
downs, full of the sense of invincible life, and young master Peter,
very puckered and ugly and red and pitiful, in a blanket in the nurse’s
arms, and Dr. Fremisson smirking behind her, entirely satisfied with
himself and the universe and every detail of it.
When Dolly had been kissed and whispered to they gave Peter to his
father to hold.
Peter’s father had never understood before that a baby is an exquisite
thing.
§ 2
The parents of Peter were modern young people, and Peter was no
accidental intruder. Their heads were full of new ideas, new that is in
the days when Queen Victoria seemed immortal and the world settled for
ever. They put Peter in their two sunniest rooms; rarely were the
windows shut; his nursery was white and green, bright with pretty
pictures and never without flowers. It had a cork carpet and a rug
displaying amusing black cats on pink, and he was weighed carefully
first once a week and then once a month until he was four years old.
His father, whom everybody called Stubbo, came of an old Quaker stock.
Quakerism in its beginnings was a very fine and wonderful religion
indeed, a real research for the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, a new way of
thinking and living, but weaknesses of the mind and spirit brought it
back very soon to a commoner texture. The Stubland family was among
those which had been most influenced by the evangelical wave of the
Wesleyan time. Peter’s great-grandfather, old Stubland, the
West-of-England cloth manufacturer, was an emotional person with
pietistic inclinations that nearly carried him over at different times
to the Plymouth Brethren, to the Wesleyan Methodists, and to the
Countess of Huntingdon’s connexion. Religion was his only social
recreation, most other things he held to be sinful, and his surplus
energies went all into the business. He had an aptitude for mechanical
organization and started the Yorkshire factory; his son, still more
evangelical and still more successful, left a business worth well over
two hundred thousand pounds among thirteen children, of whom Peter’s
father was the youngest. “Stublands” became a limited company with
uncles Rigby and John as directors, and the rest of the family was let
loose, each one with a nice little secure six hundred a year or
thereabouts from Stubland debentures and Stubland ordinary shares, to do
what it liked in the world.
It wasn’t, of course, told that it could do what it liked in the
world. That it found out for itself—in the teeth of much early
teaching to the contrary. That early teaching had been predominantly
prohibitive, there had been no end of “thou shalt not” and very little
of “thou shalt,” an irksome teaching for young people destined to
leisure. Mankind was presented waiting about for the Judgment Day,
with Satan as busy as a pickpocket in a crowd. Also he offered
roundabouts and cocoanut-shies.... This family doctrine tallied so
little with the manifest circumstances and natural activity of the
young Stublands that it just fell off their young minds. The keynote
of Stubbo’s upbringing had been a persistent unanswered “Why _not_?”
to all the things he was told not to do. “Why _not_ dance? Why _not_
go to theatres and music-halls? Why _not_ make love? Why _not_ read
and quote this exciting new poetry of Swinburne’s?”...
The early ’nineties were a period of careless diastole in British
affairs. There seemed to be enough and to spare for every one, given
only a little generosity. Peace dwelt on the earth for ever. It was
difficult to prove the proprietorship of Satan in the roundabouts and
the cocoanut-shies. There was a general belief that one’s parents and
grandparents had taken life far too grimly and suspiciously, a belief
which, indeed, took possession of Stubbo before he was in trousers.
His emancipation was greatly aided by his elder sister Phyllis, a girl
with an abnormal sense of humour. It was Phyllis who brightened the
Sunday afternoons, when she and her sister Phœbe and her brothers were
supposed to be committing passages of scripture to memory in the attic,
by the invention of increasingly irreligious Limericks. Phœbe would
sometimes be dreadfully shocked and sometimes join in with great vigour
and glory. Phyllis was also an artist in misquotation. She began by
taking a facetious view of the ark and Jonah’s whale, and as her courage
grew she went on to the Resurrection. She had a genius for asking
seemingly respectful but really destructive questions about religious
matters, that made her parents shy of instruction. The Stubland parents
had learnt their faith with more reverence than intelligence from
_their_ parents, who had had it in a similar spirit from their parents,
who had had it from their parents; so that nobody had looked into it
closely for some generations, and something vital had evaporated
unsuspected. It had evaporated so completely that when Peter’s father
and Peter’s aunts and uncles came in their turn as children to examine
the precious casket, they not only perceived that there was nothing in
it, but they could very readily jump to the rash conclusion that there
never had been anything in it. It seemed just an odd blend of empty
resonant phrases and comical and sometimes slightly improper stories,
that lent themselves very pleasantly to facetious illustration.
Stubbo, as he grew up under these circumstances, had not so much taken
on the burthen of life as thrown it off. He decided he would not go into
business—business struck him as a purely avaricious occupation—and after
a pleasant year at Cambridge he became quite clear that the need of the
world and his temperament was Art. The world was not beautiful enough.
This was more particularly true of the human contribution. So he went
into Art to make the world more beautiful, and came up to London to
study and to wear a highly decorative blue linen blouse in private and
to collect posters—people then were just beginning to collect posters.
From the last stage of Quakerism to the last extremity of decoration is
but a step. Quite an important section of the art world in Britain owes
itself to the Quakers and Plymouth Brethren, and to the drab and grey
disposition of the sterner evangelicals. It is as if that elect strain
in the race had shut its eyes for a generation or so, merely in order to
open them again and see brighter. The reaction of the revolting
generation has always been toward colour; the pyrotechnic display of the
Omega workshops in London is but the last violent outbreak of the Quaker
spirit. Young Stubland, a quarter of a century before the Omega
enterprise, was already slaking a thirst for chromatic richness behind
the lead of William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites. It took a year or so
and several teachers and much friendly frankness to persuade him he
could neither draw nor paint, and then he relapsed into decoration and
craftsmanship. He beat out copper into great weals of pattern and he
bound books grossly. He spent some time upon lettering, and learnt how
to make the simplest inscription beautifully illegible. He decided to be
an architect. In the meantime he made the acquaintance of a large circle
of artistic and literary people, became a Fabian socialist, abandoned
Stubland tweeds for fluffy artistically dyed garments, bicycled about a
lot—those were the early days of the bicycle, before the automobile
robbed it of its glory—talked endlessly, and had a very good time. He
met his wife and married her, and he built his own house as a sample of
what he could do as an architect.
It was, with one exception, the only house he ever built. It was quite
original in design and almost indistinguishable from the houses of a
round dozen contemporaries of Mr. Charles Voysey. It was a little
low-browed, white house, with an enormous and very expensive roof of
green slates; it had wide, low mullioned casement windows, its rooms
were eight feet high and its doors five foot seven, and all about it
were enormous buttresses fit to sustain a castle. It had sun-traps and
verandahs and a terrace, and it snuggled into the ruddy hillside and
stared fatly out across the Weald from beyond Limpsfield, and it was
quite a jolly little house to live in when you had learnt to be shorter
than five feet seven inches and to dodge the low bits of ceiling and the
beam over the ingle-nook.
And therein, to crown the work of the builder, Peter was born.
§ 3
Peter’s mother came from quite a different strand in the complicated web
of British life. Her “people”—she was brought up to call them that—were
county people, but old-fashioned and prolific, and her father had been
the sixth son of a third son and very lucky to get a living. He was the
Vicar of Long Downport and an early widower; his two sons had gone to
Oxford with scholarships, and Dolly had stayed at home, a leggy,
dark-eyed girl with a sceptical manner, much given to reading history.
One of her brothers passed from Oxford into the higher division of the
Civil Service and went to India; the other took to scornful, reactionary
journalism, dramatic criticism, musical comedy lyrics, parody, and
drink—which indeed is almost a necessity if a man is to stick to
reactionary journalism; this story will presently inherit Joan from him;
she had a galaxy of cousins who were parsons, missionaries,
schoolmasters, and soldiers; one was an explorer; not one was in
business. Her father was a bookish inattentive man who had just missed a
fellowship because of a general discursiveness; if he could have
afforded it he would have been very liberal indeed in his theology; and,
like grains of pepper amidst milder nourishment, there were all sorts of
sceptical books about the house: Renan’s _Life of Christ_, Strauss’s
_Life of Christ_, Gibbon, various eighteenth century memoirs, Huxley’s
Essays, much Victor Hugo, and a “collected” Shelley, books that his
daughter read with a resolute frown, sitting for the most part with one
leg tucked up under her in the chair, her chin on her fists, and her
elbows on either side of the volume undergoing assimilation.
Her reading was historical, and her tendency romantic. Her private
day-dream through some years of girlhood was that she was Cæsar’s wife.
She was present at all his battles, and sometimes, when he had had
another of his never altogether fatal wounds, she led the army. Also,
which was a happy thought, she stabbed Brutus first, and so her Cæsar,
contrariwise to history, reigned happily with her for many, many years.
She would go to sleep of a night dreaming of Mr. and Mrs. Imperator
driving in triumph through the gates of Rome after some little warlike
jaunt. Sometimes she drove. And also they came to Britain to drive out
the Picts and Scots, and were quartered with her father in Long
Downport, conquering Picts, Scots, Danes, and the most terrific
anachronisms with an equal stoutness and courage. The private title she
bestowed upon herself (and never told to any human being) was “The
Imperatrix.”
As she grew up she became desirous of more freedom and education. After
much argument with her father she came up to an aunt in London, and went
to study science in the Huxley days as a free student at the Royal
College of Science. She saw her future husband at an art students’
soirée, he looked tall and bright and masterful; he had a fine profile,
and his blond hair poured nobly off his forehead; she did not dream that
Peter’s impatience for incarnation put ideas into her head, she forgot
her duty to Cæsar and imagined a devotion to art and beauty. They made a
pretty couple, and she married amidst universal approval—after a slight
dispute whether it was to be a religious or a civil marriage. She was
married in her father’s church.
In the excitement of meeting, appreciating and marrying Stubbo, she
forgot that she had had a great pity and tenderness and admiration for
her shy and impulsive cousin, Oswald Sydenham, with the glass eye and
cruelly scarred face, who had won the V.C. before he was twenty at the
bombardment of Alexandria, and who had since done the most remarkable
things in Nyasaland. It had been quite typical heroism that had won him
the V.C. He had thrown a shell overboard, and it had burst in the air as
he threw it and pulped one side of his face. But when she married, she
had temporarily forgotten Cousin Oswald. She was just carried away by
Arthur Stubland’s profile, and the wave in his hair, and—life.
Arthur was Stubbo’s Christian name because he had been born under the
spell of “The Idylls of the King.”
Afterwards when Oswald came home again, she thought the good side of his
face, the side of his face that hadn’t been so seriously damaged by the
Egyptian shell, looked at her rather queerly. But the wounded side
remained a Sphinx-like mask.
“Congratulations!” said Oswald, fumbling with the word.
“Congratulations! I hope you’ll be happy, Dolly.”...
She was far gone in rationalism before she met Arthur, and he completed
her emancipation. Their ideas ran closely together. They projected some
years of travel before they settled down. He wanted to see mediaeval
Italy “thoroughly,” and she longed for Imperial Rome. They took just a
couple of rooms in South Kensington and spent all the rest of their
income in long stretches of holiday. They honeymooned in pleasant inns
in South Germany; they did some climbing in the Tyrol and the
Dolomites—she had a good head—they had a summer holiday on the Adriatic
coast, and she learnt to swim and dive well, and they did one long
knapsack tramp round and along the Swiss Italian frontier and then
another through the Apennines to Florence.
It was a perfectly lovely time. Everything was bright and happy, and
they got on wonderfully together, except that——There was a shadow for
her. She found it difficult to say exactly what the shadow was, and it
is still more difficult for the historian to define it. She dismissed
the idea that it had anything to do with Cousin Oswald’s one reproachful
eye. She sometimes had a faint suspicion that it was her jilted Cæsar
asking for at least a Rubicon to cross, but it is doubtful if she ever
had any suspicion of Peter, waiting outside the doors of life. Yet the
feeling of something forgotten, of something left out, grew throughout
those sunny days. It was in some sweet meadows high up on the great hill
above Fiesole, that she tried to tell Arthur of this vexatious feeling
of deficiency.
Manifestly she puzzled him, which was not to be wondered at since the
feeling puzzled her. But it also had a queer effect of irritating him.
“Arthur, if you always say I don’t love you,” she said, “when I tell you
anything, then how can I tell you anything at all?”
“Aren’t we having the loveliest times?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said without complete conviction. “It isn’t that.”
“You admit you love me. You admit you’re having the loveliest time!”
She sat up with her elbows on her knees and her knuckles pressing her
round, firm chin.
“It’s just all one holiday,” she said.
“I did some work last month.”
He had planned three impossible houses and made a most amusing cardboard
model of one of them. She disregarded this plea.
“When we came up here people were working in the fields. Even that
pretty little girl among the bushes was looking after sheep.”
“By Jove! I wish I could paint her—and those Holman Hunt-faced sheep of
hers. It’s tantalizing to be able to see—and yet not to have the—the
expressive gift....”
“Things are going on now, Arthur. Down there in the valley along that
white road, people are going and coming.... There is a busy little train
now.... Things are happening. Things are going to happen. And the work
that goes on! The hard work! Today—there are thousands and thousands of
men in mines. Out of this sunshine....”
There was an interval. Arthur rolled over on his face to look at the
minute railway and road and river bed far below at the bottom of a deep
lake of pellucid blue air.
“I don’t agree with you,” he said at last.
“Too much is happening,” he said. “Noisy, vulgar fuss. Commercialism,
competition, factory production. Does it make people happy? Look at that
horrid little railway disturbing all this beautiful simple Tuscan
life....”
Another long pause.
She made a further step. “But if something beautiful is being
destroyed,” she tried, “we ought not to be here.”
That also took a little time to soak in.
Then he stirred impatiently.
“Don’t we,” he asked, “protest? By the mere act of living our own lives?
Don’t I, in my small way, try to do my share in the Restoration of
Craftsmanship? Aren’t people of our sort doing something—something a
little too unpretending to be obvious—to develop the conception of a
fairer and better, a less hurried, less greedy life?”
He raised an appealing face to her.
She sat with knitted brows. She did not assent, but it was difficult to
argue her disaccord.
He took advantage of her pause.
“Confess,” he said, “you would like to have me a business manager—of
some big concern. Or a politician. You want me to be in the scrimmage.
No!—lording it over the scrimmage. The real things aren’t _done_ like
that, Dolly. The real things aren’t done like that!”
She put her next thought out in its stark simplicity.
“Are we doing any real thing in the world at all?”
He did not answer for some seconds.
Then he astonished her by losing his temper. It was exactly as if her
question had probed down to some secret soreness deep within him. “Oh,
_damn_!” he shouted. “And on this lovely morning! It’s too bad of you,
Dolly!” It was as if he had bit upon a tender tooth. Perhaps a fragment
of the stopping had come out of his Nonconformist conscience.
He knelt up and stared at her. “You don’t love _this_, anyhow—whether
you love me or not.”
He tried to alter his tone from a note of sheer quarrelsomeness to
badinage. “You Blue Conscience, you! You Gnawing Question! Are we doing
anything real at all, you say. Is no one, then, to stand up and meet the
sunlight for its own sake, when God sends it to us? No! You can’t unsay
it now.” (Though she was not unsaying it. She was only trying for some
more acceptable way of saying it over again.) “My day is spoilt! You’ve
stuck a fever into me!”
He looked about him. He wanted some vivid gesture. “Oh, come on!” he
cried.
He sprang up. He gesticulated over her. He banished the view with a
sweep of rejection. “Let us go back to the inn. Let us take our traps
back to stuffy old Florence. Let us see three churches and two
picture-galleries before sunset! And take our tickets for home. We
aren’t rushing and we ought to rush. Life is rush. This holiday has
lasted too long, Dolly.”
“‘Life is real! Life is earnest!’
Simple joys are not its goal.”
“Own, my Dolly! If only this afternoon we could find some solid serious
lecture down there! Or an election. You’d love an election.... And
anyhow, it’s nearly lunch time.”
She knelt, took his hand, and stood up.
“You mock,” she said. “But you know that what I want to say—isn’t
that....”
§ 4
He did know. But all the way back to England he was a man with an
irritating dart sticking in his mind. And the discussion she had
released that day worried him for months.
He wanted it to be clear that their lives were on a very high level
indeed. No mere idlers were they. Hitherto he said they had been keeping
honeymoon, but that was only before they began life in earnest. Now they
were really going to begin. They were going to take hold of life.
House and Peter followed quite logically upon that.
How easy was life in those days—at least, for countless thousands of
independent people! It was the age of freedom—for the independent. They
went where they listed; the world was full of good hotels, and every
country had its Baedeker well up to date. Every cultivated home had its
little corner of weather-worn guide books, a nest of memories, an
_Orario_, an _Indicateur_, or a _Continental Bradshaw_. The happy
multitude of the free travelled out to beautiful places and returned to
comfortable homes. The chief anxiety in life was to get good
servants—and there were plenty of good servants. Politics went on, at
home and abroad, a traditional game between the Ins and Outs. The world
was like a spinning top that seems to be quite still and stable.... Yet
youth was apt to feel as Dolly felt, that there was something lacking.
Arthur was quite ready to fall in with this idea that something was
lacking. He was inclined to think that one got to the root of it by
recognizing that there was not enough Craftsmanship and too much cheap
material, too much machine production, and, more especially, too much
aniline dye. He was particularly strong against aniline dyes. All
Britain was strong against aniline dyes,—and so that trade went to
Germany. He reached socialism by way of æsthetic criticism. Individual
competition was making the world hideous. It was destroying
individuality. What the world needed was a non-competitive communism for
the collective discouragement of machinery. (Meanwhile he bought a
bicycle.) He decided that his modest six hundred a year was all that he
and Dolly needed to live upon; he would never work for money—that would
be “sordid”—but for the joy of work, and on his income they would lead a
simple working-man’s existence, free from the vulgarities of
competition, politics and commercialism.
Dolly was fascinated, delighted, terrified and assuaged by Peter, and
Peter and a simple house free also from the vulgarities of modern
mechanism kept her so busy with only one servant to help her, that it
was only in odd times, in the late evening when the sky grew solemn or
after some book had stirred her mind, that she recalled that once
oppressive feeling of something wanting, something that was still
wanting....
CHAPTER THE SECOND
STUBLANDS IN COUNCIL
§ 1
But although Dolly did not pursue her husband with any sustained
criticism, he seemed now to feel always that her attitude was critical
and needed an answer. The feeling made him something of a thinker and
something of a talker. Sometimes the thinker was uppermost, and then he
would sit silent and rather in profile (his profile, it has already been
stated, was a good one, and much enhanced by a romantic bang of warm
golden hair that hung down over one eye), very picturesque in his
beautiful blue linen blouse, listening to whatever was said; and
sometimes he would turn upon the company and talk with a sort of
experimental dogmatism, as is the way with men a little insecure in
their convictions, but quite good talk. He would talk of education, and
work, and Peter, and of love and beauty, and the finer purposes of life,
and things like that.
A lot of talk came the way of Peter’s father.
Along the Limpsfield ridge and away east and west and north, there was a
scattered community of congenial intellectuals. It spread along the
ridge beyond Dorking, and resumed again at Haslemere and Hindhead, where
Grant Allen and Richard Le Gallienne were established. They were mostly
people of the same detached and independent class as the Stublands; they
were the children of careful people who had created considerable
businesses, or the children of the more successful of middle Victorian
celebrities, or dons, or writers themselves, or they came from
Hampstead, which was in those days a nest of considerable people’s
children, inheritors of reputations and writers of memoirs, an hour’s
’bus drive from London and outside the cab radius. A thin flavour of
Hampstead spread out, indeed, over all Surrey. Some of these newcomers
lived in old adapted cottages; some of them had built little houses
after the fashion of the Stublands; some had got into the real old
houses that already existed. There was much Sunday walking and “dropping
in” and long evenings and suppers. Safety bicycles were coming into use
and greatly increasing intercourse. And there was a coming and going of
Stubland aunts and uncles and of Sydenhams and Dolly’s “people.” Nearly
all were youngish folk; it was a new generation and a new sort of
population for the countryside. They were dotted among the farms and the
estates and preserves and “places” of the old county family pattern. The
“county” wondered a little at them, kept busy with horse and dog and
gun, and, except for an occasional stiff call, left them alone. The
church lamented their neglected Sabbaths. The doctors were not
unfriendly.
One of the frequent visitors, indeed, at The Ingle-Nook—that was the
name of Peter’s birthplace—was Doctor Fremisson, the local general
practitioner. He was a man, he said, who liked “Ideas.” The aborigines
lacked Ideas, it seemed; but Stubland was a continual feast of them. The
doctor’s diagnosis of the difference between these new English and the
older English of the country rested entirely on the presence or absence
of Ideas. But there he was wrong. The established people were people of
fixed ideas; the immigrants had abandoned fixed ideas for discussion. So
far from their having no ideas, those occasional callers who came
dropping in so soon as the Stublands were settled in The Ingle-Nook
before Peter was born, struck the Stublands as having ideas like
monstrous and insurmountable cliffs. To fling your own ideas at them was
like trying to lob stones into Zermatt from Macugnana.
One day when Mrs. Darcy, old Lady Darcy’s daughter-in-law, had driven
over, some devil prompted Arthur to shock her. He talked his extremest
Fabianism. He would have the government control all railways, land,
natural products; nobody should have a wage of less than two pounds a
week; the whole country should be administered for the universal
benefit; everybody should be educated.
“I’m sure the dear old Queen does all she can,” said Mrs. Darcy.
“I’m a democratic republican,” said Arthur.
He might as well have called himself a Christadelphian for any idea he
conveyed.
Presently, seized by a gust of unreasonable irritation, he went out of
the room.
“Mr. Stubland talks,” said Mrs. Darcy; “_really_——” She paused. She
hesitated. She spoke with a little disarming titter lest what she said
should seem too dreadful. “He says such things. I really believe he’s
more than half a Liberal. _There!_ You mustn’t mind what I say, Mrs.
Stubland....”
Dolly, by virtue of her vicarage training, understood these people
better than Peter’s father. She had read herself out of the great
Anglican culture, but she remembered things from the inside. She was
still in close touch with numerous relations who were quite completely
inside. Before the little green gate had clicked behind their departing
backs, Arthur would protest to her and heaven that these visitors were
impossible, that such visitors could not be, they were phantoms or bad
practical jokes, undergraduates dressed up to pull his leg.
“They know nothing,” he said.
“They know all sorts of things you don’t know,” she corrected.
“What _do_ they know? There isn’t a topic one can start on which they
are not just blank.”
“You start the wrong topics. They can tell you all sorts of things about
the dear Queen’s grandchildren. They know things about horses. And about
regiments and barracks. Tell me, Arthur, how is the charming young
Prince of Bulgaria, who is just getting married, related to the late
Prince Consort.”
“Damn their Royal Marriages!”
“If you say that, then they have an equal right to say, ‘damn your
Wildes and Beardsleys and William Morrises and Swinburnes.’”
“They read nothing.”
“They read Mrs. Henry Wood. They read lots of authors you have never
heard of, _nice_ authors. They read so many of them that for the most
part they forget their names. The bold ones read Ouida—who isn’t half
bad. They read every scrap they can find about the marriage of the
Princess Marie to the Crown Prince of Roumania. Mrs. Bagshot-Fawcett
talked about it yesterday. It seems he’s really a rarer and better sort
of Hohenzollern than the young German Emperor, our sailor grandson that
is. She isn’t very clear about it, but she seems to think that the
Prince of Hohenzollern ought rightfully to be German Emperor.”
“Oh, what _rot_!”
“But perhaps she’s right. How do you know? _I_ don’t. She takes an
almost voluptuous delight in the two marriage ceremonies. You know, I
suppose, dear, that there were two ceremonies, a Protestant one and a
Catholic one, because the Roumanian Hohenzollerns are Catholic
Hohenzollerns. Of course, the dear princess would become a Catholic——”
“Oh, _don’t_!” cried Peter’s father; “don’t!”
“I had to listen to three-quarters of an hour of it yesterday. Such a
happy and convenient occurrence, the princess’s conversion,
but—archly—of course, my dear, I suppose there’s sometimes just a little
_persuasion_ in these cases.”
“Dolly, you go too far!”
“But that isn’t, of course, the great interest just at present. The
great interest just at present is George and May. You know they’re going
to be married.”
Arthur lifted a protesting profile. “My dear! _Who_ is May?” he tenored.
“Affected ignorance! She is the Princess May who was engaged to the late
Duke of Clarence, the Princess Mary of Teck. And now he’s dead, she’s
going to marry the Duke of York. Surely you understand about that. He is
your Future Sovereign. Mrs. Bagshot-Fawcett gets positively lush about
him. It was George she always lurved, Mrs. Bagshot-Fawcett says, but she
accepted his brother for Reasons of State. So after all it’s rather nice
and romantic that the elder brother——”
Arthur roared and tore his hair and walked up and down the low room.
“What are these people to me?” he shouted. “What are these people to
me?”
“But there is twenty times as much about that sort of thing in the
papers as there is about _our_ sort of things.”
There was no disputing it.
“We’re in a foreign country,” cried Arthur, going off at a tangent.
“We’re in a foreign country. We English are a subject people.... Talk of
Home Rule for Ireland!... Why are there no _English_ Nationalists? One
of these days I will hoist the cross of St. George outside this cottage.
But I doubt if any one on this countryside will know it for the English
flag.”
§ 2
Whatever is seems right, and it is only now, after five and twenty years
of change, that we do begin to see as a remarkable thing the detached
life that great masses of the English were leading beneath the canopy of
the Hanoverian monarchy. For in those days the court thought in German;
Teutonized Anglicans, sentimental, materialistic and resolutely “loyal,”
dominated society; Gladstone was notoriously disliked by them for his
anti-German policy and his Irish and Russian sympathies, and the old
Queen’s selection of bishops guided feeling in the way it ought to go.
But there was a leakage none the less. More and more people were
drifting out of relationship to church and state, exactly as Peter’s
parents had drifted out. The Court dominated, but it did not dominate
intelligently; it controlled the church to no effect, its influence upon
universities and schools and art and literature was merely deadening; it
responded to flattery but it failed to direct; it was the court of an
alien-spirited old lady, making much of the pathos of her widowhood and
trading still on the gallantry and generosity that had welcomed her as a
“girl queen.” The real England separated itself more and more from that
superficial England of the genteel that looked to Osborne and Balmoral.
To the real England, dissentient England, court taste was a joke, court
art was a scandal; of English literature and science notoriously the
court knew nothing. In the huge pacific industrial individualism of
Great Britain it did not seem a serious matter that the army and navy
and the Indian administration were orientated to the court. Peter’s
parents and the large class of detached people to which they belonged,
were out of politics, out of the system, scornful, or facetious and
aloof. Just as they were out of religion. These things did not concern
them.
The great form of the empire contained these indifferents, the great
roof of church and state hung over them. Royal visits, diplomatic
exchanges and the like passed to and fro, alien, uninteresting
proceedings; Heligoland was given to the young Emperor William the
Second by Lord Salisbury, the old Queen’s favourite prime minister,
English politicians jostled the French in Africa as roughly as possible
to “larn them to be” republicans, and resisted the Home Rule aspirations
and the ill-concealed republicanism of the “Keltic fringe”; one’s
Anglican neighbours of the “ruling class” went off to rule India and the
empire with manners that would have maddened Job; they stood for
Parliament and played the game of politics upon factitious issues. Sir
Charles Dilke, the last of the English Republicans, and Charles Stewart
Parnell, the uncrowned King of Ireland, had both been extinguished by
opportune divorce cases. (Liberal opinion, it was felt, must choose
between the private and the public life. You could not have it both
ways.) It did not seem to be a state of affairs to make a fuss about.
The general life went on comfortably enough. We built our pretty
rough-cast houses, taught Shirley poppies to spring artlessly between
the paving-stones in our garden paths, begot the happy children who were
to grow up under that roof of a dynastic system that was never going to
fall in. (Because it never had fallen in.)
Never before had nurseries been so pretty as they were in that glowing
pause at the end of the nineteenth century.
Peter’s nursery was a perfect room in which to hatch the soul of a
little boy. Its walls were done in a warm cream-coloured paint, and upon
them Peter’s father had put the most lovely pattern of trotting and
jumping horses and dancing cats and dogs and leaping lambs, a carnival
of beasts. He had copied these figures from books, enlarging them as he
did so; he had cut them out in paper, stuck them on the wall, and then
flicked bright blue paint at them until they were all outlined in a
penumbra of stippled blue. Then he unpinned the paper and took it on to
another part of the wall and so made his pattern. There was a big brass
fireguard in Peter’s nursery that hooked on to the jambs of the
fireplace, and all the tables had smoothly rounded corners against the
days when Peter would run about. The floor was of cork carpet on which
Peter would put his toys, and there was a crimson hearthrug on which
Peter was destined to crawl. And a number of stuffed dogs and elephants,
whose bead eyes had been carefully removed by Dolly and replaced with
eyes of black cloth that Peter would be less likely to worry off and
swallow, awaited his maturing clutch. (But there were no Teddy Bears
yet; Teddy Bears had still to come into the world. America had still to
discover the charm of its Teddy.) There were scales in Peter’s nursery
to weigh Peter every week, and tables to show how much he ought to weigh
and when one should begin to feel anxious. There was nothing casual
about the early years of Peter.
Peter began well, a remarkably fine child, Dr. Fremisson said, of nine
pounds. Although he was born in warm summer weather we never went back
upon that. He favoured his mother perhaps more than an impartial child
should, but that was at any rate a source of satisfaction to Cousin
Oswald (of the artificial eye).
Cousin Oswald was doing his best to behave nicely and persuade himself
that all this show had been got up by Dolly and was Dolly’s show—and
that Arthur just happened to be about.
“Look at him,” said Cousin Oswald as Peter regarded the world with
unwinking intelligence from behind an appreciated bottle; “the Luck of
him. He’s the Heir of the Ages. Look at this room and this house and
every one about him.”
Dolly remarked foolishly that Peter was a “nittle darum. ’E
dizzerves-i-tall. Nevything.”
“The very sunshine on the wall looks as though it had been got for him
specially,” said Cousin Oswald.
“It _was_ got for him specially,” said Dolly, with a light of amusement
in her eyes that reminded him of former times.
This visit was a great occasion. It was the first time Cousin Oswald had
seen either Arthur or Peter. Almost directly after he had learnt about
Dolly’s engagement and jerked out his congratulations, he had cut short
his holiday in England and gone back to Central Africa. Now he was in
England again, looked baked and hard, and his hair, which had always
been stubby, more stubby than ever. The scarred half of him had lost its
harsh redness and become brown. He was staying with his aunt, Dolly’s
second cousin by marriage, Lady Charlotte Sydenham, not ten miles away
towards Tonbridge, and he took to bicycling over to The Ingle-Nook every
other day or so and gossiping.
“These bicycles,” he said, “are most useful things. Wonderful things. As
soon as they get cheap—bound to get cheap—they will play a wonderful
part in Central Africa.”
“But there are no roads in Central Africa!” said Arthur.
“Better. Foot tracks padded by bare feet for generations. You could ride
for hundreds of miles without dismounting....”
“Compared with our little black babies,” said Cousin Oswald, “Peter
seems immobile. He’s like a baby on a lotus flower meditating existence.
Those others are like young black indiarubber kittens—all acrawl. But
then they’ve got to look sharp and run for themselves as soon as
possible, and he hasn’t.... Things happen there.”
“I wonder,” said Arthur in his lifting tenor, “how far all this opening
up of Africa to civilization and gin and Bibles is justifiable.”
The one living eye glared at him. “It isn’t exactly like that,” said
Oswald stiffly, and offered no occasion for further controversy at the
moment.
The conversation hung for a little while. Dolly wanted to say to her
cousin: “He isn’t thinking of you. It’s just his way of generalizing
about things....”
“Anyhow this young man has a tremendous future,” said Oswald, going back
to the original topic. “Think of what lies before him. Never has the
world been so safe and settled—most of it that is—as it is now. I
suppose really the world’s hardly begun to _touch_ education. In this
house everything seems educational—pictures, toys, everything. When one
sees how small niggers can be moulded and changed even in a missionary
school, it makes one think. I wish I knew more about education. I lie
awake at nights thinking of the man I might be, if I knew all I don’t
know, and of all I could do if I did. And it’s the same with others.
Every one who seems worth anything seems regretting his education wasn’t
better. Hitherto of course there’s always been wars, interruptions,
religious rows; the world’s been confused and poor, a thorough muddle;
there’s never been a real planned education for people. Just scraps and
hints. But we’re changing all that. Here’s a big safe world at last. No
wars in Europe since ’71 and no likelihood in our time of any more big
wars. Things settle down. And _he_ comes in for it all.”
“I hope all this settling down won’t make the world too monotonous,”
said Arthur.
“You artists and writers have got to see to that. No, I don’t see it
getting monotonous. There’s always differences of climate and colour.
Temperament. All sorts of differences.”
“And Nature,” said Arthur profoundly. “Old Mother Nature.”
“Have you christened Peter yet?” Oswald asked abruptly.
“He’s not going to be christened,” said Dolly. “Not until he asks to be.
We’ve just registered him. He’s a registered baby.”
“So he won’t have two godfathers and a godmother to be damned for him.”
“We’ve weighed the risk,” said Arthur.
“He might have a godfather just—_pour rire_,” said Oswald.
“That’s different,” Dolly encouraged promptly. “We must get him one.”
“I’d like to be Peter’s godfather,” said Oswald.
“I will deny him no advantage,” said Arthur. “The ceremony—— The
ceremony shall be a simple one. Godfather, Peter; Peter, godfather.
Peter, my son, salute your godfather.”
Oswald seemed trying to remember a formula. “I promise and vow three
things in his name; first a beautiful mug; secondly that he shall be
duly instructed in chemistry, biology, mathematics, the French and
German tongues and all that sort of thing; and thirdly, that—what is
thirdly? That he shall renounce the devil and all his works. But there
isn’t a devil nowadays.”
Peter having consumed his bottle to the dregs and dreamt over it for a
space, now thrust it from him and turning towards Oswald,
regurgitated—but within the limits of nursery good manners. Then he
smiled a toothless, slightly derisive smile.
“Intelligent ’e is!” crooned Dolly. “Unstand evlyfling ’e does....”
§ 3
This conversation about Peter’s future, once it had been started,
rambled on for the next three weeks, and then Oswald very abruptly saw
fit to be called away to Africa again....
Various interlocutors dropped in while that talk was in progress. Arthur
felt his way to his real opinions through a series of experimental
dogmas.
Arthur’s disposition was towards an extreme Rousseauism. It is the
tendency of the interrogative class in all settled communities. He
thought that a boy or girl ought to run wild until twelve and not be
bothered by lessons, ought to eat little else but fruit and nuts, go
bareheaded and barefooted. Why not? Oswald’s disposition would have been
to oppose Arthur anyhow, but against these views all his circle of ideas
fought by necessity. If Arthur was Ruskinite and Morrisite, Oswald was
as completely Huxleyite. If Arthur thought the world perishing for need
of Art and Nature, Oswald stood as strongly for the saving power of
Science. In this matter of bare feet——
“There’s thorns, pins, snakes, tetanus,” reflected Oswald.
“The foot hardens.”
“Only the sole,” said Oswald. “And not enough.”
“Shielded from all the corruptions of town and society,” said Arthur
presently.
“There’s no such corruptor as that old Mother Nature of yours. You
daren’t leave that bottle of milk to her for half an hour but what she
turns it sour or poisons it with one of her beastly germs.”
“I never approved of the bottle,” said Arthur, bringing a flash of hot
resentment into Dolly’s eyes....
Oswald regretted his illustration.
“Old Mother Nature is a half-wit,” he said. “She’s distraught. You
overrate the jade. She’s thinking of everything at once. All her affairs
got into a hopeless mess from the very start. Most of her world is
desert with water running to waste. A tropical forest is three-quarters
death and decay, and what is alive is either murdering or being
murdered. It’s only when you come to artificial things, such as a
ploughed field, for example, that you get space and health and every
blade doing its best.”
“I don’t call a ploughed field an artificial thing,” said Arthur.
“But it is,” said Oswald.
Dr. Fremisson was dragged into this dispute. “A ploughed field,” he
maintained, “is part of the natural life of man.”
“Like boots and reading.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” said Dr. Fremisson warily. He had the usual
general practitioner’s belief that any education whatever is a terrible
strain on the young, and he was quite on the side of Rousseau and Arthur
in that matter. Moreover, as a result of his professional endeavours he
had been forced to a belief that Nature’s remedies are the best.
“I’d like to know just what does belong to the natural life of man and
what is artificial,” said Oswald. “If a ploughed field belongs then a
plough belongs. And if a plough belongs a foundry belongs—and a coal
mine. And you wouldn’t plough in bare feet—not in those Weald Clays down
there? You want good stout boots for those. And you’d let your ploughman
read at least a calendar? Boots and books come in, you see.”
“You’re a perfect lawyer, Mr. Sydenham,” said the doctor, and pretended
the discussion had become fanciful....
“But you’ll not leave him to go unlettered until he is half grown up!”
said Oswald to Dolly in real distress. “It’s so easy to teach ’em to
read early and so hard later. I remember my little brother....”
“I am the mother and I muth,” said Dolly. “When Peter displays the
slightest interest in the alphabet, the alphabet it shall be.”
Oswald felt reassured. He had a curious confidence that Dolly could be
trusted to protect his godchild.
§ 4
One day Aunt Phyllis and Aunt Phœbe came down.