while Aunt Phyllis was a wit and her hats a spree Aunt Phœbe was
fantastically serious and her hats went beyond a joke. They got their
stuffs apparently from the shop of William Morris and Co., they had
their dresses built upon Pre-Raphaelite lines, they did their hair
plainly and simply but very carelessly, and their hats were noble
brimmers or extravagant toques. Their profiles were as fine almost as
Arthur’s, a type of profile not so suitable for young women as for
golden youth. They were bright-eyed and a little convulsive in their
movements. Beneath these extravagances and a certain conversational
wildness they lived nervously austere lives. They were greatly delighted
with Peter, but they did not know what to do with him. Phyllis held him
rather better than Phœbe, but Phœbe with her chatelaine amused him
rather more than Phyllis.
“How happy a tinker’s baby must be,” said Aunt Phœbe, rattling her
trinkets: “Or a tin-smith’s.”
“I begin to see some use in a Hindoo woman’s bangles,” said Aunt
Phyllis, “or in that clatter machine of yours, Phœbe. Every young mother
should rattle. Make a note of it, Phœbe dear, for your book....”
“Whatever you do with him, Dolly,” said Aunt Phœbe, “teach him anyhow to
respect women and treat them as his equals. From the Very First.”
“Meaning votes,” said Aunt Phyllis. “Didums _want_ give um’s mummy a
_Vote_ den.”
“Never let him touch butcher’s meat in any shape or form,” said Aunt
Phœbe. “Once a human child tastes blood the mischief is done.”
“Avoid patriotic songs and symbols,” prompted Aunt Phyllis, who had
heard these ideas already in the train coming down.
“And never buy him toy soldiers, drums, guns, trumpets. These things
soak deeper into the mind than people suppose. They make wickedness
domestic.... Surround him with beautiful things. Accustom him——”
She winced that Arthur should hear her, but she spoke as one having a
duty to perform.
“Accustom him to the nude, Dolly, from his early years. Associate it
with innocent amusements. Retrieve the fall. Never let him wear a hat
upon his head nor boots upon his feet. As soon tie him up into a
papoose. As soon tight-lace. A child’s first years should be one long
dream of loveliness and spontaneous activity.”
But at this point Peter betrayed signs that he found his aunts
overstimulating. He released his grip upon the thimble-case of the
chatelaine. His face puckered, ridges and waves and puckers of pink
fatness ran distractedly over it, and he threw his head back and opened
a large square toothless mouth.
“Mary,” cried Dolly, and a comfortable presence that had been hovering
mistrustfully outside the door ever since the aunts appeared, entered
with alacrity and bore Peter protectingly away.
“He must be almost entirely lungs,” said Aunt Phœbe, when her voice
could be heard through the receding bawl. “Other internal organs no
doubt develop later.”
“Come out to the stone table under the roses,” said Dolly. “We argue
there about Peter’s upbringing almost every afternoon.”
“Argue, I grant you,” said Aunt Phœbe, following her hostess and
dangling her chatelaine from one hand as if to illustrate her remarks,
“but argue rightly.”
When Oswald came over in the afternoon he was disposed to regard the two
aunts as serious reinforcements to Arthur’s educational heresies.
Phyllis and Phœbe were a little inclined to be shy with him as a strange
man, and he and Arthur did most of the talking, but they made their
positions plain by occasional interpolations. Arthur, supported by their
presence, was all for letting Peter grow up a wild untrammelled child of
nature. Oswald became genuinely distressed.
“But education,” he protested, “is as natural to a human being as nests
to birds.”
“Then why force it?” said Phyllis with dexterity.
“Even a cat boxes its kittens’ ears!”
“A domesticated cat,” said Phœbe. “A _civilized_ cat.”
“But I’ve seen a wild lioness——”
“Are we to learn how to manage our young from lions and hyenas!” cried
Phœbe.
They were too good for Oswald. He saw Peter already ruined, a fat,
foolish, undisciplined cub.
Dolly with sympathetic amusement watched his distress, which his living
half face betrayed in the oddest contrast to his left hand calm.
Arthur had been thinking gracefully while his sisters tackled their
adversary. Now he decided to sum up the discussion. His authoritative
manner on these occasions was always slightly irritating to Oswald. Like
so many who read only occasionally and take thought as a special
exercise, Arthur had a fixed persuasion that nobody else ever read or
thought at all. So that he did not so much discuss as adjudicate.
“Of course,” he said, “we have to be reasonable in these things. For men
a certain artificiality is undoubtedly natural. That is, so to speak,
the human paradox. But artificiality is the last resort. Instinct is our
basis. For the larger part the boy has just to grow. But We watch his
growth. Education is really watching—keeping the course. The human error
is to do too much, to distrust instinct too much, to over-teach,
over-legislate, over-manage, over-decorate——”
“No, you _don’t_, my gentleman,” came the voice of Mary from the shadow
under the old pear tree.
“Now I wonder——” said Arthur, craning his neck to look over the rose
bushes.
“Diddums then,” said Mary. “Woun’t they lettim put’tt in ’s mouf?
_Oooh!_”
“Trust her instinct,” said Dolly, and Arthur was restrained.
Oswald took advantage of the interruption to take the word from Arthur.
“We joke and sharpen our wits in this sort of talk,” he said, “but
education, you know, isn’t a joke. It might be the greatest power in the
world. If I didn’t think I was a sort of schoolmaster in Africa....
That’s the only decent excuse a white man has for going there.... I’m
getting to be a fanatic about education. Give me the schools of the
world and I would make a Millennium in half a century.... You don’t mean
to let Peter drift. You say it, but you can’t mean it. Drift is waste.
We don’t make half of what we _could_ make of our children. We don’t
make a quarter—not a tenth. They could know ever so much more, think
ever so much better. We’re all at sixes and sevens.”
He realized he wasn’t good at expressing his ideas. He had intended
something very clear and compelling, a sort of ultimatum about Peter.
“I believe in Sir Francis Galton,” Aunt Phœbe remarked in his pause;
saying with stern resolution things that she felt had to be said. They
made her a little breathless, and she fixed her eye on the view until
they were said. “Eugenics. It is a new idea. A revival. Plato had it.
Men ought to be bred like horses. No marriage or any nonsense of that
kind. Just a simple scientific blending of points. Then Everything would
be different.”
“Almost too different,” Arthur reflected....
“When I consider Peter and think of all one could do for him——” said
Oswald, still floundering for some clenching way of putting it....
§ 5
One evening Dolly caught her cousin looking at her husband with an
expression that stuck in her memory. It was Oswald’s habit to sit if he
could in such a position that he could rest the obliterated cheek of his
face upon a shadowing hand, his fingers on his forehead. Then one saw
what a pleasant-faced man he would have been if only he had left that
Egyptian shell alone. So he was sitting on this occasion, his elbow on
the arm of the settle. His brow was knit, his one eye keen and steady.
He was listening to his host discoursing upon the many superiorities of
the artisan in the middle ages to his successor of today. And he seemed
to be weighing and estimating Arthur with some little difficulty.
Then, as if it was a part of the calculation he was making, he turned to
look at Dolly. Their eyes met; for a moment he could not mask himself.
Then he turned to Arthur again with his expression restored to polite
interest.
It was the most trivial of incidents, but it stayed, a mental burr.
§ 6
A little accident which happened a few weeks after Oswald’s departure
put the idea of making a will into Arthur’s head. Dolly had wanted to
ride a bicycle, but he had some theory that she would not need to ride
alone or that it would over-exert her to ride alone, and so he had got a
tandem bicycle instead, on which they could ride together. Those were
the days when all England echoed to the strains of
“_Di_sy, _Di_sy, tell me your answer true;
I’m arf _crizy_
All fer the love of you-oo ...
Yew’d look sweet
Upon the seat
Of-a-bicycle-mide-fer-two.”
A wandering thrush of a cockney whistled it on their first expedition.
Dolly went out a little resentfully with Arthur’s broad back obscuring
most of her landscape, and her third ride ended in a destructive spill
down Ipinghanger Hill. The bicycle brake was still in a primitive stage
in those days; one steadied one’s progress down a hill by the art, since
lost to mankind again, of “back-pedalling,” and Dolly’s feet were
carried over and thrown off the pedals and the machine got away.
Arthur’s nerve was a good one. He fought the gathering pace and steered
with skill down to the very last bend of that downland descent. The last
corner got them. They took the bank and hedge sideways and the crumpled
tandem remained on one side of the bank and Arthur and Dolly found
themselves torn and sprained but essentially unbroken in a hollow of wet
moss and marsh-mallows beyond the hedge.
The sense of adventure helped them through an afternoon of toilsome
return....
“But we might both have been killed that time,” said Arthur with a
certain gusto.
“If we had,” said Arthur presently, expanding that idea, “what would
have become of Peter?”...
They had both made simple wills copied out of _Whitaker’s Almanack_,
leaving everything to each other; it had not occurred to them before
that two young parents who cross glaciers together, go cycling together,
travel in the same trains, cross the seas in the same boats, might very
easily get into the same smash. In that case the law, it appeared,
presumed that the wife, being the weaker vessel, would expire first, and
so Uncle Rigby, who had relapsed more and more stuffily into evangelical
narrowness since his marriage, would extend a dark protection over
Peter’s life. “Lucy wouldn’t even feed him properly,” said Dolly. “She’s
so close and childlessly inhuman. I can’t bear to think of it.”
On the other hand, if by any chance Dolly should show a flicker of life
after the extinction of Arthur, Peter and all his possessions would fall
under the hand of Dolly’s shady brother, the failure of the family, a
being of incalculable misdemeanours, a gross, white-faced literary man,
an artist in parody (itself a vice), who smelt of tobacco always, and
already at thirty-eight, it was but too evident, preferred port and old
brandy to his self-respect.
“We ought to remake our wills and each appoint the same guardian,” said
Arthur.
It was not very easy to find the perfect guardian.
Then as Arthur sat at lunch one day the sunshine made a glory of the
little silver tankard that adorned the Welsh dresser at the end of the
room.
“Dolly,” he said, “old Oswald would like this job.”
She’d known that by instinct from the first, but she had never expected
Arthur to discover it.
“He’s got a sort of fancy for Peter,” he said.
“I think we could trust him,” said Dolly temperately.
“Poor old Oswald,” said Arthur; “he’s a tragic figure. That mask of his
cuts him off from so much. He idolizes you and Peter, Dolly. You don’t
suspect it, but he does. He’s our man.”
CHAPTER THE THIRD
ARTHUR OR OSWALD?
§ 1
Destiny is at times a slashing sculptor. At first Destiny seemed to have
intended Oswald Sydenham to be a specimen of the schoolboy hero; he made
record scores in the school matches, climbed trees higher than any one
else did, and was moreover a good all-round boy at his work; he was
healthy, very tall but strong, dark, pleasant-looking, and popular with
men and women and—he was quite aware of these facts. He shone with equal
brightness as a midshipman; he dared, he could lead. Several women of
thirty or thereabouts adored him—before it is good for youth to be
adored. He had a knack of success, he achieved a number of things; he
judged himself and found that this he had done “pretty decently,” and
that “passing well.” Then Destiny decided apparently that he was not
thinking as freshly or as abundantly as he ought to do—a healthy,
successful life does not leave much time for original thinking—and
smashed off the right side of his face. In a manner indeed quite
creditable to him. It was given to few men in those pacific days to get
the V.C. before the age of twenty-one.
He lay in hospital for a long spell, painful but self-satisfied. The
nature of his injuries was not yet clear to him. Presently he would get
all right again. “V.C.,” he whispered. “At twenty. Pretty decent.”
He saw himself in the looking-glass with half his face bandaged, and
there was nothing very shocking in that. Then one day came his first
glimpse of his unbandaged self....
“One must take it decently,” he said to himself again and again through
a night of bottomless dismay.
And, “How can I look a woman in the face again?”
He stuck to his bandages as long as possible.
He learnt soon enough that some women could not look him in the face
anyhow, and among them was one who should have hidden her inability from
him at any cost.
And he was not only disfigured; he was crippled and unserviceable; so
the Navy decided. Something had gone out of his eyesight; he could no
longer jump safely nor hit a ball with certainty. He could not play
tennis at all; he had ten minutes of humiliation with one of the nurses,
protesting all the time. “Give me another chance and I’ll begin to get
into it. Let me get my eye in—my only eye in. Oh, the devil! give a chap
a chance!... Sorry, nurse. Now!... _Damn!_ It’s no good. Oh God! it’s no
good. What shall I do?” Even his walk had now a little flavour of
precaution. But he could still shoot straight up to two or three hundred
yards.... These facts formed the basis for much thinking on the part of
a young man who had taken it for granted that he was destined to a
bright and leading rôle in the world.
When first he realized that he was crippled and disabled for life, he
thought of suicide. But in an entirely detached and theoretical spirit.
Suicide had no real attraction for him. He meant to live anyhow. The
only question therefore was the question of what he was to do. He would
lie awake at nights sketching out careers that did not require
athleticism or a good presence. “I suppose it’s got to be chiefly using
my brains,” he decided. “The great trouble will be not to get fat and
stuffy. I’ve never liked indoors....”
He did his best to ignore the fact that an honourable life before him
meant a life of celibacy. But he could not do so. For many reasons
arising out of his temperament and the experiences those women
friendships had thrust upon him, that limitation had an effect of
dismaying cruelty upon his mind. “Perhaps some day I shall find a blind
girl,” he said, and felt his face doubtfully. “Oh, damn!” He perceived
that the sewing up of his face was a mere prelude to the sewing up of
his life. It distressed him beyond measure. It was the persuasion that
the deprivation was final that obsessed him with erotic imaginations.
For a time he was obsessed almost to the verge of madness.
He had moods of raving anger on account of this extravagant and
uncontrollable preoccupation. He would indulge secretly in storms of
cursing, torrents of foulness and foul blasphemies that left him
strangely relieved. But he had an unquenchable sense of the need of a
fight.
“I’ll get square with this damned world somehow,” he said. “I won’t be
beaten.”
There were some ugly and dismal aspects in his attempt not to be beaten,
plunges into strange mires with remorse at the far side. They need not
deflect our present story.
“What’s the whole beastly game about anyhow?” he asked. “Why are we made
like this?”
Meanwhile his pride kept up a valiant front. No one should suspect he
was not cheerful. No one should suspect he felt himself to be a thing
apart. He hid his vicious strain—or made a jest of it. He developed a
style of humour that turned largely on his disfigurement. His internal
stresses reflected a dry bitterness upon the world.
It was a great comfort presently to get hints that here and there other
souls had had to learn lessons as hard as his own. One day he chanced
upon the paralyzed Heine’s farewell to beauty. “Perhaps,” he said, “I’ve
only got by a short cut to where a lot of people must come out sooner or
later. Every one who lives on must get bald and old—anyhow.” He took a
hint from an article he found in some monthly review upon Richard
Crookback. “A crippled body makes a crippled mind,” he read. “Is that
going to happen to me?”
Thence he got to: “If I think about myself now,” he asked, “what else
_can_ happen? I’ll go bitter.”
“Something I can do well, but something in which I can forget myself.”
That, he realized, was his recipe.
“Let’s find out what the whole beastly game _is_ about,” he decided—a
large proposition. “And stop thinking of _my_ personal set-back
altogether.”
But that is easier said than done.
§ 2
He would, he decided, “go in for science.”
He had read about science in the magazines, and about its remorseless
way with things. Science had always had a temperamental call upon his
mind. The idea of a pitiless acceptance of fact had now a greater
fascination than ever for him. Art was always getting sentimental and
sensuous—this was in the early ’eighties; religion was mystical and
puritanical; science just looked at facts squarely, and would see a
cancer or a liver fluke or a healing scar as beautiful as Venus.
Moreover it told you coldly and correctly of the skin glands of Venus.
It neither stimulated nor condemned. It would steady the mind. He had an
income of four hundred a year, and fairly good expectations of another
twelve hundred. There was nothing to prevent him going in altogether for
scientific work.
Those were the great days when Huxley lectured on zoology at South
Kensington, and to him Oswald went. Oswald did indeed find science
consoling and inspiring. Scientific studies were at once rarer and more
touched by enthusiasm a quarter of a century ago than they are now, and
he was soon a passionate naturalist, consumed by the insatiable craving
to know how. That little, long upper laboratory in the Normal School of
Science, as the place was then called, with the preparations and
diagrams along one side, the sinks and windows along the other, the row
of small tables down the windows, and the ever-present vague mixed smell
of methylated spirit, Canada balsam, and a sweetish decay, opened vast
new horizons to him. To the world of the eighteen-eighties the story of
life, of the origin and branching out of species, of the making of
continents, was still the most inspiring of new romances. Comparative
anatomy in particular was then a great and philosophical “new learning,”
a mighty training of the mind; the drift of biological teaching towards
specialization was still to come.
For a time Oswald thought of giving his life to biology. But biology
unhappily had little need of Oswald. He was a clumsy dissector because
of his injury, and unhandy at most of the practical work, he had to work
with his head on one side and rather close to what he was doing, but it
dawned upon him one day as a remarkable discovery that neither personal
beauty nor great agility are demanded from an explorer or collector. It
was a picture he saw in an illustrated paper of H. M. Stanley traversing
an African forest in a litter, with a great retinue of porters, that
first put this precious idea into his head. “One wants pluck and a
certain toughness,” he said. “I’m tough enough. And then I shall be out
of reach of—Piccadilly.”
He had excellent reasons for disliking the West End. It lured him, it
exasperated him, it demoralized him and made him ashamed. He got and
read every book of African travel he could hear of. In 1885 he snatched
at an opportunity and went with an expedition through Portuguese East
Africa to Nyasa and Tanganyika. He found fatigue and illness and
hardship there—and peace of nerve and imagination. He remained in that
region of Africa for three years.
But biology and Africa were merely the fields of human interest in which
Oswald’s mind was most active in those days. Such inquiries were only a
part of his valiant all-round struggle to reconstruct the life that it
had become impossible to carry on as a drama of the noble and
picturesque loves and adventures of Oswald Sydenham. His questions led
him into philosophy; he tried over religion, which had hitherto in his
romantic phase simply furnished suitable church scenery for meetings and
repentances. He read many books, listened to preachers, hunted out any
teacher who seemed to promise help in the mending of his life,
considered this “movement” and that “question.” His resolve to find what
“the whole beastly game was about,” was no passing ejaculation. He
followed the trend of his time towards a religious scepticism and an
entire neglect of current politics. Religion was then at the nadir of
formalism; current politics was an outwardly idiotic, inwardly
dishonest, party duel between the followers of Gladstone and Disraeli.
Social and economic questions he was inclined to leave to the
professors. Those were the early days of socialist thought in England,
the days before Fabianism, and he did not take to the new teachings very
kindly. He was a moderate man in æsthetic matters, William Morris left
him tepid, he had no sense of grievance against machinery and aniline
dyes, he did not grasp the workers’ demand because it was outside his
traditions and experiences. Science seemed to him more and more plainly
to be the big regenerative thing in human life, and the mission
immediately before men of energy was the spreading of civilization, that
is to say of knowledge, apparatus, clear thought, and release from
instinct and superstition, about the world.
In those days science was at its maximum of aggressive hopefulness. With
the idea of scientific progress there was also bound up in many British
minds the idea of a racial mission. The long Napoleonic wars had cut off
British thought from the thought of the continent of Europe, and this
separation was never completely healed throughout the nineteenth
century. In spite of their world-empire the British remained remarkably
self-centred and self-satisfied. They were a world-people, and no other
people were. They were at once insular and world-wide. During the
nineteenth century until its last quarter there was no real challenge to
their extra-European ascendancy. A man like Sydenham did not so much
come to the conclusion that the subjugation and civilization of the
world by science and the Anglican culture was the mission of the British
Empire, as find that conclusion ready-made by tradition and
circumstances in his mind. He did not even trouble to express it; it
seemed to him self-evident. When Kipling wrote of the White Man’s
Burden, Briton was understood. Everywhere the British went about the
world, working often very disinterestedly and ably, quite unaware of the
amazement and exasperation created in French and German and American
minds by the discovery of these tranquil assumptions.
So it was with Oswald Sydenham for many years. For three years he was in
the district between Bangweolo and Lake Nyasa, making his headquarters
at Blantyre, collecting specimens and learning much about mankind and
womankind in that chaos of Arab slavers, Scotch missionaries, traders,
prospectors, native tribes, Zulu raiders, Indian store-keepers, and
black “Portuguese”; then, discovering that Blantyre had picked up a
nickname from the natives of “Half Face” for him, he took a temporary
dislike to Blantyre, and decided to go by way of Tanganyika either to
Uganda or Zanzibar, first sending home a considerable collection of
specimens by way of Mozambique. He got through at last to Uganda, after
some ugly days and hours, only to learn of a very good reason why he
should return at once to the southern lakes. He heard that a new British
consul was going up the Zambesi to Nyasaland with a British protectorate
up his sleeve, and he became passionately anxious to secure a position
near the ear of this official. There were many things the man ought to
know at once that neither traders nor mission men would tell him.
To get any official position it was necessary for Oswald to return to
London and use the influence of various allied Sydenhams. He winced at
the thought of coming back to England and meeting the eyes of people who
had known him before his disfigurement, but the need to have some sort
of official recognition if he was to explain himself properly in
Nyasaland made it necessary that he should come. That was in the summer
of 1889.