The season was drawing to its dusty end, and everyone I knew was
arranging to go away. Mrs. Strickland was taking her family to the
coast of Norfolk, so that the children might have the sea and her
husband golf. We said good-bye to one another, and arranged to meet in
the autumn. But on my last day in town, coming out of the Stores, I met
her with her son and daughter; like myself, she had been making her
final purchases before leaving London, and we were both hot and tired.
I proposed that we should all go and eat ices in the park.
I think Mrs. Strickland was glad to show me her children, and she
accepted my invitation with alacrity. They were even more attractive
than their photographs had suggested, and she was right to be proud of
them. I was young enough for them not to feel shy, and they chattered
merrily about one thing and another. They were extraordinarily nice,
healthy young children. It was very agreeable under the trees.
When in an hour they crowded into a cab to go home, I strolled idly to
my club. I was perhaps a little lonely, and it was with a touch of envy
that I thought of the pleasant family life of which I had had a
glimpse. They seemed devoted to one another. They had little private
jokes of their own which, unintelligible to the outsider, amused them
enormously. Perhaps Charles Strickland was dull judged by a standard
that demanded above all things verbal scintillation; but his
intelligence was adequate to his surroundings, and that is a passport,
not only to reasonable success, but still more to happiness. Mrs.
Strickland was a charming woman, and she loved him. I pictured their
lives, troubled by no untoward adventure, honest, decent, and, by
reason of those two upstanding, pleasant children, so obviously
destined to carry on the normal traditions of their race and station,
not without significance. They would grow old insensibly; they would
see their son and daughter come to years of reason, marry in due
course—the one a pretty girl, future mother of healthy children; the
other a handsome, manly fellow, obviously a soldier; and at last,
prosperous in their dignified retirement, beloved by their descendants,
after a happy, not unuseful life, in the fullness of their age they
would sink into the grave.
That must be the story of innumerable couples, and the pattern of life
it offers has a homely grace. It reminds you of a placid rivulet,
meandering smoothly through green pastures and shaded by pleasant
trees, till at last it falls into the vasty sea; but the sea is so
calm, so silent, so indifferent, that you are troubled suddenly by a
vague uneasiness. Perhaps it is only by a kink in my nature, strong in
me even in those days, that I felt in such an existence, the share of
the great majority, something amiss. I recognised its social values, I
saw its ordered happiness, but a fever in my blood asked for a wilder
course. There seemed to me something alarming in such easy delights. In
my heart was a desire to live more dangerously. I was not unprepared
for jagged rocks and treacherous shoals if I could only have
change—change and the excitement of the unforeseen.