AVELEY

The train drew up at a little wayside station soon after four o'clock on a

November afternoon. It was a bare, but rather an attractive landscape. The

line ran along a wide, shallow valley, with a stream running at the bottom,

with many willows, and pools fringed with withered sedges. The fields were

mostly pastures, with here and there a fallow. There were a good many bits

of woodland all about, and a tall spire of pale stone, far to the south,

overtopped the roofs of a little town. I was met by an old groom or

coachman, with a little ancient open cart, and we drove sedately along

pleasant lanes, among woods, till we entered a tiny village, which he told

me was Aveley, consisting of three or four farmhouses, with barns and

ricks, and some rows of stone-built cottages. We turned out of the village

in the direction of a small and plain church of some antiquity, behind

which I saw a grove of trees and the chimneys of a house surmounted by a

small cupola. The house stood close by the church, having an open space of

grass in front, with an old sundial, and a low wall separating it from the

churchyard. We drove in at a big gate, standing open, with stone

gate-posts. The Hall was a long, stone-built Georgian house, perhaps a

hundred and fifty years old, with two shallow wings and a stone-tiled roof,

and was obviously of considerable size. Some withered creepers straggled

over it, and it was neatly kept, but with no sort of smartness. The trees

grew rather thickly to the east of the house, and I could see to the right

a stable-yard, and beyond that the trees of the garden. We drew up--it was

getting dark--and an old manservant with a paternal air came out, took

possession of my bag, and led me through a small vestibule into a long

hall, with a fire burning in a great open fireplace. There was a gallery at

one end, with a big organ in it. The hall was paved with black and white

stone, and there were some comfortable chairs, a cabinet or two, and some

dim paintings on the walls. Tea was spread at a small table by the fire,

and four or five men, two of them quite young, the others rather older,

were sitting about on chairs and sofas, or helping themselves to tea at the

table. On the hearth, with his back to the fire, stood a great, burly man

with a short, grizzled beard and tumbled gray hair, rather bald, dressed in

a rough suit of light-brown homespun, with huge shooting boots, whom I saw

at once to be my host. The talk stopped as I entered, and I was aware that

I was being scrutinised with some curiosity. Father Payne did not move, but

extended a hand, which I advanced and shook, and said: "Very glad to see

you, Mr. Duncan--you are just in time for tea." He mentioned the names of

the men present, who came and shook hands very cordially. Barthrop gave me

some tea, and I was inducted into a chair by the fire. I thought for a

moment that I was taking Father Payne's place, and feebly murmured

something about taking his chair. "They're all mine, thanks!" he said with

a smile, "but I claim no privileges." Someone gave a faint whistle at this,

and Father Payne, turning his eyes but not his head towards the young man

who had uttered the sound, said: "All right, Pollard, if you are going to

be mutinous, we shall have a little business to transact together, as Mr.

Squeers said." "Oh, I'm not mutinous, sir," said the young man--"I'm quite

submissive--I was just betrayed into it by amazement!" "You shouldn't get

into the habit of thinking aloud," said Father Payne; "at least not among

bachelors--when you are married you can do as you like!--I hope you are

polite?" he went on, looking round at me. "I think so," I said, feeling

rather shy, "That's right," he said. "It's the first and only form of

virtue! If you are only polite, there is nothing that you may not do. This

is a school of manners, you know!" One of the men, Rose by name, laughed--a

pleasant musical laugh. "I remember," he said, "that when I was a boy at

Eton, my excellent but very bluff and rough old tutor called upon us, and

was so much taken up with being hearty, that he knocked over the

coal-scuttle, and didn't let anyone get a word in; and when he went off in

a sort of whirlwind, my old aunt, who was an incisive lady, said in a

meditative tone: 'How strange it is that the only thing that the Eton

masters seem able to teach their boys is the only thing they don't

themselves possess!'"

Father Payne uttered a short, loud laugh at this, and said: "Is there any

chance of meeting your aunt?" "No, sir, she is long since dead!" "Blew off

too much steam, perhaps," said Father Payne. "That woman must have had the

steam up! I should have liked to have known her--a remarkable woman! Have

you any more stories of the same sort about her?"

"Not to-day," said Rose, smiling.

"Quite right," said Father Payne. "You keep them for an acceptable time.

Never tell strings of stories--and, by the way, my young friends, that's

the art of writing. Don't cram in good things--space them out, Barthrop!"

"I think I can spread the butter as thin as anyone," said Barthrop,

smiling.

"So you can, so you can!" said Father Payne enthusiastically, "and very

thin slices too! I give you full credit for that!"

The men had begun to drift away, and I was presently left alone with Father

Payne. "Now you come along of me!" he said to me; and when I got up, he

took my arm in a pleasant fashion, led me to a big curtained archway at the

far end of the hall, under the gallery, and along a flagged passage to the

right. As we went he pointed to the doors--"Smoking-room--Library"--and at

the end of the passage he opened a door, and led me into a small panelled

room with a big window, closely curtained. It was a solid and stately

place, wholly bare of ornament. It had a writing-table, a bookcase, two

armchairs of leather, a fine fireplace with marble pillars, and an old

painting let into the panelling above it. There was a bright, unshaded lamp

on the table. "This is my room," he said, "and there's nothing in it that I

don't use, except those pillars; and when I haul on them, like Samson, the

house comes down. Now you sit down there, and we'll have a talk. Do you

mind the light? No? Well, that's all right, as I want to have a good look

at you, you know! You can get a smoke afterwards--this is business!"

He sate down in the chair opposite me, and stirred the fire. He had fine,

large, solid hands, the softness of which, like silk, had struck me when I

shook hands with him; and, though he was both elderly and bulky, he moved

with a certain grace and alertness. "Tell me your tale from the beginning,"

he said, "Don't leave out any details--I like details. Let's have your life

and death and Christian sufferings, as the tracts say."

He heard me with much patience, sometimes smiling, sometimes nodding, when

I had finished, he said: "Now I must ask you a few questions--you don't

mind if they are plain questions--rather unpleasant questions?" He bent his

brows upon me and smiled. "No," I said, "not at all." "Well, then," he

said, "where's the vocation in all this? This place, to be brief, is for

men who have a real vocation for writing, and yet never would otherwise

have the time or the leisure to train for it. You see, in England, people

think that you needn't train for writing--that you have just got to begin,

and there you are. Very few people have the money to wait a few years--they

have to write, not what they want to write, but what other people want to

read. And so it comes about that by the time that they have earned the

money and the leisure, the spring is gone, the freshness is gone, there's

no invention and no zest. Writing can't be done in a little corner of life.

You have to give up your life to it--and then that means giving up your

life to a great deal of what looks like pure laziness--loafing about,

looking about, travelling, talking, mooning; that is the only way to learn

proportion; and it is the only way, too, of learning what not to write

about--a great many things that are written about are not really material

for writing at all. And all this can't be done in a drivelling mood--you

must pick your way if you are going to write. That's a long preface; but I

mean this place to be a place to give men the right sort of start. I happen

to be able to teach people, more or less, how to write, if they have got

the stuff in them--and to be frank, I'm not sure that you have! You think

this would be a pleasant sort of experience--so it can be; but it isn't

done on slack and chattering lines. It is just meant to save people from

hanging about at the start, a thing which spoils a lot of good writers. But

it's deadly serious, and it isn't a dilettante life at all. Do you grasp

all that?"

"Yes," I said, "and I believe I can work! I know I have wasted my time, but

it was not because I wanted to waste time, but because the sort of things I

have always had to do--the classics--always seemed to me so absolutely

pointless. No one who taught me ever distinguished between what was good

and what was bad. Whatever it was--a Greek play, Homer, Livy, Tacitus--it

was always supposed to be the best thing of the kind. I was always sure

that much of it was rot, and some of it was excellent; but I didn't know

why, and no one ever told me why."

"You thought all that?" said he. "Well, that's more hopeful! Have you ever

done any essay work?"

"Yes," I said, "and that was the worst of all--no one ever showed me how to

do it in my own way, but always in some one else's way."

He sate a little in silence. Then he said: "But mind you, that's not all! I

don't think writing is the end of life. The real point is to feel the

things, to understand the business, to have ideas about life. I don't want

people to learn how to write interestingly about things in which they are

not interested--but to be interested first, and then to write if they can.

I like to turn out a good writer, who can say what he feels and believes.

But I'm just as pleased when a man tells me that writing is rubbish, and

that he is going away to do something real. The real--that's what I care

about! I don't want men to come and pick up grains of truth and reality,

and work them into their stuff. I have turned out a few men like that, and

those are my worst failures. You have got to care about ideas, if you come

here, and to get the ideas into shape. You have got to learn what is

beautiful and what is not, because the only business of a real writer is

with beauty--not a sickly exotic sort of beauty, but the beauty of health

and strength and generous feeling. I can't have any humbugs here, though I

have sent out some humbugs. It's a hard life this, and a tiring life;

though if you are the right sort of fellow, you will get plenty of fun out

of it. But we don't waste time here; and if a man wastes time, out he

goes."

"I believe I can work as hard as anyone," I said, "though I have shown no

signs of it--and anyhow, I should like to try. And I do really want to

learn how to distinguish between things, how to know what matters. No one

has ever shown me how to do that!"

"That's all right!" he said, "But are you sure you don't want simply to

make a bit of a name--to be known as a clever man? It's very convenient,

you know, in England, to have a label. Because I want you clearly to

understand that this place of mine has nothing whatever to do with that. I

take no stock in what is called success. This is a sort of monastery, you

know; and the worst of some monasteries is that they cultivate dreams.

That's a beautiful thing in its way, but it isn't what I aim at. I don't

want men to drug themselves with dreams. The great dreamers don't do that.

Shelley, for instance--his dreams were all made out of real feeling, real

beauty. He wanted to put things right in his own way. He was enraged with

life because he was fine, while Byron was enraged with life because he was

vulgar. Vulgarity--that's the one fatal complaint; it goes down deep to the

bottom of the mind. And I may as well say plainly that that is what I fight

against here."

"I don't honestly think I am vulgar," I said.

"Not on the surface, perhaps," he said, "but present-day education is a

snare. We are a vulgar nation, you know. That is what is really the matter

with us--our ambitions are vulgar, our pride is vulgar. We want to fit into

the world and get the most we can out of it; we don't, most of us, just

want to give it our best. That's what I mean by vulgarity, wanting to take

and not wanting to give."