PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS
After Easter, 1878, I was sent to a private school presided over by Mr.
Ottiwell Waterfield, at Temple Grove, East Sheen, and remained there
three years. The house and grounds vanished entirely somewhere about
1908, under the trail of the suburban builder, and now hideous rows of
small residences occupy their spaciousness. For the purposes of a school
numbering some hundred and thirty boys, the original George I and Queen
Anne house had been largely supplemented with dormitories and
schoolrooms, and a modern wing as large as the house ran at right angles
by the edge of the cricket field. But the part where Mr. Waterfield and
his family lived had not been touched: there was a fine library,
drawing-room, and his study (how awful was that place!) _en suite_, a
paved hall, with a full-sized billiard table and a piano where a frail
widow lady called Mrs. Russell gave music-lessons, and the French
master, whose name really was M. Voltaire, conducted a dancing-class as
well as teaching French and being, I think, slightly immoral. A passage
out of the hall gave on to the private garden of Mr. Waterfield, where
there were fine cedar trees, and a broad oak-staircase led up from it to
the bedrooms of the family.
Already, darkly in the glass of fiction and under the title of David
Blaize, I have hinted at some of the habits of the young gentlemen who
led a life, alternately uproarious and terror-stricken, in the other
part of the house, but now more personal details can be indulged in. By
far the most salient feature in the school, even as the sun is the most
salient feature in the day, making it precisely what it is, was Mr.
Waterfield himself. He seems now to me to have been nine feet high, and
he certainly walked with a curious rocking motion, which was convenient,
because if you were where you should not be, you could detect his coming
long before he could detect anybody. He had a square grey beard which
smelt of cigars, a fact known from his practice, when he had frightened
the life out of you by terrible harangues, of saying, “Well, that’s all
over, my boy,” and kissing you. I believe him to have been about the
best private schoolmaster who ever lived, for he ruled by love and fear
combined in a manner that while it inspired small boys with hellish
terror, yet rewarded them with the sweet fruits of hero-worship. He
exacted blind obedience, under peril of really infamous torture with a
thick ruler with which he savagely caned offending hands, but he managed
at the same time to make us appreciate his approbation. The ruler was
kept in a convenient drawer of the knee-hole table in his study, and was
a perfectly brutal instrument, but the approach of the ruler, like a
depression over the Atlantic, was always heralded by storm-cones. The
first of these was the taking of the keys from his trousers-pocket, and
then you had time to pull yourself together to retract an equivocation,
to confess a fault, or try to remember something you had been repeatedly
told. The second storm-cone was the insertion of the key into the drawer
where the ruler was kept. You had to be of very strong nerve when that
second storm-cone was hoisted, and divert your mind from the possible
future to the supine which you could not recollect, for when the key was
once inserted there might any moment be a sudden startling explosion of
wrath, and out flew the ruler. Then came a short agonizing scene, and
the blubbering victim after six smart blows had the handle of the door
turned for him by somebody else, because his hands were useless through
pain. The ruler was quite rare, and probably well deserved; anyhow it
was the counter-balance to the hero-worship born of Mr. Waterfield’s
approval. For more heinous offences there was birching, but that had
certain compensations, for afterwards you took down your breeches and
showed the injured parts to admiring companions. But there was nothing
to show, as Mrs. Pullet said about the boluses, when you were caned.
Besides you could play cricket quite easily, shortly after a whipping,
but no human hand could hold a bat shortly after the application of the
ruler.
The top form (called the first form, not the sixth form), had certain
specified lessons every week taken by Waterfield, and he did not teach
regularly in other forms. But he was liable to make meteoric appearances
soon after the beginning of a lesson in the big schoolroom where the
next three forms were at work, and take any lesson himself. A hush fell
as he strode in, and we all cowered like partridges below a kite, while
he glared round, selecting the covey on to which he pounced. This was a
subtle plan, for you could never be sure that it would not be he who
would hear any particular lesson, and the chance of that made it most
unwise to neglect any preparation altogether.
The school got its fair share of public-school scholarships, so I
suppose the teaching of the other masters was sound, but I cannot
believe that a stranger set of instructors were ever got together.
Rawlings, who taught the first form, used habitually to read the
_Sporting Times_ in school with his feet up on the desk until the time
came for him to hear us construe. Daubeny, the master of the second
form, had no thought but for the encouragement of a small moustache;
Davy of the third form used mostly to be asleep; Geoghehan of the fourth
form (called “Geege”) had lost his right arm, and used always to have
some favourite in his class, who sat on his knee in school time and was
an important personage, for he could, if you were friends with him,
always persuade Geege not to report misconduct to Waterfield. One such
boy, now a steady hereditary legislator, I well remember: he pulled
Geege’s beard, and altered the marks in his register, and ruled him with
a rod of iron. Geege was otherwise an effective disciplinarian, and had
an unpleasant habit, if he thought you were not attending, of spearing
the back of your hand with the nib of his pen, dipped in purple ink.
Then there was a handwriting specialist called Prior who gave out
stationery on Saturdays. His appearance was always hailed by a sort of
Gregorian chant to which the words were, “All boys wanting ink, go to
Mr. Prior.” Then came Mr. Voltaire, the gay young Frenchman, and these
with one or two more of whom I cherish no recollection all lived
together at a house in East Sheen called Clarence House, and were, I
think, a shade more frightened of Waterfield than we.
The ways of boys are past finding out, and what could have induced us to
believe that the food supplied was disgusting to the verge of being
poisonous I have no idea. But tradition, at the time of which I am
speaking, ordained that this was so, and how often when I was longing
to eat a plateful of pudding have I shovelled it into an envelope to
bury in the playground, since the currants in it were held to be
squashed flies and the suet to be made with scourings from dirty plates.
Then somebody once saw potatoes, no doubt intended for school
consumption, lying on the floor in a shed in the garden, which was
considered a terrible way in which to keep potatoes. I remembering
telling my father this, and with the utmost gravity he answered that
every potato ought to be wrapped up singly in silver paper. He also
asked if it was true that Mr. Waterfield had been seen, with his
trousers turned up diluting the beer for dinner out of a garden
watering-can. Most poisonous of all were supposed to be the sausages
which we had for breakfast now and then: it was a point of honour not to
eat a single mouthful of this garbage. Then suddenly for no reason the
fashion changed, and the food was supposed to be, and indeed it probably
was, excellent. We gobbled up our sausages, asked for more and got it,
and ate the potatoes that had once lain on the dirty ground, and had
even degraded themselves by growing in it....
I plunged headlong into this riot of school life and for the first year
enjoyed it enormously. I had been placed too low in the school and
without the slightest effort I found myself term after term at the top
of the class, and loaded with prizes, for no merit of my own but for the
fact that I had the kind of superficial memory that retained what it had
scarcely attended to at all. In consequence for a whole year I had no
fear of Waterfield as regards lessons, and devoted myself to games,
stag-beetles, and friendship, and I find it hard to decide whether the
rapture of making twenty at cricket against overhand bowling (not lobs
from sisters) was greater or less than finding a stag-beetle on the
palings, or in the early dawn of summer mornings going on tiptoe into
the next dormitory, and, after waking up my special friend, sitting on
his bed, propped up with pillows and talking in whispers till there came
the sound of the dressing-bell, which portended the entrance of the
matron. Then it was necessary to steal round the corner of his cubicle,
and slide back into my own bed, there apparently to fall into a
refreshing slumber, for to be caught out of bed before it was time to
dress meant to be reported to Waterfield, who took a serious, and to me
then an unintelligible view of such an offence. But an hour’s whispered
conversation with a friend was worth that risk, indeed probably the risk
added a certain savour to it, and perhaps our present Minister at the
Vatican has recollections similar to mine. Or else it would be I who was
awakened by the soft-stepping night-shirted figure, and moved aside in
bed to give room for him to sit there, and there would be plans to be
made, and then combining friendship with stag-beetles into one
incomparable compound we would take the stag-beetles (for there were two
of them, male and female called “The Monarch of the Glen” and “Queen”)
out of my washing basin, where they passed the night in optimistic
attempts to climb its slippery sides, and refresh them with a breakfast
of elm leaves and perhaps the half of a strawberry. They had to be put
back into two match-boxes which were their travelling carriages before
Jane the matron came round, for she had said that if ever she found
stag-beetles in basins again she would throw them out of the window.
An “Exeat” now and then diversified the course of the term, and these I
spent with my Aunt Eleanor who had married Mr. Thomas Hare, famous for
his book on the _Representation of Minorities_. He was a great friend
of John Stuart Mill, whom Aunt Eleanor, for some reason of her own,
always called “Mr. Mills.” They lived in a house near Surbiton which had
a tower in it, on the top floor of which was Uncle Hare’s laboratory,
chemistry being a hobby of his, and he made oxygen in glass retorts, and
put snippets of potassium to scurry, flaring and self-lit, on the
surface of a basin of water.... On the 5th of November every year I was
asked to a children’s party, given by Princess Mary, Duchess of Teck, at
the White Lodge, Richmond Park, and there was an immense tea followed by
fireworks in the garden. There we were given squibs and told to be sure
to throw them away as soon as they burned low, before the explosion came
at the end, and on one of these occasions the Duke of Teck wanting a
light for his cigar told me to give him my squib, for he had no matches.
I told him that it was already burning low, but he said “Wass?” rather
alarmingly, and so I handed it to him. He had just applied the burning
end of it to his cigar when the explosion came, and his face and hair
were covered with sparks, and he danced about, and said sonorous things
in German, and I gathered that he was vexed....
The minds of children as they grow have those diseases incident to
childhood much as their bodies have. I had had my measles of
sentimentality, and having got over that I developed during this year a
kind of whooping-cough of lying. I used to invent and repeat
extraordinary experiences, which had their root in fact, but were
embellished by my imagination to scenes of unparalleled magnificence.
For instance, the family spent that summer holidays at Etretat, crossing
from Southampton to Havre, and I came back with Arthur who was going to
Eton, a day late for the assembling of Temple Grove. The crossing was an
extremely rough one; all night the water broke over the decks heavy and
solid, and certainly some unfortunate passenger came into the cabin
drenched through. All next day as I travelled to Temple Grove my
imagination worked on these promising materials, and I told my admiring
schoolfellows that we had barely escaped shipwreck. The waves, which
certainly did deluge the decks, I represented as having poured in
torrents down the funnels, extinguishing the furnaces, so that we had to
stop till the fires were relit, while out of the passenger who came down
drenched into the cabin I constructed a Frenchman who was supposed to
have said to me in broken English, “Ze water is not coming over in
bucketfuls it is coming over in shipfuls.” So vividly did I imagine
this, that before long I really half believed it. Again the next winter
holidays were marked by a heavy snowfall in Cornwall succeeded by a
partial thaw and a hard frost. In consequence the horses had to be
roughed, and it is certainly a fact that the carriage which was bringing
my father home one evening slewed so violently that, according to his
quite authentic description, he looked out of the window, and saw
instead of the hedge-rows the steep glazed road in front of him. I
seized hungrily on that incident, and on returning to school said that
we had enjoyed delightful sledging in the holidays, over roads and
lakes, adding the further embellishment that I personally drove the
horses.... There were more of these fictions which I cannot now
remember, all of which had some exiguous foundation of fact, and great
was my horror when an implacable enemy handed me one morning a scrap of
paper, in the manner of an ultimatum headed:
“BENSON’S LIES”
and there below, neatly summarized were all these stories which I
thought had been listened to with such respectful envy. The implacable
enemy added darkly that “they” (whoever “they” might be) were
considering what they were going to do about it all. I suppose
consternation was graven on me, for he stonily added, “Yes, you may well
turn pale,” and I pictured (my imagination again rioting off) this
damning text being handed to Waterfield, who would send it to my father.
What was the public upshot, I cannot remember, but by aid of that
terrifying medicine I made a marvellously brisk recovery from that
particular disease.
Some time during that first year at school, there occurred a scene which
I still look back on as among the most awful I have ever witnessed. Two
boys, one high in the school, a merry handsome creature, the other quite
a small boy, suddenly disappeared. They were in their places at
breakfast, but during breakfast were sent for by Waterfield and at
school that morning their places were empty. They did not appear at
dinner, they did not appear at tea, and that night in the next dormitory
their beds were vacant. Jane said they were not ill, and forbade any
further questions, and curious whisperings went about, of which I could
not grasp the import. Next morning there came a sudden order that all
the school should be assembled, and we crowded into the big schoolroom.
Presently Waterfield entered with his cap and gown on, followed by the
two missing boys. He took his place at his desk, and motioned them to
stand out in the middle of the room. There was a long silence.
Then Waterfield began to speak in a low voice that grew gradually
louder. He told us all to look at them, which we did. He then told us
that they had brought utter ruin and disgrace on themselves, that no
public school would receive them, and that they had broken their
parents’ hearts. They were not going to stop an hour longer amongst us,
for their presence was filthy and contaminating. They were publicly
expelled and would now go back to the homes on which they had brought
disgrace.
He then told us all to go out, and was left with those two, and I
wondered, limp with terror, whether he was going to kill them, and what
on earth it was that they had done. And if I was limp then, you may
judge what was my condition, when presently the school sergeant who
brought summonses from Waterfield told me that he wished to see me....
Indeed that imaginative habit which had made up so many glorious
adventures for myself on slender grounds was a poor friend at that
moment, for as I went to the study, it vividly suggested to me that I
too, for some unintelligible reason, would be despatched to Cornwall, a
ruined and disgraced boy.
I tapped at the door, tapped again without receiving any answer and
entered. Waterfield was sitting at his table and he was crying. He
indicated to me that I was to sit down, which I did. Then he blew his
nose with an awful explosion of sound, and came with his rocking walk
across to the chimney-piece.
“I want to ask you a question,” he said. “Do you understand why those
two boys were sent away?”
“No, sir,” said I.
His voice choked for a moment.
“I am very glad to hear it,” he said. “I thank God for that. You may
go.”
Here was a mysterious affair! I went out wondering about a million
things, why Waterfield was crying, why he had sent for me, and above all
why those two boys were publicly disgraced. I began to grub in my memory
for any clue, and recalled trivial incidents. The elder of the two had
been rather kind to a junior like myself: he had nodded good night to me
one evening on the stairs, and I think the next night had given me a
lump of Turkish delight. Finally, only a few days before, he had by
virtue of his first-form privileges taken me for a stroll round the
wooded grounds, where the first-form might go at pleasure, and I felt
highly honoured at his notice. He had become rather odd: he began
questions like, “I say, do you ever----,” and stopped. As I did not know
what he was talking about, and only grew puzzled, he remarked rather
contemptuously, “I didn’t know you were such a kid. Why, when I was your
age....”
Then our privacy came to an abrupt conclusion, for we suddenly met
Waterfield, with a large cigar, strolling along a path. He took us both
into a greenhouse, and gave us some grapes, and walked back with us, one
on each side of him.
There was nothing there at the time which had roused any strong
curiosity in me. I had wondered vaguely why these sentences were left
unfinished, and why he had only then discovered that I was such a kid.
But now, in an intensity of wonder as to why Waterfield had been so glad
to know that the reason for this expulsion was incomprehensible to me,
and as to what that reason was, I began, with the groping instincts of a
young thing, that has either to guess its way, or to be told it, to fit
meaningless little pieces of the puzzle together, trying first one pair
of fragments and then another, intensely curious and instinctively
certain that there was something here which other boys understood, and
which Waterfield certainly understood, but which I did not. I supposed
that the completed puzzle contained something in which right and wrong
were involved, since a transgression such as the two expelled boys had
been guilty of was an affair that could not be atoned for by a caning or
a birching.
For days after that, hints, fragments, surmises floated as thickly about
the school as motes of dust in a sunbeam. We were forbidden to talk
about the subject at all, which gave an additional zest to discussion.
Some knew a great deal, some knew a little, some knew nothing. Those who
knew nothing learned a little, those who knew a little learned more, and
we seethed with things that were unsavoury, because the secrecy and the
prohibition made the unsavouriness of them.... But in heaven’s name, why
could we not all have been given clean lessons in natural history? Is it
better that young boys should guess and experiment and be left to find
things out for themselves, with the gusto that arises from the notion of
forbidden mysteries, than that they should be taught cleanness by their
elders, instead of being left to experimentalize in dirtiness? Until
there is extracted from boyhood its proper legitimate inquisitiveness
which is the reason of its growth, nothing can prevent boys from seeking
to learn about those things which its elders cover up in a silence so
indiscreet as to be criminal. It is a libellous silence, for it
surrounds, in an atmosphere of suspicion, knowledge which is perfectly
wholesome and necessary.
Between terms came holidays full of things just as wonderful as the
swamping of the furnaces of the Havre boat and “Benson’s lies”
generally, and these must be lumped together, to form a general summary
as to how we amused ourselves for the next three years or so, when
holidays brought us together. About now a joint literary effort of all
us children, called (for no known reason) the _Saturday Magazine_, made
its punctual appearance. Already we were such savage wielders of the pen
that one issue every holidays no longer contented us, but two or three
times between term and term my father and mother were regaled of an
evening with a flood of prose and poetry. Arthur would say one morning,
“Let’s have a Saturday Magazine next Tuesday,” and straightway we called
for a supply of that useful paper known as “sermon paper,” which
contains exactly twenty-three lines to a small quarto page, faintly
ruled in blue. Dialogues, satirical sketches, tales of adventure,
essays, and poems, were poured out in rank profusion, the rule being
that each member of the family should contribute “at least” four pages
of prose, or one page of verse. There was, after we had all got blooded
with the lust of production, little cause for this minimum regulation,
and perhaps it would have been better, in view of subsequent
fruitfulness, to have substituted for the minimum restriction of “at
least” a maximum restriction of “at most.” Yet this habit of swift
composition gave us all a certain ease in expressing ourselves if only
because we expressed ourselves so freely. The contents of the _Saturday
Magazine_ were, since all choice of subject was left to the author, of
the most varied description. Arthur would produce (at least) an essay in
the style of _The Spectator_ (Addison’s) describing how he threw a cake
of yellow soap at a serenading cat, Nellie would refresh us with an
imaginary interview with our Scotch coachman on the subject of sore
backs, Maggie, whose chief avocation now was to rear an enormous number
of guinea-pigs and find names for them, gave a dialogue between
Atahualpa and Ixlitchochitl (only she knew how to spell them); poor Fred
treated them to a poem on the Devil, which he felt sure solved the very
difficult question about the origin of evil, and Hugh, who by reason of
his youth was let off with two pages of prose, produced adventures so
bloody, that out of sheer reaction his audience rocked with unquenchable
laughter. There was a Saturnalian liberty allowed, and my mother’s
experiences with a runaway pony, or her fondness for cheese, were
treated with sharp-edged mockery, and even my father made a ludicrous
appearance in some dialogue, where he was supposed to be worsted by the
superior wit of his children....
In lighter mood (save the mark) we played a poetry game called “American
nouns,” in which you had to answer, metrically and with rhyme, a
question written down at the top of a half-sheet of paper, and bring in
a particular word like “unconstitutional” or some stumper of that kind.
This particular word was given to my Uncle Henry Sidgwick together with
the question, “What do you know of astronomy?” to which in the winking
of an eye he produced the following gem:
Phœbus, the glorious king of the sky,
In his unconstitutional way,
Dispenses at will his bounties on high
And royally orders the day.
No starry assembly controls his bright flow,
No critical comet presumes to say “No.”
Or again, my mother having to answer the question, “Does the moon draw
the sea?” and to bring in the word “artist,” made a glorious last
stanza:
Ask me no more, but let me be;
My temper’s of the tartest:
For if the moon doth draw the sea,
Why, then she is an artist.
Somehow she got the reputation of being an indifferent poet, but that
was considered remarkably good “for her,” and worthy of being
immortalized on the printing press which belonged to this epoch. This
was a small wooden box, at the bottom of which you set the type
backwards if you were capable of a sustained effort, and if not, anyhow.
The “forme” was then smudged over with a black roller anointed with
printer’s ink, and letters of the set type used to stick to it (like
teeth in toffee) and must be replaced if possible. Then a piece of paper
was gingerly laid on the top, a lid was fitted on, and a lever was
turned which pressed the lid (and of course the paper) against the inked
type. The lever got out of order and I think broke, so instead several
smart hammer-blows were given to the lid in order to produce the same
result. The printed paper was then taken out, and the marks of
punctuation inserted by hand, because there weren’t any commas and
colons and so forth in our fount, or because it was easier to put them
in afterwards. “E’s” had often to be left out too, and inserted
afterwards, because “e” being a common letter was not sufficiently
represented if you wanted to print a long piece like Uncle Henry’s....
Chemistry, also, among the Arts and Sciences claimed our attention,
especially Maggie’s (when she was not too busy about guinea-pigs) and
mine. The highest feat that we attained to, and that wanted a lot of
stirring, was to dissolve a threepenny-piece in nitric acid. Then there
was photography; I think a godfather gave me a camera, and we made our
own wet plates which was very difficult, and began with pouring
collodion (was it collodion?) smoothly over a piece of glass. Then
nitrate of silver--we might have used the dissolved threepenny-bit, I
suppose--must be applied. The plates usually recorded nothing whatever,
but once an image remarkably like the yew tree outside the nursery
window did certainly appear there. Arthur began collecting butterflies
and moths, which eventually became a very important asset to a museum
which now overflowed into all our bedrooms. There was an extraordinary
abundance of clouded yellows (_Colias Edusa_, and why do I remember
that?) one year and he used to return, profusely perspiring, with
captives in chip boxes, to which Maggie and I were anæsthetists, for
Nellie took no part in this collection, as she objected to killing
butterflies.
Small strips of blotting-paper--this was our procedure--were taken, and
moons of chloroform, quite similar to the eau-de-Cologne moons, were
made on them from an unstoppered bottle of chloroform. These were
inserted in the chip boxes while Arthur, the executioner, got the oxalic
acid and a nib. With this lethal weapon he speared their unconscious
thoraxes, and out came the setting-boards. Nocturnal expeditions for
purposes of “sugaring” tree-trunks were even more exciting. We mixed
beer and sugar, heating them together, and at dusk pasted trees in the
garden with the compound which Watch found so delicious that if the jug
containing it was left on the ground for a moment, he began lapping it
up. On such sugaring nights I was allowed to sit up later than usual,
and about ten o’clock the excited procession again started with more
chip boxes, and a dark lantern, which was turned on to the sugared
patches. There were the bright-eyed creatures of the night, drunkenly
feasting, and Arthur enriched his pill-boxes with Silver Y and an
occasional Golden Y, and rejected the Yellow Underwing, and grew taut
over the Crimson Underwing, while I carried a butterfly net, and swooped
with it at wandering moths which were attracted by the unveiled lantern
carried by Maggie, and Watch wagged his tail and licked up gratefully
the droppings from the sugared tree and any moths that might be on them.
And then Beth would come out and say that “my Mamma” said that I must go
to bed at once, and I usually didn’t. O happy nights!
I think every day in those holidays must have lasted a week, and every
month a year, for when I consider it, we surely spent the whole
afternoons in playing “Pirates” in the garden. Theoretically now, as
well as practically then, I believe that “Pirates,” a game evolved by
the family generally, and speedily brought to its perfect and
stereotyped form, was the best sporting invention, requiring no material
implements, of modern time. What powers of the mind, what refinements of
cunning, compared to which deer-stalking is mere child’s play, were
brought into action! For here we were up against each other’s wits, and
awful were the results of any psychological mistake. I must describe
that game for the benefit of families of energetic children who like
thinking and running and scoring off each other.
At the top of the garden there was a summer-house, and that of course
was “home.” There was a lateral laurel hedge to the left of it which
screened a path that led by the copse outside the nursery windows, and
communicated by means of a garden door with the abysses of the stable
copse, and the stable yard. The henyard, an outlying piece of kitchen
garden, and the other copse, excellent hiding-places in themselves, were
outside the range of pirates, and the touch-line, so to speak, beyond
which neither pirates nor trophy-seekers might go passed on the hither
side of these. Straight in front of “home” was an open space, safe in
itself but hedged in with peril, for there were climbable trees, from
which a pirate might almost drop on your head, and thickets. To the
right was a most dangerous door, because the latch was stiff and if you
were pursued from outside by the pirate you were almost bound to be
caught before you could kick it open. In the middle distance, straight
ahead were beehives; beyond, kitchen garden and orchard. Never was there
anything so trappy.
So much for the theatre: the _dramatis personæ_ were five (occasionally
six when my mother played, once seven when my father played), and of
this number there were chosen in rotation two pirates, but my father and
mother, of course, were never pirates, because they would not have had a
chance, as you will see. The pirates, being chosen, went away together,
and were given five minutes law to hide wherever they chose within the
assigned limits. During these five minutes a captain was chosen, from
among the blockade runners, who directed his side as to what trophy each
of them was to bring from his cruise. One had, for instance, to bring
back a croquet hoop from the lawn, another an apple from the third tree
in the orchard, another an ivy-leaf from the stable-yard. With their
trophies in their hands they had to return in safety to the summer-house
without being caught by a pirate.
So far all is simple, but now there comes in the great point of the
game. _No pirate could catch you, until you had your trophy, whatever it
was, about you._ Thus if your trophy was the curry-brush, you might (and
did) if you were seen by a pirate and knew it, hastily pluck up a
croquet hoop and begin running. Then the pirate, supposing that this was
your trophy, ran like mad after you, and when he caught you, you merely
assured him that the croquet hoop wasn’t your trophy. That was a score,
it also winded the pirate a little, and perhaps Nellie, going cautiously
towards the croquet-lawn where her real mission was, would have observed
this, and plucking up a croquet hoop (which was her true trophy) begin
to run. On which the slightly winded pirate would leave you and run
after Nellie, who generally screamed, thus giving away the fact that she
had her trophy. Meantime you would proceed with caution towards the
stable-yard, seize up a curry-brush and instantly hear a crash from the
copse and find the second pirate in pursuit. Even as deep called unto
deep the pirates would then shout to each other, and though you thought
you could get away from one, the other, having captured Nellie, would
appear in front of you....
There were infinite psychological problems. Supposing your trophy had
been an apple, you would, if you were very cunning, put it in your
pocket, and continue a pleasant stroll, without hurry, more or less in
the direction of “home.” Then if a fast pirate like Arthur sighted you,
you would not run away at all, but ask him sarcastically if he had
caught anybody yet. There was a good chance that he would think you had
not yet got your trophy and would continue to follow you, till he saw
another blockade runner looking guilty. On the other hand, he might
conceivably suspect you had it already and clap an awful hand on your
shoulder, and say, “Caught.” But probably he preferred to watch you, for
that made more sport, and then you would suddenly sprint for home, while
he was off his guard. There was a bay tree round which a skilful dodger
could score off a heavier and faster craft, but under no circumstances
might you jump over flower-beds, because that led to running through
them instead, which was ruinous to petunias.
In the same summer-house which was “home,” we also held a mystical
“Chapter,” of which Arthur was warden, Nellie, Maggie and myself,
sub-warden, secretary and treasurer, and Hugh was Henchman. The word
“Chapter” was no doubt of Cathedral origin, and denoted a ceremonious
meeting. We all subscribed to the funds of the Chapter (my mother, who
was an honorary member, subscribed most) and the money was spent in
official salaries, and in providing decorations, chains and crosses and
ribands for the officials. The largest salary, which I think was half a
crown, was drawn by Arthur as warden; he also wore the most magnificent
jewel, while Hugh, the menial, drew but the salary of one penny, and had
a very poor gaud to console himself with. As Henchman, his duty was
chiefly to run errands for the rest of the Chapter, to summon my mother
when she was allowed to appear, to kill wasps, and to fetch the warden’s
straw hat. He was the only member of the Chapter who dared to dispute
the will of the warden, and was known to exclaim, “Why shouldn’t Fred?”
(the treasurer) when he was tired of running about. Even more subversive
of canonical discipline was his assertion one day that he would not be a
member of any more societies, in which he was only deputy
sub-sub-bootboy. But I secretly (though treasurer) rather sympathized
with him, for I considered then, and consider still, that the Chapter
was rather a soft job for Arthur. It is true that he invented it, that
he covered our symbols of office with sealing-wax lacquer--what has
happened to sealing-wax lacquer all these years?--and that he wrote out
in exquisite black-letter hand the patents whereby we held office,
signed by himself, but a salary of half a crown was excessive. At the
meetings we had to present these patents to him before we took our
seats, and then had a short formal conversation in which we were
“Brother Sub-warden, Brother Secretary” and so forth, and read the
minutes of the last meeting, and when the presence of the Honorary
Member was requested, Brother Henchman had to go to find her. Donations
were made, and salaries were paid, but I am confident that nothing else
happened. The Chapter was then adjourned; the orders were put back in a
box, and we played pirates....
And yet though we played Pirates all day, and collected clouded yellows
all day, and printed the most exquisite poems as well as writing them,
and held Chapters, and did a certain amount of holiday-task, and rode
with my father, and drove with my mother, there was always time for
other excitements. There was bathing in the Fal, there were picnics at
Perran, especially when a south-west gale had been blowing, and from
seven miles inland there was audible the thump of Atlantic waves on that
bleak beach. Then in Truro itself there were great things to be done,
for the volcanic energy of my father had soon kindled the county into
pouring out money for the erection of a new Cathedral, the first that
had been built in England since the time of the Reformation. St. Mary’s
Church was the site of it, and to-day an aisle of St. Mary’s (the rest
of a wonderfully hideous church being demolished) forms the baptistery
of the Cathedral. The ground was cleared and foundations were dug, and
slowly the great stately building began to rise flower-like from the
barren soil. I do not suppose that any of us cared independently two
straws about a Cathedral, but to go down there with my father, and hear
him talk to Mr. Bubb, the Clerk of the Works, infected us with his noble
zeal, and the rising walls got pleasingly confused with the rebuilding
of the temple by Nehemiah, and the vision of the New Jerusalem. Hugh, I
am certain, was allowed to lay a stone himself, and Mr. Bubb presented
him with the trowel and mallet with which he had laid it. Or did we all
lay stones? I seem to hear my father say in an awestruck voice, “There,
you have helped to build Truro Cathedral!” but I am not sure whether
that was said to me or not, and my uncertainty is the measure, I am
afraid, of the impression that the building of the Cathedral really made
on me....
I wonder if it could have been otherwise, and with regret I do not see
how it could. As his own childish records show, my father at my age then
was a zealous ecclesiastic, for did he not when ripely eleven obtain the
use in his mother’s house of an empty room, which he converted into an
oratory? There was an altar there, and it was hung with rubbings he had
made from brasses in churches. This piece of childish piety was
certainly natural to him, and as certainly there was no kind of
priggishness in it, for he set a booby-trap over the door, so that his
sisters should not be able to enter “his” oratory in his absence without
being detected. He did not want his sisters praying there: and the
booby-trap over the chapel door was certainly an admirable device to
keep them out. But in none of us, nor indeed in my mother, was there
implanted an ecclesiastical mind, not even in Hugh. He took orders it is
true, in the English Church, and subsequently the Catholic Church
claimed him, and to it and its service he gave his whole love and
energy. But the ecclesiastical mind in him was a later development, for
it must be remembered that before taking orders at all he had tried and
failed to get into the Indian Civil Service. (He and I, at that time,
used to dress up in nightshirts, with trousers over our shoulders to
represent stoles, and celebrate the “rite of the Silver Cow” in our
sitting-room at Addington. I feel sure that there was not any solid
profanity in it: we but parodied, and that with great amusement, the
genuflexions, the bobbings and bowings, the waving of a censer,
considered merely as ridiculous pieces of ritual, but such a rite could
not be held indicative of a reverent attitude towards ritual as such.)
But my father’s mind, even as a child, was strongly ecclesiastical; only
his children did not share it, nor did my mother. Of all men and women
that I have ever known, she was the most deeply religious in her
realization of the pervading presence of God, but the garb, the
habiliments of her religion were not the same as my father’s. To him the
Church and its ceremonies were a natural self-expression, and in that he
gorgeously clothed his love of God. To none of us was such expression
natural, and thus his enthusiasms though they infected us to some extent
were things caught from him, not cathedraically developed. That he
missed this in all of us, I think could not be helped, but I do not
think, at that time at any rate, that he missed it much, for he was
Elijah in the whirlwind of his enthusiasms, and caught us all up, as in
the fringes of a dust-cloud, to subside again when he had passed.
What estranged was my continued fear of him, which now yields easily to
analysis and dispersal, but was in those days regarded by me merely as
an instinct, as natural and as incontrovertible as hunger or thirst. I
understood neither him nor any part of him. I did not grasp the fact
that the root in him as regards his children was his love for them, and
that it was his love and nothing else that, at bottom, was accountable
for his quickness in putting his finger on a fault and his sternness in
rebuke. It was out of his love that he regarded himself so strictly as
responsible for our mental and moral education, and what I thought his
readiness to blame was only the watchfulness of it. For instance, if, as
I so well specifically remember, I appeared with an umbrella huddled up
anyhow in its confining elastic, he saw in that a tendency towards
slovenliness, and he made, in the fervency of his wish that I should not
grow up to be of slovenly habit, no allowance for the natural frailty of
tender years. Trivial carelessness and unpunctuality in the same way
were pounced upon with a severity that altogether over-brimmed the cup
of the occasion; he saw in them (and his love hastened to correct)
instances of a dangerous tendency. In consequence he brought great and
formidable guns to bear on small faults, which could just as efficiently
have been visited with a light instead of a heavy hand. Sometimes, too,
he was utterly wrong in his interpretation of our motives, and this gave
us a sense of injustice; etchingly recorded on my memory, for instance,
is a Sunday afternoon walk when Maggie and I pranced and ran ahead, from
the mere exuberance, as far as I can judge, produced by a heavy meal and
a fine day. But my father put the gloomiest interpretation on our
antics, telling us that we were behaving thus in order to excite the
admiration of passers-by at our agility. “You are saying to yourselves,
‘I am Hercules, I am Diana,’” he witheringly observed; whereas, nothing
was farther from our thoughts. But it was unthinkable to argue the
point, to assure him that no similitude of that kind had ever suggested
itself. The only course was to walk soberly and sedately instead of
running. And since the lives of young children, especially if they are
at all vividly inclined, are a chessboard of small faults, this fear of
the rebuke, in the absence of comprehension of its root-cause, became a
constant anxiety to us, making us mere smooth-faced, blue-eyed dolls in
his presence, with set fixed movements and expressions; and when
released from it, we scampered off as if from an examination under a
magnifying-glass.
I do not mean to convey the idea that my father was continually pulling
us up, for nothing is further from the truth. Continually we played to
him, and he danced the most fascinating measure; continually he played
to us, and our dancing strove to keep time with his enchanting airs. He
could render us speechless with laughter at his inimitable mirth, or
breathless with suspense at his stories. But all the time there was this
sense that at any moment the mirth might cease, and that a formidable
rebuke might be visited on an offence that we had no idea we had
committed. But it was never any joy in fault-finding that prompted it:
the real cause was the watchfulness and responsibility of his love. How
often our fear was ill-founded, passes enumeration, but one way or
another, it had become a habit with all of us, except perhaps Nellie,
for she, out of a remarkable faculty of not knowing at all what fear
meant (except when playing Pirates) arrived at a much completer
comprehension of my father than any of us.
Still less did the rest of us understand those fits of black depression
which from time to time assailed and overwhelmed my father, not grasping
the fact that when they were on him, he really ceased to be himself, and
was under a sort of obsession. They were, I imagine, as purely physical
as a cold in the head or an ache of indigestion, but during the two or
three days that they lasted he was utterly unapproachable. He would sit
through a meal, or take us out for a walk in a silence which if broken
at all, was broken only by blame or irony. If we spoke to him, there
would be no reply; if, under the intolerable heaviness we were silent,
he would ask if there was nothing that interested us which he was worthy
of hearing.... And all the time, as we knew later, he was struggling
with this demoniacal load, longing to be rid of it, yearning to burst
out of it, but possessed by it to the point of helplessness. While the
fit was on him, and he was in this abnormal state, the most innocent of
words and actions would evoke a formidable censure, and I suspect that
three-quarters of our fear for him were derived from our belief that
these attacks were a part of him, always there, and always liable to
come into play. That was an entire mistake, though it was a natural one.
As it was, these black fits were not incapsulated by us, but suffered to
mingle with and make part of our estimate of him. That we should so have
feared him, that we should so have made ourselves unnatural and formal
with him, when all the time his love was streaming out towards us, makes
a pathos so pitiful that I cannot bear to think of it. But there it was,
and long it lasted, and all the time I never got a true perspective of
him. We saw ourselves as a nervous row of pupils before a schoolmaster,
and all the time it was his very strictness which was a manifestation of
his love, and his love hungered for ours. Our troubles and our joys, the
worst of us and the best of us, went like homing pigeons to my mother,
and she gave the same welcome to the one and to the other, and for ever
treasured both.
The relationship of each one of us to her was unique as regards any
other of us, for each of us found exactly and precisely what we desired,
though how often we did not know what we desired till she gave it us!
All her life she was wiser and younger than anybody else, limpid and
bubbling, and from the first days when any of us began to understand
what she was, she never had any blank surprises in store, for it was
always quite obvious that she would understand and appreciate, and would
never condone but always forgive. Never from first to last did I repent
having opened my heart to her; never did I not repent having shut it. I
do not think she ever asked any of us for a confidence, but the
knowledge, conveyed in the very atmosphere of her, that she was ready,
toeing the mark, so to speak, to run to us when the pistol fired, gave
her that particular precision of sympathy. Did she scold us? Why, of
course; but how her precious balms healed our heads!
Love is a stern business, and about hers there was never the faintest
trace of sentimentality. She loved with a swift eagerness, and she had
no warm slops to comfort us. But there was always the compliment of
consultation. “Now you’ve behaved very badly indeed,” she would say,
“Don’t you think the first thing to do is to say you’re sorry?”... And
then with that inimitable breaking of her smile, “Oh, my dear, I _am_
glad you told me.”... And did ever any other mother at the age of
forty run so violently in playing that strenuous game called, “Three
knights a-riding,” that she broke a sinew in her leg? Mine did. And did
ever a mother so encourage an extremely naughty boy of thirteen after a
really dreadful interview with his father, as by giving him a prayer
book and saying, “I shall write in it ‘Wherewithal shall a young man
cleanse his ways?’” Being called a young man at the age of thirteen was
enough in itself to make him realize what an exceedingly tiresome child
he had been. Tact! Beth used to call it “tac,” and when I got my shoes
wet through three times a day, or fell backwards into one of those
Cornish streams she said, “Eh, Master Fred, but you’ve got no tac’!” No
more I had.