So I went into exile in the dog-cart to Redwood station, with Jukes the
coachman, coldly silent, driving me, and all my personal belongings in
a small American cloth portmanteau behind.
I felt I had much to embitter me; the game had and the beginnings of
fairness by any standards I knew.... But the thing that embittered me
most was that the Honourable Beatrice Normandy should have repudiated
and fled from me as though I was some sort of leper, and not even have
taken a chance or so, to give me a good-bye. She might have done that
anyhow! Supposing I had told on her! But the son of a servant counts as
a servant. She had forgotten and now remembered.
I solaced myself with some extraordinary dream of coming back to
Bladesover, stern, powerful, after the fashion of Coriolanus. I do not
recall the details, but I have no doubt I displayed great
magnanimity...
Well, anyhow I never said I was sorry for pounding young Garvell, and I
am not sorry to this day.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
OF MY LAUNCH INTO THE WORLD AND THE LAST I SAW OF BLADESOVER
I
When I was thus banished from Bladesover House, as it was then thought
for good and all, I was sent by my mother in a vindictive spirit, first
to her cousin Nicodemus Frapp, and then, as a fully indentured
apprentice, to my uncle Ponderevo.
I ran away from the care of my cousin Nicodemus back to Bladesover
House.
My cousin Nicodemus Frapp was a baker in a back street—a slum
rather—just off that miserable narrow mean high road that threads those
exquisite beads, Rochester and Chatham. He was, I must admit, a shock
to me, much dominated by a young, plump, prolific, malingering wife; a
bent, slow-moving, unwilling dark man with flour in his hair and
eyelashes, in the lines of his face and the seams of his coat. I’ve
never had a chance to correct my early impression of him, and he still
remains an almost dreadful memory, a sort of caricature of incompetent
simplicity. As I remember him, indeed, he presented the servile
tradition perfected. He had no pride in his person; fine clothes and
dressing up wasn’t “for the likes of” him, so that he got his wife, who
was no artist at it, to cut his black hair at irregular intervals, and
let his nails become disagreeable to the fastidious eye; he had no
pride in his business nor any initiative; his only virtues were not
doing certain things and hard work. “Your uncle,” said my mother—all
grown-up cousins were uncles by courtesy among the Victorian
middle-class—“isn’t much to look at or talk to, but he’s a Good
Hard-Working Man.” There was a sort of base honourableness about toil,
however needless, in that system of inversion. Another point of honour
was to rise at or before dawn, and then laboriously muddle about.
It was very distinctly impressed on my mind that the Good Hard-Working
Man would have thought it “fal-lallish” to own a pocket handkerchief.
Poor old Frapp—dirty and crushed by, product of, Bladesover’s
magnificence! He made no fight against the world at all, he was
floundering in small debts that were not so small but that finally they
overwhelmed him, whenever there was occasion for any exertion his wife
fell back upon pains and her “condition,” and God sent them many
children, most of whom died, and so, by their coming and going, gave a
double exercise in the virtues of submission.
Resignation to God’s will was the common device of these people in the
face of every duty and every emergency. There were no books in the
house; I doubt if either of them had retained the capacity for reading
consecutively for more than a minute or so, and it was with amazement
that day after day, over and above stale bread, one beheld food and
again more food amidst the litter that held permanent session on the
living-room table.
One might have doubted if either of them felt discomfort in this dusty
darkness of existence, if it was not that they did visibly seek
consolation. They sought this and found it of a Sunday, not in strong
drink and raving, but in imaginary draughts of blood. They met with
twenty or thirty other darkened and unclean people, all dressed in
dingy colours that would not show the dirt, in a little brick-built
chapel equipped with a spavined roarer of a harmonium, and there
solaced their minds on the thought that all that was fair and free in
life, all that struggled, all that planned and made, all pride and
beauty and honour, all fine and enjoyable things, were irrevocably
damned to everlasting torments. They were the self-appointed confidants
of God’s mockery of his own creation. So at any rate they stick in my
mind. Vaguer, and yet hardly less agreeable than this cosmic jest, this
coming “Yah, clever!” and general serving out and “showing up” of the
lucky, the bold, and the cheerful, was their own predestination to
Glory.
“There is a Fountain, filled with Blood
Drawn from Emmanuel’s Veins,”
so they sang. I hear the drone and wheeze of that hymn now. I hated
them with the bitter uncharitable condemnation of boyhood, and a twinge
of that hate comes back to me. As I write the words, the sounds and
then the scene return, these obscure, undignified people, a fat woman
with asthma, an old Welsh milk-seller with a tumour on his bald head,
who was the intellectual leader of the sect, a huge-voiced haberdasher
with a big black beard, a white-faced, extraordinarily pregnant woman,
his wife, a spectacled rate collector with a bent back.... I hear the
talk about souls, the strange battered old phrases that were coined
ages ago in the seaports of the sun-dry Levant, of balm of Gilead and
manna in the desert, of gourds that give shade and water in a thirsty
land; I recall again the way in which at the conclusion of the service
the talk remained pious in form but became medical in substance, and
how the women got together for obstetric whisperings. I, as a boy, did
not matter, and might overhear.
If Bladesover is my key for the explanation of England, I think my
invincible persuasion that I understand Russia was engendered by the
circle of Uncle Frapp.
I slept in a dingy sheeted bed with the two elder survivors of Frapp
fecundity, and spent my week days in helping in the laborious disorder
of the shop and bakehouse, in incidental deliveries of bread and so
forth, and in parrying the probings of my uncle into my relations with
the Blood, and his confidential explanations that ten shillings a
week—which was what my mother paid him—was not enough to cover my
accommodation. He was very anxious to keep that, but also he wanted
more. There were neither books nor any seat nor corner in that house
where reading was possible, no newspaper ever brought the clash of
worldly things into its heavenward seclusion; horror of it all grew in
me daily, and whenever I could I escaped into the streets and tramped
about Chatham. The news shops appealed to me particularly. One saw
there smudgy illustrated sheets, the _Police News_ in particular, in
which vilely drawn pictures brought home to the dullest intelligence an
interminable succession of squalid crimes, women murdered and put into
boxes, buried under floors, old men bludgeoned at midnight by robbers,
people thrust suddenly out of trains, happy lovers shot, vitrioled and
so forth by rivals. I got my first glimpse of the life of pleasure in
foully drawn pictures of “police raids” on this and that. Interspersed
with these sheets were others in which Sloper, the urban John Bull, had
his fling with gin bottle and obese umbrella, or the kindly empty faces
of the Royal Family appeared and reappeared, visiting this, opening
that, getting married, getting offspring, lying in state, doing
everything but anything, a wonderful, good-meaning, impenetrable race
apart.
I have never revisited Chatham; the impression it has left on my mind
is one of squalid compression, unlit by any gleam of a maturer charity.
All its effects arranged themselves as antithetical to the Bladesover
effects. They confirmed and intensified all that Bladesover suggested.
Bladesover declared itself to be the land, to be essentially England; I
have already told how its airy spaciousness, its wide dignity, seemed
to thrust village, church, and vicarage into corners, into a secondary
and conditional significance. Here one gathered the corollary of that.
Since the whole wide country of Kent was made up of contiguous
Bladesovers and for the gentlefolk, the surplus of population, all who
were not good tenants nor good labourers, Church of England, submissive
and respectful, were necessarily thrust together, jostled out of sight,
to fester as they might in this place that had the colours and even the
smells of a well-packed dustbin. They should be grateful even for that;
that, one felt, was the theory of it all.
And I loafed about this wilderness of crowded dinginess, with young,
receptive, wide-open eyes, and through the blessing (or curse) of some
fairy godmother of mine, asking and asking again: “But after all,
_why_—”
I wandered up through Rochester once, and had a glimpse of the Stour
valley above the town, all horrible with cement works and foully
smoking chimneys and rows of workmen’s cottages, minute, ugly,
uncomfortable, and grimy. So I had my first intimation of how
industrialism must live in a landlord’s land. I spent some hours, too,
in the streets that give upon the river, drawn by the spell of the sea.
But I saw barges and ships stripped of magic and mostly devoted to
cement, ice, timber, and coal. The sailors looked to me gross and
slovenly men, and the shipping struck me as clumsy, ugly, old, and
dirty. I discovered that most sails don’t fit the ships that hoist
them, and that there may be as pitiful and squalid a display of poverty
with a vessel as with a man. When I saw colliers unloading, watched the
workers in the hold filling up silly little sacks and the succession of
blackened, half-naked men that ran to and fro with these along a plank
over a thirty-foot drop into filth and mud, I was first seized with
admiration of their courage and toughness and then, “But after all,
_why_—?” and the stupid ugliness of all this waste of muscle and
endurance came home to me. Among other things it obviously wasted and
deteriorated the coal.... And I had imagined great things of the sea!
Well, anyhow, for a time that vocation was stilled.
But such impressions came into my leisure, and of that I had no excess.
Most of my time was spent doing things for Uncle Frapp, and my evenings
and nights perforce in the company of the two eldest of my cousins. He
was errand boy at an oil shop and fervently pious, and of him I saw
nothing until the evening except at meals; the other was enjoying the
midsummer holidays without any great elation; a singularly thin and
abject, stunted creature he was, whose chief liveliness was to pretend
to be a monkey, and who I am now convinced had some secret disease that
drained his vitality away. If I met him now I should think him a
pitiful little creature and be extremely sorry for him. Then I felt
only a wondering aversion. He sniffed horribly, he was tired out by a
couple of miles of loafing, he never started any conversation, and he
seemed to prefer his own company to mine. His mother, poor woman, said
he was the “thoughtful one.”
Serious trouble came suddenly out of a conversation we held in bed one
night. Some particularly pious phrase of my elder cousin’s irritated me
extremely, and I avowed outright my entire disbelief in the whole
scheme of revealed religion. I had never said a word about my doubts to
any one before, except to Ewart who had first evolved them. I had never
settled my doubts until at this moment when I spoke. But it came to me
then that the whole scheme of salvation of the Frappes was not simply
doubtful, but impossible. I fired this discovery out into the darkness
with the greatest promptitude.
My abrupt denials certainly scared my cousin amazingly.
At first they could not understand what I was saying, and when they did
I fully believe they expected an instant answer in thunderbolts and
flames. They gave me more room in the bed forthwith, and then the elder
sat up and expressed his sense of my awfulness. I was already a little
frightened at my temerity, but when he asked me categorically to unsay
what I had said, what could I do but confirm my repudiation?
“There’s no hell,” I said, “and no eternal punishment. No God would be
such a fool as that.”
My elder cousin cried aloud in horror, and the younger lay scared, but
listening. “Then you mean,” said my elder cousin, when at last he could
bring himself to argue, “you might do just as you liked?”
“If you were cad enough,” said I.
Our little voices went on interminably, and at one stage my cousin got
out of bed and made his brother do likewise, and knelt in the night
dimness and prayed at me. That I found trying, but I held out
valiantly. “Forgive him,” said my cousin, “he knows not what he
sayeth.”
“You can pray if you like,” I said, “but if you’re going to cheek me in
your prayers I draw the line.”
The last I remember of that great discussion was my cousin deploring
the fact that he “should ever sleep in the same bed with an Infidel!”
The next day he astonished me by telling the whole business to his
father. This was quite outside all my codes. Uncle Nicodemus sprang it
upon me at the midday meal.
“You been sayin’ queer things, George,” he said abruptly. “You better
mind what you’re saying.”
“What did he say, father?” said Mrs. Frapp.
“Things I couldn’t’ repeat,” said he.
“What things?” I asked hotly.
“Ask ’_im_,” said my uncle, pointing with his knife to his informant,
and making me realise the nature of my offence. My aunt looked at the
witness. “Not—?” she framed a question.
“Wuss,” said my uncle. “Blarsphemy.”
My aunt couldn’t touch another mouthful. I was already a little
troubled in my conscience by my daring, and now I began to feel the
black enormity of the course upon which I had embarked.
“I was only talking sense,” I said.
I had a still more dreadful moment when presently I met my cousin in
the brick alley behind the yard, that led back to his grocer’s shop.
“You sneak!” I said, and smacked his face hard forthwith. “Now then,”
said I.
He started back, astonished and alarmed. His eyes met mine, and I saw a
sudden gleam of resolution. He turned his other cheek to me.
“’It it,” he said. “’It it. _I’ll_ forgive you.”
I felt I had never encountered a more detestable way of evading a
licking. I shoved him against the wall and left him there, forgiving
me, and went back into the house.
“You better not speak to your cousins, George,” said my aunt, “till
you’re in a better state of mind.”
I became an outcast forthwith. At supper that night a gloomy silence
was broken by my cousin saying,
“’E ’it me for telling you, and I turned the other cheek, muvver.”
“’E’s got the evil one be’ind ’im now, a ridin’ on ’is back,” said my
aunt, to the grave discomfort of the eldest girl, who sat beside me.
After supper my uncle, in a few ill-chosen words, prayed me to repent
before I slept.
“Suppose you was took in your sleep, George,” he said; “where’d you be
then? You jest think of that me boy.” By this time I was thoroughly
miserable and frightened, and this suggestion unnerved me dreadfully
but I kept up an impenitent front. “To wake in ’ell,” said Uncle
Nicodemus, in gentle tones. “You don’t want to wake in ’ell, George,
burnin’ and screamin’ for ever, do you? You wouldn’t like that?”
He tried very hard to get me to “jest ’ave a look at the bake’ouse
fire” before I retired. “It might move you,” he said.
I was awake longest that night. My cousins slept, the sleep of faith on
either side of me. I decided I would whisper my prayers, and stopped
midway because I was ashamed, and perhaps also because I had an idea
one didn’t square God like that.
“No,” I said, with a sudden confidence, “damn me if you’re coward
enough.... But you’re not. No! You couldn’t be!”
I woke my cousins up with emphatic digs, and told them as much,
triumphantly, and went very peacefully to sleep with my act of faith
accomplished.
I slept not only through that night, but for all my nights since then.
So far as any fear of Divine injustice goes, I sleep soundly, and
shall, I know, to the end of things. That declaration was an epoch in
my spiritual life.