That is the last I shall tell of Bladesover. The dropscene falls on
that, and it comes no more as an actual presence into this novel. I did
indeed go back there once again, but under circumstances quite
immaterial to my story. But in a sense Bladesover has never left me; it
is, as I said at the outset, one of those dominant explanatory
impressions that make the framework of my mind. Bladesover illuminates
England; it has become all that is spacious, dignified pretentious, and
truly conservative in English life. It is my social datum. That is why
I have drawn it here on so large a scale.
When I came back at last to the real Bladesover on an inconsequent
visit, everything was far smaller than I could have supposed possible.
It was as though everything had shivered and shrivelled a little at the
Lichtenstein touch. The harp was still in the saloon, but there was a
different grand piano with a painted lid and a metrostyle pianola, and
an extraordinary quantity of artistic litter and _bric-à-brac_
scattered about. There was the trail of the Bond Street showroom over
it all. The furniture was still under chintz, but it wasn’t the same
sort of chintz although it pretended to be, and the lustre-dangling
chandeliers had passed away. Lady Lichtenstein’s books replaced the
brown volumes I had browsed among—they were mostly presentation copies
of contemporary novels and the _National Review_ and the _Empire
Review_, and the _Nineteenth Century and After_ jostled current books
on the tables—English new books in gaudy catchpenny “artistic” covers,
French and Italian novels in yellow, German art handbooks of almost
incredible ugliness. There were abundant evidences that her ladyship
was playing with the Keltic renascence, and a great number of ugly cats
made of china—she “collected” china and stoneware cats—stood about
everywhere—in all colours, in all kinds of deliberately comic, highly
glazed distortion.
It is nonsense to pretend that finance makes any better aristocrats
than rent. Nothing can make an aristocrat but pride, knowledge,
training, and the sword. These people were no improvement on the Drews,
none whatever. There was no effect of a beneficial replacement of
passive unintelligent people by active intelligent ones. One felt that
a smaller but more enterprising and intensely undignified variety of
stupidity had replaced the large dullness of the old gentry, and that
was all. Bladesover, I thought, had undergone just the same change
between the seventies and the new century that had overtaken the dear
old _Times_, and heaven knows how much more of the decorous British
fabric. These Lichtensteins and their like seem to have no promise in
them at all of any fresh vitality for the kingdom. I do not believe in
their intelligence or their power—they have nothing new about them at
all, nothing creative nor rejuvenescent, no more than a disorderly
instinct of acquisition; and the prevalence of them and their kind is
but a phase in the broad slow decay of the great social organism of
England. They could not have made Bladesover they cannot replace it;
they just happen to break out over it—saprophytically.
Well—that was my last impression of Bladesover.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE WIMBLEHURST APPRENTICESHIP
I
So far as I can remember now, except for that one emotional phase by
the graveside, I passed through all these experiences rather callously.
I had already, with the facility of youth, changed my world, ceased to
think at all of the old school routine and put Bladesover aside for
digestion at a latter stage. I took up my new world in Wimblehurst with
the chemist’s shop as its hub, set to work at Latin and materia medica,
and concentrated upon the present with all my heart. Wimblehurst is an
exceptionally quiet and grey Sussex town rare among south of England
towns in being largely built of stone. I found something very agreeable
and picturesque in its clean cobbled streets, its odd turnings and
abrupt corners; and in the pleasant park that crowds up one side of the
town. The whole place is under the Eastry dominion and it was the
Eastry influence and dignity that kept its railway station a mile and
three-quarters away. Eastry House is so close that it dominates the
whole; one goes across the marketplace (with its old lock-up and
stocks), past the great pre-reformation church, a fine grey shell, like
some empty skull from which the life has fled, and there at once are
the huge wrought-iron gates, and one peeps through them to see the
façade of this place, very white and large and fine, down a long avenue
of yews. Eastry was far greater than Bladesover and an altogether
completer example of the eighteenth century system. It ruled not two
villages, but a borough, that had sent its sons and cousins to
parliament almost as a matter of right so long as its franchise
endured. Every one was in the system, every one—except my uncle. He
stood out and complained.
My uncle was the first real breach I found in the great front of
Bladesover the world had presented me, for Chatham was not so much a
breach as a confirmation. But my uncle had no respect for Bladesover
and Eastry—none whatever. He did not believe in them. He was blind even
to what they were. He propounded strange phrases about them, he
exfoliated and wagged about novel and incredible ideas.
“This place,” said my uncle, surveying it from his open doorway in the
dignified stillness of a summer afternoon, “wants Waking Up!”