II

So I remember my uncle in that first phase, young, but already a little

fat, restless, fretful, garrulous, putting in my fermenting head all

sorts of discrepant ideas. Certainly he was educational....

For me the years at Wimblehurst were years of pretty active growth.

Most of my leisure and much of my time in the shop I spent in study. I

speedily mastered the modicum of Latin necessary for my qualifying

examinations, and—a little assisted by the Government Science and Art

Department classes that were held in the Grammar School—went on with my

mathematics. There were classes in physics, in chemistry, in

mathematics and machine drawing, and I took up these subjects with

considerable avidity. Exercise I got chiefly in the form of walks.

There was some cricket in the summer and football in the winter

sustained by young men’s clubs that levied a parasitic blackmail of the

big people and the sitting member, but I was never very keen at these

games. I didn’t find any very close companions among the youths of

Wimblehurst. They struck me, after my cockney schoolmates, as loutish

and slow, servile and furtive, spiteful and mean. _We_ used to swagger,

but these countrymen dragged their feet and hated an equal who didn’t;

we talked loud, but you only got the real thoughts of Wimblehurst in a

knowing undertone behind its hand. And even then they weren’t much in

the way of thoughts.

No, I didn’t like those young countrymen, and I’m no believer in the

English countryside under the Bladesover system as a breeding ground

for honourable men. One hears a frightful lot of nonsense about the

Rural Exodus and the degeneration wrought by town life upon our

population. To my mind, the English townsman, even in the slums, is

infinitely better spiritually, more courageous, more imaginative and

cleaner, than his agricultural cousin. I’ve seen them both when they

didn’t think they were being observed, and I know. There was something

about my Wimblehurst companions that disgusted me. It’s hard to define.

Heaven knows that at that cockney boarding-school at Goudhurst we were

coarse enough; the Wimblehurst youngsters had neither words nor courage

for the sort of thing we used to do—for our bad language, for example;

but, on the other hand, they displayed a sort of sluggish, real

lewdness, lewdness is the word—a baseness of attitude. Whatever we

exiled urbans did at Goudhurst was touched with something, however

coarse, of romantic imagination. We had read the _Boys of England_, and

told each other stories. In the English countryside there are no books

at all, no songs, no drama, no valiant sin even; all these things have

never come or they were taken away and hidden generations ago, and the

imagination aborts and bestialises. That, I think, is where the real

difference against the English rural man lies. It is because I know

this that I do not share in the common repinings because our

countryside is being depopulated, because our population is passing

through the furnace of the towns. They starve, they suffer, no doubt,

but they come out of it hardened, they come out of it with souls.

Of an evening the Wimblehurst blade, shiny-faced from a wash and with

some loud finery, a coloured waistcoat or a vivid tie, would betake

himself to the Eastry Arms billiard-room, or to the bar parlour of some

minor pub where nap could be played. One soon sickened of his slow

knowingness, the cunning observation of his deadened eyes, his idea of

a “good story,” always, always told in undertones, poor dirty worm! his

shrewd, elaborate maneuvers for some petty advantage, a drink to the

good or such-like deal. There rises before my eyes as I write, young

Hopley Dodd, the son of the Wimblehurst auctioneer, the pride of

Wimblehurst, its finest flower, with his fur waistcoat and his bulldog

pipe, his riding breeches—he had no horse—and his gaiters, as he used

to sit, leaning forward and watching the billiard-table from under the

brim of his artfully tilted hat. A half-dozen phrases constituted his

conversation: “hard lines!” he used to say, and “Good baazness,” in a

bass bleat. Moreover, he had a long slow whistle that was esteemed the

very cream of humorous comment. Night after night he was there.

Also you knew he would not understand that _I_ could play billiards,

and regarded every stroke I made as a fluke. For a beginner I didn’t

play so badly, I thought. I’m not so sure now; that was my opinion at

the time. But young Dodd’s scepticism and the “good baazness” finally

cured me of my disposition to frequent the Eastry Arms, and so these

noises had their value in my world.

I made no friends among the young men of the place at all, and though I

was entering upon adolescence I have no love-affair to tell of here.

Not that I was not waking up to that aspect of life in my middle teens

I did, indeed, in various slightly informal ways scrape acquaintance

with casual Wimblehurst girls; with a little dressmaker’s apprentice I

got upon shyly speaking terms, and a pupil teacher in the National

School went further and was “talked about” in connection with me but I

was not by any means touched by any reality of passion for either of

these young people; love—love as yet came to me only in my dreams. I

only kissed these girls once or twice. They rather disconcerted than

developed those dreams. They were so clearly not “it.” I shall have

much to say of love in this story, but I may break it to the reader now

that it is my role to be a rather ineffectual lover. Desire I knew well

enough—indeed, too well; but love I have been shy of. In all my early

enterprises in the war of the sexes, I was torn between the urgency of

the body and a habit of romantic fantasy that wanted every phase of the

adventure to be generous and beautiful. And I had a curiously haunting

memory of Beatrice, of her kisses in the bracken and her kiss upon the

wall, that somehow pitched the standard too high for Wimblehurst’s

opportunities. I will not deny I did in a boyish way attempt a shy,

rude adventure or so in love-making at Wimblehurst; but through these

various influences, I didn’t bring things off to any extent at all. I

left behind me no devastating memories, no splendid reputation. I came

away at last, still inexperienced and a little thwarted, with only a

natural growth of interest and desire in sexual things.

If I fell in love with any one in Wimblehurst it was with my aunt. She

treated me with a kindliness that was only half maternal—she petted my

books, she knew about my certificates, she made fun of me in a way that

stirred my heart to her. Quite unconsciously I grew fond of her....

My adolescent years at Wimblehurst were on the whole laborious,

uneventful years that began in short jackets and left me in many ways

nearly a man, years so uneventful that the Calculus of Variations is

associated with one winter, and an examination in Physics for Science

and Art department Honours marks an epoch. Many divergent impulses

stirred within me, but the master impulse was a grave young disposition

to work and learn and thereby in some not very clearly defined way get

out of the Wimblehurst world into which I had fallen. I wrote with some

frequency to Ewart, self-conscious, but, as I remember them, not

intelligent letters, dated in Latin and with lapses into Latin

quotation that roused Ewart to parody. There was something about me in

those days more than a little priggish. But it was, to do myself

justice, something more than the petty pride of learning. I had a very

grave sense of discipline and preparation that I am not ashamed at all

to remember. I was serious. More serious than I am at the present time.

More serious, indeed, than any adult seems to be. I was capable then of

efforts—of nobilities.... They are beyond me now. I don’t see why, at

forty, I shouldn’t confess I respect my own youth. I had dropped being

a boy quite abruptly. I thought I was presently to go out into a larger

and quite important world and do significant things there. I thought I

was destined to do something definite to a world that had a definite

purpose. I did not understand then, as I do now, that life was to

consist largely in the world’s doing things to me. Young people never

do seem to understand that aspect of things. And, as I say, among my

educational influences my uncle, all unsuspected, played a leading

part, and perhaps among other things gave my discontent with

Wimblehurst, my desire to get away from that clean and picturesque

emptiness, a form and expression that helped to emphasise it. In a way

that definition made me patient. “Presently I shall get to London,” I

said, echoing him.

I remember him now as talking, always talking, in those days. He talked

to me of theology, he talked of politics, of the wonders of science and

the marvels of art, of the passions and the affections, of the

immortality of the soul and the peculiar actions of drugs; but

predominantly and constantly he talked of getting on, of enterprises,

of inventions and great fortunes, of Rothschilds, silver kings,

Vanderbilts, Goulds, flotations, realisations and the marvelous ways of

Chance with men—in all localities, that is to say, that are not

absolutely sunken to the level of Cold Mutton Fat.

When I think of those early talks, I figure him always in one of three

positions. Either we were in the dispensing lair behind a high barrier,

he pounding up things in a mortar perhaps, and I rolling pill-stuff

into long rolls and cutting it up with a sort of broad, fluted knife,

or he stood looking out of the shop door against the case of sponges

and spray-diffusers, while I surveyed him from behind the counter, or

he leant against the little drawers behind the counter, and I hovered

dusting in front. The thought of those early days brings back to my

nostrils the faint smell of scent that was always in the air, marbled

now with streaks of this drug and now of that, and to my eyes the rows

of jejune glass bottles with gold labels, mirror-reflected, that stood

behind him. My aunt, I remember, used sometimes to come into the shop

in a state of aggressive sprightliness, a sort of connubial ragging

expedition, and get much fun over the abbreviated Latinity of those

gilt inscriptions. “Ol Amjig, George,” she would read derisively, “and

he pretends it’s almond oil! Snap!—and that’s mustard. Did you _ever_,

George?

“Look at him, George, looking dignified. I’d like to put an old label

on to _him_ round the middle like his bottles are, with Ol Pondo on it.

That’s Latin for Impostor, George _must_ be. He’d look lovely with a

stopper.”

“_You_ want a stopper,” said my uncle, projecting his face....

My aunt, dear soul, was in those days quite thin and slender, with a

delicate rosebud completion and a disposition to connubial badinage, to

a sort of gentle skylarking. There was a silvery ghost of lisping in

her speech. She was a great humourist, and as the constraint of my

presence at meals wore off, I became more and more aware of a filmy but

extensive net of nonsense she had woven about her domestic relations

until it had become the reality of her life. She affected a derisive

attitude to the world at large and applied the epithet “old” to more

things than I have ever heard linked to it before or since. “Here’s the

old news-paper,” she used to say—to my uncle. “Now don’t go and get it

in the butter, you silly old Sardine!”

“What’s the day of the week, Susan?” my uncle would ask.

“Old Monday, Sossidge,” she would say, and add, “I got all my Old

Washing to do. Don’t I _know_ it!”...

She had evidently been the wit and joy of a large circle of

schoolfellows, and this style had become a second nature with her. It

made her very delightful to me in that quiet place. Her customary walk

even had a sort of hello! in it. Her chief preoccupation in life was, I

believe, to make my uncle laugh, and when by some new nickname, some

new quaintness or absurdity, she achieved that end, she was, behind a

mask of sober amazement, the happiest woman on earth. My uncle’s laugh

when it did come, I must admit was, as Baedeker says, “rewarding.” It

began with gusty blowings and snortings, and opened into a clear “Ha

ha!” but in fullest development it included, in those youthful days,

falling about anyhow and doubling up tightly, and whackings of the

stomach, and tears and cries of anguish. I never in my life heard my

uncle laugh to his maximum except at her; he was commonly too much in

earnest for that, and he didn’t laugh much at all, to my knowledge,

after those early years. Also she threw things at him to an enormous

extent in her resolve to keep things lively in spite of Wimblehurst;

sponges out of stock she threw, cushions, balls of paper, clean

washing, bread; and once up the yard when they thought that I and the

errand boy and the diminutive maid of all work were safely out of the

way, she smashed a boxful of eight-ounce bottles I had left to drain,

assaulting my uncle with a new soft broom. Sometimes she would shy

things at me—but not often. There seemed always laughter round and

about her—all three of us would share hysterics at times—and on one

occasion the two of them came home from church shockingly ashamed of

themselves, because of a storm of mirth during the sermon. The vicar,

it seems, had tried to blow his nose with a black glove as well as the

customary pocket-handkerchief. And afterwards she had picked up her own

glove by the finger, and looking innocently but intently sideways, had

suddenly by this simple expedient exploded my uncle altogether. We had

it all over again at dinner.

“But it shows you,” cried my uncle, suddenly becoming grave, “what

Wimblehurst is, to have us all laughing at a little thing like that! We

weren’t the only ones that giggled. Not by any means! And, Lord! it

_was_ funny!”

Socially, my uncle and aunt were almost completely isolated. In places

like Wimblehurst the tradesmen’s lives always are isolated socially,

all of them, unless they have a sister or a bosom friend among the

other wives, but the husbands met in various bar-parlours or in the

billiard-room of the Eastry Arms. But my uncle, for the most part,

spent his evenings at home. When first he arrived in Wimblehurst I

think he had spread his effect of abounding ideas and enterprise rather

too aggressively; and Wimblehurst, after a temporary subjugation, had

rebelled and done its best to make a butt of him. His appearance in a

public-house led to a pause in any conversation that was going on.

“Come to tell us about everything, Mr. Pond’revo?” some one would say

politely.

“You wait,” my uncle used to answer, disconcerted, and sulk for the

rest of his visit.

Or some one with an immense air of innocence would remark to the world

generally, “They’re talkin’ of rebuildin’ Wimblehurst all over again,

I’m told. Anybody heard anything of it? Going to make it a reg’lar

smartgoin’, enterprisin’ place—kind of Crystal Pallas.”

“Earthquake and a pestilence before you get _that_,” my uncle would

mutter, to the infinite delight of every one, and add something

inaudible about “Cold Mutton Fat.”...