IV

I was left, I say, as part of the lock, stock, and barrel, at

Wimblehurst with my new master, a Mr. Mantell; who plays no part in the

progress of this story except in so far as he effaced my uncle’s

traces. So soon as the freshness of this new personality faded, I began

to find Wimblehurst not only a dull but a lonely place, and to miss my

aunt Susan immensely. The advertisements of the summer terms for Cough

Linctus were removed; the bottles of coloured water—red, green, and

yellow—restored to their places; the horse announcing veterinary

medicine, which my uncle, sizzling all the while, had coloured in

careful portraiture of a Goodwood favourite, rewhitened; and I turned

myself even more resolutely than before to Latin (until the passing of

my preliminary examination enabled me to drop that), and then to

mathematics and science.

There were classes in Electricity and Magnetism at the Grammar School.

I took a little “elementary” prize in that in my first year and a medal

in my third; and in Chemistry and Human Physiology and Sound, Light and

Heat, I did well. There was also a lighter, more discursive subject

called Physiography, in which one ranged among the sciences and

encountered Geology as a process of evolution from Eozoon to Eastry

House, and Astronomy as a record of celestial movements of the most

austere and invariable integrity. I learnt out of badly-written,

condensed little text-books, and with the minimum of experiment, but

still I learnt. Only thirty years ago it was, and I remember I learnt

of the electric light as an expensive, impracticable toy, the telephone

as a curiosity, electric traction as a practical absurdity. There was

no argon, no radium, no phagocytes—at least to my knowledge, and

aluminium was a dear, infrequent metal. The fastest ships in the world

went then at nineteen knots, and no one but a lunatic here and there

ever thought it possible that men might fly.

Many things have happened since then, but the last glance I had of

Wimblehurst two years ago remarked no change whatever in its pleasant

tranquillity. They had not even built any fresh houses—at least not

actually in the town, though about the station there had been some

building. But it was a good place to do work in, for all its

quiescence. I was soon beyond the small requirements of the

Pharmaceutical Society’s examination, and as they do not permit

candidates to sit for that until one and twenty, I was presently

filling up my time and preventing my studies becoming too desultory by

making an attack upon the London University degree of Bachelor of

Science, which impressed me then as a very splendid but almost

impossible achievement. The degree in mathematics and chemistry

appealed to me as particularly congenial—albeit giddily inaccessible. I

set to work. I had presently to arrange a holiday and go to London to

matriculate, and so it was I came upon my aunt and uncle again. In many

ways that visit marked an epoch. It was my first impression of London

at all. I was then nineteen, and by a conspiracy of chances my nearest

approach to that human wilderness had been my brief visit to Chatham.

Chatham too had been my largest town. So that I got London at last with

an exceptional freshness of effect, as the sudden revelation of a whole

unsuspected other side to life.

I came to it on a dull and smoky day by the South Eastern Railway, and

our train was half an hour late, stopping and going on and stopping

again. I marked beyond Chiselhurst the growing multitude of villas, and

so came stage by stage through multiplying houses and diminishing

interspaces of market garden and dingy grass to regions of interlacing

railway lines, big factories, gasometers and wide reeking swamps of

dingy little homes, more of them and more and more. The number of these

and their dinginess and poverty increased, and here rose a great public

house and here a Board School and there a gaunt factory; and away to

the east there loomed for a time a queer, incongruous forest of masts

and spars. The congestion of houses intensified and piled up presently

into tenements; I marveled more and more at this boundless world of

dingy people; whiffs of industrial smell, of leather, of brewing,

drifted into the carriage; the sky darkened, I rumbled thunderously

over bridges, van-crowded streets, peered down on and crossed the

Thames with an abrupt eclat of sound. I got an effect of tall

warehouses, of grey water, barge crowded, of broad banks of

indescribable mud, and then I was in Cannon Street Station—a monstrous

dirty cavern with trains packed across its vast floor and more porters

standing along the platform than I had ever been in my life before. I

alighted with my portmanteau and struggled along, realising for the

first time just how small and weak I could still upon occasion feel. In

this world, I felt, an Honours medal in Electricity and magnetism

counted for nothing at all.

Afterwards I drove in a cab down a canon of rushing street between high

warehouses, and peeped up astonished at the blackened greys of Saint

Paul’s. The traffic of Cheapside—it was mostly in horse omnibuses in

those days—seemed stupendous, its roar was stupendous; I wondered where

the money came from to employ so many cabs, what industry could support

the endless jostling stream of silk-hatted, frock-coated, hurrying men.

Down a turning I found the Temperance Hotel Mr. Mantell had recommended

to me. The porter in a green uniform who took over my portmanteau,

seemed, I thought, to despise me a good deal.

V

Matriculation kept me for four full days and then came an afternoon to

spare, and I sought out Tottenham Court Road through a perplexing

network of various and crowded streets. But this London was vast! it

was endless! it seemed the whole world had changed into packed

frontages and hoardings and street spaces. I got there at last and made

inquiries, and I found my uncle behind the counter of the pharmacy he

managed, an establishment that did not impress me as doing a

particularly high-class trade. “Lord!” he said at the sight of me, “I

was wanting something to happen!”

He greeted me warmly. I had grown taller, and he, I thought, had grown

shorter and smaller and rounder but otherwise he was unchanged. He

struck me as being rather shabby, and the silk hat he produced and put

on, when, after mysterious negotiations in the back premises he

achieved his freedom to accompany me, was past its first youth; but he

was as buoyant and confident as ever.

“Come to ask me about all _that_,” he cried. “I’ve never written yet.”

“Oh, among other things,” said I, with a sudden regrettable politeness,

and waived the topic of his trusteeship to ask after my aunt Susan.

“We’ll have her out of it,” he said suddenly; “we’ll go somewhere. We

don’t get you in London every day.”

“It’s my first visit,” I said, “I’ve never seen London before”; and

that made him ask me what I thought of it, and the rest of the talk was

London, London, to the exclusion of all smaller topics. He took me up

the Hampstead Road almost to the Cobden statue, plunged into some back

streets to the left, and came at last to a blistered front door that

responded to his latch-key, one of a long series of blistered front

doors with fanlights and apartment cards above. We found ourselves in a

drab-coloured passage that was not only narrow and dirty but

desolatingly empty, and then he opened a door and revealed my aunt

sitting at the window with a little sewing-machine on a bamboo

occasional table before her, and “work”—a plum-coloured walking dress I

judged at its most analytical stage—scattered over the rest of the

apartment.

At the first glance I judged my aunt was plumper than she had been, but

her complexion was just as fresh and her China blue eye as bright as in

the old days.

“London,” she said, didn’t “get blacks” on her.

She still “cheeked” my uncle, I was pleased to find. “What are you old

Poking in for at _this_ time—_Gubbitt?_” she said when he appeared, and

she still looked with a practised eye for the facetious side of things.

When she saw me behind him, she gave a little cry and stood up radiant.

Then she became grave.

I was surprised at my own emotion in seeing her. She held me at arm’s

length for a moment, a hand on each shoulder, and looked at me with a

sort of glad scrutiny. She seemed to hesitate, and then pecked little

kiss off my cheek.

“You’re a man, George,” she said, as she released me, and continued to

look at me for a while.

Their _ménage_ was one of a very common type in London. They occupied

what is called the dining-room floor of a small house, and they had the

use of a little inconvenient kitchen in the basement that had once been

scullery. The two rooms, bedroom behind and living room in front, were

separated by folding-doors that were never now thrown back, and indeed,

in the presence of a visitor, not used at all. There was of course no

bathroom or anything of that sort available, and there was no water

supply except to the kitchen below. My aunt did all the domestic work,

though she could have afforded to pay for help if the build of the

place had not rendered that inconvenient to the pitch of impossibility.

There was no sort of help available except that of indoor servants, for

whom she had no accommodation. The furniture was their own; it was

partly secondhand, but on the whole it seemed cheerful to my eye, and

my aunt’s bias for cheap, gay-figured muslin had found ample score. In

many ways I should think it must have been an extremely inconvenient

and cramped sort of home, but at the time I took it, as I was taking

everything, as being there and in the nature of things. I did not see

the oddness of solvent decent people living in a habitation so clearly

neither designed nor adapted for their needs, so wasteful of labour and

so devoid of beauty as this was, and it is only now as I describe this

that I find myself thinking of the essential absurdity of an

intelligent community living in such makeshift homes. It strikes me now

as the next thing to wearing second-hand clothes.

You see it was a natural growth, part of that system to which

Bladesover, I hold, is the key. There are wide regions of London, miles

of streets of houses, that appear to have been originally designed for

prosperous-middle-class homes of the early Victorian type. There must

have been a perfect fury of such building in the thirties, forties, and

fifties. Street after street must have been rushed into being, Campden

Town way, Pentonville way, Brompton way, West Kensington way in the

Victoria region and all over the minor suburbs of the south side.

I am doubtful if many of these houses had any long use as the

residences of single families if from the very first almost their

tenants did not makeshift and take lodgers and sublet. They were built

with basements, in which their servants worked and lived—servants of a

more submissive and troglodytic generation who did not mind stairs. The

dining-room (with folding doors) was a little above the ground level,

and in that the wholesome boiled and roast with damp boiled potatoes

and then pie to follow, was consumed and the numerous family read and

worked in the evening, and above was the drawing-room (also with

folding doors), where the infrequent callers were received. That was

the vision at which those industrious builders aimed. Even while these

houses were being run up, the threads upon the loom of fate were

shaping to abolish altogether the type of household that would have

fitted them. Means of transit were developing to carry the moderately

prosperous middle-class families out of London, education and factory

employment were whittling away at the supply of rough, hardworking,

obedient girls who would stand the subterranean drudgery of these

places, new classes of hard-up middle-class people such as my uncle,

employees of various types, were coming into existence, for whom no

homes were provided. None of these classes have ideas of what they

ought to be, or fit in any legitimate way into the Bladesover theory

that dominates our minds. It was nobody’s concern to see them housed

under civilised conditions, and the beautiful laws of supply and demand

had free play. They had to squeeze in. The landlords came out

financially intact from their blundering enterprise. More and more

these houses fell into the hands of married artisans, or struggling

widows or old servants with savings, who became responsible for the

quarterly rent and tried to sweat a living by sub-letting furnished or

unfurnished apartments.

I remember now that a poor grey-haired old woman who had an air of

having been roused from a nap in the dust bin, came out into the area

and looked up at us as we three went out from the front door to “see

London” under my uncle’s direction. She was the sub-letting occupier;

she squeezed out a precarious living by taking the house whole and

sub-letting it in detail and she made her food and got the shelter of

an attic above and a basement below by the transaction. And if she

didn’t chance to “let” steadily, out she went to pauperdom and some

other poor, sordid old adventurer tried in her place....

It is a foolish community that can house whole classes, useful and

helpful, honest and loyal classes, in such squalidly unsuitable

dwellings. It is by no means the social economy it seems, to use up old

women, savings and inexperience in order to meet the landlord’s

demands. But any one who doubts this thing is going on right up to

to-day need only spend an afternoon in hunting for lodgings in any of

the regions of London I have named.

But where has my story got to? My uncle, I say, decided I must be shown

London, and out we three went as soon as my aunt had got her hat on, to

catch all that was left of the day.