How is it that my earliest recollections should centre about folk no
nearer or dearer to me than domestic servants? I know that my mother
died within three months of my birth. There had to be, and was,
another woman in my life before Amelia; but I have no memories of her.
She was an aunt, an unmarried sister of my mother's; but I believe my
father quarrelled with her before I began to 'take notice' very much;
and then came Amelia.
The large underground kitchen really was fairly big. I had a look at
it no more than a dozen years ago. The house, too, was and is a not
unpleasing one, situated within a stone's throw of Russell Square,
Bloomsbury. Its spaces are ample, its fittings solidly good, and its
area less subterranean than many. Near by is a select livery stable
and mews of sub-rural aspect, with Virginia creeper climbing over a
horse's head in stucco. Amelia shared with me a night nursery and a
nursery-living room in this house, the latter overlooking the mews,
through the curving iron rails of a tiny balcony. Below us my father
occupied a small bedroom and a large sitting-room, the latter being
the 'first floor front.'
At this time, and indeed during all the period of my first English
memories--say, eight years--my father was engaged in journalistic
work. I know now that he had been called to the bar, a member of
Lincoln's Inn; but I do not know that he ever had a brief. He gave
some years, I believe, to coaching and tutoring. I remember seeing,
later in my boyhood, a tattered yellow prospectus which showed that he
once delivered certain lectures on such subjects as 'Mediaeval English
Poetry.' In my time I gather that my father called no man master or
employer, but was rather the slave of a number of autocrats in Fleet
Street. 'The office,' as between Amelia and myself, may have meant all
Fleet Street. But my impression now is that it meant the building then
occupied by the ----. (Here figures the name of one of London's oldest
morning newspapers.--Ed.) And, it may be, the ---- Club; for I have
reason to believe that my father did much of his work at his club. I
have even talked there with one member at least who recollected this
fact.
But the memory of my father as he was in this early period is
curiously vague. It would seem that he produced no very clear
impression on my mind then. Our meetings were not very frequent, I
think. As I chiefly recall them, they occurred in the wide but rather
dark entrance hall, and were accompanied by conversation confined to
Amelia and my father. At such times he would be engaged in polishing
his hat, sometimes with a velvet pad, and sometimes on his
coat-sleeve. I used to hear from him remarks like these:
'Well, keep him out of doors as much as possible, so long as it
doesn't rain. Eh? Oh, well, you'd better buy another. How much will it
be? I will send up word if I am back before the boy's bed-time.'
And then he might turn to me, after putting on his hat, and absently
pull one of my ears, or stroke my nose or forehead. His hands were
very slender, warm, and pleasantly odorous of soap and tobacco. 'Be a
good man,' he would say. And there the interview ended. He never said:
'Be a good child'; always 'a good man'; and sometimes he would repeat
it, in a gravely preoccupied way.
Once, and, so far as I remember, only once, we met him out-of-doors;
in the park, it was, and he took us both to the Zoological Gardens,
and gave us tea there. (Yellowish cake with white sugar icing over it
has ever since suggested to me the pungent smell of monkey-houses and
lions' cages.) The meeting was purely accidental, I believe.
It must have been in about my ninth year, I fancy, that I began really
to know something of my father, as a man, rather than as a sort of
supernatural, hat-polishing, He-who-must-be-obeyed. We had a small
house of our own then, in Putney; and the occasion of our first coming
together as fellow-humans was a shared walk across Wimbledon Common,
and into Richmond Park by the Robin Hood Gate. The period was the
'sixties of last century, and I had just begun my attendance each day
at a local 'Academy for the Sons of Gentlemen.' To us, in the Academy,
my father descended as from Olympus, while the afternoon was yet
young, and carried me off before the envious eyes of my fellow
sufferers and what I felt to be the grudging gaze of the usher, who
had already twice since dinner-time severely pulled my ears, because
of some confusion that existed in my mind between Alfred and his burnt
cakes and Canute and his wet feet. (As I understood it, Canute sat on
the beach upon one of those minute camp-stools which mothers and
nurses used at the seaside before the luxurious era of canopied
hammock chairs.)
In my devious childish fashion, I presently gathered that there had
been momentous doings in London town that day, and that in the upshot
my father had terminated his connection with the famous newspaper from
which the bulk of his earnings had been drawn for some years. For a
little while I fancied this must be almost as delightful for him as my
own unexpected escape from the Academy that afternoon had been for me.
But, gradually, my embryo intelligence rejected this theory, and I
became possessed of a sense of grave happenings, almost, it might be,
of catastrophe. Quite certainly, my father had never before talked to
me as he did that summer afternoon in Richmond Park. His vein was, for
him, somewhat declamatory, and his unusual gestures impressed me
hugely. It is likely that at times he forgot my presence, or ceased,
at all events, to remember that his companion was his child. His
massive, silver-headed malacca cane did great execution among the
bracken, I remember.
(I had been rather pleased for my school-mates to have had an
opportunity of observing this stick, and had regretted the absence of
my father's usual hat, equal in refulgence to the cane. Evidently, he
had called at the house and changed his head-gear before walking up to
the Academy, for he now wore the soft black hat which he called his
'wideawake.')
That he was occasionally conscious of me his monologue proved, for it
included such swift, jerky sentences as:
'Remember that, my son. Have nothing to do with this accursed trade of
ink-spilling. Literary work! God save the mark!' (I wondered what
particular ink 'mark' this referred to.) 'The purse-proud wretches
think they buy your soul with their starveling cheques. Ten years' use
of my brain; ten years wasted in slavish pot-boiling for them; and
then--then, this!'
'This,' I imagine, was dismissal; accepted resignation, say. I
gathered that my father had been free to do his work where he chose;
that he had used the newspaper office only as a place in which to
consult with his editor before writing; and that now some new broom in
the office was changing all that; that my father had been bidden to
attend a certain desk during stated hours to perform routine work each
day; that he had protested, refused, and closed his connection with
the journal, after a heated interview with some managerial bashaw.
In the light of all I now know, I apprehend that my father had just
been brought into contact with the first stirrings of those radical
changes which revolutionised the London world of literature and
journalism during the last three decades of the nineteenth century.
The Board School had not quite arrived, but the social revolution was
at hand; and, there among the bracken in Richmond Park, my father with
his malacca cane was defying the tide--like my friend of the
camp-stool: Canute. Remembered phrases like: 'Underbred little clerk!';
'His place is the counting-house, and ---- [the editor] should have
known better than to leave us at the mercy of this impudent cad,'
convince me that my father's wrath was in great part directed less
against an individual than a social movement or tendency.
Much that my father said that afternoon would probably have a
ridiculous seeming in this twentieth century. Compulsory education and
the aesthetic movement, not to mention the Labour Party, Tory
Democrats, and the Halfpenny Press, were as yet undiscovered delights
when my father talked to me in Richmond Park. A young man of to-day,
reading or listening to such words, would almost certainly be misled
by them regarding the character and position of the speaker. My father
was no scion of a noble house, but the only son of a decayed merchant.
His attitude of mind and disposition, however, were naturally somewhat
aristocratic, I think. Also, as I have said, our talk was in the
'sixties. He was sensitive, very proud, inclined, perhaps, to
scornfulness, certainly to fastidiousness, and one who seldom suffered
fools either gladly or with much show of tolerance. It was a somewhat
unfortunate temperament, probably, for a man situated as he was,
possessed of no private means and dependent entirely upon his
earnings. In my mother, I believe he had married a lady of somewhat
higher social standing than his own, who never was reconciled to the
comparatively narrow and straitened circumstances of her brief
wifehood.
'The people who have to do with newspapers are the serfs and the
prostitutes of literature. It was not always so, but I've felt it
coming for some time now. It is the growing dominion of the City, of
commerce, of their boasted democracy. The People's Will! Disgusting
rubbish! How the deuce should these office-bred hucksters know what is
best? But, I tell you, my boy, that it is they who are becoming the
masters. There is no more room in journalism for a gentleman;
certainly not for literary men and people of culture. They think it
will pay them better to run their wretched sheets for the proletariat.
We shall see. Oh, I am better out of it, of course. I see that
clearly; and I am thankful to be clear of their drudgery.' (My
listening mind brightened.) 'But yet--there's your education to be
thought of. Expenses are--And, of course--H'm!' (Clouds shadowed my
outlook once more.) 'This pitiful anxiety to cling to the safety of a
salary is humiliating--unworthy of one's manhood. Good heavens! why
was I born, not one of them, and yet dependent on the caprices of such
people?'
It may be filial partiality, but something makes me feel genuinely
sorry for my father, as I look back upon that outpouring of his in
Richmond Park. And that was in the 'sixties. I wonder how the
twentieth-century journalism would have struck him. The later
subtleties of unadmitted advertising, the headline, the skittishly
impressionistic descriptive masterpieces of 'our special
representative,' and the halfpenny newspapers, were all unthought-of
boons, then. And as for the advancing democracy of his prophecies,
why, there were quite real sumptuary laws of a sort still holding sway
in the 'sixties, and well on into the 'eighties, for that matter!
We walked home from the Roehampton Gate, and in some respects I was no
longer quite a child when I climbed into bed that night.