It was the close of a bleak, autumnal afternoon. All day long in the
chill and windy atmosphere the dust had been driven helter-skelter
along the shabbier streets of Clapham, whirling with it the leaves
which had fallen from the depressed trees in the gardens of the
innumerable semi-detached villas. Here and there, fragments of torn
paper rustled spasmodically along the gutter as the driving gust
caught them, or—now that the dusk had fallen—floated spectrally for a
few moments in mid-air, like disembodied spirits, essaying an upward
flight, only to be baulked by a lull in the wind and to come suddenly
to earth again, where they lay until the next gust of wind caught
them.
Among the dismal streets not one was more depressing than Ursula
Grove. As if to deprive it of the least trace of individuality it was
but a connecting link between two more important residential roads
running parallel with each other, and even these were not very
important; hence it is obvious that Ursula Grove was humble indeed.
Each house had a yard or two of front garden entered through cheaply
varnished wooden gate-lets, which announced in faded gold lettering
that should anyone enter he would find himself in Seaview, or on The
Riviera, as the case might be. Provided the name was inappropriate
there appeared to have been no initial objection to its being
anything. In fact, those responsible for the christening of these
desirable residences appeared to have acted on the same principle as
the small builder, who, erecting houses at too great a rate to be able
to waste time in seeking appropriate names, was accustomed to choose
them haphazard out of the newspapers, and thus christened two small
stucco atrocities joined together in semi-detached matrimony, the
Vatican and the Quirinal, because these two names appeared in the
course of the same leading article.
Each house had a little bow window which belonged to the drawing-room.
If these bow windows could have been removed and all the little
drawing-rooms placed, as it were, on exhibition they would have
presented an extraordinary likeness. There were the same three or four
saddle-bag chairs, the same saddle-bag sofa, the same little bamboo
occasional table, and the same little gilt mirror; all luxuries that
were rewarded, apparently, by their own virtue and a sense of their
own unique beauty, for it was seldom that their owners enjoyed them.
In the summer the blinds were kept down for fear the sun should spoil
the carpet, which it certainly would have done if it had been allowed
a fair field and no favour with the gaudy little stiff squares of
cheap Kidderminster. These front rooms, although infinitely the
largest and most convenient in the house, were never degraded to the
level of living rooms, however large the family. Sometimes in the
winter a fire was lighted on Sundays and the inhabitants sat round it,
but by Monday morning at breakfast time all traces of this revel had
disappeared, and the fire ornaments were back again, trailing their
gilded and tawdry finery over a highly polished grate, glittering out
on the darkened, frosty room, that suggested nothing so much as the
laying out of a corpse.
These chilly arcadias were the pride of their owners’ hearts, and if,
when about their household work, they heard the door of the sacred
apartment open they were immediately on the alert.
“Willie, what are you doing in the drawing-room?”
“Nuffin’, mama, I was only havin’ a look.”
“Then come out and shut the door immediately.”
Willie, old enough to be troublesome, but not old enough to go to
school, would do as he was bid, at the same time impressed by his
mother’s admonition with a sense of the splendour of the mansion in
which it was his privilege to dwell.
The family always lived in the smaller sitting-room—an apartment
rendered oblong by the exigencies of the staircase. These rooms were
invariably furnished, as were the drawing-rooms, with a depressing
similarity: two horse-hair arm chairs with the springs in a state of
collapse; six ordinary dining-room chairs to match; some framed
_Graphic_ Christmas numbers on the wall, an untidy bookcase, and the
flooring a waste of linoleum with a little oasis of moth-eaten rug
before the fire.
I mention these facts because the atmosphere of my childhood is
important in view of my after development.
It was on such an evening as I have described—at least, I am credibly
informed that it was so—that my father descended from his ’bus two or
three streets off, and, after threading his way through the
intervening maze of semi-detached villadom, entered the depressing
length of Ursula Grove.
An unusual though not astonishing sight met his eyes. The blinds of
the first-floor-front of his own house were drawn down and a bright
light from within glowed against them and streamed from under them. It
could not be his wife dressing for dinner, for they did not have
dinner, and had they been in the habit of dining neither of them would
have thought of dressing. Their evening meal was tea; it might be with
an egg or it might be with ham, but it was certainly tea.
My father hastened his footsteps. The cause of this phenomenon had
suddenly dawned on him. He opened the wooden gate-let with unwonted
gentleness and without letting it swing to, which was the usual signal
that he had come home. Then he went round to the back and softly let
himself in.
He walked along the passage and paused at the foot of the stairs.
There was borne down to him from above the wail of an infant. He was
obliged to catch hold of the bannisters, for his heart leapt into his
mouth and nearly suffocated him.
He sat down on the stairs to recover himself, while the tears of joy
and pride welled into his tired eyes and flowed down his faded cheeks.
The doctor on his way downstairs nearly fell over him.
“Come, come, Mr. Rank, you must bear up. ‘In the midst of life we are
in death.’”
Apparently the doctor was condoling from force of habit. The speech
was certainly alarming, and my father whitened.
“But my wife?”
“Mother and child, Mr. Rank, both doing well. It’s a boy.”
The alarm disappeared from his face. He was a father at last. “An
Isaac was born unto him.”
“May I go up?” he asked timidly.
“Most certainly, but be careful not to excite the patient.”
My father went upstairs and knocked nervously. The nurse opened the
door holding me in her arms. It is to my father’s credit, however,
that he hardly cast a look at the desire of their married life, but
crossed at once to the bed.
My poor mother looked up tenderly and lovingly at the dowdy little
figure bending over her, and smiled.
“It’s a boy,” she whispered, and then added: “We wanted a boy.”
My father pressed her hand gently, but remembering the doctor’s
instructions not to excite the patient kissed her lips and stole
gently out to look at his first, though somewhat late, born. A
puckered face, to which the blood rushed spasmodically, clouding it
almost to the suggestion of apoplexy, was all he could see. My father
looked down at me and saw that I was dark. I could not well have been
otherwise if he were to believe himself my father, for he was Jewish
from the crown of his well-shaped head to the soles of his rather
large feet.
If my mother is to be credited, he was when she fell in love with him
a singularly handsome little man, but at the time of my birth the
physical blight which falls on nearly all men of our race towards
middle age was upon him.
She possessed a small cabinet photograph of him, taken when such
things were a novelty. In early years I was accustomed—misled by the
out-of-date clothes—to regard it as a very frumpish affair indeed.
When I grew up I came to think otherwise: for one day, placing my hand
over the offending clothes, there looked out at me a face which,
granting the wonderful complexion which my mother always insisted he
possessed, was singularly handsome and very like my own.
I only remember him as a faded little creature, who had run to stomach
to an extent which was absurd, especially when it was contrasted with
the extreme thinness of the rest of his body. He was a commercial
traveller, and always attributed this inharmonious excrescence on an
otherwise slim form to the amount of aerated waters he was obliged to
mix with those drinks the taking of which was indispensable to his
calling.
My mother was dark too, so it was little wonder that such hair as I
had when I was born was of the blackest imaginable hue, as likewise
were my eyes.
“He’s a beautiful baby; a bit small, but beautiful,” said the nurse.
My father, who could not at the moment dissociate my appearance from
Mr. Darwin’s theory of the origin of species, tried to believe her,
and stole downstairs, where he made his own tea and boiled himself a
couple of eggs. A meat pie with the unbaked crust lying beside it
suggested that I had arrived quite unexpectedly, as indeed had been
the case. This perhaps accounted for the fact that as a baby I was
weakly.
Before the first year of my life was over, my doting parents had gone
through many an agony of suspense, and my father had more than once
slackened his steps on returning home after his day’s work, fearing to
enter the house lest my mother should meet him and weeping inform him
that the tiny thread of life, by which I was alone prevented from
flying away and becoming a little angel, had snapped.
But by dint of the greatest care from a mother, who, whatever may have
been her coldness to the outside world, possessed a burning affection
for her husband and child, I was brought safely to my first birthday.
Sitting here during the last few unpleasant days with nothing to
entertain me but the faces of ever-changing warders—whose
personalities seem all to have been supplied from one pattern—I have
had time to think over many things, and I have more than once
reflected whether I would not rather my mother had been less careful
and had allowed the before mentioned tiny thread to snap.
My present nervousness, which even my worst enemy will find excusable,
tempts me to regret that her extreme care was so well rewarded. My
intellect, however, which has always shone brightly through the murk
of my emotions, tells me—and supports the information with irrefutable
logic—that I am an ignoble fool to think anything of the kind. I
question whether Napoleon would have foregone his triumphant career to
escape St. Helena. The principle involved in his case and my own is
the same. I have had a great career; I am paying for it—only
fortunately the public are asking an absurdly low price. It is only
when I have smoked too many cigarettes that I feel nervous about
Monday’s ceremony.
One thing I trust, however, and that is that my mother will not in any
way be made unhappy, for should her spirit have the power of seeing my
present condition, and of suffering by reason of it, it would give me
the greatest concern.
But to resume. My arrival must have been an immense comfort to my
mother even more than to my father. His business frequently took him
away from home for a week at a time, and although he rarely failed to
be with us from Saturday till Monday the shabby little Clapham house
had been very dull till my shrill baby cries broke the silence of his
absence.
Until I arrived to keep her company my mother had been thrown almost
entirely on her own resources, and the reason of this loneliness is
also the reason of my strange career. They are inseparable one from
the other.
My mother had married beneath her. Her father had been a solicitor in
a fair way of business, blessed with one son and one daughter. They
were not rich but they were gentlefolk, and by descent something more.
In fact, only nine lives stood between my mother’s brother and one of
the most ancient peerages in the United Kingdom.
My mother’s maiden name was Gascoyne, and her father was the
great-grandson of a younger son. Her father’s family had for the last
two generations drifted away from, and ceased to have any acquaintance
with, the main and aristocratic branch of the family. Beyond a couple
of ancestral portraits, the one of Lord George Gascoyne, my mother’s
great-grandfather, and the other of that spendthrift’s wife, there was
no visible evidence that they were in any way of superior social
extraction to their well-to-do but suburban surroundings.
My father and mother were brought together in this way. My mother’s
brother belonged to a cricket club of which my father was also a
member. The two struck up a friendship, although at a first glance
there could appear to be very little in common between the successful
solicitor’s heir and the junior clerk in a wholesale city house. My
father, however, had a gift of music which recommended him strongly to
his new friend, and, as my mother always said, a natural refinement of
manner which made him a quite possible guest at the quasi-aristocratic
house of the Gascoynes.
“Perhaps I was sentimental and foolish,” my mother would say, with
that quiet, unemotional voice of hers which caused strangers to doubt
whether she could ever be either, “but he had such beautiful eyes and
played in such an unaffected, dreamy way. And he was so good,” she
would add, as if this were the quality which in the end had impressed
her most. “He might have been much better off than he was, only he
never could do anything underhand or mean. I don’t think such things
ever even tempted him. He was simply above them.”
My father became a great favourite with the household till he
committed the intolerable impertinence of falling in love with Miss
Gascoyne. From the position of an ever welcome guest he descended to
that of a “presuming little Jewish quill-driver,” as my uncle—whose
friendship for him had always been of a somewhat patronising
order—described him.
In fact, my uncle was considerably more bitter in denouncing his
presumption than my grandfather, who, his first irritation over, went
so far as to suggest that the best should be made of a bad job, and
that they should turn him into a lawyer, urging his nationality as a
plea that his admission into the firm was not likely to do any harm.
But my uncle was certainly right in receiving such a proposal with
derision.
“He hasn’t even got the qualities of his race,” he said—although this
very fact had been, till their quarrel, a constantly reiterated
argument in my father’s favour.
My father and mother were forbidden to meet, and so one Sunday
morning—Sunday being the only day on which my father could devote the
whole day to so important an event—my mother stole out of the house
and they were married before morning service, on a prospective income
of a hundred a year. As mad a piece of sentimental folly as was ever
perpetrated by a pair of foolish lovers.
The strange thing was that they were happy. They loved one another
devotedly, and my grandfather—though quite under the thumb of my
uncle—surreptitiously paid the rent of the small house where they
spent the whole of their married life, and which after a time, still
unknown to my uncle, he bought for them. My uncle, whom even when I
was a child I thought a singularly interesting man—and the
estrangement was certainly one of the griefs of my mother’s life—had a
great opinion of himself on account of the family from which he was
derived.
He made a point of having in readiness all proofs of his claim to the
title in case the extraordinary event should happen of the intervening
lives going out one after the other like a row of candles. His
researches on the subject enabled him to show a respectable number of
instances in which an heir even as distant as himself had succeeded.
My mother’s unequal marriage caused him to make all haste in choosing
a wife. He might not have betrayed nearly so much antipathy to my
father as a brother-in-law had not the Gascoyne earldom been one of
the few peerages capable of descending through the female line. Thus,
till he should have an heir of his own, his sister and any child of
hers stood next in succession.
He chose his wife with circumspection. She was the daughter of a
baronet, not so reduced as to have ceased to be respectable; and the
main point was that the match would look well on the family tree. To
his infinite chagrin his first child died an hour after birth, and
Mrs. Gascoyne suffered so severely that a consolation was impossible.
It thus became inevitable that should the unexpected happen the title
would pass after himself to his sister and her children.
He drew some comfort from the fact that so far my father and mother
had no child.
Whether it was the disappointment of his own childlessness, or a
natural disposition to ostentation, I do not know, but from this time
my uncle’s mode of living grew more extravagant.
Through the death of my grandfather he became the head of the firm. He
left the suburbs where he had been born, and he and his wife set up
house in the West End, where they moved in a very expensive set, so
expensive, in fact, that in less than five years my uncle, to avoid
criminal proceedings—which must have ensued as the result of a
protracted juggling with clients’ money—put a bullet through his
brains.
He was much mourned by my father and mother, who had both loved him.
He was a fine, handsome fellow, good-natured at heart, and they had
always deemed it certain that one day a reconciliation would take
place.
Inasmuch as my parents had never met my aunt she could not become less
to them than she had been, but evidently to show how little she
desired to have anything to do with them, she allowed their letter of
condolence to remain unanswered. Those who were responsible for
winding up my uncle’s affairs forwarded to my mother, in accordance
with his wishes, the portrait of my ancestor, Lord George Gascoyne,
together with an envelope containing a full statement of her claim to
the Gascoyne peerage. My father, who was certainly more interested
than ever my mother was in the documents that constituted this claim,
took charge of them, and I believe that at my birth not a little of
his elation was due to the fact that he was the parent of a being so
exalted as to be only nine removes from an earldom. In time he came to
regard himself as a sort of Prince Consort whose claims as father of
the heir-apparent could not fail to be substantial.
I don’t think there ever was a child more devotedly tended than I was.
Arriving late, and being the only one, my parents were able to afford
positive extravagances in the way of extra-quality perambulators and
superfine toys, and in my earliest years it would have been quite
impossible for me to guess that I was other than the child of
affluence.
I was christened Israel Gascoyne Rank. From my earliest years,
however, I cannot remember being called anything but Israel, and in my
childhood if I were asked my name I was sure to answer “Israel Rank,”
and equally sure to supplement the information by adding, “and my
other name is Gascoyne—Israel Gascoyne Rank.”
I suppose that it is due to my sense of humour—which has never
deserted me and which I trust will not do so even at the last trying
moment—that I cannot help feeling just a trifle amused at the idea of
my saintly mother and my dear, lovable little father carefully
bringing up—with all the love and affection which was in them—_me_. It
must be admitted to have its humorous side.
I played about the dingy house at Clapham during my happy childhood
and was strangely contented without other companionship than my
mother’s. I certainly betrayed no morbid symptoms, but was, on the
contrary, noted for a particularly sunny disposition. My mother
declared that my laugh was most infectious, so full was it of real
enjoyment and gaiety.
I have always attributed my psychological development along the line
it afterwards took to a remark made to my mother by a woman who used
to come in and sew for her.
I was playing just outside the room with a wooden horse, when Mrs.
Ives remarked as she threaded the needle preparatory to driving the
machine: “Lord, mum, I do believe that boy of yours gets handsomer
every time I come. I never see such a picture, never.”
I was quite old enough to grasp the remark, and for it to sink deep
into my soul, planting there the seeds of a superb self-consciousness.
From that moment I was vain. I grew quite used to people turning to
look at me in the streets, and saying: “What a lovely child!” and in
time felt positively injured if the passers-by did not testify openly
to their admiration. My mother discouraged my being flattered—I
suppose from the point of view of strict morality, with which I cannot
claim acquaintance. Flattery is bad, and yet at the same time it
always seems an absurd thing to talk to and bring up a child of
exceptional personal attractions as if he or she were quite ordinary.
If he be a boy, he is told that personal attractions are of no
consequence, things not to be thought of and which can on no account
make him better or worse, and then, whether girl or boy, the child
finds on going out into the world that it is as valuable a weapon as
can be given to anybody, that to beauty many obstacles are made easy
which to the plain are often insuperable, and that above all his moral
direction and his looks stand in very definite relation.
It was of no use telling me that I was not exceptionally good-looking;
I grasped the fact from the moment of Mrs. Ives’ flattering little
outburst.
My father was immensely proud of my appearance; I suppose the more so
because he could claim that I was like him and that I did not resemble
the Gascoynes in any way.
I was dark and Jewish, with an amazingly well-cut face and an
instinctive grace of which I was quite conscious. I have never known
from my childhood what it was to be ill at ease, and I have certainly
never been shy. I inherited my father’s gift of music. With him it had
never developed into more than what might give him a slight social
advantage; with myself I was early determined it should be something
more, and was quick to see the use it might be in introducing me into
good society.