The complete works, p.158
The Complete Works, page 158
he bawled again. "Wantje. Some one to see you. Surprisin'."
There came an inaudible reply, and a sudden loud bump over our heads as of some article of domestic utility pettishly flung aside, then the cautious steps of someone descending the twist, and then my aunt appeared in the doorway with her hand upon the jamb.
"It's Aunt Ponderevo," cried my uncle. "George's wife--and she's brought over her son!" His eye roamed about the room. He darted to the bureau with a sudden impulse, and turned the sheet about the patent flat face down. Then he waved his glasses at us, "You know, Susan, my elder brother George. I told you about 'im lots of times."
He fretted across to the hearthrug and took up a position there, replaced his glasses and coughed.
My aunt Susan seemed to be taking it in. She was then rather a pretty slender woman of twenty-three or four, I suppose, and I remember being struck by the blueness of her eyes and the clear freshness of her complexion. She had little features, a button nose, a pretty chin and a long graceful neck that stuck out of her pale blue cotton morning dress. There was a look of half-assumed perplexity on her face, a little quizzical wrinkle of the brow that suggested a faintly amused attempt to follow my uncle's mental operations, a vain attempt and a certain hopelessness that had in succession become habitual. She seemed to be saying, "Oh Lord! What's he giving me THIS time?" And as came to know her better I detected, as a complication of her effort of apprehension, a subsidiary riddle to "What's he giving me?" and that was--to borrow a phrase from my schoolboy language
"Is it keeps?" She looked at my mother and me, and back to her husband again.
"You know," he said. "George."
"Well," she said to my mother, descending the last three steps of the staircase and holding out her hand! "you're welcome. Though it's a surprise.... I can't ask you to HAVE anything, I'm afraid, for there isn't anything in the house." She smiled, and looked at her husband banteringly. "Unless he makes up something with his old chemicals, which he's quite equal to doing."
My mother shook hands stiffly, and told me to kiss my aunt....
"Well, let's all sit down," said my uncle, suddenly whistling through his clenched teeth, and briskly rubbing his hands together. He put up a chair for my mother, raised the blind of the little window, lowered it again, and returned to his hearthrug. "I'm sure," he said, as one who decides, "I'm very glad to see you."
V
As they talked I gave my attention pretty exclusively to my uncle.
I noted him in great detail. I remember now his partially unbuttoned waistcoat, as though something had occurred to distract him as he did it up, and a little cut upon his chin. I liked a certain humour in his eyes. I watched, too, with the fascination that things have for an observant boy, the play of his lips--they were a little oblique, and there was something
"slipshod," if one may strain a word so far, about his mouth, so that he lisped and sibilated ever and again and the coming and going of a curious expression, triumphant in quality it was, upon his face as he talked. He fingered his glasses, which did not seem to fit his nose, fretted with things in his waistcoat pockets or put his hands behind him, looked over our heads, and ever and again rose to his toes and dropped back on his heels.
He had a way of drawing air in at times through his teeth that gave a whispering zest to his speech It's a sound I can only represent as a soft Zzzz.
He did most of the talking. My mother repeated what she had already said in the shop, "I have brought George over to you,"
and then desisted for a time from the real business in hand.
"You find this a comfortable house?" she asked; and this being affirmed: "It looks--very convenient.... Not too big to be a trouble--no. You like Wimblehurst, I suppose?"
My uncle retorted with some inquiries about the great people of Bladesover, and my mother answered in the character of a personal friend of Lady Drew's. The talk hung for a time, and then my uncle embarked upon a dissertation upon Wimblehurst.
"This place," he began, "isn't of course quite the place I ought to be in."
My mother nodded as though she had expected that.
"It gives me no Scope," he went on. "It's dead-and-alive.
Nothing happens."
"He's always wanting something to happen," said my aunt Susan.
"Some day he'll get a shower of things and they'll be too much for him."
"Not they," said my uncle, buoyantly.
"Do you find business--slack?" asked my mother.
"Oh! one rubs along. But there's no Development--no growth.
They just come along here and buy pills when they want 'em--and a horseball or such. They've got to be ill before there's a prescription. That sort they are. You can't get 'em to launch out, you can't get 'em to take up anything new. For instance, I've been trying lately--induce them to buy their medicines in advance, and in larger quantities. But they won't look for it!
Then I tried to float a little notion of mine, sort of an insurance scheme for colds; you pay so much a week, and when you've got a cold you get a bottle of Cough Linctus so long as you can produce a substantial sniff. See? But Lord! they've no capacity for ideas, they don't catch on; no Jump about the place, no Life. Live!--they trickle, and what one has to do here is to trickle too-- Zzzz."
"Ah!" said my mother.
"It doesn't suit me," said my uncle. "I'm the cascading sort."
"George was that," said my mother after a pondering moment.
My aunt Susan took up the parable with an affectionate glance at her husband.
"He's always trying to make his old business jump," she said.
"Always putting fresh cards in the window, or getting up to something. You'd hardly believe. It makes ME jump sometimes."
"But it does no good," said my uncle.
"It does no good," said his wife. "It's not his miloo..."
Presently they came upon a wide pause.
From the beginning of their conversation there had been the promise of this pause, and I pricked my ears. I knew perfectly what was bound to come; they were going to talk of my father. I was enormously strengthened in my persuasion when I found my mother's eyes resting thoughtfully upon me in the silence, and than my uncle looked at me and then my aunt. I struggled unavailingly to produce an expression of meek stupidity.
"I think," said my uncle, "that George will find it more amusing to have a turn in the market-place than to sit here talking with us. There's a pair of stocks there, George--very interesting.
Old-fashioned stocks."
"I don't mind sitting here," I said.
My uncle rose and in the most friendly way led me through the shop. He stood on his doorstep and jerked amiable directions to me.
"Ain't it sleepy, George, eh? There's the butcher's dog over there, asleep in the road-half an hour from midday! If the last Trump sounded I don't believe it would wake. Nobody would wake!
The chaps up there in the churchyard--they'd just turn over and say: 'Naar--you don't catch us, you don't! See?'.... Well, you'll find the stocks just round that corner."
He watched me out of sight.
So I never heard what they said about my father after all.
VI
When I returned, my uncle had in some remarkable way become larger and central. "Tha'chu, George?" he cried, when the shop-door bell sounded. "Come right through"; and I found him, as it were, in the chairman's place before the draped grate.
The three of them regarded me.
"We have been talking of making you a chemist, George," said my uncle.
My mother looked at me. "I had hoped," she said, "that Lady Drew would have done something for him--" She stopped.
"In what way?" said my uncle.
"She might have spoken to some one, got him into something perhaps...." She had the servant's invincible persuasion that all good things are done by patronage.
"He is not the sort of boy for whom things are done," she added, dismissing these dreams. "He doesn't accommodate himself. When he thinks Lady Drew wishes a thing, he seems not to wish it.
Towards Mr. Redgrave, too, he has been--disrespectful--he is like his father."
"Who's Mr. Redgrave?"
"The Vicar."
"A bit independent?" said my uncle, briskly.
"Disobedient," said my mother. "He has no idea of his place. He seems to think he can get on by slighting people and flouting them. He'll learn perhaps before it is too late."
My uncle stroked his cut chin and me. "Have you learnt any Latin?" he asked abruptly.
I said I had not.
"He'll have to learn a little Latin," he explained to my mother,
"to qualify. H'm. He could go down to the chap at the grammar school here--it's just been routed into existence again by the Charity Commissioners and have lessons."
"What, me learn Latin!" I cried, with emotion.
"A little," he said.
"I've always wanted" I said and; "LATIN!"
I had long been obsessed by the idea that having no Latin was a disadvantage in the world, and Archie Garvell had driven the point of this pretty earnestly home. The literature I had read at Bladesover had all tended that way. Latin had had a quality of emancipation for me that I find it difficult to convey. And suddenly, when I had supposed all learning was at an end for me, I heard this!
"It's no good to you, of course," said my uncle, "except to pass exams with, but there you are!"
"You'll have to learn Latin because you have to learn Latin,"
said my mother, "not because you want to. And afterwards you will have to learn all sorts of other things...."
The idea that I was to go on learning, that to read and master the contents of books was still to be justifiable as a duty, overwhelmed all other facts. I had had it rather clear in my mind for some weeks that all that kind of opportunity might close to me for ever. I began to take a lively interest in this new project.
"Then shall I live here?" I asked, "with you, and study... as well as work in the shop?"
"That's the way of it," said my uncle.
I parted from my mother that day in a dream, so sudden and important was this new aspect of things to me. I was to learn Latin! Now that the humiliation of my failure at Bladesover was past for her, now that she had a little got over her first intense repugnance at this resort to my uncle and contrived something that seemed like a possible provision for my future, the tenderness natural to a parting far more significant than any of our previous partings crept into her manner.
She sat in the train to return, I remember, and I stood at the open door of her compartment, and neither of us knew how soon we should cease for ever to be a trouble to one another.
"You must be a good boy, George," she said. "You must learn....
And you mustn't set yourself up against those who are above you and better than you.... Or envy them."
"No, mother," I said.
I promised carelessly. Her eyes were fixed upon me. I was wondering whether I could by any means begin Latin that night.
Something touched her heart then, some thought, some memory; perhaps some premonition.... The solitary porter began slamming carriage doors.
"George" she said hastily, almost shamefully, "kiss me!"
I stepped up into her compartment as she bent downward.
She caught me in her arms quite eagerly, she pressed me to her--a strange thing for her to do. I perceived her eyes were extraordinarily bright, and then this brightness burst along the lower lids and rolled down her cheeks.
For the first and last time in my life I saw my mother's tears.
Then she had gone, leaving me discomforted and perplexed, forgetting for a time even that I was to learn Latin, thinking of my mother as of something new and strange.
The thing recurred though I sought to dismiss it, it stuck itself into my memory against the day of fuller understanding. Poor, proud, habitual, sternly narrow soul! poor difficult and misunderstanding son! it was the first time that ever it dawned upon me that my mother also might perhaps feel.
VII
My mother died suddenly and, it was thought by Lady Drew, inconsiderately, the following spring. Her ladyship instantly fled to Folkestone with Miss Somerville and Fison, until the funeral should be over and my mother's successor installed.
My uncle took me over to the funeral. I remember there was a sort of prolonged crisis in the days preceding this because, directly he heard of my loss, he had sent a pair of check trousers to the Judkins people in London to be dyed black, and they did not come back in time. He became very excited on the third day, and sent a number of increasingly fiery telegrams without any result whatever, and succumbed next morning with a very ill grace to my aunt Susan's insistence upon the resources of his dress-suit. In my memory those black legs of his, in a particularly thin and shiny black cloth--for evidently his dress-suit dated from adolescent and slenderer days--straddle like the Colossus of Rhodes over my approach to my mother's funeral. Moreover, I was inconvenienced and distracted by a silk hat he had bought me, my first silk hat, much ennobled, as his was also, by a deep mourning band.
I remember, but rather indistinctly, my mother's white paneled housekeeper's room and the touch of oddness about it that she was not there, and the various familiar faces made strange by black, and I seem to recall the exaggerated self-consciousness that arose out of their focussed attention. No doubt the sense of the new silk hat came and went and came again in my emotional chaos.
Then something comes out clear and sorrowful, rises out clear and sheer from among all these rather base and inconsequent things, and once again I walk before all the other mourners close behind her coffin as it is carried along the churchyard path to her grave, with the old vicar's slow voice saying regretfully and unconvincingly above me, triumphant solemn things.
"I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die."
Never die! The day was a high and glorious morning in spring, and all the trees were budding and bursting into green.
Everywhere there were blossoms and flowers; the pear trees and cherry trees in the sexton's garden were sunlit snow, there were nodding daffodils and early tulips in the graveyard beds, great multitudes of daisies, and everywhere the birds seemed singing.
And in the middle was the brown coffin end, tilting on men's shoulders and half occluded by the vicar's Oxford hood.
And so we came to my mother's waiting grave.
For a time I was very observant, watching the coffin lowered, hearing the words of the ritual. It seemed a very curious business altogether.
Suddenly as the service drew to its end, I felt something had still to be said which had not been said, realised that she had withdrawn in silence, neither forgiving me nor hearing from me--those now lost assurances. Suddenly I knew I had not understood. Suddenly I saw her tenderly; remembered not so much tender or kindly things of her as her crossed wishes and the ways in which I had thwarted her. Surprisingly I realised that behind all her hardness and severity she had loved me, that I was the only thing she had ever loved and that until this moment I had never loved her. And now she was there and deaf and blind to me, pitifully defeated in her designs for me, covered from me so that she could not know....
I dug my nails into the palms of my hands, I set my teeth, but tears blinded me, sobs would have choked me had speech been required of me. The old vicar read on, there came a mumbled response--and so on to the end. I wept as it were internally, and only when we had come out of the churchyard could I think and speak calmly again.
Stamped across this memory are the little black figures of my uncle and Rabbits, telling Avebury, the sexton and undertaker, that "it had all passed off very well--very well indeed."
VIII
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.
