PART I

How Harry Mortimer Smith Was Made

THE DREAM

CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE EXCURSION

§ 1

Sarnac had worked almost continuously for the better part of a year upon some very subtle chemical reactions of the nervous cells of the sympathetic system. His first enquiries had led to the opening out of fresh and surprising possibilities, and these again had lured him on to still broader and more fascinating prospects. He worked perhaps too closely; he found his hope and curiosity unimpaired, but there was less delicacy of touch in his manipulation, and he was thinking less quickly and accurately. He needed a holiday. He had come to the end of a chapter in his work and wished to brace himself for a new beginning. Sunray had long hoped to be away with him; she, too, was at a phase in her work when interruption was possible, and so the two went off together to wander among the lakes and mountains.

Their companionship was at a very delightful stage. Their close relationship and their friendship was of old standing, so that they were quite at their ease with one another, yet they were not too familiar to have lost the keen edge of their interest in each other's proceedings. Sunray was very much in love with Sarnac and glad, and Sarnac was always happy and pleasantly exalted when Sunray was near him. Sunray was the richer-hearted and cleverer lover. They talked of everything in the world but Sarnac's work because that had to rest and grow fresh again. Of her own work Sunray talked abundantly. She had been making stories and pictures of happiness and sorrow in the past ages of the world, and she was full of curious speculations about the ways in which the ancestral mind has thought and felt.

They played with boats upon the great lake for some days, they sailed and paddled and drew up their canoe among the sweet-scented rushes of the islands and bathed and swam. They went from one guest-house to another upon the water and met many interesting and refreshing people. In one house an old man of ninety-eight was staying: he was amusing his declining years by making statuettes of the greatest beauty and humour; it was wonderful to see the clay take shape in his hands. Moreover, he had a method of cooking the lake fish that was very appetising, and he made a great dish of them so that everyone who was dining in the place could have some. And there was a musician who made Sunray talk about the days gone by, and afterwards he played music with his own hands on a clavier to express the ancient feelings of men. He played one piece that was, he explained, two thousand years old; it was by a man named Chopin, and it was called the Revolutionary Etude. Sunray could not have believed a piano capable of such passionate resentment. After that he played grotesque and angry battle music and crude marching tunes from those half-forgotten times, and then he invented wrathful and passionate music of his own.

Sunray sat under a golden lantern and listened to the musician and watched his nimble hands, but Sarnac was more deeply moved. He had not heard very much music in his life, and this player seemed to open shutters upon deep and dark and violent things that had long been closed to mankind. Sarnac sat, cheek on hand, his elbow on the parapet of the garden wall, looking across the steely blue of the lake at the darkling night sky at the lower end. The sky had been starry, but a monstrous crescent of clouds like a hand that closes was now gathering all the stars into its fist of darkness. Perhaps there would be rain to-morrow. The lanterns hung still, except that ever and again a little shiver of the air set them swaying. Now and then a great white moth would come fluttering out of the night and beat about among the lanterns for a time and pass away. Presently it would return again or another moth like it would come. Sometimes there would be three or four of these transitory phantoms; they seemed to be the only insects abroad that night.

A faint ripple below drew his attention to the light of a boat, a round yellow light like a glowing orange, which came gliding close up to the terrace wall out of the blue of the night. There was the sound of a paddle being shipped and a diminishing drip of water, but the people in the boat sat still and listened until the musician had done altogether. Then they came up the steps to the terrace and asked the master of the guest-house for rooms for the night. They had dined at a place farther up the lake.

Four people came by this boat. Two were brother and sister, dark handsome people of southern origin, and the others were fair women, one blue-eyed and one with hazel eyes, who were clearly very much attached to the brother and sister. They came and talked about the music and then of a climbing expedition they had promised themselves in the great mountains above the lakes. The brother and sister were named Radiant and Starlight, and their work in life, they explained, was to educate animals; it was a business for which they had an almost instinctive skill. The two fair girls, Willow and Firefly, were electricians. During the last few days Sunray had been looking ever and again at the glittering snowfields and desiring them; there was always a magic call for her in snowy mountains. She joined very eagerly in the mountain talk, and it was presently suggested that she and Sarnac should accompany these new acquaintances up to the peaks they had in mind. But before they went on to the mountains, she and Sarnac wanted to visit some ancient remains that had recently been excavated in a valley that came down to the lake from the east. The four new-comers were interested in what she told them about these ruins, and altered their own plans to go with her and Sarnac to see them. Then afterwards all six would go into the mountains.

§ 2

These ruins were rather more than two thousand years old.

There were the remains of a small old town, a railway station of some importance, and a railway tunnel which came right through the mountains. The tunnel had collapsed, but the excavators had worked along it and found several wrecked trains in it which had evidently been packed with soldiers and refugees. The remains of these people, much disturbed by rats and other vermin, lay about in the trains and upon the railway tracks. The tunnel had apparently been blocked by explosives and these trainloads of people entombed. Afterwards the town itself and all its inhabitants had been destroyed by poison-gas, but what sort of poison-gas it was the investigators had still to decide. It had had an unusual pickling effect, so that many of the bodies were not so much skeletons as mummies; and there were books, papers, papier mâché objects or the like in a fair state of preservation in many of the houses. Even cheap cotton goods were preserved, though they had lost all their colour. For some time after the great catastrophe this part of the world must have remained practically uninhabited. A landslide had presently blocked the lower valley and banked back the valley waters so as to submerge the town and cover it with a fine silt and seal up the tunnel very completely. Now the barrier had been cut through and the valley drained again, and all these evidences of one of the characteristic disasters of the last war period in man's history had been brought back to the light once more.

The six holiday-makers found the visit to this place a very vivid experience, almost too vivid for their contentment. On Sarnac's tired mind it made a particularly deep impression. The material collected from the town had been arranged in a long museum gallery of steel and glass. There were many almost complete bodies; one invalid old woman, embalmed by the gas, had been replaced in the bed from which the waters had floated her, and there was a shrivelled little baby put back again in its cradle. The sheets and quilts were bleached and browned, but it was quite easy to see what they had once been like. The people had been taken by surprise, it seemed, while the midday meal was in preparation; the tables must have been set in many of the houses; and now, after a score of centuries beneath mud and weeds and fishes, the antiquaries had disinterred and reassembled these old machine-made cloths and plated implements upon the tables. There were great stores of such pitiful discoloured litter from the vanished life of the past.

The holiday-makers did not go far into the tunnel; the suggestion of things there were too horrible for their mood, and Sarnac stumbled over a rail and cut his hand upon the jagged edge of a broken railway-carriage window. The wound pained him later, and did not heal so quickly as it should have done. It was as if some poison had got into it. It kept him awake in the night.

For the rest of the day the talk was all of the terrible days of the last wars in the world and the dreadfulness of life in that age. It seemed to Firefly and Starlight that existence must have been almost unendurable, a tissue of hate, terror, want and discomfort, from the cradle to the grave. But Radiant argued that people then were perhaps no less happy and no happier than himself; that for everyone in every age there was a normal state, and that any exaltation of hope or sensation above that was happiness and any depression below it misery. It did not matter where the normal came. "They went to great intensities in both directions," he said. There was more darkness in their lives and more pain, but not more unhappiness. Sunray was inclined to agree with him.

But Willow objected to Radiant's psychology. She said that there could be permanently depressed states in an unhealthy body or in a life lived under restraint. There could be generally miserable creatures just as there could be generally happy creatures.

"Of course," interjected Sarnac, "given a standard outside themselves."

"But why did they make such wars?" cried Firefly. "Why did they do such horrible things to one another? They were people like ourselves."

"No better," said Radiant, "and no worse. So far as their natural quality went. It is not a hundred generations ago."

"Their skulls were as big and well shaped."

"Those poor creatures in the tunnel!" said Sarnac. "Those poor wretches caught in the tunnel! But everyone in that age must have felt caught in a tunnel."

After a time a storm overtook them and interrupted their conversation. They were going up over a low pass to a guest-house at the head of the lake, and it was near the crest of the pass that the storm burst. The lightning was tremendous and a pine-tree was struck not a hundred yards away. They cheered the sight. They were all exhilarated by the elemental clatter and uproar; the rain was like a whip on their bare, strong bodies and the wind came in gusts that held them staggering and laughing, breathlessly unable to move forward. They had doubts and difficulties with the path; for a time they lost touch with the blazes upon the trees and rocks. Followed a steady torrent of rain, through which they splashed and stumbled down the foaming rocky pathway to their resting-place. They arrived wet as from a swim and glowing; but Sarnac, who had come behind the others with Sunray, was tired and cold. The master of this guest-house drew his shutters and made a great fire for them with pine-knots and pine-cones while he prepared a hot meal.

After a while they began to talk of the excavated town again and of the shrivelled bodies lying away there under the electric light of the still glass-walled museum, indifferent for evermore to the sunshine and thunderstorms of life without.

"Did they ever laugh as we do?" asked Willow. "For sheer happiness of living?"

Sarnac said very little. He sat close up to the fire, pitching pine-cones into it and watching them flare and crackle. Presently he got up, confessed himself tired, and went away to his bed.

§ 3

It rained hard all through the night and until nearly midday, and then the weather cleared. In the afternoon the little party pushed on up the valley towards the mountains they designed to climb, but they went at a leisurely pace, giving a day and a half to what was properly only one day's easy walking. The rain had refreshed everything in the upper valley and called out a great multitude of flowers.

The next day was golden and serene.

In the early afternoon they came to a plateau and meadows of asphodel, and there they sat down to eat the provisions they had brought with them. They were only two hours' climb from the mountain-house in which they were to pass the night, and there was no need to press on. Sarnac was lazy; he confessed to a desire for sleep; in the night he had been feverish and disturbed by dreams of men entombed in tunnels and killed by poison-gas. The others were amused that anyone should want to sleep in the daylight, but Sunray said she would watch over him. She found a place for him on the sward, and Sarnac laid down beside her and went to sleep with his cheek against her side as suddenly and trustfully as a child goes to sleep. She sat up--as a child's nurse might do--enjoining silence on the others by gestures.

"After this he will be well again," laughed Radiant, and he and Firefly stole off in one direction, while Willow and Starlight went off in another to climb a rocky headland near at hand, from which they thought they might get a very wide and perhaps a very beautiful view of the lakes below.

For some time Sarnac lay quite still in his sleep and then he began to twitch and stir. Sunray bent down attentively with her warm face close to his. He was quiet again for a time and then he moved and muttered, but she could not distinguish any words. Then he rolled away from her and threw his arms about and said, "I can't stand it. I can't endure it. Nothing can alter it now. You're unclean and spoilt." She took him gently and drew him into a comfortable attitude again, just as a nurse might do. "Dear," he whispered, and in his sleep reached out for her hand....

When the others came back he had just awakened.

He was sitting up with a sleepy expression and Sunray was kneeling beside him with her hand on his shoulder. "Wake up!" she said.

He looked at her as if he did not know her and then with puzzled eyes at Radiant. "Then there is another life!" he said at last.

"Sarnac!" cried Sunray, shaking him. "Don't you know me?"

He passed a hand over his face. "Yes," he said slowly. "Your name is Sunray. I seem to remember. Sunray.... Not Hetty-- No. Though you are very like Hetty. Queer! And mine--mine is Sarnac.

"Of course! I am Sarnac." He laughed at Willow. "But I thought I was Harry Mortimer Smith," he said. "I did indeed. A moment ago I was Henry Mortimer Smith.... Henry Mortimer Smith."

He looked about him. "Mountains," he said, "sunshine, white narcissus. Of course, we walked up here this very morning. Sunray splashed me at a waterfall.... I remember it perfectly.... And yet I was in bed--shot. I was in bed.... A dream? ... Then I have had a dream, a whole lifetime, two thousand years ago!"

"What do you mean?" said Sunray.

"A lifetime--childhood, boyhood, manhood. And death. He killed me. Poor rat!--he killed me!"

"A dream?"

"A dream--but a very vivid dream. The reallest of dreams. If it was a dream.... I can answer all your questions now, Sunray. I have lived through a whole life in that old world. I know....

"It is as though that life was still the real one and this only a dream.... I was in a bed. Five minutes ago I was in bed. I was dying.... The doctor said, 'He is going.' And I heard the rustle of my wife coming across the room...."

"Your wife!" cried Sunray.

"Yes--my wife--Milly."

Sunray looked at Willow with raised eyebrows and a helpless expression.

Sarnac stared at her, dreamily puzzled. "Milly," he repeated very faintly. "She was by the window."

For some moments no one spoke.

Radiant stood with his arm on Firefly's shoulder.

"Tell us about it, Sarnac. Was it hard to die?"

"I seemed to sink down and down into quiet--and then I woke up here."

"Tell us now, while it is still so real to you."

"Have we not planned to reach the mountain-house before nightfall?" said Willow, glancing at the sun.

"There is a little guest-house here, within five minutes' walk of us," said Firefly.

Radiant sat down beside Sarnac. "Tell us your dream now. If it fades out presently or if it is uninteresting, we can go on; but if it is entertaining, we can hear it out and sleep down here to-night. It is a very pleasant place here, and there is a loveliness about those mauve-coloured crags across the gorge, a faint mistiness in their folds, that I could go on looking at for a week without impatience. Tell us your dream, Sarnac."

He shook his friend. "Wake up, Sarnac!"

Sarnac rubbed his eyes. "It is so queer a story. And there will be so much to explain."

He took thought for a while.

"It will be a long story."

"Naturally, if it is a whole life."

"First let me get some cream and fruit from the guest-house for us all," said Firefly, "and then let Sarnac tell us his dream. Five minutes, Sarnac, and I will be back here."

"I will come with you," said Radiant, hurrying after her.

This that follows is the story Sarnac told.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

THE BEGINNING OF THE DREAM

§ 1

"This dream of mine began," he said, "as all our lives begin, in fragments, in a number of disconnected impressions. I remember myself lying on a sofa, a sofa covered with a curious sort of hard, shiny material with a red and black pattern on it, and I was screaming, but I do not know why I screamed. I discovered my father standing in the doorway of the room looking at me. He looked very dreadful; he was partially undressed in trousers and a flannel shirt and his fair hair was an unbrushed shock; he was shaving and his chin was covered with lather. He was angry because I was screaming. I suppose I stopped screaming, but I am not sure. And I remember kneeling upon the same hard red and black sofa beside my mother and looking out of the window--the sofa used to stand with its back to the window-sill--at the rain falling on the roadway outside. The window-sill smelt faintly of paint; soft bad paint that had blistered in the sun. It was a violent storm of rain and the road was an ill-made road of a yellowish sandy clay. It was covered with muddy water and the storming rainfall made a multitude of flashing bubbles, that drove along before the wind and burst and gave place to others.

"'Look at 'em, dearie,' said my mother. 'Like sojers.'

"I think I was still very young when that happened, but I was not so young that I had not often seen soldiers with their helmets and bayonets marching by."

"That," said Radiant, "was some time before the Great War, then, and the Social Collapse."

"Some time before," said Sarnac. He considered. "Twenty-one years before. This house in which I was born was less than two miles from the great military camp of the British at Lowcliff in England, and Lowcliff railway station was only a few hundred yards away. 'Sojers' were the most conspicuous objects in my world outside my home. They were more brightly coloured than other people. My mother used to wheel me out for air every day in a thing called a perambulator, and whenever there were soldiers to be seen she used to say, 'Oh! PRITTY sojers!'

"'Sojers' must have been one of my earliest words. I used to point my little wool-encased finger--for they wrapped up children tremendously in those days and I wore even gloves--and I would say: 'Sosher.'

"Let me try and describe to you what sort of home this was of mine and what manner of people my father and mother were. Such homes and houses and places have long since vanished from the world, not many relics of them have been kept, and though you have probably learnt most of the facts concerning them, I doubt if you can fully realise the feel and the reality of the things I found about me. The name of the place was Cherry Gardens; it was about two miles from the sea at Sandbourne, one way lay the town of Cliffstone from which steamboats crossed the sea to France, and the other way lay Lowcliff and its rows and rows of ugly red brick barracks and its great drilling-plain, and behind us inland was a sort of plateau covered with raw new roads of loose pebbles--you cannot imagine such roads!--and vegetable gardens and houses new-built or building, and then a line of hills, not very high but steep and green and bare, the Downs. The Downs made a graceful sky-line that bounded my world to the north as the sapphire line of the sea bounded it to the south, and they were almost the only purely beautiful things in that world. All the rest was touched and made painful by human confusion. When I was a very little boy I used to wonder what lay behind those Downs, but I never went up them to see until I was seven or eight years old."

"This was before the days of aeroplanes?" asked Radiant.

"They came into the world when I was eleven or twelve. I saw the first that ever crossed the Channel between the mainland of Europe and England. That was considered a very wonderful thing indeed. ("It was a wonderful thing," said Sunray.) I went with a lot of other boys, and we edged through a crowd that stood and stared at the quaint old machine; it was like a big canvas grasshopper with outspread wings; in a field--somewhere beyond Cliffstone. It was being guarded, and the people were kept away from it by stakes and a string.

"I find it hard to describe to you what sort of places Cherry Gardens and Cliffstone were like--even though we have just visited the ruins of Domodossola. Domodossola was a sprawling, aimless town enough, but these sprawled far more and looked with a far emptier aimlessness into the face of God. You see in the thirty or forty years before my birth there had been a period of comparative prosperity and productivity in human affairs. It was not of course in those days the result of any statesmanship or forethought; it just happened,--as now and then in the course of a rain-torrent there comes a pool of level water between the rapids. But the money and credit system was working fairly well; there was much trade and intercourse, no extensive pestilences, exceptionally helpful seasons, and few very widespread wars. As a result of this conspiracy of favourable conditions there was a perceptible rise in the standards of life of the common people, but for the most part it was discounted by a huge increase of population. As our school books say, 'In those days Man was his own Locust.' Later in my life I was to hear furtive whispers of a forbidden topic called Birth Control, but in the days of my childhood the whole population of the world, with very few exceptions, was in a state of complete and carefully protected ignorance about the elementary facts of human life and happiness. The surroundings of my childhood were dominated by an unforeseen and uncontrollable proliferation. Cheap proliferation was my scenery, my drama, my atmosphere."

"But they had teachers and priests and doctors and rulers to tell them better," said Willow.

"Not to tell them better," said Sarnac. "These guides and pilots of life were wonderful people. They abounded, and guided no one. So far from teaching men and women to control births or avoid diseases or work generously together, they rather prevented such teaching. This place called Cherry Gardens had mostly come into existence in the fifty years before my birth. It had grown from a minute hamlet into what we used to call an 'urban district.' In that old world in which there was neither freedom nor direction, the land was divided up into patches of all sorts and sizes and owned by people who did what they liked with it, subject to a few vexatious and unhelpful restrictions. And in Cherry Gardens, a sort of men called speculative builders bought pieces of land, often quite unsuitable land, and built houses for the swarming increase of population that had otherwise nowhere to go. There was no plan about this building. One speculative builder built here and another there, and each built as cheaply as possible and sold or let what he had built for as much as possible. Some of the houses they built in rows and some stood detached each with a little patch of private garden--garden they called it, though it was either a muddle or a waste--fenced in to keep people out."

"Why did they keep people out?"

"They liked to keep people out. It was a satisfaction for them. They were not secret gardens. People might look over the fence if they chose. And each house had its own kitchen where food was cooked--there was no public eating-place in Cherry Gardens--and each, its separate store of household gear. In most houses there was a man who went out to work and earn a living--they didn't so much live in those days as earn a living--and came home to eat and sleep, and there was a woman, his wife, who did all the services, food and cleaning and everything, and also she bore children, a lot of unpremeditated children--because she didn't know any better. She was too busy to look after them well, and many of them died. Most days she cooked a dinner. She cooked it.... It was cooking!"

Sarnac paused--his brows knit. "Cooking! Well, well. That's over, anyhow," he said.

Radiant laughed cheerfully.

"Almost everyone suffered from indigestion. The newspapers were full of advertisements of cures," said Sarnac, still darkly retrospective.

"I've never thought of that aspect of life in the old world," said Sunray.

"It was--fundamental," said Sarnac. "It was a world, in every way, out of health.

"Every morning, except on the Sunday, after the man had gone off to his day's toil and the children had been got up and dressed and those who were old enough sent off to school, the woman of the house tidied up a bit and then came the question of getting in food. For this private cooking of hers. Every day except Sunday a number of men with little pony carts or with barrows they pushed in front of them, bearing meat and fish and vegetables and fruit, all of it exposed to the weather and any dirt that might be blowing about, came bawling along the roads of Cherry Gardens, shouting the sort of food they were selling. My memory goes back to that red and black sofa by the front window and I am a child once again. There was a particularly splendid fish hawker. What a voice he had! I used to try to reproduce his splendid noises in my piping childish cries: 'Mackroo-E-y'are Macroo! Fine Macroo! Thee a Sheen. _Macroo_!'

"The housewives would come out from their domestic mysteries to buy or haggle and, as the saying went, 'pass the time of day' with their neighbours. But everything they wanted was not to be got from the hawkers, and that was where my father came in. He kept a little shop. He was what was called a greengrocer; he sold fruits and vegetables, such poor fruits and vegetables as men had then learnt to grow--and also he sold coals and paraffin (which people burnt in their lamps) and chocolate and ginger-beer and other things that were necessary to the barbaric housekeeping of the time. He also sold cut-flowers and flowers in pots, and seeds and sticks and string and weed-killer for the little gardens. His shop stood in a row with a lot of other shops; the row was like a row of the ordinary houses with the lower rooms taken out and replaced by the shop, and he 'made his living' and ours by buying his goods as cheaply as he could and getting as much as he could for them. It was a very poor living because there were several other able-bodied men in Cherry Gardens who were also greengrocers, and if he took too much profit then his customers would go away and buy from these competitors and he would get no profit at all.

"I and my brother and sisters--for my mother had been unable to avoid having six babies and four of us were alive--lived by and in and round about this shop. In the summer we were chiefly out of doors or in the room above the shop; but in the cold weather it cost too much trouble and money to have a fire in that room--all Cherry Gardens was heated by open coal fires--and we went down into a dark underground kitchen where my mother, poor dear! cooked according to her lights."

"You were troglodytes!" said Willow.

"Practically. We always ate in that downstairs room. In the summer we were sunburnt and ruddy, but in the winter, because of this--inhumation, we became white and rather thin. I had an elder brother who was monstrous in my childish memory; he was twelve years older than I; and I had two sisters, Fanny and Prudence. My elder brother Ernest went out to work, and then he went away to London and I saw very little of him until I too went to London. I was the youngest of the lot; and when I was nine years old, my father, taking courage, turned my mother's perambulator into a little push-cart for delivering sacks of coals and suchlike goods.

"Fanny, my elder sister, was a very pretty girl, with a white face from which her brown hair went back in graceful, natural waves and curls, and she had very dark blue eyes. Prudence was also white but of a duller whiteness, and her eyes were grey. She would tease me and interfere with me, but Fanny was either negligent or gracefully kind to me and I adored her. I do not, strangely enough, remember my mother's appearance at all distinctly, though she was, of course, the dominant fact of my childish life. She was too familiar, I suppose, for the sort of attention that leaves a picture on the mind.

"I learnt to speak from my family and chiefly from my mother. None of us spoke well; our common idioms were poor and bad, we mispronounced many words, and long words we avoided as something dangerous and pretentious. I had very few toys: a tin railway-engine I remember, some metal soldiers, and an insufficient supply of wooden building-bricks. There was no special place for me to play, and if I laid out my toys on the living-room table, a meal was sure to descend and sweep them away. I remember a great longing to play with the things in the shop, and especially with the bundles of firewood and some fire-kindlers that were most seductively shaped like wheels, but my father discouraged such ambitions. He did not like to have me about the shop until I was old enough to help, and the indoor part of most of my days was spent in the room above it or in the underground room below it. After the shop was closed it became a very cold, cavernous, dark place to a little boy's imagination; there were dreadful shadows in which terrible things might lurk, and even holding fast to my mother's hand on my way to bed, I was filled with fear to traverse it. It had always a faint, unpleasant smell, a smell of decaying vegetation varying with the particular fruit or vegetable that was most affected, and a constant element of paraffin. But on Sundays when it was closed all day the shop was different, no longer darkly threatening but very, very still. I would be taken through it on my way to church or Sunday school. (Yes--I will tell you about church and Sunday school in a minute.) When I saw my mother lying dead--she died when I was close upon sixteen--I was instantly reminded of the Sunday shop....

"Such, my dear Sunray, was the home in which I found myself. I seemed to have been there since my beginning. It was the deepest dream I have ever had. I had forgotten even you."

§ 2

"And how was this casually begotten infant prepared for the business of life?" asked Radiant. "Was he sent away to a Garden?"

"There were no Children's Gardens such as we know them, in that world," said Sarnac. "There was a place of assembly called an elementary school. Thither I was taken, twice daily, by my sister Prudence, after I was six years old.

"And here again I find it hard to convey to you what the reality was like. Our histories tell you of the beginning of general education in that distant time and of the bitter jealousy felt by the old priesthoods and privileged people for the new sort of teachers, but they give you no real picture of the ill-equipped and understaffed schoolhouses and of the gallant work of the underpaid and ill-trained men and women who did the first rough popular teaching. There was in

## particular a gaunt dark man with a cough who took the older boys, and

a little freckled woman of thirty or so who fought with the lower children, and, I see now, they were holy saints. His name I forget, but the little woman was called Miss Merrick. They had to handle enormous classes, and they did most of their teaching by voice and gesture and chalk upon a blackboard. Their equipment was miserable. The only materials of which there was enough to go round were a stock of dirty reading-books, Bibles, hymn-books, and a lot of slabs of slate in frames on which we wrote with slate pencils to economise paper. Drawing materials we had practically none; most of us never learnt to draw. Yes. Lots of sane adults in that old world never learnt to draw even a box. There was nothing to count with in that school and no geometrical models. There were hardly any pictures except a shiny one of Queen Victoria and a sheet of animals, and there were very yellow wall-maps of Europe and Asia twenty years out of date. We learnt the elements of mathematics by recitation. We used to stand in rows, chanting a wonderful chant called our Tables:--

"'_Twi_-swun two. _Twi_-stewer four. _Twi_-shee'r six. _Twi_-sfour' rate.'

"We used to sing--in unison--religious hymns for the most part. The school had a second-hand piano to guide our howlings. There had been a great fuss in Cliffstone and Cherry Gardens when this piano was bought. They called it a luxury, and pampering the working classes."

"Pampering the working classes!" Firefly repeated. "I suppose it's all right. But I'm rather at sea."

"I can't explain everything," said Sarnac. "The fact remains that England grudged its own children the shabbiest education, and so for the matter of fact did every other country. They saw things differently in those days. They were still in the competitive cave. America, which was a much richer country than England, as wealth went then, had if possible meaner and shabbier schools for her common people.... My dear! it was so. I'm telling you a story, not explaining the universe.... And naturally, in spite of the strenuous efforts of such valiant souls as Miss Merrick, we children learnt little and we learnt it very badly. Most of my memories of school are memories of boredom. We sat on wooden forms at long, worn, wooden desks, rows and rows of us--I can see again all the little heads in front of me--and far away was Miss Merrick with a pointer trying to interest us in the Rivers of England:--

"Ty. Wear. Teasumber."

"Is that what they used to call swearing?" asked Willow.

"No. Only Jogriphy. And History was:--

"Wi-yum the Conqueror. Tessisstysiss. Wi-yum Ruefiss. Ten eighty-seven."

"What did it mean?"

"To us children? Very much what it means to you--gibberish. The hours, those interminable hours of childhood in school! How they dragged! Did I say I lived a life in my dream? In school I lived eternities. Naturally we sought such amusement as was possible. One thing was to give your next-door neighbour a pinch or a punch and say, 'Pass it on.' And we played furtive games with marbles. It is rather amusing to recall that I learnt to count, to add and subtract and so forth, by playing marbles in despite of discipline."

"But was that the best your Miss Merrick and your saint with the cough could do?" asked Radiant.

"Oh! they couldn't help themselves. They were in a machine, and there were periodic Inspectors and examinations to see that they kept in it."

"But," said Sunray, "that Incantation about 'Wi-yum the Conqueror' and the rest of it. It meant something? At the back of it, lost to sight perhaps, there was some rational or semi-rational idea?"

"Perhaps," reflected Sarnac. "But I never detected it."

"They called it history," said Firefly helpfully.

"They did," Sarnac admitted. "Yes, I think they were trying to interest the children of the land in the doings of the Kings and Queens of England, probably as dull a string of monarchs as the world has ever seen. If they rose to interest at times it was through a certain violence; there was one delightful Henry VIII with such a craving for love and such a tender conscience about the sanctity of marriage that he always murdered one wife before he took another. And there was one Alfred who burnt some cakes--I never knew why. In some way it embarrassed the Danes, his enemies."

"But was that all the history they taught you?" cried Sunray.

"Queen Elizabeth of England wore a ruff and James the First of England and Scotland kissed his men favourites."

"But history!"

Sarnac laughed. "It is odd. I see that--now that I am awake again. But indeed that was all they taught us."

"Did they tell you nothing of the beginnings of life and the ends of life, of its endless delights and possibilities?"

Sarnac shook his head.

"Not at school," said Starlight, who evidently knew her books; "they did that at church. Sarnac forgets the churches. It was, you must remember, an age of intense religious activity. There were places of worship everywhere. One whole day in every seven was given up to the Destinies of Man and the study of God's Purpose. The worker ceased from his toil. From end to end of the land the air was full of the sound of church bells and of congregations singing. Wasn't there a certain beauty in that, Sarnac?"

Sarnac reflected and smiled. "It wasn't quite like that," he said. "Our histories, in that matter, need a little revision."

"But one sees the churches and chapels in the old photographs and cinema pictures. And we still have many of their cathedrals. And some of those are quite beautiful."

"And they have all had to be shored up and underpinned and tied together with steel," said Sunray, "because they were either so carelessly or so faithlessly built. And anyhow, these were not built in Sarnac's time."

"Mortimer Smith's time," Sarnac corrected.

"They were built hundreds of years earlier than that."

§ 3

"You must not judge the religion of an age by its temples and churches," said Sarnac. "An unhealthy body may have many things in it that it cannot clear away, and the weaker it is the less it can prevent abnormal and unserviceable growths.... Which sometimes may be in themselves quite bright and beautiful growths.

"But let me describe to you the religious life of my home and upbringing. There was a sort of State Church in England, but it had lost most of its official standing in regard to the community as a whole; it had two buildings in Cherry Gardens--one an old one dating from the hamlet days with a square tower and rather small as churches went, and the other new and spacious with a spire. In addition there were the chapels of two other Christian communities, the Congregationalists and the Primitive Methodists, and also one belonging to the old Roman Catholic communion. Each professed to present the only true form of Christianity and each maintained a minister, except the larger Church of England place, which had two, the vicar and the curate. You might suppose that, like the museums of history and the Temples of Vision we set before our young people, these places would display in the most moving and beautiful forms possible the history of our race and the great adventure of life in which we are all engaged, they would remind us of our brotherhood and lift us out of selfish thoughts.... But let me tell you how I saw it:--

"I don't remember my first religious instruction. Very early I must have learnt to say a rhymed prayer to--

"'Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, Look on me, a little child.'

And also another prayer about 'Trespassing' which I thought referred to going into fields or woods where there was no public footpath, and which began with the entirely incomprehensible words, 'Our Father Charting Heaven, Haloed B thy Name.' Also one asked for one's 'daily bread' and that God's Kingdom should come. I learnt these two prayers from my mother at an incredibly early age, and said them every night and sometimes in the morning. She held these words in far too great reverence to explain them, and when I wanted to ask for my 'daily bread and butter,' she scolded me bitterly. I also wanted to ask what would happen to good Queen Victoria when God's Kingdom came, but I never mustered courage to ask my mother that. I had a curious idea that there could be a marriage but that nobody had thought of that solution. This must have been very early in my life, because Victoria the Good died when I was five, during the course of a long, far-away, and now almost-forgotten struggle called the Boer War.

"These infantile perplexities deepened and then gave way to a kind of self-protective apathy when I was old enough to go to church and Sunday school.

"Sunday morning was by far the most strenuous part of all the week for my mother. We had all had a sort of bath overnight in the underground kitchen, except my father and mother, who I don't think ever washed all over--I don't know for certain--and on Sunday morning we rose rather later than usual and put on our 'clean things' and our best clothes. (Everybody in those days wore a frightful lot of clothes. You see, they were all so unhealthy they could not stand the least exposure to wet or cold.) Breakfast was a hurried and undistinguished meal on the way to greater things. Then we had to sit about, keeping out of harm's way, avoiding all crumpling or dirt, and pretending to be interested in one of the ten or twelve books our home possessed, until church time. Mother prepared the Sunday meal, almost always a joint of meat in a baking-dish which my elder sister took in to the baker's next door but one to be cooked while we worshipped. Father rose later than anyone and appeared strangely transformed in a collar, dickey and cuffs and a black coat and his hair smoothed down and parted. Usually some unforeseen delay arose; one of my sisters had a hole in her stocking, or my boots wouldn't button and nobody could find the buttonhook, or a prayer-book was mislaid. This engendered an atmosphere of flurry. There were anxious moments when the church bell ceased to ring and began a monotonous 'tolling-in.'

"'Oh! we shall be late _again_!' said my mother. 'We shall be late _again_.'

"'I'll go on with Prue,' my father would say.

"'Me too!' said Fanny.

"'Not till you've found that button'ook, Miss Huzzy,' my mother would cry. 'For well I know you've 'ad it.'

"Fanny would shrug her shoulders.

"'Why 'e carn't 'ave lace-up shoes to 'is feet like any other kid, I carn't understand,' my father would remark unhelpfully.

"My mother, ashen white with flurry, would wince and say, 'Lace-up shoes at 'is age! Let alone that 'e'd break the laces.'

"'What's that on the chiffoneer?' Fanny would ask abruptly.

"'Ah! Naturally you know.'

"'Naturally I use my eyes.'

"'Tcha! Got your answer ready! Oh, you _wicked_ girl!'

"Fanny would shrug her shoulders again and stare out of the window. There was more trouble afoot than a mislaid buttonhook between her and my mother. Overnight 'Miss Huzzy' had been abroad long after twilight, a terrible thing from a mother's point of view, as I will make plain to you later.

"My mother, breathing hard, would button my boots in a punitive manner and then off we would go, Prue hanging on to father ahead, Fanny a little apart and scornful, and I trying to wriggle my little white-cotton-gloved hand out of my mother's earnest grip.

"We had what was called a 'sitting' at church, a long seat with some hassocks and a kind of little praying-ledge at the back of the seat in front. We filed into our sitting and knelt and rose up, and were ready for the function known as morning service."

§ 4

"And this service again was a strange thing. We read about these churches and their services in our histories and we simplify and idealise the picture; we take everything in the account, as we used to say in that old world, at its face value. We think that the people understood and believed completely the curious creeds of those old-world religions; that they worshipped with a simple ardour; that they had in their hearts a secret system of comforts and illusions which some of us even now try to recover. But life is always more complicated than any account or representation of it can be. The human mind in those days was always complicating and overlaying its ideas, forgetting primary in secondary considerations, substituting repetition and habit for purposive acts, and forgetting and losing its initial intentions. Life has grown simpler for men as the ages have passed because it has grown clearer. We were more complicated in our lives then because we were more confused. And so we sat in our pews on Sunday, in a state of conforming inattention, not really thinking out what we were doing, feeling rather than knowing significances and with our thoughts wandering like water from a leaky vessel. We watched the people about us furtively and minutely and we were acutely aware that they watched us. We stood up, we half knelt, we sat, as the ritual of the service required us to do. I can still recall quite vividly the long complex rustle of the congregation as it sat down or rose up in straggling unison.

"This morning service was a mixture of prayers and recitations by the priests--vicar and curate we called them--and responses by the congregation, chants, rhymed hymns, the reading of passages from the Hebrew-Christian Bible, and at last a discourse. Except for this discourse all the service followed a prescribed course set out in a prayer-book. We hopped from one page of the prayer-book to another, and 'finding your place' was a terrible mental exercise for a small boy with a sedulous mother on one side and Prue on the other.

"The service began lugubriously and generally it was lugubrious. We were all miserable sinners, there was no health in us; we expressed our mild surprise that our Deity did not resort to violent measures against us. There was a long part called the Litany in which the priest repeated with considerable gusto every possible human misfortune, war, pestilence, famine, and so on, and the congregation interjected at intervals, 'Good Lord deliver us!' although you might have thought that these were things within the purview of our international and health and food administrators rather than matters for the Supreme Being. Then the officiating priest went on to a series of prayers for the Queen, the rulers of the State, heretics, unfortunate people, travellers, and the harvest, all of which I concluded were being dangerously neglected by Divine Providence, and the congregation reinforced the priest's efforts by salvos of 'We beseech Thee to hear us, Good Lord.' The hymns were of very variable quality, but the greater part were effusive praises of our Maker, with frequent false rhymes and bad quantities. We thanked Heaven for our 'blessings,' and that without a thought of irony. Yet you would imagine that a Deity of Infinite Power might easily have excused our gratitude for the precarious little coal and greengrocery business in Cherry Gardens and all my mother's toil and anxieties and my father's worries.

"The general effect of this service beneath its surface adulation of the worshipped God, was to blame Him thoroughly and completely for every human misfortune and to deny the responsibility of mankind for its current muddle and wretchedness. Throughout the land and throughout most of the world, Sunday after Sunday, by chant and hymn and prayer and gesture, it was being dinned into the minds of young people, whenever for a moment the service broke through the surface of their protective instinctive inattention, that mankind was worthless and hopeless, the helpless plaything of a moody, impulsive, vain, and irresistible Being. This rain of suggestion came between their minds and the Sun of Life; it hid the Wonderful from them; it robbed them of access to the Spirit of Courage. But so alien was this doctrine of abasement from the heart of man, that for the most part the congregation sat or stood or knelt in rows in its pews repeating responses and singing mechanically, with its minds distracted to a thousand distant more congenial things, watching the deportment of its neighbours, scheming about business or pleasure, wandering in reverie.

"There would come at times into this service, sometimes but not always, parts of another service, the Communion Service. This was the reduced remainder of that Catholic Mass of which we have all learnt in our histories. As you know, the world of Christianity was still struggling, nineteen hundred years after Christianity had begun, to get rid of the obsession of a mystical blood sacrifice, to forget a traditional killing of a God-man, that was as old as agriculture and the first beginnings of human settlement. The English State Church was so much a thing of compromise and tradition that in the two churches it had in Cherry Gardens the teaching upon this issue was diametrically opposed; one, the new and showy one, St. Jude's, was devoted to an exaggeration of the importance of the Communion, called it the Mass, called the table on which it was celebrated the Altar, called the Rev. Mr. Snapes the Priest, and generally emphasised the ancient pagan interpretation, while the other, the little old church of St. Osyth, called its priest a Minister, its altar the Lord's Table, and the Communion the Lord's Supper, denied all its mystical importance, and made it merely a memorial of the life and death of the Master. These age-long controversies between the immemorial temple worship of our race and the new life of intellectual and spiritual freedom that had then been dawning in the world for three or four centuries were far above my poor little head as I fretted and 'behaved myself' in our sitting. To my youthful mind the Communion Service meant nothing more than a long addition to the normal tediums of worship. In those days I had a pathetic belief in the magic of prayer, and oblivious of the unflattering implications of my request I would whisper throughout the opening prayers and recitations of the morning: 'Pray God there won't be a Communion Service. Pray God there won't be a Communion Service.'

"Then would come the sermon, the original composition of the Rev. Mr. Snapes, and the only thing in the whole service that was not set and prescribed and that had not been repeated a thousand times before.

"Mr. Snapes was a youngish pinkish man with pinkish golden hair and a clean-shaven face; he had small chubby features like a cluster of _champignons_, an expression of beatific self-satisfaction, and a plump voice. He had a way of throwing back the ample white sleeve of his surplice when he turned the pages of his manuscript, a sort of upthrow of the posed white hand, that aroused in me one of the inexplicable detestations of childhood. I used to hate this gesture, watch for its coming and squirm when it came.

"The sermons were so much above my head that I cannot now tell what any of them were about. He would talk of things like the 'Comfort of the Blessed Eucharist' and the 'Tradition of the Fathers of the Church.' He would discourse too of what he called the Feasts of the Church, though a collection plate was the nearest approach to feasting we saw. He made much of Advent and Epiphany and Whitsuntide, and he had a common form of transition to modern considerations, 'And we too, dear Brethren, in these latter days have our Advents and our Epiphanies.' Then he would pass to King Edward's proposed visit to Lowcliffe or to the recent dispute about the Bishop of Natal or the Bishop of Zanzibar. You cannot imagine how remote it was from anything of moment in our normal lives.

"And then suddenly, when a small boy was losing all hope of this smooth voice ever ceasing, came a little pause and then the blessed words of release: 'And now to God the Father, God the Son----'

"It was over! There was a stir throughout the church. We roused ourselves, we stood up. Then we knelt for a brief moment of apparent prayer and then we scrabbled for hats, coats, and umbrellas, and so out into the open air, a great pattering of feet upon the pavement, dispersing this way and that, stiff greetings of acquaintances, Prue to the baker's for the Sunday dinner and the rest of us straight home.

"Usually there were delightful brown potatoes under the Sunday joint and perhaps there would be a fruit pie also. But in the spring came rhubarb, which I hated. It was held to be peculiarly good for me, and I was always compelled to eat exceptionally large helpings of rhubarb tart.

"In the afternoon there was Sunday school or else 'Children's Service,' and, relieved of the presence of our parents, we three children went to the school-house or to the church again to receive instruction in the peculiarities of our faith. In the Sunday school untrained and unqualified people whom we knew in the week-days as shop assistants and an auctioneer's clerk and an old hairy deaf gentleman named Spendilow, collected us in classes and discoursed to us on the ambiguous lives and doings of King David of Israel and of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the misbehaviour of Queen Jezebel and the like topics. And we sang easy hymns in unison. At times our teachers spoke of the Master of Mankind, but they spoke without understanding; they spoke of him as a sort of trickster who worked miracles and achieved jail delivery from the tomb. And so had 'saved' us--in spite of the manifest fact that we were anything but saved. The teaching of the Master was, you know, buried under these tales of Resurrection and Miracles for two thousand years. He was a light shining in the darkness and the darkness knew it not. And of the great past of life, of the races of men and their slow growth in knowledge, of fears and dark superstitions and the dawning victories of truth, of the conquest and sublimation of human passions through the ages, of the divinity of research and discovery, of the latent splendour of our bodies and senses, and the present dangers and possibilities amidst which the continually more crowded masses of our race were then blundering so tragically and yet with such bright gleams of hope and promise, we heard no talk at all. We were given no intimation that there was so much as a human community with a common soul and an ultimate common destiny. It would have been scandalous and terrifying to those Sunday-school teachers to have heard any such things spoken about in Sunday school.

"And mind you," said Sarnac, "there was no better preparation for life in all the world then than the sort of thing I was getting. The older church of St. Osyth was in the hands of the Rev. Thomas Benderton, who dispersed a dwindling congregation by bellowing sermons full of the threat of hell. He had scared my mother to the church of St. Jude by his frequent mention of the devil, and the chief topic of his discourse was the sin of idolatry; he treated it always with especial reference to the robes adopted by Mr. Snapes when he celebrated Holy Communion and to something obscure that he did with small quantities of bread and wine upon his Communion table.

"Of what the Congregationalists and the Primitive Methodists did and taught in their places of resort, their chapels and Sunday schools, I do not know very exactly, because my mother would have been filled with a passion of religious terror if ever I had gone near those assemblies. But I know that their procedure was only a plainer version of our church experiences with still less of the Mass and still more of the devil. The Primitive Methodists, I know, laid their chief stress upon the belief that the greater portion of mankind, when once they had done with the privations and miseries of this life, would be tortured exquisitely for ever and ever in hell. I got this very clearly because a Primitive Methodist boy a little older than myself conveyed his anxieties to me one day when we had gone for a walk into Cliffstone.

"He was a bent sort of boy with a sniff and he wore a long white woollen comforter; there hasn't been such a figure in the world now for hundreds of years. We walked along the promenade that followed the cliff edge, by the bandstand and by the people lounging in deck-chairs. There were swarms of people in their queer holiday clothes, and behind, rows of the pallid grey houses in which they lodged. And my companion bore his testimony. 'Mr. Molesly 'e says that the Day of Judgment might come any minute--come in fire and glory before ever we get to the end of these Leas. And all them people'd be tried....'

"'Jest as they are?'

"'Jest as they are. That woman there with the dog and that fat man asleep in 'is chair and--the policeman.'

"He paused, a little astonished at the Hebraic daring of his thoughts. 'The policeman,' he repeated. 'They'd be weighed and found wanting, and devils would come and torture them. Torture that policeman. Burn him and cut him about. And everybody. Horrible, horrible torture....'

"I had never heard the doctrines of Christianity applied with such

## particularity before. I was dismayed.

"'I sh'd 'ide,' I said.

"''_E_'d see you. '_E_'d see you and tell the devils,' said my little friend. ''_E_ sees the wicked thoughts in us now....'"

"But did people really believe such stuff as that?" cried Sunray.

"As far as they believed anything," said Sarnac. "I admit it was frightful, but so it was. Do you realise what cramped, distorted minds grew up under such teaching in our under-nourished, infected bodies?"

"Few people could have really believed so grotesque a fairy-tale as hell," said Radiant.

"More people believed than you would think," said Sarnac. "Few people, of course, held it actively for long--or they would have gone mad--but it was in the background of a lot of minds. And the others? The effect of this false story about the world upon the majority of minds was a sort of passive rejection. They did not deny, but they refused to incorporate the idea with the rest of their thoughts. A kind of dead place, a scar, was made just where there ought to have been a sense of human destiny, a vision of life beyond the immediate individual life ...

"I find it hard to express the state of mind into which one grew. The minds of the young had been outraged by these teachings; they were no longer capable of complete mental growth, a possibility had been destroyed. Perhaps we never did really take into ourselves and believe that grotesque fairy-tale, as you call it, about hell but, because of what it had done to our minds, we grew up without a living faith and without a purpose. The nucleus of our religious being was this suppressed fear of hell. Few of us ever had it out fairly into the light of day. It was considered to be bad taste to speak of any such things, or indeed of any of the primaries of life, either by way of belief or denial. You might allude circuitously. Or joke. Most of the graver advances in life were made under a mask of facetiousness.

"Mentally that world in the days of Mortimer Smith was a world astray. It was astray like a lost dog and with no idea of direction. It is true that the men of that time were very like the men of this time--in their possibilities--but they were unhealthy in mind as well as body, they were adrift and incoherent. Walking as we do in the light, and by comparison simply and directly, their confusion, the tortuous perplexity of their thoughts and conduct, is almost inconceivable to us. There is no sort of mental existence left in our world now, to which it can be compared."

§ 5

"I think I mentioned the line of hills, the Downs that bounded the world of my upbringing to the north. What lay beyond them was a matter for wonder and speculation to me long before I was able to clamber to their crests. In summer time the sun set behind them to the north-west, often in a glow of gold and splendour, and I remember that among my fancies was a belief that the Day of Judgment was over there and that Celestial City to which Mr. Snapes would some day lead us--in procession, of course, and with a banner.

"My first ascent of this childhood's boundary must have occurred when I was eight or nine. I do not remember with whom I went or any other

## particulars, but I have a very acute memory of my disappointment at

looking down a long, very gentle slope and seeing nothing but fields and hedges and groups of large sheep feeding. What I had expected to find I cannot now remember. I seem to have noted only the foreground then, and it must have been after many such excursions that I began to realise the variegated spaciousness of the country to the north. The view indeed went very far; on a clear day we saw blue hills nearly twenty miles away; there were woodlands and parklands, brown ridges of plough-land that became golden ridges of corn in summer time, village churches amidst clustering greenery, and the gleaming of ponds and lakes. Southward the horizon lifted as the Downs were ascended and the breadth of the sea-belt increased. It was my father who drew my attention to that, on the first occasion of our crossing the Downs together.

"'Go as 'igh as you like, 'Arry,' he said, 'and the sea goes up as 'igh. There it is, you see--level with us and we ever so 'igh above Cherry Gardens. And yet it don't _drown'd_ Cherry Gardens! And why don't it drown'd Cherry Gardens seeing that it might? Tell me that, 'Arry.'

"I couldn't.

"'Providence,' said my father triumphantly. 'Providence does it. 'Olds back the sea, Thus Far. And over there, see 'ow plain it is! is France.'

"I saw France and it was exceptionally plain.

"'Sometimes you see France and sometimes you don't,' said my father. 'There's a lesson in that too, my boy, for those who care to take it.'

"It had always been the custom of my father to go out after tea on Sundays, summer and winter alike, and walk right over the Downs to Chessing Hanger, six miles and more away. He went, I knew, to see my Uncle John, Uncle John Julip, my mother's brother, who was gardener to Lord Bramble of Chessing Hanger Park. But it was only when he began to take me with him that I realised that these walks had any other motive than fraternal (in law) affection and the natural desire of a pent-up shopkeeper for exercise. But from the first journey on I knew that the clue to these expeditions lay in the burthens with which we returned to Cherry Gardens. Always there was supper in the cosy little gardener's cottage, and always as we departed we picked up an unobtrusive load of flowers, fruit or vegetables, celery, peas, aubergines, mushrooms or what-not, and returned through the dusk or moonlight or darkness or drizzle as the season and the weather might determine to the little shop. And sometimes my father would be silent or whistle softly and sometimes he would improve our journey with a discourse on the wonders of nature, the beauty of goodness, and the beneficence of Providence to man.

"He talked of the moon one moonlight night. 'Look at it, 'Arry,' he said--'a dead world. Like a skull it is, up there, stripped of its soul which is its flesh so to speak and all its trees, which, if you take me, were its 'air and its whiskers--stripped and dead for ever and ever. Dry as a bone. And everyone who lived there gone too. Dust and ashes and gone.'

"'Where they gone, farver?' I would ask.

"'Gorn to their judgment,' he would explain with gusto. 'Kings and greengroshers, all the lot of 'em, tried and made sheep and goats of, and gone to their bliss or their sufferings, 'Arry. According to their iniquities. Weighed and found wanting.'

"Long pause.

"'It's a pity,' he said.

"'What is, farver?'

"'Pity it's over. It 'ud be something to look at, them running about up there. Friendly-like it 'ud be. But that's questioning the ways of Providence, that is. I suppose we'd be always staring up and falling over things.... You never see a thing in this world, 'Arry, that you think isn't right but what when you come to think it out it isn't wiser than you knew. Providence is as deep as E is I and you can't get be'ind 'im. And don't go banging them pears against your side, my boy; they'm Wi'yums, and they won't like it.'

"About the curious habits of animals and the ways and migrations of birds my father would also talk very freely.

"'Me and you, 'Arry, we walk by the light of reason. We 'ave reasonable minds given us to do it with. But animals and birds and worms and things, they live by Instink; they jus' feel they 'ave to do this or that and they do it. It's Instink keeps the whale in the sea and the bird in the air; but we go where our legs carry us as reason 'as directed. You can't ask an animal Why did you do this? or Why did you do that?--you just 'it it; but a man you ask and 'e 'as to answer, being a reasonable creature. That's why we 'as jails and punishment and are answerable for our sins, 'Arry. Every sin we 'as to answer for, great or small. But an animal don't 'ave to answer. It's innocent. You 'it it or else you leave it be....'

"My father thought for a time. 'Except for dogs and some _old_ cats,' he said. He mused among his memories for a time. 'I've known some _sinful_ cats, 'Arry,' he said.

"He would enlarge on the wonders of instinct.

"He would explain how swallows and starlings and storks and such-like birds were driven by instinct thousands of miles, getting drowned on the way and dashed to pieces against lighthouses. 'Else they'd freeze and starve where they was, 'Arry,' said my father. And every bird knew by instinct what sort of nest it had to build, no one ever showing it or telling it. Kangaroos carried their young in pouches by instinct, but man being a reasonable creature made perambulators. Chickens ran about by instinct directly they were born; not like human children, who had to be carried and taken care of until reason came. And jolly lucky that was for the chicken, 'For 'ow a 'en would carry them,' said my father, 'I carn't imagine.'

"I remember that I put my father into a difficulty by asking him why Providence had not given birds an instinct against beating themselves against lighthouses and moths against the gas-jet and the candle-flame. For in the room over the shop on a summer's night it was quite unpleasant to read a book because of the disabled flies and moths that fell scorched upon its pages. 'It's to teach 'em some lesson,' said my father at last. 'But what it's to teach them, 'Arry, I don't rightly know.'

"And sometimes he would talk, with illustrative stories, of ill-gotten gold never staying with the getter, and sometimes he would talk of murders--for there were still many murders in the world--and how they always came out, 'hide them as you may.' And always he was ready to point out the goodness and wisdom, the cleverness, forethought, ingenuity, and kindliness of Providence in the most earnest and flattering manner.

"With such high discourse did we enliven our long trudges between Cherry Gardens and Chessing Hanger, and my father's tone was always so exalted that with a real shock I presently came to realise that every Sunday evening we were in plain English stealing and receiving stolen produce from Lord Bramble's gardens. Indeed, I cannot imagine how we should have got along without that weekly raid. Our little home at Cherry Gardens was largely supported by my father's share in the profits of these transactions. When the produce was too good and costly for Cherry Gardens' needs, he would take it down to Cliffstone and sell it to a friend there who had a fashionable trade."

Sarnac paused.

"Go on," said Radiant. "You are making us believe in your story. It sounds more and more as if you had been there. It is so circumstantial. Who was this Lord Bramble? I have always been curious about Lords."

§ 6

"Let me tell my story in my own way," said Sarnac. "If I answer questions I shall get lost. You are all ready to ask a hundred questions already about things I have mentioned and points familiar to me but incomprehensible to you because our world has forgotten them, and if I weaken towards you you will trail me away and away further and further from my father and my Uncle Julip. We shall just talk about manners and customs and about philosophy and history. I want to tell my story."

"Go on with your story," said Sunray.

"This Uncle John Julip of mine, although he was my mother's brother, was a cynical, opinionated man. He was very short and fatter than was usual among gardeners. He had a smooth white face and a wise, self-satisfied smile. To begin with, I saw him only on Sundays and in white shirt sleeves and a large straw hat. He made disparaging remarks about my physique and about the air of Cherry Gardens every time he saw me. His wife had been a dissenter of some sort and had become a churchwoman under protest. She too was white-faced and her health was bad. She complained of pains. But my Uncle John Julip disparaged her pains because he said they were not in a reasonable place. There was stomachache and backache and heartburn and the wind, but her pains were neither here nor there; they were therefore pains of the imagination and had no claim upon our sympathy.

"When I was nearly thirteen years old my father and uncle began planning for me to go over to the Chessing Hanger gardens and be an under-gardener. This was a project I disliked very greatly; not only did I find my uncle unattractive, but I thought weeding and digging and most of the exercises of a garden extremely tiring and boring. I had taken very kindly to reading, I liked languages, I inherited something of my father's loquaciousness, and I had won a special prize for an essay in my school. This had fired the most unreasonable ambitions in me--to write, to write in newspapers, possibly even to write books. At Cliffstone was what was called a public library to which the householders of Cliffstone had access and from which members of their families could borrow books--during holidays I would be changing my book almost every day--but at Chessing Hanger there were no books at all. My sister Fanny encouraged me in my reading; she too was a voracious reader of novels, and she shared my dislike of the idea that I should become a gardener.

"In those days, you must understand, no attempt was made to gauge the natural capacity of a child. Human beings were expected to be grateful for any opportunity of 'getting a living.' Parents bundled their children into any employment that came handy, and so most people followed occupations that were misfits, that did not give full scope for such natural gifts as they possessed and which commonly cramped or crippled them. This in itself diffused a vague discontent throughout the community, and inflicted upon the great majority of people strains and restraints and suppressions that ate away their possibility of positive happiness. Most youngsters as they grew up, girls as well as boys, experienced a sudden tragic curtailment of freedom and discovered themselves forced into some unchosen specific drudgery from which it was very difficult to escape. One summer holiday came, when, instead of enjoying delightful long days of play and book-devouring in Cliffstone, as I had hitherto done, I was sent off over the hills to stay with Uncle John Julip, and 'see how I got on' with him. I still remember the burning disgust, the sense of immolation, with which I lugged my little valise up the hills and over the Downs to the gardens.

"This Lord Bramble, Radiant, was one of the landlords who were so important during the reigns of the Hanoverian Kings up to the time of Queen Victoria the Good. They owned large areas of England as private property; they could do what they liked with it. In the days of Victoria the Good and her immediate predecessors these landlords who had ruled the Empire through the House of Lords made a losing fight for predominance against the new industrialists, men who employed great masses of people for their private gain in the iron and steel industries, cotton and wool, beer and shipping, and these again gave way to a rather different type who developed advertisement and a political and financial use of newspapers and new methods of finance. The old land-holding families had to adapt themselves to the new powers or be pushed aside. Lord Bramble was one of those pushed aside, an indignant, old-fashioned, impoverished landowner. He was in a slough of debts. His estates covered many square miles; he owned farms and woodlands, a great white uncomfortable house, far too roomy for his shrunken means, and two square miles of park. The park was greatly neglected, it was covered with groups of old trees infested and rotten with fungus; rabbits and moles abounded, and thistles and nettles. There were no young trees there at all. The fences and gates were badly patched; and here and there ran degenerating roads. But boards threatening trespassers abounded, and notices saying 'NO THOROUGHFARE.' For it was the dearest privilege of the British landlord to restrict the free movements of ordinary people, and Lord Bramble guarded his wilderness with devotion. Great areas of good land in England in those days were in a similar state of picturesquely secluded dilapidation."

"Those were the lands where they did the shooting," said Radiant.

"How did you know?"

"I have seen a picture. They stood in a line along the edge of a copse, with brown-leaved trees and a faint smell of decay and a touch of autumnal dampness in the air, and they shot lead pellets at birds."

"They did. And the beaters--I was pressed into that service once or twice--drove the birds, the pheasants, towards them. Shooting

## parties used to come to Chessing Hanger, and the shooting used to go

on day after day. It was done with tremendous solemnity."

"But why?" asked Willow.

"Yes," said Radiant. "Why did men do it?"

"I don't know," said Sarnac. "All I know is that at certain seasons of the year the great majority of the gentlemen of England who were supposed to be the leaders and intelligence of the land, who were understood to guide its destinies and control its future, went out into the woods or on the moors to massacre birds of various sorts with guns, birds bred specially at great expense for the purpose of this slaughter. These noble sportsmen were marshalled by gamekeepers; they stood in rows, the landscape was animated with the popping of their guns. The highest in the land participated gravely in this national function and popped with distinction. The men of this class were in truth at just that level above imbecility where the banging of a gun and the thrill of seeing a bird swirl and drop is inexhaustibly amusing. They never tired of it. The bang of the gun seems to have been essential to the sublimity of the sensations of these sportsmen. It wasn't mere killing, because in that case these people could also have assisted in killing the sheep and oxen and pigs required by the butchers, but this sport they left to men of an inferior social class. Shooting birds on the wing was the essential idea. When Lord Bramble was not killing pheasants or grouse he shot in the south of France at perplexed pigeons with clipped wings just let out of traps. Or he hunted--not real animal hunting, not a fair fight with bear or tiger or elephant in a jungle, but the chasing of foxes--small stinking red animals about the size of water-spaniels, which were sedulously kept from extinction for this purpose of hunting; they were hunted across cultivated land, and the hunters rode behind a pack of dogs. Lord Bramble dressed himself up with extreme care in a red jacket and breeches of pigskin to do this. For the rest of his time the good man played a card game called bridge, so limited and mechanical that anyone nowadays would be able to read out the results and exact probabilities of every deal directly he saw his cards. There were four sets of thirteen cards each. But Lord Bramble, who had never learnt properly to count up to thirteen, found it full of dramatic surprises and wonderful sensations. A large part of his time was spent in going from race-course to race-course; they raced a specially flimsy breed of horses in those days. There again he dressed with care. In the illustrated papers in the public library I would see photographs of Lord Bramble, with a silk hat--a top hat, you know--cocked very much on one side 'in the Paddock' or 'snapped with a lady friend.' There was much betting and knowingness about this horse-racing. His Lordship dined with comparative intelligence, erring only a little on the excessive side with the port. People still smoked in those days, and Lord Bramble would consume three or four cigars a day. Pipes he thought plebeian and cigarettes effeminate. He could read a newspaper but not a book, being incapable of sustained attention; after dinner in town he commonly went to a theatre or music-hall where women could be seen, more or less undraped. The clothing of that time filled such people as Lord Bramble with a coy covetousness for nakedness. The normal beauty of the human body was a secret and a mystery, and half the art and decoration of Chessing Hanger House played stimulatingly with the forbidden vision.

"In that past existence of mine I took the way of life of Lord Bramble as a matter of course, but now that I recall it I begin to see the enormous absurdity of these assassins of frightened birds, these supporters of horses and ostlers, these peepers at feminine thighs and shoulder-blades. Their women sympathised with their gunmanship, called their horses 'the dears,' cultivated dwarfed and crippled breeds of pet dogs, and yielded the peeps expected of them.

"Such was the life of the aristocratic sort of people in those days. They set the tone of what was considered a hard, bright, healthy life. The rest of the community admired them greatly and imitated them to the best of its ability. The tenant farmer, if he could not shoot pheasants, shot rabbits, and if he could not bet twenty-pound notes at the fashionable race-meeting at Goodwood, put his half-crown upon his fancy at the Cliffstone races on Byford Downs--with his hat cocked over one eye as much like Lord Bramble and King Edward as possible.

"Great multitudes of people there were whose lives were shaped completely by the habits and traditions of these leaders. There was my Uncle John Julip for example. His father had been a gardener and his grandfather before him, and almost all his feminine ancestry and his aunts and cousins were, as the phrase went, 'in service.' None of the people round and about the downstairs of Chessing Hanger had natural manners; all were dealing in some more or less plausible imitation of some real lady or gentleman. My Uncle John Julip found his ideal in a certain notorious Sir John ffrench-Cuthbertson. He sought similar hats and adopted similar attitudes.

"He bet heavily in imitation of his model, but he bet less fortunately. This my aunt resented, but she found great comfort in the way in which his clothing and gestures under-studied Sir John.

"'If only he'd been _born_ a gentleman,' said my aunt, 'everything 'ud a-been all right. 'E's a natural sportsman; 'e eats 'is 'eart out in the gardens.'

"He certainly did not work his heart out. I do not remember ever seeing him dig or carry or wheel a barrow. My memory of him in the garden is of one who stood, one hand gripping a hoe as if it were a riding whip under the tail of his coat, and the other gesticulating or pointing out what had to be done.

"To my father and myself he was always consciously aristocratic, bearing himself in the grand manner. This he did, although my father was a third as tall again as he was and far more abundantly intelligent. He always called my father 'Smith.'

"'What are you going to do with that boy, Smith?' he would ask. 'Seems to me, wants feedin' up and open air.'

"My father, who secretly shared the general view that my Uncle John under happier stars would have made a very fine gentleman, always tried, as he expressed it, 'to keep his end up' by calling my uncle 'John.' He would answer, 'Carn't say as I've rightly settled that, John. 'E's a regular book-worm nowadays, say what you like to him.'

"'Books!' said my Uncle John Julip with a concentrated scorn of books that was essentially English. 'You can't get anything out of books that 'asn't been put into them. It stands to reason. There's nothing in books that didn't first come out of the sile. Books is flattened flowers at the best, as 'is Lordship said at dinner only the other night.'

"My father was much struck by the idea. 'That's what I tell 'im,' he said--inexactly.

"'Besides, who's going to put anything into a book that's worth knowing?' said my uncle. 'It's like expecting these here tipsters in the papers to give away something worth keeping to theirselves. Not it!'

"''Arf the time,' my father agreed, 'I expect they're telling you lies in these books of yours and larfing at you. All the same,' he reflected with an abrupt lapse from speculation to reverence, 'there's One Book, John.'

"He had remembered the Bible.

"'I wasn't speaking of that, Smith,' said my uncle sharply. 'Sufficient unto the day---- I mean, that's Sunday Stuff.'

"I hated my days of trial in the gardens. Once or twice during that unpleasant month I was sent with messages up to the kitchen and once to the pantry of the great house. There I said something unfortunate for my uncle, something that was to wipe out all possibility of a gardener's career for me.

"The butler, Mr. Petterton, was also a secondary aristocrat, but in a larger and quite different manner from that of my uncle. He towered up and looked down the slopes of himself, his many chins were pink and stabbed by his collar, and his hair was yellow and very shiny. I had to deliver into his hands a basket of cucumbers and a bunch of blue flowers called borage used in the mixing of summer drinks. He was standing at a table talking respectfully to a foxy little man in tweeds who was eating bread-and-cheese and drinking beer; this I was to learn later was Lord Bramble's agent. There was also a young footman in this room, a subterranean room it was with heavily barred windows, and he was cleaning silver plate with exemplary industry.

"'So you brought this from the gardens,' said Mr. Petterton with fine irony. 'And may I ask why Mr.--why Sir John did not condescend to bring them himself?'

"''E tole me to bring them,' I said.

"'And pray who may you be?'

"'I'm 'Arry Smith,' I said. 'Mr. Julip, 'e's my uncle.'

"'Ah!' said Mr. Petterton and was struck by a thought. 'That's the son of Smith who's a sort of greengrosher in Cliffstone.'

"'Cherry Gardens, sir, we live at.'

"'Haven't seen you over here before, my boy. Have you ever visited us before?'

"'Not 'ere, sir.'

"'Not here! But you come over to the gardens perhaps?'

"'Nearly every Sunday, sir.'

"'Exactly. And usually I suppose, Master Smith, there's something to carry back?'

"'Almost always, sir.'

"'Something a bit heavy?'

"'Not too heavy,' I said bravely.

"'You see, sir?' said Mr. Petterton to the foxy little man in tweeds.

"I began to realise that something unpleasant was in the wind when this latter person set himself to cross-examine me in a rapid, snapping manner. What was it I carried? I became very red about the face and ears and declared I did not know. Did I ever carry grapes? I didn't know. Pears? I didn't know. Celery? I didn't know.

"'Well, _I_ know,' said the agent. '_I_ know. So why should I ask you further? Get out of here.'

"I went back to my uncle and said nothing to him of this very disagreeable conversation, but I knew quite well even then that I had not heard the last of this matter."

CHAPTER THE THIRD

MISFORTUNES COME UPON THE SMITH FAMILY

§ 1

"And now," said Sarnac, "I have to tell of a tornado of mischances that broke up our precarious little home at Cherry Gardens altogether. In that casual, planless, over-populated world there were no such things as security or social justice as we should understand these words nowadays. It is hard for us to imagine its universal ramshackle insecurity. Think of it. The whole world floated economically upon a cash and credit system that was fundamentally fictitious and conventional, there were no adequate protections against greedy abuses of those monetary conventions, no watch kept over world-production and world-consumption, no knowledge of the variations of climate year by year, and the fortunes not only of individuals but of states and nations fluctuated irrationally and uncontrollably. It was a world in which life was still almost as unsafe for men and women as life remains to-day for a field-mouse or a midge, which is never safe from one moment to another in a world of cats and owls and swallows and the like. People were born haphazard, gladdened, distressed, glorified or killed haphazard, and no one was ready for either their births or their deaths. Sudden death there is still in the world, a bright adventure--that lightning yesterday might have killed all or any of us, but such death is a rare thing and a clean thing. There is none of the distressful bearing-down to death through want, anxiety, and illness ill-tended and misunderstood, that was the common experience in the past. And one death does not devastate a dozen or more lives as deaths often did in the old days. A widow in the old days had lost not only her lover but her 'living.' Yet life is full of subtle compensations. We did not feel our endless dangers in those days. We had a wonderful power of disregard until the chances struck us.

"All children," said Sarnac, "start with an absolute confidence in the permanence of the things they find about them. Disillusionment about safety postulates clear-headedness. You could not realise your dangers unless you were clear-headed, and if you were clear-headed you had the fortitude to face your dangers. That old world was essentially a world of muddle-headed sophisticated children, blind to the universal catastrophe of the top-heavy and collapsing civilisation in which they played their parts. They thought that life was generally safe in a world of general insecurity. Misfortune astonished everyone in those days, though I cannot understand why they should have been astonished at any misfortune.

"The first blow fell without notice about six weeks after I had come back from Chessing Hanger to my last half year of schooling before I became a gardener. It was late afternoon and I was home from school. I was downstairs reading a book and my mother was clearing away tea and grumbling at Fanny who wanted to go out. The lamp was lit, and both I and my father who was having what he called 'a bit of a read at the noosepaper' were as close up to its insufficient light as we could get. We heard the shop bell jangle overhead.

"'Drat it!' said my father. 'Whaddey want this time o' day?'

"He removed his spectacles. He had bought a pair haphazard at a pawnbroker's shop and always used them when he read. They magnified his large mild eyes very greatly. He regarded us protestingly. What _did_ they want? We heard the voice of Uncle John Julip calling down the staircase.

"'Mort'mer,' he said in a voice that struck me as unusual. I had never heard him call my father anything but Smith before.

"'That you, John?' said my father standing up.

"'It's me. I want to speak to you.'

"'Come down and 'ave some tea, John,' cried my father at the bottom of the stairs.

"'Somethin' to tell you. You better come up here. Somethin' serious.'

"I speculated if it could be any misdeed of mine he had come over about. But my conscience was fairly clear.

"'Now whatever can it be?' asked my father.

"'You better go up and arst 'im,' my mother suggested.

"My father went.

"I heard my uncle say something about, 'We're busted. We've bin give away and we're busted,' and then the door into the shop closed. We all listened to the movements above. It sounded as though Uncle Julip was walking up and down as he talked. My sister Fanny in her hat and jacket flitted unobtrusively up the stairs and out. After a time Prue came in; she had been helping teacher tidy up, she said, though I knew better. Then after a long interval my father came downstairs alone.

"He went to the hearthrug like one in a trance and stood, staring portentously in order to make my mother ask what was the matter. 'Why hasn't John come down for a bit of tea or something? Where's he gone, Morty?'

"''E's gorn for a van,' said my father; 'that's where 'e's gone. For a van.'

"'Whatever for?' asked my mother.

"'For a removal,' said my father. 'That's what for.'

"'Removal?'

"'We got to put 'em up 'ere for a night or so.'

"'Put'em up! Who?'

"''Im and Adelaide. He's coming to Cherry Gardens.'

"'You done mean, Morty, 'e's lost 'is situation?'

"'I do. S'Lordship turned against 'im. Mischief 'as been made. Spying. And they managed to get 'im out of it. Turned out 'e is. Tole to go.'

"'But surely they give 'im notice!'

"'Not a bit of it. S'Lordship came down to the gardens 'ot and strong. "'Ere," 'e said, "get out of it!" Like that 'e said it. "You thank your lucky stars," 'e said, "I ain't put the 'tecs on to you and your snivellin' brother-in-law." Yes. S'Lordship said that.'

"'But what did 'e mean by it, Morty?'

"'Mean? 'E meant that certain persons who shall be nameless 'ad put a suspicion on John, told lies about 'im and watched 'im. Watched 'im they did and me. They've drawed me into it, Martha. They've drawed in young 'Arry. They've made up a tale about us.... I always said we was a bit too regular.... There it is, 'e ain't a 'ead gardener any more. 'E ain't going to 'ave references give 'im; 'e ain't ever going to 'ave another regular job. 'E's been betrayed and ruined, and there we are!'

"'But they say 'e took sompthing?--my brother John took sompthing?'

"'Surplus projuce. What's been a perquisite of every gardener since the world began....'

"I sat with burning ears and cheeks pretending not to hear this dreadful conversation. No one knew of my own fatal share in my uncle's downfall. But already in my heart, like the singing of a lark after a thunderstorm, was arising a realisation that now I might never become a gardener. My mother expressed her consternation brokenly. She asked incredulous questions which my father dealt with in an oracular manner. Then suddenly my mother pounced savagely on my sister Prue, reproaching her for listening to what didn't concern her instead of washing up."

"This is a very circumstantial scene," said Radiant.

"It was the first great crisis of my dream life," said Sarnac. "It is very vivid in my memory. I can see again that old kitchen in which we lived and the faded table-cloth and the paraffin lamp with its glass container. I think if you gave me time I could tell you everything there was in that room."

"What's a hearthrug?" asked Firefly suddenly. "What sort of thing was your hearthrug?"

"Like nothing on earth to-day. A hearthrug was a sort of rug you put in front of a coal fire, next to the fender, which prevented the ashes creeping into the room. This one my father had made out of old clothes, trousers and such-like things, bits of flannel and bits of coarse sacking, cut into strips and sewn together. He had made it in the winter evenings as he sat by the fireside, sewing industriously."

"Had it any sort of pattern?"

"None. But I shall never tell my story, if you ask questions. I remember that my uncle, when he had made his arrangements about the van, came in for a bread-and-cheese supper before he walked back to Chessing Hanger. He was very white and distressed looking, Sir John had all faded away from him; he was like a man who had been dragged out from some hiding-place, he was a very distressed and pitiful man exposed to the light. I remember my mother asked him, ''Ow's Adelaide taking it?'

"My uncle assumed an expression of profound resignation. 'Starts a new pain,' he said bitterly. 'At a time like this.'

"My father and mother exchanged sympathetic glances.

"'I tell you----' said my uncle, but did not say what he told us.

"A storm of weak rage wrung him. 'If I knew who'd done all this,' he said. 'That--that cat of a 'ousekeeper--cat I call her--she's got someone what wanted my place. If she and Petterton framed it up----'

"He struck the table, but half-heartedly.

"My father poured him out some beer.

"'Ugh!' said my uncle and emptied the glass.

"'Got to face it,' said my uncle, feeling better. 'Got to go through with it. I suppose with all these tuppenny-apenny villa gardens 'ere there's jobbing work to be got. I'll get something all right.... Think of it! Jobbing gardener! Me--a Jobber! By the Day! It'll set up some of these 'ere season-ticket clerks no end to 'ave Lord Bramble's gardener dragging a lawn-mower for them. I can see 'em showing me to their friends out of the window. Bin 'ead-gardener to a Lord, they'll say. Well, well----!

"'It's a come-down,' said my father when my uncle had departed. 'Say what you like, it's a come-down.'

"My mother was preoccupied with the question of their accommodation. 'She'll 'ave to 'ave the sofa in the sitting-room I expect, and 'e'll 'ave a bit of a shake-up on the floor. Don't suppose she'll like it. They'll 'ave their own bedding of course. But Adelaide isn't the sort to be comfortable on a sofa.'

"Poor woman! she was not. Although my uncle and my father and mother all pointed out to her the untimeliness and inconsiderateness of her conduct she insisted upon suffering so much that a doctor had to be called in. He ordered a prompt removal to a hospital for an immediate operation.

"Those were days," said Sarnac, "of the profoundest ignorance about the body. The ancient Greeks and the Arabs had done a little anatomy during their brief phases of intellectual activity, but the rest of the world had only been studying physiology in a scientific way for about three hundred years. People in general still knew practically nothing of vital processes. As I have told you they even bore children by accident. And living the queer lives they did, with abnormal and ill-prepared food in a world of unchecked infections, they found the very tissues of the bodies going wrong and breaking out into the queerest growths. Parts of these bodies would cease to do anything but change into a sort of fungoid proliferation----"

"Their bodies were like their communities!" said Radiant.

"The same sort of thing. They had tumours and cancers and such-like things in their bodies and Cherry-Garden urban-districts on their countrysides. But these growths!--they are dreadful even to recall."

"But surely," said Willow, "in the face of such a horrible possibility which might afflict anyone, all the world must have wanted to push on with physiological research."

"Didn't they see," said Sunray, "that all these things were controllable and curable?"

"Not a bit of it," said Sarnac. "They didn't positively like these tumours and cancers, but the community was too under-vitalised to put up a real fight against these miseries. And everyone thought that he or she would escape--until it had them. There was a general apathy. And the priests and journalists and so forth, the common opinion makers, were jealous of scientific men. They did their best to persuade people that there was nothing hopeful in scientific research, they did all they could to discredit its discoveries, to ridicule its patient workers and set people against them."

"That's what puzzles me most," said Sunray.

"Their mental habits were different. Their minds hadn't been trained to comprehensive thinking. Their thinking was all in compartments and patches. The morbid growths in their bodies were nothing to the morbid growths in their minds."

§ 2

"My aunt in the hospital, with that lack of consideration for my uncle that had always distinguished her, would neither recover nor die. She was a considerable expense to him and no help; she added greatly to his distresses. After some days and at the urgent suggestion of my mother he removed himself from our sitting-room to a two-roomed lodging in the house of a bricklayer in an adjacent street; into this he crowded his furniture from Chessing Hanger, but he frequented my father's shop and showed a deepening attachment to my father's company.

"He was not so successful a jobbing gardener as he had anticipated. His short contemptuous way with his new clients in the villas of Cliffstone failed to produce the respect he designed it to do; he would speak of their flower-beds as 'two penn'orths of all-sorts' and compare their gardens to a table-cloth or a window box; and instead of welcoming these home-truths, they resented them. But they had not the manliness to clear up this matter by a good straightforward argument in which they would have had their social position very exactly defined; they preferred to keep their illusions and just ceased to employ him. Moreover, his disappointment with my aunt produced a certain misogyny, which took the form of a refusal to take orders from the wives of his patrons when they were left in sole charge of the house. As many of these wives had a considerable influence over their husbands, this too injured my uncle's prospects. Consequently there were many days when he had nothing to do but stand about our shop to discuss with my father as hearer the defects of Cliffstone villa-residents, the baseness of Mr. Petterton and that cat ('cat' he called her) and the probable unworthiness of any casual customer who strayed into range of comment.

"Nevertheless my uncle was resolved not to be defeated without a struggle. There was a process which he called 'keeping his pecker up,' which necessitated, I could not but perceive, periodic visits to the Wellington public-house at the station corner. From these visits he returned markedly more garrulous, more like Sir John ffrench-Cuthbertson, and exhaling a distinctively courageous smell when he coughed or breathed heavily. After a time, as his business difficulties became more oppressive, my father participated in these heartening excursions. They broadened his philosophical outlook but made it, I fancied, rather less distinct.

"My uncle had some indefinite sum of money in the Post Office Savings Bank, and in his determination not to be beaten without a struggle he did some courageous betting on what he called 'certs' at the race-meetings on Byford Downs."

"'Cert' beats me altogether," said Radiant.

"A 'cert' was a horse that was certain to win and never did. A 'dead cert' was an extreme form of the 'cert.' You cannot imagine how the prospects and quality of the chief race-horses were discussed throughout the land. The English were not a nomadic people, only a minority could ride horses, but everybody could bet on them. The King was, so to speak, head of the racing just as he was head of the army. He went in person to the great race-meetings as if to bless and encourage the betting of his subjects. So that my Uncle John Julip was upheld by the most loyal and patriotic sentiments when he wasted his days and his savings on Byford Downs. On several of these occasions my father went with him and wrestled with fortune also. They lost generally, finally they lost most of what they had, but on one or two occasions, as my uncle put it, they 'struck it rich.' One day they pitched upon a horse called Rococo, although it was regarded as the very reverse of a 'cert' and the odds were heavy against it, but an inner light seems to have guided my uncle; it came in first and they won as much as thirty-five pounds, a very large sum for them. They returned home in a state of solemn exaltation, which was only marred by some mechanical difficulty in pronouncing the name of the winning horse. They began well but after the first syllable they went on more like a hen that had laid an egg than like rational souls who had spotted a winner. 'Rocococo' they would say or 'Rococococo.' Or they would end in a hiccup. And though each tried to help the other out, they were not really helpful to each other. They diffused an unusually powerful odour of cigars and courage. Never had they smelt so courageous. My mother made them tea.

"'_Tea!_' said my uncle meaningly. He did not actually refuse the cup she put before him, but he pushed it a little aside.

"For some moments it seemed doubtful whether he was going to say something very profound or whether he was going to be seriously ill. Mind triumphed over matter. 'Knew it would come, Marth,' he said. 'Knew allong it would come. Directly I heard name. Roc----' He paused.

"'Cococo,' clucked my father.

"'Cocococo--hiccup,' said my uncle. 'I knew ourour 'ad come. Some men, Smith, some men 'ave that instink. I would 'ave put my shirt on that 'orse, Marth--only.... They wouldn't 'ave took my shirt.'

"He looked suddenly very hard at me. 'They wouldn't 'ave took it, 'Arry,' he said. 'They done _take_ shirts!' "'No,' he said and became profoundly thoughtful.

"Then he looked up. 'Thirty-six to one against,' he said. 'We'd 'ave 'ad shirts for a lifetime.'

"My father saw it from a wider, more philosophical point of view. 'Might never 'ave been spared to wear 'em out,' he said. 'Better as it is, John.'

"'And mind you,' said my uncle; 'this is only a beginning. Once I start spotting 'em I go on spotting 'em--mind that. This Roc----'

"'Cococo.'

"'Cocococo--whatever it is, s'only a beginning. S'only the firs'-ray-sunlight 'v' a glorious day.'

"'In that case,' said my mother, 't'seems to me some of us might have a share.'

"'Certainly,' said my uncle, 'certainly, Marth.' And amazingly he handed me a ten-shilling piece--in those days we had gold coins and this was a little disk of gold. Then he handed Prue the same. He gave a whole sovereign, a golden pound, to Fanny and a five-pound Bank of England note to my mother.

"'Hold on!' said my father warningly.

"'Tha's a' right, Smith,' said my uncle with a gesture of princely generosity. 'You share, seventeen pounce ten. Six pounce ten leaves 'leven. Lessee. One 'n' five six--seven--eight--nine--ten--'leven. _Here!_'

"My father took the balance of the money with a puzzled expression. Something eluded him. 'Yers,' he said; 'but----'

"His mild eye regarded the ten-shilling piece I still held exposed in my hand. I put it away immediately but his gaze followed my hand towards my pocket until it met the table edge and got into difficulties.

"'Thout the turf, Smith, there wouldn't be such a country as England,' said my Uncle John, and rounded his remarks off with, 'Mark my words.'

"My father did his best to do so."

§ 3

"But this hour of success was almost the only bright interlude in a steady drift to catastrophe. In a little while I gathered from a conversation between my mother and my father that we were 'behind with the rent.' That was a quarterly payment we paid to the enterprising individual who owned our house. I know all that sounds odd to you, but that is the way things were done. If we got behind with our rent the owner could turn us out."

"But where?" asked Firefly.

"Out of the house. And we weren't allowed to stay in the street. But it is impossible for me to explain everything of that sort in detail. We were behind with the rent and catastrophe impended. And then my sister Fanny ran away from us.

"In no other respect," said Sarnac, "is it so difficult to get realities over to you and make you understand how I thought and felt in that other life than in matters of sex. Nowadays sex is so simple. Here we are free and frank men and women; we are trained so subtly that we scarcely know we are trained, not to be stupidly competitive, to control jealous impulses, to live generously, to honour the young. Love is the link and flower of our choicest friendships. We take love by the way as we take our food and our holidays, the main thing in our lives is our creative work. But in that dark tormented world in which I passed my dream life, all the business of love was covered over and netted in by restraints and put in fetters that fretted and tortured. I will tell you at last how I was killed. Now I want to convey to you something; of the reality of this affair of Fanny.

"Even in this world," said Sarnac, "my sister Fanny would have been a conspicuously lovely girl. Her eyes could be as blue as heaven, or darken with anger or excitement so that they seemed black. Her hair had a brave sweep in it always. Her smile made you ready to do anything for her; her laughter made the world clean and brightly clear about her even when it was touched with scorn. And she was ignorant---- I can hardly describe her ignorance.

"It was Fanny first made me feel that ignorance was shameful. I have told you the sort of school we had and of our religious teachers. When I was nine or ten and Fanny was fifteen, she was already scolding me for fumbling with the pronunciation of words and

## particularly with the dropping of the aspirate.

"'Harry,' she said, 'if you call me Fenny again it's war and pinching. My name's Fanny and yours is Harry and don't you forget it. It's not English we talk in this place; it's mud.'

"Something had stung her. She had been talking with someone with a better accent and she had been humiliated. I think that someone may have mocked her. Some chance acquaintance it must have been, some ill-bred superior boy upon the Cliffstone promenade. But Fanny was setting out now to talk good English and make me do the same, with a fury all her own.

"'If only I could talk French,' she said. 'There's France in sight over there; all its lighthouses winking at us, and all we've got to say is, "Parley vous Francy," and grin as if it was a joke.' She brought home a sixpenny book which professed but failed to teach her French. She was reading voraciously, greedily, to know. She read endless novels but also she was reading all sorts of books, about the stars, about physiology (in spite of my mother's wild scoldings at the impropriety of reading a book 'with pictures of yer insides' in it), about foreign countries. Her passion that I should learn was even greater than her own passion for knowledge.

"At fourteen she left school and began to help earn her living. My mother had wanted her to go into 'service,' but she had resisted and resented this passionately. While that proposal was still hanging over her, she went off by herself to Cliffstone and got a job as assistant book-keeper in a pork butcher's shop. Before a year was out she was book-keeper, for her mind was as neat as it was nimble. She earned enough money to buy books and drawing material for me and to get herself clothes that scandalised all my mother's ideas of what was becoming. Don't imagine she 'dressed well,' as we used to say; she experimented boldly, and some of her experiments were cheap and tawdry.

"I could lecture to you for an hour," said Sarnac, "of what dress and the money to buy dresses meant for a woman in the old world.

"A large part of my sister's life was hidden from me; it would have been hidden altogether but for the shameless tirades of my mother, who seemed to prefer to have an audience while she scolded Fanny. I can see now that my mother was bitterly jealous of Fanny because of her unexhausted youth, but at the time I was distressed and puzzled at the gross hints and suggestions that flew over my head. Fanny had a maddening way of not answering back or answering only by some minor correction. 'It's horrible, mother,' she would say. 'Not 'orrible.'

"Behind her defensive rudenesses, unlit, unguided, poor Fanny was struggling with the whole riddle of life, presented to her with an urgency no man can fully understand. Nothing in her upbringing had ever roused her to the passion for real work in the world; religion for her had been a grimace and a threat; the one great reality that had come through to her thoughts was love. The novels she read all told of love, elusively, partially, and an impatience in her imagination and in her body leapt to these hints. Love whispered to her in the light and beauty of things about her; in the moonlight, in the spring breezes. Fanny could not but know that she was beautiful. But such morality as our world had then was a morality of abject suppression. Love was a disgrace, a leering fraud, a smutty joke. She was not to speak about it, not to look towards it until some good man--the pork butcher was a widower and seemed likely to be the good man in her case--came and spoke not of love indeed but marriage. He would marry her and hurry home with his prize and tear the wrappings from her loveliness, clumsily, stupidly, in a mood of morbidly inflamed desire."

"Sarnac," said Firefly, "you are horrible."

"No," said Sarnac. "But that world of the past was horrible. Most of the women, your ancestors, suffered such things. And that was only the beginning of the horror. Then came the birth and desecration of the children. Think what a delicate, precious and holy thing a child is! They were begotten abundantly and abnormally, born reluctantly, and dropped into the squalour and infection of an overcrowded disordered world. Bearing a child was not the jolly wholesome process we know to-day; in that diseased society it was an illness, it counted as an illness, for nearly every woman. Which the man her husband resented--grossly. Five or six children in five or six years and a pretty girl was a cross, worried wreck of a woman, bereft of any shred of spirit or beauty. My poor scolding, worried mother was not fifty when she died. And one saw one's exquisite infants grow up into ill-dressed, under-nourished, ill-educated children. Think of the agony of shamed love that lay beneath my poor mother's slaps and scoldings! The world has forgotten now the hate and bitterness of disappointed parentage. That was the prospect of the moral life that opened before my sister Fanny; that was the antistrophe to the siren song of her imagination.

"She could not believe this of life and love. She experimented with love and herself. She was, my mother said, 'a bold, bad girl.' She began I know with furtive kissings and huggings in the twilight, with boy schoolfellows, with clerks and errand-boys. Some gleam of nastiness came into these adventures of the dusk and made her recoil. At any rate she became prim and aloof to Cherry Gardens, but only because she was drawn to the bands and lights and prosperity of Cliffstone. That was when she began to read and correct her accent. You have heard of our old social stratifications. She wanted to be like a lady; she wanted to meet a gentleman. She imagined there were gentlemen who were really gentle, generous, wise and delightful, and she imagined that some of the men she saw on the cliff promenade at Cliffstone were gentlemen. She began to dress herself as I have told.

"There were scores of such girls in every town in Europe," said Sarnac, "turning their backs on their dreadful homes. In a sort of desperate hope.

"When you hear about the moral code of the old world," Sarnac went on, "you are apt to think of it as a rule that everyone respected in exactly the same way that you think everyone believed the professed religions. We have not so much a moral code now as a moral training, and our religion involves no strain on reason or instincts, and so it is difficult for us to understand the tortuosity and evasions and defiances and general furtiveness and meanness of a world in which nobody really understood and believed the religious creeds, not even the priests, and nobody was really convinced to the bone of the sweetness and justice of the moral code. In that distant age almost everybody was sexually angry or uncomfortable or dishonest; the restraints we had did not so much restrain as provoke people. It is difficult to imagine it now."

"Not if you read the old literature," said Sunray. "The novels and plays are pathological."

"So you have my pretty sister Fanny, drawn by impulses she did not understand, flitting like a moth out of our dingy home in Cherry Gardens to the lights, bright lights of hope they seemed to her, about the bandstand and promenade of Cliffstone. And there staying in the lodging-houses and boarding-houses and hotels were limited and thwarted people, keeping holiday, craving for bright excitements, seeking casual pleasures. There were wives who had tired of their husbands and husbands long weary of their wives, there were separated people who could not divorce and young men who could not marry because they could not afford to maintain a family. With their poor hearts full of naughtiness, rebellious suppressions, jealousies, resentments. And through this crowd, eager, provocative, and defenceless, flitted my pretty sister Fanny."

§ 4

"On the evening before Fanny ran away my father and my uncle sat in the kitchen by the fire discoursing of politics and the evils of life. They had both been keeping up their peckers very resolutely during the day and this gave a certain rambling and recurrent quality to their review. Their voices were hoarse, and they drawled and were loud and emphatic and impressive. It was as if they spoke for the benefit of unseen listeners. Often they would both be talking together. My mother was in the scullery washing up the tea-things and I was sitting at the table near the lamp trying to do some homework my teacher had given me, so far as the distraction of this conversation so close to me and occasional appeals to me to 'mark' this or that, would permit. Prue was reading a book called _Ministering Children_ to which she was much addicted. Fanny had been helping my mother until she was told she was more a hindrance than a help. Then she came and stood at my side looking over my shoulder at what I was doing.

"'What's spoiling trade and ruining the country,' said my uncle, 'is these 'ere strikes. These 'ere strikes reg'ler destrushion--destruction for the country.'

"'Stop everything,' said my father. 'It stands to reason.'

"'They didn't ought to be allowed. These 'ere miners'r paid and paid 'andsomely. Paid 'andsomely they are. 'Andsomely. Why! I'd be glad of the pay they get, glad of it. They 'as bulldogs, they 'as pianos. Champagne. Me and you, Smith, me and you and the middle classes generally; we don't get pianos. We don't get champagne. Not-tit....'

"'Ought to be a Middle Classes Union,' said my father, 'keep these 'ere workers in their places. They 'old up the country and stop trade. Trade! Trade's orful. Why! people come in now and look at what you got and arst the price of this and that. Think twice they do before they spend a sixpence.... And the coal you're expected to sell nowadays! I tell 'em, if this 'ere strike comes off this 's 'bout the last coal you're likely to see, good or bad. Straight out, I tell 'em....'

"'You're not working, Harry,' said Fanny without troubling to lower her voice. 'Don't see how you can work, with all this jawing going on. Come out for a walk.'

"I glanced up at her and rose at once. It wasn't often Fanny asked me to go for a walk with her. I put my books away.

"'Going out for a bit of fresh air, mother,' said Fanny, taking her hat down from its peg.

"'No, you don't--not at this time,' cried my mother from the scullery. 'Ain't I said, once and for all----?'

"'It's all right, mother, Harry's going with me. He'll see no one runs away with me and ruins me.... You've said it once and for all--times enough.'

"My mother made no further objection, but she flashed a look of infinite hate at my sister.

"We went upstairs and out into the street.

"For a time we said nothing, but I had a sense that I was going to be 'told things.'

"'I've had about enough of all this,' Fanny began presently. 'What's going to become of us? Father and uncle 've been drinking all day; you can see they're both more than half-screwed. Both of 'em. It's every day now. It's worse and worse and worse. Uncle hasn't had a job these ten days. Father's always with him. The shop's getting filthy. He doesn't sweep it out now for days together.'

"'Uncle seems to have lost 'eart,' I said, 'since he heard that Aunt Adelaide would have to have that second operation.'

"'Lost heart! He never had any heart to lose.' My sister Fanny said no more of my uncle--by an effort. 'What a home!' she cried.

"She paused for a moment. 'Harry,' she said, 'I'm going to get out of this. Soon.'

"I asked what she meant by that.

"'Never mind what I mean. I've got a situation. A different sort of situation.... Harry, you--you care for me, Harry?'

"Professions of affection are difficult for boys of thirteen. 'I'd do anything for you, Fanny,' I said after a pause. 'You know I would.'

"'And you wouldn't tell on me?'

"'Whad you take me for?'

"'Nohow?'

"'No'ow.'

"'I knew you wouldn't,' said Fanny. 'You're the only one of the whole crew I'll be sorry to leave. I do care for you, Harry. Straight, I do. I used to care for mother. Once. But that's different. She's scolded me and screamed at me till it's gone. Every bit of it. I can't help it,--it's gone. I'll think of you, Harry--often.'

"I realised that Fanny was crying. Then when I glanced at her again her tears were over.

"'Look here, Harry,' she said, 'would you do--something--for me? Something--not so very much--and not tell? Not tell afterwards, I mean.'

"'I'd do anything, Fanny.'

"'It's not so very much really. There's that little old portmanteau upstairs. I've put some things in it. And there's a little bundle. I've put 'em both under the bed at the back where even Prying Prue won't think of looking. And to-morrow--when father's out with uncle like he is now every day, and mother's getting dinner downstairs and Prue's pretending to help her and sneaking bits of bread--if you'd bring those down to Cliffstone to Crosby's side-door.... They aren't so very heavy.'

"'I ain't afraid of your portmanteau, Fanny. I'd carry it more miles than that for you. But where's this new situation of yours, Fanny? and why ain't you saying a word about it at home?'

"'Suppose I asked you something harder than carrying a portmanteau, Harry?'

"'I'd do it, Fanny, if I could do it. You know that, Fanny.'

"'But if it was just to ask no questions of where I am going and what I am going to do? It's--it's a good situation, Harry. It isn't hard work.'

"She stopped short. I saw her face by the yellow light of a street lamp and I was astonished to see it radiant with happiness. And yet her eyes were shining with tears. What a Fanny it was, who could pass in a dozen steps from weeping to ecstasy!

"'Oh! I wish I could tell you all about it, Harry,' she said. 'I wish I could tell you all about it. Don't you worry about me, Harry, or what's going to happen to me. You help me, and after a bit I'll write to you. I will indeed, Harry.'

"'You aren't going to run away and marry?' I asked abruptly. 'It'd be like you, Fanny, to do that.'

"'I won't say I am; I won't say I'm not; I won't say anything, Harry. But I'm as happy as the sunrise, Harry! I could dance and sing. If only I can do it, Harry.'

"'There's one thing, Fanny.'

"She stopped dead. 'You're not going back on me, Harry?'

"'No. I'll do what I've promised, Fanny. But----' I had a moral mind. I hesitated. 'You're not doing anything wrong, Fanny?'

"She shook her head and did not answer for some moments. The look of ecstasy returned.

"'I'm doing the rightest thing that ever I did, Harry, the rightest thing. If only I can do it. And you are a dear to help me, a perfect dear.'

"And suddenly she put her arms about me and drew my face to hers and kissed me and then she pushed me away and danced a step. 'I love all the world to-night,' said Fanny. 'I love all the world. Silly old Cherry Gardens! You thought you'd got me! You thought I'd never get away!'

"She began a sort of chant of escape. 'To-morrow's my last day at Crosby's, my very last day. For ever and ever. Amen. He'll never come too near me again and breathe down my neck. He'll never put his fat hand on my bare arm and shove his face close to mine while he looks at my cash-sheet. When I get to----, wherever I'm going, Harry, I'll want to send him a post card. Good-bye, Mr. Crosby, good-bye, _dear_ Mr. Crosby. For ever and ever. Amen!' She made what I knew to be her imitation of Mr. Crosby's voice. 'You're the sort of girl who ought to marry young and have a steady husband older than yourself, my dear. Did I ought? And who said you might call me your dear, dear Mr. Crosby? Twenty-five shillings a week and pawings about and being called dear, thrown in.... I'm wild to-night, Harry--wild to-night. I could laugh and scream, and yet I want to cry, Harry, because I'm leaving you. And leaving them all! Though why I care I don't know. Poor, boozy, old father! Poor, silly, scolding mother! Some day perhaps I may help them if only I get away. And you--you've got to go on learning and improving, Harry, learning, learning. Learn and get out of Cherry Gardens. Never drink. Never let drink cross your lips. Don't smoke. For why should anyone smoke? Take the top side of life, for it's easier up there. Indeed, it's easier. Work and read, Harry. Learn French--so that when I come back to see you, we can both talk together.'

"'You're going to learn French? You're going to France?'

"'Farther than France. But not a word, Harry. Not a word of it. But I wish I could tell you everything. I can't. I mustn't. I've given my promise. I've got to keep faith. All one has to do in the world is to love and keep faith. But I wish mother had let me help wash-up to-night, my last night. She hates me. She'll hate me more yet.... I wonder if I'll keep awake all night or cry myself to sleep. Let's race as far as the goods-station, Harry, and then walk home.'"

§ 5

"The next night Fanny did not come home at all. As the hours passed and the emotion of my family deepened I began to realise the full enormity of the disaster that had come upon our home."

Sarnac paused and smiled. "Never was there so clinging a dream. I am still half Harry Mortimer Smith and only half myself. I am still not only in memory but half in feeling also that young English barbarian in the Age of Confusion. And yet all the time I am looking at my story from our point of view and telling it in Sarnac's voice. Amidst this sunshine.... Was it really a dream? ... I don't believe I am telling you a dream."

"It isn't a bit like a dream," said Willow. "It is a story--a real story. Do you think it was a dream?"

Sunray shook her head. "Go on," she said to Sarnac. "Whatever it is, tell it. Tell us how your family behaved when Fanny ran away."

"You must keep in mind that all these poor souls were living in a world of repressions such as seem almost inconceivable now. You think they had ideas about love and sex and duty different from our ideas. We are taught that they had different ideas. But that is not the truth; the truth is that they had no clear, thought-out ideas about such things at all. They had fears and blank prohibitions and ignorances where we have ideas. Love, sex, these were things like the enchanted woods of a fairy tale. It was forbidden even to go in. And--none of us knew to what extent--Fanny had gone in.

"So that evening was an evening of alarm deepening to a sort of moral panic for the whole household. It seemed to be required of my family that they should all behave irrationally and violently. My mother began to fret about half-past nine. 'I've tole 'er, once for all,' she said, partly to herself but also for my benefit. 'It's got to stop.' She cross-examined me about where Fanny might be. Had she said anything about going on the pier? I said I didn't know. My mother fumed and fretted. Even if Fanny had gone on the pier she ought to be home by ten. I wasn't sent to bed at the usual hour so that I saw my father and uncle come in after the public-house had closed. I forget now why my uncle came in to us instead of going straight home, but it was not a very unusual thing for him to do so. They were already disposed to despondency and my mother's white face and anxious tiding deepened their gloom.

"'Mortimer,' said my mother, 'that gal of yours 'as gone a bit too far. Sarf-pars' ten and she isn't 'ome yet.'

"''Aven't I tole 'er time after time,' said my father, 'she's got to be in by nine?'

"'Not times enough you 'aven't,' said my mother, 'and 'ere's the fruit!'

"'I've tole 'er time after time,' said my father. 'Time after time.' And he continued to repeat this at intervals throughout the subsequent discussion until another refrain replaced it.

"My uncle said little at first. He took up his position on the hearthrug my father had made and stood there, swaying slightly, hiccupping at intervals behind his hand, frowning and scrutinising the faces of the speakers. At last he delivered his judgment. 'Somethin'sappened to that girl,' he said. 'You mark my words.'

"Prue had a mind apt for horrors. 'She's bin in 'naccident per'aps,' she said. 'She may've bin knocked down.'

"'I've tole 'er,' said my father, 'time after time.'

"'If there's bin 'naccident,' said my uncle sagely. 'Well ... 'nything ma've 'appened.' He repeated this statement in a louder, firmer voice. ''Nything ma've 'appened.'

"'Stime you went to bed, Prue,' said my mother, ''igh time. 'N' you too, 'Arry.'

"My sister got up with unusual promptitude and went out of the room. I think she must have had an idea then of looking for Fanny's things. I lingered.

"'May've been 'naccident, may not,' said my mother darkly. 'Sworse things than accidents.'

"'Whaddyoumean by that, Marth?' asked my uncle.

"'Never mind what I mean. That girl's worried me times and oft. There's worse things than accidents.'

"I listened, thrilled. 'You be orf to bed, 'Arry,' said my mother.

"Whaddyou got to do,--simple,' said my uncle, leaning forward on his toes. 'Telephone 'ospitals. Telephone plice. Old Crow at the Wellington won't've gone to bed. 'Sgot telephone. Good customers. 'E'll telephone. Mark my words--s'snaccident.'

"And then Prue reappeared at the top of the stairs.

"'_Mother!_' she said in a loud whisper.

"'You be orf to bed, miss,' said my mother. ''Aven't I got worries enough?'

"'Mother,' said Prue. 'You know that little old portmantle of Fanny's?'

"Everyone faced a new realisation.

"'Sgorn,' said Prue. 'And her two best 'ats and all 'er undercloe's and 'er other dress--gorn too.'

"'Then she's took 'em!' said my father.

"'And 'erself!' said my mother.

"'Time after time I tole her,' said my father.

"'She's run away!' said my mother with a scream in her voice. 'She's brought shame and disgrace on us! She's run away!'

"'Some one's got 'old of 'er,' said my father.

"My mother sat down abruptly. 'After all I done for 'er!' she cried, beginning to weep. 'With an honest man ready to marry 'er! Toil and sacrifice, care and warnings, and she's brought us to shame and dishonour! She's run away! That I should 'ave lived to see this day! Fanny!'

"She jumped up suddenly to go and see with her own eyes that Prue's report was true. I made myself as inconspicuous as possible, for I feared some chance question might reveal my share in our family tragedy. But I didn't want to go to bed; I wanted to hear things out.

"'Sanny good my going to the plice-station for you on my way 'ome?' my uncle asked.

"'Plice!' said my father. 'What good's plice? Gaw! If I 'ad my 'ands on that villain's throat--I'd plice 'im! Bringing shame on me and mine! _Plice_! 'Ere's Fanny, my little daughter Fanny, beguiled and misled and carried away! ... I'm 'asty.... Yes, John. You go in and tell the plice. It's on your way. Tell 'em from me. I won't leave not a single stone unturned so's to bring 'er back.'

"My mother came back whiter than ever. 'It's right enough,' she said. 'She's gorn! She's off. While we stand 'ere, disgraced and shamed, she's away.'

"'Who with?' said my father. That's the question, who with? 'Arry, 'ave you ever seen anyone about with your sister? Anyone 'anging about? Any suspicious-looking sort of dressed-up fancy man? 'Ave you ever?'

"I said I hadn't.

"But Prue had evidence. She became voluble. About a week ago she had seen Fanny and a man coming along from Cliffstone, talking. They hadn't seen her; they had been too wrapped up in each other. Her description of the man was very vague and was concerned chiefly with his clothes; he had worn a blue serge suit and a grey felt hat; he was 'sort of a gentleman like.' He was a good lot older than Fanny--Prue wasn't sure whether he had a moustache or not.

"My father interrupted Prue's evidence by a tremendous saying which I was to hear him repeat time after time during the next week. 'Sooner'n this sh'd've 'appened,' said my father, 'I'd 've seen 'er lying dead at my feet--_gladly_ I'd 've seen 'er lying dead at my feet!'

"'Poor girl!' said my uncle. 'Sabitter lesson she 'as before 'er. A _bitter_ lesson! Poo' chile! Poo' little Fanny!'

"'Poor Fanny indeed!' cried my mother vindictively, seeing it all, I perceived, from an entirely different angle. 'There she is prancin' about with 'er fancy gentleman now in all 'er fallals; dinners and wine she'll 'ave, flowers she'll 'ave, dresses and everything. Be took about and shown things! Shown off and took to theayters. The shame of it! And us 'ere shamed and disgraced and not a word to say when the neighbours ask us questions! 'Ow can I look 'em in the face? 'Ow can I look Mr. Crosby in the face? That man was ready to go down on 'is bended knees to 'er and worship 'er. Stout though 'e was. 'E'd 'ave given 'er anything she arst for--in reason. What 'e could see in 'er, I could never make out. But see it 'e did. And now I've got to face 'im and tell 'im I've told 'im wrong. Time after time I've said to 'im--"_You wait. You wait, Mr. Crosby_." And that 'uzzy!--sly and stuck-up and deep! Gorn!'

"My father's voice came booming over my mother's shrill outcry. 'Sooner'n this should've 'appened I'd 've seen er dead at my feet!'

"I was moved to protest. But for all my thirteen years I found myself weeping. ''Ow d'you know,' I blubbered, 'that Fanny 'asn't gone away and got married? 'Ow d'you know?'

"'Merried!' cried my mother. 'Why should she run away to be merried? If it was merridge, what was to prevent 'er bringing 'im 'ome and having 'im interjuced to us all, right and proper? Isn't her own father and mother and 'ome good enough for her, that she 'as to run away and get merried? When she could 'ave 'ad it 'ere at St. Jude's nice and respectable with your father and your uncle and all of us and white favours and a carriage and all. I wish I could 'ope she was merried! I wish there was a chance of it!'

"My uncle shook his head in confirmation.

"'Sooner 'n this should 've 'appened,' boomed my father, 'I'd 've seen 'er dead at my feet!'

''Last night,' said Prue, 'she said 'er prayers.'

"'Didn't she always say 'er prayers?' asked my uncle, shocked.

"'Not kneeling down,' said Prue. 'But last night she was kneeling quite a long time. She thought I was asleep but I watched 'er.'

"'That looks bad,' said my uncle. 'Y'know, Smith; that looks bad. I don't like that praying. Sominous. I don't like it.'

"And then suddenly and violently Prue and I were packed off upstairs to bed.

"For long the sound of their voices went on; the three of them came up into the shop and stood at the front door while my uncle gradually took leave, but what further things they said I did not hear. But I remember that suddenly I had a brilliant idea, suggested no doubt by Prue's scrap of evidence. I got out of bed and knelt down and said, 'Pray God, be kind to my Fanny! Pray God not to be hard on Fanny! I'm sure she means to get merried. For ever and ever. Amen.' And after putting Providence upon his honour, so to speak, in this fashion, I felt less mentally distracted and got back into bed and presently I fell asleep."

Sarnac paused.

"It's all rather puzzling," said Willow.

"It seemed perfectly natural at the time," said Sarnac.

"That pork butcher was evidently a repulsive creature," said Firefly. "Why didn't they object to him?"

"Because the importance of the marriage ceremonial was so great in those days as to dominate the entire situation. I knew Crosby quite well; he was a cunning-faced, oily-mannered humbug with a bald head, fat red ears, a red complexion and a paunch. There are no such people in the world now; you must recall some incredible gross old-world caricature to imagine him. Nowadays you would as soon think of coupling the life of a girl with some gross heavy animal as with such a man. But that mattered nothing to my father or my mother. My mother I suspect rather liked the idea of the physical humiliation of Fanny. She no doubt had had her own humiliations--for the sexual life of this old world was a tangle of clumsy ignorances and secret shames. Except for my mother's real hostility to Fanny I remember scarcely a scrap of any simple natural feeling, let alone any reasonable thinking, in all that terrible fuss they made. Men and women in those days were so much more complex and artificial than they are now; in a muddled way they were amazingly intricate. You know that monkeys, even young monkeys, have old and wrinkled faces, and it is equally true that in the Age of Confusion life was so perplexing and irrational that while we were still children our minds were already old and wrinkled. Even to my boyish observation it was clear that my father was acting the whole time; he was behaving as he imagined he was expected to behave. Never for a moment either when drunk or sober did he even attempt to find out, much less to express, what he was feeling naturally about Fanny. He was afraid to do so. And that night we were all acting--all of us. We were all afraid to do anything but act in what we imagined would be regarded as a virtuous rôle."

"But what were you afraid of?" asked Radiant. "Why did you act?"

"I don't know. Afraid of blame. Afraid of the herd. A habit of fear. A habit of inhibition."

"What was the objection to the real lover?" asked Firefly. "I don't understand all this indignation."

"They guessed rightly enough that he did not intend to marry Fanny."

"What sort of a man was he?"

"I never saw him until many years afterwards. But I will tell you about that when I come to it."

"Was he--the sort of man one could love?"

"Fanny loved him. She had every reason to do so. He took care of her. He got her the education she craved for. He gave her a life full of interest. I believe he was an honest and delightful man."

"They stuck to each other?"

"Yes."

"Then why didn't he marry her--if it was the custom?"

"He was married already. Marriage had embittered him. It embittered many people. He'd been cheated. He had been married by a woman who pretended love to impose herself upon him and his fortunes and he had found her out."

"Not a very difficult discovery," said Firefly.

"No."

"But why couldn't they divorce?"

"In those days it took two to make a divorce. She wouldn't let him loose. She just stuck on and lived on his loneliness. If he had been poor he would probably have tried to murder her, but as it happened he had the knack of success and he was rich. Rich people could take liberties with marriage-restrictions that were absolutely impossible for the poor. And he was, I should guess, sensitive, affectionate and energetic. Heaven knows what sort of mind he was in when he came upon Fanny. He 'picked her up,' as people used to say casually. The old world was full of such pitiful adventures in encounter. Almost always they meant disaster, but this was an exceptional case. Perhaps it was as lucky for him that he met her as it was for her that she met him. Fanny, you know, was one of those people you have to be honest with; she was acute and simple; she cut like a clean sharp knife. They were both in danger and want; the ugliest chances might have happened to her and he was far gone on the way to promiscuity and complete sexual degradation.... But I can't go off on Fanny's story. In the end she probably married him. They were going to marry. In some way the other woman did at last make it possible."

"But why don't you know for certain?"

"Because I was shot before that happened. If it happened at all."

§ 6

"_No!_" cried Sarnac, stopping a question from Willow by a gesture.

"I shall never tell my story," said Sarnac, "if you interrupt with questions. I was telling you of the storm of misfortunes that wrecked our household at Cherry Gardens....

"My father was killed within three weeks of Fanny's elopement. He was killed upon the road between Cherry Gardens and Cliffstone. There was a young gentleman named Wickersham with one of the new petrol-driven motor-cars that were just coming into use; he was hurrying home as fast as possible, he told the coroner, because his brakes were out of order and he was afraid of an accident. My father was walking with my uncle along the pavement, talking. He found the pavement too restricted for his subject and gestures, and he stepped off suddenly into the roadway and was struck by the car from behind and knocked headlong and instantly killed.

"The effect upon my uncle was very profound. For some days he was thoughtful and sober and he missed a race-meeting. He was very helpful over the details of the funeral.

"'You can't say 'e wasn't prepared, Marth,' he told my mother. 'You can't say 'e wasn't prepared. Very moment 'e was killed, 'e 'ad the name 'v' Providence on 'is lips. 'E'd been saying 'ow sorely 'e'd been tried by this and that.'

"''E wasn't the only one,' said my mother.

"''E was saying 'e knew it was only to teach 'im some lesson though he couldn't rightly say what the lesson was. 'E was convinced that everything that 'appened to us, good though it seemed or bad though it seemed, was surely for the best....'

"My uncle paused dramatically.

"'And then the car 'it 'im,' said my mother, trying to picture the scene.

"'Then the car 'it 'im,' said my uncle."

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE WIDOW SMITH MOVES TO LONDON

§ 1

"In those days," said Sarnac, "the great majority of the dead were put into coffins and buried underground. Some few people were burnt, but that was an innovation and contrary to the very materialistic religious ideas of the time. This was a world in which you must remember people were still repeating in perfect good faith a creed which included 'the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.' Intellectually old Egypt and her dreaming mummies still ruled the common people of the European world. The Christian creeds were themselves mummies from Lower Egypt. As my father said on one occasion when he was discussing this question of cremation: 'It might prove a bit orkward at the Resurrection. Like not 'aving a proper wedding garment so to speak....

"'Though there's Sharks,' said my father, whose mental transitions were sometimes abrupt. 'And them as 'ave been eat by lions. Many of the best Christian martyrs in their time was eat by lions.... They'd _certainly_ be given bodies....

"'And if _one_ is given a body, why not another?' said my father, lifting mild and magnified eyes in enquiry.

"'It's a difficult question,' my father decided.

"At any rate there was no discussion of cremation in his case. We had a sort of hearse-coach with a place for the coffin in front to take him to the cemetery, and in this vehicle my mother and Prue travelled also; my elder brother Ernest, who had come down from London for the occasion, and my uncle and I walked ahead and waited for it at the cemetery gates and followed the coffin to the grave-side. We were all in black clothes, even black gloves, in spite of the fact that we were wretchedly poor.

"''Twon't be my last visit to this place this year,' said my uncle despondently, 'not if Adelaide goes on as she's doing.'

"Ernest was silent. He disliked my uncle and was brooding over him. From the moment of his arrival he had shown a deepening objection to my uncle's existence.

"'There's luck they say in funerals,' said my uncle presently, striking a brighter note. 'Fi keep my eye open I dessay I may get a 'int of somethin'.'

"Ernest remained dour.

"We followed the men carrying the coffin towards the cemetery chapel in a little procession led by Mr. Snapes in his clerical robes. He began to read out words that I realised were beautiful and touching and that concerned strange and faraway things: 'I am the Resurrection and the Life. He that believeth in Me though he were dead yet shall he live....'

"'I know that my Redeemer liveth and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth....'

"'We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the Name of the Lord.'

"Suddenly I forgot the bickerings of my uncle and brother and was overcome with tenderness and grief for my father. A rush from my memory of many clumsy kindlinesses, a realisation of the loss of his companionship came to me. I recalled the happiness of many of my Sunday tramps by his side in spring-time, on golden summer evenings, in winter when the frost had picked out every twig in the downland hedgerows. I thought of his endless edifying discourses about flowers and rabbits and hillsides and distant stars. And he was gone. I should never hear his voice again. I should never see again his dear old eyes magnified to an immense wonder through his spectacles. I should never have a chance of telling him how I cared for him. And I had never told him I cared for him. Indeed, I had never realised I cared for him until now. He was lying stiff and still and submissive in that coffin, a rejected man. Life had treated him badly. He had never had a dog's chance. My mind leapt forward beyond my years and I understood what a tissue of petty humiliations and disappointments and degradations his life had been. I saw then as clearly as I see now the immense pity of such a life. Sorrow possessed me. I wept as I stumbled along after him. I had great difficulty in preventing myself from weeping aloud."

§ 2

"After the funeral my brother Ernest and my uncle had a violent wrangle about my mother's future. Seeing that my Aunt Adelaide was for all practical purposes done for, my uncle suggested that he should sell up most of his furniture, 'bring his capital' into the greengrocery business and come and live with his sister. But my brother declared that the greengrocery business was a dying concern, and was for my mother moving into a house in Cliffstone when she might let lodgings, Prue would be 'no end of a 'elp' in that. At first this was opposed by my uncle and then he came round to the idea on condition that he participated in the benefits of the scheme, but this Ernest opposed, asking rather rudely what sort of help my uncle supposed he would be in a lodging-house. 'Let alone you're never out of bed before ten,' he said, though how he knew of this fact did not appear.

"Ernest had been living in London, working at a garage; he drove hired cars by the month or job, and his respect for the upper classes had somehow disappeared. The dignity of Sir John ffrench-Cuthbertson at secondhand left him cold and scornful. 'You ain't going to 'ave my mother to work for you and wait on you, no'ow,' he said.

"While this dispute went on my mother with the assistance of Prue was setting out the cold collation which in those days was the redeeming feature of every funeral. There was cold ham and chicken. My uncle abandoned his position of vantage on my father's rag hearthrug and we all sat down to our exceptional meal.

"For some little time the cold ham and chicken made a sort of truce between my brother Ernest and my uncle, but presently my uncle sighed, drank off his beer and reopened the argument. 'You know I think, Marth,' he said, spearing a potato from the dish neatly with his fork, 'you ought to 'ave some voice in what is going to become of you. Me and this young man from London 've been 'aving a bit of a difference 'bout what you ought to do.'

"I realised abruptly from the expression of my mother's white face, a sort of white intentness which her widow's cap seemed to emphasise, that she was quite determined to have not only some voice but a decisive voice in this matter, but before she could say anything my brother Ernest had intervened.

"'It's like this, mother,' he said, 'you got to do something, 'aven't you?'

"My mother was about to reply when Ernest snatched a sort of assent from her and proceeded: 'Well, naturally I ask, what sort of thing can you do? And as naturally, I answer Lodgings. You carn't expect to go on being a greengrocer, because that ain't natural for a woman, considering the weights and coal that 'as to be lifted.'

"'And could be lifted easy, with a man to 'elp 'er,' said my uncle.

"'If 'e _was_ a man,' said my brother Ernest with bitter sarcasm.

"'Meaning----?' asked my uncle with cold hauteur.

"'What I say,' said brother Ernest. 'No more, no less. So if you take my advice, mother, what you'll do is this. You go down early to-morrow to Cliffstone to look for a suitable little 'ouse big enough to 'old lodgers and not so big as to break your back, and I'll go and talk to Mr. Bulstrode about ending up your tenancy 'ere. Then we'll be able to see where we are.'

"Again my mother attempted to speak and was overborne.

"''Fyou think I'm going to be treated as a nonentity,' said my uncle, 'you're making the biggest mistake you ever made in your life. See? Now you listen to me, Marth----'

"'You shut up!' said my brother. 'Mother's _my_ business first and foremost.'

"'_Shut up!_' echoed my uncle. 'Wot manners! At a funeral. From a chap not a third my age, a mere 'azardous empty boy. _Shut_ up! You shut up yourself, my boy, and listen to those who know a bit more about life than you do. I've smacked your 'ed before to-day. Not once or twice either. And I warmed your 'ide when you stole them peaches--and much good it did you! I oughter've took yer skin off! You and me 'ave never got on much, and unless you keep a civil tongue in your head we ain't going to get on now.'

"'Seeing which,' said brother Ernest with a dangerous calmness, 'the sooner you make yourself scarce the better for all concerned.'

"'Not to leave my on'y sister's affairs in the 'ands of a cub like you.'

"Again my mother essayed to speak, but the angry voices disregarded her.

"'I tell you you're going to get out, and if you can't get out of your own discretion I warn you I'll 'ave to 'elp you.'

"'Not when you're in mourning,' said my mother. 'Not wearing your mourning. And besides----'

"But they were both too heated now to attend to her.

"'You're pretty big with your talk,' said my uncle, 'but don't you preshume too far on my forbearance. I've 'ad about enough of this.'

"'So've I,' said my brother Ernest and stood up.

"My uncle stood up too and they glared at one another.

"'That's the door,' said my brother darkly.

"My uncle walked back to his wonted place on the hearthrug. 'Now don't let's 'ave any quarrelling on a day like this,' he said. 'If you 'aven't any consideration for your mother you might at least think of 'im who has passed beyond. My objec' 'ere is simply to try n'range things so's be best for all. And what I say is this, the ideer of your mother going into a lodging-'ouse alone, without a man's 'elp, is ridiculous, perfectly ridiculous, and only a first-class inconsiderate young fool----'

"My brother Ernest went and stood close to my uncle. 'You've said enough,' he remarked. 'This affair's between me and my mother and your motto is Get Out. See?'

"Again my mother had something to say and again she was silenced. "'This is man's work, mother,' said Ernest. 'Are you going to shift it, uncle?'

"My uncle faced up to this threat of Ernest. 'I've a juty to my sister----'

"And then I regret to say my brother laid hands on him. He took him by the collar and by the wrist and for a moment the two black-clad figures swayed.

"'Lea' go my coat,' said my uncle. 'Lea' go my coat collar.'

"But a thirst for violence had taken possession of Ernest. My mother and Prue and I stood aghast.

"'Ernie!' cried my mother, 'You forget yourself!'

"'Sall _right_, mother,' said Ernie, and whirled my uncle violently from the hearthrug to the bottom of the staircase. Then he shifted his grip from my uncle's wrist to the seat of his tight black trousers and partly lifted and partly impelled him up the staircase. My uncle's arms waved wildly as if he clutched at his lost dignity.

"'John!' cried my mother. ''Ere's your 'at!'

"I had a glimpse of my uncle's eye as he vanished up the staircase. He seemed to be looking for his hat. But he was now offering no serious opposition to my brother Ernest's handling of him.

"'Give it 'im, 'Arry,' said my mother. 'And there's 'is gloves too.'

"I took the black hat and the black gloves and followed the struggle upstairs. Astonished and unresisting, my uncle was propelled through the front door into the street and stood there panting and regarding my brother. His collar was torn from its stud and his black tie disarranged. Ernest was breathing heavily. 'Now you be orf and mind your own business,' said Ernie.

"Ernie turned with a start as I pushed past him. ''Ere's your 'at and gloves, uncle,' I said, handing them to him. He took them mechanically, his eyes still fixed on Ernest.

"'And you're the boy I trained to be 'onest,' said my uncle to my brother Ernest, very bitterly. 'Leastways I tried to. You're the young worm I fattened up at my gardens and showed such kindness to! _Gratitood!_'

"He regarded the hat in his hand for a moment as though it was some strange object, and then by a happy inspiration put it on his head.

"'God 'elp your poor mother,' said my Uncle John Julip. 'God 'elp 'er.'

"He had nothing more to say. He looked up the street and down and then turned as by a sort of necessity in the direction of the _Wellington_ public-house. And in this manner was my Uncle John Julip on the day of my father's funeral cast forth into the streets of Cherry Gardens, a prospective widower and a most pathetic and unhappy little man. That dingy little black figure in retreat still haunts my memory. Even from the back he looked amazed. Never did a man who has not been kicked look so like a man who has been. I never saw him again. I have no doubt that he carried his sorrows down to the _Wellington_ and got himself thoroughly drunk, and I have as little doubt that he missed my father dreadfully all the time he was doing so.

"My brother Ernest returned thoughtfully to the kitchen. He was already a little abashed at his own violence. I followed him respectfully.

"'You didn't ought t'ave done that,' said my mother.

'What right 'as 'e to plant 'imself on you to be kept and waited on?'

''E wouldn't 'ave planted 'imself on me,' my mother replied. 'You get 'eated, Ernie, same as you used to do, and you won't listen to anything.'

"'I never did fancy uncle,' said Ernie.

"'When you get 'eated, Ernie, you seem to forget everything,' said my mother. 'You might've remembered 'e was my brother.'

"'Fine brother!' said Ernie. 'Why!--who started all that stealing? Who led poor father to drink and bet?'

"'All the same,' said my mother, 'you 'adn't no right to 'andle 'im as you did. And your poor father 'ardly cold in 'is grave!' She wept. She produced a black-bordered handkerchief and mopped her eyes. 'I did 'ope your poor father would 'ave a nice funeral--all the trouble and expense--and now you've spoilt it. I'll never be able to look back on this day with pleasure, not if I live to be a 'undred years. I'll always remember 'ow you spoilt your own father's funeral--turning on your uncle like this.'

"Ernest had no answer for her reproaches. 'He shouldn't 've argued and said what he did,' he objected.

"'And all so unnecessary! All along I've been trying to tell you you needn't worry about me. I don't want no lodging-'ouse in Cliffstone--_with_ your uncle or _without_ your uncle. I wrote to Matilda Good a week come Tuesday and settled everything with 'er--everything. It's settled.'

"'What d'you mean?' asked Ernest.

"'Why, that 'ouse of hers in Pimlico. She's been wanting trusty 'elp for a long time, what with her varicose veins up and downstairs and one thing 'nother, and directly she got my letter about your poor dear father she wrote orf to me. "You need never want a 'ome," she says, "so long as I got a lodger. You and Prue are welcome," she says, "welcome 'elp, and the boy can easy find work up 'ere--much easier than 'e can in Cliffstone." All the time you was planning lodging-'ouses and things for me I was trying to tell you----

"'You mean it's settled?'

"'It's settled.'

"'And what you going to do with your bits of furniture 'ere?'

"'Sell some and take some....'

"'It's feasible,' said Ernest after reflection.

"'And so we needn't reely 'ave 'ad that--bit of a' argument?' said Ernest after a pause. 'Not me and uncle?'

"'Not on my account you needn't,' said my mother.

"'Well--we 'ad it,' said Ernest after another pause and without any visible signs of regret."

§ 3

"If my dream was a dream," said Sarnac, "it was a most circumstantial dream. I could tell you a hundred details of our journey to London and how we disposed of the poor belongings that had furnished our home in Cherry Gardens. Every detail would expose some odd and illuminating difference between the ideas of those ancient days and our own ideas. Brother Ernest was helpful, masterful and irascible. He got a week's holiday from his employer to help mother to settle up things, and among other things that were settled up I believe my mother persuaded him and my uncle to 'shake hands,' but I do not know the particulars of that great scene, I did not see it, it was merely mentioned in my hearing during the train journey to London. I would like to tell you also of the man who came round to buy most of our furniture, including that red and black sofa I described to you, and how he and my brother had a loud and heated argument about some damage to one of its legs, and how Mr. Crosby produced a bill, that my mother understood he had forgiven us on account of Fanny long ago. There was also some point about something called 'tenant's fixtures' that led my brother and the landlord, Mr. Bulstrode, to the verge of violence. And Mr. Bulstrode, the landlord, brought accusations of damage done to the fabric of his house that were false, and he made extravagant claims for compensation based thereon and had to be rebutted with warmth. There was also trouble over carting a parcel of our goods to the railway station, and when we got to the terminus of Victoria in London it was necessary, I gathered, that Ernest should offer to fight a railway porter--you have read of railway porters?--before we received proper attention.

"But I cannot tell you all these curious and typical incidents now because at that rate I should never finish my story before our holidays are over. I must go on now to tell you of this London, this great city, the greatest city it was in the world in those days, to which we had transferred our fates. All the rest of my story, except for nearly two years and a half I spent in the training camp and in France and Germany during the First World War, is set in the scenery of London. You know already what a vast congestion of human beings London was; you know that within a radius of fifteen miles a population of seven and a half million people were gathered together, people born out of due time into a world unready for them and born mostly through the sheer ignorance of their procreators, gathered together into an area of not very attractive clay country by an urgent need to earn a living, and you know the terrible fate that at last overwhelmed this sinfully crowded accumulation; you have read of west-end and slums, and you have seen the cinema pictures of those days showing crowded streets, crowds gaping at this queer ceremony or that, a vast traffic of clumsy automobiles and distressed horses in narrow unsuitable streets, and I suppose your general impression is a nightmare of multitudes, a suffocating realisation of jostling discomfort and uncleanness and of an unendurable strain on eye and ear and attention. The history we learn in our childhood enforces that lesson.

"But though the facts are just as we are taught they were, I do not recall anything like the distress at London you would suppose me to have felt, and I do remember vividly the sense of adventure, the intellectual excitement and the discovery of beauty I experienced in going there. You must remember that in this strange dream of mine I had forgotten all our present standards; I accepted squalor and confusion as being in the nature of things, and the aspects of this city's greatness, the wonder of this limitless place and a certain changing and evanescent beauty, rise out of a sea of struggle and limitation as forgetfully as a silver birch rises out of the swamp that bears it.

"The part of London in which we took up our abode was called Pimlico. It bordered upon the river, and once there had been a wharf there to which ships came across the Atlantic from America. This word Pimlico had come with other trade in these ships; in my time it was the last word left alive of the language of the Algonquin Red Indians, who had otherwise altogether vanished from the earth. The Pimlico wharf had gone, the American trade was forgotten, and Pimlico was now a great wilderness of streets of dingy grey houses in which people lived and let lodgings. These houses had never been designed for the occupation of lodgers; they were faced with a lime-plaster called stucco which made a sort of pretence of being stone; each one had a sunken underground floor originally intended for servants, a door with a portico and several floors above which were reached by a staircase. Beside each portico was a railed pit that admitted light to the front underground room. As you walked along these Pimlico streets these porticos receded in long perspectives and each portico of that endless series represented ten or a dozen misdirected, incomplete and rather unclean inhabitants, infected mentally and morally. Over the grey and dingy architecture rested a mist or a fog, rarely was there a precious outbreak of sunlight; here and there down the vista a grocer's boy or a greengrocer's boy or a fish hawker would be handing in food over the railings to the subterranean members of a household, or a cat (there was a multitude of cats) would be peeping out of the railings alert for the danger of a passing dog. There would be a few pedestrians, a passing cab or so, and perhaps in the morning a dust-cart collecting refuse filth--set out for the winds to play with in boxes and tin receptacles at the pavement edge--or a man in a uniform cleaning the streets with a hose. It seems to you that it must have been the most depressing of spectacles. It wasn't, though I doubt if I can make clear to you that it wasn't. I know I went about Pimlico thinking it rather a fine place and endlessly interesting. I assure you that in the early morning and by my poor standards it had a sort of grey spaciousness and dignity. But afterwards I found the thing far better done, that London architectural aquatint, in Belgravia and round about Regent's Park.

"I must admit that I tended to drift out of those roads and squares of lodging-houses either into the streets where there were shops and street-cars or southward to the Embankment along the Thames. It was the shops and glares that drew me first as the lights began to fail and, strange as it may seem to you, my memories of such times are rich with beauty. We feeble children of that swarming age had, I think, an almost morbid gregariousness; we found a subtle pleasure and reassurance in crowds and a real disagreeableness in being alone; and my impressions of London's strange interest and charm are, I confess, very often crowded impressions of a kind this world no longer produces, or impressions to which a crowded foreground or background was essential. But they were beautiful.

"For example there was a great railway station, a terminus, within perhaps half a mile of us. There was a great disorderly yard in front of the station in which hackney automobiles and omnibuses assembled and departed and arrived. In the late twilight of an autumn day this yard was a mass of shifting black shadows and gleams and lamps, across which streamed an incessant succession of bobbing black heads, people on foot hurrying to catch the trains: as they flitted by the lights one saw their faces gleam and vanish again. Above this foreground rose the huge brown-grey shapes of the station buildings and the façade of a big hotel, reflecting the flares below and pierced here and there by a lit window; then very sharply came the sky-line and a sky still blue and luminous, tranquil and aloof. And the innumerable sounds of people and vehicles wove into a deep, wonderful and continually varying drone. Even to my boyish mind there was an irrational conviction of unity and purpose in this spectacle.

"The streets where there were shops were also very wonderful and lovely to me directly the too-lucid and expository daylight began to fade. The variously coloured lights in the shop-windows which displayed a great diversity of goods for sale splashed the most extraordinary reflections upon the pavements and roadway, and these were particularly gem-like if there had been rain or a mist to wet the reflecting surfaces. One of these streets--it was called Lupus Street, though why it had the name of an abominable skin disease that has long since vanished from the earth I cannot imagine--was close to our new home and I still remember it as full of romantic effectiveness. By daylight it was an exceedingly sordid street, and late at night empty and echoing, but in the magic hours of London it was a bed of black and luminous flowers, the abounding people became black imps and through it wallowed the great shining omnibuses, the ships of the street, filled with light and reflecting lights.

"There were endless beauties along the river bank. The river was a tidal one held in control by a stone embankment, and the roadway along the embankment was planted at the footway edge with plane trees and lit by large electric lights on tall standards. These planes were among the few trees that could flourish in the murky London air, but they were unsuitable trees to have in a crowded city because they gave off minute specules that irritated people's throats. That, however, I did not know; what I did know was that the shadows of the leaves on the pavements thrown by the electric glares made the most beautiful patternings I had ever seen. I would walk along on a warm night rejoicing in them, more particularly if now and then a light breeze set them dancing and quivering.

"One could walk from Pimlico along this Thames Embankment for some miles towards the east. One passed little black jetties with dangling oil lamps; there was a traffic of barges and steamers on the river altogether mysterious and romantic to me; the frontages of the houses varied incessantly, and ever and again were cleft by crowded roadways that brought a shining and twinkling traffic up to the bridges. Across the river was a coming and going of trains along a railway viaduct; it contributed a restless _motif_ of clanks and concussion to the general drone of London, and the engines sent puffs of firelit steam and sudden furnace-glows into the night. One came along this Embankment to the great buildings at Westminster, by daylight a pile of imitation Gothic dominated by a tall clock-tower with an illuminated dial, a pile which assumed a blue dignity with the twilight and became a noble portent standing at attention, a forest of spears, in the night. This was the Parliament House, and in its chambers a formal King, an ignoble nobility and a fraudulently elected gathering of lawyers, financiers and adventurers took upon themselves, amidst the general mental obscurity of those days, a semblance of wisdom and empire. As one went on beyond Westminster along the Embankment came great grey-brown palaces and houses set behind green gardens, a railway bridge and then two huge hotels, standing high and far back, bulging with lit windows; there was some sort of pit or waste beneath them, I forget what, very black, so that at once they loomed over one and seemed magically remote. There was an Egyptian obelisk here, for all the European capitals of my time, being as honest as magpies and as original as monkeys, had adorned themselves with obelisks stolen from Egypt. And farther along was the best and noblest building in London, St. Paul's Cathedral; it was invisible by night, but it was exceedingly serene and beautiful on a clear, blue, windy day. And some of the bridges were very lovely with gracious arches of smutty grey stone, though some were so clumsy that only night could redeem them.

"As I talk I remember," said Sarnac. "Before employment robbed me of my days I pushed my boyish explorations far and wide, wandering all day and often going without any meal, or, if I was in pocket, getting a bun and a glass of milk in some small shop for a couple of pennies. The shop-windows of London were an unending marvel to me; and they would be to you too if you could remember them as I do; there must have been hundreds of miles of them, possibly thousands of miles. In the poorer parts they were chiefly food-shops and cheap clothing shops and the like, and one could exhaust their interest, but there were thoroughfares like Regent Street and Piccadilly and narrow Bond Street and Oxford Street crammed with all the furnishings of the life of the lucky minority, the people who could spend freely. You will find it difficult to imagine how important a matter the mere buying of things was in the lives of those people. In their houses there was a vast congestion of objects neither ornamental nor useful; purchases in fact; and the women spent large portions of every week-day in buying things, clothes, table-litter, floor-litter, wall-litter. They had no work; they were too ignorant to be interested in any real thing; they had nothing else to do. That was the world's reward, the substance of success--purchases. Through them you realised your well-being. As a shabby half-grown boy I pushed my way among these spenders, crowds of women dressed, wrapped up rather, in layer after layer of purchases, scented, painted. Most of them were painted to suggest a health-flushed face, the nose powdered a leprous white.

"There is one thing to be said for the old fashion of abundant clothing; in that crowded jostling world it saved people from actually touching each other.

"I would push through these streets eastward to less prosperous crowds in Oxford Street and to a different multitude in Holborn. As you went eastward the influence of women diminished and that of young men increased. Cheapside gave you all the material for building up a twentieth-century young man from the nude. In the shop-windows he was disarticulated and priced: hat five and sixpence, trousers eighteen shillings, tie one and six; cigarettes tenpence an ounce; newspaper a half-penny, cheap novel sevenpence; on the pavement outside there he was put together and complete and the cigarette burning, under the impression that he was a unique immortal creature and that the ideas in his head were altogether his own. And beyond Cheapside there was Clerkenwell with curious little shops that sold scarcely anything but old keys or the parts of broken-up watches or the like detached objects. Then there were great food markets at Leadenhall Street and Smithfield and Covent Garden, incredible accumulations of raw stuff. At Covent Garden they sold fruits and flowers that we should think poor and undeveloped, but which everyone in those days regarded as beautiful and delicious. And in Caledonian Market were innumerable barrows where people actually bought and took away every sort of broken and second-hand rubbish, broken ornaments, decaying books with torn pages, second-hand clothing--a wonderland of litter for any boy with curiosity in his blood....

"But I could go on talking endlessly about this old London of mine and you want me to get on with my story. I have tried to give you something of its endless, incessant, multitudinous glittering quality and the way in which it yielded a thousand strange and lovely effects to its changing lights and atmosphere. I found even its fogs, those dreaded fogs of which the books tell, romantic. But then I was a boy at the adventurous age. The fog was often very thick in Pimlico. It was normally a soft creamy obscurity that turned even lights close at hand into luminous blurs. People came out of nothingness within six yards of you, were riddles and silhouettes before they became real. One could go out and lose oneself within ten minutes of home and perhaps pick up with a distressed automobile driver and walk by his headlights, signalling to him where the pavement ended. That was one sort of fog, the dry fog. But there were many sorts. There was a sort of yellow darkness, like blackened bronze, that hovered about you and did not embrace you and left a clear nearer world of deep browns and blacks. And there was an unclean wet mist that presently turned to drizzle and made every surface a mirror."

"And there was daylight," said Willow, "sometimes surely there was daylight."

"Yes," Sarnac reflected; "there was daylight. At times. And sometimes there was quite a kindly and redeeming sunshine in London. In the spring, in early summer or in October. It did not blaze, but it filled the air with a mild warmth, and turned the surfaces it lit not indeed to gold but to amber and topaz. And there were even hot days in London with skies of deep blue above, but they were rare. And sometimes there was daylight without the sun....

"Yes," said Sarnac and paused. "At times there was a daylight that stripped London bare, showed its grime, showed its real ineffectiveness, showed the pitiful poverty of intention in its buildings, showed the many coloured billstickers' hoardings for the crude and leprous things they were, brought out the shabbiness of unhealthy bodies and misfitting garments....

"Those were terrible, veracious, unhappy days. When London no longer fascinated but wearied and offended, when even to an uninstructed boy there came some intimation of the long distressful journey that our race had still to travel before it attained even to such peace and health and wisdom as it has to-day."

§ 4

Sarnac stopped short in his talk and rose with something between a laugh and a sigh. He stood facing westward and Sunray stood beside him.

"This story will go on for ever if I digress like this. See! the sun will be behind that ridge in another ten minutes. I cannot finish this evening, because most of the story part still remains to be told."

"There are roast fowls with sweet corn and chestnuts," said Firefly. "Trout and various fruits."

"And some of that golden wine?" said Radiant.

"Some of that golden wine."

Sunray, who had been very still and intent, awoke. "Sarnac dear," she said, slipping her arm through his. "What became of Uncle John Julip?"

Sarnac reflected. "I forget," he said.

"Aunt Adelaide Julip died?" asked Willow.

"She died quite soon after we left Cherry Gardens. My uncle wrote, I remember, and I remember my mother reading the letter at breakfast like a proclamation and saying, 'Seems if she was reely ill after all.' If she had not been ill then surely she had carried malingering to the last extremity. But I forget any particulars about my uncle's departure from this world. He probably outlived my mother, and after her death the news of his end might easily have escaped me."

"You have had the most wonderful dream in the world, Sarnac," said Starlight, "and I want to hear the whole story and not interrupt, but I am sorry not to hear more of your Uncle John Julip."

"He was such a perfect little horror," said Firefly....

Until the knife-edge of the hills cut into the molten globe of the sun, the holiday-makers lingered watching the shadows in their last rush up to the mountain crests, and then, still talking of this

## particular and that in Sarnac's story, the six made their way down to

the guest-house and supper.

"Sarnac was shot," said Radiant. "He hasn't even begun to get shot yet. There is no end of story still to come."

"Sarnac," asked Firefly, "you weren't killed in the Great War, were you? Suddenly? In some inconsequent sort of way?"

"Not a bit of it," said Sarnac. "I am really beginning to be shot in this story though Radiant does not perceive it. But I must tell my story in my own fashion."

At supper what was going on was explained to the master of the guest-house. Like so many of these guest-house-keepers he was a jolly, convivial, simple soul, and he was amused and curious at Sarnac's alleged experience. He laughed at the impatience of the others; he said they were like children in a Children's Garden, agog for their go-to-bed fairy-tale. After they had had coffee they went out for a time to see the moonlight mingle with the ruddy afterglow above the peaks; and then the guest-master led the way in, made up a blazing pinewood fire and threw cushions before it, set out an after-dinner wine, put out the lights and prepared for a good night's story-telling.

Sarnac remained thoughtful, looking into the flames until Sunray set him off again by whispering: "Pimlico?"

§ 5

"I will tell you as briefly as I can of the household in Pimlico where we joined forces with my mother's old friend, Matilda Good," said Sarnac; "but I confess it is hard to be reasonably brief when one's mind is fuller of curious details than this fire is of sparks."

"That's excellent!" said the master of the guest-house. "That's a perfect story-teller's touch!" and looked brightly for Sarnac to continue.

"But we are all beginning to believe that he has been there," whispered Radiant, laying a restraining hand on the guest-master's knee. "And he"--Radiant spoke behind his hand--"he believes it altogether."

"Not _really_?" whispered the guest-master. He seemed desirous of asking difficult questions and then subsided into an attention that was at first a little constrained and presently quite involuntary.

"These houses in Pimlico were part of an enormous proliferation of houses that occurred between a hundred years and seventy years before the Great War. There was a great amount of unintelligent building enterprise in those decades in London, and at the building, as I have already told you, I think, was done on the supposition that there was an endless supply of fairly rich families capable of occupying a big house and employing three or four domestic servants. There were underground kitchens and servants' rooms, there was a dining-room and master's study at the ground level, there was a 'drawing-room floor' above, two rooms convertible into one by a device known as folding doors, and above this were bedrooms on a scale of diminishing importance until one came to attics without fire-places in which the servants were to sleep. In large areas and particularly in Pimlico, these fairly rich families of the builder's imagination, with servile domestics all complete, never appeared to claim the homes prepared for them, and from the first, poorer people, for whom of course no one had troubled to plan houses, adapted these porticoed plaster mansions to their own narrower needs. My mother's friend, Matilda Good, was a quite typical Pimlico householder. She had been the trusted servant of a rich old lady in Cliffstone who had died and left her two or three hundred pounds of money----"

The master of the guest-house was endlessly perplexed and made an interrogative noise.

"Private property," said Radiant very rapidly. "Power of bequest. Two thousand years ago. Made a Will, you know. Go on, Sarnac."

"With that and her savings," said Sarnac, "she was able to become tenant of one of these Pimlico houses and to furnish it with a sort of shabby gentility. She lived herself in the basement below and in the attic above, and all the rest of the house she had hoped to let in pieces, floor by floor or room by room, to rich or at least prosperous old ladies, and to busy herself in tending them and supplying their needs and extracting a profit and living out of them, running up and down her staircase as an ant runs up and down a rose stem tending its aphides. But old ladies of any prosperity did not come into Pimlico. It was low and foggy, the children of its poorer streets were rough and disrespectful, and it was close to the river embankment over which rich, useless old ladies naturally expected to be thrown. So Matilda Good had to console herself with less succulent and manageable lodgers.

"I remember Matilda Good giving us an account of those she had as we sat in her front downstairs room having a kind of tea supper on the evening of our arrival. Ernest had declined refreshment and departed, his task as travel conductor done, but there were my mother and Prue and myself, all in dingy black and all a little stiff and strange, thawing slowly to tea and hot buttered toast with a poached egg each, our mouths very full and our eyes and ears very attentive to Matilda Good.

"She appeared quite a grand lady to me that night. She was much larger than any lady I had hitherto been accustomed to; she had a breadth and variety of contour like scenery rather than a human being; the thought of her veins being varicose, indeed of all her anatomy being varicose and fantastic, seemed a right and proper one. She was dressed in black with outbreaks of soiled lace, a large gold-rimmed brooch fastened her dress at the neck and she had a gold chain about her, and on her head was what was called a 'cap,' an affair like the lower shell of an oyster inverted, made of layers of dingy lace and adorned with a black velvet bow and a gold buckle. Her face had the same landscape unanatomical quality as her body; she had a considerable moustache, an overhung slightly mischievous mouth and two different large dark-grey eyes with a slightly vertical cast in them and very marked eyelashes. She sat sideways. One eye looked at you rather sidelong, the other seemed to watch something over your head. She spoke in a whisper which passed very easily into wheezy, not unkindly laughter.

"'You'll get no end of exercise on these stairs, my dear,' she said to sister Prue, 'no end of exercise. There's times when I'm going up to bed when I start counting 'em, just to make sure that they aren't taking in lodgers like the rest of us. There's no doubt this 'ouse will strengthen your legs, my dear. Mustn't get 'em too big and strong for the rest of you. But you can easy manage that by carrying something, carrying something every time you go up or down. Ugh--ugh. That'll equalise you. There's always something to carry, boots it is, hot water it is, a scuttle of coals or a parcel.'

"'I expect it's a busy 'ouse,' said my mother, eating her buttered toast like a lady.

"'It's a toilsome 'ouse,' said Matilda Good. 'I don't want to deceive you, Martha; it's a toilsome 'ouse.

"'But it's a 'ouse that keeps full,' said Matilda Good, challenging me with one eye and ignoring me with the other. 'Full I am now, and full I've been since last Michaelmas, full right up; two permanents I've 'ad three years on end and those my best floors. I've something to be thankful for, all things considered, and now I got 'elp of a sort that won't slide downstairs on a tea tray or lick the ground-floor's sugar lump by lump knowing the lumps was counted and never thinking that wetness tells, the slut! we'll get on swimmingly. The sluts I've 'ad, Martha! These board-schools turn them out a 'orror to God and a danger to men. I can't tell you. It's a comfort to set eyes on any girl as I can see at once 'as been brought up to take a pride in 'erself. 'Ave a little of that watercress with your toast, my dear. It'll do that complexion of yours good.'

"My sister Prue reddened and took some watercress.

"'The drawing-room floor,' said Matilda Good, 'is a lady. It isn't often you keep a lady three years, what with the things they know and the things they fancy they know, but I've kept her. She's a real lady--born. Bumpus 'er name is--Miss Beatrice Bumpus. I don't know whether you'll like her, Martha, when you set eyes on her, but she's got to be studied. She's a particular sort of Warwickshire Bumpus that hunts. She'll ask you if you want the vote, Martha, directly she sees you're a fresh face. It isn't a vote or any old vote she asks you to want, it's _the_ vote.' The whispering voice grew thicker and richer and a persuasive smile spread far and wide over the face. 'If it's all the same to you, Martha, you better say you do.'

"My mother was sipping her fourth cup of tea. 'I don't know,' she said, 'as I altogether 'old with this vote.'

"Matilda Good's great red hands, which had been lying apparently detached in her lap, produced short arms and lace cuffs and waved about in the air, waving my mother's objections away. ''Old with it on the drawing-room floor,' wheezed Matilda. ''Old with it on the drawing-room floor.'

"'But if she arsts questions?'

"'She won't wait to have them answered. It won't be difficult, Martha. I wouldn't put you into a position of difficulty, not if I could 'elp it. You just got to 'old with 'er quietly and she'll do the rest.'

"'Mother,' said Prue, who was still too overawed by Matilda Good to address her directly. 'Mother, what _is_ this here vote?'

"'Vote for Parliament, my dear,' said Matilda Good.

"'When shall we get it?' asked my mother.

"'You won't get it,' said Matilda Good.

"'But if we did, what should we have to do with it, like?'

"'_Nothing_,' said Matilda Good with bottomless contempt. 'All the same it's a great movement, Martha, and don't you forget it. And Miss Bumpus she works night and day, Martha, gets 'it about by policemen, and once she was actually in prison a night, getting you and me the vote.'

"'Well, it shows a kind nature,' said my mother.

"'My ground-floor's a gentleman. The worst of 'im is the books there are to dust, books and books. Not that 'e ever reads 'em much.... Very likely you'll 'ear 'im soon playing his pianola. You can 'ear it down 'ere almost as if you were inside it. Mr. Plaice, 'e's an Oxford gentleman and he works at a firm of publishers, Burrows and Graves, they're called; a very 'igh-class firm I'm told--don't go in for advertisements or anything vulgar. He's got photographs of Greek and Latin statues and ruins round above his bookshelves and shields with College arms. Naked some of the statues are, but for all that none of them are anything but quite nice and genteel, _quite_ genteel. You can see at once he's a University gentleman. And photographs of Switzerland he's got. He goes up mountains in Switzerland and speaks the language. He's a smoker; sets with a pipe writing or reading evening after evening and marking things with his pencil. Manuscripts he reads and proofs. Pipes he has with a pipe for every day in the week, and a smoker's outfit all made with bee-utiful stone, serpentine they call it, sort of bloodshot green it is; tobacco-jar and a pot for feathers to clean his pipes, little places for each day's pipe, everything all of stone; it's a regular monument. And when you're dusting it--remember if you drop this here serpentine it breaks like earthenware. Most of the maids I've 'ad 'ave 'ad a chip at that tobacco graveyard of 'is. And mind you----' Matilda Good leant forward and held out her hand to arrest any wandering of my mother's attention. '_'E don't 'old with Votes for Women_! See?'

"'One's got to be careful,' said my mother.

"'One has. He's got one or two little whims, has Mr. Plaice, but if you mind about them he don't give you much trouble. One of 'is whims is to pretend to 'ave a bath every morning. Every morning he 'as a shallow tin bath put out in his room and a can of cold water and a sponge, and every morning he pretends to splash about in it something fearful and makes a noise like a grampus singing a hymn--calls it 'is Tub, he does; though it's a lot more like a canary's saucer. Says he must have it as cold as possible even if there's ice on it. Well----'

"Matilda Good performed a sort of landslide over the arm of her chair, her head nodded, and the whisper became more confidential. 'He _doesn't_,' wheezed Matilda Good.

"'You mean he doesn't get into the bath?'

"'Not-tit,' said Matilda Good. 'You can see when he's really been in by his wet footmarks on the floor. Not 'arf the time does he have that bath. Per'aps 'e used to have it when he was a young man at College. I wonder. But it's always got to be put out and the can always got to be lugged up and poured out and poured away again, and nobody's ever to ask if he'd like the chill taken off. Not the sort of thing you ask a University gentleman. No. All the same,' said Matilda Good, 'all the same I've caught 'im pouring his hand and shaving water into that water-splash in the winter, after he'd been going dirty for a week. But have a can of warm? Have the chill taken off his water? Not Tim! It's curious, ain't it? But that's one of his whims.

"'I sometimes think,' said Matilda Good still more extravagantly confidential, 'that perhaps he climbs all those mountains in Switzerland same way as he takes his bath....'

"She rolled back large portions of her person into a less symmetrical attitude. 'This Mr. Plaice you must know,' she said, 'has a voice between a clergyman's and a schoolmaster's, sort of hard and superior, and when you say anything to him he's apt to make a noise, "Arrr ... Arrr ... Arrr," a sort of slow neighing it is, as though he doesn't think much of you but doesn't want to blame you for that and anyhow can't attend to you properly. You mustn't let it annoy you. It's the way he's been brought up. And he has a habit of using long condescending sort of words to you. And calling you insulting names. He'll think nothing of calling you "My worthy Abigail," or "Come in, my rosy-fingered Aurora," when you knock in the morning. Just as though a girl could keep 'er 'ands pink and clean with all these fires to light! He'll ask of me 'How's the Good Matilda? How's honest Matilda Good to-day?"--sort of fiddling about with your name. Of course he don't mean to be rude; it's just his idea of being pleasant and humorous, and making you feel you're being made fun of in a gentle sort of way instead of being terrible like he might be, and--seeing he's good pay and very little trouble, Martha--it's no good getting offended with him. All the same I can't help thinking at times of how he'd get on if I answered 'im back, and which of us two would be left alive if we had a fair match of it, making fun of one another. The things--the things I could say! But that,' said Matilda Good, breaking into an ingratiating smile of extraordinary extent and rolling one eye at me--'is just a dream. It isn't the sort of dream to indulge in in this 'ouse. I've rehearsed it a bit, I admit. Says 'e--but never mind what 'e says or what I says back to him.... Ugh! Ugh! ... He's good pay and regular, my dear; he ain't likely to lose his job and he ain't likely ever to get another, and in this Vale anyhow we got to put up with 'is whims. And----'

"Matilda Good spoke as one who confesses to a weakness. 'His pianola cheers me up at times. I will say that for 'im. It's almost the only noise one hears from him. Except when he takes off his boots.

"'Well, up above my drawing-room at present is my second floor front, the Reverend Moggeridge and his good lady. They been here five months now and they seem like taking root.'

"'Not a clergyman?' said my mother respectfully.

"'A very poor clergyman,' said Matilda, 'but a clergyman. So much to our credit, Martha. Oh! but they're poor old things! Poor old things! Been curate or something all his life in some out-of-the-world place. And lost his job. Somebody had the heart to turn 'em out. Or something happened. I wonder. 'E's a funny old man....

"'He dodders off nearly every Saturday on supply, they call it, to take services somewhere over the Sunday, and like as not he comes back with his cold worse than ever, sniffing and sniffing. It's cruel how they treat these poor old parsons on supply, fetch 'em from the station in open traps they do, in the worst of weather, and often the rectory tee-total without a drop of anything for a cold. Christianity! I suppose it's got to be.... The two of them just potter about upstairs and make shift to get their meals, such as they are, over the bedroom fire. She even does a bit of her own washing. Dragging about. Poor old things! Old and forgotten and left about. But they're very little trouble and there it is. And as I say--anyhow--he's a clergyman. And in the other room at the back there's a German lady who teaches--well, anything she can persuade anyone to be taught. She hasn't been here more than a month, and I don't know whether I like her or not, but she seems straight enough and she keeps herself pretty much to herself and when one has a room to let one can't always pick and choose.

"'And that's the lot, my dear. To-morrow we'll have to begin. You'll go up presently and settle into your two rooms at the top. There's a little one for Mortimer and a rather bigger one for you and Prue. There's pegs and curtains for your things. I'm next door to you. I'll give you my little old alarum clock and show you all about it and to-morrow at seven sharp down we come, you and me and Prue. My Lord, I suppose, has the privilege of his sex and doesn't come down until half-past! Oh! I'm a suffragette, Martha,--same as Miss Bumpus. First thing is this fire, and unless we rake the ashes well forward the boiler won't heat. Then there's fires and boots, dust the front rooms and breakfasts: Mr. Plaice at eight sharp and mind it is, and Miss Bumpus at eight-thirty, and get away with Mr. Plaice if you can first because of the shortness of tablespoons. Five I got altogether and before I lost my last third floor back I 'ad seven. 'E was a nice lot; 'e was. The old people get their own breakfast when they want it, and Frau Buchholz has a tray, just bread and butter and tea, whenever we can manage it after the drawing-room's been seen to. That's the programme, Martha.'

"'I'll do my best, 'Tilda,' said my mother. '_As_ you know.'

"'Hullo!' said Matilda indicating the ceiling, 'the concert's going to begin. That bump's him letting down the pianola pedals.'

"And then suddenly through the ceiling into our subterranean tea-party came a rush of Clavier notes--I can't describe it.

"One of the few really good things of that age was the music. Mankind perfected some things very early; I suppose precious-stone work and gold work have never got very much beyond the levels it reached under the Seventeenth Dynasty in Egypt, ages ago, and marble statuary came to a climax at Athens before the conquests of Alexander. I doubt if there has ever come very much sweeter music into the world than the tuneful stuff we had away back there in the Age of Confusion. This music Mr. Plaice was giving us was some bits of Schumann's _Carnaval_ music; we hear it still played on the Clavier; and it was almost the first good music I ever heard. There had been brass bands on Cliffstone promenade, of course, but they simply made a glad row. I don't know if you understand what a pianola was. It was an instrument for playing the Clavier with hammers directed by means of perforated rolls, for the use of those who lacked the intelligence and dexterity to read music and play the Clavier with their hands. Because everyone was frightfully unhandy in those days. It thumped a little and struck undiscriminating chords, but Mr. Plaice managed it fairly well and the result came, filtered through the ceiling---- As we used to say in those days, it might have been worse.

"At the thoughts of that music I recall--and whenever I hear Schumann as long as I live I shall recall--the picture of that underground room, the little fire-place with the kettle on a hob, the kettle-holder and the toasting fork beside the fire-place jamb, the steel fender, the ashes, the small blotched looking-glass over the mantel, the little china figures of dogs in front of the glass, the gaslight in a frosted glass globe hanging from the ceiling and lighting the tea-things on the table. (Yes, the house was lit by coal-gas; electric light was only just coming in.... My dear Firefly! can I possibly stop my story to tell you what coal-gas was? A good girl would have learnt that long ago.)

"There sat Matilda Good reduced to a sort of imbecile ecstasy by these butterflies of melody. She nodded her cap, she rolled her head and smiled; she made appreciative rhythmic gestures with her hands; one eye would meet you in a joyous search for sympathy while the other contemplated the dingy wall-paper beyond. I too was deeply stirred. But my mother and sister Prue sat in their black with an expression of forced devotion, looking very refined and correct, exactly as they had sat and listened to my father's funeral service five days before.

"'Sputiful,' whispered my mother, like making a response in church, when the first piece came to an end....

"I went to sleep that night in my little attic with fragments of Schumann, Bach and Beethoven chasing elusively about my brain. I perceived that a new phase of life had come to me....

"Jewels," said Sarnac. "Some sculpture, music--just a few lovely beginnings there were already of what man could do with life. Such things I see now were the seeds of the new world of promise already there in the dark matrix of the old."

§ 6

"Next morning revealed a new Mathilda Good, active and urgent, in a loose and rather unclean mauve cotton wrapper and her head wrapped up in a sort of turban of figured silk. This costume she wore most of the day except that she did her hair and put on a cotton lace cap in the afternoon. (The black dress and the real lace cap and the brooch, I was to learn, were for Sundays and for week-day evenings of distinction.) My mother and Prue were arrayed in rough aprons which Matilda had very thoughtfully bought for them. There was a great bustle in the basement of the house, and Prue a little before eight went up with Matilda to learn how to set out breakfast for Mr. Plaice. I made his acquaintance later in the day when I took up the late edition of the _Evening Standard_ to him. I found him a stooping, tall gentleman with a cadaverous face that was mostly profile, and he made great play with my Christian name.

"'Mortimer,' he said and neighed his neigh. 'Well--it might have been Norfolk-Howard.'

"There was an obscure allusion in that: for once upon a time, ran the popular legend, a certain Mr. Bugg seeking a less entomological name had changed his to Norfolk-Howard, which was in those days a very aristocratic one.... Whereupon vulgar people had equalised matters by calling the offensive bed-bugs that abounded in London, 'Norfolk-Howards.'

"Before many weeks were past it became evident that Matilda Good had made an excellent bargain in her annexation of our family. She had secured my mother's services for nothing, and it was manifest that my mother was a born lodging-house woman. She behaved like a partner in the concern, and the only money Matilda ever gave her was to pay her expenses upon some specific errand or to buy some specific thing. Prue, however, with unexpected firmness, insisted upon wages, and enforced her claim by going out and nearly getting employment at a dressmaker's. In a little while Matilda became to the lodgers an unseen power for righteousness in the basement and all the staircase work was left to my mother and Prue. Often Matilda did not go up above the ground level once all day until, as she said, she 'toddled up to bed.'

"Matilda made some ingenuous attempts to utilise me also in the service of the household: I was exhorted to carry up scuttles of coal, clean boots and knives and make myself useful generally. She even put it to me one day whether I wouldn't like a nice suit with buttons--in those days they still used to put small serving boys in tight suits of green or brown cloth, with rows of gilt buttons as close together as possible over their little chests and stomachs. But the very thought of it sent my mind to Chessing Hanger, where I had conceived an intense hatred and dread of 'service' and 'livery,' and determined me to find some other employment before Matilda Good's large and insidious will enveloped and overcame me. And, oddly enough, a talk I had with Miss Beatrice Bumpus helped me greatly in my determination.

"Miss Bumpus was a slender young woman of about five and twenty, I suppose. She had short brown hair, brushed back rather prettily from a broad forehead, and she had freckles on her nose and quick red-brown eyes. She generally wore a plaid tweed costume rather short in the skirt and with a coat cut like a man's; she wore green stockings and brown shoes--I had never seen green stockings before--and she would stand on her hearthrug in exactly the attitude Mr. Plaice adopted on his hearthrug downstairs. Or she would be sitting at a writing-desk against the window, smoking cigarettes. She asked me what sort of man I intended to be, and I said with the sort of modesty I had been taught to assume as becoming my station, that I hadn't thought yet.

"To which Miss Bumpus answered, 'Liar.'

"That was the sort of remark that either kills or cures. I said, 'Well, Miss, I want to get educated and I don't know how to do it. And I don't know what I ought to do.'

"Miss Bumpus held me with a gesture while she showed how nicely she could send out smoke through her nose. Then she said, 'Avoid Blind Alley Occupations.'

"'Yes, Miss.'

"'But you don't know what Blind Alley Occupations are?'

"'No, Miss.'

"'Occupations that earn a boy wages and lead nowhere. One of the endless pitfalls of this silly man-made pseudo-civilisation. Never do anything that doesn't lead somewhere. Aim high. I must think your case out, Mr. Harry Mortimer. I might be able to help you....'

"This was the opening of quite a number of conversations between myself and Miss Bumpus. She was a very stimulating influence in my adolescence. She pointed out that although it was now late in the year, there were many evening classes of various sorts that I might attend with profit. She told me of all sorts of prominent and successful people who had begun their careers from beginnings as humble and hopeless as mine. She said I was 'unhampered' by my sex. She asked me if I was interested in the suffrage movement, and gave me tickets for two meetings at which I heard her speak, and she spoke, I thought, very well. She answered some interrupters with extreme effectiveness, and I cheered myself hoarse for her. Something about her light and gallant attitude to life reminded me of Fanny. I said so one day, and found myself, before I knew it, telling her reluctantly and shamefully the story of our family disgrace. Miss Bumpus was much interested.

"'She wasn't like your sister Prue?'

"'No, Miss.'

"'Prettier?'

"'A lot prettier. Of course--you could hardly call Prue _pretty_, Miss.'

"'I hope she's got on all right,' said Miss Bumpus. 'I don't blame her a bit. But I hope she got the best of it.'

"'I'd give anything, Miss, to hear Fanny was all right.... I did care for Fanny, Miss.... I'd give anything almost to see Fanny again.... You won't tell my mother, Miss, I told you anything about Fanny? It kind of slipped out like.'

"'Mortimer,' said Miss Bumpus, 'you're a sticker. I wish I had a little brother like you. There! I won't breathe a word.'

"I felt we had sealed a glorious friendship. I adopted Votes for Women as the first plank of my political platform. (No, Firefly, I won't explain. I won't explain anything. You must guess what a political platform was and what its planks were.) I followed up her indications and found out about classes in the district where I could learn geology and chemistry and how to speak French and German. Very timidly I mooted the subject of my further education in the basement living-room."

§ 7

Sarnac looked round at the fire-lit faces of his listeners.

"I know how topsy-turvy this story must seem to you, but it is a fact that before I was fourteen I had to plead for education against the ideas and wishes of my own family. And the whole household from top to bottom was brought into the discussion by Matilda or my mother. Except for Miss Bumpus and Frau Buchholz, everyone was against the idea.

"'Education,' said Matilda, shaking her head slowly from side to side and smiling deprecatingly. 'Education! That's all very well for those who have nothing better to do, but you want to get on in the world. You've got to be earning, young man.'

"'But if I have education I'll be able to earn more.'

"Matilda screwed up her mouth in a portentous manner and pointed to the ceiling to indicate Mr. Plaice. 'That's what comes of education, young man. A room frowsty with books and just enough salary not to be able to do a blessed thing you want to do. And giving yourself Airs. Business is what you want, young man, not education.'

"'And who's to pay for all these classes?' said my mother. 'That's what _I_ want to know.'

"'That's what we all want to know,' said Matilda Good.

"'If I can't get education----' I said, and left the desperate sentence unfinished. I am afraid I was near weeping. To learn nothing beyond my present ignorance seemed to me then like a sentence of imprisonment for life. It wasn't I who suffered that alone. Thousands of poor youngsters of fourteen or fifteen in those days knew enough to see clearly that the doors of practical illiteracy were closing in upon them, and yet did not know enough to find a way of escape from this mental extinction.

"'Look here!' I said, 'if I can get some sort of job during the day, may I pay for classes in the evening?'

"'If you can earn enough,' said Matilda. 'It's no worse I suppose than going to these new cinema shows or buying sweets for girls.'

"'You've got to pay in for your room here and your keep, Morty, first,' said my mother. 'It isn't fair on Miss Good if you don't.'

"'I know,' I said, with my heart sinking. 'I'll pay in for my board and lodging. Some'ow. I don't want to be dependent.'

"'What good you think it will do you,' said Matilda Good, 'I _don't_ know. You'll pick up a certain amount of learning perhaps, get a certificate or something and ideas above your station. You'll give all the energy you might use in shoving your way up in some useful employment. You'll get round-shouldered and near-sighted. And just to grow up a discontented misfit. Well--have it your own way if you must. If you earn the money yourself it's yours to spend.'

"Mr. Plaice was no more encouraging. 'Well, my noble Mortimer,' he said, 'they tell me _Arr_ that you aspire to university honours.'

"'I want to learn a little more than I know, Sir.'

"'And join the ranks of the half-educated proletariat?'

"It sounded bad. 'I hope not, Sir,' I said.

"'And what classes do you propose to attend, Mortimer?'

"'Whatever there are.'

"'No plan? No aim?'

"'I thought they'd know.'

"'Whatever they give you--eh? A promiscuous appetite. And while you--while you _Arr_ indulge in this mixed feast of learning, this futile rivalry with the children of the leisured classes, somebody I suppose will have to keep _you_. Don't you think it's a bit hard on that kind mother of yours who toils day and night for you, that you shouldn't work and do your bit, eh? One of the things, Mortimer, we used to learn in our much-maligned public schools, was something we called _playing cricket_. Well, I ask you, is this--this disinclination to do a bit of the earning, _Arr_, is it playing cricket? I could expect such behaviour from an 'Arry, you know, but not from a Mortimer. _Noblesse oblige_. You think it over, my boy. There's such a thing as learning, but there's such a thing as Duty. Many of us have to be content with lives of unassuming labour. Many of us. Men who under happier circumstances might have done great things....'

"The Moggeridges were gently persuasive in the same strain. My mother had put her case to them also. Usually I was indisposed to linger in the Moggeridge atmosphere; they had old-fashioned ideas about draughts, and there was a peculiar aged flavour about them; they were, to be plain, a very dirty old couple indeed. With declining strength they had relaxed by imperceptible degrees from the not very exacting standards of their youth. I used to cut into their room and out of it again as quickly as I could.

"But half a century of the clerical life among yielding country folk had given these bent, decaying, pitiful creatures a wonderful way with their social inferiors. 'Morning, Sir and Mam,' I said, and put down the coals I had brought and took up the empty scuttle-lining I had replaced.

"Mrs. Moggeridge advanced shakily so as to intercept my retreat. She had silvery hair, a wrinkled face and screwed-up red-rimmed eyes; she was short-sighted and came peering up very close to me whenever she spoke to me, breathing in my face. She held out a quivering hand to arrest me; she spoke with a quavering voice. 'And how's Master Morty this morning?' she said, with kindly condescending intonations.

"'Very well thank you, Mam,' I said.

"'I've been hearing rather a sad account of you, Morty, rather a sad account.'

"'Sorry, Mum,' I said, and wished I had the courage to tell her that my life was no business of hers.

"They say you're discontented, Morty. They say you complain of God's Mercies.'

"Mr. Moggeridge had been sitting in the armchair by the fire-place. He was in his slippers and shirt-sleeves and he had been reading a newspaper. Now he looked at me over his silver-rimmed spectacles and spoke in a rich succulent voice.

"'I'm sorry you should be giving trouble to that dear mother of yours,' he said. 'Very sorry. She's a devoted saintly woman.'

"'Yessir,' I said.

"'Very few boys nowadays have the privilege of such an upbringing as yours. Some day you may understand what you owe her.'

("'I begin to,'" interjected Sarnac.)

"'It seems you want to launch out upon some extravagant plan of classes instead of settling down quietly in your proper sphere. Is that so?'

"'I don't feel I know enough yet, Sir,' I said. 'I feel I'd like to learn more.'

"'Knowledge isn't always happiness, Morty,' said Mrs. Moggeridge close to me--much too close to me.

"'And what may these classes be that are tempting you to forget the honour you owe your dear good mother?' said Mr. Moggeridge.

"'I don't know yet, Sir. They say there's classes in geology and French and things like that.'

"Old Mr. Moggeridge waved his hand in front of himself with an expression of face as though it was I who emitted an evil odour. 'Geology!' he said. 'French--the language of Voltaire. Let me tell you one thing plainly, my boy, your mother is quite right in objecting to these classes. Geology--geology is--All Wrong. It has done more harm in the last fifty years than any other single influence whatever. It undermines faith. It sows doubt. I do not speak ignorantly, Mortimer. I have seen lives wrecked and destroyed and souls lost by this same geology. I am an old learned man, and I have examined the work of many of these so-called geologists--Huxley, Darwin and the like; I have examined it very, very carefully and very, very tolerantly, and I tell you they are all, all of them, _hopelessly mistaken men_.... And what good will such knowledge do you? Will it make you happier? Will it make you better? No, my lad. But I know of something that will. Something older than geology. Older and better. Sarah dear, give me that book there, please. Yes'--reverentially--'_the_ Book.'

"His wife handed him a black-bound Bible, with its cover protected against rough usage by a metal edge. 'Now, my boy,' he said, 'let me give you this--this old familiar book, with an old man's blessing. In that is all the knowledge worth having, all the knowledge you will ever need. You will always find something fresh in it and always something beautiful.' He held it out to me.

"Accepting it seemed the shortest way out of the room, so I took it. 'Thank you, Sir,' I said.

"'Promise me you will read it.'

"'Oh yes, Sir.'

"I turned to go. But giving was in the air.

"'Now, Mortimer,' said Mrs. Moggeridge, 'do please promise me to seek strength where strength is to be found and try to be a better son to that dear struggling woman.' And as she spoke she proffered for my acceptance an extremely hard, small, yellow orange.

"'Thank you, Mam,' I said, made shift to stow her gift in my pocket, and with the Bible in one hand and the empty coal-scuttle-lining in the other, escaped.

"I returned wrathfully to the basement and deposited my presents on the window-sill. Some impulse made me open the Bible, and inside the cover I found, imperfectly erased, the shadowy outlines of these words, printed in violet ink: 'Not to be Removed from the Waiting-Room.' I puzzled over the significance of this for some time."

"And what did it signify?' asked Firefly.

"I do not know to this day," said Sarnac. "But apparently the reverend gentleman had acquired that Book at a railway-station during one of his journeys as a Sunday supply."

"You mean----?" said Firefly.

"No more than I say. He was in many ways a peculiar old gentleman, and his piety was, I fancy, an essentially superficial exudation. He was--I will not say 'dishonest,' but 'spasmodically acquisitive.' And like many old people in those days he preferred his refreshment to be stimulating rather than nutritious, and so he may have blurred his ethical perceptions. An odd thing about him--Matilda Good was the first to point it out--was that he rarely took an umbrella away with him when he went on supply and almost always he came back with one--and once he came back with two. But he never kept his umbrellas; he would take them off for long walks and return without them, looking all the brighter for it. I remember one day I was in the room when he returned from such an expedition, there had been a shower and his coat was wet. Mrs. Moggeridge made him change it and lamented that he had lost his umbrella _again_.

"'Not lost,' I heard the old man say in a voice of infinite gentleness. 'Not lost, dear. Not lost; but gone before.... Gone before the rain came.... The Lord gave.... Lord hath taken 'way.'

"For a time he was silent, coat in hand. He stood with his shirt-sleeve resting on the mantel-shelf, his foot upon the fender, and his venerable hairy face gazing down into the fire. He seemed to be thinking deep, sad things. Then he remarked in a thoughtful, less obituary tone: 'Ten'n-sixpence. A jolly goo' 'mbrella."

§ 8

"Frau Buchholz was a poor, lean, distressful woman of five and forty or more, with a table littered with the documents of some obscure litigation. She did not altogether discourage my ambitions, but she laid great stress on the hopelessness of attempting Kultur without a knowledge of German, and I am inclined to think that her attitude was determined mainly by a vague and desperate hope that I might be induced to take lessons in German from her.

"Brother Ernest was entirely against my ambition. He was shy and vocally inexpressive, and he took me to the Victoria Music Hall and spent a long evening avoiding the subject. It was only as we drew within five minutes of home that he spoke of it.

"'What's all this about your not being satisfied with your education, 'Arry?' he asked. 'I thought you'd had a pretty decent bit of schooling.'

"'I don't feel I know anything,' I said. 'I don't know history or geography or anything. I don't even know my own grammar.'

"'You know enough,' said Ernest. 'You know enough to get a job. Knowing more would only make you stuck-up. We don't want any more stuck-ups in the family, God knows.'

"I knew he referred to Fanny, but of course neither of us mentioned her shameful name.

"'Anyhow, I suppose I'll have to chuck it,' I said bitterly.

"'That's about it, 'Arry. I know you're a sensible chap--at bottom. You got to be what you got to be.'

"The only encouragement I got to resist mental extinction was from Miss Beatrice Bumpus, and after a time I found even that source of consolation was being cut off from me. For my mother began to develop the most gross and improbable suspicions about Miss Bumpus. You see I stayed sometimes as long as ten or even twelve minutes in the drawing-room, and it was difficult for so good a woman as my mother, trained in the most elaborate precautions of separation between male and female, to understand that two young people of opposite sex could have any liking for each other's company unless some sort of gross familiarity was involved. The good of those days, living as they did in a state of inflamed restraint, had very exaggerated ideas of the appetites, capacities and uncontrollable duplicity of normal human beings. And so my mother began to manoeuvre in the most elaborate way to replace me by Prue as a messenger to Miss Bumpus. And when I was actually being talked to--and even talking--in the drawing-room I had an increasing sense of that poor misguided woman hovering upon the landing outside, listening in a mood of anxious curiosity and ripening for a sudden inrush, a disgraceful exposure, wild denunciation of Miss Bumpus, and the rescue of the vestiges of my damaged moral nature. I might never have realised what was going on if it had not been for my mother's direct questionings and warnings. Her conception of a proper upbringing for the young on these matters was a carefully preserved ignorance hedged about by shames and foul terrors. So she was at once extremely urgent and extraordinarily vague with me. What was I up to--staying so long with that woman? I wasn't to listen to anything she told me. I was to be precious careful what I got up to up there. I might find myself in more trouble than I thought. There were women in this world of a shamelessness it made one blush to think of. She'd always done her best to keep me from wickedness and nastiness."

"But she was mad!" said Willow.

"All the countless lunatic asylums of those days wouldn't have held a tithe of the English people who were as mad in that way as she was."

"But the whole world was mad?" said Sunray. "_All_ those people, except perhaps Miss Bumpus, talked about your education like insane people! Did none of them understand the supreme wickedness of hindering the growth of a human mind?"

"It was a world of suppression and evasion. You cannot understand anything about it unless you understand that."

"But the whole world!" said Radiant.

"Most of it. It was still a fear-haunted world. 'Submit,' said the ancient dread, 'do nothing--lest you offend. And from your children--_hide_.' What I am telling you about the upbringing of Harry Mortimer Smith was generally true of the upbringing of the enormous majority of the inhabitants of the earth. It was not merely that their minds were starved and poisoned. Their minds were stamped upon and mutilated. That world was so pitiless and confused, so dirty and diseased, because it was cowed and dared not learn of remedies. In Europe in those days we used to be told the most extraordinary stories of the wickedness and cruelty of the Chinese, and one favourite tale was that little children were made to grow up inside great porcelain jars in order to distort their bodies to grotesque shapes so that they could be shown at fairs or sold to rich men. The Chinese certainly distorted the feet of young women for some obscure purpose, and this may have been the origin of this horrible legend. But our children in England were mentally distorted in exactly the same fashion except that for porcelain jars we used mental tin-cans and dustbins.... My dears! when I talk of this I cease to be Sarnac! All the rage and misery of crippled and thwarted Harry Mortimer Smith comes back to me."

"Did you get to those classes of yours?" asked Sunray. "I hope you did."

"Not for a year or two--though Miss Bumpus did what she could for me. She lent me a lot of books--in spite of much ignorant censorship on the part of my mother--and I read voraciously. But, I don't know if you will understand it, my relations with Miss Bumpus were slowly poisoned by the interpretations my mother was putting upon them. I think you will see how easy it was for a boy in my position to fall in love, fall into a deep emotional worship of so bright and friendly a young woman. Most of us young men nowadays begin by adoring a woman older than ourselves. Adoring is the word rather than loving. It's not a mate we need at first but the helpful, kindly goddess who stoops to us. And of course I loved her. But I thought much more of serving her or dying for her than of embracing her. When I was away from her my imagination might go so far as to dream of kissing her hands.

"And then came my mother with this hideous obsession of hers, jealous for something she called my purity, treating this white passion of gratitude and humility as though it was the power that drags a blow-fly to some heap of offal. A deepening shame and ungraciousness came into my relations with Miss Bumpus. I became red-eared and tongue-tied in her presence. Possibilities I might never have thought of but for my mother's suggestions grew disgustingly vivid in my mind. I dreamt about her grotesquely. When presently I found employment for my days my chances of seeing her became infrequent. She receded as a personality and friend, and quite against my will became a symbol of femininity.

"Among the people who called to see her a man of three or four and thirty became frequent. My spirit flamed into an intense and impotent jealousy on account of this man. He would take tea with her and stay for two hours or more. My mother took care to mention his visits in my hearing at every opportunity. She called him Miss Bumpus' 'fancy man,' or alluded to him archly: 'A certain person called again to-day, Prue. When good-lookin' young men are shown in at the door, votes flies out of the winder.' I tried to seem indifferent but my ears and cheeks got red and hot. My jealousy was edged with hate. I avoided seeing Miss Bumpus for weeks together. I sought furiously for some girl, any girl, who would serve to oust her image from my imagination."

Sarnac stopped abruptly and remained for a time staring intently into the fire. His expression was one of amused regret. "How little and childish it seems now!" he said; "and how bitter--oh! how bitter it was at the time!"

"Poor little errand-boy!" said Sunray, stroking his hair. "Poor little errand-boy in love."

"What an uncomfortable distressful world it must have been for all young things!" said Willow.

"Uncomfortable and pitiless," said Sarnac.

§ 9

"My first employment in London was as an errand-boy--'junior porter' was the exact phrase--to a draper's shop near Victoria Station: I packed parcels and carried them to their destinations; my next job was to be boy in general to a chemist named Humberg in a shop beyond Lupus Street. A chemist then was a very different creature from the kind of man or woman we call a chemist to-day; he was much more like the Apothecary we find in Shakespeare's plays and such-like old literature; he was a dealer in drugs, poisons, medicines, a few spices, colouring matters and such-like odd commodities. I washed endless bottles, delivered drugs and medicines, cleared up a sort of backyard, and did anything else that there was to be done within the measure of my capacity.

"Of all the queer shops one found in that old-world London, the chemists' shops were, I think, the queerest. They had come almost unchanged out of the Middle Ages, as we used to call them, when Western Europe, superstitious, dirty, diseased and degenerate, thrashed by the Arabs and Mongols and Turks, afraid to sail the ocean or fight out of armour, cowered behind the walls of its towns and castles, stole, poisoned, assassinated and tortured, and pretended to be the Roman Empire still in being. Western Europe in those days was ashamed of its natural varieties of speech and talked bad Latin; it dared not look a fact in the face but nosed for knowledge among riddles and unreadable parchments; it burnt men and women alive for laughing at the absurdities of its Faith, and it thought the stars of Heaven were no better than a greasy pack of cards by which fortunes were to be told. In those days it was that the tradition of the 'Pothecary was made; you know him as he figures in _Romeo and Juliet_; the time in which I lived this life was barely four centuries and a half from old Shakespeare. The 'Pothecary was in a conspiracy of pretentiousness with the almost equally ignorant doctors of his age, and the latter wrote and he 'made up' prescriptions in occult phrases and symbols. In our window there were great glass bottles of red- and yellow- and blue-tinted water, through which our gas-lamps within threw a mystical light on the street pavement."

"Was there a stuffed alligator?" asked Firefly.

"No. We were just out of the age of stuffed alligators, but below these coloured bottles in the window we had stupendous china jars with gilt caps mystically inscribed--let me see! Let me think! One was _Sem. Coriand_. Another was _Rad. Sarsap_. Then--what was the fellow in the corner? _Marant. Ar_. And opposite him--_C. Cincordif_. And behind the counter to look the customer in the face were neat little drawers with golden and precious letters thereon; _Pil. Rhubarb_, and _Pil. Antibil._ and many more bottles, _Ol. Amyg._ and _Tinct. Iod._, rows and rows of bottles, mystic, wonderful. I do not remember ever seeing Mr. Humberg take anything, much less sell anything, from all this array of erudite bottles and drawers; his normal trade was done in the bright little packets of an altogether different character that were piled all over the counter, bright unblushing little packets that declared themselves to be Gummidge's Fragrant and Digestive Tooth Paste, Hooper's Corn Cure, Luxtone's Lady's Remedy, Tinker's Pills for All Occasions, and the like. Such things were asked for openly and loudly by customers; they were our staple trade. But also there were many transactions conducted in undertones which I never fully understood. I would be sent off to the yard on some specious pretext whenever a customer was discovered to be of the _sotto voce_ variety, and I can only suppose that Mr. Humberg was accustomed at times to go beyond the limits of his professional qualification and to deal out advice and instruction that were legally the privileges of the qualified medical man. You must remember that in those days many things that we teach plainly and simply to every one were tabooed and made to seem occult and mysterious and very, very shameful and dirty.

"My first reaction to this chemist's shop was a violent appetite for Latin. I succumbed to its suggestion that Latin was the key to all knowledge, and that indeed statements did not become knowledge until they had passed into the Latin tongue. For a few coppers I bought in a second-hand bookshop an old and worn Latin _Principia_ written by a namesake Smith; I attacked it with great determination and found this redoubtable language far more understandable, reasonable and straight-forward than the elusive irritable French and the trampling coughing German I had hitherto attempted. This Latin was a dead language, a skeleton language plainly articulated; it never moved about and got away from one as a living language did. In a little while I was able to recognize words I knew upon our bottles and drawers and in the epitaphs upon the monuments in Westminster Abbey, and soon I could even construe whole phrases. I dug out Latin books from the second-hand booksellers' boxes, and some I could read and some I could not. There was a war history of that first Cæsar, Julius Cæsar, the adventurer who extinguished the last reek of the decaying Roman republic, and there was a Latin New Testament; I got along fairly well with both. But there was a Latin poet, Lucretius, I could not construe; even with an English verse translation on the opposite page I could not construe him. But I read that English version with intense curiosity. It is an extraordinary thing to note, but that same Lucretius, an old Roman poet who lived and died two thousand years before my time, four thousand years from now, gave an account of the universe and of man's beginnings far truer and more intelligible than the old Semitic legends I had been taught in my Sunday school.

"One of the queerest aspects of those days was the mingling of ideas belonging to different ages and phases of human development due to the irregularity and casualness of such educational organisation as we had. In school and church alike, obstinate pedantry darkened the minds of men. Europeans in the twentieth Christian century mixed up the theology of the Pharaohs, the cosmogony of the priest-kings of Sumeria, with the politics of the seventeenth century and the ethics of the cricket-field and prize-ring, and that in a world which had got to aeroplanes and telephones.

"My own case was typical of the limitations of the time. In that age of ceaseless novelty there was I, trying to get back by way of Latin to the half knowledge of the Ancients. Presently I began to struggle with Greek also, but I never got very far with that. I found a chance of going once a week on what was called early-closing night, after my day's work was done, to some evening classes in chemistry. And this chemistry I discovered had hardly anything in common with the chemistry of a chemist's shop. The story of matter and force that it told belonged to another and a newer age. I was fascinated by these wider revelations of the universe I lived in, I ceased to struggle with Greek and I no longer hunted the dingy book-boxes for Latin classics but for modern scientific works. Lucretius I found was hardly less out of date than Genesis. Among the books that taught me much were one called _Physiography_ by a writer named Gregory, Clodd's _Story of Creation_ and Lankester's _Science from an Easy Chair_. I do not know if they were exceptionally good books; they were the ones that happened to come to my hand and awaken my mind. But do you realise the amazing conditions under which men were living at that time, when a youngster had to go about as eager and furtive as a mouse seeking food, to get even such knowledge of the universe and himself as then existed? I still remember how I read first of the differences and resemblances between apes and men and speculations arising thencefrom about the nature of the sub-men who came before man. It was in the shed in the yard that I sat and read. Mr. Humberg was on the sofa in the parlour behind the shop sleeping off his midday meal with one ear a-cock for the shop-bell, and I, with one ear a-cock for the shop-bell and the other for any sounds of movement in the parlour, read for the first time of the forces that had made me what I was--when I ought to have been washing out bottles.

"At one point in the centre of the display behind the counter in the shop was a row of particularly brave and important-looking glass jars wearing about their bellies the gold promises of _Aqua Fortis_, _Amm. Hyd._ and such-like names, and one day as I was sweeping the floor I observed Mr. Humberg scrutinising these. He held one up to the light and shook his head at its flocculent contents. 'Harry,' he said, 'see this row of bottles?'

"'Yessir.'

"'Pour 'em all out and put in fresh water.'

"I stared, broom in hand, aghast at the waste. 'They won't blow up if I mix 'em?' I said.

"'Blow up!' said Mr. Humberg. 'It's only stale water. There's been nothing else in these bottles for a score of years. Stuff I want is behind the dispensary partition--and it's different stuff nowadays. Wash 'em out--and then we'll put in some water from the pump. We just have 'em for the look of 'em. The old women wouldn't be happy if we hadn't got 'em there."

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