The Passionate Friends
forget it; and this incident it was that gathered up the fruits of those
moments beside my father's body and set me to write this book. It had
the effect of a little bright light held up against the vague dark
immensities of thought and feeling that filled my mind because of my
father's death.
Now that I come to set it down I see that it is altogether trivial, and
I cannot explain how it is that it is to me so piercingly significant. I
had to whip you. Your respect for the admirable and patient
Mademoiselle Potin, the protectress and companion of your public
expeditions, did in some slight crisis suddenly fail you. In the extreme
publicity of Kensington Gardens, in the presence of your two little
sisters, before a startled world, you expressed an opinion of her, in
two languages and a loud voice, that was not only very unjust, but
extremely offensive and improper. It reflected upon her intelligence and
goodness; it impeached her personal appearance; it was the kind of
outcry no little gentleman should ever permit himself, however deeply he
may be aggrieved. You then, so far as I was able to disentangle the
evidence, assaulted her violently, hurled a stone at her, and fled her
company. You came home alone by a route chosen by yourself, flushed and
wrathful, braving the dangers of Kensington High Street. This, after my
stern and deliberate edict that, upon pain of corporal punishment,
respect and obedience must be paid to Mademoiselle Potin. The logic of
the position was relentless.
But where your behavior was remarkable, where the affair begins to touch
my imagination, was that you yourself presently put the whole business
before me. Alone in the schoolroom, you seem to have come to some
realization of the extraordinary dreadfulness of your behavior. Such
moments happen in the lives of all small boys; they happened to me times
enough, to my dead father, to that grandfather of the portrait which is
now in my study, to his father and his, and so on through long series of
Strattons, back to inarticulate, shock-haired little sinners slinking
fearfully away from the awful wrath, the bellowings and limitless
violence of the hairy Old Man of the herd. The bottom goes out of your
heart then, you are full of a conviction of sin. So far you did but
carry on the experience of the race. But to ask audience of me, to come
and look me in the eye, to say you wanted my advice on a pressing
matter, that I think marks almost a new phase in the long developing
history of father and son. And your account of the fracas struck me as
quite reasonably frank and honest. "I didn't seem able," you observed,
"not to go on being badder and badder."
We discussed the difficulties of our situation, and you passed sentence
upon yourself. I saw to it that the outraged dignity of Mademoiselle
Potin was mocked by no mere formality of infliction. You did your best
to be stoical, I remember, but at last you yelped and wept. Then,
justice being done, you rearranged your costume. The situation was a
little difficult until you, still sobbing and buttoning--you are really
a shocking bad hand at buttons--and looking a very small, tender,
ruffled, rueful thing indeed, strolled towards my study window. "The
pear tree is out next door," you remarked, without a trace of animosity,
and sobbing as one might hiccough.
I suppose there are moments in the lives of all grown men when they come
near to weeping aloud. In some secret place within myself I must have
been a wild river of tears. I answered, however, with the same admirable
detachment from the smarting past that you had achieved, that my study
window was particularly adapted to the appreciation of our neighbor's
pear tree, because of its height from the ground. We fell into a
conversation about blossom and the setting of fruit, kneeling together
upon my window-seat and looking up into the pear tree against the sky,
and then down through its black branches into the gardens all
quickening with spring. We were on so friendly a footing when presently
Mademoiselle Potin returned and placed her dignity or her resignation in
my hands, that I doubt if she believed a word of all my assurances until
the unmistakable confirmation of your evening bath. Then, as I
understood it, she was extremely remorseful to you and indignant against
my violence....
But when I knelt with you, little urchin, upon my window-seat, it came
to me as a thing almost intolerably desirable that some day you should
become my real and understanding friend. I loved you profoundly. I
wanted to stretch forward into time and speak to you, man myself to the
man you are yet to be. It seemed to me that between us there must needs
be peculiar subtleties of sympathy. And I remembered that by the time
you were a man fully grown and emerging from the passionately tumultuous
openings of manhood, capable of forgiving me all my blundering
parentage, capable of perceiving all the justifying fine intention of my
ill-conceived disciplines and misdirections, I might be either an old
man, shriveling again to an inexplicable egotism, or dead. I saw myself
as I had seen my father--first enfeebled and then inaccessibly tranquil.
When presently you had gone from my study, I went to my writing-desk and
drew a paper pad towards me, and sat thinking and making idle marks upon
it with my pen. I wanted to exceed the limits of those frozen silences
that must come at last between us, write a book that should lie in your
world like a seed, and at last, as your own being ripened, flower into
living understanding by your side.
This book, which before had been only an idea for a book, competing
against many other ideas and the demands of that toilsome work for
peace and understanding to which I have devoted the daily energies of my
life, had become, I felt, an imperative necessity between us.
§ 3
And then there happened one of those crises of dread and apprehension
and pain that are like a ploughing of the heart. It was brought home to
me that you might die even before the first pages of this book of yours
were written. You became feverish, complained of that queer pain you had
felt twice before, and for the third time you were ill with
appendicitis. Your mother and I came and regarded your touzled head and
flushed little face on the pillow as you slept uneasily, and decided
that we must take no more risks with you. So soon as your temperature
had fallen again we set about the business of an operation.
We told each other that nowadays these operations were as safe as going
to sleep in your bed, but we knew better. Our own doctor had lost his
son. "That," we said, "was different." But we knew well enough in our
hearts that you were going very near to the edge of death, nearer than
you had ever been since first you came clucking into the world.
The operation was done at home. A capable, fair-complexioned nurse took
possession of us; and my study, because it has the best light, was
transfigured into an admirable operating-room. All its furnishings were
sent away, every cloth and curtain, and the walls and floor were covered
with white sterilized sheets. The high little mechanical table they
erected before the window seemed to me like an altar on which I had to
offer up my son. There were basins of disinfectants and towels
conveniently about, the operator came, took out his array of scalpels
and forceps and little sponges from the black bag he carried, put them
ready for his hand, and then covered them from your sight with a white
cloth, and I brought you down in my arms, wrapped in a blanket, from
your bedroom to the anæsthetist. You were beautifully trustful and
submissive and unafraid. I stood by you until the chloroform had done
its work, and then left you there, lest my presence should in the
slightest degree embarrass the surgeon. The anæsthetic had taken all the
color out of your face, and you looked pinched and shrunken and greenish
and very small and pitiful. I went into the drawing-room and stood there
with your mother and made conversation. I cannot recall what we said, I
think it was about the moorland to which we were going for your
convalescence. Indeed, we were but the ghosts of ourselves; all our
substance seemed listening, listening to the little sounds that came to
us from the study.
Then after long ages there was a going to and fro of feet, a bump, the
opening of a door, and our own doctor came into the room rubbing his
hands together and doing nothing to conceal his profound relief.
"Admirable," he said, "altogether successful." I went up to you and saw
a tumbled little person in the bed, still heavily insensible and moaning
slightly. By the table were bloody towels, and in a shallow glass tray
was a small object like a damaged piece of earthworm. "Not a bit too
soon," said the surgeon, holding this up in his forceps for my
inspection. "It's on the very verge of perforation." I affected a
detached and scientific interest, but the prevailing impression in my
mind was that this was a fragment from very nearly the centre of your
being.
He took it away with him, I know not whither. Perhaps it is now in
spirits in a specimen jar, an example to all medical students of what to
avoid in an appendix; perhaps it was stained and frozen, and
microtomized into transparent sections as they do such things, and
mounted on glass slips and distributed about the world for curious
histologists to wreak their eyes upon. For a time you lay uneasily still
and then woke up to pain. Even then you got a fresh purchase on my
heart. It has always been our custom to discourage weeping and outcries,
and you did not forget your training. "I shan't mind so much, dadda,"
you remarked to me, "if I may yelp." So for a day, by special
concession, you yelped, and then the sting of those fresh wounds
departed.
Within a fortnight, so quickly does an aseptic wound heal up again, you
were running about in the sun, and I had come back, as one comes back to
a thing forgotten, to the first beginnings of this chapter on my desk.
But for a time I could not go on working at it because of the fear I had
felt, and it is only now in June, in this house in France to which we
have come for the summer, with you more flagrantly healthy than I have
ever known you before, that my heart creeps out of its hole again, and I
can go on with my story.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
BOYHOOD
§ 1
I was a Harbury boy as my father and grandfather were before me and as
you are presently to be. I went to Harbury at the age of fourteen. Until
then I was educated at home, first by a governess and then by my
father's curate, Mr. Siddons, who went from us to St. Philip's in
Hampstead, and, succeeding marvellously there, is now Bishop of
Exminster. My father became rector of Burnmore when I was nine; my
mother had been dead four years, and my second cousin, Jane Stratton,
was already his housekeeper. My father held the living until his
resignation when I was nearly thirty. So that all the most
impressionable years of my life centre upon the Burnmore rectory and the
easy spaciousness of Burnmore Park. My boyhood and adolescence
alternated between the ivied red-brick and ancient traditions of Harbury
(and afterwards Christ-church) and that still untroubled countryside.
I was never a town dweller until I married and we took our present house
in Holland Park. I went into London at last as one goes into an arena.
It cramps me and wearies me and at times nearly overwhelms me, but
there it is that the life of men centres and my work lies. But every
summer we do as we have done this year and go to some house in the
country, near to forests or moorland or suchlike open and uncultivated
country, where one may have the refreshment of freedom among natural and