The Passionate Friends
hunting, a clutch, and then, detestable process, the blowing of the egg.
Of course we were very humane; we never took the nest, but just
frightened off the sitting bird and grabbed a warm egg or so. And the
poor perforated, rather damaged little egg-shells accumulated in the
drawers, against the wished-for but never actually realized day of glory
when we should meet another collector who wouldn't have--something that
we had. So far as it was for anything and not mere imbecile
imitativeness, it was for that.
And writing thus of eggs reminds me that I got into a row with Mr.
Siddons for cruelty.
I discovered there was the nest of a little tit in a hole between two
stones in the rock bank that bordered the lawn. I found it out when I
was sitting on the garden seat near by, learning Latin irregular verbs.
I saw the minute preposterous round birds going and coming, and I found
something so absurdly amiable and confiding about them--they sat
balancing and oscillating on a standard rose and cheeped at me to go and
then dived nestward and gave away their secret out of sheer
impatience--that I could not bring myself to explore further, and kept
the matter altogether secret from the enthusiasm of Mr. Siddons. And in
a few days there were no more eggs and I could hear the hungry little
nestlings making the minutest of fairy hullabaloos, the very finest spun
silk of sound; a tremendous traffic in victual began and I was the
trusted friend of the family.
Then one morning I was filled with amazement and anguish. There was a
rock torn down and lying in the path; a paw had gone up to that little
warm place. Across the gravel, shreds of the nest and a wisp or so of
down were scattered. I could imagine the brief horrors of that night
attack. I started off, picking up stones as I went, to murder that sandy
devil, the stable cat. I got her once--alas! that I am still glad to
think of it--and just missed her as she flashed, a ginger streak,
through the gate into the paddock.
"_Now_ Steve! Now!" came Mr. Siddons' voice behind me....
How can one explain things of that sort to a man like Siddons? I took my
lecture on the Utter Caddishness of Wanton Cruelty in a black rebellious
silence. The affair and my own emotions were not only far beyond my
powers of explanation, but far beyond my power of understanding. Just
then my soul was in shapeless and aimless revolt against something
greater and higher and deeper and darker than Siddons, and his
reproaches were no more than the chattering of a squirrel while a storm
uproots great trees. I wanted to kill the cat. I wanted to kill whatever
had made that cat.
§ 5
Mr. Siddons it was who first planted the conception of Life as a Career
in my mind.
In those talks that did so much towards shaping me into the likeness of
a modest, reserved, sporting, seemly, clean and brave, patriotic and
decently slangy young Englishman, he was constantly reverting to that
view of existence. He spoke of failures and successes, talked of
statesmen and administrators, peerages and Westminster Abbey. "Nelson,"
he said, "was once a clergyman's son like you."
"England has been made by the sons of the clergy."
He talked of the things that led to failure and the things that had made
men prominent and famous.
"Discursiveness ruins a man," I remember him saying. "Choose your goal
and press to it."
"Never do anything needlessly odd. It's a sort of impertinence to all
the endless leaders of the past who created our traditions. Do not
commit yourself hastily to opinions, but once you have done so, stick to
them. The world would far rather have a firm man wrong, than a weak man
hesitatingly right. Stick to them."
"One has to remember," I recall him meditating, far over my head with
his face upturned, "that Institutions are more important than Views.
Very often one adopts a View only to express one's belief in an
Institution.... Men can do with almost all sorts of Views, but only with
certain Institutions. All this Doubt doesn't touch a truth like that.
One does not refuse to live in a house because of the old symbols one
finds upon the door.... If they _are_ old symbols...."
Out of such private contemplations he would descend suddenly upon me.
"What are _you_ going to do with your life, Steve?" he would ask.
"There is no happiness in life without some form of service. Where do
you mean to serve? With your bent for science and natural history, it
wouldn't be difficult for you to get into the I.C.S. I doubt if you'd do
anything at the law; it's a rough game, Steve, though the prizes are
big. Big prizes the lawyers get. I've known a man in the Privy Council
under forty--and that without anything much in the way of a family....
But always one must concentrate. The one thing England will not stand is
a loafer, a wool-gatherer, a man who goes about musing and half-awake.
It's our energy. We're western. It's that has made us all we are."
I knew whither that pointed. Never so far as I can remember did Mr.
Siddons criticize either myself or my father directly, but I understood
with the utmost clearness that he found my father indolent and
hesitating, and myself more than a little bit of a mollycoddle, and in
urgent need of pulling together.
§ 6
Harbury went on with that process of suppressing, encrusting, hardening,
and bracing-up which Mr. Siddons had begun. For a time I pulled myself
together very thoroughly. I am not ungrateful nor unfaithful to Harbury;
in your turn you will go there, you will have to live your life in this
British world of ours and you must learn its language and manners,
acquire its reserves and develop the approved toughness and patterning
of cuticle. Afterwards if you please you may quarrel with it. But don't
when the time comes quarrel with the present conditions of human
association and think it is only with Harbury you quarrel. What man has
become and may become beneath the masks and impositions of civilization,
in his intimate texture and in the depths of his being, I begin now in
my middle age to appreciate. No longer is he an instinctive savage but a
creature of almost incredible variability and wonderful new
possibilities. Marvels undreamt of, power still inconceivable, an empire
beyond the uttermost stars; such is man's inheritance. But for the
present, until we get a mastery of those vague and mighty intimations at
once so perplexing and so reassuring, if we are to live at all in the
multitudinousness of human society we must submit to some scheme of
clumsy compromises and conventions or other,--and for us Strattons the
Harbury system is the most convenient. You will have to go to the old
school.
I went to Rendle's. I just missed getting into college; I was two places
below the lowest successful boy. I was Maxton's fag to begin with, and
my chief chum was Raymond, who is your friend also, and who comes so
often to this house. I preferred water to land, boats to cricket,
because of that difficulty about pitch I have already mentioned. But I
was no great sportsman. Raymond and I shared a boat, and spent most of
the time we gave to it under the big trees near Dartpool Lock, reading
or talking. We would pull up to Sandy Hall perhaps once a week. I never
rowed in any of the eights, though I was urged to do so. I swam fairly
well, and got my colors on the strength of my diving.
On the whole I found Harbury a satisfactory and amusing place, I was
neither bullied nor do I think I greatly bullied, and of all that
furtive and puerile lasciviousness of which one hears so many hints
nowadays--excitable people talk of it as though it was the most
monstrous and singular of vices instead of a slightly debasing but
almost unavoidable and very obvious result of heaping boys together
under the inefficient control of a timid pretentious class of men--of
such uncleanness as I say, scarcely more than a glimpse and a whisper
and a vague tentative talk or so reached me. Little more will reach you,
for that kind of thing, like the hells of Swedenborg, finds its own.
I had already developed my growing instinct for observance to a very
considerable extent under Siddons, and at Harbury I remember myself, and
people remember me, as an almost stiffly correct youth. I was pretty
good at most of the work, and exceptionally so at history, geology, and
the biological side of natural science. I had to restrain my interest in
these latter subjects lest I should appear to be a "swat," and a
modern-side swat at that. I was early in the sixth, and rather a
favorite with old Latimer. He incited me to exercise what he called a
wholesome influence on the younger boys, and I succeeded in doing this
fairly well without any gross interventions. I implied rather than
professed soundly orthodox views about things in general, and I was
extremely careful to tilt my straw hat forward over my nose so as just
not to expose the crown of my head behind, and to turn up my trousers
with exactly that width of margin which the judgment of my
fellow-creatures had decided was correct. My socks were spirited without
being vulgar, and the ties I wore were tied with a studious avoidance
of either slovenliness or priggish neatness. I wrote two articles in the
Harburonian, became something of a debater in the Literacy and
Political, conducted many long conversations with my senior
contemporaries upon religion, politics, sport and social life, and
concealed my inmost thoughts from every human being. Indeed, so
effective had been the training of Harbury and Mr. Siddons, that I think
at that time I came very near concealing them from myself. I could
suppress wonder, I could pass by beauty as if I did not see it, almost I
think I did not see it for a time, and yet I remember it in those years
too--a hundred beautiful things.
Harbury itself is a very beautiful place. The country about it has all
the charm of river scenery in a settled and ancient land, and the great
castle and piled town of Wetmore, cliffs of battlemented grey wall
rising above a dense cluster of red roofs, form the background to
innumerable gracious prospects of great stream-fed trees, level meadows
of buttercups, sweeping curves of osier and rush-rimmed river, the
playing fields and the sedgy, lily-spangled levels of Avonlea. The
college itself is mostly late Tudor and Stuart brickwork, very ripe and
mellow now, but the great grey chapel with its glorious east window
floats over the whole like a voice singing in the evening. And the
evening cloudscapes of Harbury are a perpetual succession of glorious
effects, now serene, now mysteriously threatening and profound, now
towering to incredible heights, now revealing undreamt-of distances of
luminous color. Assuredly I must have delighted in all those aspects, or
why should I remember them so well? But I recall, I mean, no confessed
recognition of them; no deliberate going-out of my spirit, open and
unashamed, to such things.
I suppose one's early adolescence is necessarily the period of maximum
shyness in one's life. Even to Raymond I attempted no extremities of
confidence. Even to myself I tried to be the thing that was expected of
me. I professed a modest desire for temperate and tolerable achievement
in life, though deep in my lost depths I wanted passionately to excel; I
worked hard, much harder than I allowed to appear, and I said I did it
for the credit of the school; I affected a dignified loyalty to queen
and country and church; I pretended a stoical disdain for appetites and
delights and all the arts, though now and then a chance fragment of
poetry would light me like a fire, or a lovely picture stir unwonted
urgencies, though visions of delight haunted the shadows of my
imagination and did not always fly when I regarded them. But on the