Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island E-Book

H G Wells

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The Blettsworthys, my family, have always been a very scrupulous family and gentle, the Wiltshire Blettsworthys perhaps even more so than the Sussex branch. I may perhaps be forgiven if I say a word or two about them before I come to my own story. I am proud of my ancestors and of the traditions of civilized conduct and genial living they have handed down to me; the thought of them, as I shall tell, has supported and sustained me on some difficult occasions. “What,” I have asked, “should a Blettsworthy do?” and I have at least attempted to make my conduct a proper answer.

Leseprobe

Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island

Herbert George Wells

© 2024 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782385746865

Dedicated

to the Immortal Memory

of

CANDIDE

CHAPTER THE FIRST

Relates how Mr. Blettsworthy was sent upon a Sea Voyage for his Health’s Sake and gives some Account of his State of Mind at the time.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

Tells how Mr. Blettsworthy put out to Sea and of his Voyage and how he was Shipwrecked and left on a Derelict Ship and how Savages appeared and captured him.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

Tells how Mr. Blettsworthy found himself among the Savages of Rampole Island and of his early impressions of their Manners and Customs. How he saw the Megatherium, the Giant Ground Sloth, still surviving, and of its extraordinary natural history. What he learnt of the Religion of the Rampole Islanders, their marriages and their laws. How he talked to them of the Realities of Civilization and how War came to Rampole Island.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

Of the Strange Transfiguration that happened to Rampole Island. How Mr. Blettsworthy came back to Civilization. How he played his part manfully and was wounded and nearly died a hero in the World War for Civilization. Of Rowena his wife and his Children. How he found an occupation and of a Great Talk he had with an Old Friend. Leading to those Reflections upon Life in General promised on the Title Page.

CHAPTER THE FIRST

Relates how Mr. Blettsworthy was sent upon a Sea Voyage for his Health’s Sake and gives some Account of his State of Mind at the time.

CHAPTER THE FIRST

§ 1.

The Blettsworthy Family

§ 2.

The Good Broad Churchman

§ 3.

The Rector Is Ill and Dies

§ 4.

Love and Olive Slaughter

§ 5.

Interlude with Mrs. Slaughter

§ 6.

Collision in the Dark

§ 7.

Mr. Blettsworthy Forgets Himself Altogether

§ 1 The Blettsworthy Family

The Blettsworthys, my family, have always been a very scrupulous family and gentle, the Wiltshire Blettsworthys perhaps even more so than the Sussex branch. I may perhaps be forgiven if I say a word or two about them before I come to my own story. I am proud of my ancestors and of the traditions of civilized conduct and genial living they have handed down to me; the thought of them, as I shall tell, has supported and sustained me on some difficult occasions. “What,” I have asked, “should a Blettsworthy do?” and I have at least attempted to make my conduct a proper answer.

There have always been Blettsworthys in English life in the south and west of England, and they have always been very much the same sort of people. Many epitaphs and similar records reaching back far beyond Tudor times witness to their virtues, their kindness, probity and unobstructive prosperity. There is said to be a branch of them in Languedoc, but of that I know nothing. Blettsworthys went to America, to Virginia in particular, but they seem to have been swallowed up and lost there. Yet ours is a family of persistent characteristics not easily extinguished. Perhaps some American reader may know of the fate of this branch. Such chances occur. There is an alabaster figure of a Bishop Blettsworthy in Salisbury Cathedral that was brought thither from the aisle of old Sarum when that was demolished and Salisbury set up, and the marble face might have been a bust of my uncle, the rector of Harrow Hoeward, and the fine hands are like his hands. There ought to be Blettsworthys in America, and it perplexes me that I never hear of any. Something of their quality appears, I am told, in the Virginian landscape, which is wide and warm and kindly, they say, like our English downland, a little touched by the sun.

The Blettsworthys are a family of cultivators and culture. They have had little to do with merchandising, either in gross or detail, and they played no part in the direct development of what is called industrialism. They have preferred the Church to the Law, and classical scholarship, botany and archæology to either, but they appear doing their duty by the land in Domesday Book, and Blettsworthy’s Bank is one of the last of the outstanding private banks in these days of amalgamation. It is still a great factor in West of England life. The Blettsworthys, rest assured, were drawn into banking by no craving for usurious gain, but simply to oblige the needs and requests of less trustworthy neighbours in Gloucestershire and Wilts. The Sussex branch is not quite so free from commercialism as the Wiltshire; it practised “free trade” during the French wars when free trade was strictly speaking illegal and a fine adventure, and in spite of the violent end of Sir Carew Blettsworthy and his nephew Ralph as the result of a misunderstanding with some Custom House officials in the streets of Rye that necessitated bloodshed, it acquired considerable wealth and local influence through these activities and has never altogether severed its connection with the importation of silks and brandy.

My father was a man of sterling worth but eccentric action. Many of the things he did demanded explanation before the soundness of his motives was clear, and some, because of their remoteness, his habitual negligence, or for other reasons, were never fully explained. The Blettsworthys are not always good at explanation. It is their habit to rely on their credit. Being a fifth son and with no prospects of a fortune nor any marketable abilities, my father was urged by his friends and relations to seek his fortune abroad, and left Wiltshire at an early age to look, as he said, for gold, looking, I admit, without any natural avidity and generally in quite unsuitable places. Gold, I understand, is extremely localized in its origins, and it is as a rule found gregariously in what are called “gold rushes,” but my father had an aversion from crowds and crowd behaviour and preferred to seek the rare and precious metal among agreeable surroundings and where the ungracious competition of unrefined people did not incommode him, subsisting meanwhile upon the modest remittances afforded him by his more prosperous connections. He held that though this line of conduct might diminish his chances of discovering gold, it gave him a prospect of monopolizing any lucky find that occurred to him. He was more careless about marriage than is usual in the Blettsworthy strain, contracting it several times and sometimes rather informally—though indeed we are all rather unguarded in our assent to contracts—and my mother happened to be of mixed Portuguese and Syrian origin, with a touch of the indigenous blood of Madeira, where I was born.

My birth was entirely legitimate; whatever confusion there may be in my father’s matrimonial record came later and as a consequence of the extremely variable nature of marriage in tropical and subtropical climates.

My mother was, I understand, on the testimony of my father’s letters, a passionately self-forgetful woman, but she did not altogether eliminate herself in my composition. To her, I think, I must owe my preference for inclusive rather than concise statement, and a disposition, when other things are equal, to subordinate reality to a gracious and ample use of language. “She talks,” wrote my father to my uncle during her lifetime. “You never hear the last of anything.” Meaning that she felt things so finely and acutely that she resorted instinctively to the protection of a felt of words and that her mind could not rest satisfied so long as a statement was in any way incomplete. She fined; she retouched. How well I understand! I too understand how insupportable inexpression may become. Moreover I surely owe to her something even more alien to the Blettsworthy stock in my sense of internal moral conflict. I am divided against myself—to what extent this book must tell. I am not harmonious within; not at peace with myself as the true Blettsworthys are. I am at issue with my own Blettsworthyness. I add to my father’s tendency to a practical complexity, a liability to introspective enquiry. I insist I am a Blettsworthy, and you will remark that I insist. That is what no twenty-four carat Blettsworthy would do. I am consciously a Blettsworthy because I am not completely and surely a Blettsworthy. I have great disconnected portions of myself. Perhaps I am all the more loyal to my family traditions because I can be objectively loyal.

My mother died when I was five years old, and my few memories of her are hopelessly confused with a tornado that ravaged the island. Two clouds of apprehension mingled and burst in dreadful changes. I remember seeing trees and hours most shockingly inverted and a multitude of crimson petals soddened in a gutter, and that is associated confusedly with being told that my mother was dying and then dead. At the time I believe I was not so much grieved as astounded.

My father, after some futile correspondence with my maternal relations in Portugal and a rich uncle in Aleppo, succeeded in entrusting me to an inexperienced young priest who was coming from Madeira to England, and requested him to deposit me with an aunt in Cheltenham, Miss Constance Blettsworthy, who in that manner first became aware of my existence. My father had armed his emissary with documents that left no doubt of my identity. I have vague memories of mounting the side of the steamship at Funchal, but my recollections of the subsequent sea passage are happily effaced. I have a distincter picture of my aunt’s parlour in Cheltenham.

She was a dignified lady in what was either a blonde wig or hair skilfully arranged in such a fashion as to imitate one; she had a Companion similar to herself but larger, an unusually large person in fact, whose bust impressed my childish mind profoundly; and I remember they both sat up very high above me while I occupied a hassock before the fire, and that the conversation with the young priest was sufficiently momentous to leave a strong impression on my mind. They were clearly of opinion that he had been wrongly advised to bring me to Cheltenham and that he ought to take me on at once at least a further hour’s journey by rail to the home of my uncle, the rector of Harrow Hoeward.

My aunt said repeatedly that she was touched by my father’s confidence in her, but that the state of her health made her feel unequal to my entertainment. She and her Companion furnished the young priest with such facts about her state of health as were suitable for him to hear and even, I fancy, with additional particulars. They must have felt the emergency called for decisive treatment. In spite of the commiseration his profession demanded from him, he was manifestly anxious to waive these confidences in so far as they might be considered relevant to the business in hand. My father had said nothing to him about this brother at Harrow Hoeward, having concentrated his directions upon my Aunt Constance, the elder sister of his upbringing and a pillar of strength in his memory. The young priest did not feel justified, he declared, in varying his instructions. The trust was discharged, the young priest maintained, by my delivery into the hands of my aunt, and he lingered only for settlement of certain incidental expenses upon the voyage for which my father had made no provision.

For my own part, I sat stoically upon my hassock and with an affected concentration regarded the fire-place and the hob, which were of a type unknown in Madeira, listening the while. I was not very anxious to stay with my aunt, but I was quite eager to see no more of the young priest, so that I wished him well in his efforts to relinquish me and was pleased by his success.

He was a fat white young priest, with a round face and a high strangulated tenor voice more suitable for praying aloud than ordinary conversation. He had begun our acquaintance with the warmest, most winning professions of affection, and I had shared his berth on board at his suggestion, but my inability to support the motion of the vessel with restraint, and a certain want of judgment in my disposition of the outcome, had gradually embittered a relationship that had promised to be ideal. By the time we reached Southampton we had conceived a mutual distaste which was mitigated only by the prospect of a separation that promised to be speedy and enduring.

In short, he would have no more to do with me. . . .

I stayed with my aunt.

Cheltenham was not a very happy refuge for me. A small boy of five is sedulous in pursuit of occupation, tactless in his choice of entertainment, and destructive in his attempts to investigate and comprehend the more fragile objects of interest with which life teems for him. My aunt was addicted to collecting Chelsea figurines and other early English china; she loved the quaint stuff; and yet she failed to recognize a kindred passion in me when my eager young imagination would have introduced conflict and drama among her treasures. Nor did my attempts to play with and enliven the life of two large blue Persian cats who adorned the house please her maturer judgment. I did not understand that a cat, if one wishes to play with it, should not be too ardently pursued, and is rarely roused to responsive gaiety by even the best aimed blows. My doughty exploits in the garden, where I dealt with her dahlias and Michaelmas daisies as though they were hostile champions and embattled hosts, aroused no spark of approval in her.

The two elderly domestics and the crumpled gardener, who ministered to the comfort and dignity of my aunt and her Companion, shared their employer’s opinion that the education of the young should be entirely repressive, so that I was able to go on existing at all only in a very unobtrusive manner. A young tutor was engaged, I seem to remember, to take me for walks as prolonged as possible and give me instructions as inaudible as possible, but I have no distinct recollection of him except that he was the first person I knew who wore detachable cuffs, and my impressions of Cheltenham are of a wilderness of endless spacious roads of pale grey houses under a pale blue sky, and of a Pump Room, bath chairs and an absence of bright colour and exhilarating incident in the extremest contrast with Madeira.

I note these months at Cheltenham—or perhaps they were only weeks, though in my memory at least they are months of a vague immensity—as a sort of interregnum in the Void before my real life began. Above and outside the sphere of my attention, my aunt and her Companion must have been making the most strenuous efforts to place me among other surroundings, for against the dim background to these Cheltenham reminiscences there come and go a number of still dimmer figures, Blettsworthys all, scrutinizing me without either affection or animosity, but with a rapidly crystallizing disposition to have nothing further to do with me. Their comments, I believe, fell under three main headings; first, that I was good for my aunt because I should take her out of herself—but clearly she did not want to be taken out of herself, and indeed who does?—or, secondly, that I had better be returned to my father, but that was impossible because he had left Madeira for an uncertain address in Rhodesia and our imperial postal system will not accept little boys addressed to the Poste Restante in remote colonies; or, thirdly, that the whole thing, meaning me, ought to be put before my uncle, the Rev. Rupert Blettsworthy, the rector of Harrow Hoeward. They were all in agreement that I promised to be rather small for a Blettsworthy.

My uncle was away in Russia at that time, with various Anglican bishops, discussing the possible reunion of the Anglican and Orthodox churches—it was long, long before the Great War and the coming of Bolshevism. Letters from my aunt pursued him, but were delayed and never overtook him. Then suddenly, just as I was growing resigned to a purely negative life in a household at Cheltenham under the direction of a tutor with detachable cuffs, my uncle appeared.

He resembled my father generally, but he was shorter and rosier and rounder and dressed like the rich and happy rector he was, instead of in loose and laundry-worn flannels. There was much about him too that needed explanation, but the need was not so manifest. And his hair was silver-grey. He came right out of the background at once in a confident and pleasing manner. He put rimless glasses on his nose and regarded me with a half smile that I found extremely attractive.

“Well, young man,” he said in almost my father’s voice; “they don’t seem to know what to do with you. How would you like to come and live with me?”

“Please, sir,” I said as soon as I grasped the meaning of the question.

My aunt and her Companion became radiantly appreciative of me. They cast concealment aside. I had never suspected how well they thought of me. “He is so lively and intelligent,” they said; “he takes notice of everything. Properly looked after and properly fed he will be quite a nice little boy.”

And so my fate was settled.

§ 2 The Good Broad Churchman

With my establishment at Harrow Hoeward my life, I consider, really began. My memory, which has nothing but gleams and fragments of the preceding years, jumps into continuity from the very day of my arrival at that most homelike home. I could, I believe, draw maps to scale of the rectory, and certainly of the garden, and I can recall the peculiar damp smell of the pump in the yard beyond the outhouse and the nine marigolds at equal distances against the grey stone wall. Year by year old Blackwell, the gardener, replaced them. I could write a chronicle of the cats, with sketches of their characters. And out beyond the paddock was a ditch and then the steep open down, rising against the sky. In the snowy winter or the hot summer I used to slide down that on a plank, for the dry grass in summer was more slippery than ice. In the front of the vicarage was a trim lawn and a hedge of yew, and to the left of us were Copers Cottages, and then at the notch in the road the Post Office and the General Store. The church and churchyard was our boundary the other way.

My uncle took me there, a small indeterminate plastic creature, which might have become anything. But there inevitably I became the Blettsworthy I am to-day.

From the first moment of our acquaintance he was the most real and reassuring thing in life for me. It was like awakening on a bright morning merely to see him. Everything in my life before his appearance had been vague, minatory and yet unconvincing; I felt I was wrong and unsafe, that I was surrounded by shadowy and yet destructive powers and driven by impulses that could be as disastrous as they were uncontrollable. Daily life was the mask of a tornado. But now that effect of a daylight dream which might at any time become a nightmare, which was already creeping into my life in childhood in spite of a sort of stoical resistance I offered its invasion, was banished for many years from my mind. “Things have got a little wrong with you,” he said in effect in that Cheltenham parlour, “but, as a matter of fact and fundamentally, they are all right.”

And so long as he lived, either they were fundamentally all right or by some essential personal magic he made them seem so. Even now I cannot tell which of these things it was.

I do not remember my Aunt Dorcas as vividly as I do my uncle. Indeed, I do not remember her as fully as I do old Blackwell or the cook. This is odd, because she must have had a lot to do with me. But she was a busy self-effacing woman, who effected her ministrations so efficiently that they seemed to be not her acts but part of the routine of the universe. I believe she had always desired children of her own, and at first she had been a little distressed to realize that her sole family was to be one half alien nephew, a doubtful scrutinizing being already past babyhood, eking out a limited English vocabulary with dubious scraps of Portuguese. Perhaps there remained a certain estrangement of spirit always. She never betrayed any want of affection; she did her duty by me completely, but it is clear as I look back upon these things that there was no motherhood, no sonship between us. The realities of her life were turned away from me altogether. All the more did my heart go out to my uncle, who seemed to diffuse kindliness as a hayfield in good weather diffuses scent, and who presided, in my childish imagination, not only over the house and the church and all the souls of Harrow Hoeward, but over the wide bare downland and the very sunshine. It is extraordinary how extensively he has effaced my father from my mind.

My idea of God is still all mixed up with him. In Madeira I had heard much of Dios by way of expletive and invocation, a subtropical passionate Dios, hot and thundery; but I never connected the two divinities until I reached years of comparison. God began afresh with me in England as the confederated shadow of my uncle, a dear English gentleman of a God, a super-Blettsworthy in control, a God of dew and bright frosty mornings, helpful and unresentful, whose peculiar festivals were Easter and Christmas and the Harvest Thanksgiving. He was the God of a world that was right way up, stern only to smile again, and even through the solemnity and restraint of Good Friday peeped out my uncle’s assurance that the young gentleman would come back safe and sound on Sunday. A serious time of course, occasion for grave reflections, but meanwhile we had our hot cross buns.

There were crosses in my uncle’s church but no crucifix, no crown of thorns, no nails.

My uncle shook back his surplice from his shapely hands, leant over the pulpit and talked to us pleasantly of this pleasant supreme power who ruled the world, for twenty minutes at the most, since God must not be made tiresome to the weaker brethren. He needed explanation at times, this God of the Blettsworthys, his ways had to be justified to man, but not tediously. My uncle loved particularly to talk in his sermons of the rainbow and the ark and God’s certain covenants. He was awfully decent, was God, as my uncle displayed him, and he and my uncle made me want to be decent too. In a world of “All right” and “Right O” and “Right you are Sir.” I lived in it and was safe in it all those years. Was it no more than a dream?

Evil was very far away and hell forgotten. “You don’t do that sort of thing,” said my uncle, and you didn’t. “Play up,” said my uncle, and you did. “Fair doos,” said my uncle; “you mustn’t be hard on people.” And patience with the poor performer; “How do you know the fellow isn’t trying?” Even the gipsies who drifted through that tranquil Downland and sometimes had to confer with my uncle in his secular might upon the bench, about minor issues of conduct, were deeply Anglicized gipsies; if they pinched a trifle now and again they were neither robbers nor violent. Dear England! Shall I never see you again as I saw you in those safe and happy days? Languedoc and Provence they say are gentle regions also, and Saxony; and here and there in Scandinavia you will find whole country-sides of kindliness, needing only the simplest explanations. I do not know about these places. It is to the English Downland that my heart returns.

My uncle shook back the sleeves of his surplice and leant smiling and persuasive over his pulpit, making everything clear and mild like English air, and I felt that if I were given a vision sufficiently penetrating I should see high above the blue ether another such kindly Father, instructing His fortunate world. Under Him in pews as it were and looking up to Him, were princes, potentates and powers all to be credited with the best intentions until there was positive proof to the contrary. Queen Victoria, simple and good and wise and rather the shape of a cottage loaf with a crown upon it, sat highest of all, not, I felt, so much a Queen and Empress as a sort of Vice Deity in the earth. On Sundays she occupied the big imperial pew right under God’s pulpit and no doubt took Him home to lunch. To dusky potentates who happened to know and respect her better than they knew God, she presented copies of the Authorized Version of the English Bible and referred them up magnanimously to her friend and ruler. No doubt she wrote Him earnest letters, with her particular wishes underlined, just as she wrote to Lord Beaconsfield and the German Emperor, upon what her fine instinct, a little instructed by Baron Stockmar, told her was best for the Realm, His World and her Family connections. Beneath her was a system of hierarchic kindliness. Our local magnate was Sir Willoughby Denby, a great man for the irrigation of subtropical lands and the growing of cotton for the mills of Manchester and the needs of all mankind. A ruddy handsome man, inclined to be fat, and riding through the village on a stout cob. Further towards Devizes spread the dominion and influence of Lord Penhartingdon, banker and archæologist, and Blettsworthy on the mother’s side. Actually Blettsworthy held their ancestral lands from Downton to Shaftesbury and again towards Wincanton.

In this benevolent world which my uncle’s God and his own goodness had made upon the Wiltshire uplands, I grew from childhood to adolescence, and the dark strain of my mother’s blood, sorrowful and errant, flowed unsuspected in my veins and gave no sign. Perhaps for a Blettsworthy I was a trifle garrulous and quick with languages. First I had a governess, a Miss Duffield from Boars Hill near Oxford, the daughter of a friend of my uncle’s, blandly adoring him and very successful with my French and German, and then I went as a weekly boarder to the excellent school at Imfield that Sir Willoughby Denby under God and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners had done so much to revive and re-endow. It was tremendously modern for those days and we had classes in carpentry and did experimental biology with plants and frog spawn, and learnt Babylonian and Greek history instead of learning Greek grammar. My uncle was a governor of this school and came at times and talked to us.

They were unpremeditated talks of perhaps five or ten minutes that sprang up in his mind when he came down to us, not so much attempts to put anything over us as, in response to our youth and activity and fresh expectation, a kindly word to clear difficulties away.

“Civilization,” he would say to us. “Grow sound and strong here and go out to civilize the earth.”

That was what Imfield School was for. “Civilization” was his word; I think I must have heard it from him six times as often as “Christianity.” Theology was a mental play for him, and rather idle play. He was all for the Reunion of Christendom in the interests of civilization, and had great hopes of the holy men who lived in the Troitzko-Sergiyevskaya Lavra near Moscow and never put their feet to earth. He wanted an interchange of Orthodox and Anglican orders. His power of imagining resemblances was far greater than his power of recognizing differences. He could imagine the mentality of a gentle curate beneath the long hair and beard of a Russian priest. He thought Russian country gentlemen could presently become like English country gentlemen with a parliament in St. Petersburg just the same. He corresponded with several of the Cadets. And that point between the creeds of Latin and Greek about Filioque, that most vital point, seemed I fear to him, no better than a quibble.

“At bottom we are all the same thing,” he said to me, preparing me for confirmation. “Never get excited about forms or formulæ. There is only one truth in the world and all good men have got it.”

“Darwin and Huxley?” I reflected.

“Sound Christians both,” said he, “in the proper sense of the word. Honest men that is. No belief is healthy unless it takes air and exercise and turns itself round and about and stands upon its head for a bit.”

Huxley was a great loss to the bench of bishops, he assured me, an athlete of the spirit and respectable to the bone. Everyone would take his word before that of many a bishop. Because science and religion were two sides of the medal of truth, it did not follow that they were in opposition, and to be unconsciously a Christian was perhaps the very essence of sound Christianity.

“Let him who thinketh he stand,” quoted my uncle, “take heed lest he fall.”

All men meant the same thing really and everyone was fundamentally good. But sometimes people forgot themselves. Or didn’t quite understand how things ought to be explained. If the Origin of Evil troubled my uncle but little, he was sometimes perplexed I think by the moral inadvertence of our fellow creatures. He would talk over his newspaper at breakfast to his wife and Miss Duffield and me, or with our frequent guests at lunch or dinner, about crimes, about the disconcerting behaviour of pitiful ungracious individuals, murderers, swindlers and the like.

“Tut, tut,” he would say at breakfast. “Now that’s really too disgraceful.”

“What have they done now?” asked my aunt Dorcas.

“It’s the wicked foolishness of it,” he would say.

Miss Duffield would sit back and admire him and wait, but my aunt would go on with her breakfast.

“Here’s a poor silly muddle-witted fellow must poison his wife. Insures her for quite a lot of money—which is what attracted attention to the whole thing—and then gives her poison. Three nice little children too. When they tell in court the way the woman suffered and how she made a remark about its being hard on her, the poor wretch chokes and weeps. Silly poor idiot! Tut, tut! He never knew which way to turn for money. . . . Pitiful.”

“But she was murdered,” said my aunt Dorcas.

“They lose all sense of proportion when they get into that state of worry. I’ve seen it so often before me when I’ve been upon the bench. No confidence in life and then comes a sort of moral stampede. Very probably to begin with he wanted money because he couldn’t bear to see that poor woman living in such poverty. And then the craving for money became overpowering. At any cost he must have money. Forgot everything else in that.”

Miss Duffield nodded her head very fast in token of intelligent edification, but my aunt Dorcas still hung undecided.

“But what would you do with him, dearest?” said my aunt Dorcas. “You wouldn’t let him out to poison someone else.”

“You don’t know he would,” said my uncle.

“Christ would have forgiven him,” Miss Duffield said softly and with some obscure difficulty.

“I suppose he ought to be hanged,” said my uncle, dealing firmly with my aunt’s question. “Yes, I suppose he ought to be hanged. (These are excellent kippers. The best we have had for some time.)”

He viewed all sides of the question. “I would forgive him—his sin if not his punishment. No. For the sake of the weaker brethren under temptation, I grant you he ought to be hanged. Yes. He ought to be hanged.” He sighed deeply. “But in a civilized spirit. You see—Someone ought to go to him and make it clear to him that it is to be a hanging without malice, that we realize we are all poor sinful tempted things not a bit better than he is, not a bit better, sinners all, but that it is just because of that that he has to die. We have to be helped by the certainty of punishment, so that though he has now to go through with this disagreeable experience, he dies for the good of the world just as much as any soldier on the battle-field. . . . I wish it weren’t a case of a hangman. The hangman is barbaric. A bowl of hemlock would be far more civilized, a bowl of hemlock, a sober witness or so, sitting at hand, and a friendly voice to comfort and console.

“We shall come to that,” said my uncle. “Cases of this sort get rarer—exactly as people become more tolerant and better arrangements are made. The more we civilize the less there is of this fretting and vexation and hopelessness—and meanness, out of which such crises arise. And such punishments as we award them. Things get better. When you are my age, Arnold, you will be able to realize that steadily things get better.”

He shook his head sadly at his newspaper and seemed to hesitate whether he would read it again.

No, he had had enough newspaper for the day. He got up absent-mindedly, found the sideboard attractive, and helped himself to a second kipper. . . .

It was his favourite contention that he had never in the whole course of his experience as a magistrate tried a really bad man or woman, but only ignorant creatures, morally dense and hopelessly muddled. I realize now his utter inconsistency. All his professional theology was based upon the doctrine of a fall, and daily he denied it. What was sin? Sin shrank before civilization. There may have been real wicked sins in the past, but such weeds had been kept under so long that now they were very rare, very rare indeed. All his practical and informal teaching was permeated by the idea not of sin but of inadvertent error. He did not preach therefore. It was so much better to explain.

He taught me not to be afraid of life. To walk fearlessly and even carelessly round the darkest corner. To tell the truth and shame the devil. To pay the sum demanded without haggling or asking questions. One might be cheated now and then or meet here and there with brutality, but on the whole if one trusted people, if one trusted oneself to people, one was not betrayed. Just as one couldn’t be bitten by a dog or kicked by a horse unless one threatened or startled it. Or betrayed a provocative distrust and an inviting fear. So long as your movements explain themselves even a dog will not bite you. If you had argued that there were not only dogs in the world but tigers and wolves, he would have answered that in a civilized world one so rarely met the latter that they could be ignored. We lived in a civilized world that grew in civilization daily. For all practical purposes things ignored were things exterminated. Accidents happen in life and there may be moral as well as material accidents, but there were enough honest people about and enough simple goodwill for us to disregard these adverse chances and walk about unarmed. He thought a man who carried weapons upon him either a bully or a coward. He disliked precautions of every sort against one’s fellow creatures. So he hated Cash Registers. And every sort of spying upon people. And he hated hiding things from people and all misleading tricks. He thought every secret a darkening of life and any lie a sin.

Human beings are good unless they are pressed or vexed or deluded or starved or startled or scared. Men really are brothers. Getting this explained and believed, and above all believing and acting upon it oneself, was what my dear uncle meant by civilization. When at last all the world was civilized everyone would be happy.

And thanks to his teaching and his candid confident example, I became, what I hope I still am, in spite of the frightful adventures that have happened to me and the dark streaks of fear and baseness that have been revealed in my composition, an essentially civilized man.

Little did I hear of the wars and social conflicts that loomed over us, in these golden Victorian days among the Wiltshire hills. The latest great war had been the Franco-German war, of which the animosities, my uncle said, were dying down year by year. That Germany and England should ever be at war was dead against the laws of consanguinity. A man may not marry his grandmother and still less may he fight her, and our Queen was grandmother to the world in general and their Emperor William in particular.

Revolutions were even remoter than wars. Socialism my uncle taught me was a most wholesome corrective to a certain hardness, a certain arithmetical prepossession on the part of manufacturers and business men. Due mainly to their social inexperience. So that they did the sort of things that really are not done. He gave me Ruskin’s “Unto this Last” to read and afterwards “News from Nowhere” by William Morris. I agreed enthusiastically with the spirit of these books, and I looked forward with a quiet assurance to a time when everyone would understand and agree.

§ 3 The Rector Is Ill and Dies

There was hardly more evil in my school life than in my uncle’s home. I have heard much since of the peculiar vileness of schoolboys and of the sinks of systematic vice public schools in Britain could be. Much of this talk I am convinced is exaggerated stuff and anyhow there was little or no viciousness at Imfield. We had the curiosities natural to our years and satisfied them unobtrusively, and like all boys we evoked a certain facetiousness from things that lurk coyly and provocatively beneath our social conventions. The Deity in his inscrutable wisdom has seen fit to make certain aspects of life a running commentary upon human dignity, and the youthful mind has to pass through a phase of shocked astonishment and healing laughter in its effort to grasp the universe.

Save for a few such explicable kinks and crumplings of the mind I grew up simple and clean and healthy. I acquired and hid away a fair knowledge of three languages and some science, and I attained considerable skill at cricket, learning to bat with style and vigour and to bowl balls less straightforward than they seemed. I rode a little and played the primitive tennis of those days. I grew long in the limb and fairer. Had you met me in my flannels on the way to the practice nets in Sir Willoughby Denby’s park you would no more have suspected that my mother was Portuguese and Syrian with a dash of Madeira than the remoter ancestors of the Blettsworthys had hair and tails. So completely had the assimilative power of our Blettsworthy countryside worked upon me and civilized me.

I grew to manhood clean, confident and trustful, and if I did not look disagreeable facts in the face that was largely because in that green and tranquil part of Wiltshire there were no disagreeable facts sufficiently obtrusive to invite it. And when presently I went up to Oxford, to Lattmeer, I met with no great shock either there or on my way thither. It was my aunt Constance who paid for me to go to Oxford and presently died and left me all her little property, subject only to a life annuity that absorbed most of the income for her Companion. From a dismayed apprehension of me, both these ladies had passed over to a real and confessed liking as I opened out in the sunshine of my uncle’s care. The will was made when my father was killed in Bechuanaland and I was left a penniless orphan. He was killed in a rather intricate and never completely documented affair in which the Boer War, his disputed marriage to the daughter of a Bechuanaland notable and the mineral rights under certain lands claimed by his possible father-in-law, were involved. He failed to explain his presence within the Boer lines upon some mission connected with his always complicated but never I believe dishonourable private life and his complex inexplicable search for gold. But at the time, we believed him to have been killed for King and Country in the normal course of warfare.

That Boer War left no scars upon my boyish mind. It was certainly the most civilized war in all history, fought with restraint and frequent chivalry, a white man’s war, which ended in mutual respect and a general shaking of hands. Most of us must be orphaned sooner or later, and to have had a father one had long forgotten dying, as we supposed, a hero’s death in a fair fight, was as satisfactory a way of realizing that customary bereavement as I can imagine.

Nor did the passing of the great Queen Victoria throw any permanent shadow upon my mind. It had the effect of a stupendous epoch and I was a little surprised to find Punch and the Established Church still going on after it. But they did go on; gradually one realized that most things were going on, with a widowed air indeed but not hopelessly widowed; King Edward reigned in her stead, reformed but still amiable, and one’s sense of the stability of things was if anything strengthened by her demise.

My life at Lattmeer confirmed my faith in the civilization of the universe. I felt I was not only safe but privileged. I took to the water and rowed number four in the college boat. I swam with distinction. I anointed my hair and parted it in the middle. I adorned my person gaily. I had a knitted waistcoat of purple with lines of primrose-yellow that few excelled. I learned to distinguish one wine from another. I formed friendships and one or two were confidential and exalted; I fell in love with the daughter of a tobacconist, a widow who kept a shop in the street that leads from the back lane of Lattmeer towards Johns. I even acquired the small amount of classical learning needed for a special degree. And I shared without pre-eminence in the activities of the O.U.D.S.

I had every reason to be happy in those days and I look back to them now as a prisoner for life might look back upon a summer’s holiday in his free unchallenged past. The bequest of my aunt’s small but by no means contemptible fortune relieved me of those worldly forebodings that oppress the dawn of manhood for the majority of young men. I sustained the death of her former Companion, which presently released the entire income for my use, with a manly fortitude, and prepared to take my place in the scheme of God’s indulgences with an easy confidence in their continuation. I had no suspicion that all this happiness and hope was destined to be only a bright foil for the series of dark experiences that was now descending upon me.

The first great shadow that fell upon my young life was the deaths in rapid succession of my aunt and uncle. My uncle was the first to be evidently ailing and the last of the two to die. The exact nature of his disease I do not know nor was it I think ever clearly known. The professional training and organization of English doctors conduce rather to their dignity, comfort and orderly behaviour than to any great skill in diagnosis, and the appendix, kidneys, liver, spleen, stomach, sympathetic system, musculature and obscure internal infections were mentioned without any compromising exactitude by the medical man in attendance as being among other possible causes of his discomfort and disease. The ultimate certificate alleged cardiac failure following a cold. No specialists were summoned, perhaps because too many would have been involved and their aggregate mileage beyond my uncle’s means. Treatment at that distance from London was largely determined by the doctor’s memory, such as it was, of his own and other treatment in apparently similar cases, and by the current resources of the local pharmacy.