by

ERNEST EGERTON WOOD

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

JUVENILITY

§1

AMONG the warmest and clearest of my early recollections a dirty old field stands out pre-eminent – if I may describe as a field a patch of ground, abandoned for the time being by a discouraged suburban builder, between the backyard walls of two rows of houses facing two parallel streets. Very little grass there was on this field, but it was pitted all over with delightful holes full of sticky reddish-grey clay, and right across its centre it was diversified by two parallel lines of kerbstones, marking the place where in some remote future – too far off to disturb a child’s enjoyment – another street would run, flanked by two more rows of houses, which would eventually obliterate this paradise and subject it to utility instead of joy.

Standing out more clearly than my brother and the few shadowy boy friends who played in those delightful holes of clay – I can recollect no girls, or else I was unconscious of any difference between girls and boys – were several strange creatures from other spheres.

There was a fox-terrier dog, dressed in white with black patches, which attracted my gaze again and again – something outstanding and interesting, as not of my world, but more the material of which fairy tales were made. There was a very old woman who hung round about with pieces of grey-black cloth. Even her face and hands were of almost the same colour. She was always bending. I cannot recollect that she ever straightened herself up. And she was always poking about among the old cans and other rubbish that obscured the earth in those parts. The little boy watched her with untiring and almost breathless [11] fascination, as she gathered together her peck of dirt, the which presumably to eat before she died.

Other foreign beings – somewhat midway in shadowiness between these two outstanding figures and the other playfellows – used to emerge at eventide from sundry back doors, and presently, passing the time of evening to one another, these would urge their offspring through backyard gates to the inevitabilities that lay beyond.

My mother is not to be counted among the foreign or shadowy beings. Far from it. She was a very substantial young woman, the daughter of a Shropshire tenant-farmer, aged about nineteen when I was born. Even at the early age of five, of which I am now writing, I remember regarding her as a beauty, not perhaps that I used that word or idea to myself, but I know that I particularly liked the line of her cheek and her dark colouring. Although the aesthetics of touch – especially with reference to clay, sand, pebbles and water, and I remember, too, a very keen appreciation of velvet and an equal abhorrence of leather – were much more in my department than those of sight, I was not without eyes for a handsome curve, of which my mother presented many, composed, as I again knew by tactual experience, of good firm muscle.

In the early mornings I used to go from my bedroom – where I slept with my elder brother – to hers, and watch her dress. She never laced or unlaced her stays, but simply put them on or off, and yet – as I learnt later, when keeping my ears open in the course of shopping expeditions – they measured only twenty-three inches at the waist, which was not to be considered much under the circumstances, even in those days of eighteen– and nineteen-inch figures, and indeed looked small beside her muscular shoulders and neck, especially when covered closely with cloth and presented in photographic form in the family album. There were many mysteries of dress in those latter years of the eighteen-eighties. I could never understand why she tied a big pad on the back of her (they were days of the bustle).

My mother’s muscularity I remember well also on bath nights. A zinc tub would be brought into the kitchen – a cosy place with a roaring fire, for my father and mother, however poor at the time of which I am writing, were never mean with reference to their children’s needs and comforts – dumped down on the oilcloth before the fire and filled [12] with hot water. My brother and I were then invited, and if necessary commanded, to enter the water, where we sat side by side immersed to the neck, while our heads and laces, and afterwards the rest of our bodies, standing, were subjected to a merciless application of soap and elbow-grease, with regard to which also there was no parsimony, though I would have welcomed it in that sphere.

The water was painfully hot to me, though not to my mother’s hands, and not apparently to my brother’s skin; but she never understood my complaints and protests in this particular, but always thought me fanciful or wayward, and supplemented her commands when necessary with physical force. However, what would you? When a muscular young female of our species has embarked upon a career of mass production at the age of about eighteen, one cannot expect too much discrimination of particulars, but rather what the poet has described as the method of Nature – so careless of the single life, so careful of the type! Still, I must add that economics had their say then, as today, and the mass production stopped with me for more than five years, when came my younger brother, whereby presently will hang a tale.

I had my mother very much to myself for several years, as my elder brother was not much in evidence. Somehow he did not make a very strong mark on me during this period, although we played together constantly. I used to follow my mother about the house and watch every little thing that she was doing, and must have been a great trouble, always getting in her way, watching and listening to everything, though not speaking very much. In some aspects I was a disappointment to her: she had very much wanted her second child to be a girl. In fact, she kept me dressed as a little girl as long as she could; the family album shows me in that form at the age of about three or four. There is a picture in a velvet dress. I wonder if it was then I hat I acquired my love for the touch of velvet and other soft textiles, and consequent dislike for hard or homespun cloths.

Vivid domestic pictures of my mother remain in my mind: (I) at her treadle sewing-machine – she used to make all our clothes, as well as her own, which she fitted upon a revolting headless and legless dummy, whose presence quite spoilt the pleasure of our empty back bedroom as a playroom; (2) in [13] the kitchen, with her sleeves turned up, rolling pastry with anuncomm only large rolling-pin – she was, and still is, an excellent cook; and (3) in the cellar, at the copper, which had a fire underneath, and was filled with boiling water and clothes, where she wielded a three-legged dolly with immense speed and vigour, while the floor swam in water, and an atmosphere of tropical heat and moisture intrigued my skin and my sense of smell.

During those years I thus acquired much feminine lore, though no art or skill. I was just a looker-on. If it had been New York, instead of a suburb of an English commercial town, they would have called me a rubber-neck! But our houses and streets were miniature, and not overstrong at that. I recollect that a few years later, when I came to a more athletic age, and had rigged up an old broomstick or something as a horizontal bar, fastened to one of the beams of the roof, the man who had built the house called upon my father and told him that it must be taken down or else I should bring the whole roof upon their heads.

This close association, and my mother’s thoughts towards me for several years, must have influenced my psychology very greatly, for still I do not distinguish very clearly between the sexes, except when I specially think of it, and I am more at home with women than with men, not because they are women, but because of their ways, their gentleness, their delicacy, their freedom from earthiness, which I tend not to admire from a distance so much as to absorb for my own. As a consequence, I am afraid that I am much more of a friend than of a husband to my wife. Recently a travelling companion asked me: “Done any shooting lately – ah?” Taken aback, I could only stammeringly reply: “Er – not since the war.”

With all that, though short of stature, I was not an effeminate boy. Sometimes on the rather rare occasions on which a neighbour might have ventured into our very self-centred home, there would be an exhibition of the heavy muscular development of my shoulders and legs, of which my mother was proud, though unreasoningly, as they were quite out of proportion, and in competition with the bones my calf muscles had got the best of it and caused my legs to become slightly bowed. Generally the display of two crowns (whorls in the hair) would conclude this entertainment. [14]

My brother was much more effeminate in appearance and build than I. He was tall, thin, fair-haired (like his father) and languid; I was just the opposite; short, dark-haired (like my mother), muscular and energetic. Later, in my schooldays, I remember I was occasionally censured for being too rough at football – though I know now that all that was a semi-conscious revolt against my own feminine complexes. Again, at the age of about eighteen, I sported a long, dark beard, which used to make people ask which was the father and which the son when I took walks with my father in the village, as we called our suburb. And later still, when the Great War came, the doctors put me into the A class without hesitation, notwithstanding my meagre five feet six inches of height. But I digress.

§2

My father used to come home from his business in the city every evening about seven o’clock. He was then manager and buyer in one of the large stationery warehouses in the city, and in conjunction with that occupation he contrived to give my brother and me an almost Montessori education, by the constant supply of otherwise useless samples that he used to bring home. Every evening, when we heard his key in the lock, we would rush into the lobby to greet him like a pair of young puppy dogs, and almost his first act would be to draw from his pocket some small sample-books of coloured tissue or printing paper, or two or three sample playing cards, or something of the kind. After that he would take off his coat, go upstairs two or three at a time – he had been an apprentice in a sailing ship – take off his collar and tie, turn down the neck-band of his shirt, remove his cuffs and roll up his shirt sleeves, and subject himself to such a washing of neck and ears and face and arms as I never ceased to marvel at, in view of the fact that it was not compulsory in his case. Then he would dress himself carefully again and come down to tea, which was our chief meal of the day.

A good meal it was, too, for, as I before remarked, my mother was an excellent cook, with an unerring instinct for the proper moment to take things off the fire or out of the oven. She made also our supplies of jams and pickles, while I used to stand by with discs of paper and a saucer of [15] flour paste, putting on the “lids” of the jars, as she filled them with the steaming jam – there were no screw stoppers then. But I remember that her one solitary attempt to make the household bread was a failure; it came out as hard as bricks and was eventually used instead of coal.

In the midday our meal was much simpler. My father would take a few sandwiches to town with him, and eat them somewhere privately during the lunch hour, or else go to one of the cheap little vegetarian restaurants which abounded then – there were twenty-two of them in our city – and spend a few pence on a bit of something to eat. My mother, at home, would be equally frugal in the middle of the day; at that meal we could not have jam and butter on our bread both at the same time, but only one or the other. I recollect that it was then that my scientific proclivities began to manifest themselves, in the discovery that I got more taste out of my bread and butter or my bread and jam by eating it upside down than right side up, for thus the tasty portion rather than the mere pabulum would most fully and immediately strike the tongue; though I cannot say that this discovery of mine was highly approved in the family from the aesthetic point of view. Another bit of science was my formula for learning right and left – “If I stand beside the oven and look through the window my right arm is on the oven side.” For a long time I had to picture this scene when I wanted to know which side was right or left. I remember also systematically finding out that it took ten minutes to count a thousand.

In the early mornings my father used to get up and make the kitchen fire, clean the boots, and make his own breakfast and a cup of tea for my mother, which he took up to her bed, for he firmly disapproved of her getting up until he was off to his business. Often he had a sausage for breakfast, and when we came down my brother and I used to find the two ends, each about an inch long, standing up neatly on a plate, titbits greatly relished by us, not only for their taste, but also on account of their interesting appearance and shape. My father used playfully to call these “sassengers,” until one day he went into a provision dealer’s shop and asked for “a pound of sassengers,” thereby attracting in his direction more eyes than he was accustomed to meet at one time. Notwithstanding the charm of these titbits, tea remained the chief gustatory event of the day for all of us, [16] though it was probably marred to some extent for my father by my insistence upon sitting so close up against him at table that he could hardly use his arm.

My father and mother had no friends. They never went out to tea or evening functions, and no one came to see them. Occasional advances of friendliness by neighbours they quietly but firmly discouraged. Their time was entirely devoted to their children and to reading. Tea being over at about half-past seven, my mother would clear the table and then sit down to read by the fire, while my father would play with us and teach us. It was in this way that we learnt to read and to perform the operations of simple arithmetic, long before going to school. Somehow our father made this learning into a kind of play, so that we were never conscious of any effort, or indeed that we were learning anything. These occasions were enlivened, however, by a certain amount of undesirable competition, especially in mental arithmetic, in which my brother used to become annoyed because I was quicker in answering, and seldom gave him a chance to reply.

Those evening studies were mingled with games – among which I remember particularly wall quoits, tiddleywinks and the flicking of marbles through holes in a board, or at rows of toy soldiers. I was always good at marbles, but my brother would not touch them at all, declaring – though not in exactly these words – that they were too plebeian for his lofty taste. Our father never brought in playing cards – except snap cards, with ugly faces and mottoes on them, such as “Away with Melancholy,” of which I could never see the sense. Nor did he bring in any of those games which depend upon the throwing of dice.

I suppose that no children could ever have had a more companionable or entertaining young father. When we were tired of games or of reading he would tell us thrilling stories of his schooldays, which were very amusing when not painful, and of his adventures at sea in sailing ships, and in various distant lands, especially South America and Australia. He would talk, for example, of the long walk that he undertook across country from Melbourne to Sydney, of the trying experience of a sailing ship held up for six weeks off the south of Cape Horn, heeling over on its side on account of the shifting of a cargo of guano, while all hands dug the unsavoury substance back to its proper position, [17] hard put to it to prevent the handles of the spades from freezing to their fingers and taking away the skin. He would talk of quarrels and fights at sea, bordering on mutiny, in which his sympathies were always with the men in their complaints of rough treatment and of live stock and decay in their food. He would talk of the desolate nitrate tracts behind Iquique and the more pleasant country around Valparaiso and Concepcion, all of which I was destined to see for myself in years to come.

My brother and I acquired many fragments of economic and scientific knowledge from these histories. Once our father had decided, after leaving a sheep farm, to stay in Sydney and look round for work there. He did look, for weeks, until he had come to the last of his money. He was wandering on the Circular Quay (which, by the way, is square) wondering what to do, when – the last straw – the sole came off one of his shoes. He was looking at this with stunned helplessness when he heard a voice calling his name. Looking up he saw the face of a ship’s sailmaker whom he had known protruding over the gunwale of the famous ship Thermopylae. The sailmaker stitched the shoe, and took him to the captain, who gave him a job as rigger.

Among the scientific bits, we learned that in a storm at sea a man on deck would go and shut himself in a cabin in order to hear more clearly the voice of a man up aloft.

§3

Sundays were dreadfully dull, especially the mornings, as, although we were never troubled with religion in any form, we were not allowed any but very quiet games. Sunday afternoon walks brightened things up a bit, and often we used to go to a dell called Daisy Nook and pick flowers. Although we lived in a street composed of rows of houses, the front doors of which opened straight on to the pavement, the neighbourhood was not heavily built up, and there were some nice walks. Opposite our house was a neat little municipal park, to which our mother used to take us in the afternoons, while our father was in town. There we used to play ball on the grass or sit while she read to us from picture and story books. Nursery stories were followed by Grimms and Andersen. Grimms I liked, with their caverns and magic, but I could not bear Andersen’s habit of making [18] leather and broomsticks talk. And I wanted to know, if a princess was shut up in a tower, what arrangements were made for her sanitary convenience. Later The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments proved a glorified Grimms. Saturday afternoons were devoted to shopping. I remember standing outside a greengrocer’s and looking at tomatoes. They were something new. It was remarked that they were “an acquired taste.”

Twice, I think, my brother and I went to Sunday-school, upon the solicitation of a young lady who called at our house and volunteered to take us. But our experiments in religion came to an abrupt end. Somebody had been talking about Hell, to which my father seriously objected. He was a keen admirer of Mr. Charles Bradlaugh and in a lesser degree of Mrs. Annie Besant; he took me once, at the age of about four, to one of Mr. Bradlaugh’s lectures, but I do not think I profited much by the occasion, as to which I can only remember a big broad back blocking my view.

Still, like many other children, I was not without my own private hells. One of these was called “the bury hole.” Who put this into my mind I do not know, but I had a good deal of vague fear in connection with it. I thought that little boys called naughty – not really naughty, of course, for there was no such thing! I was quite destitute of what the clergy call the sense of sin – were driven away in a big black hearse, drawn by two black horses hung round with black tassels, to a barren land, where they were then buried up to the neck with their heads sticking out, or were put into a deep hole which was then filled entirely with earth, and thus left to their future. I had no idea of death as a termination of consciousness.

Night I dreaded. My especial trouble for a long time was a dreadful man who had secreted himself under the bed and was always about to plunge a sword right through the mattress into some part of my defenceless anatomy; I always had a dread of this sword, and used to picture quite in detail the events of its playing about in my abdominal regions. And what a trouble my father had to persuade me to go to the barber’s shop for the first time! Our mother had always cut our hair before that. Though he remained beside me the whole time, I expected every moment that the barber would cut my throat with one of the razors of [19] which he had a handsome display, or else would jab the points of his scissors into my eyes.

At night the gas jet used to be left on low in our bedroom. Nevertheless, as I looked at the patch of light on the wall I used to see there malignant grimacing faces. There was always a great battle of wills with these. By force of will I used to convert them piecemeal into portraits of my father, whom I regarded practically as God; but always the portrait would escape control and would change again into some new horror, and so the contest would go on until I fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. I do not think there were any pleasant imaginings to compensate for these. Only sometimes I used to put my head under the bedclothes and deliberately imagine that I was passing along some underground corridors which were literally lined on either side with thousands upon thousands of toys, but only once did I succeed in making it seem at all real to myself.

I kept all my fears entirely to myself, and endured them privately until they gradually faded away, to be replaced by another implanted by my mother. She had a fear of her own, much more real than any of mine, and she did not keep it to herself. It was that her husband might fall ill. He had a delicate appearance, and in some ways was, perhaps, not very strong, especially being a restless sleeper and sometimes subject to biliousness. She considered that after a hard day in town the attention of two boys in the evening might wisely be subjected to a little moderation, which she administered by telling us to be very gentle with our father, lest he fall ill and lose his employment and we find ourselves in the workhouse, pictured as a sort of prison – as indeed it was in those days – or wandering the streets as dreadful, loathsome beggars – objects of which we had plenty of ocular evidence. I then learnt that food, clothing and shelter did not drop as manna from heaven, but that certain means had to be taken to obtain them, and at best it was a precarious business indeed. This thought preoccupied me for many years. This new sword was all the worse because it not only hovered over myself, but harried me with regard to all sorts of people, some of them quite imaginary.

My mother was not altogether to be blamed for this. She had felt poverty. When my elder brother was born she and her husband had lived in one room in a ramshackle house in [20] Liverpool, and a moderate gale had sufficed to blow the window in, frame and all, while she lay in bed – a situation distressing enough to two young love-birds who, though they had roughed it a bit before marriage, had known gentler days, for my father had been to a school where the young gentlemen wore toppers, and my mother’s family was not without dignity of name.

These two young people had quarrelled violently with their respective fathers, on the subject in each case of a second marriage of the latter, as those were times when fathers were fathers (somewhat as in some remote parts of the world, men are still men, if our modern novelists are to be believed). It was also true that some boys and girls were boys and girls – at least my parents were, though they also proved themselves to be men and women, for they left their respective homes, practically penniless, and subsequently met and loved and married on the munificent income of fifteen shillings a week. However, my father was well educated, trustworthy, intelligent and painstaking, and so he made his way steadily up the ladder of commercial life, ill adapted to it though his previous life had been.

§4

At the time of which I am writing our little family had progressed through four houses (materially, not astrologically) since my birth. I was born in one of those houses which are now becoming scarcer, which have no backs, not of course that they are open to the atmosphere, but because the back wall of the rooms is also the back wall of the rooms of another row of houses facing another parallel street.

I do not remember living in that street, but I saw it afterwards, and also heard talk about it. My mother and father always dressed carefully, and even fashionably, and the neighbours, lounging at their doors, were wont to pass audible remarks about them, sometimes more euphonious than classical. So their days were not long in that land. They moved as soon as possible to something a bit better, and again moved, when circumstances permitted, to the place of my earliest recollections, at 52 Bell Street.

Here I became a collector, and even something of a connoisseur, the subject being not pictures, nor china, nor [21] numismatics, nor philately, but the more modest one of handbills – handbills large and small and of every conceivable colour – which remained for a long time piled in a neat heap in a corner of an empty back upstairs bedroom, until my mother decided that they were harbouring too much dust and too many spiders, and swept the whole lot away.

While we lived in that house, we watched the building of a new row of houses further up the street, and when they were ready we moved – from number 52 to number 26, a mathematical curiosity which stuck firmly in my young mind.

It was in 26 Bell Street, when I was five years and nearly ten months old, that my younger brother was born. That disturbing event happened in the following manner, as far as my share in it was concerned. On a certain evening I had been playing in one of the clay pits, and by dusk I had accumulated about a dozen small clay models, some of them very neatly rounded by rolling between the hands. These precious objects had to be taken home with me. When it came time for sleep I was not allowed to take them into the bed, but after some discussion a compromise was struck and they were placed on a saucer on a small table at the side of the bed.

Evidently I was of a mystical temperament, and quite prepared to regard myself as a modern Pygmalion capable of producing even a round dozen of Venuses, for when I was awakened in the night by thin squeaking and piping sounds and an occasional wail, I was fully prepared to believe that the clay figures had come to life and were beginning to express their individuality and independence. This frightened me, I confess, and I shut my eyes tightly and kept the clothes well pulled up about my head. The next morning I was taken into my mother’s bedroom by my father – an unusual procedure, calculated to awaken excitement as well as curiosity. But oh! what a disappointment when I entered the bedroom and found my mother lying in bed with something resembling a large slug beside her, as to which I could see no reason for the fuss that was being made. And my clay images were as dead as ever they had been. I do not think I ever played in the clay pit again. My temper seems also to have been affected a little, for I remember, while my mother was still in bed, threatening [22] both nurse and housemaid to joint combat with a diminutive cricket bat, because they had eaten all the jam.

Somehow I realized that this thing had come to stay in our house. Probably I had put the question of its departure and had had my feelings dashed by a negative reply. In any case, my misgivings were justified, for, though it was interesting to watch my mother washing and powdering the thing in the mornings, I was often called upon during the day to “mind the baby,” an occupation – or rather lack of occupation – which I loathed for its monotony, and also because I very much disliked its dirty ways. What with one thing and another my relations with my mother lost their intimacy, and even, I fear, some of their affectionateness for some time after this.

I would date real affection for my mother from about the age of twelve – too old to show it. I can remember awakenings to love – they were always sudden, and distinct events. One must not expect love in small children. It was related of myself – though the incident is not in my memory – that my father once asked: “You would not like your mother to die, would you?” The disturbing answer was “No; who would get my breakfast ready?” I remember, however, an evening on which my father came home without any plaything in his pocket, and I looked disappointed. He made some remark that showed that he was hurt, and I immediately became aware of his consciousness and was filled with remorse. Before that he had been something in my life. Now his life appeared as something in itself, though coming into mine.

§5

After this, world-shaking events began to occur in my life in quick succession. First came the death of my paternal grandfather’s second wife (who had been the cause of my father’s troubles and poverty, though also the cause indirectly of his alliance with my mother – such is the law of compensation) and a consequent armistice and even slight rapprochement between my father and his father, familiarly alluded to as “the Gov’nor.” Not that I knew much about this, and it did not appear that there were any pecuniary benefits attaching to it, but its results manifested in my life in the appearance in our house of some dozens [23] of old school books which had belonged to my father and his elder brothers and had now come to us consequent upon my grandfather’s desire to simplify the contents of his household.

I did not myself see the old man until many years later, and then I did not harmonize with him, for I found him to be a short-tempered and dominating old gentleman, though I tried, not very successfully, to be polite. He was a man of some importance in his own world, being proprietor of a wholesale business which was the second largest of its kind in England, and he could not forget it in private life. When later on I went into business on my own account at the age of sixteen, and was quite proud of the sixteen clerks in my office, his patronizing air irritated me much, and I am afraid I caused some anxiety to my father by showing my irritability a little sometimes. “The Gov’nor” and I had too much in common – our short stature, big noses, instinct for money-making and incorrigible obstinacy.

It was my grandfather who made “the warehouse” into a really big business, though his grandfather had established it, but the big nose must have been there before that, for tradition had it that it was brought over from the Continent by some Norman ancestor who had been given a jaghire in Yorkshire, but my grandfather’s grandfather had degraded it to commerce after recklessly ruining himself in racing and betting on horses in the neighbourhood of London.

This third commercial generation, allied to a country girl from the south of Ireland – where my grandfather frequently went on business – who smoked a long churchwarden clay pipe while sitting in her hooped skirts (although she was the descendant of semi-divine kings!) presented my grandfather with numerous offspring and also the companionship of a brother of hers, rejoicing in the name of Aloysius Gonzigu, who could patronize even my grandfather, and would enter a shop with the command: “Show me the overcoat that you would show to the Prince of Wales if he came in here,” and would buy it, too! But I digress once more.

Those books which I mentioned some time ago became almost my principal playthings. Many of them contained intriguing diagrams, particularly Newth’s Natural Philosophy, as Physics was then called, and Todhunter’s Euclid; while the root-signs in Colenso’s Algebra and some [24] trigonometry books puzzled me exceedingly. Among the reading books, which were entirely unillustrated, one attracted me especially because it contained a series of stories upon “The Transmigrations of Indur,” which I read again and again.

A few months afterwards we brothers caught scarlet fever, and nothing would console me in bed but that about a dozen of these books should be arranged in two piles, one on either side of my pillow, and though they fell down again and again they had always to be replaced. I remember, too, lying in bed and watching some pigeons and sparrows which flitted past the window, and wondering whether, if I died, I should become a pigeon or a sparrow. There was a Dr. Hamil who came to visit us, with his little pointed black beard – a very charming and agreeable gentleman, who quite prevented us from developing any fear of “the doctor.” I remember him at an earlier period in our previous house, turning our trousers down and our behinds up to see if we had chicken-pox.

When we were better of scarlet fever, but still not allowed out of the bedroom, my mother went out by herself one afternoon, leaving us locked in the house. I remember how pretty and buoyant she looked as she came back into the bedroom. I think she was very happy about the successful termination of our illness. It was almost a Christmas occasion, she brought back with her so many toys and books. I remember among the books some of the Hesba Stretton series – Christie’s Old Organ, Jessica’s First Prayer, and Max Homburg – the last a story of Strassburg during the Franco-Prussian war. The advent of these books was the beginning of a sort of religious career of mine, which took place at dead of night, was never made known to anyone else, and was quite short-lived.

It happened that my brother was a much steadier sleeper than I. Not infrequently I would wake in the middle of the night, and feeling cold, would complain against him for taking all the clothes to his side of the bed – until I found that I was lying on the floor, having fallen out of bed. The actual fall never woke me up, but the subsequent cold did. Again, I was much troubled with colds in the head and I would turn periodically from one side to the other, with the stuffed nostril on top, so as to get some relief in breathing, for I resolutely refused to open my mouth. My mother took [25] what precautions she could against this, rubbed goose grease on my chest and placed hot oven plates wrapped in old blankets in the bed. And she well knew the warm virtues of newspapers and brown paper when laid between the blankets. No, I was not cold, but very restless, while my brother was a steady sleeper.

Thus the stage was well set for my bout of religion, when the handy little books arrived. Waiting till dead of night, when all the household was perfectly quiet, I would silently slip out of bed, creep across the room and turn up the gas sufficiently for me to read. Then I would creep back into bed, draw my book from under the pillow and revel in it for one or two hours. Christie’s Old Organ was the book particularly suited to the circumstances of my mood. I shuddered over the evils of drink and untruth; I was thrilled with the beauty of kindness and unselfishness. God was a magnification of my father, somehow invisible, yet ever-present – the last an important point. Jesus was my ideal self. 1 wanted to go about with Him and even more to melt myself into Him. I did not pray, but I yearned. Somehow the references in the stories to persons going to church and praying and performing ceremonies made no impression on me. I would hurry through those portions and seek for passages of human life. Surely if God is really omnipresent these things constitute the reverse of devotion – I felt this, but I did not think it. I was seeking the fulness of life, not trying to understand it. [26]

CHAPTER II

PUPILARITY

§1

SCHOOL came in its appointed time. My first school lasted a short time for me, mercifully brought to an end by the arrival of the scarlet fever already mentioned. My brother had been going to that school for some time before I started. I think that was how he escaped my fate of having to mind the baby. It was a dame’s school run by two sisters. I remember the two ladies – or rather my vision of them – quite well. One was old and dry and always dressed in black, and as stiff as a ramrod, the other very much younger, rounded and playful. We were taken to this school by some elder girls who lived on the opposite side of our street, midway between the old house and the new, but these girls have left no impression upon my memory except for their legs – black boots and stockings. I suppose I was so small that these constituted the chief part of the scenery when I walked with them.

I cannot remember anything in the school except that we sat bunched on benches in an open square waiting for closing time. The elder schoolmistress put the lid completely on this misery, as far as I was concerned, by expecting me to kiss her, or allow her to kiss me. Though it was only a matter of routine – for she went round the whole class systematically, and I remember watching with a sinking heart the deadly peril coming nearer and nearer – when it came I openly and violently rebelled, and thus created quite a sensation and I think a precedent in the school. That school did not see me many times more. I had been so upset that I was quite ill and unfit to attend. I am sure I lost nothing by this absence. It did not seem that they really taught anything, and if they had done so the [27] memory of the indignity would have driven it from my thoughts.

My second school was a more business-like affair. I was much impressed by the huge building – a large main half curtained off for several classes, and a number of separate rooms. I joined that school on my seventh birthday. My first memory of it is that of standing before one whom I may call the reception clerk, along with three or four other boys. Do what I would I could not make that man understand that it was my birthday.

“How old are you?”

“Seven” (years understood).

“And when was your birthday?”

“To-day.”

He persisted in thinking I had misunderstood him, and what he ultimately wrote down in his record I have no idea. I paid my tenpence – it was tenpence a week – and that was that.

That school was a great place for misunderstandings. Sometimes the teachers misunderstood me; sometimes I misunderstood them. I remember an occasion when our class was confronted with a large map of Egypt and the land of Canaan. The teacher was instructing us in the wanderings of the Jews. I was somewhat interested in this, for I thought he was talking about the migrations of some kind of black birds. Crows were interesting; ancient Jews not at all. It was only afterwards, in another school (my fourth), that I learnt what ancient Jews really were, though I remembered very clearly the configuration of the map, and understood that quite well.

It was in that same class and on that very occasion that I was first threatened with physical violence at school – first, that is, if we omit the kissing from that category. There were about four rows of boys in that class, arranged on the gallery system. I was on the second row. At the beginning of the lesson the teacher used to appoint one boy to stand at the end of each row and watch the others, and call out the names of any boys who appeared to be inattentive to the teacher, such boys being then required to stand out in front of the class. There would usually be about half a dozen of these boys by the end of the lesson, each of whom would receive a whack on the hand from the cane of the teacher and then would go back to his place. [28] I remember that my name was called out on the occasion of the wanderings of the Jews, but I pretended not to hear, and for some reason the monitor did not insist.

Teachers differed very much in their temper and degree of cruelty. There was one man, whom we called Toby, who was constantly and ferociously cruel, until one day the father of one of the boys walked in and gave him a thorough thrashing before the whole class, which laid him up in hospital for several weeks. There was one horrible school-master, very often half-drunk, who used to beat little boys, but leave the bigger ones alone, and that was commented upon privately by all the boys.

Another schoolmaster, a thick-set man with a very dark beard, assembled the whole school of perhaps five hundred boys, and then, holding one small boy aloft by the back of his coat, with one strong hand, administered to him a merciless beating with a stick held in the other. In whispered consultation with other boys I tried to learn what the boy had done, and understood that he had been guilty of soiling the wrong portion of the school latrine. This was what was called “an example.” Of what? Quite apart from any abnormal soiling, those school latrines were dreadfully noisome; it was necessary to go into them sometimes, but always a torture. There were obviously sins of omission as well as of commission in connection with them, but the former were excused.

I remember another misunderstanding in that same school. There was to be an examination. We were taken into a big room with individual desks on which paper, pens and ink and other articles were laid out. Cards were then handed round, containing questions which we were to answer. There was no pen on my desk, so I sat still, while the others were either writing or chewing their penholders, as the case might be. Presently a pleasant young man came along and looked at me.

“Have you no pen?”

“Yes,” I replied, meaning, quite logically, that I had not a pen.

He went away, and I waited patiently for him to bring the pen, but it did not come. After a long time someone else came up.

“Where is your pen?”

“I don’t know.” [29]

I assumed that there must be a certain pen intended for me, since he talked of my pen, but I did not know where they had put it. However, after some further confused discussion he seemed to understand that no pen had been placed on my desk that morning. I had lost about half my time, but came through the examination all right. All these things occurred in somewhat of a dream, which only occasionally took on the aspect of a nightmare.

Many years afterwards I had a similar experience in a High Court in India, when I happened to be one of the witnesses in a rather celebrated case.

“Did you,” asked the advocate, “on the night of August 22nd, sleep in the next room with a big stick, intending to prevent anyone from molesting So-and-so?”

I hesitated, and was about to try to explain what had really happened.

The Judge thundered: “Answer the question, Yes or No!”

With obvious discomfort I answered “No,” though in fact it was only the date that was wrong. And later, in the written judgment of the case, in the Appellate Court appeared the interesting remark: “I do not believe – (another witness’s name, very similar to mine!) when he says that he did not sleep in an adjacent room with a big stick for the purpose of preventing any interference with -”

The only other thing of note that I remember in that school was the spelling lessons, held in the same examination room. They did not give me much trouble, as I seem to have had an eye for the form of words, but I was much struck by the lack of uniformity in the spelling of similar sounds, and I theorized to myself on the vast amount of time wasted and trouble caused to children thereby. No wonder the English do not learn many languages, when they have to spend so much time and energy learning their own.

St. Luke’s School was about fifteen minutes’ walk from our house. I remember walking there by myself sometimes, with a satchel over my shoulder. After passing the spot where I had formerly seen the old woman gathering her peck of dirt, one came to a road which ran along two sides of a square field which was fenced in. I remember that field very well because of an incident that happened one day on my way to school.

While walking along beside the fence I had been [30] entertaining myself with a little cinematograph which I carried in my hand. Perhaps I had better explain. One of the early childhood toys which my mother used sometimes to make for us consisted of a large button, through two holes of which a circle of thin string or thread was run and the two ends tied together. Holding the thread taut, horizontally, by looping it over the two middle fingers, with the button standing vertically in the middle of it, one gave the button a number of turns so as to twist the threads, then started the button spinning by gradually drawing the threads tight so as to untwist them, and then allowing the momentum to twist the thread the other way, by gradually reducing the pull on the thread, and so, alternately increasing and reducing the pull, one caused the button to spin with great speed. The cinematograph was somewhat on that principle. A stiff card, with pictures on the margins, was mounted on two pieces of string. By making it to revolve at a certain speed, one caused the pictures partially to blend, and 10, the cow jumped over the moon.

While I was strolling along engrossed in this interesting occupation, I suddenly heard a loud shout from the rear. I looked round, and there, to my horror, was a large policeman, shouting and gesticulating and hurrying towards me. Having no more confidence in the law outside school than within it, I fled for my life, the policeman after me.

After running some distance, I looked fearfully round to see how far away my pursuer was, and then observed that he was not running very fast and was holding up to my view, as he shouted, a school satchel. I suddenly realized that mine was missing – I must have dropped it – and that this was it, which he wished to return to me. Half-reassured, I warily approached the policeman, and as he held the satchel at arm’s length, I took it from him also at arm’s length, and once more fled. One never knew what trick a policeman might play to get a little boy into prison, so that he could enjoy himself by gloating through the bars, and saying:

“Fee, fi, fo, fum,” or something equally dreadful.

Teachers, too, were a bit ogreish. When they asked a question they did not want you to say what you knew or thought on the subject, but they wanted you to guess what was in their minds. It was a sort of idiotic game, having little to do with facts. I remember that we were once asked to write a small essay on the telephone – a typical subject [31] for small boys coming chiefly from penurious homes! – and got myself much abused for mentioning, among other things, that there had been telephones in Egypt – yet I had read that very thing in a weekly paper of snippets or titbits. I do not suppose that one single boy in that class had ever seen a telephone instrument. I was fortunate enough to have had a toy one – two little parchment drums connected by a thread. My father had played with us with it, and talked about it, so I had something to say.

On another occasion, on a sixth of November, we were asked to write on our experiences of a Guy Fawkes’ night bonfire. I said that it was a wonderfully big fire, and that it actually had not gone out until ten o’clock at night! The teacher, having more spacious ideas and experience, insisted that that must be altered to ten o’clock the next morning, though what I had said was perfectly accurate. The school day was one round of bickering. If it was not oneself, it was someone else in the class.

§2

I did not stay in that school more than a year. As soon as circumstances were favourable my parents decided to move further out of town, into what was then a little old-fashioned country place, but near enough to town for my father to go and come by train daily. But before I relate what occurred in our new residence I must mention The Four Events of the Year, far more important than the Christian or any other Calendar. These were – in order of importance in our eyes – a week at Blackpool, Christmas, a visit to Hamilton’s Panorama, and a Saturday afternoon at the Zoological Gardens.

At Blackpool the prime thing was to dig in the sand and let the waves supply water to the moats of the castles which you made. It did not outrage our sense of the fitness of things when the waves overdid their business and flooded the whole works. Rather the young mind rejoiced at this opportunity for a spectacle of destruction. Niggers were there, but I admired only their athletic exhibitions, not their blackness, nor their buffoonery, which hurt my feelings, which were over-sensitive to human dignity. Lucky packets absorbed a large number of our pennies. The sense of height was satisfied by walks and play on the pier, [32] especially when the waves roared and bounded about beneath, as waves can at Blackpool. The pier also contained many slot machines, and when I saw other people about to drop their pennies therein I used to buzz along to see the fun. There was only one slot machine that tempted me – a “try your grip” machine, which would give you your penny back if you could ring the bell. I put my penny through again and again, joyously listening to the ringing of the bell when I pulled, until at last I lost it. There must have been something wrong with that machine – a small boy could not have been so strong in the wrist. Another attraction was a phrenologist, with his curious diagrams and little lectures outside his tent. I sunk sixpence on him once and learned that I ought to become a doctor, or failing that an auctioneer, though to this day I cannot see the connection between the two.

Talking of the pier reminds me of my father’s next younger brother, whom we always liked for both his jollity and his largess. He was in “the warehouse” (and, in fact, inherited it when my grandfather died) and consequently was well-to-do. Nearly always when he visited us he would slip coins into our hands on his way to the front door. I recollect that at a very early age he held out before me a large brown coin and a very little white one and asked me which I would have. I chose the threepenny bit, having been born canny in such matters. He and his wife came to Blackpool when we were there. The latter was a profoundly respectable lady, daughter of a clergyman in a family which took religion and social restrictions very seriously. Once my uncle was riding in a tramcar and talking to a friend, and his wife’s father happened to be sitting on the other side in the far corner (the seats used to run the length of the car). The friend got out, and the father-in-law came over and sat beside the son-in-law.

“I am surprised,” he said, “to see you so friendly with that man. Don’t you know that he is a Roman Catholic?”

Well, my uncle was always very jolly (except when he was, not infrequently, steeped in profound melancholy) and at Blackpool there occurred a grand opportunity to have a little game with his wife. She was sitting on a seat at the side of the pier, my father and his brother and we boys being on the sand beneath. Suddenly my uncle looked up to the [33] pier, cupped his hands at the side of his mouth and shouted in the broadest possible Lancashire dialect: “Eh, missus! ’Ast ’ad ta baggin’?” to her great confusion, and to the amusement of the numerous onlookers, who certainly thought they had discovered a shining example of the new rich. Still, she could not be displeased for long with my uncle; he was so genuinely good-natured, even if his playfulness was sometimes embarrassing. Perhaps, by the way, his remark needs translation. It meant nothing more than “Have you had your lunch?”

The journey from our home to Blackpool in the train occupied about an hour and a half, but that was all too long. I used to sit whenever possible with my face to the engine in a corner window seat. I would put my hand against the side of the frame of the window and push as hard as I could, to speed the train along. We used generally to return at night so as to make as much of the holiday as possible. Looking into the darkness through the windows I was much frightened in my younger days by the horrible faces that were to be seen there. Only later on I learnt that they were the reflections of the faces of my fellow-passengers.

Children have a great capacity for looking forward. I believe we began to think about Christmas as soon as the summer holidays were over. Its chief events for us were the presents to be found at the foot of the bed on Christmas morning, a visit to the pantomime, and a tour of the decorated shops. Of all the things ever found at the foot of the bed the most exciting were two watches complete with chains – watches that really went, and told the time, and made us feel very grown up. They had been sent by our jolly uncle. The only thing to mar the full enjoyment of them was the fact that we should have to write letters of thanks – rather a formidable task.

Perhaps some readers of these recollections will remember that the three great symbols of initiation into the brotherhood of men are the first watch, the first pair of long trousers, and the first cigarette. Those watches at least made us feel our novitiate, although we knew that the long trousers and the cigarette were still far ahead.

As to the pantomime, one never understood the story, but the transformation scenes gave a glimpse of other worlds, perhaps of real fairylands in which the hard facts of our world could be escaped at will. One heard some ladies call [34] these scenes heavenly, and formed one’s pictures of heaven accordingly.

Hamilton’s Panorama used to put in its appearance in the largest hall in our city about half-way between Blackpool and Christmas. It must have been a gigantic undertaking for Mr. Hamilton, or whoever was behind the scenes. For about two hours scenes from all over the world would unroll themselves across the back of the stage, accompanied by the most realistic sound and light effects. A ship would come sailing through a smooth starlit sea. Gradually dawn would appear, the sun would rise, and as the day wore on clouds would make their appearance, a storm would blow up and lash the elements into fury. Then lightning, rain and wind would afflict the scene until at last the ship either sank before our eyes or won its way through the storm to a peaceful harbour – and all in the comfortable space of about ten minutes. Within a similar period the Bay of Naples would present its charm, and Vesuvius its fearsome possibilities, while a gentleman in evening dress and a huge moustache explained in an Oxford voice the implications of the scene. And interspersed between these grander demonstrations, a Chinese juggler or conjurer would perform for us in a street in Hong Kong, and Hungarian acrobats would imperil their lives for our delectation in marble halls of Italy or among the minarets of India.

In anticipation of Hamilton’s Panorama, before leaving Blackpool we used to buy little panoramas for twopence each. They were shaped like a stage front, and there were about twenty pictures mounted on rollers. Unfortunately the pictures consisted mostly of scenes of such doubtful educational value as the murder of the little princes in the Tower. I will give them credit, however, for being very realistically executed.

The visit to the Zoo was a movable feast, occurring some time between Christmas and Blackpool, and much dependent on the weather. It was literally a feast, in the restricted modern use of the word, as it always included a period devoted to the consumption of ices – not ice cream, but real ices, which were composed, I suppose, of ice chopped up small and sugared and then served in small saucers. This and the elephant ride were the two chief features of the Zoo. There were animals to look at, but they were not very interesting, being shut up in little enclosures behind bars, and for [35] the most part looking very bored. It was much more interesting to feed the ducks in the park, to see them swim under the little bridges and come out on the other side, though when they put down their heads and stood with their tails out of the water one did not know whether it was proper to continue staring, and wondering at the suppressed giggles of the young ladies standing near by.

§3

One day there came to our house two big furniture vans with splendid heavy-weight horses and three men in thick green aprons, who clumped into the house, drank glasses of beer at one draught, and in a marvellously short time deposited all our belongings on the pavement outside in a sea of straw, for the covert scrutiny of the neighbours, prior to packing them in the vans.

Leaving them to finish their work, my mother took us off by bus, train and foot, seriatim; first, through the suburbs into a big railway station, then in the train – one never ceased wondering how it could go without horses, nor fearing that it would mount the platform as it came with a deafening roar into the station. For five minutes the train clanked across a veritable sea of railway lines, among chimneys and factories; then it went through a long and perfectly dark tunnel, and finally it ran for another five minutes in a cutting with grass on either side, ultimately depositing us in a little country station, with nothing outside but fields and fences.

Fifteen minutes’ walk brought us to some new building activities, a few rows of little houses with small spaces for gardens in front. One of these, number 30 Brookfield Avenue, was our destination, and there really were both a field and a brook within forty or fifty yards – or I should say one brook and many fields, as far as the eye could reach, containing occasional thatched cottages and rambling farmhouses – one of them with black and white gables and the distinction of having been slept in by Queen Elizabeth on one of her journeys to the north.

This was indeed a new world. Often we used to watch the builder’s men preparing for new rows of houses by cutting down the old oak and beech trees, watching with an illusion of participating in the work. In the mornings we would [36] walk the long distance – on a footpath, with a field of poppies on one side, an orchard on the other, through the cobbled yard of a farm, then along a road through “the old village,” past the smithy – often lingering to see a horse shod, or a piece of iron hammered into shape on the anvil, to the accompaniment of glittering sparks, which never hurt the big strong man in the leather apron – past a few little shops with window panes six inches square, and round a corner to the old school, which stood in a garden, looked like a church, and was a thousand times nicer outside than in. In front of the school was the village green – a small triangle of land, having at one point “the old church” and on the other two sides of the triangle respectively, a little thatched farm and a public-house with a swinging sign.

In the school – twopence a week this time – we were taught by a fat girl with a big flat face. I remember her name, but forbear to mention it. She liked history, I think, for she awoke our young English blood to patriotism with her accounts of Caractacus and Cassivellaunus and Boadicea, and dropped us to depths of gloom and horror with her grim stories of the many civil wars of England. She added also to our already awakened pessimism a picture of probable wars to come.

The boys were a rough lot, speaking an only half intelligible language. The first day, at close of school, a big fellow came up to me.

“I can fight you,” he announced. He did, too, in a ring of ghoulish onlookers, but I do not remember to have been much hurt, and nobody troubled me any more with attentions of that kind.

There was, however, a disagreeable group of boys who used to shout from the other side of the road when some of us were walking home. One of these – the most troublesome – rejoiced in the name of Livingstone. One day, these boys were shouting something particularly offensive from a distance behind us, and in exasperation I picked up a flint from the side of the path and threw it at them, not intending to hurt but only to frighten them. With beginner’s luck – ill-luck this time – I hit Livingstone fair and square on the head. It was several weeks before he could return to school.

I expected dire consequences, but nothing happened.

Evidently the boys kept the matter to themselves and [37] invented some excuse for the broken head. But they must have regarded me as a potential Chicago gangster, something quite the reverse of truth, for I was physically nervous. I did almost everything from a motive of cowardice. Our teachers seemed to encourage that ignoble motive, for they were always telling us to study hard so that we might save ourselves from being among those whose faces are walked upon in the battle of life, to take physical exercises so as to avoid disease, to be honest so as to avoid prison, to be good so that God would not send us to hell, and finally and above all to obey themselves, in order to avoid a whacking.

I was really sorry that I hit poor Livingstone on the head, for I bore him no malice. Nevertheless, by some peculiarity of fate or coincidence, I have been repaid in kind and with interest for that injury. In the half-dozen or so motor-car and other accidents in which I have since participated I have invariably been injured on the head and nowhere else. Fate began to work in this direction comparatively soon after the incident I have mentioned. One day I had been much out of sorts, and I was lying on the sofa while my mother was sewing near the window at the other side of the room. Suddenly I said to myself: “It is all nonsense lying here feeling sick. The thing to do is to get up and do something!” With a leap I jumped up from the sofa, only to meet the corner of an open cupboard door just above my head.

I have never seen a woman cry as my mother did as she took me into her arms in a rocking-chair and mopped up the blood with several towels. When I was able to go back to school I was the proud bearer for weeks of a conspicuous patch of sticking plaster on a partially shaved head. The spot still remains without hair, although it is now threatening to merge itself into that bright and shining place where there is no parting.

Perhaps I owed something in the bank of fate, too, on account of the numerous jacksharps, tadpoles, moths and caterpillars which had met an untimely fate at my hands, having been incarcerated in various bowls, jars and boxes which were evidently not suited to them. But I was never cruel, like some of the boys, who used to catch frogs, insert straws into their recta and blow them up until they burst. Or like the cartmen who were bringing bricks to the houses opposite, who, when language failed, used to kick their [38] horses in the stomach with their hobnailed boots in order to force them over the rougher parts. Or like the farmer whom I once watched through the hedge of the village green as he walked about his garden, picked up one duck after another, slit its throat with his penknife and then put it down again on the ground, where it walked a few feet and then threw a somersault backwards. Or like those other farmers who hung the squealing pigs by the back legs while they poured boiling water over them so that the bristles might come out more easily afterwards. But once more I am in danger of digressing.

I was speaking, I think, of luck, in connection with stone-throwing. I had another stroke of luck one day, or rather one night. Once a travelling fair came to our village and set itself up on a vacant plot of ground beside the police station. One evening my brother and I begged twopence each and went off with a few friends to enjoy ourselves thereat. First I turned my attention to the roulette wheel. One put a halfpenny on a chosen number on the circle which surrounded a spinning pointer. The man in charge spun the wheel, and if the pointer stopped opposite the number containing the coin one received a coco-nut. Failing that, the halfpenny was irretrievably lost, with nothing to show for it. Down went my halfpenny, I got a coco-nut. As I did not want the coco-nut, I sold it back to the man for twopence. I suppose he thought he would get the twopence back. Thirteen times running this phenomenon was repeated. Calculate – thirteen twopences, minus thirteen halfpennies. I was beginning to be in clover. On the fourteenth turn I lost, pocketed my balance and, with a deaf ear to the man who was urging me to try again, turned away. I shared the money in equal parts with my friends, who quite logically maintained that they deserved it as much as I did and watched them spend it on swings and roundabouts, while I kept my portion, to go home triumphantly about as rich as I had come out, which could be said of few people who attended that fair. I think I shall never play at Monte Carlo, for no one can expect such luck twice in a lifetime. Only once have I ventured to lay down any stakes at roulette – in the Casino at Santos in Brazil – when I found this axiom duly confirmed. [39]

§4

We had the luck of being removed from the twopenny school after a few months. Whether my grandfather had suddenly melted, and decided no longer to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, or whether my father had made one of his periodical advances in the business world, I do not know. Anyhow, we were sent to what was considered the best private high school within reach. It was rather a small affair – about a hundred boys.

We were excited by the playground, which was actually composed partly of grass, on which we could have splendid games of leap frog and “cappy” without hurting ourselves too much. The idea of the last was that one boy would make a back over which the others had to go in turn, each leaving his cap behind. Sooner or later one of the leapers would upset the caps, and would then have to make a “back.”

There was also a greenhouse in that playground, but I fancy the chief thing about it was the schoolmaster’s son, who used to sit there smoking a pipe, to keep the insects off the plants, he said. I suppose this exhibition must have started many boys smoking surreptitiously. I was once induced to go shares in the expenses of a packet of cigarettes. I tried one of them behind a wall, and decided that as an amusement smoking was overrated, and though as an assertion of manhood it might have its points, a halfpenny in the pocket was much more desirable than a cigarette in the mouth.

It was about this time that my brief musical career began. When our piano first arrived I had solemnly announced to my father that I did not intend to learn to play in the ordinary way; I simply wanted to make a noise by knocking on the keys. However, he firmly informed me that I must learn properly or leave it alone. The upshot of it was that once a week my brother and I went to the house of a little old lady (that is what we called Miss Nash, though probably she was only about thirty – for such is the judgment of the young) and made a sufficient progress with her help and an hour’s practice every day. It was a tiresome obstacle that my hands were too small to stretch an octave, though I gradually overcame this difficulty with regard to the left hand only, by forcing my thumb to become double jointed at the root, thus increasing my span by nearly an inch. [40]

At Blackpool I had been much impressed by the sound of a mandoline, played in a concert on the pier, and nothing would satisfy me but to add this also to my musical accomplishments. My indulgent father immediately bought one of the instruments and brought it home. For some time I learnt to play alone, and afterwards at the big school of music in the city, where they brought me to the point of playing in public. I nearly became a professional musician at the age of thirteen, as will shortly appear.

It was now time for us to remove again to a new house. My mother always absolutely refused to have one which had been occupied by anybody before. She seemed to have an idea that it would retain emanations from the previous occupants. We removed a very short distance to a high-standing three-storied house directly overlooking a beautiful meadow containing many oak and beech trees. This meadow had the form of a valley, the brook already mentioned running down the middle. It had also the great merit of being accessible for play, as a public path ran across it. It was a fine place for flying kites, which we used to make for ourselves often in fantastic shapes. One of mine took the form of a phrenological head marked with the localities of the various faculties, copied from a chart issued by the professor of the art on Blackpool sands.

Safety bicycles now came within our ken. The word safety has long been dropped, but it was used then to distinguish the new bicycles having wheels about the same size from the old ones which had one big wheel in front, with pedals attached to its hubs, and a tiny little wheel behind. We used occasionally to watch performers on the old type of bicycle – I say performers because they were rarely riders, but seemed to spend most of their time getting on and falling off. We saw, too, the big roller skates, with wheels which appeared about nine inches in diameter. A man ran from London to Manchester on these and we saw him pass. It seemed terribly dangerous. I wondered if he had any sort of braking arrangement. I saw, too, one of the first motor-cars, with a man running in front shouting and waving a red flag, as required by law.

The new safety bicycles were heavy things, with solid rubber tyres and no free wheel. My father bought one cheap from a man who had been stopped in a country road by a burly fellow who grasped his handlebar and demanded his [41] money. Though the cyclist had saved his money by pulling a spanner out of his pocket and with it dealing a smashing blow to the hand on the handlebar, and then riding swiftly away, the incident had spoiled his taste for cycling in the country.

A second bicycle, for my elder brother, soon appeared. Then, of course, the question of one for me arose. One Saturday afternoon my father and mother and I looked at a small-size bicycle in one of the big shops. It was, alas, very expensive – about five pounds. We had walked some distance away from the shop in silence and gloom, when I heard my mother say quietly to my father: “Think of the child’s feelings -” My mother was that said-to-be-rare phenomenon, a woman who does not speak much. She could always convey a lot of meaning, however, in half a dozen words.

My father went back to the shop alone and later arrived home, having ridden with great difficulty on the tiny machine, with his knees knocking the handle-bar at every rotation. So I became the possessor not of a heavy old hard-tyred second-hand bicycle, but of a brand new machine having the marvellous pneumatic tyres, which had only just come in and about which we and apparently even the shop-man knew so little at first that my father had actually ridden it home on flat tyres, not knowing that they had to be pumped up. Fortunately it did not spoil them.

How my brother and I cleaned those bicycles, down even to the ball bearings, in preparation for the Sunday morning rides which our father took with us all over the surrounding country-side! My mother, however, could not be persuaded to become one of “the new women,” who at that date began to go on bicycles and were generally treated to rude remarks and sometimes to stones. She was free to come, as we had by then a maid, or rather a succession of maids. One of them, I remember, new from the country, blackleaded all the spoons, with disastrous effect when we started to eat our boiled eggs!

§5

Although our new school was considered to be very highly respectable, and intended for the “sons of gentlemen” (there might have been no ladies involved from the little one heard of them in this connection) things were not [42] entirely what they seemed. There were some rough boys, a Jew bullies, and some worse than that. I remember an occasion when two of these bullies hoisted me on their shoulders to carry me off somewhere for purposes of petty torture, but I managed to free myself at the expense of a nasty bump, by giving one of them a kick in the ear with all my force. They dropped me to the ground, upon which I ran across the street, put my back to a large plate-glass shop window, and from that vantage pelted them with stones until they went away.

I used sometimes to see some of the boys rolling on the grass; one would be on his back and the others apparently playfully pulling off his clothes. I did not like that sort of rough and tumble, and I vowed that if any of them subjected me to those indignities I would not stop short of killing them. Only years afterwards I learnt from one of them that those invasions of one another’s privacy were a prelude to private instruction in sexual vice. In the vista of years I do not think as badly as I did of those boys. I realize that heredity varies enormously in respect of the sex-excitement and sex-imagination that is such a peculiar and unnatural feature of humanity. It never troubled me. Years afterwards, in translating from Sanskrit, I wrote with regard to a certain type of sinner: “He will be reborn from the womb of a wild cock,” and never noticed the incongruity until somebody showed me a marked copy of my book!

In our family there was always more education in the home than at school. We were voracious readers of weekly papers and novels. At an early age, my brother and I had read all Dickens and a great part of Walter Scott and Thackeray. While still in Brookfield Avenue I had an exercise book containing a list of all the books I had read, and it then numbered over eighty, though among these I included serial stories which I had read in Chums and The Boy’s Own Paper. Also, my father was always willing to teach when we were willing to learn. He started us off with French when I was eight years old, and he taught me also Pitman’s shorthand, in which I ultimately attained the respectable speed of a hundred and eighty words a minute, which I could keep up on the average for an hour and read completely afterwards, and he taught me also a good amount of commercial book-keeping, including double entry. [43]

I think our school was almost useless for learning anything, however excellent its respectability. If a boy could teach himself in it, well and good, not otherwise. Practically nothing was ever explained.

“Form III. Open your geography books, page 54. Study to the end of page 55. I will hear you at four o’clock.” The master would then go out, to obtain a drop for his thirst, duly return in an irritable mood, call our form “up,” and question us. There was much indignation if we had not learnt the lesson, though the idea of teaching it never seemed to enter his mind. He used to give us marks on the results of these questions, and call them out for us to enter in our mark books at the end of the day. Still I got on pretty well. I was eager to learn, and was always running neck and neck at the head of the class with a boy named Carver, about two years older than myself. I had ambitions, and used still at home to make use of the old school books in subjects not taught in the school at our age. I would get down on the floor of the bedroom – somehow I was able to study better on the floor – with Initia Latina until again and again my mother would come in and literally drive me out unwillingly to play.

We had in our school a real army sergeant, full of talk about the Crimean war. He conducted real army drill with wooden imitation rifles, in the playground, often with errand boys jeering over the wall. I detested those wooden rifles, and the sneering tongue of the sergeant, and wanted to have as little as possible to do with them. One day he offered me the corporal’s stripe in our platoon and his indignation when I declined it knew no bounds, I hated the sham of it all.

Two of our fellow-students were Greeks. I very much wanted to make a beginning with Greek, and begged of the elder to teach me the Greek alphabet, which he could rattle off with alluring speed. But the mercenary young scamp demanded too high a price – as much as sixpence, I think – which was more than I could make in a fortnight by selling marbles at half the shop prices, since it had become known that I could win all the marbles that came within reach.

One of our favourite occupations in the school was map-drawing. The son of the schoolmaster, himself a junior master, used to supply us with railway maps from various parts of the world, which we would copy on full sheets of [44] printing paper pinned on our drawing-boards. We had large and expensive drawing-boards, which we were expected occasionally to carry home in black alpaca covers, as also those wooden rifles; this no doubt being a subtle advertisement for the school. It appeared that each boy had one or two favourite colours for doing the outlines of the countries in his maps – mine was pale chrome, and sometimes we used to quarrel on account of our loyalty to our respective colours. We had also favourite towns. Two that struck my fancy particularly were Boston and Philadelphia, and another was the smaller Hyderabad in Sind, where, curiously enough, I was to become Principal of the College later on.

Crayon drawing was also a popular subject – it gave such a good opportunity for many of the boys to stand round the hot stove sharpening their pencils. My brother was a born artist, could draw and paint as well as write beautifully without an effort. Me, I could never write on the line, and drawing was an effort that fatigued me enormously, and produced results that exasperated the drawing master. When he saw such little and such poor results he accused me of idling, and when I denied that, he accused me of lying, for which he lost every atom of respect I might have had for him, though he probably cared as little for my good will as I cared for his.

I had a curious experience, which might be called psychic, about this time. As I was walking home from school, crossing a little street, I seemed to hear a voice, which asked me whether I would rather be tall or short “this time.” I will not attempt to say what peculiarity of the subconscious mind or other cause may have produced this, but will only record that it was perfectly clear, and took me in such a mood that I did not till afterwards wonder what it meant by the curious expression “this time.” I had been for some time in a mood of humility. I wanted to go through life inconspicuously, and I had some subtle and indefinite dislike for anything in the world in the shape of pomp or display. It may have been this which caused me to give the reply, after the slightest hesitation, that I would choose the short. In any case, I scarcely grew for several years, though fortunately I made a bit of a spurt after sixteen, which at last gave me my meagre five feet six inches of height. [45]

At last my brother left school to go to business. I wanted to leave at the same time, for I did not think that school could teach me any more, and I was impatient to be a man and independent. I was then twelve years old. However, everybody decided that I was too young to leave, so I had to spend another year in a class by myself at the top of the school – a little fellow, and younger by years than many of the other boys. Practically I studied by myself for that year. I took some of the ancient school books and showed them to the schoolmaster, and he permitted me to study them by myself, saying that he would help me when I came to any difficulties. His help did not amount to much. I remember going to him with some difficulties in Colenso’s Algebra (I still have the book – about seventy-five years old). Poor man, he had to confess that he had forgotten, and suggest that I should look at the answers and try to work from them backwards.

I had ambitions. I wanted to become a doctor, or failing that a student interpreter in Japan. No luck. What with shortage of money, unkind reports by the schoolmaster – to cover his own shortcomings – and the tradition of business, it was decided that I should become an apprentice in a wholesale warehouse. I was far too young for a shipping firm. [46]

CHAPTER III

JUNIORITY

§1

WHEN I left school my mother pressed that I should be allowed a holiday for some months before being sent to work, and gained her point. But it proved disastrous. I became one of the unemployed even before I was employed. I must have presented myself to twenty or thirty heads of firms before I got a chance. I would be called into the private office and questioned on my scholastic attainments, which were quite satisfactory, and then the trouble would begin, always the same.

“You are very small. You look pale. Are you strong? When did you leave school?” – and then the dreadful question, which I soon learnt to recognize as sealing my fate: “What have you been doing since you left school?” And finally: “Well, we will let you know,” – which they never did, even negatively. I believe there were always anything from twenty to two hundred applicants for those posts.

Some of these people who interviewed me were kindly, but most of them were rude, and a few bullies. One disagreeable man asked if I knew all the streets in the city, and when I replied “Yes,” thinking quite naturally that he meant the main streets, since no one could possibly be expected to know all the others, he blackguarded me disgracefully for a young liar. And this, when I was suffering from truthfulness with regard to the date of leaving school! My discomforts as a truth addict began early.

However, I got a position at last as an apprentice in a millinery warehouse. The proprietor who engaged me was [47] a charming gentleman, and spoke very kindly and encouragingly – he would give me five shillings a week for the first year and I was to go through a three years’ apprenticeship. But unluckily he had as practical manager (the devil for steward, as so often!) a younger brother of his who was rather a freak, six feet three inches tall, and proportionately disagreeable. He had a curious manner and way of speaking which made me wonder whether he was right in the head and was not put there out of a compassion which would be very natural in his brother.

I was in the ribbon department. We supplied some hundreds, I should think, of retail shops. In the early morning I had to see that all the reels of ribbon were neatly arranged on the long counters in the enormous showroom, and, with a feather duster, to see that they were kept free from the minutest speck of dust. In the afternoons our customers would generally come in. Most of them were ladies, probably milliners, for ribbons were much used in ladies’ hats. In the evening two of us would cover everything up with large dust-sheets.

It was part of my work to tie up some of the parcels, for the ribbons could not be sent to the packing-room in an exposed condition. The senior apprentice, after having been told to show me how to do everything, did all in his power to prevent me from getting to know how things were to be done, so that it was some time before I discovered the best way even to turn the string and form the knots of the parcels. Once he demanded money to show me something, but soon came to the conclusion, I think, that if I had not come from Aberdeen I must have had an ancestor who had.

The hours of work for everybody were fairly long in those days. I used to go to town on my father’s train, which left the station at five minutes to seven. He would awaken me at six o’clock, and then we would have an intensive hour working together (it was a period of no maid) making the fire, cleaning the boots, preparing and eating our breakfast and – I look back upon this with surprise – doing ten minutes Sandow exercises, also together (I used dumb-bells weighing eight pounds each), in addition to all the business of getting ourselves ready, including the fixing of stiff collars and cuffs which were very hard on the thumbs.

My father used to wear “solitaire” cuff-links – the kind [48] which came in two pieces, and of which you punched the stem of the head into the socket of the lower piece. I remember a curious incident that occurred before I left school in connection with these. I was walking home, when I saw lying on the pathway the head of a gold cuff link. I put it in my pocket. That evening my father told us that during the day he had lost the head of one of his cuff links. I pulled my find out of my pocket and handed it to him. It fitted perfectly, though of quite a different design from the one he had lost. I never found a cuff-link head before, nor since, nor did he lose one.

Thus our day began with forty minutes’ miscellaneous rather strenuous activities. Then ten minutes’ quick walk in the dark (for a large part of the year) brought us to the railway station. After getting out of the train I had another fifteen minutes’ walk through the city streets to the warehouse, and so I would arrive in good time. The warehouse hours were from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., with an hour’s interval for lunch. Then back through the city streets to the train and through the country lanes from the train home – wash, tea, a game of chess with my father and at last bed. Rather a heavy day for a boy of thirteen, especially in a city where the presence of sulphur in the air, from burning coal, necessitated the weekly removal to the country of the decorative plants growing in tubs in the city square. We were keen chess players at that time; I entered for the “Hobbies” correspondence tournament and came out in the third place.

I lost my job after two or three months. It was decided to remove one of the departments to another room in a distant part of the building. Nothing was to be done during the day, lest a customer come in and find us disarrayed. But at 6 p.m. we were told to start carrying the things. I was already very tired with standing all day, having nothing to eat since breakfast except a very meagre lunch, but I tried to do my share of carrying. By eight o’clock I could hardly walk, but when I said so I was merely rebuked for laziness. By nine I was on the verge of collapse, so I told the department manager that I simply must go home, and I went – without his consent. The next day the general manager came along, about six feet three inches towering above me. He poured out words of indignation, and the end of the conversation, or rather monologue, was that I must [49] leave when the month was up. I left that night, and forfeited whatever wages were due.

§2

Then began again the answering of questions. As I had no reference I had to say I had not been engaged before, which was very galling. And the question as to what I had been doing since I left school was more formidable than ever. Luckily, after a month or two, a warehouse in which my elder brother had worked wanted an apprentice. I applied, and because they had been delighted with my brother they gave me the job, merely remarking: “You don’t look strong.”

At first I was in the ready-mades department – workmen’s shirts, women’s aprons, children’s frocks and what not. Attached to our department was a workroom, with thirty or forty girls incessantly toiling at sewing machines, the sight of whom moved me to the profoundest pity. By working in those dismal surroundings from morning till night for fifty-one weeks in the year they could just keep body and soul together, but they could not clothe themselves well, nor provide themselves with decent and sufficient shoe-leather.

I had once more to keep the stock clean and tidy, open and pack up parcels, box shirts and other things in dozens and half-dozens, layout orders and list the things for sending to the packing room. It had been impressed upon me at home that I was an apprentice and must not allow myself to be put upon for inferior work, particularly that of an errand boy. So I acquired some unpopularity when the head of my department and his first assistant desired me to go out to a little restaurant near by and bring in their tenpenny lunches on a tray, which I refused to do.

After about three months I was transferred to the shirting and quilt department. It was a heavy job to keep those large pieces in order on the racks, to get them down, unpack them and pack them and put them back. In this warehouse we were allowed only half an hour for lunch, but hot water was given to us on the premises, so I had my little store of mixed tea and sugar, and bread and cheese – how glad I was to learn from a magazine that the cheapest kinds of cheese were the most nourishing – and a tin of condensed milk, [50] which was quite dark brown in colour before I had done with it.

This department was managed by one of the partners, who was seldom in. Next to him there was one man, then a senior apprentice, then myself. The conversation of the senor apprentice and his friends who used to drop in from other departments now and then was not edifying. It was mostly about what they called “tarts.”

After I had been in the department some few months it happened that the assistant manager was taken ill and could not come to work, and then the senior apprentice left, so that I was alone in that department, except when the partner in charge happened to come in. Customers rarely came in person, unless they had already made an appointment with him. I had now the task of laying out the orders for the day, entering them in the daybook, making out department invoices, writing letters to the customers when necessary to regret that certain goods were out of stock and to explain when they might be expected, and preparing all the orders for the packing room. In addition to this I had to telephone to various other warehouses and manufacturers’ offices, ordering patterns which had run out of stock, or to explain to other apprentices on outdoor duty for the day where to look for various necessary items, for which I would give them samples, with written orders. All this I managed to do to the satisfaction of my employers – and all on the munificent pay of fifteen shillings a month. Of course, as an apprentice my compensation was supposed to lie in an opportunity to learn the business, which I certainly had in that department.

Now, unluckily for me, it happened once in the middle of a day that one of our biggest customers – a man who would think nothing of ordering a hundred pieces of shirting of one kind at a single time – came in. When he arrived I ran round the warehouse looking for the partner in charge of my department, who would certainly have wanted to see him, but failed to find him, he being out for his two or three hours’ lunch. So I served the customer myself. There was a line that we called “Diamond” shirting, which we sold at 5 1/8 d. per yard, and which our customer sold at 5 1/4 d. – it was by cutting prices that he had such a volume of trade. He wanted some of that.

A new book of patterns had come from the manufacturers [51] a day or two before, but I first let the customer make his selection from the old pattern book and then said: “Would you not like some of these new patterns as well?” bringing out the new cuttings. He was rather amused at my little trick; it mattered nothing to him to order another fifty or sixty pieces, though he had already taken as many as he originally intended. But this was to prove my undoing. When he next met the partner he seems to have indulged in some jocular remark about the size of their “manager” in the shirting and quilt department, though he spoke highly of me. The pride of the firm was wounded. They sent down a young man from another department into mine and requested me to teach him all about everything, and he was then to be my boss! This was too bad, from my limited point of view, and I protested that I was quite capable of carrying on alone.

The head of the firm was a venerable old gentleman, whom we all respected very much. He would even take the trouble to say “Good morning” to all the employees whom he passed, even though they were worth only 3s. 9d. a week! He called me into his private office and reasoned with me. But it was quite hopeless. I could manage their department, but I could not reason. He begged me to have patience, and pointed out how well I might expect to succeed later on. I was an obstinate young donkey. One point I remember very well. He said: “Suppose in your father’s warehouse such a thing had happened. Do you not think your father would want an older man in the department, because of what customers would think?”

But the surly boy only replied with a logical rudeness born of wounded pride: “But it could not happen there, where they have eighteen or twenty men in every department!”

What patience the old gentleman had! Here was I threatening him with notice, and at last he gave in with a sigh for my sake and accepted it, and I for the third time joined the army of unemployed at the age of fourteen.

The mention of my father’s warehouse here requires some comment. I have mentioned that my father had become the manager of a stationery concern, but it happened that by the time of which I am now writing he had joined our family warehouse. “The Guv’nor” had died, and my jolly uncle who, out of five brothers, had solely inherited the [52] business, invited him to join him, which he had done. The two warehouses knew each other, being among the biggest in their respective lines, and the proprietor of mine took it for granted that my father was a man of greater importance in the family concern than he really was. It was only later on that my father became the head of the family business, after my uncle died. In the meantime, my uncle was sole proprietor, and the natural course of things was that his two sons should go into the business and inherit from him, while the rest of the grandchildren should keep outside and be content with certain monetary bequests which “the Guv’nor” had bequeathed them, to become theirs on tile death of their parents.

It might be wondered by those who do not know the customs of city merchants why my benevolent proprietor did not expect me to go into the family warehouse. The explanation is simple: it was not usually considered desirable for the character and development of youngsters that they should serve their apprenticeship in their own family warehouses, where they might become slack in work or in character on account of family indulgence and the superior respect with which the other employees might treat them in view of favours to come.

I must also explain that my brother had left the warehouse where I now worked because he had taken a fancy to retail business. He had gone into a “gents’ outfitters” to learn the business, having been promised a shop of his own – he had a chain of shops in his mind’s eye – when he and the time should be ripe. He had always been interested and careful in his own dress, and therefore was quite at home in that business. In our Sunday afternoon walks when we were still at school, when we had come to the stage at which we were expected to walk along sedately without shaking our bowler hats off our heads, it had been I, not he, who had raised objections to this uncomfortable headgear. I had objected to stiff cuffs and collars and fronts, as well as bowler hats, but had had to submit to them.

It must have gone against me in business that I was careless in dress. As a young man, in fact, I refused to wear anything but cloth caps, which put me rather in the “workman class.” But I had another reason for that. I had been taken one day by my father to see one of the big felt hat manufacturing works at Denton, near [53] Manchester. I saw the chopped fur being blown on to the revolving cones, and in a later stage of the process the felts being washed in steaming vats over which several people were bending. All those workers seemed rather hollow cheeked, but one man was worse than the others. My father commented on this.

“Yes,” replied the proprietor, “he will not last long now. They never last more than about five years at this job.”

To my vivid young mind, the wearing of felt hats was thenceforth to be regarded as nothing short of indirect murder. I had already seen the unhappy girls in the shirt factory. I learnt from my father of other and even worse cases. There was one factory known to him where he had asked why better ventilation was not provided. He learned that there were plenty of windows that would open, but the work-girls objected to their being opened, because the fresher air made them hungry and they could not afford to buy more food.

§3

My third bout of unemployment was more trying than ever. It went on month after month – some six months of the hardest and most soul-destroying kind of work – that of looking for a job. Do not talk to me about unemployment in the nineteen-thirties; it was hellish enough in the eighteen-nineties. My only solace during those days of searching in the city was the public art gallery, where I used to go for an occasional hour, no, not to rest, but to look at the pictures and escape from reality into a more heroic world. I lingered also at the booksellers’ windows, and especially longed for those little books which told how to achieve success in life with nothing but ability and honesty to recommend one, or how to perform miracles of development of character or memory.

I have spoken of our new house. The address was officially 6 Nell Lane, but the inhabitants, not wishing to be regarded as living in a lane, generally called it Clough Road. It had attics, which we had not enjoyed before. One of these attics had been put at my disposal, and I had seen it through several transformations – a gallery for archery, a gymnasium, a theatre – in which I had been sole actor, in various capacities, to an audience of imaginary people on imaginary [54] chairs – and lastly a sort of Venice, which I announced on a placard on the door as

VENICE

on the ADRIATIC SEA

(A dry attic. See?)

I was a little disappointed that nobody ever laughed at it! Sometimes I used to go up there, play my mandoline, and imagine myself in quite another world.

Now, it happened later, during my unemployment, that the biggest department store in the city – Lewis’s – fitted up a tank in its large basement, decorated the entire floor in Italian style, and called the ensemble “Venice.” There was a charge of one penny to enter, and another penny for a tour, which was quite extensive, in a real gondola.

Two or three times when I was searching for work I went down there and lingered for hours trying to make up my mind to ask for the manager, in order to put before him a business proposition which had entered my head and also, in fact, my heart. I thought it might be an additional attraction if they had a small boy playing the mandoline on one of the gondolas. I could play it well enough for public purposes, in fact as well as the average professional, almost as well, I thought, as the German professor and his two daughters who had taught me for some two years in a class of about fifteen girls in the school of music. However, I could not screw up my courage to the working point. I was also afraid of what my mother would say, that she might think I was disgracing the family by becoming a cheap musician in a public place. The incident reacted badly upon my interest in music. I announced to my father, much to his regret, that I must now give up all my music and devote myself entirely to the thought of making money. I rarely played the piano or the mandoline after that, and soon gave them up altogether.

§4

My third period of unemployment bade fair to become permanent, but at last a vacancy arose for an apprentice in a “gents’ outfitting” shop which had been newly opened in our suburb at the end of a row of shops near the railway [55] station. It was thought that I might follow in the same path as my brother and ultimately have a shop – or a chain of shops – of my own.

This time the apprenticeship was a more formal affair, and I had to sign on for three years. Apparently, as the formalities increased the emoluments diminished. I had sunk from five shillings to three shillings and nine pence a week, before, and now the salary was to be nothing for the first year, five shillings a week for the second and I forget what for the third. The hours of work also increased, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays (except for Wednesday, which contained a half-holiday), but to 10 p.m. on Saturdays, with an hour for lunch and an hour for tea. The work was not hard, but some ten hours’ standing and one hour’s quick walking every day proved fatiguing, and often I used to arrive home so tired at night that I had to go upstairs to bed on my hands and knees. I was left alone in the shop a great deal and used to consider it a pleasant thing when a customer came in. I was soon able to do everything connected with the business, except the actual buying of goods – on that side the proprietor seemed anxious that my tuition should be delayed as long as possible. I think that all he wanted was a cheap salesman, which he certainly got!

From beginning to end I disliked the year and a half which I spent in that shop. I used to get tired, as already mentioned. Sometimes my attitude when alone – which was constant, as the proprietor more and more stayed at home, and once he was away for weeks in hospital – might have served as illustration for a modern murder story, as I lolled across the counter in a state of mental as well as physical despair. To add to my distress, my clothes gave me endless trouble. My socks were always coming down (it was before the invention of sock suspenders). My hands were always tensely curled up, trying to hold up my loose cuffs. The stiff loose shirt front was always trying to get through the opening of my waistcoat. One size of collar was too small and the next size was said to look too big. My shoes were heavy and clumsy, but this was my own fault, for I bought them myself and got them like that to thwart a craving in myself for something quite the opposite.

Sometimes in the long idle hours of waiting for customers I used to picture how I could be quite cheerful and comfortable in that shop if I could dress in a style of my own, [56] combining the conveniences of dress worn by all kinds of people – I never thought of sexes as such. There would be long stockings, supported from a light corset, which would save me from the need of lolling on the counter, would give my back comfortable support through the long hours of waiting and provide a convenient place for a belt to hold knickers buttoning beneath the knee. There would be some soft kind of tennis shirt – emphatically no collar, nor front, nor cuffs, nor hard hat. There would be no waistcoat, but a simple coat. There would be light shoes, shaped so as not to press the toes sideways, and with perhaps a two inch heel to add a little to my height, which I was then beginning to desire increased, for practical convenience in association with other people.

I think that for the most part I hit in my imagination upon a costume which would have made mankind healthier and happier if it could have been introduced, though it was certainly not in keeping with aspiration for success in the “gents’ outfitting” business! It would have made all the difference in my own life. It may be that there was some morbidity in part of it, but as I look back upon it I see that it contained not only a desire for relief from very real and constant discomfort, but also a longing for something positive in the way of lightness and refinement – a desire for material spirituality.

But all that was not to be, and I remained thoroughly out of accord with my environment. The demands of a ridiculous and cruel orthodoxy in dress, associated with caste ideas (in America they talk of the “white collar” class, but we had no word for it in England), have always been inexorable. I remember when I was at school that one day there came along the street a gentleman wearing a soft felt hat dinted in at the top. The boys ran after him shouting, “Trilby, Trilby!” I was the only one not to share in that pursuit, though I too thought the hat an absurd shape. Perhaps the masculine element of mankind is a bit cynically acceptive of coarseness and earthiness. A rough assertiveness, even if clumsy and unintelligent, adds to its sense of personality or life.

It would be interesting to record the beginnings of adolescence. But that does not seem possible. Either there was nothing in particular or I cannot remember it. Such slight physical discomfort as I may have had was not [57] associated with any sexual imaginings. I am quite sure that I never dreamed or thought about girls or women. I knew that men and women got married and set up joint establishments, but I did not know that there was any physical connection between men and women, either for pleasure or the production of children. I must have been unusually unknowledgeable for my age in such matters.

Where did my thoughts run? I am afraid they were mostly negative, preoccupied with present discomforts and future economics, with only an occasional lifting of the imagination to pictures of freedom, open skies, sunshine and foreign travel, though at the same time I knew that these could not satisfy me, for I wanted to solve the economic problem for everybody, not only for myself, though that came first.

Two or three times I had been to the city to an old house which had fallen on evil times, to get the shirts cut to measure by my employer for his richer patrons. My destination was one room, bare of furniture but for a sewing machine, a crooked table, some broken chairs, a screen, and a dirty mattress laid on the floor in one corner. There were an old woman and two girls, the former bent out of human shape, with red eyes, an underlip hanging far over (from constant wetting of thread) and a thickened flattened thumb (from pressing the cloth), the latter preparing for the same dreadful fate. With my own eyes I had seen something which might well have inspired Hood’s

Stitch, stitch, stitch ...

In poverty, hunger and dirt.

I had not been at the shop more than a few months when I was saved the long walk several times a day by our removal from Clough Road to 12 Silverdale Road – I am bound to say that builder had a genius for inventing fetching names for his streets. The new house was only two or three minutes’ walk away from the shop, and this time it was not rented but bought outright – a nice semi-detached house with a good-sized lawn, on which one could, and did, play croquet. On this occasion my employer earned a bit more of my dislike by quoting, I suppose for want of something else to say, that three removals were as bad as a fire, which I – absurdly sensitive as usual – took to be a criticism of my father, which I could not tolerate. [58]

It was at this period that I made my first experiments in Indian Yoga. I found an article in a popular magazine, describing how the yogis developed extraordinary powers by means of special methods of breathing. I felt that I needed special powers, since the ordinary ones seemed of little use in life unless conjoined by some chance with special opportunities. So once, in the midday, when I had the shop to myself, I went into the back room (which had been newly acquired and contained a chair) and sat down to practise the breathing exercises prescribed. I did it for about forty minutes. At that point I heard somebody come into the shop. I rose from the chair and walked to the front room without feeling the floor I walked on or any sense of my own weight. My employer entered and asked for a pair of scissors, which I found and handed to him without any feeling of the article or sense of its weight. I must have looked peculiar in some way, for I remember he stared at me very hard and with a surprised expression. The incident passed off. Gradually my sense of touch and weight returned. I did not perform the experiment again, as I considered it to be dangerous. Still it remained in my mind as an interesting possibility, to be pursued further if an opportunity for greater knowledge in connection with it should turn up.

Another occult possibility came within my ken about this time. When we were out cycling one Sunday morning my father told me about a lecture of Mrs. Besant’s which he had just attended. She had spoken of visits to the worlds of the dead, describing the modes of life of the departed as continuing the mental and emotional interests with which they had left the earth, and she had concluded by saying that almost anybody who would take the trouble could develop the use of astral and mental bodies so as to move in those worlds and observe for themselves. I vowed to myself that I would hear Mrs. Besant on her next visit, and would do this thing myself if it were really true. These were dangerous subjects, I knew – populus vult decipi – but I would be scientific about them. [59]

CHAPTER IV

MASTERY

§1

LIKE many other boys, I had in my schooldays collected foreign stamps, and in my last year at school I had been in the habit of exchanging and selling my duplicates, and had even done some selling for a London firm on a commission which I shared with the purchasers. It happened that while I was at the shop I one day saw an advertisement of an old stamp collection for sale for £7. I went to see it, and knew it for a rare bargain. I had, however, only £2 saved up. I borrowed £5 from my father, promising to repay the amount soon, and bought the collection.

I started to sell the collection piecemeal. Within a week my father had his money back – much to his surprise – I was some pounds in pocket and I had still most of the stamps in stock.

I began to deal. I advertised cheap packets of stamps in some of the weekly and monthly magazines, and with the packets I sent out “approval sheets” of a better class of stamps than those which appeared in the packets. Within a month I was doing a roaring trade. There was a good element of luck in it. I happened to get that collection and to hit the market at a favourable moment, not at the time of financial depression. I was thus able to obtain the business of a large number of boys in the public schools and also a certain number of more mature collectors. I opened up trade connections with prominent dealers, and began to import the cheaper stamps in sacks containing a million each, from the collections made by Swiss convents. I was also selling these by tens of thousands by weight, after picking them over and extracting the unusual kinds. This [60] work occupied my Sundays, my Wednesday afternoons, my early mornings and the greater part of my lunch and tea hours. My father, always ready to help his sons in any way, used to come up into the attic to help me in his spare time. My elder brother had by now gone to live in another town, where he was employed. My younger brother was at school.

After some time and discussion my employer consented to the cancellation of my agreement of apprenticeship, so, with a joyous heart, I bade good-bye to warehouses and retail shops, to stiff collars and fronts and loose cuffs.

Very shortly afterwards I rented the living quarters over a large stationery and toyshop, and began to employ clerks. At first two, then three and more until at the age of sixteen I had sixteen clerks in my office. These were all girls.

I employed girls instead of men, not because they were cheaper, but because my father emphatically assured me that they were steadier for simple work, more honest (my business offered many opportunities for theft), more contented, and less likely to learn my methods of business in order to go away and start rival businesses, perhaps with a list of my customers in the pocket. He also hinted to me that apart from business this method had, however, its dangers, and impressed upon me again and again the blessings of a bachelor’s life. He was not thinking of immorality; I fancy he knew that I was as safe from that as the Bank of England, so to speak; but there might be several young ladies who would not object to marrying my business, however lacking in charms the proprietor thereof.

I did, in fact, fall in love with the very first girl I engaged, and even before I engaged her, during the five minutes’ preliminary interview. She was a handsome girl, with large brown eyes and a smile which, when she let it loose towards the termination of our interview, nearly carried me off my feet. She was a typical “Gibson girl” – the style of the period – of the same age and just as tall as myself, with a pompadour, a blouse and skirt costume with an unbelievably small waist, and shoes – which I disapproved, for anything in the nature of voluntary deformity always made me feel quite sick – which must have been pushing her big toe very much out of line.

I never gave her the slightest indication of my devotion, though it lasted for several years, and we were together all day, laughing and chatting over our work. There is no [61] doubt that I should have let myself go sooner or later – a little later rather than sooner – but for one fact. She used to come to business by train, and some weeks after our first meeting I heard, from her conversation with the other girls – which was not concealed from me, as I did not try to stop my employees from talking, since I wanted them to enjoy themselves while they worked – that she had met on the train a young city clerk or secretary in a good position in the Ship Canal (which turned out to be perfectly true) who had become very much attached to her and used to take her out to theatres and other entertainments. She liked him, too.

That was enough for me. I reasoned it out that the young man concerned was in a better position to make her happy than I was, untrained as I was to society and theatres and dancing, and my business after all was not a very safe one in economic emergencies, as I dealt only in luxuries. I had indulged in pictures of good business and a happy wife with a little child in her arms (though, believe me, I did not yet know that there was such a thing as physical connection between man and woman and the birth of children thereby), but I put these aside decisively and finally when the other young man appeared on the scenes, and rigidly confined myself to a “fatherly” interest after that. Y ears afterwards they were married. I met her again some fourteen years after we parted; she was happy and well kept and very fond of a little daughter.

§2

This girl became my head clerk, and manageress whenever I was not on the spot. She was very intelligent, and flung all her vivacity and energy into the business as if it were her own. She was an expert typist, playing the whole keyboard with one finger of each hand, after the fashion of those days. She could rattle off letters by the dozen, once given the idea of the points to be written about. I had a card-index system of my own invention, which was a great time-saver. It was a little tricky, but she understood it and could handle it perfectly. It was no mean business that I was carrying on, for it was not at all unusual for me to have to open five hundred letters in the morning mail, and I used to make it a practice to clear out all orders on the same day, [62] even those which came by the afternoon post. I had an old four-wheeler “growler” – horse cab – to take my mails to the post office; nothing so musty exists on earth now, I think.

I took care to pay wages about fifteen per cent above the market, and most of the girls were fairly happy. One, an orphan, had a cruel time living with a distant relative who expected her to be general servant as well as to bring in some money every week, but I could do nothing about that. One was absolutely alone and entirely dependent upon the small wage she received from me; I could never send her away, though she proved to be very slow and incompetent. Two or three of them were rather down at heel, especially one girl who had some younger brothers and sisters to help to maintain. One was a clergyman’s daughter, a delicate, pretty girl, with a club foot; she was the only one who objected to take her turn at making the fire, because she said she was afraid that her mother would take her away if she did, and then she would not have her pocket-money. We had all sorts.

The conversation of the girls was always interesting and laughter was constantly passing round the tables. It was always clean, in contrast with that of the young men I had known in business. Rarely, there was a little bit of spitefulness. I remember an occasion near the beginning, when the head girl was wearing a blue serge dress, which was probably home-made and had represented a good deal of economy and care. One or two of the other girls made fun of it, quite unnecessarily. She was greatly upset and did not wear it again. I very much wanted to tell her that I liked her better in that dress than any other, but I dared not rise to such intimacy. Altogether, the company of those girls was much to my taste, even if it did partake somewhat of the nature of a musical comedy scene. When my religious aunt was visiting our house one day she expressed wonder that I did not fall in love with one of them. I startled her by replying – without thought – that there was safety in numbers.

I was a firm believer in the adage that it pays to advertise. Every week I used to make a careful estimate of my profits, and at least half of them I would immediately put into advertising, while most of the other half went to increasing the stock. I was also quite willing to sell some stamps at [63] a loss in order to make a profit on others. The cheap packets of stamps which I advertised and sold at twenty-five per cent less than the actual cost to me of the stamps contained in them brought me thousands of customers, from many of whom I obtained further business, once my catalogue and approval selections were in their hands.

In my regular lines I did not raise the price to compensate for these losses, which I regarded as part of my advertising expenses, but on the whole I sold well under the general market, as I worked on the principle of small profits and quick returns.

Another little stroke of luck came for me at this time in the sudden enthusiasm for penny post throughout the Empire. It became possible to send letters under two ounces weight to all parts of the Empire, except, I think, Rhodesia, for one penny. This may seem a small matter, but it instantly increased my trade with the Colonies about tenfold. That postal arrangement was entirely reciprocal, very much in contrast with the present, when the Englishman sending his letter to India puts on it a 1 1/2 d. stamp, but the poor Indian posting his to England must put on 2 1/2 annas, equal to about 2 3/4 d.

After about a year I began to find my premises altogether too small. As no suitable building was available for rent I decided to build. My father disliked the idea of my stock lying practically unprotected in a vacant office at nights, so he suggested selling his house and building a new one along with my proposed new office. First we planned a house with a huge basement for my business, but my mother objected to that idea because it would bring business and employees actually into her house, even if there were a separate entrance to the basement. We then decided on a two-storied office, each floor sixty by eighteen feet, to stand in the garden at the side of the new house. All this took many months to build, as it was a year of abnormal rains and the contractors also got themselves into some financial difficulties.

Before we moved, however, I had an experience which bade fair to terminate the entire proceedings, as far as I was concerned. My upper lip began to swell and become hard, then my cheek and forehead, and then the side of the head near the temple. I lay in the front bedroom in Silverdale Road. It was an abnormally hot season, and I could [64] hear the hum of a mosquito in the room – a rare thing in the north of England.

The doctor came and did what he could. He opened the swelling, but nothing would come out. Then I heard my father and the doctor talking in the adjacent bathroom. They forgot that the walls were very thin. My father said, in a broken voice: “He was a good boy” – was, mind you. The past tense was quite unequivocal. I told myself that I did not want to die, just when I was beginning, at the age of seventeen, to get a bit of success and fun out of life.

The doctor said that if I survived the night he would make another trial to get the stuff out in the morning. He duly arrived with an instrument shaped like a glove-stretcher, made an opening in my lip, pushed the long end of the instrument in gradually, about as far as my eye, and stretched it open a bit by means of the handles, which he then told me to hold while he knelt on the side of the bed and pressed his knuckles on my face with all his weight behind them. I thought the bones would cave in under the pressure. Fortunately he succeeded in squeezing out some of the bad matter, a hard greenish substance. The doctor insisted that I was a brick, but I rather thought it was the bones that had proved themselves of that category.

That day the weather broke. Rain fell in torrents. The trains were running a foot deep in water in the railway cutting. The air became cool. I felt immediate relief, and in a few days was able to attend to my work in a modified degree. In the interval my father had carried on the selling end of the business with the aid of the head girl. [65]

CHAPTER V

FRATERNITY

§1

SHORTLY after we removed, Mrs. Besant came again to our city, and gave two lectures in a small hall seating about six hundred people. I went with my father to hear her. She had a sort of superhuman halo or atmosphere about her. She did not carry herself or act like other people. All the people present seemed to believe that she walked as easily in the worlds of the dead as in those of the living, or at least were impressed by her sincerity and held the idea that “it might be so.” Her fluent words, impressive voice and holy manner, and the importance of the subject combined to produce an atmosphere intense, devout and even aspirational. I was quite carried away, though I cannot remember the subject of her oration.

On the occasion of a second lecture I bought at the door a book of hers called In the Outer Court. I was greatly impressed by it and read it again and again. The heights to which a human being could climb thrilled me; the practical ways in which this could be done called for instant endeavour. They were simply the old time-worn formulae of virtue, but carried to their climax with uncompromising rigidity – spotless truth, love for all, even for those who hate and hurt, perfect control of thought, the building of character by imagination, purity and above all self-sacrifice. The climax dwelt upon words quoted by her from another book, as follows:

Before the eyes can see they must be incapable of tears.

Before the ear can hear it must have lost its sensitiveness.

Before the voice can speak in the presence of the Masters it must have lost the power to wound.

Before the soul can stand in the presence of the Masters its feet must be washed in the blood of the heart. [66]

Mrs. Besant held the crucible theory. We must make ourselves into crucibles, standing in the fire while in us the evils of the world are transformed to good. My father was not quite so much impressed as I. He remarked that when such a little book was sold for two shillings, somebody must be getting something out of it.

It happened perhaps a year before this time that my jolly uncle gave to my father an extract from The Light of Asia, which had been given to him in turn by a doctor friend of his who was a student of mystical literature. My uncle had a passion for poetry. One afternoon, when my elder brother was with us, I entered the kitchen and found him leaning against the dresser, obviously thinking hard, with a slip of paper – this extract – in his hand. He said: “Have you read this?”

I took the paper, and read of Buddha carrying the wounded lamb down the hill-side to the hall of sacrifice, and speaking to the king such words as made the priests hide their crimsoned hands:

While still our Lord went on, teaching how fair

This earth were if all living things be linked

In friendliness and common use of foods,

Bloodless and pure; the golden grain, bright fruits,

Sweet herbs which grow for all, the waters wan,

Sufficient drinks and meats. Which when these heard

The might of gentleness so conquered them,

The priests themselves scattered their altar-flames

And through the land next day passed a decree

Proclaimed by criers, and in this way graved

On rock and column: “Thus the King’s will is:

There hath been slaughter for the sacrifice

And slaying for the meat, but henceforth none

Shall spill the blood of life or taste of flesh,

Seeing that knowledge grows, and life is one,

And mercy cometh to the merciful.”

My brother said: “If you will become a vegetarian, I will.”

“All right,” said I.

From that moment we were vegetarians, though my mother put up a good deal of opposition, fearing that we would lose our health. My father also would have become a vegetarian then, but for his consideration for her feelings.

We listened to all the arguments against vegetarianism, but none of them was sufficiently convincing to counteract [67] the moral issue. It was said by some that the animals would overrun the earth if we did not destroy them for food. The Chinese might as well argue to the American that his continent would be overrun by frogs if he persisted in his foolish policy of not eating frogs. On the contrary it is found necessary to breed animals by the million to fill the meat markets. This very aspect of the matter, however, constituted in my eyes the greatest argument in favour of flesh food.

I was once, years later, speaking to a lady on a boat, and she put me this issue: “But do you not realize that if we did not eat meat there would be millions of animals which would never have any life at all?”

A bit Irish, perhaps, but I understood, and replied: “Yes. I could be reconciled to that idea, if we could have an agreement that every animal before being killed should be given its share of the bargain, that is, a reasonable long life, at least to the other side of maturity, and there should be no lamb and sucking pig on our tables, and no horrors such as pate de foie gras, goose liver produced by nailing the bird’s feet permanently to a board so as to deprive it of all exercise, and stuffing food forcibly down its throat so as to enlarge its liver.”

There was no answer to this. Besides, if it is on the ground of providing life to other creatures that we ought to eat them, we ought on the same ground to insist on using horse-carriages and refuse the use of motor-cars for ordinary short-distance traffic. A city taxi-cab should be