Chapter 3

Assuredly I must have delighted in all those aspects, or
why should I remember them so well? But I recall, I mean, no confessed
recognition of them; no deliberate going-out of my spirit, open and
unashamed, to such things.

I suppose one's early adolescence is necessarily the period of maximum
shyness in one's life. Even to Raymond I attempted no extremities of
confidence. Even to myself I tried to be the thing that was expected of
me. I professed a modest desire for temperate and tolerable achievement
in life, though deep in my lost depths I wanted passionately to excel; I
worked hard, much harder than I allowed to appear, and I said I did it
for the credit of the school; I affected a dignified loyalty to queen
and country and church; I pretended a stoical disdain for appetites and
delights and all the arts, though now and then a chance fragment of
poetry would light me like a fire, or a lovely picture stir unwonted
urgencies, though visions of delight haunted the shadows of my
imagination and did not always fly when I regarded them. But on the
other hand I affected an interest in games that I was far from feeling.
Of some boys I was violently jealous, and this also I masked beneath a
generous appreciation. Certain popularities I applauded while I doubted.
Whatever my intimate motives I became less and less disposed to obey
them until I had translated them into a plausible rendering of the
accepted code. If I could not so translate them I found it wise to
control them. When I wanted urgently one summer to wander by night over
the hills towards Kestering and lie upon heather and look up at the
stars and wonder about them, I cast about and at last hit upon the
well-known and approved sport of treacling for moths, as a cloak for so
strange an indulgence.

I must have known even then what a mask and front I was, because I knew
quite well how things were with other people. I listened politely and
respected and understood the admirable explanations of my friends. When
some fellow got a scholarship unexpectedly and declared it was rotten
bad luck on the other chap, seeing the papers he had done, and doubted
whether he shouldn't resign, I had an intuitive knowledge that he
wouldn't resign, and I do not remember any time in my career as the
respectful listener to Mr. Siddons' aspirations for service and
devotion, when I did not perceive quite clearly his undeviating eye upon
a bishopric. He thought of gaiters though he talked of wings.

How firmly the bonds of an old relationship can hold one! I remember
when a few years ago he reached that toiled-for goal, I wrote in a tone
of gratified surprise that in this blatant age, such disinterested
effort as his should receive even so belated a recognition. Yet what
else was there for me to write? We all have our Siddonses, with whom
there are no alternatives but insincerity or a disproportionate
destructiveness. I am still largely Siddonsized, little son, and so, I
fear, you will have to be.

§ 7

The clue to all the perplexities of law and custom lies in this, that
human association is an artificiality. We do not run together naturally
and easily as grazing deer do or feeding starlings or a shoal of fish.
We are a sort of creature which is only resuming association after a
long heredity of extreme separation. We are beings strongly
individualized, we are dominated by that passion which is no more and
no less than individuality in action,--jealousy. Jealousy is a fierce
insistence on ourselves, an instinctive intolerance of our
fellow-creatures, ranging between an insatiable aggression as its
buoyant phase and a savage defensiveness when it is touched by fear. In
our expansive moments we want to dominate and control everyone and
destroy every unlikeness to ourselves; in our recessive phases our homes
are our castles and we want to be let alone.

Now all law, all social order, all custom, is a patch-up and a
concession to this separating passion of self-insistence. It is an
evasion of conflict and social death. Human society is as yet only a
truce and not an alliance.

When you understand that, you will begin to understand a thousand
perplexing things in legislation and social life. You will understand
the necessity of all those restrictions that are called
"conventionality," and the inevitableness of the general hostility to
singularity. To be exceptional is to assert a difference, to disregard
the banked-up forces of jealousy and break the essential conditions of
the social contract. It invites either resentment or aggression. So we
all wear much the same clothing, affect modesty, use the same phrases,
respect one another's "rights," and pretend a greater disinterestedness
than we feel....

You have to face this reality as you must face all reality. This is the
reality of laws and government; this is the reality of customs and
institutions; _a convention between jealousies_. This is reality, just
as the cat's way with the nestlings was reality, and the squealing rat
one smashed in a paroxysm of cruelty and disgust in the barn.

But it isn't the only reality. Equally real is the passionate revolt of
my heart against cruelty, and the deep fluctuating impulse not to
pretend, to set aside fear and jealousy, to come nakedly out of the
compromises and secretive methods of every-day living into the light,
into a wide impersonal love, into a new way of living for mankind....

CHAPTER THE THIRD

INTENTIONS AND THE LADY MARY CHRISTIAN

§ 1

I know that before the end of my Harbury days I was already dreaming of
a Career, of some great and conspicuous usefulness in the world. That
has always haunted my mind and haunts it now. I may be cured perhaps of
the large and showy anticipations of youth, I may have learnt to drop
the "great and conspicuous," but still I find it necessary to believe
that I matter, that I play a part no one else can play in a progress, in
a universal scheme moving towards triumphant ends.

Almost wholly I think I was dreaming of public service in those days.
The Harbury tradition pointed steadfastly towards the state, and all my
world was bare of allurements to any other type of ambition. Success in
art or literature did not appeal to us, and a Harbury boy would as soon
think of being a great tinker as a great philosopher. Science we called
"stinks"; our three science masters were _ex officio_ ridiculous and the
practical laboratory a refuge for oddities. But a good half of our
fathers at least were peers or members of parliament, and our sense of
politics was close and keen. History, and particularly history as it
came up through the eighteenth century to our own times, supplied us
with a gallery of intimate models, our great uncles and grandfathers and
ancestors at large figured abundantly in the story and furnished the
pattern to which we cut our anticipations of life. It was a season of
Imperialism, the picturesque Imperialism of the earlier Kipling phase,
and we were all of us enthusiasts for the Empire. It was the empire of
the White Man's Burthen in those days; the sordid anti-climax of the
Tariff Reform Movement was still some years ahead of us. It was easier
for us at Harbury to believe then than it has become since, in our own
racial and national and class supremacy. We were the Anglo-Saxons, the
elect of the earth, leading the world in social organization, in science
and economic method. In India and the east more particularly we were the
apostles of even-handed justice, relentless veracity, personal
cleanliness, and modern efficiency. In a spirit of adventurous
benevolence we were spreading those blessings over a reluctant and
occasionally recalcitrant world of people for the most part "colored."
Our success in this had aroused the bitter envy and rivalry of various
continental nations, and particularly of France, Russia, and Germany.
But France had been diverted to North Africa, Russia to Eastern Asia,
and Germany was already the most considered antagonist in our path
towards an empire over the world.

This was the spacious and by no means ignoble project of the later
nineties. Most of us Harbury boys, trained as I had been trained to be
uncritical, saw the national outlook in those terms. We knew little or
nothing, until the fierce wranglings of the Free Traders and Tariff
Reformers a few years later brought it home to us, of the commercial,
financial and squalid side of our relations with the vast congeries of
exploited new territories and subordinated and subjugated populations.
We knew nothing of the social conditions of the mass of people in our
own country. We were blankly ignorant of economics. We knew nothing of
that process of expropriation and the exploitation of labor which is
giving the world the Servile State. The very phrase was twenty years
ahead of us. We believed that an Englishman was a better thing in every
way than any other sort of man, that English literature, science and
philosophy were a shining and unapproachable light to all other peoples,
that our soldiers were better than all other soldiers and our sailors
than all other sailors. Such civilization and enterprise as existed in
Germany for instance we regarded as a shadow, an envious shadow,
following our own; it was still generally believed in those days that
German trade was concerned entirely with the dishonest imitation of our
unapproachable English goods. And as for the United States, well, the
United States though blessed with a strain of English blood, were
nevertheless "out of it," marooned in a continent of their own and--we
had to admit it--corrupt.

Given such ignorance, you know, it wasn't by any means ignoble to be
patriotic, to dream of this propagandist Empire of ours spreading its
great peace and culture, its virtue and its amazing and unprecedented
honesty,--its honesty!--round the world.

§ 2

When I look and try to recover those early intentions of mine I am
astonished at the way in which I took them ready-made from the world
immediately about me. In some way I seem to have stopped looking--if
ever I had begun looking--at the heights and depths above and below that
immediate life. I seem to have regarded these profounder realities no
more during this phase of concentration than a cow in a field regards
the sky. My father's vestments, the Burnmore altar, the Harbury pulpit
and Mr. Siddons, stood between me and the idea of God, so that it needed
years and much bitter disillusionment before I discovered my need of it.
And I was as wanting in subtlety as in depth. We did no logic nor
philosophy at Harbury, and at Oxford it was not so much thought we came
to deal with as a mistranslation and vulgarization of ancient and alien
exercises in thinking. There is no such effective serum against
philosophy as the scholarly decoction of a dead philosopher. The
philosophical teaching of Oxford at the end of the last century was not
so much teaching as a protective inoculation. The stuff was administered
with a mysterious gilding of Greek and reverence, old Hegel's monstrous
web was the ultimate modernity, and Plato, that intellectual
journalist-artist, that bright, restless experimentalist in ideas, was
as it were the God of Wisdom, only a little less omniscient (and on the
whole more of a scholar and a gentleman) than the God of fact....

So I fell back upon the empire in my first attempts to unify my life. I
would serve the empire. That should be my total significance. There was
a Roman touch, I perceive, in this devotion. Just how or where I should
serve the empire I had not as yet determined. At times I thought of the
civil service, in my more ambitious moments I turned my thoughts to
politics. But it was doubtful whether my private expectations made the
last a reasonable possibility.

I would serve the empire.

§ 3

And all the while that the first attempts to consolidate, to gather
one's life together into a purpose and a plan of campaign, are going on
upon the field of the young man's life, there come and go and come again
in the sky above him the threatening clouds, the ethereal cirrus, the
red dawns and glowing afternoons of that passion of love which is the
source and renewal of being. There are times when that solicitude
matters no more than a spring-time sky to a runner who wins towards the
post, there are times when its passionate urgency dominates every fact
in his world.

§ 4

One must have children and love them passionately before one realizes
the deep indignity of accident in life. It is not that I mind so much
when unexpected and disconcerting things happen to you or your sisters,
but that I mind before they happen. My dreams and anticipations of your
lives are all marred by my sense of the huge importance mere chance
encounters and incalculable necessities will play in them. And in
friendship and still more here, in this central business of love,
accident rules it seems to me almost altogether. What personalities you
will encounter in life, and have for a chief interest in life, is nearly
as much a matter of chance as the drift of a grain of pollen in the
pine forest. And once the light hazard has blown it has blown, never to
drive again. In other schoolrooms and nurseries, in slum living-rooms
perhaps or workhouse wards or palaces, round the other side of the
earth, in Canada or Russia or China, other little creatures are trying
their small limbs, clutching at things about them with infantile hands,
who someday will come into your life with a power and magic monstrous
and irrational and irresistible. They will break the limits of your
concentrating self, call you out to the service of beauty and the
service of the race, sound you to your highest and your lowest, give you
your chance to be godlike or filthy, divine or utterly ignoble, react
together with you upon the very core and essence of your being. These
unknowns are the substance of your fate. You will in extreme intimacy
love them, hate them, serve them, struggle with them, and in that
interaction the vital force in you and the substance of your days will
be spent.

And who they may chance to be and their peculiar quality and effect is
haphazard, utterly beyond designing.

Law and custom conspire with the natural circumstances of man to
exaggerate every consequence of this accumulating accident, and make it
definite and fatal....

I find it quite impossible now to recall the steps and stages by which
this power of sex invaded my life. It seems to me now that it began very
much as a gale begins, in catspaws upon the water and little rustlings
among the leaves, and then stillness and then a distant soughing again
and a pause, and then a wider and longer disturbance and so more and
more, with a gathering continuity, until at last the stars were hidden,
the heavens were hidden; all the heights and depths of life were
obscured by stormy impulses and passionate desires. I suppose that
quite at the first there were simple curiosities; no doubt they were
vivid at the time but they have left scarcely a trace; there were vague
first intimations of a peculiar excitement. I do remember more
distinctly phases when there was a going-out from myself towards these
things, these interests, and then a reaction of shame and concealment.

And these memories were mixed up with others not sexual at all, and
particularly with the perception of beauty in things inanimate, with
lights seen at twilight and the tender mysteriousness of the dusk and
the confused disturbing scents of flowers in the evening and the
enigmatical serene animation of stars in the summer sky....

I think perhaps that my boyhood was exceptionally free from vulgarizing
influences in this direction. There were few novels in my father's house
and I neither saw nor read any plays until I was near manhood, so that I
thought naturally about love and not rather artificially round and about
love as so many imaginative young people are trained to do. I fell in
love once or twice while I was still quite a boy. These earliest
experiences rarely got beyond a sort of dumb awe, a vague, vast,
ineffectual desire for self-immolation. For a time I remember I
worshipped Lady Ladislaw with all my being. Then I talked to a girl in a
train--I forget upon what journey--but I remember very vividly her quick
color and a certain roguish smile. I spread my adoration at her feet,
fresh and frank. I wanted to write to her. Indeed I wanted to devote all
my being to her. I begged hard, but there was someone called Auntie who
had to be considered, an Atropos for that thread of romance.

Then there was a photograph in my father's study of the Delphic Sibyl
from the Sistine Chapel, that for a time held my heart, and--Yes, there
was a girl in a tobacconist's shop in the Harbury High Street. Drawn by
an irresistible impulse I used to go and buy cigarettes--and sometimes
converse about the weather. But afterwards in solitude I would meditate
tremendous conversations and encounters with her. The cigarettes
increased the natural melancholy of my state and led to a reproof from
old Henson. Almost always I suppose there is that girl in the
tobacconist's shop....

I believe if I made an effort I could disinter some dozens of such
memories, more and more faded until the marginal ones would be
featureless and all but altogether effaced. As I look back at it now I
am struck by an absurd image; it is as if a fish nibbled at this bait
and then at that.

Given but the slightest aid from accidental circumstances and any of
those slight attractions might have become a power to deflect all my
life.

The day of decision arrived when, the Lady Mary Christian came smiling
out of the sunshine to me into the pavilion at Burnmore. With that the
phase of stirrings and intimations was over for ever in my life. All
those other impressions went then to the dusty lumber room from which I
now so slightingly disinter them.

§ 5

We five had all been playmates together. There were Lord Maxton, who was
killed at Paardeberg while I was in Ladysmith, he was my senior by
nearly a year, Philip, who is now Earl Ladislaw and who was about
eighteen months younger than I, Mary, my contemporary within eight days,
and Guy, whom we regarded as a baby and who was called, apparently on
account of some early linguistic efforts, "Brugglesmith." He did his
best to avenge his juniority as time passed on by an enormous length of
limb. I had more imagination than Maxton and was a good deal better
read, so that Mary and I dominated most of the games of Indians and
warfare and exploration in which we passed our long days together. When
the Christians were at Burnmore, and they usually spent three or four
months in the year there, I had a kind of standing invitation to be with
them. Sometimes there would also be two Christian cousins to swell our
party, and sometimes there would be a raid of the Fawney children with a
detestable governess who was perpetually vociferating reproaches, but
these latter were absent-minded, lax young persons, and we did not
greatly love them.

It is curious how little I remember of Mary's childhood. All that has
happened between us since lies between that and my present self like
some luminous impenetrable mist. I know we liked each other, that I was
taller than she was and thought her legs unreasonably thin, and that
once when I knelt by accident on a dead stick she had brought into an
Indian camp we had made near the end of the west shrubbery, she flew at
me in a sudden fury, smacked my face, scratched me and had to be
suppressed, and was suppressed with extreme difficulty by the united
manhood of us three elder boys. Then it was I noted first the blazing
blueness of her eyes. She was light and very plucky, so that none of us
cared to climb against her, and she was as difficult to hold as an eel.
But all these traits and characteristics vanished when she was
transformed.

For what seems now a long space of time I had not seen her or any of the
family except Philip; it was certainly a year or more, probably two;
Maxton was at a crammer's and I think the others must have been in
Canada with Lord Ladislaw. Then came some sort of estrangement between
him and his wife, and she returned with Mary and Guy to Burnmore and
stayed there all through the summer.

I was in a state of transition between the infinitely great and the
infinitely little. I had just ceased to be that noble and potent being,
that almost statesmanlike personage, a sixth form boy at Harbury, and I
was going to be an Oxford undergraduate. Philip and I came down together
by the same train from Harbury, I shared the Burnmore dog-cart and
luggage cart, and he dropped me at the rectory. I was a long-limbed
youngster of seventeen, as tall as I am now, and fair, so fair that I
was still boyish-faced while most of my contemporaries and Philip (who
favored his father) were at least smudgy with moustaches. With the
head-master's valediction and the grave elder-brotherliness of old
Henson, and the shrill cheers of a little crowd of juniors still echoing
in my head, I very naturally came home in a mood of exalted gravity, and
I can still remember pacing up and down the oblong lawn behind the
rockery and the fig-tree wall with my father, talking of my outlook with
all the tremendous _savoir faire_ that was natural to my age, and noting
with a secret gratification that our shoulders were now on a level. No
doubt we were discussing Oxford and all that I was to do at Oxford; I
don't remember a word of our speech though I recall the exact tint of
its color and the distinctive feeling of our measured equal paces in the
sunshine....

I must have gone up to Burnmore House the following afternoon. I went up
alone and I was sent out through the little door at the end of the big
gallery into the garden. In those days Lady Ladislaw had made an Indian
pavilion under the tall trees at the east end of the house, and here I
found her with her cousin Helena Christian entertaining a mixture of
people, a carriageful from Hampton End, the two elder Fawneys and a man
in brown who had I think ridden over from Chestoxter Castle. Lady
Ladislaw welcomed me with ample graciousness--as though I was a
personage. "The children" she said were still at tennis, and as she
spoke I saw Guy, grown nearly beyond recognition and then a shining
being in white, very straight and graceful, with a big soft hat and
overshadowed eyes that smiled, come out from the hurried endearments of
the sunflakes under the shadows of the great chestnuts, into the glow of
summer light before the pavilion.

"Steve arrived!" she cried, and waved a welcoming racquet.

I do not remember what I said to her or what else she said or what
anyone said. But I believe I could paint every detail of her effect. I
know that when she came out of the brightness into the shadow of the
pavilion it was like a regal condescension, and I know that she was
wonderfully self-possessed and helpful with her mother's hospitalities,
and that I marvelled I had never before perceived the subtler sweetness
in the cadence of her voice. I seem also to remember a severe internal
struggle for my self-possession, and that I had to recall my exalted
position in the sixth form to save myself from becoming tongue-tied and
abashed and awkward and utterly shamed.

You see she had her hair up and very prettily dressed, and those
aggressive lean legs of hers had vanished, and she was sheathed in
muslin that showed her the most delicately slender and beautiful of
young women. And she seemed so radiantly sure of herself!

After our first greeting I do not think I spoke to her or looked at her
again throughout the meal. I took things that she handed me with an
appearance of supreme indifference, was politely attentive to the elder
Miss Fawney, and engaged with Lady Ladislaw and the horsey little man in
brown in a discussion of the possibility of mechanical vehicles upon the
high road. That was in the early nineties. We were all of opinion that
it was impossible to make a sufficiently light engine for the purpose.
Afterwards Mary confessed to me how she had been looking forward to our
meeting, and how snubbed I had made her feel....

Then a little later than this meeting in the pavilion, though I am not
clear now whether it was the same or some subsequent afternoon, we are
walking in the sunken garden, and great clouds of purple clematis and
some less lavish heliotrope-colored creeper, foam up against the ruddy
stone balustrading. Just in front of us a fountain gushes out of a
grotto of artificial stalagmite and bathes the pedestal of an absurd
little statuette of the God of Love. We are talking almost easily. She
looks sideways at my face, already with the quiet controlled
watchfulness of a woman interested in a man, she smiles and she talks of
flowers and sunshine, the Canadian winter--and with an abrupt
transition, of old times we've had together in the shrubbery and the
wilderness of bracken out beyond. She seems tremendously grown-up and
womanly to me. I am talking my best, and glad, and in a manner scared at
the thrill her newly discovered beauty gives me, and keeping up my
dignity and coherence with an effort. My attention is constantly being
distracted to note how prettily she moves, to wonder why it is I never
noticed the sweet fall, the faint delightful whisper of a lisp in her
voice before.

We agree about the flowers and the sunshine and the Canadian
winter--about everything. "I think so often of those games we used to
invent," she declares. "So do I," I say, "so do I." And then with a
sudden boldness: "Once I broke a stick of yours, a rotten stick you
thought a sound one. Do you remember?"

Then we laugh together and seem to approach across a painful,
unnecessary distance that has separated us. It vanishes for ever. "I
couldn't now," she says, "smack your face like that, Stephen."

That seems to me a brilliantly daring and delightful thing for her to
say, and jolly of her to use my Christian name too! "I believe I
scratched," she adds.

"You never scratched," I assert with warm conviction. "Never."

"I did," she insists and I deny. "You couldn't."

"We're growing up," she cries. "That's what has happened to us. We shall
never fight again with our hands and feet, never--until death do us
part."

"For better, or worse," I say, with a sense of wit and enterprise beyond
all human precedent.

"For richer, or poorer," she cries, taking up my challenge with a
lifting laugh in her voice.

And then to make it all nothing again, she exclaims at the white lilies
that rise against masses of sweet bay along the further wall....

How plainly I can recall it all! How plainly and how brightly! As we
came up the broad steps at the further end towards the tennis lawn, she
turned suddenly upon me and with a novel assurance of command told me to
stand still. "_There_," she said with a hand out and seemed to survey me
with her chin up and her white neck at the level of my eyes. "Yes. A
whole step," she estimated, "and more, taller than I. You will look down
on me, Stephen, now, for all the rest of our days."

"I shall always stand," I answered, "a step or so below you."

"No," she said, "come up to the level. A girl should be smaller than a
man. You are a man, Stephen--almost.... You must be near six feet....
Here's Guy with the box of balls."

She flitted about the tennis court before me, playing with Philip
against Guy and myself. She punished some opening condescensions with a
wicked vigor--and presently Guy and I were straining every nerve to save
the set. She had a low close serve I remember that seemed perfectly
straightforward and simple, and was very difficult to return.

§ 6

All that golden summer on the threshold of my manhood was filled by
Mary. I loved her with the love of a boy and a man. Either I was with
Mary or I was hoping and planning to be with Mary or I was full of some
vivid new impression of her or some enigmatical speech, some pregnant
nothing, some glance or gesture engaged and perplexed my mind. In those
days I slept the profound sweet sleep of youth, but whenever that deep
flow broke towards the shallows, as I sank into it at night and came out
of it at morning, I passed through dreams of Mary to and from a world of
waking thought of her.

There must have been days of friendly intercourse when it seemed we
talked nothings and wandered and meandered among subjects, but always we
had our eyes on one another.