while i had been in south africa circumstances had conspired to alter my prospects in life very greatly. unanticipated freedoms and opportunities had come to me, and it was no longer out of the question for me to think of a parliamentary career. our fortunes had altered. my father had ceased to be rector of burnmore, and had become a comparatively wealthy man.
my second cousin, reginald stratton, had been drowned in finland, and his father had only survived the shock of his death a fortnight; his sister, arthur mason's first wife, had died in giving birth to a stillborn child the year before, and my father found himself suddenly the owner of all that large stretch of developing downland and building land which old reginald had bought between shaddock and golding on the south and west esher station on the north, and in addition of considerable investments in northern industrials. it was an odd collusion of mortality; we had had only the coldest relations with our cousins, and now abruptly through their commercial and speculative activities, which we had always affected to despise and ignore, i was in a position to attempt the realization of my old political ambitions.
my cousins' house had not been to my father's taste. he had let it, and i came to a new home in a pleasant, plain red-brick house, a hundred and fifty years old perhaps, on an open and sunny hillside, sheltered by trees eastward and northward, a few miles to the south-west of guildford. it had all the gracious proportions, the dignified simplicity, the roomy comfort of the good building of that time. it looked sunward; we breakfasted in sunshine in the library, and outside was an old wall with peach trees and a row of pillar roses heavily in flower. i had a little feared this place; burnmore rectory had been so absolutely home to me with its quiet serenities, its ample familiar garden, its greenhouses and intimately known corners, but i perceived i might have trusted my father's character to preserve his essential atmosphere. he was so much himself as i remembered him that i did not even observe for a day or so that he had not only aged considerably but discarded the last vestiges of clerical costume in his attire. he met me in front of the house and led me into a wide panelled hall and wrung my hand again and again, deeply moved and very inexpressive. "did you have a good journey?" he asked again and again, with tears in his eyes. "did you have a comfortable journey?"
"i've not seen the house," said i. "it looks fine."
"you're a man," he said, and patted my shoulder. "of course! it was at burnmore."
"you're not changed," i said. "you're not an atom changed."
"how could i?" he replied. "come—come and have something to eat. you ought to have something to eat."
we talked of the house and what a good house it was, and he took me out into the garden to see the peaches and grape vine and then brought me back without showing them to me in order to greet my cousin. "it's very like burnmore," he said with his eyes devouring me, "very[pg 126] like. a little more space and—no services. no services at all. that makes a gap of course. there's a little chap about here, you'll find—his name is wednesday—who sorts my papers and calls himself my secretary.... not necessary perhaps but—i missed the curate."
he said he was reading more than he used to do now that the parish was off his hands, and he was preparing material for a book. it was, he explained later, to take the form of a huge essay ostensibly on secular canons, but its purport was to be no less than the complete secularization of the church of england. at first he wanted merely to throw open the cathedral chapters to distinguished laymen, irrespective of their theological opinions, and to make each english cathedral a centre of intellectual activity, a college as it were of philosophers and writers. but afterwards his suggestions grew bolder, the articles of religion were to be set aside, the creeds made optional even for the clergy. his dream became more and more richly picturesque until at last he saw canterbury a realized thelema, and st. paul's a new academic grove. he was to work at that remarkable proposal intermittently for many years, and to leave it at last no more than a shapeless mass of memoranda, fragmentary essays, and selected passages for quotation. yet mere patchwork and scrapbook as it would be, i still have some thought of publishing it. there is a large human charity about it, a sun too broad and warm, a reasonableness too wide and free perhaps for the timid convulsive quality of our time, yet all good as good wine for the wise. is it incredible that a day should come when our great grey monuments to the norman spirit should cease to be occupied by narrow-witted parsons and [pg 127]besieged by narrow-souled dissenters, the soul of our race in exile from the home and place our fathers built for it?...
if he was not perceptibly changed, i thought my cousin jane had become more than a little sharper and stiffer. she did not like my uncle's own personal secularization, and still less the glimpses she got of the ampler intentions of his book. she missed the proximity to the church and her parochial authority. but she was always a silent woman, and made her comments with her profile and not with her tongue....
"i'm glad you've come back, stephen," said my father as we sat together after dinner and her departure, with port and tall silver candlesticks and shining mahogany between us. "i've missed you. i've done my best to follow things out there. i've got, i suppose, every press mention there's been of you during the war and since. i've subscribed to two press-cutting agencies, so that if one missed you the other fellow got you. perhaps you'll like to read them over one of these days.... you see, there's not been a soldier in the family since the peninsular war, and so i've been particularly interested.... you must tell me all the things you're thinking of, and what you mean to do. this last stuff—this chinese business—it puzzles me. i want to know what you think of it—and everything."
i did my best to give him my ideas such as they were. and as they were still very vague ideas i have no doubt he found me rhetorical. i can imagine myself talking of the white man's burthen, and how in africa it had seemed at first to sit rather staggeringly upon our under-trained shoulders. i spoke of slackness and planlessness.
"i've come back in search of efficiency." i have no doubt i said that at any rate.
"we're trying to run this big empire," i may have explained, "with under-trained, under-educated, poor-spirited stuff, and we shall come a cropper unless we raise our quality. i'm still imperialist, more than ever i was. but i'm an imperialist on a different footing. i've no great illusions left about the superiority of the anglo-saxons. all that has gone. but i do think it will be a monstrous waste, a disaster to human possibilities if this great liberal-spirited empire sprawls itself asunder for the want of a little gravity and purpose. and it's here the work has to be done, the work of training and bracing up and stimulating the public imagination...."
yes, that would be the sort of thing i should have said in those days. there's an old national review on my desk as i write, containing an article by me with some of those very phrases in it. i have been looking at it in order to remind myself of my own forgotten eloquence.
"yes," i remember my father saying. "yes." and then after reflection, "but those coolies, those chinese coolies. you can't build up an imperial population by importing coolies."
"i don't like that side of the business myself," i said. "it's detail."
"perhaps. but the liberals will turn you out on it next year. and then start badgering public houses and looting the church.... and then this tariff talk! everybody on our side seems to be mixing up the unity of the empire with tariffs. it's a pity. salisbury wouldn't have stood it. unity! unity depends on a common literature and a common language and common ideas and sympathies. it doesn't unite people for them to be forced to trade with each other. trading isn't friendship. i don't trade with my friends and i don't make friends with my tradesmen. natural enemies—polite of course but antagonists. are you keen over this tariff stuff, steve?"
"not a bit," i said. "that too seems a detail."
"it doesn't seem to be keeping its place as a detail," said my father. "very few men can touch tariffs and not get a little soiled. i hate all this international sharping, all these attempts to get artificial advantages, all this making poor people buy inferior goods dear, in the name of the flag. if it comes to that, damn the flag! custom-houses are ugly things, stephen; the dirty side of nationality. dirty things, ignoble, cross, cunning things.... they wake you up in the small hours and rout over your bags.... an imperial people ought to be an urbane people, a civilizing people—above such petty irritating things. i'd as soon put barbed wire along the footpath across that field where the village children go to school. or claim that our mushrooms are cultivated. or prosecute a sunday-society cockney for picking my primroses. custom-houses indeed! it's chinese. there are things a great country mustn't do, stephen. a country like ours ought to get along without the manners of a hard-breathing competitive cad.... if it can't i'd rather it didn't get along.... what's the good of a huckster country?—it's like having a wife on the streets. it's no excuse that she brings you money. but since the peace, and that man chamberlain's visit to africa, you imperialists seem to have got this nasty spirit all over you.... the germans do it, you say!"
my father shut one eye and regarded the color of his port against the waning light. "let 'em," he said.... "fancy!—quoting the germans! when i was a boy, there weren't any germans. they came up after '70. statecraft from germany! and statesmen from birmingham! german silver and electroplated empires.... no."
"it's just a part of our narrow outlook," i answered from the hearthrug, after a pause. "it's because we're so—limited that everyone is translating the greatness of empire into preferential trading and jealousy of germany. it's for something bigger than that that i've returned."
"those big things come slowly," said my father. and then with a sigh: "age after age. they seem at times—to be standing still. good things go with the bad; bad things come with the good...."
i remember him saying that as though i could still hear him.
it must have been after dinner, for he was sitting, duskily indistinct, against the light, with a voice coming out to him. the candles had not been brought in, and the view one saw through the big plate glass window behind him was very clear and splendid. those little wealden hills in surrey and sussex assume at times, for all that by swiss standards they are the merest ridges of earth, the dignity and mystery of great mountains. now, the crests of hindhead and blackdown, purple black against the level gold of the evening sky, might have been some high-flung boundary chain. nearer there gathered banks and pools of luminous lavender-tinted mist out of which hills of pinewood rose like islands out of the sea. the intervening spaces were magnified to continental dimensions. and the closer lowlier things over which we looked, the cottages below us, were grey and black and dim, pierced by a few luminous orange windows and with a solitary street lamp shining like a star; the village might have been nestling a mountain's height below instead of a couple of hundred feet.
i left my hearthrug, and walked to the window to survey this.
"who's got all that land stretching away there; that little blunted sierra of pines and escarpments i mean?"
my father halted for an instant in his answer, and glanced over his shoulder.
"wardingham and baxter share all those coppices," he remarked. "they come up to my corner on each side."
"but the dark heather and pine land beyond. with just the gables of a house among the trees."
"oh? that," he said with a careful note of indifference. "that's—justin. you know justin. he used to come to burnmore park."
