the most sumptuous present that millicent received on her seventh birthday was a doll’s house. “with love to darling little mill from aunty loo.” aunt loo was immensely rich, and the doll’s house was almost as grandiose and massive as herself.
it was divided into four rooms, each papered in a different colour and each furnished as was fitting: beds and washstands and wardrobes in the upstair rooms, arm-chairs and artificial plants below. “replete with every modern convenience; sumptuous appointments.” there was even a cold collation ready spread on the dining-room table—two scarlet lobsters on a dish, and a ham that [pg 2]had been sliced into just enough to reveal an internal complexion of the loveliest pink and white. one might go on talking about the doll’s house for ever, it was so beautiful. such, at any rate, was the opinion of millicent’s brother dick. he would spend hours opening and shutting the front door, peeping through the windows, arranging and rearranging the furniture. as for millicent, the gorgeous present left her cold. she had been hoping—and, what is more, praying, fervently, every night for a month—that aunty loo would give her a toy sewing-machine (one of the kind that works, though) for her birthday.
she was bitterly disappointed when the doll’s house came instead. but she bore it all stoically and managed to be wonderfully polite to aunty loo about the whole affair. she never looked at the doll’s house: it simply didn’t interest her.
dick had already been at a preparatory school for a couple of terms. mr. killigrew, the headmaster, thought him a promising boy. “has quite a remarkable aptitude for mathematics,” he wrote in his report. “he has started algebra [pg 3]this term and shows a”—“quite remarkable” scratched out (the language of reports is apt to be somewhat limited)—“a very unusual grasp of the subject.” mr. killigrew didn’t know that his pupil also took an interest in dolls: if he had, he would have gibed at dick as unmercifully and in nearly the same terms as dick’s fellow-schoolboys—for shepherds grow to resemble their sheep and pedagogues their childish charges. but of course dick would never have dreamt of telling anyone at school about it. he was chary of letting even the people at home divine his weakness, and when anyone came into the room where the doll’s house was, he would put his hands in his pockets and stroll out, whistling the tune of, “there is a happy land far, far away, where they have ham and eggs seven times a day,” as though he had merely stepped in to have a look at the beastly thing—just to give it a kick.
when he wasn’t playing with the doll’s house, dick spent his holiday time in reading, largely, devouringly. no length or incomprehensibility could put him off; he had swallowed down robert elsmere in [pg 4]the three-volume edition at the age of eight. when he wasn’t reading he used to sit and think about things in general and nothing in particular; in fact, as millicent reproachfully put it, he just mooned about. millicent, on the other hand, was always busily doing something: weeding in the garden, or hoeing, or fruit-picking (she could be trusted not to eat more than the recognized tariff—one in twenty raspberries or one in forty plums); helping kate in the kitchen; knitting mufflers for those beings known vaguely as the cripples, while her mother read aloud in the evenings before bedtime. she disapproved of dick’s mooning, but dick mooned all the same.
when dick was twelve and a half he knew enough about mathematics and history and the dead languages to realize that his dear parents were profoundly ignorant and uncultured. but, what was more pleasing to the dear parents, he knew enough to win a scholarship at ?sop college, which is one of our greatest public schools.
if this were a public school story, i should record the fact that, while at [pg 5]?sop, dick swore, lied, blasphemed, repeated dirty stories, read the articles in john bull about brothels disguised as nursing-homes and satyrs disguised as curates; that he regarded his masters, with very few exceptions, as fools, not even always well-meaning. and so on. all which would be quite true, but beside the point. for this is not one of the conventional studies of those clever young men who discover atheism and art at school, socialism at the university, and, passing through the inevitable stage of sex and syphilis after taking their b.a., turn into maturely brilliant novelists at the age of twenty-five. i prefer, therefore, to pass over the minor incidents of a difficult pubescence, touching only on those points which seem to throw a light on the future career of our hero.
it is possible for those who desire it—incredible as the thing may appear—to learn something at ?sop college. dick even learnt a great deal. from the beginning he was the young benjamin of his mathematical tutor, mr. skewbauld, a man of great abilities in his own art, and who, though wholly incapable of keeping [pg 6]a form in order, could make his private tuition a source of much profit to a mathematically minded boy. mr. skewbauld’s house was the worst in ?sop: dick described it as a mixture between a ghetto and a home for the mentally deficient, and when he read in sir thomas browne that it was a vulgar error to suppose that jews stink, he wrote a letter to the school magazine exploding that famous doctor as a quack and a charlatan, whose statements ran counter to the manifest facts of everyday life in mr. skewbauld’s house. it may seem surprising that dick should have read sir thomas browne at all. but he was more than a mere mathematician. he filled the ample leisure, which is ?sop’s most precious gift to those of its alumni who know how to use it, with much and varied reading in history, in literature, in physical science, and in more than one foreign language. dick was something of a prodigy.
“greenow’s an intellectual,” was mr. copthorne-slazenger’s contemptuous verdict. “i have the misfortune to have two or three intellectuals in my house. [pg 7]they’re all of them friends of his. i think he’s a bad influence in the school.” copthorne-slazenger regarded himself as the perfect example of mens sana in corpore sano, the soul of an english gentleman in the body of a greek god. unfortunately his legs were rather too short and his lower lip was underhung like a salmon’s.
dick had, indeed, collected about him a band of kindred spirits. there was partington, who specialized in history; gay, who had read all the classical writings of the golden age and was engaged in the study of medi?val latin; fletton, who was fantastically clever and had brought the art of being idle to a pitch never previously reached in the annals of ?sop. these were his chief friends, and a queer-looking group they made—dick, small and dark and nervous; partington, all roundness, and whose spectacles were two moons in a moonface; gay, with the stiff walk of a little old man; and fletton, who looked like nobody so much as mr. jingle, tall and thin with a twisted, comical face.
“an ugly skulking crew,” copthorne-slazenger, [pg 8]conscious of his own olympian splendour, would say as he saw them pass.
with these faithful friends dick should have been—and indeed for the most part was—very happy. between them they mustered up a great stock of knowledge; they could discuss every subject under the sun. they were a liberal education and an amusement to one another. there were times, however, when dick was filled with a vague, but acute, discontent. he wanted something which his friends could not give him; but what, but what? the discontent rankled under the surface, like a suppressed measles. it was lord francis quarles who brought it out and made the symptoms manifest.
francis quarles was a superb creature, with the curly forehead of a bull and the face and limbs of a gr?co-roman statue. it was a sight worth seeing when he looked down through half-shut eyelids, in his usual attitude of sleepy arrogance, on the world about him. he was in effect what mr. copthorne-slazenger imagined himself to be, and he shared that gentleman’s dislike for dick and his [pg 9]friends. “yellow little atheists,” he called them. he always stood up for god and the church of england; they were essential adjuncts to the aristocracy. god, indeed, was almost a member of the family; lack of belief in him amounted to a personal insult to the name of quarles.
it was half-way through the summer term, when dick was sixteen, on one of those days of brilliant sunshine and cloudless blue, when the sight of beautiful and ancient buildings is peculiarly poignant. their age and quiet stand out in melancholy contrast against the radiant life of the summer; and at ?sop the boys go laughing under their antique shadow; “little victims”—you feel how right gray was. dick was idly strolling across the quadrangle, engaged in merely observing the beauty about him—the golden-grey chapel, with its deep geometrical shadows between the buttresses, the comely rose-coloured shapes of the brick-built tudor buildings, the weathercocks glittering in the sun, the wheeling flurries of pigeons. his old discontent had seized on him again, and to-day in [pg 10]the presence of all this beauty it had become almost unbearable. all at once, out of the mouth of one of the dark little tunnelled doors pierced in the flanks of the sleeping building, a figure emerged into the light. it was francis quarles, clad in white flannels and the radiance of the sunshine. he appeared like a revelation, bright, beautiful, and sudden, before dick’s eyes. a violent emotion seized him; his heart leapt, his bowels were moved within him; he felt a little sick and faint—he had fallen in love.
francis passed by without deigning to notice him. his head was high, his eyes drowsy under their drooping lids. he was gone, and for dick all the light was out, the beloved quadrangle was a prison-yard, the pigeons a loathsome flock of carrion eaters. gay and partington came up behind him with shouts of invitation. dick walked rudely away. god! how he hated them and their wretched, silly talk and their yellow, ugly faces.
the weeks that followed were full of strangeness. for the first time in his [pg 11]life dick took to writing poetry. there was one sonnet which began:
is it a vision or a waking dream?
or is it truly apollo that i see,
come from his sylvan haunts in arcady
to { laugh and loiter
sing and saunter by an english stream. . . .
he kept on repeating the words to himself, “sylvan haunts in arcady,” “laugh and loiter” (after much thought he had adopted that as more liquidly melodious than “sing and saunter”). how beautiful they sounded!—as beautiful as keats—more beautiful, for they were his own.
he avoided the company of gay and fletton and partington; they had become odious to him, and their conversation, when he could bring himself to listen to it, was, somehow, almost incomprehensible. he would sit for hours alone in his study; not working—for he could not understand the mathematical problems on which he had been engaged before the fateful day in the quadrangle—but reading novels and the poetry of mrs. browning, and at intervals [pg 12]writing something rather ecstatic of his own. after a long preparatory screwing up of his courage, he dared at last to send a fag with a note to francis, asking him to tea; and when francis rather frigidly refused, he actually burst into tears. he had not cried like that since he was a child.
he became suddenly very religious. he would spend an hour on his knees every night, praying, praying with frenzy. he mortified the flesh with fasting and watching. he even went so far as to flagellate himself—or at least tried to; for it is very difficult to flagellate yourself adequately with a cane in a room so small that any violent gesture imperils the bric-à-brac. he would pass half the night stark naked, in absurd postures, trying to hurt himself. and then, after the dolorously pleasant process of self-maceration was over, he used to lean out of the window and listen to the murmurs of the night and fill his spirit with the warm velvet darkness of midsummer. copthorne-slazenger, coming back by the late train from town one night, happened to see his moon-pale face hanging [pg 13]out of window and was delighted to be able to give him two hundred greek lines to remind him that even a member of the sixth form requires sleep sometimes.
the fit lasted three weeks. “i can’t think what’s the matter with you, greenow,” complained mr. skewbauld snufflingly. “you seem incapable or unwilling to do anything at all. i suspect the cause is constipation. if only everyone would take a little paraffin every night before going to bed! . . .” mr. skewbauld’s self-imposed mission in life was the propagation of the paraffin habit. it was the universal panacea—the cure for every ill.
his friends of before the crisis shook their heads and could only suppose him mad. and then the fit ended as suddenly as it had begun.
it happened at a dinner-party given by the cravisters. dr. cravister was the headmaster of ?sop—a good, gentle, learned old man, with snow-white hair and a saintly face which the spirit of comic irony had embellished with a nose that might, so red and bulbous it was, [pg 14]have been borrowed from the properties of a music-hall funny man. and then there was mrs. cravister, large and stately as a galleon with all sails set. those who met her for the first time might be awed by the dignity of what an elizabethan would have called her “swelling port.” but those who knew her well went in terror of the fantastic spirit which lurked behind the outward majesty. they were afraid of what that richly modulated voice of hers might utter. it was not merely that she was malicious—and she had a gift of ever-ready irony; no, what was alarming in all her conversation was the element of the unexpected. with most people one feels comfortably secure that they will always say the obvious and ordinary things; with mrs. cravister, never. the best one could do was to be on guard and to try and look, when she made a more than usually characteristic remark, less of a bewildered fool than one felt.
mrs. cravister received her guests—they were all of them boys—with stately courtesy. they found it pleasant to be taken so seriously, to be treated as [pg 15]perfectly grown men; but at the same time, they always had with mrs. cravister a faint uncomfortable suspicion that all her politeness was an irony so exquisite as to be practically undistinguishable from ingenuousness.
“good evening, mr. gay,” she said, holding out her hand and shutting her eyes; it was one of her disconcerting habits, this shutting of the eyes. “what a pleasure it will be to hear you talking to us again about eschatology.”
gay, who had never talked about eschatology and did not know the meaning of the word, smiled a little dimly and made a protesting noise.
“eschatology? what a charming subject!” the fluty voice belonged to henry cravister, the headmaster’s son, a man of about forty who worked in the british museum. he was almost too cultured, too erudite.
“but i don’t know anything about it,” said gay desperately.
“spare us your modesty,” henry cravister protested.
his mother shook hands with the other guests, putting some at their ease with a [pg 16]charming phrase and embarrassing others by saying something baffling and unexpected that would have dismayed even the hardiest diner-out, much more a schoolboy tremblingly on his good behaviour. at the tail end of the group of boys stood dick and francis quarles. mrs. cravister slowly raised her heavy waxen eyelids and regarded them a moment in silence.
“the gr?co-roman and the gothic side by side!” she exclaimed. “lord francis is something in the vatican, a rather late piece of work; and mr. greenow is a little gargoyle from the roof of notre dame de paris. two epochs of art—how clearly one sees the difference. and my husband, i always think, is purely malayan in design—purely malayan,” she repeated as she shook hands with the two boys.
dick blushed to the roots of his hair, but francis’ impassive arrogance remained unmoved. dick stole a glance in his direction, and at the sight of his calm face he felt a new wave of adoring admiration sweeping through him.
the company was assembled and complete, mrs. cravister looked round the [pg 17]room and remarking, “we won’t wait for mr. copthorne-slazenger,” sailed majestically in the direction of the door. she particularly disliked this member of her husband’s staff, and lost no opportunity of being rude to him. thus, where an ordinary hostess might have said, “shall we come in to dinner?” mrs. cravister employed the formula, “we won’t wait for mr. copthorne-slazenger”; and a guest unacquainted with mrs. cravister’s habits would be surprised on entering the dining-room to find that all the seats at the table were filled, and that the meal proceeded smoothly without a single further reference to the missing copthorne, who never turned up at all, for the good reason that he had never been invited.
dinner began a little nervously and uncomfortably. at one end of the table the headmaster was telling anecdotes of ?sop in the sixties, at which the boys in his neighbourhood laughed with a violent nervous insincerity. henry cravister, still talking about eschatology, was quoting from sidonius apollinarius and commodianus of gaza. mrs. [pg 18]cravister, who had been engaged in a long colloquy with the butler, suddenly turned on dick with the remark, “and so you have a deep, passionate fondness for cats,” as though they had been intimately discussing the subject for the last hour. dick had enough presence of mind to say that, yes, he did like cats—all except those manx ones that had no tails.
“no tails,” mrs. cravister repeated—“no tails. like men. how symbolical everything is!”
francis quarles was sitting opposite him, so that dick had ample opportunity to look at his idol. how perfectly he did everything, down to eating his soup! the first lines of a new poem began to buzz in dick’s head:
“all, all i lay at thy proud marble feet—
my heart, my love and all my future days.
upon thy brow for ever let me gaze,
for ever touch thy hair: oh (something) sweet . . .”
would he be able to find enough rhymes to make it into a sonnet? mrs. cravister, who had been leaning back in her chair for the last few minutes in a [pg 19]state of exhausted abstraction, opened her eyes and said to nobody in particular:
“ah, how i envy the calm of those chinese dynasties!”
“which chinese dynasties?” a well-meaning youth inquired.
“any chinese dynasty, the more remote the better. henry, tell us the names of some chinese dynasties.”
in obedience to his mother, henry delivered a brief disquisition on the history of politics, art, and letters in the far east.
the headmaster continued his reminiscences.
an angel of silence passed. the boys, whose shyness had begun to wear off, became suddenly and painfully conscious of hearing themselves eating. mrs. cravister saved the situation.
“lord francis knows all about birds,” she said in her most thrilling voice. “perhaps he can tell us why it is the unhappy fate of the carrion crow to mate for life.”
conversation again became general. dick was still thinking about his sonnet. oh, these rhymes!—praise, bays, roundelays, [pg 20]amaze: greet, bleat, defeat, beat, paraclete. . . .
“. . . to sing the praise
in anthems high and solemn roundelays
of holy father, son and paraclete.”
that was good—damned good; but it hardly seemed to fit in with the first quatrain. it would do for one of his religious poems, though. he had written a lot of sacred verse lately.
then suddenly, cutting across his ecstatic thoughts, came the sound of henry cravister’s reedy voice.
“but i always find pater’s style so coarse,” it said.
something explosive took place in dick’s head. it often happens when one blows one’s nose that some passage in the labyrinth connecting ears and nose and throat is momentarily blocked, and one becomes deaf and strangely dizzy. then, suddenly, the mucous bubble bursts, sound rushes back to the brain, the head feels clear and stable once more. it was something like this, but transposed into terms of the spirit, that seemed now to have happened to dick.
[pg 21]
it was as though some mysterious obstruction in his brain, which had dammed up and diverted his faculties from their normal course during the past three weeks, had been on a sudden overthrown. his life seemed to be flowing once more along familiar channels.
he was himself again.
“but i always find pater’s style so coarse.”
these few words of solemn foolery were the spell which had somehow performed the miracle. it was just the sort of remark he might have made three weeks ago, before the crisis. for a moment, indeed, he almost thought it was he himself who had spoken; his own authentic voice, carried across the separating gulf of days, had woken him again to life!
he looked at francis quarles. why, the fellow was nothing but a great prize ox, a monstrous animal. “there was a lady loved a swine. honey, said she . . .” it was ignoble, it was ridiculous. he could have hidden his face in his hands for pure shame; shame tingled through his body. goodness, how grotesquely he had behaved!
[pg 22]
he leaned across and began talking to henry cravister about pater and style and books in general. cravister was amazed at the maturity of the boy’s mind; for he possessed to a remarkable degree that critical faculty which in the vast majority of boys is—and from their lack of experience must be—wholly lacking.
“you must come and see me some time when you’re in london,” henry cravister said to him when the time came for the boys to get back to their houses. dick was flattered; he had not said that to any of the others. he walked home with gay, laughing and talking quite in his old fashion. gay marvelled at the change in his companion; strange, inexplicable fellow! but it was pleasant to have him back again, to repossess the lost friend. arrived in his room, dick sat down to attack the last set of mathematical problems that had been set him. three hours ago they had appeared utterly incomprehensible; now he understood them perfectly. his mind was like a giant refreshed, delighting in its strength.
[pg 23]
next day mr. skewbauld congratulated him on his answers.
“you seem quite to have recovered your old form, greenow,” he said. “did you take my advice? paraffin regularly . . .”
looking back on the events of the last weeks, dick was disquieted. mr. skewbauld might be wrong in recommending paraffin, but he was surely right in supposing that something was the matter and required a remedy. what could it be? he felt so well; but that, of course, proved nothing. he began doing müller’s exercises, and he bought a jar of malt extract and a bottle of hypophosphites. after much consultation of medical handbooks and the encyclop?dia, he came to the conclusion that he was suffering from an?mia of the brain; and for some time one fixed idea haunted him: suppose the blood completely ceased to flow to his brain, suppose he were to fall down suddenly dead or, worse, become utterly and hopelessly paralysed. . . . happily the distractions of ?sop in the summer term were sufficiently numerous and delightful to [pg 24]divert his mind from this gloomy brooding, and he felt so well and in such high spirits that it was impossible to go on seriously believing that he was at death’s door. still, whenever he thought of the events of those strange weeks he was troubled. he did not like being confronted by problems which he could not solve. during the rest of his stay at school he was troubled by no more than the merest velleities of a relapse. a fit of moon-gazing and incapacity to understand the higher mathematics had threatened him one time when he was working rather too strenuously for a scholarship. but a couple of days’ complete rest had staved off the peril. there had been rather a painful scene, too, at dick’s last school concert. oh, those ?sop concerts! musically speaking, of course, they are deplorable; but how rich from all other points of view than the merely ?sthetic! the supreme moment arrives at the very end when three of the most eminent and popular of those about to leave mount the platform together and sing the famous “?sop, farewell.” greatest of school [pg 25]songs! the words are not much, but the tune, which goes swooning along in three-four time, is perhaps the masterpiece of the late organist, dr. pilch.
dick was leaving, but he was not a sufficiently heroic figure to have been asked to sing, “?sop, farewell.” he was simply a member of the audience, and one, moreover, who had come to the concert in a critical and mocking spirit. for, as he had an ear for music, it was impossible for him to take the concert very seriously. the choir had clamorously re-crucified the messiah; the soloists had all done their worst; and now it was time for “?sop, farewell.” the heroes climbed on to the stage. they were three demi-gods, but francis quarles was the most splendid of the group as he stood there with head thrown back, eyes almost closed, calm and apparently unconscious of the crowd that seethed, actually and metaphorically, beneath him. he was wearing an enormous pink orchid in the buttonhole of his evening coat; his shirt-front twinkled with diamond studs; the buttons of his waistcoat were of fine [pg 26]gold. at the sight of him, dick felt his heart beating violently; he was not, he painfully realized, master of himself.
the music struck up—dum, dum, dumdidi, dumdidi; dum, dum, dum, and so on. so like the merry widow. in two days’ time he would have left ?sop for ever. the prospect had never affected him very intensely. he had enjoyed himself at school, but he had never, like so many ?sopians, fallen in love with the place. it remained for him an institution; for others it was almost an adored person. but to-night his spirit, rocked on a treacly ocean of dominant sevenths, succumbed utterly to the sweet sorrow of parting. and there on the platform stood francis. oh, how radiantly beautiful! and when he began, in his rich tenor, the first verse of the valedictory:
“farewell, mother ?sop,
our childhood’s home!
our spirit is with thee,
though far we roam . . .”
he found himself hysterically sobbing.
