A Child of the Age (Adams)/Chapter 4
IV
Early in the next term I received another letter from Clayton. There wasn't much in it, I thought. 'He was really about to leave old England, going to learn his occupation in life, where every man should learn it—under fire, and in the smoke of the battle.'
I put the letter into my pocket, intending to answer it that evening at preparation: indeed, did begin upon it, but, after the first seven lines or so, tore the sheet up and went on with my work. I didn't care about the fellow enough to write to him any of my thoughts, and, if I couldn't write them, I didn't want to write anything.
I believe he said or wrote things about me to one or two of his friends, especially Scott. For Scott is every now and then polite to me, when the chance occurs, as Clayton himself used to be; but that sort of politeness has no relish.
That midsummer term I remember well enough—by its dreariness. Dull skies and rain, and our wretched School House 'crew,' pulling up the river, and down again, and on home mostly sulky. Once or twice I almost gave it up; but the thought of the good the exercise did me restrained me. Then the Bumping Races came. On the fourth night we bumped Gough's, and kept our place as head of the river for the remaining four nights.
As I was passing through the hall after the last night's races, I saw two or three letters on the end table and, stopping, I don't know quite why, to glance at them, saw one was for me. I recognised Colonel James's handwriting at once. He wrote to me usually in the first week of August enclosing a £5 note, for which I as usually thanked him, in a jerked letter which invariably caused me not a little impatience; for, as I have already said, when I didn't care about people enough to write to them any of my thoughts, I didn't care about writing to them at all. His letter was somewhat after this fashion:
'Junior United Service Club,
'Dear Leicester,—A communication has been forwarded to me from my lawyer's, purporting' to come from Mr. Charles Cholmeley, of the Myrtles, Seabay, Isle of Wight, who, I am thereby informed, is the only brother of the late Mrs. Leicester your mother. He has I believe been residing for some time abroad, owing to the weak state of his health, and is, as he is good enough to inform me, by birth an American. He has received from me what information I thought fit to give him about your affairs, and you may shortly expect to receive a direct communication from him yourself. He desires that you should be allowed to pass the first fortnight of your midsummer vacation with him at the Myrtles, Seabay, Isle of Wight, and I at present see no objection to your accepting his invitation; but you are, as far as I am concerned, at liberty to please yourself in the matter. He is, I understand, likely to go abroad again very shortly, having only come to England, as he informs me, in order to transact some urgent business which requires his presence in England; so that, as there need be no further acquaintance between you, beyond perhaps some small correspondence, I have not, as I have said, seen any objection to your accepting his invitation to pass the first fortnight of your midsummer vacation with him. At the same time I desire you to understand, that, as long as you are under my care, I must insist that your acquaintance with any of the late Mrs. Leicester's, your mother's, relations be nothing beyond what ordinary courtesy to them shall require. Any intimacy with them was strongly deprecated by the late Major Leicester, your father, during his lifetime, and both as his friend and as your guardian I feel myself bound to follow out his wishes on the subject, even if my own did not coincide with them, as, I may add, they do most completely.
'I enclose my accustomary allowance of £5 to you for the year's pocket-money. You can apply to the Rev. Dr. Craven for the necessary funds for your travelling expenses, an account of which I shall expect you to forward to me.—I remain, truly yours, Thos. R. James.
'Bertram Leicester.'
As I stripped myself, ran down to the wash-room, took my place behind the last fellow on the stairs, and as I was washing in the wash-room before I went under the tap, I thought in a half-dreamy way about this uncle of mine, and then about my mother and Colonel James, and then about my father. But going under the tap and standing there with the cool water gushing all over my chest and down my body, my thoughts, arrested, took another turn, and it was not till I was in bed that night that they reverted to the matter. Who was my mother? My father was a major in the army, a 'friend' of Colonel James: something like Colonel James seems to me, perhaps: a stiff-bodied, stiff-kneed, steel-grey-headed old gentleman modelled upon Thackeray's Major Pendennis. . . . Was my mother the woman up in one of the berths of that second darker vision, the woman up in one of the berths, soothing and giving suck to the child fractious with sleep and misery? The baby-boy, then, was my brother or sister? Had I a brother or sister? I felt somehow that I had not. Had I a mother? I felt that, on the other side of some broad, shelved and dim atmosphere, I had. Sometimes she stood still, turned towards me; but neither of us made any great effort to see the other. 'My father lies dead in the close dark coffin in the ground with a frown on his face. . . . And my thoughts of them,' I said to myself, 'are this much worth: that my mother is dead, "the late Mrs. Leicester," and my father's face probably past all frowning now. Nay, they probably are semi-dissolved bodies together!' On which thought I fell asleep, and had a horrible dream of propping up the body of my father, great, naked, flabby, which would come upon me. This dream disturbed me for the whole of the next day with a feeling of flabby death near and not near me, by and not by me, my father and not my father.
The morning after that, at breakfast, Armstrong, who sat next me, getting up to look at the letters when they were brought in, returned and threw one on to my plate. It was addressed to B. Leicester, Esq., in a thin scratchy hand, and the envelope was large and oblong and of glazed white paper. In a little I opened it, supposing it to be from Mr. Cholmeley, and rightly. It ran like this:
'The Myrtles, Seabay, Isle of Wight,
'Dear Mr. Leicester,—I daresay that by this time, my name, Cholmeley, will convey some impression to your mind; for I must suppose that your guardian. Colonel James, has not left you in complete ignorance of the correspondence that has been passing between us.
'I prefer coming at once to the point, or rather one of the points; for there are two. The first is, some explanation of what you must suppose to have been nothing short of absolute neglect of yourself on my part; the second is, as you are probably aware, to ask you to confer upon me the pleasure of your society here for the first fortnight in August. I should, indeed, have been happy to have given you a somewhat larger invitation; but, as my health requires me to hasten south again to those parts which alone seem able to make my wretched old body an endurable habitation, you will see that this is impossible.
'I now return to the first point. I saw but very little of my sister, Isabel, your mother; for having very early shown a decided inclination for the study of the classics, that chiefest laborum dulce lenimen, and my grandfather, having himself been a scholar of no despicable pretensions (although of a somewhat more artificial, if sounder, character, than those at present in vogue), and moreover money not being a want to us, I naturally desired, and at last gained, my father's permission to return to England, ultimately proceeding to Cambridge, where I obtained the distinction of Chancellor's Medallist and Second Classic, terms doubtless familiar to you, a member of a school in which, I believe, the old classical tradition is still handed down unsullied by the barbaric bar-sinister of either Science or, what they call, a 'Modern Side!' Shortly after my matriculation I had heard that my father's health was a little shaken by a severe chill caught at some festal gathering, but the evil effects were, apparently, eradicated by care and a good doctor, and I had given up any anxious thought about the matter. Indeed, the account I had of him for the next few years was encouraging in the extreme. You may, then, imagine my consternation and grief when, shortly after my last University success, I received intelligence of his sudden death and of my sister's desire to come to England as soon as possible, in order that she might take up her residence with an aunt of ours at that time residing near Manchester. This voyage was actually performed, and I myself stayed for a few days at my aunt's house, from the experience of which few days I formed that estimate of, what appeared to me to be, your mother's natural disposition, which, despite all subsequent events, I have seen no proper reason to cease to hold as being, in the main, a correct one. I can say with the most absolute sincerity, that I believe that the greatest of her faults was thoughtlessness, and that I have so far considered, and shall in all probability continue to consider to the end of my life, that all attempts to make her out as, either naturally or by her early training, depraved are as unfounded as they are ungenerous and unjust. I make no doubt that you already know at any rate the general outline of your unhappy mother's subsequent career, and I shall, therefore, make no further allusion to it than that which I have already made.
'You will I think easily perceive, that her marriage with your father and their instantaneous departure for Cork, where his regiment was then quartered, and my scholastic labours and ultimately my own marriage, to say nothing of our most opposed spheres of life, made any close intimacy between the two families all but impossible. After a short, too short! period of happiness I was left to face life with the motherless pledge of mutual affection and a frame shattered by an, alas useless, attendance on the sick bed of my beloved wife and companion. I felt that change of scene and change of climate were absolutely necessary to me. I left England therefore; and so it came about that, unhonoured by the confidence of my sister, I remained for long in ignorance of anything more than the general facts of her history. It was only through inquiries, instituted by me shortly after I had received intelligence of her death, that I learnt of your existence at all, and then, being informed that you were well cared for, and being myself at the time engaged upon a most laborious and absorbing undertaking, I thought it no great neglect of you to wait till, that undertaking completed, however unworthily, and my presence in England being from the nature of the thing (I need not scruple to inform you that I refer to my forth-coming edition of the plays of Sophocles) an absolute necessity, at any rate for a short season, I could make your acquaintance personally, instead of being compelled to know you and be known of you through nothing more intimate than the post!
'There are other things which I desired to say to you, but, for the present, I must forbear, for my exertions of the last few days have so worn out these wretchedly shattered nerves of mine, that I find both energy and acumen to be pitiably lacking. Let this, I pray you, be some excuse for the paltriness of this letter: and more especially for the abrupt ending which I am now about to give to it. I hope to hear from you shortly, and, in the meantime, ask you to believe me, dear Mr. Leicester, to be your affectionate uncle,
The letter made no impression upon me at the time; for it did not seem to have much, if any, concern with me. I had read it with half-absent thoughts: then I put it into my breast-coat pocket: finished my breakfast: got up to my locker: took out one or two books, and went off to my study to look through some Cicero, the Pro Milone, which we had for exam, at second lesson. It was not till, the exam, paper over, I stood at my locker in the hall again, putting away my pen and blotting-paper, that my mind recurred to Mr. Cholmeley and his invitation. I shut-to the locker door: took my hat off one of the pegs, and went out into the quad, with my hands in my pockets, thinking: 'I suppose I may as well go down there.… And yet I don't know. There's the boating, and I reckoned on a happy time by myself. Well, it's only for three weeks at the worst: and I suppose, as he's my uncle, I … And—he might tell me something about my mother' (I lifted up my head). 'I have just enough care about her, or her history, or whatever it is, to call it curiosity.' It was on some doubt consequent on this thought that I went in to see Craven.
I found him in the study taking off his gown. He received me affably. Yes, he had received a letter (this was it!) from Mr. Mr. Cholmeley, yes Mr. Cholmeley—My uncle? Ah yes, my uncle!—asking permission from him to allow me to spend the first fortnight of my midsummer vacation with him at Seabay in the Isle of Wight. Colonel James had been good enough to make his (Craven's) permission a requisite? Well (looking up from his inspection of the letter), he had no objection to my going: no objection: No. Mr. Cholmeley was my uncle? Did I know if he was any relation of … Ah, it must be the same, he saw: Charles K. Cholmeley.—He had not noticed the initials.
'Are you aware, Leicester,' he said with his foolish blinking smile, 'that Mr. Cholmeley is one of the greatest authorities on the Greek tragedians that we have? What, what } You weren't aware of it?… Now I hope you'll be careful not to …' And so on. The end of it being that he informed me, after a pause, that he thought a fortnight at Seabay would do me good. I was not to forget to warn Mrs. Jones of the change in my plans. There were some charming pieces of scenery in the neighbourhood of Seabay.
' That is,' he said with another of his silly grins, 'if you care for charming pieces of scenery, Leicester? What, what?'
I thought that it would be purposeless to say to him that I did or how much I did: so kept silence with my eyes on the ground, waiting for the old fool to finish.
'Well, well!' he said. 'Perhaps that will come later on!—You may go, Leicester.'
I went out and up into my study, and sat down in a chair, tilting it back and putting my feet against the table by the window looking out on to the quad., and began to think whether I really wanted to go and see my uncle, or wasn't it foolish to give up the pleasure of an extra fortnight alone on the river? 'Well,' I said, getting up, 'I shall go now I suppose.'
The remaining week passed with imperceptible fleetness. I read a good deal: stalked out and over the fields to the bathing-place twice or three times, and sculled a little up the river.
I remember, the last night, going in to Mother McCarthy to get my hat from the cupboard—how I came along the dark passage: opened the door, with Gordon (the monitor) under the gas, leaning against the iron-work of Armstrong's bed, reading a book and biting his nails: went on to by my bed; threw the hat on to it: turned to the opened window and looked out—through the branches of two of the dark deep trees, into the quad, all there in the moonlight with the shadowed houses and, beyond, the opened heaven paley blue, lit with some self-containing radiance.
And a feeling of soft peace grew in me, something which was unspeakable and which could not be left, to turn round to the bright gas-light, and the bedded, jugged room and the fellows; so that the thought of them left me, trailing and fading away as some half-pulsing sort of tentacle in a dream, and I remained with the fulness of that soft peace unspeakable: until there was a start, my attention taken backward, a book snapped up, and I knew the butler had been in and put out the gas.
I went from the window into the space between the two beds, and undressed in silence, thinking.