AUGUSTUS CARP, Esq.

Myself at the age of 21 from a photograph now in the possession of the Reverend Simeon Whey

AUGUSTUS CARP, Esq.

By HIMSELF

BEING THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF

A REALLY GOOD MAN

With

Illustrations by

ROBIN

BOSTON & NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

1924

Printed in Great Britain

DEDICATED

TO THE MEMORY OF MY DEAR FATHER

AUGUSTUS CARP

OF CAMBERWELL

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I

No apology for writing this book. An imperative duty under present conditions. Description of my parents and their personal appearances. Description of Mon Repos, Angela Gardens. Long anxiety prior to my birth. Intense joy when at last this takes place. My father’s decision as to my Xtian name. Early selection of my first godfather.

It is customary, I have noticed, in publishing an autobiography to preface it with some sort of apology. But there are times, and surely the present is one of them, when to do so is manifestly unnecessary. In an age when every standard of decent conduct has either been torn down or is threatened with destruction; when every newspaper is daily reporting scenes of violence, divorce, and arson; when quite young girls smoke cigarettes and even, I am assured, sometimes cigars; when mature women, the mothers of unhappy children, enter the sea in one-piece bathing-costumes; and when married men, the heads of households, prefer the flicker of the cinematograph to the Athanasian Creed—then it is obviously a task, not to be justifiably avoided, to place some higher example before the world.

For some time—I am now forty-seven—I had been feeling this with increasing urgency. And when not only my wife and her four sisters, but the vicar of my parish, the Reverend Simeon Whey, approached me with the same suggestion, I felt that delay would amount to sin. That sin, by many persons, is now lightly regarded, I am, of course, only too well aware. That its very existence is denied by others is a fact equally familiar to me. But I am not one of them. On every ground I am an unflinching opponent of sin. I have continually rebuked it in others. I have strictly refrained from it in myself. And for that reason alone I have deemed it incumbent upon me to issue this volume.

A glance at the frontispiece will show me as I appeared at the age of twenty-one. But I propose in the first instance to deal with my earliest surroundings and the influence exerted upon me by my father. Believing as I do that every man (and to a lesser extent every woman) is almost entirely the product of his or her personal endeavours, I cannot pretend, of course, to attach much importance to merely paternal influence. Nevertheless in the lives of each one of us it undoubtedly plays a certain part. And although my father had numerous faults, as I afterwards discovered and was able to point out to him, he yet brought to bear on me the full force of a frequently noble character.

That such was his duty I do not of course deny. But duty well done is rare enough to deserve a tribute. And in days such as these, when fatherhood is so lightly regarded, and is so frequently, indeed, accidental, too much attention can surely not be given to so opposite an instance.

At the time of my birth, then, and until his death, my father was a civic official in a responsible position, being a collector of outstanding accounts for the Consolidated Water Board. In addition, he was one of the most respected and trustworthy agents of the Durham and West Hartlepool Fire and Burglary Insurance Company, a sidesman of the Church of St. James-the-Less in Camberwell, and the tenant of Mon Repos, Angela Gardens. This was one of some thirty-six admirably conceived houses of a similar and richly ornamented architecture, the front door of each being flanked and surmounted by diamond-shaped panes of blue and vermilion glass; and though it was true that this particular house had been named by the landlord in a foreign tongue, it must not be assumed that this nomenclature in any way met with my father’s approval. On the contrary, he had not only protested, but such was his distrust of French morality that he had always insisted, both for himself and others, upon a strictly English pronunciation.

Somewhat under lower middle height, my father, even as a boy, had been inclined to corpulence, a characteristic, inherited by myself, that he succeeded in retaining to the end of his life. Nor did he ever lose—or not to any marked extent—either the abundant hair that grew upon his scalp, his glossy and luxurious moustache, or his extraordinarily powerful voice. This was a deep bass that in moments of emotion became suddenly converted into a high falsetto, and he never hesitated, in a cause that he deemed righteous, to employ it to its full capacity. Always highly coloured, and the fortunate possessor of an exceptionally large and well-modelled nose, my father’s eyes were of a singularly pale, unwinking blue, while in his massive ears, with their boldly outstanding rims, resided the rare faculty of independent motion.

My mother, on the other hand, presented hardly a feature that could, in the strictest sense, have been called beautiful, although she was somewhat taller than my father, with eyes that were similar in their shade of blue. Like my father’s, too, her nose was large, but it had been built on lines that were altogether weaker, and the slightly reddish down upon her upper lip might even by some people have been considered a disfigurement. She had inherited, however, together with five hundred pounds, an apparently gentle disposition, and was a scion or scioness of the Walworth Road branch of the great family of Robinson. Herself the eldest of the nine daughters of Mortimer Robinson, a well-known provision merchant, my father had claimed relationship for her, albeit unsuccessfully, with Peter Robinson of Oxford Street, while he used half humorously to assert her connection with the fictional character known as Robinson Crusoe. Clean in her habits, quiet about the house, and invariably obedient to his slightest wish, he had very seldom indeed, as he often told me, seriously regretted his choice of a wife.

With sufficient capital, therefore, not only to furnish his house, but to pay its first year’s rent and establish an emergency fund, my father might well have been supposed by an ignorant observer to be free from every anxiety. Such was not the case, however, and he was obliged, almost immediately, to face one of the sternest ordeals of his married life. Ardently desiring increase, it was not for nine and a half months that Providence saw fit to answer his prayers, and as week succeeded week and the cradle still remained empty, only his unfaltering faith saved him from despair. But the hour came at last, and so vividly has my father described it to me that I have long since shared its triumphant joy.

Born at half-past three on a February morning, the world having been decked with a slight snow-fall, it was then that my mother’s aunt, Mrs. Emily Smith, opened the bedroom door and emerged on the landing. My father had gone outside to lean over the gate, and was still leaning there when she opened the door, but my mother’s mother, with another of my mother’s aunts, were standing with bowed heads at the foot of the stairs. Prone in the parlour, and stretched in uneasy attitudes, five of her eight sisters were snatching a troubled sleep, while two fellow-members of my mother’s Mothers’ Guild were upon their knees in the back kitchen. But for the fact, indeed, that two of my mother’s sisters had not, at that time, had their tonsils removed, the whole house would have been wrapped in the profoundest stillness.

My mother’s mother was the first to see Mrs. Smith, though she only saw her, as it were, through a mist. Mrs. Smith was the first to speak, in a voice tremulous with emotion.

“Where’s Augustus?” she said. Augustus was my father’s name.

“He’s just gone outside,” said my mother’s mother.

Something splashed heavily on the hall linoleum. It was a drop of moisture from Mrs. Smith’s forehead.

“Tell him,” she said, “that he’s the father of a son.”

My mother’s mother gave a great cry. My father was beside her in a single leap. Always, as I have said, highly coloured, his face at this moment seemed literally on fire. The two fellow-members of my mother’s Mothers’ Guild, accompanied by my father’s five sisters-in-law, rushed into the hall. Mrs. Smith leaned over the banisters.

“A boy,” she said. “It’s a boy.”

“A boy?” said my father.

“Yes, a boy,” said Mrs. Smith.

There was a moment’s hush, and then Nature had its way. My father unashamedly burst into tears. My mother’s mother kissed him on the neck just as the two fellow-members burst into a hymn; and a moment later, my mother’s five sisters burst simultaneously into the doxology. Then my father recovered himself and held up his hand.

“I shall call him Augustus,” he said, “after myself.”

“Or tin?” suggested my mother’s mother. “What about calling him tin, after the saint?”

“How do you mean—tin?” said my father.

“Augus-tin,” said Mrs. Emily Smith.

But my father shook his head.

“No, it shall be tus,” he said. “Tus is better than tin.”

Then his five sisters-in-law resumed the singing, from which the two fellow-members had been unable to desist, until my father, who had been rapidly thinking, once again held up his hand.

“And I shall give the vicar,” he said, “the first opportunity of becoming Augustus’s godfather.”

Then he took a deep breath, threw back his shoulders, tilted his chin, and closed his eyes; and with the full vigour of his immense voice, he too joined in the doxology.

CHAPTER II

Trials of my infancy. Varieties of indigestion. I suffer from a local erythema. Instance of my father’s unselfishness. Difficulty in providing a second godfather. Unexpected solution of the problem. The ceremony of my baptism. A narrow escape. Was it culpable carelessness? My father transfers his worship to St. James-the-Lesser-Still, Peckham Rye.

With the portion of my life that intervened between my birth and my baptism I do not propose, owing to exigencies of space, to deal in the fullest detail. But it may be of some comfort to weaker fellow-sufferers to be assured that, from the outset, the ill-health to which I have been a life-long martyr played its part in testing my character. Singularly well formed, of a sanguine complexion, and weighing not less than four and three-quarter pounds, Providence saw fit almost immediately to purge me without medicinal aid. Whether this was due, under Higher Supervision, as my father several times forcibly suggested to her, to some dietary excess or indiscretion on the part of my mother was never determined. But the fact remained that for several weeks I suffered from indigestion in two main directions.

Twice indeed, on the grounds of health, the ceremony of my baptism had to be postponed; and for hours together, I have been told, I lay upon my back, with my knees drawn up and my fingers clenched, in an anguished endeavour to stifle the moans that I was too enfeebled wholly to suppress. Time after time, too, my mother’s mother, the aunt that had stood with her at the bottom of the stairs, and various of my mother’s sisters would recommend alternative forms of nourishment. But although, at my father’s desire, each of these suggestions was given an immediate trial, it was not for two months, and until I had been subjected to a heart-breaking period of starvation, that an affliction abated to which I have since been liable at any moment of undue excitement.

Chastened within, however, as I had been, I was not to escape chastisement without. For no sooner had I begun, in some small measure, to assimilate the food provided for me than I became the victim of an unfortunate skin complaint known, as I am informed, as erythema. This was happily local, but it gave rise to a very profound irritation, and one that proved, as my father has often assured me, to be of a peculiarly obstinate character. Naturally diffident, owing to the site of the affection, to mention it even to the family doctor, my parents exhausted their every resource without procuring the least alleviation. Though for night after night they made it a matter of prayer, my sufferings were pitiful, I have been told, to the last extreme; and almost hourly, from supper-time to breakfast, the darkness was rent with my cries.

Unable at last, owing to his acute sensibilities, to witness my agony any longer, my father was obliged, with the deepest reluctance, to confine himself to a separate bedroom. But it was in this extremity that his almost Quixotic unselfishness shone if possible with an added lustre. From the time of his marriage to the day of my birth, and as soon thereafter as the doctor had permitted her to rise, my father had been in the habit of enabling my mother to provide him with an early cup of tea. And this he had done by waking her regularly a few minutes before six o’clock. In view of the fact, however, that he was now occupying a different bedroom, and that, owing to my indisposition, she was awake most of the night, he offered to excuse her should she chance to be asleep at that hour, from the performance of this wifely duty. Needless to say, it was not an offer that she could accept. Indeed, in his heart he had not expected her to do so. And I have even considered the incident, in later days, as illustrative of a certain weakness in my father’s character. But I have never been able to regard it without affection or to forbear mentioning it on appropriate occasions.

That in most respects, however, my father’s temperament was an exceptionally unflinching one was amply corroborated by the circumstances attendant upon the choice of my second godfather. This gave rise, as my father has frequently told me, to the most prolonged and anxious discussions, and entailed an enormous amount of correspondence, some of which has been preserved among the family documents. For with his ruthless determination, inherited by myself, to discover and expose every kind of wrong-doing, with his life-long habit of informing those in authority of any dereliction of duty in themselves and their subordinates, and with the passion for truth that compelled him on every occasion instantly to correct what he deemed the reverse, my father had necessarily but little leisure to cultivate the easy art of friendship. Amongst his acquaintances, indeed, there were but few that even remotely approximated to his standards; and he had found none that his conscience had permitted him to select for the purposes of personal friendship.

It was for this reason that, on the occasion of his marriage, he had dispensed with the services of a best man. And although the vicar had eventually agreed to act as one of my male sponsors, the appointment of a second began to assume the proportions of an almost insoluble problem. It being manifestly impossible to hope for a suitable candidate among such persons as occasionally called at the house, and my father’s character having long ago isolated him from his more immediate masculine relatives, he resolved at last to appeal to the public sense of the higher officials of the Church of England.

Nor was the result ungratifying, as various letters still in my possession go to prove. Though unable, owing to so many similar and previously acquired obligations, to accede to my father’s suggestion, all of them replied with the greatest courtesy. Thus the Dean of St. Paul’s wrote in person wishing me every success in life; the Bishop of London trusted that my father’s aspirations as to my personal holiness would be realized; while the Archbishop of Canterbury commanded his secretary to express his gratification at the suggestion of an honour that only the exigencies of his position as Primate forbade him to accept. Needless to say, those in charge of the State, whom my father next approached, behaved very differently. Neither the Prime Minister nor the Home Secretary saw fit to reply at all, while the President of the Board of Trade merely expressed a formal regret. And yet in the end, as is so often the case, the solution proved quite a simple one. Turn but a stone, says a poet, and start a wing. And my father did not even need to turn a stone. Sick at heart, he was returning home one night when he suddenly caught sight of himself in a cheesemonger’s window. It was as though Providence, he said, had touched him on the shoulder. Whereas he had been blind, he said, then he saw. For a moment the shock was almost too much for him. A member of the constabulary, indeed, actually asked him to move on. But the solution was there, staring him in the face. Involuntarily he raised his hat. He himself was the man.

With my aunt, Mrs. Emily Smith, only too eager to be my godmother, everything now seemed to be propitious for the happy consummation of my baptism, and no more earnest or reverent gathering could have been found that day in any metropolitan church. The vicar being godfather, the actual ceremony was, at my father’s suggestion, performed by the senior curate, the junior curate, in deference to my father’s position as sidesman, being on the vicar’s right hand between him and my mother.

On the senior curate’s left stood my father, flanked on his own left by the verger, the circle round the font being completed by Mrs. Emily Smith, my mother’s mother, my mother’s father, her eight sisters and the aunt that had stood with my mother’s mother at the foot of the stairs. A soft April rain was refreshing the outside world, and the first part of the service had been successfully performed, when an incident occurred that might well have been attended with the most tragic and irreparable consequences. For there suddenly took place, just as I had been handed to the senior curate, so acute an exacerbation of the erythema that, in the ensuing convulsion, he was quite unable to retain me in his grasp.

I say unable, but, as my father pointed out to him immediately after the close of the service, had I suffered any provable damage he would certainly have taken legal advice. Falling from his arms, however, I remained poised for a moment upon the extreme brim of the font, and then fell forward, colliding with the vicar, who stumbled backwards in his efforts to save me. From the tottering vicar I then ricochetted, in what I believe is a military phrase, towards the feet of the junior curate, who became unexpectedly the instrument of Providence. I do not myself practise, nor do I greatly approve, any form of merely athletic exercise. But it was perhaps fortunate that the curate in question happened to be a skilful player of cricket. For just as my head was within an inch of the floor and the blood had receded from every countenance, he shot out his hand and succeeded in catching me in a position technically known, I believe, as the slips.

“Oh, well held, sir!” cried the senior curate, and then for a moment or two his emotion overcame him.

The vicar, still pale, recovered his balance.

“Poor little Augustus,” said my mother; “it’s the irritation.”

My father frowned at her.

“Without prejudice,” he said. And then for perhaps half a minute there was a deathly silence. It was fractured, I have been told, by myself, as the junior curate handed me back to the senior.

But my father intervened.

“Not again,” he said. “Never again; never in this world.”

The silence was resumed, broken only by myself. My father stood holding me, trembling with emotion. The vicar took a deep breath.

“Is the service to proceed?” he asked.

“Certainly,” said my father. “But in other hands.”

It was another instance of his dominating character, but also of his innate sense of justice.

“I am not insensible,” he said to the senior curate, “of the services that you have already rendered. But in the interests of my son, as you must surely agree, I cannot again trust him to your care.”

The senior curate bowed, but did not articulate a reply, and my father then handed me once more to the junior. For a moment the latter hesitated, but at the vicar’s request accepted the privilege of concluding my baptism. Later, I have been told, there was a certain amount of argument, in which my father more than held his own, finally absolving the vicar from further sponsorial duties and notifying his decision to transfer his worship elsewhere.

For a man of my father’s position this was a serious step. But it was one that he did not hesitate to take. And within a year, as I have always been proud to remember, he had made himself a sidesman at St. James-the-Lesser-Still, Peckham Rye.

CHAPTER III

My parents’ studies in the upbringing of children. A successful instance of non-vaccination. Further example of my father’s consideration for others. My mother’s ill-health. My parents engage a charwoman. Her appearance and character. Physical characteristics of her son. Deplorable social result of the war. Continued presumption of charwoman’s son. I rebuff him. Affection for grey rabbit. Charwoman’s son’s cannon and the use made of it by him. Scenes of violence, and intervention of my father. Intervention of charwoman. A lethargic vicar. Was he also immoral? My father transfers his worship to St. James-the-Least-of-All.

Apart from the ill-health to which I have previously made reference, but which was punctuated with intervals of comparative well-being, I have always regarded my first five or six years as a particularly fruitful period. At my father’s desire, almost in this case a command, my mother began to study various books on childhood, such as Dr. Brewinson’s Childish Complaints, Mrs. Edward Podmere’s Diet in Infancy, the Reverend Ambrose Walker’s First Steps in Religion, Wilbur P. Nathan’s The Babe and the Infinite, Mrs. Wood-Mortimer’s Clothes and the Young, and Jonathan and Cornwall’s Dictionary of Home Medicine. Each of these, with the exception of the Dictionary, was borrowed in turn from the nearest public library, and it became my mother’s custom to consecrate her afternoon rest hour to the perusal of these volumes.

According to an arrangement suggested by my father, she would study one chapter each afternoon, or alternatively three and a half pages of the Dictionary of Home Medicine. On his return from work, and after she had washed up the supper dishes—for my father at this time did not employ a domestic—he would put her through a searching examination upon what she had read earlier in the day. If, as was frequently the case, since my mother was not naturally scholastic, she failed to satisfy her examiner, he would playfully impose upon her the little penalty of again going through her task before she went to bed. And on such occasions, if he had not fallen asleep, he would re-examine her when she came to bid him good-night. If, on the other hand, her replies had been judged adequate, it was an understood thing that she might claim an extra kiss. So seriously, indeed, did my mother apply herself that she began to grow unattractively thin; and once, when she had failed in her examination on three successive nights, she actually burst into tears. For this feminine weakness, when she had asked his pardon, my father of course readily forgave her, merely pointing out that, with my future at stake, he was obviously unable to relax his standards.

Regarding me thus, from the very first, as a sacred trust committed to their charge, this is but a small example of the immense and unremitting care with which my parents undertook me. But it will at least suffice to show that they had not underrated the high task to which they had been called. To my father especially, as the months slipped all too quickly by, I became inexpressibly dear; and it was for that reason among others that I escaped the torments of vaccination. Though Jonathan and Cornwall’s Dictionary of Home Medicine advocated this operation on historical grounds, my father had an instinctive, but none the less well-reasoned, horror of the knife. Himself the subject of frequent boils, he would never permit these to be lanced, invariably giving orders that they should be poulticed until Nature herself brought about their evacuation. Nor can I say that, in my own case, he has been other than completely justified. It is true that I have suffered, and still do suffer, apart from the indigestion previously referred to, from several forms of neurasthenia, a marked tendency to eczema, occipital headaches, sour eructations, and flatulent distension of the abdomen. But from smallpox, although entirely unvaccinated, I have always remained singularly immune.

A similar prescience, too, sufficed to protect me from the anguish and indignity of personal chastisement. For although in principle my father was an ardent supporter of this, and indeed had administered it to several of his relatives’ children, he had never required it, he said, in his own case, and did not propose to have it inflicted on me. And it was the abrogation of this rule, although not until my seventh year, by the son of a powerful Hibernian charwoman that first revealed to me, in a never-to-be-forgotten flash, some of the profoundest depths of human iniquity.

It was soon after my sixth birthday that my father was first compelled to employ a charwoman, owing to an attack of unconsciousness on the part of my mother. For several months she had been complaining of breathlessness, incident upon certain of her domestic duties, such as floor-scrubbing, home laundry-work, cleaning the front steps, and polishing the boots and shoes. With his usual consideration my father had instantly remitted various other tasks proper to her position, such as the baking of bread twice a week, and the knitting of the family socks and stockings; and he had further excused her from my own daily tuition in both Latin and arithmetic. Involving, as these subjects did, considerable previous preparation, this was of course a sensible relief, obtained though it was at some hazard to my own intellectual future. But despite all these concessions, she continued to be unwell, and finally, as I have said, lapsed into unconsciousness.

For a brief period, therefore, and after medical advice, my father resolved to employ extraneous aid, and at a very considerable financial sacrifice engaged a person called Mrs. O’Flaherty. The widow of a colour-sergeant, and one of the church scrubbers, she was highly recommended by the vicar of St. James-the-Lesser-Still, and was not devoid, in certain deceptive respects, of the superficial charm of her race. Ominously developed as she was, both below and above the waist, her features were informed with an unintelligent but specious cheerfulness; and these, together with a not unattractive complexion, sufficed for some time to impose upon my mother.

My father, from the beginning, had his doubts of her character, but in view of the vicar’s recommendation, decided to employ her; and for the first month or two, apart from her habit of singing, found no cause for particular complaint. He even went so far, upon my mother’s intercession, as to allow the woman to bring her youngest child with her, a somewhat gross and over-exuberant lad a few months younger than myself.

That this youth, practically a gutter-snipe, and afterwards a private in the army, should have become a Brigadier-General in the late war, and even have received, as I understand, some kind of decoration, was one of the most deplorable of the many social upheavals for which that disaster was responsible.

From the very outset, with that sensitiveness of vision granted by Providence to certain children, I regarded this new intruder with the deepest suspicion. Obviously inheriting the physique of his mother, and as it seemed the proclivities of his father, his chief article of amusement appeared to be a small cannon, equipped with a spring for purposes of propulsion. This he offered to lend me on the occasion of his first visit, but declining his advances I moved to another room, where I continued my study of a book upon the apostles, written for the young by a Somersetshire clergyman.

Undeterred, however, by a reticence that should have been more than sufficient for a boy with the least good feeling, Desmond, for that was his pretentious name, made a similar offer on his second visit. Again I declined and removed myself, subsequently mentioning the matter to my father, who instantly gave orders that for the future Mrs. O’Flaherty’s boy was to be confined to the kitchen.

“You will kindly make it clear,” he said, “to your son that I cannot have my own son disturbed, and that admission to my house does not necessarily include admission to my social circle.”

Unfortunately, owing to a very natural slip due to the rapidity of his elocution, my father pronounced these words as sershle soakle; and I have never forgotten the vulgar and ill-concealed grin with which Mrs. O’Flaherty promised to attend to the matter.

Upon the following Saturday, however, a beautiful day in June, with the gerania in the front garden in full bloom, Desmond O’Flaherty again began to make overtures to me through the open door of the kitchen. The parlour door being again ajar, I was of course visible to him as I reclined on the sofa; and I instantly observed that he had brought his cannon with him and that its muzzle was pointing towards myself. Informing me that his pocket was full of peas, suitably dried for the purposes of ammunition, he then invited me to become his companion in a game of definitely military character.

This I refused, and I can still recall every detail of all that followed. Happily employed combing a grey rabbit, to which I was deeply attached, and which I had named, but a day or two previously, after the major prophet Isaiah, I heard a faint click and the next moment was violently struck upon the back of my hand. Unable to suppress a cry of pain, I involuntarily tightened my grip on Isaiah, who suddenly turned his head and made a movement as if about to bite my index finger. Realizing as I did, from my knowledge of the Dictionary of Home Medicine, the fatal consequences that might possibly have ensued, I flung him from me and sprang to the floor, almost beside myself with fear and anguish. With an expression of reproach that cut me to the very heart Isaiah then retreated behind the harmonium; and at the same moment I heard a raucous laugh proceeding from the direction of Desmond.

But for Desmond and his mother I was alone in the house, yet I did not hesitate to advance towards the kitchen and grind the cannon beneath my foot. Twice I stamped upon it in what still seems to me a wholly righteous indignation, and in a couple of seconds I had reduced it to an irreparable wreck. For a moment Desmond said nothing. I had taken him by surprise. But then he rushed towards me with a kind of snort, and fiercely hit me on a face already suffused with tears. I turned away from him shaken with sobs. But his bestial appetites were still unsated. A second and a third time he hit me, on both occasions on the neck, and followed this up by an assault with his foot upon the lower portion of my back. But my cries, now almost amounting to shrieks, had by this time attracted Mrs. O’Flaherty, and at the same instant my father, returning early, unlocked the front door. In a flash I was in his arms and had sobbed out to him the whole pitiful tale. I felt him quiver and then control himself, as he gently placed me to one side. Then he advanced to Desmond, pointing to the crumpled cannon.

“Pick that up,” he said, “and leave this house for ever.”

Desmond replied insolently that he would not do so, whereupon my father struck him smartly upon the cheek. For a moment Desmond glared at him, and then, lowering his head, he rushed at my father, beating him with both fists. Taken unawares, my father was obliged to sit heavily down upon an entirely unpadded hall chair, and once again I observed a malignant smile upon the face of Mrs. O’Flaherty. But it was only momentary. For, thrusting the little savage away from him, my father hit him twice with the handle of his walking-stick.

As well aimed as they were richly deserved, these blows took instant effect, the first knocking the evil lad sideways, and the second dividing the integument of his forehead. Suffering though he was, my father then rose to his feet and was once more about to address Desmond, when Mrs. O’Flaherty, revealed in her true character, ferociously caught him by the shoulders. As I have already recorded, she was a woman of repulsively over-developed physique, and she now began to shake my father so violently that his upper denture fell to the ground.

“You little whelp!” she cried with incredible blasphemy, “you little whelp of a bullying puff-ball!”

Then to my horror, no less than to his own, she lifted him bodily from the ground. For a brief moment, or so it seemed to me, I was on the verge of a merciful oblivion, but the next instant I beheld Mrs. O’Flaherty thrusting my father’s head into her pail. It was a commodious pail, very nearly full with incompletely clean water, and containing in addition the saturated garment with which it was her habit to wash the linoleum. Three separate times she immersed his head in this, even submerging the backs of his ears, and when at last she released him, and he had regained his breath, he was more moved than I had ever seen him.

Always eloquent, his denunciation of her conduct, deservedly attuned to the level of her understanding, was of a severity that has scarcely been equalled even in the writings of my rabbit’s namesake. Time after time, with a holy passion that repeatedly interfered with his respiration, he felt it obligatory to adjure his Creator to consign such a soul to its just perdition. And when Mrs. O’Flaherty handed him his upper denture he dashed it once more to the ground. Finally he commanded her to leave the house instantly, frankly informing her that he should prosecute her for assault.

“Yes, it’ll look real nice,” she said, “in the local papers, chippin’ a child’s ’ead open and ’avin’ yer own in a pail.”

My dear Father in his prime taken from a group of sidesman of St. James-the-Less

The malevolence with which she said this was almost inconceivable. But, as my father pointed out to me when she had gone, it raised issues of the profoundest importance that would demand his most serious consideration. For while in his own person—in propria persona[^[1]]—it might be his duty to bring her before the magistrates, it might be no less important, as a sidesman of the Established Church, to avoid the contingent publicity. This indeed was the decision to which he ultimately came, and as an instance of what may be called, perhaps, his sanctified statesmanship, it has always seemed to me to shed a peculiar radiance upon one of the sublimest aspects of his character. With regard, however, to the lethargy, little less than criminal, of the vicar of St. James-the-Lesser-Still, I have always been at a loss; and I cannot help suspecting, as indeed my father openly suggested to him, that his relations with Mrs. O’Flaherty were not at all what they should have been. For not only did he deprecate, having heard my father’s narrative, what he weakly described as any precipitate action, but she was actually observed by an acquaintance of my father’s scrubbing the church floor upon the following evening.

[1]. In his own person.

Under such circumstances my father had no choice but to hasten instantly to the vicarage, where he confronted the vicar with the suggestion—an extremely natural one—already referred to. But his reply, as my father has often assured me, was neither Xtian nor even gentlemanly, and my father was obliged therefore, with the deepest reluctance, once more to transfer his worship. It was a serious step, but he had been fortified with the experience previously forced upon him at St. James-the-Less, and in less than five months he had become one of the foremost sidesmen at St. James-the-Least-of-All, Kennington Oval.

CHAPTER IV

Further years of boyhood and additional crosses. Progress in study and music. I excel at the game of Nuts in May. I am to go to Hopkinson House School. But Providence again intervenes. I become a victim of the ring-worm. Devastating effect of an ointment. Mr. Balfour Whey and his sons. A brutal County Court judge. But my father obtains damages.

Physically shattered as I had been by the attack on my person by Desmond O’Flaherty, the mental and spiritual consequences of this assault were far more serious and prolonged. Awakened for the first time to the contemporary existence of a depravity hitherto unsuspected by me, I was unable for several weeks to regain my previous composure, or indeed to venture unaccompanied beyond the precincts of the house. Nor could I bear even to contemplate the introduction of a successor to Mrs. O’Flaherty.

For that reason, although still in poor health, my mother was obliged to resume her former duties, while my father was confirmed in his decision to postpone my schooldays for another three or four years. To this he had already been inclined, partly owing to the representations that I myself had been compelled to make to him, and partly owing to his desire to assist me as far as possible in bearing the crosses with which Providence had entrusted me. Far beyond the average both in weight and number, I can realize now of course what a privilege these were. But in the earlier years of my boyhood they taxed my faith to its utmost powers.

Many were the times, for instance, when after a long morning’s study, merely interrupted by an occasional cup of cocoa, I turned with avidity to a simple but abundant meal of roast pork and open jam tart, only to find myself, an hour or two later, rolling in agony upon the sofa, or even indeed summoned on certain occasions to yield it back whence it came. This was perhaps the hardest lesson of all. But I am happy to say that at last I learned it. And I can well remember the pride with which my father, hurrying into the parlour with a convenient receptacle, first found me consoling myself with some appropriate verses from an early chapter of the book of Job.

That incident alone, as my father often used to say, was a complete justification of his decision to postpone my school-life; and I am quite confident that, had I been earlier subjected to the propinquity of coarser-fibred boys, I should never have survived to render adult service to the men and women of my time. Nor should I have made, I am sure, such intellectual progress as I achieved between my sixth and eleventh birthdays. Familiar from cover to cover not only with the Holy Bible, but also with the Apocrypha, I had attained dexterity in simple division, was acquainted with the geography of the British Isles, and had read the history of England so far as the reign of Queen Anne. Passionately devoted to music, I had taught myself to play from memory the airs of a large number of well-known hymns, including several of the more rapid and accentuated of the late Messrs. Moody and Sankey. Subject to my father’s guidance, too, I ranged in boyish fashion amongst literature of a lighter order. With some of the works of Longfellow, for instance, I was soon so familiar as to be able to repeat them without a mistake, and I can still recall the delight with which I read a work of fiction in which Martin Luther was one of the characters portrayed.

Happy as I was, however, with some such volume as this, a pound or two of chocolates, and my rabbit Isaiah, or to settle down for a long summer afternoon with the Hymnal Companion to the Book of Common Prayer, I was not averse from an occasional ramble in the company of my father, or even from exercise of a more vehement order with younger and suitable comrades. The chief of these latter was Emily Smith, the granddaughter of Mrs. Emily Smith, my mother’s aunt, a gentle child, who was unfortunately an albino, but of a deeply religious and sympathetic nature.

A year or two older than myself, she lived with her grandmother at New Cross, and in her company and that of some of her school companions, I played several health-giving and mirthful games. One of our favourites, I remember, was Hide and Go Seek, combining both physical and mental exertion; and another, of which we were hardly less fond, was known as Nuts in May.

For the purposes of this latter game those who proposed to take part would first form themselves into two equal groups, the members of each moiety then standing side by side, facing the same way and holding each other’s hands. The two groups would then take up positions, each opposite each, in joyous anticipation, and so arranged as to secure a space between them sufficient for an alternating advance and retreat. By a previous arrangement one of the two sides would then approximate itself to the other, singing in unison and to an established melody, the following humorously incongruous lines.

Here we go gathering nuts in May, nuts in May, nuts in May,

Here we go gathering nuts in May

On a cold and frosty morning.

That we were not in fact doing so was of course obvious. But the innocent laughter that the words always provoked in us was quite sufficient, in the opinion of myself and my comrades, to rob them of any semblance of deliberate untruthfulness.

It would then become the turn of the previously silent and stationary players to advance singing a second stanza, in which they would merrily inquire which of their number was to be chosen as symbolic of these nuts in May. To them in reply the first group would designate a member of the second, whereupon the second group would once more advance with the very pertinent query:—

Whom will you send to fetch her (or him, if it was myself) away, fetch her (or him, if it was myself) away, fetch her (or him, if it was myself) away,

Whom will you send to fetch her (or him, if it was myself) away,

On a cold and frosty morning?

The members of the first group would then select one of their comrades to be the emissary of conveyance, and to the same melody and with a similar gesture, would announce their choice to the second group. A pocket-handkerchief, folded upon itself diagonally, would then be stretched upon the grass, parallel to and midway between the merry and expectant companies of players. The symbolized nut and its would-be gatherer would then face each other across the extended handkerchief, grasp hands, and each earnestly endeavour to draw the other across the separating fabric. To whomsoever was successful the other would then be accorded as a member henceforward of the victor’s group, and the game would proceed as before with ever-increasing mirth.

Ultimately it might happen, and indeed it often did, that one of the sides would finally absorb the other, and the absorbing side usually including myself, my services were naturally in the keenest demand. I soon found in fact that, in spite of my ill-health, I was singularly adapted to this form of recreation. Inheriting, as I did, to a very great extent, my father’s powerful and sonorous voice, I was able to throw myself with dominating effect into the preliminary vocal exchanges, while my physique stood me in admirable stead in the later stages of the game. For though I was short, with singularly slender arms, my abdomen was large and well covered, while my feet, with their exceptional length and breadth and almost imperceptible arches, enabled me to obtain a tenacious hold of the ground upon which they were set.

So proficient in fact did I become that when I went to school I was bitterly disappointed to find that this, my favourite game of play, was not even included in the curriculum. In later years I have heard this game criticized both on moral and physical grounds, and even my friend and vicar, the Reverend Simeon Whey, has had grave doubts as to its permissibility. On many occasions indeed we have sat far into the night arguing about its effect on the Xtian character. But I am happy to say that he has now gone so far as to approve of it for others. Indeed, as I have more than once facetiously suggested to him, his real objections to the game have been personal, founded on a lack of success in its practice that may well have prejudiced his outlook. For though he is no mean exponent of the game of Draughts, as well as that of Word Making and Word Taking, at Nuts in May he has seldom if ever avoided being drawn across the handkerchief. As the result of my protests, however, he has continued to permit the game to be one of the brightest features of our annual Sunday School gatherings; and most of our schoolmistresses, I think, would be compelled to testify that I have retained all my old-time skill.

In such fashion, then, I emerged into my twelfth year; and, albeit with considerable misgivings, my father arranged at last for my entry into a high-class school in the neighbourhood. Known as Hopkinson House School for the Sons of Gentlemen, it was conveniently situated in Jasmine Grove on the southern outskirts of Camberwell, and included features in its dignified exterior of almost every type of architecture. Approached by a semi-circular gravel drive with gates of entry and exit, it was flanked on both sides, and isolated in the rear, by an asphalt recreation-ground. Above the front steps, two chocolate-coloured pillars supported a classical portico, and the windows of the first-floor rooms were surmounted with characteristic Gothic mouldings. The windows of the first, second and third storeys were of a simpler Georgian pattern, but the roof was uplifted, at its anterior corners, into castellated Norman turrets. Midway between these, an Elizabethan gable formed a pleasing contrast, and the two chimney-stacks, each bearing a lightning-conductor, were decorated with Moorish relief work.

Conducted by a Mr. Septimus Lorton, the successor to Mr. Hopkinson, the founder of the school, it was daily attended by some seventy or eighty of the sons of the Peckham and Camberwell gentry. Concerning Mr. Lorton I shall have more to say presently, but just about a week before what was to have been my first term, a tender but inscrutable Providence once again intervened. The agent of this new affliction was a parasite commonly known, I understand, as the ring-worm, and within a brief period it had established upon my head no less than four separate colonies. That being the case, not only was my school-life yet a second time postponed, but I was obliged to render up, under medical orders, and that the extent of the malady might be the more easily discernible, the greater proportion of my abundant and not unattractive chestnut hair. To the first of these consequences I was reconciled with no great difficulty, but to the second, I must confess, resignation was not so easy; and for night after night my pillow was moistened with tears scarcely restrained during the day. But worse was to follow. For upon the appearance of a fifth and even more intractable settlement, the doctor in charge of the case took the opportunity of prescribing a wholly unjustifiable ointment. That it slew the parasites was undoubtedly true. But such were the ravages of this violent medicament that, to an accompaniment of the acutest distress, the whole of my hair disappeared.

Even in this, however, probably up till then the darkest hour of my existence, Providence had set a rainbow across my despair from which I have never since failed to glean comfort. Roused to the very depths of his indignant paternity, my father immediately began to take steps against the doctor, while both Mrs. Emily Smith, the grandmother of my little comrade, and the aunt that had stood with my mother’s mother at the bottom of the stairs, provided me with velveteen skull-caps, skilfully embroidered with forget-me-nots.

Perhaps the most fruitful, however, of the issues of this affliction, apart from the damages that my father ultimately secured, was the life-long friendship that it produced between ourselves and the Whey family. A junior sidesman to my father at St. James-the-Least-of-All, Mr. Balfour Whey was not only a rising solicitor, but the father of two boys, Simeon and Silas. To the elder of these, Simeon, I have already referred as the vicar of the parish in which I at present reside. But Silas, since dead under distressing circumstances, to which I shall refer in due course, was but half an hour younger, and they were usually regarded as being twins.

Xtian lads of about my own age, and each with an impediment in his speech, both were destined on this account for eventual ordination in the Church of England. What knitted us together, however, at this painful juncture was the curious fact that, in addition to others, both of them were suffering like myself from an invasion of the ring-worm. Adequately treated, however, they had retained their hair, and, as their father immediately perceived, might for this reason prove invaluable witnesses in the prosecution upon which we had determined.

From a portrait of the Aunt who stood and my mother’s mother at the foot of the stairs

In this Mr. Balfour Whey had already consented to act as my father’s legal adviser, on the understanding that, if the case should fail, my father should be exempt from the payment of charges, while, if it should succeed, the damages should be shared between them on agreed and equitable terms. An extremely forcible Hibernian barrister was then engaged on a similar basis, and never shall I forget the noble determination of these two earnest and devoted men. Fortified with the assistance, somewhat expensive, but under the circumstances deemed necessary, of an extremely adaptable, intelligent, and experienced medical expert, they proved far too powerful both for the doctor, a young man unrepresented by counsel, and even for the County Court judge, a sinister-looking person evidently addicted to alcohol. Nevertheless it was no easy fight and the bias of the judge was obvious from the outset. Time after time when my father rose from his seat in the well of the court to make ejaculations, he commanded him to be silent in a tone of voice that no gentleman should have used to another. And once when my mother’s aunt, Mrs. Emily Smith, and the aunt that had stood with my mother’s mother at the foot of the stairs, rose simultaneously and cried, “Oh, you story,” after an unveracious comment by the doctor, he actually threatened to have them ejected by one of his underlings in the court.

Nor was he more polite to my mother’s eight sisters, industrious young women who had brought their knitting, even going so far as to say that, if they continued to rattle their needles, he should have them similarly transported. To this my father very naturally objected in one of his most dignified and impassioned speeches, again cut short, though not without the utmost difficulty, by this self-assertive and presumptuous man. Even to Simeon and Silas Whey, each of whom had covered the Bible with kisses, he behaved in such a fashion as entirely to rob them of their natural joy in being in the witness-box. For though it was true, and only to be expected, that their vocal disabilities were increased by their excitement, he not only professed to consider them irrelevant but brutally informed them that they were unintelligible. For a moment we were stunned. But then, as one woman, my mother’s eight sisters rose to their feet, as did Mrs. Balfour Whey, Mrs. Emily Smith, and the aunt that had stood with my mother’s mother at the foot of the stairs. Led by my father they shouted “Shame” in tones that shook the very roof, while the Hibernian barrister, with a gesture that I have never seen equalled, swept his papers from the desk before him, and sank speechless into his seat.

It was such a scene as no one in the court had probably ever before witnessed, and even the judge seemed slightly taken aback by the volume of resentment that he had aroused. It was at any rate with a distinct tremor and in markedly altered tones that he ordered the proceedings to be resumed. And when I myself, as the prosecution’s last witness, proceeded to take the oath in my velveteen skull-cap, his change of colour was so manifest as to become the subject of general comment.

Keeping my face firmly towards him, upon the advice of my counsel, I stood unshaken, albeit not unmoved, during the latter’s preliminary remarks. Here was a lad, he said, in the soft and vibrant tones of the convinced and accomplished pleader, the only lad, nay, the only child, the solitary hope of his devoted parents. Too delicate hitherto to have been sent to the school—the scholastic establishment for which his abilities had long since qualified him, he had been happily expecting, with all the ardour that His Honour would observe imprinted on his countenance, to have entered this academy of learning some seven weeks before. But what had happened? His Honour had heard. It was the subject matter of this action. Not only had his career, since time was money, been already seriously crippled, but he had been subjected to a personal mutilation, the moral effect of which it was impossible to appraise. One moment a happy—nay, he might almost say without unduly straining the truth—one moment a happy, but not only a happy, a positively handsome young gentleman, he had been reduced in the next, either by wilful design, by malevolent neglect, or by an infamous want of knowledge, to the spectacle that he would be obliged—how reluctantly His Honour could imagine—to submit to His Honour’s inspection.

Here a low ripple of sympathy and horror broke involuntarily from most of those present; and it was perhaps significant, as Mr. Whey remarked to my father, that the judge took no steps to suppress it. Then, after a brief question or two, since, as my counsel said, mine was an ordeal that he dared not long prolong, he asked me to remove my velveteen skull-cap and let His Honour see what was underneath. It was an effort. But I achieved it, and the effect on the judge was instantaneous. In spite of his pallor, he had still, up to that point, retained some evidences of his gross habit of life. But now the last vestige of his colour had left him, and he seemed visibly to have lost weight. Contracted to pin-points, his pupils were fixed upon my scalp in a haggard yet fascinating stare; and great beads of perspiration began to glisten upon his forehead. Then, with a sharp expiration like that of a punctured bicycle tyre, he covered his eyes for a moment with his hand, and I knew instinctively, as I replaced my skull-cap, that the case was won.

There were further arguments, of course, and technical exchanges, but to everyone in court they must have seemed of little moment; and I was soon being embraced by father, my aunts and great-aunts, in the happy consciousness that right had triumphed. Nor was that all. For thanks to the damages awarded, my father and myself were enabled to spend a month at Scarborough, while a generous fee was paid by a well-known firm of hair-restorers for a copy of a photograph of my head that my father had thoughtfully taken. Two years later they paid a similar sum for a photograph of the same area normally covered, both being subsequently reproduced, under another name of course, and with the interval diminished for commercial purposes, as illustrative of the effects of what has since become, I believe, a very profitable commodity.

CHAPTER V

First experience at Hopkinson House School. It is amongst the masters that I hope to find spiritual companionship. I do not do so. Apology of Mr. Muglington. I am struck by a football. Subsequent apology of Mr. Beerthorpe. Degraded habits of my fellow-scholars. A fearful discovery and its sequel. Amazing ineptitude of Mr. Lorton. Concerted assault upon my person. I am rescued by my father, who procures a public apology.

Owing to the successive delays imposed by my general ill-health, the assault upon my person by Desmond O’Flaherty, the sudden invasion of the ring-worm, and the cranial nudity wrought by the ointment, it was not until I was nearly fourteen that I was at last able to attend school; and even then it was perhaps doubtful whether my father should have recommended it. For, although by that time my health was somewhat less precarious, the chastening experiences that I had been called upon to endure had naturally lifted me, in almost every respect, far above the plane of most of my contemporaries. And while it was true, of course, that in Simeon and Silas Whey I should find sympathetic and well-liked comrades, I was so much older, both mentally and spiritually, than such of their acquaintances as I had chanced to meet that it was only amongst the masters that there seemed any reasonable hope of obtaining an equal and appropriate companionship.

It was to this end, therefore, while endeavouring at the same time to place my services at the disposal of my fellow-scholars, that I resolved from the outset to encourage my tutors to perceive in me a staunch and valuable associate. For the first few days this was not of course easy, owing to the natural confusion incident upon a new term, and it was only by the interjection of an occasional informative remark that I was enabled to adumbrate my ultimate purpose.

Thus when our form-master, a Mr. Muglington, asked me if I knew the capital of Belgium, I replied that while I had not as yet enjoyed the opportunity of paying the town a personal visit, I had been credibly informed that it was known as Brussels, so indissolubly associated with the well-known brassica.[^[2]] Though he was a repellent-looking man with a ginger moustache, I had nevertheless accompanied the words with a friendly smile. But he merely stared at me in what I was compelled to recognise as a singularly crude and offensive fashion.

[2]. The botanical family that includes the sprout. I am now convinced that Mr. Muglington did not know this.

“Let me see,” he said, “I think your name is Carp.”

“Augustus Carp,” I replied, “of Angela Gardens.”

“Then kindly remember,” he said, “to confine yourself in future to the information asked for and nothing else.”

It was of course the speech of a peculiarly narrow-minded and vindictive man, fortuitously thrust into a position of authority that had evidently nourished his worst propensities. But I had not as yet realized how deplorably typical he was of the class to which he belonged, and it was a considerable time before I could restrain the sobs that his infamous words had provoked. Nor did he fail to take a further and dastardly advantage of my emotion.

“Perhaps,” he observed, with a malignant sneer, “when you’ve quite finished chewing the cud, you’d be so kind as to oblige us by enumerating the principal exports of Finland.”

Afterwards, I am glad to say, thanks to the instant and imperative demand of my father, he was obliged to apologise to me both in my father’s presence and in that of the head master, Mr. Septimus Lorton. But it was not an apology, as I discerned at once, founded on any real and heart-felt contrition, and although I assured him that, so far as I was concerned, he might consider the incident closed, it was perfectly apparent to me that I could never in the future admit him to the privileges of friendship.

Nor was I destined to receive a more satisfying response from the next advance that it seemed my duty to make. Excused on moral grounds from the study of French by a special stipulation of my father, I was permitted instead to take extra lessons in German from a Mr. Beerthorpe. A stoutly-built man with extremely short sight, corrected by lenses of exceptional thickness, I was at first attracted to this person by an expression of what I soon discovered was a spurious amiability. I was also distressed to find him almost universally alluded to by the first syllable of his name only, to which the letter y, not originally present in it, had been appended by way of suffix.

Whether or not he was aware of this I did not of course know, but both as an act of kindness and in justice to myself, I felt it incumbent on me to seek the earliest chance of dissociating myself from such a practice. I accordingly took the opportunity one day, when he was acting as arbitrator in a game of football in the playground, of approaching him and touching him on the elbow and suggesting that I should like to have a few words with him.

“Eh, what?” he said. “Foul,” and he then blew a blast, I remember, on a small whistle. Taken unawares, I could not refrain from shuddering a little, and instinctively put my hands to my ears.

“Well, what is it?” he asked. “What’s the matter?”

“Perhaps we might withdraw,” I replied, “to some quieter place.”

“But what’s the trouble?” he said. “Look out,” and he abruptly leapt back to avoid the oncoming football. Not so fortunate, and left entirely unprotected by Mr. Beerthorpe’s sudden retreat, I received the full impact of the hurtling projectile upon the upper part of my neck and my left ear, and for some moments I was entirely unable to proceed with the conversation. Indeed had the missile been of the egg-shaped variety frequently employed, I understand, in the same barbarous pursuit, the blow might well have had the most serious, if not fatal, consequences. Nor could I help feeling a trifle disheartened to perceive, when I had regained my powers of speech, that Mr. Beerthorpe was still callously blowing his whistle in a remote corner of the playground. Under such circumstances many another lad would have been deflected from his purpose. But in spite of what followed, I have always been glad to remember that I did not allow myself to be deterred. Approaching him a second time, I again touched his elbow.

“Good God,” he said, “are you still there?”

Naturally flinching a little at the expletive, I reminded him that I had still something to communicate.

“Oh, all right,” he said. “Come along then.”

He handed his instrument to a neighbouring boy.

“Well, what is it?” he asked.

We entered an empty schoolroom.

“Perhaps I may first,” I said, “ask you to accept this.”

It was a box of chocolates weighing half a pound and tastefully adorned with a lemon-coloured ribbon.

“It is merely a token,” I proceeded, “albeit I hope an acceptable one, of a desire to inaugurate friendly relations.”

For a moment he stared at it with his mouth open and then made a rasping noise in the back of his throat.

“But look here,” he said, “you don’t mean to tell me that you’ve interrupted a game of football just to bring me in here and give me half a pound of chocolates?”

“Not wholly,” I said, “nor even principally, though I am naturally a little wounded by your tone of voice. But I also desired to inform you that you were the subject of a prevalent indignity from which personally I have strongly dissented.”

“Good God!” he said. “What on earth do you mean?”

After flinching a second time, I lowered my voice a little.

“I thought you ought to know,” I said, “that you are very generally referred to—I trust without foundation—as Beery.”

For perhaps twelve, or it might have been thirteen, seconds, the silence was only broken by the cries of the footballers. But I observed that his cheeks were suffused with blood and his myopic eyes beginning to bulge. It was a repulsive sight, and then, like Mr. Muglington, he stood revealed in his true character. No less intoxicated than the former with the petty authority conferred by his position, his general conduct, as well as his verbiage, was even coarser and more debased.

“Look here,” he said, “young What’s-your-name, I don’t know your name, and I don’t want to. But if I have any more of your insolence I shall report you to the headmaster. And now you can clear out and take your chocolates with you.”

Stung to the quick, and with the tears running down my cheeks, I nevertheless held up my hand.

“One moment,” I said. “You have misapprehended me, and it was perhaps foolish of me to have supposed that it could have been otherwise. But I must clearly point out to you, both for my own sake and that of the school to which we both belong, that it will be rather I who shall be obliged to report you for the language that I have listened to this day.”

Florid to an extreme that I have seldom seen equalled, he opened his mouth once or twice in silence. Then he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

“I had rather flattered myself,” he said, “on my temperance.”

“On the contrary,” I said, “I am obliged to remind you that you have twice openly invoked the Deity.”

“Good God!” he gasped.

I opened the door for him.

“That makes the third time,” I said. “You will hear more of this.”

I had preserved my self-control, but it was only with an effort that left me pitiably weak and wretched and induced a gastritis that robbed me of several minutes’ sleep as well as of most of my evening meal. Thanks, however, to a second and even more trenchant interview between my father and Mr. Lorton, during which it transpired that Mr. Beerthorpe was the father of five unfortunate children, he too was obliged to apologise to me and give me an undertaking to restrain his blasphemy. But, as my father agreed, it was an apology obviously given with the utmost reluctance and affording no hope of the happier communion to which I had at one time looked forward.

Meanwhile I had not neglected my fellow-students, unattractive to me as most of them were, and more than once had I offered my spiritual services to an inexperienced or erring class-mate. That these had been fruitless I am not prepared to say. But it was perhaps not surprising, considering the standard of the masters, that the general moral status of their pupils should have left almost everything to be desired. Such a rule, for example, as that forbidding the ingestion of sweetmeats during the hours set apart for study was daily infringed, not only by the younger boys, but by many far older than myself. Exhibitions, too, of personal violence were only too common in the playground, and I had even heard boys, presumably the sons of gentlemen, making use of the word damn.[^[3]]

[3]. I repeat this with regret. But truth is often best served, I have found, by being completely outspoken.

It was not until nearly half-term, however, under the eyes of Mr. Lorton, and in the most sacred hour of the scholastic week, that I suddenly became conscious of the existence of an evil that for a moment completely paralysed me. Himself an organiser rather than a scholar, a proprietor rather than a professor, Mr. Lorton confined himself, in respect of actual teaching, to the exposition of the Holy Scriptures. For this purpose he visited each class once a week in rotation, the text-book employed being the Lorton Bible for Schools, published by his brother, Mr. Chrysostom Lorton. We had been studying, I remember, the Second Book of Kings, and considering the evil reign of Pekahiah, when Mr. Lorton suddenly asked the head boy of the form if he could tell him the name of his successor.

This was of course Pekah, the son of Remaliah, with whom I had been familiar for several years. But unfortunately my position in the centre of the class forbade my giving an immediate answer. Nevertheless I perceived, as boy after boy mutely revealed the depths of his ignorance, that I had probably been destined by the grace of Providence to become the means of their enlightenment. What was my horror, then, on this beautiful autumn day, with the November sunlight slanting through the window, to observe Harold Harper, the boy on my left, and Henry Hancock, the boy on my right, each studying the Second Book of Kings under the shelter conferred by his desk. Objectionable lads as I knew them both to be, I had never dreamed them to have been capable of this, and when Henry Hancock rose in his place and without a tremor said, “Pekah, son of Remaliah,” it was as though each syllable had been a knife deeply plunged into my very vitals. Pale with wrath I rose to my feet.

“Sir,” I cried, “Henry Hancock was deceiving you. He read his answer from the open Scripture.”

There was a deathly pause.

“And not only that,” I said, “but Harold Harper was prepared to do the same.”

Mr. Lorton removed his eye-glasses.

“Hancock and Harper,” he said, “stand up.”

They did so, but with marked reluctance.

“Hancock and Harper,” he said, “is this true?”

They were silent. But their faces betrayed them, as did Harper’s Bible, that slipped to the floor.

“Hancock and Harper,” said Mr. Lorton, “I am ashamed of you. You must each write me out fifty lines.”

“But, sir,” I cried, “in justice to myself, who knew the correct answer without committing sacrilege, nay, in justice to my fellow-scholars, to say nothing of Holy Writ, surely these lads must be subjected to some less trivial and severer penalty.”

Mr. Lorton readjusted his glasses. Then he removed them again and began to wipe them.

“Hanper and Harcock,” he said, “I mean Harcock and Hanper, as Carp has reminded you, you have sinned very grievously. But I hope—er—this publicity, this publicity, I say, will not be lacking in its due effect upon you.”

“But, sir,” I cried, “these are mere words.”

“They are very serious ones,” he said, “very serious ones. Also, as I said, you will each write me fifty lines. And now perhaps Smith Major can tell us who Argob was.”

Petrified by the levity with which the very owner of the school was able to endure so shattering an exposure, I remained standing for several seconds, wholly unable to utter a syllable. And when I sank at last, stunned and unsupported, into the seat from which I had so lately risen, it was as though my boyhood (and indeed this was actually the case) had been finally snatched from me for ever. Nor was this the end. For, when we emerged into the playground, I found myself surrounded by an opprobrious mob, evidently suborned by Harper and Hancock for the purposes of physical assault and battery. Thrust from one to the other, my collar was disarranged, I was several times smitten upon the face, and it was only by the exercise of my utmost lung-power that I succeeded in attracting adult attention. Indeed I am almost certain that I observed Mr. Muglington and Mr. Beerthorpe lurking supine behind a curtain, and it was by no less a person than my own father that I was ultimately removed from danger.

Collecting an account a couple of streets away, he had instantly recognised my screams, and, abandoning everything, had rushed to my aid just as Mr. Lorton hurried into the playground. But my father was first, and never shall I forget the stentorian thunder of his tones. Seizing in each hand one of my lesser persecutors, he shook them like thistles before the wind, while time after time, breaking into his highest falsetto, he overtopped even my most piercing note. Colourless and stricken, a little group of masters stood huddled against the wall of the house, while an ever-growing stream of neighbours and local tradesmen began to throng every inch of the asphalt. Then, with a final and supreme imprecation, he flung the two ruffians into the midst of their fellows, and clasping me to his bosom, clove his way through the now vociferously applauding multitude. It was perhaps the greatest moment of his career, but like myself he had to pay the penalty for it, and for the following two weeks we were confined in adjacent bedrooms, while my mother had to wait upon us night and day. Afterwards, shaken as he was, he had a third interview with Mr. Lorton, insisting upon and obtaining a public apology as the only alternative to legal proceedings.

CHAPTER VI

Reasons for remaining at Hopkinson House School. I pass from boyhood to early young manhood. Expeditions both urban and rural in the company of my dear father. An excellent and little-known diversion. Youthful adventures by sea and land. But what is to be my career on leaving school? Various alternatives prayerfully considered. A vision is vouchsafed to us by Providence. A commercial Xtian. My first razor.

I have frequently been asked, and I have but little doubt that hosts of my readers will put the same query to me, why I did not, after such an experience, transfer my attendance to another school. And I ought to say at once, perhaps, that both my father and myself were strongly disposed to this course. Having regard to the facts, however, that Hopkinson House School was the only one in the neighbourhood for sons of gentlemen; that my moral position had now been defined there beyond any possibility of doubt; that the apologies elicited would probably secure me in the future from any further corporal interference; and that both Simeon and Silas Whey had expressed their horror at my treatment—in view of these facts, we came to the conclusion that, for the present at any rate, I had better remain there. That it could never be the same to me was of course the case. But then my hopes had not been extravagant. And although, as I have indicated, my boyhood had been ruthlessly plucked from me like a geranium in full bud, my early young manhood found me securer than ever in the approval of a wise and discerning Providence. Apart from an occasional boil, too, and a somewhat intractable and disfiguring affection known as acne, my health was giving rise to less anxiety than for some time past, and I have always looked back on the next two years as amongst the happiest of my life.

Necessarily thrown, as the result of what had happened, very largely upon my own resources, I was agreeably surprised to find that these were even richer and more varied than I had supposed; and I frequently walked, on a Saturday afternoon, as far as Dulwich or Blackheath, thoroughly contented with the company of none other than myself. What was my joy, too, to discover, a couple of weeks after my fifteenth birthday, that my voice had broken into a full-toned bass that promised to be even more powerful than my father’s; and many a long hour did we spend at the harmonium together in friendly competition over our favourite hymns. Though he was rather more accurate than myself in the matter of tune, in the matter of time there was little to choose between us, while in the actual volume of sound produced I was soon my father’s equal, if not his superior.

Nor was singing our only mutual occupation, for once a month, thanks to my father’s generosity, we would journey to such a place of instructional interest as the Tower of London or Sir John Soane’s Museum. We even visited, I remember, the National Gallery of Art, with its remarkable collection of hand-painted pictures; and I can still recall the delicacy with which my father would intervene to shelter me from any that contained an undraped female figure.

Perhaps our happiest times, however, were those spent with Nature during my father’s annual fortnight’s holiday, when we would usually procure lodgings at some such salubrious resort as Clacton-on-Sea or Cliftonville near Margate. Here we would abandon ourselves to the contemplation of the waves, and here, under my father’s skilful tuition, I became quite an adept at an entrancing pursuit less well known, I think, than it should be.

Consisting in the first place of the selection of a flat-shaped stone—itself often a gleeful and difficult task—it then becomes the object of the participators in the game to propel this seawards across the surface of the ocean. Being heavier than water, it would naturally be supposed that at the first impact with the latter the stone would sink; and indeed, if projected by an unskilled player, this is what usually eventuates. As I was happy to demonstrate, however, to our Sunday School mistresses only last year at Southend, in the hands of a careful and experienced performer this is by no means necessarily the case. Supporting the stone, with its flatter surface downwards, on the flexed middle finger of the thrower’s hand, his (or her) forefinger should lie along its circumference, the thumb gently resting on its superior surface. It should then be so cast as to travel horizontally, its flat surface parallel to the surface of the water, with the surprising result that, when at last it drops, it bounces into the air again and proceeds onwards. Nay, it may even, in the hands of the most expert, repeat this process two or three times, to the intense and delighted fascination of those who have been privileged to witness him.

Not lacking in the element of competition, yet devoid of all possibility of personal danger, affording healthful exercise, but at the same time immune from the perils of over-exertion, it has always seemed strange to me that, up to the present, it has played so small a part in our national life. An island community, here if anywhere is a diversion that should surely appeal to us; and I for one should rejoice to see the day when, instead of the football ground and the tennis pitch, our coasts should be thronged with eager young men and women enjoying this hygienic and innocent pastime.

Nor did we confine ourselves, while at the sea-side, merely to terrestrial amusement, and we would frequently indulge, for perhaps a quarter of an hour, in the enjoyable practice of pedal immersion. Wholly precluded, of course, for constitutional reasons, from the fuller development of this art involved in swimming, we nevertheless found this to be a most laughable and even exciting occupation; and I can recall at least two occasions when, owing to a momentary inadversion, our rolled-up trousers became partially submerged. A smart run home, however, a cup of hot milk, and immediate retirement to bed sufficed, in both instances, to protect us from any untoward results.

With my two friends, also, Simeon and Silas Whey, I had many hours of fruitful companionship. Equally segregated with myself from the majority of their schoolfellows, though less upon moral and intellectual than purely physical grounds, they were yet earnest and high-minded lads with many notably endearing qualities. Reticent to an extreme, partly, in the case of Silas, owing to an initial difficulty in articulating anything at all, and in the case of Simeon, owing to a kind of laryngeal click from which he is still unfortunately a sufferer, they appeared to find a comfort in my own natural eloquence that I was only too glad to bestow upon them. In return for this, their ample pocket-money was always entirely at my disposal, and many a pound of toffee and Turkish delight was I able to enjoy at their expense. Like myself unaddicted to athletics, and thereby preserved from its associated vices, they would saunter for hours with me discussing some favourite Bible character or humming in unison some well-known hymn; and we were further united, if that were possible, in our eventual confirmation by the self-same Bishop.

Nevertheless, as I have said, it was chiefly upon myself that I had to depend for company; and in my walks abroad, my studies of the shop-windows, and my exploration of the neighbouring churches, my closest comrade was myself, and I can honestly say that I have never regretted it. Nor must it be supposed that the hours so spent were entirely devoid of legitimate adventure. On two or three occasions, for instance, I was abruptly addressed by some surprised or suspicious verger, and once, owing to ignorance of its usual closing hours, I was incarcerated in a local cemetery. Confined by railings too lofty to scale and too narrowly approximated to permit egress, for a few moments the prospects were sufficiently black to cause a sensible quickening of my pulse. A felicitous remark, however, addressed to an under-gardener, secured my exit by a private gate, and I hurried home, not without relief, but none the worse for my little mischance.

Nor shall I forget the thrill, perhaps a trifle guilty, with which I discovered, soon after I was sixteen, how to descend from a vehicle in motion without the sacrifice of an erect position. Hitherto, like my father, when travelling by tram or omnibus, I had always insisted upon complete immobility prior both to entrance into and departure from one of these public conveyances; and many a conductor had been reported by us both for failing to secure the requisite lack of motion. Upon my sixteenth birthday, however, perceiving that the omnibus in which I was journeying could not be brought to a standstill at the desired position, I decided to alight from it notwithstanding, and boldly descended from its posterior step.

Naturally leaving this at right angles, what was my rather rueful amazement to discover myself, in the next instant, lying upon my side in the roadway. At first I imagined that I must have stepped upon something slippery or that some such article must have been adhering to my footwear. But a minute examination both of these and the roadway failed to reveal any such cause. Completely baffled, I made a second attempt, but with an equally discomforting result, and time after time, in spite of my utmost efforts, I was the victim of a similar loss of equilibrium. Many a less determined and timider lad would indeed have given up the venture, and again I ought to confess, perhaps, in view of municipal regulations, that my pertinacity was not wholly defensible.

Robbed of candour, however, such a record as the present would lose the greater part of its spiritual value; and while I am prepared to admit that, in this particular instance, my youthful conduct may have been open to misjudgment, I cannot concede that it was in any degree incompatible with the highest expression of the Xtian character. Refusing to be cast down, therefore, save in the most literal sense, I continued dauntlessly with my efforts, to be rewarded at last with a final success no less gratifying than entire. Failing to remain upright in departing from the moving vehicle either at right angles to it or with my back towards the driver, I found that by facing in the same direction I could not only descend from it with greater immunity, but that by running after it, as it were, for two or three steps, I could do so with complete integrity. Needless to say, having acquired this knowledge, I only made use of it in an occasional emergency, and for some years now, owing to declining success, I have discontinued the practice altogether.

With the unfolding of my seventeenth year, however, I was definitely approaching the great problems of adult life, and much of my time now began to be occupied with the contemplation of my future career. Thanks to the tempered foresight of my father, a firm believer as a rule in unlimited families, in the exceptional circumstances of his own case he had refrained from further parentage. On his demise, therefore, as he had given me to understand, I should inherit some two thousand pounds, this being the amount to which his insurance and savings would by then probably have accrued. Should my mother survive him, I should of course be expected, and would gladly, as I assured him, make her some allowance. But her health was so precarious as to render this sacrifice a very improbable necessity.

Devoid of anxiety, therefore, as to ultimate no less than immediate penury, I could afford to regard the future with an adequate deliberation, and I need scarcely say, perhaps, that the Church of England was the subject of my first and most prolonged consideration. Financially inadequate as were even its highest rewards, I was yet so adapted to its every need that both my father and myself would have been willing to overlook this very serious disadvantage. But to become ordained presupposed an examination, and I had been seriously handicapped in this particular respect by a proven disability, probably hereditary in origin, to demonstrate my culture in so confined a form.

For a similar reason, even had I been attracted to it, the profession of Medicine would have been unavailable, while from that of the Law, nobler in every way, I was equally precluded. For some time, however, we canvassed very carefully the strong claims of Diplomacy, for which in many ways, as my father agreed with me, I was most admirably fitted. And I am still convinced that both as attaché and ambassador I should have found congenial and Xtian employment. Unhappily, however, such a career involved the acquirement of the French language, with attendant dangers, to which my father could not persuade himself to expose me. Whether he was right in this is perhaps open to argument, and I have since met several apparently devout men who have not only spoken this tongue with reported fluency, but have deliberately sojourned in the country of its origin. Personally, however, while reluctant to condemn them, I must confess to sharing my father’s views, and I am happy in the knowledge that the vicar of my parish holds precisely the same opinion. Abandoning Diplomacy, therefore, we considered the Consolidated Water Board, in which my father of course had considerable influence. But here, as in the Church of England, the emoluments were unsatisfactory, while the spiritual opportunities, of course, were far more restricted.

Thus step by step, as though by the hand of Providence—and indeed, as my father said, it could have been by no other hand—we were slowly led to the conclusion that in some branch of Commerce lay my future destiny. Requiring no previous examinations, with liberal, nay illimitable, monetary possibilities, this was the field—the highest, perhaps, of all—that was now unfolded before our gaze. For a few moments, I remember, we sat there speechless, one on each side of the parlour table. Then my father rose and stood for another few moments with his right hand resting on the harmonium. In his face there was a great joy, not unmixed with solemnity. His eyes looked beyond me out towards eternity. Indeed it was to eternity that he addressed himself.

“Augustus,” he said, “my son Augustus—a Xtian tradesman, preferably wholesale.”

My mother came in to announce the supper. But almost impatiently he motioned her aside.

“Oh, can’t you see,” he cried, “that we’re standing on Pisgah?”

For a moment, not comprehending him, she stared at his feet. Then very softly she withdrew, and he came toward me with outstretched hands.

“A Xtian magnate,” he said, “a commercial Xtian—what better could I have desired for you?”

Impulsively I kissed him, perhaps a little too impulsively. But he scarcely flinched as he received the impact, merely remarking that, upon the next day, he would present me with my first razor. Nor did he fail to do so, partly reminded by myself, and partly by the appearance, early the next morning, of a slight but painful urticaria or nettlerash in the region of our most vehement facial adjustment. But that was a penalty, as he several times assured me, that many a father would have been glad to pay, and one that yielded, in less than a fortnight, to an inunction embracing the oxide of zinc.

CHAPTER VII

A further vision is vouchsafed to us by Providence. Mr. Chrysostom Lorton and the sources of his wealth. The debt owed to me by Mr. Septimus Lorton. Interview with Mr. and Mrs. Septimus Lorton. Mr. Septimus Lorton’s disgraceful attitude. My father is compelled to be frank with him. What I discovered in Greenwich Park.

Manifestly as it had been Providence that had thus revealed to us the general sphere of my future activities, it was no less clearly the same beneficent Agency that determined their actual channel; and it has always seemed to me peculiarly appropriate that the particular enterprise with which I was to be first connected should have been suggested to my father during the process of family prayers.

This took place, according to our usual custom, immediately after the conclusion of our evening meal and consisted of the singing by my father and myself of two or three hymns or sacred choruses, followed by the reading on the part of my father of a chapter of Holy Scripture, the whole being concluded by one of those extemporary prayers in the composition of which my father was so skilled. For the purposes of the Scripture reading the volume generally used was a large Bible inherited by my father, but on the evening in question, owing to an accident with some stewed fruit, this was absent at a neighbouring bookbinder’s. My father had therefore borrowed with my glad permission my copy of the Lorton Bible for Schools, and it was in opening this that he caught sight of the words “eighteenth edition” on the first page.

That something had perturbed him was instantly apparent both to my mother and myself, not only on account of the sudden tremor that became visible in his left hand but of the extraordinary rapidity with which he read the appointed chapter, and the verbal errors that consequently ensued. His subsequent prayer too was so brief that we were scarcely upon our knees before he had leapt to his feet again, and my mother and myself, indeed, were still kneeling when he began to expound the idea that had been vouchsafed to him.

“I have it,” he cried. “It’s just been sent to me. Chrysostom Lorton. That’s the man. Eighteen editions—that’s what his Bible’s gone into, and none of the authors with any royalty rights!”

Nor was that all, for in addition, as I have said, to being the elder brother of Mr. Septimus Lorton, he was not only the proprietor of the well-known Beulah, perhaps the most popular of weekly religious journals, but his Peeping Up Series for Children, devotional stories with coloured illustrations, were familiar objects upon the nursery book-shelves of every evangelical household. Moreover he was the medium through which were issued to the world many millions of hortatory pamphlets, while the counters of his show-room in Paternoster Row were heaped with every kind of Protestant literature.

Such then was the man and such the undertaking, not only Xtian but lucrative, that by a chance gesture, or so it might have seemed, now stood beckoning before us; and it was only necessary, as my father justly said, for his brother Septimus to do the rest. But would he? I was at first doubtful. A weak man, he was also inert. And it did not of course follow that because he used his brother’s Bible he was on intimate or influential terms with him. This much was clear, however, that as the oldest pupil in his school, and in view of the treatment that I had received from his subordinates, he was under an obligation to me that neither my father nor myself could morally allow ourselves to remit. And although for reasons that I have already mentioned I had not advanced from my original class, in the strictly ethical sense, by his own admission, I was facile princeps.[^[4]]

[4]. Easily first.

“A good boy,” said Mr. Lorton, “a very, very good boy, or shall we say, now that he has begun to shave, an extremely admirable young man.”

This was upon the next evening, the penultimate evening of my last term at school, when both my father and myself were sitting in Mr. Lorton’s study for the purpose indicated above.

“It is useless to deny, of course,” my father had said, “that we have been seriously disappointed in your school, or to suggest that either my son or myself will be able to look back upon it with approval. Nor can I profess to be wholly convinced as to the necessity that you have so often explained to me of promoting your pupils from class to class according to the results of an examination. At the same time I am open-minded enough to recognise that this method has the sanction of custom, and to forbear from arraigning you for the consequently meagre position that my son still occupies in your establishment. Refusing to accept the standard, I can afford to ignore its results. But of this, Mr. Lorton, I am completely confident—that if the index had been a moral or religious one, my boy Augustus would have been second to none.”

Here my father paused for a moment to expectorate some phlegm, and it was then that Mr. Lorton used the words I have quoted.

“A good boy,” he said, as his wife entered the room, “a very, very good boy, or shall we say, now that he has begun to shave, an extremely admirable young man.”

A heavily-constructed woman of immense height, with prominent cheek-bones and a bovine chin, it was generally understood that Mr. Lorton had selected her chiefly on account of her income. And neither my father nor myself had ever been able to detect in her the least sign of intelligence. Happily her intrusion, however, was but momentary, and my father was able once more to proceed.

“I am obliged to you for your tribute,” he said, “and if, as you must surely admit, my son’s influence in your school has been inestimable, you will the more readily agree with me in adopting a reciprocal attitude towards the important question of his future employment.”

As we both observed, Mr. Lorton’s expression changed a little. But his voice retained its professional amiability.

“Oh, precisely,” he said, “precisely, although you must understand, of course, that my influence is strictly limited.”

“Nevertheless,” said my father, “I am depending on its exertion to the utmost boundary of its capacity. And I should be glad to learn what openings you have in view for one to whom so admittedly you are a debtor.”

At this point Mrs. Lorton returned and took up a position on her husband’s left flank. Mr. Lorton glanced at her before replying.

“Well, of course,” he said, “the problem is a somewhat difficult one.”