TONO-BUNGAY  by H.G. Wells  BOOK THE FIRST  THE DAYS BEFORE TONO-BUNGAY WAS INVENTED  CHAPTER THE FIRST  OF BLADESOVER HOUSE , AND MY MOTHER ; AND THE CONSTITUTION OF SOCIETY  Most people in this world seem to live " in character " ; they have a beginning , a middle and an end , and the three are congruous one with another and true to the rules of their type .  You can speak of them as being of this sort of people or that .  They are , as theatrical people say , no more ( and no less ) than " character actors .  " They have a class , they have a place , they know what is becoming in them and what is due to them , and their proper size of tombstone tells at last how properly they have played the part .  But there is also another kind of life that is not so much living as a miscellaneous tasting of life .  One gets hit by some unusual transverse force , one is jerked out of one 'sstratum and lives crosswise for the rest of the time , and , as it were , in a succession of samples .  That has been my lot , and that is what has set me at last writing something in the nature of a novel .  I have got an unusual series of impressions that I want very urgently to tell .  I have seen life at very different levels , and at all these levels I have seen it with a sort of intimacy and in good faith .  I have been a native in many social countries .  I have been the unwelcome guest of a working baker , my cousin , who has since died in the Chatham infirmary ; I have eaten illegal snacks — the unjustifiable gifts of footmen — in pantries , and been despised for my want of style ( and subsequently married and divorced ) by the daughter of a gasworks clerk ; and — to go to my other extreme — I was once — oh , glittering days !  — an item in the house — party of a countess .  She was , I admit , a countess with a financial aspect , but still , you know , a countess .  I 'veseen these people at various angles .  At the dinner-table I 'vemet not simply the titled but the great .  On one occasion — it is my brightest memory — I upset my champagne over the trousers of the greatest statesman in the empire — Heaven forbid I should be so invidious as to name him !  — in the warmth of our mutual admiration .  And once ( though it is the most incidental thing in my life ) I murdered a man ... .  Yes , I 'veseen a curious variety of people and ways of living altogether .  Odd people they all are great and small , very much alike at bottom and curiously different on their surfaces .  I wish I had ranged just a little further both up and down , seeing I have ranged so far .  Royalty must be worth knowing and very great fun .  But my contacts with princes have been limited to quite public occasions , nor at the other end of the scale have I had what I should call an inside acquaintance with that dusty but attractive class of people who go about on the high-roads drunk but enfamille ( so redeeming the minor lapse ) , in the summertime , with a perambulator , lavender to sell , sun-brown children , a smell , and ambiguous bundles that fire the imagination .  Navvies , farm-labourers , sailormen and stokers , all such as sit in 1834 beer-houses , are beyond me also , and I suppose must remain so now for ever .  My intercourse with the ducal rank too has been negligible ; I once went shooting with a duke , and in an outburst of what was no doubt snobbishness , did my best to get him in the legs .  But that failed .  I 'msorry I have n't done the whole lot though ... .  You will ask by what merit I achieved this remarkable social range , this extensive cross-section of the British social organism .  It was the Accident of Birth .  It always is in England .  Indeed , if I may make the remark so cosmic , everything is .  But that is by the way .  I was my uncle 'snephew , and my uncle was no less a person than Edward Ponderevo , whose comet-like transit of the financial heavens happened — it is now ten years ago !  Do you remember the days of Ponderevo , the great days , I mean , of Ponderevo ?  Perhaps you had a trifle in some world-shaking enterprise !  Then you know him only too well .  Astraddle on Tono-Bungay , he flashed athwart the empty heavens — like a comet — rather , like a stupendous rocket !  — and overawed investors spoke of his star .  At his zenith he burst into a cloud of the most magnificent promotions .  What a time that was !  The Napoleon of domestic conveniences !  I was his nephew , his peculiar and intimate nephew .  I was hanging on to his coat-tails all the way through .  I made pills with him in the chemist 'sshop at Wimblehurst before he began .  I was , you might say , the stick of his rocket ; and after our tremendous soar , after he had played with millions , a golden rain in the sky , after my bird's-eye view of the modern world , I fell again , a little scarred and blistered perhaps , two and twenty years older , with my youth gone , my manhood eaten in upon , but greatly edified , into this Thames-side yard , into these white heats and hammerings , amidst the fine realites of steel — to think it all over in my leisure and jot down the notes and inconsecutive observations that make this book .  It was more , you know , than a figurative soar .  The zenith of that career was surely our flight across the channel in the Lord Roberts B ... .  I warn you this book is going to be something of an agglomeration .  I want to trace my social trajectory ( and my uncle 's) as the main line of my story , but as this is my first novel and almost certainly my last , I want to get in , too , all sorts of things that struck me , things that amused me and impressions I got — even although they do n't minister directly to my narrative at all .  I want to set out my own queer love experiences too , such as they are , for they troubled and distressed and swayed me hugely , and they still seem to me to contain all sorts of irrational and debatable elements that I shall be the clearer-headed for getting on paper .  And possibly I may even flow into descriptions of people who are really no more than people seen in transit , just because it amuses me to recall what they said and did to us , and more particularly how they behaved in the brief but splendid glare of Tono-Bungay and its still more glaring offspring .  It lit some of them up , I can assure you !  Indeed , I want to get in all sorts of things .  My ideas of a novel all through are comprehensive rather than austere ... .  Tono-Bungay still figures on the hoardings , it stands in rows in every chemist 'sstoreroom , it still assuages the coughs of age and brightens the elderly eye and loosens the elderly tongue ; but its social glory , its financial illumination , have faded from the world for ever .  And I , sole scorched survivor from the blaze , sit writing of it here in an air that is never still for the clang and thunder of machines , on a table littered with working drawings , and amid fragments of models and notes about velocities and air and water pressures and trajectories — of an altogether different sort from that of Tono-Bungay .  I write that much and look at it , and wonder whether , after all , this is any fair statement of what I am attempting in this book .  I 'vegiven , I see , an impression that I want to make simply a hotch-potch of anecdotes and experiences with my uncle swimming in the middle as the largest lump of victual .  I 'llown that here , with the pen already started , I realise what a fermenting mass of things learnt and emotions experienced and theories formed I 'vegot to deal with , and how , in a sense , hopeless my book must be from the very outset .  I suppose what I 'mreally trying to render is nothing more nor less than Life — as one man has found it .  I want to tell — MYSELF , and my impressions of the thing as a whole , to say things I have come to feel intensely of the laws , traditions , usages , and ideas we call society , and how we poor individuals get driven and lured and stranded among these windy , perplexing shoals and channels .  I 'vegot , I suppose , to a time of life when things begin to take on shapes that have an air of reality , and become no longer material for dreaming , but interesting in themselves .  I 'vereached the criticising , novel-writing age , and here I am writing mine — my one novel — without having any of the discipline to refrain and omit that I suppose the regular novel-writer acquires .  I 'veread an average share of novels and made some starts before this beginning , and I 'vefound the restraints and rules of the art ( as I made them out ) impossible for me .  I like to write , I am keenly interested in writing , but it is not my technique .  I 'man engineer with a patent or two and a set of ideas ; most of whatever artist there is in me has been given to turbine machines and boat building and the problem of flying , and do what I will I fail to see how I can be other than a lax , undisciplined story-teller .  I must sprawl and flounder , comment and theorise , if I am to get the thing out I have in mind .  And it is n't a constructed tale I have to tell , but unmanageable realities .  My love-story — and if only I can keep up the spirit of truth-telling all through as strongly as I have now , you shall have it all — falls into no sort of neat scheme of telling .  It involves three separate feminine persons .  It 'sall mixed up with the other things ... .  But I 'vesaid enough , I hope , to excuse myself for the method or want of method in what follows , and I think I had better tell without further delay of my boyhood and my early impressions in the shadow of Bladesover House .  There came a time when I realised that Bladesover House was not all it seemed , but when I was a little boy I took the place with the entirest faith as a complete authentic microcosm .  I believed that the Bladesover system was a little working-model — and not so very little either — of the whole world .  Let me try and give you the effect of it .  Bladesover lies up on the Kentish Downs , eight miles perhaps from Ashborough ; and its old pavilion , a little wooden parody of the temple of Vesta at Tibur , upon the hill crest behind the house , commands in theory at least a view of either sea , of the Channel southward and the Thames to the northeast .  The park is the second largest in Kent , finely wooded with well-placed beeches , many elms and some sweet chestnuts , abounding in little valleys and hollows of bracken , with springs and a stream and three fine ponds and multitudes of fallow deer .  The house was built in the eighteenth century , it is of pale red brick in the style of a French chateau , and save for one pass among the crests which opens to blue distances , to minute , remote , oast-set farm-houses and copses and wheat fields and the occasional gleam of water , its hundred and seventeen windows look on nothing but its own wide and handsome territories .  A semi-circular screen of great beeches masks the church and village , which cluster picturesquely about the high road along the skirts of the great park .  Northward , at the remotest corner of that enclosure , is a second dependent village , Ropedean , less fortunate in its greater distance and also on account of a rector .  This divine was indeed rich , but he was vindictively economical because of some shrinkage of his tithes ; and by reason of his use of the word Eucharist for the Lord 'sSupper he had become altogether estranged from the great ladies of Bladesover .  So that Ropedean was in the shadows through all that youthful time .  Now the unavoidable suggestion of that wide park and that fair large house , dominating church , village and the country side , was that they represented the thing that mattered supremely in the world , and that all other things had significance only in relation to them .  They represented the Gentry , the Quality , by and through and for whom the rest of the world , the farming folk and the labouring folk , the trades-people of Ashborough , and the upper servants and the lower servants and the servants of the estate , breathed and lived and were permitted .  And the Quality did it so quietly and thoroughly , the great house mingled so solidly and effectually earth and sky , the contrast of its spacious hall and saloon and galleries , its airy housekeeper 'sroom and warren of offices with the meagre dignities of the vicar , and the pinched and stuffy rooms of even the post-office people and the grocer , so enforced these suggestions , that it was only when I was a boy of thirteen or fourteen and some queer inherited strain of scepticism had set me doubting whether Mr. Bartlett , the vicar , did really know with certainty all about God , that as a further and deeper step in doubting I began to question the final rightness of the gentlefolks , their primary necessity in the scheme of things .  But once that scepticism had awakened it took me fast and far .  By fourteen I had achieved terrible blasphemies and sacrilege ; I had resolved to marry a viscount 'sdaughter , and I had blacked the left eye — I think it was the left — of her half-brother , in open and declared rebellion .  But of that in its place .  The great house , the church , the village , and the labourers and the servants in their stations and degrees , seemed to me , I say , to be a closed and complete social system .  About us were other villages and great estates , and from house to house , interlacing , correlated , the Gentry , the fine Olympians , came and went .  The country towns seemed mere collections of ships , marketing places for the tenantry , centres for such education as they needed , as entirely dependent on the gentry as the village and scarcely less directly so .  I thought this was the order of the whole world .  I thought London was only a greater country town where the gentle-folk kept town-houses and did their greater shopping under the magnificent shadow of the greatest of all fine gentlewomen , the Queen .  It seemed to be in the divine order .  That all this fine appearance was already sapped , that there were forces at work that might presently carry all this elaborate social system in which my mother instructed me so carefully that I might understand my " place , " to Limbo , had scarcely dawned upon me even by the time that Tono-Bungay was fairly launched upon the world .  There are many people in England to-day upon whom it has not yet dawned .  There are times when I doubt whether any but a very inconsiderable minority of English people realise how extensively this ostensible order has even now passed away .  The great houses stand in the parks still , the cottages cluster respectfully on their borders , touching their eaves with their creepers , the English countryside — you can range through Kent from Bladesover northward and see persists obstinately in looking what it was .  It is like an early day in a fine October .  The hand of change rests on it all , unfelt , unseen ; resting for awhile , as it were half reluctantly , before it grips and ends the thing for ever .  One frost and the whole face of things will be bare , links snap , patience end , our fine foliage of pretences lie glowing in the mire .  For that we have still to wait a little while .  The new order may have gone far towards shaping itself , but just as in that sort of lantern show that used to be known in the village as the " Dissolving Views , " the scene that is going remains upon the mind , traceable and evident , and the newer picture is yet enigmatical long after the lines that are to replace those former ones have grown bright and strong , so that the new England of our children 'schildren is still a riddle to me .  The ideas of democracy , of equality , and above all of promiscuous fraternity have certainly never really entered into the English mind .  But what IS coming into it ?  All this book , I hope , will bear a little on that .  Our people never formulates ; it keeps words for jests and ironies .  In the meanwhile the old shapes , the old attitudes remain , subtly changed and changing still , sheltering strange tenants .  Bladesover House is now let furnished to Sir Reuben Lichtenstein , and has been since old Lady Drew died ; it was my odd experience to visit there , in the house of which my mother had been housekeeper , when my uncle was at the climax of Tono-Bungay .  It was curious to notice then the little differences that had come to things with this substitution .  To borrow an image from my mineralogical days , these Jews were not so much a new British gentry as " pseudomorphous " after the gentry .  They are a very clever people , the Jews , but not clever enough to suppress their cleverness .  I wished I could have gone downstairs to savour the tone of the pantry .  It would have been very different I know .  Hawksnest , over beyond , I noted , had its pseudomorph too ; a newspaper proprietor of the type that hustles along with stolen ideas from one loud sink-or-swim enterprise to another , had bought the place outright ; Redgrave was in the hands of brewers .  But the people in the villages , so far as I could detect , saw no difference in their world .  Two little girls bobbed and an old labourer touched his hat convulsively as I walked through the village .  He still thought he knew his place — and mine .  I did not know him , but I would have liked dearly to have asked him if he remembered my mother , if either my uncle or old Lichtenstein had been man enough to stand being given away like that .  In that English countryside of my boyhood every human being had a " place .  " It belonged to you from your birth like the colour of your eyes , it was inextricably your destiny .  Above you were your betters , below you were your inferiors , and there were even an unstable questionable few , cases so disputable that you might for the rough purposes of every day at least , regard them as your equals .  Head and centre of our system was Lady Drew , her " leddyship , " shrivelled , garrulous , with a wonderful memory for genealogies and very , very old , and beside her and nearly as old , Miss Somerville , her cousin and companion .  These two old souls lived like dried-up kernels in the great shell of Bladesover House , the shell that had once been gaily full of fops , of fine ladies in powder and patches and courtly gentlemen with swords ; and when there was no company they spent whole days in the corner parlour just over the housekeeper 'sroom , between reading and slumber and caressing their two pet dogs .  When I was a boy I used always to think of these two poor old creatures as superior beings living , like God , somewhere through the ceiling .  Occasionally they bumped about a bit and one even heard them overhead , which gave them a greater effect of reality without mitigating their vertical predominance .  Sometimes too I saw them .  Of course if I came upon them in the park or in the shrubbery ( where I was a trespasser ) I hid or fled in pious horror , but I was upon due occasion taken into the Presence by request .  I remember her " leddyship " then as a thing of black silks and a golden chain , a quavering injunction to me to be a good boy , a very shrunken loose-skinned face and neck , and a ropy hand that trembled a halfcrown into mine .  Miss Somerville hovered behind , a paler thing of broken lavender and white and black , with screwed up , sandy-lashed eyes .  Her hair was yellow and her colour bright , and when we sat in the housekeeper 'sroom of a winter 'snight warming our toes and sipping elder wine , her maid would tell us the simple secrets of that belated flush ... .  After my fight with young Garvell I was of course banished , and I never saw those poor old painted goddesses again .  Then there came and went on these floors over our respectful heads , the Company ; people I rarely saw , but whose tricks and manners were imitated and discussed by their maids and valets in the housekeeper 'sroom and the steward 'sroom — so that I had them through a medium at second hand .  I gathered that none of the company were really Lady Drew 'sequals , they were greater and lesser after the manner of all things in our world .  Once I remember there was a Prince , with a real live gentleman in attendance , and that was a little above our customary levels and excited us all , and perhaps raised our expectations unduly .  Afterwards , Rabbits , the butler , came into my mother 'sroom downstairs , red with indignation and with tears in his eyes .  " Look at that !  " gasped Rabbits .  My mother was speechless with horror .  That was a sovereign , a mere sovereign , such as you might get from any commoner !  After Company , I remember , came anxious days , for the poor old women upstairs were left tired and cross and vindictive , and in a state of physical and emotional indigestion after their social efforts ... .  On the lowest fringe of these real Olympians hung the vicarage people , and next to them came those ambiguous beings who are neither quality nor subjects .  The vicarage people certainly hold a place by themselves in the typical English scheme ; nothing is more remarkable than the progress the Church has made — socially — in the last two hundred years .  In the early eighteenth century the vicar was rather under than over the house-steward , and was deemed a fitting match for the housekeeper or any not too morally discredited discard .  The eighteenth century literature is full of his complaints that he might not remain at table to share the pie .  He rose above these indignities because of the abundance of younger sons .  When I meet the large assumptions of the contemporary cleric , I am apt to think of these things .  It is curious to note that to-day that down-trodden , organ-playing creature , the Church of England village Schoolmaster , holds much the same position as the seventeenth century parson .  The doctor in Bladesover ranked below the vicar but above the " vet , " artists and summer visitors squeezed in above or below this point according to their appearance and expenditure , and then in a carefully arranged scale came the tenantry , the butler and housekeeper , the village shopkeeper , the head keeper , the cook , the publican , the second keeper , the blacksmith ( whose status was complicated by his daughter keeping the post-office — and a fine hash she used to make of telegrams too !  ) the village shopkeeper 'seldest son , the first footman , younger sons of the village shopkeeper , his first assistant , and so forth .  All these conceptions and applications of a universal precedence and much else I drank in at Bladesover , as I listened to the talk of valets , ladies'-maids , Rabbits the butler and my mother in the much-cupboarded , white-painted , chintz-brightened housekeeper 'sroom where the upper servants assembled , or of footmen and Rabbits and estate men of all sorts among the green baize and Windsor chairs of the pantry — where Rabbits , being above the law , sold beer without a license or any compunction — or of housemaids and still — room maids in the bleak , matting-carpeted still-room or of the cook and her kitchen maids and casual friends among the bright copper and hot glow of the kitchens .  Of course their own ranks and places came by implication to these people , and it was with the ranks and places of the Olympians that the talk mainly concerned itself .  There was an old peerage and a Crockford together with the books of recipes , the Whitaker 'sAlmanack , the Old Moore 'sAlmanack , and the eighteenth century dictionary , on the little dresser that broke the cupboards on one side of my mother 'sroom ; there was another peerage , with the covers off , in the pantry ; there was a new peerage in the billiard-room , and I seem to remember another in the anomalous apartment that held the upper servants 'bagatelle board and in which , after the Hall dinner , they partook of the luxury of sweets .  And if you had asked any of those upper servants how such and such a Prince of Battenberg was related to , let us say , Mr. Cunninghame Graham or the Duke of Argyle , you would have been told upon the nail .  As a boy , I heard a great deal of that sort of thing , and if to this day I am still a little vague about courtesy titles and the exact application of honorifics , it is , I can assure you , because I hardened my heart , and not from any lack of adequate opportunity of mastering these succulent particulars .  Dominating all these memories is the figure of my mother — my mother who did not love me because I grew liker my father every day — and who knew with inflexible decision her place and the place of every one in the world — except the place that concealed my father — and in some details mine .  Subtle points were put to her .  I can see and hear her saying now , " No , Miss Fison , peers of England go in before peers of the United Kingdom , and he is merely a peer of the United Kingdom .  " She had much exercise in placing people 'sservants about her tea-table , where the etiquette was very strict .  I wonder sometimes if the etiquette of housekeepers 'rooms is as strict to-day , and what my mother would have made of a chauffeur ... .  On the whole I am glad that I saw so much as I did of Bladesover — if for no other reason than because seeing it when I did , quite naively , believing in it thoroughly , and then coming to analyse it , has enabled me to understand much that would be absolutely incomprehensible in the structure of English society .  Bladesover is , I am convinced , the clue to almost all that is distinctively British and perplexing to the foreign inquirer in England and the English-speaking peoples .  Grasp firmly that England was all Bladesover two hundred years ago ; that it has had Reform Acts indeed , and such-like changes of formula , but no essential revolution since then ; that all that is modern and different has come in as a thing intruded or as a gloss upon this predominant formula , either impertinently or apologetically ; and you will perceive at once the reasonableness , the necessity , of that snobbishness which is the distinctive quality of English thought .  Everybody who is not actually in the shadow of a Bladesover is as it were perpetually seeking after lost orientations .  We have never broken with our tradition , never even symbolically hewed it to pieces , as the French did in quivering fact in the Terror .  But all the organizing ideas have slackened , the old habitual bonds have relaxed or altogether come undone .  And America too , is , as it were , a detached , outlying part of that estate which has expanded in queer ways .  George Washington , Esquire , was of the gentlefolk , and he came near being a King .  It was Plutarch , you know , and nothing intrinsically American that prevented George Washington being a King ... .  I hated teatime in the housekeeper 'sroom more than anything else at Bladesover .  And more particularly I hated it when Mrs. Mackridge and Mrs. Booch and Mrs. Latude-Fernay were staying in the house .  They were , all three of them , pensioned-off servants .  Old friends of Lady Drew 'shad rewarded them posthumously for a prolonged devotion to their minor comforts , and Mrs. Booch was also trustee for a favourite Skye terrier .  Every year Lady Drew gave them an invitation — a reward and encouragement of virtue with especial reference to my mother and Miss Fison , the maid .  They sat about in black and shiny and flouncey clothing adorned with gimp and beads , eating great quantities of cake , drinking much tea in a stately manner and reverberating remarks .  I remember these women as immense .  No doubt they were of negotiable size , but I was only a very little chap and they have assumed nightmare proportions in my mind .  They loomed , they bulged , they impended .  Mrs. Mackridge was large and dark ; there was a marvel about her head , inasmuch as she was bald .  She wore a dignified cap , and in front of that upon her brow , hair was PAINTED .  I have never seen the like since .  She had been maid to the widow of Sir Roderick Blenderhasset Impey , some sort of governor or such-like portent in the East Indies , and from her remains — in Mrs. Mackridge — I judge Lady Impey was a very stupendous and crushing creature indeed .  Lady Impey had been of the Juno type , haughty , unapproachable , given to irony and a caustic wit .  Mrs. Mackridge had no wit , but she had acquired the caustic voice and gestures along with the old satins and trimmings of the great lady .  When she told you it was a fine morning , she seemed also to be telling you you were a fool and a low fool to boot ; when she was spoken to , she had a way of acknowledging your poor tinkle of utterance with a voluminous , scornful " Haw !  " that made you want to burn her alive .  She also had a way of saying " Indade !  " with a droop of the eyelids .  Mrs. Booch was a smaller woman , brown haired , with queer little curls on either side of her face , large blue eyes and a small set of stereotyped remarks that constituted her entire mental range .  Mrs. Latude-Fernay has left , oddly enough , no memory at all except her name and the effect of a green-grey silk dress , all set with gold and blue buttons .  I fancy she was a large blonde .  Then there was Miss Fison , the maid who served both Lady Drew and Miss Somerville , and at the end of the table opposite my mother , sat Rabbits the butler .  Rabbits , for a butler , was an unassuming man , and at tea he was not as you know butlers , but in a morning coat and a black tie with blue spots .  Still , he was large , with side whiskers , even if his clean-shaven mouth was weak and little .  I sat among these people on a high , hard , early Gregorian chair , trying to exist , like a feeble seedling amidst great rocks , and my mother sat with an eye upon me , resolute to suppress the slightest manifestation of vitality .  It was hard on me , but perhaps it was also hard upon these rather over-fed , ageing , pretending people , that my youthful restlessness and rebellious unbelieving eyes should be thrust in among their dignities .  Tea lasted for nearly three-quarters of an hour , and I sat it out perforce ; and day after day the talk was exactly the same .  " Sugar , Mrs. Mackridge ?  " my mother used to ask .  " Sugar , Mrs. Latude-Fernay ?  "  The word sugar would stir the mind of Mrs. Mackridge .  " They say , " she would begin , issuing her proclamation — at least half her sentences began " they say " — " sugar is fatt-an-ing , nowadays .  Many of the best people do not take it at all .  "  " Not with their tea , ma'am , " said Rabbits intelligently .  " Not with anything , " said Mrs. Mackridge , with an air of crushing repartee , and drank .  " What wo n't they say next ?  " said Miss Fison .  " They do say such things !  " said Mrs. Booch .  " They say , " said Mrs. Mackridge , inflexibly , " the doctors are not recomm-an-ding it now .  "  My Mother : " No , ma'am ?  "  Mrs. Mackridge : " No , ma'am .  "  Then , to the table at large : " Poor Sir Roderick , before he died , consumed great quan-ta-ties of sugar .  I have sometimes fancied it may have hastened his end .  "  This ended the first skirmish .  A certain gloom of manner and a pause was considered due to the sacred memory of Sir Roderick .  " George , " said my mother , " do n't kick the chair !  "  Then , perhaps , Mrs. Booch would produce a favourite piece from her repertoire .  " The evenings are drawing out nicely , " she would say , or if the season was decadent , " How the evenings draw in !  " It was an invaluable remark to her ; I do not know how she would have got along without it .  My mother , who sat with her back to the window , would always consider it due to Mrs. Booch to turn about and regard the evening in the act of elongation or contraction , whichever phase it might be .  A brisk discussion of how long we were to the longest or shortest day would ensue , and die away at last exhausted .  Mrs. Mackridge , perhaps , would reopen .  She had many intelligent habits ; among others she read the paper — The Morning Post .  The other ladies would at times tackle that sheet , but only to read the births , marriages , and deaths on the front page .  It was , of course , the old Morning Post that cost threepence , not the brisk coruscating young thing of to-day .  " They say , " she would open , " that Lord Tweedums is to go to Canada .  "  " Ah !  " said Mr. Rabbits ; " dew they ?  "  " Is n't he , " said my mother , " the Earl of Slumgold 'scousin ?  " She knew he was ; it was an entirely irrelevant and unnecessary remark , but still , something to say .  " The same , ma'am , " said Mrs. Mackridge .  " They say he was extremelay popular in New South Wales .  They looked up to him greatlay .  I knew him , ma'am , as a young man .  A very nice pleasant young fella .  "  Interlude of respect .  " ' Is predecessor , " said Rabbits , who had acquired from some clerical model a precise emphatic articulation without acquiring at the same time the aspirates that would have graced it , " got into trouble at Sydney .  "  " Haw !  " said Mrs. Mackridge , scornfully , " so am tawled .  "  " ' E came to Templemorton after ' e came back , and I remember them talking ' im over after ' e 'dgone again .  "  " Haw ?  " said Mrs. Mackridge , interrogatively .  " ' Is fuss was quotin 'poetry , ma'am .  ' E said — what was it ' e said — ' They lef ' their country for their country 'sgood , ' — which in some way was took to remind them of their being originally convic 's, though now reformed .  Every one I 'eard speak , agreed it was takless of ' im .  "  " Sir Roderick used to say , " said Mrs. Mackridge , " that the First Thing , " — here Mrs. Mackridge paused and looked dreadfully at me — " and the Second Thing " — here she fixed me again — " and the Third Thing " — now I was released — " needed in a colonial governor is Tact .  " She became aware of my doubts again , and added predominantly , " It has always struck me that that was a Singularly True Remark .  "  I resolved that if ever I found this polypus of Tact growing up in my soul , I would tear it out by the roots , throw it forth and stamp on it .  " They 'requeer people — colonials , " said Rabbits , " very queer .  When I was at Templemorton I see something of ' em .  Queer fellows , some of ' em .  Very respectful of course , free with their money in a spasammy sort of way , but — Some of ' em , I must confess , make me nervous .  They have an eye on you .  They watch you — as you wait .  They let themselves appear to be lookin 'at you ... "  My mother said nothing in that discussion .  The word colonies always upset her .  She was afraid , I think , that if she turned her mind in that direction my errant father might suddenly and shockingly be discovered , no doubt conspicuously bigamic and altogether offensive and revolutionary .  She did not want to rediscover my father at all .  It is curious that when I was a little listening boy I had such an idea of our colonies that I jeered in my heart at Mrs. Mackridge 'scolonial ascendancy .  These brave emancipated sunburnt English of the open , I thought , suffer these aristocratic invaders as a quaint anachronism , but as for being gratified — !  I do n't jeer now .  I 'mnot so sure .  It is a little difficult to explain why I did not come to do what was the natural thing for any one in my circumstances to do , and take my world for granted .  A certain innate scepticism , I think , explains it and a certain inaptitude for sympathetic assimilation .  My father , I believe , was a sceptic ; my mother was certainly a hard woman .  I was an only child , and to this day I do not know whether my father is living or dead .  He fled my mother 'svirtues before my distincter memories began .  He left no traces in his flight , and she , in her indignation , destroyed every vestige that she could of him .  Never a photograph nor a scrap of his handwriting have I seen ; and it was , I know , only the accepted code of virtue and discretion that prevented her destroying her marriage certificate and me , and so making a clean sweep of her matrimonial humiliation .  I suppose I must inherit something of the moral stupidity that would enable her to make a holocaust of every little personal thing she had of him .  There must have been presents made by him as a lover , for example — books with kindly inscriptions , letters perhaps , a flattened flower , a ring , or such-like gage .  She kept her wedding-ring , of course , but all the others she destroyed .  She never told me his christian name or indeed spoke a word to me of him ; though at times I came near daring to ask her : add what I have of him — it is n't much — I got from his brother , my hero , my uncle Ponderevo .  She wore her ring ; her marriage certificate she kept in a sealed envelope in the very bottom of her largest trunk , and me she sustained at a private school among the Kentish hills .  You must not think I was always at Bladesover — even in my holidays .  If at the time these came round , Lady Drew was vexed by recent Company , or for any other reason wished to take it out of my mother , then she used to ignore the customary reminder my mother gave her , and I " stayed on " at the school .  But such occasions were rare , and I suppose that between ten and fourteen I averaged fifty days a year at Bladesover .  Do n't imagine I deny that was a fine thing for me .  Bladesover , in absorbing the whole countryside , had not altogether missed greatness .  The Bladesover system has at least done one good thing for England , it has abolished the peasant habit of mind .  If many of us still live and breathe pantry and housekeeper 'sroom , we are quit of the dream of living by economising parasitically on hens and pigs ... .  About that park there were some elements of a liberal education ; there was a great space of greensward not given over to manure and food grubbing ; there was mystery , there was matter for the imagination .  It was still a park of deer .  I saw something of the life of these dappled creatures , heard the belling of stags , came upon young fawns among the bracken , found bones , skulls , and antlers in lonely places .  There were corners that gave a gleam of meaning to the word forest , glimpses of unstudied natural splendour .  There was a slope of bluebells in the broken sunlight under the newly green beeches in the west wood that is now precious sapphire in my memory ; it was the first time that I knowingly met Beauty .  And in the house there were books .  The rubbish old Lady Drew read I never saw ; stuff of the Maria Monk type , I have since gathered , had a fascination for her ; but back in the past there had been a Drew of intellectual enterprise , Sir Cuthbert , the son of Sir Matthew who built the house ; and thrust away , neglected and despised , in an old room upstairs , were books and treasures of his that my mother let me rout among during a spell of wintry wet .  Sitting under a dormer window on a shelf above great stores of tea and spices , I became familiar with much of Hogarth in a big portfolio , with Raphael , there was a great book of engravings from the stanzas of Raphael in the Vatican — and with most of the capitals of Europe as they had looked about 1780 , by means of several pig iron-moulded books of views .  There was also a broad eighteenth century atlas with huge wandering maps that instructed me mightily .  It had splendid adornments about each map title ; Holland showed a fisherman and his boat ; Russia a Cossack ; Japan , remarkable people attired in pagodas — I say it deliberately , " pagodas .  " There were Terrae Incognitae in every continent then , Poland , Sarmatia , lands since lost ; and many a voyage I made with a blunted pin about that large , incorrect and dignified world .  The books in that little old closet had been banished , I suppose , from the saloon during the Victorian revival of good taste and emasculated orthodoxy , but my mother had no suspicion of their character .  So I read and understood the good sound rhetoric of Tom Paine 's" Rights of Man , " and his " Common Sense , " excellent books , once praised by bishops and since sedulously lied about .  Gulliver was there unexpurgated , strong meat for a boy perhaps but not too strong I hold — I have never regretted that I escaped niceness in these affairs .  The satire of Traldragdubh made my blood boil as it was meant to do , but I hated Swift for the Houyhnhnms and never quite liked a horse afterwards .  Then I remember also a translation of Voltaire 's" Candide , " and " Rasselas ; " and , vast book though it was , I really believe I read , in a muzzy sort of way of course , from end to end , and even with some reference now and then to the Atlas , Gibbon — in twelve volumes .  These readings whetted my taste for more , and surreptitiously I raided the bookcases in the big saloon .  I got through quite a number of books before my sacrilegious temerity was discovered by Ann , the old head-housemaid .  I remember that among others I tried a translation of Plato 's" Republic " then , and found extraordinarily little interest in it ; I was much too young for that ; but " Vathek " — " Vathek " was glorious stuff .  That kicking affair !  When everybody HAD to kick !  The thought of " Vathek " always brings back with it my boyish memory of the big saloon at Bladesover .  It was a huge long room with many windows opening upon the park , and each window — there were a dozen or more reaching from the floor up — had its elaborate silk or satin curtains , heavily fringed , a canopy ( is it ?  ) above , its completely white shutters folding into the deep thickness of the wall .  At either end of that great still place was an immense marble chimney-piece ; the end by the bookcase showed the wolf and Romulus and Remus , with Homer and Virgil for supporters ; the design of the other end I have forgotten .  Frederick , Prince of Wales , swaggered flatly over the one , twice life-size , but mellowed by the surface gleam of oil ; and over the other was an equally colossal group of departed Drews as sylvan deities , scantily clad , against a storm-rent sky .  Down the centre of the elaborate ceiling were three chandeliers , each bearing some hundreds of dangling glass lustres , and over the interminable carpet — it impressed me as about as big as Sarmatia in the store-room Atlas — were islands and archipelagoes of chintz-covered chairs and couches , tables , great Sevres vases on pedestals , a bronze man and horse .  Somewhere in this wilderness one came , I remember , upon — a big harp beside a lyre-shaped music stand , and a grand piano ... .  The book-borrowing raid was one of extraordinary dash and danger .  One came down the main service stairs — that was legal , and illegality began in a little landing when , very cautiously , one went through a red baize door .  A little passage led to the hall , and here one reconnoitered for Ann , the old head-housemaid — the younger housemaids were friendly and did not count .  Ann located , came a dash across the open space at the foot of that great staircase that has never been properly descended since powder went out of fashion , and so to the saloon door .  A beast of an oscillating Chinaman in china , as large as life , grimaced and quivered to one 'slightest steps .  That door was the perilous place ; it was double with the thickness of the wall between , so that one could not listen beforehand for the whisk of the feather-brush on the other side .  Oddly rat-like , is it not , this darting into enormous places in pursuit of the abandoned crumbs of thought ?  And I found Langhorne 's" Plutarch " too , I remember , on those shelves .  It seems queer to me now to think that I acquired pride and self-respect , the idea of a state and the germ of public spirit , in such a furtive fashion ; queer , too , that it should rest with an old Greek , dead these eighteen hundred years to teach that .  The school I went to was the sort of school the Bladesover system permitted .  The public schools that add comic into existence in the brief glow of the Renascence had been taken possession of by the ruling class ; the lower classes were not supposed to stand in need of schools , and our middle stratum got the schools it deserved , private schools , schools any unqualified pretender was free to establish .  Mine was kept by a man who had had the energy to get himself a College of Preceptors diploma , and considering how cheap his charges were , I will readily admit the place might have been worse .  The building was a dingy yellow-brick residence outside the village , with the schoolroom as an outbuilding of lath and plaster .  I do not remember that my school-days were unhappy-indeed I recall a good lot of fine mixed fun in them — but I cannot without grave risk of misinterpretation declare that we were at all nice and refined .  We fought much , not sound formal fighting , but " scrapping " of a sincere and murderous kind , into which one might bring one 'sboots — it made us tough at any rate — and several of us were the sons of London publicans , who distinguished " scraps " where one meant to hurt from ordered pugilism , practising both arts , and having , moreover , precocious linguistic gifts .  Our cricket-field was bald about the wickets , and we played without style and disputed with the umpire ; and the teaching was chiefly in the hands of a lout of nineteen , who wore ready-made clothes and taught despicably .  The head-master and proprietor taught us arithmetic , algebra , and Euclid , and to the older boys even trigonometry , himself ; he had a strong mathematical bias , and I think now that by the standard of a British public school he did rather well by us .  We had one inestimable privilege at that school , and that was spiritual neglect .  We dealt with one another with the forcible simplicity of natural boys , we " cheeked , " and " punched " and " clouted " ; we thought ourselves Red Indians and cowboys and such-like honourable things , and not young English gentlemen ; we never felt the strain of " Onward Christian soldiers , " nor were swayed by any premature piety in the cold oak pew of our Sunday devotions .  All that was good .  We spent our rare pennies in the uncensored reading matter of the village dame 'sshop , on the Boys of England , and honest penny dreadfuls — ripping stuff , stuff that anticipated Haggard and Stevenson , badly printed and queerly illustrated , and very very good for us .  On our half-holidays we were allowed the unusual freedom of rambling in twos and threes wide and far about the land , talking experimentally , dreaming wildly .  There was much in those walks !  To this day the landscape of the Kentish world , with its low broad distances , its hop gardens and golden stretches of wheat , its oasts and square church towers , its background of downland and hangers , has for me a faint sense of adventure added to the pleasure of its beauty .  We smoked on occasion , but nobody put us up to the proper " boyish " things to do ; we never " robbed an orchard " for example , though there were orchards all about us , we thought stealing was sinful , we stole incidental apples and turnips and strawberries from the fields indeed , but in a criminal inglorious fashion , and afterwards we were ashamed .  We had our days of adventure , but they were natural accidents , our own adventures .  There was one hot day when several of us , walking out towards Maidstone , were incited by the devil to despise ginger beer , and we fuddled ourselves dreadfully with ale ; and a time when our young minds were infected to the pitch of buying pistols , by the legend of the Wild West .  Young Roots from Highbury came back with a revolver and cartridges , and we went off six strong to live a free wild life one holiday afternoon .  We fired our first shot deep in the old flint mine at Chiselstead , and nearly burst our ear drums ; then we fired in a primrose studded wood by Pickthorn Green , and I gave a false alarm of " keeper , " and we fled in disorder for a mile .  After which Roots suddenly shot at a pheasant in the high road by Chiselstead , and then young Barker told lies about the severity of the game laws and made Roots sore afraid , and we hid the pistol in a dry ditch outside the school field .  A day or so after we got in again , and ignoring a certain fouling and rusting of the barrel , tried for a rabbit at three hundred yards .  Young Roots blew a molehill at twenty paces into a dust cloud , burnt his fingers , and scorched his face ; and the weapon having once displayed this strange disposition to flame back upon the shooter , was not subsequently fired .  One main source of excitement for us was " cheeking " people in vans and carts upon the Goudhurst road ; and getting myself into a monstrous white mess in the chalk pits beyond the village , and catching yellow jaundice as a sequel to bathing stark naked with three other Adamites , old Ewart leading that function , in the rivulet across Hickson 'smeadows , are among my memorabilia .  Those free imaginative afternoons !  how much they were for us !  how much they did for us !  All streams came from the then undiscovered " sources of the Nile " in those days , all thickets were Indian jungles , and our best game , I say it with pride , I invented .  I got it out of the Bladesover saloon .  We found a wood where " Trespassing " was forbidden , and did the " Retreat of the Ten Thousand " through it from end to end , cutting our way bravely through a host of nettle beds that barred our path , and not forgetting to weep and kneel when at last we emerged within sight of the High Road Sea .  So we have burst at times , weeping and rejoicing , upon startled wayfarers .  Usually I took the part of that distinguished general Xenophen — and please note the quantity of the o .  I have all my classical names like that , — Socrates rhymes with Bates for me , and except when the bleak eye of some scholar warns me of his standards of judgment , I use those dear old mispronunciations still .  The little splash into Latin made during my days as a chemist washed off nothing of the habit .  Well , — if I met those great gentlemen of the past with their accents carelessly adjusted I did at least meet them alive , as an equal , and in a living tongue .  Altogether my school might easily have been worse for me , and among other good things it gave me a friend who has lasted my life out .  This was Ewart , who is now a monumental artist at Woking , after many vicissitudes .  Dear chap , how he did stick out of his clothes to be sure !  He was a longlimbed lout , ridiculously tall beside my more youth full compactness , and , except that there was no black moustache under his nose blob , he had the same round knobby face as he has to-day , the same bright and active hazel brown eyes , the stare , the meditative moment , the insinuating reply .  Surely no boy ever played the fool as Bob Ewart used to play it , no boy had a readier knack of mantling the world with wonder .  Commonness vanished before Ewart , at his expository touch all things became memorable and rare .  From him I first heard tell of love , but only after its barbs were already sticking in my heart .  He was , I know now the bastard of that great improvident artist , Rickmann Ewart ; he brought the light of a lax world that at least had not turned its back upon beauty , into the growing fermentation of my mind .  I won his heart by a version of Vathek , and after that we were inseparable yarning friends .  We merged our intellectual stock so completely that I wonder sometimes how much I did not become Ewart , how much Ewart is not vicariously and derivatively me .  And then when I had newly passed my fourteenth birthday , came my tragic disgrace .  It was in my midsummer holidays that the thing happened , and it was through the Honourable Beatrice Normandy .  She had " come into my life , " as they say , before I was twelve .  She descended unexpectedly into a peaceful interlude that followed the annual going of those Three Great Women .  She came into the old nursery upstairs , and every day she had tea with us in the housekeeper 'sroom .  She was eight , and she came with a nurse called Nannie ; and to begin with , I did not like her at all .  Nobody liked this irruption into the downstairs rooms ; the two " gave trouble , " -a dire offence ; Nannie 'ssense of duty to her charge led to requests and demands that took my mother 'sbreath away .  Eggs at unusual times , the reboiling of milk , the rejection of an excellent milk pudding-not negotiated respectfully but dictated as of right .  Nannie was a dark , longfeatured , taciturn woman in a grey dress ; she had a furtive inflexibility of manner that finally dismayed and crushed and overcame .  She conveyed she was " under orders " -like a Greek tragedy .  She was that strange product of the old time , a devoted , trusted servant ; she had , as it were , banked all her pride and will with the greater , more powerful people who employed her , in return for a life-long security of servitude-the bargain was nonetheless binding for being implicit .  Finally they were to pension her , and she would die the hated treasure of a boarding-house .  She had built up in herself an enormous habit of reference to these upstairs people , she had curbed down all discordant murmurings of her soul , her very instincts were perverted or surrendered .  She was sexless , her personal pride was all transferred , she mothered another woman 'schild with a hard , joyless devotion that was at least entirely compatible with a stoical separation .  She treated us all as things that counted for nothing save to fetch and carry for her charge .  But the Honourable Beatrice could condescend .  The queer chances of later years come between me and a distinctly separated memory of that childish face .  When I think of Beatrice , I think of her as I came to know her at a later time , when at last I came to know her so well that indeed now I could draw her , and show a hundred little delicate things you would miss in looking at her .  But even then I remember how I noted the infinite delicacy of her childish skin and the fine eyebrow , finer than the finest feather that ever one felt on the breast of a bird .  She was one of those elfin , rather precocious little girls , quick coloured , with dark hair , naturally curling dusky hair that was sometimes astray over her eyes , and eyes that were sometimes impishly dark , and sometimes a clear brown yellow .  And from the very outset , after a most cursory attention to Rabbits , she decided that the only really interesting thing at the tea-table was myself .  The elders talked in their formal dull way-telling Nannie the trite old things about the park and the village that they told every one , and Beatrice watched me across the table with a pitiless little curiosity that made me uncomfortable .  " Nannie , " she said , pointing , and Nannie left a question of my mother 'sdisregarded to attend to her ; " is he a servant boy ?  "  " S-s-sh , " said Nannie .  " He 'sMaster Ponderevo .  "  " Is he a servant boy ?  " repeated Beatrice .  " He 'sa schoolboy , " said my mother .  " Then may I talk to him , Nannie ?  "  Nannie surveyed me with brutal inhumanity .  " You must n't talk too much , " she said to her charge , and cut cake into fingers for her .  " No , " she added decisively , as Beatrice made to speak .  Beatrice became malignant .  Her eyes explored me with unjustifiable hostility .  " He 'sgot dirty hands , " she said , stabbing at the forbidden fruit .  " And there 'sa fray to his collar .  "  Then she gave herself up to cake with an appearance of entire forgetfulness of me that filled me with hate and a passionate desire to compel her to admire me ... .  And the next day before tea , I did for the first time in my life , freely , without command or any compulsion , wash my hands .  So our acquaintance began , and presently was deepened by a whim of hers .  She had a cold and was kept indoors , and confronted Nannie suddenly with the alternative of being hopelessly naughty , which in her case involved a generous amount of screaming unsuitable for the ears of an elderly , shaky , rich aunt , or having me up to the nursery to play with her all the afternoon .  Nannie came downstairs and borrowed me in a careworn manner ; and I was handed over to the little creature as if I was some large variety of kitten .  I had never had anything to do with a little girl before , I thought she was more beautiful and wonderful and bright than anything else could possibly be in life , and she found me the gentlest of slaves-though at the same time , as I made evident , fairly strong .  And Nannie was amazed to find the afternoon slip cheerfully and rapidly away .  She praised my manners to Lady Drew and to my mother , who said she was glad to hear well of me , and after that I played with Beatrice several times .  The toys she had remain in my memory still as great splendid things , gigantic to all my previous experience of toys , and we even went to the great doll 'shouse on the nursery landing to play discreetly with that , the great doll 'shouse that the Prince Regent had given Sir Harry Drew 'sfirst-born ( who died at five ) , that was a not ineffectual model of Bladesover itself , and contained eighty-five dolls and had cost hundreds of pounds .  I played under imperious direction with that toy of glory .  I went back to school when that holiday was over , dreaming of beautiful things , and got Ewart to talk to me of love ; and I made a great story out of the doll 'shouse , a story that , taken over into Ewart 'shands , speedily grew to an island doll 'scity all our own .  One of the dolls , I privately decided , was like Beatrice .  One other holiday there was when I saw something of her-oddly enough my memory of that second holiday in which she played a part is vague-and then came a gap of a year , and then my disgrace .  Now I sit down to write my story and tell over again things in their order , I find for the first time how inconsecutive and irrational a thing the memory can be .  One recalls acts and cannot recall motives ; one recalls quite vividly moments that stand out inexplicably-things adrift , joining on to nothing , leading nowhere .  I think I must have seen Beatrice and her half-brother quite a number of times in my last holiday at Bladesover , but I really cannot recall more than a little of the quality of the circumstances .  That great crisis of my boyhood stands out very vividly as an effect , as a sort of cardinal thing for me , but when I look for details , particularly details that led up to the crisis-I cannot find them in any developing order at all .  This halfbrother , Archie Garvell , was a new factor in the affair .  I remember him clearly as a fair-haired , supercilious looking , weedily-lank boy , much taller than I , but I should imagine very little heavier , and that we hated each other by a sort of instinct from the beginning ; and yet I cannot remember my first meeting with him at all .  Looking back into these past things-it is like rummaging in a neglected attic that has experienced the attentions of some whimsical robber-I cannot even account for the presence of these children at Bladesover .  They were , I know , among the innumerable cousins of Lady Drew , and according to the theories of downstairs candidates for the ultimate possession of Bladesover .  If they were , their candidature was unsuccessful .  But that great place , with all its faded splendour , its fine furniture , its large traditions , was entirely at the old lady 'sdisposition ; and I am inclined to think it is true that she used this fact to torment and dominate a number of eligible people .  Lord Osprey was among the number of these , and she showed these hospitalities to his motherless child and step-child , partly , no doubt , because he was poor , but quite as much , I nowadays imagine , in the dim hope of finding some affectionate or imaginative outcome of contact with them .  Nannie had dropped out of the world this second time , and Beatrice was in the charge of an extremely amiable and ineffectual poor army-class young woman whose name I never knew .  They were , I think , two remarkably illmanaged and enterprising children .  I seem to remember too , that it was understood that I was not a fit companion for them , and that our meetings had to be as unostentatious as possible .  It was Beatrice who insisted upon our meeting .  I am certain I knew quite a lot about love at fourteen and that I was quite as much in love with Beatrice then as any impassioned adult could be , and that Beatrice was , in her way , in love with me .  It is part of the decent and useful pretences of our world that children of the age at which we were , think nothing , feel nothing , know nothing of love .  It is wonderful what people the English are for keeping up pretences .  But indeed I cannot avoid telling that Beatrice and I talked of love and kissed and embraced one another .  I recall something of one talk under the overhanging bushes of the shrubbery-I on the park side of the stone wall , and the lady of my worship a little inelegantly astride thereon .  Inelegantly do I say ?  you should have seen the sweet imp as I remember her .  Just her poise on the wall comes suddenly clear before me , and behind her the light various branches of the bushes of the shrubbery that my feet might not profane , and far away and high behind her , dim and stately , the cornice of the great facade of Bladesover rose against the dappled sky .  Our talk must have been serious and business-like , for we were discussing my social position .  " I do n't love Archie , " she had said , apropos of nothing ; and then in a whisper , leaning forward with the hair about her face , " I love YOU !  "  But she had been a little pressing to have it clear that I was not and could not be a servant .  " You 'llnever be a servant-ever !  "  I swore that very readily , and it is a vow I have kept by nature .  " What will you be ?  " said she .  I ran my mind hastily over the professions .  " Will you be a soldier ?  " she asked .  " And be bawled at by duffers ?  No fear !  " said I .  " Leave that to the plough-boys .  "  " But an officer ?  "  " I do n't know , " I said , evading a shameful difficulty .  " I 'drather go into the navy .  "  " Would n't you like to fight ?  "  " I 'dlike to fight , " I said .  " But a common soldier it 'sno honour to have to be told to fight and to be looked down upon while you do it , and how could I be an officer ?  "  " Could n't you be ?  " she said , and looked at me doubtfully ; and the spaces of the social system opened between us .  Then , as became a male of spirit , I took upon myself to brag and lie my way through this trouble .  I said I was a poor man , and poor men went into the navy ; that I " knew " mathematics , which no army officer did ; and I claimed Nelson for an exemplar , and spoke very highly of my outlook upon blue water .  " He loved Lady Hamilton , " I said , " although she was a lady-and I will love you .  "  We were somewhere near that when the egregious governess became audible , calling " Beeee-atrice !  Beeee-e-atrice !  "  " Snifty beast !  " said my lady , and tried to get on with the conversation ; but that governess made things impossible .  " Come here !  " said my lady suddenly , holding out a grubby hand ; and I went very close to her , and she put her little head down upon the wall until her black fog of hair tickled my cheek .  " You are my humble , faithful lover , " she demanded in a whisper , her warm flushed face near touching mine , and her eyes very dark and lustrous .  " I am your humble , faithful lover , " I whispered back .  And she put her arm about my head and put out her lips and we kissed , and boy though I was , I was all atremble .  So we two kissed for the first time .  " Beeee-e-e-a-trice !  " fearfully close .  My lady had vanished , with one wild kick of her black-stocking leg .  A moment after , I heard her sustaining the reproaches of her governess , and explaining her failure to answer with an admirable lucidity and disingenuousness .  I felt it was unnecessary for me to be seen just then , and I vanished guiltily round the corner into the West Wood , and so to love-dreams and single-handed play , wandering along one of those meandering bracken valleys that varied Bladesover park .  And that day and for many days that kiss upon my lips was a seal , and by night the seed of dreams .  Then I remember an expedition we made-she , I , and her half-brother-into those West Woods-they two were supposed to be playing in the shrubbery-and how we were Indians there , and made a wigwam out of a pile of beech logs , and how we stalked deer , crept near and watched rabbits feeding in a glade , and almost got a squirrel .  It was play seasoned with plentiful disputing between me and young Garvell , for each firmly insisted upon the leading roles , and only my wider reading-I had read ten stories to his one-gave me the ascendency over him .  Also I scored over him by knowing how to find the eagle in a bracken stem .  And somehow-I do n't remember what led to it at all-I and Beatrice , two hot and ruffled creatures , crept in among the tall bracken and hid from him .  The great fronds rose above us , five feet or more , and as I had learnt how to wriggle through that undergrowth with the minimum of betrayal by tossing greenery above , I led the way .  The ground under bracken is beautifully clear and faintly scented in warm weather ; the stems come up black and then green ; if you crawl flat , it is a tropical forest in miniature .  I led the way and Beatrice crawled behind , and then as the green of the further glade opened before us , stopped .  She crawled up to me , her hot little face came close to mine ; once more she looked and breathed close to me , and suddenly she flung her arm about my neck and dragged me to earth beside her , and kissed me and kissed me again .  We kissed , we embraced and kissed again , all without a word ; we desisted , we stared and hesitated-then in a suddenly damped mood and a little perplexed at ourselves , crawled out , to be presently run down and caught in the tamest way by Archie .  That comes back very clearly to me , and other vague memories-I know old Hall and his gun , out shooting at jackdaws , came into our common experiences , but I do n't remember how ; and then at last , abruptly , our fight in the Warren stands out .  The Warren , like most places in England that have that name , was not particularly a warren , it was a long slope of thorns and beeches through which a path ran , and made an alternative route to the downhill carriage road between Bladesover and Ropedean .  I do n't know how we three got there , but I have an uncertain fancy it was connected with a visit paid by the governess to the Ropedean vicarage people .  But suddenly Archie and I , in discussing a game , fell into a dispute for Beatrice .  I had made him the fairest offer : I was to be a Spanish nobleman , she was to be my wife , and he was to be a tribe of Indians trying to carry her off .  It seems to me a fairly attractive offer to a boy to be a whole tribe of Indians with a chance of such a booty .  But Archie suddenly took offence .  " No , " he said ; " we ca n't have that !  "  " Ca n't have what ?  "  " You ca n't be a gentleman , because you are n't .  And you ca n't play Beatrice is your wife .  It's-it 'simpertinent .  "  " But " I said , and looked at her .  Some earlier grudge in the day 'saffairs must have been in Archie 'smind .  " We let you play with us , " said Archie ; " but we ca n't have things like that .  "  " What rot !  " said Beatrice .  " He can if he likes .  "  But he carried his point .  I let him carry it , and only began to grow angry three or four minutes later .  Then we were still discussing play and disputing about another game .  Nothing seemed right for all of us .  " We do n't want you to play with us at all , " said Archie .  " Yes , we do , " said Beatrice .  " He drops his aitches like anything .  "  " No , ' e does n't , " said I , in the heat of the moment .  " There you go !  " he cried .  " E , he says .  E !  E !  E !  "  He pointed a finger at me .  He had struck to the heart of my shame .  I made the only possible reply by a rush at him .  " Hello !  " he cried , at my blackavised attack .  He dropped back into an attitude that had some style in it , parried my blow , got back at my cheek , and laughed with surprise and relief at his own success .  Whereupon I became a thing of murderous rage .  He could box as well or better than I-he had yet to realise I knew anything of that at all-but I had fought once or twice to a finish with bare fists .  I was used to inflicting and enduring savage hurting , and I doubt if he had ever fought .  I had n't fought ten seconds before I felt this softness in him , realised all that quality of modern upper-class England that never goes to the quick , that hedges about rules and those petty points of honour that are the ultimate comminution of honour , that claims credit for things demonstrably half done .  He seemed to think that first hit of his and one or two others were going to matter , that I ought to give in when presently my lip bled and dripped blood upon my clothes .  So before we had been at it a minute he had ceased to be aggressive except in momentary spurts , and I was knocking him about almost as I wanted to do ; and demanding breathlessly and fiercely , after our school manner , whether he had had enough , not knowing that by his high code and his soft training it was equally impossible for him to either buck-up and beat me , or give in .  I have a very distinct impression of Beatrice dancing about us during the affair in a state of unladylike appreciation , but I was too preoccupied to hear much of what she was saying .  But she certainly backed us both , and I am inclined to think now-it may be the disillusionment of my ripened years-whichever she thought was winning .  Then young Garvell , giving way before my slogging , stumbled and fell over a big flint , and I , still following the tradition of my class and school , promptly flung myself on him to finish him .  We were busy with each other on the ground when we became aware of a dreadful interruption .  " Shut up , you FOOL !  " said Archie .  " Oh , Lady Drew !  " I heard Beatrice cry .  " They 'refighting !  They 'refighting something awful !  "  I looked over my shoulder .  Archie 'swish to get up became irresistible , and my resolve to go on with him vanished altogether .  I became aware of the two old ladies , presences of black and purple silk and fur and shining dark things ; they had walked up through the Warren , while the horses took the hill easily , and so had come upon us .  Beatrice had gone to them at once with an air of taking refuge , and stood beside and a little behind them .  We both rose dejectedly .  The two old ladies were evidently quite dreadfully shocked , and peering at us with their poor old eyes ; and never had I seen such a tremblement in Lady Drew 'slorgnettes .  " You 'venever been fighting ?  " said Lady Drew .  " You have been fighting .  "  " It was n't proper fighting , " snapped Archie , with accusing eyes on me .  " It 'sMrs. Ponderevo 'sGeorge !  " said Miss Somerville , so adding a conviction for ingratitude to my evident sacrilege .  " How could he DARE ?  " cried Lady Drew , becoming very awful .  " He broke the rules " said Archie , sobbing for breath .  " I slipped , and-he hit me while I was down .  He knelt on me .  "  " How could you DARE ?  " said Lady Drew .  I produced an experienced handkerchief rolled up into a tight ball , and wiped the blood from my chin , but I offered no explanation of my daring .  Among other things that prevented that , I was too short of breath .  " He did n't fight fair , " sobbed Archie .  Beatrice , from behind the old ladies , regarded me intently and without hostility .  I am inclined to think the modification of my face through the damage to my lip interested her .  It became dimly apparent to my confused intelligence that I must not say these two had been playing with me .  That would not be after the rules of their game .  I resolved in this difficult situation upon a sulky silence , and to take whatever consequences might follow .  The powers of justice in Bladesover made an extraordinary mess of my case .  I have regretfully to admit that the Honourable Beatrice Normandy did , at the age of ten , betray me , abandon me , and lie most abominably about me .  She was , as a matter of fact , panic-stricken about me , conscience stricken too ; she bolted from the very thought of my being her affianced lover and so forth , from the faintest memory of kissing ; she was indeed altogether disgraceful and human in her betrayal .  She and her half-brother lied in perfect concord , and I was presented as a wanton assailant of my social betters .  They were waiting about in the Warren , when I came up and spoke to them , etc.  On the whole , I now perceive Lady Drew 'sdecisions were , in the light of the evidence , reasonable and merciful .  They were conveyed to me by my mother , who was , I really believe , even more shocked by the grossness of my social insubordination than Lady Drew .  She dilated on her ladyship 'skindnesses to me , on the effrontery and wickedness of my procedure , and so came at last to the terms of my penance .  " You must go up to young Mr. Garvell , and beg his pardon .  "  " I wo n't beg his pardon , " I said , speaking for the first time .  My mother paused , incredulous .  I folded my arms on her table-cloth , and delivered my wicked little ultimatum .  " I wo n't beg his pardon nohow , " I said .  " See ?  "  " Then you will have to go off to your uncle Frapp at Chatham .  "  " I do n't care where I have to go or what I have to do , I wo n't beg his pardon , " I said .  And I did n't .  After that I was one against the world .  Perhaps in my mother 'sheart there lurked some pity for me , but she did not show it .  She took the side of the young gentleman ; she tried hard , she tried very hard , to make me say I was sorry I had struck him .  Sorry !  I could n't explain .  So I went into exile in the dog-cart to Redwood station , with Jukes the coachman , coldly silent , driving me , and all my personal belongings in a small American cloth portmanteau behind .  I felt I had much to embitter me ; the game had and the beginnings of fairness by any standards I knew ... .  But the thing that embittered me most was that the Honourable Beatrice Normandy should have repudiated and fled from me as though I was some sort of leper , and not even have taken a chance or so , to give me a good-bye .  She might have done that anyhow !  Supposing I had told on her !  But the son of a servant counts as a servant .  She had forgotten and now remembered .  I solaced myself with some extraordinary dream of coming back to Bladesover , stern , powerful , after the fashion of Coriolanus .  I do not recall the details , but I have no doubt I displayed great magnanimity ...  Well , anyhow I never said I was sorry for pounding young Garvell , and I am not sorry to this day .  CHAPTER THE SECOND  OF MY LAUNCH INTO THE WORLD AND THE LAST I SAW OF BLADESOVER  When I was thus banished from Bladesover House , as it was then thought for good and all , I was sent by my mother in a vindictive spirit , first to her cousin Nicodemus Frapp , and then , as a fully indentured apprentice , to my uncle Ponderevo .  I ran away from the care of my cousin Nicodemus back to Bladesover House .  My cousin Nicodemus Frapp was a baker in a back street — a slum rather — just off that miserable narrow mean high road that threads those exquisite beads , Rochester and Chatham .  He was , I must admit , a shock to me , much dominated by a young , plump , prolific , malingering wife ; a bent , slow-moving , unwilling dark man with flour in his hair and eyelashes , in the lines of his face and the seams of his coat .  I 'venever had a chance to correct my early impression of him , and he still remains an almost dreadful memory , a sort of caricature of incompetent simplicity .  As I remember him , indeed , he presented the servile tradition perfected .  He had no pride in his person ; fine clothes and dressing up was n't " for the likes of " him , so that he got his wife , who was no artist at it , to cut his black hair at irregular intervals , and let his nails become disagreeable to the fastidious eye ; he had no pride in his business nor any initiative ; his only virtues were not doing certain things and hard work .  " Your uncle , " said my mother — all grown-up cousins were uncles by courtesy among the Victorian middle-class — " is n't much to look at or talk to , but he 'sa Good Hard-Working Man .  " There was a sort of base honourableness about toil , however needless , in that system of inversion .  Another point of honour was to rise at or before dawn , and then laboriously muddle about .  It was very distinctly impressed on my mind that the Good Hard-Working Man would have thought it " fal-lallish " to own a pocket handkerchief .  Poor old Frapp — dirty and crushed by , product of , Bladesover 'smagnificence !  He made no fight against the world at all , he was floundering in small debts that were not so small but that finally they overwhelmed him , whenever there was occasion for any exertion his wife fell back upon pains and her " condition , " and God sent them many children , most of whom died , and so , by their coming and going , gave a double exercise in the virtues of submission .  Resignation to God 'swill was the common device of these people in the face of every duty and every emergency .  There were no books in the house ; I doubt if either of them had retained the capacity for reading consecutively for more than a minute or so , and it was with amazement that day after day , over and above stale bread , one beheld food and again more food amidst the litter that held permanent session on the living-room table .  One might have doubted if either of them felt discomfort in this dusty darkness of existence , if it was not that they did visibly seek consolation .  They sought this and found it of a Sunday , not in strong drink and raving , but in imaginary draughts of blood .  They met with twenty or thirty other darkened and unclean people , all dressed in dingy colours that would not show the dirt , in a little brick-built chapel equipped with a spavined roarer of a harmonium , and there solaced their minds on the thought that all that was fair and free in life , all that struggled , all that planned and made , all pride and beauty and honour , all fine and enjoyable things , were irrevocably damned to everlasting torments .  They were the self-appointed confidants of God 'smockery of his own creation .  So at any rate they stick in my mind .  Vaguer , and yet hardly less agreeable than this cosmic jest , this coming " Yah , clever !  " and general serving out and " showing up " of the lucky , the bold , and the cheerful , was their own predestination to Glory .  " There is a Fountain , filled with Blood Drawn from Emmanuel 'sVeins , "  so they sang .  I hear the drone and wheeze of that hymn now .  I hated them with the bitter uncharitable condemnation of boyhood , and a twinge of that hate comes back to me .  As I write the words , the sounds and then the scene return , these obscure , undignified people , a fat woman with asthma , an old Welsh milk-seller with a tumour on his bald head , who was the intellectual leader of the sect , a huge-voiced haberdasher with a big black beard , a white-faced , extraordinarily pregnant woman , his wife , a spectacled rate collector with a bent back ... .  I hear the talk about souls , the strange battered old phrases that were coined ages ago in the seaports of the sun-dry Levant , of balm of Gilead and manna in the desert , of gourds that give shade and water in a thirsty land ; I recall again the way in which at the conclusion of the service the talk remained pious in form but became medical in substance , and how the women got together for obstetric whisperings .  I , as a boy , did not matter , and might overhear .  If Bladesover is my key for the explanation of England , I think my invincible persuasion that I understand Russia was engendered by the circle of Uncle Frapp .  I slept in a dingy sheeted bed with the two elder survivors of Frapp fecundity , and spent my week days in helping in the laborious disorder of the shop and bakehouse , in incidental deliveries of bread and so forth , and in parrying the probings of my uncle into my relations with the Blood , and his confidential explanations that ten shillings a week — which was what my mother paid him — was not enough to cover my accommodation .  He was very anxious to keep that , but also he wanted more .  There were neither books nor any seat nor corner in that house where reading was possible , no newspaper ever brought the clash of worldly things into its heavenward seclusion ; horror of it all grew in me daily , and whenever I could I escaped into the streets and tramped about Chatham .  The news shops appealed to me particularly .  One saw there smudgy illustrated sheets , the Police News in particular , in which vilely drawn pictures brought home to the dullest intelligence an interminable succession of squalid crimes , women murdered and put into boxes , buried under floors , old men bludgeoned at midnight by robbers , people thrust suddenly out of trains , happy lovers shot , vitrioled and so forth by rivals .  I got my first glimpse of the life of pleasure in foully drawn pictures of " police raids " on this and that .  Interspersed with these sheets were others in which Sloper , the urban John Bull , had his fling with gin bottle and obese umbrella , or the kindly empty faces of the Royal Family appeared and reappeared , visiting this , opening that , getting married , getting offspring , lying in state , doing everything but anything , a wonderful , good-meaning , impenetrable race apart .  I have never revisited Chatham ; the impression it has left on my mind is one of squalid compression , unlit by any gleam of a maturer charity .  All its effects arranged themselves as antithetical to the Bladesover effects .  They confirmed and intensified all that Bladesover suggested .  Bladesover declared itself to be the land , to be essentially England ; I have already told how its airy spaciousness , its wide dignity , seemed to thrust village , church , and vicarage into corners , into a secondary and conditional significance .  Here one gathered the corollary of that .  Since the whole wide country of Kent was made up of contiguous Bladesovers and for the gentlefolk , the surplus of population , all who were not good tenants nor good labourers , Church of England , submissive and respectful , were necessarily thrust together , jostled out of sight , to fester as they might in this place that had the colours and even the smells of a well-packed dustbin .  They should be grateful even for that ; that , one felt , was the theory of it all .  And I loafed about this wilderness of crowded dinginess , with young , receptive , wide-open eyes , and through the blessing ( or curse ) of some fairy godmother of mine , asking and asking again : " But after all , WHY — "  I wandered up through Rochester once , and had a glimpse of the Stour valley above the town , all horrible with cement works and foully smoking chimneys and rows of workmen 'scottages , minute , ugly , uncomfortable , and grimy .  So I had my first intimation of how industrialism must live in a landlord 'sland .  I spent some hours , too , in the streets that give upon the river , drawn by the spell of the sea .  But I saw barges and ships stripped of magic and mostly devoted to cement , ice , timber , and coal .  The sailors looked to me gross and slovenly men , and the shipping struck me as clumsy , ugly , old , and dirty .  I discovered that most sails do n't fit the ships that hoist them , and that there may be as pitiful and squalid a display of poverty with a vessel as with a man .  When I saw colliers unloading , watched the workers in the hold filling up silly little sacks and the succession of blackened , half-naked men that ran to and fro with these along a plank over a thirty-foot drop into filth and mud , I was first seized with admiration of their courage and toughness and then , " But after all , WHY — ?  " and the stupid ugliness of all this waste of muscle and endurance came home to me .  Among other things it obviously wasted and deteriorated the coal ... .  And I had imagined great things of the sea !  Well , anyhow , for a time that vocation was stilled .  But such impressions came into my leisure , and of that I had no excess .  Most of my time was spent doing things for Uncle Frapp , and my evenings and nights perforce in the company of the two eldest of my cousins .  He was errand boy at an oil shop and fervently pious , and of him I saw nothing until the evening except at meals ; the other was enjoying the midsummer holidays without any great elation ; a singularly thin and abject , stunted creature he was , whose chief liveliness was to pretend to be a monkey , and who I am now convinced had some secret disease that drained his vitality away .  If I met him now I should think him a pitiful little creature and be extremely sorry for him .  Then I felt only a wondering aversion .  He sniffed horribly , he was tired out by a couple of miles of loafing , he never started any conversation , and he seemed to prefer his own company to mine .  His mother , poor woman , said he was the " thoughtful one .  "  Serious trouble came suddenly out of a conversation we held in bed one night .  Some particularly pious phrase of my elder cousin 'sirritated me extremely , and I avowed outright my entire disbelief in the whole scheme of revealed religion .  I had never said a word about my doubts to any one before , except to Ewart who had first evolved them .  I had never settled my doubts until at this moment when I spoke .  But it came to me then that the whole scheme of salvation of the Frappes was not simply doubtful , but impossible .  I fired this discovery out into the darkness with the greatest promptitude .  My abrupt denials certainly scared my cousin amazingly .  At first they could not understand what I was saying , and when they did I fully believe they expected an instant answer in thunderbolts and flames .  They gave me more room in the bed forthwith , and then the elder sat up and expressed his sense of my awfulness .  I was already a little frightened at my temerity , but when he asked me categorically to unsay what I had said , what could I do but confirm my repudiation ?  " There 'sno hell , " I said , " and no eternal punishment .  No God would be such a fool as that .  "  My elder cousin cried aloud in horror , and the younger lay scared , but listening .  " Then you mean , " said my elder cousin , when at last he could bring himself to argue , " you might do just as you liked ?  "  " If you were cad enough , " said I .  Our little voices went on interminably , and at one stage my cousin got out of bed and made his brother do likewise , and knelt in the night dimness and prayed at me .  That I found trying , but I held out valiantly .  " Forgive him , " said my cousin , " he knows not what he sayeth .  "  " You can pray if you like , " I said , " but if you 'regoing to cheek me in your prayers I draw the line .  "  The last I remember of that great discussion was my cousin deploring the fact that he " should ever sleep in the same bed with an Infidel !  "  The next day he astonished me by telling the whole business to his father .  This was quite outside all my codes .  Uncle Nicodemus sprang it upon me at the midday meal .  " You been sayin 'queer things , George , " he said abruptly .  " You better mind what you 'resaying .  "  " What did he say , father ?  " said Mrs. Frapp .  " Things I could n't ' repeat , " said he .  " What things ?  " I asked hotly .  " Ask ' IM , " said my uncle , pointing with his knife to his informant , and making me realise the nature of my offence .  My aunt looked at the witness .  " Not — ?  " she framed a question .  " Wuss , " said my uncle .  " Blarsphemy .  "  My aunt could n't touch another mouthful .  I was already a little troubled in my conscience by my daring , and now I began to feel the black enormity of the course upon which I had embarked .  " I was only talking sense , " I said .  I had a still more dreadful moment when presently I met my cousin in the brick alley behind the yard , that led back to his grocer 'sshop .  " You sneak !  " I said , and smacked his face hard forthwith .  " Now then , " said I .  He started back , astonished and alarmed .  His eyes met mine , and I saw a sudden gleam of resolution .  He turned his other cheek to me .  " ' It ' it , " he said .  " ' It ' it .  I 'LLforgive you .  "  I felt I had never encountered a more detestable way of evading a licking .  I shoved him against the wall and left him there , forgiving me , and went back into the house .  " You better not speak to your cousins , George , " said my aunt , " till you 'rein a better state of mind .  "  I became an outcast forthwith .  At supper that night a gloomy silence was broken by my cousin saying ,  " ' E 'it me for telling you , and I turned the other cheek , muvver .  "  " ' E 'sgot the evil one be'ind 'im now , a ridin ' on 'is back , " said my aunt , to the grave discomfort of the eldest girl , who sat beside me .  After supper my uncle , in a few ill-chosen words , prayed me to repent before I slept .  " Suppose you was took in your sleep , George , " he said ; " where 'dyou be then ?  You jest think of that me boy .  " By this time I was thoroughly miserable and frightened , and this suggestion unnerved me dreadfully but I kept up an impenitent front .  " To wake in 'ell , " said Uncle Nicodemus , in gentle tones .  " You do n't want to wake in 'ell , George , burnin 'and screamin ' for ever , do you ?  You would n't like that ?  "  He tried very hard to get me to " jest 'ave a look at the bake'ouse fire " before I retired .  " It might move you , " he said .  I was awake longest that night .  My cousins slept , the sleep of faith on either side of me .  I decided I would whisper my prayers , and stopped midway because I was ashamed , and perhaps also because I had an idea one did n't square God like that .  " No , " I said , with a sudden confidence , " damn me if you 'recoward enough ... .  But you 'renot .  No !  You could n't be !  "  I woke my cousins up with emphatic digs , and told them as much , triumphantly , and went very peacefully to sleep with my act of faith accomplished .  I slept not only through that night , but for all my nights since then .  So far as any fear of Divine injustice goes , I sleep soundly , and shall , I know , to the end of things .  That declaration was an epoch in my spiritual life .  But I did n't expect to have the whole meeting on Sunday turned on to me .  It was .  It all comes back to me , that convergence of attention , even the faint leathery smell of its atmosphere returns , and the coarse feel of my aunt 'sblack dress beside me in contact with my hand .  I see again the old Welsh milkman " wrestling " with me , they all wrestled with me , by prayer or exhortation .  And I was holding out stoutly , though convinced now by the contagion of their universal conviction that by doing so I was certainly and hopelessly damned .  I felt that they were right , that God was probably like them , and that on the whole it did n't matter .  And to simplify the business thoroughly I had declared I did n't believe anything at all .  They confuted me by texts from Scripture which I now perceive was an illegitimate method of reply .  When I got home , still impenitent and eternally lost and secretly very lonely and miserable and alarmed , Uncle Nicodemus docked my Sunday pudding .  One person only spoke to me like a human being on that day of wrath , and that was the younger Frapp .  He came up to me in the afternoon while I was confined upstairs with a Bible and my own thoughts .  " ' Ello , " he said , and fretted about .  " D'you mean to say there is n't — no one , " he said , funking the word .  " No one ?  "  " No one watching yer — always .  "  " Why should there be ?  " I asked .  " You ca n't ' elp thoughts , " said my cousin , " anyhow .  You mean — " He stopped hovering .  " I s'pose I ought n't to be talking to you .  "  He hesitated and flitted away with a guilty back glance over his shoulder ... .  The following week made life quite intolerable for me ; these people forced me at last into an Atheism that terrified me .  When I learnt that next Sunday the wrestling was to be resumed , my courage failed me altogether .  I happened upon a map of Kent in a stationer 'swindow on Saturday , and that set me thinking of one form of release .  I studied it intently for half an hour perhaps , on Saturday night , got a route list of villages well fixed in my memory , and got up and started for Bladesover about five on Sunday morning while my two bed mates were still fast asleep .  I remember something , but not so much of it as I should like to recall , of my long tramp to Bladesover House .  The distance from Chatham is almost exactly seventeen miles , and it took me until nearly one .  It was very interesting and I do not think I was very fatigued , though I got rather pinched by one boot .  The morning must have been very clear , because I remember that near Itchinstow Hall I looked back and saw the estuary of the Thames , that river that has since played so large a part in my life .  But at the time I did not know it was the Thames , I thought this great expanse of mud flats and water was the sea , which I had never yet seen nearly .  And out upon it stood ships , sailing ships and a steamer or so , going up to London or down out into the great seas of the world .  I stood for a long time watching these and thinking whether after all I should not have done better to have run away to sea .  The nearer I drew to Bladesover , the more doubtful I grew of the duality of my reception , and the more I regretted that alternative .  I suppose it was the dirty clumsiness of the shipping I had seen nearly , that put me out of mind of that .  I took a short cut through the Warren across the corner of the main park to intercept the people from the church .  I wanted to avoid meeting any one before I met my mother , and so I went to a place where the path passed between banks , and without exactly hiding , stood up among the bushes .  This place among other advantages eliminated any chance of seeing Lady Drew , who would drive round by the carriage road .  Standing up to waylay in this fashion I had a queer feeling of brigandage , as though I was some intrusive sort of bandit among these orderly things .  It is the first time I remember having that outlaw feeling distinctly , a feeling that has played a large part in my subsequent life .  I felt there existed no place for me that I had to drive myself in .  Presently , down the hill , the servants appeared , straggling by twos and threes , first some of the garden people and the butler 'swife with them , then the two laundry maids , odd inseparable old creatures , then the first footman talking to the butler 'slittle girl , and at last , walking grave and breathless beside old Ann and Miss Fison , the black figure of my mother .  My boyish mind suggested the adoption of a playful form of appearance .  " Coo-ee , mother " said I , coming out against the sky , " Coo-ee !  "  My mother looked up , went very white , and put her hand to her bosom .  I suppose there was a fearful fuss about me .  And of course I was quite unable to explain my reappearance .  But I held out stoutly , " I wo n't go back to Chatham ; I 'lldrown myself first .  " The next day my mother carried me off to Wimblehurst , took me fiercely and aggressively to an uncle I had never heard of before , near though the place was to us .  She gave me no word as to what was to happen , and I was too subdued by her manifest wrath and humiliation at my last misdemeanour to demand information .  I do n't for one moment think Lady Drew was " nice " about me .  The finality of my banishment was endorsed and underlined and stamped home .  I wished very much now that I had run away to sea , in spite of the coal dust and squalour Rochester had revealed to me .  Perhaps over seas one came to different lands .  I do not remember much of my journey to Wimblehurst with my mother except the image of her as sitting bolt upright , as rather disdaining the third-class carriage in which we traveled , and how she looked away from me out of the window when she spoke of my uncle .  " I have not seen your uncle , " she said , " since he was a boy ... .  " She added grudgingly , " Then he was supposed to be clever .  "  She took little interest in such qualities as cleverness .  " He married about three years ago , and set up for himself in Wimblehurst ... .  So I suppose she had some money .  "  She mused on scenes she had long dismissed from her mind .  " Teddy , " she said at last in the tone of one who has been feeling in the dark and finds .  " He was called Teddy ... about your age ... .  Now he must be twenty-six or seven .  "  I thought of my uncle as Teddy directly I saw him ; there was something in his personal appearance that in the light of that memory phrased itself at once as Teddiness — a certain Teddidity .  To describe it in and other terms is more difficult .  It is nimbleness without grace , and alertness without intelligence .  He whisked out of his shop upon the pavement , a short figure in grey and wearing grey carpet slippers ; one had a sense of a young fattish face behind gilt glasses , wiry hair that stuck up and forward over the forehead , an irregular nose that had its aquiline moments , and that the body betrayed an equatorial laxity , an incipient " bow window " as the image goes .  He jerked out of the shop , came to a stand on the pavement outside , regarded something in the window with infinite appreciation , stroked his chin , and , as abruptly , shot sideways into the door again , charging through it as it were behind an extended hand .  " That must be him , " said my mother , catching at her breath .  We came past the window whose contents I was presently to know by heart , a very ordinary chemist 'swindow except that there was a frictional electrical machine , an air pump and two or three tripods and retorts replacing the customary blue , yellow , and red bottles above .  There was a plaster of Paris horse to indicate veterinary medicines among these breakables , and below were scent packets and diffusers and sponges and soda-water syphons and such-like things .  Only in the middle there was a rubricated card , very neatly painted by hand , with these words —  Buy Ponderevo 'sCough Linctus NOW .  NOW !  WHY ?  Twopence Cheaper than in Winter .  You Store apples !  why not the Medicine You are Bound to Need ?  in which appeal I was to recognise presently my uncle 'sdistinctive note .  My uncle 'sface appeared above a card of infant 'scomforters in the glass pane of the door .  I perceived his eyes were brown , and that his glasses creased his nose .  It was manifest he did not know us from Adam .  A stare of scrutiny allowed an expression of commercial deference to appear in front of it , and my uncle flung open the door .  " You do n't know me ?  " panted my mother .  My uncle would not own he did not , but his curiosity was manifest .  My mother sat down on one of the little chairs before the soap and patent medicine-piled counter , and her lips opened and closed .  " A glass of water , madam , " said my uncle , waved his hand in a sort of curve and shot away .  My mother drank the water and spoke .  " That boy , " she said , " takes after his father .  He grows more like him every day ... .  And so I have brought him to you .  "  " His father , madam ?  "  " George .  "  For a moment the chemist was still at a loss .  He stood behind the counter with the glass my mother had returned to him in his hand .  Then comprehension grew .  " By Gosh !  " he said .  " Lord !  " he cried .  His glasses fell off .  He disappeared replacing them , behind a pile of boxed-up bottles of blood mixture .  " Eleven thousand virgins !  " I heard him cry .  The glass was banged down .  " O — ri — ental Gums !  "  He shot away out of the shop through some masked door .  One heard his voice .  " Susan !  Susan !  "  Then he reappeared with an extended hand .  " Well , how are you ?  " he said .  " I was never so surprised in my life .  Fancy !  ... You !  "  He shook my mother 'simpassive hand and then mine very warmly holding his glasses on with his left forefinger .  " Come right in !  " he cried — " come right in !  Better late than never !  " and led the way into the parlour behind the shop .  After Bladesover that apartment struck me as stuffy and petty , but it was very comfortable in comparison with the Frapp living-room .  It had a faint , disintegrating smell of meals about it , and my most immediate impression was of the remarkable fact that something was hung about or wrapped round or draped over everything .  There was bright-patterned muslin round the gas-bracket in the middle of the room , round the mirror over the mantel , stuff with ball-fringe along the mantel and casing in the fireplace , — I first saw ball-fringe here — and even the lamp on the little bureau wore a shade like a large muslin hat .  The table-cloth had ball-fringe and so had the window curtains , and the carpet was a bed of roses .  There were little cupboards on either side of the fireplace , and in the recesses , ill-made shelves packed with books , and enriched with pinked American cloth .  There was a dictionary lying face downward on the table , and the open bureau was littered with foolscap paper and the evidences of recently abandoned toil .  My eye caught " The Ponderevo Patent Flat , a Machine you can Live in , " written in large firm letters .  My uncle opened a little door like a cupboard door in the corner of this room , and revealed the narrowest twist of staircase I had ever set eyes upon .  " Susan !  " he bawled again .  " Wantje .  Some one to see you .  Surprisin '.  "  There came an inaudible reply , and a sudden loud bump over our heads as of some article of domestic utility pettishly flung aside , then the cautious steps of someone descending the twist , and then my aunt appeared in the doorway with her hand upon the jamb .  " It 'sAunt Ponderevo , " cried my uncle .  " George 'swife — and she 'sbrought over her son !  " His eye roamed about the room .  He darted to the bureau with a sudden impulse , and turned the sheet about the patent flat face down .  Then he waved his glasses at us , " You know , Susan , my elder brother George .  I told you about ' im lots of times .  "  He fretted across to the hearthrug and took up a position there , replaced his glasses and coughed .  My aunt Susan seemed to be taking it in .  She was then rather a pretty slender woman of twenty-three or four , I suppose , and I remember being struck by the blueness of her eyes and the clear freshness of her complexion .  She had little features , a button nose , a pretty chin and a long graceful neck that stuck out of her pale blue cotton morning dress .  There was a look of half-assumed perplexity on her face , a little quizzical wrinkle of the brow that suggested a faintly amused attempt to follow my uncle 'smental operations , a vain attempt and a certain hopelessness that had in succession become habitual .  She seemed to be saying , " Oh Lord !  What 'she giving me THIS time ?  " And as came to know her better I detected , as a complication of her effort of apprehension , a subsidiary riddle to " What 'she giving me ?  " and that was — to borrow a phrase from my schoolboy language " Is it keeps ?  " She looked at my mother and me , and back to her husband again .  " You know , " he said .  " George .  "  " Well , " she said to my mother , descending the last three steps of the staircase and holding out her hand !  " you 'rewelcome .  Though it 'sa surprise ... .  I ca n't ask you to HAVE anything , I 'mafraid , for there is n't anything in the house .  " She smiled , and looked at her husband banteringly .  " Unless he makes up something with his old chemicals , which he 'squite equal to doing .  "  My mother shook hands stiffly , and told me to kiss my aunt ... .  " Well , let 'sall sit down , " said my uncle , suddenly whistling through his clenched teeth , and briskly rubbing his hands together .  He put up a chair for my mother , raised the blind of the little window , lowered it again , and returned to his hearthrug .  " I 'msure , " he said , as one who decides , " I 'mvery glad to see you .  "  As they talked I gave my attention pretty exclusively to my uncle .  I noted him in great detail .  I remember now his partially unbuttoned waistcoat , as though something had occurred to distract him as he did it up , and a little cut upon his chin .  I liked a certain humour in his eyes .  I watched , too , with the fascination that things have for an observant boy , the play of his lips — they were a little oblique , and there was something " slipshod , " if one may strain a word so far , about his mouth , so that he lisped and sibilated ever and again and the coming and going of a curious expression , triumphant in quality it was , upon his face as he talked .  He fingered his glasses , which did not seem to fit his nose , fretted with things in his waistcoat pockets or put his hands behind him , looked over our heads , and ever and again rose to his toes and dropped back on his heels .  He had a way of drawing air in at times through his teeth that gave a whispering zest to his speech It 'sa sound I can only represent as a soft Zzzz .  He did most of the talking .  My mother repeated what she had already said in the shop , " I have brought George over to you , " and then desisted for a time from the real business in hand .  " You find this a comfortable house ?  " she asked ; and this being affirmed : " It looks — very convenient ... .  Not too big to be a trouble — no. You like Wimblehurst , I suppose ?  "  My uncle retorted with some inquiries about the great people of Bladesover , and my mother answered in the character of a personal friend of Lady Drew 's.  The talk hung for a time , and then my uncle embarked upon a dissertation upon Wimblehurst .  " This place , " he began , " is n't of course quite the place I ought to be in .  "