Part 2

How easy was life in those days—at least, for countless thousands of independent people! It was the age of freedom—for the independent. They went where they listed; the world was full of good hotels, and every country had its Baedeker well up to date. Every cultivated home had its little corner of weather-worn guide books, a nest of memories, an _Orario_, an _Indicateur_, or a _Continental Bradshaw_. The happy multitude of the free travelled out to beautiful places and returned to comfortable homes. The chief anxiety in life was to get good servants—and there were plenty of good servants. Politics went on, at home and abroad, a traditional game between the Ins and Outs. The world was like a spinning top that seems to be quite still and stable.... Yet youth was apt to feel as Dolly felt, that there was something lacking.

Arthur was quite ready to fall in with this idea that something was lacking. He was inclined to think that one got to the root of it by recognizing that there was not enough Craftsmanship and too much cheap material, too much machine production, and, more especially, too much aniline dye. He was particularly strong against aniline dyes. All Britain was strong against aniline dyes,—and so that trade went to Germany. He reached socialism by way of æsthetic criticism. Individual competition was making the world hideous. It was destroying individuality. What the world needed was a non-competitive communism for the collective discouragement of machinery. (Meanwhile he bought a bicycle.) He decided that his modest six hundred a year was all that he and Dolly needed to live upon; he would never work for money—that would be “sordid”—but for the joy of work, and on his income they would lead a simple working-man’s existence, free from the vulgarities of competition, politics and commercialism.

Dolly was fascinated, delighted, terrified and assuaged by Peter, and Peter and a simple house free also from the vulgarities of modern mechanism kept her so busy with only one servant to help her, that it was only in odd times, in the late evening when the sky grew solemn or after some book had stirred her mind, that she recalled that once oppressive feeling of something wanting, something that was still wanting....

CHAPTER THE SECOND STUBLANDS IN COUNCIL

§ 1

But although Dolly did not pursue her husband with any sustained criticism, he seemed now to feel always that her attitude was critical and needed an answer. The feeling made him something of a thinker and something of a talker. Sometimes the thinker was uppermost, and then he would sit silent and rather in profile (his profile, it has already been stated, was a good one, and much enhanced by a romantic bang of warm golden hair that hung down over one eye), very picturesque in his beautiful blue linen blouse, listening to whatever was said; and sometimes he would turn upon the company and talk with a sort of experimental dogmatism, as is the way with men a little insecure in their convictions, but quite good talk. He would talk of education, and work, and Peter, and of love and beauty, and the finer purposes of life, and things like that.

A lot of talk came the way of Peter’s father.

Along the Limpsfield ridge and away east and west and north, there was a scattered community of congenial intellectuals. It spread along the ridge beyond Dorking, and resumed again at Haslemere and Hindhead, where Grant Allen and Richard Le Gallienne were established. They were mostly people of the same detached and independent class as the Stublands; they were the children of careful people who had created considerable businesses, or the children of the more successful of middle Victorian celebrities, or dons, or writers themselves, or they came from Hampstead, which was in those days a nest of considerable people’s children, inheritors of reputations and writers of memoirs, an hour’s ’bus drive from London and outside the cab radius. A thin flavour of Hampstead spread out, indeed, over all Surrey. Some of these newcomers lived in old adapted cottages; some of them had built little houses after the fashion of the Stublands; some had got into the real old houses that already existed. There was much Sunday walking and “dropping in” and long evenings and suppers. Safety bicycles were coming into use and greatly increasing intercourse. And there was a coming and going of Stubland aunts and uncles and of Sydenhams and Dolly’s “people.” Nearly all were youngish folk; it was a new generation and a new sort of population for the countryside. They were dotted among the farms and the estates and preserves and “places” of the old county family pattern. The “county” wondered a little at them, kept busy with horse and dog and gun, and, except for an occasional stiff call, left them alone. The church lamented their neglected Sabbaths. The doctors were not unfriendly.

One of the frequent visitors, indeed, at The Ingle-Nook—that was the name of Peter’s birthplace—was Doctor Fremisson, the local general practitioner. He was a man, he said, who liked “Ideas.” The aborigines lacked Ideas, it seemed; but Stubland was a continual feast of them. The doctor’s diagnosis of the difference between these new English and the older English of the country rested entirely on the presence or absence of Ideas. But there he was wrong. The established people were people of fixed ideas; the immigrants had abandoned fixed ideas for discussion. So far from their having no ideas, those occasional callers who came dropping in so soon as the Stublands were settled in The Ingle-Nook before Peter was born, struck the Stublands as having ideas like monstrous and insurmountable cliffs. To fling your own ideas at them was like trying to lob stones into Zermatt from Macugnana.

One day when Mrs. Darcy, old Lady Darcy’s daughter-in-law, had driven over, some devil prompted Arthur to shock her. He talked his extremest Fabianism. He would have the government control all railways, land, natural products; nobody should have a wage of less than two pounds a week; the whole country should be administered for the universal benefit; everybody should be educated.

“I’m sure the dear old Queen does all she can,” said Mrs. Darcy.

“I’m a democratic republican,” said Arthur.

He might as well have called himself a Christadelphian for any idea he conveyed.

Presently, seized by a gust of unreasonable irritation, he went out of the room.

“Mr. Stubland talks,” said Mrs. Darcy; “_really_——” She paused. She hesitated. She spoke with a little disarming titter lest what she said should seem too dreadful. “He says such things. I really believe he’s more than half a Liberal. _There!_ You mustn’t mind what I say, Mrs. Stubland....”

Dolly, by virtue of her vicarage training, understood these people better than Peter’s father. She had read herself out of the great Anglican culture, but she remembered things from the inside. She was still in close touch with numerous relations who were quite completely inside. Before the little green gate had clicked behind their departing backs, Arthur would protest to her and heaven that these visitors were impossible, that such visitors could not be, they were phantoms or bad practical jokes, undergraduates dressed up to pull his leg.

“They know nothing,” he said.

“They know all sorts of things you don’t know,” she corrected.

“What _do_ they know? There isn’t a topic one can start on which they are not just blank.”

“You start the wrong topics. They can tell you all sorts of things about the dear Queen’s grandchildren. They know things about horses. And about regiments and barracks. Tell me, Arthur, how is the charming young Prince of Bulgaria, who is just getting married, related to the late Prince Consort.”

“Damn their Royal Marriages!”

“If you say that, then they have an equal right to say, ‘damn your Wildes and Beardsleys and William Morrises and Swinburnes.’”

“They read nothing.”

“They read Mrs. Henry Wood. They read lots of authors you have never heard of, _nice_ authors. They read so many of them that for the most part they forget their names. The bold ones read Ouida—who isn’t half bad. They read every scrap they can find about the marriage of the Princess Marie to the Crown Prince of Roumania. Mrs. Bagshot-Fawcett talked about it yesterday. It seems he’s really a rarer and better sort of Hohenzollern than the young German Emperor, our sailor grandson that is. She isn’t very clear about it, but she seems to think that the Prince of Hohenzollern ought rightfully to be German Emperor.”

“Oh, what _rot_!”

“But perhaps she’s right. How do you know? _I_ don’t. She takes an almost voluptuous delight in the two marriage ceremonies. You know, I suppose, dear, that there were two ceremonies, a Protestant one and a Catholic one, because the Roumanian Hohenzollerns are Catholic Hohenzollerns. Of course, the dear princess would become a Catholic——”

“Oh, _don’t_!” cried Peter’s father; “don’t!”

“I had to listen to three-quarters of an hour of it yesterday. Such a happy and convenient occurrence, the princess’s conversion, but—archly—of course, my dear, I suppose there’s sometimes just a little _persuasion_ in these cases.”

“Dolly, you go too far!”

“But that isn’t, of course, the great interest just at present. The great interest just at present is George and May. You know they’re going to be married.”

Arthur lifted a protesting profile. “My dear! _Who_ is May?” he tenored.

“Affected ignorance! She is the Princess May who was engaged to the late Duke of Clarence, the Princess Mary of Teck. And now he’s dead, she’s going to marry the Duke of York. Surely you understand about that. He is your Future Sovereign. Mrs. Bagshot-Fawcett gets positively lush about him. It was George she always lurved, Mrs. Bagshot-Fawcett says, but she accepted his brother for Reasons of State. So after all it’s rather nice and romantic that the elder brother——”

Arthur roared and tore his hair and walked up and down the low room. “What are these people to me?” he shouted. “What are these people to me?”

“But there is twenty times as much about that sort of thing in the papers as there is about _our_ sort of things.”

There was no disputing it.

“We’re in a foreign country,” cried Arthur, going off at a tangent. “We’re in a foreign country. We English are a subject people.... Talk of Home Rule for Ireland!... Why are there no _English_ Nationalists? One of these days I will hoist the cross of St. George outside this cottage. But I doubt if any one on this countryside will know it for the English flag.”

§ 2

Whatever is seems right, and it is only now, after five and twenty years of change, that we do begin to see as a remarkable thing the detached life that great masses of the English were leading beneath the canopy of the Hanoverian monarchy. For in those days the court thought in German; Teutonized Anglicans, sentimental, materialistic and resolutely “loyal,” dominated society; Gladstone was notoriously disliked by them for his anti-German policy and his Irish and Russian sympathies, and the old Queen’s selection of bishops guided feeling in the way it ought to go. But there was a leakage none the less. More and more people were drifting out of relationship to church and state, exactly as Peter’s parents had drifted out. The Court dominated, but it did not dominate intelligently; it controlled the church to no effect, its influence upon universities and schools and art and literature was merely deadening; it responded to flattery but it failed to direct; it was the court of an alien-spirited old lady, making much of the pathos of her widowhood and trading still on the gallantry and generosity that had welcomed her as a “girl queen.” The real England separated itself more and more from that superficial England of the genteel that looked to Osborne and Balmoral. To the real England, dissentient England, court taste was a joke, court art was a scandal; of English literature and science notoriously the court knew nothing. In the huge pacific industrial individualism of Great Britain it did not seem a serious matter that the army and navy and the Indian administration were orientated to the court. Peter’s parents and the large class of detached people to which they belonged, were out of politics, out of the system, scornful, or facetious and aloof. Just as they were out of religion. These things did not concern them.

The great form of the empire contained these indifferents, the great roof of church and state hung over them. Royal visits, diplomatic exchanges and the like passed to and fro, alien, uninteresting proceedings; Heligoland was given to the young Emperor William the Second by Lord Salisbury, the old Queen’s favourite prime minister, English politicians jostled the French in Africa as roughly as possible to “larn them to be” republicans, and resisted the Home Rule aspirations and the ill-concealed republicanism of the “Keltic fringe”; one’s Anglican neighbours of the “ruling class” went off to rule India and the empire with manners that would have maddened Job; they stood for Parliament and played the game of politics upon factitious issues. Sir Charles Dilke, the last of the English Republicans, and Charles Stewart Parnell, the uncrowned King of Ireland, had both been extinguished by opportune divorce cases. (Liberal opinion, it was felt, must choose between the private and the public life. You could not have it both ways.) It did not seem to be a state of affairs to make a fuss about. The general life went on comfortably enough. We built our pretty rough-cast houses, taught Shirley poppies to spring artlessly between the paving-stones in our garden paths, begot the happy children who were to grow up under that roof of a dynastic system that was never going to fall in. (Because it never had fallen in.)

Never before had nurseries been so pretty as they were in that glowing pause at the end of the nineteenth century.

Peter’s nursery was a perfect room in which to hatch the soul of a little boy. Its walls were done in a warm cream-coloured paint, and upon them Peter’s father had put the most lovely pattern of trotting and jumping horses and dancing cats and dogs and leaping lambs, a carnival of beasts. He had copied these figures from books, enlarging them as he did so; he had cut them out in paper, stuck them on the wall, and then flicked bright blue paint at them until they were all outlined in a penumbra of stippled blue. Then he unpinned the paper and took it on to another part of the wall and so made his pattern. There was a big brass fireguard in Peter’s nursery that hooked on to the jambs of the fireplace, and all the tables had smoothly rounded corners against the days when Peter would run about. The floor was of cork carpet on which Peter would put his toys, and there was a crimson hearthrug on which Peter was destined to crawl. And a number of stuffed dogs and elephants, whose bead eyes had been carefully removed by Dolly and replaced with eyes of black cloth that Peter would be less likely to worry off and swallow, awaited his maturing clutch. (But there were no Teddy Bears yet; Teddy Bears had still to come into the world. America had still to discover the charm of its Teddy.) There were scales in Peter’s nursery to weigh Peter every week, and tables to show how much he ought to weigh and when one should begin to feel anxious. There was nothing casual about the early years of Peter.

Peter began well, a remarkably fine child, Dr. Fremisson said, of nine pounds. Although he was born in warm summer weather we never went back upon that. He favoured his mother perhaps more than an impartial child should, but that was at any rate a source of satisfaction to Cousin Oswald (of the artificial eye).

Cousin Oswald was doing his best to behave nicely and persuade himself that all this show had been got up by Dolly and was Dolly’s show—and that Arthur just happened to be about.

“Look at him,” said Cousin Oswald as Peter regarded the world with unwinking intelligence from behind an appreciated bottle; “the Luck of him. He’s the Heir of the Ages. Look at this room and this house and every one about him.”

Dolly remarked foolishly that Peter was a “nittle darum. ’E dizzerves-i-tall. Nevything.”

“The very sunshine on the wall looks as though it had been got for him specially,” said Cousin Oswald.

“It _was_ got for him specially,” said Dolly, with a light of amusement in her eyes that reminded him of former times.

This visit was a great occasion. It was the first time Cousin Oswald had seen either Arthur or Peter. Almost directly after he had learnt about Dolly’s engagement and jerked out his congratulations, he had cut short his holiday in England and gone back to Central Africa. Now he was in England again, looked baked and hard, and his hair, which had always been stubby, more stubby than ever. The scarred half of him had lost its harsh redness and become brown. He was staying with his aunt, Dolly’s second cousin by marriage, Lady Charlotte Sydenham, not ten miles away towards Tonbridge, and he took to bicycling over to The Ingle-Nook every other day or so and gossiping.

“These bicycles,” he said, “are most useful things. Wonderful things. As soon as they get cheap—bound to get cheap—they will play a wonderful part in Central Africa.”

“But there are no roads in Central Africa!” said Arthur.

“Better. Foot tracks padded by bare feet for generations. You could ride for hundreds of miles without dismounting....”

“Compared with our little black babies,” said Cousin Oswald, “Peter seems immobile. He’s like a baby on a lotus flower meditating existence. Those others are like young black indiarubber kittens—all acrawl. But then they’ve got to look sharp and run for themselves as soon as possible, and he hasn’t.... Things happen there.”

“I wonder,” said Arthur in his lifting tenor, “how far all this opening up of Africa to civilization and gin and Bibles is justifiable.”

The one living eye glared at him. “It isn’t exactly like that,” said Oswald stiffly, and offered no occasion for further controversy at the moment.

The conversation hung for a little while. Dolly wanted to say to her cousin: “He isn’t thinking of you. It’s just his way of generalizing about things....”

“Anyhow this young man has a tremendous future,” said Oswald, going back to the original topic. “Think of what lies before him. Never has the world been so safe and settled—most of it that is—as it is now. I suppose really the world’s hardly begun to _touch_ education. In this house everything seems educational—pictures, toys, everything. When one sees how small niggers can be moulded and changed even in a missionary school, it makes one think. I wish I knew more about education. I lie awake at nights thinking of the man I might be, if I knew all I don’t know, and of all I could do if I did. And it’s the same with others. Every one who seems worth anything seems regretting his education wasn’t better. Hitherto of course there’s always been wars, interruptions, religious rows; the world’s been confused and poor, a thorough muddle; there’s never been a real planned education for people. Just scraps and hints. But we’re changing all that. Here’s a big safe world at last. No wars in Europe since ’71 and no likelihood in our time of any more big wars. Things settle down. And _he_ comes in for it all.”

“I hope all this settling down won’t make the world too monotonous,” said Arthur.

“You artists and writers have got to see to that. No, I don’t see it getting monotonous. There’s always differences of climate and colour. Temperament. All sorts of differences.”

“And Nature,” said Arthur profoundly. “Old Mother Nature.”

“Have you christened Peter yet?” Oswald asked abruptly.

“He’s not going to be christened,” said Dolly. “Not until he asks to be. We’ve just registered him. He’s a registered baby.”

“So he won’t have two godfathers and a godmother to be damned for him.”

“We’ve weighed the risk,” said Arthur.

“He might have a godfather just—_pour rire_,” said Oswald.

“That’s different,” Dolly encouraged promptly. “We must get him one.”

“I’d like to be Peter’s godfather,” said Oswald.

“I will deny him no advantage,” said Arthur. “The ceremony—— The ceremony shall be a simple one. Godfather, Peter; Peter, godfather. Peter, my son, salute your godfather.”

Oswald seemed trying to remember a formula. “I promise and vow three things in his name; first a beautiful mug; secondly that he shall be duly instructed in chemistry, biology, mathematics, the French and German tongues and all that sort of thing; and thirdly, that—what is thirdly? That he shall renounce the devil and all his works. But there isn’t a devil nowadays.”

Peter having consumed his bottle to the dregs and dreamt over it for a space, now thrust it from him and turning towards Oswald, regurgitated—but within the limits of nursery good manners. Then he smiled a toothless, slightly derisive smile.

“Intelligent ’e is!” crooned Dolly. “Unstand evlyfling ’e does....”

§ 3

This conversation about Peter’s future, once it had been started, rambled on for the next three weeks, and then Oswald very abruptly saw fit to be called away to Africa again....

Various interlocutors dropped in while that talk was in progress. Arthur felt his way to his real opinions through a series of experimental dogmas.

Arthur’s disposition was towards an extreme Rousseauism. It is the tendency of the interrogative class in all settled communities. He thought that a boy or girl ought to run wild until twelve and not be bothered by lessons, ought to eat little else but fruit and nuts, go bareheaded and barefooted. Why not? Oswald’s disposition would have been to oppose Arthur anyhow, but against these views all his circle of ideas fought by necessity. If Arthur was Ruskinite and Morrisite, Oswald was as completely Huxleyite. If Arthur thought the world perishing for need of Art and Nature, Oswald stood as strongly for the saving power of Science. In this matter of bare feet——

“There’s thorns, pins, snakes, tetanus,” reflected Oswald.

“The foot hardens.”

“Only the sole,” said Oswald. “And not enough.”

“Shielded from all the corruptions of town and society,” said Arthur presently.

“There’s no such corruptor as that old Mother Nature of yours. You daren’t leave that bottle of milk to her for half an hour but what she turns it sour or poisons it with one of her beastly germs.”

“I never approved of the bottle,” said Arthur, bringing a flash of hot resentment into Dolly’s eyes....

Oswald regretted his illustration.

“Old Mother Nature is a half-wit,” he said. “She’s distraught. You overrate the jade. She’s thinking of everything at once. All her affairs got into a hopeless mess from the very start. Most of her world is desert with water running to waste. A tropical forest is three-quarters death and decay, and what is alive is either murdering or being murdered. It’s only when you come to artificial things, such as a ploughed field, for example, that you get space and health and every blade doing its best.”

“I don’t call a ploughed field an artificial thing,” said Arthur.

“But it is,” said Oswald.

Dr. Fremisson was dragged into this dispute. “A ploughed field,” he maintained, “is part of the natural life of man.”

“Like boots and reading.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Dr. Fremisson warily. He had the usual general practitioner’s belief that any education whatever is a terrible strain on the young, and he was quite on the side of Rousseau and Arthur in that matter. Moreover, as a result of his professional endeavours he had been forced to a belief that Nature’s remedies are the best.