You Can't Be Too Careful

I. Darling Bud

It took Mrs Richard Tewler, his mother, three and twenty hours to bring her only son into the world. He came shyly, not head-first but toe-first like a timid bather, and that sort of presentation always causes trouble. It is doubtful if his reluctant entry into this fierce universe would have occurred even then if it had not been for the extreme inadequacy of the knowledge of what are called preventatives that prevailed in the late Victorian period. People didn’t want children then, except by heart’s desire, but they got them nevertheless. One knew there was some sort of knowledge about it, but one couldn’t be too careful whom one asked, and your doctor also in those days couldn’t be too careful in misunderstanding your discreet hints and soundings. In those days England was far behind Polynesia in that matter. So there you were—and do what you could, you were liable to be caught.

Yet such is the heart of woman that Edward Albert Tewler had been scarcely four and twenty hours in this dangerous world before his mother loved him passionately. Neither she nor her husband had really desired him. And now he was the animating centre of their lives. Nature had played a trick upon them, caught them in a careless moment, and this miracle occurred.

If Mrs Tewler was overcome by love such as she had never known before, Mr Tewler was equally distended by pride. He was the useful repair man to Messrs Colebrook and Mahogany of North Lonsdale Street; a row of great windows they had, in those days, full of the loveliest Chinese porcelain, Danish China, Venetian glass, old Wedgwood and Spode and Chelsea, and every sort of old and modern English ware; and he came up in a green baize apron from somewhere below and considered the case carefully and gave his advice with discretion, and cemented invisibly and filled up gaps and, when necessary, riveted with the utmost skill. He was used to handling delicate, fragile things. But never in his life had he held anything so fragile and delicate as Edward Albert in the nascent stage.

And he had made this wonder. He himself had made it. He held it in his arms, having promised on his honour not to drop it whatever he did, and he marvelled at its perfection.

It had hair, darkish hair of an extreme softness and fineness. There were no teeth, and its round mouth expressed an artless . astonishment tinged with resentment, but its nose was finished minutely, nostrils and bridge and all, and it had hands, complete hands with little nails—every finger had a miniature nail on it, a perfect finger-nail. One, two, three, four, five fingers—only so delicate! And toes also. Not one missing.

He pointed this out to his wife and she shared his pride. They doubted secretly if anyone else had ever produced so highly finished a product. If you had cared to do so, you could have told the little chap’s fortune from those hands. They were not flat and featureless as you might have expected them to be; already they had all the lines and creases known to palmistry. If no one had ever thought of “This little pig went to market”, I think Mrs Tewler would have invented something of the kind herself. She seemed unable to get over the fact that Edward Albert at the age of a week had as many fingers as his father. And later on, weeks later, when she was pretending to bite them off and gobble them up she was rewarded by Edward Albert Tewler’s first indisputable smile He gurgled and he smiled.

The pride of Richard Tewler took many forms and masks according to his immediate surroundings. The “governor” at Colebrook and Mahogany’s, Jim Whittaker—he had married Jane Mahogany—had heard of the great event.

“All’s well with the Missus, Tewler?” he asked.

“All Sir Garnet, Sir,” said Mr Richard Tewler. “They tell me he weighed nine pounds.”

“That’s a good start,” said Mr Whittaker. “He’ll fall away from that for a bit, but that won’t be anything to worry about. “the firm’s been thinking of a silver mug. If there’s no other godfathers in sight. Eh?”

“Such a nonner,” said Mr Tewler, overwhelmed....

Among the warehousemen and boys downstairs he assumed an air of modest assurance. They attempted badinage.

“So you didn’t get them twins you were counting on, Mr Tooler,” said old Matteriock.

“Sample first,” said Mr Tewler.

“You took your time getting started,” said old Matterlock.

“Better than never starting at all, grandfather.”

“That’s all you know, my boy. Well, now you’ve found out how it’s done, you be careful not to overdo it. What I mean is, don’t make a ’abit of it.”

“Somebody’s got to keep up the breed,” said Mr Tewler.

Mr Matteriock paused in his packing in order to demolish Mr Tewler by facial play. He featured an opinion of Mr Tewler’s genes, a doubt of his health and beauty, an astonishment at his presumption....

The proud father was invincible. “It ain’t no good, Methuselah. You should see my kid.”

Shackle, .known as the Sniffer because of an objectionable but incurable habit, winked heavily at Matteriock, and wiped his muzzle with his sleeve. “What you ought to do, Tewler, you know, is to stick a notice of it in the Times; births, marriages, and deaths. No, no other paper, just the Times. ‘Mrs Tewler of a son, no flowers by request.’ Just that and the address.... Oh, I know what I’m talking about. I know a chap that did it. In the blasted old Times, and straight off from all over the country they began sending his missus samples of foods and drinks and medicine, and stuff, for the kid and for ’er. Strengthenin’ things and so on. I do believe there was a bottle of special nourishing stout. Just think of that! Pounds worth it came to.”

For a moment Mr Tewler considered the possibility. Then he put it aside. “Mrs Whittaker might see it,” he said,

“The guv’nor might laugh it off but she wouldn’t. She’d think it a liberty....”

But as he made his way home to Camden Town that night, he found himself repeating in a sort of song, “Mrs Richard Tewler of a son. Mrs Richard Tewler of a son,” He went over the details of the conversation and decided he had had much the better of old Matterlock. And of course it was quite right that one mustn’t make a ’abit of it.

Still, somewhen there might have to be some one to wear out Edward Albert’s clothes. Children grew so fast they didn’t half wear their clothes out. He’d heard that said. It was almost as cheap to provide for two as for one—two or at the outside three. Not more. “Mrs Richard Tewler of a son.” What would old Matterlock say to that? One in the eye for him. It made him feel quite excited and philoprogenitive, and when he got home, Mrs Tewler thought he had never been more affectionate. “Not yet for a bit, Dickybird,” she said.

She hadn’t called him Dickybird for years.... Later on that idea recurred to them, particularly after some transitory infection had jumped up the temperature of Master Edward Albert to 104° Fahrenheit, “To think of that little cot empty!?” said Mrs Tewler, “What it would be.”

But you cannot be too careful, and the matter had to be considered from every point of view. After all there was no hurry. No need to plunge, If not to-day, then next week or next month. The “governor” had been very nice about Edward Albert, but you never knew how things may be misinterpreted.

“Of course,” said Mr Richard Tewler, “it would sort of look like rushing him for another silver mug. You have to think of that.”

So in the end Edward Albert Tewler remained an only child. A little brother or sister was eliminated altogether from his world of possibility by the unexpected death of his father when he was four. Mr Richard Tewler was crossing the road from Camden Town Tube Station and had just passed behind an omnibus, when he discovered another bearing down upon him from the opposite direction and close upon him. He might have dashed across in front of that, but suddenly he stopped dead. It would have been wiser to recoil. You cannot be too careful, and in that instant while he stood uncertain as to the best course to pursue, the big vehicle, which was swerving to pass behind him, skidded and killed him.

Fortunately he had insured his life so fully, taking out a new policy when Edward Albert was born, that on the whole his wife and son were left rather better off than they had ever been before his loss. He had belonged to a Burial Society, and the funeral had a black magnificence of the most satisfying sort. Messrs Colebrook and Mahogany put up a special ceremonial shutter (used normally for royal funerals) at each great window, six of the warehousemen, including Matterlock and Shackle the Sniffer, were given time off to attend the funeral, and Jim Whittaker, who knew that Tewler was irreplaceable and ought to have had a rise years ago, sent as big a wreath of virginal lilies as money could buy. The salesman in the shop also sent a wreath, and Mrs Tewler’s uncle in Scotland astonished her by sending one too; a distinctly niggardly one, however, of everlasting flowers, with a curious second-hand look about it.

That intrigued her greatly. Why had he sent it? How he had come by it was beyond her imaginative range. He had acquired it some months before when he sold, up one of his weekly tenants, an undertaker’s widow. He had taken it because there was nothing else to take in its place. But he hated the sight of it once he had got it and hung it up on the living-room wall. He began to have fancies about it. He feared it might grace his own demise. The undertaker’s widow, a dark highland woman with second sight, had cursed him. Simply for taking what was due to him she had cursed him. Maybe she had cursed this wreath on to him. Once he had put it in the dustbin, but the dustman brought it back next day and wanted a whole bawbee, man, as a reward! He put it here and he put it there, he had a fit of indigestion, and its air of waiting for him increased. The death of his nephew-in-law had come as a happy solution. He did not feel he was giving something away; he was simply releasing himself from a menace. Handing it on whence it could never come back to roost.

But it seemed to Mrs Tewler. that in his heart he must have been inspired by some glimmer of obligation towards his sole surviving next of kin. That gave her food for reverie, and later on she wrote him a long, long, grateful letter telling him of the wonderfulness of Edward Albert and of her own complete devotion to the little fellow; hard struggle though it might be for her; and so on. The old man saw no reason to waste a postage stamp on a reply.

At the funeral, which was wet and windy, Mrs Tewler wore a quite astonishing amount of crape for such a slender person. Long streamers waved about her and made sudden almost coquettish tentacular assaults upon the officiating clergy, patting their faces, even getting round their legs. Edward Albert himself wore a black Fauntleroy velvet suit with a lace collar. He had been put into knickerbockers for the first time. He had looked forward to his escape from the shame of girlish plaid frocks with unalloyed pleasure, sad though the occasion was. But the knickerbockers had been put together rather thoughtlessly, and they threatened to saw him asunder at every movement. Life suddenly became a long cold vista of bisection, so that he wept unaffectedly with disappointment and pain, to the edification of all beholders.

His mother was profoundly touched by this evidence of precocious sensibility. She had feared he might stare about and ask impossible questions, and point.

“You are all I have left,” she sobbed, constricting him and wetting him in a passionate embrace. “You are everything in the world to me. You must be my Dickybird and everything, now that He has gone.”

She was disposed at first to go on wearing her weeds indefinitely as dear Queen Victoria did, but afterwards someone suggested to her that this might cast a shadow upon Edward Albert’s budding mind. So she compromised on black and white and mauve for such short years as still remained to her.

II. Mrs Humbelay Marvels

So it was Edward Albert Tewler began his earthly career, rather overweight and with a silver mug to his mouth, at a date so auspicious that when the World War of 1914—18 broke out he was four years too young to take an active part in it. Few of us could imagine a more fortunate beginning. Yet he missed a father’s guidance, and—in 1914—his mother also passed over to that better world, where insurance is unnecessary—all our dear lost Dickybirds wait our coming, and as for the weary, the weary are at rest.

I have told my tale but ill if I have failed to convey that if this most natural and excellent of mothers had any fault at all in her, it was a certain disposition to excessive solicitude, and, associated with that and integral to that, an element of fear. I will not discuss whether these qualities were innate or the infection of her generation, for that would be a breach of the undertaking given in the Preface. She was not afraid herself, but her protective motherliness extended to everyone and everything that appertained to her. And it came to a focus upon young Albert Edward, who was always central to her thoughts and dreams and plans and speeches. She was not you must understand an unhappy woman. She lived a life of intensely concentrated anxious happiness. There was always some new menace to excite her.

Her Treasure had to be shielded from every harm. He had to be watched over and trained to recoil from every form of danger. His shielding was her sole topic of conversation. She welcomed every new threat to her darling; she sought ideas for fresh precautions. She would ask the most churlish to advise her, and remained poised expectant while they did their best to keep their replies within the still very narrow limits of early Edwardian good manners. Their real ideas about what ought to be done to Edward Albert they muttered when she was out of earshot. But one old curmudgeon was driven to say: “Let him be run over. Let him. I implore you. He won’t do it twice. That’ll teach him if nothing else will.”

Of course he could not know how dear Richard had been killed. Still it was heartless....

She made her solicitude the justification for an unrelenting pursuit of lecturers, teachers, doctors, and the minor clergy.

“No harm shall come near him,” she said. “Only tell me.”

Earnest preachers hid in vestries, peeping slyly at her until she went away, and hygienic experts, after giving the most edifying lectures and passing lightly over the more difficult parts, escaped through the most undignified and unhygienic exits to avoid this importunate widow’s demand for precisions. She subscribed to numerous periodicals wherein

“Aunt Jane” or “Dorothy Wisdom” advised and answered readers’ questions, when a coupon was enclosed. She asked for all the information that was fit to print, and got it—time after time.

But there are many dangers and riddles that centre upon the upbringing of a solitary male child that cannot be solved in public print, and here Mrs Tewler was much beholden to intimate, shame-faced but extremely interesting talks with various people endowed with a rich store of obsessions and inaccurate but moving information, who would talk to her in undertones, with circumlocutions, metaphors and gestures and an obvious mutuality of relief. There was, for example, Mrs Humbelay, acquired at the Baptist Social Afternoons, who would come to tea, or entertain Mrs Tewler in her own modest but extremely over-furnished apartment. She said very little at the Socials, but she listened with an appreciative tranquility, and she was very helpful, bringing little delicacies and making buttered toast.

These Socials were becoming an increasingly important factor in Mrs Tewler’s life. Now there was no Dickybird to whom she could tell her troubles in the evening she turned more definitely to the little close Baptist community. Behind the blue door they were Strict and Particular and she agreed. She could talk about her devotion to her Darling and about her ill-health with a reasonable reciprocity. And in particular there was this Mrs Humbelay.

Mrs Humbelay had been and still was an extremely fine woman, and everything was fine and large about her, her things particularly, except her rooms, which were small, and her voice, which was infinitesimal, a whisper at the best of times, and an inaudible wheeze, in which facial expression had to come to its assistance. She had not very much facial expression beyond a certain astonishment at the things she was saying.

She had left her village school in a state of innocent simplicity to become under-housemaid to Miss Pooter-Bayton, who was then living under the protection and in the household of the scandalous Duke of Dawes, the sixth Duke. There was some pretence that Miss Pooter-Bayton had a husband somewhere and that her relations to the Duke were Platonic. But when the under-housemaid asked what Platonic was, she got only mirthful and perplexing replies. She gave way to wonder, and open-eyed and breathless wonder became her permanent attitude to life. Fate had decided that she should see the entirely disreputable side of what used to be called the Fin de Siècle. She was a young, simple, rather pretty, acquiescent creature, and all sorts of things happened to her. She was never greatly shocked. She wept at nothing; she laughed at nothing. Fate pitched her about and she marvelled. “The things they do!” she said.

The things they did to her!

It wasn’t right, she knew, but apparently there was no right, really. Everybody told lies about what they did, making things out to be worse or better as the mood took them. That gave her a sense of standards. The Duke’s house steward, who had fallen in love with her wide-eyed credulity, suddenly married her. It seemed rather unnecessary after all that had happened to her, but he knew what he was up to. “We are going to run a private hotel down in Cornwall for the Duke and his sort,” he said, “and fine times we’re going to have there,” and so she acquired that houseful of large furniture of which the remnant still clung to her, Except the pictures. She got rid of all that stuff. Fine times they had for a bit, and then he turned against her. There was a great Fin de Siècle scandal in London and he seemed to change. He said one day that she was getting too fat for endurance and that a cow could make love better than she did. “I do my best,” she said. “If only you’d tell me what you want me to do....”

Then suddenly the Fin de Siècle world fled abroad in a great flutter like starlings. “You run this place, my dear, until things blow over and I come back, and put by all the money for me,” he said, and he left her, still marvelling but bankrupt, in a great shady hotel that had figured in the case so conspicuously that nobody now would come near it. She extricated herself as well as she could, and came to London; the works of art she sold to furtive dealers and private collectors; and, having always had a subdued craving for conventional standards and a virtuous life, she joined the congregation of the smaller Baptist Church up Camden Hill, the Particular Baptist Church, the one with the blue doorway. She disliked smoking and detested alcohol, and the Baptist atmosphere suited her admirably. She tried to thin herself by avoiding almost every sort of food except cakes and buttered toast at tea-time, and little snacks in between meals. Yet every day she grew larger of body and shorter of breath, and her look of faint perplexity increased. As you may understand, she felt a great need to talk to someone about the fantastic whirl of improper revelations amidst which she had been spinning all her life. And you will realise what a godsend she was to Mr Tewler, and what a godsend Mrs Tewler was to her.

Yet if only she had not had that trick of letting her voice die out with her lips still active but inaudible, and staring you with those innocent, earnest, inquiring blue eyes of hers, Mrs Tewler’s ideas might have been more explicit,

“Sometimes I can’t make head or tail of it,” Mrs. Tewler would complain, but really it was the tail she lost. She wanted to know, for Dearest One’s sake, what were all those dreadful things that lay in wait for the unguarded young, underneath the sunken tail and the raised eyebrows. She wanted particulars and she got this sort of thing.

“Sometimes I think it’s the good ones really make the bad ones. For after all, you see....”

“There isn’t so very much that they can do with themselves....”

“Well, my dear, it isn’t as though we was octopuses, is it? all legs and arms and things....”

“His Grace had a sort of joking way of saying, ‘All the world’s a stage, my girl’....”

Mrs Tewler went to the Public Library afterwards and with the librarian’s assistance looked that up in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations:

Nothing in that. It was a mystery.

“All they want to do is something queer and awful. Would it matter—whether it was upside down or round about, if the good people didn’t make such a fuss about it? I could never find anything so wonderful....”

“But good people say, ‘This is a sin’, and that is terrible....”

“What is—exactly?”

“Doing all these things. And so they make laws against them and all that, and it seems to give them dignity, so to to speak, as though they mattered. Why should they matter? For instance, is there really any great harm....”

Lost again!

Most people like breaking laws, just to show they aren’t to be put upon. If they’d been left alone, they’d just have done this or that and forgotten about it. Everybody does things somewhen—”

“But they are sins,” cried Mrs Tewler. “And I think it’s all terrible. And wicked!”

“Maybe you’re right. They call it Original Sin, It seems the most unoriginal sort of sin possible to me. Why if for example....”

“But someone must teach them these dreadful things!”

“They get together. Or they get alone. And there’s nothing else to distract them. And before you know where you are you find....”

“But if one keeps one’s little boy away from nasty little boys and girls, and watches over his reading and never leaves him alone until he’s sound asleep—”

“There’s dreams,” said the wise woman. “There’s fancies that come from nowhere at all. Very likely you’ve forgotten your own early dreams and fancies. Most people do. Or they wouldn’t make such a fuss. I haven’t. Why, long before I went into service, I used to sleep with the curate and my elder brother and a boy I once saw bathing—”

“My dear Mrs Humbelay!”

“Only in dreams. Have you forgotten all that about yourself? Well “—down went the voice—” and I used to imagine myself....” Mrs Tewler could get nothing of it.

“Oh! Oh!” she cried. “My Boy isn’t like that. My Boy can’t be like that He just sleeps like a little harmless lamb....”

“Maybe he’s different. Still I’m only telling you what I’ve come across in life. I can’t make out what it’s all about....

“It’s a great relief to talk to an understanding woman like yourself. I’ve thought of putting all my troubles plainly and simply to Mr Burlap. What I’ve been through. What I’ve seen. But you see he doesn’t know anything of what I’ve been, really. He thinks I’m just a comfortable respectable widow. I wouldn’t like him to turn against me...”

“I don’t think you’d be wise to tell him.”

“Nor me. Still, what’s the answer to it all? We’ve got all these desires and impulses, we’re told, so as to have children.

So you may say. But they don’t lead to children, Mrs Tewler. They lead right away from them. Why, I ask you, my dear, should Nature dispose a man—well now, for example, to....”

III. Mr Myame Deplores Sin

Mrs Tewler brooded profoundly on these conventions. Enough came across to convince her of the diabolical wickedness that would presently be weaving its snares about the unsuspecting feet of the Most Precious Child in the world. She tried Mr Burlap, the pastor of the little chape). He received her in his Sanctum. “It’s a very difficult thing,” she said, “for a mother to know what to do about the—I hardly know how to put it—well, the sexual education of a solitary fatherless child.”

“H’rump,” said Mr Burlap. He leant back in his chair and looked as thoughtful as he could, but his ears and nostrils had suddenly gone very red, and his eyes, magnified by his spectacles, were uncomfortable and defensive.

“Yee-es,” he said. “It is a difficult problem.”

“It is a difficult problem.”

“It is certainly, a very difficult problem.”

“That’s what I feel.”

So far they were in perfect agreement.

“Whether he ought to be told” she resumed after a pause.

“Whether he ought to be warned. Books perhaps. A talk to a doctor.”

“Oom,” said Mr Burlap, filling the Sanctum with his reverberation.

“Exactly,” she said, and waited.

“You see, my dear Mrs Tewler, that this problem so to speak varies with the circumstances of the case. We are not all made alike. What may be wise in one case may be quite unsuitable for another case.”

“Yes? “she said.

“And of course, Vice Versa.”

“I see that,” she said.

“Rereads?”

“Quite often.”

“There is a little book called, I believe, The Loves of the Flowers. Mr Burlap’s face was suffused with an honourable blush. “He could have no more helpful introduction to the—to the great mystery.”

“I will give it to him.”

“And then perhaps a little judicious talk.”

“Judicious talk.”

“When the opportunity arises,”

“I must pray for that.”

All that was very clear and helpful. But it seemed to leave something still to be said. There was something even a little superficial about it all. “Nowadays,” she said, “there is so much evil about.”

“These are evil times, Mrs Tewler. ‘The world is very evil; the times are growing late.’ This has never been so true as it is to-day. Guard him. Evil communications corrupt good manners. Keep him close to you. Yes.”

He seemed to be wanting to convey that the matter was practically settled.

“I have taught him his letters and so on, but presently he will have to go to school. There he may learn—all sorts of things.”

“Oom,” said Mr Burlap again, and then seemed to be struck by an idea.

“I hear such dreadful things of schools,” she said. Mr Burlap roused himself from his idea. “Boarding schools?”

“Yes, boarding Schools.”

“Boarding schools,” said Mr Burlap, “are, without exception, Sinks of Iniquity. Especially the Preparatory Schools and the so-called Public Schools. I know. I know. There are things—I cannot speak of them,”

“That is exactly what I came to talk to you about,” said Mrs Tewler.

“Well,” said the worthy pastor, “H’rump. Here we have in our own little congregation just the one man.... You have never noted? Mr Myame. That slender, reserved man with a big head, large black side-whiskers and a bass voice. You must at least have noticed his voice. You could hardly fail to do that. He is a man of great spiritual power, a Boanerges, a son of Thunder. He has a small, a very select, private day school. He is most particular whom he takes. His wife is, I fear, consumptive; a very sweet and tender woman. They have no children of their own; it is a great sorrow to them; but their school is in the best sense of the word their family. They study the characters of their little charges. They are never weary of discussing them. There and with your home influence, I cannot imagine any harm coming near to your little fellow....”

So Mrs Tewler went to Mr Myame.

There was something very reassuring in the grave earnestness of Mr Myame’s large grey eyes and of the black hair that streamed sporadically from every part of his visage. And instead of sitting far off and defensive at a desk, he came and stood right over her and studied her very earnestly as he talked down to her. After a little preliminary skirmishing she came to the point, “To be frank,” said she, with eyes downcast, “I am troubled by problems—My poor little Hopeful.... Without a father.... The onset of sex. One cannot be too careful.”

“No,” said Mr Myame, in a voice that enveloped her. “That is the greatest scandal of my profession. Eager only for examinational results and what are called games. Cram and cricket. The carelessless, the indifference, to purity, to true manliness....”

“I hear,” said she, and paused. “I know so little about these things. But I have been told,.... Things have come to my knowledge. Very dreadful things....”

“Such as—?” he helped her.

Bit by bit they led each other into the thickets of this absorbing subject.

“No one warns them.” said Mr Myame. “No one tells them of the dangers.... Their own little school-fellows make themselves the very agents of the devil.”

“Yes,” she said, and looked up, stirred by the vibrant passion in his voice.

A gleam of fanaticism shone in Mr Myame’s eye.

“We must speak plainly,” he said. “We must avoid all self-deception.”

He shirked no particulars. It was a most edifying conversation. His discreet undertones were like the rumble of a train in a distant tunnel. Under any other circumstances it would, she felt, have been painful and very indelicate of her to pursue this knowledge, but for her Sweet Boy she felt no sacrifice was too great. So she did not merely pursue it. She hunted it into its most recondite corners, Mr Myame, who had never been honoured by the confidences of Mrs Humbelay, was astonished by the range of Mrs Tewler’s knowledge. She must surely know it by inspiration....

“Another Parent?” asked his wife after he had let Mrs Tewler out.

“At the full rates,” he said, with a certain gladness.

“You look—excited,” she remarked.

“Fanny, I have been talking to the purest and holiest Mother I have ever known. Who could touch pitch and not be defiled. I have learnt much. It has been a great spiritual experience and I hope I may do my duty by her Little One,”

He paused.

“I have asked her to come to our inner circle meeting next Friday. She breaks bread with us but she has not yet undergone Baptism. She has hesitated but she is very desirous; Like you she has very delicate health. She does not want to risk an illness that might separate her from her son. Later perhaps....”

A phase of great spiritual contentment opened in Mrs Tewler’s life. Impelled only by love and her sense of duty, she found she had come into a circle of intense and sustained mutual appreciation, a sort of inner chapel into which she was extremely careful not to introduce Mrs Humbelay. Mrs Humbelay could be very helpful and generous on the social side, but she was, one had to admit, lacking in real spirituality, suited to be at most a sort of lay sister to the chapel. And also subconsciously Mrs Tewler did not want to spoil Mrs Humbelay for herself.... It was a case of oil and water....

Everyone in that inner group was a Beloved Spirit, a Saintly Figure, a Noble and Outstanding Soul with an Inner Light shining through. Her Baptism continued to be deferred, but she seemed to anticipate its beneficent influence. She broke bread. She invented and exchanged experiences. Wrapped in that confident anticipation of an eternity of Glory which the Strict and Particular Baptists entertained, her face almost luminous with that happy inner light, she would thread her way through the countless multitudes of the damned who thronged the streets of Camden Town. And she led her One Darling by the hand.

And safe in her keeping Edward Albert would extend his tongue or snoot at the Children of Perdition passing him on their way to Judgment, or tug back to look at things in the shop windows. Sometimes there would be a bit of a struggle when the bill boards outside the newly opened cinema caught his eye. Moreover at that tender age he felt a curious desire to pull little girls by the hair, that twice became irresistible....

But when he was taxed with that he denied it stoutly. There were scenes in the street. Fierce accusations and disgraceful retorts. He said the little girls were Wicked Little Fibs. His mother would not believe it of him, and he could scarcely believe it of himself.

IV. Animalism of Animals

Mrs Tewler would let no nurse girl intervene between herself and her “Precious.” During his lays, she herself, proud and vigilant, wheeled him out in his little perambulator every day up Camden Hill or into Regent’s Park. When Edward Albert showed signs of friendliness towards dogs, and reached out at them, saying! “Bow-wow, Bow-wow,” she intervened. “Never touch a strange dog,” she said. “They bite. They bite and give you hydrophobia and you go mad and run about biting people. And then thy go mad too.”

Something in the eye of the small boy suggested that this was not an altogether unattractive idea, “And you scream when you see water and you die in awful agony,” she said. That gleam of hope faded.

Cats too Edward Albert was trained to shun. “They have pins in their toes,” and sometimes these can be very poisonous pins. Lots of people have caught things from a cat’s scratches. They bring measles into the house. They don’t love you even when they purr. And then she heard a terrible story that had to be repeated at once to the cherished darling, of a cat, being petted, purring in the lap of its little mistress, and it watched her eyes, it kept on watching her eyes, and suddenly it sprang at them with its claws out....

After that Edward Albert developed an antipathy for cats, and declared he could not endure them in the same room .with him. He was cat-allergic, as people say nowadays, in their bright, inexact way. But at times cats got near him unobserved—which wasn’t in accordance with that assertion. Horses too he feared, because he realised they could be equally dangerous to human life at either end. Sheep he was inclined to bully and run after, until one dreadful day in Regent’s Park an old ram suddenly turned on him and stamped and stood his ground, Whereupon he fled screaming to his mother, who, pale but determined, intervened, confronted the danger and disposed of it very rapidly by opening and shutting her grey—and-white parasol. That left only the new grey squirrels which had recently come over from America for him to be reasonably bold about. He gave them nuts sometimes, but when they became over-familiar and wanted to run up his legs and over him, he struck and kicked at them. When a passer-by remonstrated with his mother, the defended him.

“You never know what they’ll give you,” she said. “They’re thick with fleas, you see, and he’s a delicate, sensitive child.”

Such were the reactions Edward Albert acquired to the indigenous fauna of London. His knowledge of the graver extremities to which Nature was allowed to go after the Fall of Man was derived chiefly from books. He invented a marvellous electric gun for his private comfort which always killed and never required re-loading, and this he always kept close at hand when he travelled in his reveries across the silver seas. Gorillas and bears lurked in the darker corners of the house and under his bed, and no sort of emergency would induce him to quit that shelter once he had been tucked up in it. Four guardian angels, he knew, watched about him, but none of them had the pluck or the intelligence to rout about underneath the bed. If he woke up at night they weren’t there. He would listen to things creeping about and scrutinise dim ambiguous shapes until it became unbearable, and then he would scream for his mother.

“Was there a nasty bear?” she would say, rejoicing in her protectiveness. She never lit up the room and showed him the emptiness of his fears. So he learnt to hate animals in every shape and form. They were his enemies, and when he went to the Zoo he made derisive faces and put out his tongue at all the most dangerous animals behind the bars. But the mandrill went one better.

After the mandrill Mrs Tewler and her son went on for a time in silence.

Some things are unspeakable.

They both felt that animals ought never to have been allowed, none of them, and that coming to the Zoo was simply encouraging them to be the animals they were.

“Would you like a nice ride on the elephant, darling?” said Mrs Tewler, breaking that embarrassed silence, “or look at the dear little fish in the aquarium?”

At first Edward Albert was inclined to have a ride on the elephant. But he asked to have a good look at it first. He thought perhaps he might sit by the keeper man and be allowed to beat it about the head, but when he saw the elephant taking programmes and newspapers out of people’s hands and eating them, and when it handed up pennies to its keeper in the most intimate way, and when it suddenly put a moist mendicant trunk in front of him, he decided he would prefer to go home. So he and his mother went home.

V. All-Seeing Eye

The home in which Edward Albert’s mind expanded for the nine crucial years that followed his father’s death was a furnished first floor. He had the little back room. There was fortunately no bathroom, so up to the day of her death he performed his week-end top to toe modestly in a sitz bath into which a large can of hot water had been poured, in his mother’s room, under her watchful eye. The front room was the living-room and sitting-room, and it had a balcony from which the little fellow could watch the proceedings of his wilder fellow-creatures at large in the street below. He went for walks with his mother to and fro from school and on small commissions. He skirted dogs widely and never answered if anyone accosted him. And one day when a small low-class boy punched him heavily in the back he went his way as though nothing had happened. But afterwards he meditated horrible reprisals! If ever he met that kid again!....

This peaceful and secluded home had been furnished in order to be let. Mrs Tewler had never possessed any things of her own, though she and her husband had often discussed setting up a place of their own on the hire purchase system, but as we have seen they were people of slow decisions. No human eye had ever seen the fundamental upholstery of the various chairs and sofa except by peeping. They were enveloped in covers changed semi-annually from a faded chintz to a weary cretonne. Folding-doors separated the apartment from the principal bedroom. There was a sideboard and a bookcase and various pictures, a fine steel engraving of a stag at bay, a view of Jerusalem, a picture of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort with a slaughtered deer, gillies, etc., balancing the stag, and a large and sensational rendering of the Writing on the Wall. A round table, an overmantel and a large coal scuttle, refilled at sixpence a time, completed the apartment.

Mrs Tewler had added many souvenirs, knicknacks, photographs framed and unframed, and objects of art and fancy to all this, making it very personal and homelike. She had thought of having in a piano on the hire purchase system, but, as she could not play it, she had decided this might be regarded as ostentation.

There was indeed no music whatever in Master Edward Albert’s early life, except the harmonium and sustained hymn singing of the chapel and a passing barrel organ. The gramophone, the pianola, the radio, had still to break the grave serenity of British home life, silent still except for an occasional cough or sniff, the rustle of a turning page, the crepitation of the fire or a peculiar snoring of the gas jets, whose light was supplemented by a shaded paraffin lamp of noble proportions set upon a woollen mat in the midst of the central table. It had a glass receiver and when one touched it one acquired a faint but persistent odour of paraffin. On Sundays when one changed into clean linen came a whiff of lavender. The roast chestnut men, the baked potato men and suchlike “cries of London” stood out brightly against this olfactory background.

On the mantel was a card which Mrs Tewler had discovered in a shop together with others proclaiming “Furnished Apartments” and “Teas.” It bore two words which were destined many years later to become a national slogan;

“Safety First.” By what gleam of foresight this card had been inspired, or what particular danger it advertised in mitigation of damages, I cannot imagine. But there it was, and it found a prompt response in the mind of Mrs Richard Tewler.

By the standards of our present violent times, this atmosphere might have been considered under-stimulating. In Edward Albert’s own little room however there was a more definite appeal to his religious susceptibilities. There was a coloured picture of his Redeemer surrounded by a great number of children, with the inscription, “Suffer little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” For some reason Edward Albert could not identify himself with any of these roseate innocents. Severally and collectively he hated them. The other religious subjects that adorned his apartment neither offended nor appealed to him. He just avoided looking at them. But one or two of the illuminated texts bothered him. “Thou God seest me,” in particular. He did not like that. He liked it less and less as he grew to boy’s estate.

It wasn’t fair, he felt. Was there nothing He couldn’t see? Could He see through bedclothes for example? And whatever you chanced to be doing? There was something indelicate about this relentless stare.

It was Edward Albert’s first encounter with Doubt. Never once did the faintest gleam of affection for the divinity, Father, Son or Holy Ghost, enter into his soul. He believed that this Watcher and Punisher brooded insanely over his world and that he had sent his Only Son just to put his helpless creatures still more in the wrong. That was what Edward Albert felt and believed. I make no comment; I am merely recording facts. Since God was Almighty and Relentless, you had to propitiate Him—safety first—and not think a thought of protest even in the darkness of your black little heart. No putting out your tongue at Him, No! (And a recording angel writing it all down! ) Edward Albert doubted but he never denied. Like most other Believers he managed to mitigate. He had an inspiration. “He can see you,” he argued. “But they can’t be looking at everybody and writing down about everybody all the time.”

That wasn’t an idea to tell other people. It was an idea to keep very much to oneself. If you talked about it too much you might suddenly attract His attention. Our young man put up that idea like a modest private parasol between himself and the Sun of Righteousness. And insensibly the skies clouded over so that presently he did not seem to need his parasol any more. God ceased to be a consuming fire.

We are not arguing here. I am simply recording indisputable facts: I am telling the story of one little boy, who grew up to be a hero as you shall hear, and I cannot help it if his story becomes for a moment the story of countless millions of other little souls. This is how Christians temper their faith and how they are able to behave as they do behave in spite of its stupendous imperatives.

VI. Advertised to Death

Edward Albert’s mother died when he was thirteen. The elderly doctor who attended her last illness certified that she died of “bronchitis.” It was a prevalent custom in those days to certify for bronchitis and probe no deeper into the matter. Doctors are a mentally overworked race, and in this matter of diagnosis they have their own epidemic and epidemic disorders. As a matter of fact she died, as a great number of people died in those days, of a surfeit of patent medicine advertisements.

Because in that golden age of freedom, security and opportunity in which our story opens, people enjoyed, among other enviable liberties, great liberty of salesmanship, and a number of enterprising business men, realising that a vast majority o their fellow-creatures suffered from internal pains and discomforts due to the consumption of well-advertised but unwholesome foods, to the unhygienic quality of their housing and employment, and to the survival at a low level of existence of multitudes of individuals who would have been far better dead, devoted themselves to their exploitation. This great uneasy majority constituted from the point of view of salesmanship a mass of consumers to be catered for with a view to profit, and to that these entrepreneurs vying with one another, set themselves with great energy.

The medical profession in those days worked almost, entirely for private gain and protected its privileges upon trade union principles; it combined very low standards of education and qualification, with a creditable insistence upon the honour and privilege of the individual practitioner. Doctors were disposed to’ stand by one another under criticism, in a post mortem or anything of that sort, when definitely unprofessional conduct did not .appear. Their methods of diagnosis were old-fashioned; good diagnosis was a matter of aptitude rather than training, and generally they preferred to diagnose a definite disease and bring it out fairly and squarely and cure it or kill, than tackle all those various and ill-defined states of malaise that would not yield to such forthright treatment. They waved these aside as fancifulness. Consequently there was a considerable irritation between doctors and patients; the doctor and his antiquated and incomprehensible prescriptions, his authoritative manners and his failure to enlist the intelligence of his patient such as it was, in the process of recovery, was distrusted even more than he deserved; and the way lay wide open for salesmanship, to flout his claim to be the sole dealer in the health of the community.

So in spite of him there had grown up a steadily expanding business of pills, aperients, tonics, sustaining foods, cures for every sort of twinge and pain, stimulants, purifiers. These new salesmen began perhaps crudely, but they steadily improved in their methods and reached an ever-widening clientele. Their advertisements became a more and more important item in newspaper finance. From early appeals to people who already had pains, their more and more competent methods instructed people how, when and where to have pains. The medical profession attempted warnings, published analyses of popular remedies, explained their ineffectiveness and their harmfulness, and so forth, but this now gigantic system of human enterprise had achieved the control of all the media of news distribution, and the doctors were quite unable to get their protests over to the public at large. Their pamphlets vanished from the bookstalls and got no “Press.” They said things to their patients, but they found their patients incredulous in the face of an enormous volume of skilled assertion.

This book is no picture of the Edwardian-Georgian age, but these simple circumstances have to be stated here if the reader, in this new and vivid world of adventure and disaster in which we live to-day, is to understand the way in which Mrs Richard Tewler did herself to death.

The newspapers began to look for Mrs Tewler in real earnest in the benign reign of King Edward the Seventh. Then it was that “Constant Reader”, in anticipation of Professor Crew, changed sex. In the old days when Richard was alive, Mrs Tewler hardly ever glanced at the paper. She took no interest in Politics or what men had considered to be news, and it was only when she discovered the existence of “Aunt Jane” and “Dorothy Wisdom” through such publications as the Mothers’ Vade-mecum, that she spread out her reading to the new daily Press, so different from the grey uneventful expanses of the old.

She began to read first about bargains and cosmetics, because, although no decent Christian woman paints her face or does anything of that sort, it might be possible to learn something about one’s appearance that did not involve that. Naturally her attention flowed over to the more intimate discussions beside them.

There was “that tired feeling.” She had it. But she did not realise what it meant for her until the salesmen told her. It meant the onset of anaemia and then pernicious anaemia. For that a certain blood mixture was admirable. She stocked that and forgot to note its effect because next she was being made conscious of a whole series of neuralgic pains.

They flitted about, pursued by nervous panaceas, and got to her head. There always had been times when she had had headaches, but never the. splitting headaches she realised after she had seen a picture of a mighty fist hammering nails into a head. It was liver pills she needed for that, and they were added to her medical menu.

Effervescent salts promised and failed to restore her to a giddy cheerfulness, because now she lay awake all night suffering from night starvation. That too could be met. Uric acid also got loose in her system and clamoured for further remedies. Her washstand carried an ever-increasing array of bottles, capsules, pills and powders.

Still the salesmen pursued her. It dawned upon her that she had sinus trouble and incipient arthritis, cancer in several places and osteomyelitis. She did all that could be done to anticipate and defeat these evils. She did not tell her doctor about the cancer, because the salesman assured her that would bring upon her the crowning horror of an operation. She could not face that. No operation. No!

She felt under-nourished, and, instead of taking wholesome food, she consumed a cup of feeble tea with a meaty flavour, that the salesmen assured her with vivid illustrations, had the strength of a whole ox in it. Never a newspaper dared to denounce this murderous lie. She swallowed the stuff, felt satisfied for half an hour or so, and then faded again. She picked herself up with a viciously drugged red wine because its salesmen assured her that all its profits went to the promotion of Christian Missions throughout the world.

Its advertisements were endorsed with signatures of venal divines of every persuasion. All religious organisations, as Shaw has been reminding us in his Major Barbara film, need funds, and all organisations that need funds can be bought A.M.D.G., and so ultimately the Lord’s work was done on the craving stomach and suffering frame of Mrs Tewler. Poor Mother Eve, from first to last thou and all thy seed have been the victims of the Salesman! For so it was we lost our paradise, when the first salesman sold thee his fruit and lingerie. He proffered his free sample, he guaranteed satisaction. And until selling shall cease from the earth—....

(Censor.)

She stood in her bedroom wearily taking her doses, hoping she had not forgotten anything, and listening to her ever more sinister internal noises. Then she would feel herself all over for growths and tumours. Often she felt quite hard ones.

She told everybody she could all about her sufferings, and Mr Myame called her “Our Dear Martyred Sister.” And he told her, all this will be returned to you a thousandfold, which possibly was not exactly what he intended to say. Some of the other members of the inner circle were fairly good at affliction, but none could produce anything to equal hers either in depth or variety. Mrs Humbelay one day described an artificial hernia to her, and remarked that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and Mrs Tewler said, “If it comes to that, my dear, I think I would rather die....”

But hernia she was mercifully spared. It did not come to that. The salesmen could make nothing out of artificial hernias.

She clang so desperately to life; because where would her Only One be without her? And it is to be noted that very little of this remedial struggle of hers extended to him. But that was because she was able to observe her own terrible symptoms, while, after one single experience with some tonic drops, nothing would induce Edward Albert to admit he had any symptoms at all. His demonstration of his extreme vitality on a later occasion included an attempt to stand on his head which was only partially successful and led to the breaking of a plate.

“You cannot be too careful”—she coughed from her chair—she was developing her pleurisy that day. “Doing that might lead to a rush of blood to the head and apoplexy. Promise me, whatever happens, you will never attempt that again.”

She had a spasm of pain. “He’s not much use, darling, but do you know I feel so queer that I think I ought to see Dr Gabbidash. If you’ll go round for him. He might at least give me a morphia injection.”

The good doctor did, and in the course of a week assisted her departure from this vale of trial and error in a soundly professional manner. For she really had pleurisy. She had brought herself down to a vulnerability that gave any old germs a fair chance with her. Their blitzkrieg was swift and successful.

During her final phase of medicated malaise Mrs Tewler made several wills, couched for the most part in a richly pious phraseology. The valid instrument left a number of trifling souvenirs to various friends, including a marked Bible and a silver-framed photograph for her dear friend Mrs Humbelay, and named Mr Myame as sole executor, trustee and guardian for her son until the dear child was twenty-one, exhorting the young man to trust and obey his guardian as a Father and more than a Father, a Guide and a Wise Dear Friend.

Edward Albert listened to these dispositions without an excessive display of emotion.

He looked at the lawyer and he looked at Mr Myame, He sat on the edge of his chair meagre and wary.

“I suppose it ’ad to be,” he said with resignation, He sucked his teeth for a moment.

“Who was that Mr Whittaker who sent that great wreath?” he asked. “What sort of relation is he to me?”

Neither of them could tell him.

Then he reflected, “I didn’t know Mother was nearly so bad as she was. No.... I suppose it ’ad to be.... That was—it was “—gulp—” a lovely wreath anyhow, She would have liked....”

And suddenly his white little face crumpled up and he was weeping.

“You have lost the Noblest and the very best of Mothers,” said Mr Myame. “That Sainted Brave Woman....”

Edward Albert had acquired a habit of never listening to what Mr Myame might be saying. He wiped his miserable sniffing face with the back of a dirty little hand. He was only beginning to realise what all this meant to him. Day or night she would never be there any more. Never. He wouldn’t go home to her presently and tell her things to his credit, true or false according to circumstances, and bask in the love she bore him. She wouldn’t be there. She wasn’t there. She’d gone!