You Can't Be Too Careful

I. The Hidden Hand

At thirteen our young Englishman was pale and undersized. Like his mother he was a trifle exopthalmic. His features were delicate and undistinguished and his bearing circumspect. Some more vigorous element in his heredity, however, struggled against the effects of his early restriction; he grew irregularly and inelegantly to average proportions, and his profile became firmer as he got into his later teens. There was a repressed drive in him throughout his life—as we shall see. He did not actually cease growing until he was nearly thirty.

For some reason he never learnt either to whistle properly or throw hard. His mother may have checked early attempts at whistling, and so he developed a sort of hiss-whistle with his upper teeth well over the lower. And as for throwing, he was. ambidextrous, which in fact meant that he was not dexterous with either hand. He lobbed with his left hand and learnt belatedly to throw with his right. He could never throw very high or very far, and that was just as well, because an undetected astigmatism made his direction uncertain. In those days there was no examination of school children’s eyes; you had to put up with the eyes God had given you. So that he also jumped uncertainly and to the best of his ability avoided jumping.

His life had been so completely shielded from mental or physical harm that until he went to Mr Myame’s school for young gentlemen at the age of eleven and a half, he had no child associates whatever. But there he found school-fellows, and some of them were even permitted to invite him home to tea. He always had to assure his mother they were nice little boys before she allowed him to go. They had families, sisters and cousins, and his circle increased.

He became a boarder instead of a day boy in Mr Myame’s Commercial Academy when his mother died, and for a time he shared the bleak “Joseph Hart” dormitory, the larger one, with six other boys, which the ever-solicitous Mr Myame in list slippers might prowl through at any hour of the night.

And since Edward Albert had no home to go to, his first summer holidays were spent among the alarming circumstances of animal life at large and unashamed, in a Wiltshire farm belonging to Mr Myame’s brother-in-law. There were fields in which great cows grazed and stared at you, chewing slowly as they meditated your death, and there was not the slightest protection for the passer-by. There were horses, and once at sundown three of them started galumphing round a field most terrifyingly. Edward Albert dreamt about it afterwards. There were unmuzzled dogs. There was a lot of poultry with no sense of decency whatever. Awful! And you couldn’t help looking and you sort of knew and you sort of didn’t know. And you didn’t want anyone to see you were looking, either. There were ducks, but they weren’t so bad. There were geese that would come at you very alarmingly if you went near them, but then you needn’t go near them, and otherwise they were perfectly respectable. They disapproved, it seemed, of everybody. And there was Master Horace Budd, aged ten,, very sturdy and rosy, who was coming back to London to be a boarder, too, next quarter.

“I promised Mother not to hit you,” said Master Horry, “and I won’t. But if you want a fight—”

“I don’t want a fight,” said Edward Albert. “I don’t fight,”

“Not just a punching match?”

“No. I don’t like fighting.”

“I promised Mother. Why won’t you come and ride on the old horse like I do?”

“I don’t want to.”

“I didn’t promise anything about not setting Boxer on to you.”

“If you do anything to me,” said Edward Albert, “anything I don’t like, I’ll kill you. I’ll just kill you. I know away. See?”

This gave Horry pause. “Nobody’s talking of killing people,” he said.

“I am” said Edward Albert.

“Oh, come and feed the rabbits,” said Horry, and then after a pause for reflection. “You got a knife?”

Edward Albert whistled after his fashion for a moment or so. “I don’t do it that way,” he said. “I got a way of my own.”

He had a way of his own in his imagination. For behind his unobtrusive façade Edward Albert led a life of lurid reverie. He liked to be the still man who never spoke, the Secret Killer, the Avenger, the Hand of Doom. And he and Bert Bloxham, with the big fair cranium, and Nuts MacBryde of the warts, belonged to a secret society, the Hidden Hand of Camden Town. It had passwords and secret signs, and you were admitted by an Ordeal. You had to stand with your finger in a gas-jet for five seconds. It hurt no end, you smarted for days afterwards, and you could smell your flesh burning. But let it be recorded that Edward Albert stood up to the test. He licked his finger first, but Bert Bloxham, who hadn’t thought of that, made him wipe it dry.

The headquarters of the Hidden Hand of Camden Town were in the room over the disused stable behind Bert Bloxham’s aunt’s house. You went up to it by an almost vertical ladder. She was an extremely indifferent aunt, a heavy, silent woman in chapel, and with no trace of family resemblance to Bertie, and she never on any occasion ventured up that ladder. So the Hidden Hand had an admirable library of “bloods” stowed away there, and three black masks and three dark lanterns which stank of Brunswick Black when they were lit, an air-gun and a knuckle-duster, and there it planned a reign of terror that reached from King’s Cross to Primrose Hill. Little did the people of that region know how terrorised they were.

On dark winter evenings the Hidden Hand would prowl sometimes for as long as an hour, with their dark lanterns nestling hotly inside their jackets and their masks on, actually on, except when a policeman was spotted. Then “Nix and we dissemble.”

In this fashion these desperadoes just raised hell. They swore and used forbidden words—Nuts’ every other word was an oath—he thought nothing of saying “Godormighty”—and they had a pack of real cards, “the Devil’s picture-books”, and gambled with them at Beat your Neighbour out of doors and Grab and suchlike skin games for almost unlimited stakes. Afterwards Nuts learnt Map from a cousin. For some obscure reason they always played for dollars and generally wore their masks while doing so. They swore and spat. They did not play for cash, they gave chits and kept a record, and at one time Nuts owed Edward Albert over five thousand dollars and Bert half as much again. That was a pretty load to carry for boys still under thirteen. Since it was quite within the range of possibilities that they would be smelt over when they went home, they did not smoke. Nuts had tried chewing tobacco, using a partially-smoked cigarette he had picked up, but his reaction was so prompt and so extremely unpleasant for everyone concerned that the experiment was not repeated.

Such was the hidden life that flowed darkly beneath the fair surface of Edward Albert’s meek discretion.

His mother, remarking how often he went to tea with Bert Bloxham or the MacBrydes—though indeed he never went near the MacBrydes—suggested a return of hospitality. For a time he was disposed to resist this. He did not know what his mother would think of Nuts’ vocabulary if perchance his tongue was loosened, nor did he know what his fellow-toughs of the Hidden Hand might think of his home life. She pressed the proposal. “They’re regular chaps,” he said. All the more reason for knowing them. He stipulated for fruit cake and ice cream.

“Of course, darling,” said his mother.

“They may seem a bit rough,” he said.

“All boys are rough,” she said flatteringly.

She did them well. They both came looking morbidly clean, and for a while everyone was too busy feeding Tor any other sort of behaviour. They made noises, but good wholesome noises, and chiefly when they drank. “Thank you, Mam,” they said to all Mrs Tewler’s proposals, and for a time they hardly said anything else. Sighs of satisfaction marked the conclusion of the feast.

“I wish I had your appetites,” said Mrs Tewler.

And then came the crucial moment when Mrs Tewler said, “And now what shall we do?” But she knew just what they were going to do. And believe it or not, these devils incarnate, these gamblers who thought nothing of staking a hundred dollars on a single throw, these wicked toughs who clothed themselves with cursing as with a garment, became as little children again. The Hidden Hand played Snakes and Ladders and Race Game and said “Thank you for our luvlay tea, Mam,” just as though they really were the quite nice little boys Edward Albert had said they were.

Bert belched slightly as he said it, but Mother had not seemed to be aware of that.

II. The Cricket Match

The number of boys in Mr Myame’s school varied between nineteen and twenty-four, and yet Edward Albert got into the first eleven before he had been there two years, and played in his last year in the annual match against Bolter’s College. Before that match he had not liked cricket very much, but sifter it he was as thorough a cricket fan as every young Englishman ought to be.

Mr Myame’s school played cricket in Regent’s Park in the summer, but it did not play any game in the winter, because football made the boys muddy and parents objected, But Mr Myame was convinced that good sound open-air exercise was conducive to morality. He hated to think of boys “loafing about” and the menu of his prospectus included “compulsory games.” Boys should go tired to bed. It was possible to obtain caps, flannels, shoes and equipment generally from firms of school outfitters at advantageous wholesale prices, and even the most unworldly parents were gratified by the spectacle of their offspring apparently playing cricket in a socially acceptable manner. The underlying seriousness of the school was apparent in the choice of black and white for the school colours.

Contemplating this enlargement of his enterprise, Mr Myame, being aware of a certain athletic insufficiency in himself, added a “Games Master” to the staff, Mr Plipp, an excellent young married elementary teacher who was free on Wednesday afternoons and who was also prepared to regard scout marches and tracking on Primrose Hill as a compulsory game for the winter months.

Nothing remained to perfect this games side of the school except to arrange a few matches, and here Mr Myame was so fortunate as to fall in with the Principal of Bolter’s College who was watching his boys “practise”, while he wrestled with a similar problem. Bolter’s College was a small genteel private establishment in Highbury which catered mainly for the offspring of remote or hypothetical parents in the tropics; it had a Union Jack on its blazer pockets, its caps were red, white and blue, and its style of play did not seem to be hopelessly above the school standard. So an annual, no, the annual cricket match was arranged, and had been going on for several years before Edward Albert joined the school Generally Bolter’s won by producing lean, lithe and dusky “old boys” or alleged new additions to the staff who never reappeared. Nothing had been said about “old boys.” It seemed unkind to exclude them. Myame’s was a younger and smaller establishment without them.

They wanted Edward Albert to come up nearer and on the off side. Was there to be no longstop? Up there and closer was more dangerous. In the slips a ball can knock you over and stun you before you know where you are. Why not pretend to be sick or go home? And be jawed at after by Mr Myame? Instead of tea?

Edward Albert trotted up to his appointed place. The ritual of the game began. Middle? No—a little to the left. That’s right. Play!

The old boy batting at the wicket snicked the ball neatly for a boundary. It passed within a foot of Edward Albert. Six.

“Look alive there, Tewler,” said Mr Plipp, not too pleasantly.

Edward Albert neglected the game for a moment or so while he exchanged offensive grimaces with Nuts. Then a ball hit him,

It hit him so hard that for a moment he thought he saw two balls, one at his feet and one running away from him. The College batsmen were running. “Can you, Sir?”

cried the daemonic old boy. “Come on, Sir?” They were stealing a second run. “Now then, Tewler!” cried Mr Myame. “Oh! Look alive.”

Edward Albert scrabbled at his feet and secured a ball, and with all his soul and strength threw it at the wicket keeper. It missed him by about a yard and a half, and knocked the bails off the wicket. The bat of the long darkie slid over the creases, five seconds too late. Still Edward Albert did not realise his good fortune.

“Owzatsir?” Mr Myame was saying, and the Umpire answered “Out.”

“Well thrown in, Tewler!” said Mr Plipp. “Perfect! exactly what I wanted.”

Edward Albert grew an inch or so and forgot that he probably had a bump at the back of his head. “I fort it best to throw straight at the wicket, Sir,” he said.

“Exactly. Exactly.”

“You did quite right,” Mr Myame confirmed. “We shall make a cricketer of you yet, Tewler. Smartest thing you’ve done for a long time....”

The game was held up for a moment by cries of “Thank you, Sir, Thank you.” There was a ball about from an adjacent game, and this was the established way of demanding its return. There it was, quite close to the Umpire’s foot. (Then there had been a second ball! ) The Old Boy picked it up absent-mindedly and sent it soaring home, before retiring to the College outs to brood over his premature dismissal. He had counted on a long and glorious afternoon of free, loose hitting. He was replaced by a small boy who succumbed to the third of what were known as Mr Plipp’s “googlies”, a curious slow overarm delivery with great hypnotic power over the young.

“Owe-ver.”

And then came a terrific event. Mr Plipp told Edward Albert to bowl. He told him to bowl. He held the ball in his hand, looked at it, started, seemed to be struck by some strange idea, and then ordered Edward Albert to bowl.

Mr Plipp was a cricket strategist of the most elaborate type, but for him to tell Edward Albert to take the next over strained the faith of his following to near the breaking point. He instructed his pupil carefully in undertones. “This big chap,” he said, “is a slogger and used to good ordinary bowling. Well, give him some of those incalculable grounders of yours. See? Lob a bit if you like. Don’t mind if he swipes you out of bounds once or twice. I know what I’m doing.”

And, after looking at it again for another reflective moment, he handed the ball to Edward Albert. “Bowl to his leg side,” said Mr Plipp, “and vary the pace. I want him to hit.”

Fear and pride mingled in Edward Albert’s heart as he handled the ball. As he felt for its creases, he had a curious feeling of unfamiliarity. This ball was showing signs of wear, he thought.... But now to bowl, If he aimed about a yard or so to the right he might get the wicket. It often happened like that. He would do that. To begin with he would try one of his short sneakers. It pitched short and rolled slowly towards the wicket The giant, who seemed now ten feet high and broad in proportion, awaited its Doming with some hesitation. It was not the sort of ball he was accustomed to deal with. He wasn’t prepared for anything so feeble. He simply blocked the ball.

“Well bowled, Tewler,” cried Nuts derisively. Jealous? Yes, but next time...

Our hero resolved to vary his attack. He would send in a few very simple grounders to the giant’s leg. One fast and then a slow twister? Down there. Out of his reach, perhaps. The fast one first. Edward Albert put all his strength into it and alas! up went the ball in the air. Up, up, it went—a perfect Yorker. He’d slog it to—heaven! But the giant, expecting another lob, had been advancing to smite. This strange ball, high in the air, made him hesitate, and, hesitating, he was lost. He remembered what he had to do just half a second too late. He stepped across the pitch and hit hard to leg. Swish! Click! The leg bail dropped. Flop, went the ball into Mr Myame’s gloves. To Goliath’s astonishment, to Edward Albert’s astonishment, to everyone’s astonishment, the ball had got the leg stump. “Howzat, Umpire?” came Mr Myame’s astonished voice as he held up the ball.

“Out!” came the verdict.

“Oh, GorORMIGHTY!” cried Nuts out loud and unreproved. Butter-fingers had clean bowled Goliath. Clean bowled him, Sir!

The rest of the innings was inglorious. Two of the College kids made two runs, and there was a wide, and, strangely enough, Edward Albert was not asked to bowl again. The back of the defence was broken. Mr Plipp resumed his celebrated googlies and Mr Myame bowled three overs, and the last man was out.

The College had been disposed of for twenty-four, eighteen actual runs, a wide, three byes and two no-balls by Mr Myame overrunning the crease. The black and whites went in at last to a possible victory. This time they just might do it. Mr. Plipp displayed an unwonted disposition to slog, scored sixteen, and was caught out by Goliath at long on.

Mr Myame compiled a cautious five and was clean bowled by the lean and long Old Boy, who also gave four byes from his bowling. Edward Albert did not actually score a run, but the end of the innings left him in so that he “carried his bat “triumphantly” not out.” Nothing remained but the cheering. The school had won by six wickets, and Edward Albert was the hero of the day.

“A fine match,” said the Principal, shaking hands with Mr Myame.

Bert wanted to throw catches to some of the other chaps, but he found Mr Plipp had pocketed the ball. “No, you don’t want them to see you miss your catches,” said Mr Plipp, with unusual snappiness.

The College retired in good order, discussing the glorious uncertainties of the game, and the victorious school fell into column with the annual match tea (currant bread and jam, day-boys invited), enlivening its outlook.

As they left the park a young man in flannels came hurrying after Mr Myame. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m afraid you’ve been playing most of the time with the wrong ball. He produced a nice new red match ball as he spoke, and handed it to the Headmaster.

“Hm,” said Mr Myame gravely. “That certainly has a resemblance to our ball, but—”

He looked across at the departing College. It was far away and out of earshot. He turned a perplexed and heavy face to Mr Plipp. “Odd,” he said. Mr Plipp took the ball and immediately put it into his pocket, producing another with the greatest promptitude. “That is yours,” he said.

“That is ours,” said the young man. “It’s a Lillywhite, Yours is a Duke. I hope this won’t upset your game in any way. We didn’t notice at first.”

“I hit two boundaries,” said Mr Plipp. “The change may have occurred then. Just at the end of the game.”

“I think it occurred rather earlier,” said the young man,

“I really don’t know of any rule of the M.C.C. on the matter.”

“Nor do I,” said Mr Plipp.

Mr Myame reflected. There was a pause of several seconds and then he coughed and his hirsute adornments sprang to attention. “Let us assume,” he said, “that there has been at some time in this game a temporary and beneficial substitution of one ball for another, then, the question arises, was this a deliberate and dishonest substitution of one ball for another, or was it due to some entirely innocent misapprehension? In the former case we have no right to our victory. No, Sir. None whatever. We have to call this match off as—” he sought for an appropriate phrase—“a non sequitur. But if, on the other hand, the substitution by the player was pure and honest—and I happen to know this young Tewler as one of the most earnest young Christians in my charge, a veritable Child of God, let alone that he was suffering from considerable pain at the time from die concussion of the ball, then I have no hesitation whatever in saying that not only are we entitled to this match, but that it was meant and intended that we should win this match. The stars in their courses, if one may put it humbly and reverently, were fighting for us, and it would be sheer ingratitude—ingratitude—to quibble over this victory.”

The young man regarded Mr Myame with a qualified admiration, “That doesn’t leave anything more to be said about it, Sir, does it?” he said, pitching up his recovered ball and catching it again.

“I’m all for that,” said Mr Plipp.

Mr Myame and Mr Plipp hurried to overtake their exultant crocodile in a thoughtful silence. There was no reason why they should not talk together, but strangely enough neither of them could think of anything suitable to say. Finally, at the house door Plipp said one word, “Tewler.”

“No question about it,” snapped Mr. Myame, closing the discussion.

Boys who had never had a civil word for Edward Albert Tewler before, could be heard in the dingy passage and schoolroom glorifying and elaborating his achievements—melting up to him!...

And that is how he became a cricket fan and began to follow the Tests and collect pictures of eminent cricketers and watch matches on every possible occasion. There was hardly any grade of match that he could not watch now with helpful comments. “Well run, Sir!”

“Keep ’em down, Sir!”

He did not play very much himself because you cannot be too careful about corrupting your style by inferior practice. But in his reveries, whistling after his fashion, he grew an immense beard—or wore a false beard perhaps—and made W.G. Grace seem a mere precursor to his own brighter and better batting. Or he returned triumphantly to the pavilion (all the other side out for nine), the super-Spofforth of his day, and there among the applauding throng were Bert and Nuts, realising with amazement that this demon bowler was merely another of the endless impersonations of silent Teddy Tewler, their intimate and yet mysterious pal.

And henceforth “playing cricket” became a stock phrase with him, that phrase which still means so much to every Englishman, and which no Englishman can ever quite explain. We have submitted a sample, plucked straight from Regent’s Park. “Do I play cricket with you or don’t I?” he would demand of the Hidden Hand.

A new confidence appeared in his bearing. Hitherto Bert had unquestionably been the leader, but not now. And one day young Horry Budd, who had butted our hero playfully in the back after ’his custom, received the surprise of his life. Hitherto Edward Albert had been indisposed to resent these little attentions. Now suddenly he turned. “Vad—a-nuff-o-vis,” said Edward Albert thickly.

He smacked Horry’s face with extreme viciousness, and smacked again with all his strength. He overwhelmed Horry with surprise and dismay. Horry was a puncher, and face-smacking was outside his imagination. He had never smacked a face in his life. He howled aloud. The red marks remained for days.

“Nuffin to what I’ll do to you, if I have any more of your cheek,” said Edward Albert.

III. Metamorphosis of Man

So the child Edward Albert passed on through boyhood, and approached that peculiar reconstruction in the human life-cycle known as adolescence.

“Peculiar”, like every other word in this conscientious narrative, is written with deliberation. It is a metamorphosis. The change is indeed not so wide as it is between tadpole and frog, but it is much more marked in man, my zoologist friends tell me, than in most others of the land animals about us. Your cat, for example, does not undergo anything like the same transformation. It does not suddenly grow hair in unexpected places, change its miaow to a leonine roar, lose its teeth, and get a new set, become spotty and gawky with chemical and nervous uncertainty. Your kitten grows into a cat, “but gradually and gracefully, it is a specialised and completed creature from the moment it opens its eyes on the world, and it has no metamorphosis at all. The human animal has, and Edward Albert, following the la\v of our species, metamorphosed.

Perhaps it is a new idea to you that man undergoes a ^metamorphosis much more after the fashion of a frog than do most other land animals. But it, is not my fault that you do not know that. I have done my feeble utmost to help in saving you and our world from the dismal mess of antiquated misconception and misrepresentation, self-satisfaction and blank ignorance in which we wallow so tragically to-day. I have fought the academic classical tradition tooth and nail. If the idea of a metamorphosis is a new one to you, you have only those wretched impostors who pretended to educate you to blame. If you find anything perplexing and unusual in what is written here, here and in the first Chapter of Book the Third, ahead of you, it is due to their default. A few of is who have had the good fortune to get some real education have tried to supplement your possible deficiencies We made you and we have tried in vain to force into school and college use, a group of encyclopaedic books of which The Science of Life is the one most relevant here. You can get it now in a single volume brought up to the date of 1938. You ought really to read it all, because you cannot begin to understand our world or face the present gigantic challenges of life without it.

But for our present purposes all I would direct you to consult is a diagram and the accompanying text taken from an article in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society by Dr W.G. Gregory. You will find it put as an Appendix at the end of this book. If you look at that and the one that precedes it, condensing what is known about the evolution of the Placental Mammals, you will grasp what I am saying here about a human metamorphosis and what I shall have to say further in Book the Third, about the extreme primitiveness of the Hominida in the scale of being. Because otherwise you will not realise the extreme primitiveness of Edward Albert in the scale of being. You can check back Dr Gregory in your Encyclopaedia in the articles Primates and Tarsias. You can supplement Dr Gregory if you like by inspecting a little lemuroid creature, the Spectral Tarsier, Tarsier Spectrum, in any Zoological Garden or collection of stuffed animals. It is an inhabitant of Malaya, and it has something dimly suggestive of our Edward Albert in its look and movements, a small, tailed, nocturnal, furry and rather scared Edward Albert. One of its fossil Eocene cousins, by the by, was so human in its bones that it was christened Tetonius homunculus, the primordial Little Man (Strubei). It is much nearer to your actual ancestor than the black magnificent gorilla, that formidable gentleman. It was close to our ancestor and the ancestors of all the monkeys and apes, but while they branched off from our family tree on a line of their own, from which there is no returning, becoming our cousins in various degrees, the Tarsier sub-order, came right on to the Hominids and us.

And after that much information, which ought to be totally unnecessary^ you may begin to realise why I shall presently be urging you to change the name of the species Homo sapiens to the more modest one of Homo Tewler. I shall be sorry if it causes you some trouble to follow me in this. I shall not blame you, but I must condole with you. You are the innocent victim of your upbringing. None of this is digression. I promised to write about Tewler and I write about Tewler now. I have to put him in his place in the universe. Which we share. I will tell, you everything I know about Tewler, I will dissect and demonstrate on the creature, but for the few years of life that remain to me, I will be damned if I write a single propitiatory or mitigated line about our ancestry to please all the Tewlers in the world. We are a lowly and infantile breed, There is hardly a quadruped in the Zoo that is not more modified, evolved, distinguished and finished than ourselves. Go and look at the grace and finality of a tiger for example, or a gazelle, or a seal...

As his metamorphosis proceeded, two new sets of problems invaded Edward Albert’s mind. It was borne in upon him that he had to do certain things called earning a living, and simultaneously that complex of impulses, taboos, terrors and repressions, that onset of sex and sex education, which his mother had apprehended so anxiously, gathered about him and closed in upon him. Let us take the simpler issue first.

IV. Feudal Strain?

“Earning a living.” That phrase began to have a dim menace for him some time before his mother died.

“You’ll have to earn your living, you know, when I’m gone,” his mother would say when he was getting her to do his homework for him. Mixing up the idea of lessons, sufficiently disagreeable in themselves when you still had mother to help you, with earning a living when her help would be no longer available, didn’t make the prospect more palatable. He averted his attention from it as long as he could.

George Orwell, an English Trotskyist writer with enormous feet, who fought very valiantly in Spain, recently made a study of the literature consumed by the English and American young at the close of their tadpole days. He produced generalisations about it, which I have partially forgotten, and so I do not think it is any breach of the undertaking I have made to keep ideas completely out of this book, if I refer to one observation of his that has stuck in my mind, because it will be very helpful in framing the adolescence of Edward Albert in its proper setting,

His point was that, by the showing of this literature, in matters of sex and business alike, either the young American is precocious or the young Briton is retarded. That retardation is not altogether disadvantageous. Because of the postponement of those adult preoccupations the British boys and girls get on with their school work with easier minds, and are found to be sounder and further advanced in their schooling than Americans of the same age. This cannot be due to any profound difference in race. The blood of the American population is hardly more mongrelised than the British. Then why?

I was reflecting on this problem; albeit sternly resolved to put nothing about it into this story, but just for my own amusement, when it dawned upon me that though Edward Albert was born in the back streets of Camden Town in that melting-pot of humanity called London, both his mother and his father had lived, they and their progenitors, in a feudal world, in a feudal world from whose remote interferences the thirteen colonies escaped, finally and emphatically, a century and a half ago. What would seem strange about him to an American reader is just that difference. Feudal! I had the clue. Generalisations evaporate at this word and fact resumes its sway.

Mrs Tewler’s mother was born in the shires, under the shadow of a lord of the manor, and she was brought up, so to speak, bone-feudal. The Baptist connection was due to the fact that Dickybird was a Backslider from the Particular Baptists of Camden Town. His grandfather had found religion there, but Dickybird had never become a hall member by immersion, and the couple would probably have drifted back to the Anglican Communion if it had not been for his conspicuous inability to “find his place” in his prayer book. She was ashamed of him. The Baptists were easier.

Except for that one touch of dissent, Richard Tewler’s tradition was just as feudal as his wife’s. He was a Cockney craftsman of the fourth generation, and his Firm had been Royal Warrant Holders since Royal Warrant Holding began. The Royal Arms and “By Appointment to his Majesty,” headed their bills. His grandfather and his father had both been with Colebrook and Mahogany all their lives, and they would as soon have thought of leaving the Firm, as the Firm would have thought of dismissing them. Colebrook and Mahogany pensioned off their old hands, helped them with their domestic difficulties, took an interest in their children, as a matter of course.

Now this feudalism which ramifies to this day through the British social structure and gives its literature and social habits and distinctions that peculiar affectation of high unspoken values which so baffles and irritates Americans, was the underlying cause why our hero, instead of rushing forward, like a young American or a young Jew or a young barbarian, to embrace and wallow in his adolescence, advanced upon it, so to speak back foremost, pretending as far as possible to himself and the world at large that it really wasn’t there, and that it was not of the slightest consequence even if it was.

V. Terrifying Enterprise

Unrestrained youngsters think and talk of getting on in the world. Young Buffin Burleybank, who came into the school as a day boy for one short term until there was a vacancy for him at Mottiscombe, lived in an acquisitive home atmosphere where making money was openly discussed and glorified. He had wonderful stories of “young Harmsworth” and “old Newnes.” Young Harmsworth had lived just round the corner, so to speak, in Camden Town, and his father was an unsuccessful barrister who used to speak in the Camden Town Mock Parliament. And the youngster had borrowed a bit of money somehow, started something called Answers, started something else called Comic Cuts, and now was worth a cool million. Still young and worth a cool million. And Newnes had been just a little obscure country chemist until he read a bit out of a paper and said to his wife, “I call that a regular Tit Bit.” And then came the great idea, why not have a magazine filled up entirely with Tit Bits, with unconsidered trifles picked up here there and everywhere? And he put a bit of capital into it and here he was ’normously rich. ’Normously rich. “Why! he owns pretty nearly every funicular in the world!”

“What’s a funicular?” asked Edward Albert.

“My father says he does, anyhow,” said Buffin, evading the question. “What I’m going to do is, go in for cars. Yes, cars. Put my shirt on them. These motor cars are going big. They cost a lot to make and they’re always going to cost a lot to make. You got to have skilled exact workmen, my father says, and those you can’t get cheap. Nohow. So if the demand grows the price will go up. See? They’ve got cars now about as cheap first-hand as ever they’re going to be, and what people like doctors and commercial travellers and middle-class people will get will be anything from shop-soiled to tenth-hand. Well, that’s a business for you. Eh? Growing and growing. You can buy ’em, do ’em up as good as new, sell ’em hire purchase, hire ’em out—In a few years only dukes and earls and millionaires will have the slick new cars. There won’t be one car in ten on the road new. Not one in ten.”

“You don’t think they might somehow make reely cheap cars?” speculated Edward Albert.

“They’ve tried it, in America. My father knows all about that. There’s a man named Henry Ford and his cars—why they’re a joke! They rattle. They’re ugly as sin. They fall to pieces. He makes jokes about ’em himself. Then there’s these steam cars they have. Kettles on wheels. They blow out in a high wind. My father saw one of them blown out the other day. No. The car for a man of ordinary means is going to be the second-hand, third-hand, fourth-hand, high grade car, done-up and carefully renewed. There’s lots of cars on the road now that will still be on the road in twenty-five years’ time. And that’s where little Buffin Burleybank means to come in. That’s where we open the oyster. You watch me. Go to Buffin Burleybank for a car. Get his advice. See his selection. His ’normous selection. A Car for Everyman. There’s wonderful twists and turns in it. There’s such things as vintage years for cars, my father says. J’ever think of that?”

“What’s a vintage year?” asked Edward Albert.

“My father says they’ll buy ’em by their dates,” said Buffin, overriding the question. “It’s a great game. You got to watch out for everything. You got to keep your eyes skinned.”

And excited by this home-grown faith in his business ability, he actually started a scheme of his own for buying and selling bicycles right there in the school, that even impressed Mr Myame. If you bought a single bicycle you were the public and you had to pay full price; the dealer was bound by his contract with the wholesaler not to undersell. But suppose a few of you got together and made yourselves a firm and had an address and business notepaper all proper, then you could order half a dozen machines at trade rates and get them—Buffin was a little vague—twenty-five, thirty-five per cent off. Which meant, said Buffin, calculating rapidly, you get six at the price of four. “Practically,” said Buffin, seeing Mr Myame was checking his figures slowly but earnestly. For he talked the idea out to Mr Myame after school one day, and Mr Myame was interested and bent his countenance towards him and seemed to half believe in him. So it was that a firm named B. Burleybank and Co. came into actual being in Camden Town. It had the use of a small newsagent’s shop for its address, and by advance payments by Mr Myame and Nuts MacBryde and a friendly advance and an order from Burleybank père, who wanted to give the boy a bit of experience as well as a birthday present of a bicycle, the necessary capital was assembled and six shining bicycles were procured and stored, after a brief altercation, in the newsagent’s back yard.

“And now,” said our young entrepreneur, after handing out his three cost price bicycles to his three associates, “I’ve only got to sell the other three at the market rate and I stand in to make....”

There were complications in the reckoning; the stationery and so forth had to be paid for. And there was a difficulty he had not anticipated in finding just the particular people in Camden Town who were disposed to buy a bicycle in a hurry at the market rate. He persuaded the newsagent to put one of the unsold machines into the shop, and marked it at a ten per cent reduction as “A bargain. Slightly shop-soiled”, but after a couple of days the newsagent insisted upon its removal because customers coming in for papers and cigarettes barked their shins against the treadle and swore something dreadful.

Buffin became almost wistful in his inquiries, “You don’t happen to know anyone who wants a brand new bicycle in splendid condition at very little over cost price?” He went about reading the faces of passers-by for the bicycle-buying look. Intimations of a transitory failure, of a lesson that would finally redound to his credit, came into his speeches. “It’s not such a good thing as I thought. This. I started undercapitalised. If it wasn’t for having to go to Mottiscombe I’d risk it now. I’d ask for three months’ credit on twelve more bicycles, twelve, mind you, hire a shop-window and make a splash. And when the credit was up I’d pay upon what I’d sold and have credit extended for more. They’d do it if I talked to them. I’m getting the hang of it.... Well, let me tell you a day will come when all you timid snipe will remember how Buffin bought his first experience for forty pounds—maybe it will come to that, s’much as that—bought it for forty pounds and sold it for a million.”

“And suppose ’e doesn’t sell his bicycles,” said Edward Albert, whistling after his fashion. “Suppose they don’t pay him at Mottiscombe. Nice ’ole ’e’ll be in.”

Which indeed was precisely what happened. Buffin went off to Mottiscombe and never more did the star of the Burleybanks rise above Edward Albert’s horizon. Anything may have happened to them except success. Maybe Burleybank and Son went in too deep for second-hand cars before they heard of the use of gauges in mass production.

Edward Albert watched this burst of enterprise with envious disapproval when, first of all, he felt it might succeed, and then with that “told you so” feeling which is one of our subtler pleasures in this vale of tears.

But Mr Myame’s transitory appreciation of Buffin’s cleverness wounded our hero profoundly. There was an element of worldliness about it. He had expected more other-worldliness from Mr Myame. He anyhow had got out of it very well, he and Nuts.... It set one thinking.

VI. First Steps in French

The feudal framework of Edward Albert’s ideas would admit of no gainful enterprises of this kind whatever; His disposition was to do nothing of any sort anywhere until he was told. Quite time enough then,

“Earning a living” meant for him finding a “place”, a “situation”, both definitely sessile words. You ceased to float dangerously along the stream of life at the very earliest opportunity and struck root. You found where you could get the best pay for the least work—if possible with fixed rises and a pension scheme—and you settled down, trusting, admiring, but at the same time avoiding the humiliating company of your betters as much as possible. You got a nice little household of your own—but of that later. You started a “hobby” to amuse you in your spare time, you watched cricket and played golf, and so backed slowly towards the grave in which you were to bury whatever talent you had ever possessed. Respectful but irresponsible dependence; “ordering yourself lowly and reverently to all your betters”, as the dear old catechism puts it; that was the feudal idea.

Before his mother’s death, Edward Albert had been induced to contemplate the problem of his social anchorage so far as to listen to a suggestion made by one of her friends that a Gas Works Clerk was one of the soundest possible positions to which a modest young Believer might aspire. To qualify for such a place in the world, he heard the lady say it was best to go twice a week to the evening classes of the Imperial College of Commercial Science for their Course of Training in Business Methods. They issued certificates of proficiency in all the clerkly arts, précis and book-keeping by single and double entry, commercial arithmetic, mensuration, long hand and shorthand. Elementary French—not French but Elementary French, whatever that may mean. This training was specially adapted to turning a crude human being into a Gas Works Clerk, and indeed she knew as a fact that the gas works people came to the College and accepted its certificates unquestioningly. The College, according to its copious prospectus, engaged in many other activities, the Lower Division Civil Service, London Matriculation and so on, but it was the Gas Works Clerk, one particular case she had known, that had seized upon the informant’s imagination. He was such a nice young man.

Edward Albert listened carelessly at first and then attentively, and reflected. The College was situated in Kentish Town; its hoarding made a brave show, and what he saw there was not so much the prospect of gumming himself down firmly as a Gas Works Clerk, as of going in the evening, unwatched and uncontrolled, through the magic of the lit streets to the college. One could start early and arrive late; he was already an adept in such intercalary freedoms. He had still much of the lingering levity of boyhood and the Hidden Hand in his make-up.

Then he would be able to loiter on his way outside the glittering temptations of the cinema theatre. He could stop and see and read everything there was to be read and seen, contemplate the lively “stills”, wondering. He could watch people going in. He wouldn’t go in. That would be wrong. Bat there was no harm in asking what it would cost to go in. What would you see? And if after all, someday he did go in. It would be a sin of course, a dreadful sin, disobedience, deceit, all that. You might be run over on your way home and go straight to hell with all your sin upon you....

But suppose you weren’t run over! Lovely ladies, quite close up, kissing. Fellers carrying them off on their saddles. Shooting. Throwing knives. What harm would it be to see it once? Those were the days of the early Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, Mack Sennett; and dear Mary Pickford as “Little Pal” was dawning on a world that has always loved her. Magically silent they were, with a stirring piano accompaniment. Through those forbidden doors you could hear the music; you could get glimpses....

Of course he would repent very bitterly before he went to bed—for one cannot be too careful—and pray God to preserve him, and promise never to do it again. God was pretty good at forgiving anyhow if you set about it in the right way. Seventy times seven and all that. “ ’Ave mercy on me, a miserable sinner, God; ’ave mercy on me. I was led away. I was tempted.”

He felt he could get away with it. Those evening classes would be like a great door opening upon unknown mysteries and freedoms. You might stay out until after ten!

So that when the project was brought before Mr Myame, there was a very considerable discussion before it was deferred.

“I am all for it,” said Mr Myame, “in due course. When he is ripe for it. But that is not yet. You see, at times and in some subjects he will not exert himself. I have had to note that in his reports. His ability, I maintain, is considerable, but until he makes more progress in his Elementary French, in his Arithmetic, in his dictation and parsing and handwriting—Look at those inky fingers now, Mrs Tewler! Is he ready yet to benefit by a Commercial College?”

Edward Albert felt a spasm of hatred for Mr Myame.

“Of course, p’raps they teach you better in the College,” said Edward Albert, and then, mitigating the blow; “Faster like.”

“There’s no Royal Road to Learning,” said Mr Myame. “No. ‘Thorough’, has always been my motto. Like the great Earl Strafford. So let us go down to the foundations, the Elements. What is the French, Tewler, for ‘the’?”

That was easy. “Ler Lar Lay,” sang Edward Albert.

“Elementary French,” said Mr Myame, “that is all he will ever have to study. Advanced French has an amount of innuendo in it.... I don’t admire it. I hope he will never be able to read French books or go on one of those trips they advertise nowadays to Boulogne or Paris. French literature even at its best is tainted by a curious continental flavour. There is something un-English about it. All that is worth while in it has been translated and suitably expurgated. Or much of it could not be published here. But let us get on with our little examination. Tell me again, Tewler, what is the French for ‘the’—in the singular.”

“Masculine, Ler; feminine, Lar.”

“And neuter, dear?” said Mrs Tewler encouragingly.

Mr Myame smiled gravely. “I am afraid there is no neuter in French. None whatever. ‘Lay’, the third word you heard, is simply the plural.

“The French language brings sex into everything,” Mr Myame proceeded to explain. “That is its nature. Everything is ‘il’ or ‘elle’. ‘Il’ is he and ‘elle’ is she. Nothing is neuter in French—nothing.”

“Extraordinary!” said Mrs Tewler.

“A table, oone table, is feminine, believe it or not. Oone shays, feminine also, is a chair. But a knife, oon canif, is masculine. Oon, you observe, not Oone. You notice the difference, masculine and female.”

“A male knife! A female chair! It makes me feel—quite uncomfortable,” said Mrs Tewler. “Why do they do it?”

“There it is. And now, Tewler, how do you say ‘the father and the mother’?”

“Le père ate la mère.”

“Good. Very good. And now for the plural.”

Gently but firmly Mr Myame led him on from this first reassuring stage to more difficult combinations. Various relations, an aunt, an uncle, a nephew, various objects, apples, books, gardens, houses, encumbered the mind; ownership, Mong and mar and note, complicated their relationship. By the time they got to “To the books of the aunt of the gardener of our house,” Edward Albert had lost his head completely. He was guessing and floundering. Mr Myame corrected him and tangled him up almost caressingly.

“You see,” said Mr Myame, “he has it in a sort of way, but he is unsound. He is not yet Thorough. The grounding is loose because so far he has not given his mind to it. Until he has all that firm and clear and hard as a rock, it would be a mere waste of money to send him on to the College....”

VII. Mr Myame Is Uneasy

Jim Whittaker had sent his large expensive wreath to Mrs Tewler’s funeral in accordance with the feudal traditions of Colebrook and Mahogany, and at the same time he had recalled with surprise that there must be some family or something that had never been looked up and looked over by the Firm. There was no need for anyone who had inherited Richard Tewler’s dexterity of hand and solicitude of manner to go wandering beyond its range. Mr Whittaker had made a memorandum on a bit of paper,

“Tewler boy query”, but it had slipped under some other papers and he had forgotten it under the pressure of the sale of the great Borgman collection. It was only some six months later that the scrap of paper turned up to recall him to his obligation, “God bless my Heart and Liver,” said Mr Jim.

“I might have lost sight of him!”

So one morning Mr Myame beetled over Edward Albert for some moments and then said: “Tewler. A word with you in my study.”

“What’s he found out now?” thought Edward Albert, for plainly there was trouble in the air.

“Siddown,” said Mr Myame, and became hairily and darkly interrogative with his head on one side. He trifled with various objects on his table and began rather slowly.

“I had ah—a visitant—so to speak, this morning. An inquirer. Who wanted to know, to put it briefly, everything he could possibly know about you. He wanted to know how old you are, what your abilities are, your prospects, what you hoped to do in the world.” (“ ‘Strordinary!” interjected Edward Albert.)” Among other things he asked who paid your school fees? I told him that, as your guardian, I did. I asked him by what authority he was making these—these investigations. He said on behalf of a Mr James Whittaker, who carries on a china and glass business under the alias—or shall we say? the pseudonym—of Colebrook and Mahogany. It seems your father worked for him—or them—whichever one ought to say. Do you know anything about this?”

“Why, it was ’im sent that great wreath at mother’s funeral!” said Edward Albert.

“I remember. A really extravagant wreath. Yes. It was that person. Now why should he suddenly want to know all these things?”

“Was it ’im?” asked Edward Albert.

“No. It was some sort of agent. Never mind. Have you by any chance written to this Mr Whittaker?”

“I ’adn’t got ’is address.”

Mr Myame regarded Edward Albert with a look of intense penetration. “Or you might have done so?”

“Jest to thank ’im for that wreath of ’is.”

Mr Myame dismissed some obscure suspicion. “Well, he seems to think he is entitled to know all about you. I would like to know how far he is. Your dear good mother made me your guardian. She was a sweet pure precious soul and your religious and moral welfare was her first thought and her last. She feared for you. Perhaps it was that very Mr James Whittaker with his pseudonyms and misrepresentation! that she feared. And if he wanted to communicate with you why should he resort to one of those Private Inquiry Agencies? Why should a Private Inquiry Agent come asking all sorts of questions about the conduct of my school?”

“I’ve read advertisements somewhere. ‘Does it take all that time shopping? Inquiries as to character. Missing relatives traced’. D’you think perhaps this Mr Whittaker is some sort of relation? Maybe he wasn’t thinking anything about the school. Didn’t mean any harm like. He’d just lost me and wanted to find me.”

“If he is a relation, then it is manifest your dear Mother thought he was not the sort of relation that would do you any good. This is all I wanted to ask you, Edward.”

The scrutiny intensified.

“You did not communicate your whereabouts to this Mr Whittaker—I believe that—and I would like you to give me your promise on your word of honour that you will not do anything of the sort. Except with my knowledge and consent.”

“I’d like to thank him for that lovely wreath, Sir. I think my mother would have appreciated that wreath.”

“I am not so sure, Edward. In this matter I ask you to be guided by me. As your dear mother wished. I might perhaps send him a message on your behalf.”

It was plain to Edward Albert’s cautious mind that the less he committed himself to Mr Myame and the sooner he found out what this Mr Whittaker was up to, the better.

“You know best, Sir,” he said. “Of course if he goes about pretending to be Colebrook and Mahogany, it certainly can’t be right....”

Mr Myame did not challenge the name of the firm. Good!

“I can rely on you, Edward?”

“Certainly, Sir.” And with that Edward Albert escaped and wrote down the name of Colebrook and Mahogany there and then on a scrap of paper.

In many ways Buffin Burleybank had enlarged Edward Albert’s knowledge of the dodges and expedients of life. He had learnt that there were things called Trade Directories. There was one, he discovered, in that accommodating newsagent’s shop. It was an old one, but no Trade Directory was half as old as the firm of Colebrook and Mahogany, Royal Warrant Holders, of North Lonsdale Street. And so Edward Albert, having been sent on a mission to Godberry’s, the school-furnishers in Oxford Street, to inquire if they dealt in second-hand desks and if so, would they give him a list of any bargains they had on offer, successfully lost his way and was presently contemplating for the first time the wonder and beauty of Colebrook and Mahogany’s magnificent windows. There you had the most wonderful china elephants, great blue vases with pictures of delightful scenery, white china statuary, gigantic bowls, lovely half-naked gods and goddesses of shining porcelain, dinner services for kings, decanters and glass beyond description.

He allowed his imagination to play loose with fantastic possibilities. He was related to this man who, for some mysterious purpose, ran this mighty and lovely business in the name of Colebrook and Mahogany. What was he trying to conceal by this? Some relationship? And what, if presently everything was brought to light, would that hidden relationship turn out to be? Edward Albert skipped a vast complication of possibilities, just as he skipped the plot stuff in the stories he read. He landed precisely where he wanted to land for the purpose of reverie. He was the long-lost rightful heir and this man, either out of affection or remorse, or just no reason at all, was going to do him justice.

This place must be worth fousands of pounds, fousands and fousands and fousands of pounds...

He could say to all sorts of people: “I came into some money. I came into—”

“Forty, fifty ’undred fousand? Well, fifty, say?”

He would say it to Mr Myame. He would walk into the classroom when all the school was present. He could come in late for prayers. “Sorry to be late, but I’ve had important news, Sir. ’Fraid I’ll have to be leaving you. You see I came into fifty fousand pounds and I been put down for Eton and ’Arrow and Oxford and Cambridge, leastways as soon as there’s a vacancy anywhere. I’ll be looking in on you’ one of these days when I’m seeing the match at Lord’s. Maybe I’ll be in the match. If so”—here we turn to the school—“I hope I’ll be able to get all of you chaps tickets for the Pavilion....” Make ’em sit up, that will. Or Buffin Burleybanks. “Where’d’you get that ’at?” Buffin would say.

“I lef old Myame’s for Eton,” Edward Albert would answer.

“What sort of school is Mottiscombe?”

Reluctantly he turned away from the great windows and, still dreaming and whistling softly to himself, pursued his errand to Messrs Godberry’s and so home to school again.

“You’ve been a long time,” said Mr Myame, faintly suspicious.

“I lost my way a bit,” said Edward Albert. “I arst a man who told me wrong.”

And now, how to get past the vigilance of Mr Myame to this opulent and mysterious friend behind that tremendous

VIII. Snares for Mr Myame

The letter composed by Edward Albert was coloured in its phraseology by the beginnings of instruction in commercial correspondence and perhaps also by the Home Letter with which the school sessions terminated. It ran as follows:

Mr Jim Whittaker re-read this letter for the sixth time and then handed it to his friend Sir Rumbold Hooper, the well-known patent specialist, the omniscient solicitor, Old Artful, the friend of man and woman, gallant but discreet. They were sitting together in a warm corner of the Reform Club Smoking Room after lunch. They were consuming excellent but deleterious white port—and they realised themselves in a glow of tawny gold. They knew almost too certainly that they were wise and worthy men.

“Document One,” said Mr James Whittaker....” And now for Document Two.... It’s illuminating, isn’t it? And here is what Keyhole and Sludge report. It seems to me that the worthy Myame is a frightened, bad-tempered man. What’s upset him? But read it....”

Document Two ran as follows:

“That hired investigator seems to have put him through a bit of a grilling, and he seems to have answered a lot of questions he needn’t have done, before he realised what he was doing. Ah! here’s the young sleuth’s report. Quite an intelligent report too. Keyhole and Sludge—I know a thing or two about Keyhole and Sludge. It must be quite a change for them to be fishing in clean water. So Chadband is guardian and trustee and practically everything. He seems to be in a pretty strong position,”

“Chadband? I should have thought it was Squeers we had to deal with.”

“What a fellow Dickens was!” said Mr Jim Whittaker.

“How he knew his English! Bleak House is as complete and deadly a picture of England as we shall ever get. The types, the temperaments, the Tite Barnacles and all the rest of them. Nobody can touch him! How he poured it out! Mixed with mud. With a lot of mud. Like Shakespeare. Like everything English.” (“Dostoyevsky, for example,” whispered Hooper unheeded, “or Balzac.”) “And the public he wrote for! He had to tell them when to laugh and when to cry. And he couldn’t bear not to have ’em all chuckling and sniffing with him. All the same he knew the English mixture. How completely he knew it! No wonder the highbrows hate him! Micawber, Chadband, Horace Skimpole, Mrs Jellaby, Squeers. There isn’t an Englishman alive who doesn’t correspond to some character or other of his—or some combination of them. Not one. How he laced it all together from Tulkinghorn to that poor little wretch ‘Jo’! Marvellous!”

Sir Rumbold reflected. “I never had your obsession with Dickens. Still—he got over a vast breadth of canvas, I admit. When did you read Bleak House last, Whittaker?”

“I read it and re-read it when I was at Cambridge. No!—at Winchester.”

“Don’t read it again—ever. There’s a time in a young man’s life for reading Dickens—and a time to stop reading Dickens.”

“I could read Pickwick now with the same enjoyment—”

“You don’t.”

“I tell you—”

“Don’t. It won’t be true, Whittaker. You’ll think it is true and you’ll get irritated if I throw doubts. Why cannot you be moderate, Whittaker? What a gift you have for unqualified enthusiasms! You over-do everything, unless you forget to do anything about it. Shakespeare isn’t all good. You’d die rather than confess it. If you had to choose two books for a desert island, you’d choose the Bible—and Shakespeare. You say that at once. I wouldn’t. I know them too well. If there was a third book allowed, you’d say Dickens....”

“This literary talk is all very well,” said Whittaker. “But where does it get us?”

“Who began it?”

“Have it your own way. But what concerns me now is this problem of Squeers-Chadband. What are we to do about him?”

“It’s poor ‘Jo’ out of Tom’s All Alone we have to consider,” said Sir Rumbold. “Do you remember poor Jo? He died very beautifully but rather incredibly repeating the Lord’s Prayer.”

“I remember Jo all right. But what I can do for him, I don’t know. His letter is a shriek for help, but Squeers-Chadband seems to have got him tied up body and soul, all ready to devour.”

“You think?”

“Should I consult you if I didn’t?”

“Another little port won’t do us any harm....”

“Well now, what standing have we? Whatever little pile of savings Ma Tewler left is completely in his hands until the kid is twenty-one, and, as the report points out, there is nothing to prevent him paying not only interest but principal into his own account as school and tuition fees, and transferring investments and so forth and so on. He seems to be launching out and enlarging his school. What’s to prevent him buying our little misery a partnership in his own school? He can break him down to a junior partner, and make a sort of unpaid assistant of him. Something that dropped from him, the report says, seems to suggest that. What right has anyone to intervene?”

“We’ll see about that later. Why is Chadband in a funk about it at all? Why doesn’t he face us out?”

“That puzzles me.”

“Conscience makes cowards of us all, Whittaker. Our investigator makes a suggestion. That youngster ought to be at Scotland Yard, by the way, instead of defiling himself with Keyhole and Sludge. But you see he suggests here that Chadband began by keeping accounts for a month or so until he felt safe about something, and that since then he has just been swiping money out of the trust whenever he felt like it. The appetite grows with what it feeds on. What was it he had to feel safe about? Well—let us consider. You?”

“How me?”

“As the boy’s next of kin or father perhaps?”

“But—!”

“When you didn’t follow up that evidently much too impressive wreath, he dropped the idea, and now this inquiry of yours has revived it.”

“My dear Hooper! Damnation! You don’t imagine!”

“No. But Chadband may. You can’t imagine the ideas he has about—our sort of people. I see no reason why he shouldn’t go on imagining it for a bit. I don’t think it would give you any standing in the case, but he may think it might.”

“Preposterous!”

“A time will come when you’ll have to drop that double port after lunch. It makes you gouty and testy. I can stand it but you can’t. It’s your hormones or something.... Anyhow Chadband’s not a well-informed man. You must always in this sort of affair consider the limitations of the particular individual you are dealing with. He may imagine there is some sort of legal supervision of trustees. There isn’t but there ought to be. There ought to be a sort of Public Trustee for these things. There will be one of these days. Let that pass. But evidently he can’t stand up to any sort of examination of his accounts, and that is what scares him. He’s just been drawing cheques out of the trust account, selling securities, and going ahead, building a new classroom, throwing out a wing for a third dormitory. And what we have to consider is just how we can go through his passbooks.”

“We can’t,”

“We can.”

“How can we?”

“And without any slur on your high moral character.”

“Well, just consider! The wife of a trusted employee! Damn it! I wish you wouldn’t keep harping on that idea. It’s disagreeable. Things like this without a word of truth in them get about. And when once they get about....”

“Forgive me. We’ll drop all that. When I tried that suggestion I hadn’t thought of the real way to do the job. Now I have.”

“Well?”

“You see,” said Sir Rumbold, “you owe the boy a considerable sum of money.”

“The devil I do!”

“Yes. You owe him well over a hundred pounds.”

“First I’ve heard about it. You get wilder and wilder.”

“You see you have a system of crediting commissions to your staff as a sort of bonus to the retiring allowance.”

“It’s news to me.”

“All done very quietly. Yes. You don’t know everything about your Firm, you know. By a long chalk. Listen to what I am telling you. Don’t keep interrupting. I’m doing this job for you, aren’t I? This bonus may have its imaginative element, but the fact is it gets us right into Chadband’s pass- book and that’s where we want to get.”

“He’ll just swipe that extra hundred pounds. What’s to prevent him?”

“That’s easy.”

“I don’t see it.”

“No. But listen! You have to see that it is invested to the best advantage. That is in the instrument or deeds or whatever they are—leave that to me—and that is where we poke our inquiring little fingers into the guardianship of the worthy Myame. We go and see him. We look at him hard. We ask for insignificant details. Somehow, and quite improperly and unjustly, the word embezzlement creeps into the discussion. Does your slow but solid intelligence begin to grasp the situation now?”

“Suppose he fights when he realises he is cornered?”

“Chadband isn’t going to fight. Trust me. We’ll have him whining in no time.”

IX. Out of the Deeps, oh Lord!

“If the Lord had not been on my side,” said Mr Myame, “when men rose up against me, they had swallowed me up quick when their wrath was kindled against me. Then the waters had overwhelmed me, the stream had gone over my soul.

“Yes, but thou spared him, Lord. His weeping was turned to joy. Blessed be the Lord who hath not given us a prey to their teeth. Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken and we are escaped. Blessed words. Oh blessed words! So thou dealtest with thy servant David! So thou dealest with all sinners that repent. And now—do I cry in vain? Are not these blessed words for me? Are not these words for me? Out of the darkness I cry. Let my cry come unto thee.”

It was late at night and he was in his study in sore tribulation Wrestling with the Spirit. For some months he had been living in a state of great spiritual contentment. Now suddenly a terrible darkness had closed in upon him. His sense of Divine Guidance had departed from him. He delivered these long treasured words with profound emphasis and paused. But there came no answer to him in the stillness without or within.

“Hide not thy face from me,” he resumed, “in the day when I am in trouble; incline thine ear unto me: In the day when I call, answer me speedily. For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burnt as an hearth. My heart is smitten, and withered like grass; so that I forget to eat my bread. By reason of the voice of my groaning my bones cleave to my skin. I am like a pelican of die wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert. I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top. Mine enemies reproach me all the day; and they that are mad against me are sworn against me. For I have eaten ashes like bread, and mingled my drink with weeping, because of thine indignation and thy wrath: for thou hast lifted me up, and cast me down.

No comfort came to him.

On the table in front of him was the One Good Book, and in his distress and search for guidance Mr Myame had resorted to an old-fashioned expedient, opening the precious volume with his eyes shut, running his finger down the page, and then taking the verse on which it rested as his message. But his first verse had been Genesis x, 23, and the words were: “And the children of Aram; Uz and Hul, and Gether, and Mash.”

He had pondered, but there was no light in that, none whatever. He had tried again and got First Chronicles xii, 27. It was just as opaque. “And Jehoiada was the leader of the Aaronites, and with him were three thousand and seven hundred.”

“Three thousand and seven hundred,” he reflected. “No. It’s nothing like that. It isn’t anything like that. Anyhow.”

Then he had resorted to his well stored memory for consolation and found no consolation, neither wind, nor thunder, nor a still small voice. He stood, at the end of his tether, bowed down, helpless, God-forsaken.

Penitence and prayer. He knelt before his fireside chair and prayed. Prayed for light, prayed that at least he might know why the Spirit had gone out of him. And at last, still on his knees, he confessed. “I have sinned, Oh Heavenly Father. I am no more worthy to be called thy Son.”

A vast load upon his shoulders seemed to lighten. “I have sinned. I have been presumptuous. I have taken upon myself—” He weighed his words carefully. “More than I should....

“Not my will but thy will be done....

“I presumed and thou has chastened me. But thou who readest the heart, thou knowest that in my pride it seemed to me that thou hadst delivered this task into my hands, to take this poor evil-hearted treacherous child and lead him into the light, to mould his heart and mind, and make him one of thy Holy Saints, to take him as my partner and at last my successor in this thy-school—for to Thee alone be the praise. To make this School a school of souls, a real Preparatory School for thy service, a centre of light in this dark world....”

The Divine Spirit made no audible reply, but it seemed now to Mr Myame that he or it was listening. The good man searched further into the situation.

“But that was not Thy way, Oh Lord. That was not Thy Will and thou hast chastened me. Thou hast raised up a serpent in my bosom....”

For some moments Mr Myame was at a loss for words.

“He hath sharpened his tongue like a serpent. Adder’s poison is under his lips. Adder’s poison. The proud have laid a snare for me and cords; they have spread a net by the wayside; they have set gins for me,.... Heap burning coals upon him....”

He paused lest there should be any mistake about this. Then he resumed, addressing himself more particularly to Edward Albert.

“What shall be given unto thee or what shall be done unto thee, thou false tongue? Sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of jumper. Yea indeed. Coals of juniper. Woe is me that I dwell in the tents of Kedar! My soul hath long dwelt with him that hateth peace.... But that, Oh Lord, is all over now. I cast him forth, according to thy will. Verily I cast him forth to have his part with the wicked. Forgive him, Lord, for he is young and foolish. Remember his transgression that at last he may find grace. Chasten me, yes, because I did not prove a better shepherd for him, but chasten him also! Chasten him too, Oh Lord. Chasten him and bring him back in thine own good time to thy salvation.”

He paused and sighed heavily. He felt he was being very generous and that the Holy Spirit would appreciate this. Bunyan’s burthen was palpably lighter on his shoulders, but still it was there.

He rose slowly to his feet and stood and gloomed. He mingled a certain element of soliloquy with his next address to the eternal.

“If it is thy Will that I abase myself, thy Will be done. But Lord how can I pay it back? Thou knowest how matters stand. If I humble myself. If thou shouldst soften their hearts. If, for instance, part of it could be made into a mortgage, a first mortgage....”

Men’s judgments of their fellow men are too often crude and rash. Mr Myame was no Chadband after the fashion of Dickens’ cruel portrait. He was a sincere, earnest Believer. He would have been the first to disclaim intellectual power, He pretended to no great learning. It was only the very simplest members of the congregation who imagined that he could read the Scriptures in the original Greek and Hebrew. But like most of that little church he was rich in the Gifts of the Spirit. What are intellectual powers and learning when it comes to the Gifts of the Spirit? Given those, you can teach anybody everything that matters, here and hereafter. That has been the strength of Believers ever since Religion began.

The Gifts of the Spirit are so copious, the inheritance of our common Christianity is so vast and various, that practically anything in the way of belief except Monism and Atheism can be picked out of its limitless treasury of exalting but contradictory statements and traditions. The orthodoxies and heresies alike are all no more than choice selections from that stupendous abundance. All the priestly religions have found it expedient for their own stability to restrain reference to the Holy Scriptures. But the invention of paper and of printing from movable type, let loose an unexpected flood of Bibles upon Christendom, and the Anabaptists, the General Baptists, the Particular Baptists and a great multitude of other non-conformists ensued.

None of this, by the way, is dissertation or generalisation or “ideas” or anything of that sort. There is no breach of our undertaking here. This is a plain and simple exposition of the fundamental processes that were going on in Mr Myame’s poor troubled hairy beetling head. He had been born into the little Camden Town church, and he had obeyed the injunction to search the Scriptures very faithfully. What his group of believers searched them for were scraps and phrases, often incomplete sentences or misapplied interpolations, that fell in with their already firmly established line of thought. They picked these out and let the rest of that unmanageable abundance slide. They were blind to it. The Bible abounds in contradictions of the most varied sort, and though there are millions of Bible Readers, pledged to get through the Word about every year or so, yet their Faith burns so brightly in them that not one of them seems ever to observe an inconsistency.

Mr Myame was a Trinitarian Bible Christian to the bone, and he had no doubt whatever that the Holy Ghost, having wantonly chosen him for salvation out of the general multitude of the hopelessly damned, was now, with the assistance of Almighty Providence engaged in an edifying wrestling match catch as catch can, with him for the good of his soul. The stars, the gulf of time, the intricate wonder of things unknown, were just the highly impressive but relatively insignificant adornment of the garment of this God who was trying out Mr Myame so sorely that night. There was not a scrap of make-believe about this superb wrestling match. He wrestled with his Deity in perfect good faith.

He and the Spirit were still battling darkly when he went upstairs.

His wife coughed and woke up.

“You are very late, Abner,” she said. “Is anything the matter?”

“The hand of the Lord is very heavy upon me,” he said. “He has—I can’t tell you. But a great darkness has come upon my soul.”

He divested himself of his upper garments in silence, assumed his long grey-green flannel nightshirt and then in all modesty removed his shoes and trousers. That, by the way, was as much as she had ever seen of him, and he had seen even less of her.

“I have sinned. I have been presumptuous and God has punished my pride. That boy Tewler....”

He paused.

“I always thought there was something a little sneakish about him.”

“I pray God that some day I may be able to forgive him,” he said.

Terrible words to say.

And in the night he tossed and worried and talked in his sleep. Sometimes he was praying. He was praying that he might be humble, that God would temper this cup to his lips, that he might be comforted and restored to God’s favour. And sometimes he seemed to be doing sums. And anon he seemed to be addressing himself to Edward Albert in language which, though generally scriptural, was invariably unpleasant. Towards morning he seemed to come to a definite conclusion. He spoke as if he was wide awake. “As the Scotch say, I must ‘dree my weird’,” he said in an exceedingly loud voice, and became quite still.

And presently he fell asleep with his mouth wide open, and snored.

“He giveth his beloved sleep,” whispered his devoted wife. She had followed all these distressful phenomena with sympathetic interest. It seemed he had fought a good fight and won. She stifled a fit of coughing for his sake. Presently she also sank into slumber.

Such was the deep spiritual conflict through which Mr Myame passed, because these two worldlings in their so-called Reform Club made a net for his feet and compassed him about, and, understanding nothing of the matter, called him “Chadband.” Would a Chadband, a deliberate hypocrite, have achieved the stern self-abandonment with which he now set himself to readjust Edward Albert’s affairs? That strains the Chadband theory. And would a mere self-regarding Chadband have displayed the same intensity of indignation at the wickedness as he conceived it, of Edward Albert’s behaviour? His wrath was not after the manner of a Chadband, or a Chadband-Squeers; his wrath and anger were the wrath and anger of David King of Israel—in humbler circumstances, of course.

I do not know precisely what they mean, but the only words that occur to me to round off this description are

“Chadband forsooth!”

So let it rest at that.

Beyond all question Mr Myame was of the stuff that Saints are made of. This is before all things a truthful novel, and that is the truth about him—and about them.

X. Faith and Hope

So it was that at last Edward Albert entered the presence of Jim Whittaker. He was ushered through long aisles of shining and glittering glass ware and china and porcelain into a large comfortable office where Mr James Whittaker was dictating letters to a bright-haired young stenographer.

“That’s Tewler,” he said, looking round for an instant.

“Glad to see you, my boy. Sit down on that sofa there. I’ll be done with these letters in a brace of shakes and then we’ll have a talk.”

Dreams of being the missing heir or the long-lost son or half brother vanished beyond recall. Edward Albert reverted to the feudal system. He had been preparing for this encounter for four days, chiefly in the Public Library and with the librarian’s assistance, and his meditations and enquiries had not been without result.

“That’s all for the present, Miss Scoresby,” said Mr Whittaker and rotated startlingly in his chair as the bright-haired secretary gathered up her pads and pencils. Edward Albert had never seen a rotating armchair before. “Let’s have a look at you, young Tewler. What sort of hands have you got?”

Edward Albert hesitated, but under encouragement held out his hands.

“Not like your father’s. His were broader. You don’t happen to draw or paint or do anything like that?”

“No, I don’t, Sir,” said Edward Albert.

“H’m. No fretwork or anything of that sort?”

“I’m not much use with my ’ands, Sir. No.”

“You can put ’em down. H’m, So you don’t take after your father in that sort of thing. That’s a pity. What we are going to do about you, Mr Edward Albert Tewler, I don’t quite know. Old Myame has blown up like a powder magazine. He doesn’t seem to like you a bit. You’ve just put him out something awful....”

“I reely didn’t mean to ’urt Mr Myame, Sir. I reely didn’t. ’E’s a good man, ’E really is a good man, but I did think I’d a right to see you. After you sent that wreath and everything. He’s Narrer, Sir. That’s the fact about ’im. ’E’-s Narrer. ’Ess got it into his head you’re not a Believing Christian and that you’re worldly and that seeing you won’t do me anything but serious harm. So he don’t seem to mind what he said or did so long as I didn’t see you. He’s called me perfectly dreadful things. Sir, perfectly dreadful things. Serpents. Poison, Sir. Coals of Jupiter, ’e says, got to be ’eaped on my head. What are coals of Jupiter, Sir? He’s sent me to Coventry. None of the boys must speak to me or me say anything to them. He says he can’t bear the sight of me. Spawn of the devil he says I am. He’s turned me out of the classes and I’ve had to go and sit all day in the Public Library. It isn’t fair to me, Sir; it isn’t fair. I never meant to ’urt ’im like that.”

He sat forward on the sofa, hands on knees, a mean and meagre little creature, under-nourished and crazily taught, doing his best to exist and make something of a world of which his fundamental idea was that you cannot be too careful. He sensed rather than apprehended the feudal link that put Mr James Whittaker under an obligation to him.

“He did ask you not to talk to me; didn’t he”?”

“But how was I to know, Sir, that he’d take it so serious?”

“Right up to the time he found out, he was all right with you?”

“He was strict, Sir. But then he’s naturally strict. He’s such an upright man, Sir. He don’t seem to understand disobedience.”

“Quite like his Old Man,” said Jim Whittaker, but his impiety was happily over the head of his hearer. “And then you became an adder and so forth and so on.”

“Yessir.”

“What are these coals of Jupiter you keep talking about?” asked Jim Whittaker. “I’ve never heard of them.”

“I don’t know rightly what they are, Sir, but they’re sure to be something very disagreeable, Sir, if ’e got ’em out of the Bible. They’re ’eaped on your ’ed, you see, Sir.”

“What, when you go to hell?”

“Before that, I think. Sir. I thought you might know, Sir.”

“No. I must look it up. And so you’re not a Believing Christian, Jo—I mean Edward. You’re beginning Doubt very young.”

“Oo! No, Sir,” protested Edward Albert, much alarmed. “Don’t imagine that. I ’ope I’m one of the Saved. I know that my Redeemer liveth. But what I feel, Sir, is that it isn’t anything to get so Narrer about. That’s where I seem to ’ave ’urt Mr Myame.”

“There’s something in that. Tell me some more about what you believe? If you don’t mind.”

Edward Albert made a great effort. “Well, Christianity! Sir. What everybody knows in England. Chrise died for me and all that. I suppose he knew what he was doing, ’E shed his precious blood or us, and I hope I’m truly thankful, Sir. It’s in the creed, Sir. It’s nothing to get angry about and be unpleasant to other people, calling them nasty names out of the Bible and carrying on just as though they was cheating somehow....”

“You don’t think everybody’s saved, eh? That, you know, would be a serious heresy, Tewler. I forget which—Perfectionism or something—but it would be.”

“I don’t fink at all, Sir. I don’t know enough. Only I feel if Chrise died to save us sinners, ’E wouldn’t make a mess of it and leave most of us out. Like that, Sir. Would ’E, Sir? If you repent truly and believe.”

“And you believe?”

“Like anything, Sir. Don’t make no mistake about that, Sir. I says my prayers and ’ope to be forgiven. I do my best to be good. I’ve never scoffed in my life. I’ve never used bad language. Never. I’ve listened to it but I’ve never used it No, Sir.”

“And the less said about it all the better?”

“Yessir.” He replied so eagerly and with such manifest relief that Jim Whittaker realised the religious Inquisition was at an end.

“And so, to come to business. We had a sort of discussion with the worthy man here. He’s still “—he got the only word for it—” he’s Wraath with you. Wraath.”

Edward Albert featured blameless distress.

“He says he wants you to leave his—his high-class establishment and live elsewhere.”

“But where am I to live?”

“I think we can arrange something. You see, you will have a small income.”

“What, my own? To spend?”

“We think you can be trusted to do that. You’ll have to be careful, you know,”

“One can’t be too careful.”

“That’s exactly the principle. You see your mother left a little property in the savings bank and in various investments—not very much but quite enough to keep you—and Mr Myame has invested practically all of it in his school—on your behalf. We’ve arranged with him that this shall take the form of a first mortgage on his property, with reasonable arrangements to pay it off—”

“I don’t rightly know what a mortgage is,” said Edward Albert.

“You needn’t. They’ll see to all that in Hooper’s office. You’re the mortgagee and Myame is the mortgagor. It’s perfectly simple. He mortgages his school to you. See? Mortgage. And what it comes to is that you will get something like two guineas and a half a week, of which about five bob will be capital repayment which you’ll have to put by—or Hooper’s office might do that for you—and you’ll have to live on that, and I should think you can rub along quite well until you begin to earn a living. That’s the outlook, and the next question is, what do you want to get up to? Then we can decide where you ought to live and all that. What’s your idea about all that, Tewler?”

“Well, Sir, it’s like this. I’ve been making ’nquiries as you might say! There’s a very nice gentleman who’s Librarian in the Public Library and he’s been a great ’elp. It’s no good me trying to ’ide it from you, Sir. I’m not ’ighly educated. Yet,”

“Oh, come, Edward. Don’t be down-hearted.”

“I got on a bit with Elementary French and Scripture, but all the same, Sir, Mr Myame didn’t take me very far.”

Mr Whittaker intimated a general agreement.

“Frinstance it would be nice to be a Bang Clark. That’s reely respectable. You ’ave your Bang Collar Days. You ’ave promotion. You ’ave a pension. You know where you are. But I’m not educated enough to be a Bang Clark. Even if I went to a good college and worked very ’ard, I doubt if I could qualify in time....

“Then there’s Lower Division Civil Service. That’s safe. You go on to a pension. If I worked ’ard. I’m only thirteen. If I was to work ’ard for that....

“Then there’s London Matriculation. That’s ’ard. But the gentleman in the lib’ry said it was a good thing to work for. It opens all sorts of avenues, ’e said....”

Jim Whittaker allowed Edward Albert to unfold his discreet but ignoble conception of life. It appeared to him that before Edward Albert died he was likely to be despised and detested by quite a number of people. So there was no reason to detest the poor sniffy little beast here and now. All in good time. The Firm had always rather underpaid old Tewler and it had to do its duty by his son, whether it liked him or not.

And it did its duty. It acceded to his strong desire to embark upon a life of miscellaneous mental improvement in that Imperial College of Commercial Science in Kentish Town, and it made an attempt to get him housed and fed according to his condition.

XI. Introducing Doobers

Young Matterlock, a counting-house clerk of thirty-two, was charged to deal with this responsibility. A boarding-house which offered opportunities for conversation and companionship seemed to be indicated. He found such establishments rare in Kentish Town. There it was mostly lodging-houses. But when one went south and east, he found boarding-houses in an enormous abundance with the utmost variety of -charges, customs, habits and clients. London was a great centre for students of every sort and colour, and for every sort and colour boarding-houses had adapted themselves. It was a museum of nationalities, a kaleidoscope of broken-off social fragments. The difficulty was to find a boarding-house that was just simply a boarding-house.

It did not occur to young Matterlock as anything extraordinary that in all this vast wilderness of lodgings and boarding-houses, not one had ever been planned and built as a lodging-house or boarding-house. Every one had been built to accommodate an imaginary and quite impossible family of considerable means and insanitary habits, with cheap abject servants packed away in the attics and basement, a dining-room, a drawing-room, a parlour and the like. The ground landlords, the architects and builders of the period seem to have been incapable of any other idea. Not ten per cent of these hopeful family residences were ever occupied by that vanishing English family; the rest were sub-divided into “floors” from the first, and nearly all of them, even the family houses, were furnished with faded and misfitting second-hand furniture. With a plentiful lack of imagination, nineteenth-century England had shaped its conduct and future to the forms of an obsolete social dream.

Thackeray has embalmed for ever this particular phase in our decadent and commercialised feudalism for the student of social history. Our concern is wholly and solely with Edward Albert, and it is not for us to speculate here, now that London and most of our other big cities such as they were, have been knocked to pieces, how far England may presently reveal a quickened and creative mind, how far it will still continue to be an unchangeable, unimaginative mother or how far it may lapse into an unpicturesque decay of muddle and misfits.... Doober’s, to which young Matterlock finally entrusted Edward Albert, had a fairly handsome facade in Bendle Street, just south of the Euston Road. Its official name of Scartmore House was painted in resolute lettering across its brow. Young Matterlock had inspected it and made the necessary arrangements beforehand. Then he had collected Edward Albert, with a tin box, a cricket bat, an outgrown overcoat and a new portmanteau, from the school, and brought him in a slow, sure four-wheeler to his new habitation.

“I think you’ll find it a very nice homely place,” he said on the way. “Mrs Doober who runs it seems a thoroughly good sort. She’ll introduce you to people and make you feel at home. You’ll soon get used to it. If you fall upon any difficulties you know my address. Your money will come every Saturday from Hooper’s office and you’ll pay the bill that day. The balance over you ought to find enough for clothes, college fees and running-expenses. If you’re careful you can manage. You can’t be too careful.”

Edward Albert made a responsive noise to that familiar phrase. .

“I think you ought to get your clothes made to measure. Those cheap ready-mades of Myame’s make you look even worse than you need do. I think Mrs Doober or some one will find you some sort of tailor round the corner. Bespoke tailors I think they call them. You see this doesn’t sit on your shoulders, and your sleeve’s so short it shows too much of your wrists. Wrists aren’t exactly your strong point, Tewler.... Well, here we are!”

Mrs Doober opened the door, beaming and being as thoroughly a good sort as she knew how. Behind her hovered the current slavey summoned to help with the luggage.

The “Hall” of Scartmore House, that is to say its passage entrance, testified that Doober’s was reasonably and miscellaneously full. The place had a dingy but nutritious smell, and was toned by oil-cloth and marbled paper to a pale mellow brown. Colour and odour blended together. A row of hat and coat pegs sustained a selection of outer garments above an extensive range of umbrellas and sticks. There was a large hall-stand with a fly-blown mirror and racks for letters and papers.

Largely occluding this mellow background was Mrs Doober’s receptive personality. “And this is our young gentleman?” said she. “A student. We’ll do all we can to make you comfortable. You’re not the only student, you’ll find. There’s young Mr Frankincense from University College. Such a clever young man—the highest honours!—and we’ve got a great teacher of elocution, Mr Harold Thump, and his lady, and a young Indian gentleman.”

She whispered confidentially closer to young Matterlock.

“The son of a rajah. He speaks English beautifully.”

She shot an aside at the slavey. “Number thirteen. If they’re too heavy, take them up one at a time.... Well then, ask Gawpy to help you. Don’t stand there helpless.”

She restored her amiability as she turned back to her clients.

Edward Albert listened confusedly. He was doing his best to keep his unfortunate wrists up his sleeves, and he had already acquired a habit of inaccurate attention that would last his lifetime. “We’re a young household,” she was saying.

“There’s only one really old gentleman among us and he’s charming. Such.good stories!....”

He felt the pressure of young Matterlock’s hand upon his shoulder. “You’ll be all right. You’ll feel a little strange at first but you’ll soon settle down to it.”

“Belgians. A family of refugees from Antwerp. So if you want to learn French....”

“So it’s good-bye and good luck, Tewler.” Matterlock was shaking his hand. And leaving him!

Edward Albert had a wild desire to cry out, “Oh, don’t leave me,” and bolt after his protector before the door closed. Then he was alone with Mrs Doober. Her propitiatory manner was now faintly tinged with proprietorship.

“I must show you our common rooms and explain a few of our rules and regulations—because there must be rules and regulations, you know—and then I will take you up to your own apartment. Just a quiet little room it is,” she said, and then added informatively, “upstairs. It’s number thirteen. I hope you won’t mind that. I’ve sometimes thought of changing it to 12A. But I never have. I do so hope you’ll like it all. We’re all such friends—it’s just like one big family. You must hang up your hat and coat on that peg....”

And in this manner Edward Albert entered upon a fresh phase in his life and adapted himself discreetly to a new and wider environment. Breakfast was from half-past seven to half-past nine. Then you were supposed to go out and return about six or seven. (But one old gentleman was asleep before the fire in the drawing-room. He woke up, stared for a moment, grunted, and then composed himself for further slumber.) Dinner was from seven-thirty to nine-thirty. There was a large dingy dining-room with shaded gas lamps, a big sideboard, a service lift that came up with a rumble and a smack, and a sort of backward extension to a little sitting-room behind, and on the first floor there was a diffused drawing-room which had once been bisected by folding doors, with armchairs and corners more or less appropriated by books, pieces of knitting, shawls and the like, two fireplaces and a snuggery with two card tables, a chess table, and a sofa at the back. And so upstairs, where Edward Albert was left to unpack, put his things away in a chest of drawers, and spend a long time studying his wrists in the little looking-glass and meditating upon the possibilities of bespoke clothes. If he had long cuffs; if he got one of those new up and then down collars like what Mr Matterlock wore; if he pulled himself up—so. And a dark suit with a touch of blue in it and creased trousers like Mr Matterlock’s. Which fitted. Then it would be different?....

They looked at him at the dinner table when Mrs Doober brought him down—she had to bring him down. They didn’t say so very much to him, but they peeped and looked at him all the time. (He would get those cuffs to-morrow.) People came and went with an extraordinary assurance. Afterwards in the drawing-room a lady said, “You’re a new arrival?” and he said “Yes, Mam.”

“And what’s your name?” she said, and he told her quite friendly like, and then he got into a corner and affected to read a very nice book, A Guide to the Hotels of Europe, while he watched his fellow boarders unobtrusively.

XII. Mr Harold Thump

Some of the happy family of Scartmore House Edward Albert got to know quite soon. Some remained remote. For a time Mr Harold Thump dominated all the other individualities in this new world. He was, Mrs Doober had explained, “a teacher of elocution and a reciter; and such a buoyant man”, large, round and rosy, with a lot of fair hair and large, watery, blue eyes; he rubbed his hands together and breathed with a gusto whenever he thought of it; sometimes he forgot himself and lapsed into a coma; but when the spirit was in him he went about Doober’s like a brass band. He sang in the bathroom like a choir coming home from a heavily liquidated bean-feast. He saluted everybody by name as he encountered them. He always brightened up for a new arrival.

“Ah, a new recruit to the Select Company!” he said, at his first sight of Edward Albert, who, on his second night, had come down to dinner rather early, so as not to be brought down by Mrs Doober, and cooed over as he came down.

“Young I perceive you are, but you’ll grow out of it. Tell me your name, laddie....

“Now tell me, my young friend, have you heard the latest story about the zoo? About the monkey and the little fretful porcupine?”

He was addressing himself to Edward Albert. Edward Albert was being asked whether he had heard the story of the monkey and the little fretful porcupine.

“No, Sir,” he said brightly.

“It was such a leetle monkey,” said Mr Thump, and then in a whisper, “Blue. You’ve seen them—blue?”

“Yes, Sir.” He hadn’t exactly, but he could imagine it. Whereupon Mr Thump’s face changed and became marvellous. He lifted a flat hand as who should say, “You wait!”

His lips tightened. His eyes became very round, he projected his face. He seemed to be scrutinising every corner of the room for some hostile hearer. “It’s such a vulgar story,” he said in a stage whisper, confidentially. He reduced Edward Albert to a state of tension. He stood up and looked over the top of the lamp. What was he looking for there? There couldn’t be anything there. Edward Albert began to giggle. Mr Thump, much encouraged, leant forward to look behind the door.

Then suddenly he affected to think of under the table. He went down to look underneath. Edward Albert’s giggle became uncontrollable. Mr Thump looked at him dubiously and went underneath again. Then he came up questioningly, with only the upper part of his face, shining, grave, doubtful, confidential. “Eh?” he said, and put his finger to his lips.

It was too funny.

Then the lady came in, the lady who had said, “You’re a new arrival?” the night before.

She took her place at the table. She affected to ignore Mr Thump. You might infer she did not like him.

Mr Thump, very absurdly, ignored her upon strictly parallel lines. Ridiculous it was.

“Not now,” he said. “No. Never do.”

Other people dropped in, Mrs Doober and a rather severe-looking blonde young lady. With each arrival Mr Thump featured a deepening hopelessness, and Edward Albert’s delight in his frustration increased. Plainly the story was becoming more and more impossible. Mr Thump would start at every fresh arrival and throw up his eyes in comic despair. Always when no one but Edward Albert was looking. The others were beginning to notice Edward Albert’s uncontrollable hilarity. They suspected him. What was he laughing at? Then they suspected Mr Thump. Thereupon Mr Thump became more suspicious than anyone. He was a fair treat.

He addressed Edward Albert protestingly. He spoke in a low plaintive voice. “I only said a porcupine, you know, a very leetle porcupine. What is there to laugh at in a porcupine?”

His features had an instantaneous fit and then became very sad.

Edward Albert devoured bread hastily and a crumb went the wrong way.

“Just a porcupine!” said Thump in a broken falsetto.

“Oh! Oh! Oh!”

“You’ve set that boy laughing!” said Mrs Doober, “and I doubt if he’ll get any dinner. Gawpy, take him away and help him. It’s a shame of you, Mr Thump.”

“I never set him laughing. He started laughing at me. All I said, Mrs Doober, was this; I asked him if he knew the story of the monkey and the porcupine.”

“Well,” said the elderly man who had been sleeping before the drawing-room fire in the afternoon. “What is this precious story of the monkey and the porcupine? If it’s fit to tell here.”

“How should I know?” said Mr Thump, now in his glory. “If I knew, would I ask a little chap like that?”

“You mean to say there isn’t a story?”

“Not that I know of. No. Why should there be? I’ve been asking about it for years. From the way he laughed I really thought he had got something....”

The old gentleman grunted in a hostile manner.

“One of your Artful Catches, Mr Thump,” said Mrs Doober. “I shall fine you, if you do any more of them....”

Then changing the subject; “Our Belgian friends are late to-night....”

Mr Thump aired his voice for a few tuneful bars and then caught his wife’s eye and desisted. “Hm!” said Mr Thump, and sank back into insignificance.

When Albert Edward returned to the dining-room watery-eyed and still slightly hysterical, the Belgians had come in and the table talk had drifted away to other subjects, so that he never learnt that the great story of the monkey and the porcupine was merely selling a bargain. Immediately his eye sought Mr Harold Thump’s and was rewarded by a sympathetic grimace.

In this way a curious mental dependence was established between Mr Thump and himself. They reassured one another. They convinced each other that they existed.

When Mr Thump came into one of the reception rooms and everybody else behaved as though they had nothing against him very much except that they had had quite enough of him some time ago, he would look for Edward Albert and be sure of finding a bright expectant face. And Edward Albert, coming discreetly into a company to which, except for Mrs Doober’s official encouragements, he seemed invisible and unaudible, would find Harold Thump ready with a grimace for him and just that sly obliquity of vision in it that made them both fellow-conspirators against their fellow-boarders.

“They don’t exist,” they told each other mutely.

XIII. Intimations of Empire

Behind the florid personality of Mr Harold Thump, other individuals advanced and retreated. There was that other student, young Frankincense from University College, who had won so many honours. He was slender and tall, surmounted by a pear-shaped head with the broad part upward, and he came to Edward Albert and said, “I gather you too are a scholarship holder?”

“Not exactly a scholarship holder,” said Edward Albert.

“I’m studying at the Imperial College of Commercial Science in Kentish Town. Civil Service and all that.”

“Oh God!” cried Mr Frankincense in undisguised contempt, and turned away, and never afterwards approached him.

Whereupon a profound hatred for Mr Frankincense was born in Edward Albert’s soul, and it troubled him profoundly that he could devise no way of getting square with him. In reveries he called him Turnip Head, and cut him out with a particularly beautiful but non-existent young lady, with whom he was desperately enamoured. In this Edward Albert’s new tailor-made suit played its part. But Frankincense paid little attention to these profound humiliations, since he knew nothing whatever about them.

Edward Albert would see him playing chess in the snuggery and particularly with the Indian young gentleman, who looked like one of the Bolter’s College Old Boys, only more so, and who spoke in a high-pitched clear staccato manner that filled Edward Albert with a strange sense of superiority, more particularly when he learnt from old Mr Blake that this way of talking was “chi-chi” and characteristic of the lesser breeds within the law who inhabit Hindustan. He was part of Edward Albert’s Indian Empire, and as for his being a somebody because he was a Rajah’s son, said old Mr Blake, “these rajahs have dozens of ’em. Hareems they have, and they tax the skins off their people to keep them up and then blame us for it. Four wives and a lot of concubines and then some. Rajah’s son he may be in India, but over here he’s nothing more than a blasted bastard. But to hear him argue at times you would think we’d robbed India of her cotton trade and every sort of wealth they ever had.... Hareems is their factories, and whatsoever wealth they get, they’ll produce more mouths to eat it up, trust them. Why, when I see him talking to a nice blonde English girl like Miss Pooley, and giving himself airs with her, it fair makes my blood boil. Out there she’d be a Mem Sahib and he’d be salaaming to her....”

Edward Albert, as a prospective citizen of the British Motherland would listen to his subject from afar, watch the sinister movements of his long hands, and resent his shrill laugh of delight when he gained any advantage over Turnip Head, who after all was an Englishman, and who ought to know better than to lose games of chess to his political inferior. You cannot be too careful. At any time there might be another Mutiny, if once we lost our grip on them.

And in his reveries he would deal with his subject races very firmly. Sadly and sternly he would blow them from guns, because that was what they dreaded most. It affected their resurrection in some way. He revived his fantasy of an electric gun that never required re-loading, and with it he fought his way through hordes and hordes of turbaned rebels, mowing them down by the Fousand, literally by the Fousand, to rescue the foolish Turnip Head—just in time.

There the man was, hemmed in, his ammunition running short, awaiting the fate of all those who pander to the treacherous natives, yet, let this be said for him, holding out to the last, and then he heard the bagpipes. Softly in his own peculiar manner, Edward Albert whistled that inspiring tune, “The Campbells are Coming.”

He advanced along a nullah, because, whatever it may be, a nullah is what you always advance along in India, shooting right and left.

Then he discovered he was sitting quite close to the Indian rebel,....

Edward Albert didn’t care if he had heard....

XIV. Do Belgians Speak French?

Another stimulus to the patriotic consciousness of Edward Albert was those newly arrived Belgian refugees from Antwerp, always sitting together in a bunch, watchful to behave well, and talking of their affairs and hopes with the utmost freedom, to anyone whom on the slightest provocation they imagined might understand their French. In a little while the Germans would be driven out of Belgium again and they would return. Miss Pooley and the widow lady who had first spoken to Edward Albert really did have a working knowledge of French, and so it fell to them to hear and hand on their account of what in those milder days were regarded as the horrors of war.

They seemed pretty dreadful then to everyone. Antwerp had been shelled and scores of civilians had been killed. One story was of a human shoulder-blade lying in the street far away from the heap of clothes and the pool of blood that had once been its body, and the other was of a man who just stepped out on a balcony to see what was happening. His wife called out to him to come in for his coffee, and, getting no answer, went out to find him—headless!

That sort of thing. It was strange to listen to people who could not speak three words of English talking so freely and quickly in their own difficult tongue.

Harold Thump was disposed to be critical of those Belgians from the first, and cast a doubt, some indefinite sort of doubt, upon them. They constituted a rival attraction and he could not bear it. He would make a humorous face and discover Edward Albert was not looking at him. He tried to recover that attention by affecting to jump and be alarmed at Monsieur Harcourt’s more emphatic gestures, and watching him with extreme caution and looking round at him suddenly, as if he was something that might explode at any moment. This succeeded partially. But only partially.

Because Tewler was listening most of the time for bits of Elementary French and hoping against hope that he might be able to cut in. But it was just gabble, gabble, so that at times he doubted if it really was French at all.

Never once did he hear of Lar mair, ler frair, that ever-present tante, the gardener, the books of my uncle, the house that is ours, the dog, the cat, and all that curious world which pullulates round and round and round the foundations laid for the French language in English.

Did these Belgians really speak good French? There was talk fostered by Mrs Doober of everybody having French lessons now while they had the opportunity. But you cannot be too careful. Edward Albert, listening attentively, heard Monsieur Harcourt say, whenever he was interrupted, “Comment?” Now that wasn’t the proper French for “What”, which was what he was trying to say. The proper French for “What” is “Quoi.”

“Comment” means “How.” In Elementary French it does, anyhow, because it said so in the vocabulary at the end of his French Primer. And anyhow he wasn’t going to be taught French if he wasn’t to be taught French in English, and the Harcourts had no English. No fear!

So it was that Edward Albert became one of that vast majority of humanity who, after courses and examinations and certificates and so forth in French, are still unable to speak or understand or even read a dozen words in that language. When at long last, if ever—for the outlook for civilisation seems still very uncertain—when the history of the human mind comes to be written, it will be noted incidentally that from first to last throughout the earth, in the course of the centuries, some billions of people—using “billions” in the English and not the American sense—“learnt French” and still remained entirely uncontaminated. The vast edifice of things the world has been “taught” and which yet remained unknown! Whackings, keepings-in, yells and insults, forced competitions, bogus examinations, sham graduations, gowns, hoods and honours, a vast parade of learning. And what have we got?

The world knows little as yet of what it owes to its teachers. But it is beginning to suspect.

It did glimmer at times in Edward Albert’s dim and now rapidly closing mind that in some hidden way a certain number of people “got the hang of” this French. It wasn’t all a bluff.

He watched Miss Pooley closely. She wasn’t just pretending to understand and making up a story. She really did appear to be understanding and to be saying things that were understood.

Anyhow, Edward Albert reflected, he didn’t intend ever to talk French. So why worry? He wanted it, if he wanted it at all, only for examination purposes, and that was that. Nevertheless—

XV. Things He Missed

It added to the vagueness due to his growing habit of inattention to anything that did not immediately concern him, that there was a real element of mystery about the occupations of nearly all his fellow-boarders during the middle part of the day. It never dawned upon Edward Albert from first to last that Mr Harold Thump was living almost entirely on the earnings of his wife. The fiction that she was engaged in some literary work of an exalted sort veiled the fact that she managed an ill-ventilated dressmaking workroom in Shaftesbury Avenue with considerable harshness and success. Harold Thump sat about in the parks in fine weather or repaired to Selfridge’s extremely hospitable new premises in Oxford Street when it was cold or wet, or he watched the world go by at some railway station, alert for any conversation that might lead to a lesson in voice production or an invitation to a sing-song. Or if he was in a state of financial elation, he would drift to the Hippodrome corner, and there exchange drinks and reminiscences of success, with various kindred spirits who gathered there, the “Boys”, the ripe characters, the good Old Guard. That way he sometimes heard of opportunities, though they were usually opportunities that fled too quickly to be grasped. But Edward Albert imagined a different picture altogether of his off-stage hours. He thought of a great classroom and Harold leading a large resonant chorus. Harold: “Oorl the Woorrld’s a Stay-je.”

Chorus in thunderous unison: “Oorl the Woorrld’s a Stay-je.”

It did not dawn upon Edward Albert that the young lady from Harley Street, Miss Pooley, whose Christian name was part of her personal reserve, was not a distinguished medical practitioner but the young lady who made appointments for an oculist and stood by helpfully to hand him the various lights, mirrors, spectacle frames, needed in his practice, or that bitter old Mr Blake, who displayed so vivid a hatred and contempt for every prominent scientific reputation, because, it seemed, they appropriated the work that far better men did for them, was in fact a decaying laboratory assistant from University College.

Nor did our hero ever realise that the quiet genteel widow who was constantly referring to “my friend Lady Tweedman”—that Lady Tweedman who “used to say” so many authoritative and quenching things about social behaviour—disappeared so suddenly from Doober’s because, after repeated warnings, she had been caught red-handed shoplifting. The magistrate made an example of her. He swept Lady Tweedman aside. “If this Lady Twiddlum (oh, Tweedman, did you say? Tweedman) can answer for your character, why isn’t she here to do so?”

Edward Albert heard Mrs Doober say “Kleptomania” to Miss Pooley, but it meant nothing to him. Suddenly the widow was not, and dear Lady Tweedman was heard of no more. And he pursued his destiny unobservantly as ever, not missing her.

She was just one less person that you need not listen to.

It took him a long time even to grasp the constitution of Mrs Doober’s staff. The chief assistant was a niece of Mr Doober. Mr Doober was “something in the city” that demanded a punctual departure every morning. He was not, as a matter of fact, a company director or a stockbroker. He was an office cleaner and hall porter, and he changed into a green baize apron for duty.. But he resumed his social importance as he removed the green apron and made his way home, and Edward Albert never found him out. He talked but little, and that mostly of stocks and shares. His advice on promising lock-ups and sound investments was invariably sound. Old Mr Blake, who hunted a small nest egg from nest to nest in search of something called capital appreciation, was guided by him entirely.

Then there was Gawpy. Gawpy was a cousin who had lent her savings to Mrs Doober and acquired a half share in the concern, but as it was impossible for Mrs Doober ever to pay her back, and as she had nowhere else to go, she remained as a general utility, to hold on to and live by her invested bit of money as long as it lasted. To Edward Albert and the rest of the boarders she was just Gawpy, something in the nature of things, like the milkman or atmospheric pressure. You took her for granted. You could not imagine what life would be without her. You asked her for everything and she always got you something more or less.

The rebellious unstable slaveys came and went.

One of them passing Edward Albert on the stairs, addressed him cheerfully in language so filthy and familiar that he could not believe his ears. She grinned back at him over her shoulder and supplemented her words by an even more obscene and incredible gesture. “Leaving my dear!” she said.

“Ain’t it a pity?” He remained aghast on the stair-case. Very slowly he crept on up to his room. It couldn’t have happened. Such things couldn’t happen. Anyhow she was leaving.

After that he remained uncomfortably aware of slaveys. He kept his eye on them, hesitated, and fled their approach.

Whenever Doober’s had rooms to spare a card was put into the ground floor window, and there would be transients for three or four days or perhaps a week. Sometimes they looked odd enough to dislike. If they were alone, they read. If there were several of them they sat and muttered in corners. Sometimes they played strange card games. Nobody took any notice of them unless it was to pass the time of day. Except Gawpy, who would chat to them about the sights of London and the buses and the Underground. Or anything else they seemed disposed to talk about....

XVI. Boy into Man

In this setting it was that Edward Albert Tewler began that series of studies, trials, efforts and inquiries that constituted the basic side of his metamorphosis, his wakening to the need of getting a living and finding a place for himself in the great swaying organism of adult human life. He was too young to be affected very seriously by the First World War of 1914-18. After the first excitement of being at war, that wider interest faded. He had not acquired the newspaper habit. He celebrated Armistice Day as the triumphant realisation that “we”, the British, had won, as ever, and he ceased to have any sort of international consciousness thereafter. He was, as we shall tell later, quite surprised by the war in 1939.

He set himself with great gravity to his studies in that Kentish Town College. He had a serious discussion with the Principal about his prospects. The idea of a bank clerkship seemed hopeless, and the Principal was by no means so convinced of the value of the London Matriculation as the Camden Town librarian. “It’s pretty stiff, you know. Three languages. There’s Latin, French, and either Greek or German.”

“German’s Greek to me” said Edward Albert.

“And it’s not much in itself unless you’re going to be a teacher.

“But what I should do, if I were you,” said the Principal, “is to take our special course of Business Method for our own Certificate of Proficiency. There are one or two business organisations, ‘North London Leaseholds’ for example, that practically take all their clerical staff from us on our certificate. We charge a slight commission when you are placed. There you get something certain. The pay isn’t high, I admit, but the hours aren’t bad, nine to one and two to six, and then you could come here for more advanced work in our evening classes, and have a shot at the Lower Division Civil Service or something of that sort....”

That seemed a sound, safe proposition to Edward Albert and he accepted it. He gained his Certificate of Proficiency at the second attempt and was presently handed over to North London Leaseholds, and after that he went on with a variety of evening classes, and never got anywhere or did anything further. Nothing whatever. His objectives wavered continually.

He became a perennial student. He sat in the backs of lecture theatres not even trying to keep up with what was going on. Generally he began with a certain mental resistance to the lecturer, which deepened into something very like detestation as the course flowed on. “How does he know?” he would ask himself, “and, anyhow he needn’t give himself the airs he does. I expect there’s others could make all his blab blab look pretty small if they chose. Wish I’d never joined up for this Rot. Worse than the last, it is.” If he had known of any way of putting out his tongue at those lecturers invisibly, he would certainly have done so.

Among other subjects, he attended classes in Elizabethan Literature, Botany, English Prose Composition, Elementary Latin, Political Economy, Agricultural Science, Geology, Geometrical Drawing and Greek Art. But whatever possibility his mind had had of deliberate concentration was rapidly diminishing now under the pressure of those intense preoccupations with which we shall deal in the next chapter.

When he was just over one—and-twenty a wonderful thing happened to him, one of his reveries was more than realised; he came in for money. He inherited an estate of some of the very worst slum-property in Edinburgh, which finally realised a capital of between nine and ten thousand pounds. His maternal uncle had died intestate and he was the sole next of kin. He had no idea of the magnitude of the old man’s hoard. That dawned upon him by degrees. His idea of a legacy was a “hundred pounds.” At first he thought the whole thing might be a joke of Harold Thump’s, but the postmark was Edinburgh right enough. He consulted Mrs Doober, Mr Doober, Colebrook and Mahogany, and the College Lecturer in Constitutional Law. They all took it seriously and gave valuable advice.

So he got a week’s leave in anticipation of his customary ten days. holidays from his North London Leaseholds job, and went off to Scotland to see about it all. All his advisers seemed to expect more than that “cool hundred.”

“A cool fousand, then,” he had tried.

“It might be more than that,” said Mr Doober. “Much more than that.

Edward Albert’s expectations expanded. Endless reveries had prepared his mind for some such good fortune. He was elated but not intoxicated when he began to realise the extent and nature of his windfall. He displayed an unsuspected business shrewdness. “I can’t manage that property, as you say; it has to be somebody on the spot, and if there’s people ready to buy an’ ready to sell. What I want is mortgages, first mortgages, scattered about, for you can’t be too careful. I know a bit about mortgages; I bin a mortgagee for years. And I’d like if I can to have it all done by Hooper and Kirkshaw and Hooper—you know, Sir Rumbold Hooper.”

Whereupon the people in Edinburgh became excessively respectful and distributed his fortune carefully and righteously, and Edward Albert came back to London in a real first-class carriage, with tremendously padded blue seats and white lace for your head and hot water pipes and everything, whistling softly to himself and torn between a desire to tell everybody about his legacy and a determination not to let anybody know too much about it.

His reveries were confused and exciting. You will hear more about them in the next Book. He foresaw nothing, but on that return journey he anticipated a good deal. Nothing he anticipated happened. That something which figures so largely in heavy classical discourses upon Greek Tragedy, “ἀνάγκη”, seems to have been on the same train and to have followed him post haste to Scartmore House.

From this point onward Mr James Whittaker and Mr Myame faded unobtrusively out of Edward Albert’s life and in consequence out of our story. “It takes the lousy little beast right off our hands, and that’s that,” said Mr James Whittaker, and never gave him another thought. Those are his last words in our drama.

Mr Myame’s formal exit had occurred already.

The winding-up of his trusteeship had been accomplished with the utmost correctness and formality by Hooper and Kirkshaw and Hooper. The mortgage was being paid off with regularity and the good man’s accounts were entirely in order. The transition occurred without a jolt. A residuum of a thousand pounds remained undisturbed for some years by dignified mutual consent.

Such was Mr Myame’s formal exit. But something of him hung about in dreamland to the very end of Edward Albert’s days.

Mr Myame had figured in a string of religious nightmares during a phase of dyspepsia and influenza following upon a revivalist sermon Edward Albert had been miraculously induced to hear by a sudden shower of rain. “Strait is the gate,” tenored the revivalist, “and narrow is the way!”—the very first words Edward Albert heard. How many times had he not called Mr Myame narrow? Narrow is the way. You cannot be too careful. Hell is on either side.

With these rapid confusions of identity natural in dreamland, Mr Myame would be at one moment himself and at another his own just and terrible God, who, according to the best Christian authorities, had created a world of sinners in order to hunt it remorselessly to a hell of everlasting torture. This amiable Divinity overhung him, pouring coals of Jupiter upon him out of a kind of cornucopia scuttle. Edward Albert screamed noiselessly in the dreamland way. He awoke rigid with horror and for days his soul was black with spiritual dismay.

He dreaded bedtime and those God-ridden hours.

There was nothing to be done about them, except live through them. You can’t give up going to bed. And gradually they were pushed out of his consciousness by returning health and the steady onset of that other dominant system of urgencies in the human metamorphosis, the convergent factors of the sexual drive. That too shall be told with the same disinterested integrity that we have observed hitherto, at any cost to the lingering illusions and natural modesty of reader and writer alike.