Читать книгу Autobiography of a Cad - A. G. Macdonell - Страница 4

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My name is Edward Percival Fox-Ingleby and I was born in 1889. My father was a wealthy landowner in the neighbourhood of Midhampton, Midhamptonshire. We were not an aristocratic family in the sense that we were quartered with the Dukeries or mentioned in Domesday Book, but we were of good solid upper-class stock. Naturally I would have preferred, when I grew sufficiently old to understand these things, to have been the viscount heir to a marquis, or even the younger son of a Nova Scotia baronet, always provided that my income was no smaller. But at no time in my life would I have exchanged my father’s competence for an impoverished title and a mortgaged estate. We live in a world of realism in which a coronet, however pleasant, is seldom the equivalent of a large block of War Loan.

For those who are acquainted with the true relative values of these matters, a title is by no means everything. Many a family which has not even a baronetcy at its head is more ancient, more renowned, more essentially noble, than a dozen dukedoms and a score of marquisates. The Inglebys (Fox- was added later) are not actually mentioned in the Roll of Battle Abbey nor is their escutcheon among those which adorn the fringes of the Roll, but there is a very strong presumption that they were present in some strength at the Battle of Hastings, as there is no record of any Inglebys remaining in Normandy after the early spring of 1066. My descent, therefore, can be traced direct from father to son—with a trivial gap between the battle of Tewkesbury in the Wars of the Roses and the accession of Henry the Seventh, during which it is presumed that loyalty to the defeated Yorkists necessitated a temporary change of name, and a few other trivial gaps later on,—right back to that fine old Norman family. So you will readily understand that I can hold up my head in any company, although only a plain commoner, with this resounding fanfaronade of ancestry behind me.

Of my great-grandfather on the paternal side—I have never taken much account of maternal relations; they are unimportant in deciding a man’s heredity—little, if anything, is known. But the fact that he bequeathed neither money, nor land, nor ancestral Ingleby plate, nor the family portraits, nor even a crested snuffbox, to his son Jedediah Percival, my grandfather, leads me to think that he must have gambled away the Ingleby fortunes in the company of Fox and Pitt and Sheridan and the Prince Regent. I fancy he was one of the inner clique of the Corinthians and the Hell-Fire Club. Probably he was famous as Beau Ingleby. There is no actual proof of this but it is the only possible explanation of Grandfather Jedediah’s humble start in life. Thrown out, a pauper infant, into a hard world by the early death of the aristocratic spendthrift, poor little Jedediah was brought up in a middle-class, nonconformist household near Dulwich—a strange milieu for an Ingleby—and by the time he was sixteen years old he had so far assimilated his bourgeois surroundings that he had acquired a passionate admiration for John Bright, a belief in the teachings of Wesley, and a determination never to regard anything less than fifteen per cent as an adequate return upon outlaid capital. The only exception he ever made in the third of these tenets was in the case of other people’s capital. For this he always thought four per cent was more than sufficient.

I do not remember Grandfather Jedediah very clearly, but I have heard enough about him to make me revere his memory, and at the same time to feel extremely glad that he is dead. He was a Liberal of the good old school. He hated privilege and tyranny with equal vehemence, and was always ready to denounce, upon the private hearth or upon the public platform, the Tories, Ferdinand of Naples, the Tsar, the Sultan, Disraeli, Napoleon the Third, and all those who used the feudal system of birth and prerogative and salon-intrigue to keep the Claimant out of the Tichborne estates and title. He subscribed to good causes at the rate of a guinea each per annum, and threw all his influence against Lord Shaftesbury’s attempts to interfere with the normal and natural relations of capital and labour. I have been told that Grandfather Jedediah was animated against Lord Shaftesbury—Lord Ashley as he then was—by the fact that he, Grandpapa, was at that time financing a number of small chimney-sweeping enterprises in various towns in the north Midlands, and resented his Lordship’s meddling campaign to prohibit the use of young lads in the chimneys. But this I know to be a malicious accusation, for my grandfather’s religious, Wesley-inspired soul would not have allowed him to do anything so wicked as to exploit children in chimneys unless the system had been economically sound. He was as vigorous as even his Lordship was in the denunciation of all abuses which did not show a reasonable profit at the end of the financial year, and he was particularly philanthropic in his desire to stamp out the monstrous exploitation of humanity which was so often practised by his rivals in trade.

Jedediah Percival Ingleby made a large fortune out of his various business enterprises, and even the sudden expropriation of his numerous slaves upon his West Indian estates (he never visited them, of course, but he held a controlling interest in them through a majority holding in a parent company) did not do more than shake a little the solid structure upon which he had built his fortune. “I am a religious man,” he used to say reverently—I was only a child, but I can remember the occasion vividly, the big iron-grey head wagging, and the straight blue eyes gazing at the ancestral Bible which never left the desk in the dining-room—“I am a religious man, and the Almighty God will not, I think, misunderstand me when I say that the Ingleby Estates Company is the Rock upon which I have founded my Church.”

Jedediah took an active part in Liberal politics in the Midlands and was chairman of the County Liberal Association and a frequent visitor to the Party Councils at Westminster.

It was greatly to his credit that he did not sever his connection with Liberalism after the Acts were passed which prohibited the employment of children under six in factories for more than fourteen hours a day. He must have lost many thousands a year by that piece of bureaucratic interference. From his letters of that mid-century period I gather that he would have thrown in his lot with the Tories, had it not been for Lord Beaconsfield’s abrupt and ill-considered extension of the franchise to the ten-pound free-holder and his equally undigested Factory Acts. Such iniquities revolted my grandfather’s essentially Liberal soul, and he remained loyal to the old party, surviving even the imposition of the income-tax and the proposal—of all criminal lunacies—to give Home Rule to Ireland.

Grandpapa Jedediah died in 1896, full of years. He cut up for close on a cool quarter of a million. He was a man. His wife was negligible.

There is no virtue in the world, in my opinion, to equal the grandeur of filial piety. If I may call from the vasty deep a vague spirit of the classics which I studied as a youth, I would refer you to pious Aeneas, who carried his old father either out of Troy or into Rome—I forget which. But anyway, the point is that he carried him somewhere or other; the particular city which was the starting-point or destination is immaterial. Aeneas was a good son, and I have always admired him for it. I, too, was a good son and, although my father has been dead for many years, I think that I still am. For, however deep my grievances against my father, and with whatsoever unfairness he treated me, no one ever heard me say or write a word against him and no one ever will.

The trouble about Father was that he inherited Grandfather’s Liberal ideas in theory without Grandfather’s Liberal ideas in practice. Thus, he sold all the family shares in the Ingleby Estates Company, invested the proceeds in consols, and settled down at the big house at Grantly Puerorum in Midhamptonshire to lead the life of a squire.

Grandfather Jedediah had bought the house—it was the old Manor of the Grantly-de-la-Vignes, who were contemporaries of ours, having left Normandy at the same time as the Inglebys—after one of his finest financial coups. When the Prussians scored their unexpected military successes at Mars-la-Tour and Gravelotte and Vionville in the war of 1870, shrewd old Jedediah saw what was going to happen, down to the last detail. He sent an agent, with a large credit at the Banque de France, to enlist the services, on a commission basis, of all the available rat-catchers in Paris. In the weeks which elapsed between the disaster at Sedan and the Prussian investment of Paris, Jedediah’s agent and his rat-catchers had pretty well cornered the metropolitan sewer-rats. They put them into cages in a couple of hotels in the Rue St. Honoré which Jedediah leased for the purpose, and waited for the siege and its inevitable pressure. Weeks before the surrender of Paris on January 26th, 1871—if my historical memory serves me aright—rats were selling at seven and eight francs a head. Mind you, francs in those days were francs, and you cannot be surprised that a frantically starving populace, still retaining some francs and madly anxious to buy a sewer-rat almost at any price, should have materially assisted my grandfather to buy the Manor House of Grantly Puerorum.

It is, indeed, on record that old Jedediah was heard to grumble once or twice that the Siege of Paris had ended too soon. If it had not been for the untimely capitulation signed by Favre (I am not pretending. I looked it up in a history book), Jedediah claimed that he would have disposed of the two hundred and twenty thousand rats which still remained on his books. But even as it was, he did not do very badly out of the transaction. The remaining rats went back to the sewers of Paris and, out of the profits, he bought the Manor House of Grantly Puerorum. But if the siege had gone on long enough, and if it had not been for that iniquitous Favre with his craven hurry to surrender, Grandfather Jedediah always maintained that out of the surplus rats he could have bought Grantly Grange, Grantly Place, and the grazing and turf-cutting rights over Grantly Common as well. Which just shows that you can never trust those French. Indeed, all through my life I have found it difficult to distinguish between French and rats. I suppose it is a hereditary trait with which I have been endowed owing to Grandfather’s financial disappointment.

To return:

Father cut loose from all Grandfather’s commercial affairs within a few days of coming into his inheritance, and settled down at Grantly.

He was a passionate believer in a quiet life and a fixed income.

It is difficult to see where he got these defeatist ideas from. The Inglebys have been traditionally fighters, ever since the old days in Normandy. Jedediah was a fighter, and I do not suppose anyone could say that I have been conspicuously backward in an affray.

But Father was painfully mild.

He looked painfully mild. His face was red and hearty, his long moustaches were white and middle-class, his blue eyes were almost grotesquely gentle, and his kindness to his inferiors was the laughing-stock of the young bloods of the county. His behaviour as the squire of Grantly Puerorum was, alas! that a son should say it, undignified.

Father was, to put it in a nutshell, a sort of amateur saint. Professional saints have always seemed to me to be pretty awful—all those peculiar Italians and Swiss and Frenchmen and Spaniards, who wore dressing-gowns and made liqueurs and kept large dogs. I have always been proud to belong to a race which did not mess about with professional saints.

But amateurs, whether in theatricals or in literature or in sanctification, are even worse, and Father was an amateur saint. I have no time to do more than sketch the lines which his unpaid canonization took. For example, he developed a painful knack of espousing lost causes and, worse, of subscribing heavily to them. Gone was the old notion of the grandpaternal guinea. The new paternal notion was seldom less than a hundred guineas. Then Father had the repairing habit. That is to say, he re-roofed leaky cottages on the estate, rebuilt tottering barns for the tenant farmers, laid on water and gas for peasants who probably never washed and couldn’t read, maintained fences and gates, and paid for hedging and ditching. Not only did he indulge these extravagant whims, but he stubbornly refused to add the interest charges on all this capital expenditure to the rent of the peasants and, on more than a dozen occasions in my own recollection, he actually excused the entire estate of its annual rent on the ground that the harvest had been ruined by the weather or something. I am a little uncertain what it is that ruins harvests, but, whatever it is, it was that.

It is difficult to understand where Father got these ideas. Jedediah never spent a penny on the estate unless he was legally compelled to—and then the man who legally compelled him got it hot and strong in double quick time—or unless he could see a way of getting twopence back. But Father threw solid gold into what he facetiously called “these green and pleasant fields,” and never expected to get anything back except what he called “good-will.” I am all in favour of good-will myself, but I am not so keen on it when you have to pay for it, and I simply detest it when you have to pay through the nose for it.

Then there were the two infuriating blunders which Father made about temperance and blood-sports, either of them sufficient in itself to ruin my social career. I have to speak about them, not to disparage my father—that would be unthinkable—but out of ordinary honesty to myself. If I am to give you any idea of the background against which I was brought up, I must not shirk any of the relevant points.

Briefly, on temperance and blood-sports, my father disastrously revised the sane and practical policy of my grandfather. Jedediah Ingleby, like a good Liberal, was a strong temperance man, but he was sensible enough not to be bigoted. He employed none but rigid abstainers upon the estate, and inexorably discharged without a character—and in those admirable days loss of job and character at a week’s notice also meant loss of cottage at a week’s notice—any employee who was suspected of having entered the local inn. Chairman of the local bench, his sentences for inebriety were exemplary. But he was broad-minded enough to admit a certain elasticity into his principles, and he seldom retired to bed before he had drunk, in addition to his bottle of favourite claret, two bottles—smaller, of course, by a good deal than our modern bottle—of port or madeira wine.

As for field-sports, Grandfather neither hunted, fished, nor shot. His youth and middle-age had been too fully occupied with the creation of his fortune to allow of such pastimes, and in his later days he preferred, when he wished for diversion, to amuse himself in a manner which required less money and less time, and which, moreover, required no new apprenticeship.

I have often in my life been told by seedy, dingy persons, who seem to be only one step removed from blackmail, that they are my first cousins on the wrong side of the blanket, and it certainly would appear that Grandpapa Jedediah’s interpretation of “blood-sports” was inclined to casuistry. He would not shed the blood of an animal by way of sport, but he would not deny himself the sportive play which hot blood made possible, and infinitely desirable, until he was seriously advanced in years. Be that how it may, I admire him for it. He knew his own limitations. A pheasant on the wing was one thing, a village maiden quite another. He could not bring down the former, and he knew it, and he did not try. But he could bring down the latter, and he knew it, and he did try, and he did succeed. In consequence the local gentry liked and respected him. They put up with his accent and his manners for the sake of his wine, and, exhausted as they were, as a local gentry always is, every evening by their tramps after partridge or their gallops after foxes, they did not fall foul of him in the rustic courts of Venus. They were tired after their own hunting and so they were not rivals in his. In consequence the old man was fairly popular with his well-bred neighbours, and they gradually came to regard him as “a rare old character.”

Father’s attitude was very different and, considering the effect which it had upon my social career, I would not have hesitated to stigmatize it as unforgivably mean, low-class, selfish, and vulgar, if anyone else but my father had been the person concerned. Father, the moment he came into the property, with Grandfather hardly cold in his grave, relaxed all the firm rules about alcoholism on the estate. He sent Christmas presents of firkins of ale to all his dependants and broached enormous barrels at the annual tenantry ball in the village Institute. Yet he himself was a teetotaller, and no drinks were served at the Manor House. The festive parties at the Manor soon faded away. Father’s invitations to dinner were only accepted by the nonconformist parsons, the big tradesmen in Midhampton, the Radical politicians, and a handful of people, here and there, who, one can only suppose, came because they liked him. The big neighbouring squires simply would not sit at a board which was graced by lemonades, barley-waters, and even, to my shame, cocoas.

Worse quickly followed. My father declared publicly, on a Liberal platform at the election of 1901, that encouragement of field-sports was incompatible with the tenets and spirit of Liberalism, and that the whole estate of Grantly Puerorum was to be wired forthwith. And wired it forthwith was. This gratuitous insult to the surrounding country, together with Father’s almost comically light sentences on poachers whenever he found himself in control of the bench, alienated us completely from the cultured society and the elevated milieu in which I had naturally expected to be brought up. My contemporaries of eleven and twelve years of age, triumphant in the victory of the Unionist Party at the polls in 1901, lost no opportunity of jeering at me as “a dirty little Rad” or “Foxy the spoil-sport” or “Ginger-beer Neddie,” whenever we chanced to meet in the country lanes or on the way back to school. And, bitterly though I suffered, I could not find it in my heart to blame them. After all, I was a little Rad, and I was the son of Fox-Ingleby, the Spoil-sport, and my name was Edward, and ginger-beer was drunk a good deal in our house, so how could I say that I had a legitimate grievance? But it irked me sadly all the same. Boys of that age are pathetically sensitive, and it would probably be no exaggeration to say that I was perhaps even more sensitive than the ordinary run. But how I envied them, those swaggering young sons of true-blue Tory landowners with their ponies and their trout-rods and their twelve-bore guns and their hereditary grooms and their freemasonry of class and their instinctive domination. I was as good as they. I knew it, and they—I fancy—knew it. But my father, whom I loved and against whom no word shall be spoken in my presence, was a damned anti-blood-sport Radical.

My mother was an ideal wife and mother. She was placid and comfortable and well-meaning. She fussed, of course, and she had an extraordinarily irritating trick of assuming that everyone had got a cold and needed eucalyptus on their handkerchiefs. The faintest clearing of the throat by the butler, the most casual sneeze by the kitchen-maid, the merest snuffle by a nasty adenoidal boots, was enough to send Mother off into a paroxysm of solicitude. During the winter months the whole house reeked of disinfectant like the dress-circle of a West-End theatre when the play is faltering, and the incompetent country doctor made a very comfortable income out of Grantly Manor.

Mother was a champion pauperizer. She used to give so many old clothes, and boots, and blankets, and sacks of coal to the wives of the tenants and workmen on the estate that it was really hardly necessary for them to do any work at all, and her extravagant generosity when any of them had a baby was a positive encouragement to plebeian incontinence. And she used to spend hours sitting in their frowsty little parlours, talking to them about nothing. A little geniality from the master or mistress is a wonderful tonic to a semi-feudal community such as ours was, but Mother overdid it to such an extent that she must have seemed undignified to the dependants. Her excessive familiarity caused me agonies of shame when I was a small boy. Even at an early age I had an instinctive sense of the essential fitness of things, and Mother’s free-and-easy failure to play the part of the Grande Dame was distressing to me. But the truth is that Mother was in many ways an irritating person. She had a knack of looking after Father when she ought to have been looking after her only child which never failed to annoy me, and she scarcely made any secret of the fact that she was a wife first and a mother second. This was wrong. Nobody wishes to be spoilt, but there ought to be a middle course between spoiling and positively putting the child’s interests after the father’s.

But it is not for me to criticize. In her own fussy fashion, she was a wonderful woman and I loved her very dearly.

She was a Fox, and Father added her name to his when he married her. I rather fancy that she was descended from Gaston de Foix, who figures, you will remember, in the Chronicles of Froissart.