Читать книгу Autobiography of a Cad - A. G. Macdonell - Страница 5

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Cut off as I was by Father’s short-sighted folly from the society of those of my contemporaries who were wrongly supposed to be superior to me in length of pedigree, and were certainly inferior in talent, I was forced to spend most of my holidays in the society of the only son of my father’s estate-agent. His name was George Bedford and he was almost exactly the same age as myself. The estate-agent himself, William Bedford, was a man for whom I had a keen contempt even in those early days. In old Jedediah’s times, William Bedford had been a keen follower of the pack and a fine shot. But he accepted the fatal edict of 1901 with a servile lack of protest which I could never forgive, and put away his pink coats and guns and rods without a word, and threw himself with energy into my father’s Utopian experiments for improving the breed of potatoes, and running a model farm, and such-like nonsense. Serf-like humility is not a thing which I care for very much. And I always disliked the endless drain of money which these experiments involved.

I have always thought that a man who has once worn a pink coat ought to be proud to go on wearing a pink coat, and that a man who throws a thousand pounds away in an endeavour to improve the pedigree strain of brussels sprouts would be, if he were not my beloved father, a fool.

But William Bedford put as much servile enthusiasm into the jettisoning of his pink coat as he did into Father’s experiments in the in-breeding of cabbages, or whatever it was. He seemed to take a pride in his work as work, without ever enquiring whether one sort of work might not be more worth while than another. He had that dull, rustic type of mind which has no sense of discrimination. Still, take him for all in all, William Bedford was not a bad fellow.

He was a big hearty man with a red face and huge hands, and very popular with the farmers and the farm servants, which was only natural because it was William Bedford who had to carry out Father’s reckless schemes of improvements and to announce the rent dispensations in bad years. No wonder he was popular with them. Any man can cultivate the goodwill of savages if he takes them a bag of beads or a musical box. The surprising thing about Bedford was that in some mysterious way he managed to retain the esteem of the gentry, which he had acquired in his hunting days, even after he had supervised the construction of the wire fences. The Master, of course, and one or two of the younger and clearer-sighted members of the Hunt could not be anything more than coldly civil to him after the apostasy, but many of the older landowners in the Grantly country, and the sporting Archdeacon, and most of the High Church parsons, used to chaff him about the wire fences and his conversion from sport to farming as if it really was a laughing matter.

William Bedford had one outstanding quality which I have always hoped was an honest quality. He was utterly loyal to Father and Mother. Indeed, he seemed to adore them both. It was difficult for me at that age to make out whether he really loved them or whether he merely loved the hands which fed him, but there can be no doubt that Father and Mother believed in the sincerity of his affection for them and that they genuinely loved him. The three-cornered friendship which existed between them unbroken for nearly thirty years was a peculiar English anomaly. Probably I am hereditarily a throw-back to my Norman ancestors, but I never could feel anything but uneasiness at the idea of sitting down to supper with one’s estate-agent. Father and Mother were so essentially English that they did it every Sunday for nearly thirty years. Yet what is an estate-agent but a paid servant, when all is said and done? And who would sit down to supper with his footman, except on the annual occasion of the servants’ ball? But my parents thought otherwise, and it was their business, not mine. They loved William Bedford and—let us give him the benefit of the doubt—he probably loved them.

George Bedford, the son, inherited from his father the subservience which made his father follow mine without a murmur from hunting to brussels sprouts and from blood-sports to benevolence. But it was the only quality which he did inherit, for in every other way he was the opposite of William Bedford.

He was born at the old Dower House, just outside the north gate of the Park on the Weltonborough Road, in the same month as I was born at the Hall. He was tall for his age and thin, with sloping shoulders and a pigeon chest and a pale face and spectacles, and he was a precocious reader of books. There was none of his father’s yeoman bluntness and rusticity about him. Nor was there much of his father’s practical bent. At least William Bedford knew on which side his bread was buttered when he put up the wire fences. He lost his hunting but he kept his salary and his house. But George, from my earliest recollection, wasted time on book-learning that could be of no future material value to a man in the position which he was likely to occupy in after-life. It was all very well for me to study the classics and learn the poets off by heart and master the jargon of the art-galleries. A knowledge of Homer and Southey was obviously an investment for me. For George it was a waste. The Elements of the Law of Trespass, or Halliburton on Pigs, or Elm Disease, its Cause and Cure, would have been far more useful for an estate-agent’s son who could hardly hope to rise higher than an estate-agency himself. Many and many a time I used to point this out to young George, and he always listened attentively. But not even my advice could stem his output of misdirected energy.

This disregard of my advice—for although I was in a position to order the little fellow, I never dreamt of giving him my opinions and ideas in any other form than that of brotherly advice—used to annoy me a good deal in those days before I got my temper under perfect control, and I doubt if I would have continued to extend my friendship to George if it had not been for two alleviating circumstances. Firstly, his submissiveness of nature took the intellectual form of admiring me and following my slightest lead and falling in with my lightest wish, and that is a form of flattery which not even the highest characters can easily resist. It is the age-long secret of the dog’s popularity with certain types of human beings, and, conversely, the age-long secret of the cat’s unpopularity with the same types. George regarded me with the same immeasurable devotion as the cow-eyed spaniel regards his master, and I could not help feeling the same half-amused, half-contemptuous affection for George that the master feels for the cow-eyed spaniel. And the second reason was that, after my father inherited Grantly Puerorum and began his cynical campaign—for I can regard it as nothing else—against my social advancement, there was no one else except George Bedford in anything remotely like my own walk of life with whom I could play. So I made the best of it and, in my holidays, played with George Bedford.

He used to bicycle up to the Hall every morning of the holidays on one of my old bicycles which I had grown out of—it was too small for him, as he was even taller than I was when we were entering our teens, though I was a good deal more symmetrically built, but it sufficed and he was justifiably grateful for the gift—and we used to climb the chestnut trees in the park, bicycle down the long avenues, swim in the lake in fine weather, play croquet, a pastime at which I was already proficient, or carpenter in my handsomely fitted carpentry shop. At one time we experimented with lawn-tennis but I found it a tedious game and we soon gave it up. Oddly enough, George developed a decidedly skilful knack at lawn-tennis during the short time that we played it, and I often wish that I had been sufficiently interested in it to encourage him to make progress. But I preferred the more intellectual game of croquet. During the years that George and I played croquet, I can hardly remember a single occasion on which he beat me.

He did not, of course, go to a preparatory school in the proper sense of the word. In spite of the large salary which my father paid to his father, nearly fifty per cent more than old Jedediah had paid him, George only went to a small local school in Midhampton, a queer place, where the boys went home on Saturdays and did not mind the other boys knowing the Christian names of their sisters, and wore knickerbockers at football to save the expense of soap, hot water, and towels for the washing of muddy knees. I well remember my astonishment—I suppose I was eleven by that time—at eliciting from George the extraordinary statement that no one in his school cheated at French. Of course I was at an age when creative imagination cannot be expected to flower—whatever may have happened to me since—and so perhaps I may be excused for having found it difficult to imagine a school in which one did not cheat at French. Even more difficult was it to imagine a schoolboy to whom it had not occurred to cheat at French. Such a lack of enterprise and common-sense seemed then, as it seems now, quite unbelievable. But that is what George was like then, and in after life—the epitome of the smug little bourgeois. It was, in fact, symbolical of George’s character that it was the subject of French on which he elected to be conspicuously honest. In his walk of life the French language and France meant only four things: unbridled licence in morals, sinister perfection of manners, naked feminine breasts, and a glorification of queer cards like Gambetta and Boulanger.

I am not suggesting for a moment that George, at the age of eleven, paid any attention to morals, manners, Gambetta, or feminine breasts. But the atmosphere in which he was brought up, of an English estate-agent’s house in the Midlands—so different from the atmosphere of the Boul’ Mich’—was enough to make him suspicious even of the word French. So, in learning the language of those slippery and immoral foreigners, George was characteristically careful to display all the Britisher’s dull and self-conscious integrity.

That, I think, sums up the essence of George’s early life and the preparatory school to which he was sent. Middle-class honesty was the keynote, and if one had to make a differentiation between the varying degrees of middle-class honesty, one would say that George belonged to the slightly lower middle-class, with which, of course, goes a slightly higher and more self-conscious brand of honesty. George was, in a word, at the age of eleven, a very nice lad, not talented, not even a gentleman, but certainly not a boor.

My own preparatory school was, of course, rather different. We did not run home to our mammies every Saturday—indeed we found it rather a bore to have to go home at the end of the term for the holidays. We did not adhere to a rigid code of “playing the game,” in spite of the quaint exhortations of some of the junior, and therefore still idealistic, masters. We soon discovered that “playing the game” inevitably meant a low place in class, a target for fouls at football, and from time to time a sharp spanking from those in authority for failing to reach the high standard set by those who did not play the game either on the football fields or in the class-room. When we discovered this, we ceased to play the game in any of the departments of school-life, and we enjoyed ourselves immensely in consequence.

The high light of my four years at my prep. school was when I stole a parrot from a passing circus and put it into Matron’s bed. The parrot, on being suddenly uncovered by Matron in her grey woollen nightdress, screamed repeatedly “Jezebel, Jezebel, Jezebel.” Matron had a fit of hysterics and was only saved from a permanent derangement by the kindly action of Jenkinson Ma., who threw a basin of water (in which Jenkinson Mi. had been washing his famous trio of white Albino mice) over her; and the headmaster, entering abruptly and mistaking the sequence of events, beat Jenkinson Ma. and Jenkinson Mi. very sharply indeed. As I was the only witness of the entire episode from beginning to end, it was largely on my evidence that the Jenkinson Brothers suffered. The parrot escaped. So did I. And so, I believe, but I never bothered to enquire, did the triplet mice.

But, in the main, life was dull at that prep. school, and it was with a lively hope of the future that I shed the dust of it, and departed to Eton, at the age of thirteen years and a half.