Читать книгу In Search of Myself - Frederick Philip Grove - Страница 4

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MY EARLIEST distinct and undoubted memory of my life as a wanderer over the face of Europe, in the wake of my mother, is of the afternoon of a late summer day when, arriving from England, we landed at Boulogne-sur-mer. I see myself reluctantly trailing along on Annette’s hand. On account of my curiosity, which was everlastingly attracted by trifles, especially on board ship, I was a drag on her; but she dared not let go of me, for we were approaching the gang-planks leading to the quay; she feared I might get lost in the crowd or be pushed into the water by the crush.

I must have been about eight years old; for I had recently begun school. I did not yet show any sign of growing up into a tall young man, though I believe I was even then somewhat above the average height for my age. I was thin and looked a bit sickly; not that there was anything definitely wrong with me; but I was a poor eater and subject to terrific colds which more or less disabled me when they came.

At Boulogne we stayed for a week or so at a hotel; and meanwhile my mother, aided by two or three agents, searched for a suitable cottage or house. The season was over; but there were still a few hardy bathers left. Her suite at the hotel had been ordered by wire; and I remember how I was struck by the magnificent and superabundant display of flowers in the living-room. We were used to them, especially when we moved, and it never occurred to me to ask where they came from; they came from places which we had left; and they came from places for which we were bound; in this case they also came from Boulogne and the surrounding districts. To an outsider, my mother’s travels always resembled a triumphal progress.

From this stay at Boulogne another memory emerges, a visual one. Endless interviews had taken place with crafty house-agents; and sometimes, when houses for rent had been inspected, I had been taken along. One morning a particularly cunning agent appeared at the hotel with a carriage, inviting my mother to accompany him into the country to look at a vacant chateau. I still see him standing in front of her, in the parlour of the hotel, speaking in a dulcet voice full of flattery—nobody, abroad, ever spoke to my mother in any tone but that of flattery—and praising what he had to offer. On this occasion the language was extravagant. I see him gathering the tips of his fingers and kissing them, spreading them airily as he exclaimed, “Mais c’est un bijou, madame!”

My mother, amused, consented to go, and took me along, without Annette this time.

Of the chateau as such I remember nothing; but the location of the place was somewhat similar to that of Thurow, though everything was on a smaller scale. The last thing the agent showed was a beach which was narrow and flanked as well as dotted with granite boulders. What followed is etched on my memory as on a copper plate.

The agent, a small man with loosely-hung limbs, a moustache and a goatee, was standing on one of these boulders, holding forth on the surpassing merits of the place. Meanwhile, having a cold, he was frantically digging about in his pockets for a handkerchief. I, fascinated, standing by my mother’s side and holding on to her left hand, followed his contortions with complete absorption and, no doubt, with an open mouth.

Suddenly, finding no handkerchief, he reached into his hip-pocket, without ceasing to pour out his sales talk, and thence drew the remains of a roll of toilet paper. To my childish horror, he peeled off a long strip, coolly folded it into a suitable size, and, gesticulating and rhapsodizing, used it to blow his nose. Then, reaching up with an unconsciously careless but graceful gesture, he set it afloat on the salt-breeze blowing in from the channel, as if that were the most natural way of disposing of his rheum.

As though convinced by that motion, my mother promptly rented the place, much to my delight, for I had already fallen in love with the beach and the woods above it.

This move involved a great many things. Among others, it involved the hiring of horses, carriage, and a number of servants. It also involved our moving again in a month or so.

As soon as we were definitely settled in town—in a house standing flush with the sidewalk of a dignified street—my mother, retaining the carriage, made a few calls, both within and without the city, received a few intimates—intimates, it seems to me today, she had in every city, large or small, of the then-known world—and settled down to her usual life of playing the piano and of reading, reading, reading.

Me, she sent to school. There, for the first time, I was faced with the task of acquiring a boy’s version of the French language. So far, my French had been that of Annette who edited it, being careful not to let me be contaminated by anything resembling a living idiom; I verily believe she made sure that a phrase was to be found in Bossuet before she used it in speaking to me. At school, however, I was soon valiantly struggling along; and, I believe, I succeeded middling well.

Somehow my mother was less close to me abroad than at home. She seemed always to have callers. In the morning, I was not at home; in the afternoon and evening she, so it seems at this distance of time, was never alone. She was more remote and magnificent, too; perhaps for no other reason than that her callers, female as well as male, though the latter outnumbered the former, treated her with a formal deference or at least politeness which I never seemed to observe in their social intercourse with other women. None of them ever entered into any sort of relationship with me, though, of course, I was often called in to show myself and to bow and shake or even kiss hands. Whenever this happened, Annette stood by the door where nobody took the slightest notice of her. I was spoken to by these great ladies and their charming men; but I had been, and was being, taught to answer briefly, in monosyllables, taking care not to forget to add “sir” or “madam” to every word. On such occasions I wore a black velvet suit with a wide lace collar, both of which I hated as being “sissy”.

On the whole, I think, my mother was less active abroad than at home. She rarely rode out alone, though on occasion she formed one of a cavalcade; and when she did, my old admiration for her returned; she looked so magnificent on horseback. When, at night, she dressed to go out, she was invariably more gorgeous than I ever saw her at Thurow; she was more décolletée; she wore more jewels; she was more carefully powdered and touched up.

As for Annette, she was entering upon, and, as the years went by, advancing in, middle age; her face became more and more like that of a bulldog; her temper, with everybody but myself, became soured. It was exceedingly rare that I saw her in male company; yet, whenever we left a place, she shed tears.

One word about school. Without ever exerting myself, I was and remained an excellent scholar. My memory never failed me; what I had once heard, I retained; and to this day I say certain things, smiling to myself, with the accents of my teachers. At Boulogne, I was much helped along by the fact that the French of my teachers was the same as Annette’s who, though she spoke English fluently, was under orders to use only French with me. No language ever presented me with difficulties; and, no matter in what country we were, I always learned two versions: that of the teachers and that of the boys.

Then, at Boulogne, one morning, at recess time, Annette appeared in the small, walled-in school-yard and summoned me home. I followed her, puzzled to find the house in confusion.

Two or three months had gone by; my life in this little city had assumed the appearance of being settled. But my mother, it proved, was tired of the place and, on a few hours’ notice, had arranged to vacate the house and to catch an early afternoon train to Paris. Already the furniture was being loaded on drays which stood drawn up on the cobble-stone pavement of the street, to be returned to the dealer, for it had been rented. The maids were busy packing our trunks.

At Paris, where we arrived in the evening, there followed an hour or two of chaos. It appeared that, so far, we had not so much been going somewhere as escaping the place from which we came. The question was whether to remain where we were or to go on; I believe the answer finally given was solely determined by the weather. It happened to be a raw and blustery November day; and my mother wanted the sun.

Late at night we boarded the Riviera Express; and a day and a half later we alighted at Florence. Again we went to a hotel; and again we started on the search for a suitable place to live in. After many drives into the hills overlooking the Arno, and after much haggling with crafty house-agents, my mother rented a small villa in a fine residential quarter of the city, furnished it with rented furniture, made a few calls, and began to receive a few intimates. Thus she settled down to her usual life of playing the piano and of reading, reading, reading.

Of course I was sent to school.

I have sometimes wondered whether I was in her way. More and more, as the years went by, she left me and my upbringing to Annette; up to a certain point, that is; very likely it was the point which is marked by our last flight from home. From then on, I being a young man rather than a mere child, she began to like to take me along when she went out; and I accompanied her on all her shopping trips and, occasionally, to some afternoon social function. By that time she was fifty, or nearly so; and she had resigned herself to no longer being a young woman. She had had her first operation for cancer; and a second one, much more serious, had been advised. Again and again she put it off; but her face began to be invaded by traces of suffering; and she often looked as though she foresaw a terrible end. I, on the other hand, was adolescent and full of exuberant curiosity about life. Having weathered the first onslaughts of illness, I seemed slowly to grow up into immunity. As is only natural, at the very time when, in her life abroad, my mother was inclined to fall back on her motherhood, I was growing away from her, for I was exploring paths of my own.

We must return to Florence, however. At school, I struggled valiantly along, trying to fit myself into a new environment and to acquire a language, in two versions, for which Annette had not prepared me. It was not to be for long.

One morning, at recess-time, Annette appeared once more to summon me home; and, as I followed her, I found the villa again in complete confusion.

My mother, it appeared, was tired of the place and, on a few hours’ notice, had arranged to vacate the house and to catch an afternoon train to the south.

I cannot go on in detail, giving a list; sequences are disturbed in my memory. Suffice it to say that, in the course of the next few years, we alighted successively at Palermo, Zuerich, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest, Odessa, Moscow, St. Petersburg—still so-called—Berlin, Munich, Copenhagen, home, Edinburgh, London, Paris, Rheims, Marseille. I am stringing the names together at random as they may conceivably have followed each other, though no geographical nearness was ever a determining factor. Thus my mother, who carried on a vast correspondence, might happen to be somewhere in the Danubian basin when word came to her that, on a given day, there would be a performance of the Ninth Symphonie at Cologne; incontinently she started for that distant city to hear it. Or the Bayreuth season might open. Seats were reserved by telegraph; and we would be there for the opening night. Every major musical event formed one occasion on which even I, even in those earlier years, was given a glimpse of the greater world. It was my mother’s desire that I should grow up with a taste for great music and with a solid knowledge of the masterpieces of the past. The consequence is that, even today, there are few great operas or symphonies which I cannot hum or croak—I have no singing voice!—in spite of the fact that, after the great break in my life, forty years were to go by during which I was lucky if, once in five, six, seven years, I could listen to a performance; on one occasion, the interval was of almost exactly twenty years.

Invariably, I was also sent for when a great performer or composer was in her drawing-room; and they all came when invited: Joachim, Nikish, Mahler, Brahms, and scores of others whose names I have forgotten. And this is perhaps the moment to say a few words of the atmosphere of her drawing-room.

Before I do so, one word about my further education. When I was ten or eleven, a trained governess joined my mother’s staff: an English-woman this time who, in addition to supervising my school work, was to teach me to play the piano and to instruct me in such modern languages as were not taught in the schools which I attended, especially Spanish. It never struck me at the time that my mother might have a definite aim in view when she urged me to pay much attention to Spanish. In Russia and, later, in Constantinople, Smyrna, Cairo, and Fez—for as I grew up, my mother extended her trips—I was sent to private institutions, French or English; in France, Italy, and Germany I attended schools conducted in the language of the country. So, to my present regret, I never learned Russian, though, of course, now as later, I picked up a good many words and phrases. As for my music, my governess is to blame for the fact that I took a violent dislike to the piano; she tried to teach it with a ruler; and my knuckles were always sore. To my mother’s great chagrin and my present poignant regret, I soon begged off; and shortly after the place of the governess was taken by a young German tutor who had no music himself. This I did not consider so serious a deficiency as that he had no Greek; for already I harboured the secret ambition to become a classical scholar. This desire, as we shall see, led to the only great conflict with my mother, who had conceived other plans with regard to my future.

Now, though when we were abroad, there was never anything which could be called a home atmosphere, there was a very distinct and striking intellectual atmosphere in the circles which gathered about my mother; and that atmosphere had a profound and persistent influence on me and my whole development to come. No matter where we were, even in Egypt and Turkey, the people who called on my mother or on whom she called; who crowded her drawing-room or sat down at her table when she gave one of her rare dinner parties, were the men and women—fewer then—who were more or less internationally known as “good Europeans”, and whose names are quoted today, in the world of letters, of music, of art, of science. It is true that there were on occasion, especially in Germany and Austria, though also in France, crowds of brilliant uniforms; but these uniforms were worn by men who, though their vocation was a military one, had wider interests and in addition were students.

No matter where my mother went, she dropped automatically into milieus where it established a higher claim to attention and even distinction to have written a notable book, to have painted an enduring picture, to have carved a fascinating statue than to have amassed wealth or even to have ruled nations. The wealthy and the mighty were not always absent; but their credentials had to be other than wealth or power. Which does not mean that there was ever a Bohemian air about these gatherings; very much the reverse. It was only after my mother’s death that I became acquainted with the borderlands of human societies. Thus, from an early age, I was taught to distinguish between the ephemerals and the essentials. Yet, strange to say, one of the four estates never figured in these circles; and that was the estate ecclesiastical.

Which lends itself to the recording of an external fact. Soon after the operation which I had undergone in Hamburg at the age of thirteen, we spent some six months in England; it was probably in the following fall and winter; and there I was confirmed in the Anglican Church in which I had been baptized. I call it an external fact, for such it was to my mother and, consequently, to me. I was told that this was a formality which it might be wise to go through, though it was not presumed to make any profound impression on my inner life. Perhaps I might add right here that no church ever succeeded in making me other than I was, with the single exception perhaps of the Roman Catholic Church. I have always been able to discuss almost anything with Roman Catholic priests; whereas with any other ecclesiastics I invariably ran up, within a few minutes, against things which were, so I felt, racially incompatible with my mentality.

To all this I must add one other fact. From an early age I, being thus taken over the face of Europe, evinced a special, almost passionate interest in the remains of antiquity, mostly Roman, of course. I saw aqueducts, gateways, vast arenas; I saw the Forum in Rome; the ruins of the Parthenon in Athens. Pesto, Girgenti were shrines to me. And since all these places were linked to the present by the Renaissance, I soon understood that they represented mere meshes in the great web of European life. They, too, had been built by men like myself, by men like those that surrounded me—who had been children once, who had grown up, had lived their lives and had died: men who had once trembled with joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, and who yet were gone beyond recall except in as much as, perhaps, some essence of them lived on in what they had left behind. Most of them were anonymous, as nameless as the writers of the Book of Kings. What they spoke of, to us, was rather the race out of which they had arisen—a race which, on balance, seemed after all to have been greater than the race of the living. Greater, too, seemed to me those who had written the Book of Kings, the Iliad, and the Oresteia. But at least some of the works of literature remained entire; whereas these remnants ...

In the main, these remnants of ancient civilizations were crumbling. Though many of them had been, and a few of them continued to be, works of high art, expressive, unmistakably, of the spirit of man, so that I shivered when I realized their essence, and destined, therefore, to live forever in the echoes of the human mind. Yet in so far as they had formed parts of great material civilizations, they had fallen, or were falling, into the dust.

Occasionally, an American would find his way into this circle; and at least once one of them took me under his wing for a day or two, his chief object being to impress me with a sense of the new civilization which was growing up across the sea. But the fact was that I was not at all impressed with this visitor from a continent which was destined to furnish me with a home throughout the greater part of my life to come: a fact still hidden from me at the time. Yet he succeeded, by his descriptions of New York and Chicago, in creating a vision. I must have been fourteen or fifteen years old at the time; and we were at Venice. Characteristically, I, seeming to myself to stand at a point in history whence I was looking back over the last two or three millennia, or perhaps it was even five or six, for we had recently been in Egypt, at once saw that vision of an American civilization from a point in history a few millennia hence, when it would lie in ruins and when those who were building it would be forgotten and gone. There seemed to be only one difference between the ruins of the past and those of the future derived from the present, namely, that those of the future would, very likely, be less enduring than those of the past had after all proved to be. It is natural, perhaps, to draw inferences from the quality of the work as to the stature of those who created it; and, conversely, having a race of giants in mind, as the creators of what were now the ruins of the past, I looked at my American whose chief objection to Italy was that she had no coal of her own and drew a conclusion, from him, as to the race of Americans from among whom he sprang; finding them wanting, I inferred that their work would one day be found wanting as well.

From the cut of his clothes, from the assurance of his bearing, and from his speech I soon learned to recognize his countrymen wherever I saw them; and they impressed me like hosts of invaders from some distant planet, the moon or Mars, pullulating about the remnants left by a race of supermen of the past.

On the ancient ruins, the Renaissance had built its world; and modern Italy was building a third world on the second. The whole globe was a palimpsest: no doubt even the Americas would one day reveal older worlds to the archeologist.

Out of that insight, I believe, arose my ambition to study archeology.

But it must not be imagined that I was a brooder; far from it; I enjoyed my day-to-day life as much as anyone. I was a dreamer, yes; and a dreamer with the devouring ambition to do things worthy of the past of mankind.

I began to pick up a little Greek by myself; having mastered the alphabet, I began to read, intoxicating myself with the sound of the language. In this, my mother gave me neither help nor encouragement. Even my tutor could not assist. I came to suspect that my mother had picked him for the sake of that disability. But here and there, now in Italy, now in France, and above all in Germany, I ran across a teacher who, thinking me a queer sort of child, mischievous though I was, took me humorously at first, and indulgently, but who, as time went by, became interested and finally helped me. I was not yet fifteen when I began to decipher and to memorize passages in Homer, Aeschylus, and Euripides—I seemed to have no organ for Sophocles—in Sappho, Alcman, Alcaeus, Simonides—all of them poets. I used cribs, a dictionary, and a grammar; but I took no interest in the acquisition of the language as such and used it only as a gateway to the literature. Thus I spent hours and hours on what, to my tutor, seemed a fruitless endeavour. Yet even he found his interest in it; for it left him free to do as he pleased: one day, when he had saved enough money, he, too, wanted to carve out a university career for himself, in the law; and so he enjoyed sitting in an arm-chair, a long pipe in his mouth, to pursue his own reading while I worked away at my Greek. It saved him the task of keeping me amused or otherwise occupied.

Strange to say, and as if to make up for his deficiency in Greek, this tutor was a great skier and skater; and my mother, whom even this may have influenced in her selection, made it a point to spend that winter in the mountains of Bohemia, chiefly, if I remember aright, at a place called Schreiberhau—I find myself unable to locate it on any map at my disposal. I became a good figure-skater; I am teaching my son today; and more than once my tutor and I went off on a day’s excursion, in a horse-drawn sleigh which took us up some mountain-slope, to descend on skis in a few minutes. All which I enjoyed with a sense of exhilaration which makes my flesh tingle today.

Life went much more smoothly than at home. In spite of our frequent change of scene, I have, for all these years between 1880 and 1888, nothing whatever to tell of exciting episodes, such as diversified the intervals at Thurow. I became supranational or cosmopolitan, that is all. Any attempt to distinguish the years, in a geographical sense, could result in only one of two things: either a record of slow but unbroken growth on the part of myself, and of slow but unbroken ageing on the part of my mother; or in a travelogue which would necessarily be built on conjecture only, for my memory refuses to tell me when we were where. We spent a few months at a Hungarian castle, with delightful but wholly irresponsible people of the upper aristocracy who talked of nothing but war and conquest in the Balkans; we spent another few months at Cairo, living at a hotel, in the company, chiefly, of English engineers who would come and go. We lived alternately at Paris or London, at Vienna or Berlin; but it is no longer possible to assign the trifles that linger in my memory to any particular time or locality.

Yet, slowly, slowly, the great conflict approached, between my mother and myself—a conflict to which she rallied all her dwindling powers and every ally she could find but in which she was necessarily defeated, if only by her death. The only fact that stands out is that, when at last it came to an open fight, she had already lost the battle; and a sort of truce was declared to give her the time to die in peace. This, to me, is a heart-breaking thing, much more so today than, in the egotism of my youth, it was at the time.

My earliest desire, with regard to my future life, had been to go to sea. That desire she had passionately and successfully fought. The last weapon she used, almost ex-post-facto, for I had already learned to laugh at my old ambition, was that she gave me the most magnificent birthday present which I have ever received in my life: a steel sailing yacht in the Baltic. I was sixteen at the time; and I believe she saw her end coming. By that present she tied herself down; for what use could that yacht be to me unless we lived by the sea? Later, I shipped the boat about as I changed my abode; but at the time not even the possibility of such a thing occurred to either of us. It was, of course, after her break, our break, with my father; otherwise we could have gone home. As it was, we spent a long summer at Baltic sea-ports: St. Petersburg, Danzig, Luebeck, Copenhagen; and it was I who moved the baggage in my boat. My apprenticeship I served with Uncle Jacobsen who had already gained a considerable ascendancy over me.

This Dane was a ship-broker at Hamburg, with a business which he had built up himself and in which he had prospered amazingly. How he came to know my mother, and what their exact relation had been, I cannot tell for certain. I only know that he obeyed her slightest wish, especially with regard to myself. During the years in which I was mentally mature enough to judge, let me say, from my tenth year on, he had, whenever we were in northern Europe, except at home, joined us, taking me in hand. I do not think he was a highly cultivated man, or a man of particularly fine breeding; it is true, he wore expensive clothes; but he always somehow managed, in polite company, to look just a bit untidy. In spite of his conspicuous success in business he had never married. But like my father he was an athlete, a bold swimmer, a skilful rower and sailor, and an expert at all sorts of acrobatics: these were his hobbies; and he taught me much, not by giving me instruction, but by showing me how he did certain things. He could stand on his head, walk on his hands, turn a cartwheel, and walk the tight rope; above all, he swam and dived like a fish. And soon I had the desire to do likewise. I have not the slightest doubt that, if at the time of writing I am physically still alert and mentally nimble, I owe it to him.

He always treated me as an equal; and when he was with us, everything else, even my school work, remained in abeyance. We rode together; and we walked together, often staying away for a whole day or longer. Whenever we were near water, he had one of his fleet of boats shipped out from Hamburg: a double skiff, or a half-outrigger boat, and finally two single-seaters with full-outrigger row-locks and sliding seats. In these boats, some of them no more than sixteen inches wide, we travelled thousands of miles, on the Rhine, the Elbe, the Oder penetrating thence into the Mosel, the Main, the Neckar, the Havel. We went to England to attend the great regattas and thus saw much of the countryside. And finally he taught me to sail.

All this, I have no doubt today, he did at the request of my mother, and for a purpose; for he was the successful business man.

He spent weeks and months with me, always unexpectedly turning up when we were within reasonable distance, no doubt kept informed of our movements by my mother. Invariably, when he appeared, looking inconspicuous and casual, but carrying himself with the assurance of the self-made man, I greeted him with delight; and my mother handed me over to him with the supreme confidence that, from any trip made in his company, I should come home physically improved and mentally invigorated. For years, I believe, he made himself a boy to please me or to please her. He never spoke of anything but of what was in hand. He seemed enormously and exclusively practical. Nobody could pick out the proper kind of wood for a given purpose more unfailingly than he; nobody could as simply and convincingly explain a puzzling fact; and nobody was ever quite as ready as he to undertake what must often have appeared as the irrational whim of a child. The cost of a thing was never even as much as mentioned.

He was about my mother’s age, medium-sized, bearded, and intensely sober. But, as the years went by, he began to prefer sailing to rowing; I have no doubt that it was he who suggested the purchase of the yacht; I know that he closed the deal. During that last summer of my freedom, before my mother’s final illness, we sailed from Luebeck to Haparanda and Helsingfors; and even down the Baltic, past Thurow into the Skagerrak, along Jutland, and down the North Sea to Hamburg.

The yacht had accommodation for four, with the galley in front of the cabin. It had three sails and was, therefore, not too large to be worked by a single man; but, of course, we were always two and took the tiller alternately. I distinctly remember our first all-night sail, into the teeth of a high wind and a rising sea, when our chief problem was to keep the water out of the cabin.

And all this, I was to discover, represented a move in my mother’s game of chess against me. Yet, unwittingly, it had been she who had spurred on my desires in the very direction which she wished to block.

Slowly, as the conflict between us defined itself, many things came back to me which she had said to me in the past, ever since I had been her little boy; and gradually they took on their true and, to me, startling meaning.

I must say a word about my reading here. From the time when I had mastered the mechanics of the art, I had been an omnivorous reader; and she had taken me in hand herself and directed my selection of books. By the time I was fourteen I had a not inconsiderable library of my own; and it consisted very largely of complete sets. On every birthday I received, as a matter of course, at least one such set. The list was led by Scott; and Scott was followed by Byron. Then came Shakespeare—the latter, strange to say, at first in the German translation by Schlegel and Tieck, perhaps because we happened to be at Munich; but before the year was out I had an English Shakespeare as well. Schiller, Goethe, Manzoni, Leopardi, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Browning, Eliot, Macaulay, Carlyle followed; and with my pocket money I acquired classical authors in both Latin and Greek. I could not really read the latter so far, but, guided by my reading of critical utterances, I picked out certain passages, especially in Homer, concentrated on them and memorized them so thoroughly that to this day I can rattle them off by heart. Add to that, as I grew up, such divers fare as Montaigne, Pascal, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Hoelderlin, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Verga, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderon, Lesage, Corneille, Racine, Molière, and countless others of lighter weight—Stevenson, for instance, whose Kidnapped came out about that time, Mark Twain, Jules Verne—and you have a small idea of the extent of my reading. By acquiring standard histories of literature—a department of learning in which Germany excelled—I managed somehow even to organize my knowledge to a certain extent. I am, today, often amazed to find how much of my present reading is merely re-reading of what I read at the time.

It was the appearance of Greek books on my shelves which caused my mother the first serious alarm. For years she had talked to me chiefly of her one desire that I should become a “practical” man. Just what that implied, coming from her lips, did not become entirely clear till towards the end of this period when she began, tentatively at first, then more directly, to exemplify the “impractical” man.

Whenever she talked to me of my father, and the occasions became more and more frequent, she did so in a conciliatory spirit, as if she wished to win me back to him. His very serious short-comings she began to put down to temper rather than to innate defects. He was self-willed, headstrong, subject to sudden bursts of uncontrollable anger, true; he had never been checked in life; he lacked the imagination to place himself in the position of others; but at bottom, she said, he meant well. The worst about him was that he was “impractical”.

This sounded all the stranger to me since it was at about this time that, my mother’s reserves breaking down under the pressure of illness, I had the first hints of an early conflict in her own life. She became less reticent and, on occasion, spoke bitterly of her own father. I pieced the fragments together. It seemed that, in her girlhood, there had been three men: an Austrian who held a high rank in the army; my father; and a third man whom, incredibly, I seemed to recognize as my “Uncle Jacobsen”. So that, I said to myself, was the relation between “us” and “Uncle Jacobsen”. She never named him, though. To all three my grandfather had objected violently: to the Austrian because he was Austrian and, therefore, unstable and weak in character; to my father because he considered him a spendthrift; to the third man because, at the time, he had been penniless, a mere employee in a great commercial firm at Hamburg; to all three because they had not been of his picking for her, besides being foreigners. My father, being of English descent himself, had been the least foreign; and so, after a violent struggle, he had carried the day. All of which was completely bewildering to me; I could not see the importance of it: what did the choice of a husband matter? But my worship of my mother was still sufficiently recent to me to make me vow, when, in a tearful exchange of confidences, she urged me, that I, for one, would never marry. Thus I replied to her warnings; for, strange to say, she kept warning me against women. In women she saw the great danger to men; in men, to women. And I, being still at the stage when boys have little but contempt for girls, readily fell in with her plans as she painted for me her ideal of a happy old age for herself: she would be living with me, directing my household, ceasing to do so only with death. I should be a middle-aged man, then, like Uncle Jacobsen, beyond the temptations of early manhood. Women, she said one day, make a man weak.

In discussing my father, she remained dispassionate and impartial; in some things she went so far as to blame herself. It was true, according to her, my father had no sense of property. Where the use of money was concerned, he had no inhibitions. Money, to him, had only one use: to secure, out of life, as much pleasure as he could, as much pleasure as a human life could hold. But even in that, she pronounced the, to me, shocking judgment that it was more the fault of the women who would not leave him alone than his own fault. Above all, she repeated over and over again, he was impractical. He could never hold what he had; much less could he make his money work for him. He was a spender. His father, she told me, had been a man who acquired; a man who built up; a man who made money. It was a new idea to me that money might have to be made, even by such as we. So far, the possession of acquired wealth, in contradistinction to wealth that had been inherited, had been something rather which, in the balance of character, had stood on the debit side. This new view, of the necessity of earning or making money, seemed to imply a complete reversal even in my mother’s attitude. It was only later that I came to see the reason for this reversal: she, having, at the time of her first operation for cancer, made a new deal with her father, was now nearing the end of the resources secured by that deal: she, too, was impractical; she, too, had been living grotesquely beyond her means; for years, to keep up her mode of life, she had been living on capital, first taking a little, then, as interest and dividends dwindled, more; and then still more. Seeing the end of her financial independence coming, feeling herself unable to stave off ruin, hoping against hope, perhaps, that she was not going to live to see the end of her resources, and yet hanging on to life as the supreme and perhaps only good, she looked about among her intimates and saw only one who, having had nothing, now had much, Uncle Jacobsen, who, so I inferred, had remained single on her account. Of the approaching ruin I knew nothing at the time, of course; though even then I overheard little snatches of conversation between her and Uncle Jacobsen from which I inferred that she was entrusting him with certain financial transactions; that she was, at last, handing over to him the management of her affairs; and I also inferred, without as yet fully grasping the significance of the fact, that these financial transactions consisted, on the whole, of the sale of securities.

At last she openly broached the question of a future career for me; and to my amazement and consternation she told me of her wish that, the moment I reached the full age of sixteen, I was to enter Uncle Jacobsen’s business as a sort of apprentice. At the age of sixteen! Within a few months! That meant that I was to break off my education before I could even feel that I had really started upon it. So I was not to be a student, a scholar. All my dreams, my ambitions, my efforts were to go for nothing. I faced an abyss.

Much rather be a nurseryman, as my father’s father had been; much rather be a farmer—a farmer with an education which enabled him to devote his leisure to the enjoyment of great literature, music, and art. I knew that my father, during the intervals between our visits at Thurow, had spent a considerable fraction of his time abroad, like ourselves. At least once he had been at Paris when we were there: at the time of my fourteenth birthday. I also knew that he did not go to Paris for the purpose of study; he went there to have sumptuous dinners at Paillard’s, Voisin’s, and at the Tour d’Argent. I at least suspected that he did not take these dinners alone but in gay company; he was well-known in Paris and London, and even in Berlin which he disliked; he was known as a fast liver and a furious spender. If he could do such things, why should not I be able to do the other thing? For already the desire had sprung up in me to be one day counted among the great poets or writers.

At last I spoke to my mother about this plan. Why not let me follow my father as the squire of Thurow?

She did not answer at once; she took several days to think it over; she had begun to see that there lay a struggle ahead. I was no longer her little boy; I was a young man with a will of my own; she would have to reason with me.

It was not an easy task; she had never been one to reason. She had been used to say, “Do this”, and to see it done. It had not only been the power of money, though that had no doubt entered into it. Above all, she had, in the past, only had to appear to find everybody bowing. It had been her bearing, her beauty. I remember an occasion when, at Paris, a gown had been submitted to her in some great dress-making establishment of world-wide reputation. That gown had been made for her: her dimensions had always made it impossible for her to wear “models”. It was laid out, on a sort of counter or large table, for her inspection. But it had not met with her approval. She frowned angrily, the bulge in her forehead, due to the horse’s kick, burning red; and then she had pushed the gown contemptuously from her, so that it slipped to the floor. The “madame” behind the counter, herself of formidable proportions, bowed with a green smile, looking at one of her assistants. “Enlevez-le,” she muttered and then proceeded, unruffled, to display other things. No doubt the price of what my mother ultimately bought had included the cost of the rejected gown.

On another occasion which I remember, we, five of us, were standing in the station at Milan, with piles of baggage at our feet, momentarily deserted by our porters, when the departure of the train which we were to take was announced. Only Herr Niemoeller, my tutor, was there to carry a small fraction of those hand-bags. In spite of the fact that two whole compartments were reserved for us, there was danger of our missing that train. My mother turned to two passers-by, tradesmen very likely, or possibly even professional men—they had the proud bearing of the Italian bourgeois—and said briefly, “Signori, I have to catch that train. Will you oblige me?” And she pointed to the pile of bags. The men gave her a peculiar look; I still see it; but they did as they were bidden; for my mother’s tone had not been that of a mere request. Between them they, Herr Niemoeller and I picked it all up and carried it over to our compartments. My mother thanked them, of course, but by no means effusively. The last moment the porters came running, protesting loudly and insolently, claiming their fees. “There is plenty of time, signora, plenty of time,” they said; but the train was moving already; and my mother gave them nothing but a withering look.

No, my mother had never reasoned; but with me, her darling boy, she could not assume the attitude of command.

Again and again she pursued an indirect course, telling me about my father. She told me that he had run through two fortunes, confidently expecting that he would be able to run through a third. How, at present, he was keeping things going, she did not know.

At last it was I who objected that these fortunes had had to be made; or he could not have run through them.

That, she had already admitted; but she repeated that it was not he who had made them; and for the first time she told me that, on the father’s side, I came of peasant stock. My great-grandfather had laid the foundations, in Kent, by dealing in hops, in addition to farming, and by beginning to grow nursery stock. My grandfather had been an exceedingly shrewd man; he had seen the opening for this nursery trade in the Baltic. Even he had already been inclined to spend lavishly; or he would never have acquired Thurow which had cost hundreds of thousands. But chance had favoured him; he had secured the great government contracts from Sweden, Germany, and Russia. But at last the flow of money from that source was drying up; the demand had been supplied. No, to be a successful farmer, the first thing needed was money; more money; money all the time. Farming was well enough when one were either rich to begin with or went into it after one had made his pile at something else. She bade me look at Uncle Jacobsen who owned a business with ramifications at London, Le Havre, New York, Rio, Valparaiso. He would help me; would send me into the new world for a few years; that was the reason why she had insisted on my learning Spanish. If I entered his business, I could feel sure that I should be promoted as fast as possible, for her sake. Within ten years, he had said, I might be a junior partner in the firm; when the time came for him to retire, which would be in some twenty or twenty-five years, he would turn the whole concern over to me. When I exclaimed at the figure of twenty-five years, she smiled wanly: when I came to be her age, I should understand that twenty-five years were nothing to speak of: I should be only forty or forty-one, a young man still. Meanwhile I should see German trade expanding over the world; Germany was the country of the future; the opportunities for a young man with my knowledge of languages were unlimited; there was no telling how far I might not go. Uncle Jacobsen was the only true friend she had; the only one on whom she could rely; one day he would adopt me.

She had no idea how deeply she shocked me. Being adopted by someone else was tantamount to giving up my identity; and, so far, I was proud of being myself. But, like her, I did not answer at once.

We were in Berlin at the time; and I was attending a so-called Realgymnasium, which meant a secondary school in which Latin was taught only to the extent to which it was useful in the teaching of moderns. The chief stress was laid on mathematics, science, English and French. Mr. Niemoeller had at last been dismissed; I did not need to be supervised any longer. During the lessons in English and French I was free; my teachers did not speak either language with the fluency and idiomatic correctness which I commanded. Annette was resuming her function as my mother’s maid, the only servant that was retained, though, once a week, there was still a gathering in the drawing-room—a gathering which, with some stretch of the term, could still be called brilliant though it had taken on a tinge of Bohemia. We occupied a furnished apartment of six or eight rooms, with a fine view on the Tiergarten, the chief park of the city—an expensive apartment. Yet even I could see that our social life was much reduced. On occasion, when I saw my mother nervous over some trifling expenditure to which formerly she would not have given a thought, I began to feel the chill air of a coming disaster.

Nor could I shut my eyes to the fact that my mother was getting heavy, almost unwieldy; and that at a rate which could not be explained by the normal process of her ageing; her face was often lined and hollow; she was losing her beauty; she still had her moments of magnificence in which men went wild over her; but they were becoming rare. One day I came home and found her convulsed with laughter: a very young man, attaché at one of the legations, had proposed marriage to her; and it did sound funny; but there was a trace of hysteria in her mirth. I, of course, could not read the signs; I knew nothing of illness and death; but her physician did. I am afraid I found her passionate pleading with me simply importunate.

When, after several days, I did speak, I became at once aware of her profound disappointment at my not falling readily in with her arguments. She had assumed that her reasoning was irrefutable and final. I told her that my ultimate desire was to be a writer; the road to that, in my opinion, lay through a career as a scholar.

She bit her lips. “My dear boy,” she said at last, “I wish I could agree. But are you aware of what that implies?”

“Perhaps not altogether,” I replied. “At least I don’t know what you refer to, Mother.”

“If I am to put you through a university career,” she said with shattering emphasis, “I must either return to your father and live on him, using what little I have left for you; or I must get a divorce and marry again; that is, marry money, not a man. Your grandfather advised that course when I saw him last before his death.”

I was appalled. The word divorce still had a sinister sound at the time; and a new marriage would be as bad, for me, as an adoption by Uncle Jacobsen. “Marry again!” I exclaimed with something like terror and something like scorn in my voice.

This piqued her. She remained silent for a while. Then she smiled at me, with a ghastly attempt at coquetry which was more revealing than any amount of words could have been. “You don’t know, of course,” she said, “that, since I left your father, amicably, fifteen, sixteen years ago, I have had at least a score of offers?”

I was still more appalled.

“Mother,” I said, trying to lead away from that topic, “I know you want to do the best you can for me ...”

“Of course,” she interrupted. “But you don’t realize. Let me tell you, then; I am ruined.”

This “of course” put an end to all my pleas, at least for the moment.

And now I came to another conclusion: somehow my mother seemed to assume that I could avert her ruin by adopting a commercial career; as if the pittance I might earn as a beginner were sufficient to support, not only me but her as well. I had some idea of what such beginners were paid; it was less than I had been used to spend as my pocket money. Frankly, I did not know what to do. In this dilemma I thought more and more of my Uncle Jacobsen, but in a sense different from that suggested by my mother.

Within a comparatively short time there followed the first of the three great nightmares of my life.

One day I made the suggestion. If things were as bad as my mother tried to make out, why not ask Uncle Jacobsen, who was wealthy, to step into the breach?

“Oh!” she cried in an agony so intense that it pierced even my egotism. “Don’t you see, child? I’ve sent him a wire this morning to come and to help me in doing what has to be done. But as for money ... Don’t you understand that I can ask him to do almost anything for you; but that I can’t ask him to do a thing for me? That I couldn’t accept if he offered.”

I did not understand; I was obtuse, I grant; but I was only sixteen.

“How about Father?” I asked at last.

“Do you want me to go back to Thurow? It was on your account that I left it.”

I am afraid I was impatient; I was preoccupied with my own problems, “What do you intend to do, then, Mother?” I asked. My own problems would have to wait, I supposed; and anyway, this was not the moment to bother my mother.

“It isn’t a question of intention or wish any longer,” she cried. “It’s a question of necessity.” For the first time in her life she gave way completely. She burst into tears and exclaimed at the injustice which life had dealt her. “If only my father were alive!” she groaned at last.

I looked at her in consternation.

Her hysteria subsided; she was drying her tears. “I’ll tell you exactly,” she said. “Perhaps you’ll understand then. I am going to rent the apartment next to this and conduct a boarding-house.”

The bottom fell out of my world.

However, the struggle between me and my mother went on unabated, none the less bitter because it now became silent.

I was leading my classes at school. Since I had for years not had to take moderns, mathematics had always been my strong point; I was intensely interested in the sort of science which was taught, physics and chemistry. In my type of school, therefore, progress was a walkover. I did my written assignments, of course; and that took a modicum of my time—time, not exertion. I never really worked at my school tasks; my memory was phenomenal. So I had much leisure outside of school hours; but I concealed the fact: I worked at my Greek instead. By this time I had firmly made up my mind, if we remained in Germany, to transfer, for my final year at school, to a gymnasium where the classics stood in the centre of the curriculum. If I did that, I should be five or six years behind in Greek: not in reading but in grammar and so-called composition which was really translation into Greek. Now, I was not in the least interested in these aspects of the language: I wanted to be able to read Greek; and I was able to do so; I had taught myself, by reading. But there were teachers in my Realschule who knew better; and one or two of them gave me a little time, when a spare period of mine coincided with one of theirs, to drill me in declensions and conjugations. Just how much my mother knew or divined of this, I cannot tell at this distance of time.

At last Uncle Jacobsen came. When my mother had sent her wire, he had been at New York.

There were no excursions this time, no athletics. He remained closeted with my mother for many hours. When he took me aside, he did so only to impart to me final decisions arrived at.

Instead of renting the apartment adjoining the one which we occupied, my mother surrendered her lease, being lucky in having the chance to do so. She rented the whole, large ground floor of a nearby house and furnished it. A huge black and gold sign was fastened up along the balconies which jutted from its front. “Internationale Pension”, it read. A not inconsiderable staff of servants was hired; and within two weeks the establishment was opened.

Uncle Jacobsen was the first to rent a suite, if only for a few days; and while he remained at Berlin, he was indefatigably busy in bringing in others. For the moment my mother seemed to have completely recovered her buoyancy; she was continually in and out, with the bearing of one who had been a landlady all her life. She insisted that the rent must be paid a year in advance; and the moment that was done, she felt secure; much more so than even in my judgment was warranted.

But the boarders came: Russian, French, Italian, Spanish. Nearly all of them were connected with one or other of the legations. The thing seemed to rejuvenate my mother; she was used to marshalling about considerable numbers of servants and felt in her element. What was the difference between twenty boarders and twenty volunteers at home?

Uncle Jacobsen departed. Even he did not read the signs.

For, as far as my mother was concerned, it was a last flicker. The final breakdown came within a few weeks. A doctor was called in, insisted on a consultation, advised an immediate operation, and carried her off to the hospital.

Nobody, suddenly, bothered about me. Here I was with a boarding-house and some twenty boarders on my hands. For the moment, it is true, the place seemed to run itself; it ran by its own momentum. At least, until pay-day came around for the servants’ staff. It was the cook who spoke to me, though one of the parlour-maids who also acted as a waitress assumed command.

I went to see my mother; and she told me that, in a secret drawer of the secretary in her office I should find all that was needed. I must, of course, pay all wages due as well as the tradesmen’s bills.

As a matter of fact, I found five banknotes of a hundred marks each; and that kept the ship from foundering for the time being; but within two weeks, I no longer knew where to turn. My mother refused to believe that there was no more money. She became very thoughtful and finally told me to bill the boarders. She seemed quite lucid and gave me minute directions which I followed to the letter. In that way I secured some funds; but the amount was only just sufficient to help me weather things for another week or so.

And then the appalling thing happened. My mother, who had a private room at the hospital, paid for in advance, tried to leave at night. She was seen before she got out of the building and taken back to her room; but she behaved like one insane and had to be forcibly restrained. I was notified and, when I saw her, tried to talk matters over with her in a quiet way. But she vetoed every suggestion of mine. It was with great reluctance that she at last consented to my sending Uncle Jacobsen a wire. I should have preferred to send it to my father; but she would not hear of it.

Uncle Jacobsen came and consulted with the physicians. He was told that, unless an operation was performed immediately—a thing which my mother would not agree to—she was doomed. Then he came to talk matters over with me. He told me that he had from the beginning been opposed to the venture of the boarding-house but had given in on that point because my mother seemed to dread nothing so much as going back to my father. If, he said, there were any chance of her recovering to the point where she could once more look after the business in person, there might be hope; for she was a very capable woman; but he added that, at best, the probability was one in ten.

What, he asked at last, in case he got her consent to sell the business, were my ideas about myself? I said I did not know; but already I had an idea in the back of my head the possibilities of which I wanted to explore. Could he give me a day to think matters over? Very well, he said; but was he to take this as meaning that I did not wish to come in with him? I had to tell him, at that, what my own desires and ambitions were. In case of need, I said, I should like to try to put myself through school and university by my own efforts. He agreed that that would be a worthy attempt.

I went to see the teachers who had been helping with my Greek; and I told them what there was to tell. Both agreed that I could readily make my living as a “coach”, by getting pupils who needed help to keep their standing in their classes. They added, however, that it was a dog’s life, and that there would be no time left for study of my own.

When I saw my Uncle Jacobsen again, he had been talking to the parlour-maid who had so readily assumed all managerial functions. She was willing to take over the boarding-house as a going concern, agreeing to pay, in half-yearly instalments, half the new value of the furniture, provided that the current year’s rent was thrown in. That rent amounted to about three thousand marks—a vast amount for me to lose. Uncle Jacobsen, however, seemed to think that her offer could be accepted as a basis for negotiation. I told him what I had found out; and he nodded.

He went to see my mother who, of course, did not know how hopeless her case was considered to be. He came away with a power-of-attorney. At the best, he told me, the physicians whom he had also seen again, gave her six months.

What could be done? I was obstinate in refusing Uncle Jacobsen’s direct financial aid. Otherwise I agreed to whatever he might think best. He at once opened negotiations with the energetic parlour-maid.

She was willing to compromise. Above all, she agreed to let me have, for the remainder of the year, room and board, in lieu of the rent which had been paid in advance. It appeared that she had about a thousand marks in savings. For the moment, that would be sufficient to carry my mother at the hospital. The balance, some seven thousand marks or so, she agreed to pay in five annual instalments. On this basis the papers were signed next day.

I must add that, at that time of my life, I looked considerably older than I was. Nobody would have doubted my veracity had I given my age at twice the correct figure; few people would have guessed that I was not over twenty. I was tall and thin; but my bearing was that of a man, not a boy. My wandering life had done one thing for me: it had enabled me to approach anyone except my mother with assurance and self-confidence.

Uncle Jacobsen left. I saw the “Director” of my school; and he gave me a number of introductions. Within a few weeks I began to have pupils, mostly young boys attending the gymnasia of the city; and it was my task to see to it that their home-work was done in a satisfactory manner. In addition, I had a few night pupils in English, French, and Spanish, employees in commercial houses these, who wished to qualify for positions as correspondents.

At the end of the first month I was able to write to Uncle Jacobsen that, in addition to keeping myself at school, I was able to pay for my mother’s stay at the hospital, keep myself in pocket money, and lay by a little towards the time when I should have to pay for my board. I did not add that I spent a goodly fraction of my income on books; of that he would have disapproved.

And then came the dreaded day of the operation to which my mother had at last agreed.

It was over in half an hour. I met the surgeon in the corridor as he came from the operating room—he was a European celebrity. Seeing me, he raised his hands and motioned me to follow him into the room at the end of the passage.

“You are the son of the patient, are you not?” he asked.

I answered in the affirmative.

“There was nothing I could do,” he went on. “I explored and closed the incision; that is all. Her vital organs are so grown through with the tumour that the knife is powerless to help. You must be prepared for the worst.”

I nodded; I could not speak.

But the incision healed; and now the physicians began to realize that it would be a long struggle: the tumour was pitched in battle against a tremendous constitution.

I was told I might take her home if I wished to. Home? Where? Uncle Jacobsen had dismissed even Annette.

However, I arranged at the boarding-house for a room; and one day she was brought there and put to bed. A nurse came with her.

Once more Uncle Jacobsen arrived to make the arrangements. Fortunately the business as such was flourishing, though with a clientele very different from that on which my mother had counted. The new management catered to pleasure-seekers from the provinces who came for the sake of the night-life of Berlin, that lurid night-life for which the city was just beginning to be famous. So the new owner of the place was quite willing to let room and board for my mother stand against her indebtedness; and I had to pay only for the nurse, a Roman sister, and for such incidentals as were needed. Actually, the patient’s coming “home” eased matters for me, at least financially. Since it was still winter, I began to do a little skating at night, mostly very late, after eleven o’clock. And then I went home to work; it was rare that I went to bed before two or three in the morning. Yet I realized even then that the whole thing was made bearable only by the expectation that it could not last.

Meanwhile my mother lay in more or less complete apathy, broken by occasional spells of lucidity in which she argued fiercely with me, in a broken voice, imploring me not to be blind to my own best interests by refusing to join Uncle Jacobsen; and at last I began to think that ultimately I should have to give in to her urgency. I felt very unhappy about it all, for to yield would have meant a surrender of all my desires.

It must have been at this stage that I first met another relative of mine, a great-uncle by the name of Rutherford. More precisely, he was a first cousin of my grandfather on the maternal side. He was well known as a traveller and explorer in the wilder districts of central Asia, Tibet and Sin-Kiang; and he had written several books, especially on the north-east border of India where he had spent a good many years in the Indian Civil Service. He was nearing his sixties; but physically he was more alert than many a man half his age. He had called on Uncle Jacobsen at Hamburg and thus secured our address. The circumstances in which he found us appalled him; but he did not stay; he was engaged in negotiations with the Russian government at St. Petersburg; for he was planning a winter trip through Northern Siberia. Two years later he was to play a sudden and decisive part in my life.

It so happened that my mother, during the whole of his visit, remained in a state of semi-coma; and so he left with me certain funds which he said he owed my mother who had financed his first trip into Tibet; I never found out whether that was a pretext or not. He went out with me, taking me to famous restaurants and to a show or two; so that, when he left for St. Petersburg, his departure left a sudden void in my life, but not before he had, in a long talk, more or less convinced me that it was my duty to notify, not Uncle Jacobsen, but my father of how matters stood; my mother, he said, could not be considered in this move since she was not of sound mind.

I did not do so immediately, for by this time I was convinced that, at least financially, I could handle the situation myself. My work as a tutor was highly successful and not unremunerative; throughout, I had the offer of more pupils than I could accept; and nearly all of them came from the wealthy homes of the capital. I raised my charges, and the fact seemed to result, not only in an increased income, but also in a greater demand for my services. “Of course,” people said, “he isn’t cheap.” And that seemed to be a recommendation to purse-proud bankers and manufacturers and their wives.

And then the final disaster came. One morning my mother was gone. A thorough search of the house was made, without result; and before the day was over, I had to notify the police. Remaining away from school, I at last wrote to my father, not because I wanted help, but because my great-uncle’s argument that my father had a right to be told bore fruit; after all, that uncle had said, my mother was still his lawful wife; and the situation seemed now to have gone beyond my capacity of handling.

By the time my father arrived, however, my mother was back at the house. She came in a carriage, early one morning, driven by a liveried coachman from an estate in the neighbourhood of the city, and accompanied by an elderly woman who could give me no other information than that, around midnight, my mother had been found in the park of the estate, by some guests departing from the “Schloss”. By order of Herr von ——, a man whom my mother had known in the past, she had been taken in but had at once given her address and asked to be sent home. She was out of her mind; but her address had been correct enough.

She was put to bed and remained semi-conscious. Perhaps I should say that, since her return from the hospital, she had been kept under the influence of morphia, administered by the “sister”. The doctor seemed to think that her complete breakdown was due to the sudden withdrawal of the drug. It was only later that I found out a few details of her wanderings. She had gone to a village of that estate before going to the park; and there she had entered several cottages, labourers’ dwellings, which were under quarantine for measles—a disease which she had never had.

My father arrived that night; and his appearance appalled me almost as much as that of my mother would have done had I not seen her for a few years. He no longer towered above me. He gave the impression that, in the lumbar region, his spine was shortened and bent at an angle; when he stood beside a table, it always looked as if he were bending over it, sideways. His enormously long legs, straight as ever, made it appear as if his body had been split from below, up to the region of the chest in a normal body. As I have said, he reminded me grotesquely of Niels, the “inspector”. His head, however, long and narrow, remained very handsome, set off, now, by a long beard of ash-blond, wavy hair; it had aged amazingly little. He must have been seventy-four or five; but he looked fifty; there was not a grey hair on his head. In fact, his hair seemed rather to have darkened, so that at first I suspected that he dyed it; but the colour was natural. His clothes and his long, narrow hands seemed as well groomed as ever; but when he looked straight at me, which he rarely did now, I became aware of a droop in the left eye-lid; and there was something the matter with the eye, too. I found later that an opacity was invading the pupil.

It so happened that there was a suite vacant in the house; and he took it for the night. During the following day he sat for a few hours with my mother who remained apathetic. Then, at noon, he told me to go to school and to see the Director, with a view to securing some sort of testimonial with regard to my progress and standing; and when he heard how I had earned my living and at least part of my mother’s as well, he nodded approvingly, adding that I had better devote my afternoon to winding up my obligations. I had, for some time, not been used to taking anyone’s orders; and it felt queer to have this man step in and tell me what to do. But I obeyed.

The principal or Director of the school was most kind. He called a meeting of my teachers at his office; and it was unanimously resolved, in my presence, to give me a statement testifying that I had satisfactorily covered the year’s work. It was not, of course, expressly stated that I had remained to the end of the term; but I remember distinctly that it was more or less implied. In this, account was taken of the fact that I was to leave the country. One more year, then, would give me university-entrance.

Next, I did, with regard to my pupils, as my father had directed; and when I met him again at night, I could answer his question whether I was ready to leave in the affirmative. We were in his sitting-room; and apparently he wished to talk matters over. He spoke in a strangely gentle voice, as if he feared to touch on the past. Of my mother he said no more than that it would be best, taking things all around, if she died at home, adding that he had made all arrangements for the transfer.

Then he broached the subject of my future.

It was not without diffidence that I told him of my wish to finish my schooling and then to attend the university.

He merely nodded.

Encouraged, I told him of my mother’s plans for me and of my disinclination for a commercial career.

“No,” he said, “that would hardly do for you.” And after an interval of thought he added, “Law. International Law. How would that suit you? It would pave the way for a career. I can pull some strings; there might be something in the diplomatic service.”

I hesitated. Was there another conflict ahead? With my father this time? But with a certain amount of cunning, I said to myself that, once I got to the university, no matter how, no matter where, I could do pretty well as I pleased; he would not be there to supervise me. If he financed a university course for me, I could matriculate in law and attend as many lectures in classical philology or archeology as I cared to. It was not standing I was after; it was knowledge. So I agreed.

“What university?” he asked next. “I’d say Paris to start with. In the diplomatic service you’d be dependent on Stockholm, of course. Paris, Berlin, Rome. That would give you the necessary prestige.”

The addition of Rome settled the matter in my mind.

“Very well,” he said in the tone of dismissal, without rising.

I was to find out that he did not like to be seen standing: it showed up the disproportion of his body too strikingly; and slowly, during the next few months, I was to come to a partial realization of the magnitude of the tragedy which had befallen him. He had taken to living the life of a hermit, showing himself to his neighbours on horseback only; he felt ashamed of his disfigurement; he never dismounted when he went from Thurow to an adjacent estate; and whenever ladies appeared he took his departure promptly.

I do not remember what it was that delayed us; but about two more weeks had gone by before my mother was one morning transferred from her bed to a stretcher, with two newly-engaged nurses in attendance; for my father dismissed the “sister” with a handsome present for her convent; she herself was not permitted to accept any remuneration.

The stretcher was lifted into an ambulance and, half an hour later, into the train in which my father, according to his custom, had reserved a carriage. Thus, once more, and for a last time, my mother made the trip to Thurow. We arrived two days later.

I, being now fully sixteen years old, went over all the familiar places, no longer on the pony which had been mine in the past; I used one of the Danes. My mother’s saddle-horses, I found, had all been disposed of. For a week or two, it was like a melancholy and yet strangely burdenless holiday; the woods, the fields, the beach—all seemed unreal.

As for my mother, from the moment of our arrival at Thurow, we were all simply waiting for the end. A doctor from the city was, of course, in daily attendance; the nurses looked after her; my father often sat at her bedside for hours. I myself dropped in, of course; but she was a distressing sight, and there was absolutely nothing I could do for her. She was beyond human help except inasmuch as human care could spare her pain.

Yet she had still one surprise for us. She must have picked up the infection in the workmen’s village where, during her last escapade, she had entered the quarantined cottages. The fact was that, when she died, she did not die of cancer but of a children’s disease which had been incubating in her for some time. When it declared itself, it carried her off within a few days. Only towards the very last did she become conscious once more; and when she did, she called for me. When I came to her bedside, she burst into tears and then, a last time, admonished me to enter Uncle Jacobsen’s business, urging me to give her my promise. Somehow I evaded; I did not pledge my word. And, seeing that I refused, she muttered a few words which mean more to me now than they did at the time; I cannot bear to repeat them.

As for myself, I only remember that my prevailing feeling was of the awfulness of the change which had come over her—not nearly so much of a loss to myself. I was very young. The conflict between us had brought an element of estrangement. That conflict had already been decided in my favour. It is appalling to me today that the fact should have spared me sorrow; but so it was. I was no longer living with her; I was living in my own future. The mother I had adored as a child had been dying too long to leave any poignancy to the final event.

When, a few days later, I stood by her coffin, I shed tears, it is true; a lump rose in my throat; and when that coffin was carried out of the house, I sobbed. But, as we followed the hearse, I verily believe, my father, who had his early memories of her, was more profoundly shaken than I.

More than a hundred carriages followed her to the grave: all she had known in the neighbourhood, and many, like my Uncle Jacobsen, who had come from a distance. Among the latter there were two women, one from Vienna, the other I do not remember whence in the Danubian basin; her sisters. I see, today, only one of them with my mind’s eye. Though older than my mother, she resembled her strikingly, in the carriage of her body as well as in her imperious ways. Both, on leaving, after a few days, carried away a few trifles that had belonged to the woman who had died.

With that ended my childhood, and my youth began—a youth which, four years later, or a little more, was to end no less catastrophically.