Читать книгу Joan and Peter - H. G. Wells - Страница 5

Table of Contents

The parents of Peter were modern young people, and Peter was no accidental intruder. Their heads were full of new ideas, new that is in the days when Queen Victoria seemed immortal and the world settled for ever. They put Peter in their two sunniest rooms; rarely were the windows shut; his nursery was white and green, bright with pretty pictures and never without flowers. It had a cork carpet and a rug displaying amusing black cats on pink, and he was weighed carefully first once a week and then once a month until he was four years old.

His father, whom everybody called Stubbo, came of an old Quaker stock. Quakerism in its beginnings was a very fine and wonderful religion indeed, a real research for the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, a new way of thinking and living, but weaknesses of the mind and spirit brought it back very soon to a commoner texture. The Stubland family was among those which had been most influenced by the evangelical wave of the Wesleyan time. Peter’s great-grandfather, old Stubland, the West-of-England cloth manufacturer, was an emotional person with pietistic inclinations that nearly carried him over at different times to the Plymouth Brethren, to the Wesleyan Methodists, and to the Countess of Huntingdon’s connexion. Religion was his only social recreation, most other things he held to be sinful, and his surplus energies went all into the business. He had an aptitude for mechanical organization and started the Yorkshire factory; his son, still more evangelical and still more successful, left a business worth well over two hundred thousand pounds among thirteen children, of whom Peter’s father was the youngest. “Stublands” became a limited company with uncles Rigby and John as directors, and the rest of the family was let loose, each one with a nice little secure six hundred a year or thereabouts from Stubland debentures and Stubland ordinary shares, to do what it liked in the world.

It wasn’t, of course, told that it could do what it liked in the world. That it found out for itself—in the teeth of much early teaching to the contrary. That early teaching had been predominantly prohibitive, there had been no end of “thou shalt not” and very little of “thou shalt,” an irksome teaching for young people destined to leisure. Mankind was presented waiting about for the Judgment Day, with Satan as busy as a pickpocket in a crowd. Also he offered roundabouts and cocoanut-shies.... This family doctrine tallied so little with the manifest circumstances and natural activity of the young Stublands that it just fell off their young minds. The keynote of Stubbo’s upbringing had been a persistent unanswered “Why not?” to all the things he was told not to do. “Why not dance? Why not go to theatres and music-halls? Why not make love? Why not read and quote this exciting new poetry of Swinburne’s?”...

The early ’nineties were a period of careless diastole in British affairs. There seemed to be enough and to spare for every one, given only a little generosity. Peace dwelt on the earth for ever. It was difficult to prove the proprietorship of Satan in the roundabouts and the cocoanut-shies. There was a general belief that one’s parents and grandparents had taken life far too grimly and suspiciously, a belief which, indeed, took possession of Stubbo before he was in trousers.

His emancipation was greatly aided by his elder sister Phyllis, a girl with an abnormal sense of humour. It was Phyllis who brightened the Sunday afternoons, when she and her sister Phœbe and her brothers were supposed to be committing passages of scripture to memory in the attic, by the invention of increasingly irreligious Limericks. Phœbe would sometimes be dreadfully shocked and sometimes join in with great vigour and glory. Phyllis was also an artist in misquotation. She began by taking a facetious view of the ark and Jonah’s whale, and as her courage grew she went on to the Resurrection. She had a genius for asking seemingly respectful but really destructive questions about religious matters, that made her parents shy of instruction. The Stubland parents had learnt their faith with more reverence than intelligence from their parents, who had had it in a similar spirit from their parents, who had had it from their parents; so that nobody had looked into it closely for some generations, and something vital had evaporated unsuspected. It had evaporated so completely that when Peter’s father and Peter’s aunts and uncles came in their turn as children to examine the precious casket, they not only perceived that there was nothing in it, but they could very readily jump to the rash conclusion that there never had been anything in it. It seemed just an odd blend of empty resonant phrases and comical and sometimes slightly improper stories, that lent themselves very pleasantly to facetious illustration.

Stubbo, as he grew up under these circumstances, had not so much taken on the burthen of life as thrown it off. He decided he would not go into business—business struck him as a purely avaricious occupation—and after a pleasant year at Cambridge he became quite clear that the need of the world and his temperament was Art. The world was not beautiful enough. This was more particularly true of the human contribution. So he went into Art to make the world more beautiful, and came up to London to study and to wear a highly decorative blue linen blouse in private and to collect posters—people then were just beginning to collect posters.

From the last stage of Quakerism to the last extremity of decoration is but a step. Quite an important section of the art world in Britain owes itself to the Quakers and Plymouth Brethren, and to the drab and grey disposition of the sterner evangelicals. It is as if that elect strain in the race had shut its eyes for a generation or so, merely in order to open them again and see brighter. The reaction of the revolting generation has always been toward colour; the pyrotechnic display of the Omega workshops in London is but the last violent outbreak of the Quaker spirit. Young Stubland, a quarter of a century before the Omega enterprise, was already slaking a thirst for chromatic richness behind the lead of William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites. It took a year or so and several teachers and much friendly frankness to persuade him he could neither draw nor paint, and then he relapsed into decoration and craftsmanship. He beat out copper into great weals of pattern and he bound books grossly. He spent some time upon lettering, and learnt how to make the simplest inscription beautifully illegible. He decided to be an architect. In the meantime he made the acquaintance of a large circle of artistic and literary people, became a Fabian socialist, abandoned Stubland tweeds for fluffy artistically dyed garments, bicycled about a lot—those were the early days of the bicycle, before the automobile robbed it of its glory—talked endlessly, and had a very good time. He met his wife and married her, and he built his own house as a sample of what he could do as an architect.

It was, with one exception, the only house he ever built. It was quite original in design and almost indistinguishable from the houses of a round dozen contemporaries of Mr. Charles Voysey. It was a little low-browed, white house, with an enormous and very expensive roof of green slates; it had wide, low mullioned casement windows, its rooms were eight feet high and its doors five foot seven, and all about it were enormous buttresses fit to sustain a castle. It had sun-traps and verandahs and a terrace, and it snuggled into the ruddy hillside and stared fatly out across the Weald from beyond Limpsfield, and it was quite a jolly little house to live in when you had learnt to be shorter than five feet seven inches and to dodge the low bits of ceiling and the beam over the ingle-nook.

And therein, to crown the work of the builder, Peter was born.