The last weeks of the Easter term were the happiest of my schooldays so far, and the holidays were irradiated by them. For the first time I felt that I was someone. But when I tried to explain my improved status to my mother she was puzzled. Success in work she would have understood (and happily I was able to report this also) or success in games (of this I could not boast, but I had hopes of the cricket season). But to be revered as a magician! She gave me a soft, indulgent smile and almost shook her head. In a way she was religious: she had brought me up to think about being good, and to say my prayers, which I always did, for our code permitted it as long as it was done in a perfunctory manner; soliciting divine aid did not count as sneaking. Perhaps she would have understood what it meant to me to be singled out among my fellows if I could have told her the whole story; but I had to edit and bowdlerize it to such a degree that very little of the original was left, and least of all the intoxicating transition from a trough of persecution to a pedestal of power. A few of the boys had been a little unkind; now they were all very kind. Because of something I had written in my diary which was rather like a prayer, the unkind boys had hurt themselves and of course I couldn’t help being glad about it. “But ought you to have been glad?” she asked anxiously. “I think you ought to have been sorry, even if they were a little unkind. Did they hurt themselves badly?” “Rather badly,” I said, “but you see they were my enemies.” But she refused to share my triumph and said uneasily: “But you oughtn’t to have enemies at your age.” In those days a widow was still a figure of desolation; my mother felt the responsibility of bringing me up and thought that firmness should come into it, but she never quite knew when or how to apply it. “Well, you must be nice to them when they come back,” she sighed; “I expect they didn’t mean to be unkind.”
Jenkins and Strode, who had had some bones broken, did not in fact return until the autumn. They were very much subdued, and so was I, and we had no difficulty in being nice to each other.
My mother was mistaken if she thought that I gloated over their downfall; it was the rise in my own stock that enlarged my spirit. But I was sensitive to atmosphere, and under my mother’s half-hearted sympathy my dreams of greatness did not thrive. I began to wonder if they were something to be ashamed of, and when I went back to school it was in a private capacity, not as a magician. But my friends and clients had not forgotten; to my surprise they were as eager as ever to profit by my proficiency in the Black Arts. I was still the vogue, and any scruples of conscience I retained soon fled. I was urged to put out more spells, one of which was that we should be given a whole holiday. Into this last I put all the psychic force I had, and I was rewarded. Soon after the beginning of June we had an outbreak of measles. By half-term more than half the school was down with it, and soon after came the dramatic announcement that we were to break up.
The delight of the survivors, of whom I was one and Maudsley another, can be imagined. The spiritual and emotional intoxication, which normally took thirteen weeks to brew, was suddenly engendered after seven; and added to it was the thrilling sense of having been favoured by fortune, for only once before in the history of the school had such a crowning mercy been vouchsafed.
The appearance at my bedside of my shiny black trunk with its imposing, rounded roof, flanked by my father’s brown wooden tuck-box, which still showed, by a path of darker paint, where my initials had been painted over his—this ocular proof that we were really going back had an effect on my spirits more overwhelming than the headmaster’s brief announcement after prayers the previous evening. And not only the sight, the smell: the smell of home exhaled by the trunk and tuck-box, drowning the smell of school. For the whole of one day the vessels of salvation stood empty, and as long as they were empty there was always the fear that J.C., as we called him, might change his mind. The matron and her assistant were engaged in other dormitories. But our turn came, and at last, stealing upstairs to look, I saw the trunk with its lid pushed back and its tray foaming with the tissue paper in which were wrapped my lighter and more breakable possessions. This was a supreme moment: nothing that came afterwards surpassed it in pure bliss, though excitement steadily mounted.
Two brakes, instead of three, were drawn up before the school front door. The apathy on the drivers’ faces contrasted strongly but rather agreeably with the joy on ours. They knew the procedure, however; they did not start off as soon as the last small boy (even to me he looked extremely small) had climbed into his place. There was a last rite to perform—the only flourish we allowed ourselves, for we were not an emotional school. The head boy stood up and, looking round him, cried: “Three cheers for Mr. Cross, Mrs. Cross, and the baby!” How the baby came to be included I never knew; perhaps it was the spontaneous, facetious afterthought of a former head boy. Late in life (or so it seemed to us) Mr. and Mrs. Cross had been blessed with a third daughter. The other two were already, to our eyes, grown up, and them we did not cheer. For that matter the baby was no longer a baby; she was nearly four, but for some reason it delighted us to cheer her, as it plainly delighted her to be lifted up between her parents and to wave her hand. We waited for this to happen, and when it did we laughed and nudged one another, relieved, as English-men, at not having to take our cheering too seriously.
The volume of sound was thin compared with normal times, but it lacked nothing in fervour nor did we stop to think how it would sound to the suffering prisoners in the San. The “baby’s” acknowledgment left nothing to be desired: it was comically regal. The drivers raised their whips without raising their faces, and we were off.
How long did the ecstasy of escape continue? It was at its height in the train. Both coming and going, the school was allotted a special coach. It was a parlour car of a kind not found now, upholstered in deep red plush, the seats facing each other the whole length of the compartment. They were impregnated with a most searching smell of train smoke and tobacco, which on the outward journey at once turned my stomach. But going home it was the very breath of freedom and acted like an apéritif. Joy shone on every face; playful punches were exchanged; new variations were found of the theme of the South-Eastern and Smashem Railway. Nonchalantly I took out my diary and began to decorate the date—it was Friday the 15th of June—with a red pencil. Covertly my neighbours watched me. Was a new spell being cast? Presently I tired of arabesques and whirligigs and decided to paint the whole day red.
Did I really believe that I had been responsible for the epidemic? Modestly, I took some credit for it, and in certain quarters credit was given me. My pretensions were not exploded—far from it—but the awe with which I had been regarded was now tempered with a certain good-natured banter that might easily have turned to ridicule had the term gone on. I expect I had got a little above myself, not, I prefer to think, in manner, but in my outlook on life. Once I had been too self-distrustful; now I was overconfident. I expected things to go my way, and without much conscious effort on my part. I had only to wish them to serve me and they would. I had forgotten the era of persecution; I had relaxed and withdrawn the sentries. I felt myself to be invulnerable. I did not believe that my happiness was contingent on anything: I felt that the laws of reality had been suspended on my behalf. My dreams for the year 1900 and for the twentieth century and for myself were coming true.
It never occurred to me, for instance, that I might get measles, and it astonished me that my mother regarded this as not only possible but probable. “You will tell me, won’t you,” she said anxiously, “the first moment that you don’t feel well?” I smiled. “Of course I shall be all right,” I assured her. “I hope so too,” she said. “But don’t forget last year, and how ill you were.”
Last year, the year 1899, had been a disastrous year. In January my father died after a brief illness, and in the summer I had diphtheria, with complications; almost all July and August I had spent in bed. They were phenomenally hot months, but what I recollected of the heat was my own fever, of which the heat in my room seemed only ano
ther aggravating aspect; heat was my enemy, the sun something to be kept out. I dreaded it; and whenever I heard people saying what a wonderful summer it had been, almost the hottest within living memory, I could not understand what they meant—I only thought of my aching throat and the desperate search of my fretful limbs for a cool place in the bedclothes. I had good reason to wish the century over.
The summer of 1900 would be a cool one, I decided; I should arrange for that. And the Clerk of the Weather hearkened to me. On July 1 the temperature was in the sixties and we had only had three hot days—the 10th, the 11th, and the 12th of June. I had marked them in my diary with a cross.
The 1st of July also brought Mrs. Maudsley’s invitation, for in those days we still had a post on Sundays. My mother showed me the letter: it was written in a large, bold, sloping hand. I had just reached the age when I could read hand-writing that was unfamiliar to me, and this accomplishment gave me some pride. Mrs. Maudsley did not ignore the possibility of measles though she took it more light-heartedly than my mother did. “If neither of our boys has come out in spots by July 10th,” she wrote, “I should be so very pleased if you would allow Leo to spend the rest of the month with us. Marcus”—ah, that was his name—“has told me quite a lot about him, and I am most anxious to make his acquaintance, if you can spare him. It will be very nice for Marcus to have a boy of his own age to play with as he is the baby of the family, and a little apt to feel left out. I understand that Leo is an only child and I promise you we will take great care of him. The Norfolk air …” etc. She ended up: “You may be surprised that we should be spending the Season in the country but neither my husband nor I have been very well, and Town is no place for a small boy in the summer.”
I pored over the letter and soon committed it to memory. I imagined that its conventional phrases implied a deep and sympathetic interest in my personality; it was almost the first time I had felt myself real to somebody who didn’t know me.
At first I was all agog to go and couldn’t understand my mother’s hesitation in accepting for me. “Norfolk is such a long way off,” she would say, “and you’ve never been away from home before, to stay with strangers, I mean.” “But I’ve been to school,” I argued. She had to admit that. “But I wish you weren’t going for so long,” she said. “You may not like it, and then what will you do?” “I’m sure I shall enjoy myself,” I told her. “And you will be there for your birthday,” she said. “We’ve always been together for your birthday.” I said nothing to that, I had forgotten about my birthday and was visited by a pang of premature nostalgia. “Promise me you’ll let me know if you’re not happy,” she said. I didn’t like to say again I knew I should be happy, so I promised. But still she wasn’t satisfied. “Perhaps you’ll get measles after all,” she told me hopefully, “or Marcus will.”
A dozen times a day I asked her if she had written saying I might go, until in the end she quite lost patience with me. “Don’t worry me—I have written,” she said at last.
Preparations followed—what should I take with me? One thing I shouldn’t need, I said, was summer clothes. “I know it won’t be hot.” And the weather bore me out—cool day followed cool day. My mother saw eye to eye with me in this: she believed that thick clothes were somehow safer than thin ones. And she had another motive: economy. The hot months of last year I had spent in bed, so I had no hot-weather outfit suitable to my size. I was growing fast: the outlay would be considerable and perhaps money thrown away. My mother yielded to me. “But try not to get hot,” she said. “Getting hot is always a risk. You needn’t do anything violent, need you?” We looked at each other in perplexity, and dismissed the idea that I should have to do anything violent.
In imagination, often in apprehension, she tried to foresee the kind of life I should lead. One day she said, apropos of nothing: “Try to go to church if you can. I don’t know what sort of people they are—perhaps they don’t go to church. If they do, I expect they drive.” Her face grew wistful, and I knew she wished she was going with me.
I shouldn’t have wanted that. I was haunted by the schoolboy’s fear that my mother wouldn’t look right, do right, be right in the eyes of the other boys and their parents. She would be socially unacceptable; she would make a bloomer. I could bear humiliation for myself, I thought, more easily than I could for her.
But as the day of departure drew nearer, my feelings underwent a change. Now it was I who wanted to get out of going, and my mother who held me to it. “You could so easily say I had got measles,” I pleaded. She was horrified. “I couldn’t say such a thing,” she cried indignantly. “And besides they would know. You were out of quarantine yesterday.” My heart sank; I tried a spell for making spots come out on my chest, but it didn’t work. On the last evening my mother and I sat together in the drawing-room on the two-humped settee, which reminded me of a dromedary in profile. The room faced the street and was a little stuffy, for we used it seldom and when it was not in use the windows were fastened to keep out the dust, which in the dry weather rose in clouds whenever a vehicle went by. It was our one formal room and I think my mother may have chosen it for its moral effect; its comparative strangeness would be a step towards the strangeness I should feel in another house. Also I suspect she had something special to say, which the room would lend weight to, but she never said it, for I was too near to tears to be open to practical or moral counsels.
2
TO MY MIND’S eye, my buried memories of Brandham Hall are like effects of chiaroscuro, patches of light and dark: it is only with an effort that I can see them in terms of colour. There are things I know, though I don’t know how I know them, and things that I remember. Certain things are established in my mind as facts, but no picture attaches to them; on the other hand there are pictures unverified by any fact which recur obsessively, like the landscape of a dream.
The facts I owe to my diary, which I kept religiously, beginning on the 9th, the day I arrived, and going on until the 26th, the eve of the fateful Friday. The last few entries are in code—how proud I was of having invented that! Not a pretence code such as I had used to call down curses on Jenkins and Strode, but a real one like Pepys’s—perhaps I had heard of his. I found it difficult to “break,” partly because, from motives of prudence and also, possibly, to display my virtuosity, I modified and embellished it each day. There are still two or three sentences that don’t give up their secret, though the whole affair is clearer to me now than it was then.
Facts there are in plenty, beginning with “M. met me on Norwich platform with the pony carriage and the Under-Coachman. We drove 13¾ miles to Brandham Hall, which came in site after about 12½ miles and then disapeared again.”
No doubt this was so, but I have no recollection of the drive, no visual image to make it real for me; the first part of my visit remains in my memory as a series of unrelated impressions, without time sequence, but each with a distinct feeling attaching to it. Some of the entries might just as well refer to places I have never seen, and incidents I have never experienced. Even the look of the house is vague to me. I laboriously transcribed into my diary a description of it that I found in a directory of Norfolk:
Brandham Hall, the seat of the Winlove family, is an imposing early Georgian mansion pleasantly situated on a plot of rising ground and standing in a park of some five hundred acres. Of an architectural style too bare and unadorned for present tastes, it makes an impressive if over-plain effect when seen from the S.W. The interior contains interesting family portraits by Gains-borough and Reynolds, also landscapes by Cuyp, Ruysdael, Hobbema, etc., and in the smoking-room a series of tavern scenes by Teniers the Younger (these are not shown). The first-floor apartments are approached by a double staircase which has been much admired. The Winlove family has the gift of the livings of Brandham, Brandham-under-Brandham, and Brandham All Saints. At present the mansion, park, and pleasure grounds are let to Mr. W. H. Maudsley, of Princes Gate and Threadneedle Street, who allows the public the
same facilities to see the house that it enjoyed formerly. Permission to view should be obtained from the agent, Brandham Estate Offices, Brandham.
Now of this all that remains clear in my mind’s eye is the double staircase, which certainly was admired by me. I likened it to many things: a tilted horseshoe, a magnet, a cataract; and both coming down and going up I made it a rule to use alternate routes; I persuaded myself that something awful might happen if I went the same way twice. But surprisingly enough (considering how ready I was to be impressed), the imposing façade, which I am sure I studied from the S.W., has faded from my mind. I can see the front of the house now, but through the eyes of the directory, not through my own.
Perhaps we came and went through a side-door—I think we did, and that there was a backstairs near it convenient for our bedroom—for I shared a bedroom, and indeed a bed, a four-poster, with Marcus. And not only with him, but with his Aberdeen terrier, an elderly, cross creature, whose presence soon became almost intolerable. My memories are of the hinder parts of the house, invisible from the S.W., which were higgledy-piggledy and rambling, and of passages with sudden bends and confusing identical doors, where you could easily lose your way and be late for meals. They were not well lighted, if I remember, which the Georgian addition must have been. Perhaps our bedroom was an old night nursery. It had a broad, squat window, set high in the wall, Elizabethan possibly: sitting up in bed I could only see the sky. In those days even rich people did not always give their children the kind of sleeping-quarters we should think essential for them now.