Section 5
It was late when I parted from Parload and came back to my own
home.
Our house stood in a highly respectable little square near
the Clayton parish church. Mr. Gabbitas, the curate of all work,
lodged on our ground floor, and upstairs there was an old lady,
Miss Holroyd, who painted flowers on china and maintained her blind
sister in an adjacent room; my mother and I lived in the basement
and slept in the attics. The front of the house was veiled by
a Virginian creeper that defied the Clayton air and clustered in
untidy dependant masses over the wooden porch.
As I came up the steps I had a glimpse of Mr. Gabbitas printing
photographs by candle light in his room. It was the chief delight
of his little life to spend his holiday abroad in the company of a
queer little snap-shot camera, and to return with a great multitude
of foggy and sinister negatives that he had made in beautiful and
interesting places. These the camera company would develop for him
on advantageous terms, and he would spend his evenings the year
through in printing from them in order to inflict copies upon his
undeserving friends. There was a long frameful of his work in the
Clayton National School, for example, inscribed in old English
lettering, "Italian Travel Pictures, by the Rev. E. B. Gabbitas."
For this it seemed he lived and traveled and had his being. It was
his only real joy. By his shaded light I could see his sharp little
nose, his little pale eyes behind his glasses, his mouth pursed up
with the endeavor of his employment.
"Hireling Liar," I muttered, for was not he also part of the system,
part of the scheme of robbery that made wages serfs of Parload and
me?--though his share in the proceedings was certainly small.
"Hireling Liar," said I, standing in the darkness, outside
even his faint glow of traveled culture. . .
My mother let me in.
She looked at me, mutely, because she knew there was something
wrong and that it was no use for her to ask what.
"Good night, mummy," said I, and kissed her a little roughly, and
lit and took my candle and went off at once up the staircase to
bed, not looking back at her.
"I've kept some supper for you, dear."
"Don't want any supper."
"But, dearie------"
"Good night, mother," and I went up and slammed my door upon her,
blew out my candle, and lay down at once upon my bed, lay there a
long time before I got up to undress.
There were times when that dumb beseeching of my mother's face
irritated me unspeakably. It did so that night. I felt I had to
struggle against it, that I could not exist if I gave way to its
pleadings, and it hurt me and divided me to resist it, almost beyond
endurance. It was clear to me that I had to think out for myself
religious problems, social problems, questions of conduct, questions
of expediency, that her poor dear simple beliefs could not help me
at all--and she did not understand! Hers was the accepted religion,
her only social ideas were blind submissions to the accepted
order--to laws, to doctors, to clergymen, lawyers, masters, and all
respectable persons in authority over us, and with her to believe
was to fear. She knew from a thousand little signs--though still at
times I went to church with her--that I was passing out of touch of
all these things that ruled her life, into some terrible unknown.
From things I said she could infer such clumsy concealments as I
made. She felt my socialism, felt my spirit in revolt against the
accepted order, felt the impotent resentments that filled me with
bitterness against all she held sacred. Yet, you know, it was not
her dear gods she sought to defend so much as me! She seemed always
to be wanting to say to me, "Dear, I know it's hard--but revolt
is harder. Don't make war on it, dear--don't! Don't do anything to
offend it. I'm sure it will hurt you if you do--it will hurt you
if you do."
She had been cowed into submission, as so many women of that time
had been, by the sheer brutality of the accepted thing. The existing
order dominated her into a worship of abject observances. It had
bent her, aged her, robbed her of eyesight so that at fifty-five
she peered through cheap spectacles at my face, and saw it only
dimly, filled her with a habit of anxiety, made her hands------
Her poor dear hands! Not in the whole world now could you find a
woman with hands so grimy, so needle-worn, so misshapen by toil,
so chapped and coarsened, so evilly entreated. . . . At any rate,
there is this I can say for myself, that my bitterness against the
world and fortune was for her sake as well as for my own.
Yet that night I pushed by her harshly. I answered her curtly,
left her concerned and perplexed in the passage, and slammed my
door upon her.
And for a long time I lay raging at the hardship and evil of life,
at the contempt of Rawdon, and the loveless coolness of Nettie's
letter, at my weakness and insignificance, at the things I found
intolerable, and the things I could not mend. Over and over went
my poor little brain, tired out and unable to stop on my treadmill
of troubles. Nettie. Rawdon. My mother. Gabbitas. Nettie. . .
Suddenly I came upon emotional exhaustion. Some clock was striking
midnight. After all, I was young; I had these quick transitions.
I remember quite distinctly, I stood up abruptly, undressed very
quickly in the dark, and had hardly touched my pillow again before
I was asleep.
But how my mother slept that night I do not know.
Oddly enough, I do not blame myself for behaving like this to my
mother, though my conscience blames me acutely for my arrogance to
Parload. I regret my behavior to my mother before the days of the
Change, it is a scar among my memories that will always be a little
painful to the end of my days, but I do not see how something of
the sort was to be escaped under those former conditions. In that
time of muddle and obscurity people were overtaken by needs and
toil and hot passions before they had the chance of even a year or
so of clear thinking; they settled down to an intense and strenuous
application to some partial but immediate duty, and the growth of
thought ceased in them. They set and hardened into narrow ways.
Few women remained capable of a new idea after five and twenty,
few men after thirty-one or two. Discontent with the thing that
existed was regarded as immoral, it was certainly an annoyance, and
the only protest against it, the only effort against that universal
tendency in all human institutions to thicken and clog, to work
loosely and badly, to rust and weaken towards catastrophes, came
from the young--the crude unmerciful young. It seemed in those
days to thoughtful men the harsh law of being--that either we must
submit to our elders and be stifled, or disregard them, disobey them,
thrust them aside, and make our little step of progress before we
too ossified and became obstructive in our turn.
My pushing past my mother, my irresponsive departure to my own
silent meditations, was, I now perceive, a figure of the whole hard
relationship between parents and son in those days. There appeared
no other way; that perpetually recurring tragedy was, it seemed,
part of the very nature of the progress of the world. We did not
think then that minds might grow ripe without growing rigid, or
children honor their parents and still think for themselves. We were
angry and hasty because we stifled in the darkness, in a poisoned
and vitiated air. That deliberate animation of the intelligence
which is now the universal quality, that vigor with consideration,
that judgment with confident enterprise which shine through all
our world, were things disintegrated and unknown in the corrupting
atmosphere of our former state.
(So the first fascicle ended. I put it aside and looked for the
second.
"Well?" said the man who wrote.
"This is fiction?"
"It's my story."
"But you-- Amidst this beauty-- You are not this ill-conditioned,
squalidly bred lad of whom I have been reading?"
He smiled. "There intervenes a certain Change," he said. "Have I
not hinted at that?"
I hesitated upon a question, then saw the second fascicle at hand,
and picked it up.)
