“We’ll be sorry to leave the little house of course. It’s a bit like Adam and Eve, you know. Lord! what a chap old Milton was!
“‘The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.’
It sounds, George…. Providence their guide!… Well — thank goodness there’s no imeedgit prospect of either Cain or Abel!
“After all, it won’t be so bad up there. Not the scenery, perhaps, or the air we get here, but — LIFE! We’ve got very comfortable little rooms, very comfortable considering, and I shall rise. We’re not done yet, we’re not beaten; don’t think that, George. I shall pay twenty shillings in the pound before I’ve done — you mark my words, George, — twenty — five to you…. I got this situation within twenty-four hours — others offered. It’s an important firm — one of the best in London. I looked to that. I might have got four or five shillings a week more — elsewhere. Quarters I could name. But I said to them plainly, wages to go on with, but opportunity’s my game — development. We understood each other.”
He threw out his chest, and the little round eyes behind his glasses rested valiantly on imaginary employers.
We would go on in silence for a space while he revised and restated that encounter. Then he would break out abruptly with some banal phrase.
“The Battle of Life, George, my boy,” he would cry, or “Ups and Downs!”
He ignored or waived the poor little attempts I made to ascertain my own position. “That’s all right,” he would say; or, “Leave all that to me. I’LL look after them.” And he would drift away towards the philosophy and moral of the situation. What was I to do?
“Never put all your resources into one chance, George; that’s the lesson I draw from this. Have forces in reserve. It was a hundred to one, George, that I was right — a hundred to one. I worked it out afterwards. And here we are spiked on the off-chance. If I’d have only kept back a little, I’d have had it on U.P. next day, like a shot, and come out on the rise. There you are!”
His thoughts took a graver turn.
“It’s where you’ll bump up against Chance like this, George, that you feel the need of religion. Your hard-and-fast scientific men — your Spencers and Huxleys — they don’t understand that. I do. I’ve thought of it a lot lately — in bed and about. I was thinking of it this morning while I shaved. It’s not irreverent for me to say it, I hope — but God comes in on the off-chance, George. See? Don’t you be too cocksure of anything, good or bad. That’s what I make out of it. I could have sworn. Well, do you think I — particular as I am — would have touched those Union Pacifics with trust money at all, if I hadn’t thought it a thoroughly good thing — good without spot or blemish?… And it was bad!
“It’s a lesson to me. You start in to get a hundred percent. and you come out with that. It means, in a way, a reproof for Pride. I’ve thought of that, George — in the Night Watches. I was thinking this morning when I was shaving, that that’s where the good of it all comes in. At the bottom I’m a mystic in these affairs. You calculate you’re going to do this or that, but at bottom who knows at all WHAT he’s doing? When you most think you’re doing things, they’re being done right over your head. You’re being done — in a sense. Take a hundred-to one chance, or one to a hundred — what does it matter? You’re being Led.”
It’s odd that I heard this at the time with unutterable contempt, and now that I recall it — well, I ask myself, what have I got better?
“I wish,” said I, becoming for a moment outrageous, “You were being Led to give me some account of my money, uncle.”
“Not without a bit of paper to figure on, George, I can’t. But you trust me about that never fear. You trust me.”
And in the end I had to.
I think the bankruptcy hit my aunt pretty hard. There was, so far as I can remember now, a complete cessation of all those cheerful outbreaks of elasticity, no more skylarking in the shop nor scampering about the house. But there was no fuss that I saw, and only little signs in her complexion of the fits of weeping that must have taken her. She didn’t cry at the end, though to me her face with its strain of self-possession was more pathetic than any weeping. “Well” she said to me as she came through the shop to the cab, “Here’s old orf, George! Orf to Mome number two! Goodbye!” And she took me in her arms and kissed me and pressed me to her. Then she dived straight for the cab before I could answer her.
My uncle followed, and he seemed to me a trifle too valiant and confident in his bearing for reality. He was unusually white in the face. He spoke to his successor at the counter. “Here we go!” he said. “One down, the other up. You’ll find it a quiet little business so long as you run it on quiet lines — a nice quiet little business. There’s nothing more? No? Well, if you want to know anything write to me. I’ll always explain fully. Anything — business, place or people. You’ll find Pil Antibil. a little overstocked by-the-by, I found it soothed my mind the day before yesterday making ‘em, and I made ‘em all day. Thousands! And where’s George? Ah! there you are! I’ll write to you, George, Fully, about all that affair. Fully!”
It became clear to me as if for the first time, that I was really parting from my aunt Susan. I went out on to the pavement and saw her head craned forward, her wide-open blue eyes and her little face intent on the shop that had combined for her all the charms of a big doll’s house and a little home of her very own. “Goodbye!” she said to it and to me. Our eyes met for a moment — perplexed. My uncle bustled out and gave a few totally unnecessary directions to the cabman and got in beside her. “All right?” asked the driver. “Right,” said I; and he woke up the horse with a flick of his whip. My aunt’s eyes surveyed me again. “Stick to your old science and things, George, and write and tell me when they make you a Professor,” she said cheerfully.
She stared at me for a second longer with eyes growing wider and brighter and a smile that had become fixed, glanced again at the bright little shop still saying “Ponderevo” with all the emphasis of its fascia, and then flopped back hastily out of sight of me into the recesses of the cab. Then it had gone from before me and I beheld Mr. Snape, the hairdresser, inside his store regarding its departure with a quiet satisfaction and exchanging smiles and significant headshakes with Mr. Marbel.
IV
I was left, I say, as part of the lock, stock, and barrel, at Wimblehurst with my new master, a Mr. Mantell; who plays no part in the progress of this story except in so far as he effaced my uncle’s traces. So soon as the freshness of this new personality faded, I began to find Wimblehurst not only a dull but a lonely place, and to miss my aunt Susan immensely. The advertisements of the summer terms for Cough Linctus were removed; the bottles of coloured water — red, green, and yellow — restored to their places; the horse announcing veterinary medicine, which my uncle, sizzling all the while, had coloured in careful portraiture of a Goodwood favourite, rewhitened; and I turned myself even more resolutely than before to Latin (until the passing of my preliminary examination enabled me to drop that), and then to mathematics and science.
There were classes in Electricity and Magnetism at the Grammar School. I took a little “elementary” prize in that in my first year and a medal in my third; and in Chemistry and Human Physiology and Sound, Light and Heat, I did well. There was also a lighter, more discursive subject called Physiography, in which one ranged among the sciences and encountered Geology as a process of evolution from Eozoon to Eastry House, and Astronomy as a record of celestial movements of the most austere and invariable integrity. I learnt out of badly-written, condensed little textbooks, and with the minimum of experiment, but still I learnt. Only thirty years ago it was, and I remember I learnt of the electric light as an expensive, impracticable toy, the telephone as a curiosity,