The Bulpington of Blup ebook

Contents

I. HIS ORIGINS AND EARLY YEARS

II. THE RED-HAIRED BOY AND HIS SISTER

III. ADOLESCENCE

IV. THEODORE AS LOVER

V. THEODORE AND DEATH

VI. HEROICS

VII. WAR STRESS

VIII. THE RETURN OF THE WARRIOR

IX. CAPTAIN BLUP-BULPINGTON, AT YOUR SERVICE

I. HIS ORIGINS AND EARLY YEARS

§1 RAYMOND AND CLORINDA

THERE had been a time when he felt that he ought not to call himself The Bulpington of Blup. Though it was only in his own mind that he called himself the Bulpington of Blup. He never called himself the Bulpington of Blup to any other human being. But to himself he did it continually. And the effects of doing it spread about in his brain. Sometimes it seemed to help things; sometimes to hinder them. For some years he made a great effort not to be The Bulpington of Blup any more, to be simply and really what he was–whatever that might be.

That was in the serious time when he felt he was growing up but not growing up quite right. It had been a hard struggle. Certain alien influences had swayed him profoundly and particularly those Broxteds, his friends and neighbours. He had determined to look facts in the face–squarely in the face. He would go for walks whispering, “I am just Theodore Bulpington, a commonplace youth.” Even so he would find himself putting it in phrases that betrayed him. “It ill becomes the Bulpington of Blup to shirk the harsh visage of reality.” Later, as we shall tell, his efforts slackened. The Bulpington of Blup habit was weakened but not cured. It returned; it recovered force. It became an invader, a conqueror. How, you shall be told in this story.

Bulpington he was, quite legitimately. But there were other Bulpingtons and several of much more importance than himself. That “The” therefore was unwarrantable.

His father was a poet and critic with a weak chest who lived at Blayport on the Blay. His mother was one of the ten Spink girls who had partaken, all of them, of the earlier crude vintages of the higher education for women. They had no brother. Old Spink, undismayed by this feminist bias of his chromosomes, had said, “Every girl of mine shall be as good as a man.” Clorinda, the fourth of them, was, within the limits of her marriage, better. For Raymond Bulpington, her spouse, had neglected his final studies at Oxford for the aesthetic life. He was not really up to her. She married him rather inattentively. When you are one of ten sisters marriage is apt to be something of a scramble. She wanted someone “uncommon” and she wanted to cut a dash intellectually. And she was in a hurry. He had seemed all right. She was a dark, sturdy, well-built girl of great energy and her mind was unusually broad. She took double first in everything so to speak, until it came to offspring. She ought to have had twins and completed the record, but Theodore–it may be through some deficiency in Raymond–was her only child.

The marriage occurred in the imperial days of Queen Victoria, when Wilde and Whistler were great stars in the skies of the artistic world and when Pseudonyms jostled Keynotes in the booksellers’ shops. The West was just discovering the Russian novel and the Scandinavian drama. Frank Harris had captured the Saturday Review and Aubrey Beardsley adorned the Yellow Book. Dim memories of the Renaissance were affecting the costumes and morals of the time; the crinoline had gone and Protestantism was beginning to look deflated and dowdy. Liberalism and Liberty were giving place to Freedom and Passion. All the Spink girls rode bicycles in knickerbockers, one after the other, and there was no end to their cigarettes. But they cared nothing for golf, a game then for whimsical old gentlemen, and when they played tennis they rustled.

Theodore’s father, who had come down from Oxford with a brilliant reputation for brilliance, as full of promise as an egg is full of meat, was already something of an invalid in Theodore’s childhood. There had been a brief glittering bachelor-time in London, studios and the Cafe Royal, epigrams before breakfast and the brilliant promise breaking out in the most scathing criticisms of established reputations. He contributed to the Saturday Review and the Yellow Book, drew women of new and startling shapes in black and white, and played quite a prominent part in the Revival of Wickedness in progress at that time. Then Clorinda got him. His union had been a wild affair, as wildness went in those days; the young couple had eloped to Thetford a fortnight before the ceremony and old Spink, maddened by the scandal, had threatened to shoot him and was only partly appeased by the belated marriage lines. Raymond and Clorinda declared that the ceremony had no binding effect upon them and did their best to behave accordingly; they lived in two communicating and sometimes disconnected studios and were much talked about until his health broke down.

It broke down soon after the occurrence of Theodore. Sea air and a dry soil became imperative; they retreated to little old Blayport and Raymond flung himself into a History of the Varangians that was to outshine Doughty, a task from which he never emerged, from which indeed nothing emerged; and between whiles to supplement his income during the work in progress, he edited classics, projected translations, advised a peculiarly scoundrelly publisher and lured young men by timely praise into the scoundrel’s clutches, wrote scornful essays and criticisms and despised contemporary art and literature generally; while Clorinda got an annual season ticket to Charing Cross and divided her time between home life at Blayport, world movements and a sympathetic treatment of progressive artists and advanced thinkers in London. Old Spink died and did not cut up nearly so well as had been expected, so that the Bulpingtons had to go on living within strictly defined limits. Even in Blayport they were by no means solitary; it was a sunny resort in winter, and people of the intelligenzia liked to come and stay in the place and call in to hear Raymond talk about their contemporaries. No one could better serve you a spatchcocked contemporary than Raymond.

Both parents gave a considerable amount of disconnected thought to the problem of Theodore’s education. Clorinda met all sorts of ideas about education in London, people brought ideas down with them to Blayport and Raymond found them in books. It was a generation exceptionally prolific of educational ideas. It floated tranquilly along the flood of armament towards the Great War, talking meanwhile of the welfare of the young and the assured future of mankind. Butler and Shaw had disseminated a general feeling that schools were wrong, and so Theodore did not go very much to school and acquired that feeling early. So much at least was to the good.

But nothing took the place of school. He was simply left uninstructed. There was a general objection to discipline and discouragement in the prevalent educational theory of the time. So neither of his parents disciplined or discouraged him in any way. He was left in charge of a trusted nurse, who afterwards gave place to a polyglot Russian lady, a refugee from political persecution. Later on she departed; she had got herself attached as mistress to one of the passing intellectual visitors who, so to speak, packed her up with his luggage, and a Portuguese lady succeeded her. But collaboration with Raymond in the translation of the Lusiad led to an emotional crisis before Theodore had acquired more than a smattering of abusive Portuguese; and a conscientious Swiss followed, whom Raymond never really liked on account of her ankles, but tolerated for the boy’s sake. She was sent away because Clorinda could not bear her insistence upon the superiority of Swiss domestic management to British household methods, and after that there was an interregnum. After the interregnum Theodore went to St. Artemas’s, a local school where there was no corporal punishment but much brushwork, metalwork and sea bathing. Under this regime he developed considerable linguistic facility, an obstinate incapacity for mathematics, and marked artistic tendencies, and he became a voracious reader of fiction, history and poetry. He wrote verse from a remarkably early age and sketched with inaccuracy and distinction. He was good at his piano lessons, despised all but the greatest composers and talked precociously about many adult interests. And in his secret heart, to assuage some unsatisfied need, he was The Bulpington of Blup.

As for that “Blup”, it was, he told himself, the ancient name of Blayport. But he really had no evidence that it was the ancient name of Blayport. The history mistress had talked of ancient names and how they had become distorted with the years. She talked of Brighthelmstone which had become Brighton and Londinium which was now London, and Portus Lemanus contracted to Lynn. On the beach, in a mood of facetiousness, he and Francolin and Bletts had parodied the lesson. They had suggested bright and better variations in numerous familiar places’ names–involving generally a faint agreeable flavour of indelicacy. What could Blayport become? Blappy or Blappot, Blaypot or Blup? Francolin fancied Blaypot and sang, “Blaypot is my washpot; over Edom will I cast my shoe.” Blup hit upon Theodore’s fancy, hit his fancy indeed, extremely. Blup. It sounded like a great cliff, a “bluff”; it sounded like the smack of waves; it made him think of a horde of pirates, desperate fellows, harbouring there, Bulpingtons all. And among them a leader, one, head of the clan, spite of his tender years, the best of the breed, The Bulpington himself. So he fell into a muse and let Francolin do what he liked with Blaypot, carry it about, wear it on his head–call for it hastily after Resurrection Pie. Blup was the word for him.

§2 THE FASTNESSES OF BLUP

There was something unstable and elusive about Blup. It was never quite Blayport; it was much rockier; and soon it got detached and began wandering about the country. Its scenery acquired a touch of the Highlands even while it was still a haunt of sea-going men; it made itself a tortuous rocky harbour like a Norwegian fiord. It retreated up formidable gorges. And then it went inland and became a strange mountainous country where there were dense very green forests and the white roads wound about like serpents. One saw it usually from very far off and particularly about the time of sunset. It had walls and pinnacles of a creamy sort of rock that glittered micaceously, and there were always very still and watchful sentinels upon its ramparts. And at the sunset gun the great embroidered banner of The Bulpington fell down fold upon fold, fold upon fold, gold thread and shining silk, and gave place to the little storm flag that fluttered through the night.

And sometimes Blup receded altogether beyond the visible horizon and The Bulpington thereof, mysteriously in exile, went unsuspected and misunderstood, a slight dark boy going for an apparently aimless walk, a schoolboy treated contumeliously by women teachers of mathematics, a scornful saunterer amidst the vulgar antics of excursionists upon the beach, biding his time for the signal that would change all that. There came a military period when Blup had to be put into a state of defence, to resist what was afterwards to be known in the secret history of the world as the Beleaguerment of Blup. The Castalonians with their strange devices, their black armour and cold-drawn-steel weapons, their masked prince and their trail of vile and wretched camp followers, were coming up against it. Across the sea and over the mountains by three devious routes they were coming up against it. It was a vast task for one mind to plan and foresee every possibility of that struggle and it involved subterranean passages of the most intricate and astounding sort....

“Penny for your thoughts, Theodore,” said one of his father’s casual visitors.

“I was just thinking,” said Theodore.

“Yes–but what about?”

Theodore sought in his mind for a suitable subject for a visitor’s understanding and snatched a fragment from the table talk of the last week-end.

“I was wondering why it is that Berlioz so often falls just short of greatness.”

“God!” cried the visitor as if he had been stung, and went back to London to report that Raymond and Clorinda had produced the most awful little prig that had ever been heard of upon God’s earth.

“Happily he looks delicate,” said the visitor.

§3 DELPHIC SIBYL

Some day, before many years perhaps, the psychologists may give us clearer ideas than they do at present of how such a personality as The Bulpington of Blup, such a visitant, such an intervener, can come into existence among the infinite delicate tangle of cells and fibres in a human brain, and how it can draw together about itself those shadows and sublimations of experience that feed its phantom life. Always it knew itself for a visitant and unreal and yet it clung obstinately to itself, and was always interchanging suggestions and feelings and interpretations with that other individual that ruled beside it and over it–that other individual it could influence to sign his name “Theo Bulpington”, with the most grudging of little o’s for the Theo and with a long and complicated flourish that was indeed no less than the words “of Blup”, stifled before they were born. This visitant, this inner personality preyed upon Theodore’s mental vitality; it struggled to control him; it gave him the inward-looking hesitating manner that distinguished him; it accounted perhaps for his occasional stammer. Through the mist of its urgencies and impulses, its unformulated yet influential judgments and powerful yet indistinct desires, the real world, the world sustained by the rough endorsements of experience and the confirmations of people about him, projected itself into Theodore’s brain. The intruder could not defeat and destroy the power of these present realities, but it remained a living protest against them and it could throw its glamour over past and future until they became its own.

In the world of Theodore, Blayport was always Blayport, always on the English Channel and always at exactly the same distance from London. The first afternoon train from Victoria got to Blayport very punctually, never before 5.27 and rarely very much later. In this popular seaside resort, his home was established with an effect of stupendous fixity. He remembered no other home and did not yet imagine there could be a different one. The weather changed beyond his control from a heavy wet sou’wester with grey rolling seas that beat upon and foamed at the Esplanade, to a wild sou’wester with shining white clouds in a blue sky, to an east wind that tasted of blue-black ink, that made all the world look like a painted ink drawing and had skies of a hard decisive blue; and so back to the wet sou’wester again that drove the rain and spindrift hissing along the asphalt. The hours trampled upon his wishes, dinnertime and school-time were always interruptions and night came undesired. The holidays rushed to their end and the mathematical mistress could, like Joshua, make the day stand still.

The world of Theodore was full of boredom, obligation and frustration.

Both his father and mother lacked completeness in this world. All sorts of things about his father and mother had been thrust out of his consciousness, together with any awareness of this thrusting out. All sorts of things were yet to be observed. His father had a fine dark querulous face and found the world to blame. The south-west wind made his hair, which was longer than it was thick, dreadfully untidy. His eyes were the colour of red copper and his shirts were a clear yellow and open at the neck. Theodore’s mother was so different outdoors from in, tailor-made with spatter-dashes in the open air, and a large slow softness about the house in a dressing-gown that became a tea-gown as the day wore on, that she seemed to be two separate people. The house was always adorned with poppies, sunflowers, dahlias, asters and suchlike large passionate flowers in great glazed earthenware bowls; and her cigarette-ends were everywhere. White flowers she could not endure.

Servants came and went. One, going in a rather exceptional tumult of dismissal, called Clorinda “a curly-headed old cow”. It made Theodore look at his mother for a time in quite a new light.

Raymond went for long solitary walks. He was very proud of his untiring wolf-like stride. When he was at home he read and wrote at a long oak table littered with books by the window.

Or he talked. Or he slept. Theodore knew that when Raymond wrote or slept little boys should be seen and not heard, but Raymond seemed to see him very little. However, he let him turn over the pages of any book he liked and sometimes said, “Well, little man,” and ruffled his hair in quite a kindly manner.

Raymond’s study was furnished with severe good taste. The walls were whitewashed, there were numerous untidy bookshelves of unstained oak and a few really good Chinese bowls. There was one of those early pre-Broadwood pianos that people are apt to call spinets, and later came a pianola. On his Clementi, Raymond would play Scarlatti and Purcell and sometimes Mozart quite gracefully. He found the pianola served to remind him of music and that was his excuse for possessing it. He would never admit the pianola played music. He would say: “Let us put some Weber–or Bach or Beethoven–through the sausage machine.” There was much talk of music in the house and when Raymond was out Theodore would put Beethoven, Bach, Brahms and even Berlioz through the machine himself. Deep in his heart and unconfessed he most loved Berlioz because when he played him–and especially the Symphonie Fantasque–the Bulpington of Blup, moody and magnificent, enlarged to colossal dimensions, stalked through his imagination unrestrained. Theodore vanished. Russian music and the Russian ballet had not yet happened to England; they were to storm his adolescence.

Clorinda would go to London for whole days and sometimes for several days together pursuing her movements.

“Don’t overdo it,” Raymond would say. When she returned she would relapse into her languorous art gowns and her affection for Raymond would be exceptionally ostentatious and abundant. It was as if she had bought a great present of new caresses for him up there. He accepted them without manifest enthusiasm. While she was away Raymond and Theodore saw little of each other. Theodore sometimes wished that the servants and governesses of Clorinda’s choice were lovelier and more capable of romance. The only conceivable romantic associate for Theodore was that Portuguese governess, but when Clorinda was in London, collaboration between the young lady and Raymond became so earnest that Theodore was sent out to play upon the beach by himself. At other times she exercised a dark and deliberate charm upon him. But she would call him by diminutive pet names and drag his father’s character and dispositions into their conversations. It did not interest Theodore in the least to speculate whether his father was paradoxical, whether he cared for Clorinda or whether he would be terrible in anger.

For a time a fair young man who was staying at the Blayport Arms frequented Theodore’s home. He talked in low tones to Clorinda, as it were privately, and publicly in a rather loud strained controversial voice to Raymond. The two men talked a lot about Miracle Plays and German puppet shows, agreeing harshly with each other. The young man was very busy inventing folk dances and beautiful cottage industries that the English ought to have had even if they hadn’t actually had them, and Clorinda was very enthusiastic about it all. She found him Early English. One half-holiday Theodore who had been sent out on the rocks to play returned suddenly for a magic crystal belonging to the Bulpington of Blup. He stole in noiselessly because Raymond might be having an afternoon nap.

In the living-room he came upon Clorinda and the fair young man. They were on the Empire sofa. Their lips were pressed together and the young man’s hand (and half his arm) was thrust in a searching manner into the ample décolletage of Clorinda’s gown. Theodore’s presence was only remarked as he departed.

It was after this that he was given boots instead of sandshoes and told by Clorinda to carry himself manfully and not to “sneak about” so much. She said it got on her nerves. And the relationship of Theodore of Blayport to The Bulpington of Blup took on a new aspect. It became clear that they had been changed at birth.

For a time indeed this changeling, the Bulpington of Blup, seemed likely to oust Theodore, the son of Clorinda, altogether. The true mother of The Bulpington of Blup was as different from Clorinda as could be. What she was like was never very fixed. Sometimes she was this and sometimes she was that. She was rather like Britannia in the Punch cartoons for a time, and afterwards she was like Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks in Clorinda’s bedroom. Then she was dark and soft and great. You did not see her face but her arm was about you. Afterwards she was like Prud’hon’s Sleeping Psyche and very calm and loving. For a little while, for a hesitating time, she was the Delphic Sibyl from Michael Angelo’s great ceiling. But that was wrong; that was dismissed and wiped out, a mistake altogether. The Delphic Sibyl was much too young. Her face was too young. Another destiny presently claimed that lovely being, with her sweet wide eyes, her awakening youth.

Whisper it low; she had become the Bulpington of Blup’s own true love.

The lingering softness of childhood was giving place to a completer boyhood day by day, and he began to realize his need for feminine companionship, hard feminine companionship, and forget his craving for protection. She would ride in armour beside him through the greenwood of Wonderland, his mate, his friend, his dearest friend. No nonsense about it, nothing soppy, nothing of that sort. She could fence almost as well as he could; she could throw a lance almost as far. But not quite. She was fearless, all too fearless, in a world where Castalonian camp followers may lurk in any thicket.

The Bulpington of Blup spent more and more time in her company as Theodore’s boyhood ripened. He would talk to her in his reverie; and his talking made his reverie less phantasmal and elusive than it had been. He framed sentences and phrases, for language and imagination were growing in his mind. He would tell her about his days of exile, about his mysterious daylight exile at Blayport. Sometimes that degradation seemed to be an enchantment, but generally he and she treated it as a deliberate concealment, a disguise, a temporary self-effacement for mighty ends.

Never a word to anyone else yet of all these things. The time for the éclaircissement would come. Meanwhile we pass as the son of these people, Master Theodore Bulpington, known to his coevals and familiars as “Snifter” or the “Snipe”. But in bed before he fell asleep, how near she came! The pillow became her arm. She breathed beside him, saying nothing and yet comforting his heart. Nothing soppy, you know, nothing in the least soppy–just that.

§4 GOD, THE PURITANS AND MR. WIMPERDICK

The talk in that cultivated Blayport home was abundant, various and stimulating. Nothing was kept from the little hearer. “To the pure all things are pure,” said Clorinda. “What doesn’t concern them doesn’t affect them.” And besides she wasn’t going to be bothered about it. Theodore made such use and application as he could of what he heard and what he found in the unrestricted books that filled the house. Every day that hungry young brain-cortex was seizing upon a thousand new things, words and phrases, sights and sounds, and weaving ten thousand new threads of connexion between the new and the old. It was doing its instinctive best to get a coherent picture of the universe about itself.

Over it and through it flowed the little events of Theodore’s life, the scenes and happenings of the street and beach, the casual teachings of home, the clumsy quasi-intentional teachings of governesses and school teachers, books, pictures, presently magazines and newspapers, and these spates and streams of home talk.

The talk was about music, about the Varangians and the fall of the Western Empire, about new books, about old books which Raymond was editing and prefacing, about the beauty and richness of words and phrases, about new and old poetry, about manners and morals, about the weaknesses of the absent and the personalities of the present, about the undesirability of the newer movements in art, literature and behaviour that had arisen since the great days when Raymond had been the spirit of innovation at the Café Royal. (But Clorinda thought that novelties were still permissible.) And even religion was touched upon. But law and current politics were disregarded as being too topical and tripperish and newspaperish for attention. And business was an unclean thing.

Most little boys and girls in those days were instructed to centre the picture of the universe they were forming in their minds on God. They were referred to Him continually; they were trained to dread His love and anger in about equal measure. He had made them; He had made everything; He was everywhere. Or at any rate He was tremendously and imminently overhead. Only as they grew up did they begin to conceive of Him as the Great Absentee. He had made them; He had made everything. Yes, but then apparently–one began to realize–He had gone. He wasn’t everywhere, He wasn’t anywhere, He had abandoned overhead for a long time to Infinite Space; He had gone right away.

But never did this God achieve any strength of personality upon the cerebral cortex of Theodore. Compared with the vivid and concrete Bulpington of Blup, God remained only a dark menace at the back of things. Compared with the dear face and the vitalizing presence of the Delphic Sibyl he was infinitely remote. Servants and one governess made some efforts to give substance to this word God in Theodore’s mind, to this great idea on which the world is supposed to have built its belief for centuries, by dwelling on His power to “send you to ‘ell” and other theological circumstances; but even the simple faith of the servant class was losing its powers of conviction in these days. Hell was among a collection of landscapes in Theodore’s imagination, but only as a hot sandy waste among arid rocks with frisky-looking demons and rather pleasing little threads of vertical smoke coming out of the ground. It was not nearly so alarming as the crater of Vesuvius or the Maelstrom. They were really horrible.

Nor did the thought of the Watching Eye ever pierce the security of Theodore’s secret life. It was only when he was a young man that he noted the import of his own name.

At school he was made to read the Bible, verse by verse, and even prepared Kings and Chronicles for an examination, but the Bible seemed to be concerned not so much with God as the Jews–and Raymond had given Theodore a poor opinion of the Jews.

The New Testament story did not touch Theodore’s unprepared heart and he regarded pictures of the Crucifixion–even by the greatest masters–with horror and loathing. He turned them over as soon as he could and hurried on to the Venuses and the Sibyls. It was a mythological story from the first for him, and a very unpleasant one. It would seem a son had been nailed on the cross in that hideous manner by his father. Because this father was annoyed by the way the world he had made had gone wrong. A frightful story, as nasty as needless. It hurt the palms of Theodore’s hands even to think of it. It set him against Raymond. One day when Raymond was hanging a picture, dismay seized Theodore and instead of handing up nails he went out of the room. He grew up an almost entirely godless boy, godless and god-evasive, and it was only later that he began to take any interest in divinity.

Yet there were quite a number of religious people, even professionally religious people, who came and went in that little centre of culture and intellectual activity. There were one or two priests who seemed on excellent terms with Raymond; plump, well-lubricated, agreeable-mannered men with a disposition to pat little boys in an absent-minded and avoidable way, men who liked to eat and drink and wore golden crosses and medals and suchlike interesting things on their shiny black paunches; and there was Enoch Wimperdick, the eminent convert and Catholic apologist, a small round fiercely smiling man, always short of breath and full of combative chuckles. He had a lot of fat that did not fit him. He was as if he was wearing the fat of a much bigger man. It overflowed at his neck and his wrists, his voice sounded as though it found his throat full of it and had to squeeze through, and it seemed to pinch his eyes up and out of place. His hair was very black and wiry, very thick where it ought to be and turning up in all sorts of places where it ought not to be. His eyebrows were like maddened toothbrushes soaked in blue-black ink. It seemed doubtful if he shaved his upper lip; probably he hacked the crop with scissors; and his blue chins and cheeks–one might call them loose-shaved in contradiction to close-shaved. His irregular alert teeth seemed to guard rather than work in his wide smiling mouth. Clorinda behind his back said that he ought to smile less or clean his teeth more. But she got on very well with him. “You’re a jahly atheist,” he wheezed to her. “I’ll pray for you. You’re Latin and logical in your mind and I’ve got no quarrel with you. You’re the Catholic negative and I’m the Catholic positive. Come over.”

“Jahly” was his distinctive word, he brought it to Blayport and spread it about the house. Raymond took it up, but altering it a little, pronounced it with a half-smile, a little gust of something akin to laughter and a faint flavour of repudiation as “Cholly”. Clorinda never by any chance used it. But it was a year or more after the visits of Mr. Wimperdick had ceased that “jolly” got back to its normal place in the language again.

From conversations round and about and following after Mr. Wimperdick, it was borne into the mind of Theodore that the classification of the universe into what was Jahly and what was not was very distinct and fundamental. High in the scale of Jahly things was Wine provided it was red and abundant. It was best waved about in the air to impromptu song before being consumed. “Good ale” (but not apparently beer) was Jahly and so were all inns. Oak furniture was Jahly and the warmth of wood fires and great abundance of food, particularly if cooked in a pot or roasted on a spit. Women, when taken in a cheerful disrespectful mood and understood to be fundamentally unclean, were germane to Wimperdick’s Jahly scheme. They were best “buxom” and a little short of “wanton”. You leered at them warmly about something secret that had never occurred. Then you patted them and told them to be off with them, the baggages.

But here there seemed to be differences of opinion among the grown-ups. Clorinda professed advanced ideas and Raymond extremely sensuous ones. “Sensuous” was one of his favourite words. He was always quoting Swinburne and talking of “cholly lust”. But Clorinda never mentioned lust and spoke principally of freedom. Wimperdick on the other hand betrayed something like a hatred for Swinburne. A restrained hatred. He said with an effect of generous liberality that Swinburne was a Jahly atheist, and seemed to get bothered when that didn’t dispose of him. But Raymond found Swinburne Cholly altogether–wallowed in him, returned to him, quoting him by the yard mouthingly. Wimperdick grudged talking about women. He made gestures with his short arms to indicate that all that was conceded, that he was perfectly sound in the matter, that the Church was perfectly sound and liberal-minded in the matter, no confounded puritanism or anything of that kind, but that he would prefer to avoid particulars.

The Church had never been hard on sins of the flesh, from bathing without anything on or looking at your naked self in a mirror, down to the more definitely scheduled offences. Sins of the flesh are venial sins. The grievous sins were sins of Pride–such as failing to agree with Wimperdick and believe in the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church it was evident was quintessentially Jahly. And so also were the Middle Ages, craftsmen, armies with banners, sailing ships and the brass on carthorses. Those were Jahly too. Tapestries again. But one could go on for a long time. The small boy gathered these things together as sometimes on country walks he picked bunches of flowers. It was an incoherent but bright attractive bundle.

And against the Jahly miscellany stood the Adversaries. These were Progress, Protestantism, Factory Chimneys and Pitiless Machinery–with which Theodore lumped and loathed to the lowest deeps the detestable inflexibility of mathematics–and Jews and Puritans. Especially Puritans. And Liberals, those damned Liberals! And Darwin and Huxley.

It was not very clear to Theodore what Puritans were but it was clear they were a hateful lot. They had been ruinous to stained-glass windows and they set their flinty faces against all the Jahly side of life. Art and loveliness they pursued with a venomous hate. Theodore would walk along the Esplanade wondering how it would feel to meet a Puritan suddenly.

There was a cadaverous man at Root’s, the Upholsterer’s, who suffered from gastric trouble and always wore black clothes because of the undertaking side of the business. It seemed to Theodore that even if this man was not actually a puritan, he had a very puritanical look. The Catholics had discovered America but it was the Puritans in North America and the Liberals in the Latin South had made it what it is.

So Catholicism first presented itself to Theodore as a campaign, as a Jahly scrap of everything in life that was colourful and picturesque against Jews, Puritans, Liberals, Progress and Evolution and all those dull, dark and dreadful powers. It was bound to win in the end, which was why Wimperdick was always chuckling. As an undertow to this gallant conflict flowed the sins of the flesh, jahly if you didn’t make too much of the woman and readily condoned so far as the men were concerned, and at the back of this Catholic-business, inexplicably associated with it and never clearly referred to by Wimperdick, never indeed to be rashly referred to, was that strange mystery, that shuddering horror, the Crucifix, the Son put there and apparently left there now for ever, by the Great Absentee. About whom the less said the better. (If only one had never seen a Medici print of Crivelli’s picture with the wounds!) That made it difficult to be always Jahly with Wimperdick.

That was how Theodore got it. All wrong and most unjust, but that was how he got it. Religion. The Catholic and Puritan were fighting for the world, the Crucifix dripped over them out of the dark shadows, and at an infinite distance was the inattentive back of the Great Absentee....

But anyhow in the foreground you had Art, Literature and the cultivated weeklies.

Theodore never got hold of it all together. Perhaps it does not hang together enough for anyone to get hold of completely. But he puzzled his wits over this or that chunk in the mighty jigsaw. He tried his best to get all that Raymond and Clorinda and Wimperdick and various other people said into one scheme because he had a real instinct for coherence. Somebody must be wrong....

“Daddy,” he said, “are you a Catholic?”

“I’m fairly catholic I think–yes.”

“But a Catholic–the cross and the Ever Blessed Virgin and all that?”

“Not a regular Catholic of that sort–no.”

“Are you a Puritan?”

“Good God, NO!”

“Are you a Christian?”

Raymond turned round to look at him fairly with smilingly grave eyes.

“You haven’t been listening to one of those preachers on the beach, Theodore? It sounds like it.”

“I just thought,” said Theodore.

“Don’t,” said Raymond. “Keep it for a year or two–like smoking....”

And afterwards Theodore heard Raymond asking Clorinda whether any of the servants had been “pitching religion into that kid?”

“I don’t want to have him worried with that sort of thing,” said Raymond. “He’s the sort of boy who might easily take it too seriously.”

What was one to make of that?

It was hard stuff and not very attractive.

And yet somehow it seemed to matter in a menacing kind of way. About hell for example.... It perplexed and there was trouble in it....

Oh, bother it! Why fret about it? Plenty of time yet. Leave it till later, as Raymond said. The mind slipped away from it with extreme readiness–and down it all went into the deeps.

The woods of Blup were high and green and sweet and it was very pleasant to return to them and ride from glade to glade at the side of that dear companion with the broad brow and the calm clear eyes.

§5 THE BOY HAS TASTE

But if religion was little more than conflict, perplexity, boredom and a faint and distant menace, Art was a powerful reality in that little Blayport home–Art and, still more, talking about Art.

You exalted, you defended, you attacked and you denounced. You waylaid and stabbed with sneers. Eyes grew bright and cheeks flushed. Literature came in–so far as it was Art. Socialism was a movement for the rehabilitation of Art, a movement a little encumbered and perplexed by the austere and systematic Webbs, Puritans both. This or that critic was a “deadly scoundrel” and “Imposters” were like a pine forest, so close and high they grew. There were Bounders and Boomsters and Tradesmen and Drivellers and Freaks and a whole vast distinctive fauna in that world of Art. There were fellows who tried to pass off Anecdotes as true Short Stories and give you sentiments for feeling. There was George Moore who was certainly all right and Hardy who perhaps wasn’t. George Moore said he wasn’t. And Hall Caine and Mrs. Humphry Ward who were simply hell. Theodore was already a rather confused partisan by fourteen. He was a Socialist Medievalist. He thought machinery the devil, and Manchester and Birmingham the devil’s own dominions. He hoped one day to see Florence. And Siena.

His taste was precocious. He pronounced judgments in a style closely resembling Raymond’s. He said once that reading Spenser’s Faerie Queene made him feel like a fly that was crawling over the pattern of a lovely wallpaper that never quite repeated and was always on the verge of repeating. That was an original remark and was much applauded. He had tried really hard to read the Faerie Queene and the resemblance had come to him in bed one morning as, that masterpiece neglected, he watched a fly upon the wall. But his subsequent mot about William Morris being a jolly old timber poet that only a woodcarver could appreciate properly he had got, in an attempt to repeat his success, out of a back number of the Saturday Review. He looked at Watt’s Time, Death and Judgment and said in a weary voice, “But what is it all about?” He concealed his secret passion for Berlioz and Offenbach (that Barcarolle) and explored Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on the pianola until Clorinda was fairly beaten and asked him to desist. He was smilingly severe upon the architecture of Blayport and the fashions in Blayport shops. He begged for two Japanese prints to put up in his bedroom to replace a Madonna of Raphael’s that he found “tedious”. He objected to collars on aesthetic grounds and went to school in an orange neckwrap. He drew decorative borders in the style of Walter Crane on the paper they gave out for mathematics. For his present on his fourteenth birthday he asked for a really good book about the Troubadours.

Even Raymond admitted, “The boy has taste.”

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