Aliens Part 13

For instance, if a stranger cheeks you, you _feel_ as if you'd like to hit him. My young brother _did_ hit him. What was still more to his advantage he gave people the impression that he was always ready to jump over the table at them. My impression is that the old Head didn't dare flog him and had been glad to find an excuse to get rid of him. It didn't occur to the old chap that my brother wouldn't come home. He little knew my brother!

"Several days pa.s.sed and we began to get anxious. My mother telegraphed the Head and the railway company. No good. Now it's all very well for well-meaning people to say tell the police,' but when you are up against a private disgrace, you think pretty hard before you walk into a police station. My brother was fifteen and big for his age. Why, he might disguise himself anyhow. The week-end came before we made up our minds that the police would have to be notified. I went to Scotland Yard on the Sat.u.r.day afternoon with a reward and description. I don't pretend that I felt very anxious about him. He had never sought either my friends.h.i.+p or my protection, and we looked at life from totally different angles. To me there was something common and dirty about an intrigue with a school-slavey. My brother, I thought, should have been above that sort of thing. But he wasn't and he never has been. With him a woman is just a woman. He raises his hand and they come running, and apologizing if they're late. So after I had been to Scotland Yard, I stayed down West, went to a theatre and looked in at _El Vino_ for a gla.s.s of port afterwards. _El Vino_ in those days had a curious reputation, quite different from the Continental or the Leicester Lounge. No one would ever suggest you were a loose fish because you drank a dock-gla.s.s in _El Vino_, though there were women there every night. Just as I was lifting the gla.s.s some one gave me a slap on the back. It was my young brother.

"'Hullo, Charley!' he says. 'Fancy _you_ here.'

"'What are _you_ doing here?' I asked him. I realized he was as tall as I was. 'Why aren't you at home?'

"'I'm coming home with you, Charley boy,' he says, looking round at the girls. 'All the old talent here, you see!'

"I own frankly I was disgusted. I was so disgusted I never went into that place again. We got the 12.20 at King's Cross and it was a quarter past one in the morning before we arrived at our house. Here was a nice state of things; the elder son finding his fifteen-year-old brother in _El Vino_, and coming home with the milk. That was my brother's way all along. He made everything I do seem a black sin. I left him to tell his own story and turned in.

"The next morning he went on the carpet. My mother gave him a pretty hot talking to. She told him he was a disgrace to the name of Carville, that he'd begun bad and would go to worse. She asked him how she was ever to get him into a position if he left school like that and for such a reason. He took out a cigarette-case and helped himself. 'No need to worry, mater,' says he, 'I've got a position already.'

"And so he had! He'd gone into the city and got a position in a big wholesale house as a clerk. Ask me how he did it and all I can say is 'Personality.' He could do anything with anybody. There he was, fifteen, with a guinea a week to start. And I was twenty-two and only getting a few s.h.i.+llings more.

"After the first shock my mother resigned herself to the inevitable and hoped for the best. And for a couple of years we managed to rub along without any scandals. In our several ways, my brother and I were busy with life, as far as we knew it. He went up to the city every day, and played football and cricket, but the serious business of his life was girls. He seemed to have hundreds. If I saw him in the Strand, on Sat.u.r.day, he would be with three or four. If I met him on Hadley Common, on Sunday, he would have three or four there, but fresh ones. He had them in the trains, he lunched with them in the city. Barring the few hours he spent in our house at night he lived chiefly on girls. There were a score or so in the house where he worked, a wholesale business in Wood Street. It was a mania, you might say; but it was the girls who had the mania, not he. He spent all his money as he got it on them, he borrowed more and spent that. One thing particularly annoyed me just about this time, and that was his free way of borrowing my clothes when they fitted him. Vests and ties especially. You may think it a trivial matter, but to me there was something exasperating in seeing one's brother on a park seat in the dusk, with his girl's head leaning on one's own fancy vest! He would just shy whatever he had borrowed on the bed and leave me to pick the hair off it. What they call a _Superman_, I believe, nowadays. I had another name for him.

"Apart from these annoyances, I was sliding along a well-oiled groove in life. It generally happens that a young man in such a position as mine marries and settles down for good. Now it may have been that my brother's wholesale dealings with girls threw me to the other extreme. I don't think that had much to do with it. I think, now, that I had a natural bend towards Culture.

"Don't misunderstand me," said Mr. Carville. "I use that word without any doubt of what it means. I know George Du Maurier's sneers. Culture means an instinct for the best. I had that. I have it now.

"I don't say that culture is opposed to marriage. That would be nonsense. But it may seriously interfere with marriage. A young man in the twenties has no irresistible desire for matrimony. As a rule I mean. And if sport or business or, as in my case, study, takes up his attention, he will put it off for a while. That's what happened to me. I had access to books. I had an easy job and no great responsibility. I knew nothing about the world really; I only read about it in books. It seemed to me a splendid thing to be a learned man. I became a book-worm, reading several hours a day. What was I aiming at? Upon my soul I can't say. It was just blind instinct leading me on to read the books that since then have become part of me.

"My work was, as I said, light. The firm I was with were specialists in certain machinery, and I was a.s.sistant to the London manager. I had to plan out and make estimates for various plants, and travel about the south of England getting orders and superintending erection. I can tell you it just suited me, those journeys by train. I always had my book with me, and as soon as I had been over a job, I forgot all about contracts and went back to Pater, or Gibbon or Flaubert or Emerson, whoever I happened to be reading. In the evenings I used to try and imitate what I had read.

"But what could I write? What did I know? Nothing! I had never been anywhere, I had never met anybody in particular, I had never been in love. I had never waked up. I was in a sort of trance, surrounded by the traditions of the genteel professional cla.s.s. Of course, in a dim way I knew that my mother expected me to be something exceptional, but I was too comfortable to make any effort. It seemed to me I was quite unconventional enough in being such a reader and in keeping clear of girls. I wonder where I would have landed, supposing I had never waked up.

"My brother was going his way all this time, when all of a sudden he roused me up again. For a long time he had been earning twenty-five s.h.i.+llings a week and spending forty, and my mother had been making good the deficit. She had just given him a five-pound note to pay for his quarterly season-ticket on the railway. He didn't pay it. Just went on travelling to the city with the old one. Of course, a lot of people had done that trick and the Company were wise to it. My brother was caught and summoned before the Lord Mayor at the Mansion House. You can believe my mother was distressed. It wouldn't have been so bad if he had only held his tongue and let her pay the forty s.h.i.+llings fine and costs. No!

he had to give the Lord Mayor a piece of his mind. And that made the evening papers feature the amusing incident, as they call it.

"I must admit the boy made out a very good case. He told the Court his father, his brother and himself had been travelling over the line for something like sixteen years. Altogether we had paid the railways two hundred pounds in fares. 'Now,' says he to the Court, 'if I had done two hundred pounds worth of business with a firm, they wouldn't be down on me for being a day or two late with a small account of five pounds, would they? They'd be glad to accommodate me. But the railway wants to put me in prison.' Well, the Lord Mayor happened to be a shareholder in the railway, and of course he couldn't admit that at all. He fined him the regulation forty s.h.i.+llings and several pounds cost. But as I said, this peculiar argument of my brother's got the case into a prominent position and everybody saw it. His employers saw it and cas.h.i.+ered him the next morning. My uncle, who lived at Surbiton, saw it and wrote to my mother.

"The first I saw of it was in the papers. I remember feeling sick and giddy all over when I saw our name in the police court news. '_The Seamy Side_' they called it. When I got home my brother and my mother were having it out. He didn't care. It was all over for him, he admitted.

Better let him start afresh somewhere else. My mother wanted to send him to Canada, where she had relatives, but he said he'd be d.a.m.ned if he went to Canada. He was sick of clerking. What did he want to do? I asked him. He said he was going in for engineering. I smiled at this, and he rounded on me. 'Oh I don't mean your engineering,' he says. 'I mean something that's worth while.' Very sneering he was.

"Well, do you know what he did? He got fifty pounds out of my mother to start with and disappeared. That's all. Simply vanished without a word.

In a way it was a relief. We gave out that he had gone to Canada and the scandal died down. A month later my uncle wrote and mentioned that Frank had called on him and borrowed fifty pounds to go to New Zealand with. I don't know how he managed to do it, for my uncle doesn't let go easy at all. He has had to work for his money too hard. Personality, I suppose. If my brother had had a five-minute personal interview with the Lord Mayor I daresay he would have got the old chap to pay the fine for him.

"After this little brush-up my mother and I jogged along for a few years as quiet as before. I was still in my job as manager's a.s.sistant, and still reading away into the cla.s.sics. I was about twenty-five when all my ideas and prejudices slid away over side and I found I had got the disease we call love. It nearly killed me."

Mr. Carville paused and leaned over to knock his pipe against the geranium-tub. We did not interrogate him. There was something numbing to me in the thought of this quiet ordinary little man telling us in a quiet matter-of-fact tone that love had nearly killed him. We had no comment worthy of the fact. He looked across the valley for a moment as though lost in retrospection.

"She came home from a convent in Brussels," he continued, feeling for his little bra.s.s box, "and to use the slang of our professional cla.s.s, her people knew my people. That was the way we talked. If a thing was good, we called it 'ripping.' If it was unpleasant, we said it was 'beastly.' I believe the slang has changed since then, but the silly artificial spirit of it will never change. Why can't educated people speak English?

"She came home from a convent in Brussels. Her home was about a mile off, a big house in East Barnet, and she called with her mother one day when I happened to come home from a journey early. She gave me a look....

"You see, she wasn't beautiful. She was well-dressed and well-mannered and she had grey eyes. Beyond that I haven't any distinct memory of what she was like. And the astounding thing to me, when I look back on that business, is the utter lack of any common interests. How _could_ I expect her to take any notice of me? I was a book-worm. I couldn't do any of the social tricks she admired. I knew as much about music as a cow, and considered tennis a bore. And yet I wanted her. I wanted that eighteen-year-old girl as I've never wanted anything since. I made myself a door-mat for her feet, I took her impudence and said nothing, I waited for her and made no complaint when she forgot to keep an appointment. My mother saw it and did her best to help me (though it wasn't much), for she wanted me to get married. This would have been a good match, for it so happened that 'her people' were in a position to advance me in my profession, as I called it.

"And strange to say, my persistence did make some impression. I did make some headway. I chucked my books to one side, went in for tennis, and even took girls up the river to Kingston and Bourne End, she being one of them. It made a hole in the little bank account I had started, but I suppose it was worth it. I met a lot of pretty girls; but I was not after a pretty girl; I was after her. The river was a lot in my favour, I believe. It so happened that Belvoir's young brother, a Charterhouse boy, whom I knew slightly, nearly ran our punt down one Sat.u.r.day with his launch. It made a big impression on Gladys, my knowing young Belvoir. You see she had been at school with Belvoir's cousin, so it all worked in. In a way I suppose I was happy ... yes, it's a wonderful thing, a tremendous thing to be in love; but all the same, I wouldn't like to go through it again!

"So it stood, when one day in the autumn, the whole thing capsized. My brother came back.

"He didn't come back like any other prodigal I ever heard of. No, he came back in his own way, like a conquering hero, which he was. He came back on an automobile.

"You laugh? But you must remember that in those days there weren't fifty automobiles in England. When my brother came up the London Road with a whiz and a bang, a long trail of blue stench coming out of the back of the machine, I really think that was the third or fourth time I had ever seen such a thing. Well, there he was, a great big chap with a hooked nose and flas.h.i.+ng black eyes behind the goggles. Where had he been?

Neither to Canada nor to New Zealand. He'd been to France. He'd gone there and learned the motor-car business in one of the first shops ever built. Picked it up you may say, as he picked everything up, but he got it none the less. He'd seen the possibilities of the thing, and here he was appointed London agent for the French firm at three hundred a year.

He, laughed when he saw me. 'Hullo, Charley!, he sneers. 'How's the puff-puffs?' He sneered at everything about me. I had learned to read French pretty well and knew my cla.s.sics in the original, but here was my young brother sneering at me in French _argot_ which he knew I couldn't resent because I couldn't understand it.

"He would come down to the tennis club that evening, though I didn't want him. Somehow I dreaded introducing him to Gladys. There was no need for me to worry. He introduced himself. In another five minutes he was talking French with her, and she was screaming with laughter at the stories he told her. He saw her home....

"You can understand that the next day I was in a bad condition for work.

And it so happened that I had a job that needed all the concentration I could give it. I don't remember a single detail of it. I had been neglecting my work then, like all young chaps in love, but on this occasion I made a costly mistake. I marked the driving pulley on a line-shaft a foot too small. The aggravating part was I sent it to the head office in Yorks.h.i.+re without revising it and _they_ got on to my boss. He took the bit in his teeth and went for me. He gave me a week to find another job. I was 'down and out.'

"I was paralyzed for a while. I didn't know where to turn. The bottom had dropped out of my world for good and all. Another job! Why, I knew men in that employ who had held their jobs for forty years.

"I said nothing about it at home. My brother, with his three hundred a year and his French _argot_, made home unbearable and I thought of clearing out of it. But where could I go? You see, if you work for some specialist for a number of years, the only job you can move to is a position with another specialist of the same line. And this business I was in was run by about six big firms.

"Still, the thought of clearing out held me. I saw that if my brother was going to live at home, I'd have to go. And Sat.u.r.day came round and found me wondering what to do.

"At times I used to go over to my uncle's at Surbiton. It was my duty to pay respects, so to speak. His family had a grudge against my mother, because if my father hadn't married her, they would have inherited his money, so that there was not much love lost between them. But occasionally my old uncle would ring me up and ask me to go down with him. He did this Sat.u.r.day I speak of, and as there was no one else in my office at the time I told him my trouble. And he laughed! Humph!

"The inhuman old sh.e.l.l-back laughed! And yet, if you'll believe me, when I heard the old chap rumbling at the other end of the wire, it cheered me up. I began to think, 'Why, he may have influence. He may get me a job.' You see the vicious state of mind of the professional cla.s.s! When I mentioned the possibility to him, he said, 'I can get you a job all right. How'd you like to go to sea?'

"I nearly dropped the receiver when he said that. Go to sea! People in residential suburbs didn't go to sea!

"'Eh?' I said. 'What d'you mean?'

"'What I said,' he bellows. 'Go to sea,'

"'I'll come round and talk to you,' I said.

"I went round and found him in the office. He was a fierce old chap, burnt black with sun, and with hair grey as the sea. He was enjoying his life apparently, bossing things in that office. But he told me at once that he could do no more than give me a chance to start at the bottom. I must work up and pa.s.s the Board of Trade tests for each grade. I give him credit for painting the picture as dark as he could. He even suggested I should try and get another draughtsman's job if I was afraid of going through the mill. But I didn't know enough to be afraid, and asked him off-hand when he would need me.

"'We don't need you,' he said, as if surprised. 'We can get a couple of thousand young fellows to-morrow if we want them. It's up to you.'

"That was the first slap in the face. I sat there in that great gloomy vault of an office in Fenchurch Street, looking at the half-models of s.h.i.+ps and a map of the docks at Monte Video on the walls, and wondering what I should do. I was not hesitating, you understand, because of pride. No, that was gone. My brother, when he saw Gladys home, had done for that. It was more like a fear gripping at me. I was scared at letting go of my professional easy-going life. I'd never been on a s.h.i.+p since I'd been born on one. I knew nothing about marine engineering. I hesitated because I was afraid.

"'When shall I start?' I asked after a while.

"'The _Corydon's_ in the river now,' said my uncle. 'They want a Fourth: can you get down to-night?'

"'To-night!' I said. 'I've not given notice yet!'

"'Phone from here,' he says.

"'But I've nothing packed,' I whimpered. And he laughed.

"I know now why he laughed. Partly because a landsman is always rather a comic figure to a sailor, partly because he knew how I had been brought up. He had never agreed with the theory of gentility which had taken such a hold of my mother. He was as out of place in his Surbiton home as a bear in a back-yard. His daughters, my cousins, couldn't make him see the importance, in England, of gentility. When he and my father and all the rest of them had been boys on that New England farm, they had had to clear stones off the land. No stones, no dinner. And now he had a house in Surbiton, and was laughing at me, who had never lifted a stone in my life. Even in the works where I was a pupil we had always had a little private lavatory to wash and change in. He laughed at me. He believed one trip would be enough for me. He didn't believe for a minute that I would stick to it.