Section 5
It was late when I parted from Parload and came back to my ownhome.
Our house stood in a highly respectable little square nearthe 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 blindsister in an adjacent room; my mother and I lived in the basementand slept in the attics. The front of the house was veiled bya Virginian creeper that defied the Clayton air and clustered inuntidy dependent masses over the wooden porch.
As I came up the steps I had a glimpse of Mr. Gabbitas printingphotographs by candle light in his room. It was the chief delightof his little life to spend his holiday abroad in the company of aqueer little snap-shot camera, and to return with a great multitudeof foggy and sinister negatives that he had made in beautiful andinteresting places. These the camera company would develop for himon advantageous terms, and he would spend his evenings the yearthrough in printing from them in order to inflict copies upon hisundeserving friends. There was a long frameful of his work in theClayton National School, for example, inscribed in old Englishlettering, "Italian Travel Pictures, by the Rev. E. B. Gabbitas."For this it seemed he lived and traveled and had his being. It washis only real joy. By his shaded light I could see his sharp littlenose, his little pale eyes behind his glasses, his mouth pursed upwith 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 andme?--though his share in the proceedings was certainly small.
"Hireling Liar," said I, standing in the darkness, outsideeven his faint glow of traveled culture. . .
My mother let me in.
She looked at me, mutely, because she knew there was somethingwrong and that it was no use for her to ask what.
"Good night, mummy," said I, and kissed her a little roughly, andlit and took my candle and went off at once up the staircase tobed, 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 along time before I got up to undress.
There were times when that dumb beseeching of my mother's faceirritated me unspeakably. It did so that night. I felt I had tostruggle against it, that I could not exist if I gave way to itspleadings, and it hurt me and divided me to resist it, almost beyondendurance. It was clear to me that I had to think out for myselfreligious problems, social problems, questions of conduct, questionsof expediency, that her poor dear simple beliefs could not help meat all--and she did not understand! Hers was the accepted religion,her only social ideas were blind submissions to the acceptedorder--to laws, to doctors, to clergymen, lawyers, masters, and allrespectable persons in authority over us, and with her to believewas to fear. She knew from a thousand little signs--though still attimes I went to church with her--that I was passing out of touch ofall these things that ruled her life, into some terrible unknown.From things I said she could infer such clumsy concealments as Imade. She felt my socialism, felt my spirit in revolt against theaccepted order, felt the impotent resentments that filled me withbitterness against all she held sacred. Yet, you know, it was nother dear gods she sought to defend so much as me! She seemed alwaysto be wanting to say to me, "Dear, I know it's hard--but revoltis harder. Don't make war on it, dear--don't! Don't do anything tooffend it. I'm sure it will hurt you if you do--it will hurt youif you do."
She had been cowed into submission, as so many women of that timehad been, by the sheer brutality of the accepted thing. The existingorder dominated her into a worship of abject observances. It hadbent her, aged her, robbed her of eyesight so that at fifty-fiveshe peered through cheap spectacles at my face, and saw it onlydimly, filled her with a habit of anxiety, made her hands------Her poor dear hands! Not in the whole world now could you find awoman 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 theworld 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 mydoor 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'sletter, at my weakness and insignificance, at the things I foundintolerable, and the things I could not mend. Over and over wentmy poor little brain, tired out and unable to stop on my treadmillof troubles. Nettie. Rawdon. My mother. Gabbitas. Nettie. . .
Suddenly I came upon emotional exhaustion. Some clock was strikingmidnight. After all, I was young; I had these quick transitions.I remember quite distinctly, I stood up abruptly, undressed veryquickly in the dark, and had hardly touched my pillow again beforeI 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 mymother, though my conscience blames me acutely for my arrogance toParload. I regret my behavior to my mother before the days of theChange, it is a scar among my memories that will always be a littlepainful to the end of my days, but I do not see how something ofthe sort was to be escaped under those former conditions. In thattime of muddle and obscurity people were overtaken by needs andtoil and hot passions before they had the chance of even a year orso of clear thinking; they settled down to an intense and strenuousapplication to some partial but immediate duty, and the growth ofthought 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 thatexisted was regarded as immoral, it was certainly an annoyance, andthe only protest against it, the only effort against that universaltendency in all human institutions to thicken and clog, to workloosely and badly, to rust and weaken towards catastrophes, camefrom the young--the crude unmerciful young. It seemed in thosedays to thoughtful men the harsh law of being--that either we mustsubmit to our elders and be stifled, or disregard them, disobey them,thrust them aside, and make our little step of progress before wetoo ossified and became obstructive in our turn.
My pushing past my mother, my irresponsive departure to my ownsilent meditations, was, I now perceive, a figure of the whole hardrelationship between parents and son in those days. There appearedno other way; that perpetually recurring tragedy was, it seemed,part of the very nature of the progress of the world. We did notthink then that minds might grow ripe without growing rigid, orchildren honor their parents and still think for themselves. We wereangry and hasty because we stifled in the darkness, in a poisonedand vitiated air. That deliberate animation of the intelligencewhich is now the universal quality, that vigor with consideration,that judgment with confident enterprise which shine through allour world, were things disintegrated and unknown in the corruptingatmosphere of our former state.
(So the first fascicle ended. I put it aside and looked for thesecond.
"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 Inot hinted at that?"
I hesitated upon a question, then saw the second fascicle at hand,and picked it up.)
CHAPTER THE SECOND
NETTIE