Latest / The H. G. Wells Library / The Passionate Friends Chapter 2 - Boyhood Parts 1-3

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The Passionate Friends Chapter 2 - Boyhood Parts 1-3 · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Chapter two, parts one to three of The Passionate Friends
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  Speaker 1: by H. G. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the
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  Speaker 1: public domain recording by Peter Eastman, Chapter the Second Boyhood one.
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  Speaker 1: I was a Harbury boy, as my father and grandfather
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  Speaker 1: were before me, and as you are presently to be.
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  Speaker 1: I went to Harbury at the age of fourteen. Until
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  Speaker 1: then I was educated at home, first by a governess,
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  Speaker 1: and then by my father's curate, mister Siddens, who went
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  Speaker 1: from us to Saint Philip's in Hampstead, and, succeeding marvelously
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  Speaker 1: there is now Bishop of Exminster. My father became Rector
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  Speaker 1: of Burnmore when I was nine. My mother had been
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  Speaker 1: dead four years, and my second cousin, Jane Stratten, was
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  Speaker 1: already his housekeeper. My father held the living until his
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  Speaker 1: resignation when I was nearly thirty, so that all the
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  Speaker 1: most impressionable years of my life center upon the Burnmore
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  Speaker 1: Rectory and the easy, spaciousness of Birnmore Park. My boyhood
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  Speaker 1: and adolescence alternated between the ivied red brick and ancient
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  Speaker 1: traditions of Harbury, and afterwards christ Church and that still
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  Speaker 1: untroubled countryside. I was never a town dweller until I
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  Speaker 1: married and we took our present house in Holland Park.
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  Speaker 1: I went into London at last. As one goes into
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  Speaker 1: an arena, it cramps me and wearies me, and at
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  Speaker 1: times nearly overwhelms me. But there it is that the
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  Speaker 1: life of men centers and my work lies. But every
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  Speaker 1: summer we do as we have done this year, and
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  Speaker 1: go to some house in the country, near to forests
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  Speaker 1: or moorland, or suchlike, open and uncultivated country, where one
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  Speaker 1: may have the refreshment of freedom among natural and unhurried things.
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  Speaker 1: This year we are in a walled garden upon the Seine,
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  Speaker 1: about four miles above Chateau Galliard, and with the forest
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  Speaker 1: reaching up to the paddock beyond the orchard clothes. You
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  Speaker 1: will understand better when I have told you my story
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  Speaker 1: why I saw Burnmore for the last time when I
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  Speaker 1: was one and twenty, and why my memories of it
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  Speaker 1: shine so crystal and clear. I have a thousand vivid
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  Speaker 1: miniatures of it in my mind, and all of them
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  Speaker 1: are beautiful to me, so that I could quite easily
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  Speaker 1: write a whole book of landscapes from the park alone.
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  Speaker 1: I can still recall quite vividly, the warm, beauty soaked
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  Speaker 1: sensation of going out into the morning sunshine of the
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  Speaker 1: park with my lunch in a little green Swiss tin
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  Speaker 1: under my arm, and the vast interminable day all before me,
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  Speaker 1: the gigantic, divinely unconditional day that only boyhood knows, and
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  Speaker 1: the park so great and various that it was more
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  Speaker 1: than two hours going for me to reach its eastern fences.
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  Speaker 1: I was only a little older then than you are now.
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  Speaker 1: Sometimes I went right up through the woods to the
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  Speaker 1: house to companion with Philip and Guy Christian and their sister.
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  Speaker 1: I loved her then, and one day I was to
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  Speaker 1: love her with all my heart. But in those boyish
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  Speaker 1: times I liked most to go alone. My memories of
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  Speaker 1: the park are all under blue sky and sunshine, with
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  Speaker 1: just a thunder storm or so. On wet days and
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  Speaker 1: cold days, I was kept to closer limits. And it
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  Speaker 1: seems to me now rather an intellectual conviction than a
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  Speaker 1: positive memory, that, save for a few pine clad patches
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  Speaker 1: in the extreme southeast, its soil was all thick clay
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  Speaker 1: that meant for me only beautiful green marshes, a number
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  Speaker 1: of vividly interesting mirrors upon the course of its street,
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  Speaker 1: and a wealth of gigantic oaks. The meres lay at
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  Speaker 1: various levels, and the hand of Lady Ladice Law had
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  Speaker 1: assisted nature in their enrichment with lilies and water plants.
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  Speaker 1: There were places of sedge and scented rush amidst which
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  Speaker 1: were sapphire mists of forget me not for long stretches,
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  Speaker 1: skirmishing commandos of yellow iris, and wide wastes of floating
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  Speaker 1: water lilies. The gardens passed insensibly into the park, and
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  Speaker 1: beyond the house were broad stretches of grass, sunlit, barred
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  Speaker 1: with the deep green shadows of great trees, and animated
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  Speaker 1: with groups and lines of fallow deer. Near the house
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  Speaker 1: was an italianate garden with balustradings and statuary, and a
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  Speaker 1: great wealth of roses and flowering shrubs. Then there were
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  Speaker 1: bracken wildernesses in which the doughes lurked with the young fawns,
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  Speaker 1: and a hollow shallow and wide, with a turf greatly
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  Speaker 1: attacked by rabbits and exceptionally threadbare, where a stricken oak
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  Speaker 1: lightning stripped, spread out its ghastly arms above contorted rotting branches,
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  Speaker 1: and the mysterious skeletons of I should think five several
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  Speaker 1: deer in the evening time. The woods behind this place
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  Speaker 1: of bones, they were woods of straight, growing rather crowded trees,
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  Speaker 1: and standing as it were, a little aloof became even
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  Speaker 1: under the warmest sunset, gray and cold, and as if
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  Speaker 1: they waded. And in the distant corner where the sand
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  Speaker 1: was rose suddenly a steep little hill surmounted by a
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  Speaker 1: wild and splendid group of pines, through which one looked
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  Speaker 1: across a vale of cornfields at an ancient town that
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  Speaker 1: became strange and magical as the sun went down, so
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  Speaker 1: that I was held gazing at it, and afterwards had
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  Speaker 1: to flee the twilight across the windy spaces and under
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  Speaker 1: the dim and darkling trees. It is only now, in
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  Speaker 1: the distant retrospect that I identify that far off city of
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  Speaker 1: wonder and luminous mist, with a commonplace little town through
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  Speaker 1: whose narrow streets we drove to the railway station. But
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  Speaker 1: of course that is what it must have been. There
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  Speaker 1: are persons to be found mixed up in those childish memories.
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  Speaker 1: Lady Ladislaw, tall and gracious, in dresses of floating blue
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  Speaker 1: or gray, or thin subtly folding flowering stuffs, Philip and
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  Speaker 1: his sister Guy, the old Butler, A multitude of fainter
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  Speaker 1: figures long become nameless and featureless. They are far less
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  Speaker 1: vivid in my memory than the fine solitudes of the
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  Speaker 1: park itself, and the dreams I had there. I wonder
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  Speaker 1: if you dream as I dreamt. I wonder whether indeed
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  Speaker 1: I dreamt as now I think I did? Have. I
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  Speaker 1: in these latter years, given form and substance and a
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  Speaker 1: name to things as vague in themselves as the urgencies
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  Speaker 1: of instinct. Did I really go into those woods and
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  Speaker 1: waving green places as one keeps a tryst, expectant of
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  Speaker 1: a fellowship more free and delicate and delightful than any
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  Speaker 1: I knew? Did I know in those days of nymphs
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  Speaker 1: and dryads and fawns, and all those happy, soulless beings
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  Speaker 1: with which the desire of man's heart has animated the wilderness? Once?
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  Speaker 1: Certainly I crawled slowly through the tall bracken, and at
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  Speaker 1: last lay still for an interminable while, convinced that so
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  Speaker 1: I should see those shadows populous with fairies, with green
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  Speaker 1: little people. How patiently I lay, But the stems creaked
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  Speaker 1: and stirred, and my heart would keep on beating like
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  Speaker 1: a drum in my throat. It is incredible that once
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  Speaker 1: a furry, whispering, half human creature with bright brown eyes
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  Speaker 1: came and for a time played with me near where
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  Speaker 1: the tall ferns foam in a broad torrent, from between
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  Speaker 1: the big chestnuts down to the upper mirror. That must
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  Speaker 1: have been real dreaming. And yet now, with all my
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  Speaker 1: sanities and skepticisms, I could half believe it real. Two,
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  Speaker 1: you become reserved, perhaps not exceptionally so, but as all
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  Speaker 1: children become reserved. Already you understand that your heart is
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  Speaker 1: very preciously your own. You keep it from me and
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  Speaker 1: everyone so much so, so justifiably so that when by
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  Speaker 1: virtue of her kindred and all that we have in common,
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  Speaker 1: I get sudden glimpses right into your depths, their mixes
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  Speaker 1: with the swift spasm of love, I feel a dread
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  Speaker 1: lest you should catch me as it were spying into you,
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  Speaker 1: and that one of us, I know not which should
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  Speaker 1: feel ashamed. Every child passes into the secret stage, it
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  Speaker 1: closes in from its first frankness. It carries off the
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  Speaker 1: growing jewel of its consciousness to hide from all mankind.
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  Speaker 1: I think I can see why this should be so,
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  Speaker 1: but I cannot tell why in so many cases, no
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  Speaker 1: jewel is given back again at last, a light, ripened, wonderful,
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  Speaker 1: glowing with the deep fires of experience. I think that
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  Speaker 1: is what ought to happen. It is what does happen
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  Speaker 1: now with true poets and true artists. Some day I
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  Speaker 1: think it will be the life of all normal human souls,
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  Speaker 1: but usually it does not seem to happen at all.
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  Speaker 1: Children pass out of a stage, open, beautiful, exquisitely simple,
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  Speaker 1: into silences and discretions beneath an imposed and artificial life,
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  Speaker 1: and they are lost. Out of the finished careful, watchful, restrained,
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  Speaker 1: and limited man or woman. No child emerges again. I
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  Speaker 1: remember very distinctly how I myself came, by imperceptible increments
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  Speaker 1: of reservation, to withdraw those early delicacies of judgments, those
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  Speaker 1: original and personal standards and appreciations from sight and expression.
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  Speaker 1: I can recall specific moments when I perceive now that
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  Speaker 1: my little childish figure stood, as it were, obstinately and
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  Speaker 1: with a sense of novelty, in a doorway, denying the
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  Speaker 1: self within. It was partly I think a simple instinct
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  Speaker 1: that drew that curtain of silences and concealments. It was
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  Speaker 1: much more a realization that I had no power of
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  Speaker 1: lucidity to save the words and deeds I sought to
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  Speaker 1: make expressive from complete misunderstanding. But most of all, it
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  Speaker 1: was the reception that I was under training and compulsion
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  Speaker 1: for ends that were all askew and irrelevant to the
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  Speaker 1: trend of my imaginations, the quality of my dreams. There
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  Speaker 1: was around me something unfriendly to this inner world, something
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  Speaker 1: very ready to pass from unfriendliness to acute hostility. And
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  Speaker 1: if indeed I succeeded in giving anything of my inner
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  Speaker 1: self to others, it was only, as people put it,
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  Speaker 1: to give myself away. My nurses, my governess, my tutor,
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  Speaker 1: my father. The servants about me seemed all bent upon
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  Speaker 1: imposing an artificial personality upon me. Only in a very
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  Speaker 1: limited sense did they want me. What they wanted was
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  Speaker 1: something that could be made out of me by extensive
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  Speaker 1: suppressions and additions. They ignored the fact that I had
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  Speaker 1: been born with a shape of my own. They were
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  Speaker 1: resolved I should be pressed into a mold and cast.
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  Speaker 1: It was not that they wanted outer conformity to certain
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  Speaker 1: needs and standards that I think would be a reasonable
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  Speaker 1: thing enough to demand. But they wanted to subdue my
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  Speaker 1: most private thoughts to their ideals. My nurses and my
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  Speaker 1: governesses would rate me for my very feelings, would clamor
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  Speaker 1: for gratitude, and reproach me bitterly for betraying that I
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  Speaker 1: did not, at some particular moment love. Only yesterday I
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  Speaker 1: heard Mademoiselle Potemp doing that very same thing to you.
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  Speaker 1: It is that you do not care, Master Steve. It
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  Speaker 1: is that you do not care. You do not want
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  Speaker 1: to care. They went too far in that invasion of
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  Speaker 1: my personal life, But I perceived quite clearly the present
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  Speaker 1: need for most of the process of molding and subjugation
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  Speaker 1: that children must undergo. Human society is a new thing
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  Speaker 1: upon the earth, an invention of the last ten thousand years.
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  Speaker 1: Man is a creature, as yet not freely and instinctively gregarious.
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  Speaker 1: In his more primordial state, he must have been an
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  Speaker 1: animal of very small groups and limited associations, an animal
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  Speaker 1: rather self centered and fierce, And he is still but
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  Speaker 1: imperfectly adapted, either morally or physically, to the wider social life.
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  Speaker 1: His crowding interactions force upon him. He still learns speech
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  Speaker 1: and computation, and civility and all the devices of this
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  Speaker 1: artificially extended and continually broadening tribal life with an extreme reluctance.
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  Speaker 1: He has to be shaped in the interests of the species.
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  Speaker 1: I admit to the newer conditions, the growing social order,
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  Speaker 1: must be protected from the keen edge of his still
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  Speaker 1: savage individuality, and he must be trained in his own
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  Speaker 1: as interests to save himself from the destruction of impossible revolts.
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  Speaker 1: But how clumsily is the thing done, How we are
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  Speaker 1: caught and jammed, and pressed and crippled into citizenship. How
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  Speaker 1: excessive and crushing is the suppression, and how inadequate every
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  Speaker 1: child feels that, even if every child does not clearly
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  Speaker 1: know it, every child presently begins to hide itself from
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  Speaker 1: the confused tyrannies of the social process, from the searching
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  Speaker 1: inspections and injunctions and interferences of parent and priest and teacher.
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  Speaker 1: I have got to be so, we all say, deep
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  Speaker 1: down in ourselves, and more or less distinctly according to
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  Speaker 1: the lucidities of our minds. But in my heart I
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  Speaker 1: am this, and in the outcome. We all try to seem,
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  Speaker 1: at least to be so and ineffectual. Rebel struggles passionately,
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  Speaker 1: like a beast caught in a trap, for ends altogether
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  Speaker 1: more deep and dangerous, for the rose and the star
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  Speaker 1: and the wildfire, for beauty and beautiful things. These we
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  Speaker 1: all know, in our darkly vital recesses are the real
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  Speaker 1: needs of life. The obediences imposed upon us by our
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  Speaker 1: crude necessities and jostling proximities mere incidentals on our way
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  Speaker 1: to those profounder purposes. And when I write thus of ourselves,
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  Speaker 1: I mean our bodies quite as much as our imaginations.
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  Speaker 1: The two sides of us are covered up alike and
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  Speaker 1: put alike into disguises and unnatural shapes. We are taught
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  Speaker 1: and forced to hide them for the same reasons, from
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  Speaker 1: a fear of ourselves and a fear of the people
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  Speaker 1: about us. The sense of beauty, the sense of one's body,
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  Speaker 1: the freedom of thought and of desire, and the wonder
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  Speaker 1: of life are all interwoven strands. I remember that in
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  Speaker 1: the park of Burnmore, one great craving I had was
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  Speaker 1: to take off my clothes there altogether and bathe in
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  Speaker 1: a clear place among loose strife and meadow sweet, and
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  Speaker 1: afterwards lie wet and naked upon the soft green turf,
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  Speaker 1: with the sun shining upon me. But I thought also
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  Speaker 1: that that was a very wicked and shameful craving to have,
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  Speaker 1: and I never dared give way to it. Three, as
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  Speaker 1: I think of myself and all these glowing secrecies and
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  Speaker 1: hidden fancies within, walking along beside old citizens and half
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  Speaker 1: listening to his instructive discourse, I see myself as though
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  Speaker 1: I was an image of all humanity under tuition for
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  Speaker 1: the social life. I write old citizens, for so he
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  Speaker 1: seemed to me. Then in truth he was scarcely a
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  Speaker 1: dozen years older than I. And the other day, when
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  Speaker 1: I exchanged salutations with his gaitered presence in the haymarket
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  Speaker 1: on his way I suppose to the Athenaeum, it struck
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  Speaker 1: me that he it is who is now the younger man.
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  Speaker 1: But at Burnmore he was eighteen inches or more above
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  Speaker 1: my head, and all the way of school and university
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  Speaker 1: beyond me. Full of the world they had fitted him for,
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  Speaker 1: and eager to impart its doctrines, he went along in
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  Speaker 1: his tweeds that were studiously untidy. A Norfolk jacket of
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  Speaker 1: one clerically grayish stuff, and trousers of another somewhat lighter
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  Speaker 1: pattern in thick boots, the collar of his calling, and
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  Speaker 1: a broad minded hat, bearing his face heavenward as he talked,
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  Speaker 1: and not so much aware of me as appreciating the
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  Speaker 1: things he was saying, And sometimes he was manifestly talking
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  Speaker 1: to himself and airing his outlook. He carried a walking stick,
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  Speaker 1: a manly, homely, knobby donnish walking stick. He forced the
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  Speaker 1: pace a little, for his legs were long, and he
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  Speaker 1: had acquired the habit of strenuous pedestrianism at Oxford. With
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  Speaker 1: all the other things. He obliged me to go at
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  Speaker 1: a kind of skipping trot. And he preferred the high
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  Speaker 1: roads towards Wickenham for our walks, because they were flatter
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  Speaker 1: and there was little traffic upon them in those days
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  Speaker 1: before the motor car, and we could keep abreast and
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  Speaker 1: go on talking uninterruptedly, that is to say, he could talk.
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  Speaker 1: What talk. It was of all the virtues that the
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  Speaker 1: young should have. He spoke of courage, and how splendid
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  Speaker 1: it was to accustom oneself not even to feel fear
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  Speaker 1: of truth, and difficult cases where one might conceivably injure
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  Speaker 1: others by telling the truth, and so perhaps perhaps qualify
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  Speaker 1: the rigor of one's integrity. But how one should never
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  Speaker 1: hesitate to inure one's own self in that matter. Then
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  Speaker 1: in another phase he talked of belief and the disagreeableness
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  Speaker 1: of dissenters. But here I remember there was a discussion.
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  Speaker 1: I have forgotten how I put the thing, but in
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  Speaker 1: some boyish phrasing or other I must have thrown out
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  Speaker 1: the idea that thought is free and beliefs uncontrollable. What
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  Speaker 1: of conformity if the truth was that you doubted? Not
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  Speaker 1: if you make an effort. I remember him saying, not
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  Speaker 1: if you make an effort. I have had my struggles.
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  Speaker 1: But if you say firmly to yourself. The church teaches this.
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  Speaker 1: If you dismiss mer carping and say that. But suppose
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  Speaker 1: you can't, I must have verged you can if you will,
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  Speaker 1: he said, with a note near enthusiasm. I have been
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  Speaker 1: through all that. I did it. I dismissed doubts. I
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  Speaker 1: wouldn't listen. I felt this won't do. All this leads
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  Speaker 1: to nowhere, And he it was told me the classic
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: story of that presumptuous schoolboy who went to his head
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  Speaker 1: master and declared himself an atheist. There were no dialectics
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  Speaker 1: but a prompt horsewhipping in after life, said mister Siddons,
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  Speaker 1: with unctuous gratification. He came to recognize that thrashing as
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  Speaker 1: the very best thing that had ever happened to him,
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  Speaker 1: The kindest thing. Yes, urged the obstinate rebel within me,
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  Speaker 1: but the truth, that fearless insistence on the truth. I could, however,
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  Speaker 1: find nothing effective to say aloud, and Siddons prevailed over me.
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  Speaker 1: That story made my blood boil. It filled me with
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  Speaker 1: an anticipatory hatred of and hostility to head masters. And
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  Speaker 1: at the same time there was something in it brutally
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  Speaker 1: truer to the conditions of human association than any argument.
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  Speaker 1: I do not remember the various steps by which I
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  Speaker 1: came to be discussing doubts so early in my life.
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  Speaker 1: I could not have been much more than thirteen when
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  Speaker 1: that conversation occurred. I am, I think, perhaps exceptionally unconscious
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  Speaker 1: about myself. I find I can recall the sayings and
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  Speaker 1: even the gestures of other people far more distinctly than
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  Speaker 1: the things I said and did myself. Even my dreams
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  Speaker 1: and imaginings are more active than my positive thoughts and proceedings.
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  Speaker 1: But I was no doubt very much stimulated by the
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  Speaker 1: literature lying about my home, and the gleams and echoes
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  Speaker 1: of controversies that played like summer lightning round and about
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  Speaker 1: the horizons of my world over my head. And after
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  Speaker 1: I had gone to bed, my father and sit ins
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  Speaker 1: were talking. My cousin was listening with strained apprehensions. There
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  Speaker 1: was a new spirit in my father's sermons. It was
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  Speaker 1: the storm of Huxley Darwin controversies that had at last
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  Speaker 1: reached Burnmore. I was an intelligent little listener, an eager
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  Speaker 1: reader of anything that came to hand. Mister Siddons had
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  Speaker 1: a disposition to fight his battles over again in his
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  Speaker 1: monologues to me. And after all, at thirteen, one isn't
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  Speaker 1: a baby the small boy of the lower classes used
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  Speaker 1: in those days to start life for himself long before then.
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  Speaker 1: How dramatic a phase it was in the history of
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  Speaker 1: the human mind when science suddenly came into the vicarages,
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: into all the studies and quiet places that had been
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: the fastnesses of conviction and our ideals, and denied with
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: all the power of evidence it had been accumulating for
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: so long, and so obscurely and inaggressively, with fossils and strata,
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: with embryology and comparative anatomy, the doctrine of the historical fall,
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: and all the current scheme of orthodoxy that was based
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: on that. What a quickening shock it must have been
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: in countless thousands of educated lives, and my father, after
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: a toughly honest resistance, was won over to Darwinism. The
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: idea of evolution got hold of him, the idea that
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: life itself was intolerant of vain repetitions, and he had
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: had to consider his position in the church. To him,
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: as to innumerable other honest, middle aged and comfortable men,
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: Darwinism came as a dreadful invitation to go out into
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: the wilderness over my head and just out of range
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: of my ears. He was debating that issue with sit
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: ins as a foil and my cousin as a horrified antagonist.
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: Slowly he was developing his conception of compromise. And meanwhile
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: he wasn't going out into the wilderness at all, but
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: punctually to and fro along the edge of the lawn
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: by the bed of hollyhocks, and through the little green
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: door in the garden wall, and across the corner of
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: the churchyard to the vestry and the perennial services and
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: sacraments of the church. But he never talked to me
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: privately of religion. He left that for my cousin and
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: mister Siddens to do or not to do, as they
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: felt disposed. And in those silences of his I may
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: have found another confirmation of my growing feeling that religion was,
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: from one point of view, a thing somehow remote and unreal,
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: claiming unjustifiable interventions in the detailed conduct of my life,
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: and from another a peculiar concern of my fathers and
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: mister Sidens, to which they went through the vestry changing
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: into strange garments on the way end of Chapter two,
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: Parts one to three,