The nauseous-sublime liquid would gush surprisingly down the baby’s throat, oftenest, at the time when quite worn out he was falling asleep, hypnotised by the regularity of his suctional reflex, into an illusion of satiety. His abdomen filled with what, outside him, was the atmosphere driving the stuffy sugary stench from his clammy swaddles up to his drowsiness.
+
The third was born in that addressless household, known as a den of thieves. The first vision of his looking upward is when propped upon his mother’s knee, pale, in a public house, he squints at his girlish bonnet, puffed with transparent and unconvincing silk.
The offspring of a deliberate passion born into his parents’ world of unaccountable luxury.
Already he wears bangles on his wrists; already he has sipped his drop of beer.
+
The first child, Ian Gore, went to a preparatory school for the sons of gentlemen.
The second child, whose name was Jacky Sider, went to board-school.
The third child, with his apple-y quality for his parent’s eye, was prepared by private tutors, exceedingly slick with their hands.
He also had among so many lawless things, one lawful thing, a name.
That name was Hyde Park Hinderman.
+
Several of the earlier years of these three heirs were taken up with the pouring of the parents’ minds, into their own. Years in no way notable except for the children’s curious preference for the society of the lower animals.
Indeed, as none of these children were of vicious nature, the placid social relation to cats and dogs, and on rare occasions, elephants and tigers of Ian, Jacky and Hyde Park were identical.
They did not review these parentalised contents of their respective minds until that day on which each became conscious of his ego.
The ego no longer to be taken as a matter of course as undetached from its surroundings.
On that day the ego detached itself, and making a volte-face on the parental precepts, pronounced judgement upon them.
Ian Gore, on inspecting the chambers of his mind, finding himself stronger than anything that had been stored there, proceeded to break up the furniture. He denounced the fabricated truth of organised society as lies; precedents as corpses. He did not stop to question authority before he defied it. The moulding of the mind by a laboriously perfected system of education to the loftiest standard established by the human intellect, he objected to as pseudo-classic piffling. As for sportsmanship he defined the ball as the nincompoop’s microcosm, and he doubted the beneficence of killing things that preferred to be alive anyhow.
Of good form — and Ian’s father could be placed in the irreproachable minority — there was something clownlike about his soul, that urged him to pull faces at it; to stick out his tongue. He devised, for the future, how to frighten good form to death! Already he had appeared at dinner with a collar not quite fresh.
These decisions came completely into his mind as ideas, in conversation he summarised them with—
“It’s all bilge,” or, “You can’t fool me.”
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For Jacky there had been no presentation of the highest standard of the human intellect, of sportsmanship, of good form.
He had been told that thrift was the moral motive of mankind. That three rags and an old fender equal one dinner, forty years of thrift, one old-age pension. That it was thrifty people that God, or was it the Prince of Wales, was most likely to stoop down to and pat on the back,
“Well done my good and faithful servant, Slow-but-Steady.”
He did not think overmuch of the nincompoop’s macrocosm; it was too likely to roll down the gutter; too likely to entice you under the wheels of a van.
His lively instinct was however, to get his hand into the pocket of that stooping God. For Jacky grew tired of the dusts of thrift. He was lured by the perfumes of brazen girls.
The abstract authority of the moral concept that Ian defied, took the concrete form of a policeman in Jacky’s world. For Ian the policeman was only a faithful servant to be kept always in the same place, to be asked for various kinds of information.
Ian defied authority openly. He could. Belonging to the class in which authority was bred.
Jacky defied authority secretly, belonging, as he did, to that class for whom authority is “intended.” For Jacky, slow of attention in the board-school, had found his eyes, his hands, to be marvellously dexterous.
He was, although good form had been presented to him as the fitness of smirking when answering his betters, not servile; not a coward. He guessed that betterness only meant advantage. He was going to “get at” advantage with his nerve.
He was one of those rare beings born to greatness, who see the world lying spread around them like an open gold-mine. Unlike the average man who sees nothing beyond his appointed pigeon-hole in which he hopes, by virtue of obedience to be allowed to remain safe “in that state to which it hath pleased God to call — —”
Ian Gore was also born to be a great man. He first came to understand this when he discovered how infinitely more potential was the margin of his Latin verse, than the text. His hand and eye were also marvellously dexterous. He knew himself to be a draughtsman, and also that to mature his genius he must live upon a barge.
Mr. and Mrs. Gore had only one son to offer on the altar of society. This son refused. He wanted to revert to the beefy foul-tongued leading of a manly life; to drink beer with the husky dregs of a population. To limn souls that were not smeared over, smoothed out, made unrecognisable to the creator by the footling ritual of civilization. He did not care who, what, a man was. All he asked of him was to have “form,” chunks of form, that the strong eye might wrestle with and master. The impulse of his art was to define volume.
His father pleaded, he would, “at least” — — — — He insisted — — “first study art.” Ian consented, after his inspection of an art school had suggested itself to him as a likely place for his initial rehearsals of “frightening good form to death.”
+
In the meantime the more puny son of the criminal world had also conceived his ideal. An ideal so startling, so incompatible with the possibilities on his horizon, that he alone of the three, had it not been for an accident, would have stood a chance of failure.
Hyde Park Hinderman’s desire was towards conformity. He yearned to prop himself against the pillars of society, in time to delicately detach himself and become one of such pillars himself. He was convinced that criminals were not good form. He longed for approval. In other words he was a snob.
It all began with his respectful admiration for a policeman’s helmet. When he arrived at a definition of the exact adjustment between his parents’ social status and the policeman’s, there took place in him the spontaneous evolutionary modification of the parental type, so usual in the imaginative young.
He hung about the mission house, felt happy if he got patted on the head, and read their books. He was a pretty boy, with large blue eyes, a mixture of his father’s grey blank ones, and the vague velvety black pansy ones of his decoying Mamma. An air of innocence was thus arrived at. The mission house felt itself to be in a responsible position.
His father said the boy had a white liver.
His mother was in awe of him. Somebody had once told her, “the child would be a judgement on her.”
He would pore over the books from the mission house and then nag his parents about mending their ways. He tried to convince them that people didn’t do these things. Sometimes he would cry on his mother’s breasts — “We’re outcasts, outcasts”! She was like a deaf woman in a church.