have described the kind of education that happens to a man of my
class nowadays, and it has been convenient to leap a phase in my
experience that I must now set out at length. I want to tell in
this second hook how I came to marry, and to do that I must give
something of the atmosphere in which I first met my wife and some
intimations of the forces that went to her making. I met her in
Staffordshire while I was staying with that uncle of whom I have
already spoken, the uncle who sold my father's houses and settled my
mother in Penge. Margaret was twenty then and I was twenty-two.
It was just before the walking tour in Switzerland that opened up so
much of the world to me. I saw her once, for an afternoon, and
circumstances so threw her up in relief that I formed a very vivid
memory of her. She was in the sharpest contrast with the industrial
world about her; she impressed me as a dainty blue flower might do,
come upon suddenly on a clinker heap. She remained in my mind at
once a perplexing interrogation and a symbol…
But first I must tell of my Staffordshire cousins and the world that
served as a foil for her.
2
I first went to stay with my cousins when I was an awkward youth of
sixteen, wearing deep mourning for my mother. My uncle wanted to
talk things over with me, he said, and if he could, to persuade me
to go into business instead of going up to Cambridge.
I remember that visit on account of all sorts of novel things, but
chiefly, I think, because it was the first time I encountered
anything that deserves to be spoken of as wealth. For the first
time in my life I had to do with people who seemed to have endless
supplies of money, unlimited good clothes, numerous servants; whose
daily life was made up of things that I had hitherto considered to
be treats or exceptional extravagances. My cousins of eighteen and
nineteen took cabs, for instance, with the utmost freedom, and
travelled first-class in the local trains that run up and down the
district of the Five Towns with an entire unconsciousness of the
magnificence, as it seemed to me, of such a proceeding.
The family occupied a large villa in Newcastle, with big lawns
before it and behind, a shrubbery with quite a lot of shrubs, a
coach house and stable, and subordinate dwelling-places for the
gardener and the coachman. Every bedroom contained a gas heater and
a canopied brass bedstead, and had a little bathroom attached
equipped with the porcelain baths and fittings my uncle
manufactured, bright and sanitary and stamped with his name, and the
house was furnished throughout with chairs and tables in bright
shining wood, soft and prevalently red Turkish carpets, cosy
corners, curtained archways, gold-framed landscapes, overmantels, a
dining-room sideboard like a palace with a large Tantalus, and
electric light fittings of a gay and expensive quality. There was a
fine billiard-room on the ground floor with three comfortable sofas
and a rotating bookcase containing an excellent collection of the
English and American humorists from THREE MEN IN A BOAT to the
penultimate Mark Twain. There was also a conservatory opening out
of the dining-room, to which the gardener brought potted flowers in
their season…
My aunt was a little woman with a scared look and a cap that would
get over one eye, not very like my mother, and nearly eight years
her junior; she was very much concerned with keeping everything
nice, and unmercifully bullied by my two cousins, who took after
their father and followed the imaginations of their own hearts.
They were tall, dark, warmly flushed girls handsome rather than
pretty. Gertrude, the eldest and tallest, had eyes that were almost
black; Sibyl was of a stouter build, and her eyes, of which she was
shamelessly proud, were dark blue. Sibyl's hair waved, and
Gertrude's was severely straight. They treated me on my first visit
with all the contempt of the adolescent girl for a boy a little
younger and infinitely less expert in the business of life than
herself. They were very busy with the writings of notes and certain
mysterious goings and comings of their own, and left me very much to
my own devices. Their speech in my presence was full of
unfathomable allusions. They were the sort of girls who will talk
over and through an uninitiated stranger with the pleasantest sense
of superiority.
I met them at breakfast and at lunch and at the half-past six
o'clock high tea that formed the third chief meal of the day. I
heard them rattling off the compositions of Chaminade and Moskowski,
with great decision and effect, and hovered on the edge of tennis
foursomes where it was manifest to the dullest intelligence that my
presence was unnecessary. Then I went off to find some readable
book in the place, but apart from miscellaneous popular novels, some
veterinary works, a number of comic books, old bound volumes of THE
ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS and a large, popular illustrated History of
England, there was very little to be found. My anut talked to me in
a casual feeble way, chiefly about my motber's last illness. The
two bad seen very little of each other for many years; she made no
secret of it that the ineligible qualities of my father were the
cause of the estrangement. The only other society in the house
during the day was an old and rather decayed Skye terrier in
constant conflict with what were no doubt imaginary fleas. I took
myself off for a series of walks, and acquired a considerable
knowledge of the scenery and topography of the Potteries.
It puzzled my aunt that I did not go westward, where it was country-
side and often quite pretty, with hedgerows and fields and copses