He also taught me to lie. I had never told a lie till I went to Temple Grove. But as he prided himself on his acuteness, he was constitutionally unable to believe the truth. It was too obvious for him. When I found that he invariably thought I was lying while I still obeyed my mother’s teaching, and was too afraid of God to tell a lie, I suddenly made up my mind that I would humour him, and tell whatever lie was necessary to this transparent Sherlock Holmes. After this he always believed me, unless I accidentally forgot and told him the truth. And I liked him so much that I wished him to believe me.
He did not injure my character as much as he might have done, because I was born with a loathing for insincerity. The difficulty came when he and Waterfield, the head master, questioned me about the same thing, for Waterfield mesmerised one into telling the truth, and he tempted one to tell a lie. It reminds me now of Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love.”
At Temple Grove I acquired my taste for games and taste for natural history.
In 1868, my mother, to whom I was passionately attached, died. I used to dream that she was alive for months afterwards. And the great theosophist to whom I mentioned this sees in it an astral communication. To divert my thoughts from this, the greatest grief I had ever had, I was sent to stay with my cousin, Colonel Joseph Sladen, who had already succeeded to Ripple Court, and was then a Gunner Captain, stationed at Sheerness. He belonged to the Royal Yacht Squadron, and had a schooner yacht in which we used to go away for cruises up the Channel. I was a little boy of twelve, and his two eldest sons, Arthur Sladen, now H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught’s Private Secretary in Canada, and Sampson Sladen, now the Chief of the London Fire Brigade, were hardly more than babies, but I enjoyed it very much, because I was interested in the yachting and in the firing of the hundred-pounder Armstrongs, which were the monster guns of those days. We went in my cousin’s yacht to see the new ironclad fleets of Great Britain and France, and we went over the Black Prince and the Minotaur, the crack ships of the time.
A year after that, exactly on the first anniversary of my mother’s death, I went to Cheltenham College, where I had taken a scholarship. I was at Cheltenham College six years, and took four scholarships and many prizes at the school, the most interesting of which, in view of my after life, was the prize for the English Poem. I was also Senior Prefect, Editor of the school magazine, Captain of Football, and Captain of the Rifle Corps. I shot for the school four times in the Public School competitions at Wimbledon, and in 1874 won the Spencer Cup, which was open to the best shot from each of the Public Schools. I was the school representative for it also in 1873.
At Cheltenham, I suppose, I laid the foundations of my literary career, because, besides editing the school magazine for a couple of years, and writing the Prize Poem, I read every book in the College library. It was such a delight to me to have the run of a well-stocked library. The books at home were nearly all religious books. I was brought up on the sternest low-Church lines; we went to church twice a day on Sunday, besides having prayers read twice at home, and hymns sung in the afternoon. The church we attended was St. Paul’s, Onslow Square, where I had to listen to hour-long sermons from Capel Molyneux and Prebendary Webb-Peploe. The dull and long services were almost intolerable, except when Millais, the great painter, who had the next pew, asked me into his pew to relieve the crush in ours. Millais sat so upright and so forward when he was listening that my father could not see me, and I used to bury my face in the beautiful Mrs. Millais’ sealskin jacket; I had such an admiration for her that I did not go to sleep. Millais—he was not Sir John in those days—did not make his children go to church; I suppose he went because he was fascinated by the eloquence of the sermons. Molyneux, Marston and Peploe were all great preachers, though they bored an unfortunate small boy to the verge of nervous prostration. We were only allowed to read Sunday books on Sunday, and the newspapers were put away, as they were to the day of my father’s death in 1910.
After my mother’s death I always longed to get back to school, because, though we had to go to chapel every day, and twice on Sunday, there was not that atmosphere of religion which made me, as a small boy, begin to feel unhappy about lunch-time on Saturday, and not thoroughly relieved till after breakfast on Monday. I hated Sunday at home; the two-mile walk to and from church was the best part of it.
I have forgotten two other preparations for a literary career which I perpetrated at Cheltenham. I and my greatest friend, a boy called Walter Roper Lawrence (now Sir W. R. Lawrence, Bart., G.C.I.E.), who afterwards rose to a position of the highest eminence in India, wrote verses for the school magazine, and I published a pamphlet to avenge a contemptuous reference, in the Shotover Papers, and was duly summoned for libel. The late Frederick Stroud, the Recorder of Tewkesbury, who was at that time a solicitor, got me off. I never saw him in after life, which I much regretted, because he was, like myself, a great student of everything connected with Adam Lindsay Gordon, the Australian poet. He died while I was writing our life of Gordon.
At the beginning of 1875 I won an open classical scholarship at Trinity College, Oxford, where I commenced residence in the following October. At Oxford again I read voraciously in the splendid library of the Union.
There my love of games continued unabated. I shot against Cambridge four years, and won all the shooting challenge-cups. I also played in the ’Varsity Rugby Union Football XV when I first went up.