I was at Wellington, destined for Sandhurst and the Army, for in spite of my father’s atrocious experiences it never occurred to either of us that the world held any other career for me.
Looking back I don’t think I really had any desire to be a soldier or knew at all what was implied in it. It just seemed inevitable, and I suppose I had up to then as much part in shaping my destinies as most people. I suppose that is how the ranks of the pawn-broking, cheese-mongering, grave-digging, and other apparently undesirable callings are kept filled.
But I knew enough to resent quite definitely the halving of my patrimony with this younger brother, concerning whose intrusion I had been in no way consulted.
I bitterly resented also the continued illness of my mother after this event.
During the greater part of my short life, which then seemed so long, she had been but a memory of infancy, repainted during one long summer when she had been home, and then her gracious, lovely presence had utterly outshone even the ideal of memory.
I had for her a boy’s romantic devotion, and her death when the child was a year old and I almost a man, overwhelmed me with the force of a man’s passionate grief abrading the exquisitely tender sensorium of a child.
And then the baby Edmund began to grow like her. From the first his eyes and mouth were hers. As he learned to speak he spoke with her voice, and innumerable little gestures reminded me of her. This was my first solace; and my early, selfish, boyish resentment died down and warmed into something else, transmuted by grief into the second great attachment of my adolescence.
Nothing could quite kill this, and I suppose that is why, at forty-five, I ordered the champagne for him.
Edmund was of course intended for the Navy, and as he grew older it seemed as if this were Nature’s arrangement as well as the family’s. There was no mere acquiescence in this case, as in mine.
But all these family dispositions were shattered just about the time I should have entered Sandhurst.