I Walked in Arden

by Jack Randall Crawford

My education was rather a haphazard affair. An amiable young man was my tutor, and he did his best to make me believe arithmetic a useful branch of knowledge. He did not convince me. I tolerated his efforts and got along fairly well. I read a great deal for myself; there were always plenty of new books in the house, and my father's library of standard works was larger than even an industrious reader could get through. I absorbed a good deal of literary background without being aware I was storing up anything. Like other boys, I read for amusement—only it happened that I was amused by a fairly wide range of authors. I knew few children my own age and was not particularly interested in those I did know. They did not read much.

It was at the beginning of my eighteenth year that my father called me into his study one night and informed me that he planned sending me to America to college. The announcement was a great surprise to me, for I was happy where I was, and I could remember little about America.

There was another surprise in my father's proposal. It appeared that I was to be trained as a manufacturing chemist. My father pointed out that he needed an expert chemist in the future development of his business and had decided to make me that man. I remember I protested, pointing out to him my ambition to become a writer. My protest was overruled. My father said something about bread and butter coming first and added that chemistry need not keep me from writing.

I went to America and spent four years at a small college in one of the Eastern States—Hilltown University, it was called. They were not wholly happy years, for I found myself in the awkward predicament of being, because of my foreign upbringing, a stranger among my classmates. I did not make friends easily, but on the whole, I got through creditably. Summer holidays during these four years I spent in England with the family.

I was graduated and ready to join my father in his London business. For a year I worked away at the practical side of chemistry, and to my inward astonishment, my work appeared to give satisfaction. Indeed, I was entrusted more and more with tasks of responsibility and, according to reports, acquitted myself well. I could never quite believe that I was really a chemist. Sometimes I would sit, in the evening, before my toy theatre and, while in the act of composing a play with its doubtful aid, wonder if I were the person who went to the laboratory every morning and worked at chemistry. My writing made little progress; the curtain of my toy theatre was more often down than up, because, as my work increased in difficulty, chemistry claimed more and more of my time.

I think Sims, my mother's maid and formerly my old nurse, understood how I felt.

"The dust do be gettin' that thick on some of your books, Master Ted. You'll 'ave to let me 'ave a go at them one of these days."

Sims's expressions of sympathy were always veiled in household threats. And then there was Chitty, an ex-soldier and one-time officer's batman, who washed apparatus for me in the laboratory. To Chitty the processes of chemistry were akin to mediaeval incantations, and it was clear that he regarded me as out of my element in having anything to do with them. When we—my father and I, that is—went away week-ends to play golf, Chitty left the laboratory and accompanied us in the capacity of handy man valet. He had a large family and definite views about the fitness of things. A gentleman following a chemical career he considered as at variance with the natural order.

"It isn't as if you was born, sir, to earning a living," he confided to me one afternoon when I had cursed an unsuccessful experiment. (It was an amiable weakness of Chitty's to believe that no one that he called a "gentleman" was under any actual necessity of working.) "Why don't you chuck it, sir, for today and come out and 'ave a round of golf?"

Possibly his advice was not always disinterested, but I believe it was. Next to my sister's, Chitty's hero-worship of me was the most profound I have known. In fact, as I think things over, these are the only two to whom I was ever a hero. Many have liked me; they had faith in me. But I am wandering, as usual.