CHAPTER III

To love is by no means necessarily to understand, and Kingston Darnley, as Nature and life had moulded him, was a very different character from Kingston Darnley as his mother’s vague mind imagined him. In point of fact she, good woman, knew little of her son but his face, though, with the splendid intrepidity of the benevolent stupid, she claimed an intimate acquaintance with every detail of his being. Her complete ignorance was due to no conscious process on either side; he as little dreamt of concealing anything from her as she of ignoring any quality in him. But time had taught Kingston that whether he confided in his mother or not, she was just as wise after the revelation as before, being totally devoid of any power to understand what she was shown, or, indeed, to realize that she was being shown anything at all.

Kingston Darnley soon learned to lead his own life without reference to his mother; to help by listening was her province; to help by comprehending was beyond the capacities of her nature. So Lady Adela was left to dwell serene in the world of her own happy little kindly fancies, while the facts of life went by her in a roar, without ever being able to capture her notice. She felt that never had mother been more loving or more beloved; that never had son been more loyal and devoted; her parental eye was fixed unerringly on her child, and she knew his nature down to the uttermost convolutions of its smallest eccentricity. Did she ever forget that he disliked the smell of onions? Had she ever failed to notice and deplore his coldness towards her favourite clergy? And had she not succeeded in the last, noblest, highest ambition of a mother’s life—that of imposing upon him a thoroughly nice and suitable bride? And he, for his part, had never rebelled, never repined, never objected, not even to the bride. Accordingly, Lady Adela felt proudly secure that she understood her son in every fibre of his being. So she smiled upon him with perfect unintelligence, and gave nightly thanks to the Powers that had so gifted her with the perfect tact of motherhood.

Kingston Darnley at one-and-twenty had found himself a great deal older than his years. His contemporaries were mere children. He had lived the sheltered life at his mother’s side, until at last came the belated time when she reluctantly permitted him to go to Oxford without her shielding company. General opinion—even that of her son—seemed opposed to Lady Adela’s plan of taking lodgings in Holywell Street, and thence keeping a mother’s eye upon her child. And to popular opinion Lady Adela accordingly yielded. She never made more than a mild and flabby resistance, and could always be induced by opposition to give up her most cherished plots with a smile. But until Kingston, alone and undefended, set off one sad October evening from Paddington, he had never been allowed outside the sphere of his mother’s presence—one can hardly say of his mother’s influence—for any influence that Lady Adela may ever have had must always have been merely that of kindly, null proximity.

However, reared by carefully-selected tutors in the gentle but stifling atmosphere of a widow’s house, the mind of Kingston Darnley had shot into premature and unsuspected growth. Intelligence he would always have had, but his training forced it into early development. And, as the growing pains of the mind are always painful as those of the body—especially if experienced too soon or too keenly—so Kingston suffered from the unseasonable expansion of his thoughts, and his discomfort was increased, no less than its cause, by the fact of his essential loneliness. He had no one to speak to. On the first mention of an idea, Lady Adela confidently diagnosed the need of pills; and any perception of inequalities in this best of all possible worlds must be treated by the purer air of Brighton or Bournemouth.

So Kingston was driven in upon himself, and, by the time he came of age, had ardently discovered all the paradoxes that more fortunate people come to in due time at twenty-five or so, and then are able to take as platitudes. The injustice of wealth, the iniquities of sport, of religion, of land-tenure—all these crimes Kingston Darnley felt to be his own particular revelation, and they fermented in his mind until he had few thoughts in common with his fellows. They, meanwhile, went placidly on their way, and when Kingston arrived at Oxford, he found himself a stranger and misplaced among the men of his own years. He was filled at first with a gnawing, cavilling discontent that arose as much from idleness and opulence as from too rapid and unhealthy growth. They, for their part, were honest, jolly fellows, who looked on discontent as an uncomfortable and ‘bad-form’ thing, to be strenuously frowned and jeered out of their circle. To enjoy what came, without analysis, was their scheme, and they resented being asked to inquire into the reasonableness and the morality of their enjoyment. At one-and-twenty no really sane creature wants to think. The time for thought comes later, when the first ardours of action are passing.

Kingston Darnley, though he had far too much sense and geniality to preach or impose his ideas on anyone, was felt to be always suggesting questions, never to be accepting the joy of the moment, in a properly acquiescent, youthful manner. And nothing is more annoying to the hedonist, of whatever age, than the companionship of someone who seems to be examining the sources of his joy. It may be that no joys can stand the test of reason, and the hedonist’s dislike of the sceptic may gain its intensity from the hedonist’s own unacknowledged realization of the fact. Even when Kingston got drunk his tone of mind seemed analytical, far removed from the frank, bellowing joyousness of the more healthy enthusiasts round him. They sat about in the Quad and howled, or beat baths beneath the windows of the junior Dean; Kingston, anxious to please, howled and beat baths with the best. But, whereas the ebullition was pure nature and joy of living with them, with him it was always an assumption, a pose, no matter how carefully assumed and disguised. And the consciousness of this was no less galling to him than to them. All felt ill at ease, disconcerted, disillusioned by his presence. His well-intentioned hilarity seemed somehow to turn the gold of their pleasure to brass, to strike a jarring note in the chorale of enjoyment they were playing so whole-heartedly. So, though never unpopular, Kingston Darnley was isolated. His own set in the college did not want to be bothered with the iniquitous why and wherefore of the game-laws, or the manifest impossibility of miracles; and the other sets to whom he would have brought these discoveries in glad pride had grown accustomed to them long ago, and for many years had looked on them as the buried foundation-stones of all reasoning. So that Kingston fell between two stools, and must needs keep company with his ideas until the passing of time should bring him level with the contemporaries over whom his training had given him such an unhealthy and fictitious advantage.

In any case it is hardly likely that he could ever have taken any really intimate part in Oxford life. Training or no training, his mind had that inquiring tone so fatal to unreflecting hilarity. He was too much interested—in the wrong things, too, and in the wrong way—in people, in causes, in problems. The men who should have been his friends were concerned almost entirely with the joy of living and the avoidance of all unnecessary work. And how is the son of a widow, reared at home decorously, without other boys to riot and tumble with—how is he to have any personal enthusiasm for the joy of living, as understood by healthier, normal men of his own age? Nor is the precocious cleverness of the unquiet mind any real test of ability. Few of Kingston Darnley’s contemporaries but had as good an intelligence as his. Their brains, however, developed naturally along the natural path. In twenty years he had lived hurriedly through five-and-twenty of feverish mental development; their five-and-twentieth year—of mind no less than of body—still lay well ahead of them. By the time he and they would be thirty they might all, perhaps, be contemporaries together. The unhealthy, straggling shoots of his forced growth would have been blighted down to a level with theirs, sturdy and natural; and by the time they came to consider the game-laws and the gospels, they would bring a ripe and genial intelligence to bear on such points, neither thinking nor talking in excess, but letting profitless points of doctrine slide, for the sake of hitting on a sane and decent scheme of living, such as can best be attained by the average sensible gentleman’s compromise between abstract justice and sound, everyday behaviour.

And Kingston himself would find, in the course of years, that the rubs and jars of life would bring his point of view to the same pitch as theirs, and would perceive that thought is a frivolous and profitless indulgence of the idle mind, as compared with the more fruitful achievement of an honest man’s daily duty, along the lines of obvious, rough-cast morality. Meanwhile, however, though without conscious arrogance, he realized his isolation, and viewed it alternately with pride and regret. On the whole, as self-satisfaction is the postulate of all human life, the pride predominated, and he carried unconsciously through Oxford the idea of being a chosen candlestick for spiritual light.