The Sundered Streams: The History of a Memory That Had No Full Stops

by Reginald Farrer

The Dadds permeated social life in Darnley-on-Downe. They were everywhere, had married into every family, had accorded brides to every neighbouring house of repute, had come at last to be, as it were, the very incarnation of decency and proper pride in Darnley-on-Downe. They were no richer than their neighbours, but in those days wealth gave no precedence, and the Dadds had a prestige which their fellow-nobles in St. Eldred’s lacked. For the Dadds owned land, and, though St. Eldred’s made no attempt to connect itself with the world of landowners and county families, yet a vague aroma of grandeur still clung to the one family in its midst that might be said to verge on the territorial class. The glory of the Dadds was a big freehold farm beyond the town, where they had been established from time immemorial, honourably obscure from the days of Henry the Eighth. St. Eldred’s, accordingly, cherishing its own pedigrees and antiquities, as it did, with as fervent a passion as any Austrian noble, yet by tacit consent accorded supremacy to this landowning family in its midst.

The Dadds by now had gone down, alas, in the world; however, St. Eldred’s never dreamed of making worldly prosperity a criterion for approval. St. Eldred’s lived, itself, in a penurious prosperity or a prosperous poverty; wealth, being unattainable, was held to be undesirable as well as rather vulgar, and the fading income of the Dadds only set the seal on their title to general admiration. The farm was still theirs indeed, but its yield was less and lessening. All through the good old Protection days their corn had brought high prices; but, unfortunately, the cost of living had grown even higher in proportion, until the Dadds found themselves forced to renounce agricultural hopes, leave the farm fallow, and plunge into small trade. From this they made a fair livelihood, and were able to support their regal position in the world of St. Eldred’s. So they lived, married, ruled, and died, till never a house in St. Eldred’s but was kin to the royal family of Dadd.

James Dadd after James Dadd contentedly took up his sceptre, swayed it during his time, and laid it by. Their clan, like all others in St. Eldred’s, was magnificently complacent in contemplation of its own position. No Dadd was ever heard to aspire to more giddy worlds, no Dadd was ever known to show any hankerings after wilder flights, after new courses, after original thought or action of any kind. In a young member of the family, in a collateral, the weight of his elders would immediately have crushed out such sparks of discontent; as for the head of the dynasty, so surrounded was the ruling Dadd by now with uncles, cousins, and aunts, not to mention dowagers of bygone sovereigns, that it would have been as easy for him to revolt as for a Pope to make headway against the College of Cardinals. Such, then, was the decorous state of affairs, when suddenly a most astonishing thing happened.

The railway mania was sweeping over England. Counties were being opened up, and landowners being driven crazy with hysterical apprehensions of ruin, and opposition to every threatened change. At first all these commotions left the quiet waters of St. Eldred’s unruffled. But eventually a railway company came sniffing round the ancestral but profitless farm of the Dadds, and, somehow, during the negotiations, it was discovered that those barren acres covered a coal-field of exuberant richness.

It was not to be expected that this new fact should bring about any sudden alteration in the feeling of St. Eldred’s towards the Dadds. Only a mild flutter agitated for a while the red-brick houses. Then it was felt that the acquisition of wealth by the Dadds was very right and proper. Wealth was only vulgar when in new and plebeian hands. A Dadd could be trusted to avoid giving offence, a Dadd would never be ostentatious, nor presume to change his mode of life. So, undeterred by any disapproval from their peers, the ruling Dadds proceeded quietly to develop their new possibilities. What those possibilities were no one had the audacity or the grandeur of mind to compute. Unsuspected, unrealized, volumes of money rolled ceaselessly in to the account of the mine-owners, while they, in their innocence, continued unperturbed in the old simple ways, never caring to dream that their new wealth could do more for them than add, at most, a parlourmaid.

It was some years before even this grand addition was made to their scale of living, and then it was only when the sudden death of James Dadd the Eighth had left the family sceptre in the hands of a queen-regent. The widow ruled for her son (now, at a tender age, raised to the rank of James Dadd the Ninth), and hardly had she grasped the reins of power than she began to show signs of wishing to use the abundant resources which had now been accumulating for fifteen years or more. Her ambitions were not approved, and the extra parlourmaid was only condoned as an indulgence for the sorrows of widowhood. But from that moment a little rift began to widen between the reigning Dadds and Darnley-on-Downe. The money began insensibly to come between the rulers and the ruled. It was inevitable that it should. An income—even an unspent income—of fifteen thousand a year cannot long live on terms of perfect friendly equality with incomes of several hundred or so. The richer, sooner or later, condescends; the poorer, sooner or later, grudges. Thus it was in Darnley-on-Downe. Even the suspicion that Mrs. Dadd had ‘notions’—that she would have liked a landau, and had conceived thoughts of sending her sons to Eton—caused a certain vigilant enmity to exasperate the keenness with which her every action was watched and weighed by her council of relatives. The slightest sign of ambition was soon marked as a treason to the clan. All the Dadd connections, all the Dadd collaterals, all the dowagers and younger branches of the Dadds made common cause with St. Eldred’s, and joined in the general suspicion with which the conduct of Mrs. Dadd was viewed. The widow found herself unable to carry out the smallest extravagance. Very innocent and trifling were the few indulgences that she had hoped for, but even these were put beyond her reach by the decree of her relatives, by that incorruptible synod over which even a Dadd queen-regent had no more power than a doge of Venice over his Council of Ten. Nor was her submission able to redeem her popularity. The very fact of having once had ‘notions’ was enough to mark her out for ever as a traitor to the Constitution of St. Eldred’s. She was no longer quite ‘one of themselves.’ The excommunication was pronounced by those terrible princesses, the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd, and no one was found to question its justice as it thundered across the tea-table.

Inquiries were made into her remote ancestry, and it was soon found that, though by birth an unblemished Blessing, yet she had inherited the sinister tendencies of a Messiter great-great-great-grandmother, whom history convicted of eccentricities that went the length of reading her Bible in French. From such a tainted spring what purity could be expected? The situation was summed up by the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd. The stream cannot rise higher than its source, was their stern pronouncement. A regretful loyalty, a disapproving adherence now marked the family’s attitude towards her—a loyalty, an adherence as faithful but as disapproving as ever a virtuous believer in Divine right can have felt for a drunken and profligate Pretender, or a patriotic Catholic for Queen Elizabeth.

So far, it is true, her eldest son, James Dadd the Ninth, seemed a model of Dadd virtues. He had made no open move towards ostentation and prodigality. His younger brother Robert, however, was the incarnate tragedy of St. Eldred’s, the incarnate accusation of Mrs. Dadd’s regency. Briefly, this ulcer of St. Eldred’s must be skimmed; Robert Dadd had run away from home, and when next heard of, many years later, was understood to be in Japan, and to have become a Mormon or a Buddhist, or a disciple of whatever religion rules in those benighted parts. Never again was his name heard in St. Eldred’s, but the Messiter great-great-great-grandmother was held accountable for such a strange, terrible aberration—the first break in the impeccable succession of the Dadds. There was yet another child—a daughter—but she was ten years younger than her brothers, and could not as yet prove, in her own person, the corrupt heredity of her mother. However, she was already watched with care, and every tearing of her pinafore was held symptomatic of inherited depravity.

James Dadd the Ninth came at last to his own, and his unhappy mother, crushed by years of disapproval, sank, unregretted, to the grave. And hardly had St. Eldred’s consigned her decently to the tomb, than James Dadd gave abundant proof of the evil spirit that all his relatives had long suspected. He left Darnley-on-Downe. He shut up the family house; he travelled; he began timidly to live on a scale that drove St. Eldred’s dizzy with horrified astonishment. Thanks to his mother’s economy, he was now extremely rich, and bit by bit began to realize the extent of his opportunities. But, though St. Eldred’s shook its head over him, though the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd refused to read the papers any longer, for fear of finding his iniquities chronicled, James Dadd remained the true son of his fathers. Wealth could not make him wealthy; it takes a generation at least to make the genuine spendthrift, to ingraft the joy and the splendour of purchasing. James Dadd remained nervous, awkward, bourgeois in his uneasy enjoyment of his money. Assertive one moment, he was uneasy and parsimonious the next, always self-conscious, always troubled by the disapproval of the only world he really knew—the world that had made him and written its signature large across the face of his personality. Wherever he went, he carried St. Eldred’s, and heard the mild but tremendous tones of the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd among the arches of the Colosseum as in the silences of the Desert. Sometimes he defied the voices, sometimes he quailed before them, but escape them he never could. He was out of his sphere; they told him so. He had cast off his own world, and could enter no other.

Often in his travels he met other men on similar errands of pleasure, young men and old, sons of country squires or illustrious families. In most cases they had not a quarter of his income, but they seemed to have the careless knack of getting more pleasure out of half a crown than he could ever buy with a five-pound note. Poor as they might be, generations of spending ancestors had left them the secret of spending easily, gaily, serenely, of letting money flow unperceived between their fingers, of securing a double return for their outlay through their very indifference as to whether they ever got any return at all. This was the whole distinction between himself and them. Actual superiority of birth and breeding they had none, though their forbears might be more prominent than his. But centuries of inconspicuousness disqualify a man for the conspicuous position conferred by sudden wealth, and James Dadd, for all his long pedigree, was far less fitted for his new place in life than many a grandson of some successful politician or lawyer, who might number, perhaps, two generations to James Dadd’s twenty, but made up for this lack of quantity by the eminence of the father and grandfather whose high and hard-won position he had painlessly inherited.