Mrs. Rendall did not show great concern at the untimely arrival of her offspring. She accepted it, as she accepted all things, with phlegmatical calm. A great deal was required to still Mrs. Rendall’s emotions, so much, in fact, that it was not within the recollection of any of her intimates that they ever had been stirred. It did not occur to her that the birth of a child, mature or premature, was a matter of moment. If it lived, well and good, and the best must be done for it. If it died, the occurrence must be regarded as sad and an occasion for shedding a given number of tears. It was clearly useless to foreshadow either event, since one was as likely as the other and could be as readily treated with when the time arose.
It must not be thought that Mrs. Rendall’s calm was the result of philosophy. That would be far from the truth. It occurred simply and solely from a vacant mind—a mind nourished by the dead-sea fruit of its own vacuity. She lacked impulse and intelligence, and was, indeed, no more than a lifeless canal along which the barges of domesticity were drearily towed. Her ideas were other people’s, and valueless at that; her conversation was a mere repetition of things she had said before.
When the doctor, rubbing his hands to lend an air of cheerful optimism to a cheerless situation, declared, “We shall pull that youngster through, see if we don’t,” she responded, “Oh, yes,” with a falling inflexion. If he had said the opposite, her reply would have been the same—delivered in the same manner.
In some cases heredity ignores personalities, and this, in the instance of Wynne Rendall, was hardly difficult of achievement. From his mother he took nothing, unless it were a measure of her fragility, which was perhaps the only circumstance about her to justify attention. The characteristics that he did not bring into the world with himself he inherited from his grandfather, via his own sire.
The grandfather was certainly the more notable of the two gentlemen, and had achieved some astonishing ideals on canvas, very heartily disapproved of by the early Victorian era, and some memorable passages of wit which had heightened his unpopularity. He was an artist who went for his object with truly remarkable energy. To seek a parallel among modern men, his work possessed some of the qualities of Aubrey Beardsley’s, combined with the vigour of John S. Sargent. But the world was not ready for such productions, and, casting its eyes upward in pious horror, hurried from the walls on which they were exhibited. Old Edward Tyler Rendall scorned them as they departed, but he understood the situation notwithstanding.
“I’ve come too soon,” he mused, “too soon by a generation or more.”
His belief in his art was so great that he determined to sacrifice his liberty and get married, in the hope that he might have a son who would carry on the work for the benefit of a world enlightened by broader-minded civilization.
In due course the son was born, and when he reached an age of understanding, the reason of his being was dinned into his ears.
“Get away from old traditions; build something new, dextrous, adroit, understanding. See what I mean, Robert boy? Be plucky—plucky in line, composition, subject. Always have a purpose before you; don’t mind how offensive it is—no one cares for that if you’ve the courage to declare your meaning in honest black and white.”
The result of this intensive artistic culture was that Robert Everett Rendall, at the age of sixteen and a half, ran away from home and took a position as office boy in a large firm of tea-tasters in the City.