An English gentleman of the old school,
He was an unaffected friend,
An indulgent parent,
And a tolerant husband.
“In the Heaven a perfect round.”
The acquisition of a moderate income could not induce me to give myself up to idleness and self-indulgence. I determined that I would take up the reins of management where my father had dropped them and make his business into the success it deserved to be. For this purpose I decided to go right through, starting at the very bottom as an inferior clerk, and working my way up. This was by no means an uncommon thing in those days for the junior partner of a business firm to do, and I have always felt that it gave us a great advantage, which many modern young men are unfortunate enough to miss. It meant that we got to know our employés, and to earn their confidence by working side by side with them. It meant that we had a practical, first-hand knowledge of every department of the work, instead of depending on information supplied to us by others. It meant that we had the opportunity of winning our spurs, by showing in a humble sphere the capacity which alone would qualify us for a superior position. I have known a Gosport, a Macpherson, and a Schenkenberg serve their apprenticeship in this way, and express gratitude afterwards for the salutary discipline it entailed. For myself, I could not well leave my mother, who depended very much on me since our bereavement, but I had been careful to have the teledictaphone installed at Greylands as soon as we took it over, and it was thus possible for me, without ever actually going to the office, to take my orders every morning like a simple clerk, and to execute them to the satisfaction of my employers. In rather less than a year I had gained such a thorough grasp of the business and given such evidence of financial ability that I allowed myself to be advanced to the position of a partner in the firm. Not that, in doing so, I had any intention of giving myself an easy time or doing less than my share in the actual direction of the firm: from ten to one every morning and from three to five in the afternoon, unless any serious rival claims distracted my attention, the teledictaphone was always at my side and the affairs of the office engrossed me.
Meanwhile, it must be understood that it was rather a small world we lived in. It has been my good fortune to move in various kinds of society, and I will freely confess that it was not till a much later period than this that the important people, the people who will have left their names inscribed on the scroll of history, were the guests of my roof or the habitués of my boudoir. Yet the simple life of the country-side had its charm in those days, a charm not easily recaptured now, when ease of intercommunication has made neighbours strangers, and thrown us into the society of cronies three counties off. I had, of course, my private helico, and had recently learned to drive it myself; and already one thought nothing of driving over to Cambridge for an afternoon call, or up to London for a dinner. But it needed a comfortable income to do this, and they were not days of comfortable incomes. The county squires still kept up the tradition of big nurseries; a family of four or five was by no means unusual even among Protestants. The professional classes were still heavily burdened by the income tax, which was nearly a shilling in the pound, and it was only in very rare cases that they could keep anything more than motors. Our old doctor, though a bachelor, only drove a Rolls-Royce till the day of his death. So we were all herded together within the narrow confines of “the county,” and found, as people no doubt find when they are shipwrecked together on a desert island, that the little handful of acquaintances necessity makes for you are well worth studying; have their own foibles, their own angles, their own little traits of lovableness; that to keep up your own position, and at the same time to keep the peace, among your immediate neighbours demands as much in the way of social tact as holding a salon in Hampstead or entertaining Royalty in Mayfair.
To begin with, there was our vicar, Mr. Rowlands. A mild man, hampered by shyness and unconscious of the power of local gossip, he had made a grave mistake in marrying his curate. Mrs. Rowlands, who had been ordained a deaconess at the early age of 24, was a woman of strong, masterful character who had come into the parish with the almost expressed intention of “making things hum.” She was of the most violent Relativist school, and rumour said that she always omitted the Creed when she was conducting the service herself, and sat down, sometimes even whistling to herself, when Mr. Rowlands said it. Mr. Rowlands was of the old-fashioned evangelical school, and the village had grown accustomed to his ways: churchgoing was not common, but his slim figure in its plain cassock and penwipery sort of cap, bound for morning or evening service in church, was a familiar sight to all, and he was universally respected. The deaconess, Miss Anderson as she then was, became the subject of a local taboo; and a memorial, signed by twenty-eight communicants, was sent to the Bishop to uphold Mr. Rowlands against the misbehaviour of his impetuous colleague. It was while this document still lay—it is to be feared, unread—on the Bishop’s study table, that the unlooked-for Concordat between vicar and curate suddenly altered the whole situation; Mr. Rowlands, instead of laying a complaint against Miss Anderson, had determined to lead her to the altar.
I do not know how they got on after that with the church services, for I was not pratiquant as far as the village was concerned. It will have become obvious by now that my religious convictions at the time were not of the deepest, and my church attendance was confined to an occasional visit to Evensong in King’s Chapel, where the services were at that time adorably rendered. But in the life of our little community Mr. and Mrs. Rowlands counted for a good deal. He was of the eternal type produced by an established Christianity: you could picture him, with a few alterations of outward manner and expression, as a benign Caroline clergyman, happily married, writing love-poems to wholly imaginary young ladies with classical names, or as an old-fashioned High Churchman of the early Tractarian period receiving his “Tracts for the Times” regularly, and not knowing whether he stood on his head or his heels as he read them. He was obsessed with the consciousness that we lived in changeful times, and desperately convinced that “the Church” must have “an attitude” to take up about it all. Often he would deplore the fact that the Bishops did not “give him a lead”: for himself he never got nearer to an attitude than a profound conviction that “while on the one hand ... yet on the other hand...,” a turn of phrase which was so frequent in his sermons that Juliet Savage, who sat under him exasperated whenever she came to stay with me, said he was the only Christian she had ever met whose left-hand never knew what his right hand did. Another fixed principle of his was that all these movements of our time would work themselves out right in the long run: whatever was best, he used to say, would remain, while everything else would disappear. The only occasion on which this conviction is known to have deserted him was one night when his house was broken into by burglars.
His was a marriage of opposites. Mrs. Rowlands seemed to worship innovation for its own sake, and she seemed to read the papers for no other purpose than to learn what new discoveries or inventions were announced, principally from America, and retail them afterwards, with a purr of admiration, to anyone who had not had the good fortune to see them first. I was easy game for her, since I used to keep abreast of the day’s news by means of the tape machine in the front hall, and was never properly prepared for her onslaughts. “Do you hear this, Miss Winterhead,” she would say, “about the utilization of atomic force? They tell me” (“they” always meant the Daily Mail) “that we shall soon be able to travel to Spitzbergen without spending a penny!” Then I would maintain that they would have to pay me pretty heavily before I would go there (Mrs. Rowlands always made me frivolous), and she would retaliate by informing me that it was now proved, from a skull discovered near Letchworth, that man had existed three hundred million years before Adam; it was no good my suggesting that Eve’s appearance must in that case have been welcomed with relief; she would be off on a fresh tangent before I had finished my sentence. I never know which class inspires more horror in me, the people who tell you things you did know or the people who tell you things you didn’t. The former insult one’s intelligence, the latter one’s lack of it.