"They went from Callao to Brisbane and loaded again in Melbourne for home. My mother used to say she thought they would never get round the Cape of Good Hope. My father had done the voyage once in sixty-two days, almost a record; but this time everything went dead wrong. They were driven as far as the Crozets, somewhere down near the South Pole, I believe. The grub gave out, and even my mother had to eat bread from corn that was ground in the coffee mill. The crew got restless and sulky. I've often tried to imagine it, the Skipper and his two mates, talking it over in the cuddy, keeping the men working to stop their thinking, running for days under reefed courses and double reefed topsails. And all the time with something else on his mind, something that materialized finally, into me!
"My mother told me that my father nearly went crazy with joy when I was born one Sunday morning, 18 south, 21 west, at seven bells on the starboard watch. They were in the trade then, spanking along almost due north for Fernando Noronha. It was rum for all hands that morning, almost the only soft thing left on the ship, and a little tea. The tea came in handy for their pipes, my mother told me. Poor chaps! They were dying for a smoke. Well, I have always got a good deal of satisfaction from knowing everybody was glad I came into the world. My father was dancing mad to get home and tell all the folks that the curse was lifted. He promised my mother anything; a home in London was one thing. He said he would quit the sea, for another. And he kept his word too. He was going on fifty-five, and had been at sea for thirty-eight years. Think of that! I've been at it for fifteen years now, and it seems an infernally long time. Thirty-eight years!
"So they settled in England. I don't know whether you people can see it plainly, but if you think a little you will realize how strange those two felt in London, with their Saratoga trunks, their sea habits and their American prejudices. Can you?"
He looked from one to the other as we sat there, our chairs twisted a little so that we could see his face. The question was a shrewd one. I remember wondering if he was aware how vividly it brought back to our minds our first few weeks in San Francisco, our mistakes, our petulant anger with strange habits, our feeling of awful homesickness. Again we nodded silently.
"For a time they were up against it, you would say," he went on, "and they didn't dare to move away from their lodgings in the East India Dock Road. It was natural for my father to think he ought to live near the ships. The custom of living in the suburbs, commuting as they call it here, hadn't begun in the seventies. It was my mother who fired his ambition to live further out. It would have been all right and everything might have been different if his ambition hadn't been fired in another direction at the same time.
"My father had done well on the whole. He had saved for years and kept his money in banks or in ships, which he understood. But now, when the Erin's Isle was sold and he found himself worth about fifty thousand dollars, he began to invest in all sorts of queer ventures. He wanted to double his fortune before he died. Others had done it, men he met in Leadenhall Street and on the Baltic; why shouldn't he? You see, he had got hold of the masculine part of my mother's ambition all right. She wanted to have an establishment, like a lady; he wanted to found a family in England. The money he was to make was for me. I was, he had settled, to be an engineer. He saw, that with steel coming in, engineering was to be the great gold-mine of the future. So he would provide the capital by which I was to build up a huge fortune. The Carvilles were to be big people, understand; 'my son was to be Prime Minister some day,' Humph!"
There was no bitterness in the exclamation, only a veiled irony, a detached amusement, at this memory of a dead ambition. We did not interrupt.
"They moved out just a little way, to Mildmay Park. You must remember that my father had no friends outside of business friends, and he had no idea that he would gain anything by moving west. My mother disliked what she saw of Kensington and Bayswater, and they thought in their simplicity that places with names like Mildmay Park, Finsbury Park, and finally Oakleigh Park, were good enough to begin on. Each move was a little further out, a little bigger house and a little higher rent until at Oakleigh Park, when I was six years old, it was a big semi-detached villa, with a garden and tennis-lawn and professional people for neighbours. That year my brother was born and my father began to die.
"You will laugh, I suppose, at the folly of it, but in her own way, my mother was setting up to be a fine lady. We had a cook and housemaid, and a nurse for me, and fine things I learned from her! We had a hired landau on Saturday afternoon to go drives in, a pew in the church, and sometimes people to dinner. She even got my father to send to Dublin to find out the Carville ancestry and coat-of-arms. She did, that's a fact! So you see, she understood perfectly what was meant in England by keeping up a position. As I said, if my father had not got a sort of mania for turning his money over, the scheme might have gone through.
"He began to die when I was not quite six, and he went on dying and at the same time investing money until I was nearly eight. Imagine it! A great big man, as irritable as a child, slowly rotting away inside with cancer and two helpless little children, one a baby. All the time it was doctor after doctor, each one recommending a different cure; all the time it was investment after investment, the estate getting more and more entangled. He went to Baden one autumn and came home worse. He tried Harrogate in the spring, but it was no use. He came back, went to bed and never rose from it. Mind you, all the time the cancer was eating his body, this other cancer was at his mind. He plunged into the craziest schemes for getting twenty per cent. interest. Nothing my mother could say was able to make him see the madness of it. She wanted him to buy land, but he said no one but a fool would buy land unless they had a fortune to keep it up. At last, one January, it was over and done with. He died, and we had a grand funeral, and the real business of life began for us.