"For me it took a shape that I never got used to for all the years I was kept at it—school. For the life of me I can't see what use it was to me or to anyone else. What does a child learn at school that's of any use to him? You'll think I am talking like an ignorant fool, I dare say, but hear me out. Between eight and seventeen I went to six different schools. The country in those days was spotted with them. Some were called colleges, some academies, one was called an 'Ecole' of something or other. Each one I went to had a different badge, a different coloured tassel, a different set of rules and subjects. Barring the last one, which was down in Essex, near Maldon, they were simply swindles. A mile from our house was a board-school, but it would not have been keeping up our position to send me there. I learned to read and write, but, Great God! curiosity will make a child do that. If he isn't curious to learn what's the use of him learning? He just forgets it, as I forgot it, as you did too very likely, forgot it and learned it again when you needed to. A child ought to be outdoors learning the names of flowers and trees and birds. I know what I'm talking about, mind! You may fancy that if a boy is going into the professions as I was to go, as I did go, he ought to be schooled. Well, when I entered my profession at seventeen, I had to begin at the bottom for all my schooling. I know as much of 'professions' as most men, and I say of schools, I have no faith in them. The men who teach them know nothing. They're frauds and they know it. All that these schools did for me was to teach me the importance of keeping up a position.
"Twenty per cent! Twenty per cent! The madness of it! The holes and corners he had rushed into, in his frantic hunt for twenty per cent! A bank in Australia, a railroad in Ecuador, a sailing ship that never by any chance sailed into prosperity, a ginger-beer works in Denmark, a cement works in Spain, a foolish concern which proposed to earn vast sums by buying moribund bad debts, a drydock in Japan, and a lunatic-scheme for shoeing horses without nails! This last invention, if I remember rightly, was to fasten them with steel suspenders and a kind of cuff-button over the pastern! And we couldn't even leave the infernal things to die of inanition. Not content with paying no dividend, their familiar demons used to wake up and demand more capital. Calls! I would come home from school for my vacation and find my mother nearly crazy over another call. We were so simple that at first we paid them, and my father's old 'business friends' (he hadn't any others that I ever heard of) saw no objection. Humph! When I read in novels how a father's friends help the hero and heroine, succouring the widow and the fatherless, I must smile. I recall the days of our storm and stress, when those sleek and slippery wolves, the 'business friends' of my father, sat round waiting for my poor distracted, gallant-hearted mother to stumble and stagger in her struggle with those wild-cats of investments. Wild cats! Bengal tigers were a better name for them! But she didn't! She won out and defied the whole caboodle, as she called them when she was roused. She won out, or I shouldn't be here now, maybe. She was a mother fighting for her offspring, and many a shrewd knock they had from her. And the 'business friends' slunk away and we've never seen them since. They talk about the romance of big business. What about the tragedy of the small business? What about the dark and dirty meannesses of business? What about the 'business friend,' watching, watching for the weaker ones to fall? What sort of romance is there in battles between wolves and women, in wars without chivalry? Mercy? Consideration for the weak and helpless? Knightly courtesy towards women? You won't find any of them in business, I'm afraid. I remember often sitting in the room with my book, a school-boy on his holidays, while some smug specimen of the business-friend variety sat explaining and domineering over my mother, who did her best to understand. Perhaps she was difficult and stupid. It isn't every woman—or man either—who can keep a grasp on the details of banks and railroads and cement and ginger-beer and marine insurance and company-law and all the other tarradiddles that were going to yield twenty per cent and didn't yield twenty cents! I used to wonder if these men's own wives would be as intelligent as my mother in similar circumstances. Humph! I saw those ladies in one or two instances when they were widowed and had to face the world without a man. I was astounded. To see those proud big-bosomed women, with their red faces and narrow hearts and silly conversation, collapse and go down in ruin before the blasts of adversity! To see them, who had tried in their patronizing way to get us to give up our home and go into apartments, selling up and letting apartments themselves! Them! They hadn't a tenth of the fight in them my little colonial mother had, for all their big bosoms and tall brag about their independence and the fine offers they had when they were single. Some of the men too were in misfortune after a while. Some disaster sent up a big wave which washed them off their little rafts. I used to wonder what became of them. One I know died of heart-trouble. He was never troubled with his heart when he sat in our parlour laying down the law to a harassed widow and trying to get her money into his own rotten little business. Oh, it used to make my heart burn within me; but what could I do? All very fine for boys in novels to make vows to get the fortune back. Humph! You might as well try to get butter off a dog's tongue, or capture the steam from the kettle. Its gone! Besides, I always had a dumb dislike of business. I used to moon. We were so troubled with business-troubles we had no time to live. We never really got to know each other. I used to think my mother was hard and unsympathetic because her view of life wasn't mine—as if it could be. It was a miserable tangle. There was my father, whose love for us made him leave us that horrible legacy of investments. And my mother was so busy providing for us she had no leisure to love us. And my brother and I were so different in temper and age and inclination we simply ignored each other. Love? It's easy to talk; but think of the innumerable gradations of it! Think of how incompetent most of us are to express it! I used to hear the servants use the word, and I would wonder. I used to read stories about it, and wonder still more. Little Lord Fauntleroy.... Humph!
"Somehow or other, my mother did eventually get things straight. There wasn't much to bring up a future Prime Minister on, and besides, there was my brother. He took more after my father than I did. I was mother's boy, but he was a dark daring little devil without much respect for either of us. I don't know quite how it began, but between us there grew a feeling that can't be called brotherly love. Perhaps he realized that, according to my mother's ideas of founding a family, I was to be first and he was to be—nowhere. As it happened this was not just. He was clever from the very first. I was to be an engineer, and he was to do—well, anything that came along. But he had the talent for engineering; I hadn't. I liked it, same as any boy does, but while I couldn't do a simple division sum without making a mess of it, he could do it in his head, and standing on his head for that matter. Whatever he tried, that he could do, whereas my range has always been quiet and limited. I liked reading. He never seemed to be in the house long enough to read anything, but he knew more than I did. He does now."
"Where is he now?" I asked. He laughed.
"That's more than I can say. I'll get to that presently. What I want you to understand is the feeling we brothers had for each other. He didn't detest me, you know. He didn't take the trouble to do that. He simply laughed at me. He made friends with board-school boys and even errand-boys. One day my mother saw him out in the baker's cart driving it round the neighbourhood. It was a sore humiliation for her, I'm afraid. He didn't care. There were girls, too, even when he was only ten or eleven. Humph!
"All this time I was growing up in this sort of life, the life of the professional classes. When I left school, at seventeen, neither my mother nor I had much idea of the way a young gentleman became an engineer. She had no relatives in England, my father's brothers were either at sea or dead, and my father's business friends dropped away when he died, a way business friends have, I've noticed since. We were aliens still as far as real friends went. And then one day we saw an interview in a paper called the Young Pilgrim, one of those mushy papers for young people that do a lot of harm, in my opinion. It was an interview with Sir Gregory Gotch, the great engineer. My mother, who had a good deal of practical enterprise, decided to write to him and ask him. I've often wondered what he thought of that letter. It ran something like this: Mrs. Carville presents her compliments to Sir Gregory Gotch, and would be obliged to him if he would inform her of the best way to article her son (aged seventeen) to the engineering profession in a manner suitable to his position. Something like that. You can understand from that that my mother had grasped the principle of gentility all right. It went down, too, for in a few days we had an answer, in which the great man gave the names of three or four firms in London that he recommended as reliable and old-established. We selected one, and apparently Sir Gregory's name was an open sesame there, for we had an invitation to go into the city and see them at once.
"We went, the gentlemanly youth and his ladylike mother, and saw the heads of the firm. We discovered then, that there were two ways of learning engineering, an easy way and a hard way. People say there's no royal road to learning. Like most proverbs, it's a lie. There's always a royal road, if you happen to be king of enough money. I might be an ordinary apprentice or a special pupil. If I was apprenticed I should have to start at six o'clock in the morning and work just like the men. I would stay in one shop for seven years and be turned out an expert mechanic. And I would have to wait six months for an opening, as they were full-up. If I came as a pupil, however, I would be allowed to spend so much time in each shop, including the offices; I could start at nine o'clock in the morning and finish the whole business in three years. The premium was nine hundred dollars, and I could start that minute. They didn't seem to care how soon they got that nine hundred dollars.
"We talked it over in the train. Of course, I was all for the royal road and had plenty of good arguments in favour of it. What I want you to notice is that my mother was in favour of it, too! Think of it. She had been brought up in a hard school. She knew what it was to live sparingly and how useful early discipline was. She had told me often that all great men had a hard struggle. Therefore, how could I be a great man if I didn't have a hard struggle? And yet she was so obsessed with this notion of gentility that she deliberately gave me a soft time. She paid out three hundred dollars every year for three years....
"That time was what you might call a comedy of errors. I am not going to admit that I idled, for it is not true. I was ambitious. Since I was to be an engineer I went at it bald-headed. I went to polytechnics and night-schools, I spent whole nights in study, and did everything that any young chap could do. The whole of my efforts did not amount to a row of rivets. Why? I was up against the gentility again. I met the professional classes face to face.
"There were three other chaps there as pupils, and it so happened that they were every one from the great public schools. One was from Haileybury, one from Eton, and another from Winchester. When they found I was not one of them they ragged me, of course, which was good and proper. I often think the ragging in public schools is one of the few useful things they do there. When these men found I intended to study my profession they thought I was stark mad. They were all nice young fellows and had money coming to them. Why should they bother? They thought I ought to look at it in the same light. Eventually I did. It was three to one. I found out that any amount of study and genuine merit would not carry me along in a profession. It was all well enough to be an engineer; but the main thing was to be a gentleman. Gradually I dropped the study, took afternoons off to go down west and began to worry my mother for more money.