"Don't misunderstand me," said Mr. Carville. "I use that word without any doubt of what it means. I know George Du Maurier's sneers. Culture means an instinct for the best. I had that. I have it now.
"I don't say that culture is opposed to marriage. That would be nonsense. But it may seriously interfere with marriage. A young man in the twenties has no irresistible desire for matrimony. As a rule I mean. And if sport or business or, as in my case, study, takes up his attention, he will put it off for a while. That's what happened to me. I had access to books. I had an easy job and no great responsibility. I knew nothing about the world really; I only read about it in books. It seemed to me a splendid thing to be a learned man. I became a book-worm, reading several hours a day. What was I aiming at? Upon my soul I can't say. It was just blind instinct leading me on to read the books that since then have become part of me.
"My work was, as I said, light. The firm I was with were specialists in certain machinery, and I was assistant to the London manager. I had to plan out and make estimates for various plants, and travel about the south of England getting orders and superintending erection. I can tell you it just suited me, those journeys by train. I always had my book with me, and as soon as I had been over a job, I forgot all about contracts and went back to Pater, or Gibbon or Flaubert or Emerson, whoever I happened to be reading. In the evenings I used to try and imitate what I had read.
"But what could I write? What did I know? Nothing! I had never been anywhere, I had never met anybody in particular, I had never been in love. I had never waked up. I was in a sort of trance, surrounded by the traditions of the genteel professional class. Of course, in a dim way I knew that my mother expected me to be something exceptional, but I was too comfortable to make any effort. It seemed to me I was quite unconventional enough in being such a reader and in keeping clear of girls. I wonder where I would have landed, supposing I had never waked up.
"My brother was going his way all this time, when all of a sudden he roused me up again. For a long time he had been earning twenty-five shillings a week and spending forty, and my mother had been making good the deficit. She had just given him a five-pound note to pay for his quarterly season-ticket on the railway. He didn't pay it. Just went on travelling to the city with the old one. Of course, a lot of people had done that trick and the Company were wise to it. My brother was caught and summoned before the Lord Mayor at the Mansion House. You can believe my mother was distressed. It wouldn't have been so bad if he had only held his tongue and let her pay the forty shillings fine and costs. No! he had to give the Lord Mayor a piece of his mind. And that made the evening papers feature the amusing incident, as they call it.
"I must admit the boy made out a very good case. He told the Court his father, his brother and himself had been travelling over the line for something like sixteen years. Altogether we had paid the railways two hundred pounds in fares. 'Now,' says he to the Court, 'if I had done two hundred pounds worth of business with a firm, they wouldn't be down on me for being a day or two late with a small account of five pounds, would they? They'd be glad to accommodate me. But the railway wants to put me in prison.' Well, the Lord Mayor happened to be a shareholder in the railway, and of course he couldn't admit that at all. He fined him the regulation forty shillings and several pounds cost. But as I said, this peculiar argument of my brother's got the case into a prominent position and everybody saw it. His employers saw it and cashiered him the next morning. My uncle, who lived at Surbiton, saw it and wrote to my mother.
"The first I saw of it was in the papers. I remember feeling sick and giddy all over when I saw our name in the police court news. 'The Seamy Side' they called it. When I got home my brother and my mother were having it out. He didn't care. It was all over for him, he admitted. Better let him start afresh somewhere else. My mother wanted to send him to Canada, where she had relatives, but he said he'd be damned if he went to Canada. He was sick of clerking. What did he want to do? I asked him. He said he was going in for engineering. I smiled at this, and he rounded on me. 'Oh I don't mean your engineering,' he says. 'I mean something that's worth while.' Very sneering he was.
"Well, do you know what he did? He got fifty pounds out of my mother to start with and disappeared. That's all. Simply vanished without a word. In a way it was a relief. We gave out that he had gone to Canada and the scandal died down. A month later my uncle wrote and mentioned that Frank had called on him and borrowed fifty pounds to go to New Zealand with. I don't know how he managed to do it, for my uncle doesn't let go easy at all. He has had to work for his money too hard. Personality, I suppose. If my brother had had a five-minute personal interview with the Lord Mayor I daresay he would have got the old chap to pay the fine for him.
"After this little brush-up my mother and I jogged along for a few years as quiet as before. I was still in my job as manager's assistant, and still reading away into the classics. I was about twenty-five when all my ideas and prejudices slid away over side and I found I had got the disease we call love. It nearly killed me."
Mr. Carville paused and leaned over to knock his pipe against the geranium-tub. We did not interrogate him. There was something numbing to me in the thought of this quiet ordinary little man telling us in a quiet matter-of-fact tone that love had nearly killed him. We had no comment worthy of the fact. He looked across the valley for a moment as though lost in retrospection.