by H. G. Wells
fostered by the Penge Middleton Library, did not leave me much
leisure for local topography. On Sundays also I sang in the choir
at St. Martin 's Church, and my mother did not like me to walk out
alone on the Sabbath afternoon, she herself slumbered, so that I
wrote or read at home. I must confess I was at home as little as I
could contrive.
Home, after my father's death, had become a very quiet and
uneventful place indeed. My mother had either an unimaginative
temperament or her mind was greatly occupied with private religious
solicitudes, and I remember her talking to me but little, and that
usually upon topics I was anxious to evade. I had developed my own
view about low-Church theology long before my father's death, and my
meditation upon that event had finished my secret estrangement from
my mother's faith. My reason would not permit even a remote chance
of his being in hell, he was so manifestly not evil, and this
religion would not permit him a remote chance of being out yet.
When I was a little boy my mother had taught me to read and write
and pray and had done many things for me, indeed she persisted in
washing me and even in making my clothes until I rebelled against
these things as indignities. But our minds parted very soon. She
never began to understand the mental processes of my play, she never
interested herself in my school life and work, she could not
understand things I said; and she came, I think, quite insensibly to
regard me with something of the same hopeless perplexity she had
felt towards my father.
Him she must have wedded under considerable delusions. I do not
think he deceived her, indeed, nor do I suspect him of mercenariness
in their union; but no doubt he played up to her requirements in the
half ingenuous way that was and still is the quality of most wooing,
and presented himself as a very brisk and orthodox young man. I
wonder why nearly all lovemaking has to be fraudulent. Afterwards
he must have disappointed her cruelly by letting one aspect after
another of his careless, sceptical, experimental temperament appear.
Her mind was fixed and definite, she embodied all that confidence in
church and decorum and the assurances of the pulpit which was
characteristic of the large mass of the English people-for after
all, the rather low-Church section WAS the largest single mass-in
early Victorian times. She had dreams, I suspect, of going to
church with him side by side; she in a little poke bonnet and a
large flounced crinoline, all mauve and magenta and starched under a
little lace-trimmed parasol, and he in a tall silk hat and peg-top
trousers and a roll-collar coat, and looking rather like the Prince
Consort,-white angels almost visibly raining benedictions on their
amiable progress. Perhaps she dreamt gently of much-belaced babies
and an interestingly pious (but not too dissenting or fanatical)
little girl or boy or so, also angel-haunted. And I think, too, she
must have seenherself ruling a seemly "home of taste," with a
vivarium in the conservatory that opened out of the drawing-room, or
again, making preserves in the kitchen. My father's science-
teaching, his diagrams of disembowelled humanity, his pictures of
prehistoric beasts that contradicted the Flood, his disposition
towards soft shirts and loose tweed suits, his inability to use a
clothes brush, his spasmodic reading fits and his bulldog pipes,
must have jarred cruelly with her rather unintelligent
anticipations. His wild moments of violent temper when he would
swear and smash things, absurd almost lovable storms that passed
like summer thunder, must have been starkly dreadful to her. She
was constitutionally inadaptable, and certainly made no attempt to
understand or tolerate these outbreaks. She tried them by her
standards, and by her standards they were wrong. Her standards hid
him from her. The blazing things he said rankled in her mind
unforgettably.
As I remember them together they chafed constantly. Her attitude to
nearly all his moods and all his enterprises was a sceptical
disapproval. She treated him as something that belonged to me and
not to her. "YOUR father," she used to call him, as though I had
got him for her.
She had married late and she had, I think, become mentally self-
subsisting before her marriage. Even in those Herne Hill days I
used to wonder what was going on in her mind, and I find that old
speculative curiosity return as I write this. She took a
considerable interest in the housework that our generally
servantless condition put upon her-she used to have a charwoman in
two or three times a week-but she did not do it with any great
skill. She covered most of our furniture with flouncey ill-fitting
covers, and she cooked plainly and without very much judgment. The
Penge house, as it contained nearly all our Bromstead things, was
crowded with furniture, and is chiefly associated in my mind with
the smell of turpentine, a condiment she used very freely upon the
veneered mahogany pieces. My mother had an equal dread of "blacks"
by day and the "night air," so that our brightly clean windows were
rarely open.
She took a morning paper, and she would open it and glance at the
headlines, but she did not read it until the afternoon and then, I
think, she was interested only in the more violent crimes, and in
railway and mine disasters and in the minutest domesticities of the
Royal Family. Most of the books at home were my father's, and I do
not think she opened any of them. She had one or two volumes that
dated from her own youth, and she tried in vain to interest me in
them; there was Miss Strickland's QUEENS OF ENGLAND, a book I
remember with particular animosity, and QUEECHY and the WIDE WIDE
WORLD. She made these books of hers into a class apart by sewing
outer covers upon them of calico and figured muslin. To me in these
habiliments they seemed not so much books as confederated old
ladies.
My mother was also very punctual with her religious duties, and
rejoiced to watch me in the choir.
On winter evenings she occupied an armchair on the other side of the
table at which I sat, head on hand reading, and she would be darning
stockings or socks or the like. We achieved an effect of rather
stuffy comfortableness that was soporific, and in a passive way I
think she found these among her happy times. On such occasions she
was wont to put her work down on her knees and fall into a sort of
thoughtless musing that would last for long intervals and rouse my
curiosity. For like most young people I could not imagine mental
states without definite forms.
She carried on a correspondence with a number of cousins and
friends, writing letters in a slanting Italian hand and dealing
mainly with births, marriages and deaths, business starts (in the
vaguest terms) and the distresses of bankruptcy.
And yet, you know, she did have a curious intimate life of her own
that I
suspected nothing of at the time, that only now becomes
credible to me. She kept a diary that is still in my possession, a
diary of fragmentary entries in a miscellaneous collection of pocket
books. She put down the texts of the sermons she heard, and queer
stiff little comments on casual visitors,-" Miss G. and much noisy
shrieking talk about games and such frivolities and CROQUAY. A.
delighted and VERY ATTENTIVE." Such little human entries abound.
She had an odd way of never writing a name, only an initial; my
father is always "A.," and Iam always "D." It is manifest she
followed the domestic events in the life of the Princess of Wales,
who is now Queen Mother, with peculiar interest and sympathy. "Pray
G. all may be well," she writes in one such crisis.
But there are things about myself that I still find too poignant to
tell easily, certain painful and clumsy circumstances of my birth in
very great detail, the distresses of my infantile ailments. Then
later I find such things as this: "Heard D. s--." The "s" is
evidently "swear "-" G. bless and keep my boy from evil." And
again, with the thin handwriting shaken by distress: "D. would not
go to church, and hardened his heart and said wicked infidel things,
much disrespect of the clergy. The anthem is tiresome!!! That men
should set up to be wiser than their maker!!!" Then trebly
underlined: "I FEAR HIS FATHER'S TEACHING." Dreadful little tangle
of misapprehensions and false judgments! More comforting for me to
read, "D. very kind and good. He grows more thoughtful every day."
I suspect myself of forgotten hypocrisies.
At just one point my mother's papers seem to dip deeper. I think
the death of my father must have stirred her for the first time for
many years to think for herself. Even she could not go on living in
any peace at all, believing that he had indeed been flung headlong
into hell. Of this gnawing solicitude she never spoke to me, never,
and for her diary also she could find no phrases. But on a loose
half-sheet of notepaper between its pages I find this passage that
follows, written very carefully. I do not know whose lines they are
nor how she came upon them. They run:-
"And if there be no meeting past the grave;
If all is darkness, silence, yet 'tis rest.
Be not afraid ye waiting hearts that weep,
For God still giveth His beloved sleep,
And if an endless sleep He wills, so best."
That scrap of verse amazed me when I read it. I could even wonder
if my mother really grasped the import of what she had copied out.
It affected me as if a stone-deaf person had suddenly turned and
joined in a whispered conversation. It set me thinking how far a
mind in its general effect quite hopelessly limited, might range.
After that I went through all her diaries, trying to find something
more than a conventional term of tenderness for my father. But I
found nothing. And yet somehow there grew upon me the realisation
that there had been love… Her love for me, on the other hand,
was abundantly expressed.
I knew nothing of that secret life of feeling at the time; such
expression as it found was all beyond my schoolboy range. I did not
know when I pleased her and I did not know when I distressed her.
Chiefly I was aware of my mother as rather dull company, as a mind
thorny with irrational conclusions and incapable of explication, as
one believing quite wilfully and irritatingly in impossible things.
So I suppose it had to be; life was coming to me in new forms and
with new requirements. It was essential to our situation that we
should fail to understand. After this space of years I have come to
realisations and attitudes that dissolve my estrangement from her, I
can pierce these barriers, I can see her and feel her as a loving
and feeling and desiring and muddle-headed person. There are times
when I would have her alive again, if only that I might be kind to
her for a little while and give her some return for the narrow
intense affection, the tender desires, she evidently lavished so
abundantly on me. But then again I ask how I could make that
return? And I realise the futility of such dreaming. Her demand
was rigid, and to meet it I should need to act and lie.
So she whose blood fed me, whose body made me, lies in my memory as
I saw her last, fixed, still, infinitely intimate, infinitely
remote…
My own case with my mother, however, does not awaken the same regret
I feel when I think of how she misjudged and irked my father, and
turned his weaknesses into thorns for her own tormenting. I wish I
could look back without that little twinge to two people who were
both in their different quality so good. But goodness that is
narrow is a pedestrian and ineffectual goodness. Her attitude to my
father seems to me one of the essentially tragic things that have
come to me personally, one of those things that nothing can
transfigure, that REMAIN sorrowful, that I cannot soothe with any
explanation, for as I remember him he was indeed the most lovable of
weak spasmodic men. But my mother had been trained in a hard and
narrow system that made evil out of many things not in the least
evil, and inculcated neither kindliness nor charity. All their
estrangement followed from that.
These cramping cults do indeed take an enormous toll of human love
and happiness, and not only that but what we Machiavellians must
needs consider, they make frightful breaches in human solidarity. I
suppose Iam a deeply religious man, as men of my quality go, but I
hate more and more, as I grow older, the shadow of intolerance cast
by religious organisations. All my life has been darkened by
irrational intolerance, by arbitrary irrational prohibitions and
exclusions. Mahometanism with its fierce proselytism, has, I
suppose, the blackest record of uncharitableness, but most of the
Christian sects are tainted, tainted to a degree beyond any of the
anterior paganisms, with this same hateful quality. It is their
exclusive claim that sends them wrong, the vain ambition that
inspires them all to teach a uniform one-sided God and be the one
and only gateway to salvation. Deprecation of all outside the
household of faith, an organised undervaluation of heretical
goodness and lovableness, follows, necessarily. Every petty
difference is exaggerated to the quality of a saving grace or a
damning defect. Elaborate precautions are taken to shield the
believer's mind against broad or amiable suggestions; the faithful
are deterred by dark allusions, by sinister warnings, from books,
from theatres, from worldly conversation, from all the kindly
instruments that mingle human sympathy. For only by isolating its
flock can the organisation survive.
Every month there came to my mother a little magazine called, if I
remember rightly, the HOME CHURCHMAN, with the combined authority of
print and clerical commendation. It was the most evil thing that
ever came into the house, a very devil, a thin l
ittle pamphlet with
one woodcut illustration on the front page of each number; now the
uninviting visage of some exponent of the real and only doctrine and
attitudes, now some coral strand in act of welcoming the
missionaries of God's mysterious preferences, now a new church in
the Victorian Gothic. The vile rag it was! A score of vices that
shun the policeman have nothing of its subtle wickedness. It was an
outrage upon the natural kindliness of men. The contents were all
admirably adjusted to keep a spirit in prison. Their force of
sustained suggestion was tremendous. There would be dreadful
intimations of the swift retribution that fell upon individuals for
Sabbath-breaking, and upon nations for weakening towards Ritualism,
or treating Roman Catholics as tolerable human beings; there would
be great rejoicings over the conversion of alleged Jews, and
terrible descriptions of the death-beds of prominent infidels with
boldly invented last words,-the most unscrupulous lying; there
would be the appallingly edifying careers of "early piety"
lusciously described, or stories of condemned criminals who traced
their final ruin unerringly to early laxities of the kind that leads
people to give up subscribing to the HOME CHURCHMAN.
Every month that evil spirit brought about a slump in our mutual
love. My mother used to read the thing and become depressed and
anxious for my spiritual welfare, used to be stirred to
unintelligent pestering…
2
A few years ago I met the editor of this same HOME CHURCHMAN. It
was at one of the weekly dinners of that Fleet Street dining club,
the Blackfriars.
I heard the paper's name with a queer little shock and surveyed the
man with interest. No doubt he was only a successor of the purveyor
of discords who darkened my boyhood. It was amazing to find an
influence so terrible embodied in a creature so palpably petty. He
was seated some way down a table at right angles to the one at which
I sat, a man of mean appearance with a greyish complexion, thin,
with a square nose, a heavy wiry moustache and a big Adam's apple
sticking out between the wings of his collar. He ate with
considerable appetite and unconcealed relish, and as his jaw was
underhung, he chummed and made the moustache wave like reeds in the